Billy cried. They prayed. Billy cried some more. He felt better for a couple of hours, but as day turned into evening and the hurt seeped in he found there was nothing for his mind to hold on to. What exactly had the pastor said? Billy remembered only the sound of it, a gauzy pambling and tinkling like easy-listening jazz. A couple of follow-up phone calls yielded similar uselessness, but now Pastor Rick won’t let him go. He keeps calling, texting, sending e-mails and links. Billy gets what’s in it for Pastor Rick; it’s cool for the reverend to have a “pastoral relationship” with a soldier in the field, it gives him cred, shows a stylish commitment to the issues of the day. Billy can hear the good pastor of a Sunday morning kick-starting his homily with a piece of Billy’s soul. “I was communicating the other day with one of our fine young soldiers who’s serving in Iraq, and we were discussing blah blah blah…”
Billy answers Kathryn, deletes Pastor Rick. Here on his right, Mango can’t get comfortable. He hunches over, flops back, peers left and right, twists around for a buggy look behind.
“Goddamn it,” Billy says, “be still. You’re making me nervous.”
“So stop being nervous.”
“You looking for something?”
“Yeah, your momma.”
“Fuck that, your momma. My momma’s a nun.”
Mango laughs and sits back. He checks out the game clock and groans. Being honored feels a lot like work and it’s worse out here on the aisle, sitting point for the Bravo-citizen interface. Yes sir, thank you sir. Yes ma’am, having a great time, absolutely. Billy passes programs down the row for everybody to autograph and has to make conversation while they come back. It’s getting better, don’t you think? It was worth it, don’t you think? We had to do it, don’t you think? He wishes that just once somebody would call him baby-killer, but this doesn’t seem to occur to them, that babies have been killed. Instead they talk about democracy, development, dubya em dees. They want so badly to believe, he’ll give them that much, they are as fervent as children insisting Santa Claus is real because once you stop believing, well, what then, maybe he doesn’t come anymore?
So what do you believe in? Billy doesn’t so much wonder as feel the question thrust upon him. Ha ha, well, okay. Jesus? Sorta. Buddha? Hm. The flag? Sure. How about… reality. Billy decides the war has made of him a rock-solid convert to the Church of What It Is, so let us pray, my fellow Americans, please join me in prayer. Let us pray for the many thousands gone, and those to follow. Let us pray for Lake and his stumps. Pray for A-bort’s SAW, that it may never jam in battle. Pray for Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld, father, son, and holy ghost, and all the angels of CENTCOM and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pray that it’s really about the oil. Pray for armor for the Humvees. Pray for Shroom, who may or may not have eternal life in heaven but who is most definitely fucking dead here on planet Earth.
Billy sits up. He supposes he’s been flaking. He cranes for a look down the sideline where Faison should be, but he’s too close to the field and doesn’t have the angle. For several minutes he tries to concentrate on the game, but it’s too slow, like riding an elevator that stops on every floor. It’s not like you’re supposed to watch the actual game anyway, no, you watch the Jumbotron, which displays not just the game in real and replay time but a nonstop filler of commercials, a barrage of sensory overload that accounts for far more content than the game itself. Could it be that advertising is the main thing? And maybe the game is just an ad for the ads. It’s too much anyway, what they want from it. Such a humongous burden the game has to bear, so many advertising dollars, such huge salaries, such enormous outlays for physical plant and infrastructure that you can practically hear the sport groaning under the massive load, and the idea of it stresses Billy out, the gross imbalance triggers a tweezing in his gut like the first queasy tugs of a general unraveling. He thinks back to his Moment in the equipment room, when all those cumulative tons of gear tried to smother him and there was Ennis doing the play-by-play for his demise, babbling about size-style-color-model-quantity and everything crammed into that ten-minute spiel, in one breath it seemed like, and even now Billy can feel his chest constrict.
He figures Ennis for batshit, but who wouldn’t go crazy holding all that inventory in his head. Billy has these visions sometimes, these brief sightlines into America as a nightmare of superabundance, but Army life in general and the war in particular have rendered him acutely sensitive to quantity. Not that it’s rocket science. None of the higher mathematics is involved, for war is the pure and ultimate realm of dumb quantity. Who can manufacture the most death? It’s not calculus, yo, what we’re dealing with here is plain old idiot arithmetic, remedial metrics of rounds-per-minute, assets degraded, Excel spreadsheets of dead and wounded. By such measures, the United States military is the most beautiful fighting force in the history of the world. The first time he saw this demonstrated up close and personal sent him into a kind of shock, or maybe what they mean by awe. They were taking small-arms fire from somewhere above, sloppy, sporadic, deadly nonetheless. Finally it’s sourced to a four-story apartment building down the street. There are flower pots in the windows, laundry strung from the sills. “Call it in,” Captain Tripp radioed to Lt., so Lt. calls in the strike, two 155 mm HE rounds engage and the whole building, no, half the block goes down, boom, problem solved in a cloud of flame and smoke. So screw all the high-tech, precision-guided, media-whore stuff, the only way to really successfully invade a country is by blasting it to hell.
“Let’s bounce,” Billy murmurs to Mango, and they’re off, burning up the stairs two at a time.
“Where we going?”
“To see my girlfriend.”
Mango snorts. On the concourse they hit Papa John’s for beers, then start walking.
“So where’s this girlfriend?”
“You’ll see. Shut up and drink your beer.”
“You never told me about no girlfriend, dawg.”
“Well I’m telling you now, dawg.”
“What’s her name?”
“You’ll see.”
“She hot?”
“You’ll see.”
“She’s here?”
“No, Arizona. Of course she’s here, dumbfuck, how else we going to see her?”
The concourse is teeming with fans. The natives are restless. It has been a frustrating game thus far and they blow off steam by spending money. Happily there is retail at every turn so the crowd doesn’t lack for buying opportunities, and it’s the same everywhere Bravo has been, the airports, the hotels, the arenas and convention centers, in the downtowns and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.
They take the section 30 tunnel off the main concourse and bomb down the aisle, shooting the gap of this human sea of fannies in the seats.
“Billy, where we going?”
“She’s down here.” Billy is sucking in deep drafts of air, oxygenating his blood to counteract the booze. God forbid his new girlfriend should think him a drunk.
“Billy, what the fuck.”