Now and Again

6.0 SWEAT AND TEARS

6.1 Penn Sinclair

Penn sat across the table from the beautiful Louise Grayson, who had waited for him, who had believed his promises that he would somehow put his trust fund and philosophy degree to work building an empire and that he would marry her as soon as he got home. He had been home for three weeks, and so far neither of them had brought up the subject of marriage. If he wanted to talk, she listened. If he wanted to be alone, she went out for dinner with a friend. Night after night he lay in bed, sweating next to the cool Louise, and night after night she brought him a glass of orange juice and a scented cloth for his forehead.

But now Louise had arranged a lunch so they could talk about his future. When her cell phone kept clamoring for attention, she held up a finger and rolled her eyes. “Did I say ivory?” she said into the phone, tapping a polished nail on the tablecloth for emphasis. “I absolutely meant ecru.”

Penn found it hard to follow the conversation — what was the difference between sautéed and braised? Would the vegetarian stuffing work for the gluten intolerant? Did they need one bartender or two? Three servers or four?

As Louise talked, Penn watched the waiters hurry back and forth from the kitchen carrying aromatic dishes and tried to imagine what their lives were like. Across the room, a thin glass window looked onto a SoHo street, with its scaffolding and construction workers and honking taxis and harried pedestrians, all living lives that were opaque to him. It was as if he had crossed into a parallel universe and was searching for a way back. He had assumed the disconnection must have happened in Iraq, but now he realized he had been looking out the window all his life and only rarely making contact: the night he had first slipped the straps of Louise’s camisole over her ivory shoulder blades, the philosophy and Latin classes at Princeton, the small brick caretaker’s cottage he pictured when he thought of home, even though the tiny building occupied only a forgotten corner of the sprawling Greenwich estate that had been in the Sinclair family for more than ninety years.

“Brides,” said Louise, finally hanging up, and it occurred to Penn that the real point of the lunch was to demonstrate how busy she was, how opposite of needy and grasping, how far from ready to be a bride herself.

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Penn, who had a sense that if one of the passersby pulled out a gun and shot through the glass into the restaurant, the bullet would pass right through him, as if he wasn’t really there.

“Someday you’ll find out for yourself,” said Louise with a laugh to show that she wasn’t being serious even though she was.

Louise’s happily-ever-after included two cherubic figments of her imagination named Joseph and Jules. Their pink and blue nurseries were oft-visited rooms in her consciousness. She could describe the darling gingham furniture and soft cotton clothing and daily routines with the precision of an event-planning professional, which was what she was, and because she could imagine those things, Penn could imagine them too: the orderly closets and brightly colored educational toys and the children themselves, beautiful and well-dressed, of course, miniature versions of Louise. The event that held the least reality for her was the explosion of a short string of IEDs that had blown five of Penn’s men to kingdom come and left two others wandering in a wilderness of misfiring neurons and brain chemicals run amok. While they waited for the main course to arrive, he spoke the sentences he had committed to memory as he was lying awake in Louise’s big four-poster bed the night before.

“But that doesn’t really change anything,” sniffled Louise, who started to cry before he came to the second clause of the second careful sentence, before he got to the reassurances that he still loved her but that the thing he was had changed so profoundly that the only way to express his love was to leave her.

“Someday you’ll see I set you free.”

That had been sentence number four. It had sounded convincing in Penn’s imagination, but now it seemed hollow and contrived. He hurried on. “In an ideal world…” he started, but before he could spit out the rest of sentence number five, the red-faced Louise mumbled, “But I don’t want to be free!”

Penn wanted to shake her. Freedom! Wasn’t that the casus belli that had remained like a golden nugget in the sieve of official excuses once all the silt of lies had washed away? If people like Louise didn’t want freedom, what had everything been for?

“I have to do what I think is right,” said Penn, the carefully planned speech forgotten. He was crying now too. He was picturing the life he might have had with Louise. And he was picturing the men he had sent on the mission — proud and insubordinate and radiating energy and health. And then he was seeing the men who had come back from it — shaken men, men who were bloody and frightened and changed. “I made a mistake,” he told her. “I have to try to make up for it.”

“It’s not as if you can undo it,” said Louise. Across the street, a man slipped on the scaffolding and caught himself.

“Of course I can’t make up for it, but I have to do something. I can’t pretend nothing happened.”

A taxi discharged a woman who carried a small dog in her purse. A businessman strode past, talking angrily into his phone. A girl in a yellow dress thought better of crossing against the light.

“It was a war, Penn. Everybody makes mistakes in war — frankly, it’s kind of a cliché. And what about the mistake you’re making now?”

“It isn’t an easy decision — I think you know that.”

“At least you get to make it,” said Louise slowly, testing the implications of casting herself in the victim role. “I just have to live with the results.”

“Id est quod est,” said Penn. “It is what it is.” He was going over the insubordination incident in his mind. What had made him so sure it wouldn’t burn itself out? What had made him think getting the men off the base was critical to preventing trouble? But the supplies had to go eventually — the colonel was right that no time would have been safe. And since the men had been eager to finish the school — at least he thought they were — he had decided he could kill three birds with one stone. If only all he had killed were birds.

“We don’t have to decide now,” Louise declared. “Anyway, you’re better off staying with me than with your parents. At least until you get settled. At least until you find a job and a place of your own. Then we can talk about this again.”

Settled, thought Penn. How would he ever be settled? He felt like a stranger washed up on a foreign shore, and Louise was either a towrope back to the world he had come from or an anchor preventing him from fully escaping. One day he felt one way about it and the next another. And then it seemed to him that the colonel was right that worrying about such things was misguided. Why did it matter what a thing was like? Why wasn’t it good enough just to name it in the usual way without thinking you’d find something else if you peeled away the layers? Sometimes he wished the colonel were there to tell him what to do. Then he would just do it, no questions asked.

6.2 Danny Joiner

Danny came home from the war with angry conversations taking place in his head. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Pig Eye’s body disintegrating in a volcano of blood and guts, and whenever he opened them, he heard a voice say, Why didn’t you see him? What are you, a fucking moron? Sometimes the dominant voice was his own, but other times the voices belonged to strangers who were criticizing him for things he did or didn’t do. He thought one of the voices might belong to an old drill sergeant, a gruff man no one really liked but they all respected. All of the voices made good points, but the things they were upset about were all things Danny couldn’t control.

“You can’t control them, but you can write them down,” said the therapist at the veteran’s hospital where Danny went when the voices got too loud, when he had to shout to be heard above them, and when Dolly went to stay with her mother for another night. “Writing is as good as therapy, you’ll see,” said the therapist.

Danny was already starting to notice things he hadn’t seen before. He was already starting to find words for them. The reception desk was gunmetal gray and the sun exploded in at the window and the therapist’s eyes were bombed-out black and the atmosphere in the room was riddled with tension. When Danny started paying attention to the words, some of the tightness went out of him. It was like putting the safety back on in order to smoke a cigarette or take a piss.

“Writers aren’t the same as other people,” said the therapist. “They use their pain as material. When life deals them lemons, they make lemonade.”

Danny didn’t think he was dealing with lemons, but instead of arguing about the exact nature of his hand, he said he’d like to write a play, or possibly a television series. He had an idea for a show where some returning soldiers banded together to stop the war. For the first time since coming home, he was hopeful. For the first time it seemed like he could give the voices a useful task to do, but the voices had ideas of their own.

— I’d like to see you try! one of them said, and another one called the therapist a quack.

— Don’t listen to that quack, said the voice.

In any case, appointments were hard to get, and after three months of shuttling between therapists and prescribing doctors, Danny had a diagnosis, but no real understanding of what was wrong with him or how to fix it. He purchased a spiral-bound notebook, and instead of blocking the voices out, he listened closely to what they were saying. At first they berated him for everything he had done wrong in his life, and then they started in on the things he thought he’d done right.

— What are you doing with Dolly, anyway? they asked. Are you trying to ruin her life as well as your own?

Occasionally he heard his own voice rise in explanation or defense, but just as often he silently acknowledged that no defense was possible and merely sat with the sand-colored notebook in his lap and watched the volcano of exploding body parts and wrote the ranting down.

6.3 Le Roy Jones

Le Roy aimed his weapon at the mouse-shaped target on the screen. It was tempting to neutralize it, but no, he’d save it for later — let it almost reach the safe house and get it then. He was creating the game for his programming class, and already he had five levels of complexity when only two had been required. He liked it that in the game world, he could have purple dreadlocks and tattoos and an ability to show mercy but also to make instantaneous life-and-death decisions. He strode across the virtual landscape pushing trees and boulders out of his way and gaining strength and speed by capturing targets. Five points for the square blue ones, fifteen if they were round and red — more if they had little ear buds and a tail.

“What are you up to?” asked E’Laine when she came home from work. “How was the shop today?”

“Good,” said Le Roy. He was surprised to see E’Laine. If he didn’t want to be surprised, he had to read the list they made together each evening and he had to set the alarm and he had to take off his headphones and turn his chair so it was facing the door. He knew he’d hit his head and it had changed him, but he liked the way he was now even if certain things caught him unawares. He liked working at the shop’s computer repair desk and he liked his online classes and he liked creating games and playing them. He liked the Boolean universe, where things were true or false, yes or no, one or zero — everything logical and ordered according to rules he was learning in his classes.

While he was distracted by E’Laine, his avatar rounded a corner, smack into two of the crosshatched monsters who roamed the hills of his online universe. Luckily for him, a roving robot programmed to annihilate enemy forces saw them and fired, saving his avatar from a serious loss of power. He panned the screen out, saw that the mouselike target was almost at the safe house, took a reading, and punched in the coordinates. Then he hit the enter key and blasted it to smithereens.

“What should I get for dinner?” asked E’Laine.

Le Roy didn’t know. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Shall I make lasagna?”

E’Laine was learning. He liked questions where he could say yes or no, either of which would flip open the gate to the next decision point, the one about helping with the dishes, for instance — yes, of course he would! He was learning too. And the one about walking down to the ice cream store and the one about strawberry or fudge brownie swirl. But sometimes she said a lot of complicated things about their relationship or asked the love question, and who knew what that door would lead to. Marriage, E’Laine said, and children and things Le Roy used to care about but couldn’t even imagine now.

“Do you want to make the salad?” asked E’Laine. It was a funny question, but he said yes, and then he did want to. He wanted to dice the tomatoes into one-inch squares and measure out the oil and salt with the blue plastic measuring set, everything in proportion, and later, when she was licking ice cream from his chin, it seemed fine to say he loved her even if he couldn’t quite remember how love was supposed to feel.

6.4 Joe Kelly

Joe Kelly arrived home to a parade. He was ushered into a light-blue convertible next to a man in uniform he had never seen before and driven through the streets of Hoboken in a long line of cars on loan from a local dealership. The cars in front and behind were full of people with pressed uniforms and stunned eyes just as he himself was stunned and pressed. They stopped frequently, and every time they stopped, someone would lean in at the window to kiss him, the unexpected proximity triggering his adrenaline button and causing the sweat to pool in his armpits.

“What’s the matter, man? Doncha like girls?” asked the soldier sitting next to him in the back seat.

The breeze was cool on Kelly’s brow, but he felt hot, as if the desert heat were trapped inside him or applied like a compress to his body, as if it were a feature of the cloth the uniform was made of or maybe stitched directly to his skin. Sometimes it was a child who leaned in to kiss him, held aloft by a relative who grinned and yammered at him, and sometimes it was a pretty young woman Kelly would have liked knowing before the war. Back then, he would have enjoyed sitting in the shiny car. He would have enjoyed imagining he owned it. He would have imagined one of the women was sitting next to him instead of the soldier and that she was kissing him for real. He wouldn’t have minded sitting in the car now if he hadn’t had to take a leak so badly, so at the next stop, he jumped out without opening the door and relieved himself at the side of the road.

“Hey! Hey!” shouted the bystanders. “Cut it out!” But Kelly paid no attention to them, looking instead at the glittering sidewalk and imagining a line of ants were enemy forces and he was the mighty rain god, dispatched to do them in.

“What did you do that for?” asked the other soldier when Kelly hopped back into the open car, and Kelly told him he had had to take a leak. He enjoyed kissing the girls a lot more after that.

6.5 Danny Joiner

— And what do you say to the charges?

— Charges?

— Of burning the American flag. Let’s start with that.

— I didn’t burn the American flag.

— Fourth of July picnic? Coming-home party not so long ago? You have to remember that at least.

— I went to a lot of picnics. I can’t be expected to remember them all.

— You met Dolly at a picnic. She was with that tall guy. The guy with the white truck. She came with him, but she went home with you. Surely that must ring a bell!

Of course he remembered meeting Dolly. She had been wearing a cowboy hat and a denim skirt. But there had been so many Fourth of July picnics, so many bonfires, so many flags and banners and garlands and bunting — did garlands and bunting count as flags?

— Is it an American flag if it doesn’t have fifty stars?

— Why do you want to know?

— If it’s just a paper decoration, is it an American flag then?

— Why the fuck do you want to know?

— Because it makes a difference, doesn’t it?

The memory coalesced and then disintegrated: Dolly when she graduated from the nursing program. Dolly back when she was happy and he hadn’t yet gone to war. Dolly kissing him and waving. And then the coming-home party, which had taken place two nights before: a bonfire, some bottle rockets and sparklers, plenty of beer and old friends and the baseball game, which started off friendly and then got a little heated. He remembered hot dogs and grilled corn and some little white paper dumplings that exploded on contact when they hit the ground. One of the guys had brought a gun. Danny hadn’t touched the gun. He knew he hadn’t touched it.

— I didn’t touch the gun.

— Did I say anything about a gun?

The napkins had been printed with a holiday motif, but whether there had been thirteen stripes, starting with red, he couldn’t say. He couldn’t say if there had been fifty stars or some other number. The tablecloths had been red, white, and blue — he was sure of that. And they had stars. He hadn’t counted them, but he definitely remembered stars.

He remembered long-ago bonfires and also more recent ones, including one where he had gotten drunk and kissed a girl who wasn’t Dolly, something he regretted now. The girl had laughed and said she had to help clean up, so he said he would help her, which is when he had pulled the spangled cloth off of the table and thrown it into the fire, which had flared gloriously toward the heavens. He had thrown the bunting into the fire too, and the paper plates, and the little dumplings and the corncobs and the sparklers — anything that would burn. Anything that would explode. He threw in the napkins, and when the older people had all gone off, the younger ones turned up the music and started to dance.

— Now let’s talk about those two boys.

— I wasn’t there.

— But you knew about it. You could have told.

— You don’t tell on your buddies. No matter what, you keep your buddies safe.

— Then how do you explain Pig Eye?

He couldn’t explain Pig Eye. Pig Eye hadn’t even been there, and then, suddenly, he was.

6.6 Penn Sinclair

Summer was almost over, and Penn was still living with Louise. Every time she smiled at him or called him Huggy Bear, he wondered if he had imagined the conversation in the SoHo restaurant. Or maybe Louise had just forgotten it, for whenever the subject of the future came up, she talked as if they were in agreement on what it would look like. He should have gotten a job by now, but interviews made him sweat and stumble over his words, and if he got a call back, he didn’t return the call.

“You just hang in there, Huggy Bear,” said Louise. “Something is sure to pop.” She liked to use words that sounded like their meaning. “Buck up,” she would say. “Worse comes to worst, you can always work for my dad. That would be a total hoot.”

Louise threw out the offer like a rope to a drowning man, but Penn knew what was on the other end of it. Louise’s father, for one thing, and for another thing, Louise herself. But he also knew that none of it was Louise’s fault — the rope alone would drag him under. “Okay,” he would say whenever she mentioned it. “I’ve got something on the line, but if it doesn’t come through, I’ll seriously consider it.”

“How seriously?”

“One hundred percent.”

Ever since arriving home, Penn had been glued to the Internet, trying to figure out the depth of his mistake — its meaning and historical context, and if it had been avoidable or fated. If it hadn’t happened to him and his men, would it have happened to someone else? This led to questions about the role of an individual tasked with acting decisively and even brutally in service of the state, which fashioned itself guardian of ethics and morality — inwardly for the benefit of its own citizens (and along the way squeezing out outliers and misfits) — but also outwardly, forcing its superior vision onto others who were less enlightened. And what did the use of force say about the possibility of peace and also about the common good?

After studying every aspect of the current wars, he started on the wars of history. He was researching the Gulf of Tonkin, a false flag incident that was used to precipitate the last unwinnable war, when Louise came home with a bottle of wine and two noisy friends.

“I’ll introduce you,” he heard her say, but when she called out to him, he didn’t respond. “He must be sleeping,” said Louise. And then she added, “I swear, it’s like he’s living in a different world.”

The women chattered about china patterns and how to deal with overbearing mothers-in-law before the talk turned to J-Lo’s skin-care secret. Penn waited until the group stepped out onto the patio to admire the view before slipping Louise’s library card out of her purse and leaving the apartment. He walked to the big downtown branch where he had been working his way through the history section instead of looking for a job. It was cool in the library. The shelves of books muffled the sounds.

By the time he had finished with the strafing of London and the Nazi death chambers, he had started to ask silent questions about the meaning of life. He didn’t necessarily need to know what that meaning was; he only wanted to know if it had meaning or if it didn’t. If it did, how did he explain the Srebrenica massacre or the shooting of Russian soldiers by German generals for sport, and if it didn’t, why did he feel so sure it did?

“The answer’s here somewhere,” he said to himself. He didn’t realize he was speaking aloud until a homeless man who had been dozing in a corner by the restrooms said, “Man is warlike.” The man raised a grizzled hand, using a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to shield his eyes from the bright egg-crate lights. “You can read any damn book you want, but that’s what it comes down to.”

“What?” asked Penn, startled to find he wasn’t alone.

“Peace is an illusion. War is inevitable. That’s fairly significant, don’t you think?”

The two men stared at each other, the older man seemingly stunned that it was taking Penn so long to absorb what he was saying, and Penn stunned by the realization that the answer he was seeking could be packed into three words. “Man is warlike,” he repeated as the homeless man beamed at him and nodded his head.

Penn pulled out a foil-wrapped bagel Louise had put in his pocket that morning and offered the man one of the halves.

“I started out the same as you,” said the man between bites. “I was home from Vietnam and looking for answers, so I came here. Of course, we didn’t have the Internet back then, but I still found what I was looking for even if it took me a very long time to find it.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen years, which is better than never, I guess. Which is how long it takes some people. Maybe even most people, but then again, most people never look. Believe me, I wasted a lot of time searching in the wrong places — bars, mostly — ha! But I finally found what I was looking for.”

“In here?” asked Penn, picking up the volume with the warrior on the cover and weighing it in his hand.

“Yes, but also in here.” He tapped his head. “Man is capable of nobility and high achievement, but the very same man has primitive impulses that can never be eradicated and will emerge full-force under the right conditions. It’s useless to ask yourself if human beings are fundamentally good or not. They are fundamentally a lot of things. But death is the thing that gives life meaning. By extrapolation, then, war intensifies life and gives it meaning too.”

A librarian rolled a reshelving cart past and peered at them over the tops of her glasses. “Excuse me, Professor,” she said, “but you and your friend are in the way.”

“Professor of what?” asked Penn.

“Ha!” said the professor. “Life, I guess.”

Penn rolled the foil into a ball and lobbed it at a nearby trash can. “Three points,” he said when he made the shot.

“You owe me more than half a bagel, seeing how I’ve saved you years of trouble,” said the professor when he had finished eating.

Penn dug around in his pocket for his wallet. He took out all of the money he had and held it out to the professor, whose hand reached for it and then disappeared into his pocket with astonishing speed.

“Thank you,” said the professor, saluting with fingers that wouldn’t straighten. “Now, do you want to know what I learned in the next fifteen years?”

“Sure,” said Penn. “Lay it on me.”

“I learned that the system is designed to preserve itself, even if it has to grind you and me up into little pieces.”

“That sounds bleak,” said Penn.

The professor picked up a walking stick that was lying on the floor and started to get to his feet. “They don’t really like me in here,” he said. “The mayor is cracking down on homeless people. We give the city a bad name.”

“Where will you go?”

“There’s a shelter a few blocks from here, but they don’t open ’til five. A better question is, why am I homeless?”

“I’ll visit you again,” said Penn, but he knew he probably wouldn’t. Man was warlike. How could he have been so naïve as to think he had been fighting for peace? It was only the terms of the next war that were being decided. Everything had happened before. Everything would happen again.

Unless, he realized, someone did something to stop it.

6.7 Danny Joiner

The doctor at the clinic abruptly changed Danny’s diagnosis from post-traumatic stress disorder to personality disorder. “What’s the difference?” asked Danny. “Why the change?”

“I’ll give you this brochure to take home with you,” said the doctor. “It should answer all of your questions, but if it doesn’t, please don’t hesitate to call.”

When Danny called, he was informed that if he wanted to talk to the doctor, he would have to make another appointment, and if he made an appointment, he’d have to make it quickly, before he was discharged from the outpatient program and his benefits were stopped.

“Why would I be discharged? And why would my benefits stop?”

“Don’t you have a brochure?” asked the pleasant female voice. “I can send you one if you want.”

“But the doctor was already treating me. I’d like to speak with him.”

“Hmm,” said the voice. “They were already treating you? That would be unusual, given that personality disorder is a pre-existing condition, but give me your name and I’ll see what I can do.”

Danny told her his name and she relegated him to hold, where a British voice was announcing the news. Just when he was about to find out whether or not the trailers that had been donated to house refugees from Hurricane Katrina were toxic, another voice came on the line to tell him that in cases of personality disorder discharge, benefits were always discontinued.

“Discontinued!”

A broom handle was sticking out of one of the garbage cans that had been set out for morning pickup, and now he used it to whack at the lid of the can. “We’re just like one of these garbage cans,” he said into the phone.

“What?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“We’re not as useful,” said Danny. “We’re like the garbage in the cans.”

— Don’t take no for an answer, said the voice of the old drill sergeant.

“I’m not taking no for an answer,” said Danny.

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s Regulation Six-thirty-five dash two hundred, chapters five to thirteen. There’s really nothing I can do.”

— So you’re quitting? I think you should march yourself back to that doctor’s office and demand your rights. A soldier never accepts defeat.

The doctor had a bristly mustache and a black Mustang. “Do I know you?” he asked when Danny, who was holding the broom handle as if it were a rifle, stepped from behind a line of parked cars and said, “Hey, Doc.

“Apparently you know me well enough to tell me I have personality disorder.”

“Oh, yes, yes.” The doctor seemed defenseless without his white coat and hospital badge.

Danny’s arms were nearly as big around as the doctor’s thighs. If he and the doctor had met in a parking lot in downtown Baghdad, Danny could have ordered the doctor to drop his weapon and put his hands in the air. He considered doing it now, and then he did it. What the fuck? he thought. “Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air,” he said.

“What? What are you talking about?” The doctor looked like a beaver. Behind the mustache his teeth were an unprofessional yellow. “I don’t have a weapon,” he said.

“Hands up,” said Danny, moving in closer and tensing his biceps and causing the doctor to take a step backward until he was leaning against the faded fabric top of the Mustang.

Slowly, the doctor put his thin white hands in the air, dropping his keys to the pavement as he did so. “What do you want? Money? I don’t have much, but you can have it.” He was wearing a light blue shirt and a striped tie. His sleeves were rolled to show pale forearms and a gold wristwatch. It all made a nice picture against the black car, pleasing somehow.

— What do you mean “nice”?

— It’s easy to distinguish the details, that’s all. The black sets everything off.

— Then say that. Don’t use some mealy word like “nice.”

— Vivid, then. The black-as-petrified-shit background enhances the vomit-and-blood colors of the tie.

When Danny’s eyes lingered on the watch, the doctor seemed relieved. “Do you want the watch?” he asked. “Do you want the car?”

“I want to know the difference between personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Danny. “I want to know why you changed my diagnosis.”

The doctor let his hands drop to his sides. “The medical review board is pressuring us to give lesser diagnoses,” he said.

— Tell him to put his hands back in the air.

“Put your hands back in the air,” said Danny. And then he said, “Shut up!”

“I didn’t say anything,” said the doctor.

“What’s a lesser diagnosis?”

— Tell him to look you in the eye when he talks to you.

“What’s a pre-existing condition?”

— Tell him to lie on his belly. Tell him to eat dirt.

“Lie down and eat the dirt!” shouted Danny.

The doctor dropped to his knees, hands shaking. “It means that you were already damaged when the army got you, so you’re not their problem anymore. It means that every dollar they spend on you means less money for bullets and able-bodied soldiers.” The doctor squeezed his eyes shut after he said it, as if Danny was going to hit him with the broom handle, but Danny figured that’s what they wanted him to do. He might be damaged, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew the rules that allowed sending someone off to war and then failing to help him didn’t allow hitting a doctor. He knew that because one of the voices was shouting at him.

— If you hit him, they’ll arrest you, asshole! Now tell him to stand the fuck up.

“Stand up!” shouted Danny, and the doctor stood up, holding the keys he had dropped and pressing a button on his key ring that started a horn blaring.

The commotion scared Danny so much that he raised the broom handle and brought it down on the Mustang’s fabric top as close to the doctor’s shoulder as he could without touching him. The breeze from the stick riffled the doctor’s hair. The sound made him jump and his eyes popped open, bugging out almost comically as the car’s emergency horn ripped through the sultry air until someone shouted at the doctor to shut it off and Pig Eye exploded in the distance for the thousandth time.

“I don’t make the rules,” said the doctor in self-defense, but the words sounded as puny and untrue as the doctor himself.

— Yes he does!

“Yeah, you do,” said Danny.

“I don’t. I swear to you I don’t. There are rules and regulations.” The doctor looked hopeful now that they were talking and the physical threat had receded somewhat.

Danny thought about using the broom handle to wipe the look off his face after all.

“There’s a rule book,” said the doctor, “but there are also monthly updates. My folder of updates is this thick.” He stretched his thumb and fingers to illustrate.

— Tell him he’s a fucking liar.

Danny was tired. The notebook was in his pocket, along with a mechanical pencil that had a reloadable cartridge for pencil leads and a retractable eraser. They all thought words could acquit them, when Danny knew that words could also be used to trick people and to control their thoughts. For instance, Danny had always considered America a place of equal opportunity because of words that had been drilled into him, not because of anything he observed. There was probably an evolutionary reason for this, but he didn’t know what it was.

— Repeat after me, asshole. Say “equal opportunity.” Fucking say “American dream.”

Danny raised the broom handle in the air and brought it down again. “American dream,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was tired. He wasn’t a violent person. “Here,” he said to the doctor. “Take this stick, and next time you want to destroy someone, be honest about it and use this.”

Then Danny sat on the curb and took out the notebook and wrote down what he could remember of the encounter. He didn’t look back at the doctor, but he could imagine him taking up the broom handle and holding it over Danny’s head.

— Never take your eyes off the enemy.

“Who’s the enemy?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not me,” said the doctor. “I hope you can find what you’re looking for somewhere else.”

The somewhere else was the army recruiting station where Danny had enlisted almost three years before. The soldiers there joined the chorus of voices shouting, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” at Danny. They must have called the police because a squad car roared up, followed by what seemed like a whole squadron of cars with sirens and loudspeakers.

“Come out with your hands up!” roared the speaker, but Danny’s voices laughed and turned their venom outward.

— Who the fuck do they think they are!

For one blissful moment, Danny had the illusion that he was leading his old company in a daring attack against the enemy. Armed with nothing but a U.S. Army ballpoint pen he had picked up off the counter, he charged at the first policeman to come through the door. He held his pen like a rifle, took aim, and then he tossed the pen to the officer and laughed.

BE ALL YOU CAN BE, said the pen.

6.8 Joe Kelly

Kelly’s parents had moved to New Jersey while he was overseas, and even though they greeted him with a banner over the door and arranged a gathering of neighbors, Kelly knew he didn’t belong there and the sooner he left, the better.

“I’ll bet you’re glad to be home,” said the people who came in the door carrying fragrant dishes and bottles of beer, and Kelly nodded and said he was.

“I’ll bet you’re glad to be home,” said a strong-looking girl who lingered in the entry, primly settling a cardigan around her shoulders and assessing the crowd.

Kelly was about to say he was, but then he changed his mind. It was one thing for a bunch of old people to drop by to have meaningless conversations with him, but the only reason a girl like that would do it was because someone had told her to or because she was desperate. He kind of liked the desperate ones. They made him feel like a trained sniper at an arcade game. When she started to walk off, he said in a low voice, “Scared of soldiers?”

“Not really.”

Game on, thought Kelly. “Well, I’m scared of big girls,” he said, smiling to show he was playing with her, drawing it out a little — respectful, but sure of himself, like if she didn’t want him now, he hoped she would change her mind. If he brought his A game, she might even end up thinking it was her idea. But where Kelly used to like to play the game straight through from “Hi, my name is Joe” to “Why didn’t you warn me you’re part tigress,” an inner restlessness prompted him to make the game more challenging by cutting right to the chase. He couldn’t see himself asking about her job or her family situation or giving her a bunch of meaningless compliments or making up some bullshit about his ambitions and goals, so he said, “You must be bored. Can I get you a drink or do you want to get straight to the sex?”

“What do you say we skip the drink and the sex and the wedding and the two kids,” said the girl, “and we go straight to where I run off with another man.”

“Shee-it,” said Kelly. She wasn’t desperate after all. “I must be losing my touch,” he said. He smiled, and the girl cracked a smile too, at first like she was humoring him according to the rules of her own game, but then with her eyes too, smiling for real. Just when they were beginning to understand each other, Joe Senior limped over with a bowl of chips and introduced them.

“This is Rita. She works down at the U-Haul with me. Her uncle runs the dealership.”

It was more than Kelly wanted to know. “Rita,” he said. “Ri-ta.”

“Joe,” she said.

Now that she had a name and a family and a reason for being there, the game was less interesting, and he started marking the exits and keeping his back to the wall just in case. Just in case a firefight broke out. Just in case insurgents stormed the living room. He laughed and said, “For a minute there, I thought I was back in Iraq.”

“That must be kind of weird,” she said.

It was the conversational cross talk that did it, and the crowded room, and his father, who was wobbling around grinning and making sure people were enjoying themselves. And it was New Jersey, with its potholes and smokestacks and rows of shabby brick houses, one of which was his home now even though he had never been there before in his life. Even the army was better than New Jersey. Even the fucking Bronx.

“I see you met Rita,” said someone Kelly didn’t know, and Kelly said he guessed he had.

“She works down at the U-Haul with your dad.”

A few minutes later someone else came by and said, “Say, Rita, have you met Joe?”

“What’s your name again?” asked Kelly, leaning in close enough to smell the musk of her hair. They had been introduced three times and he meant it as a joke, but Rita backed up a step and regarded him as if he was slow on the uptake or dangerous or possibly both, which was when he noticed she was marking the exits too.

“This isn’t a required event,” said Kelly. “Feel free to leave if you want to.” He had to admit he said it a touch brusquely, so to make up for it, he blurted out, “It’s just that you’re very, very hot.” But the sentences were out of sequence now, and lines that had always worked to flatter and spark now came off as aggressive and a little, well, desperate. “I knew I shouldn’t have worn the uniform,” he said in an obvious play for sympathy. “It changes things. It changes how people look at me.”

“I can only imagine,” said Rita.

“I can take it off and you can tell me if there’s a difference.”

“That’s a nice offer,” said Rita, “but maybe some other time.”

“I didn’t mean…I just meant I could change into jeans.”

Kelly’s mother came up with a tray of drinks, and Rita used the interruption to move toward the door. When Kelly turned around a moment later, she was gone.

“Shit, Mom. There you went and chased her off.”

“I’m sure you’ll see her again,” said Kelly’s mother. “Her name is Rita and she works with your dad down at the U-Haul.”

Kelly took one of the drinks and then another. It was some concoction his father had whipped up. It tasted like pineapple and coconut with something pink mixed in, but it carried a kick. By his third drink, the shabby house seemed to be disintegrating around him. What was he doing sleeping in a dingy little bedroom off the kitchen of his parents’ house? He was twenty-two years old. He was a man. He was a warrior, for Chrissakes. He could take any man in the room with his hands tied. Blindfolded with his hands tied. Blindfolded with his hands tied and bowling balls chained to his legs.

“How about tomorrow you look for a job,” said Joe Senior when everyone had gone.

Yeah, he could do that. Or he could hold up a bank and take what he needed without bungling the job the way his father had done. Or he could bungle it in the family tradition and go off to prison and come back fifteen years later and pretend everything was A-OK. He could vanish into thin air, kind of the way he had come. He could do all of those things or none of them. Suddenly he wanted to cry like a baby, and then crying was the last thing he wanted to do. Instead, he took a twenty out of his mother’s purse and headed out to see what people in the great state of New Jersey did for fun.

6.9 Penn Sinclair

When Penn left the library, the air was fresher than it had been, as if a storm had blown through or an oppressive haze had burned away. The sun was sharp and clean and the shadows were cool and blue, reminding him of his boyhood and hiding from the heat beneath the long veranda of the Greenwich house. Two privates were walking along the sidewalk smoking cigarettes. Every now and then one of them would stop to look around as if he wanted to take it all in: the traffic, the sooty buildings, the girls in summer dresses, the street vendors, the city smell. Recognizing military, they saluted when they saw him, and Penn saluted back.

“Where’re you headed?” he called out after them, but he said it too late and they didn’t hear him.

When he got back to Louise’s apartment, he was relieved to find it empty. After he showered and shaved, he stood in front of a long gilded mirror, dressed in a black T-shirt and new jeans, and tried to see himself as other people saw him, but he couldn’t. For the first time in months, hope stirred within him. Gone was the shame that had followed him everywhere since the incident and along with it, the impulse to study theories and avoid life. Gone too was the dense flock of misgivings that had pecked steadily at his insides as if he were Prometheus, sentenced to have his liver devoured by a giant eagle for bringing the fire of the gods to undeserving mortals. This was the way he used to feel after the snow began to melt and the crocuses and little stubs of grass poked through. He had been waiting for months for someone to tell him that everything was going to be okay, and now the news about redemption was his to tell and spread.

Louise came home a little while later. “Did you get the job?” she called down the narrow hallway. He could hear the liquid rustle of her jacket against the silk of her blouse as she took it off and hung it on a hook in the vestibule. “I’ve just discovered something. Do you want to know what it is?”

“I’ve discovered something too.” Penn could hear her opening the refrigerator and setting something on a shelf.

“It’s actually really good news for you,” called Louise.

After considering whether to share his news or listen to hers first, Penn said, “What did you discover?”

“Come out here and I’ll show you.”

“In a minute. Just tell me.” He had left the television tuned to CNN, and in the background, the six o’clock anchors talked crisply of world events. For days the news had been filled with the case of Ehren Watada, who was the first commissioned officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq on conscientious grounds and whose case was making its way through the military courts. Penn strained to listen to the story over the sound of Louise’s heels clicking against the polished floor, but he lost the thread.

“I’ve discovered costume jewelry!” she called from the bathroom. “I never understood it before, but now I do.”

The next story was about collusion between the government and the media and the blurred line between news and propaganda. Was his crime not just that he had failed to properly lead his men but that he had thought he could lead them at all in such murky circumstances? Was Watada a coward or was he insanely brave to risk being called about the worst thing Penn could think of? The questions swirling through Penn’s mind had given him the idea that he could partly make up for his mistakes by helping Watada or someone like him. That he could do something to clear away the fog and tell the truth about the war. Louise’s voice floated toward him: “Just wait until you see!” He would help Watada, and if he could help his men in the process…He didn’t know yet what he would do, but it wouldn’t be theoretical help. It would be practical and real, and nothing Louise or anyone else said or did would stop him.

When Louise walked into the bedroom, his clothing was stacked in neat piles on the bed next to his open duffel, but she didn’t see it at first. “It’s really fabulous, and it’s so cheap,” she said, striking a pose that showed off the strings of colorful baubles draped around her neck. “You’ll never have to give me anything measured in carats again!” She caught herself and laughed. “Or, well, almost never.” Then her eyes swept the room and she saw the piles of folded clothing.

“It’s not you, it’s me,” said Penn when Louise sat down next to the duffel and started to cry. He was reminded of what he loved about her — her sincerity, her elegance, her pleasure in new things. Even when she was crying, her skin was like porcelain, her eyes like glass. But he and Louise were like trains traveling in opposite directions — either they passed each other safely by or they met and destroyed each other.

“Obviously it’s you,” she said.

The tears threatened to give way to anger, but Penn had nothing more to say. The knot in his stomach was back, tense and ticking. He knew it wouldn’t go away as long as he and Louise kept each other trapped inside old versions of themselves.

Louise raised her damp eyes. Behind the tears was a smoldering clot of questions, as if she too housed a ticking mechanism and she was waiting for him to either set it off or snuff it out. Penn was sorry for so many things. “I’m sorry, Louise,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.” He could see her deciding whether to continue to cry or to shout at him, but her indecision lasted longer than usual, as if she finally understood about more than costume jewelry. He felt sorry for her, but the good thing was, he no longer felt sorry for himself.

Penn tracked Le Roy Jones down at a computer repair shop. Le Roy found Hernandez in a veterans’ database, and Hernandez had the number for Kelly’s parents’ house in New Jersey. Kelly had Danny Joiner’s number, but Danny wasn’t answering his phone.

Penn explained his idea of going to Seattle to support Watada. “Or we can do something else that will expose some of the lies about the war.”

“You can count me in,” said Kelly. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Or there’s a protest in Washington, DC,” said Penn. “What do you say we go to that?”

6.10 Danny Joiner

Danny arranged his uniform carefully on a hanger. After everything was in order, he noticed a thread hanging from the sleeve of the jacket, so he rummaged through the kitchen drawers for a pair of scissors, worried that Dolly would come home for lunch and surprise him. It was nearly noon. He had hidden the prescription bottles deep in the bathroom trash. If she thought he was sleeping, she would leave him alone, but if she saw the contents of the kitchen drawer in disarray, she might come into the bedroom to wake him up. He shouldn’t leave the uniform out either. If she came into the room, it would arouse her suspicion. He could put it on, but he worried that was disrespectful. Instead, he straightened the kitchen drawer. He tipped over the trash to make sure the two amber pill containers were all the way down at the bottom. Then he looked under the pillow to see if the locket his mother had given him was there.

— Why wouldn’t it be there?

He didn’t know why, but why had he been diagnosed with personality disorder? Why were Iraqis killing Americans, or was it the other way around? Why was Pig Eye dead and why didn’t he stay that way? Why did the postmaster insist on saluting whenever Danny went into the post office, and why did poor people keep voting to give rich people all of their money and their lives?

It seemed a shame to hang the uniform in the closet where he couldn’t see it, so he hung it on the back of the closet door. Then he pushed the discarded toothpaste tube and the wads of Kleenex aside to look for the two pill containers — just to make sure they were there — and then he covered them up again so they couldn’t be seen by anyone who was casually glancing in the direction of the wastebasket.

The contents of the kitchen drawer were as neat as a pin, but were they too neat? Before joining the army, Danny had been the messy one, but now it was Dolly who scattered things here and there. He decided that the neatness of the drawer would worry her. Just the other day she had called him a neatnik and made a comment about obsessive-compulsive disorder. “If only I had that,” he had told her. “Maybe that would be covered by the plan.”

Yes, the locket was there — at first he didn’t see it because it had slipped inside the pillowcase, so he slid it out again and tucked it farther toward the middle of the bed before fluffing the pillows over it. Then he went into the kitchen to mess up the drawer slightly — just enough so that it looked like Dolly had straightened it instead of him. Dolly didn’t care if the knives with the red handles and serrated blades were mixed in with the butter knives. Then he switched on the closet light to check the uniform for dust and stray threads and the bathroom light to check the wastebasket again before turning both lights off. Off or on? It hadn’t occurred to him to consider which was better. It was possible neither was better, but if one had even the slightest advantage, then that’s the way he wanted it. Everything as right as he could make it, even if he couldn’t make it perfect, which he realized with deep regret that he couldn’t. He knew that sometimes both options were good and sometimes neither was, but in either case, you had to choose.

As Danny considered this, his eyes strayed to the window, which admitted a rich band of late-summer sunlight into the room. Everything happens for a reason, he thought, for the sideways glance at the window was enough to convince him that natural light was eons better than artificial light, especially since Dolly had switched all of the lightbulbs over to compact fluorescents, which weren’t as soothing as incandescent. Not that he really believed everything happened for a reason. Some things just happened — what possible reason could he give for what he had done to Pig Eye and what he was about to do to himself? He believed in chaos, which might partly explain the OCD, which he decided he probably had, not that it made a difference now.

The ice had melted in the glass of water, so he thought about going to the kitchen and replacing it. Cold water would taste good, but why did it matter? He should get a fresh glass because he wanted to do things right. He also wanted to be kind to himself the way everyone he talked to said he should. It was too bad the melting ice made the glass sweat. The condensation would drip on the table and leave a stain. But then he told himself that nature wasn’t bad or good and that if he was going to try to change the actual physics of things, he was setting himself up for failure. Failure, he thought, and then he laughed.

It was 12:30. If Dolly were going to come home for lunch, she would have been there by now, so it was a pretty safe bet that she wouldn’t be home until after five — later if she stopped at the store. He had plenty of time to check for the two amber pill containers, but this time he found, buried underneath a folded piece of cardboard that he had thought was the bottommost piece of trash, a receipt from an expensive shop and a third container, the little round dispenser of the birth control pills Dolly used. When he peered down into the very depths of the trash can, he saw that the dispenser still contained some of the little pink pills, so he removed it, thinking they must be the placebos the manufacturer added on to the end of the month because it was easier to take a pill every day than to take them three weeks on, one week off. Just in case she had thrown it away inadvertently, he set it on the countertop where she would see it. As he did so, he counted more than seven days of sugar pills — almost half the pills were there. Why would Dolly throw away the medication she relied on? Was she trying to deceive him by getting pregnant without asking him first? Was she already pregnant, and if she was pregnant, was the baby his?

He rearranged the garbage in the can the same as it had been, exactly the same except that now the two amber containers with his name on them were wrapped together in a thick cocoon of tissue. He didn’t know if that was better or worse than wrapping them separately, but he couldn’t decide because now he was distracted by the new mystery of Dolly’s intentions regarding the birth control pills. Not that it mattered. He had already decisively concluded that Dolly would be better off without him, which meant that she would be better off without him with or without a baby and that he would have to trust her to make her own decisions from then on.

In the bedroom, the pillows were perfectly arranged. With the new quilt Dolly had bought, it looked like a bed in a magazine. He hated to disturb anything, but he picked up a corner of the pillow and peered underneath it, just to make sure the locket was there.

It made Danny sad to think that he would never see the locket again, that he would never see his mother even if he didn’t kill himself, because his mother was already dead. “Never forget who you are,” she had told him the last time they talked. But he had forgotten, and maybe he had never known.

He was wondering where dead people went when he heard a sound on the roof. It was probably a squirrel. He liked squirrels. He liked all animals. If he hadn’t been going to kill himself, he’d get a dog. He didn’t think they went anywhere, at least he hoped they didn’t. He didn’t want to go to all this trouble merely to wind up somewhere else. He checked the drawer again, separating the knives by color because that’s the way he liked them and then mixing them together again because that was more realistic. What was real? What did realistic even mean?

He backed down the hallway toward the bedroom like a floor-waxer making for the exit. The glass of water with fresh ice in it was already sweating. A handful of bullet-shaped pills spilled across a magazine, covering Condoleezza’s face. He had scooped half of them into his cupped hand when the phone rang. What if it was Dolly? He should answer it. He should answer it just to say good-bye — not that she’d know what he was doing. He would make sure the conversation went well — he wouldn’t say anything about the discarded birth control pills or the receipt from the expensive shop. He picked up the phone, practicing the perfect tone to use in his head, but before he could say anything, he was surprised to hear the voice of his old company leader, Captain Sinclair.

“Yes sir,” he said when Sinclair asked him if he was doing okay. “Yes sir,” he said when Sinclair asked him if he thought much about the war.

“I owe you an apology,” said the captain, to which Danny replied, “Yes sir.”

Danny was so surprised he sat down on the bed, but then he jumped up again because he didn’t want to rumple the new coverlet. He still didn’t know why Sinclair was calling.

“Guess what?” shouted Sinclair. “I’m here with Joe Kelly and Le Roy Jones.”

“Here with Kelly and Le Roy? Where’s here?”

Captain Sinclair had never really liked Joe Kelly, and Danny hadn’t really liked him either. Danny didn’t like hotheads, but perhaps Danny would like him now, since now Danny was a hothead too.

“I’m here in Oklahoma with Kelly and Le Roy. We’ve got a plan and we’re headed over to pick you up.”