That was last fall. And now, two weeks after the phone call from Boylan that woke me up in the middle of the night, he’s here, trundling into Grand Central like an oversize toddler dressed in a hand-me-down suit he’s already outgrown. The breast pulls, the pant cuffs show too much of the socks, and his grin indicates a blissful lack of awareness of how absurdly his body has been crammed into the clothes of a lesser man. I’ve seen Boylan ripped, a hulking giant. And at the end of our shared deployment, I’d seen him a gaunt, enormous skeleton. But I’ve never seen him looking so soft—pudgy in the middle and fleshy in his face. He had a staff job in Afghanistan, and it shows.
“I got this at a thrift store for twenty-five bucks,” he says, grabbing his lapel and spinning to show off his sartorial splendor.
“Why are you in a suit?” I say, and his face registers a moment of confusion.
“You said you’d take me to the Yale Club.”
It takes me a moment, but I realize I had indeed said that, three years ago. Funny what people remember.
“You don’t want to go there,” I say. “You don’t want to be anywhere around here.” I raise my arms to indicate Grand Central, the teeming masses, the cathedral beauty of it, with its constellation map gilt backward on the ceiling and its tasteful Apple store discreetly occupying the top of the east staircase. “Midtown’s got no life to it. Just seventeen-dollar drinks and the assholes that can pay for them.”
“That’ll be you soon, Mister Hundred Sixty Thousand.”
“Not yet,” I say. “And since I’m buying all drinks tonight—no, I am—we’re getting the fuck out of here.”
We take the 6 train to Astor and head to a dive bar with an all-night special of $5 for a can of PBR and a shot of what they call “Jameson.” I figure we won’t be able to spend more than $80 before going into comas. We head in and sit at the bar, and I order the first round as Boylan untucks his shirt and loosens his tie.
“I’m glad…,” I start to tell him, and I want to say I’m glad he’s alive, but that’s too maudlin even if it’s true, so I finish with, “To see you,” and he grins. Once the drinks arrive, he clinks his whiskey to mine and we shoot them back.
“Why didn’t you stay in the Corps, man?” he says.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent Boylan is already a bit drunk, and I wonder who, if anyone, he could have been drinking with. Near most stations they sell plastic bottles for the commuters to get hammered on the train. If that’s what he was doing, he wouldn’t be the only one.
“Why not, man?” he says. “You were good. Everybody says you were good.”
“Because I’m a *,” I say. “When you getting promoted to major?”
“Never. I got a DUI.” He gives a sheepish grin and before I can respond says, “I know, I know, I’m an idiot. No more drunk driving for me.” And then he starts asking me about law school, about if I’m dating anybody, about all sorts of shit, and I realize that as much as I want to hear about his war shit, he wants to hear some civilian shit.
So we talk civilian shit. I tell him about my girl and how the sex was good and the rest was bad but I wish her the best. And I tell him I’m going to go corporate and then figure shit out, because it’s impossible to figure out now. “A lot of people, their careers ping-pong back and forth between government and Big-law. Do something to feel good about yourself for a while, then go back and make money. Then feel good about yourself again. Then go back to Big-law and make some money. It’s like a karmic binge-and-purge.”
We get drunker, and eventually Boylan says, “You want to see a trick?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he crams the edge of the PBR can against his incisors, cutting into the aluminum. He rotates the can quickly, spinning it against his teeth until he slices it in a perfect circle, mouthfuls of beer spilling out the sides and onto his suit.
“Ha!” he says, holding the two halves out to me. “Whaddaya think?”
“Impressive,” I say. I notice he’s missing his tie, and I wonder if he knows where it is.
The bartender walks over and says, “Don’t do that,” and Boylan tells him to fuck himself. Then he looks at me like, “You gonna back me up on this?”
Long story short, we head to my apartment and start in on some whiskey, and when we get drunk enough, we finally get to war.
I bring up the videos of air strikes they’d show us at the Basic School, grainy videos of some hajji hot spot and then, boom, dead hajjis. Though the explosions are never as big as you think they should be. Hollywood fucks that up for you.
I tell Boylan, “It was like video games,” and he gets animated.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “You see any of the helmet cams?”
I haven’t, so he gets on my computer, standing by my desk and swaying back and forth while he tries to type into the YouTube search engine, his meaty hands spilling over and hitting multiple keys at once.
“Dude, this is cool,” he says.
Eventually he finds it, POV-style footage taken with a camera strapped to a Marine’s head during a firefight in Afghanistan.
“Now this is like a video game,” he says, and as the video plays, I realize he’s right. The Marine ducks behind a wall and I see the barrel of his rifle cutting across the screen in the exact same way it does in Call of Duty. And then he pops up and lets off a few rounds, just like Call of Duty. No wonder Marines like that game so much.
There’s a lot of yelling going on as well, and I catch a few commands but nothing clear. At the end of the video, one soldier has been shot, but not seriously.
“So this is what it’s like,” I say.
“Huh?”
“You’ve been in combat. This is what it’s like?”
Boylan looks at the screen for a second. “Nah,” he says.
I wait for more, but nothing’s coming.
“Well then,” I say, “that’s what it looks like. At least, to shoot a bad guy.”
He looks at the screen again. “Nah.”
“But that’s an actual firefight.”
“Fuck, dude,” he says. “Whatever.”
“That’s a fucking video camera shooting an actual fucking firefight.”
He looks at the screen for a long time. “Camera’s not the same,” he says, and he taps his head and smiles at me crooked.
I look back at the screen, which has recommendations for other videos, mostly war related, though for whatever reason one of them is a screenshot of some Japanese writing and a cartoon squid.
“I’d never let them put a camera on me,” he says.
His skin is waxy, sallow. I want to ask if Vockler had an open casket or if his body was too damaged, though of course I can’t.
“Iraq,” I say instead. “What do you think? Did we win?”
“Uhh… we did okay,” he says, looking at the screen of combat videos and one cartoon squid.
The first time I met Boylan, he was in his Alphas and the Bronze Star with the V was right there on his chest for anybody to see. I’d gone and looked it up immediately, but now I can’t remember exactly what it had been for. Boylan hadn’t meant much to me then, and the citation wasn’t as exciting or clear as Deme’s, since for Boylan it’d been a slow accumulation of minor heroic actions taken over the course of a long and hellish day, rather than the sort of intense crucible that makes for great drama. At least he got it, though. Vockler died in an IED, like the majority of combat casualties in these wars, a death that doesn’t offer a story younger Marines can read and get inspired by. IEDs don’t let you be a hero. That’s what makes Deme so important. The cold, hard courage that sends veterans like Vockler back to war is not what makes teenagers join the Corps in the first place. Without the rare stories like Deme’s, who’d sign up?
Eventually, Boylan is sleeping on my floor and I’m sitting by his side, drinking whiskey slow and envying him from the depths of my noncombat heart. I don’t know why. He’s not proud of his Bronze Star. He refuses to tell the story. “It was a bad day,” is the most I’ve ever heard from him. I don’t even know what it is he has that I want. I just know I want it. And he’s right here in front of me, close enough that I’ve spilled whiskey on him twice.
Agamben speaks of the difference between men and animals being that animals are in thrall to stimuli. Think a deer in the headlights. He describes experiments where scientists give a worker bee a source of nectar. As it imbibes, they cut away its abdomen, so that instead of filling the bee up, the nectar falls out through the wound in a trickle that pours as fast as the bee drinks. You’d think the bee might change its behavior in response, but it doesn’t. It keeps happily sucking away at the nectar and will continue indefinitely, enthralled by one stimulus—the presence of nectar—until released by another—the sensation of satiety. But that second stimulus never comes—the wound keeps the bee drinking until it finally starves.
I splash a little more whiskey on Boylan, halfway hoping he’ll wake up.