Via Dolorosa (42 page)

“I don’t know how long it lasted,” he told the bell captain…and it was the same thing—the truth—that he had told his superiors as well as the medical review board, “it could have been under a minute or it could have been two hours. I don’t know. But I watched them all die and I pretended to be dead, too. A rocket hit too close to the building I was in and the wall and part of the roof finally surrendered and rained down all around me. A section of the wall fell on my hand, crushing it…”

And it was like something in him blinked and shorted out. His mind summoned the image of a television just as it is turned off, and the way the screen flares to darkness leaving only that residual speck of blue fading light at its center.

Still standing in the doorway, Nick said, “I was knocked unconscious. Either by the concussion of the explosion or by sheer pain, I passed out. And when I awoke again, everything was silent. For a long while I thought I was dead. I couldn’t fully recall what had happened and I couldn’t feel any more pain, even though I could see the way the wall had fallen on my hand and knew it had been destroyed.”

“What happened?” Granger said, and that was good.

“I managed to get the pieces of wall off my hand. That’s when the pain struck me and I knew I was still alive—still alive or now in hell, because the pain was so severe. I think I passed out twice while trying to free my hand because of the pain. I remember throwing up once, too. And I remember looking at the sections of wall as I removed them—really looking at them, as if just seeing them for the first time, with all the pores in the cement and the cracks and whiteness of dust—and I thought about the man who must have made that wall, and how he probably never thought the wall would fall on the hand of an American soldier who would come in to decimate his city. That my blood was on his wall. And then I wondered where that man was. Had he fled the city? Had he been killed? Was he an innocent or had he been plotting to destroy the United States since the days of his adolescence? Anyway, that’s what I thought…”

“And my son?” Granger said.

“I finally managed to free my hand. I wrapped a strip of cloth from my shirtsleeve into a makeshift sling then bound it against my chest. Then I waited. I didn’t know what I was waiting for at the time but, in hindsight, I suppose I was just hoping I’d pass out again, maybe this time permanently, and that I wouldn’t have to go outside into the streets to see all those dead boys. But that never happened. And maybe that was the cruelest part—or perhaps the most just thing in the world.”

He had stood in the doorway of the burnt-out building, much like he stood in the doorway of his hotel room now, praying for something, anything, even if it was just to have time freeze for all eternity so no further decisions would have to be made…

“Finally, I went outside. I had my rifle up. I didn’t know how long I’d been out and I didn’t know if the insurgents were still in the mosque across the street. I passed out the door and walked against the remaining wall until I was able to duck into an alley and survey the battleground. They were dead, all of them. I could see the way they had been broken and ruined, much like my hand, and how none of them even remotely resembled the people they had been in life. And that was at least comforting, because it allowed me to believe that perhaps their souls—the essence of who they’d been—had someone managed to escape unscathed just prior to their deaths, and that somewhere, anywhere, they were at least okay.”

“Myles was still alive,” the bell captain said, his voice just barely above a whisper. “My son was still alive.”

“He was,” Nick admitted. “The only one. I saw movement across the street and saw it was one of Myles’s hands, sliding through the dirt. I felt something heave in my chest and staggered to my feet. I felt nauseous and unsteady, almost drunk. My pack and rifle suddenly gained a hundred pounds. I dropped them both to the ground and stumbled out of the alley toward the street. A part of me prayed to be gunned down, but I never heard a single shot. So I kept walking, and when I reached Myles, I could see that he had managed to turn himself over and that he was staring up at me.”

He did not see the benefit of describing to the bell captain what he actually saw, and how he had stumbled around the bodies of the others on his way to Myles—how he had tried not to look at any of them and, although the blood and ruination of their bodies had been bad, the worst had been the barbed-wire tattoo exposed on Angelino’s upper arm, now that his uniform sleeve had been shorn away, and how it suddenly looked like the most cruel and unnecessary thing in the world, the tattoo’s permanence mocking the brevity of the young boy’s life. He did not see the point of describing to Granger, either, the way his son’s body was broken and the way his face had been twisted and bloodless and pale. He also did not tell the bell captain how Myles’s first word, or attempt at a first word, had been the abbreviated, “
Lieuten
—” and how, after a hesitation and a dry-swallow of saliva, the young boy had simply begged for Nick to shoot him in the head because it hurt, it hurt, it hurt.

And Nick considered shooting him.

Shoot me. Shoot me in the head.

Hang on,
he’d told him.

Shoot me in the head. It hurts. Please, Lieutenant. Kill me.

You’ll be okay,
he’d promised the boy. No, he couldn’t shoot him. The reality of the world was rushing back to him, with all its instincts of survival.

My legs,
groaned Myles Granger, his voice hitching and sounding extremely small, extremely far away.
I don’t want to lose my legs, Lieutenant.

You’re not going to lose your legs, Myles.

I don’t want to die, Lieutenant.

You’re not—we’re not—you’re not—

“I don’t know how I did it,” Nick told the bell captain, “with my hand ruined and feeling as sick and as weak as I did, but I managed to loosen and remove Myles’s pack and all the things that made him heavy, then hoisted him up over my shoulder.”

“He was young and skinny, skin and bones,” Granger said. “He weighed next to nothing, soaking wet.”

“I carried him back across the street and back into the alley. He was sobbing against my back. I set him down in the alley and that’s when I really had a look at his legs.” He stopped himself there, not wanting to tell Myles Granger’s father about the state of his son’s legs. “After a while, we made contact with the rest of the platoon. Your son died two days later in triage.”

Granger looked at him as if he wanted the story to continue—as if, by some chance, Nick’s retelling could alter the reality of what had happened if only he’d change the ending.

“I can’t change the ending,” Nick heard himself say, not caring if Granger understood him or not. “You and I both live with guilt, Mr. Granger. So if you’re going to shoot yourself in the head, please shoot me first. Because I’m tired of thinking about it all, and I’m tired of seeing and hearing your son, too.”

The irony wasn’t lost to him—that he, Nick, was now asking a Granger to shoot him in the head and put him out of his misery. And as had happened the first time when the roles were reversed, it seemed as though the bell captain was actually considering it. Surely it would have been simple, and it would have ended it all permanently. Nick promised himself that when the bell captain finally leveled the gun at him, he would not look away and would not even close his eyes. He would take death on and watch it come and he would be better for it.

“Do it,” Nick said.

“I…can’t,” said Granger. He looked at the gun in his hand, resting on his plump thigh. “Can I?”

“It’s yes or no,” said Nick. “But whatever the decision, we have to live with it.”

“Or die with it,” said Granger.

“Yes,” Nick agreed. “Or die with it.”

Granger remained staring at the gun. Nick, too, stared at it from across the room. Then he stared at Granger. Even from this distance, he could see the large pocks in Granger’s skin, running along his cheek and up to his hairline; he could see the redness of the flesh; he could see the squint-lines around the old, old eyes.

Granger set the gun down on the bed and folded his hands in his lap. He seemed to slump forward the slightest bit.

So then,
Nick told himself,
the decision has been made.

“I’m sorry,” he said, finally entering the room. He stood before the fetal curl of the bell captain at the foot of the bed, looking down. Handwritten letters on loose-leaf paper, strewn about like confetti, littered the bedspread.

“Yes,” said the bell captain.

“And we’ve decided now, haven’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Will you let me walk you downstairs?”

“All right,” Granger said passively, not meeting Nick’s eyes. Suddenly, he had become a small child. “I know it’s done with but, just for the ride down the elevator—just for those six floors—could I call you ‘son’?”

“If it’s just for those six floors,” Nick said.

“Just the six.”

“Then all right.”

“I know you’re not Myles. I know you’re not my son and I’m not your father. I mean, I know that perfectly. It’s just…well, I want to pretend one last time.”

“For six floors,” Nick said.

“Six floors,” agreed the bell captain.

“And you should leave your gun here,” Nick added as an afterthought.

“This isn’t my gun.”

“No?”

“It’s your gun.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was here in the room when I brought the letters in,” Granger said. “It was sitting right in the center of the bed.”

“Was it?” A cold dread overtook him.

“Isn’t it yours?”

“I don’t have a gun,” Nick said. His eyes went to the little black handgun. And he recalled something Isabella had said—something about having a gun in the glove compartment of her car, and wouldn’t he, Nick, want to use it on those three men that had sailed to the island in their cabin cruiser?

Reaching out, Nick picked up the gun, hefted it, looked at it. He could see it was loaded. He slipped it into the waistband of his pants and, with that same hand, assisted Granger in removing himself from the bed.

In the hallway, Granger said, “Those are some bugs outside.”

“Yes.”

In the elevator, as if testing the feel of a new pair of shoes, Granger said, “Son.”

—Chapter XXII—

Again, the lobby was eerily silent. Nick walked Granger to the front doors, his one good hand at the small of the bell captain’s back. Outside, a light drizzle began to fall. Nick paused just inside the lobby doors, looking out. The upper portion of the windows was laden with cicadas, now having some difficulty adhering to the glass in the rain. Granger gathered his coat and keys from his workstation, gave Nick a quick hug, then examined him at arms’ length.