Afterward Nora went to the bathroom. Without meaning to, I found myself listening, wondering if she had gone in there to cry. But in a moment, I heard the toilet flush, water running from the tap, and she was back in my bedroom, wearing one of my T-shirts. She stood looking at my bookshelves, tilting her head sideways so she could read the spines. Asimov. Bradbury. Butler. Clarke. Dick. During a severe bout of insomnia some months earlier I’d alphabetized all my books, music, and movies, and organized them by genre while I was at it. At the height of my sleeplessness, I could tear through three novels a week. Now I watched her run her finger over my Terry Gilliam DVDs, examine the papier-maché lighthouse I’d made in grade school and never thrown away, no matter how often I’d moved. Then she pulled out a photo box from the shelf beside the bed. “Leave that,” I said, raising myself on one elbow. “It’s getting late.”
Playfully, she lifted the box out of my reach.
“All right,” I said after a minute. “Sit here, though.” I patted the space next to me.
The photos were not in any particular order; I’d tossed them there after pooling together several rolls of photographs. She picked up the first one, a picture of me at Camp Taqaddum, and suddenly I was looking at myself through her eyes. An invader. An occupier. An imperialist. Labels I would have easily applied to myself if I were arguing with my father or with other vets, whether in person or in the online discussion forums I logged into late at night when I couldn’t sleep, but that I had a hard time accepting from civilians, people far removed from the fog of war. She picked up the pictures one by one, and I saw myself waiting in the noontime heat again with ninety pounds of gear on me. Riding in a Humvee, my chinstrap so tight it was giving me a rash. Leaning against the barracks wall, my eyes bluer than ever in my sunburned face. Standing at a checkpoint with my weapon in my hands. “What does it say?” she asked, pointing to the big sign hanging from a light pole behind me.
“I don’t know. That was an Iraqi sign, it wasn’t one of ours. You don’t read Arabic?”
“I never studied it, but I speak it just fine.”
I offered up my palm. “Eedik, min fadlik.”
“Listen to you! They taught you that in training?”
She gave me her hand and I made a show of kissing it. Then I whispered in her ear, “Keefik, ya sukkar?”
“They definitely didn’t teach you that in training,” she said with a chuckle.
“Our terp was kind of a player. He was always trying to sweet-talk a Sudanese woman who worked in the laundry facility.”
“Terp?”
“Interpreter.”
“Were there any women in your platoon?”
“No, but there were in others.”
“Arabs?”
“One guy from Florida. Haydar. He’s still in Iraq. He’s an NCO now. Noncommissioned officer.” I put my arm around her waist and she leaned against me, the heft of her almost like an armor itself.
“How old were you here?” It was a photo taken at chow, during our first tour. Fierro and I had big smiles on our faces and blueberry jam smeared across our teeth. Trying to be funny. We looked like idiots.
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen. My God.” She stared at the photo for a long moment, then moved to another, where I stood with others in our unit, our M4s hanging from our shoulders. “What was it like, carrying that around?”
“You get used to it. You get used to anything, I guess. When they took it away after my deployment, it felt like they had taken away one of my arms. It took a while to learn how to walk around without it.”
In the neighbor’s yard, the dog barked. It was a German shepherd, a friendly pup that I’d played with before, but it still got nervous when it heard a noise, even if it was only the call of a bird or the roar of a car down the street. She picked up another photo, where we all stood around Sergeant Fletcher, squinting in the sunlight.
Enough of this, I thought. I closed the box, tossed it on the nightstand, and switched off the light. Then I turned to face the wall. In the dark I felt her tracing the scar on my back; it started on my flank and snaked up toward my shoulder, like a tree bending sideways against the wind. She ran her hand over the line of black dots that still opened from time to time, spitting out shrapnel. I knew this moment would come. I knew she would start asking questions about the war; all the women I’d been with did. I would give them the broadest outline of a story about my time in Iraq, and their eyes would widen with horror and they’d want to kiss me and make me feel better. It wasn’t hard, it worked every time. There was something false about it, though. Even when I managed to hold on to them for more than a couple of months, the look in their eyes that said I was a hero would drive me away. But Nora didn’t look at me with that kind of wonder. Long before I’d gone to war, war had come to her—a brick thrown in her father’s window, a slur written on her locker. I wouldn’t be able to satisfy her with the answers I’d given the others, and even if I could, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. With her, I was less inclined to speak of the war in two voices, the wistful one I used with my buddies and the weary one I reserved for my dates. With her, everything felt mixed-up.
Outside, the dog barked again, though no unusual sound had interrupted the silence. The barking startled the crickets, but after a minute they started singing, and then an owl joined their song. I got up to close the window and adjusted and readjusted the blackout curtains until I got them just right. All the while, I avoided her gaze. “I think I’m gonna take a bath,” I said. “That damn dog won’t let me sleep.”
I stepped into the bathroom and sat in the tub as it filled with water, nudging the lever handle toward the hottest setting with my foot. Being asked about the war meant having to remember it, and to remember the war was to relive it. It was one thing when the memories were involuntary, like that time I walked into a gas station in Riverside and caught a whiff of perfume on the clerk that took me so immediately to a crowded market square in Anbar that I nearly doubled over from the sensation, but to recall memories willfully was another thing entirely. The door creaked open and Nora stepped inside the bathroom and knelt by the side of the tub. She ran her finger on my tattoo, the scar on my side, the scratches she herself had left during our lovemaking. My body bore signs that I knew she wanted to decipher and piece together into a story, but it would always be an incomplete story. To tell her the whole of it was to risk her judgment, and I already judged myself every day. “Are you coming to bed?” she asked.
“In a minute,” I said, avoiding her eyes.
After she stepped out of the bathroom, I stayed in the tub. Maybe I should stop thinking of my time in the war as a story and tell it to her the way I remembered it late at night when I couldn’t sleep, in fragments, sometimes in order and sometimes out of order, stopping in places where the remembering got too close to the reliving. By now the bathwater had grown uncomfortably cold and I shivered as I dried myself. In the dark of the bedroom, I found her sitting on the bed, already dressed in the blue shirt and linen skirt she’d worn for dinner at the Italian restaurant we went to in Palm Springs. “You’re leaving?” I asked.
“I figured you wanted to be alone,” she said, slipping her feet into her shoes. She reached for her watch on the bedside table and stood up. The clasp clicked in the silence. “It’s getting late, anyway.”