I couldn’t sleep. I felt dark, depressed. At night, I lay on my back without moving so as not to disturb Katherine and stared at the ceiling without blinking until my eyes watered. She’d get up in the morning, but I’d stay in bed and think about Iraq. Like this one patrol. We go into a building, barely make it through the door when we see grenades dinking down the stairs. Six of our guys try to get out the door and bottleneck themselves up. I see a little bathroom and get in the stall. Tink, tink, tink, boom! Those six guys, they didn’t make it.
Another time, funnier than shit, we were in Fallujah and an insurgent at the top of the stairs of this house shot an RPG and it hit the stair beneath Perez but nothing happened. It didn’t go off. Perez yelled, I can’t die! and charged up the stairs and blew that haji to shit. I laughed every time I thought of it, had to wipe tears away I was laughing so hard, and one morning Katherine heard me laughing, and she came into the bedroom and looked at me and started laughing too, like you do when you see someone laughing, and she wanted to know what’s so funny. So I told her about Perez, how pissed he got when that fucking haji tried to waste him, I can’t die! and how he sure the fuck did die on our way to F.O.B Concord, and she stopped laughing but I couldn’t. She didn’t get it. Then I stopped laughing. I wanted to grab and shake her, do you know what the real world is like? And then I started laughing again.
When I finished my alcohol program at the VA, I stuck pretty close to the house. I’d drop Katherine off at the supermarket and then drive away, forgetting about her. I took us to the movies, and when she asked me to buy her a Coke, I’d walk past the concession stand and wander outside and get lost in the parking lot and miss the movie. I’d go meet her for lunch at Buster’s in North Beach, where she waitressed, but then I’d turn down the wrong street and drive to the Mission. I’d stop at a Mexican joint and call her and ask where the hell she was.
After I botched our fifth attempt at a lunch date, she ripped into me. This time I’d gone all the way to Oakland and called her from a pizza joint. A coworker gave her a lift to come get me. One look and I knew she was in no mood for pizza.
She drove us back home to the Richmond. We didn’t say a word to each other. She pulled into the garage and I got out of the car and walked into the living room and turned on the TV. I wanted to be alone. Her anger crowded me, boxed me in. I saw things out of the corners of my eyes, turned, and they vanished. I heard her throw her purse on the kitchen counter and knock over something and my shoulders jerked at the noise, and then she stood in front of me blocking the TV. I was eye level to her waist. Her tan legs snaked out of this short summer dress. Her blouse rose up a bit and I could see her belly button. I didn’t feel so crowded then. I reached for her. She pushed my hands away.
Are you seeing someone? she said. Is that why you’re acting like this?
Hell no! I just forgot.
My heart started pounding like I was getting chewed by the LT for some dumb shit and my hands began shaking. She didn’t get how I could forget something like lunch again and again, and I didn’t either. I got it why she was so upset, but I didn’t like her shouting at me.
Do you remember how we even met? You forget that?
I remembered. I had stopped for breakfast at Buster’s a year before my enlistment. She took my order, two eggs easy, extra hash browns, two biscuits. We started talking. She had short, curly brown hair and a throaty voice I thought was kind of suggestive, and a smile that made me smile. I said we should see a movie. Maybe, she said.
It was love at first sight, I told her.
You’re such a character, she said and blushed. Then she got shitty again. I think you’re seeing someone.
Stop it, I said.
Don’t tell me to stop it? Who is she?
Stop it!
Tell me her name!
I’d had it with her shouting. I smacked the end table with my fist hard enough to make her jump and back away. I surprised myself, like a power surge had bolted up my ass without even a here-I-come. The word bullshit rolled around in my head like a marble getting louder and louder, faster and faster, and I pressed my hands against my forehead but I couldn’t stop it, and I screamed, Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! and pounded the table again and again and the lamp fell and the bulb broke and I imagined all those pieces of glass rising in the air like shrapnel.
Katherine stood so still, eyes wide as plates, I thought she’d crack. I stared hard at her, balled my hands into fists, and laid a punch into the wall by the side of her head, willing myself just in time not to put it through her face. I held my hand and stared at it like it didn’t belong to me and ran into the garage. The air clung to me. I got in our car and spun out of the driveway, turned onto Lincoln Street and floored it for downtown with no idea what I’d do when I got there. I just wanted to go, get away, drive as fast as my heart was racing, but I hadn’t gone far, hadn’t even reached the Haight, when I rounded a curve and almost slammed into a line of stopped cars.
I stomped on the brakes and squealed to a stop, my heart a beating drum filling my head. What was the fucking holdup? I shifted into neutral, floored the accelerator to hear the engine whine, to hear noise, to hear it scream. I saw some flashing lights. I followed the car in front of me, riding its bumper with a desire to roll right over it, crushing it, and hear the metal break, beeping and pounding my hands on the steering wheel, keeping time to that marble still bouncing around inside my head, bullshitbullshitbullshitbullshit! A line of orange cones angled us into one lane and a cop waved us forward.
Sobriety checkpoint, he said. Keep moving.
I got sucked in, squeezed, cars on top of me front and back. One could explode at any moment. I cranked the radio. PSYOP would play Metallica to fuck with the hajis when we did house-to-house searches. Attention, attention, drop your weapons, someone would say through a bullhorn, and then they’d do this evil laugh. Then it was Metallica again on this big intercom thing. To keep the hajis from going to sleep and drive them crazy so they’d come out on their own and we could ripshit them to hell. I turned the radio louder until I couldn’t turn the knob.
I watched the cop in my rearview mirror while another cop checked on the guy in front of me. Then it was my turn. He leaned into my open window and made a face at all the noise. He yelled at me to turn it down. I didn’t touch it.
Having a good ol’ time, rock star? he said.
Yes, sir, I said.
He asked where I had come from.
Nowhere, sir.
My heart was hammering my chest into splinters. I needed to keep moving. The AC didn’t work. My window was down but sweat soaked my shirt. I opened the door to let more air in, my mouth dry as paste. The cop told me to close it.
Somewhere ahead of us I heard shouting. A squad car passed me on the shoulder of the road, stirring up small dust storms.
The cop shifted, moved his feet. I’m not going to tell you again.
More shouting up ahead and another squad car, going even faster, this one spitting stones from beneath its tires and hitting my car, tink, tink, tink. The dust exploded. Tink. I bolted from the car screaming and the cop grabbed me and we fell to the pavement and I clawed forward digging my fingers into the pavement. I knew what happened to prisoners. They got their heads cut off and shown on YouTube. I elbow-jabbed the cop and I heard him grunt. I rose to my knees and he knocked me flat with a punch to the back of the head and for a moment everything blazed white and then descended into deep black. He cuffed me. Another cop ran up and they both hauled me to my feet and the first cop shoved me against my car. I felt the hot metal burn my cheek, saw people leaning out their windows, the exhaust and wavering lines of heat making it look like their faces were under water.
Grenade? the cop holding me said.
I didn’t say anything, listened to him breathing hard against me, my chest heaving. You were yelling “grenade.”
I didn’t say anything.
Your bumper stickers, Operation Iraqi Freedom. You a vet? he said.
I didn’t say anything.
I was in Afghanistan, he said. Tenth Mountain Division, Khost Province.
I heard the rush of bodies running, descending on us. I felt them collecting in a huddle behind me, heard them blabbering haji mumbo jumbo. I tensed but the cop held me, his weight against me a kind of assurance. He told everyone to back off. He pressed me against the car for a long while, just the two of us breathing. Then he eased up and pulled me back. He gripped me by my right arm and stood beside me and we walked together to a squad car. I didn’t try to run. I was not there, not anywhere. I watched myself from a great distance.
The cop opened the back door and put a hand on my head, guiding me inside. I liked the touch of his hand, the firm grip of his fingers in my hair. He closed the door. The AC blew cold air, covering me like clean sheets. When he got in, I asked him where we were.
I had a roadside bomb blow up eight feet from my face once, Jay said.
Remember when it was?
No. I was on foot patrol. Shook up my head too bad. I wish I did remember. People ask me stuff and I can’t tell them. I can remember the kids I killed, but people don’t want to hear about that. It’s like saying I killed puppies. Three of them. I’m not proud of it, but I killed as many of them as I could.
It was them or you. Rule number one, Jay, come home alive.
We were getting supplies from one base back to our base. I forget which one. Not even a half hour out and we got ambushed. About seven, eight roadside bombs. The first one hit our truck and I blacked out for a couple seconds. I came to and pulled myself together. It was like Star Wars behind the truck. Firing on both sides, bombs going off, and our guys firing back. Jesus, it was loud. I spun the .50 cal in a circle toward the flashes of gunfire. When I got done firing, I looked at the side of the road. Four kids were connecting wires to set off the bombs. Ten, eleven, twelve years old, I don’t know. I know I shot three of them. They kind of exploded from the .50 cal. The fourth ran away. I didn’t get him.
What I remember of hajis dying I don’t remember as good as Jay does. I see snapshots but details are missing. Like that kid and his mother near Tower Three. One day when I was returning sniper fire, I saw them take cover in a ditch. Then they were dead, blown to shit. Cut down just like that, and I didn’t know what hit them. I want to say the sniper shot them but I don’t know. Maybe it was me. I see them now bursting like popped water balloons. I think I’d remember if I shot them. But I don’t. I don’t remember. I just see them pop.
The cop took me straight to the VA. I don’t know how long I stayed there, but it felt like hours. I had a CT scan and an MRI. A neuropsychologist asked me questions: Had I been injured in Iraq? When? Had I lost my ability to concentrate? He read something to me out of a magazine about a woman shopping. It wasn’t long and I swear I listened but when he finished and asked me questions about what he had read, I had to admit I couldn’t remember much. He kept on asking me stuff. I told him I needed a break.
Roger that, he said, and left.
Seconds later, the door opened and a shrink came at me: Did I get upset when I thought about Iraq? Did I get angry? Did the thoughts come out of nowhere? How did I react physically to those thoughts?
I don’t remember what all else he asked me but it was a lot and I got pissed. Of course thinking about Iraq upset me, what kind of thing was that to ask? And how do I react physically? What does he think? I shit myself? But I kept myself in check. I didn’t want to do another two-week stretch on the ninth floor.
When he finished, I sat by myself, exhausted and ready to sleep for days. I must’ve given someone my number and they called Katherine because she showed up out of nowhere to take me home. Before we left, the shrink and neuro guy compared notes in the hall. I watched them through a glass square in the exam room door. I closed my eyes, felt myself drifting, Katherine’s hands on my shoulders. I heard the door open, heard their approaching footsteps. Then they stopped. I opened my eyes, looked at them standing above me. They said their preliminary diagnosis showed I had traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Preliminary diagnosis, shit. What did that mean? I didn’t know and didn’t care. I was beat down, exhausted, and I didn’t ask questions. They told Katherine I needed to make an appointment for more tests, more questions, their voices rolling in and out of my head like remote thunder. They gave her prescriptions to fill. I heard the paper crinkle in her hand and make a sharp sound as she folded it. She squeezed my shoulder when they said we could go.
