The Fearsome Particles (12 page)

I nodded and tried to think of something to say that he’d consider relevant. “How long have you been here?”

“We was prob’ly on the same flight, so, pretty much same as you,” Legg said. “’Cept you get to stay a lot longer.” This I knew; soldiers’ rotations lasted six months, but support personnel were contracted for a year. Before I signed I was warned that a lot of people found it difficult being away from home and family that long; I told them I was looking forward to it.

“After that I had to wait a few years, got shipped around, and they sent me to V-K for Roto twelve.” Legg gave me a glance. “That’s
Vel
ika-Kla
du
sa. No patrols, nothin’, just bureaucracy. Human resources and public relations.” Legg shook his head. “Total fuckin’ waste.”

There was movement around us while he talked, soldiers in
CADPAT
fatigues soaked in sweat and embossed with grit coming back from patrols, others heading off to drills or illegal weapons searches. Some of them would lift a hand to Legg or nod or say something and … it was weird. In chemistry there are certain molecules that like to cluster – in the treatment facility we used a process called “flocculation,” where we’d inject polymers into the water to pull the contaminant molecules together so they could be swept away – and, when I was talking to Legg, I had this sense that these bodies moving around us were trying to catch him and drag him off somewhere, to pull us apart. I couldn’t have explained why I didn’t want that to happen just yet, but I didn’t. Thinking about it, what I’d probably say is
that talking to this soldier, who was so different from anybody I would normally have met or talked to in my life, felt like I’d won some sort of prize or something, like I’d graduated into a whole new level. And I felt this need to counteract the pulling action of all the soldiers walking around us, and the only thing I could think to do was ask questions.

“What do you mean, a waste?”

When Legg grinned, which he did just then, I couldn’t help noticing his right eye. His face was already … I guess vivid is a good word. He was tanned, with curved creases around his mouth that looked whiter than the rest of his skin. He had a snub nose over a dense, dark moustache that looked like it might be hiding a faint hare lip scar (which I figured was not something I could ask about). And now over the left eye the doctor had taped a square patch of gauze, which Legg kept worrying with his blunt fingers. And it had the effect of making the right eye seem unnaturally big and round and alive, because it was doing the work of two.

“Waste of
me
, for fucksake. You got a guy who’s equa-mouse, you should fuckin’ use him properly, put him in the right situations. But these assholes don’t know what they’re doing.” He glanced around, spreading scorn over the uniforms sitting nearby.

That was the first time I’d heard him use that word. “Sorry, what’s that you said? Mouse something?”

Legg’s eye lit up – questions seemed to work for him – and he explained the meaning and origins of equa-mouse. “A situation like up at V-K, you know, no shit happening. Everything all fuckin’ ruled out, planned out. This here, that there. Nothin’ to
worry about. That’s fuckin’ boring for a guy like me. That’s actually dangerous. ’Cause, the thing is, the world moves random, right? It’s the survivors that move with it. You can’t stop the fuckin’ storm from blowing, you know? It’s gonna fuckin’ blow. And if you try and stand still you’re just gonna get hit with shit. So you move with it. You with me so far?” He waited.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Okay. And why do people try to stand still in a fuckin’ storm?”

I shook my head.

“Because they got shit they’re trying to protect, that’s why. They got a house or kids or career plans or whatever so …” For a second Legg seemed to lose his train of thought. “Fuck, I dunno.”

“So they … shouldn’t have those things?” Legg leaned back in his chair, looking depressed. “Something like that.”

I hesitated. “Is it –”

“It’s bullshit, I dunno, it’s bullshit!” Legg waved the bullshit away. “Alls I’m saying is like with me, I don’t want shit all planned out. It’s like” – he stabbed the table with two thick fingers – “that’s like strappin’ me down in the middle of the storm. And I gotta be able to move.”

Legg downed half the drink in his glass and stared off.

“Kinda weird you’re in the D&S platoon then, isn’t it? Protecting people?”

He looked at me with his eye half closed. “That’s just my job, asshole, not my life. Life’s a totally fuckin’ different thing.”
He shook his head as though he was fed up with all the idiots in the world.

“Right,” I said.

“Look.” He leaned forward. “Some people hate surprises, right? But me, I like ’em. ’Cause that’s all the real world is, just one surprise after another. And that makes me good at my job, because if you’re a guy like me, you stay cool when shit’s happening because you don’t give a fuck, you just do what you need to do. Right? But you put me in a situation where surprises are like, what, like artificially removed, and that’s when it’s fuckin’ dangerous. ’Cause then you get lulled.” He held his hand up as if it were floating, and his voice went soft. “And if you’re lulled, you’re not movin’. And the thing is, you can’t keep the surprises out forever, ’cause the storm’s still fuckin’ blowin’. And sure enough … one day … 
bam!”
He brought his hand down as a fist and rattled the cutlery of two captains half a table away.

“Hey!”

Legg leaned away from the table, visibly contrite. “Sorry, sir!” He gave me a clandestine look and let a smirk lift the corner of his mouth. Then he leaned back in. “So you tell me, asshole, why don’t I wear my goggles on patrol?” He waited.

I tried to process everything as fast as I could. “Because then … you’ll think everything’s under control, and you’ll get lulled, and –”

“And then somebody shoots me through the eye or I step on a
PMD
or some fuckin’ thing. You got it.” He nodded like he approved. “And then I’m like all those Pashto assholes out there
walkin’ around on one fuckin’ leg.” He brought a hand up and pressed the edges of the patch.

I took the opportunity to change the subject. “How long do you have to keep that on?”

“Doctor says forty-eight hours. ’Cause I have a ‘corneal
abra
sion.’ ” He rolled his eye.

“Are you gonna keep it on?”

“Nah. Take it off tonight.” He looked around with a juicy leer. “Take it off now ’cept I’d scare all the ladies.” He motioned to the bandage on my palm. “What about you? How long you keeping that thing on?”

“They said a week.”

“A week!” Legg let his eye roam the canvas roof, apparently overcome with disdain.

I thumbed the plastic medical tape at the heel of my hand. “I dunno, maybe a few days.”

Legg pursed his lips and spoke with motherly precision. “You don’t want to get an
infection.”

A group of five or six soldiers came into the kitchen at that moment laughing and pounding desert dust off each other’s backs – the grit got into everything, after half a day you could feel it in your shorts – and Legg shot a hand out to take a glance at his watch. He crossed his arms and the intensity in his eye dimmed a little. It seemed like he wanted to leave, and I couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

“So,” he said, “what’s your story?”

I just shrugged. “I was in school,” I said. “First year chem. Then I heard about this
COF-AP
thing and applied for the water
tech job, ’cause I knew a lot of the stuff already, and I wrote the test for the certificate, and they signed me up.”

Legg seemed to be studying me, gauging his investment of interest. “You quit university?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I, uh, I guess because I knew it’d piss off my parents.” I looked up at Legg. “Because to them it wouldn’t make sense.”

It was subtle, like a ripple over dark water, but Legg’s eye seemed to come alive again. “Huh,” he grunted. “That right, eh?”

W
ater treatment at Camp Laverne was handled through a portable filtration system about the size of an
ISO
container, which they’d helicoptered in and hooked up long before I ever got there. It was a system designed to be able to take water straight from a sewer and turn it into something safe to drink, but in this case it was drawing from an army-drilled well. It took me about half a day to learn my job, which was basically to keep my eye on flow meters and follow a standard routine to put clean water through a gauntlet of purification, just in case. All the steps were detailed in a checklist from the Supervisor of Camp Services:

1. Chemical Mixing, Stage 1 Clarification

To soften the water and kill off the first possible batch of bacteria on its way from the well to the clarification chamber, I had to dump lime and soda ash from fifty-pound sacks into a chemical mixing box that fed into the water.

2. Flocculation

Once the water passed into the clarification chamber, my job was to pour in a positively charged liquid polymer that dispersed and grabbed whatever negatively charged impure molecules were there and dragged them to the bottom.

3. First Filtering

From the clarification chamber the water passed through a media filter of silica sand to clean out the flocs. Every night I had to backwash all that gunk out of the filter bed.

4. Final Polishing

Here the water got fed through a wound fibre cartridge to strain out “bad organics” that might affect the water’s smell and taste. I had to replace that filter about once a month.

5. Chlorination

Once the water was made super clean, by dumping all this stuff in and taking it all out, a metering pump fed in chlorine at a rate high enough to prevent bacteria from getting any more ideas but low enough to keep officers’ eyes from stinging. Every morning, at the beginning of the shift, I had to prepare the chlorine solution, which meant pulling on rubber gloves and dumping enough caustic calcium hypochlorite tablets into a fifty-gallon tank to get to 200 ppm.

During the shift I did tests for turbidity and pH at regular intervals and made a few measurements of the five-thousand-gallon holding tank to determine rate of water usage. Other than that, and the odd time I had to help bottle hundreds of litres of water for the presence patrols and the occasional American or European unit passing through Camp Laverne, there wasn’t much to do. Which was fine with me because in those first few
weeks it felt too hot to do much of anything. At night, when it got a bit cooler, a few of the
COF-AP
guys from my tent who worked in vehicle maintenance liked to play ball hockey on a big concrete pad with spare kitchen tables tipped over for boards. But sports never were my thing. Sometimes I listened to
CD
s and read paperbacks that I pulled from the bookshelf in the junior ranks mess. But for the first while that I was there, what I mostly did was think about the contrasts between life back home and life in the camp, because in nearly every way, life in the camp was better.

It’s true that the heat and the dust could get on your nerves – a lot of people stored their clothes in these big tin chests spattered with plastic jewels, which you could buy for six dollars at the weekly markets that set up next to camp, but even then the grit got inside. And it’s true that living on a military base meant you had no privacy at all – every environment was shared and even your bathroom moments were communal experiences. And except for visits to those markets near the gates,
COF-AP
civilians like me were never allowed to leave the camp. You had to stay “behind the wire,” which meant being stuck in the same beige world day after day with two hundred people you didn’t know, most of whom had such different expectations from life that they thought living for six months or a year next to temporary bomb shelters was just a natural career progression.

But even factoring all those things in, I liked it better there. Because it was cleaner, somehow, despite the dust. Because it was free of all the tensions and issues I took for granted at home. Things like the way Mom and Dad edged around each other all the time as if there was something they wanted to say but
couldn’t quite bring themselves to say it. Things like the worried way they smiled, as if whatever happiness they felt was loaner happiness that was already piling up late fees. Things like – this was a big one – nervous expectation. I mean, you can take that in small doses. But at my house on Breere Crescent, the walls practically ran with it.

Here’s one example: yogurt. Mom, whenever she was working on a house, always woke up really early. And every morning, before she left, she’d set out breakfast items for me to eat – a fruit, a grain, and always a dairy in the fridge, which was usually yogurt. Then she’d call up the stairs, “Darling, there’s yogurt in the fridge.” And if I didn’t answer right away, because maybe I was half asleep, she’d call again – “Darling? … Kyle? … Yogurt.” And then … “Creamy Peach” … which I’d once said I liked. I’d wake up hearing her voice reaching up with its searching fingers, until I’d have to say something – “I heard you, Mom! Fine!” – because if I didn’t say anything, she couldn’t leave. And later, when I was sitting in the breakfast nook across from Dad, I’d eat the fruit and the cereal, and Dad would wait seven or eight minutes, sometimes nine, while he listened to the news and the traffic reports, and then, always, every time, he’d remind me.

“Don’t forget about the yogurt in the fridge.”

It’s like there was this unspoken fear in the house, this huge, worrisome possibility that the yogurt Mom left for me might go … un-eaten. Not because I was deliberately defying them – that was never suggested – but because of, you know, crossed signals, static in the transmission, an accident of fate. Somehow, nobody’s fault,
the yogurt would remain
. And if that happened
then, holy shit, Mom’s attempt to feed me a complete breakfast would be ruined, and her love for me would go unexpressed, and Dad would have failed in his duty to help his wife fulfil her most fervent hopes! And I knew that, if both Mom and Dad left the house before I did, which happened a lot when my classes began late, then for the whole day they’d be wondering …