BRIAN
At the time the CSH-Baghdad was the only hospital that could handle level 1 trauma. Seventy-seven beds, three operating rooms, six general surgeons, three orthopedists, two neurosurgeons, two emergency medicine physicians, a vascular surgeon, a radiologist, a psychologist, a neurologist. A cluster of anesthesiologists and nurses. They worked on everyone—from U.S./coalition soldiers to Iraqi soldiers, civilians, and detainees—and they worked on everything—from toothaches to mass casualty events that ripped a body in half or tapped a hole in a skull, as it was with Brian.
Even once he got used to the shock of having a hole in his head, it remained a strange feeling, compounded by the strangeness of his surroundings, a white bed in a white room full of white beds on which lay soldiers blanketed in white bandages. At first, after waking from the red haze of surgery, he wanted to scream, to shut his eyes and refuse to accept his circumstances. That lasted for a few minutes, after which time he was still there and the whiteness and the blood soaking through the whiteness and the pain throbbing in his skull had not disappeared and in the end he just accepted it all because he was lying there and the doctors and the nurses were speaking to him—“Can you tell me what year it is? Can you tell me who the president is? Can you spell the word dog?”—and what else could he do except believe this was almost reality?
He was there for two weeks. During this time many men moved in and out of the beds surrounding him, but he remembered one in particular, a Private Mars from Louisiana who had lost his hand when the troop carrier he was riding atop as a gunner slid off a ravine and flipped on top of him.
They lay there, talking, while clear fluids dripped into them and dark fluids dripped out. They talked a lot—constantly, it felt like—because talking felt safe. Safer than being alone with your thoughts. They talked about how thirsty they were and when the nurse would come around again with Cokes and waters. They talked about their fathers, who had both served in Vietnam and who had opposed them enlisting. They talked about why Jif was the superior brand of peanut butter. They talked about college basketball. They talked about how hot Angelina Jolie was and how with lips like that she must give the most incredible blow jobs in the whole world. They only thing they didn’t talk about was their injuries.
Until one day when Mars told Brian a story about his grandfather, a WWII vet who had no legs. He was in the Philippines, on the island of Mindoro, when a land mine detonated beneath him. He was left with little below his knees, flaps of skin, chunks of muscle, broken bits of bone. His platoon had lost its medic in a firefight, so they did the best they could. Three men held him down while another sliced through his knees with a knife. Over a fire they heated a machete until it glowed orange. They used it to cauterize the arteries and then applied ointment and a protective plaster from a first-aid kit. They radioed in his coordinates and left him on a nearby beach and a copter picked him up a day later, feverish and with lines of infection creeping up his thighs.
“When I think of that story, I think I’m lucky.” When Mars spoke he gestured with his stump and Brian could almost imagine a ghostly set of fingers waving to the room all around them, a room oozing with blood and moans. “We’re lucky.”
Maybe for the first time Brian feels this way—he feels lucky—as he hurries through the night. Lucky enough to seek Karen out once more. Lucky enough to ignore the hunters who still wander the forest, looking for him. Though the shadows are thick, he still moves carefully, like a soldier in enemy territory, darting from tree to tree, huddling next to a bush now and then to listen to a faraway gunshot. He wears his hair suit and it makes him feel invisible, powerful.
The memory of her touch lingers—so vivid that her hand might as well hold his, pulling him through the woods, toward her. He does not repel her. This is what he keeps coming back to, to the way his injury brought her closer to him and creased her face with sympathy, warmth. It is as though he has discovered some principle of magnets—he does not repel her, he attracts her—and he rushes now to a point of assembly.
By the time he arrives, it is past midnight and her house is as dark as the forest, the windows offering no lamplight or the trembling, watery glow thrown by a television. He pauses where the trees run up to the lawn, listening for traffic along the road. Hearing nothing, he races across the grass to the garage and peers through the window of the side door, making certain that the husband isn’t home. In the gloom he spots only one car and then he heads up the steps and into the house, sliding the key in and out of the lock and pushing his way through the door.
Brian stands for a moment in the entryway. Here is the familiar sight of the shoes lined up by the door, the coats hanging from hooks. Here is the familiar smell of pasta and leather and paper. He knows this place. It is beginning to feel like home.
He takes a step forward, into that transitional space, with the hallway extending before him and archways opening to either side of him into the living room and dinette. Out of the corner of his eye he spots the clock on the VCR blinking—red, red, red, like an alarm—never reset after the storm blew through the other day and briefly knocked out the power.
He moves with such slowness—slowly pulling his feet forward, slowly depressing his weight, making sure he doesn’t thud his boot against an end table or scare a creak out of the floorboards—when touring the house. He sits down on the couch. He gently touches the needles of a cactus. He stands below a mounted deer and stares into its wide and glassy eyes and reaches up to tap one of them before running his hand along its neck, the fur dry and rough. He peers into the cold cave of the fridge. He runs his hands along the countertops. He picks up a lipstick-stained glass next to the sink. It has a rose in it that he sets aside before bringing the glass to his mouth, tasting it. He pisses in the toilet, sitting down so as not to make a sound. He smells the toothpaste. The boy’s room he peers into but does not enter. In the office he shuffles through a pile of papers, holding them up to the moonlight coming through the window, and then stands curiously at the wooden crib before moving to the master bedroom.
He remembers one occasion when his father repeatedly tried and failed to trap a beaver and finally in a rage kicked his way into their dam and clubbed the animals with a baseball bat while they hissed from their dank den. Now, at her doorway, surrounded by the dark, feeling at once weirdly strong and vulnerable, he imagines himself at once the club and the beaver.
A purple bra hangs from the doorknob. He rubs it between his fingers. He can see her shape beneath the blankets. He can hear the slow rhythm of her breathing. He takes a step into the room and notices a clock seeming to blink from the nightstand—but when he turns toward it, the light scuttles away from him, and then away from him farther when he tries to chase it, always at the corner of his eye, a red flashing.
“Oh no,” he says to the room. He brings his hand to his forehead and massages the crater there. The flashing deepens in its color. And now he can feel the first of many painful wires twisting down his cheek, his throat, his arm. The headache has snuck up on him. He didn’t notice it, tangled up as he was in the forest and then his thoughts—and now it is here, stretching itself, impatient to grow.
As quietly as he can manage, he retreats to the hallway and finds his legs suddenly heavy. He thuds against the wall and grips the doorway to hold himself up. He staggers down the hallway and tries to remember the way but his headache won’t allow it. There is only a pulsing red star, eating up everything with its light. He stumbles back into a room, the boy’s room. The ceiling glows with paste-on planets and stars, the constellations wheeling in his sight. He wants only to jump into the bed, to pull the covers over his head, but even now he knows better. He goes to utter darkness. He goes to the closet and drags the door shut behind him.
He grimaces and imagines an ugly black lacework working its way along his neck and arms, the tracery of his veins, as his surprise subsides and the throbbing hurt moves fully through him like an electrical current. Only one of his arms seems to work and he uses it to lift himself into a seated position, his back against the closet wall. Then he closes his eyes and lets the pain take him over.