“If Katrina didn’t get you, Nagin will,” said Ines, referring to the mayor. “I don’t want to do this. I wouldn’t want anyone to see me like that. Just an arm. A leg. Your head in a fucking Styrofoam cooler, the cheap kind, not that you need a Coleman if only your head is left. Listen to me. I sound like you, don’t I?”
Achilles didn’t see any way to answer that safely.
“Afghanistan was different,” said Ines. “I once walked into a house to meet a group of women about to start a school. They were all there, all five, but dead, shot where they sat, except the leader. She was raped and strangled. I cried over that for a long time. But this is even worse, to enter each room hoping not to find what I’ve been sent to look for.” She ground out the cigarette. “Oops, littering,” she chuckled morbidly. “Let’s get this over with.”
“I’ll run in.”
“You don’t mind?” she asked.
He walked off. She looked surprised when he returned so quickly, and he made sure to shake his head as soon as she saw him.
“It’s not a big place,” he said.
“Are you sure? I should have gone with you. I want this to be done.”
“There’s only so much you can do in one day. Just because he’s not here today doesn’t mean he won’t be here tomorrow.” He searched for the word to describe it. It wasn’t a mission, or recon, or a task. It was a process. “It’s not like a job. It’s a promise, but not one you make or break in one day.”
She leaned against the car, glum and listless, tracing the air around the hood ornament with her fingers.
“If I were in there or there,” she said, pointing at the morgue and then at the river, “all I’d want is another cigarette, a beignet, a bad joke, another five minutes with you.”
“I’d want to be with you too. Cold dead fingers, remember, cold dead fingers. That’s what I want now, and I’m not there or there,” he said, pointing as she had. “I’m here, and I’ll go to every morgue in the Southeast for you.”
He reached for her hands, and she pulled away the dirty one. He held out his palm and waited.
“That’s gross.”
He waited until she offered her other hand, then pressed them both to his face and kissed every fingertip, watching her eyes. He recalled the movie screening, when he had first noticed how beautiful her eyes were. His stomach flittered, then grumbled.
“Was that?”
He nodded.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, looking baffled.
He took a chance. “Very!”
“Oh my god, Achilles,” said Ines, collapsing in laughter. “Actually, me too.”
As he was nodding off that night, she led him to the bed, where they slept together, too tired to do anything else. But to be in her arms, to hear her breathe …
He awoke the next morning as he had the past few weeks, tired. The dreams were vivid, bigger than memories. He could deny memories, ignore them, like running with a sprained ankle, or how you sometimes shit yourself but kept shooting, or held your breath while searching a dead guy’s pockets. He tuned memories out as he had tuned out the pleading.
Almost everyone they had dropped off for interrogations pled for release. Merri said the more they pled the guiltier they were. Wages said the opposite. Either way, you didn’t need to be fluent in Pashto or Persian or Arabic or what-fucking-ever to know what they were saying: Allah, love, please, kids, wife, daughter, mother, father, son, brother, cousin, please, please, please. Cousin, no! Brother, no! They would say when they saw Achilles or Merriweather. No, Cousin! No, Brother! Sincere, imploring, beseeching. Sheepishly acknowledging the wet crotch, sweat, red eyes, pointing to the sky, especially the dark ones, as if their common skin was a badge of kinship.
He had heard none of it, not a word.
The dreams, though, were alive, like a switch from black and white to straight in your face 3D, from the peep show to the harem. He remembered the IED, holding Jackson’s hand. But in his dreams he sees every wound and gash on Jackson’s face — the abrasion under his eye, the cut on his chin, the missing right ear — and that his left hand has only two fingers on it, like the little girl with the burned arm. He sees Merriweather on the gurney, his foot attached by a thin white tendon. He sees Merri’s kid, looking back to make sure he isn’t being chased, running almost fifty yards before bleeding out, mouthing “Papa.” And that look of confusion. He probably hadn’t even understood why he was suddenly so tired. He remembers Troy saying, more than once, “I could have come alone.”
Achilles, arms sore as if he’d been doing pull-ups all night, made his usual breakfast times two: protein powder and bottled water, three energy bars, and a spotted apple he scored from Charlie 1. He arranged the disaster zone special on a tray, fanning the energy bars out like an asterisk, and tiptoed back to the bedroom, but Ines was not in the bed, nor the bathroom, nor any place in the apartment. He found her on the roof, wearing a pair of blue fuzzy slippers with horns.
“My old favorites. The rest were in my mom’s basement. All ruined. That little skirt you liked, my spiked heels.” She listed a few other items, such as her velour tracksuit, his personal favorite. Under it, her tits felt so soft and furry.
“The list keeps adding up.”
“Speaking of that, you’re counting at night. Slow and deliberate. You go to the forties and start over. Repeatedly. You went to 112 once, but only once.”
He asked her to write the numbers down.
“Who says I’ll be sleeping with you again?”
“No one. I expect you to be awake. If not, your findings will be unreliable,” he said in his best military voice.
She laughed. “I’m sorry about yesterday.”
“I understand. I mean, I can go alone.”
“I don’t want to make you go through this.”
“Ines, I’m used to it. I saw it every day for two years.” And I’ve done it for the last year.
“This isn’t your battle.” She stared as if considering for the first time the full depth of his experiences. “Listen to me.”
He hoped she would allow him to go alone, to be useful, to do what she couldn’t do for herself. He also wanted to use an overnight trip to a distant morgue as an excuse to be gone long enough to make one last trip to Atlanta to take care of Pepper. But Ines insisted on accompanying Achilles to the morgues, even if she didn’t go in. Achilles argued this point, claiming she would be more useful at the phone bank.
“So you’re saying that because I can’t go all the way, I shouldn’t go at all?” asked Ines, her face red. “This is man’s work, is that what it is?”
They finally agreed they would put up flyers with her grandfather’s picture and return to the morgues the following day. The city was dotted with community bulletin boards where people had posted photos and notes. Their first stop, on Canal, was near the substation where Achilles had filed the MPR. Wanting to check on Morse, he felt imprisoned by his lies. For the first time he thought of them not as lies, but omissions, which were somehow worse. Lies filled space, creating a livable history, while omissions left him feeling incomplete, like phantom limbs.
That was certainly how everyone who posted these flyers must have felt, incomplete without these dogs, cats, a ferret, relatives. Ines touched each face, reading the names. Yearbook pictures, six mug shots, vacation photos, two boudoir shots, photo booth strips, prom pictures, wedding pictures, Xeroxes, color copies, group photos with one head circled, a mother with two children in her lap and both kids’ heads circled, a Santa photo, a Halloween scene, a bar mitzvah. The lettering was typed, printed, block print, cursive, English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and, at the very bottom, labeled in crayon, an old man in a wheelchair holding a teddy bear, each wearing a birthday hat. Like most in this morbid collage, they are smiling. Written in crayon underneath: Lester Newman. Last seen at St. Louis Cathedral. Answers to Papi.