There are many ways to die in a war. Dehydration is one.
For the want of water.
Vision Is the Same As Dreaming
I am in the middle of a battlefield.
The Angelus rings and I stop and lower my head. Before me, Ijeoma does the same. Behind us and all around but invisible in the shadows are the sounds of wings, a host of unseen. Ijeoma and I mouth the prayer together, lips folding greedily around words we can never utter: The angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary … Hail Mary … the words burn in us, like the love we still share. I finish and look up smiling.
Ijeoma is not smiling. Instead, she aims her rifle straight at my chest. I flinch at the report; flinch as the bullet tears through me. I feel my chest. No blood, no wound, nothing. Maybe it’s a ghost bullet.
I look over at Ijeoma and now she is laughing. Silently, of course, but no less abandoned. I am in shock for a moment, then I drop my head back and howl at the moon. The hard convulsions of my throat, not the sound, wakes me.
I shiver in the dark. Something disturbs the fruit bats, maybe a python, and they scatter from their perches in the trees into the night, their wings like the sound of a hundred ghosts and their high-pitched squeals unbearable. It drives me to a deeper hysteria and I fire blind into the sound. Tonight the world is full of fallen angels.
A Train Is Forearms Back and Forth Like Pistons
This village, nothing more than an old water stop for the train, is no more. All that I see is the rubble of some huts. There is only one standing — roofless, but humped there in the night, its protruding sticks and poles and crumbling earthen body give it the look of an elephant’s skeleton. I pause by it, leaning against a pole. This trek of mine is getting more and more ridiculous, I think. I am mostly moving from one scene of past trauma to another, the distances between them, though vast, have collapsed to the span of a thought, and my platoon is ever elusive. I am thoroughly confused, but my desire — which is larger than my need to find my platoon, yet wrapped into it — is relentless in propelling me forward. I look at my watch. Ten minutes, it says. Ten minutes to or after, I cannot tell. Nor the hour; still, there is reassurance in looking at it.
I came here from the river, from that gruesome scene of brimstone, because while making my way through the forest, I heard the whistle of a train. If I can hitch a ride it should make my progress faster. But now that I am here I wonder if it is the right decision. Around me, darkness covers everything in a thick blanket of peppercorns. Occasionally the wind moves a cloud and the moon spills silver over the black. That’s how I see the slow snake of the train approaching. By the time it reaches me, I am crouched by the track. The train moves slowly and it is easy to get a foothold and pull myself up. The cargo car I am now hunched in is empty, but I can smell straw and animals. Through the open door I can see more villages as we pass: huts crouching into the ground; orchards flowering in sweet scents; ponds; the river again; forests; more huts; a town with electricity, the neon somehow vulgar in light of the war, the music blaring in apologetic spurts; a straggly line of refugees walking, hugging the tree line, heading for some still distant hope.
The train begins to slow and pulls to a stop in a deserted station. Dawn is just ripping night’s fabric, stars dropping as dew. A flickering storm lantern sways gently from the station-master’s quarters, its light already diffused by the birthing sun. I know I have to get off here.
In the fragile sunlight, a woman is standing on the platform, scrutinizing the train. Her head jerks every time a door opens, but she turns away when she sees me and makes the sign of the cross. I cannot speak, and with her back turned she cannot see me sign, so I have no way of reassuring her. Something in the way she stands reminds me of myself, always searching for something.
I step from the platform onto the dusty road littered with tank carcasses like an elephant graveyard. When I turn back to look at the station, by some trick of the light the train has rusted over, the station fallen into ruin, and the bombed-out track coiled in on itself like spaghetti and covered in vegetation that crawls everywhere in a rush of green. I know it can’t be true though, I just came from there.
Mirages are common here, I think, shaking it off.
Light Is Jazz Hands and a Smile
Out of a nightmare sometimes a good dream is born. Twice since she died I have met Ijeoma in dreams. Perhaps the third time will be in the afterlife. Walking in this silence, the solitude of early morning that in a different time, a better time, would be full of the ritual of coffee, a time when even songbirds are still, I feel alone in the world. Yet it is not a sadness I feel. This morning, unaccountably, I am filled with an almost unbearable lightness. This light comes not from a sudden wholeness on my part, but from the very wounds I carry on my body and in my soul. Each wound, in its particular way, giving off a particular and peculiar light.
I wipe my fingers across my eyes repeatedly, the equivalent of saying, I don’t believe it, if I could talk. The road before me suddenly sheers away, ending abruptly in a cliff. I come to a halt on the edge and stare into an impenetrable darkness. There is something sinister about this particular darkness, as though every childhood fear I have is woven into its very fiber. I sit on a log by the roadside. Behind me, in the distance, I can make out the disused station and the rusting vine-covered train. In front of me is the darkness. I do what I always do in moments of doubt, I light a cigarette. As I inhale, I think what a funny thing this habit has become. It is one I cannot do without and yet three years ago I didn’t smoke. My parents (even my hated step-father) would have gone berserk if they knew I was smoking. I remember a song I heard in boot camp, War! Huh! What is it good for … but instead of saying, Absolutely nothing, we’d add a phrase we like. I sing in my head. War! Huh! What is it good for? American cigarette companies! But it doesn’t distract me for long and my mind returns to the anomaly in front of me.
I don’t remember there being a cliff here. Not that I am sure I remember where I am, even though the sign at the train station was the same one I saw when I rode the train of death down from the north. Anyway, why would anyone build a road that leads to a dead end at a cliff edge? Apart from the obvious danger, it just doesn’t make sense. I know the road wasn’t bombed out because the darkness is too wide for any bomb we currently have. Only a nuclear bomb could do this much damage and I doubt either side has one, and even if we did and it had been used, the mushroom cloud would have been visible for miles, a tumor against the sky.
No, I decide, I am hallucinating. I must be. I scratch the cemetery on my arm and tell myself that if I put one foot into the darkness, it would disappear. I tell myself that this is only the shape of my guilt: guilt for all the lives I’ve lost or taken, guilt for letting my platoon down, guilt for losing my mother, for leaving her to die for me while I hid in the ceiling like a little coward.
I try to summon all the light that filled me moments ago. Light I need to cross the darkness. Still afraid and with no more light, I step over the edge of the cliff. The darkness vanishes and I am back on the road.
Ahead of me, a woman walks, a coffin balanced precariously on her head, her hips swaying with the effort, and yet poised, graceful even.