The Fearsome Particles (11 page)

Her responsibility, Vicki told herself, was to offer clients a vision of the life they wanted for their children. For wasn’t this life, or the hope for it, one of the reasons they were house shopping at all?

Some of these thoughts came back to Vicki now in the Lightenham house, because although there was no doubt she knew what a happy boy’s life was supposed to look like, just at the moment, the ideas weren’t coming to her. That was strange. When her mind drifted to Kyle she saw the possible cause; it was because he’d just come home from abroad, a man of travels now, no longer the handy boyish reference he’d been. She would have to work harder. She would have to cast her mind back. Still, Vicki stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by the mahogany sleigh bed with scrolling at the head- and footboards, the matching dressing table with swinging mirror, the revolving Edwardian bookcase and the charming mahogany
bonheur du jour
with its hinged front and padded writing surface. She saw these things, chosen by her and delivered only this morning, and felt troubled by them. The problem was she could not see the boy who belonged here, did not even know his name, and without a child to represent, these things were just furnishings. That was not the service she offered.

As she paced around the room, touching the corners of antiques that provided no clues, a slight burning sensation made Vicki look down to where she had tucked her hand between the buttons of her blouse. She undid two of these buttons and found she had been rubbing the spot under her ribs so hard the skin was beginning to turn raw.

The sunlight drew her to the
oeil-de-boeuf
, and when she got close, she could see a faint layer of drywall dust clinging to the glass. Vicki placed her lips near to puff it away, but she had no breath to do it.

T
he cat was obviously equa-mouse. Which won’t make any sense, but I can explain. I’d been sticking to my room for about a week, mostly sitting in front of my computer, locked into this site I’d found, just watching the screen, listening to the blips, clicking when I was supposed to click. (After a few hours it kind of felt like floating, which was perfect.) When I wasn’t looking at the screen I was watching this cat my parents got while I was away. Which was a weird thing in itself because my dad hates everything about cats (“sociopaths of the pet world” he calls them). But after watching it for a few days, it seemed to me this cat had the exact quality Legg used to call “equa-mouse.” It was his version of “equanimous,” which was a word he’d found in one of the reports they handed out to the guys in the D&S platoon (Defence and Security) on the state of relations between soldiers and the warlords that were carving up Balakhet, where the camp was located.
(“After a period of hostility, exacerbated by the actions of Mullah Takhar Dashti, now under
ISAF
custody, the temper of interactions between
CF
personnel and the local Afghan community appears, for the moment, to be equanimous.”)

Legg made quick decisions on which things to take seriously and which to make fun of, and to him using “equanimous” in that report was mockable for two factors: (1) its total ignorance of the antagonism the D&S guys felt from some of the Afghan locals during the presence patrols they conducted around Balakhet; and (2) its “ass-licking-lieutenant-typed fuck-headedness” (classic Legg). But he liked the sound of “equamouse,” I guess, and to him it came to identify a quality he valued pretty highly, which was the quality of not giving a shit. As far as the future went, he told me, as far as having a career, having a family, worrying about anyone else or even about his own personal safety, he was equa-mouse. I didn’t know what to make of it the first time I heard it, but I came to understand. I got the whole better-off-not-caring lesson.

The cat made me think of all this because the cat really seemed to be guided by the same principles. Food didn’t interest it, or people; its behaviour seemed totally disconnected and arbitrary. One day it might jump from the top of the refrigerator onto Dad’s neck, and the next day, not. It didn’t seem to have any needs or aims, not even enough ambition to become a regular menace. And the more I watched it, the more I figured out it was this carelessness that gave it a kind of power in the house. And so I just figured Legg would’ve liked the cat, and would’ve thought it was okay that I used his word.

Legg’s full name and title was Corporal Marc Sebastien Leggado, rifleman, which he never allowed anyone to use. I met him just a few weeks after I’d arrived at Camp Laverne.

I knew zip about the military before I signed up for the
COF-AP
program, but it turns out that in a few sensitive areas around the world they keep sustainment bases that hardly anyone knows about. When people talk about the Canadians in Afghanistan, they think of Camp Nathan Smith or Kandahar Airport, or before that Camp Julien. Nobody ever mentions Camp Laverne because they don’t know it exists. But it’s there, unofficially I guess, sitting on the outskirts of a place called Balakhet, a really messed-up old city in the central Wardak province. Legg said we were there “killing two birds” – the camp was about an hour away from Kabul, so it was close enough to get troops and supplies there fast if they needed to; and Wardak was also the site of the Taliban’s last stand in 2001 and now, he said, “the shit was bubbling again.” Rival militias were fighting each other and the jihadists were getting noisy. He figured the coalition wanted to beef up its presence before Balakhet went all Kandahar on them.

From what I understand about military camps, Camp Laverne is a sort of small-scale, necessities-only version, dug into the desert. It’s ringed by tall, thick bastion walls, which are like stiff, ten-foot-high bags filled with sand and topped with razor wire, and it features all the usual flat-painted G-Wagons and
LAVS
(light armoured vehicles) that are either being driven or repaired. Most of the buildings are canvas Quonset huts called weather havens – big ones for common areas like the kitchen and the messes, smaller ones for the sleeping quarters
for officers and soldiers. (Civilian support staff like me generally slept in smaller tents that weren’t as insulated from the heat.) There’s also a bunch of
ISO
units, which look like those long steel boxes that get loaded into ships, but they can be stacked or lined up and turned into offices or washrooms or storage units or, in my case, the portable water treatment facility I worked in.

I spent the first few weeks in camp pretty much the way I’d spent most of my life up to that point: keeping to myself, eating whenever they let me, focusing on the work I had to do, and just watching other people go about their lives. I’ve never been too good at making friends; it’s like there’s a trick to it I couldn’t figure out. Part of it, I think, is people consider my sense of humour a bit off, somehow. Obscure. I tend to say things that make them go “Huh?” And I guess “huh?” is hard to get past. The more trouble I had making friends the less work I put into it. By about grade six I decided it wasn’t important.

Before I even met Legg, I heard him. There was this faint, high whine coming through the dead afternoon air as I walked through the compound, across silt the colour of milky tea. I was headed for the ambulance, the closest Camp Laverne ever got to a proper medical facility while I was there, parked under a big tarpaulin to try and keep it out of the August heat. (That heat – the first time it hit me, when I stepped off the plane, it made me think of grade four recess when a big kid named Gary Millson used to sit on my stomach until I almost passed out so he could watch my eyes roll back in my head.)

I was going to the ambulance to get my hand treated for burns. Somebody had set a bunch of metal filter canisters down by the door at the treatment facility, right in the way. And when
I came on duty, after they’d been sitting in direct Afghan sunlight for a few hours, I tried to pick one up, which it turns out is something only a fairly new arrival would do.

The whine was coming from the ambulance, and I knocked on the door and waited in the shade of the tarp so I could breathe. Finally a short female medic in white shirt and pants opened the door for me and I squeezed inside.

They had a generator running a small air conditioner, so it was instantly cooler in there. Once my pupils adjusted to the blueish light I saw there were three other people besides me: the medic, a doctor, and a soldier who was lying on a pad, gripping its edges and making a sound like the steam whistle of a kettle.

In the middle of pressing and prodding around the bubbled skin on my hand, the medic glanced up and saw me staring at the soldier. The doctor was bent over his face, so I couldn’t see what was going on, but the guy was obviously in a lot of pain. “Sand devil,” she said. “A little whirlwind, whipped sand into his eyes. Happens all the time here.” She leaned toward the soldier. “Which is why soldiers on patrol are supposed to wear their
goggles.”

The soldier stopped whining and ground out a few words through a clenched jaw, which sounded like “Hate those fucking goggles.” The doctor shifted and for a second I could see through a space under his arm. He seemed to be prodding the solider’s left eyeball with a Q-tip, which made the soldier stamp his foot on the platform.

“Don’t!” said the doctor.

The medic seemed mildly amused. “Just try to breathe evenly, corporal.”

“Can’t stand shit in my eye!”

I mentioned my sense of humour? As much as it seems to put people off, it’s probably the only thing I like about myself. Generally, when it comes to my positive qualities, I prefer to reject someone else’s list rather than come up with my own. At home I’d be heading through the foyer on my way out the door and my mother would introduce me to some client I’d never met as “our lovely, intelligent boy” with “a real passion for the sciences.” She’d push the hair off my forehead with her soft fingers and say, “We think there’s medicine in Kyle’s future.” And through all this I’d have to chew on my tongue, literally crush my flesh between my molars until I tasted blood, to keep from screaming at my mother how fucking wrong she was, and how she sounded like she was writing a newspaper ad about some completely different person. She’d smile this proud little smile and I’d have to force my way past her and get out before I started yelling at her, “Who are you talking about? What’s his name? Where does he live?”

But I do notice ironies, and absurd juxtapositions, like the professor with dandruff who talks about “precipitating insolubles,” or the politician who stands behind bulletproof glass to tell viewers not to let the suicide bombers win. And I think it’s good that I notice them, because somebody should. And since they always hit me as funny, I usually can’t stop myself from saying something about them.

So when the soldier on the pad talked about “shit in my eye,” I immediately said, “I think you mean ‘mica
shists.’ ”
The medic was spreading ointment around my palm and I was kind of hypnotized by that and not really thinking about what should
or shouldn’t be coming out of my mouth. “But that’s an easy mistake,” I said. Then I laughed.

“Who’s that?” breathed the soldier on the table.

I jerked up straight. “Um.” Usually, after I say something that confuses people, I feel a wave as though I might throw up, and I was feeling that now – “I’m the water tech. Kyle Woodlore. I run the water treatment –”

“Fuck you, asshole.”

The medic
tsked
and shook her head. “ ‘Fuck me, fuck you.’ ” She winked at me. “How’d all this hostility squeeze in here?”

The doctor straightened and tossed his Q-tip into a can, and I could see the white of the soldier’s left eye was meat red, which made me feel worse. “All right,” said the doctor, “I think we can try irrigating again.” He held a hand out behind him. “Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sorry.” The medic held my bandage in place with one hand, twisted around, and passed a banana-sized syringe to the doctor with the other. He bent over the soldier again and soon I could hear a trickle of water hitting the metal floor. After a second I realized, hey, that’s my water; I made that. Normally I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but I guess at that point, in terms of my self-image, I was in take-anything-I-could-get mode. So the idea went through my mind that maybe this was something good I’d done … maybe the only thing. Which made me feel good and bad at the same time. Which is sort of typical.

T
he canvas that covered the kitchen tent was the same aridregion beige that covered just about everything else in the camp
- what my mother might have called “a drought motif.” Inside it featured a steam table for hot food, a bread table, a couple of fountain dispensers with orange and purple pseudo-juice, a place where you could get coffee and hot water for tea (which I didn’t see too many people drinking), a salad and fruit bar that was always stocked up, and enough long tables and chairs for ninety diners at a time to eat and not think about all the things they’d been told in the orientation briefings about the
IEDS
(improvised explosive devices) the jihadists were busy making and the disease-bearing sandflies everywhere and the Russian
PMN
mines, Bouncing Bettys, and “green parrots” that were sitting out there just beyond the walls.

I was in there taking my lunch hour early, and I saw Legg getting a glass of Tang. And maybe because it seemed weird, after we’d been in an ambulance together, to sit on opposite sides of the room, we ended up grabbing two chairs at the same table near the entrance. He told me his full name and said there’d be “negatory consequences” if he ever heard me use it.

“I was in B-H for Roto five,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck hard as if scraping away dried sweat or boredom. He brought his hand up and through the cropped hair of his head and every movement he made seemed to carry a vehemence.

“B-H?” I still wasn’t used to the whole military acronym thing.

“
Bos
nia-Herze
go
vina,” he said, mocking me. “Stationed up at Camp Casa Berardi in Drvar, this old bread factory they cleaned out. ‘Castle Greyskull’ we called it. Looked fuckin’ spooky in the fog. And they was all’ays moving us out into weather havens ’cause of the bedbugs.” Legg brought his drink
halfway to his mouth. “Roto five, that was pretty fuckin’ hot.” He took a noisy swig and gave a long gargley sigh of satisfaction. “Not as hot as this though.”