To Be a Friend Is Fatal (17 page)

Braces

Insurance reimbursement

Beneath it all, I wrote “Medical clearance,” knowing that I would need a new clearance before being permitted back into Iraq. In every conversation with my doctors, I pressured them to give me best-case scenarios and the most aggressive course of treatment, hoping to be back on a plane to Fallujah in less than two months.

In my childhood bedroom on a dead-end street in West Chicago, I created a war room. I locked myself in and mapped out my return. The floor was soon littered with checklists, timelines, alternative timelines, secondary to-do lists, all with boxes to be checked, printouts of articles, pill bottles, briefing materials for the canceled marines lecture. CNN looped endlessly on mute.

The first week passed, and my bosses hadn't responded to my email. Surely it had been sequestered as spam. I emptied my backpack onto the bed and found the matchbox-sized device that periodically received a several-digit code from a satellite, allowing me to log into USAID's email system to resend the message through my government account.

I woke each morning with a gnawing need to check in on the news, to log into email, in search of some connection with Iraq. I called my colleagues who had returned before me to rant about the lack or quality of media coverage and to trade news about who was being investigated for corruption, which projects were unraveling, who was going to Afghanistan next, who got what plum posting where, who was resigning from the agency in frustration over Iraq. I wrote to the few Iraqis in Fallujah whose email addresses I still had and apologized for my delay in returning.

Early on, friends relayed hurtful gossip pushed by marines and others in USAID and the State Department who barely knew me: the most
widely spread version had me drunk and partying out a window. One marine general announced in a staff meeting that I had decided to simply quit so I could stay in the United States, which angered me more than the other explanations for my absence.

Friends who found out about my accident asked me just what, exactly, had happened in the Dominican Republic. I pecked out the number of a neuropsychiatrist friend who worked with veterans at the VA hospital in New York. He listened to my account of what had happened and interrupted: “Kirk, you had a dissociative fugue state.” I perked up, remembering the months I'd spent as a fourteen-year-old learning Bach's
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
on the organ. The act of pedaling a bass line while playing on two tiers of keys was such a leap for my adolescent mind that I had to master the hands so that I could play without looking, focusing my eyes instead on the pedals below my feet and dangling tie. I stared at my casts while he continued.

Over the phone, he read from the
DSM-IV
, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, published by the American Psychiatric Association: “Travel may range from brief trips over relatively short periods of time (i.e., hours or days) to complex, usually unobtrusive wandering over long time periods (e.g., weeks or months), with some individuals reportedly crossing numerous national borders and traveling thousands of miles.” A fugue state is characterized by autopilot behavior, which is only sometimes tame. People have emerged from a fugue state to find themselves behind the wheel of their car or in a mall with shopping bags under their arms, with no recollection of how they got there. Incidence of the disorder increases during periods of war.

I hung up, shuffled over to the computer, and typed “fugue” into an online dictionary, and the page blinked back two resulting words. I wedged the sock-pen into position over a notebook and wrote in nervous, oversized letters that filled the page, “Fugue: Flight, Departure.”

I had never heard of the disorder before, but each example I found online came as a revelation. I felt as though my accident had trapped me within a kind of John Grisham novel, only a much more pathetic version. There was no pelican brief, no assassinated justices; just some
kid who sleepwalked out a window while on vacation from Fallujah. But each sentence seemed as though it were written for my eyes only, as though I had just deciphered some conspiracy in plain sight, the plot to pilot me to my death while I slept.

The essential feature of dissociative fugue is sudden, unexpected travel . . . with inability to recall some or all of one's past. . . . Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode, and upon recovery there may be amnesia for the original stressor. . . . Once the individual returns to the prefugue state, there may be no memory for the events that occurred during the fugue. . . .

Sometimes dissociative fugue cannot be diagnosed until people abruptly return to their prefugue identity and are distressed to find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances.

I took the words, symptoms, examples, and spread them like plaster over the rupture that had torn open on December 29.

At the end of the second week, I still hadn't heard anything from my bosses. I was growing angry. Didn't the near-death of a senior staff member warrant at least a brief phone call? I didn't know what was happening with my position and wanted to report on my progress, lest they think of giving the Fallujah job to someone else.

I wasn't making much progress, though. The yellow pus of infection colonized healthy flesh as it wept drowsily from the sutures on my chin and forehead. A beard was emerging, and I had the terror-filled realization that I'd need to shave to effectively fight the infection. Once I could no longer push it off, I duct-taped a sock around my razor blade. Each downward stroke tugged at the stitches, and a sickly stream emerged in response. I spent an hour shaving what felt like one whisker at a time until the tear and infection site were mostly cleared. My legs, exhausted, carried me back into bed, where I stared at the silent television screen and tried to sleep.

As I tried to avoid fixating on my bosses' silence, I began to doubt my eight-week estimate. The successful completion of once quotidian
demands—feeding, washing, shaving—triggered a wave of euphoria that quickly broke apart into a frightful awareness of how battered I was. I turned my full attention to the maintenance of my body: teeth, bones, face, antibodies, stomach. I was in the cockpit of a heavily strafed bomber, my engine sputtering and coughing, lines leaking, windshield cracked and whistling. My only priority was to hold altitude. In the quiet of my room, I would whimper, and then curse myself for the self-pity:
Oh, you big baby. Least you can walk. Lot of people never wake up. So you have a little dark spell here. Tough shit.
But my high-minded attempts at paying respect to the dead and worse off sputtered quickly. The churn of self-pity grew stronger by the day, threatening to overpower my hope for a speedy return to Fallujah.

My parents, in the thirty-seventh year of their marriage, were struggling with each other like any couple approaching four decades and the imminence and uncertainty of retirement. They had masked any sign of this whenever I'd call from Iraq, but now I was home, and it was unavoidable. And while a trauma in a family brings everyone closer, it also rubs the plates in the tectonic history against one another, resurrecting old tensions and unwanted recollections. I bickered with my dad like an adolescent. That I relied on them to shuttle me to and from surgeries didn't help. I felt guilty for being back in their space at a time when they could have used privacy, and embarrassed that I was home when I was needed elsewhere. I pushed them away, going to great lengths to take care of myself, ruffling my casts into garbage bags so that I could stand under the shower, contorting myself elaborately into my clothes, bashing knifes through tinfoil to eat.

We called the crude web of stitches binding together my upper lip the Cockroach. Whenever my mouth was closed, it looked as though I were chewing on a large dark-brown insect, with partially unraveled stitches for antennae.

I hadn't smiled for weeks. Late one evening, flipping through channels, I discovered
The Colbert Report
, which had aired its first episode while I was still in Fallujah. Two minutes into Stephen Colbert's deadpan dismantling of White House spin about Iraq, wrapped in neoconservative chest-beating pomp, I broke into a grin. The pain flooded in at once. When my lip tightened into a smile, the Cockroach slithered up toward my gums and snagged itself on the wire bracket holding my jaw together. Fresh blood trickled into my mouth, and I raced to the bathroom mirror. I unhooked the mess with my index fingers, returned to my room in a sullen mood, and turned off Colbert. No more laughing until the Cockroach was gone.

The next morning, I pulled on a pair of sweatpants, writhed my casts through an oversized T-shirt and flip-flops, worked my way down the staircase, and slipped out the front door into the numbing winter. The cold felt good on my cuts. I pried open the door to my dad's Buick, lowered myself in, and took off before anyone could stop me.

It had snowed most of the previous night. I hadn't driven in a year, and since both arms were in casts, I had only my fingertips to steer. I kept the radio off, rolled down all the windows, and suppressed a smile. I reached the first intersection, having no clue where I was headed, and again the urge to smile returned. I decided to make only right turns until I was comfortable enough to turn left across a lane.

I imagined piles of snow dumping upon Fallujah. The war would probably come to a halt. I drove up Roosevelt Road, past the grocery store, and turned right onto Joliet Street at my childhood bank, where seven dollars in savings from grade school still accrued interest, a penny a year. Snowplows scraped along ahead of me, spraying a shower of salt in their wake. Snowblowers blasted white arcs from every other driveway. My high school loomed on the left, and I sped past it anxiously. At the next red light, a beat-up Chevy Cavalier pulled up to my right, and a heavy woman stared at me, my casts, and then back at me in alarm.

I pulled into a slippery parking lot and walked into a bookstore to find stacked high in the main display Paul Bremer's book about his year as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. I used my casts like chopsticks and carried a copy to the register.

“Ohmigosh, what happened to
you
?” a teenage girl with the pasty complexion of Midwestern winters cooed warmly. I watched her eyes settle upon the Cockroach stitching between my lips and dart away.

I grunted, dumping some bills onto the counter. My first interaction with someone outside of a hospital or my home, and I realized quickly that I wasn't up for it.

“ 'Kay, here's your change. Hope ya feel better soon! 'Njoy the book!”

I trudged through the snow in my flip-flops. When I got back to the car, I realized I couldn't hold Bremer's book and open the door at the same time, so I dumped him into the parking lot snow. The book was for reading, not for displaying. There he was on the back cover of
My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope,
dismounting a Blackhawk in his idiotic costume of a prep blazer, khakis, and combat boots.

The Buick was in motion. I drove on, past strip malls, gas stations, and hibernating golf courses, following the train tracks until I reached desolate stretches of heavily tilled frozen farmland. I pulled off onto the shoulder just before a railroad crossing. The heater was the only thing audible, save for a periodic rubbery scrape of the wipers. I opened Bremer's book and started to read.

Two weeks later, I blasted out of the driveway and aimed the car at Chicago. Bremer was giving a speech in late January 2006 before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (now the Chicago Council on Global Affairs), at the same Hilton hotel where Mayor Daley had unleashed his cops on antiwar protesters during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

I gave my keys to a shocked valet and made my way into the hotel ballroom, passing a constellation of Burberry jackets and mink stoles wrapped around what I supposed was the foreign policy establishment of Chicago—an incongruous concept. I didn't know anyone and didn't bother trying to make small talk, sailing past and positioning myself in the first row in front of the podium. The Chicago cognoscenti stared at me as they wriggled out of their coats and into the seats around me. They did a poor job concealing their whispers. “What do you suppose happened to him?”