What Comes Next (18 page)

Cassie snorted but her grin remained. She stayed in the doorway as she gestured toward the books. “Don’t intellectualize, Adrian,” she said. Again, he was forced to smile. Her tone of voice echoed over all the years they’d spent together. “This isn’t an academic situation. There’s no paper to deliver or lecture to give at the end. There’s just a little girl who will be alive or dead.”

“But I have to understand…”

“Yes. But only so you can
act,
” Cassie said.

He nodded, then gestured. “Come in,” Adrian whispered. “Keep me company. This stuff”—he waved his hand over the encyclopedia—”it scares me.”

“It should.” Cassie remained in the doorway.

“This case, it happened back in the 1960s…”

“So? What has changed?”

He didn’t reply. Instead he thought, W
e are less naive than we were then.

Cassie must have heard this, or sensed it, because she quickly interrupted, “No. People haven’t changed. Only the means have.”

Adrian felt exhausted, as if learning all about a series of murders was draining him slowly.

“How do I turn one kind of understanding—you know, the book stuff—into the kind of understanding that will find Jennifer?” he asked.

Cassie smiled. He could see her face soften.

“You know who it is you should ask,” she said.

Adrian rocked a little in his seat and knew she meant Brian and wondered how exactly he could summon up one of these hallucinations on demand when he needed some prodding in the right direction.

He glanced at all the collected material about murder and suddenly shoved it aside, not far, just a few inches away on the desktop, as if he could avoid infection by not coming into contact with it. He turned to a bookcase and reached past texts and study guides to one of his shelves of poetry. In each of the many jam-packed bookcases in every room of the small house, there was at least one shelf devoted to volumes of verse, because he never knew when he was going to need an injection of eloquence.

Adrian’s fingers played across the spines of books. He did not know what he was searching for but he felt a huge compulsion to find the right poem.
Something that fits my mood and my situation,
he thought.

His hand stopped over a collection of war poets. All the doomed young men from the First World War. He seized this and let the pages fall open. Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” was the first he spotted. He read…
limped on, blood-shod.

Yes, he thought, that was him.

He read the words of the poem three times, then shut his eyes and breathed in deeply.

It was the smell that came to him first.

Thick dark oil and a rusty metal taste on his tongue, smoky and unbelievably hot, as if everything in the world was on the burner of a stove turned high and nearing the boil. He coughed sharply. Behind his closed eyes he could smell something so thick and awful that its stench nearly made him gag. He told himself to wake up, as if he were asleep, and then he felt his entire body lurch forward, then slam back, and suddenly he heard a grinding noise, rising above the half drone, half roar of a laboring engine. He felt himself pitched wildly in his seat, as if being tossed in a raging sea, and he reached out into the air to try to steady himself when he heard a voice coming from beside him, right next to his ear, a tone so familiar it would have been musical if not for the terrible smell, the overwhelming noise, and the fierce shaking back and forth.

“Hang on, Dad, it’s gonna get a lot worse.”

Adrian’s eyes shot open.

He was no longer seated at his desk, surrounded by books and papers, poetry and pictures, filled with memories.

He was lurching in the cramped back of a Humvee.

There was a banging sound and the engine accelerated. He turned to the person jammed into the seat next to him.

“Tommy,” he said. He must have gasped, because his son laughed out loud, at the same time that he grabbed a hold rod in the ceiling with one hand and tried to steady his camera with the other. His black Kevlar helmet slid down, almost covering his eyes. His navy blue flak jacket was bunched up around his neck. He looked young, Adrian thought. He looked beautiful.

“Got to speak fast, Dad, we’re coming up on the spot where I die.”

From the front, the driver—a young marine in khaki camouflage fatigues and wearing dark wraparound sunglasses—tossed a few bitter words back over his shoulder. “
Fuckin’ IED buried in the sand. No way to spot it. We were always gonna be fucked. Fallujah fucked.
”

This must have been a joke because there was some tense laughter.

Adrian looked around at the other marines jammed into the back of the vehicle. They were staring out the windows at a harsh, sand-colored countryside, weapons ready, but they nodded in agreement.
“Like this isn’t the perfect goddamn place for an ambush,”
one said. Adrian could not see his face but his voice had both a harshness and a sense of doom to it, as if he knew there was nothing anyone could do about what was about to happen. The gunner manning the .50-caliber protruding through the roof bent down. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one years old and he was laughing behind sand-caked goggles and teeth stained with dirt and dust.
“We should never have gone out on this mission,”
he shouted above the roar of the engine and wind whipping through the open windows.
“You could tell it was trouble from the first mile.”
From the shotgun seat in the front, a hard-eyed black lieutenant speaking on a radio-telephone put the receiver down and turned in his seat toward the squad crowded behind him.
“Stow it!”
he ordered sharply.
“Look, not everyone buys it. You Masters and you Mitchell, you walk out of this with a couple of scratches and a bloody nose. And you Simms, tough shit about your legs, but you live and get to fly the big bird home. And we waste a whole shitload of the ragheads when I call in the air strikes before I get lit up, so stop whining.”

Then the lieutenant suddenly lightened up, a grin creasing his face as he pointed at Tommy.
“And news boy there makes all your sorry asses famous, don’t you, Tommy?”
Tommy grinned. “Sure do,” he said.

One of the marines leaned over and slapped Tommy on the thigh and said,
“Made us into fuckin’ Internet stars!”
He laughed as he sighted down his weapon.

Adrian slammed sideways in his seat as the vehicle accelerated and bounced over debris. He caught a glimpse of mud and brick buildings, walls black-scorched by fire, pockmarked from heavy weapons rounds. Shredded palm trees littered the roadside. Burned-out cars and a tank that was twisted into a nearly unrecognizable hulk, still smoking, halfway into a ditch. A charred body hung partway out of a hatch. He heard someone mutter,
“Never mess with the flyboys,”
as they roared past.

Tommy had bent forward, the big Sony video camera raised like a weapon, trying to get a shot over the driver’s shoulder, as they rushed toward a measly collection of low-slung buildings. Dust and smoke seemed everywhere, and the smell persisted in Adrian’s nostrils. Tommy was filming but he spoke to his father. “I know. It’s pretty bad. But you get used to it. And anyway, that’s just the cordite from the explosions and maybe some burning oil. Wait until you get a whiff of dead bodies left out in the heat for a couple of days.”

He lowered the camera.

“I won an award, you know,” he said. “I get the whole thing on film, right from the spot we get hit, right through the firefight. And even after I got shot I kept my finger on the trigger so the camera would keep filming. Before they put the footage on the Internet—did you know it got nearly three million hits?—then on
The Nightly News
the anchor called everyone together and made a nice speech. You know, where he talked about being a combat journalist and Robert Capa and Ernie Pyle and getting the real story. He talked about the guys in Vietnam—Uncle Brian probably knew some of them—who would go into fights with just their Nikons strapped around their necks or a notebook in their hands and not even wearing body armor. He spoke about tradition and dedication and even made getting the story sound like some higher calling, like the priesthood. But you and I, Dad, we know I was here because I loved taking pictures and I loved excitement, and nothing combines the two like following a squad of badass marines, even if it costs you your life.”

“That’s right. Definitely badass!”
said the .50-caliber gunner, shouting above the wind noise.

“Tommy,” Adrian choked.

“No, Dad, you’ve got to listen to me, because things are going to happen fast now. I’ll try to come back to you later, when it’s not so confusing. But I need to make a point.”

“Tommy, please…”

“No, Dad, listen.”

The Humvee accelerated. The marine behind the wheel gave a little
whoop!
and said,
“Shitstorm about to happen, boys. Hang onto your cocks, pull up your jocks, and get ready.”

Adrian didn’t understand how people who were dead could talk about their dying before it happened, although he knew it already
had
happened a half dozen years earlier. He gripped the side of the Humvee tightly as it swerved into a pile of sandy dust. Beside him, Tommy was talking steadily, calmly.

“Go back to what you already saw, reading the encyclopedia. Everything you need to know is right there. You just have to think in a more modern fashion.”

“But Tommy” Adrian started, but his son pivoted toward him. There was anxiety in his face. “Dad! Think about why I came here.”

“You were a documentary filmmaker. You got permission to embed with the Marines. I remember how excited you were.”

“Don’t make it sound like more than it was.”

“Tommy, I miss you. And your mother, she was never the same after. It killed her.”

“I know, Dad, I know. I know that losing a child changes everything. That’s why Jennifer is so
goddamn
important.”

“But I’m dying, Tommy. And…”

One of the marines, manning a machine gun, pointed out the Humvee window, turned, saying,
“Hey, old-timer! We’re all dying from the day we’re born. Suck it up! Listen to Tommy. He’s being righteous.”

There was a general murmur of assent from the other men. They were all hunkered over the weapons.

“Jennifer, Dad. Keep focused on Jennifer. I’m gone. Mom’s gone. Uncle Brian’s gone. And there are others. Friends. Family. Dogs…” He laughed, though Adrian didn’t know what was funny. “We’re all gone. But Jennifer isn’t. Not yet. You know it. You can feel it. It’s something in all that education, all those lectures, something, isn’t it, that tells you she’s not gone. Not yet.”

“Shit, here we go,”
the driver said abruptly.

Tommy grabbed his father’s knee. Adrian could feel the pressure. He desperately wanted to throw his arms around his son, find a way of shielding him from what he knew was about to happen. He reached out but somehow, he couldn’t understand why, his arms fell short, waving uselessly in the air.

“It’s about the
seeing,
Dad. It’s about being able to show what you’re doing. That’s where the excitement comes from. And, by putting it out there, where anyone can see it, it gives you power, it gives you strength. It makes you
hard.
That’s where the passion comes from. Don’t you remember? When you were reading about that couple in England fifty years ago.
Pictures. Tapes.
Now, why would they do that? Come on, Dad, this is your territory. You should know.”

“But Tommy…”

“No, Dad, there’s so little time. It’s about to happen. Don’t you remember me once telling you why I wanted to film things? Because it’s the purest truth. When I took my pictures no one could say it wasn’t real or it wasn’t true. That was why we all did it. It made us into something bigger than we really were. No lies behind a camera, Dad. Think about it. Jesus! This is it!”

Adrian wanted to respond but the explosion tore the air apart. The Hum-vee seemed to rise up, as if no longer connected to the earth or to the world. The inside of the truck immediately filled with smoke and flame and the force from the blast threw Adrian backward. He thought he lost consciousness because of the darkness that enveloped him. All the smells, all the tastes seemed to increase, and his ears rang with a high-pitched bell-like noise. He was dizzy. His body felt like it was mired in sand and dust. He tried to look around for Tommy, but at first all he could make out were odd forms and twisted shapes that a few seconds earlier had been marines but now were tangled bodies, shredded and mangled by the bomb hidden in the road.

And then, as if someone had miraculously advanced the track of a movie, he found himself outside. Pale blue sky above, unrelenting heat and noise and something he thought at first was a swarm of insects but then understood was small-arms fire. At his feet was a marine, missing one leg, screaming and pulling himself toward a small dirt wall. Adrian pivoted, still looking for his son, and he saw the marine lieutenant on the radio-telephone. The lieutenant was shouting loudly, but Adrian could not make out what he was saying. The noise seemed to increase, and there was a thundering sound of heavy-weapons fire as other Humvees in the column opened up. Adrian put his hands over his ears, trying to shut out the noise, and he called out, “Tommy! Tommy!”

When he turned he spotted his son. Tommy was bleeding profusely through the ears. Adrian could see where his leg was broken, and his son was dragging it uselessly along behind him. But he was filming, just as they said he did. He had the camera up on his shoulder, as if it were his only weapon, and he was taking pictures of the firefight. Adrian realized his mouth was opened and he was trying to scream his son’s name, but no sound emerged. He saw Tommy swing the camera toward the marine lieutenant, who was lying in a dusty pool of blood. Adrian could hear the shrieks of approaching jet fighters, and he looked up and saw the unmistakable forms of two Warthogs coming in low, the sun behind them so that they appeared as black specks above the horizon. Adrian was standing in the midst of bullets and explosions, but everything suddenly seemed slowed down. He turned again to where he’d spotted Tommy and tried to yell at him,
Take cover!
But Tommy was exposed, in the open. Adrian wanted to rush toward him; he had some vague idea of throwing himself over his son, to shield him from what was taking place, but his legs would not move.