―
After those first few days on the Sonoma coastline Daniel had decided to stay. To keep the sea close. But at the same time he’d had to keep moving, too, so he’d carried on driving. He couldn’t go any farther west so he’d travelled the coast road instead, as far north as Florence, Oregon, and as far south as San Diego. As he’d travelled he’d avoided newspaper stands, bars with TVs, radio stations with regular bulletins. He soon realised, however, there was no need to be so careful. In a matter of weeks the story that had so ruptured his life had already slipped from the media’s interest, surfacing again only when the inquiry reached its conclusion. “Accidental killing”—that’s what they called what he’d done. It had been an accident. People had died. She had died. A couple of columns on page three or four. An item on the occasional news channel. Even in Australia and Britain the Pentagon statement had been little more than acknowledged. The world had moved on. To other stories, other deaths, feeding its hunger for now, not then.
Through it all they’d managed to keep his name out of the press. Whether Agent Munroe had deployed suppressing tactics or the juggernaut of military protocol had just taken over, in the eyes of the world the drone had remained unmanned.
But so had he. In those first months travelling the coast, tracing its cliffs and fishing towns, Daniel had been unable to settle. His nerves were raw and his sleep, unless he drank enough, was cursory and restless. He’d known he couldn’t return to Las Vegas while he was like that. But he also couldn’t bear stopping anywhere for long. He was still getting by on his discharge pay, so with no job to root him, he’d drifted the Californian coast like a sixties throwback, exiled from his vocation, in possession of a home, but unable to return there. That home was, though, still his final destination. He was sure of that. Not the house in Centennial Hills itself, but Cathy and the girls. They were his home, and why he was staying away from them now, so that one day in the future they might continue to be so.
Although part of Daniel’s agreement with Cathy had been to give her space, they’d still kept in regular contact. Weekly phone calls, emails. He’d Skyped the girls regularly too, close-shaving in guesthouse bathrooms to maintain his previous military smoothness. As far as Sarah and Kayce were concerned, their father’s work had taken him away again. Which in a manner of speaking, Daniel had convinced himself, was true. It wasn’t a difficult story for them to accept. Over the years of his service his absence had become as familiar to them as his presence. But even when on tour he’d always got leave, so a few months ago with Cathy’s consent, he’d travelled back to Las Vegas to see them.
He’d been with them for only a day. Cathy had said it would be too disruptive — for her and for the girls — if he’d stayed for any longer, or come to sleep at the house. So instead he’d arrived the night before, checking in to a serviced MGM apartment just off the strip. As usual, he hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d spent much of the night strolling the covered malls and the casinos, watching the gamblers feed the machines.
They met over breakfast at one of the Paris restaurants, a foot of the Eiffel Tower planted through the ceiling above them. Seeing the girls had almost been too much for Daniel. But he knew Cathy would be watching him, weighing his responses, his behaviour, so somehow he’d held himself together, suppressing his desire to just take them in his arms and hold them. As he’d paid the bill Cathy had thrown him a look, one in which the wife he’d known and the wife he was coming to know both seemed to be imploring him to understand how fragile this was, to understand what he held.
That evening Daniel took the girls to Disney on Ice, but before that they’d had a whole day together. They’d spent most of it walking the strip, Daniel pushing Sarah in her stroller, Kayce holding his hand. Between shopping in the malls and eating snacks they’d seen New York, Paris, Venice, Egypt; dwarf versions of the Empire State, the Arc de Triomphe, the Pyramids. Later, on their way to the show that evening they’d stopped to watch the choreographed fountains in the lake before the Bellagio, their towering plumes shooting from shadow into light.
After his months in the wine country and coast of Sonoma, the city felt heavily present to Daniel, and yet film-set ephemeral too. He’d never noticed before how there was music piped everywhere on the strip. From the lampposts, potted plants, all along the fake cobbled malls. Even the walkways above the highway felt like themed zones of homelessness, these being, as far as he could tell, the only places where the city’s beggars were allowed to ply their trade.
As Daniel watched the Bellagio fountains, the girls shrieking and jumping at his sides, he realised he’d been wrong. For all the time he’d worked out at Creech he’d always seen what he did there as a strangely jarring disconnect from the rest of Las Vegas. Here, in the city’s heart, fantasy, escape, and gambling were the dominant notes of its song. Out there, in the desert, they faced reality, war, death. The strip was about forgetting death. Creech was about dealing in it.
But it wasn’t that simple, and as those fountains had danced in unison he’d seen that, with a sudden clarity. Creech wasn’t a disconnect from the aspiration of the city, but a continuum. In Las Vegas, versions of the world were translated to America so America didn’t have to go there. In doing so, other countries, other places, were simultaneously brought closer and pushed farther away. Just like they had been on those screens he’d watched out in Creech. Because isn’t that what they’d done out there too, he and Maria with their coffees cooling on the shelf? Brought a version of the war to America. A close-up yet far away version, a safe equivalent, so they didn’t have to go there themselves.
All through the show that evening, as the dancers at Cinderella’s ball had spun and pirouetted over the ice, Daniel felt the city’s culture of imitation bleeding through his previous life there. All of it, he saw now, had been simulacra, representation. The broad streets and ochre houses of Centennial Hills were communal, but no more than an image of community. The desert bushes and trees planted in the gravel were miniature models of the real desert spreading beyond the locked gates of the cul-de-sacs. Even the Charleston Mountains, he realised, looked like a shrunken version of those ranges through which he’d flown in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as if they’d been bought in the same job lot as the Eiffel Tower under which they’d had breakfast. And them, too, he had to admit. He, his daughters, Cathy, sitting to eat pancakes like a real vacationing family. They, too, were no more than an imitation. A pretend family, hollow at the centre, and all because of him.
When Daniel handed the girls back over to Cathy that night, strapping them into their car seats in the Thomas & Mack Center’s parking lot, he’d made a silent promise to all of them that whatever it took, he’d fill that hollow. That they would not, one day, be just the image of a family, but the real thing, living a life together, not making one up.
As he’d driven back west the following day, taking his old route towards Creech, Daniel finally turned off the highway and drove up into the mountains he’d only ever seen from afar when he’d lived in the city. Pulling up beside the road at the crest of a high valley, he’d got out of the Camry and breathed in the scent of eucalyptus on the breeze. At that altitude snow was still patching the ground below the bushes. Bending to it, Daniel had brought a handful to his face and pressed it against his cheek, its sting gratefully real.