Her dorm room was a social hub of sorts from where her hall mates came and went with their laptops and iPods and the occasional textbook or novel, which they would glance at between the trading of notes and music and IMing with friends across campus, attending to assignments in the down moments between jokes and gossip. They were like a troupe of nervous dancers working earnestly on their poses, shifting quickly from one to the next, until the weekend came, when they’d drink enough to undo all that practice.
On the third floor, people started splitting up, heading back to their rooms, someone calling out a reminder that they had to be up by eight to catch the chartered bus to New York for the protest. When Nate eventually pushed through the doors onto Emily’s hall, she had already slipped into her room.
“You coming with us tomorrow?” Alex asked. He was standing by his door, feeling in his pockets for his key.
“I guess so,” Nate said, his head moving gently forward and back in search of balance.
Less than forty-eight hours ago, he had been sitting in the back pew of Finden Congregational at Charlotte Graves’s belated memorial, listening to one of her colleagues, a former teacher of his, talk about how dedicated she had been to her students. And he’d listened to her former students as well, four or five of them, a woman who’d become a literature professor, a man who worked for the Geological Survey, people in their thirties and forties and fifties, all of whom spoke of how hard she’d been on them and how thankful they were for it. And when they were done, Charlotte’s brother had got up again and said
how moved he was that the church was full and how Charlotte wouldn’t have believed it.
Ms. Graves would want him to go to the protest, he thought. The march to stop the war.
“Do you want a beer?” Alex asked.
“I should go to bed.”
“You’re welcome to come in if you want.”
Alex was trying to play it cool but the tightness in his voice gave him away.
Faggot, Nate thought, weakling. With a flick of his tongue he could murder some small piece of this boy. The little power gave him a sickening little thrill.
“So you’re inviting me in?” he asked, almost coyly, giving nothing away.
“Yeah. I am.”
The walls of his room were surprisingly bare. Just a few postcards tacked over the desk. Nate had expected art posters and political slogans but there was none of that. Books that didn’t fit on the overstuffed shelves stood in stacks along the floor and in piles by his computer. Above the bed was a small picture of Kafka.
Alex walked to the stereo and put on some Radiohead before getting them each a beer from the mini-fridge.
“Here,” he said, pulling out his desk chair. “Take this.” He sat opposite, on the edge of the twin bed. For a minute, the two of them sipped their last wasted drinks of the night, looking away at the walls and the floor and the bright vortex of the screen saver with its endlessly morphing patterns.
“I guess Emily probably told you that I asked about you. She’s not a big one for secrets.”
“That’s for sure.”
He wondered if he had appeared to Doug as Alex did to him now: bold and terrified at the same time.
“It’s okay,” Nate said. “It’s cool.”
“We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. I wasn’t angling for that. You just seem like a sweet guy. And I think you’re kind of cute, too.”
Nate examined the spines of the novels on the bookcase, amazed his legs were still capable of trembling after all he’d drunk.
“Thanks,” he said, taking another swig. Queer, he thought. Coward. Predator. Weakling. Monster. Only he couldn’t tell to whom the words were directed, Alex or himself. All he knew was that the derision moved in his blood like venom.
Just then he heard the music as if for the first time. As if his ears had been plugged and now the stoppers had come loose. The singer’s words were hard to make out beneath the wash of sound, but the plaintive tone was unmistakable, calling out through the dark orchestral swirl, the voice promising nothing but itself, no reassurance or escape, no comfort or caress, just testament to a longing that mere touch would never satisfy, the resonance of it reaching so much deeper into the past than touch ever could and so much farther into the future, calling the aching spirit from its hiding place, at least for a moment. And Nate saw then, in his mind’s eye, the form of his father’s corpse laid out on the floor in front of him, his garroted head resting to one side, his neck bruised from ear to ear, the poor, dear man. And lying there beside him, Ms. Graves, in her flannel skirt and cardigan, her gray hair brushed down over her ears and her eyes closed, the two of them hovering in the netherworld between the living and the forgotten dead.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Alex said.
“Is it okay if we kiss?”
Alex nodded, and Nate stood, stepping through the shadows at his feet to cross the space between them.
Chapter 21
At night, from his hotel balcony, Doug watched the Jaguars and Porsches cruise up and down Arabian Gulf Road blaring pop music as they glided by the armored cars that had appeared recently at intersections all over Kuwait City. According to the concierge, the American schools had announced an unscheduled six-week vacation and the ex-pats not here for the war were leaving with their children by the hundreds. But in the evenings along the promenade the Kuwaiti families still picnicked on the grass, enjoying the mild winter air and the views of the glittering towers up and down the waterfront, leaving their trash on the ground behind them for the municipal workers to collect—the Filipinos and Pakistanis, who came by in their minivans and green jumpsuits to spear the crumpled plastic bags and date wrappers and empty soda cans tipping and rolling in the breeze.
When he couldn’t sleep Doug walked the city, whose citizens seemed to stay up all night shopping in the twenty-four-hour supermarkets. There were American sailors about as well, up from the naval
base for their sober nights out on the town. He did his best to avoid them, though he knew his chances of being detected here were small. He’d been careful, at first, sounding out other guests at the hotel about which contractors might be hiring, thinking he needed to avoid the firms working directly with the State Department. But soon he’d realized how far the demand for people outstripped the supply and just how many of the men here were themselves not so interested in anyone knowing much about their past. If you were an American and a firm wanted you, the background check was often skipped lest it prove inconvenient.
Passing through the streets of low-rise apartments he’d reach Al Taawun Street from where he could see over the resorts and the private compounds to the coast, the lights of skiffs and police boats mingling with the more distant signals of tankers headed south with their American escorts for the Strait of Hormuz.
In all his life he’d never had this much time on his hands; such idleness was a menace to him. In the hotel room, he felt caged but out walking there was nothing to do but think. Seeing the young sailors in their dress whites moving in packs along the sidewalks put him in mind of when he’d left for the navy and what he’d imagined lay ahead of him back then.
He’d ridden the commuter train into Boston with his suitcase and knapsack and crossing the dingy concourse of South Station boarded a Greyhound that had taken the better part of two days to carry him up to the Naval Station Great Lakes, there along the western shore of Lake Michigan.
Through the dead of night on that trip, as the other passengers dozed, Doug had put on his Walkman and watched the fencing alongside the highway tick by in the headlights, the flat expanses of Ohio and then Indiana stretching out in every direction, the farmland
parceled into one forty-acre field after another, as dark and empty a landscape as his Eastern eyes had ever seen. With the signs for Gary and Chicago, lights appeared and soon the streets were bright with lamps above the barren parking lots and block-long warehouses. As the bus bounded over paved gorges of underpasses and empty surface roads, a panorama that made the Alden strip seem like little more than a candle’s light came into view: acre after acre of oil tanks and cylinders connected by masses of strut work and pipes running this way and that, white smoke jetting from valves up and down the tangle of steel, lit by thousands of naked yellow bulbs lining ladders and catwalks and above this vast tract of works, a giant orange flame billowing from the tip of a steel column like some temple fire undulating against the pale-yellow sky.
Before that trip, he’d never slept more than a single night away from home. He had signed up for the navy without ever having set foot on a boat. His first day out on a training vessel he kept thinking of the movie he’d seen on television as a kid about the sinking of the
Bismarck
and how when a ship was attacked and started taking on water, the sailors’ orders were to seal off the flooding compartments along with the men trapped inside them. When the whitecaps came up on the lake and the boat began rocking, he grew so nervous he thought he’d be sick. But then the boy next to him threw up. Doug watched with fascination the disdain in the eyes of the training officer as he handed the kid a brush and pail and told him to scrub. Gripping the rails, the others had looked on as their fellow recruit got down on his hands and knees, reaching for the streaks of his own vomit running over the deck.
He’d seen then that fear was a question of balance. As long as he saw more of it in the faces of those around him than he himself displayed—that is, as long as he had confidence—he would do more than survive. He would gain. Or so he’d imagined.
Kuwaiti civilians were no longer being allowed into the northern part of the country. Only the farmers and their foreign laborers were permitted to remain. The highway leading up to the border was said to be clogged with American convoys. It wouldn’t be long now, people agreed. During the day the government ran drills for possible Scud attacks and at the hotel restaurant in the evenings there were stories of UN staff departing and civilian contractors moving onto the American bases for protection.
Finally, Doug got the call from his new employer informing him of the date for his team’s departure. That night, he dreamt he was in the back row at St. Mary’s in Alden, listening to Father Griffin deliver his sermon, the congregation fixed in their seats and silent. All except his mother who sat in the front pew beside Nate. She leaned over to whisper words in the boy’s ear and Nate nodded in agreement. Then, as the sermon continued, the two of them stood and walked back down the aisle together passing Doug without so much as a glance. Right past him and out the doors of the church. Father Griffin kept speaking and the people kept listening and no one appeared to take any notice.
Walking through Dasman Square the next day, he thought he saw Nate among a group of sailors, and he followed them for a while, waiting for a chance to get ahead of them but when he did he saw that he’d been mistaken and that their faces were all as blank and remorseless as his own. Again in the evening, on one of the narrow streets by the vegetable market, he became convinced that a kid in jeans and a sweatshirt making his way through the crowd up ahead must be Nate. And yet for all his certainty, the person turned out to be a man in his late twenties, Scandinavian or German, a reporter or photographer who when Doug grabbed him by the arm wheeled about looking wide-eyed with terror, as if he expected at that very moment to be stabbed.
On the appointed morning, he took a taxi to the port, where alongside the warehouse that the security firm had rented a few GIs stood leaning against their Humvee, chewing tobacco and eyeing their older civilian charges with a mixture of envy and contempt. Inside, the armored Suburbans were being loaded with food and equipment. The drive to the border would take about two hours, depending on the convoy traffic. Each of the eight men—four Americans, two Brits, a Chilean, and an Australian—signed their final waivers and were issued satellite phones.
Doug traveled in the lead car, which kept a hundred yards back from the Humvee that led them speeding up the six-lane highway. For miles they saw nothing but sand and limestone gravel and the occasional paved lot of rusting oil drums. As they reached the outskirts of Al Abdaly, rows of greenhouses came into view, hundreds of them shimmering in the sun, and beyond them fields full of oblong tanks, which the driver said were filled with tilapia, grown here by the thousands using the same groundwater that irrigated the strawberries under all that glass.
“Fish in the desert!” the guy beside Doug said. His name was Bill Gunther and he was from Tennessee. He had three kids in grade school and said he was being paid more than he’d imagined possible.
They arrived at the border truck stop and could see across the line into Iraq, past the unmanned checkpoint and the demilitarized zone, where a UN watchtower stood empty. It would be six or seven hours before they crossed, just after nightfall. They kept close to the vehicles, listening to the distant grind of earthmovers working up and down the line of control, flattening the dirt berm to make way for the first wave of the invading army.
At dusk, they began to hear jets streaking overhead. Moving off,
away from the others, Doug wandered over the road and down a path that led past a diesel station to a shipping warehouse, its lot empty and its cargo doors shut.
Along this stretch the electric border fence still stood; behind it were coiled rows of concertina wire set in front of a wide, deep ditch in the sand. The empty highway beyond these defenses ran from here to Safwan: the highway of death, where the American planes had made of the retreating conscripts a smoldering graveyard back in ’91.
Soon, thankfully, the idleness and the thinking would end and the present would once more absorb all Doug’s attention. As the sounds of the impending blitz grew louder, the image of his young mother came to him once again, the person he remembered, the person he’d kept close, walking back down the aisle of the church with Nate. He could make no sense of it.