Compare and contrast x and y. I remember the call that came later that night. The semester was officially over for everyone by that point, and I was in Ilkay's room in the 26th Street dorm. There were about eight or nine people there. We had just finished off a bottle of Johnny Walker, and people were starting to get their coats on, even if it was rather warm for the season. We were going downtown to meet up with what was something of a super group of friends, as the party was to include several clusters of people, many of them mere acquaintances. But then I got the call. I was going to ignore it, as the number was not stored in my phone, but I saw that it was from my old area code. A premonition washed over me as I ducked out of the dorm room and into the hallway. Even before the voice at the other end of the line began to speak, I felt myself falling into a fugue state, my abdomen a theater of acrobats. It was Allison — hysterical, inconsolable. All she wanted was someone with whom she could feel normal, with whom she could retreat into the past, with whom she could feel safe. And I remember feeling so estranged from her, so alienated that I could not even commiserate or mourn with full sincerity. Maryland was an ancillary life at that time, even if I was set to return in only a few hours. And yet we had been separated by so much more. True, we had shared a past, but I had divorced myself from it, not because I was looking to escape it, but because I had egressed from it — from the circles that went to state schools, the army buddies, those who stayed back in the suburbs to work menial jobs and embrace ersatz versions of Yuppidom, those who would tease me when I went home because they said I didn't understand what it was like to work for a living. They were on their own, living in parts of the city that I had been taught to fear. They were regulars at neighborhood bars, even if they hadn't hit twenty-one. Some of them had wives. Some of them had husbands. Or did. And so it was with Allison, the girl who had lived just down the block from me for the majority of my life. And she was such a large part of my life for so long, even if that life now seems to be a precursor to the life I was, am, will be, living. We were in second grade when we met. You wore a red velour dress over a white, ribbed long-sleeve shirt. There were pink and yellow things on it. I don't recall what they were — bunnies or birds or something so nauseatingly cute that we still talked about it the last time I saw you. Even then they were eyesores, weren't they? Even to someone who thought a Magic Eye constituted the most brilliant marriage of technology and art, I knew they were hideous and kitschy and yet so grossly endearing that it was almost painful. You had come from Connecticut — the move a consequence of a disease of the widowing variety. Your hair was almost translucent it was so blond. Your skin was so fair it was almost transparent. I remember being able to see the veins in your face. And I remember being fascinated by it, even if this fascination now seems to be tinged by a certain type of disgust. But it wasn't disgust, was it? It couldn't have been. No, it was something more. And that something more materialized when we were fourteen. Yes, that was you in the dark as Tigermilk, the album to which your older brother could not stop listening, played. It was then that you introduced me to just how beautiful a moment could be, even if I had been taught to think of all sex as pornography, of love as the type of thing that has to be either eternal or a burden or something that can only be felt after decades of trial and error. But love can exist in the moment, can't it? Didn't it? Didn't it exist that night, not as something as profound as eternity, but as something that required nothing more than a shared experience between two people ready to shed things far more substantial than their clothing? Even in the second grade I think I understood this. Because I loved you, even if I did not understand it as love then, even if I don't think of it as the love one speaks of when discussing wives or fiancées or girlfriends; nor was it the love a father or brother or relative feels for the corresponding relative. No, it was its own state of love, a variation upon the Form, which I suppose every instance of love is, as each contains its own history by which its proclivities and idiosyncracies are fashioned. And at the time I could not help but feel as though it all gravitated around your innocence, one that was never truly lost, but eventually obfuscated by the opaque cynicism that all too often clouds the desire to be earnest, which is perhaps the kernel of love. Yes, the desire to be earnest, sincere. And so maybe your innocence was just how I experienced that kernel of truth that united the two of us. And for all I know maybe you see the same thing in me; maybe you cannot help but perceive my innocence. And now you have a child that was born in your likeness, an extension of your innocence. And now she has a husband who will rear his daughter from the confines of a photograph or a candid moment on a video. His only testimonial will come in the form of a one-page letter that he never thought he'd have to share; and yet she will read it like scripture — Frankie's Epistle. The letter was discovered on his body — badly burned, as he had been murdered by a form of blindness that had manifested itself in an I.E.D. He had been murdered because he wanted to protect us, because he thought enlisting was the noble thing to do. He was going to fight on the side of freedom, the quiet American surrounded by other quiet Americans and led by an ugly American. But it was not a battle of valor; it is not a battle of valor over there. It is just a series of murders — some justified, most not. I know that he probably had to commit murder. I know that collateral damage is not miscalculated self-defense; it is a form of murder. He knew it, too. And it was a cumbersome and agonizing epiphany that he came to recognize rather quickly. And then the guilt sank in. He was suffering over there, the suffering fueled by indignation, as so many were incapable of seeing him as defender; rather, he was the oppressor, the aggressor, another belligerent for whom conquest and imperialism were his sole motives. He was profoundly shocked, outraged by the role he had been asked to fill. I knew that he was. War may change even the most intractable, but it cannot eradicate the virtue of integrity unless that person capitulates to hatred. And this is something that he never did, something that he was not capable of. And while a more pessimistic spectator of humanity may claim to know that the world spins upon axes of avarice and wrath, that civilizations evince their advances by measuring the carnage in their wake, there is a wealth of stubbornness that one must attribute to this spectator, for whom all probity is but a lie, for whom heroism is but vanity's most cunning pretense. Yes, there is a stubbornness that will not admit the grace that seeks not to reveal itself. And Frankie was one who maintained his grace, his desire to simply protect, but not destroy, even if he was ordered to do so. He was there for reasons that were his own. And while he probably regretted the decision from time to time, he knew that he had done what he believed was right. He did not enlist to either perpetuate hatred or fulfill an atavistic duty. (He was not a military kid. His father had served in Vietnam, and his grandfather had served in the Pacific, and his great grandfather had fought in the gruesome trenches that continue to scar the European landscape (though perhaps not physically), but his family did not want to be the American Cornellii Scipiones. Perhaps they were each more akin to the ideals set forth by Cincinnatus). He was there because he believed it was the right thing to do. And he understood it as a corollary following from beliefs that he held, not as something that was categorical. He knew that I was against the war, and that others were against the war. And he understood that we believed it was wrong for reasons that stemmed from primary beliefs he did not share. But he respected them. That is why he was always calm as he argued the necessity of a liberated Iraq. He never regurgitated Bushisms, and he never questioned my patriotism. He felt sick because of the ignorance and arrogance of so many of his fellow soldiers, as well as those who shared many of his political views. They talked about shooting ragheads; one guy said he wanted to “Round up every sona'bitch named Mohammad, put'm in a camp, and drop a fuckin' nuke on'm.” I believe the words, “Git'r done” were then added — though it may have been a bit early for that. On leave in Switzerland, a young G.I. tried to baptize him. Frankie was so ashamed of all of this, so ashamed that he fought to uphold freedom and democracy, whereas others were there to participate in holy war and blind vengeance. They were there to destroy, just like the Thanatists of Flights 11 and 77 and 93 and 175, like the people who celebrate and communicate by firing automatic weapons into the air, apparently ignorant or perhaps dismissive of the Western proverb, “What goes up, must come down.” While on leave prior to his deployment, he seemed more like a man than anyone probably should be at so young an age. He had always been intelligent, disciplined; but he was more so when I saw him last. He was so calm and thoughtful for someone who would soon be asked to sacrifice both his life and the lives of others for an idealism in which so long ago I began to lose faith. And now I have — completely and absolutely. That faith's swan song accompanied the firing of seven armed men who stood within yards of his grave. Quiet outrage flowed through so many of the people there during the service. Many of his friends were twisting their programs, their eyes swollen and concentrated in resentment. Whispered sentiments of “This is fucking bullshit” and “Fuck Bush” erupted at sporadic intervals. There was rage against death, rage against war, rage against Mission Accomplished. I was enraged by the fact that his pallbearers were denied the privilege of laying him to rest; instead they had to surrender even his corpse to four Marines, four children, who stood stoic in the wet snow, who didn't know him, who would later attempt to console us by expressing regret for having never known him, who…. But it's not their fault, is it? How can I be angry with men who have been ordered to do these things? How can I hold a grudge against someone who has been commanded to provide something as benign as consolation?). It's so lucid, as is Frankie's wake, as well as the aftermath, when I told Allison that I would always be there for her. And yet I haven't: Allison, who has endured so much death and difficulty. Allison, I have forgotten about you; I have not always been there. And I could lie to myself, and say that it's distance. But it's not distance. It's never distance. But I can't think of all of this now; I can't let myself get caught up in a past that I abandoned so many years ago.