The Radiant City (41 page)

“You shouldn’t have done that. You should have stayed with him. What happened to Joseph?”

“He took off. Went home I think.”

Jack nods. He pulls a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and offers the pack to Matthew. Matthew takes one. Jack flicks a match on his thumbnail and cups the flame so it is hidden.

“So you want to kill me?” Jack says.

“I don’t know.” Matthew’s hand shakes as he lifts the cigarette to his mouth.

Jack sits with his back to the cave wall and indicates Matthew should do the same. They look out across the garden. A pair of rabbits nibble on the grass. Jack straightens his left arm and raises his right, squinting along the line, miming the action of looking down a gunsight. He aims at one of the rabbits. “Pow,” he says.

“Have you got a gun?” Matthew says. It will move things along, asking this question, get to the heart of why they are here together.

“No gun. I said I’d never have a gun again.” Jack’s teeth are very white against his darkened skin. “I was afraid somebody’d get hurt. Bad joke, huh? I kinda wish now I had one. I got a knife though.” He reaches around behind him and pulls out what looks like a hunting knife with a long serrated blade. He offers it to Matthew, handle first. “Kabar. U.S. Marine issue. You take it.” Matthew hesitates and then takes it. When it is in his palm, for a moment Jack’s hand is still around the blade and their eyes meet. “It’s good that you take it,” says Jack. “I want you to take it.”

And so, if an attack comes now, things will be more easily decided. The scales have tipped in favour of Matthew’s survival. Survival entails responsibilities. Matthew discovers he is disappointed at this turn of events. Then he slips the knife into the pocket on the inside of his jacket. It feels warm.

“Matthew,” Jack’s voice is strange—thin and hoarse. “I’ve had some time to think up here.”

“And?”

“I can’t keep fighting it anymore. I can’t let go of it either. Can’t get it out of me. This is what’s happening now—but it’s the end of a fucking chain reaction that started a long time ago. There are other things.”

It is only then that Matthew realizes Jack is crying. “What kind of other things?”

“I never told you what I did in Nam. I mean what I really did.” Jack’s laugh is filled with the harsh salt-grind of tears. “I never told nobody. Not my brother, not my wife. Fuck.” Jack rubs his palms together as though he is cold. “They must have been testing for guys who’d do it. And that’s what I can’t figure out. How did they know I’d do it? What did they see in me?” Jack lifts his eyes abruptly. “I’m not making excuses, you understand. I always had a choice. All soldiers have choices.

“You get down in the dark with dark things and you just do it, and then after a while it stops feeling weird. It starts feeling good because disciplining yourself to do these things means you can overcome everything, even your own self—your own sense of what’s right. Everything becomes possible then. There’s no line that can’t be crossed. At first you were afraid, see, that doing these things would mean you were a sick fuck, but it takes almost no time to talk yourself into believing it doesn’t mean that at all, because you’re on the right team—the good guys. You can overcome anything, even yourself and every Sunday School lesson you’ve ever been taught, right? Because you have been turned into one tough motherfucker.”

He almost looks like a kid then, crazy-eyed and tearful, but still massive and dangerous.

“‘Get the information,’ they said. ‘Get the slant-eyed gook to tell you what we need to know and you’ll be saving the lives of your buddies, Jack. Remember what the gooks do to American POWs. Never forget what they do, the slimy yellow bastards. Here, just take this little shiny thing and touch him with it. You can be gentle, in fact it’s better if you’re gentle. You’re doing your duty, soldier. Just don’t leave any scars. That’s the golden rule. And if you have to do something that might show up on the body later—make sure the body don’t show up later.’

“And why do you do it? Because you’re in the middle of hell. Because the lines have blurred. Because you’ve got so you like it. You’re in a tent with an interpreter and a VC prisoner. You got to find out if there’s a trap waiting for you. You don’t want to look like a fucking wuss. And you’re scared blue and that makes you crazy-angry. That’s how it starts. You want the guy to just fucking talk. If he talks there won’t be any need, right, for the other stuff. But he won’t fucking talk. He won’t fucking TALK! It makes you mad, because if he’d tell you something you could just stop the whole shit-show before the curtain even goes up, but he’s not helping you out. He’s this little shit who’s making you do terrible things because he won’t talk. You
hate
this little slant, then. Which makes things easy. Inevitable.

“You start with just a little flap of skin, maybe. And the gook looks down because he can’t believe it didn’t hurt that much. Oh, it hurts, and hurts bad, but not
as
bad as he imagined. And he thinks maybe it won’t be so terrible and he’ll be able to hold out, and be a fucking hard-ass, but he’s also got in his head all the shit he’d do to you if the situation was reversed and maybe he starts feeling a little smug because he knows that he’s a tougher little fuck than you are. You can’t have that, see, you just can’t have that because even if he survives this, escapes or something, he has to go back to his people with stories that’ll scare the shit out of them. So when he looks down at the flap of skin on his arm that’s neat and clean and bearable, that’s when you put the sack over his head and you make sure it’s a wet sack so he starts to think about not being able to breathe. Then you do something small. Just touch a nerve under the skin and make him jump like a dissected frog in high school biology. It’s a shock to the little fuck and he’s starting to freak out now and that’s just the beginning.” Jack’s voice is soft and soothing and Matthew pictures him speaking into the ear of a small man with a wet canvas sack over his head, speaking to him as though Jack were his friend, his lover, his priest.

Jack’s eyes are fixed on a point and they do not blink as he speaks. His forehead is pinched and his lips pulled back, but he isn’t smiling. When he turns his head his eyes remain stationary and the tears fall unimpeded.

“You get a bandage maybe, and fix up the knife wound, because there’s blood but it’s the sort of thing that might have happened in a righteous fight and if the guy survives and anybody’s stupid enough to question you, you can say, look, I didn’t hurt him, I gave him medical treatment. And the prisoner is confused now, right, because you’ve hurt him, but then you’ve helped him and you talk to him so pretty. But he’s not talking, not telling you anything, so you get a field telephone, which runs on batteries and a generator. You start with the hands, see, and then you move on to his nuts.

“You know, I had three friends back in Nam. All black guys. Soul Brothers, we said then. Frankie and Terry got shot, Thaylen got a bamboo stake covered in human shit through the throat. Seems the brothers were always on point, you know? They always got to go first. I stopped making friends after Thaylen.” Jack wipes the tears and snot off his face roughly, and hangs his head. His shoulders slope and his hands are mammoth paws. He is a great deadly bear, baited, blinded and beaten, tied to the stake of his nightmares. “Until Anthony. I never got to know another black guy, until Anthony. Fucking Anthony.”

At some point Matthew has taken his hands from between his knees and put them over his ears, and it now takes a great effort to pull them away. It has not helped. He has heard everything. Another boundary shifts, another solid piece of ground slips away beneath him. The Killers of Kigali. The Butchers of Bosnia. El Salvadorian death squads. The mass murderers in Chechnya. Iraqi torturers. Palestinian suicide bombers. Israeli hit men. Jack, his friend, who sits before him hiccupping with tears. Jack. Friend. Torturer. Murderer. Matthew is weighted. Filled with stones. Skulls.

“We’ve all done things, Jack. None of us is innocent.”

“I took pleasure in it, Matthew. I took pleasure. Came a time I didn’t want to stop. Most of my talk is just bullshit, you know that, but this thing, it’s true. And I liked it. How did they know that about me? It had to always have been there. What did they see?” He shudders, deep and violently. “Would it have come out anyway? That’s what I just don’t know. And then you come along. With your book deal and your little adopted Lebanese family and everybody thinking you’re a hero. So like me in some ways. So unlike me. I hated that.” Jack raises his face up and looked to the sky, but there was nothing there, no moon, no stars, the clouds an opaque nothingness. “There’s only one thing for it.”

“What’s that?” The words are spiny burrs against his tongue.

“Atonement, my friend.”

Matthew looks at Jack, his face ravaged with all that he has done and cannot undo, all the acts of violence and cruelty he has committed. Each act and each denial written like an unhealed scar along his skin. And something shifts in Matthew
.
Shifts to pity. To grief. It makes him sick, and he wishes the killing anger were back. It was so clean, so simple, that anger. But it is as though something dark and swollen has been blasted out of his belly. It is all quite clear. The only difference between him and Jack lies in circumstance and trajectory. And what Matthew chooses to do next.

“And how will you atone, Jack? Kill yourself?”

“Cops will be looking for me. I’m gonna let ’em find me.” He speaks slowly, precisely.

“And let them kill you?”

Jack shrugs. “Let life take its course.”

It is unclear what that course will be, but Matthew nods. It is always unclear.

Jack stands and holds out his hand. “I’m going back up. I do need you to do something, Matthew.”

“What?”

“Make sure Anthony’s all right, okay? I mean, see that his body gets home to New York. Don’t let him be buried in fucking Potter’s Field, all right? He’s got a sister there. Arcola’s her name. Same last name. Find her. Tell her I’m sorry. Bury him with a fucking cookbook or something, okay?”

“Done.” It has become very difficult to speak.

“And listen,” his hand is like cement surrounding Matthew’s. “You make the call to the cops, all right? You be the one.”

“No. I can’t do that.”

“You have to. For both of us.” He steps back. “For Anthony.”

“Yes. Fine. I’ll make the call.”

Jack gives Matthew a hug, fast and strong enough so that his spine pops.

“Fuck, I hate cops,” says Jack and before Matthew can say anything in response, Jack disappears into the back of the cave.

Matthew looks at his watch. It is two-thirty in the morning. His feet are rooted. He does not want to go, because if he does this part of their lives will be over and it will be true that Anthony is dead and that Jack is a ghost. Like the day he stood at his mother’s grave. It was his leaving that had been the final good-bye, not hers.

“Good-bye,” Matthew says to the cave. He will say good-bye to Anthony later.

Ever after, he will find it difficult to remember the walk out of the wood or much of the walk across the west of Paris. Only that it was filtered through tears. They made the city glitter, hard and cold and horribly radiant.

He intends to go home, and he almost makes it. He lusts for a bottle of whisky and a bottle of blue pills and several days, or weeks, or months of oblivion. He actually makes it to his building. He stands outside, fully intending to press the code and open the door and go inside. And then he doesn’t.

He walks to the phone booth on the corner. He tells the police he knows who is responsible for the dead man on the Champs earlier that night. He tells them where to find him and that they are expected. Then he goes walking, and when he passes a garbage can he takes the sap out of his pocket and drops it in.

Half an hour later he enters Saida’s building. As he nears her door he hears voices, hers and Joseph’s. Raised voices. The words, however, are in Arabic and he understands nothing. He hesitates for only a moment, and then knocks. Instantly, they stop speaking. Joseph opens the door. His face is swollen on one side, the cut on his cheek has been bandaged, but the eye is also black and swelling. The other one is red as well and swollen from crying.

“Matthew!”

“You tell me!” Saida pushes past her son. “You tell me what is going on now. He will not.” She pulls Matthew into the room and stands with her hands on her hips, scowling at them both. Then her expression changes. She goes pale and her hands fly to her mouth. “My God, Matthew. What is it?”

It seems he has started to cry.

“Sit down. Sit down. You are going to tell me,” she says, taking him by the arm. “Joseph, make coffee.”

It is some time before he gets control of himself. “What’s happened? What’s happened?” she keeps saying.

There is coffee in front of him. He sips, scalding his lips. He tries to breathe. “You don’t know? Joseph?” He glances at Joseph, who shakes his head slightly, then drops his eyes to the floor.