Via Dolorosa (15 page)

“Trying so hard,” she said.

“Trying?”

“Trying so hard, just like a man.”

“What I meant was—”

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping with your wife right now?”

He watched her and felt himself turn away from her and look out across the club. He said, “I don’t want to go back.”

“Ever?” she said.

“I don’t know about ever,” he said. “I just know about now, right now. And I don’t want to go back right now.” He looked at her. Said, “I can’t.”

Isabella said, “Tell me about the war.”

—Chapter VII—

There was a steep hill behind the Club Potemkin that climbed to the black sky brilliant with stars and overlooked, precipitously, the endless band of ocean. Nick walked, Isabella’s camera case around one shoulder and an accompaniment of battery-powered lights strapped together over his other shoulder. Along with the lighting equipment, Isabella had packed a portable CD player. Now, the volume turned low, the body of the CD player thumping discretely against Nick’s left thigh with every other step he took, they listened to Claxton’s latest album,
Mephistopheles,
as they walked. Beside him, Isabella moved quietly through the wet grass in her bare feet, carrying nothing except a small black purse and the hem of her dress.

He said, “Iraq was desolate and like an abortion. Which was good, I guess. It’s easier to fight on ground that isn’t alive. You don’t feel as responsible.”

“For what?”

“For everything,” he said. “For anything.” He found her questions to be nearly childlike, but also something of an insincere nature, as if she were really only playing with him, prodding him, seeing which way he would go. And this was something that had registered with him in the first few minutes of their initial encounter that day at the hotel café.

“Then what do you feel like?”

“Nothing much,” he said.

“That is the bullshit, Nicholas.”

“It’s just hard.”

“Hard how? What do you mean?”

“Hard,” he said, and found he could only repeat it: “Hard. To talk about, I mean.” And he considered. “You feel like you’re in some sort of purgatory. You feel humbled and weakened by your humility. Oddly enough, you feel peaceful but sad, too, and all at the same time. In some ways it’s like being trapped in an everlasting imperfection—a purgatory. There isn’t the intensity that everyone assumes with war. I mean, there are times like that, yeah, sure, but overall, you’re just lulled by this sense of powerlessness. Like a child being coaxed to sleep in the middle of a house-fire. And for whatever reason, you’re okay with it.”

“Because it’s too much power to have,” Isabella spoke up. “Yes? And you are glad you do not have it, or at least you do not have all of it. To hell with it. Yes? Let someone else have it. Let someone else worry about it.”

“Yes. To hell with it.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yes.” And he felt himself start to smile.

“Well, for someone so lulled by it all, you certainly do not like talking about it.”

“I have my reasons.”

“What are they?”

“They’re complicated.”

“I can see that. That is what makes me want to know all the more. Those are the best kinds of reasons.”

“But it’s too complicated to put into words. That’s the other thing about war—it’s all so damned complicated. You feel a certain way and you’re confused by it, which is probably the most complicated thing of all. Too often you don’t know how to feel, and when you do feel something—anything—you don’t know
why
you feel it, which is too confusing to even explain. I mean, I can’t anyway. And it drives you mad, trying to understand the un-understandable.”

They crested the hill. Nick paused, looking out over the black sea speckled with the reflection of a million stars, and could not move. For whatever reason (although he thought he knew the reason; thought he always knew the reason), his mind slipped back to Emma. He recalled coming home from Iraq, and that second night in bed with her. The first night in bed with her she had said nothing and had only wept, and it had been like a session, some session, and something that hurt him too much to ever recall, as she had thought him dead and his return to her had been nearly a miracle, like sleeping with a ghost. He remembered how she had looked at him in the dark and how she had talked to him, half-whispering, every word borne on a wave of a preternatural intensity.
We
won’t let little things ruin us, will we, baby?
she had said, her words now eerily prophetic.
Of course not, sweet,
he’d told her.
Of course not.
And what could ruin them? Love—honest, true, genuine love—could not be ruined. Hands, he understood, could be ruined. But love could not be ruined. And nothing would ruin them.

“What are you thinking?” Isabella asked him. She had stepped to the edge of the cliff. Her hair, long and dark, billowed out behind her. Her skin looked white and ghostly against the canopy of night.

“The war,” he said, and it wasn’t a total lie. Since his return, everything he thought about had something to do with the war. He and Emma were no different. Even now, with everything as it was, he found he still loved Emma and still wanted to belong to her. He wanted to belong to Emma and he wanted to belong to himself, too, but he found that, with all things beyond his mortal control, he belonged only to the war. And the war belonged to him. It was as sinful an affair in which one could engage.

“Has it changed you?” she asked.

He set the equipment down in the damp grass. “In some ways. Not all around, but in some ways.” After a pause, he added, “I used to have certain beliefs before the war. Then, after the war, some changed. Some stayed the same, though,” he said quickly, “but some changed, too. And then, since the change, it seems like I can’t lock on anything. Everything seems to change, to shift, over and over again. I find I trust nothing. And sometimes I’m not even entirely sure what I believe in.”

“And your hand,” she said.

“What about it?”

“Your hand has changed, too. It is perhaps the most obvious change.”

“Yes, well—I thought you meant, like—as in—”

“You talk very ambiguous,” she said, cutting him off. “If someone told me to shoot a picture of your words, I would not know what to shoot. You give me nothing to shoot, Nicholas. It is like shooting the wind. Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give me something substantial. Something solid. Something to shoot.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is the truth and the reality are in the details of what you saw and what you did and, really, in what happened.” She said, “What happened?” She said, “Tell me something that happened.”

He thought for some time. He thought eventually of the city. There had been a sadness to the old, broken city. He remembered moving toward the center of the city and into a tiny nameless village and bursting through a wooden doorway, and how the frame of the arch crumbled down, and how the gray-blue dust billowed out in a cough. There had been seven or eight flights of stairs slinking down into the suffocating earth. Endless stairs. The risers themselves were made of wood, suspended by railings bolted to the walls, and were sodden and bloated with water. In the dark, the smell was intolerable. The air was stifling and oppressive, like being trapped in the trunk of a car. How many tunnels did they traverse? Back above ground, and in the too-bright daylight, shooting erupted. They had dropped their rifles into their hands and began firing on a tight wedge of insurgents across the empty marketplace. You could never see the details of their faces. They were dark faces, very dark and almost smeared-looking, and it was as if they had no features. (That was how he had dreamed of them each night, too: smeared and slightly out of focus, like a photograph of someone taken just as they moved their head. All of them—they were phantoms, were ghosts. Ironically, it would be the way he would remember Myles Granger to look on his deathbed, too—smeared, out-of-focus, and not wholly there.) They continued to fire and the rattle of machine guns clattered off. Something on the other side of the village exploded in a dry crunch of smoke and debris. The dust was so thick it was a moving, living thing.

“You are still thinking,” Isabella said. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nicholas,” she went on. “Why is it men always say they are thinking of nothing?”

“Why is it women always ask what we’re thinking?” he quipped.

She laughed. “I like that. I like you calling me woman.”

“I didn’t call you woman.”

“It sounds so much like an animal pet name.”

“I didn’t…”

But she had already turned away from him, humming to herself. It was difficult now to tell if Isabella was paying more attention to him or Claxton’s CD. She moved away from the edge of the cliff and spoke half into the wind so that he had to strain to hear all her words…

She said, “Sometimes I think the meaning of life is to run through a succession of ideologies, trying each one on like a new pair of shoes. Slip, slip, slip. We are like Cinderella that way. Yes? And when you finally find the right one, the one that fits, you die.”

“That’s a hell of a reward.”

“I would think so. Why would it not be a reward?”

“Death?” he said. “Death is a reward?”

“Why not? What is so horrible about death? Do you know something I don’t? Did you see death when you were over in Iraq?”

He thought, not saying anything…then laughed. When Isabella did not laugh, he said, “Oh. You’re being serious.”

“Whether death is good or bad,” she said, “it is still
something.
It is still
final.
There is no more wondering, and no more waiting with death.”

“I feel like I’m waiting,” he said. The words were out of his mouth before he even understood them.

“Stop feeling,” Isabella told him. She crouched in the grass and withdrew the plastic Ziploc bag from her dress. “Feeling gets us in trouble, makes us malcontent. Are you malcontent? Yes, you are. Don’t bother to answer because you are, you are, you are. You sound completely ill with irritation when you speak. It is nearly overwhelming. Now come here.”

“Where?”

“Here,” she said. “Stand in front of me. The wind is coming over the hill. Stand in front of me and block out the wind, Nicholas, will you, please?”