Two park employees found Sam near the canoe rental. In the car on the way home, Jack had asked Sam why she’d wandered away, how she’d vanished. His blood pressure was up. There was a steady pain behind his eyes. Sam said she’d made herself invisible. It wasn’t hard, she said. It’s like how in a joke one word can hide behind the meaning of another. It’s right in front of you but you don’t see it. Invisible. She said she didn’t realize she’d gone so far until she saw the rental canoes yoked together with a chain, paddles sticking from the barrels, the blue light at the end of the dock. She said she’d walked there with a boy. “What boy?” he’d asked. She said, “The one who teaches you how to be invisible.”
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WHAT HOLLIS REMEMBERS: He was driving a medical supply truck at night along the rutted dirt road to Mosul, something he’d done dozens of times. A companion beside him was singing or humming a song Hollis couldn’t name but that the companion had sung or hummed before. A dust storm had just passed through the Iraqi village they were entering, and Hollis could taste grit in the air. Dust swirled in the headlights and it seemed for a moment like they were driving on the bottom of a silty sea. Then came the bright flash of light. Hollis remembers thinking that the light was both terrible and beautiful and that if circumstances were different he would have looked at it longer. It lit up the road and surrounding desert and revealed what he never noticed anymore—a half-eaten dog carcass, an old tire, a woman’s discarded purple slipper—but it seemed to flash inside him, too, and he imagined in that instant that all his organs were distinct and visible, which he thought was funny because as a medic he knew organs were often unrecognizable when looked at on the inside. Like one organism, indivisible.
There was no bomb concussion. Instead, a girl child appeared in the road. She wore a blue flowered dress. Her face was calm. Hollis swerved. The truck went into the ditch.
The roaring of the Lord was deafening. But it was hard to tell what it all meant.
After the truck flipped over, he decided to lie there for a bit before trying to open his eyes. Get his bearings. He couldn’t lift his head but somehow knew his skull was pointed to the east, toward Mecca. The air had a burned smell. Also blood. Shit. His singing or humming companion’s twisted body was somewhere around. He tried to plan triage in his head. He couldn’t hear a thing except for a singsong call to prayer, which also sounded like the music to an old TV variety show being played underwater. The image of the girl in the road lingered behind his eyelids. Fired his brain by some alchemical process. He wondered if he was bleeding from his ears. To take his mind off this, he took an inventory with his hands, opened his jacket, felt along his chest, rib cage, abdomen. He seemed to be dressed in a suit of chain mail. He remembered thinking, lying there in the darkness waiting on the assassins, about a TV documentary he’d once seen about ancient cave paintings in France. The absolute darkness of the caves, the effete guide said, was essential to the painters. The void was what made it possible to see things as if for the first time. The guide demonstrated with his girlish hands how these painters—after receiving their visions in that dark—used firelight and shadow and the pitted and swollen cave wall itself to animate their work in space and time. How the painters made horses and bison leap just as they did in the mind of God.
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