You feel relieved by this. That Bishop never knew that his secret was not a secret to you. That he had his privacy, at least, till the end.
Bethany grabs the wine bottle by the neck and walks into the living room and plunks herself down on the couch, doesn’t even turn on a lamp or anything, just plunks herself down in the semidarkness so that you can’t really see the plunking so much as you hear the crackling of the expensive leather (alligator, you guess) as Bethany comes to rest on top of it. You sit across from her on the very same couch you were sitting on earlier today listening to a hyper Bethany and Peter simulate a happy relationship. The only light in the apartment comes from the two little spots in the kitchen, and the glow of the surrounding skyscraper windows—not nearly enough to see by. When Bethany talks, her voice seems to come out of the void. She asks you about Chicago. About your job. What your job is like. If you enjoy it. Where you live. What your home looks like. What you do for fun. And you answer all her small-talk questions and while you’re talking she pours herself another glass of wine, and then another, swallowing the wine with the occasional audible gulp while saying “uh-huh” at the key moments in your stories. You tell her the job is fine except for the students, who are unmotivated; and the administrators, who are ruthless; and the location, which is suburban-drab; and come to think of it you don’t really like your job at all. You tell her you live in a house with a backyard that you never use and pay someone else to mow. Sometimes kids run through your backyard playing various games and you are fine with that and you see that as your contribution to community civics. Otherwise, you do not know your neighbors. You’re trying to write a book for which you’ve already been paid, which presents certain motivation problems. When she asks what the book is about, you say, “I don’t know. Family?”
By the time Bethany opens the second bottle of wine you get the sense she’s trying to gear herself up for something that requires courage and that the wine is helping her do this. She begins reminiscing, talking about old times, when you were kids: playing video games or playing in the woods.
“Do you remember the last time you came to my house?” she says. And of course you do. It was the night you kissed her. The last moment of real joy you felt before your mother left. But you don’t tell Bethany that part. You just say, “Yes.”
“My first kiss,” she says.
“Mine too.”
“The room was dark, like this one,” she says. “I couldn’t really see you. I could only feel you very close to me. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” you say.
Bethany stands—the couch announces it, the popping of the leather, the little suction sound releasing—and she comes over to you and sits next to you and she takes the glass from your hand and sets it on the floor and she’s very close now, one of her knees pressing into yours, and you’re beginning to understand about the lights and the wine.
“Like this?” she says, drawing her face to yours, smiling.
“It was darker than this.”
“We could close our eyes.”
“We could,” you say. But you don’t.
“You were about this far away,” she says, your cheeks almost touching now. You can feel the heat of her, the lavender smell of her hair. “I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I pressed my lips out and hoped it was right.”
“It was right,” you say.
“Good,” she says, and she lingers there a moment, and you’re afraid to do anything or say anything or move or breathe, feeling like this whole moment is made of air and could scatter at the smallest agitation. Your lips are only a few inches from hers, but you do not lean in. The space between you is something she must resolve herself. Then Bethany says in a whisper, “I don’t want to marry Peter.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Can you help me not marry Peter?”
To help her not marry Peter, go to the next page…
And so you finally kiss her, and when you do you feel a great cascade of relief deep inside break through, and all your obsessing and pining and worrying and regret, and all the ways you’ve been haunted by this woman, and all the torture and self-loathing that you had failed to make her love you, they all seem to shatter on the ground. It feels like you’ve been holding up a wall of glass all this time and only now you realize it’s okay to let it fall. And fall it does, and it’s almost percussive the way it tumbles and breaks around you—you try not to flinch as Bethany kisses you, as she pulls at you with her hands and you have this powerful sense memory of kissing her when you were a child, how you were surprised that her lips were dry, that you didn’t know what to do except smash your face into hers, back when kissing was not a signpost along the way but rather the destination itself. But now you are both older and you’ve had all the relevant experiences and each of you knows exactly what to do with another body—which is to say you know that kissing is a kind of communication sometimes, and what you’re telling each other right now is that you both very much want more. And so you press into her and slide your hands around her waist and curl your fingers into the slight fabric of her dress and she tugs you closer by the collar and still you’re kissing—deeply, wildly, devouring each other—and you’re aware of your awareness of this, how you seem able to concentrate on everything and feel everything all at once: Your hands and her skin and your mouth and her mouth and her fingers and her breathing and the way her body responds to yours—these things don’t feel like separate sensations but rather like layers of a single greater sensation, that drift of consciousness that can happen when you’re entwined with another and it’s all going very well and it’s almost as if you know exactly what the other person wants and can feel her emotions as they shudder through her body as if they’re shuddering through your own, like your bodies have momentarily ceased to have edges and have become things without boundaries.
This is how it feels, this expansiveness, which is why it’s such a shock when Bethany jolts up and away from you and grabs your hands to stop their progress and says, “Wait.”
“What?” you say. “What’s wrong?”
“Just…I’m sorry.” And she pulls away from you and fully disengages and curls up on the other side of the couch.
“What is it?” you say.
Bethany shakes her head and looks at you with these sad, terrible eyes.
“I can’t,” she says, and inside you feel something you might call a plummeting.
“We could go slower,” you say. “We can just slow down a little. It’s okay.”
“This isn’t fair to you,” she says.
“I don’t mind,” you say, and you hope you don’t betray all the desperation you’re feeling because you know if you come this close and still fail with this girl it will break you. You will not come back from this one. “We don’t have to have sex,” you say. “We can, I don’t know, take it easy?”
“The sex isn’t the problem,” she says, and laughs. “The sex I can do. I want to do that. But I don’t know if you want to. Or will want to.”
“I want to.”
“But there’s something you don’t know.”
Bethany stands and smoothes her clothes, a gesture meant to signal calm levelheaded dignity, a very serious break from the theatrics on the couch.
“There’s a letter for you,” she says. “On the kitchen counter. It’s from Bishop.”
“He wrote a letter? To me?”
“We got it from the army, a few months after he died. He wrote it in case something happened.”
“Did you get one?”
“No. Yours was the only one he wrote.”
Bethany turns now and walks slowly to her bedroom. She’s moving in that careful way of hers again—perfectly straight, perfectly upright, all movements composed and purposive. When she pulls open her bedroom door, she stops halfway and turns to look at you over her shoulder.
“Listen,” she says, “I looked at the letter. I’m sorry, but I did. I don’t know what it means, and you don’t have to tell me, but I want you to know I read it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to be in here,” she says, nodding toward the bedroom. “After you’ve read it, if you want to come in, that’s fine. But if you want to leave”—she pauses a moment, turns around, drops her head, seems to look at the floor—“I’ll understand.”
She withdraws into the dark bedroom, the door closing behind her with a soft click.
To read the letter, go to the next page…
Private First Class Bishop Fall sits in the belly of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, his chin on his chest, asleep. His is the second vehicle in a small convoy—three Bradleys, three Humvees, a supply truck—driving single file to a village they don’t know the name of. All they know is that insurgents have recently kidnapped the mayor of this village and beheaded him on TV. It strikes the soldiers in the convoy as bizarre that the executions are televised, and also that they’re done in this particular manner: beheading. It feels like a kind of death from another era, a viciousness called up from the dark ages.
Three Bradleys and three Humvees can carry approximately forty soldiers. The supply truck carries two more, plus water and gasoline and ammo and many hundreds of boxes of MREs. Each MRE—or Meals Ready to Eat—has a densely syllabic ingredient list that makes many of the soldiers claim that, behind beheaders and IEDs, MREs are the biggest threat to their physical health out here. A popular game is to guess whether a certain chemical is found in an MRE or a bomb. Potassium sorbate? (MRE.) Disodium pyrophosphate? (MRE.) Ammonium nitrate? (Bomb.) Potassium nitrate? (Both.) It’s a game they might play during meals when they’re feeling complexly cynical, but not when they’re traveling via Bradley to a village an hour away. When they’re on the road like this, mostly what they do is sleep. They’ve been pulling twenty-hour shifts lately, so an hour in the armored belly of a Bradley is a little slice of what goes for heaven around here. Because it’s totally dark and it’s the safest place to be when they’re outside the wire and—because a Bradley at top speed sounds like a flimsy wooden roller coaster going Mach 2—they’re wearing earplugs, so it all feels real nice and cocooned. Everyone loves it. Everyone except this one guy Chucky, whose real name no one even remembers because he was nicknamed Chucky a long time ago for his tendency to vomit while riding in the back of a Bradley. It’s due to his motion sickness. So they nicknamed him “Up Chuck,” which was soon shortened to “Chuck,” which inevitably became “Chucky.”
Chucky is nineteen years old, short-haired, spindly muscled, fifteen pounds lighter now than he was at home, often forgets to brush his teeth. He comes from some kind of rural place no one has strong opinions about (maybe Nevada? Nebraska?). He’s a kid with very deep convictions that are unburdened by facts or history. Example: One time he overheard someone calling this whole operation in the Gulf “George Bush’s war,” and Chucky got all puffed up about it and said Bush was doing the best he could with the mess Bill Clinton left. And that started this whole fight about who actually declared war and whose idea it was to invade Iraq, and everyone was trying to convince Chucky that Clinton didn’t start the war and all Chucky did was shake his head and say “Guys, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this” like he felt sorry for them. Bishop pressed him and insisted that it didn’t matter if he was pro-Bush or pro-Clinton or whatever, that who started the war was a simple neutral objective fact. And Chucky said he thought Bishop needed to “support our C and C” and Bishop blinked at that and asked “What’s a C and C?” and Chucky said “Commander and chief.” So this started a whole new argument where Bishop told him it’s not commander and chief, it’s commander in chief, and Chucky looked at him with an expression like he knew they were pulling a prank on him and he was determined not to fall for it.
Anyway, they don’t talk politics much. None of them do. It’s sort of beside the point.
One time Chucky tried to get them to open the portals in the Bradley so that during the trip he could watch the horizon and keep his bearings, which he said would help with the dizziness and vomiting. But that argument went nowhere because if the portals came off then it wouldn’t be dark inside the Bradley and they couldn’t sleep, and also because the portals are covered with armor, and no one wants to sacrifice any armor at all given the number of mines and bombs and snipers they’d encountered thus far. Chucky pointed out that the Bradley was equipped with several M231 assault rifles that are expressly designed to fit through the portals (they are basically M16s without the front sighting assembly, which is too tall to fit inside the portal, and a much shorter stock, because the inside of a Bradley is pretty narrow) and Chucky asked didn’t the mere existence of the M231 imply that they should have the external portals open so they could shoot through them? Bishop said he was impressed with Chucky’s logic, even if it was transparently self-serving. Anyway, the commander of the Bradley, whose name is actually Bradley but whose nickname is “Baby Daddy” for the several families back home he joined the army to get away from, decided that the armor would stay. He said, “If you have protection you’d be a fool not to use it,” which was pretty funny coming from him.
So one would think with the vomiting and the brittle knowledge of world events and the constant whining about the closed firing portals that Chucky would be a prime candidate for pariah status. Given how many times they have to go somewhere in the back of a Bradley, Chucky should be very unpopular indeed. But that’s not how it works. Chucky is roundly loved and adored and has been ever since this one midnight raid on a suspected enemy compound when his night-vision goggles broke, and instead of falling back like any of them would have done he kept on opening doors and clearing rooms with a goddamn flashlight. Which in an operation like that might as well have been a giant neon sign that said Shoot Me! Seriously, the courage of this kid is off the charts. He once told Bishop that the only thing worse than being shot at is when the people shooting run away. And Bishop really thought that Chucky would prefer the enemy stand still while trying to kill him rather than not try to kill him at all. So everyone loves Chucky. And it’s clear they do because they keep calling him Chucky, which is a nickname that maybe to an outsider sounds cruel for the way it ribs someone for his greatest personal flaw, but what it actually does is acknowledge that they accept this person and love this person despite that flaw. It’s a very male way of expressing unconditional love. All of this goes unsaid, naturally.
Plus there is the thing about the girl. Chucky’s primary conversational topic: Julie Winterberry. Everyone likes hearing about her. Hands down the most beautiful girl in Chucky’s whole high school, the girl who won every relevant queen-type prize a girl could win, who ran the table four years in a row, a face that launched a thousand erections, a girl whose beauty didn’t cause the usual nervous sniggering among the teenage boys but rather an almost physical pain that biting the inside of one’s cheek was sometimes an effective cure for. The boys were despondent if she did not look at them, shattered if she did. Chucky has a photo, a senior portrait, that he passes around and everyone has to agree that he is not exaggerating. Julie Winterberry. He says it with church-like reverence. The thing about Julie Winterberry is that Chucky had always been so intimidated by her beauty that he’d never spoken to her. She didn’t even know his name. Then they graduated high school and he went to basic training, where he had the most punishing drill sergeant in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces, after which he figured if he could overcome that asshole, he could talk to Julie Winterberry. She didn’t seem like much of a challenge anymore, not after basic. So in those few weeks he was home before deployment he asked her on a date. And she said yes. And now they’re in love. She even sends him dirty pictures of herself that everyone begs Chucky to show that he will not show. People are literally on their hands and knees, begging.
What everyone likes about the story is the part where he finally asks out the girl. Because the way Chucky tells it, it’s not like he had to work up the courage to do it. It’s more like it no longer required courage to do. Or maybe he discovered that he had plenty of courage all along, inside him, ready to be used, and everyone likes imagining that. They hope the same thing has happened to them, too, because they are occasionally terrified out of their minds over here, and they hope when the time comes for them to be brave, they will be brave. And it’s nice to think that they have this well of courage inside that can get them through the impossible things ahead.
If a kid like Chucky could land a girl like Julie Winterberry, surely they can make it through one lousy war.
They ask him to tell about it especially when they’re on clean-up, which is just about the biggest injustice of this war, that soldiers sometimes have to clean up the remains of suicide bombers. Imagine hunting around for body parts with a burlap bag oozing slop that looks like the inside of a pumpkin. And the road is baking in the sun and so the random pieces of flesh aren’t only sitting there but actually literally cooking. That smell: blood and meat and cordite. When they’re doing this, they ask Chucky to tell them about Julie Winterberry. It passes the time.
Eventually Baby Daddy struck a deal with Chucky that he could ride up top next to the gunner. Of course this is against regulations because a person standing where Chucky stands interferes with the movement of the M242. But Baby Daddy was willing to go against regulations in this one instance because it’s better than having to smell Chucky’s puke every time. So Chucky gets to ride up top where he can watch the horizon in that way he needs to do to avoid motion sickness, with the tacit agreement that if any shit goes down he needs to drop into the cargo area pronto. Which he’d have no problem doing because no one wants to be near the M242 when it’s firing. That thing can tear up an SUV like it’s tissue paper. The bullets are as long as Chucky’s forearm.
They were told to expect an hour’s travel to the village with the recently murdered mayor. Bishop sits in the back of the Bradley with his helmet over his eyes and his earplugs pushed practically into his brain. Blessed silence. Sixty sweet minutes of nothingness. Bishop doesn’t even dream over here. One of the many surprises of war is how it has turned him into a sleeping savant. If he’s told he has twenty minutes for a nap, he will use all twenty minutes. He can tell the difference between sleeping two hours and sleeping two and a half. He can feel the contours of consciousness over here that he never felt back home. Back home, life was like driving a road at sixty miles per hour, every little bump and texture flattened into an indistinguishable buzz. War is like stopping and feeling the road with his bare fingers. A person’s awareness expands like that. War makes the present moment slow. He feels his mind and body in ways he never knew were possible.
Which is why Bishop knows for sure when the Bradley comes to a halt and he wakes up that they are not yet at their destination: that was a thirty-minute nap. He can tell by the way his eyes feel, or maybe more accurately the way the space just behind his eyes feels, a certain kind of pressure there.
“How long have we been driving?” he asks Chucky.
“How long you think?” he says. They like to test each other this way.
“Thirty minutes?”
“Thirty-two.”
Bishop smiles. He climbs up top, blinks at the mighty desert sunlight, looks around.
“Suspicious thing in the road,” Chucky says. “Up ahead. Possible IED. You gotta see this. You’ll never believe it.”
He hands Bishop the binoculars and Bishop searches the dusty and cracked asphalt in front of them until he sees it: a soup can in the center of the road. Standing straight up. Its label pointing right at the convoy. That familiar red logo.
“Is that—”
“Yep,” Chucky says.
“A Campbell’s soup can?”
“Affirmative.”
“Campbell’s tomato soup?”
“All the way out here. I shit you not.”