To Be a Friend Is Fatal (14 page)

At about one o'clock in the morning, the helos arrived, and I jammed in some earplugs as I sprinted over to the marine waving a green glow stick. The next morning, Christmas Day, I finagled a ride from Camp Victory to the civilian terminal. The USAID charter flight was canceled due to a dust storm, but Iraqi Airways was still flying, so I pulled out a few hundred dollars and bought one of the last remaining tickets to Amman.

I sat in the terminal next to Iraqis biding their time before flights, and realized that after a year in Iraq, it was the first time I had been without body armor or mercenaries or marines nearby. The coil of stress that had been tightening with each convoy run, each missed mortar, tensed just a little. Suddenly my chest cavity seemed naked.

The dividing lines between us and them, white and brown, exposed and hidden guns, air-conditioning and sweltering heat, clean and dirty water, our knowledge that we'd be here only for a while longer but that they were stuck, began to vibrate and jostle in my mind. I didn't drink water from the fountain because I knew how badly we had failed to provide clean water. I couldn't find any relief in air-conditioning because the airport power was strong enough only to run a rickety oscillating fan that surely must have been pushing air around since the sixties.

I looked around at toddlers and smiled at them but encountered little warmth from my fellow travelers. My head hurt, so I shut my eyes for a moment, before thinking better of it. I opened them again and thought,
Just wait a little longer, and you can relax in the Dominican Republic
.

S
weetie, you've lost so much weight!” My mom cried as she hugged me, and everyone gathered close with shocked airport eyes. After over two days of travel—from Camp Fallujah to Camp Victory by the Baghdad Airport; to Amman; to Madrid; to San Juan, Puerto Rico; to Puerto Plata on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic—I was exhausted, but I stayed up late into the first night, talking with my brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles who were filtering in for the reunion. When I finally made it to bed, I stared at the ceiling fan and waited for sleep.

At three in the morning, I got out of bed and walked past the window of my hotel room. Outside, across a small, rocky field of dirt, loomed a dust-colored apartment complex. It was unfinished, with dark openings where the windows should be. My eyes darted down at my body. No armor. “Shit!” I yelled, and dropped quickly to my knees. I peered out the window from just above the sill and wondered how I could be so stupid as to walk past a window without my gear when the sniper of Fallujah was still at large.

I then realized where I was—in the Caribbean—and a shroud of embarrassment dropped over me in the quiet of the room. Had my cry woken up my family? I never swore around them. Nobody seemed to be moving around in the other rooms.

I crawled warily back into bed, and embarrassment gave way to confusion. “What the hell was that?” I muttered to myself, as a great dissonance
clanged through my mind. I didn't remember getting out of bed. I had never before been mistaken as to what country I was in.

I woke up a few hours later. Nobody was awake, so I threw on some sneakers and set out for a jog along the beach. I was alone and ran for miles along the coastline. I tried to ignore it, but what had happened the previous night was too strange to repress, and I ran faster and faster until my energy was spent. The shifting sand made my calves ache.

After breakfast, we all went down to the water. I held my baby nephew and ate Goldfish with my niece. Dad emerged from the resort with a football, and my brothers and I raced down to the surf to toss it around with him. I lunged for an overthrown pass, and as I caught it, I felt the ring on my right hand slide off into the ocean.

“
No!
” I yelled.

It had been my grandfather's wedding ring, an heirloom of nearly a hundred years, now lost in the ocean. My brothers waded over, and we peered into the water but could see nothing. The grief was mounting when the undertow lodged something in between my toes. My eyes bulged as I carefully reached down and retrieved the ring. My dad shot me a look of relief, and we stopped throwing around the football. A bright red helicopter heavy with tourists droned overhead. That night, all the branches of the family gathered for lobster.

Before I got into bed, I folded my jeans and placed my watch on the nightstand. Its date read 12 29 05.

Just after four thirty in the morning, Primitivo, a bald and spindly Haitian working the night shift, started his rounds. When he walked past my window, I yelled something and startled him. He didn't understand what I said, but he looked up and found me perched on the ledge of the window. He pointed a flashlight up at me and shouted, “
¡Peligroso!
” I shouted back in a language he didn't know. He began to run around to the front of the building to ring the bell and wake my family, and heard the sound of my fall. I don't know what it sounded like, my body falling to the concrete; I was still asleep.

He ran back and found me kneeling in a pool of my blood. He tried to help me up, but I swung at him and wouldn't let him near. I stumbled to the back door of the condo, but there were iron gates over it and I couldn't get inside. I raised my hand to the window and began tapping my grandfather's ring against it.

A light came on, and the curtain on the other side of the window rose. My dad stared into my face, splayed and pulping blood, and thought I had just been shot.
My son!
He saw Primitivo behind me and roared a primal paternal warning to “get back; get away from my son!” Primitivo spoke no English, but he retreated. My dad raced around the house, which was now waking up from the sound of the commotion. He gathered me, throwing an arm under my shoulders to help me into the kitchen of the condo. Still I was asleep.

My memory began fifteen minutes after I fell headfirst seventeen feet from my window to concrete. Faintly, I began to make out the contours of the room around me, which got brighter and brighter as my eyes adjusted. My dad, my brother Derek, and his wife, Carolyn, were in a panicked half circle around me. Their words sounded like they were underwater. I looked down. I was sitting in a chair and wearing only my boxers, which had been gray the previous night but were now red. As I stared down at them in confusion, I saw a stream of something spigoting from my forehead and splashing in a crimson puddle on my lap.

“What happened?! Kirk, what happened?! Can you hear me? Kirk!” I didn't know.

“I don't know. What happened—” A pain, indescribably fierce, exploded in my mouth as I tried to answer. I shot them a scared look and tumbled into a well of agony. A ravine of flesh ran between my eyebrows. Blood flowed bitter from the nostrils of my broken nose past the shredded remnants of my upper lip and onto my front teeth, which were dislodged from my broken jaw. My chin flapped below it all.

Carolyn sprinted to the telephone and made frantic phone calls in search of directions to the nearest hospital, which was over an hour away. Dad ran to get the keys to my uncle's pickup truck, and Derek,
who had once taken a course in emergency medical technician training, stayed with me. Primitivo stood off to the side and spoke with Derek and Carolyn in Spanish. “
¡Se cayó!
” he kept repeating. “He fell!”

I was eased into the shotgun seat of the truck. My brother gave me a towel and told me to press it against my face to keep pressure on the tears. We tore westward from the small resort town of Caberete, in search of the Centro Medico Bournigal in Puerto Plata.

“My teeth are gone,” I groaned.

“No, they're not,” Derek said firmly. “Keep pushing on that towel.”

“Yes they are.” My tongue probed the area but retreated after a fresh peal of pain.

It was dark still, and there was little moonlight. The headlights were weak, and I stared through the windshield at the curving road. We came up to a steel bridge painted forest green, identical in construction and color to the green iron Blackwater bridge, where the burned corpses of the mercenaries had been strung up. Fallujah General Hospital was on the other side of that bridge, so I turned in horrified confusion. Everyone was still there. My eyes stung from the blood if I kept them open for too long.

“Awww, Kirk! Buddy, your wrists!” Derek cried out. “Look at them!”

Both wrists were broken. The pain ravaging my face was so overpowering that I hadn't even felt them, and it explained the difficulty I was having with tugging the towel against my face. My hands twisted out in odd, acute angles.

The truck accelerated. After an hour, we were in Puerto Plata, but lost. They had brought Primitivo along to help with directions, but he had never left Caberete and was useless. My brother sprinted over to a firehouse, where some firefighters were dozing, and asked for directions. One of them hopped on a small scooter and led us the final few blocks to the hospital.

It took about an hour and a half before my face was stitched back together. They wheeled me over to a room with an X-ray machine, which was the most high-tech equipment in the hospital, hoisted me onto the table, and left to deal with another emergency. Derek came in
and sat next to me while we waited. I looked up and caught a reflection of my face in the polished glass of the machine overhead and barely recognized myself. I let out a self-pitying whimper. My brother, realizing that I could see myself, moved the X-ray away to spare me my reflection.

“Did someone do this to me?” I asked.

“We don't know yet. You still don't remember anything?”

“No. Just going to bed; I remember that fine.”

“I mean . . .” He spoke slowly. “It looks like you got hit with a crowbar.”

Even though Primitivo had told them his version of events, my family was doubtful. If I had been attacked by someone, it would make sense. My wrists could have been broken in a defensive posture.

“Yeah, maybe! See if you guys can find anything around where all the blood is.”

The medical team came in, slid the X-ray plate back into place over my head, and vacated the room while the scans were taken.

A few moments later, a surgeon came in. Derek and Carolyn translated as he explained what was about to happen to me. First, they would put me under. Then they would run a series of small wires around each tooth and bind them to a bracket to wire the jaw. Then they would stitch my lip back together. Then they would break the nose back into place. Then they would set my wrists and put them in casts.

“Okay?” the doctor asked. All I cared about was the first step, relieved that I'd be able to sleep through it all.

“Yep,” I mumbled. As they wheeled me off, I looked over at my family and said, “Find the weapon.”

My mom and oldest brother, Soren, slept through it all. We were supposed to golf that morning, and when Soren came downstairs in his golf shirt and shorts and found us gone, he thought we'd left without him. My dad eventually called over and explained what he knew, and asked them to go search for the weapon that might have been used on me. They found a small pond of my blood under the window just as a resort employee wandered over with a mop and a bucket of hot water and soap.

I awoke in a dim room. No machines beeped. It was a simple medical clinic. A small box television was mounted high on the wall, almost touching the ceiling. It was unplugged and broadcasted my reflection. I was in an anesthetic haze and couldn't see very well. There was something ringing my vision that produced the effect of looking through a tunnel. I squinted at the TV screen and saw a blue and white mask over my face. I knew something bad had happened but was trying to remember. I groaned.

“There he is! How you feeling, KJ?!” My family had been off in the corner of the room, waiting for me to wake up.

I saw Derek and remembered our last conversation. “Did you find a crowbar?” My hope was unbridled. If it had been another human, someone who attacked me and fled, there would be no mystery. If not, if it had just been my brain and me . . .

I knew the answer before he spoke, revealed in his tightened lips. “Didn't find anything.”

My dad's voice quivered when he spoke. “Kirk, do you know where we are?”

“Yes. The DR.” I understood the point of his question and suddenly worried about the state of my brain. Given the extent of the trauma, there had been a concern about hemorrhaging, but the hospital had no equipment to check. I silently went through the names of my grade school teachers, grade by grade, testing my ability to recall. I conjugated a verb in Arabic in all ten forms. I remembered the password to my email account. Things seemed to be working.

Except for the fifteen minutes from the night before. What had happened in those minutes held the key to explaining why I was now in the hospital. I searched for them, but they had already fled to an undiscovered country in my mind, and now amnesia had clawed an impassable ocean around them.

My dad squeezed one of the few toes that wasn't bandaged. “Can you feel this?”

“Yes.” His posture relaxed. I was not paralyzed.

A nurse came over and spoke very loudly in my ear. I didn't understand
what she was saying. She jabbed a needle into my right thigh and injected something. It felt like a billiard ball was lodged in my muscle, just sitting there. She slapped my thigh and rubbed it around, and the medicine dissolved into my body.

“I wanna get out of here,” I moaned.

“We know you do, guy. You gotta heal up here first, then we can go home.”

I wanted to be alone, desperately—not to avoid my family but to be freed from any demands of social interaction. I didn't want to act positive. I wanted to make sense of what my brain had just done to me. I wanted to feel sorry for myself. I wanted to watch an ungodly string of movies, I didn't care which ones. I didn't want to answer the same questions everyone asked each morning. “No, no new memories. Yes, I can still move my toes.”