Three months after I stepped on the land mine, I saw my dead son.
He was slim and dark-haired, serious-faced as only a twenty-year-old can be. Without a word, he stepped into my Rambam hospital room, lifted my truncated body into a wheelchair, and pushed me down to the sea.
The strength in those arms of his! We moved as effortlessly as time itself through the antiseptic corridors, swift and unseen. Our short, silent journey ended five minutes away at the rocky Haifa sea wall. Eroded by salt and weather and centuries, it still managed to keep the sleepy green Mediterranean at bay.
For a moment, I thought he was going to wheel me into the water, where the white foam beckoned like a whore’s smile. Just before I could gather the courage to ask him to push me in, I woke up in my narrow hospital bed, once again wired to beeping machinery. It was daylight.
I hated these machines, smug with their noises and ever-changing LCD numbers that I could understand only in the expressions of those who tended me. Humans have gone through great pain and expense improvising ways to kill and ways to keep people alive. Wouldn’t it have been far less trouble to leave everything as it was and call it a wash?
I could still smell the sea and taste its salt air on my fingers when I woke. A nurse jogged in, her large, symmetrical chest heaving in exertion. She wore very white sneakers.
“Sergeant, what is it? You were yelling.” The look on her face pegged me as a demanding American, a mentally flabby product of a carbohydrate-crazy country nestled between feeble, uxorious neighbors. The rugged realities of her border life were too much for me, her black eyes accused. Never mind that I had sacrificed a good third of myself to her rugged reality.
“Nothing,” I said, which of course wasn’t an answer. None of her fucking business that I was having an outing with my son.
“Who is David?” she asked, straightening the already rectilinear creases of my sheet. I don’t know why; it’s not like I could have kicked it loose.
“My son.”
“Will he be coming to visit?”
“He’s dead.”
Her hands, working with lovely, unconscious competence at my sheets, paused only for a moment. Dead sons weren’t uncommon here.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
She finished in silence and padded out. I put her in her mid-forties, pretty despite a faint dark mustache. She had a great ass, too. I felt an ache in parts I no longer had and wished for the will to bash my head against the iron bed railing until I bled to death, or at least became insensible forever.
I’ve had two wives and forty-one lovers not counting whores—one for each year of my life, coincidentally—and not one bore me a child. So it may seem odd that I have a dead son. It seems a bit odd to me as well, but there it is, as the old Vietnam War guys still said when I joined up in 1985. In twenty-two years in the army, I’ve seen enough weirdness to believe in most anything, sometimes even God. And if you believe that fairy tale, there’s nothing that can surprise you.
Two nights after our trip to the beach, David came again, appearing with the sudden ease of the ghost he’d have to be. He missed being born by three months, David did. I threw a wrench in those works when I was nineteen by getting drunk and wrecking a car carrying myself and my pregnant girlfriend, Allie Papadopoulos.
I don’t remember Allie’s face anymore. Only her pillowy breasts and the teenage smells of hairspray and makeup remain in my memory. For all I know, she might even be one of the nurses here taking care of me. I hope not. I hope she’s happy. I hope she’s forgotten me and lives her life far away from broken men.
The second night David woke me with a question. It was about three, and I know he was real—or as real as any ghost could be—because he interrupted an intense dream about a girl I knew near Fort Dix, New Jersey. I’ve never had a dream where I woke up from a dream, so it had to be real, right?
He sat down on the bed, in the space where my legs should have been.
“What’s it like to be in love?” His voice was a low rumble, too deep for someone so young. It made me think of scotch over ice.
“Christ, kid, that’s the one you hit me with first? Couldn’t we start with why’s the sky blue, or something?”
He just looked at me with brown eyes that were mirrors of my own. I’ve never seen anyone as pale as him. It’s a cliché, but death has a ghostly quality to it.
Once again, he lifted me from the bed and I was in the chair. His neck smelled like a baby’s. We rolled down the hospital corridors, our voices an ephemeral hush.
“I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve been in two kinds of love,” I told him. “One kind of cleaves your heart in two and changes your world forever, all in a single moment. It’s powerful enough to knock you down or make you sick when you think about it years later. The other is a more gradual process, like the opening of a flower. It’s just as intense, only steadier, so you don’t realize its power until you lose it.”
We were out in the empty streets now, and it was cold. The fog had a croupy thickness. We didn’t go to the water; instead, he rolled me in slow circles in the empty street. His breath was harsh in my ear. I guess the dead don’t get much exercise.
“Which is better?” he asked. “Which type of love?”
I laughed, my warm breath becoming vapor when it left my mouth.
“That’s an easy one, boy. The one you don’t have at the time, that’s the one that’s better.”
“That makes no sense,” he told me.
“Spend enough time around people and you’ll realize either everything makes sense or nothing does, one or the other. We do what we do.”
He obviously didn’t like that answer. He stopped pushing the chair and walked a short distance away, his arms folded in front of him.
“David.”
“I have to go.”
“David, c’mon.”
“People are stupid,” he yelled, and disappeared.
I let the cold settle in around me as I sat in the middle of that empty, ancient street. A freighter’s foghorn blew at thirty-second intervals. I felt a kinship with the cautious horn blower, imagining him a Cypriot with a wife and six kids—a man who only wanted to finish his job and go home. It must be nice to have a home.
I woke in my hospital bed at first light. David must have taken me back after I fell asleep, then removed the chair so no one would know. He’s a smart boy.
I was a smart boy, they used to say. Just lazy. The reality was that I enjoyed underachieving. I watched my parents and my classmates strive for more, and for what? Headaches, disappointments, and unhappiness.
Three weeks after the car accident, I joined the army. I was searching for a niche where I could live my life on my own terms. I chose the infantry.
The recruiter was a thirty-something year old man with a belly just beginning to creep over his belt. His cheeks were the color of my grandmother’s borscht and scraped so clean of hair he must have shaved twice a day. He wanted me to try for OCS.
“Officers have it good,” he said. “More pay, better living quarters, not as much shit to shovel.”
No way, I told him. I wanted to be the first into battle, to “walk point,” and officers didn’t do that. He looked at me like he wanted to reevaluate my psych scores and didn’t say much the rest of the way. A month later I was in Fort Benning, Georgia, learning how not to get killed.
I was a corporal when the first George Bush sent us to war. I killed my first man on a dusty highway in Kuwait.
Iraqi soldiers were surrendering to anyone not wearing a dress. Me, Drumbowski, and Southbound were detached to walk a dozen filthy, unshaven and very relieved looking Republican Guards to a drop-off point a good four miles away.
The desert was doing what deserts do during the day, stealing the air from our lungs and replacing it with fire. The haze of smoke from a thousand spiteful oil fires wasn’t helping. The ground we walked was baked so dry it was cracked in places.
Southbound, a laconic nineteen-year-old Georgian, accepted the conditions with some equanimity. Drumbowski was another matter.
“Come on, man,” Ski said. He had a whiny voice that only seemed to use a portion of his frame. White rings of sweat coated the collar of his uniform top. The rest of it was soaked like he’d just gone for a swim.
“Let’s just fuckin’ leave them here, Carlin.”
How about we leave you, is what I thought.
“They have no water. They’ll die,” I said.
He took off his helmet and shook sweat out of his thin hair. His face was the color of an exquisitely steamed lobster and I wished he’d have a heart attack and shut the fuck up already. He stopped walking and drank from his canteen. I saw the look on the prisoners’ faces as water splashed from the sides of his mouth, the droplets disappearing into the parched dirt. Ski saw them looking and took another swig, gargled and spit.
He grinned at the prisoners, who turned their backs to him.
To me, he said “They ain’t gonna die. It’s their desert. Besides, this whole mess is their fuckin’ fault, and they deserve it. Hey, watch this.”
He took a spare canteen from his pack and walked among the prisoners, who were disarmed but not tied. With heavy, dancing steps that raised a puff of dust each time his boots struck the sun-scorched earth, he moved among them and shook a tiny bit of water over each of their heads.
Southbound opened his mouth to say something, then looked at me. I cursed under my breath.
“C’mon, Ski, cut that shit out.”
“I’m baptizing the cocksuckers,” he yelled with a little laugh. The prisoners just stood there, looking like the most beat bunch of men I’ve ever seen. They also were looking at me. Why the fuck was everyone looking at me? Could any sane person think that one extra fucking stripe prepared me for something like this in a broiling desert I’d never heard of six months ago? It wasn’t fair.
I turned away and looked down the road, wishing I was anywhere but where I was at the moment. I counted to five and said without turning around, “OK, Ski, time to—”
“Ski, Ski!” Southbound screamed.
I spun around as a prisoner ripped the grenade off the dancing Ski’s web belt and yanked the pin. The spoon popped off in a slow, short arc as the man gave the grenade a panicked toss and it rolled toward Southbound and I.
I dove to the ground and tried to make myself into a postage stamp. Southbound…Southbound didn’t, I guess.
When I looked up there was a ringing in my ears. Nothing was moving except the drifting smoke of the grenade and Southbound’s foot, which twitched for the two minutes it took him to bleed out.
Ski’s face would have been comical in almost any other situation. He stood with the canteen extended, mouth open and his eyes bugged out.
The Iraqi who threw the grenade separated himself from his companions. He wore ragged uniform pants and a white undershirt. His left big toe peeked out a hole in his canvas sneakers. Somewhere in his travels he’d acquired a headband with “Nike” emblazoned on it. You can tell he took care of it, it was also ragged but far cleaner than his shirt. He looked at me without expression.
“You motherfucker,” Ski screamed, clawing at his M16 and pulling back the charging handle. The dumb fuck didn’t even have a round chambered.
I tilted my rifle and fired a three-round burst through Ski’s head, blowing what little brains he owned onto the prisoners and the desert floor, which no doubt was grateful for the scant moisture. The canteen hit the ground before Ski did, and water spilled out onto the sand. No one made a move to touch it. I motioned for the prisoners to carry my dead squad and we continued in.
I didn’t say a word when we got to the base, and obviously neither did my prisoners. Three months later, I was out of the desert. Ranger School, baby.
“The Israeli army is full of fighting women,” I said to David that night. “I’m not sure what to think of that.”
“Meat is meat,” he replied cryptically.
It had been a rough day. I’d gritted my teeth as a very young nurse took off the bandages and massaged my stumps. She would have been pretty if not for the determined set in her jaw and the pity in her eyes as she looked everywhere but at my groin.
“I don’t blame you,” I told her. “I’m not sure how to act myself. Maybe I can find a palace that still hires eunuchs.”
She averted her eyes even further until the doctor came in and probed like I was a frog ready for dissecting.
“David,” I said. “Tell me about you.”
He just smiled sadly. He really was a beautiful boy. I wondered how he could look so familiar if I’d never seen him before.
“I did,” he said. “Meat is meat.”
Once again, we sat at the edge of the Mediterranean. My parents used to take me out to Fire Island when I was a kid. I’d always avoid the darker spots in the sand in the shallow water, convinced I’d be sucked into them and lost forever. It’s amazing how each body of water looks different, being essentially the same. Like people, I guess. All the same once you dive in.
“Tell me a time you were at peace,” David demanded.
I thought. There are brief moments in the middle of the night before the booze went from too little to too much when you feel all of the world’s problems are solvable. I was going to tell him that when I remembered something.
“It snowed about two months after I got my driver’s license. For some reason, I got behind the wheel and lit a joint I’d had someone roll because I was trying to impress a girl who smoked a lot. But I was afraid to talk to her, then she left for college.
“I’ll never forget what it was like alone in that car, moving through the world at about twenty miles an hour under those drifting, pregnant flakes. I felt untouchable and finally in tune with the revolutions of the earth. It was like matching your breathing perfectly next to the person sleeping next to you.”
“I’ve never know anything but peace,” he said to me.
“Do you know what snow feels like?”
He didn’t mean to look accusing—I know he didn’t. “I don’t know what anything feels like.”
Wherever the world fell to pieces, I was usually there walking point. There was Mogadishu, where I was part of the relief effort battling street by street to reach to those Rangers and Green Beanies who got themselves in a jackpot.
Then Bosnia, or Yugoslavia, or Serbia or whatever they were calling it that week. I led my patrols through fields with land mines planted like cash crops, never losing a man. By the time we left I was famous in my battalion. I had enchanted feet, they said. I also was starting my days with a vodka and amphetamines cocktail. One to wake up, and then usually another before we went out on patrol. Locked and loaded.
When we’d get back to barracks I’d clean my weapon and read philosophy until my hands stopped shaking. It took me four months of Spinoza’s geometric approach to see the man was full of shit. So was Plato, although Aristotle was on the right track. One day I chucked it all and just kept reading von Clausewitz over and over until I realized he had nothing left to teach me about war. Then I just started writing my own shit just to be able to come down and get some sleep.
David got an odd look on his face when I told him I was going home.
“Will you come with me?” I asked.
He sat on the edge of my bed and scuffed his shoe against the floor.
“No. I can’t come see you anymore.”
“Why? We’re just getting acquainted. I look forward to your visits.”
“I just can’t,” he said. “Rules are rules.”
“David, will I see you again?”
“Maybe.”
“When?”
He turned at the door and looked at me.
“That’s not up to me,” he said, and left.
Rain washed the windows of my hospital room and reduced morning to a hazy twilight as the nurse with the mustache gently bathed me. She had that sweet-sour milky smell I knew from my first sister-in-law’s home.
“How old is your baby?” I asked.
She looked up in surprise, then couldn’t stifle a smile. She all of a sudden was beautiful enough to make me ache. I think I won’t miss the sex if I can just look at them in unguarded moments like this one.
“Three months. Her name is Katya, after her great-grandmother who was killed a long time before I was born.”
Katya is a Russian name, and of course this nurse was Jewish. I had a pretty good idea of what happened to great-grandmother Katya, but I wasn’t going to ask. This is a nation of ghosts. They’re these people’s legacy.
“I know you have a picture somewhere.”
She dug between her breasts for a locket hanging from the chain around her neck. Her daughter looked like all babies looked; strong and fragile and bursting with all the world’s possibilities. I handed it back.
“Get me a wheelchair,” I told her.
She opened her mouth in a way that told me she was going to list the reasons it was a bad idea, then looked at my face.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
There was a chair next to my bed by dark.
I waited a couple of hours for my floor to grow quiet, then used the handle dangling from the ceiling to pull myself up to a sitting position. I lifted myself from the bed to the chair. It was easy. I never knew how much legs could weigh.
I let myself settle into the chair with deep breaths. I’d eaten six of the pain pills I’d been hoarding, but when my bandages touched the chair I still gasped.
My progress was slower than when David pushed, but the corridors were just as dark and empty. It took me only about fifteen minutes to get out the elevator and cover the distance to the sea wall.
The rain had stopped but the air was still chilly. The wind ruffled and snapped the wet Israeli flag hanging from the hospital, making the Star of David dance.
Rolling as close as I could to the rocky berm separating land from water, I set the brake on the chair and carefully slid down to the cracked cement.
My tour in Afghanistan had only a couple of days left when the colonel called me in. He looked like a recruiting poster and was a by-the-book guy, but he both cared about his soldiers and gave them enough rope to do their jobs.
“Carlin is a Jewish name, isn’t it, Top?” he asked.
I looked at my file sitting on his desk, a massive carved piece that you just knew was done locally for about three dollars American and would be worth a couple of grand back home. I knew that file very clearly stated that I was of the Jewish faith.
“Last time I checked my dog tags I was, Sir.”
He looked up sharply, but I kept my face blank.
“Yes, well, how would you like to go to the motherland, First Sergeant?”
“Looking forward to it, Sir,” I lied. “Only a couple of days left, then back home for a stateside tour.”
“Not that motherland. Your people’s motherland.”
“You’re sending me to Poland, Sir?”
The colonel scowled. “Israel, Carlin, I’m sending you to Israel.”
“Sure, Sir.” Anything beat going back to the states and keeping your boots shined for some chickenshit captain with something to prove.
The colonel looked disappointed.
“Sir, I would love to go to Israel. It has always been tops on my destination list.”
The colonel beamed. “Fine, fine. Some kind of exchange deal the administration cooked up. Go show them how to walk through a minefield or two, drink their wine and fuck their woman. God knows you’ve earned the rest.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Some rest. Two weeks later I huddled behind a Mercedes carcass on a Lebanon street as tracer rounds powdered the wall behind me to dust. I was stone-cold sober in a firefight for the first time in twelve years and trying not to shit myself. Ten terrified eyes, four female and six male, looked at me like I was some half-assed Moses supposed to lead them to the promised land, which was anywhere but here.
I’d been doing exactly what the colonel said; drinking, eating well, partaking of the local women and fitting in a couple of hours a day for small unit tactics, when the Israeli government decided they’d had enough of rocket fire and kidnapped soldiers.
We’d invaded en masse, then broken up into smaller squadrons to try and find two kidnapped Israelis. It was, by any account, a massive clusterfuck.
“First Sergeant,” screamed a kid I knew only as Private Ari. “What do we do?”
Duck, asshole, what do you think we do?
“This mission is officially over,” I screamed. “We are going back.”
“Aren’t we going to look for our kidnapped soldiers?” asked Rivka. She was sturdy and twenty-three, and before this shit started I’d had high hopes for a mission of a different sort with her.
I gestured to draw her attention to the street. Ugly before this began, it was total Dresden now. “Where would you like to start?”
She shut up and I rose up to a half crouch, half squat. Israelis regularly assured me that the Hezbollah fighters were notoriously bad shots, but you gotta figure they’re biased.
“Follow me, five meter intervals. These cocksuckers don’t duck, so don’t bother stopping to shoot.”
I looked at them each for a second. “I don’t give a fuck who falls, no one stops. Step where I step, they might have snuck in behind us and laid in some mines. Plus your fucking unexploded ordnance is all over this street.
“You,” I pointed at a serious-looking, black-haired kid a little less panicked than the rest. “You’re last.”
He nodded and I took off without a word.
I didn’t bother with cover because there was none. I ran a weaving path through the rubble, rounds reshaping themselves on the pavement around me. I was filled with joy. Yes, they were lousy shots, and more importantly, I could actually do this sober.
We charged toward the dubious safety of a pair of Israeli tanks at the end of the street. One was on fire, its right track blown to hell. The other swung its ponderous turret gun until I was looking into its dark, malevolent eye, and fired well over our heads from about half a football field away, making big rubble into little rubble.
I risked a glance back and watched the boy in the rear turn a wicked somersault and land on his back. I stopped and the rest of the team swarmed past me.
The enemy gunfire, which had slackened after the tank jacked its cannon, picked up. Bullets landed all around the fallen boy, who writhed on the ground holding his flopping foot.
I never once considered going back. I just found myself there yanking him up by his uniform. His face was filthy and he had a gash on his head from the fall.
“I broke my fucking ankle,” he said in perfect Midwestern English. I’d had no idea he was American, or used to be.
I crouched and he knew what to do. With a howl he pushed on one leg as I lifted, his momentum carrying his torso over my shoulder into a fireman’s carry. I wrapped an arm around the backs of his legs and gauged the distance to the tank, where the rest of my team stood blazing away at buildings behind us. Too far with him on my back, I judged. Instead, I aimed at the open door of a house about 40 feet away. I would kick my way through the back of it and we’d come around to the tank from behind.
Would I have taken the same path if I knew of Hezbollah’s tradition of booby-trapping random doorways in abandoned neighborhoods? Maybe. I do know I’d have been a lot more careful, though.
I saw the wire an instant before I kicked it, but it was too late. The world exploded, launching scores of tiny metal ball bearings that eviscerated the boy’s head and shoulders and parted me from my legs and equipment. My luck, quite clearly, had run out.
The sturdy Rivka paid me a visit in the hospital. Dry-eyed, she told me that when they got to us I still held the boy’s legs. It confused them. Initially they thought I was holding my own.
The boy, she told me, was named Avram. He was 24. They were lovers. She still had a shirt of his, she said, but his smell was fading. She kissed me on the forehead and left, taking her scent away forever.
The sea air makes the rocks by the retaining wall slippery and it takes me about an hour to crawl the fifteen or so feet to the water. I looked back at the wheelchair, gleaming beneath the moon that just now emerged from the fast-blowing clouds to cast its long beam upon the water. I hope mustache doesn’t get in trouble. I hope she has many beautiful daughters.
I half-rolled, half dragged myself into the water, which was warmer than the outside air, and made me buoyant as a bobbing cork. I tried to reflect back on my life and realized there was nothing really to think about it. I’d done what I’d set out to do—accomplish nothing while paying my way through this world. The only thing of note worth mentioning is that the men I’d killed in war and the women I’d slept with added up to the same number. Too high in the one case, too low in the other. But like everything else in life, that was coincidence and timing.
My strokes were rusty at first, my balance off as I got used to being in the water as only a torso, but I found a rhythm soon enough, I rolled on my back and saw the moon, bright and pregnant, and drifted into its beam that stretched over the horizon.
“You can’t walk point with no legs,” I told the moon, and in slow, easy strokes began following its blazing beam toward the curvature of the earth.