Flying back to Baghdad, he realized he wasn’t even hurt. He was relieved. And when he landed back in the desert, when he got his M4 back in his grip, when he got shot on his second patrol, the bullet catching him in the vest so that he didn’t feel like he was hit in one spot but across his entire torso and that sliver of air between body and armor billowed up and out across his throat and face, he felt more at home than he had the previous eighteen days in his mother’s gaze, in his father’s humor, in Hailey’s arms. Home is a roving sensation, not a place, and for a large chunk of his life, the feel of that bullet to the chest, that was home.
Rick grabbed one of his buddies to take a picture of the two of them before they headed out. He had an old Jaguars football banner that they both held up, the snarling beast exploding through a fifty-yard line.
“Surge buddies!” he cried as his friend snapped away on the digital camera.
As Dan prepared for the nerve-tingling drive back to Baghdad, Rick gave him a burned CD. “I got it on my iPod, so you can keep it.”
He read the title: Slow River.
“Oh shit,” he said. “This is Harrington’s album.”
“Yeah, man. Not sure what you’re into, but dude’s got chops.” He laughed. “We were having beers when I was back after my first tour, and some shit I said ended up right in the lyrics. I always busted the kid’s balls for being such a fag, but it’s pretty great. You’ll recognize so much of The Cane.”
Dan burned Slow River onto his own iPod. Before bed, he’d read or write and listen to all twelve tracks on a loop. Something about it just unwound him, and he’d come to think of the title track and “Cattawa” to be as essential as any other piece of his gear.
A couple of months after that, Rick took a sniper’s bullet on a dismounted patrol. One clean shot through the temple. Of course, Dan couldn’t make it home. Nor did he care to since Hailey would no doubt be there. Mom sent him pictures of the parade and clippings from the New Canaan News. Joni Ashcraft wrote the story. It quoted two of New Canaan’s football coaches, several teachers, and Rick’s father, Marty. It was hard for Dan not to imagine what his own parade might look like.
You called me Bullfrog, Harrington sang on “Cattawa.” You warned me about these chains / If I was a weatherman I could believe / Only the darkest storms reveal the finest rains.
“And the way everyone, even the Left, would venerate them. Picking their noses and talking about the troops. Like we were over there in the desert churning out heroes—all that macho bullshit that gets idiot fucking kids to go and die every time.”
Bill kept going, and Dan let him. He’d heard worse.
“Rick was one of them,” he said. “And so when he got his head blown off, you know what I fucking did? I didn’t cry. I’ll never cry for him. We weren’t making heroes; we were making dead boys and invalids and occasionally monsters. Turning eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids into rapists and murderers. And even you guys who came back expected a parade like the saps you were when you went. Nobody gives a fuck now.” He spat these words and then choked on the leftover saliva. “So no, I didn’t go to his funeral, the parade, or fuck-all anything, and I sure as shit won’t cry for him.” He sniffed and wiped his eyes with a shirtsleeve. “This doesn’t count. This is a drunk, drugged thing.”
Dan wanted to leave, but Bill wasn’t done.
“We had this huge blowout fight before he left. I mean, I told him what I thought. I told him I thought he was getting played, and we almost beat the shit out of each other. But that’s not what it was even about.”
“What was it about?” Dan asked, mostly because Bill wanted him to.
He looked at the vivid dusting of stars overhead. “I was fucking his girlfriend.”
“Kaylyn?”
He nodded. A teardrop of snot hung from his nose.
“You were dating Lisa, though?”
A quick, bitter laugh. “Well, yeah, that’s kinda the point of cheating. If you’re gonna fuck over one person you care about why not make it a hat trick.”
“Did Rick know?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
He couldn’t find a way to assimilate this.
“The thing about it was…” Bill wagged his finger at the night. “I knew it. Even before he left I knew it was going to happen. Not like a pure psychic premonition or anything, but… Jesus, I just fucking knew it. And when I heard…” He sucked in a long breath. His voice cracked. “When my dad called me and told me, all I could think about was how much I fucking hated him.” He sobbed the last few words. “How glad I was that I’d hurt him like that. Because fuck him. That selfish fucking piece of shit with his liberty and freedom and God-and-country idiot fucking bullshit. Fuck him.”
He put his face in his hands and hunched forward. He folded into himself like a snail and stayed there making soft noises that bloomed around him and competed with the crickets.
“Goddammit,” he barked, punching the steering wheel hard enough to make the whole dash shudder. His sobs made him sound even younger than when Dan had known him in high school. When you really weep, you always sound like the child you ultimately still are. “I want all those years back. I want out of this fucked parallel universe we’re all living in.”
Dan thought of walking a dirt road, the twilight still sweltering, training the sights of his M4 on laughing children. Ashcraft wanted to see conspiracy but only because it allowed him an explanation and a way to lay blame. All history was cyclic. And these cycles beget us, even if we didn’t understand them as we live them. Cycles of politics, cycles of exploitation, cycles of immigration, cycles of organization, cycles of accumulation, cycles of distribution, cycles of pain, of despair, of hope. The only fallacy, Dan figured, is the notion we’ve never been here before. But he’d carried that sensation in his chest his whole life—like he’d lived this already. Like he knew this moment a thousand years before he was born and would know it a thousand years after he died.
Dan popped open the door. “See you, Ashcraft. Can’t say it hasn’t been interesting.”
Wiping tears from his cheeks, Bill gave him a little two-finger salute. “Been real, Eaton. And be sure to be on the lookout for the spirits tonight. Trying to steal your light.”
His truck stammered and chuffed as he pulled away. Dan had this furious, forestalled sensation he wanted to be rid of. It was like trying to express the word love in a time before there was speech.
The receptionist desk was empty. Dan started down the antiseptic hallway, sharp white bulbs throwing uniform light across the pebble-colored carpet and walls of listless, institutional pistachio green. The alcohol gave everything a surreal quality—a sensation of bright faux-cheerful catacombs. He found a few nurses gathered at a desk, all mauve uniforms and hair in buns. He could hear the music from Seinfeld leaking out of a room down the hall.
“I’m here to see Hailey Kowalczyk,” he said. “I mean, Hailey Frye.”
One of the buns looked him over and left to find her.
You can always remember a person’s face but not their presence, not how they fill a room. Not how they move or think or how they weave a conversation. Green scrubs swishing, one hand swinging a clipboard, she looked thicker in the hips and breasts. Her hair was much darker, the shade of yellowing autumn leaves, held back from her high forehead in a no-nonsense bun. She smiled and there was still that bulbous quality to her cheeks, like two rosy tangerines. The closer she came, the more each of her features felt like its own vortex into the past. The slim bridge of her nose widening at the nostrils, which she flared with every expression, every smile or frown. Inflating then deflating. No ridge at the top of her ears where the cartilage ended like a disc. Her eyes the color of a blue flame. Her grin kept spreading wider and wider.