Song for Night

Danger Is a Deeper Silence

Time is standing still — literally. My watch, an old Timex that belonged to my father, is fucked. Already broken when he died, it was the only thing of his that my uncle let me inherit. The watch has one of those expanding bracelets made of a metal that was painted gold once, and its face is a mottled brown. Since I’ve had it, the second and hour hands have fallen off, both nestling like tired armatures in the bottom of the cracked glass case. My life it turns out is a series of minutes. I glance and guess it’s about noon now. I have been walking for too long and I am dying of thirst. The river to my right is poisonous with the dead. It would be wise to get off the river road and make my way through the shade of the forest until I can find some water, but the road is faster and I decide to continue on it for now. I look at my broken watch and think, One more hour. Rustling the broken arms like pods in a shaker, I head off again.

I have other watches. Nicer watches. Rolex, Patek Philippe, Raymond Weil, Movado — name it. All of them liberated from houses we ransacked or from soldiers who had ransacked other houses before us. And not just watches. I have electronics, cameras, money, jewelry, weapons, shoes, designer clothes, even gold teeth and glasses. Looting is something we all do, rebel and federal troops, officers and enlisted men alike. John Wayne even took a car once, a Lexus that blew up shortly after. That made him angry for a week. We take what we can when we can. Since we have no means of transporting too much for too long, especially as we must keep our weight down for the mines, we made several secret stashes along the way. We figured others might stumble on a cache or two, but with the number we have, we will be well off after the war.

Through it all, my father’s watch remains my most treasured possession. That and the medallion of St. Christopher that Ijeoma gave me after she stepped on that mine. She would have taken it off her own neck, except that she no longer had any arms or legs and wasn’t much more than a bloody torso, lacerated by shrapnel, body parts scattered in a way that cannot be explained or described. Instead I read her mind, or her eyes, or something, and understood everything — what she wanted, what stood she regretted — all of it, filling my head like a bad virus. I reach under my shirt and rub the cool metal of the medallion. She said it would protect me for sure now, especially as it had already claimed one victim.

“I am proper sacrifice,” she said, and smiled.

I remember it all — every minute of it — vividly. Or at least I remember my memories of it. She lay dying in my arms, and I wiped a tear from her face.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not expecting her to answer.

“You disobeyed the rule book,” she said.

She was right. I was in the middle of a live minefield assisting a dying comrade, in direct contravention of John Wayne’s rules, abandoning my post to help her, endangering myself and the rest of my platoon. But I loved her.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t die.”

“It’s not so bad,” she said. “Dying, I mean. It’s not so bad.”

“Shush,” I said.

“Leaving …” she began, and then she died. I like to think she was going to say, “Leaving you is hard.”

I’ve often replayed that scene, wishing that I could change some detail. That I had held her back for a quick kiss, thus keeping her from that mine, but being the leader meant having to act a little indifferent toward her in front of the others. If she resented the change, she said nothing. I squeeze my eyes tightly closed, but her mocking smile can’t be shut out.

Voices, and not imaginary ones, are coming down the road from a hidden bend. I don’t hesitate, loping across the short grass between me and the forest, gaining cover quickly. There is no point in waiting around to find out if they are friend or foe. I need to get to a town and get some food and drink, so I plunge deeper into the forest, moving fast if not silently through the undergrowth. At this point, silence doesn’t matter anymore. Even if they hear me, they will imagine it is some animal. I press on until I break through the cover into a circular natural clearing in the forest. It has been widened and I can tell from the cut shrubbery where nature stopped and machetes moved forward. There are a couple of open and empty metal shipping containers, a few bombed-out vehicles, including an ambulance and a ruined armored car. Something about the ambulance fills me with a nostalgia that makes my eyes water from the sweetness of it. I stop and scan the clearing. Apart from a few crows, the place is abandoned. Something about it is very familiar though and I realize I have been here before. The entire platoon has been here. Just before Ijeoma got blown up, after the church incident, after I shot John Wayne. There is no mistaking the statues the guys liberated from the church — the wooden Jesus in a peeling red tunic with one leg missing where Nebu had chopped it off the day we killed a monkey and needed firewood to cook; Jesus’ leg was the only dry wood anywhere on that rainy day, the rain had made it possible to catch the monkey as it slipped on a wet branch. I couldn’t eat it because it reminded me too much of the dead child in my dreams, and of that night we stumbled on that gory feast, those gorgons, and I left the campsite as the others cooked and ate it. Later, Ijeoma brought me an open tin of Spam from a box we’d liberated from some rich man’s house.

I look around, eyes meeting those of the sad-looking Virgin whose white-painted concrete body has turned green from rain. She is mottled from the bullet holes we inflicted with target practice. I approach slowly. I am on the right track, this much is sure. It seems I am retracing my steps through places we passed. Something is off about it though, and yet as much as it is nagging at me, I cannot pinpoint what it is exactly, but I know it has something to do with the chronology of my memories. The time between them is shrinking, I think. If I didn’t still have this damn concussion I might be able to figure it out.

I approach the containers. Buried under them in a metal box is a cache of food we left here. It is probably bad, but it’s worth trying. Like a chicken, I scratch in the dirt under it until I pull out the metal box that used to house the rounds for the M60 machine gun we had mounted on the roof of the bombed-out truck. There are several tins of food and I quickly drive my knife through the top of one lid into the soft meat inside. Even as I do it I think it is stupid that I didn’t check to see if the contents were booby-trapped. If the cache had been disturbed it would be impossible to tell because the ground was old.

There is no booby-trap, no explosion, just the sweet taste of stale sardines in olive oil filling my mouth, my knife still embedded in the smile of the woman on the tin. Queen of the Coast, it says.

I have happy memories about this place. We spent a long time here, hiding out from the war, being teenagers, and in that forest idyll, the change the war had wrought on us seemed very subtle. When we first stumbled on this oasis, the rain had collected in a seasonal pond and we lived in the burned-out trucks and armored vehicles, feeding on the forest’s grace and swimming in the pond. Ijeoma and I lived as a couple in the back of the old ambulance, making love with desperation tinged with the foreknowledge of loss. If we could have, we would have waited out the war here We didn’t want to move on, didn’t want to press on to the front. We weren’t stupid and we were certainly no longer idealistic. We only moved forward when we were forced to. It was the systematic strafing campaign aimed at flushing out rebel soldiers hiding in the forest, a campaign that rained bombs on us, turning the forest into an inferno that made us leave. When we headed off, it was in the direction I have just come from.

I look around a little confused that there is no evidence of the bombing. The forest is lush and green. Is it possible that it grew back so fully so quickly? Things are off and I can’t quite place why. It’s like having something stuck in my teeth just out of reach of my tongue: irritating. What’s the use of hurrying things; it will come when it comes. I have other things to worry about, things more concrete.

I fall asleep under the truck I’ve been digging by, while all around a gentle rain falls, and I don’t dream of the child’s head; in the distance heavy artillery fire approaches. But for now I sleep.

Full of fish.