YESTERDAY I watched my seven-year-old son, Marshall, high up in the Douglas fir, take an imaginary bullet from his sister. The funny thing was that she didn't even want to play; he'd cajoled her into fifteen minutes of "war" by promising to wash dishes for her. C'mon, Jeanie, he'd begged, just a few fights, I need to practice dying. Really, he'd put theater into it, keeling backwards, dropping his squirt gun and then, with a glance downward, falling the five feet to the lawn and throwing himself onto it—dead. Jeanette played her part agreeably, even blowing invisible smoke off the green plastic barrel and holstering it in her front pocket. The irony was too obvious for anyone to even notice, of course: a father just back from war witnesses his children playing war and is sickened by it. What melodrama. Nevertheless, in my hammock, a little tide of nausea did rise in me. I climbed out and made myself tussle Marshall's hair on my way inside for another bourbon and coke. He looked up at me with a boy's hungry eyes for approval—for being a good actor, I suppose.

It was an early autumn Sunday and I was whipped. It's mostly the little things like such unreasonable fatigue that I noticed. Also the dread of morning when I'd get up before the sun and sit inventing lists of errands to jam-pack the day. My old boss at the framing shop kept claiming that he was saving the post for me, but kept putting off my return, echoing the shrink: wait till you get re-immersed, served alongside an overdone smile and calming hand gestures. I never thought I'd not be allowed to work—what irony. Claira would come down to the kitchen about twenty minutes before the kids, glance over my shoulder at the lists, cluck her tongue and coo that I should just relax, that I deserved some downtime for God's sake. I clamped down on my mind and forced the thoughts and images out, like a grandmother lifts a Buick that's fallen on her husband. I'd have to admit that I'd had the impulse to strike my wife when she made those loving gestures. Something about the lazy dance of dust motes and the sleepy smile on her still-young face, the hiss and sputter of the coffee maker, made me clench and panic more than the high whistle of mortars, the dry crumbling of walls, the wails of maimed people. To be brutally honest, I would have to say that in those moments my impulse was to chop my wife in the throat.

Claira didn't seem to mind that sex had become only a memory: the telltale squeak in the mattress, the scars on the wall from the bedposts' knocking. It wasn't that I didn't get aroused anymore, but more that I feared my arousal. My midnight hard-ons brought with them the adrenal checklist that preceded the zigzag across every Arab avenue: cold sweat, high pulse, the magnification of all the senses. And these quickly delivered me back into the thick of that land, the cries, the explosions, the splintering of bone under deceptively dull thuds. So each night since my return, I'd brushed Claira's auburn hair aside, put my lips on her cheek almost like a friend, and turned to await the nightmare that I knew was coming, the return to the dark room in Baghdad where I'd lost the human thread of myself.


THE VIEW through the night-vision goggles was green and black. I could make out the row of hovels, made from tin, plastic, spare lumber. Spelman, the big Nebraskan to my right, elbowed me and I turned over the goggles. The homes became only sketches in dirty moonlight.

"Fix your objective. We move in two minutes. We hit the second from the corner first; number one's empty. Guerra and Simpson will give you cover from the roof, but don't count on them to save your ass. Use your halogens to get the drop on the fuckers."

The sergeant was whispering so I couldn't tell if his voice was shaky. I adjusted my helmet and rubbed my palm on my thigh. I snuck a look at Spelman, hoping to see cool confidence that I could borrow—or hide behind. The dirty moonlight flashed once on teeth. The man was wearing some kind of a terrified, manic grin. A cinderblock of terror sat on my lungs and I sipped the dry air like grain alcohol.

"Ready weapons."

I checked that my magazine was locked in place for the thousandth time. I'd always been a little compulsive but now I was downright nuts with it. I clicked off the safety. I wasn't sure my body would obey the order. I reminded myself, over and over, that we'd trained for this exact fucking scenario, but it didn't help—it's not like a goddam math test, something you can prepare for. The night was thick; the light was weak. Vague sounds from the houses could just as easily come from a sleeping family of four as a group of militiamen. One long strand of a whining snore rose. It sounded too ordinary; I had the insane notion that it was a trick. The handle of my M16 was bonding with my calluses I gripped it so hard.

"After Spelman and Scoffield. Move, move, move—go!"

The heel of a hand hit my spine and I hurtled forward, charging, holding my rifle out like it was a spear, all memory of form stripped away. The hot grit of sand was between my molars but the metallic taste of fear was under my tongue and tingling the roof of my mouth. Boots thudded and lungs pulled air around me. The stir of shadows behind the plastic window thickened. Spelman's rifle broke the door and the salvo of rough-sounding Arabic launched as Mata translated commands to the unseen people now in front of us. Halogens mounted on our barrels gobbled holes in the blackness, divvying up the room in crazy flashes and sweeps: a wide eye glinted, a body grunted and scuffled, a wail split the air and turned my bones cold. The breeze from flying objects whispered on my face, behind my back and between my legs. I pointed the rifle frantically, here then there, I couldn't make out shit but some raised hands, vague forms, chalky clouds of dust. When something brushed my arm and I watched my sixteen cough a flame, a whole storm of others cracked immediately behind it, like an avalanche chasing a lone stone, bouncing and rolling down a slope. It was in the middle of all the shooting that I heard my own voice, screaming, something I couldn't recognize even though it was ripping my throat. There was fear like I'd never known, and then the solution: rage of the same caliber.


ALL THE SCARY SHIT hadn't begun right away when I got back. For almost two weeks, I'd tried to bask in the sweetness of being home. In fact, I felt a little gluttonous and guilty, ashamed of all the comfort and tenderness I had around me while my friends were still staggering through that slaughter. Sometimes it seemed to me that the mortar that woke me up one morning by carving hot metal through my chest was too easy of a ticket out.

But then little incidents began and seemed to multiply on their own, every day became a greater challenge to keep steady, to keep spinning the news that my heart seemed to be sending up through my body to my head—as hard as it was for the media and the administration to keep spinning the news from the war into something Americans could support. I couldn't tolerate it. Sitting watching the coverage one evening, I cracked a wineglass in my hand and looked on with as much surprise as my family while the cabernet mixed with the blood in my lap. One afternoon in the garden I overheard the crotchety neighbor scream at Jeanette for some stupid stunt and I found myself marching toward dividing hedge with a hoe held like a goddam bat, a cold roaring in my ears. Jeanie had to beat her fists into my thighs to pull me out of it.

Three months passed like that, with me monitoring myself for symptoms of what they called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The bald, fat, National Guard shrink had suggested I find someone I trusted to "monitor" me through what he called the "re-immersion process." I'd scoffed freely at him at the time, as would my buddies when asked to spill their feelings to some pussy who's never seen the desert. When I'd sat down with him, the doctor picked up a ballpoint pen and clicked it three times, just giving me a flat sort of smile.

"How do you think it might be different for you now, going home, after your experiences in Iraq, Thomas?" he'd asked me.

"I guess it's safe to say I'll appreciate my family more—already do."

I tried a smile and got a thin-lipped one in return. The doctor picked up the pen again. Click, click, click.

"That's good, Thomas. But it's part of my duty to advise you that sometimes the re-immersion process is a bit tougher than you'd expect."

I nodded like I appreciated his wisdom. The shrink watched me for a few minutes, like I was a specimen. I kept my gaze steady, my posture upright. Finally he let out a sigh, like he'd been holding his breath, scribbled his signature on a form, and offered me his small, smooth hand. I was relieved. Out of the thick sheaf of papers on PTSD, I didn't recognize ninety percent of what they called the symptoms. I was relieved at this, too, and it fueled my ability to deny that anything serious was wrong. I told myself in the first weeks that I'd dodged a bullet, but the lie came roaring in soon enough and even the smallest case of road rage made me panic, desperate to force the cage back down over the beast that snarled in me. It was like living with a maniac who hates noise on the other side of a thin wall. But in truth I knew I'd never really see it coming. It'd be an ambush, trickery.

That Sunday, after twilight started dissolving, I was actually relaxed by what had turned out to be a fun, goofy dinner—one of those when Claira and I let go of the rules about manners and let comedy and mischief be the rule. Competitive slurping of spaghetti noodles (I won), belching (giggles when mom tried it), and even some low-intensity food fighting (Marshall whipped a saucy noodle against his sister's cheek while she was feeding garlic bread crust to the dog). Then we flopped on the sofa that faces the big screen and the bay window, which frames the sunset over Puget Sound. Jeanette and Marshall actually agreed on a movie. The Disney storyline wrapped them up and put Claira to dozing on my shoulder. I was content watching the brushes of pink over the water and pretty soon hypnotized by the slow dance of it all.

My left hand rested on top of Jeanette's straw-blonde hair. My right arm was around my still wife. Marshall leaned back against my right leg: a goddam portrait of domestic peace. But I was also quite suddenly aware of the fragility of Jeanette's skull under my fingers, the closeness of my son to the heel of my foot, and the frailty of my wife, her head back, throat tilted up at me, soft as a flower petal in the TV light. It wasn't that I was afraid I would actually twist Jeanette's head, slam Marshall's nose into his brain, or crush Claira's windpipe; it was only that I saw it happen so clearly and that the sickening impulse floated up through me.

When I jumped up, I knocked my whole family out of their trances. They gazed up at me, blinking, startled. I shoved my trembling hands in my pockets and hopped over the bowl of popcorn between the kids. Before I could get out of the room, Jeanette spoke.

"What's wrong, daddy?"

The three sets of blue eyes aimed at me didn't have any accusation in them, only concern and confusion. In Claira's there may have been a small measure of fear, too. She's not dumb.

"Nothing baby," I said, driving a smile onstage, "I just fell asleep and had a bad dream."

This satisfied my daughter; Marshall was already watching the screen again. Claira couldn't mask her concern, though she gave me a look of sympathy, a look like she might have given me if I was choking on a bite of food and she slapped my back.

"I think I'll just go to bed," I said, plastic as hell. "You all tired me out." I dodged my wife's gaze and climbed the stairs.

In the bedroom, lacking oxygen, I wrestled a duffle bag out of the closet and quickly, like I was burglarizing, I crammed clothes in, dug out a scarcely used Visa from the bedside drawer. I stowed the bag away beneath the bed and began the process of calming that would let me pretend to be asleep when Claira lay down beside me.


AUTUMN CHOSE the morning to begin. I hadn't slept, but I had reached some kind of unconsciousness after Claira finally started breathing evenly at about two o'clock. I slipped down the stairs with the duffle and I was grateful for the typical Northwest fall day; the dark skies were uncompromising and fog and drizzle worked together to blur the world.

I knew that if Claira woke up and saw me going, all of her sweetness and care would implode and she'd panic and I'd have to shake her off by force—and that was something I certainly did not plan to face. I stepped like a cat but with a damn heavy heart. Saddened by the uselessness of words, I left a note next to the coffee maker in pencil that showed how violently I clutched it:

C
I can't explain, but there's no one else. I love you and the kids more than existence and you could not be better. It's just that I feel like poison here, now. I've got to figure out some things is all. Please don't worry and, please, trust me.
Thank you and I'm sorry.
T

If I wanted to, I could stay in the same lane until downtown Boston, about three thousand miles east. Speeding, I see the glow of sunrise through the curtain of gloominess over the Cascades. After the lane narrowing of downtown Seattle, which always makes me claustrophobic, I'm glad for the entrance to Interstate 90. It will soon become wide and open, a broad ribbon away from the city.

As I clear the suburban exits and begin the ascent toward Snoqualmie Pass, I settle into the rhythm of the tires and the heater finally begins to take effect. I strip off my old windbreaker and rub the raised, almost-healed wound across my shoulder and chest. It runs in a near-perfect semicircle, as if the goddam shrapnel had some grand but unfinished design in mind. Sometimes I find myself touching it tenderly and other times I pick at the ends of it, with a desperate need to peel the whole thing off. When it happened to me, I was pretty much grateful—I knew it was my ticket home, out of the hot, gritty nightmare land of the Green Zone. The only fucking green things there were officers' uniforms and ignored corpses. But this morning on the interstate, I'm stuck with the thought that maybe the wound is a curse, leaving the war was wrong. I'm not able to be home; I've been re-composed by and re-conditioned to horror, and horror doesn't have any place in a family.

I find a classic rock station that comes in good, and though AC/DC wouldn't be my first choice early in the morning these days, the hard guitar and shouted lyrics feel bracing and right and I turn it up, pull the truck back down into fourth to fly faster. The music is calling up a bunch of nostalgia in me. I feel certain that I've whipped around this very bend to this very soundtrack before, probably lost on bad pot and cheap beer when I was nineteen. So when the Denny Creek exit blooms on the right, I don't even think twice, just obey the whim and brake, cross four lanes and drive a few hundred yards through the forest, slide to a stop at the trailhead and stare up at it. Immediately the press of memory is heavy on my chest and I'm recalling the last time I was here in detail, and I can't believe, given how it played out, that I haven’t remembered till now. I close my eyes and let it come.


"TAKE IT EASY ON ME," my father had called to me. I was in my twenties, charging up the slope. "I'm not spry as I used to be."

I knew this was somewhat of an exaggeration because my father maintained his body like monks take care of a temple. But I slowed down anyway. Maybe it was something about the lush greenery that reminded me of the Indochina I'd seen on grainy newsreels and movies, but I found myself putting together a question for my dad about the war, cautiously. I didn't often ask and I was always careful when I did.

"Dad, did you ever feel ... like good over there? I mean, I know that overall everyone thinks it was a disaster. But did you ever think, like, you guys were justified and that all that shit was worth it?"

I winced at how it came out; I sounded like some kind of lowbrow news correspondent. My dad was behind me, so I couldn't see the expression my question put on his face. He didn't respond right away and we zigged and zagged enough soggy switchbacks for me to begin to regret asking. When we could hear the smallest sliver of the waterfall, like soft static, he answered me.

"It felt good to have people as scared and confused as I was around. Things are more bearable like that. But, then again, every time someone got wasted, it sort of made it worse."

I nodded, but I could tell he wasn't finished. We marched another couple of switchbacks, getting steeper.

"There was something that felt good. It certainly wasn't good. It's hard to admit, Thomas, and I kind of hate to. But you asked." He sighed in a staggered way behind me. "A couple of times, after we'd lost friends—in really awful ways, you know, Bouncing Betties and snipers and shit—and we'd get into a firefight and end up capturing some VC, either wounded or just unlucky and, well, someone would snap and just shoot them."

I felt my heart jerk. Although I'd suspected this, it still slammed into me. I felt my father's closeness on my heels and realized I had slowed way down, so I picked up the pace again.

"It's like the scenario in every damn war movie ever made. You know, the scared, angry kids who kill in revenge. But what movies try to show but can't is how good it felt. Not just ... being released from anger, but good—high-fiving kind of good. Like after winning a ball game but more."

I made myself nod, but my stomach felt like it'd been stirred with a flaming stick. I realized as I stumbled upward—the waterfall more roar than whisper suddenly—that I wished I hadn't asked. I surely was not going to dig any deeper.

We hiked the rest of the way in silence, which was our custom anyhow. When we got to the falls we teetered out carefully onto a log overhanging the pool into which the water dropped thunderously. An osprey, hunting from a high pine bough, had my eye and it was nearly too loud to talk anyway. But my dad had a few words left. His bald head glinted with all the swinging sunbeams and he had a couple of fragments of bark in his mustache. He straightened his back and turned his pair of Nordic blue eyes on me again.

"The worst part of 'Nam wasn't knowing that it was a useless, horrible war that we never could have won. The worst part about 'Nam was all of us coming back to our families. Being a father and a husband, and having to hold all that shit inside me." He looked up at the top of the falls. The osprey cried and lifted off. A cloud, thick like gauze, slid over the sun. "But I did it. It never got out."


I WAKE UP to the sound of chatter and I'm confused. It's distant and at first it sounds like another language to me. I can make out there's two voices and they're getting nearer and I sit upright. The darker gold of the sunrays playing across the dashboard mean I've been out for a while. When I look at my watch and see it's three in the afternoon, I bolt upright and startle the Gortex-covered hiker couple loading up their custom walking sticks, sleek little backpacks, and water bottles into a Subaru wagon. They're like a pair of ambassadors from the new Northwest, sent to remind me just how drastically things have changed. They wave and I notice what seems like relief in the manner of the woman—then it hits me that I was surely parked right here, unconscious, when they arrived, hours earlier. I crank the truck and follow the Subaru out toward the freeway. Before they make the turn right, back into the suburbs, and me left, on to God knows what, I read their yellow bumper sticker: WHAT IF WAR WAS NOT AN OPTION? As the Subaru accelerates away, I find myself just idling at the top of the eastbound onramp. I'm looking for an answer, maybe a rebuttal, but I'm not sure I understand the question. Yeah, what if? After a minute I shake it off and start treating that truck like it's something new and Japanese instead of old and American.

Mile marker 61. Sixty-one. The age when the cancer ambushed my father—three months, diagnosis to death. The man who'd treated his body like a temple—save for a brief stint as a drunk just after Viet Nam—and had died young and in pain anyway. Dad never said, in his consultations with doctors, that he thought the disease was from the war, from the wicked Godspit—as they used to call Agent Orange—but neither did he say otherwise when one of them brought it up. The physical memory of the burning, chemical winds of Baghdad flies into my throat and I clear it, roll down the window for some of the bracing, clean, Washington air. I never told my father that I intended to preserve the military tradition, because during his life I wasn't sure I would—and knew that he'd come down heavy on me not to. But, living in his wake, I suppose it became a way—the only way—to stay close to him, to have him nearer. It was in the month after his death that I signed on with the Guard, figuring that was playing it safe. But I guess America hadn't changed enough, and she ran me through the same trials as she had my father. Like my father, I'd failed. And like my father, I'd passed, too.

On the other side of the pass, hunger wakes up in me like a grouchy dog. I pull off at the town called Cle Elum, where I've never had the reason to stop, and find a drive-up burger joint right away. A hatchet-faced waitress with a shy smile brings me a dry chicken sandwich and I work on that a while, watching the shadow line creep back west, toward my family. Here, in this stillness, letting the meal settle into my gut, my pragmatic nature breaks back through. As much as it hurts me—and my family—I'm resigned to my departure for now. But where the hell to go? And until when or what? I riffle through my mental rolodex: I've got my brother in Austin, Jerry in Colorado, Lucinda in New Mexico, and, as a closer option, my nephew Kip moved up to Missoula, Montana. But he went there to live with some lady and he's too goddam young to take me in anyway. Besides it's all worth shit because I know, beneath this lie that I have options, that I don't actually want to go to anyone. What I want, I decide, is a fucking beer. Just like my father—drown the beast for a while.

Down the first side street in Cle Elum, I catch sight of the perfect place, the kind of joint that would have called my father to it like a magnet: a dim tavern, a roadhouse. Gritty and uncomfortable and messy—the kind of environment that gives you permission to be the same way for a spell. I plant myself—two hands around a frosty bottle, both feet on the bottom rung of the stool—at the far end of a rough-hewn bar. Country and western—the awful "popular" hits, mainly—twang out of a battered juke. Over my first two beers I see only overweight middle-aged men with mesh caps, work boots, and booming voices enter the bar. They hurl their words around half-playfully but actually kind of menacingly with a bleach blonde, petite bartender who can't be more than nineteen. She's sweet and a little flirty with me, enough to make me comfortable but not get me into any scrap with the locals.

I'm pulling on my fourth or fifth bottle when a different kind of figure knocks in. He scans the place with one hand on the door, then puts his head down and comes for my end of the bar. He puts himself two stools down from me and orders a whisky. He throws it back but not, apparently, because he likes whisky. It twists his face with disgust. The kid is in his mid-twenties: jeans and a sweater, wild hair, and a thick beard that overruns his face and tapers out halfway down his neck. He also looks nervous, keeps glancing at the door—hence the whisky. Seeing as how we apparently share the discomfort of being outsiders, and because I feel half-drunkenly social, I slide down and stick out my hand. The kid startles but recovers quickly.

"You'll have to excuse my nerves," he tells me, and signals the bartender for two more. "It was a bad weekend."

I find myself starving to hear someone else's demons spoken, assuming that they'll pale in comparison to my own. It takes me a few minutes, but I coax it out of the kid, whose name is Travis. It's not his clothing, his way of speech, or the context we're in, but something in Travis's manner reminds me a hell of a lot of myself at that age: the muted war between boyhood and manhood under the surface; the false bravado flashed at the world.

"Man, I just came out here for a few weeks to help my Pops build a cabin. He's got an acre and a half up the road. I met this girl at a gas station and we hit it off. I figure, why not? Pops has his girlfriend and I'm tented up with the fucking coyotes. Be nice to have company—and she gave me company alright."

But he's not cocky, just matter of fact. He sucks down a third of his beer and turns more toward me.

"Two days later, at the same gas station where I met her, this greasy, scary dude comes up on me while I'm putting air in a tire. Asks me if I'm Travis and I say I am. Then he slides up real close and tells me he's gonna catch me when there's no crowd around and make me sorry about diddling his woman and all that sort of thing."

Travis shakes his head now, mainly at himself, and that's definitely something I recognize.

"So I'm dumb enough to laugh at him, tell him something smart-ass like he should please his woman better. I don't know what I was thinking."

Here the story tapers off and Travis just peers down into his bottle. I'm amused by the story and enjoy the distraction and the comparative lightness of the whole drama. But then Travis swallows and his tone changes, gets darker.

"Yeah. Well, I just saw that dude and I'm thinking he saw me. But I can't go back to the house because Pops is there with his lady, you know. Can't hide much longer anyway."

Travis goes back to work on his third bottle. Now the lie of his confidence is like a neon cross hung on a stone church and there is a tremor in his hand while he drinks. And though I'd been enjoying his blues, I'm heated up now by beer and empathy and a strong if false intimacy with this kid. I had the unfortunate habit of getting myself into similar clusterfucks when I was young. And the minimal things he says about his father suggest so much more; maybe it's projection, but I hear my relationship with my dad behind the words: the hard love and drive to be useful, the pride, the competitiveness, the respect and slight resentment. I decide to share some of my own. What harm could it do? The sheaf of postwar psychiatric papers they'd pushed on me told me to try to open up. And who the hell else am I going to open up to? I don't give any preamble because that would just make me shaky.

"My third week in Iraq we had to go on a night raid. We were supposed to be looking for militia and weapons caches and shit like that. I was in the front of the squad with this big Nebraskan farmer. I can't tell you how goddam scared—"

The door to the bar swings open hard and knocks against the juke, which skips a few beats. In that short moment the place is silenced and a man who could only be described as greasy and scary finds Travis's face. Behind the man three other figures lurk, following their buddy's gaze to Travis, dark eagerness in their faces. Then the room goes back to life with twang and talk. The scary dude, a bulldog-looking son of a bitch with heavy jowls and ill-advised, long hair, starts toward us and I feel the crackle of adrenaline, the flint stone inside me, but to my surprise Travis gets up.

"Thanks for the beer, man. It's time for me to go."

His voice shakes one time, but he sucks in a breath and stands tall before spinning toward the enemy. When the dude sees this, he stops and sweeps a hairy arm in front of himself, ushering Travis out with fake formality.

The door bangs closed.

The juke is switching discs and in the lull you can hear one of the locals booming at the bartender; you can hear evil laughter just outside.

Like the night when I fucked up so bad in that Iraqi shack, I find myself preparing. Unlike that night, when I hurtled forward into that bloodbath on order, I decide for myself tonight, and it feels right this time. I throw back the last ounces of the beer, drop a twenty, and head for the exit, the blonde wiggling her fingers goodbye in the corner of my eye. Outside, a vapor light blazes over the door, a swarm of beefy moths flapping around in a panic above my head. I wave them off and stumble in a controlled way out into the street, squinting and blinking and willing my eyes to get used to the dark. When they do, I can see, just off to the side of the barn-like tavern, a fast dance of shadows, and then I hear a thud, the muffled sound of pain. One mean-hearted chuckle. A string of low voices cursing.

I can smell the stirred up dust, see the first stars pinwheeling low over the tree line, hear the dull crooning from the juke through the wall, feel my body steeling as it carries me. But I don't make much noise and the men whirl around on me when I'm only about ten feet away. I throw all my weight in between the bastards and the kid, and I glimpse Travis's wide eye, glinting in the moonbeams. My right hand crashes into the closest jaw, and I grab and twist a sweatshirt with the left. I throw the right elbow into the softness of a throat and hear a broken sound I'd heard once or twice in the war. When I spin around to charge the one man who's still standing tall, metal arcs up from the side of the silhouette and winks in moonlight as it races toward me.


I'M STANDING in a darkened room. At first I think it's just that I can't open my eyes, but then I begin to sense outlines of objects all around me: walls, a door, a window. There are people, too. They're near. Suddenly, like a sunrise on fast forward, the room is flooded with indistinct light. I can't move. A little gust of wind ripples the corner of a torn-up plastic sheet covering the window. With it comes more light and the hot grit of desert sand, which gets between my teeth when I breathe. On the floor are four figures—and I recognize them now, and the room. The nightmare. Two are dressed in the black robes of Muslim women; two are men, in rumpled, faded clothes. Slowly, like puppets coming to life, they rise to their feet. I want badly to shut my eyes, to rip myself from this place. I'm panicked to do so, because I know from repetition what I'll see: one woman's face broken into nonsense by a round in the cheek; the other with a neat stitching of holes across her torso; the men so full of bullets they seem more chopped than shot. Eyes rolled back with the horror of their end.

But that's not what I see this time.

As they come to their full height, the light rises with them. They are unharmed and very slightly smiling. I want to reach out to them, or fall to my knees before them, but I can't. And then they are the ones bending down, stooping forward, collecting something from the floor. And the young woman whose face is not shattered but whole and lovely and young stands before me and I'm so scared I can't breathe but I meet her eyes and she takes my hand and raises my palm, gently but firmly, and slides a fistful of cold, empty shell casings onto it. And I can feel I'm being wrecked inside, that there are things crashing and falling to make room for other things. And I can't sob the way I want to but I feel the tears on my face. They fly back across my temples like I'm facing a fierce wind. And the woman steps aside and the other, older, her mother maybe, steps close to me and I need both hands to hold the chilled metal she delivers.

And I can hear a voice in the distance, it's saying that I'm very fortunate, that I was lucky I was struck in that spot, that a few inches forward my brain would be damaged. And the older woman is turning away and the men are looming near and the tears are streaking back and the voice is getting louder and it's a strange man speaking, all the other damage is just fractures, he’ll heal, and the shells spill over my arms now and the four figures are leaving, one by one, through the splintered door. But the brightness keeps increasing like the sun is swelling in the sky and the tears still fly and now the strange voice is gone and there's nothing but brilliance and someone's weeping, getting nearer. The light is huge and intense but my eyes are closed and I fight to open them and they stick once, twice, and on the third try the seal breaks and the brightness burns them and they overflow, new tears following the tracks of the renegade ones that escaped before them and then, right in the middle of my forehead, three small, warm droplets.

And the sterile scent of the hospital and the sweet musk of my wife's skin mix, untying my bafflement, sweeping me home from that dark shanty at last. Awake. Alive. One, two, three drops more. And then my name, three times: Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, Claira is saying. Her tears are raining down on me and mixing with mine and her hands are on my chest and then the light is swinging away and I'm blinking and looking past the swollen violet borders of eye sockets, at my pale, smiling, trembling wife, at the kid Travis with three half moons of stitches on his face, grinning behind split lips, and it's the most beautiful sunrise I will ever claim.


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