I’m not sure if he’s serious.
“I was okay at it before,” he says. “And in dress blues I was a fucking player. Now, it’d be insulting for me to even roll up on a chick.”
“Like, ‘Hey, I think you’re ugly enough you might fuck me.’” I put a stupid smile on my face, but Jenks doesn’t seem to notice.
“Nobody wants this,” he says. “Nobody even wants to have to look past this. It’s too much.”
There’s a little silence where I’m trying to come up with something to say to that, and then Jenks puts his hand on my arm.
“But it’s okay,” he says. “I’ve given up.”
“Yeah? That’s okay?”
“You see that girl over there?”
Jenks points to the pair of girls, and though he doesn’t specify, he’s obviously talking about the hot one.
“Before, I’d see her, and I’d feel like I had to come up with a plan, get her to talk to me. But now, with Jessie and Sarah”—he checks his watch—“whenever they get here, I can just have a conversation.” He looks briefly back at the girls. “Used to be, I could never just sit in a bar with a woman.” He looks at me, then back to the girls. “Now, knowing I got no chance, it’s relaxing. I don’t have to bother. Nobody’s gonna think I’m less of a man if I can’t pick up some girl. I only talk to people I actually give a shit about.”
He raises his glass and I clink mine with his. Someone told me toasting with water was bad luck, but there’s got to be an exception for guys like Jenks.
“As for kids,” Jenks says, “I’m gonna give my shit to a sperm bank.”
“Serious?”
“Hell yeah. The Jenks line ain’t gonna die with me. My sperm isn’t disfigured.”
I have nothing to say to that.
“I’ll have some baby out there,” Jenks continues. “Some little Jenks running around. Won’t be called Jenks, but I can’t have everything, can I?”
“No,” I say. “You can’t.”
“You should go ahead with it,” he says. He jerks his head in the direction of the girls. “Go tell your war stories. I’ll tell mine to Jessie and Sarah, whenever they get here.”
“Fuck that,” I say.
“Seriously, I don’t mind.”
“Seriously. Fuck you.”
Jenks shrugs, and I stare him down for a while, but then the door opens again and there’s Jessie and Sarah, who’s Jessie’s actor friend. I look up and so does Jenks.
The two of them are like the first pair that walked in the door, one a beauty and one not, though here the difference is starker. Sarah, the pretty girl, is a stunner. Jenks raises a mangled hand to wave them over, and Jessie, the not beautiful girl, waves a four-fingered hand back.
“Hey, Jessie,” I say, and turn to the beautiful one. “You must be Sarah.”
Sarah is tall and thin and bored. Jessie is all smiles. She hugs Jenks, then looks me over and laughs.
“You’re wearing combat boots,” she says. “That to give you extra cred with Sarah?”
I look down at my feet, like a dumbass. “They’re comfortable,” I mumble.
“Sure,” she says, and gives me a wink.
Jessie’s an interesting case. Aside from a missing finger, she doesn’t have any major problems I can see, but I know the Army’s got her on 100 percent disability. Plus, a missing finger is a good indication of something more. She’s not bad-looking, though. And I don’t mean that to say she’s good-looking—I mean that she’s a hair on the good side of ugly. She’s got a fleshy oval face, but a trim, compact body. A softball player’s body. The sort of girl you look at and say, “You’ll do.” The sort of girl you pick up in a club in the last hour before it closes. But also the sort of girl you’d never want to date because you’d never be able to bring her around your friends without them thinking, Why her?
Except when Jenks first met Jessie at some disabled veterans function, he fell for her hard. He’d never admit it, of course, but why else would he be here, with no one but me to back him up, ready to talk Iraq to a total stranger? This Sarah. This pretty, pretty girl.
“Let me get you guys a drink,” says Jessie.
Jessie always gets us the first round. She says engineers reinforced her ECP two days before an SVBIED attack, so she owes engineers big-time. Doesn’t matter if we mostly did pothole repair. She gets me drinks, the only woman I know who makes a point of it.
I point to my glass. “I’m drinking Brooklyn.”
“Water,” Jenks says.
“Yeah?” Jessie says, smiling. “Cheap date, you.”
“Hey, Jess,” says Sarah, cutting in, “can you get me a gin and diet tonic? With lime.”
Jessie rolls her eyes and heads to the bar. Jenks’s eyes are full of her as she goes. I wonder what the fuck she thinks she’s doing. I wonder what Jenks thinks she’s doing.
Jenks turns back to Sarah. “So you’re an actress,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, “and I bartend to make rent.”
Sarah’s holding it together well. Apart from the occasional quick sidelong glance at Jenks, you’d think everybody at the table had a normal face.
“A bartender,” I say. “Where? Can we come by, get free drinks?”
“You’re getting free drinks,” she says, pointing toward Jessie at the bar.
I smile a little “fuck you” smile. This Sarah is way too hot not to hate. Straight brown hair, sharp features, undetectable makeup, long pretty face, long thin legs, and a starvation zone body. Her getup is all vintage clothes, the carefully careless look worn by half of white Brooklyn. If you pick this girl up at a bar, other guys will respect you. Take her home, you win. And I can already tell she’s way too smart to ever give a guy like me a chance.
“So you want to talk some war shit,” I say.
“Sort of,” she says, feigning disinterest. “A couple of the people in the project are doing interviews with vets.”
“You got Jessie,” I say. “When she was a Lioness she was in some real war shit. Hanging with the grunts, doing female engagement, getting in firefights. Her war dick is this big—” I throw my hands out in the lying fisherman pose. “Ours is tiny.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jenks says.
“It’s better than no war dick at all,” I say.
“Did Jessie explain the project?” asks Sarah.
“You want me to tell you about the IED,” Jenks says. “For a play.”
“We’re working with a group of writers from the Iraq Veterans Against the War,” she says. “They’ve been doing workshops, a sort of healing through writing thing.”
Jenks and I trade a look.
“But this is different,” Sarah says quickly. “It’s not political.”
“You’re writing a play,” I say.
“It’s a collaboration with the New York veterans community.”
I want to ask what percentage the “vet community” is getting, but Jessie comes back, precariously holding two pints of beer, one diet G&T, and a glass of water, her left hand on the bottom and the other on top, a finger or thumb in each glass. She smiles at Jenks as she puts them down on the table, and I can see him visibly relax.
Sarah starts explaining that the point of the thing isn’t to be pro- or antiwar, but to give people a better understanding of “what’s really going on.”
“Whatever that means.” Jessie laughs.
“So you’re with the IVAW now?” I say.
“Oh, no,” Jessie says. “I’ve known Sarah since kindergarten.”
That makes more sense. I always picked her for the bleeds-green type. I’d bet my left nut she voted McCain, and I’d bet my right nut this Sarah girl voted Obama. I didn’t vote at all.
“IEDs cause the signature wounds of this war,” Sarah says.
“Wars,” I say.
“Wars,” Sarah says.
“Burns and TBIs, you mean?” says Jenks. “I don’t have a TBI.”
“There’s PTSD, too,” I say, “if you believe The New York Times.”
“We’ve got some PTSD vets,” Sarah says, making it sound like she’s keeping them in jars somewhere.
“No bad burns?” I ask.
“Not like Jenks,” she says to me, then quickly turns to Jenks. “No offense.”
Jenks makes one of those maybe-a-smile faces and nods.
She leans forward. “I just want you to go through what it was like, in your own words.”
“The attack?” says Jenks. “Or after?”
“Both.”
Most people, when they try to draw Jenks out, talk to him in a “here, kitty-kitty” voice, but Sarah’s all business—clipped, polite.
“At your pace,” she says. “Whatever you think people should know.” She puts a concerned face on. I’ve seen that face on women at bars when I open up. When I’m sober, it makes me angry. When I’m drunk, it’s what I’m looking for.
“It’s like a lot of pain for a long, long time,” Jenks says. Sarah puts one hand up, a delicate, pale hand with long fingers, and with the other she reaches into her bag and pulls out her smartphone, fiddles with some app for recording.
Jenks is tense again, which is why I’m here. For backup of some kind. Or protection. Jessie flashes him a smile and puts her fucked-up hand on his, and Jenks reaches his free hand into his pocket and pulls out a wad of folded-up notebook paper. I look away, toward the other table with the other two girls. They’re drinking beer. I read a study somewhere that people who drink beer are more likely to sleep with someone on the first date.
“He’d remember the IED better than I would,” Jenks says, looking at me. I look at Sarah and know for a certified fact I’m not telling this girl shit. “I can’t even tell you that much after,” he goes on. “Scraps and pieces, at best. I’ve been working for a long time to put them together.” He taps the paper but doesn’t unfold it. I know what’s in there. I’ve read it. I’ve read the draft before and the draft before that.
“I know I was in a lot of pain,” Jenks says. “Pain like you can’t imagine. But pain like I can’t imagine either, because”—he reaches up and rubs a hand over his fucked-up scalp—“a lot of the memories are gone. Nothing. Like, system overload. Which is okay. I don’t need the memories. Plus, they had me on a cycle of morphine, an epidural drip, IV Dilaudid, Versed.”
“What’s the first thing you remember?” Sarah asks. She’s talking about the attack, but Jenks is already sliding away from that.
“My family,” Jenks says. He stops and opens the paper, flipping through the first few pages, the pages she’s here for. “They didn’t act like anything was wrong with me. And I couldn’t talk to them. I had a tube in my throat.” He looks down at the paper and starts reading. “It must have been worse for my family than for me—”
“Do you want me to maybe just read that?” she says, pointing at the papers. “Then ask you questions afterwards? I mean, if you’ve already got it written down…”
Jenks pulls the papers away from her. He looks at me.
“Or okay,” she says. “You read it. That’s best.”
Jenks takes a breath. He sips water and I sip beer. Jessie’s scowling at her friend and squeezing Jenks’s hand. After a moment, Jenks clears his throat and holds the papers out again.
“It must have been worse for my family than for me,” he starts again. “People look at me now and think, God, how terrible. But it was so much worse then. They didn’t know if I’d survive, and I didn’t look like myself. When a body loses as much blood as I did, weird things happen. I was holding an extra forty pounds of fluid in my body, puffing up my neck and face like a bloated fish. I was bandaged and oiled wherever I was burned and—”
“Do you remember the explosion itself?” Sarah cuts in. Jenks gives her a flat look. The day before, when he’d asked me to come, I’d told him that if he gave this girl his story, it wouldn’t be his anymore. Like, if you take a photograph of someone, you’re stealing their soul, except this would be deeper than a picture. Your story is you. Jenks had disagreed. He never argues with me, he just goes his own way. I told him I’d come with him whatever he chose to do.
“I’ve worked hard to remember it,” he tells Sarah, flipping back through his pages but not looking at them. “The problem is I’m not sure what’s real memory and what’s my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I’m sure of my bright light. There was a flash, definitely. There was a sulfur smell, like the Fourth of July, but real close.”
I don’t remember sulfur. I remember meat. Grilled meat. So, yeah, Fourth of July. Barbecue. It’s why I’m vegetarian now, and why the hippie chicks in Billyburg sometimes think I’m like them, which I’m not.
“And black hitting so hard,” Jenks says.
“Black?”
“Everything black and quick, a knockout. You ever been knocked out?”
“Actually, yes.”
I let out a loud snort. There’s no way Sarah’s ever been knocked out. I bet her parents had put her in Bubble Wrap all the way to the Ivy Leagues.
“Then yeah. Black hitting you, like a knockout punch to the head, no gloves, but the knuckle is bigger than you are, it hits your whole body all at once, and it’s on fire. It killed the two other guys in the vehicle, Chuck Lavel and Victor Roiche, who were amazing Marines and the best friends I’ve ever had, though I didn’t know they’d died until later. And then there are scraps of memories and then waking up in another country, wondering where my battle buddies are, and at the same time knowing they’re dead, but not being able to ask because I couldn’t move or talk and had a tube in my throat.”
Chuck and Victor were my friends too, and good friends of Jenks’s, but never his best friends. That was always me.
“So the scraps,” Sarah says.
“I remember screaming,” Jenks says, “I don’t know—from the explosion, from later, in the hospital, screaming. Though I couldn’t have screamed in the hospital.”
“Because of the tube.”
“I feel like there were times I was screaming, or maybe times when I dreamed how things should have been.”
“What do you remember?” Sarah turns to me. So does Jessie. “Do you remember screaming?”
Jenks is looking down at his hands. He sips water.
“Maybe,” I say. “Who cares? My A-driver didn’t hear shit. No sounds at all. A thing like that, if you got ten people there, then you’ll have ten different stories. And they don’t match.”
I don’t trust my memories. I trust the vehicle, burnt and twisted and torn. Like Jenks. No stories. Things. Bodies. People lie. Memories lie.
“It helps to put things in order,” Jenks says, one palm resting on his paper.
“Helps with what?” Sarah says.
Jenks shrugs. He’s been doing that a lot. “Nightmares,” he says. “Weird reactions when you hear something, smell something.”
“PTSD,” she says.
“No,” Jenks says matter-of-factly. “Explosions don’t startle me. I’m all good. Fireworks, light and sound, it’s all fine. Everybody thought the Fourth of July would freak me out, but it doesn’t unless there are too many smells. And I don’t lose it or anything. Just… weird reactions.”
“So you try to remember—”
“This way, it’s me remembering what happened,” Jenks says. “I’d rather that than be walking down the street and I smell something and the day remembers itself for me.”
“PTSD,” she says.
“No,” he says, his voice sharp, “I’m fine. Who wouldn’t have a few weird reactions? It doesn’t mess with my life.”
He taps his paper. “I’ve written this twenty times,” he says. “I always start with the explosions, the smells.”
I want to smoke a cigarette. I’ve got a pack in my pocket, my last from a carton I picked up visiting friends in the Carolinas. In this city, smoking’ll kill your bank account way before it kills your lungs.
“So you got knocked out…,” Sarah tries again.
“No,” I say. “He was awake.”
“I was frozen,” Jenks says. “My eardrums had burst. I couldn’t hear.”
“But you heard screaming?”
Jenks shrugs again.