Brief Encounters with the Enemy

OPERATORS

It was in January that Wally came back from the war. He came back to great fanfare that I felt was undeserved. He had departed to great fanfare too — which also was undeserved. I didn’t tell anyone what I thought. Instead, I said what everyone said. I said it was a shame that after everything he’d been through, he had to come back to such cold weather.

It was cold that winter. It was getting colder. Each morning when my clock went off, I would lie in bed with my eyes closed and the covers pulled up around my neck, listening to sounds and thinking about life. Life in general, life in the abstract.

I could hear the salt trucks on the street below and the sound of the wind whistling through my apartment as if the place were haunted by ghosts from a thousand years ago. It was twenty degrees outside. It was fifteen degrees. It was ten. It was going to get lower before it got higher. Everyone was saying that this was the worst winter they could remember. I had asked the landlord to weather-strip the windows but he didn’t have the time, plus it wasn’t in the lease, so one weekend I took matters into my own hands and did it myself, trimming the sheets of plastic, sealing them around the window frames, and blow-drying them so they tightened like a drum. But I must have been careless with my work, because the plastic sheets expanded and contracted whenever the wind blew, as if the windows were taking deep breaths. Lying in bed with my eyes closed, with the clunking and creaking all around me, I would try to puzzle out my dreams from the night before, dreams full of symbols — lightbulbs, doorknobs — dreams that seemed to ride the cusp of nightmare and lingered in the background the next day.

Each morning that January, on my way to the train station, I would buy a newspaper from the newspaper guy on the corner. “What’s the word today, buddy?” I’d say.

He wasn’t interested in small talk. He wore a coat over his coat. He wore a hat pulled down so you couldn’t see his eyes. He wore a scarf wrapped twice around his face and tied in a knot. I paid him in change but he never bothered to count it.

The word was that the war was going to end soon. Our man had taken over. Our man had supplanted their man. Their man was on the run. We were on his tail. Any day now, the newspaper said.

Walking to the train station, I would examine the little box of numbers on the front page that outlined our progress from the day before. On our side the casualties were generally light, generally insignificant, one or two here and there, sometimes three or four, never more than five, while on the enemy’s side the casualties were gruesome, occasionally horrific, almost always at least one hundred, sometimes several hundred, and once, when two of their battalions had been cornered in the valley, eight hundred and twenty-one.

Turning the corner, I would bend in half against the wind that came off the river and caught me in the face and whipped the newspaper in my hands and whipped under my coat and up around my suit and tie. Up and down the street in front of the houses, the American flags were whipping too. Far away across the ocean, where the action was, it was warm, it was sunny, it was seventy-eight degrees. Every day the little box of numbers on the front page announced that it was seventy-eight degrees, and every day we inched closer toward catching their man, and every day I boarded the 8:02 and took a seat next to one of the regulars, who liked to make small talk, who said, “What’s the word today, Zeke?” But I wasn’t interested in small talk. I would recline in my seat with my cup of coffee and stare at the advertisements above my head of the handsome young men in their spotless uniforms, standing on the beach or on the mountaintop, smiling at the camera and draping their arms around their buddies’ shoulders as if they were having the time of their lives. “You too can help,” the advertisements read. “You too can make a difference.” Outside my train window, the frozen landscape of the city passed by, the suburbs first, then the schools, the factories, the warehouses, Walmart and Kmart, the fix-it shops, the scrapyards, the ghettos, and finally, thirty-two minutes later, coming fast over the bridge, the office buildings would appear, office buildings lit up twenty-four hours a day, including the one that in a few minutes I would be entering. This was the great progression of civilization.

In the reflection of the train window, I would look at my face, and I would wonder if — at the age of twenty-eight — I was still young, and if I was still handsome, and in the last quarter mile I would drift off and have a brief but vivid dream, a straightforward dream in which all symbols were apparent, in which I wasn’t on a train heading toward any cubicle on the forty-eighth floor but far away, tracking down their man with my gun, with my uniform, with my night-vision goggles, getting closer and closer to the glory.

We threw a welcome-home party for him. Some of the girls spent the morning decorating the conference room with signs drawn in blue and red markers, which said things like WELCOME HOME, WE’RE PROUD OF YOU, YOU’RE OUR HERO.

When the managing director came around to my cubicle collecting money for refreshments, I gave him three dollars.

“He sure is someone special,” the managing director said. I knew for a fact that he hardly knew who Wally was.

Who he was was the guy who delivered the mail, the mailboy, and I was the one who’d gotten him the job. It had been my job first. His father had asked me to put in a good word for him and I had. I’d known Wally since high school, where I was the valedictorian and he was a regular student in regular classes. Everyone had expected nothing from him and great things from me, but I’d made some bad choices and squandered some good opportunities and ended up having to sign on as “dispatch administrator,” which meant mailboy. I’d worked three years in the subbasement, sweating in every season, before getting promoted to the forty-eighth floor. Wally had worked three months in the subbasement before he signed up for the army. Now everyone thought he was special.

“He sure is,” I said to the managing director, and then I said what a shame it was that he had to come back home to the cold weather.

The managing director obviously wanted to talk more, to heap more praise on Wally, more unearned praise on someone he didn’t know, but it was ten o’clock and my phone was ringing. Everyone’s phone was ringing. It was time to get to work.

Bringg, bringg, the phones resounded through the cubicles, one hundred phones lighting up at once as if we were the command center for something important. Bringg, bringg. I watched the managing director walk away with my money and then I put on my headset and pushed some buttons the way a fighter pilot might push some buttons, and I said as pleasantly as I could, as naturally as I could, “Good morning. My name is Zeke. How may I help you today?”

Two hundred times a day I said this, exactly this, sometimes three hundred times a day. When Bruce Springsteen came to town, I said it six hundred times. It was always “good morning” until it was time for my break at eleven-forty-five, and then it was “good afternoon” until lunch at one o’clock, and after lunch it was still “good afternoon,” all the way until it was time for me to pack up and go home. Throughout the office I could hear the voices saying “good morning, good morning, good morning, my name is …” A chorus of salutations that would last for the next eight hours and, if you weren’t careful, could drive you crazy, could enter your unconscious and reappear when you were least expecting it, like last week when I was paying the cashier at the supermarket and I handed her my credit card and said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Good morning. My name is Zeke …”

I wasn’t complaining, though. No one was complaining. We were lucky. We were bored out of our minds, but we were lucky. These were good times for us, flush times. Business was booming because of the war, because the factories had opened back up and everyone had jobs, everyone had disposable income, and all the concerts and circuses were coming to town.

The man on the other end of the phone wanted tickets to the circus. Tickets were fifty dollars apiece. He didn’t care. He wanted six. He demanded six. He didn’t say “please” or “thank you.” I tried not to take it personally. He sounded like he smoked and maybe drank, he sounded like he was overweight. He was condescending about everything. He was probably one of those guys who worked in insurance, probably sat on his terrace all day, even in the cold, drinking cans of soda and avoiding his family. Now he was trying to make up for his neglect with tickets to the circus. He didn’t say goodbye when he hung up.

After that it was an elderly woman who couldn’t remember the name of what she wanted to buy. “Oh my goodness, what was it?” she asked me as if I’d know. She was confused by everything, she struggled with everything, she was frustrated with herself. I was patient for a while, and then I lost my patience and became sadistic, forcing her to suffer ten times over for the previous caller’s coarseness. I leaned way back in my swivel chair playing dumb, not helping her with anything until she asked for it in just the right way, and then I gave her the least amount of information I could. She stumbled, she fumbled, “Um, um, um,” the air went dead and I let it stay dead. I got satisfaction from her bewilderment, picturing her in her kitchen twirling with anxious fingers the cord on the rotary phone. It was fun for me. It was a diversion. This is how time is passed in a cubicle.

But when I hung up, I was overcome with guilt, choked with guilt, almost to the point of tears. I thought of my grandmother, alone in her apartment, rheumatoid arthritis, suffering for years before she died. I put my elbows on my knees, I hung my head in shame, my tie dangled down. Now it was I who needed to atone.

Next it was a girl on the line. She sounded beautiful. She sounded forgiving. She wanted to know if she could have two tickets for the Shakespeare play. “Yes, you can,” I said, my voice heavy with remorse. If she had said one kind thing, anything, I would have cried in gratitude. She sounded like she was a brunette with glasses and a nice ass. I bet she was smart and read books. I bet she’d gone to a good college and utilized her opportunities. I helped her with everything she needed and I got her great seats at a good price. I wanted to ask if she was going to the show with her boyfriend. “Are you married?” I wanted to ask. I once made a terrible mistake years ago by inquiring if the girl on the other end of the line was married. This was against company policy, but she had sounded so beautiful, and my desire had been so unbearable. I’d managed to establish a rapport with her in a few minutes on the phone, and I’d kept talking to her well after sealing the deal. Just so I could talk. I didn’t care about company policy, I didn’t care about losing commission. She had laughed at everything I said. “You sound tall,” she had said over the phone. “Are you tall?”

“Not that tall,” I said.

I was picturing her short, but when I met her a few days later, I was shocked to see that she was tiny, and her hair was red, and she had freckles and wore giant earrings. I sat across the table from her at T.G.I. Friday’s, looking down at my plate of salmon and listening to her voice, trying to recall the image I’d had of her on the phone in my cubicle.

The girl who wanted tickets for Shakespeare was happy with what I’d done for her. She left it at that and hung up. The next six callers were happy too. I was happy for their happiness. I was the portal through which they must pass on their way to pleasure. I was the faceless voice on the end of the line that enabled them to have those memorable evenings, those exciting afternoons. If not for me, the little boys and girls of the city would never be able to see the clowns and elephants. They didn’t know what I’d done for them, those little boys and girls, but I knew, and that was good enough for me.

By the tenth caller, I was bitter again. I was callous again. I knew I would be. My mouth was dry, my ears were buzzing. Plus I had to piss.

This is how my days go, bringg, bringg; bringg, bringg, every day pretty much the same as the day before: intimacy in intervals of three minutes or less — three minutes or less if you want to make enough commission — holding at bay my desire and antagonism, and also my boredom, and not a little regret. The only thing that made today different, that made it stand out from any of the days before, was that Wally was coming back.

We gathered in the conference room. I was late getting there. I made a point of being late by staying in the bathroom. By the time I walked in, he still hadn’t arrived. This added to my aggravation.

Everyone else was there, one hundred people standing shoulder to shoulder, surrounded by an overblown display of congratulation. If you didn’t know it was January, you would have thought it was the Fourth of July. There was an American-flag cake in the middle of the table, three feet long and three inches thick, there were red-white-and-blue plates and napkins, there were red-white-and-blue cans of Coke, there were little ninety-nine-cent American flags. Hanging on the walls were the red-white-and-blue handmade signs telling Wally what a good job he’d done.

Three of the girls came my way. Amber and Melissa and Tiffany.

“Here you go, hon,” they said.

“Here you go, Zeke.”

“Here’s one for you.”

They stuck an American-flag pin in my lapel. They touched me and leaned close.

“What I really want is a slice of that cake,” I said suggestively.

“That’s for later, hon.”

They had French manicures, they had highlights, they smelled like apricots.

Twelve months ago, almost to the day, we’d clumped together in this same room, one hundred of us, saying goodbye to Wally. Everyone had cheered. Everyone had stomped their feet and chanted, “Wally, Wally! U.S.A.!” I’d done it too, despite myself. That is an example of how you can get caught up in the spirit of the moment.

About an hour after his going-away party, Wally had come into my cubicle and stood by my desk, close to my desk, playing with my paper clips and waiting for me to get off the phone. When I hung up, he said, “I just wanted to say, see you around sometime, Zeke.” He had his mailbag slung over his shoulder, half filled with mail. He looked like a paperboy. I’d known him from the neighborhood when snot had dripped from his nose even in the summertime, when he’d been undersize and chubby and the teachers had thought he might be retarded. Everyone had made fun of him except for me. I’d had compassion for some reason. I’d been the one who had chased down two boys who’d been jabbing him in the belly with sticks. “Aw, we was just playing around.” Those boys were bigger than me, but they cowered. By high school I had built a reputation for being fearless and exceptional. I’d been the one who had stood onstage at graduation and told the other students what life held in store for them. “Give your best, get your best!” I’d said. The parents had loved that. But it was Wally, slow and runny Wally, who, on his own initiative, had gone down to the Career Center one morning before work and signed up for the army, and I was the one who sat at a desk all day long with a headset on.

So when he came into my cubicle to say goodbye, I said, without missing a beat, “I’m real proud of you.” I tried to say it like I meant it, hoping he wouldn’t detect that underneath was condescension, and underneath the condescension was jealousy, and after that lay melancholy.

The next thing I knew, he was sitting down on the floor, Wally was, sitting down between my cubicle wall and desk, wedging himself in as if playing hide-and-seek, hugging his mailbag to his chest with both arms and squeezing his knees up to his chin, all the while whispering something over and over, something that I had to lean down to hear, something about being scared, Zeke, about not wanting to go, Zeke.

“I don’t want to die, Zeke,” he nearly hyperventilated. He looked at me with baby-blue eyes that were filled with tears.

I stood up so fast that the wire from my headset caught around the arm of my swivel chair and yanked the headset off my head like a rubber band. “You’re not going to die!” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “I am.” He said it like he knew it.

After that, I didn’t know what to say. What I really wanted to do was jab him in the belly with a stick. Maybe he was going to die. Maybe this was what his whole life had been leading up to and he was going to be one of those unlucky soldiers who caught it, one of those few unlucky soldiers who never made it back out of the five hundred thousand who did. He’d come back in a coffin with the flag draped over the top. I’d go to his funeral. His dad would hug me and say, “Thank you for everything.”

“You have a greater chance of dying in a car crash,” I said. But Wally didn’t want to hear about odds. He shook his head, his lips trembled, snot leaked out. I squatted down like an elementary school teacher would, hand on his knee, firm but consoling tone. “You’re not going to die,” I cooed. I mustered compassion from somewhere, and I must have said it with enough conviction that he appeared to believe me. A few moments later he rolled himself up off the floor, wiped his nose on his hand, wiped his hand on his pants, tucked his shirt into his pants.

I took him by the shoulders then, squarely, masculinely, and to lighten the mood a little, I said, “Go kick some ass, Wally!”

I had been right: he didn’t die. In fact, he was reborn. Here he was, entering the conference room unscathed, smiling, blushing hard, his head buzzed, his face tanned, waving his hands in the air like he’d just been having the time of his life. One hundred people cheered him all at once, one hundred phone operators clapping and stomping until the room shook.

“Wally, Wally!” they called, “Wally, Wally! U.S.A.!” Even the cleaning girls had stopped by, Maria and Olga, clapping, thanking him for everything he gave. I clapped too. I stomped my feet too. Because this is how you get caught up.

He was a changed man. You could see that right away. He was electric now. He was fluid.

“Where’d you go, Wally?” I thought as I pounded my hands. “What’d you see, huh?”

“I’ve been places, Zeke,” his grin seemed to be saying to me. “I’ve done things.”

He looked like he’d lost weight. That was what he’d done. He looked like he’d put on muscle too. His gut was gone and his jaw was hard and he didn’t resemble a large baby boy anymore. If his nose was running, I couldn’t tell. Apparently neither could the girls who were throwing their arms around his neck and kissing him, one after another, including Brittany, the prettiest of them all, the one I’d gone out with two years ago when the managing director had given me free tickets for a show that had come to town. We’d gone to Applebee’s afterward, Brittany and I, and I’d told her, “Order whatever you want. It’s on me,” because I wanted her to know that this was a date, that I had designs on her. But for whatever reason, our outing never seemed to rise above coworkers with free tickets gossiping about the workplace, and I ended the night kissing her on the cheek.

Now she was kissing Wally on the cheek, damn close to his mouth, leaving her lipstick on his face, and when she was done, the next girl stepped in, and when all the girls were done, they moved back in a circle to give him some space to breathe, so he could compose himself amid all the attention, and he stood in the center of the conference room, as if under a spotlight, while we waited for him to say something profound about his experience. But of course he didn’t know what to say, profound or otherwise. He looked around at a loss, lipstick all over his face, staring blankly at a roomful of people he had only ever delivered mail to.

It was the managing director who broke the silence by raising a plastic cup of soda, saying how he was happy to have Wally back, how Wally had sacrificed for us, how it was a shame that after everything he’d been through, he had to come home to such cold weather.

But Wally didn’t look like he’d been through much of anything. He didn’t have one scratch on him, as far as I could tell. He looked like he’d given little and gained a lot. As the managing director droned on, I contemplated how, if I ever went over there and came back with a tan and no scratch, I would be ashamed of myself. I would be embarrassed. I would make sure I got a scratch even if it meant I had to inflict it myself. And then I’d stand in this conference room, the way I had stood onstage at my high school graduation, and give a speech about country and family and friends. Society too. “It’s you I want to thank,” I’d say. That would bring the house down.

“You’re going to be losing your tan,” the managing director said in conclusion, and slapped Wally on the back. At that, the room laughed, clapping and shouting, with Wally standing in the middle of it like one of those things in a snow globe, with applause showering down around him.

“What’d you see, Wally?” I asked out loud. No one could hear me. “What’d you do, huh?”

For a moment our eyes met and he smiled at me.

“Why, I killed a man, Zeke. That’s what I’ve done.”

Then the applause stopped, it stopped all at once, because the break was over and it was time to get back to work. The phones were ringing.

The phones kept ringing and Wally’s hair grew back. In February the temperature dropped to zero degrees. For three straight days it stayed at zero. Then it dropped below zero. The roads froze and the pipes burst and the circus was canceled. Whatever commission we had earned had to be returned. That was company policy.

We continued to get closer to catching their man. We even had him surrounded once, briefly, but he was wily and managed to elude us. Not to worry, we were getting closer. Any day now.

Other than that, not much changed.

Then one morning, toward the end of the month, I woke as I always did to the sound of my alarm going off. It was six-forty-five. Wrangg, wrangg; wrangg, wrangg, the alarm went. The alarm could have been the telephone ringing in my cubicle. Lying in bed with my eyes closed and the covers pulled up around my chin, I listened to the winter sounds: the wind and the windows and the salt trucks. I tried to recall what my dreams had been from the night before, but as usual, they were fading — I could remember only symbols. Paperweights. Redwoods.

At 6:50 my snooze went off and I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while, following my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps going back and forth.

At 6:55 I had no choice but to get out of bed and go into the kitchen and go into the bathroom and go back to the bedroom, where I wondered if the neighbors in the apartment beneath mine were staring up at their ceiling.

“What’s the word today, buddy?” I asked the man on the corner selling newspapers.

The word today was not different than the word yesterday. The word was that it was seventy-eight degrees over there and it was minus two over here.

“What’s the word today, Zeke?” my fellow commuters on the train asked me.

The word was that they had four hundred and twenty-six casualties and we had three.

Above my head were the same government advertisements, and outside my train window was the same frozen landscape, except for the American flags, which were blowing fast. We pulled into the station at 8:34, just like we always did. And just like we always did, we crowded through the train door, every man for himself, and raced up the stairs because we were cold and because we had snoozed too long and cut it too close.

In front of us were our office buildings all lit up, including mine, and which, in a few minutes, I would be entering and riding the elevator to the forty-eighth floor, the elevator that went almost as fast as the train, as if I were being transported somewhere urgent.

But today, when the crowd turned left, I turned right. I took the side street that led to the boulevard that led to the waterfront. I was going to be late for work, but that didn’t matter. Years ago I had cut school with Wally and we had come down and hung out by the waterfront and taken off our shirts. He’d been flabby and I’d been muscular. It had been a strange feeling to be free when everyone else was captive, and I’d had the idea that this was what it meant to be an adult.

Now sheets of ice were floating on top of the river and the wind was coming off hard. I had to bend in half against the wind that went under my coat and around my suit and tie. I walked fast and my breath came out white. My fingers felt like they were burning in my gloves.

The sign was plainspoken and unadorned. CAREER CENTER, it said. There was an American flag in the window, the window was fogged. I pushed open the door and entered a room where a man sat at a desk. He was sitting cockeyed to the desk, because he wasn’t cut out for office work. He was dressed in a uniform. His hat was off and his head was buzzed. On the wall behind him was a picture of young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

He looked up at me. He put his pen down. He stood. He smiled. He said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

Everyone was proud of me. That was the first big change. The guy I bought the newspaper from in the morning was proud of me. “Bring him back dead or alive,” he said. That was the only thing he’d said in months. The commuters on the train were proud of me. So were my parents, including my dad. My landlord was proud of me. He said, “You won’t be needing any weather-stripping where you’re going.” I said, “I sure won’t,” because I was giving up my apartment anyway. And everyone at work was proud of me. The managing director came over to congratulate me, to shake my hand and let me know what he thought of men like me, to let me know that my job would be there when I got back. Later on, Amber and Melissa and Tiffany stopped by, waving those little ninety-nine-cent American flags like they were at a parade. They said, “We get to have another party!” Brittany even came by. “Are you going to send me a postcard?” She made a pouting face like I’d been the one to break her heart once already. “You know I will,” I said, winking. When the phone rang, I imagined that the people on the other end were proud of me, which helped me help them, each and every one of them, even the rude ones, even the dumb ones. I went out of my way to help them. I could feel myself transforming, morphing into someone new. My senses seemed to be heightening as I sat there in my swivel chair — sight, sound, empathy.

When Wally came by with the mailbag, he congratulated me and then said right away, “I’m wondering if you could do me a big favor, Zeke.” Shifting from foot to foot, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind putting in a good word for him with the managing director. It was all about him. “I can answer phones,” he said. He made it sound like anyone could do my job.

“I’ll put in a good word for you,” I said, but I was done putting in good words.

I had five days to go, five days before I shipped out for basic training, and the joke around the office was that I had better ship out before the war ended. We were closing in on their man. He was in the forest for sure. Or the mountains. The joke was that I might not get my office party after all. “You might not even get a tan,” the girls said.

I stayed up late, packing my stuff. There were boxes everywhere, filled with clothes and dishes and mementos from all those extracurricular activities in high school that made the teachers hold me up as an example of someone who was “more than just a student.” It was past midnight by the time I’d finished packing, but I was filled with energy. I took off my shirt. It was cold and the windows breathed, but I felt impervious. I dropped and did push-ups right there, right there on the kitchen floor, because I figured I might as well get started with basic training, might as well start getting back in shape. I hadn’t done push-ups in years, but I was able to do eighteen, no problem. Ten thousand hours with a headset on my head and I still had muscles in my arms, or the potential for muscles. There were some muscles in my legs too, because I did twenty-eight jumping jacks, no problem, working up a sweat and wondering if my neighbors, at midnight, were trying to trace the path my footsteps were making on their ceiling. I wound up going to bed at three o’clock, dreaming symbolically, and waking before my clock went off.

But when I woke, it was to something unsettling: the previous day, we had sustained nine fatalities. We’d never had nine. We’d never even had seven. It’s nothing, I told myself, tomorrow it’ll be back to normal, tomorrow we’ll continue the hunt. This was Tuesday.

Wednesday brought the news that we had lost nine more. The newspaper guy, his face crisscrossed with scarves, peered at me with concerned eyes. There was an article that day, front page, about one of our soldiers, twenty-four years old, who, in the middle of the forest, had become separated from his company while looking for potable water. In his confusion, he had wandered into a town where he was set upon by the locals. Stripping him of his flak jacket, they dragged him on the end of a rope through the streets before displaying him in the square. They were going to try him, they said. After they tried him, they were going to hang him. There was a photograph of the soldier. His face frightened and dehydrated. He looked apologetic, regretful. Staring at his photo on the train ride, I couldn’t get past the fact that there had been no potable water.

Thursday the news was worse, the news was unbearable. The balance had somehow swung in the opposite direction: we were the ones being pursued. The war was going to last longer than we thought. Maybe till summer. Maybe till fall. The experts could not agree. We would persevere in the end, of course, but for now, we were fleeing and they were chasing. The reports came in randomly, if at all. At last count, they had twenty-two casualties and we had seventy-seven. In addition, two of our companies were unaccounted for, and there was news that a general had been shot in the face. Of the soldier who had been captured while searching for water in the forest, there was no news, there were more pressing things with which to concern ourselves. Water was the least of it.

At work, no one said anything. I made it easy for them by staying in my cubicle. The only person who came by was Wally. His hair had grown even longer than before he left. It was in shaggy fashionable curls. His hair was an affront. I didn’t know whether he was coming to see if I had put in a good word for him. I made a point of staying on the phone with a customer who wanted ten tickets to the expo. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I can do ten tickets for you, ma’am.” He stood by my desk, hovering. I wanted him to witness my composure. I wanted him to witness my commission. When he left, I hung up because there was no one on the line.

That night I took my stuff to my parents’ house. Sixteen boxes of stuff. My whole life in those boxes. It was freezing and my car wouldn’t start. It rattled and coughed for a while, and then the engine caught. No one was out on the street. The only things on the street were the flags, blowing so hard they looked like they were going to fly away. They had lost their celebratory quality. They had lost their sense of unity. Now they were holding on for dear life.

“It’s like you’re moving back home, Zeke,” my dad said when I arrived.

It wasn’t like that at all. He was dressed in suspenders because he was a lawyer. My mom was dressed in an apron because she was a stay-at-home mom. My sister was dressed in torn jeans and purple eye shadow because she was a teenager.

I put the boxes in the cellar where my childhood toys were, my baseball card collection, my comic book collection, my coin collection. I’d been a hoarder as a child. Now I would learn to live with nothing.

“Stack them alongside the wall,” my dad said, referring to the boxes. He wasn’t going to give me a hand.

It was cold and clammy in the cellar. I thought about whether the barracks were going to be cold and clammy. That was something I could ask him. There were a lot of questions I could ask him. I thought about how, if I was killed, my mom and dad would have to come down to the cellar and sort through all my stuff, trying to figure out what to keep and what to throw out. I’d want them to do what we did with my grandmother’s possessions. We didn’t bother to look through any of it, we just loaded it all into a truck, mementos and everything, and gave it to Goodwill. My beer can collection, my stamp collection, give it all away.

At some point I realized that it wasn’t going to be cold and clammy in the barracks because it was seventy-eight degrees where I was headed. This failed to hearten me.

My mom had cooked a special dinner. “Chicken with stuffing, extra stuffing,” she said. That was my favorite, but I didn’t have an appetite. I hadn’t had an appetite in four days.

My dad said a prayer, “Dear Lord …” He said some things about the past and the future, generic things that could be interpreted in a number of different ways. “Amen,” he said.

“Amen,” we said.

“Dig in,” he said.

I ate to be nice. I picked, really. Moving the chicken and stuffing around on my plate, hoping somehow to diminish the portion so my mom’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I could hardly swallow. I drank plenty of water, though. Four glasses of water.

“You sure are thirsty,” my sister said.

“Is the chicken too salty?” my mom wanted to know.

“It’s just right,” I said.

“It’s more than just right,” my dad said. He was always correcting me.

My sister wanted to catch up on everything, including her special activities in school, especially for the war. Like writing letters to soldiers.

“Are you going to send me a postcard?” I said.

“You know I will,” she said. I thought I might weep. But for her it was exciting. She told me about a soldier she’d been corresponding with. I half-listened. She ended by saying, “You’re going on an adventure, Zeke!”

This was Thursday.

Friday the news was worse. We had stopped fleeing because there was nowhere left to flee. It was official: we were surrounded. All we could do was hope for the best and wait for reinforcements. Friday was also the day I had my office party.

I was late getting there because I didn’t want to go. If it were up to me, I would have canceled. To cancel, however, would have been to exhibit my fear. Or despair. I hung out in the bathroom, not doing anything, just standing in front of the mirror, letting the water run over my hands and staring at myself, wondering what I was going to look like with my head shaved and a flak jacket on, wondering what I was going to look like dehydrated. I already looked gaunt and hungover. I didn’t have far to go.

After a while, Wally opened the door. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. He was standing in the doorway with a sad face, like he knew the end was coming.

“Can’t talk now, Wally!” I said, as if bursting with enthusiasm. “I have a party to get to!”

There were one hundred people waiting for me in the conference room, standing shoulder to shoulder. It was so quiet it could have been a vigil. All that was missing were the candles. To their credit, they had spared no expense: there was cake, there was soda, there were signs on the walls that the girls had spent the morning making, and which, through either oversight or intention, all said the same thing: GOOD LUCK, ZEKE! ZEKE, GOOD LUCK! WE WISH YOU LUCK!

Luck was the thing I needed now.

As I took my place among the refreshments and decorations, the silence of the room deepened in that uncomfortable way, like when an audience doesn’t know if the play has ended. I was trying to look happy for the fun party, but I could feel my eyebrows raised unnaturally. I was sorry to have put the crowd through this. The crowd was sorry too. Two hundred sorry eyes staring at me.

Then the managing director began to clap, and the rest of the room took that as their cue to get going with false enthusiasm. They tried to applaud with the same gusto that they had applauded for Wally, but it sounded scattered and hopeless. No one was calling my name.

Somehow I summoned the energy to raise my hands above my head as if victorious, and basking in the acclaim of tepid applause, I yelled, “Let’s eat cake!” That got everyone stomping and shouting, no doubt out of relief that I was able to show some zest for life. The managing director handed me a slice of red-white-and-blue cake, the biggest slice, of course. I ate it off a red-white-and-blue plate. And when I was done, I ate another. This was my party. The men came to shake my hand, and the girls came to kiss me on the cheek. “See you in twelve months,” they said optimistically. Brittany put one of those American-flag pins in my lapel. She leaned in close and touched me. “Good luck,” she whispered.

At one o’clock everyone got back to work, and I went to my cubicle to pack up. I had imagined it would take me all day to get everything organized and sorted and thrown out. I’d been in that cubicle two years, after all. It took about fifteen minutes. There were some odds and ends, including a couple of photographs of me and my coworkers on bowling night, when one of the guys had taken the initiative to schedule some work outings, since “work shouldn’t be all about work.” Almost everything else in my desk belonged to the company. I thought about stealing something, a keepsake, but that’s not the kind of person I am. I sat down in my swivel chair one last time, aware suddenly of how soft it was and how well it swiveled. I was going to miss my chair. I was going to miss my desk and headset. My headset smelled vaguely of sweat from having been on top of my head for ten thousand hours. I put it to my face and inhaled. On Monday morning, bright and early, someone new would come, someone who didn’t know me, someone who didn’t know how good he had it. Maybe it would be Wally, after all. Maybe it would be Wally who would sit in my swivel chair, and thumb through the instruction packet, and shake hands with the managing director, and joke with Brittany about his new career. If they mentioned me, it’d be in the past tense. And at ten o’clock on the dot, my phone would ring, and Wally would put on my headset, and he would say for the very first time, “Good morning. My name is Wally. How may I help you today?”

I went out the side door with my bag of things so I wouldn’t have to see anyone else for the last time and make them embarrassed. I took the elevator down to the eighteenth floor. On the eighteenth floor, I transferred to the freight elevator.

The elevator guy said, “I haven’t seen you in a while.” It’d been two years since I’d gotten promoted. There was graffiti about pussies all over the walls

“I’ve been on vacation,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

He thought I was serious. To him, only a couple of weeks had passed since he’d last seen me. That’s how time moves when you’re in an elevator.

The subbasement was the same as always, boiling hot, even in the dead of winter, and smelling like envelopes. There were sixteen hallways in the subbasement, and if you didn’t know which way you were going, you could get lost and wander for an hour. I knew exactly where I was going. I found Wally in the bulk section, sitting on a crate while he sorted envelopes, big, little, medium. He didn’t look up when I came over. He was busy with his work, busy tossing envelopes left or right. One, two, three, he worked. He had concentration. He had work ethic. He deserved to have a good word put in for him. I’d done this for three years. I used to go home each night and wash my hands with lemon juice to try to get the smell of envelope off them. It had felt like a miracle when I moved upstairs.

For a moment I thought I might pass out, because it was hot in the subbasement, and because I’d eaten a lot of cake, and also because I knew this was it, that my “adventure” was about to begin and there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming back. I tilted slightly, briefly, and imagined myself falling into the narrow space between the big envelopes and the small envelopes. It wouldn’t be that bad, I thought, to fall into that space. It wouldn’t be that bad to do this kind of work again.

I stood to the side waiting for him to notice me, and when he looked my way, he stood up quickly. I said, “I just wanted to say, see you around sometime, Wally.”

He put down the envelope he was holding. He put his hands in his pockets. He took them out. His face was flushed from the stuffiness. This was probably what the barracks was going to feel like.

“Did the managing director ever talk to you?” I asked, as if there was a possibility.

Wally shook his head.

“That’s a shame,” I said, but I was relieved. And then I was sorry. “Well, it’s not that bad down here,” I said. I smiled, I chuckled. As if to prove my point, I picked up an envelope, weighed its heft, and tossed it into the medium pile. But before I knew what was happening, I was sputtering, teetering, grasping Wally’s hand, and saying, “I don’t want to die, Wally. I don’t want to die.”

Wally grabbed me to steady me. He put his arm around my waist. He let me lean straight into him. We stood there like that for a while in the hot basement with the sound of the fan whirring in the background, with me heaving against him.

I kept waiting to hear Wally offer some words of comfort, of consolation. I kept waiting for him to talk to me about percentages and odds. Instead, he took me by the shoulders, firmly, tightly, looked me straight in the eye, and I suppose to lighten the mood a little bit, he said, “Go kick some ass, Zeke!”

It was dawn. It was oddly warm for dawn. Twenty-five degrees, maybe.

I was supposed to catch the bus at the depot — that was the instruction. I fully intended to follow all instructions. At the depot, there were fifty guys like me milling around. No one looked at anyone. Half of us stood there smoking cigarettes. There was a sign that said NO SMOKING, but we knew the basic laws of the land didn’t apply to us anymore. The rest of us slouched in the blue plastic seats, trying to stay awake. A tall man came and sat down next to me. He had a can of Coke that he kept tipping all the way back, as if trying to get out every drop. Enjoy that last drop, I thought. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He said to me, “Do you know where we’re going?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“We’re going for training,” someone said, someone who was eavesdropping. Privacy didn’t apply to us anymore either. Soon we’d be showering together.

“No,” the tall man said to the eavesdropper, “we’re going straight to the forest.” He chuckled like this was something that could be funny.

When the bus pulled in, the headlights came at us like giant yellow eyeballs. It was a Greyhound bus with an LCD display on the front that said GOD BLESS AMERICA. The bus had been rented free of charge for the war effort so that not everything would have to fall on the taxpayers.

An officer appeared out of nowhere. His hat was on and his shoes were shined. It was clear he wasn’t a man who had trouble with the early hours of the morning. “Line up and get on” was what he said.

We did as we were told. This is day one, I thought.

A fat man sat down next to me with headphones on. He was already out of breath and would most certainly die within days. They weren’t picky anymore. They were taking anyone who wanted to be a soldier. The man bobbed his head to whatever music was on his headphones, and when I looked at him, he pulled one of the headphones off of his ear and said confidentially, “If you’ve got music, you better listen to it now, because they’re going to take it.”

“Is that so?” I said.

“That is so,” he said.

I wasn’t going in for rumors. I wasn’t going in for hysteria. I’d stay above the fray, the paranoia. I wanted cold hard facts. Cold hard facts were going to save me in the end. Facts and luck.

The officer came through the bus, doing a head count. His gun was on his hip. When he walked past me, the gun was at eye level.

Someone in the front shouted, “When am I going to get me one of those guns, Captain?” Everyone laughed.

The bus started, and we pulled out so smoothly. The bus hummed. We made a left and another left. I leaned back in my seat and found comfort in the swaying. Then I drifted off to sleep. But I didn’t dream. And when I woke, we had arrived.