“Everybody laughed as we came up with what we’d tell them. All the Marines had suggestions, but I turned them down. Americans think the best insults are all ‘cunt’ and ‘*,’ but in Arabic it’s all ‘shoes’ and ‘foreskins’ and ‘putting a dick in your mother’s rib cage.’”
“I get the idea,” she said.
“Well, this worked,” I said. “They didn’t charge out of the mosques like idiots, but they still assaulted, and they got mowed down.”
“I don’t care if it worked.”
“I mean, all this guy’s men were hearing him being disrespected. Humiliated. For an hour. This was a violent time. There were a hundred little insurgent groups, a hundred little local chiefs trying to grab power. And I was shaming him in front of everybody. I told him, ‘You think fighting us will win you honor, but we have your daughters. You’ve fucked with us, so you’ve fucked your children. There is no honor.’ He didn’t have a choice. And I never saw him die. I never saw him at all. I just heard the Marines shooting him down. They told me he led his little suicide charge.”
“I get it,” she said.
“But you don’t like it,” I said. “My dad didn’t either. He’d rather I shot them in the face. In his mind, that’s so much nicer. So much more honorable. He’d have been proud of me, if I’d done that. You’d like me better, too.”
“I’d rather you hadn’t done anything,” she said.
“And I told my father everything. Insult by insult. What I said. All the things I’d learned in America, all the things I’d learned from him, all the things that’d been said to me, all the things I could think of, and I could think of a lot.”
“I get it,” she said again, this time in the same tone of voice that my father had used when I told him and he’d said, “Enough.” But with my father I’d kept going, described every sexual act, every foul Arabic word. I’d cursed for him and at him in English, in Egyptian, in Iraqi, in MSA, in Koranic Arabic, in Bedouin slang, and he’d said, “Enough, enough,” his voice shaking with rage and then terror, because I was standing over him, shouting insults in his face, and he couldn’t see his son any more than I—standing over him and letting my rage wash out—could see my father.
“You think I’m ashamed of it?” I said to Zara, and I saw my father, heard the words he couldn’t even get out of his mouth because the shock of it was too much. His hands had trembled, his eyes were downcast. There was gray in his mustache. He looked old. Beaten. I’d never seen him that way before.
Zara asked, “What happened to his daughters?”
I didn’t know.
“When I think about killing that man,” I said, “I think of that kid with the heat fading out.”
I slumped down into the couch. We were quiet again. I thought about firing up more coals but I lacked the energy. After cursing my father I’d spent the night in a Motel 6, where my mother found me and brought me home. My father and I didn’t talk for the rest of my leave.
“Okay,” Zara said. She paused, looked out at the street. “So… what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to forgive you?”
“Forgive me?” I said. “How? For what?”
“And even if I did,” she said, “would it matter? Because I’m Muslim? You think that matters to the kid you watched die?”
I smiled at her. How far from the point, I thought, was that kid’s death. It was at best the point of somebody else’s story, though I guess Zara knew that.
“I tell vets the scope story,” I said. “They usually laugh.”
Zara stood up slowly, anger lighting her face. I didn’t move from my seat. I looked up at her and waited for a response. Even covered up, her body was still lovely under her clothes. I kept smiling, enjoying her in front of me and enjoying the superiority I knew I’d feel when her outburst came. No one can really cut you when they’re angry. It clouds their mind too much. Better to be like me in Fallujah, lying through your teeth and shouting hateful things with calm intelligence, every word calibrated for maximum harm.
But Zara’s outburst didn’t come. She just stood there. And then some emotion I couldn’t identify moved through her, and she didn’t seem angry anymore. She stepped back and looked at me, considering. She reached up and adjusted her shawl.
“Okay,” she said at last. “It’s okay.”
For the first time since that morning, walking into the Special Assistant’s office and seeing her there, I was the unsettled one. She wasn’t playing any of the moves I’d envisioned for her.
“What do you mean?” I said.
She reached over and put her hand on my shoulder, her touch light and warm. Even though her face was calm, my heart was beating and I looked up at her as though she were passing down a sentence. There was an unearthly quality to her then.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you can talk about it.” Then she walked down the steps of the porch and stopped at the bottom. Behind her were the elm trees and the shoddy clapboard houses of South Whitney Street, housing for the off-campus frats and the few Amherst students who didn’t live in dorms. She didn’t quite belong here, I thought, and neither did I.
Zara stood in the yard, not moving. After a moment, she turned back and looked up the stairs to where I was still sitting by the hookah.
“Maybe we’ll talk another time,” she said. Then she gave a slight wave with her hand, turned, and walked back to campus.
WAR STORIES
“I’m tired of telling war stories,” I say, not so much to Jenks as to the empty bar behind him. We’re at a table in the corner, with a view of the entrance.
Jenks shrugs and makes a face. Hard to tell what it means. There’s so much scar tissue and wrinkled skin, I never know if he’s happy or sad or pissed or what. He’s got no hair and no ears either, so even though it’s been three years after he got hit, I still feel like his head is something I shouldn’t stare at. But you look a man in the eye when you talk to him, so for Jenks I force my eyes in line with his.
“I don’t tell war stories,” he says, and takes a sip of his glass of water.
“Well, you’re gonna have to when Jessie and Sarah get here.”
He gives a nervous laugh and points to his face. “What’s to say?”
I take a sip of my beer and look him up and down. “Not a lot.”
Jenks’s story is pretty obvious, and that’s another weird thing because Jenks used to be me, basically. We’re the same height, grew up in the same kind of shitty suburban towns, joined the Marine Corps at the same time, and had the same plan to move to New York when we got out. Everybody always said we could be brothers. Now, looking at him is like looking at what I would have been if my vehicle had hit that pressure plate. He’s me, but less lucky.
Jenks sighs and sits back in his chair. “At least for you, it gets you laid,” he says.
“What does?”
“Telling war stories.”
“Sure.” I take a sip of beer. “I don’t know. Depends.”
“On what?”
“Circumstances.”
Jenks nods. “Remember that little reunion we had with all the ESB guys?”
“Hell, yeah,” I say. “Way we were talking, you would have thought we were some Delta Force, Jedi ninja motherfuckers.”
“The girls ate it up.”
“We did pretty well,” I say, “for a bunch of dumbass Marines hitting on city girls.”
Jenks gives me a look. Right around his eyes is the only place where his skin looks halfway normal; the eyes themselves are pale powder blue. They never really struck me before he got hit, but they’ve got a sort of intensity now in contrast with the boiled-pork-pink smoothness of his skin grafts. “Of course, that shit only worked because I was there,” he says.
Now I’m laughing, and after a second Jenks starts laughing, too. “Damn straight,” I say. “Who’s gonna call bullshit when you’re sitting there in the corner looking all Nightmare on Elm Street?”
He chuckles. “Happy to help,” he says.
“It does help. I mean, you tell a chick, ‘Yeah, I went to war, but I never fired my rifle… .’”
“Or ‘Hey, I spent most of the deployment paving roads. Building force pro. Repairing potholes.’”
“Exactly,” I say. “Even the antiwar chicks—which in this city is all of them—want to hear you were in some shit.”
Jenks points to his face. “Some shit.”
“Right. Don’t have to say anything. They’ll start imagining all sorts of stuff.”
“Black Hawk Down.”
“The Hurt Locker.”
He laughs again. “Or like you said, Nightmare on Elm Street.”
I lean forward, elbows on the table. “You remember what it was like, going to a bar in dress blues?”
Jenks gets quiet for a second. “Fuck, man. Yeah. Automatic panty dropper.”
“No matter how ugly you are.”
He grunts. “Well, there’s a limit.”
We sit in silence for a bit, and then I let out a sigh. “I’m just fucking tired of chicks getting off on it.”
“On what? The war?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I had a girl start crying when I told her some shit.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Some bullshit.”
“About me?”
“Yeah, about you, motherfucker.” Now he’s definitely smiling. The left side of his face is twisted up, the wrinkled skin over the cheeks bunched and his thin-lipped slit of a mouth straining toward where his ear should be. The right side stays still, but that’s standard for him, given the nerve damage.
“That’s nice,” he says.
“I wanted to choke her.”
“Why?”
I don’t have an exact answer for that, and while I’m trying to find a way to put it into words, the door swings open and two girls walk in, though they’re not the girls we’re waiting for. Jenks turns and looks. Without even thinking about it, I size them up—one pretty girl, maybe a seven or an eight, with her less attractive friend, who isn’t really worth giving a number to. Jenks turns away from them and looks back at me.
“I don’t know,” I continue. “I was playing her. You know. ‘Oh, baby, I’m hurting and I need your soft woman touch.’”
“You were playing her,” he said. “And it worked. So you wanted to choke her?”
“Yeah.” I laugh. “That’s kind of fucked up.”
“At least you’re getting some.”
“I’d rather go to Nevada, fuck a prostitute.” I almost believe what I’m saying. Using money would be better. But I’d probably just end up telling the hooker about Jenks anyway.
Jenks looks down at his glass, his eyes tight.
“You ever thought of getting a hooker?” I ask. “We could check the ads at the back of the Village Voice, see if anybody catches your eye. Why not?”
Jenks takes a sip of water. “You think I can’t get some?” His voice sounds playful, like he’s making a joke, but I can’t tell.
“No,” I say.
“Not even a pity fuck?”
“You don’t want that.”
“No, I don’t.”
I look at the girls down at the other end of the bar. Pretty girl’s got dark hair slashing down the side of her face and a lip piercing. Her friend is in a bright green coat.
“Think of all those other burn victims out there.” I look back at Jenks and give him a big grin. “And really fat chicks.”
“And chicks with AIDS,” he says.
“Nah, that’s not enough. Maybe, like, AIDS and herpes combined.”
“Yeah, that sounds awesome,” he says. “I’ll put an ad on Craigslist.”
Now he’s laughing for sure. Even before he got hit, when things got shitty he’d start laughing. I keep a smile plastered on my face, but for some reason now I start feeling it, the same feeling I get when I talk about Jenks and I get into it for real. Sometimes, when I’m drunk and I’m with a chick who seems like she cares, I let it out. Problem is, if I do, I can’t sleep with her. Or I shouldn’t, because then I feel like shit afterward and I walk around the city wanting to kill someone.
“There’s plenty other guys like me,” Jenks says. “I know one guy, got married, he’s having a kid.”
“Anything can happen,” I say.
“It’s bullshit anyway.” There’s a bit of hardness in his voice.
“What?”
“Finding somebody.”