Curtis squashes the phone’s keypad with his thumb. The display lights up again: 2:06 a.m. Three timezones east, Danielle’s probably leaving for work. This is a good time to catch her, but Curtis can’t bring himself to dial, can’t begin to imagine what he’d say. He’s not even mad anymore, not really. He puts away the phone, presses the heels of his hands to his eyesockets. The taxi rolls to a stop at a traffic signal, rolls forward again when the light changes; inertia tips Curtis forward and back in his seat. He turns to the window, opens his eyes.
The first big blowout since they got married. He’s walked out on her before—a few times, not long after they first moved in—but those times he always came right back: home before she’d changed into her PJs. He had no place to run then, nowhere he could imagine himself going. This time he did. And he went.
To keep himself from remembering the argument, he tries to think of the airport: sleepless hours slouched in the cushioned seats at the concourse gate, alone amid a scattering of laid-over travelers. Concentrating hard on the urgent monotonous drip of news from ceiling-bolted televisions. Barely noticing the sunrise in the windows behind him, doubled by the surface of the Delaware. Watching the war take shape.
That’s something else she said: one of her pent-up gripes. Why can’t you just admit that it’s getting to you? Okay, sure. She’s not wrong. The jumpiness and the short temper, the bad dreams and sleepless nights that he shook off after the Desert, after Mogadishu, after Kosovo—shook them off each time, shook them right off, no trouble—sure, they’ve come back a little bit. I see this at the VA all the time, Sammy D. It’s a normal thing. There’s a war coming on, and you’re not in it, and that’s gonna bother you. But it’s not the war that bothers Curtis: it’s everything else. Everything but the war bothers him. The war he knows what to do with. The war makes sense.
This favor Damon’s asking—this is not how people get jobs, Curtis. Are you even listening to yourself? Flying to Las Vegas, sneaking around casinos: this is not any kind of career track you want to get on. If you don’t want to think about your future, you can think about mine. All right? Because I goddamn sure am not gonna sit around for the next thirty–forty years to watch you cash disability checks. You hear me? This is not the way a grownup man acts. Not in the real world.
The real world: that’s the jab she’s leading with nowadays, the power halfback in her offensive pattern. She always says it like there can be no argument about what it means. But to Curtis, the stuff she talks about—cover letters and résumés, community college classes, refinancing the mortgage—it all seems about a million miles removed from what he thinks of as reality. Six thousand miles, anyway. The fact that these are ordinary concerns for every functional adult in America just makes him feel worse. Still, he can’t shake the sense that there’s something inane, something thoughtless, in worrying over stuff like this while another war is coming on. It feels babyish, inconsequential, like playacting that Curtis never took part in and has now long since outgrown.
War is a game too, of course; he knows that. But at least in war the stakes are serious, the horizon of what’s possible vastly expanded, the immediate objectives as unarguable as a white stripe across bermuda-grass. You ready yourself; you go to the war or the war comes to you; you live or you die. Curtis wonders whether he’ll ever feel so alive in this world again.
His eyes have closed; he forces them open. At the stoplight at Flamingo, a group of kids is crossing, led by a barechested boy with blue hair and vinyl pants and a cyalume glowstick that swings by a cord around his skinny neck. The boy dances and spins, the glowstick appears and disappears like a beacon, and Curtis remembers a column of flexicuffed Iraqi EPWs that he moved through a cleared minefield south of Al Burgan back in ’91: the way he felt out the safe route in the sand, searching for the bowls of cool green light in the smokeblack petroleum darkness of late afternoon. This strikes a spark off another memory: two nights ago, flying into McCarran, the way the lights came up out of the desert, out of nothing, as if the city were made of nothing but light, and all of it radiating from the Strip.
Then the cabbie is waking him, the taxi door is opening, and Curtis has stepped out into the porte-cochère of his own hotel, pinching his wallet with sleep-numb fingers as he watches the cab’s taillights dim and fade under the smug white span of the Rialto Bridge. For a while he just stands there. People step around him. He shakes his head and moves out of the way, adrift on the pavement, rotating to look at the buildings. Rows of trefoils and quatrefoils and crenellations. A gold zodiac ringing a clock’s blue face. Above the clock, the casino readerboard, flashing its loop of news down the Strip. The tinted hotel windows catching whatever news flashes back.