A few more words about my current abode: It ain’t quite the Ritz.

To be more specific, I am staying in the burned-out remains of the Tyler Street Hotel, a formerly low-to-lower-class establishment that, when it was a functioning place of lodging, boasted no celebrity clientele and a complete lack of standard facilities. There is a lobby with the customary broken chandelier, a shaky staircase leading up to rickety hallways, and six bathrooms for every twenty-four so-called “suites,” two of which are currently functional. This would have been considered a “European style” hotel, which means, on top of everything else, that it was dirt cheap. None of the actual Europeans I know would have ever stayed in this place longer than the time it took them to don a respirator and haul their ass back out to the cracked parking lot.

On the ground floor, a long, narrow room with ash-covered walls and crumbling support beams represents what may have once been a coffee shop, but it’s hard to tell in its current charred, decrepit state. There were fourteen floors to the Tyler Street Hotel once upon a time, but they called the thirteenth floor the fourteenth and the fourteenth floor the penthouse, so the fact that I’m living on the sixth floor means little, except that I’m about halfway up the place, with a stellar view of the brickwork on the high-rise next door.

My room is a good 4 meters square, and I’ve got ample space to walk around, squat, do my morning regimen of push-ups, crunches, and lunges, as well as a cozy corner in which to bed down for the night. The walls, formerly orange and beige, have been tarnished with the ash of some long-forgotten blaze, but the original color peeks through in spots now and again, so that the whole wall resembles one side of a monstrous cheetah.

My weapons are stashed in what remains of the hallway closet, haphazardly hidden beneath a rotting tarpaulin I found in the trash heap of a sporting goods store down on Savoie Street. The guns are tucked within a double fold, as if that were enough to buy them any type of added protection, but I make do with what I’ve got.

The same tarp that covers my only means of self-defense also serves as protection against the elements. It is my mattress, my quilt, and my pillow, and sometimes, late at night, I can almost pretend that I’m not sleeping on the hard, cold floor of an abandoned hotel, but instead resting the night away in an uncomfortable but well-kept bed-and-breakfast. My security blanket is the crossbow; some nights, I’ll grasp it between my arms, cradling the wooden stock like a child.

And this typewriter is kept as near to the middle of the room as I can get it. A nearby portion of the floor has rotted away, and I take great pains to keep the typewriter away from that spot, in fear that I will come back to the hotel one day to find it, smashed, three floors down, a gaping rabbit hole leading the way. But it’s close enough to the center that the relative distance from all walls should afford me some type of auditory block from the rest of the world while I jot down these notes.

But here’s the point of all of this: As I’ve said, the Tyler Street Hotel is burned out, abandoned, an empty husk of a building that now serves no purpose other than to shelter me and my sins. The lobby is empty, the rooms unoccupied, the elevator long since crashed to the bottom of the shaft. The Tyler Street Hotel is mine and mine alone.

Or so I thought until this evening.

 

I returned from the Mall via a serpentine route, making sure to drop any and all tails that I may have picked up on my rapid departure from the Credit Union. Odds were slim that I’d been followed—most repo men don’t wait until their client returns to the relative safety of their home to finish the job; an alley will usually do just fine. So the very fact that all of my major organs—artiforgs and regulars—were inside and intact a hundred yards down the road was a good sign.

But it didn’t stop me from traversing the town, dropping in and out of parking garages, hot-wiring cars as a matter of course, slipping through culverts and washouts every time I got even the slightest glimpse of the law. The boys in blue aren’t aligned with the Credit Union, but, like the rest of the public, they get kickbacks when they snitch on an artiforg deadbeat, so it always pays to steer clear.

By the time I got back to Tyler Street, it was nearing midnight and I was too tired to use the entrance I’d become accustomed to. My muscles were limp noodles, too weak to scale the back wall, leap for the fire-escape ladder, and climb in through the third-story window before beginning the rest of the ascent to Room 618. So I did what any careless on-the-run Bio-Repo man would do: I went in through the front.

So, what with the worry between being followed and the lack of security in making a front-door entrance, it’s not too surprising that it took me ten minutes before I noticed that there was a sheet of paper sticking out of my typewriter, a sheet of paper that I had definitely not placed into the machine myself.

As I approached, my mechanical heart getting the signal from the rest of my body to speed up pumping action, I noticed that this was no ordinary sheet of paper, blank and begging to be typed upon. There was a message, not typed in the heavily inked letters of the Underwood, but scrawled in a tight, furious scribble of red ballpoint. I spun around, legs suddenly leaden, the world slipping into a slow-motion crawl, the camera inside my head panning around in a dramatic lurch as my vision settled on the paper and its freshly written sentence.

For ease of use, I will simply include the two-word note, original sheet and all, right here, right now. This is what it said:

SHUT UP.

 

The reality that I have been found out, that I am no longer alone, does not bother me as much as I thought it would; perhaps the concept of companionship, invisible or otherwise, is enough to blunt the dull fear of having been located and asked to silence myself. Odds are it’s not a Bio-Repo man; they rarely leave notes, and when they do, they tend to be short explanations addressed to next of kin. Certainly, I’m not worried enough about it to follow the letter’s rudely phrased advice and silence myself for any length of time. If the clacking of this typewriter is bothering my fellow hotel dweller, then he or she will simply have to find another abandoned building in which to bunk. Even if I were inclined to give up, that two-word order has lit a new fire under my ass, so now I’ll type all through the night, pounding on that keyboard with every stroke until my knuckles lock up and my wrists are shot through with carpal tunnel lightning. I have never taken well to direct instruction.

 

The first night overseas, Harold Hennenson and I climbed off the cargo plane in Italy, leaden duffel bags slung over our shoulders, and made our way through the throng of fellow soldiers to the nearest ground transport. I’d been laboring under the impression that a throng of women would be crowding the tarmac when we landed, bearing flowers and kisses and keys to hotel rooms. But whatever pop-star fantasies I had cultivated dissipated as soon as the plane doors opened to allow a rush of angry male voices to filter into the open cabin. Orders flew by at top speed, and I didn’t know which were directed at me, at Harold, at the rest of the grunts who were running around in circles. By the time I figured out where I was supposed to be, I’d already marched in time with three separate platoons and belted out two rum-tum choruses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The lieutenant in command had ordered me to get the hell out of the airport and not stop running until I found the platoon to which I’d been assigned. But as I sped out of the airport’s double doors, my designated compatriots already having neatly boarded a series of open-bed trucks, a young, raven-haired Italian beauty stepped into my path, forcing me to skitter to a stop. Her breasts were not large, but swelled against her tube top in a way that instantly stopped my feet and made me forget about the United States, its military forces, and any traces of sexual morality.

“Soldier,” she said, carefully forming each syllable with a pair of thick, pouting lips. “You go off to die for me.” And with that, she fell into my body, wrapped her arms into a tight belt about my waist, and treated my tonsils to a long, slow, sensuous tongue bath.

I don’t know if it was because I’d been expecting to see a parade of adoring women at the airport, if I’d been missing Beth, if I wanted to impress the woman with my sense of duty, or if I was just a horny young kid who wanted to get some action, but I leaned into that mouth and that body for all I was worth, working my lips and tongue into a mandibular cha-cha that would have gotten my ass a permanent restraining order from any county-fair kissing booth.

I do know this: The bitch stole my wallet.

 

“Gypsies,” huffed Harold later that night as we unpacked our duffels. “Gotta watch out for ’em. They’ll steal anything that ain’t nailed down.”

“She seemed nice enough,” I said.

“Nicer still with another fifty bucks in her pocket.”

Most of Harold’s possessions seemed to be of the food-supplement variety. He had cans of protein powder, jars of specialized enzymes, and energy bars in six different flavors, each one of which managed to taste exactly like sawdust. As we spoke, he removed these supplements one by one, laying them in precise little rows at the foot of his bunk.

“Marines are gonna serve you food,” I told him. “You don’t have to eat those.”

His answer was typical Harold. “Marine food is good,” he explained. “If all you wanna be is a Marine.”

“And you want to be more?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be a Marine,” he replied. “I want to be the Marine.”

What he would finally be, of course, was nothing more than a splotch of red on an otherwise dun-colored desert. Poor Harold—at the very least, he would have liked his corpse to provide nourishment for a cactus or two, but the tank explosion pretty much took care of all the surrounding foliage.

 

The picture made the papers, though—THREE KILLED IN AFRICAN MANEUVERS, read the caption, and I’m pretty sure the Stars and Stripes photo caught my left sleeve as I was mourning my good buddy’s loss. Snapshot of the charred earth, a wrecked heap of indistinguishable metal center stage. A few soldiers gathered around, staring mutely at the crash, impotent to do anything but look at one another and shrug.

 

But back in Italy, Jake and I were finishing up unpacking our gear, while Harold was downing his first powdered meal of the day. It was getting on past three, and we hadn’t met up with our senior officer yet—he was away in the veldt, we were told, and wouldn’t be back until nightfall.

As a result of our sergeant’s non-appearance, the entire platoon had loosened up a notch from our usual basic-training shell shock. Jokes flew and barbs hit home as we spent a few hours meeting a bunch of other knobs who were just turning loose into the early war effort:

Ron Toomey was nineteen, from Wyoming, and had a sister who looked like she belonged on Mount Rushmore. Wasn’t so much the granite features as it was the facial hair.

Bill Braxton’s father owned a used car dealership back in Albuquerque and had told his son that he’d turn over the keys to the business as soon as he graduated from high school. Then his father said he’d get the job when he finished four years in college. Then it was a graduate degree. Then a Ph.D. And still Bill Braxton’s father clung tight to the reins of his successful dealership. When the suggestion of going to business school came up at a family dinner, Bill calmly stood, left the table, the dining room, the house, drove his father’s prized 1964 Mustang down Main Street, ran it headlong into a telephone pole, stepped confidently out of the smoking wreckage, walked down to the local Marines recruiting office, and signed on up. He was thirty-four, nearly twice as old as the rest of us, and the Marines was his first paying gig.

Ben Rosner was slight of stature, short on words, but his girl had been featured in the December issue of last year’s Hootenanny Hooter Review, and caused quite a controversy when she wore her department-store-issued Santa’s Little Helper cap and absolutely nothing else in a two-page centerfold. The department store in question dismissed the poor girl and promptly threatened to sue Hootenanny, but the ensuing hubbub got her a gig as a full-time model for phone-sex ads. She was the girl you looked at when the sixty-three-year-old hag on the other end of the line was trying to get you off. Ben proudly passed out photos to each of us like a grandfather handing out pictures of the new baby, and we scarfed them up and hid them away for future enjoyment. We knew that once we hit Africa, it would be a long time before we saw any women.

 

Every once in a while I think about Bill Braxton, the Ph.D. Marine—Doctor Jarhead, as we affectionately called him—and something he said one night after lights-out. He had the bunk two down from mine, and over the snores of Elian Ortiz, a Colombian with some serious apnea issues, we discussed the nature of the cosmos and the breast sizes of various female celebrities. Mostly the nature of the cosmos, though.

To be fair, Bill did a lot more talking than I did; he was pretty damned well educated, and though I only understood half of what he said, and retained far less, occasionally he’d blow my mind.

“There’s a scientist,” he told me one night, “back in Germany, or Holland, I can’t remember, and he proposed this experiment with a cat.”

“So, what,” I asked, “he’d give ’em drugs or do autopsies on ’em?”

“No,” Bill explained, “it wasn’t like that. It was a physics experiment, sort of. And he never really did the experiment; he just thought it up.”

“What’s the use of that?” I asked.

“It’s theoretical physics. It’s doesn’t have to have a use.”

I was impressed and disgusted at the same time. “And people get paid for this?”

“Pretty damned well. Anyway, he said to imagine that you took a cat and put it in a box, along with a radioactive device that randomly decayed and released a deadly poison gas. Half the time, the material would decay and release the gas, and the other half it wouldn’t. But the thing is random, and since the box is closed, there is no way for the scientist to know when the poison is released, and when it isn’t. That means there is no way for the scientist to know if the cat, inside that box, is still alive, or if it’s dead.”

“What about the screaming? Wouldn’t it scream?”

“Soundproofed. Thick walls. No way to know. And since there is no way to know if the cat is alive or dead, then until he opens the box, the cat has to be both.”

I said, “Both what?”

“Alive and dead.”

“At the same time?” I asked incredulously.

“Exactly.”

I processed it for a minute, maybe more, trying to wrap my head around the answer. But it didn’t make sense. How can anything be alive and dead at the same time?

“That’s gotta be the most fucked-up thing I ever heard,” I told him.

“Yep,” said Bill Braxton, and then we were silent, for a good five minutes. I couldn’t shake it, though. Something was bothering me.

“What happened to the cat?” I finally asked, breaking the stillness of the bunks.

Bill sighed, and I could see him turning over in his bunk, his back to me. He was done educating those who refused to learn. “There is no cat,” he said. “There never was. Forget it. Go to sleep.”

It was years ago, but some days I still think about Bill. About that story. About the cat and the box. And I wonder, where did I fit into that equation? Sometimes I like to think I was the poison—dealing out justice as I saw fit, handing out death on engraved invitations. Other days, I think I was the box. Holding it all together, keeping the experiment in place.

But most days—these days—I know I’m the cat. Scratching and clawing and screaming to get out, even as I lick my paws, curl up into a ball, and drift off to a nice, comfortable nap.

 

Jake Freivald was with us in that bunk, and he told some stories we hadn’t heard during boot camp. “Back in New York,” he said—which is always how he started his sentences, leading one to believe that he was from Manhattan as opposed to the upstate two-outhouse town where his family owned one of the last remaining private dairy farms in the Northeast—“I took two bullets in the back trying to steal a pumpkin off some old guy’s front stoop. Right ’round Halloween, I ran up, snatched the big ol’ thing, and took off running, and soon there’s screaming and yelling and I’m still running, and I hear this bang, but I’m okay, only there’s this powerful itch running up and down my back, and soon the itch is a sting…Next thing I know, I wake up in a hospital, the cops are all around me, and I’m answering questions for the next ten hours.”

“What’d you do?” asked Harold. “What’d you tell ’em?”

“I lied,” Jake said plainly. “If I said that I’d taken the pumpkin, they woulda given him a slap on the wrist, protecting his property and all that. So I told ’em I was doing trick or treat, house to house for candy, and that he just freaked out on me.” He laughed then, like a child remembering his first trip to a theme park. “Guy got six years.”

 

For the two months I was stationed in Italy, I rarely heard any actual Italian. As far as I could tell, they were just as happy speaking English as we were, and I didn’t give the matter a moment’s thought. Of course, the fact that I never left the warm, comforting bosom of the U.S. military might have helped in that regard.

Even when I managed to get off base, the Marines were there. It was as if we’d already invaded the southern half of the country, knocking off all the spaghetti eaters and installing ourselves in their place. Instead of Guiseppe the chef, we just threw in Tony from the Bronx and called it six of one, half a dozen of the other. Somehow, the military had managed to Americanize the entirety of Italy before I’d gotten there, so whatever cultural lessons I might have learned during my stay were prematurely obliterated by a government eager to make its fighting men feel at home.

I did come across one Italian fellow, though, who had managed to remain native on native soil. There was a convenience store, sort of a smalltown grocer, just a few clicks outside of town, and they were the only place for miles to carry anything other than American cigarettes. On the base, you could feel free to choke yourself on all the Winstons and Camels you could buy at the canteen, but Jake wouldn’t light up anything other than a brand produced in the country in which he was stationed. “If I’m going all the way around the world,” he used to say, “then my lungs are taking the trip with me.”

Harold couldn’t understand why anyone would want to inhale noxious gases into his lungs, but he didn’t understand a lot of what Jake did. Unlike Jake and myself, Harold Hennenson would not have made a good Bio-Repo man—you have to lose respect for your own body long before you can lose respect for everyone else’s.

 

The store wasn’t large—six aisles at most, with nary a slushie machine in sight—but each shelf was packed with sundries, shoved in at any and all angles, fighting for space like rockers in the front row of a concert. A single cash register sat on a rickety desk out in front, complete with push-button NO SALE signs and a drawer that got stuck on its tracks three times out of ten.

The fellow who owned the joint was an ex-Navy boy named Sketch who was at least six-five, no more than a hundred and eighty pounds, and sported three tufts of red hair sprouting out of his otherwise bald head. He looked like one of those birds you see in nature specials, the ones where you call your stoned buddies into the room and laugh for hours at God’s fucked-up sense of humor. Sketch had served four years with the military, most of it stationed in the Mediterranean, and was the only survivor of a submarine accident that had claimed the lives of ninety-eight comrades. Someone had left a torpedo tube open and flooded, a strict no-no when trolling through shallow depths, even during practice maneuvers. Two hours later, when a practice target had come into range, there was no way to know that a porpoise had somehow managed to get itself stuck inside the tube, and no way to know that the active-fire torpedo warhead would explode upon impact, sending bits of dolphin and human alike floating through the open sea.

Sketch doesn’t even drink water anymore.

 

Despite his parental approach to the matter of cigarettes, Harold joined Jake and me on our weekly sojourns to the store, mostly to hear Sketch tell stories of his days with the Navy. The submarine accident wasn’t the tall man’s only brush with death, not by a long shot. He’d nearly been decapitated once when a rigging line had snapped and swung a two-ton mast directly at his noggin, escaping from that only because he had lost his footing on the slippery deck and gone down a second before he was to meet his maker. Back at basic training in Maryland, he’d been shot at by a jealous husband who didn’t understand that his wife needed more loving than his bimonthly drunken lovefests could provide, and three months after that, he was attacked by the knife-wielding new lover of the wife who didn’t want any competition hanging around his conquest.

“You ever see any combat, Sketch?” asked Jake one time.

“You don’t call that combat?”

“No, no,” said Jake, “I mean real combat.”

Sketch just laughed and rung up the pack of cigarettes on the old German register.

 

But about that Italian guy: He used to own the store. It was called Sputini, and Sketch was cool enough to keep the name after he bought the place. He was also cool enough to let the guy hang out on the property, day in and day out, rocking back and forth on an old hammock he’d set up on the front porch. Every time we went into Sputini for some cigarettes, we’d give a curt nod to the little old man swinging on his hammock, eyeing us up and down, like we were his entertainment for the day.

The third or fourth time we went, he finally perked up. “Your head is too big for that hat,” he said as I walked by, his body practically creaking as he rose to a seated position.

“Excuse me?”

He spoke carefully, enunciating every English syllable with remarkable clarity. “Your head…is too big…for that hat.”

Without another thought, I reached up, pulled my standard-issue Marine cap off my head, smoothed out the hair beneath, and threw it in his lap. He inspected it for a moment, his dark fingers running across the olive fabric, then popped the hat open and placed it atop his own head. It fit quite nicely, and without another word, he lay back down in his hammock and went to sleep.

 

I caught hell for losing that cap, but it didn’t matter. From then on, Antonio—that was the Italian guy’s name—was my best pal, and he repeatedly informed me when my uniform was too tight, too loose, or would simply fit him better. I tried to engage him in conversation a few times to get a sense of who he was, of why he would hang around a place that was no longer his and presumably no longer held any meaning for him, but I never got any further than hello before he started in on his fashion criticisms. Sketch told me he’d bought Antonio out for fifty thousand dollars American plus an old analog color television that only pulled in religious programming from the Vatican. Antonio blew the fifty grand in a month on failed jai-alai wagers in northern Spain, then came back to Italy and set up shop outside his old place of business. Now he just swings, watches the Pope on TV, and talks folks out of their clothing.

That’s the kind of retirement a man can envy.

 

The Union has a pension plan, though I have stopped trying to receive my checks. It’s a fair plan, from what I remember, with a number of benefits thrown in that are clearly over and above the usual accountant-and-janitor-type pensions. New skin grafts, for example, should liver spots become a problem, are available at very reasonable rates from the Union supply house, as are most major artiforg implantations. The loan percentages, I hear, are quite competitive, very few reaching into the thirties, almost none into the forties. They probably would have had a nice deal on a heart for me had I gotten myself into cardiac trouble after retiring, but since my ticker fizzled out while I was on the job, the post-retirement medical benefits of my profession hadn’t yet fully kicked in. I understand this is somewhat backward in relation to the rest of the world, but the Union cadre never cared much about social standards.

The Marines were supposed to have a nice pension plan, too, but I signed away any benefits that might have been coming my way when I hooked up with the Union. It seems they only let you play the part of retired killer once.

 

Let me tell you about our sergeant: Tyrell Ignakowski, informally known as Tig, a short, squat, beefy rock of a man who kept his hair cropped, his reach long, and his sense of tact someplace even bloodhounds would have difficulty finding. If you were doing something wrong, Tig would let you know it at six hundred decibels—that instant, that moment, even if your mother, your best girl, and a photographer from Stars and Stripes were standing next to you. Especially if they were standing next to you.

Tig wasn’t afraid to humiliate his soldiers in order to break them into shape. In fact, that was the linchpin of his theory, that the concept of “molding” a soldier was an anachronism and didn’t hold in today’s military. “Maybe back in the day, when we were fightin’ the Krauts,” he told me, “maybe then you could take a soldier and push him gently this way and push him gently that way, press him into the proper mold.” Form him into military Play-Doh, as it were.

“Kids these days,” he continued, “can’t be molded. By the time they hit fifteen, sixteen, they ain’t a piece of clay no more. They’ve set, they’ve hardened, and pushing and pulling don’t help any more than it would on a vase that’s already been through the kiln for ten hours. Whatever they are, they are. Only way to work ’em into a team is to shatter whatever it is they’ve become, mix them hardened fragments all around, then crazy glue the whole mess back together however you see fit. You break ’em into small enough pieces, you can make ’em into damn near anything you want.”

 

This is all you need to know about my relationship with Tig:

One day in the desert, long after training and long before they’d send me home again, I was in a foul mood, tossing rocks out into the open sand. I hadn’t heard from Beth in weeks, and the last few letters I’d sent down to San Diego came back with RETURN TO SENDER stamped on the front. Just like the fucking song, which somehow made it even worse.

So there I was, tossing stones, not trying to hit anything, just skimming the sand, as if I were back in San Diego, standing next to my girl, staring out over the wide Pacific.

Tig approached from behind; I could feel him there. Despite his height disadvantage, he had a definite presence, a way of asserting himself without physicality. Some of the guys called him Sergeant Limburger, because you knew he was coming from a mile off. But it wasn’t a smell; it was a feel.

After watching me for a while, he said, “You’re not trying to hit anything.”

“Nossir,” I replied. “I’m just throwing rocks, sir.”

He gingerly pulled the last stone from my hand and sat me down on the warm ground below. Kneeling into a crouch, his face came close to mine. “Son, throwing rocks at nothing is like humping the air. If you want to masturbate, set up a target. If you really want to get with it, set your sights on the bad men.”

I nodded, not fully appreciating his advice at the time. Yet I understood that he was trying to assist me in something or other. “Thank you, sir,” I said. “Thank you for helping me.”

But Tig shook his head, insistent on this last point: “I’m not helping you a whiff,” he said. “Before you got here, I was nothing to you. Once you leave, I’ll be nothing to you. But while you’re here, you’re my boy, and it’s my duty as your pop to tell you things you can’t possibly understand.” He paused for a moment, and added, “You understand?”

“No?” I tried.

Tig laughed and walked away. A few minutes later, I started throwing rocks again.

 

He was right about all of it. I never saw him after the war, and despite my fond feelings for him in retrospect, it wouldn’t be right to see him now. Tig was a military man in a military place, and that was how he lived; to bring him into any other situation would be like putting a snowman in Tijuana.

 

Second day in Italy, we were marched across the main field, into a low-slung building, and down three flights of stairs, descending the aluminum staircase in lockstep, the contraption vibrating roughly with the combined weight of forty-five men. Once we reached the bottom, they separated us into three seemingly random groups of fifteen, splitting us off single file and marching us down one of three hallways.

“Today,” Tig had told us that morning at breakfast, “you will each be tested to see how you can best assist us in the African campaign. You will be poked, you will be prodded, and you will be assessed. Some of you may even like it. At the end of the day, you will be assigned to a training facility here on the base, and that facility will become your home for the next eight weeks. You may not like your assignment. You may not agree with your assignment. You may not understand your assignment. But just like here in the mess hall, gentlemen, there will be no substitutions.”

 

As an assistant led us down a series of labyrinthine hallways and corridors, each exactly like the one that preceded it, I was thinking that the test would be to find our way back out into the real world; those who made it would get to go home, and those who didn’t would be sent to Africa. But after some time, we came to a pair of metal double doors set back into the wall, and a petite young female doctor awaiting our arrival. Strawberry blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, rimless glasses perched on a jellybean nose, smiling at us as we approached, just on the safe side of beautiful. I considered getting a number, making a play for her after Taps had run its course, but it turned out that once she was done with me, I was in no position to play the springtime courtier.

“We’ll take you one at a time,” she told my group. “The rest will wait out here.”

Numbers were assigned at random. Jake was sixth; I was last. We stood in the hallway, ramrod straight, eager to impress the chick every time she stuck her head out from between the doors and called the next soldier in. I thought of Beth; she hadn’t written in a month.

Meanwhile, muffled bangs filtered their way in through the walls, patterned, well-timed beats growing in intensity, as if a giant had made his way down the beanstalk and was slowly tromping toward town. But after a minute or two, just when it seemed that on the next thump we’d be able to figure out what the heck all the fuss was about, the noises would come to an end, the doctor would call another of us in, and the cycle would start all over again.

It wasn’t until Jake stepped through the double doors and I was left all alone in the hallway that I realized that none of the soldiers who walked inside that room had yet to come back out again.

 

If you look hard enough around the back alleys and hidden crannies of your workaday underworld, you’ll find plenty of places that operate under that Roach Motel principle: Folks go in, but they don’t come out. The Credit Union had one, in fact—the Pink Door, they called it, thanks to the Pepto-Bismol shade that some bright social psychologist had painted it back in the day when they still bothered to lull folks into a false sense of security.

The Pink Door was often used as a means of last resort with deadbeats who were public figures, clients you didn’t want to drag back into the world of solvency by their dangling entrails. So rather than call out the Bio-Repo men and leave a messy Beverly Hills scene for the paparazzi, they’d send an embossed invitation, delivered by courier from the Credit Union offices, a tactfully worded letter that requested the louse’s presence for a so-called arbitration meeting. Soon after, obituaries were released along with letters of credit reinstatement, and everyone went on with their merry lives.

Still, a Bio-Repo man usually was dispatched to accompany the creditor down to the offices, just in case things got messy. One time, I had the good fortune to escort Nicolette Huffington, software heiress and erstwhile actress, into the Los Angeles branch of the Union. Head held high, her gait confident and secure, she strolled past all the common riffraff begging for their lives and straight into the Pink Door waiting room. She was no longer the breathtaking beauty she had been back in her teenage years, and the ravages of time and excess plastic surgery had exacted their revenge upon her sagging flesh, but a Huffington was a Huffington—unpaid-for liver or no—and I couldn’t resist snagging a signature for Melinda, my wife at the time.

“Just a quick autograph,” I asked her, grabbing a pen from my pocket, flipping over the Credit Union invitation to use as a pad.

She huffed a little in that famous way of hers, eyeing me up and down. “Won’t this keep till afterward, darling?” she sighed, tossing her carefully coifed hair to one side.

“No,” I replied as I led her up to the ever-so-pink welcome mat, “I don’t think it will.”

 

Melinda showed that autograph to everyone.

 

The lady doctor asked me if I was seated comfortably, and I replied that under the circumstances, I certainly was. Surrounded by padded cushions, head resting on a thick pillow, body propped up into a frog crouch, legs flexed beneath my hips, elbows flared out to the side, everything strapped to a metal framework that kept me erect and balanced in this improbable position, I felt like I should be riding one of those old American motorcycles they outlawed years ago—knees splayed, back straight, arms spread wide to grip the handlebars—only there was no hog beneath me.

“What do I do?” I asked as she tightened the last of the belts.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Concentrate on the wall.”

“Where’d the other guys go?”

“The wall, please. Look at the wall.”

The doctor returned to her lab, a small cubicle separated from the main testing area by what looked to be six full inches of lead-lined glass. This see-through wall was so thick that the room beyond took on strange, curved proportions at the edges, twisting and bending in on itself, like looking through a teardrop.

“You’re not concentrating,” the doctor told me, her voice crackling over a speaker set into the headrest just behind my left ear. “I’m getting the data in here. Please, Private. The wall.”

So I decided to be a good little soldier and follow orders, but when I took a glance, the far wall wasn’t there anymore. Instead, an endless desert stretched out in front of me, spreading to the horizon in an expansive wash of beige. The rest of the testing area was still extant—I was keenly aware of the doctor in the other room, her eyes roving along my body, across the digital readouts that were giving away all my physical secrets—but it was as if that far wall had been knocked down by a team of expert demolitionists, neatly, quietly.

“There we go,” I heard her say, the voice at the edges of my consciousness. “Just like that.”

A flare in the distance, an explosion just over the horizon. The blue sky above lit up with a splash of orange, and a very distinct ka-boom—crisp, not muffled like the sounds from the hallway—echoed through the room. Intrigued, I leaned against my restraints, trying to get a better look at the desert before me.

Another flash of light, this one closer, and a second explosion following milliseconds later, the sound waves shoving through my body, tickling me from the inside. Before I could pinpoint exactly what was going on, there was another crash, this one to my right, and I was barely able to flick my eyes in that direction before the next wall of bass was upon me, rattling my limbs inside their confines, my bladder going weak from the force.

“Wait,” I tried to yell, but my voice was drowned out by the next wave of bombs—I was sure now this is what they were, that the enemy had somehow infiltrated our base camp, knocked down a portion of the training facility, and were coming back to finish the job. Lights flashed in rapid succession, popping off left and right, the shockwaves coming closer, stronger with every burst, my head compressing and expanding, a balloon in the hands of a child.

And that’s when I saw the final missile, the one headed home and locked on to target. It was beautiful, really, a thin pencil line of light arcing through the sky, the tail of fire growing larger as it sped toward me, and even if I hadn’t been strapped into six hundred pounds of metal framework, I might not have been able to move from the sheer magnitude of it all. Impending destruction, in its own way, has a kind of beauty that only small children and deer can appreciate.

I saw the light, but I did not hear the explosion. Not that time, I didn’t.