Now and Again

8.0 WARTRUTH.COM

8.1 Le Roy Jones

Le Roy liked to find clues in his environment for where he was and what he was doing there. Now, he was surprised to see so many people with missing limbs. Some stomped haltingly on artificial prostheses, while others occupied wheelchairs or hobbled along with the assistance of friends. He looked down at his own feet just to make sure, but they were laced up in their imitation Ice-Ts and he could wiggle his toes just fine.

“What are you protesting?” asked a bystander who was wearing a souvenir T-shirt with a silkscreen of the Lincoln Memorial on it.

“The war,” said Le Roy. “We want the president to stop the war.”

Penn Sinclair was there, and so were Danny Joiner and Joe Kelly. It seemed like an astonishing coincidence until the captain reminded him they were staying together at a motel out by the airport. Of course he remembered that. Of course he remembered the trip down in the minivan and the free Wi-Fi at the motel. “Oh, yeah,” he said. The moments after he hit his head could get mixed up, but the moments from before were crystal clear. He could picture himself riding in the truck with Rinaldi and Summers and their medic, Satch. He remembered trying to get the radio to work and telling the recruiter he was good with electronics and waking up in the hospital with bandages around his head that felt like reinforced concrete. He remembered the blood pounding in his ears and the doctor saying, “Hey there, cowboy. You’ve got a pretty hard head,” which was what the doctor said every time he saw him. He remembered the rehab guy hauling him out of bed long before he was ready. He remembered fiddling with the volume on the radio and the captain saying the convoy was doubling back and heading west and someone asking how much farther to the school, and then the blood was pounding in his ears and the doctor was saying the thing about the hard head and the rehab guy was hauling his ass out of bed.

“Let’s all stay together,” said Danny. “But just in case we get separated, do you still have the address of the motel?”

“Twenty-two twenty-one Arlington Boulevard. Room two-thirteen,” said Le Roy, tapping his pocket. He could remember certain things just fine. “But yeah,” he said. “I have the card.”

“If you lose us, just go to that address.”

Le Roy liked to have a routine, but not having a routine could be good too, so long as he felt safe. He felt safe when he saw the captain and Danny, but he didn’t feel safe when someone in the crowd started shouting and two officers on horseback started to ride straight at a group of people holding placards. He liked horses, but he didn’t feel safe when one of the big animals got too close to him or when the policeman waved his baton or when the Lincoln Memorial T-shirt guy was knocked to the ground.

Le Roy helped the man to his feet and said, “Fuck this shit.” He solved the horse problem by turning his back to it — out of sight, out of mind — before flipping the bird at the yellow police tape and the official-looking signs that said PROTESTERS HERE. Then he turned his back on those too and walked up to a man with a megaphone and then to a police officer and then to someone wearing a Ranger beret, and each time, he looked the person in the eye and said, “Fuck this shit.” Soon he and the Ranger had a small following and he had forgotten to remember about Kelly and Sinclair. The group walked as a unit when the crowd began to move down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol building — except for the guy in the wheelchair, who wasn’t technically walking. Le Roy put his hand on his heart and gaped at the majestic building with its iconic marble dome gleaming in the sun. A flag streamed out from its pole. “This is Washington, DC?” he asked, even though he knew it was.

“Yeah, man,” said the Ranger. “This is it.”

Le Roy stood with his hand on his heart until the officers on the horses told them to move along. Le Roy wanted to stand just a little longer, so when the horse shouldered into him, Le Roy shouldered back, but the horse easily stood its ground. He liked horses. He didn’t blame the horse, but what the fuck? The Ranger put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Chill out, man,” but Le Roy couldn’t process what he was saying because the officer was shouting into his other ear. Easy does it, he thought. One at a time. He wished he had his computer, but it was back at the motel. The motel card was in his pocket, but he didn’t need it because the address involved numbers. Numbers and codes — that’s what he was good at.

The Ranger had taken one of the signs that had been planted in a soft patch of ground and was thrusting the rough wooden stake in front of him like a sword. When someone grabbed his shoulder from behind, he reacted the way he had been taught to react, and soon his assailant was on his back, head lolling like a football in the gutter, which was all it took for the policemen stationed at the perimeter of the zone to pull Tasers and pepper spray out of their belts.

“Stop right there!” shouted one of the officers, and the other fired his pistol into the air, which caused most of the assembled veterans to dive to the ground and two of them to storm a row of metal barricades and tear away the yellow tape.

“Halt!” shouted the police, but they didn’t halt, so the mounted officers rode forward into the crowd, knocking down anyone who was in their way. Le Roy was in their way, and he fell to the ground just inches from a big black hoof with a cleated iron shoe. He turned his head slightly and forgot about the horse, but blood was trickling from his forehead into his eyes and spattering the back of his hand. What the fuck? Where the hell was he, anyway?

“Follow me!” shouted the Ranger, dragging Le Roy to his feet. “Run!”

Le Roy started running. He ran and ran and didn’t stop until his lungs were on the verge of collapse, and then he ran a little farther, even when the reason for running got lost somewhere far behind him. He had gotten soft and, he had to admit, a little flabby, but he hadn’t forgotten how to find escape routes and assess a crowd for potential threats. He hadn’t forgotten how to stick to the shadows and double back on his trail. He hadn’t forgotten to be suspicious of males with skin that was darker than Danny’s skin but not as dark as his own, of people in flowing clothing, of people wearing backpacks, of people in beat-up cars.

As he ran, a space in his brain opened up, and he remembered something he’d forgotten — E’Laine lacing up her jogging shoes and shouting, “Come on, track star. Catch me if you can!” It was a small thing, but it served to power one last burst of speed.

8.2 Joe Kelly

Kelly had expected something more dramatic than running away from the police. He’d expected a mission-accomplished sense of satisfaction or at least some outlet for the tension that was mounting in his brain and muscles and demanding some sort of release. He’d like to have sex with a girl. He’d like to have sex with a girl he didn’t know — not the kind of sex where they lit candles or talked before and after or fit it in around a practical activity like cooking dinner or gassing up the car and not the kind where he had to take her out to a nice restaurant and feign interest in her life goals. Kelly no longer had any life goals — if he had ever had them — and the idea that other people might want to talk to him about theirs made him want to smash his fist through a piece of glass. “I’ll see you back at the hotel,” he said, but the captain put a hand on his shoulder and said, “How about we all stay together?”

Kelly twisted his body out of reach and thought about slugging the captain in the face. “Who’s coming with me?” he asked. But Le Roy had run off somewhere and Danny would only slow him down.

“I think we’ve had enough excitement for one day,” said the captain, but Kelly said, “I’m just getting started,” and slammed his shoulder into the captain’s as he walked past him and felt the captain slam back. “Why isn’t Hernandez here?” he asked, but he knew where Hernandez was. Hernandez was home in Texas with his wife and kid.

Kelly started walking. He passed a lot of official-looking buildings and restaurants — nice enough, but the exact wrong kind of nice. He checked for telltale bulges in people’s clothing. He watched a nondescript car drive slowly up the block. He envisioned a beautiful girl, one who would take pity on him, but not the kind of pity where she felt sorry for him. Maybe “pity” wasn’t the right word for the attitude she would have. Empathy or respect would be better, or, best of all, she wouldn’t have any kind of attitude toward him, just some inscrutable need of her own, a need he didn’t want to hear about but that would sync her up with him in just the right way.

After a while he came to a strip of trees, and beyond the trees, a river, and there, standing on a bridge over the river, were two teenage boys. There was Harraday, aiming his rifle at them. There were the boys, stepping into thin air. Nah, he was just imagining it. No boys, no Harraday, just a bridge over a river, and on the bridge, a stream of shiny late-model cars.

The good news was that he found an area of seedy bars and restaurants on the other side of the bridge that were just the kind of nice he had in mind. He went into one of them and ordered a beer, but when he put his hand in his pocket, he drew out his cell phone and some loose change, but not his wallet. It was then he remembered knocking into Sinclair. The captain had picked his pocket. Jeezus, he thought. Christ.

He put the change on the table and counted it by separating the coins into little piles depending on denomination. Then he knocked them over and arranged them again, this time where each pile equaled twenty-five cents. “Shee-it,” he said out loud, just as a smoky voice said, “Don’t worry about it. The beer’s on me.”

It was and wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted the beer, but he didn’t want the charity. He wanted the smoky voice, but he didn’t want the intelligence behind the eyes. He wanted the female body, but he didn’t want the pity or the story the woman would be making up to explain the piles of coins to herself. He should be buying her a drink. He should have a wallet in his pocket and a nice car parked outside. But the deck was stacked against him. War or no war, he was never going to have those things. His father hadn’t had them and his father’s father hadn’t had them, so why should it be any different for him?

“Okay, thanks,” he said.

The woman smiled again. The bartender thunked the mugs on the table. Kelly could feel the anger clenching up inside him. His hands were shaking, so he took a quick slug of beer before hiding them in his lap. “Shit,” he said again, and then he gave the girl a friendly smile. When she smiled back, her face caught the light from the beer signs hanging above the bar and he noticed her eyes had a hint of yellow in them. “Why didn’t you warn me you were part tiger?” he said.

8.3 Le Roy Jones

When Le Roy finally stopped to rest, he was surrounded by unfamiliar buildings and the members of his impromptu unit were nowhere in sight. He ducked into an alley and hunkered down against a grimy wall. All he could see from there were the back doors to a row of commercial buildings and a clutch of rusting dumpsters, and when he put his hands over his eyes, he couldn’t even see that. Every now and then he would peek out at the changing color of the clouds as the sun shifted in the sky, and then the world would stop spinning and his heart rate would even out. A flock of birds startled and then went back to scavenging for garbage. He liked birds. He liked birds even more than he liked horses, and he liked horses quite a lot.

After watching the birds he started walking again, now and then picturing the map he had seen over the captain’s shoulder and adjusting his course accordingly until the only thing that separated him from 2221 Arlington Boulevard was a six-lane highway. Hernandez had taught him a trick for making time slow down. “Guaranteed,” Hernandez had said, so Le Roy decided to try it. But first he tried the rehab guy’s checklist trick. He visualized success and thought, I am an American soldier. I will not accept defeat. Then he crouched at the side of the road in starting position, watching for a gap in the traffic. “Okay, Hernandez,” he said aloud. “I hope the fuck you’re right.”

He pushed off with his right leg, aiming for the gap, dodging through it, breaking and dodging again before diving left-then-right, behind a shiny panel van. The trick almost didn’t work, but instead of hitting him, the car in the last lane swerved and almost hit the guardrail. It was quite a sight to see the look on the driver’s face as the car fishtailed and almost spun into oncoming traffic before straightening out again. “Hey!” shouted the driver from behind the glass. “Hey, you!”

Le Roy hurdled the guardrail and rolled down the bank. He sprang to his feet and then he was running again. It felt good to run, with the motel shimmering in his imagination and then rising before him as if he had conjured it up and, when he got there, his buddies sitting on the couch drinking beer just like he could have predicted. They all jumped up when he walked through the door and said they were glad to see him in a way that made time slow down again, just for an instant. He was glad to see them too, but he didn’t think to say so.

“Did you get arrested?” asked Danny.

“No,” said Le Roy. “Did you?”

“Nah,” said Danny. “But Kelly’s still unaccounted for.”

“I guess we’re not cut out for demonstrations,” said the captain. “We’ll have to think of something else.”

“What kind of something else?” asked Le Roy after chugging a can of beer.

“The sky’s the limit,” said the captain, handing Le Roy his computer, which he had put underneath the bed so no one would step on it. Le Roy’s heart was still beating double time, but with his computer in his lap, he started to calm down.

“Who else is hungry?” asked Danny. “I’ll order a pizza and some more beer.”

It sounded good to Le Roy. Meanwhile, he put on his headphones and started working away at some code. By the time the pizza came, he had found some photographs of the demonstration that other people had posted online, and by the time everyone finished eating, he had uploaded them to a website he’d created for Watada. He liked having all of the photographs in one place where he could access them or even delete them with the tap of a finger. Tap, there were the police on horseback. Tap, tap, they were gone.

8.4 Danny Joiner

Danny wanted to borrow the computer so he could email himself some notes for the television pilot he was working on, but each time he asked, Le Roy said, “Just a sec,” and then ignored him. A few minutes would pass and then Danny would ask again and get the same response, which was why he was sitting next to Le Roy when the captain said they needed a different outlet for their efforts. Protests didn’t seem to be their thing.

Le Roy was flipping through YouTube videos from Iraq and saying, “Sweet. Swee-eet,” whenever he found one he liked. Danny looked over to see an explosion, and when Le Roy noticed him, he rewound the film to show a road-clearing crew setting a charge and unrolling wire from a spool until they were at a safe detonation distance. “That’s what Pig Eye needed,” said Le Roy. “That’s what Pig Eye needed in his kit.”

The season was changing, and the light outside the dingy motel room window was already thick and fading. When Danny was a schoolboy, autumn had always been rich with promise, as if the bus he and his friends boarded every morning would blow right past the school with the chain-link playground patrolled by grim disciplinarians and deposit them in other lives. But lately it seemed that possibility was a thing of the past, that what lay ahead of him was dark and dreadful. He didn’t know if he would ever shake the sense of impending doom he had brought home with him from the war. “Can I check my email?” he asked again, but he wasn’t in a hurry yet. Urgency was something that waxed and waned in him, something he could no longer predict, so when Le Roy said, “Just a sec,” Danny was happy to wait a little longer, happy to look over Le Roy’s shoulder to see a tank mowing down a row of trees, happy to see Pig Eye unrolling a spool of wire and this time surviving the blast, although he knew from experience that patience could evaporate and become impatience in the blink of an eye.

After a while Kelly came in and said, “Fuck you,” to the captain for taking his wallet, but he was in a good mood.

“We could interview soldiers and write a book,” suggested the captain. “We could work for anti-war political candidates. We could…”

They talked about it for a bit. Kelly made another beer run, and pretty soon they were whooping and laughing so hard that beer was spraying from the cans and the people in the room next door started banging on the walls, and pretty soon after that the motel manager knocked on the door. “Can you keep it down?” he asked. “You’re not the only ones staying here.” The captain tossed him a beer, and before too long the couple next door had joined them too.

“Hernandez should be here,” said Kelly. “Let’s get him on the phone.”

“What are you all doing in town?” asked the wife from the room next door while the captain took out his cell phone and started dialing. “Are you here on business?”

“We’re here to protest the war,” said Le Roy.

“You’ve come to the right place,” said the wife. “The national cemetery is right across the street. Seeing all those graves always makes me wanna cry.”

“But we kind of suck at protests, so we’re trying to figure out what to do instead.”

“You should start a blog,” said the wife, tapping a red fingernail on the computer screen. “A memorial or something — kind of like the cemetery, but on the Internet.”

“Yeah,” said Le Roy. “A blog would be good.”

While the captain tried to reach Hernandez and Le Roy showed the wife videos of the war on his computer, the husband turned to Danny and asked, “Did you kill anyone? In Iraq, I mean.”

“That’s none of your business,” said Danny.

“Sure,” said the husband. “But did you?”

Of all the answers Danny could give to that question, the simplest one was both a lie and the truth. “I was in a forward support unit,” he said. And there he was again, riding the train of thought that always ended in watching Pig Eye explode.

“I heard that about two percent of people — of guys, anyway — are natural killers,” said the husband. “The kind who can kill without feeling any remorse. Did you run into any fellas like that?”

“Hey, Captain,” said Danny, thinking of Harraday. “Rube here wants to know if we’re natural killers.” Once Harraday’s switch got flipped, it was like he couldn’t turn it off. Danny’s switch was different, but he couldn’t turn his off either.

“No, no.” The man laughed, deep in his throat — a genuine laugh, Danny thought at first, but then he changed his mind. There was something not quite right about him, like he was laughing to cover up how deadly serious he was.

“That’s not what I asked,” said the husband slowly. “I just asked if you knew any. And my name’s not Rube.”

“My mistake,” said Danny.

“I’m wondering if I’d be a natural killer, that’s all.”

“You are, honey,” said the wife. “You’ve been killing me for years.”

“In a good way, I hope,” said the husband. Then he turned back to Danny and said, “I’m just wondering if it comes more naturally to some people than others and if those people make better soldiers and if I’d be one of those.”

“They teach you what you need to know,” said Danny.

The husband was leaning forward now, a little too close for Danny’s liking. Over by the window, Kelly was talking to Hernandez on the captain’s phone. “I love ya, man. Wish you were here.”

“How do they teach you?” the husband wanted to know.

“They teach you to work as a unit. They teach you to be really good at what you do.”

“I heard they teach you to hate people,” said the wife, who had plopped down on the bed beside Le Roy, her mouth open and her eyes wide.

“Nah,” said Danny. He was thinking he might hate the husband. And he might hate the wife. Her hand was on Le Roy’s thigh, and Danny could feel the heat of it just by looking.

“To be honest, I’m kind of jealous,” said the husband, ticking down a level in intensity. “Sure, I have a family and all, but I don’t have any buddies anymore.”

“I can believe that,” said Danny. On a whim, he thrust his face forward so that he was almost as close to the husband as the wife was to Le Roy. “I did kill someone,” he said, trying it on. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but you seem like the kind of guy who can handle the truth. Do you want to hear about it?”

The husband dipped his chin in a wary nod.

“This is something I haven’t told anyone else.”

The husband took a sip of his beer and nodded again, his slack lips flapping a little against his teeth.

Danny was about to say something about shooting the driver of the pickup, but then he was overcome with a wave of nausea and changed his mind. “There were these two Iraqi boys,” he said. “They were throwing stones into the long grass below a bridge near where we were on patrol, trying to make us think there was something there. Could be there was, I don’t know. But we were jumpy and those boys were annoying the hell out of us.” Danny tried to recall what he had heard about the incident. Then he tried to imagine what he might have done if he had been there — if he were Harraday, for instance, instead of who he was. He could feel the tense ratcheting up as Harraday’s knot of irritation gave way to fear and the fear gave way to anger. He could see the clobbered look on the boys’ faces as they realized what was happening, the panicked flailing of their arms as they jumped, the one boy slipping beneath the oily surface of the water and the other boy reappearing again and again, fighting against the current. And then the water was sliding up Danny’s nose and pouring down his throat as surely as if he were imagining he was one of the boys instead of imagining he was Harraday, who was standing on the bridge and shooting into the water — just for fun, he bragged, but it was never just for fun. Because of the 360 degrees and because a person’s eyes couldn’t be everywhere at once and because maybe there was something hiding under the bridge and also because maybe was the same as maybe not. The words came easily to him, and he could see the gears grind behind the couple’s eyes as they tried to make sense of something that was senseless. “But you were frightened, right?” asked the wife. “And they were the enemy. They might have killed you.”

“Maybe I was,” said Danny.

“Of course they were the enemy,” said the husband. “These guys here could have been killed at any moment.”

“I guess we’ll never know,” said Danny. “But they were teens — fifteen or sixteen years old.”

“Teenagers can be vicious,” said the man. “You did what you had to do.”

Over by the window, the captain grabbed the phone away from Kelly. The plate glass was a sheet of orange now, the dust refracting the last rays of light and obscuring the view of the highway.

“Their brains haven’t developed yet.”

“Yeah,” said Danny. Harraday had been hardly more than a teenager himself, and it was mostly because of him that more of the unit hadn’t died after the IED attack.

“Hey, Hernandez,” said the captain into the phone. “You should be here with us. We’ve got something going. We’re not sure what yet, but whatever it is, it’s going to be great.” He was silent for a minute, listening to Hernandez, and then he said, “Hernandez wants us to know he’s on an emergency diaper run and Maya is waiting for him at home.”

“Pussy,” said Kelly, looking the man from next door up and down.

“Do you want to see something really sick?” Le Roy asked the wife, who was almost draped across him on the bed, clutching a pillow to her chest. Her blouse and jeans had separated to reveal JESUS tattooed in muddy ink on the small of her back.

When Le Roy opened a video clip showing hooded American soldiers getting their heads cut off, she let out a puff of air as if she had been punched in the gut, quietly, through the pillow. “Those are the guys we were fighting,” said Le Roy.

“That’s crazy,” said the wife, and the husband said, “Makes me want to join up right now and kill those motherfuckers with my bare hands.”

“Rube here wants to know if we killed anyone,” said Danny, looping the captain and Kelly into the conversation now that they were no longer talking to Hernandez. “He wants to know if he’s a natural killer.”

“How about we find out,” said Kelly, rising from his chair and blocking the window so that the room became a shade darker and a size smaller because Kelly was pretty tall.

“Whaddya mean?” asked the man.

“There’s a way to test for it,” said Kelly. “We get the guy in a chokehold — like this — and another guy punches him in the gut and we see what he does about it, right Danny?”

“Right,” said Danny.

Kelly had the man’s neck in the crook of his elbow and was hauling him to his feet and the captain was tipping his head back to drain his beer and Le Roy was tapping his computer screen and saying, “You can check your emails now,” when the urgency kicked in. Danny landed a punch in the softness of the man’s abdomen and then he wound up for another one as Le Roy and the wife rolled onto the floor and the captain dove across the room so that the four men were thrashing around on the bed and it was unclear who was fighting whom. Someone was screaming in the background. Then the fight went out of Danny as suddenly as it had come.

“Sorry, Rube,” said Kelly. “You didn’t pass the test.”

“What the hell!” cried the husband, jumping up from the tangle of bedcovers and rubbing his neck and looking around for his wife, who had flung herself into a corner when the fighting started. “What test? That didn’t seem like any kind of test!”

“The natural killer test,” said Kelly. “You’re not a natural killer after all.”

“Jeezus,” said the husband. He and the wife and the motel manager had succeeded in getting the door open, and now they were backing out of it into the hallway. “What the hell,” the husband said again, and the motel manager said, “You all keep it down in here. Other people are trying to sleep.”

8.5 Penn Sinclair

Penn followed the manager into the hallway and tried to smooth things over.

“I’m only letting you stay because you’re soldiers,” said the manager. “But no more trouble. If you promise to check out first thing in the morning, I can probably convince that couple not to call the police.”

“Thanks,” said Penn. “I owe you one.”

When he returned to the room, Danny and Kelly were laughing over the incident and Le Roy was posting links to some protest videos onto the website he was in the process of expanding.

“It almost wasn’t funny,” said Penn. “It still won’t be if they file a complaint.”

“Natural killers,” said Kelly, which set Danny laughing again.

Le Roy said, “The wife suggested we make a website dedicated to the soldiers. Some kind of memorial or blog. That way we could support the protesters from afar.”

“The wife suggested that?” asked Penn.

“Yeah,” said Le Roy. “The husband was an asshole, but the wife was okay.”

“Here’s to the wife,” said Danny, draining the last of his beer.

“What will we call it?” asked Le Roy.

Danny suggested wartruth.com, and the captain asked, “Shouldn’t it be dot o-r-g instead of dot c-o-m?”

“We want to make money,” said Kelly. “Whatever we do, I don’t want to take charity.”

“How are we going to make money on a website? We’d be doing it more because it’s a good thing to do than because it would pay anything,” said Penn.

Kelly said he didn’t know anything about websites, but he knew that some of them paid off. Le Roy said he didn’t know about money, but he knew about websites. Danny talked about bringing their brothers home and helping with their transition to civilian life. “I could have used something like that,” he said.

Penn was more and more excited by the idea. “Everybody’s bringing something to the table,” he said. Then he gave a speech about how it had taken Odysseus ten years to get home and how Agamemnon was murdered by his wife’s lover when he finally returned from Troy.

“Not that that’s relevant,” said Kelly, but Danny wanted to know what had taken Odysseus so long.

“It’s not that he couldn’t get home,” said the captain. “It’s that he didn’t want to. He knew he couldn’t be a hero sitting around at home.”

On the drive north the next day, Penn was acutely aware of the three big men with him in the van — of the body odor and the restlessness. It was as if the vehicle contained live but quiet rounds. They had been driving for an hour when Kelly asked where they were going.

“We’ve got to establish an outpost,” said Penn. “The question is, where should it be?”

Instinct was taking him north, toward Louise in New York and his family in Greenwich as if that was his destiny, but he couldn’t decide if he was trying to become something he wasn’t or trying to avoid being something he was. Then Le Roy was hungry, so they stopped and bought sandwiches, and then they stopped for gas, and a little while after that Danny said he wanted to get out and walk around. Kelly wanted to keep going, but Le Roy had to take a leak.

“We were just at the gas station for Chrissakes,” said Kelly. “Why didn’t you do whatever you had to do there?”

“Anybody got an empty bottle?” asked Le Roy, which caused Penn to declare, “We’re almost there,” even though he still had no idea where they were headed.

WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY said a sign. “New Jersey,” said Penn. “Why the hell not?”

He parked the car on a street lined with dilapidated buildings, which, on closer inspection, showed small signs of improvement: a repaved driveway, windows with yellow stickers in the corners, a fresh coat of whitewash on the brick, a woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, a sign that said GROW WITH TRENTON! LOCATE YOUR BUSINESS HERE!

“This could be it,” said Kelly, and Penn agreed that it could be. It was as if Louise’s magnet had been turned around and what he felt now was its strong repellent force, a sensation that caused him to view the railroad tracks that divided the neighborhood and the litter caught in the uncut roadside grass and the boarded-up community pool and the men loitering on the corner as selling points, at least in an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of way, so that even if Louise was hardly his enemy, he knew that by saying yes to the neighborhood, he was taking a stand against some of the things she stood for — unearned privilege, for instance, and willful ignorance of how most people lived.

They spent the night at a motel near the highway, and the next day Penn rented space on the first floor of a warehouse and the group dug in. In anticipation of winter, they purchased a portable space heater and weather stripping for the windows. They bought a mini fridge and a microwave from Best Buy, cots and plastic storage lockers from Target, and heavy-duty sleeping bags from REI. They arranged the cots and lockers along one wall and set up folding tables and chairs and computers from an office supply store along another. They bought desks off of Craigslist and argued about who was responsible for which chores and what were the consequences for laziness or dereliction.

“This ain’t the army, man,” said Kelly.

“I know, I know,” said Penn, backing off.

But a natural discipline seemed to take hold of the men according to their interests and abilities. Penn went out early and came back with breakfast. Then he set to work identifying donors to solicit and causes to promote. Danny installed the weather stripping and cleaned because he had the strictest standards for how those things should be done. Le Roy ran five miles every morning before gluing himself to his computer for the rest of the day. And Kelly set up the office space and worked the longest hours, making spreadsheets and organizing files and researching how Internet advertising worked. “Who said I can’t be a businessman?” he asked when the first check arrived in the mail. “Who said we can’t make this sucker pay?”

The room had barred windows on three sides, and to the north, it looked out onto a railroad track. Every hour or so a train rumbled through, shaking the glass in the windows and causing Danny to dive for cover behind a couch they had found discarded on a curb.

“Hit the deck, Danny!” Le Roy would say if Kelly didn’t say it first, and then Kelly would say, “New Jersey! At least it ain’t the fucking Bronx.”

The neighborhood was just squalid enough for Penn to imagine that they were still fighting for their country — particularly at night, when the businesses were shuttered and feral cats ransacked the garbage cans and the only light came from a lone streetlamp halfway down the block. Every now and then Penn would shout, “Into the breach, boys. Let’s stop the goddamn war!” He was mostly play-acting, mostly putting on a personality he had first observed in his father at the yearly picnic he held for the families of his employees on the sweeping grounds of the Greenwich estate. “Who’s ready for the sack race?” the old man would call out. “Who wants to win a prize?” And the children would flock to him as if he were good with children, which, on that one day of the year, he was.

One evening, something unusual in the cocoon of nighttime stillness drew Penn outside, where he walked up and down the block, checking that the grilles on the ground-floor windows of the businesses were secure and across the tracks to a dilapidated apartment house where a woman was sitting in the darkness smoking a cigarette and sobbing.

“I thought I heard something,” said Penn.

“It’s just them cats,” she said.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Ever’thin’s okay.”

“We’re just down the block if you need anything.”

“I’ll remember that,” she said, but she never came asking for anything, only waved at Penn when he walked up the street now and then on what he called “patrol” or when he went the long way around on his morning coffee run so he could see her sending her three kids off to school. Each time, she waved to him before going back inside the building, and one day Penn realized that what she needed wasn’t him patrolling the streets at night. What she needed was a job. “Hey,” he called out the next time he saw her. “You don’t know anybody who wants to cook and clean for a bunch of ex-soldiers, do you?”

“I jes might,” she said. “I jes might know someone like that.”

Meanwhile, the upstairs tenants clomped up the warehouse stairs to their office in the morning and down again in the afternoon in pursuit of their own entrepreneurial dreams, and now and then they said, “How ya doin’?” when Penn ran into them on the front walk, where some faded hydrangeas from an overgrown bed spilled onto the pavement. Across the street, a car parts salvage business had taken over an empty building, and two months after the soldiers moved in, a commercial laundry service opened up. In the white-gray light of early morning when he was on the breakfast run, Penn allowed himself to think that something good was starting up — the website of course, but also the little neighborhood near the tracks.

8.6 Joe Kelly

The first thing they put up on the site after the pictures from the protest was a schedule of other protests. Then they created a message board where returning soldiers could post their stories of the war. In the back of his mind, Kelly was wondering how they were going to make a bunch of stories pay, but for the time being he was happy just not to be living with his folks.

“I’m going to post something,” said Danny, who had put aside the television pilot and was working on an epic poem. “Think of the Odyssey—if it was written by Eminem.”

Kelly was still working out the angles of the site. “How do we know if the stories are true?” he asked.

“What’s true?” countered Danny. He stood up in the open space between the desks and read from his notepad:

News, news, fact or ruse,

Raise the flag and light the fuse

“I’m not sure the personal stories need to be true,” said the captain. “The idea is for soldiers to share their experiences. It’s how they see what happened that counts.”

“The documents don’t need to be true either,” said Le Roy. “They only need to be authentic, so I’m studying up on that.”

At a pause in the conversation, Danny continued reading.

“The war will be over before it starts,”

Goes the official pronouncement

(While PhDs using proven marketing techniques send

Catchy slogans into the ether)

And military contractors ramp up production,

Turning depleted uranium and enlisted men

Into dollars and cents.

Coincidentally, it is the Congressional naysayers

Who receive anthrax-laced letters in the mail.

Meanwhile, by the waters of Babylon,

A car laden with explosives

Approaches a convoy on a lonely desert road.

A soldier makes a lucky shot, and…

The train went through, blaring its whistle at the crossing and startling even Kelly. “Man, that sounded like incoming artillery fire,” he said.

When the glass had settled back into its wooden frames, Danny climbed out from behind the couch and said, “Anyway, I figured that since it’s impossible to forget, maybe I should be trying to remember.”

“You didn’t know about the grenade,” said Penn. “There’s no way you could have known.”

“That’s the point,” said Danny. “What do any of us know — me or anybody else? We run around with guns and battle plans and grandiose statements about liberation, but we might as well be kids running around in the dark. So now we post the stories and we write the poems and we dig through the official record for shards of truth or evidence of wrongdoing — and what? It doesn’t change anything we did. The damage is done.”

“The blast was going to kill him anyway,” said Kelly. “Even if you hadn’t stopped the truck.”

“He might have had a chance,” said Danny. “He might have had a fighting chance.”

“He had zero chance,” said Kelly. “Not even one in a million.”

“And those shards of truth might change things,” said the captain. “Not the past, but the future.”

“What’s true?” Danny asked again.

“I’m thinking it’s all of the personal narratives together,” said the captain, “each of them a tiny pixel in the bigger picture of what is what. And then the documents tether the narratives into some kind of objective framework. They allow people to look behind the personal accounts and the news stories to see if what we’re being told is true.”

Le Roy was still going on about authentication. “I’ve got a good guy working with me on that, but he tells me we need some kind of anonymous drop box. People can’t just email us top-secret documents. And we don’t want to know who the leakers are — we need a system where they can’t be traced.”

Kelly noticed how everyone occupied his own boxcar of thought: The captain had some theory of journalism in mind. Le Roy was obsessed with the mechanics of collecting and disseminating information. Danny was interested in stories as catharsis and art. Kelly wasn’t sure yet what he was interested in, but money was never far from his mind. “Speaking of stories,” he said, but just then the single mother from down the block arrived with the dinner she had cooked for them, and Kelly didn’t finish what he was going to say.

“You boys are in for a treat,” she said, putting a pan of lasagna on the table. “Mmm-mm. I outdid myself today!”

The first document to go up on the site was Penn’s old email to himself describing what had happened with the convoy and the IED, juxtaposed to the official version of events.

“Are you sure you want that up there?” asked Kelly.

“Yeah,” said the captain. “I do.”

“Kind of like a confession?” asked Kelly.

“Yeah,” said the captain, “kind of like that.”

The captain was headed out on his evening patrol, so Kelly pulled on his jacket and followed him down the walk, kicking at the hydrangea heads, which had turned brittle and brown as the season deepened. He was surprised to see that night had fallen and the cloud cover had given way to a clear blackness that dissolved at the edges where lights from the city center fought back the dark. “I was thinking,” he said. “Could be it’s better to leave the ghosts alone.”

“How does that help?” asked the captain. “Ghosts are creatures of darkness. They might not ever disappear completely, but they lose some of their power in the light.”

They walked across the tracks and turned down toward the river, past the boarded-up community pool. “We should get that pool reopened,” said Penn. “That’s something the neighborhood kids would like.”

“Every kid should know how to swim,” said Kelly, but he wasn’t thinking about the neighborhood kids, he was thinking about the two teenagers on the bridge. Danny hadn’t been there, but he had. “The thing is, those boys didn’t do anything but throw some rocks into the weeds, but it didn’t matter. I remember saying, ‘Wait a minute,’ but I wasn’t thinking, Let’s not hassle those kids. I was thinking, I hate fucking hajis. And I was curious about what Harraday would do and also kind of detached, as if none of it was really real.” And then he laughed and said, “What’s real?” the way Danny would have said it.

“Let it be, Kelly,” said Penn. “Whatever it is, there’s no sense dredging it all up again.”

“I thought you wanted to let the ghosts out.”

“Only if it helps, man. Only if it helps.”

“They wanted us to be afraid, and so we wanted them to be afraid too.”

They stood smelling the coming winter and listening to the wind moving through branches that still held a few papery leaves and watching the river roll underneath the railroad bridge. Then Sinclair said, “What’s to say that the stars above us aren’t the bright points of swords aimed at the earth by alien forces.”

Kelly thought he was joking, but the captain just eyed him in the steady way he had when he was being serious or when the joke went over his head. “Hey, man,” said Kelly. “We’ve got scientists ’n’ shit, so we know those are stars, not the points of any swords.”

“We had scientists,” said the captain. “We had weapons inspectors. We had the biggest intelligence agency in the world. Anyway, I’m just saying that if they told us those stars were cosmic swords hurtling toward us ready to attack the earth, we’d man the rockets and blast the stars to smithereens.”

“If,” said Kelly. “If that’s what they told us, I guess we would.”

“I’m just saying that we wouldn’t know not to. I’m saying that once you believe certain things about the world, other things become possible, even inevitable.”

Kelly didn’t say anything.

“I guess my point is that we all did stuff over there. We all did stuff we’re proud of and we all did stuff we regret and maybe you don’t get one without the other in this life. It was stubbornness and vanity that made me send that convoy…I wanted to finish the school. I wanted to be in charge and to think I could know what the best course of action was, given the circumstances. Danny’s right about that — none of us knows shit.”

“We regret it, but that’s only because we’re back here. If we were over there, we’d do it all again.”

“Could be,” said Penn. “Could be you’re right.”

The two men stood for a while contemplating the night sky before resuming their patrol. Kelly said, “The other thing I think about is if Pig Eye killed himself on purpose. The blast was going to get him whether or not Danny stopped the truck. So my question is, did he sacrifice his life for ours?”

“Knowing him, he probably thought he’d come through it just fine. He liked to imagine escape scenarios.”

Kelly laughed. “Yeah. He prided himself on that.”

They had circled around past the car parts shop. Penn went back inside, after which Kelly spent a little longer mourning Pig Eye and the other men and what he had always thought of as stars but now imagined were swords from a murderous extraterrestrial race. And then for some reason he was thinking there must be pretty girls in New Jersey, girls who wouldn’t fall apart too easily when things got rough. He didn’t know where to find them, but somewhere out there, the love of his life was standing in the moonlight wondering what was taking him so long to find her.