Yellow Birds (10 page)

Noctiluca,
I thought,
Ceratium,
as the tracers began to show themselves in sifted twilight, two words learned on a school field trip to the tidewaters of Virginia that appeared as I was shooting at the man, paying no attention then to the strange connections made inside of any mind, the small storms of electricity that cause them to rise and then submerge, then rise again. A fleeting thought of a young girl sitting beside me on a dock, back there the twilight coming on, the crack of tracers as I shot and shot again, the man crawling from his weapon until he stopped and his blood trickled down into the river in its final ebbing tide, brief as bioluminescence. Sterling and Murph came over and sat next to me and we took out more magazines and fired those into his body and his clothes were awash in blood and it ran down the low bank and flowed into the river until it all had been exhausted.

“Now you’ve got it, Privates. Thorough, thorough is the way home.”

I stopped firing and put my head in my hands. My rifle slung in my lap. I had taken it as far as I could. I looked over at Sterling. His face was serene. I wondered what he could do beyond this. No, what could I do beyond this? Where would he take us?

We regrouped. A head count revealed no casualties except for a few broken eardrums from the blast. We returned to the spot where we had been previously and waited for the QRF. There was a wet spot where the body had been and its remnants were scattered in pieces, some small and some large, others appearing infinite like the pieces we found near our feet: a piece of skin and muscle, entrails. Others were larger, an arm and bits of legs closer to where he’d been. No one said a word but in the silence we re-created the last few moments of his life in our minds. We saw him struggling and begging and asking Allah to free him, then realizing he would not be saved as they cut his throat and his neck bled and he choked and died.

The man had been made an unwilling weapon. They’d captured and killed him and eviscerated him and stuffed his abdominal cavity with explosives, detonated him when they were sure we had recognized him, then attacked. As the QRF arrived, we were told that the bridge had to be cleared.

Sterling called out, “Murph, Bartle!”

We took grappling hooks and tried to snag the larger pieces of the body. We yanked on them until we were sure they were free of explosives and posed no further threat. Murph threw the metal implement from behind a low wall and pulled until the chunks of the body resisted, then jerked hard on the rope. He looked at me when he had tugged hard on his piece, and then it was my turn. After we repeated the process several times, an officer got out of his vehicle and declared the bridge cleared.

As we continued through the city, people began returning in twos and threes and set about the task of burying the dead. I heard the muezzin call and the sun went down purple and red, painting the city softly.

That spring whole
days and weeks were slept through and swept into the afternoons, never seeing a soul. I woke at random intervals to hear the school bus down the street loading and unloading different grades and ages of children, telling me the time based on the pitch of their chattering voices.

I had deteriorated more than one might expect in the short time I’d been home. My only exercise was the two-mile round trip I made every afternoon to G.W.’s country store for a case of beer. I avoided roads, opting instead for the train tracks that passed by our house on the other side of a long, low berm. The hardwoods canopied above me provided shade, and the light fell through the green branches unceremoniously. The heat had gathered throughout the spring and now became a dense murk in the trellised pathway of the train tracks. Atlantic heat: muggy, thick with mosquitoes. It was quite unlike the heat in Al Tafar, which had the surprising effect of reducing one to tears in an instant, even after having spent hours broiling in it already. This heat was somehow more American; it confronted you immediately on your stepping out in it. Your breath warmed intolerably and it seemed you needed to push through it like a swimmer.

Sometimes, when I reached G.W.’s, I’d wait just inside the wood line until whatever old pickup turned its last rusted quarter panel down the road, and I’d walk into the chime of the double doors through the dust it had left in its wake. I can’t really explain what that feeling was like. Shame, I guess. But that wasn’t all of it. It was more particular than that. Anyone can feel shame. I remember myself, sitting in the dirt under neglected and overgrown brush, afraid of nothing in the world more than having to show myself for what I had become. I wasn’t really known around there anyway, but I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that’s what I thought. Now I know: All pain is the same. Only the details are different.

When I got back to the house, my shirt soaked through with sweat and starched again with salt, I’d put the beer in my closet, and walk into the kitchen, where I’d stand for a long time looking out the window onto the haze rising off the pond. I didn’t want to broaden the evidence of my existence wider than brief footprints of moisture on the floor of my mother’s modest country kitchen. I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the larger thing: my mother’s house becoming every other house as I once had seen it, sitting atop the southern end of a broad river valley, close enough to the mountains that every few years a scared black bear would wander down into the remaining forest, and close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they’d go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, “We are lost; therefore we will call this home.” And close enough that as a child I had been teased by older kids who said if I only tried hard enough I would smell salt water, and I, believing, stood among the light poles and the gulls in the parking lots of A&Ps and cried when I knew that it was true despite the fact that they had meant to lie, as children sometimes do.

The house itself rested above one of many ponds and streams meandering down to the James like so many pieces of unwound rope. And on the other side: Richmond, its glass buildings sometimes reflecting the river below, or clouds, or ironworks and track nearly gone to powder with rust. There it sat, up on its escarpment, which the river had scoured out over the millennia, and still it dug farther into the earth, winding in the landscape like a salesman’s banner unfurling to reveal his wares.

Back home, everything had begun to remind me of something else. Every thought I had blossomed outward and backward until it attached itself to some other memory, that one leading to another, impermanent, until I was lost to whatever present moment I was in. “Honey, do you mind fixing the fence out by the pond?” my mother would say in the shortening days of summer, and I would walk into the long expanse of the yard holding a hammer and a fistful of nails and I’d reach the fence and lean on it, looking out over the water as warm breezes made it ripple and I’d be brought back. Back to what? To nothing, to everything. The yelp of dogs echoing out from where they rolled in wet garbage in the shadow of the Shamash Gate. If I heard the caw of ugly crows swing down from the power line that they adorned in black simplicity, the caws might strike in perfect harmony with the memory of the sound of falling mortars, and I, at home now, might brace for the impact, come on, you motherfuckers, I’d think, you finally got me, and then as the birds took flight I would remember and I’d look back and see my mother’s face silhouetted in the kitchen window and I’d smile back at her and wave, take the loosening wire meshing of the fence and begin to nail it back in place. You want to fall, that’s all. You think it can’t go on like that. It’s as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can’t go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can’t. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes.

Late August. I left my mother’s house. I’d developed the habit of taking long, aimless walks to fill the days. I woke one morning in a small room off the kitchen in my single bed wishing that I hadn’t. It wasn’t the first time. I was tired of my mind running all night through the things I remembered, then through things I did not remember but for which I blamed myself on account of the sheer vividness of scenes that looped on the red-green linings of my closed eyelids. I could not tell what was true and what I had invented but I wanted it to stop, to leave it and have my perception drift away like a burned-up fog. I wanted to go to sleep and stay there, that’s all. A passive wish, one I didn’t push. Sure, there is a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself, and while I discovered you can walk that line for a long while without even noticing, anybody who is around you surely will, and then of course all kinds of unanswerable questions will not be far behind.

The phone rang one morning. Ma picked it up. “It’s Luke, honey,” she said, calling to me from the other room. Eleven o’clock. Still in bed.

“Tell him I’ll call him back.”

She walked into my room and put the mouthpiece to her chest. “You’ve got to talk to people, John. It’s not good to be by yourself so much.”

I’d known Luke since middle school. He was my best friend, though even now, those words don’t seem to mean anything. My fault, not his. His name reminded me of that discovery you make as a kid, that if you say a word over and over it will start to sound like gibberish, like white noise. “Take a message,” I said.

She looked at me.

“I’ll call him back, Ma. Promise.”

She put the phone up to her ear and turned away. “He’s tired, Luke. Can he call you back?…Tomorrow? All right. I’ll tell him.”

“We done?” I asked.

“Goddammit, Johnny,” she huffed. “They’re going to the river tomorrow afternoon. They want to see you. People want to see you.”

“All right.”

“All right, what?”

“All right, maybe.”

“You’ll think about it?”

“Yeah.”

“I really think you should. Just think about it.” She smiled tentatively.

“Goddammit, Mama. All I fucking do is think.”

I put my pants on and I went out onto the back porch and spit over the handrail, and it was a yellowish brown, and my body pulsed with a warm obtuse ache from my eyelids to my fingertips. The ache was inside my body too, an all-​encompassing type of pain like my whole skin was made out of a fat lip. I lit a cigarette and went down to the pond behind her house, the light all bright and shimmery like raw linen in the dense summer air, then farther back into the woods where the pond drained into a creek and ran between steeply gouged-out red-clay banks. At a spot where the creek caught up and swirled and eddied between exposed rocks, I found a place I’d often come to as a child. A large boulder overhung the creek, the red clay long since weathered away. Roots of a large gray birch clung to the side of the rock and went down into the ground where it leveled off into a clearing next to the creek. The leaves in the canopies of central Virginia’s hardwood forests had begun their pre-autumnal yellow tightening and they hung over the clearing and the creek and the light fell through them in a way that I was fond of and the morning was kind of soft-edged and clumsy like I’d been seeing it through gauze.

I made my way down the steep clay bank and tottered along a downed tree that crossed the creek. The rocks were slick but they were not as far apart as I remembered, and it was not too hard to get across because the previous night’s beers had me moving at a deliberate pace. I used my hands to brace myself as I made my way beneath the overhang, and though the morning had already begun to warm up it was cool under there, and I could feel the cool from the moisture of the big rock against my hands. Up on a birch, the initials J.B. had been carved into the sheet of silver bark a half-dozen times, each one a slightly different size from the others, with various patterns of lines where the cuts had stretched out with the tree’s growth. I climbed over to the tree and rubbed my fingers, all dull and warm, into the cut marks. I could not remember making the marks, but I was sure I’d made them. Of course J.B. is not an uncommon pair of initials, but I was sure I’d made the carvings and I could not remember anything about doing them and so I smiled.

I sat down there awhile until the sun was straight above me and the light fell down in wide columns and sweat ran down between my shoulder blades. I decided then to walk the tracks toward the city. It wasn’t so much a decision as it was a product of trying to turn off my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about Murph. I drifted and followed the guidance of the tops of my boots and I tried not to think and when I got back up to the porch, I wiped the sweat from my forehead, opened the sliding door, put a few things in my duffel bag, and left.

I hadn’t known what I was doing then, but my memories of Murph were a kind of misguided archaeology. Sifting through the remains of what I remembered about him was a denial of the fact that a hole was really all that was left, an absence I had attempted to reverse but found that I could not. There was simply not enough material to account for what had been removed. The closer I got to reconstructing him in my mind, the more the picture I was trying to re-​create receded. For every memory I was able to pull up, another seemed to fall away forever. There was some proportion about it all, though. It was like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion. I’d think of a time when we sat in the evening in the guard tower, watching the war go by in streaks of red and green and other, briefer lights, and he’d tell me of an afternoon in the little hillside apple orchard that his mother worked, the turn and flash of a paring knife along a wrap of gauze as they grafted uppers to rootstocks and new branches to blossom, or the time he saw but could not explain his awe when his father brought a dozen caged canaries home from the mine and let them loose in the hollow where they lived, how the canaries only flitted and sang awhile before perching back atop their cages, which had been arranged in rows, his father likely thinking that the birds would not return by choice to their captivity, and that the cages should be used for something else: a pretty bed for vegetables, perhaps a place to string up candles between the trees, and in what strange silences the world worked, Murph must have wondered, as the birds settled peaceably in their formation and ceased to sing. And I’d try to recall things until nothing came, which I quickly found was my only certainty, until what was left of him was a sketch in shadow, a skeleton falling apart, and my friend Murph was no more friend to me than the strangest stranger. My missing him became a grave that could not be filled or leveled, just a faded blemish in a field and a damn poor substitute for grief, as graves so often are.

So I took the railroad tracks, roughly following the old Danville line northeast toward the city. It began to rain a little. The creosote seeped out of the railroad ties and became slick, and the wet gray aggregate shifted under my boots. I walked slowly, more or less shuffling from one railroad tie to the next, hardly looking up. Though I was in no hurry and had no destination in mind, the trees opened up and before I realized how far I’d gone I was above the river standing on the railroad bridge’s first trestled arch. The sun would soon be going down behind the trees, and the river was calm and flat, and it bent out of sight and trailed gently off toward its beginning in the mountains. The water was all a bright purple and orange where it reflected the ruddy clouds in the fading light, and I looked over the railing down onto the old stone piers of earlier iterations of the bridge where earlier iterations of aimless walkers must have seen some kind of sight like this and stopped and stood for a while and looked out over the water taking a deep breath and maybe seeing a small wavy outline of themselves reflected down below, with all that space around, thinking there was just so much damn space to be in that it hurt.

Soon enough I felt the dull rumble of a train shudder up the tracks, and I saw the first hint of its lamplight coming around the bend on the river’s other side. The sun was not quite down yet so the light around the bend was indistinct and only twinkling a little, like a star seen at daybreak or dusk. I slid down off the trestle and a little ways down the steep dirt bank and then I sat and watched the outline of the train moving, skylit, over the bridge from one side to the other. I could barely make out windows, much less see into them, so I did not see if the train was crowded but still I thought I might want to be on it. Maybe the train was coming from D.C., crossing the bridge north to south as it was. Maybe it was headed down to Raleigh or Asheville or perhaps cutting west on a hitch line out toward Roanoke and the Blue Ridge. I looked for a place to jump on but I did not see one because the train against the sky and the lights of the city to the east moved like a black shape in the blacker night.