This piece was first published in Unlikely Stories, May 2023.
It was just after midnight on a Sunday morning in March, in the late days of the war. I barely knew dates, and none of us in the Warrior Recovery Center could imagine an end. Days of the week I knew from tracking the WRC daily schedule, because that was what you did in there. Making sense of one day at a time, Doc said, was one way of learning to get home.
“It’s about learning to return to the world,” Doc said. The WRC, as Doc explained it, was about finding a place to start. It was not a destination retreat; if you were there, it was because you’d run out of options. Doc called the project “returning to the known world, but on different terms.” His words made me think of a folded map. I was hoping if I learned to look right, I would find––something. A series of IEDs had detonated through the bodies of the men who had anchored me in the world, the last time I knew how to be. That was another world.
Whatever the terms of this one, I needed to get ahold of them. Trina had stopped asking when I’d be home. I had ruined Chloe’s eighth birthday celebration by ripping the door to her bedroom off its hinges, thinking she was trapped inside. I’d dropped Grady, the baby, before he could sit up. He was walk-running now, but still not speaking, and this was the source of a lot of the things Trina and I couldn’t say.
I hadn’t seen them since a few days after Chloe’s birthday, which was a few days before Trina found me in the truck with my lips around the barrel of the .22 contemplating the logical next step, calculating the angle and wondering how much I’d need to compensate for recoil. That was four weeks ago.
Sunday meant friends and family day, which meant a bunch of us were about to pile in a van and ride to the aquarium to whoever was still wondering when we would make it back. The idea was to practice being home before we were back in the actual spaces that we’d haunted. We would pretend to be casual patrons of the aquarium for a few hours and practice assuring ourselves and others that we were getting our bearings, that we would be home soon, that things would be some kind of normal, someday.
Doc said to practice just looking. He said don’t worry about the past, we’d deal with that in our one-on-one sessions, and the future when we came to it. For now, Doc said, the point was to practice taking stock of what was, just as it was, without trying to change it.
What else was there to do? I reviewed coordinates, surveyed surroundings.
I was in a single room on a residential hallway on the third floor of the WRC. Above the bed, a yellowish light fixture rounded from particleboard ceiling. The walls featured nondescript prints in frames, leaning abstract. There was a small desk beside the bed. My pants hung over the chair. To my right, a heavy door with an exit map posted eye level, beside a fire extinguisher.
“Nurse!” I called out. What did you have to do to get one to come?
It was a pretend call, the sort I was supposed to make if I found myself waking in a moment of panic on the floor. The idea was that if you called, certain symptoms would be alleviated.
I didn’t have it in me to keep calling. I was a far cry from the rage of bootcamp, from wanting to spit in the drill sergeant’s square red face. I had returned from a third tour a year ago. The invitation to the WRC came about six months after that.
“Fuck that,” I said, for Trina’s sake.
“I wish someone would offer me a vacation,” she said. She had her reasons. There was no room for hearing them, yet.
“It’s about finding a place to start,” Doc said.
It was 1:45 a.m. It was unlikely I would be the only one. There was a waiting room at the end of the hallway. I would walk down the hallway. I would not wait alone.
When I got here, the first real person I met, beyond the bland-faced personnel who checked my paperwork and walked me to my room, was Magic. After I got tired of staring at the ceiling waiting for my intake meeting, I walked to the waiting room to get a soda. The waiting room, shaped like the bow of a ship, had floor-to-ceiling windows facing out. Magic stood at the bowed joint of the windowed walls. His head was framed by a thick corona of grey-white hair, and there was a crown nested in it, small enough to fit one of those bottom-tier county fair stuffed animals and just as cheap. But there was something about the man’s bearing that said he either didn’t know this or didn’t care. At the clang of my can in the machine, he turned to look at me. He wore a patch over his left eye, and he held my gaze with the other, which glowed the deep brown of charred earth. His plush bathrobe was untied over a thin white t-shirt and track pants, and its color suggested the royal red of a 1970s church carpet, dyed to match the wine.
He nodded slowly, and raised both arms, one holding the cane, above his shoulders. In the gravelly voice of a bluesman, he boomed, “Welcome to the WRC!” I don’t know what my face looked like, but he chuckled and said, “Yeah, it’s okay. They all look like that at first. Stay awhile.” Moving his free arm open toward the window, he added, “Can’t beat this view,” and he laughed.
The view was desert and freeway and strip malls as far as the eye could see, stretching to the west. On my drive out, the greens of the coast had given way to wider and wider expanses of asphalt and shale, brown dust punctuated by sage and juniper, ocotillo and freeway signs, to mile after mile of billboards and motels and drive-thrus, currents of cars running back and forth between San Diego and Las Vegas, Victorville and Death Valley, Barstow and the Mojave preserve; between nowhere and the 40-East connector, past island after island of 99-cent strip malls and discount tire shops, Walmarts and Paylesses and car lots with no interest and zero down for ninety days (“Bad credit, good credit, no problem!”) where the billboards promised reverse vasectomies and Jesus is Watching and Come Stay Play, with red lips appearing over a stack of poker chips, and the world’s tallest thermometer, and it didn’t take any special sort of insight to get the message, and it was Move, Anywhere But Here.
Shortly after my welcome, Doc called me in. We had spoken on the phone once or twice before I arrived
“What’s up with the old guy?” I asked him. Doc had told me that this was a short-term “transitional care facility,” serving only recent veterans. How long had this guy been in transition, and from what war?
“That’s Magic,” Doc said, “goes by Mag.” Doc smiled like he was talking about a brother of his. “We were in the same unit in Nam.” This is why I could deal with Doc, because he had done multiple tours himself.
“He’s been here since then?”
“This place hasn’t been around that long. But when Mag ran into some trouble awhile back, I brought him here.”
“Doing what?”
“Keeping watch, right where you saw him. He’s good for morale, actually. You’ll see.”
I don’t know when Mag slept, but he was the reason that I knew, four weeks after my arrival, that when I woke up not long after midnight, that I wouldn’t be alone in the waiting room.
Sitting up was a matter of concentration. Everyday things felt like solving a riddle, where you alternate between wrapping your thoughts around a thing and then relaxing your grip. It was like looking at one of those Magic Eye posters, where you look, blur your vision, look, let go again, and there it would be, the image that was right there all along, which nobody could see at first unless they got lucky or learned how.
The bathroom light was on. I walked five paces to the sink, opened the faucet, splashed water against my face. Towel, teeth, slippers under the bed. Look, blur, look. I was trying to learn to hold onto things like this so if I slipped when I got home, I could catch myself before I heard Trina’s voice screaming my name, or saw Chloe’s scared eyes, backing away. It had to be possible, to live without waking up shouting, making the babies scream.
I opened the door. The hallway was industrial white with track lighting and emergency exit signs. The only lights on in the waiting room at this hour were those glowing from the machines in the nurse’s station against the back wall, and near the elevator and the sliding glass doors by the entrance. The chairs in the seating area were angled to face out. Mag was there, standing with his cane at the joint of the bowed windows, looking past his own reflection, over the lights and traffic of the desert floor, toward an invisible ocean.
“That you, Woz?” Mag called out without turning as I entered.
“Hey Mag, when do you sleep?”
“It’s a few hours ‘till sunrise still.”
“Yeah.”
As Doc explained it, he had been with Mag in a similar facility in the decade or so after they left Vietnam. I had to ask around for the rest of the story. According to legend, Mag had been out for a little while in the seventies, then back in when he got into some trouble with the pipe, then back out when he got cleaned up, and that’s where he got into magic. He had cards, dice, wand, rings, even a white rabbit.
Now it was just a wand, collapsed to the size of a pencil and narrow, which he wore tucked behind his ear or above it, nested in his gray-white mane. He used to save the rabbit out of the hat trick for last because the kids loved it and when the kids were lit up the tips were good. He was doing well in those years––getting clean, a few trips and false starts, but you never know. Apparently, one day he went to pull out the rabbit and came up instead with the severed head of his best friend, the shock of which was fatal to the rabbit. It became clear, after that, to Mag and anyone who would know him afterwards, that his audience was not the tourists and the Sunday families of Seaport Village, just in from church and waffle cones.
It would be a few hours before the others were up and gathered around the room in their usual poses: Picker with his guitar, Rev with the good book, and Candy Crush hunched over his phone. I’d been up at this hour more times than I could count, and usually after the initial greeting with Mag, I would just sit and stare out, past my own faint reflection in the window, into the freeway lights and the shadows of the mountains in the distance. If I was going to be awake and staring out, it was better to do it here than alone in a room, facing the ceiling. Mag seemed to know this, and more than once I had found myself waking up in chair around sunrise.
This time, Mag spoke.
“You know,” he said, still facing out.
I leaned forward. “What’s that, Mag?”
He pulled the wand from his hair and turned toward me with his single eye. Holding it up, he said, in a low voice, “it’s just a prop.”
When I was a kid too old for Underoos and too young for facial hair, I had a beginner’s magic kit and a cape. I even had the hat and the wand. It was one of the only things we’d ever spoken about, one-on-one. This was after Mag called me out, on day two, which I later learned was how he welcomed most of the new guys in. I was seated at an angle, behind him on the wall opposite the vending machine.
Holding a finger to his good eye and looking right at me, Mag said, “I may have one, but that’s enough to see you watchin’ me.”
Trying to play cool, I only nodded, “I hear you.”
He was quick to clarify. “Nah, son. I mean I left my goddamn nuts in a jungle hole.”
“Shit.”
“Hah! Like a goddamn squirrel saving up for a long winter!”
After that introduction, it was impossible not to have a certain kinship with Mag. It was about two weeks after that when we’d talked about magic, at an hour like this one, before any of the others were awake.
A magic act, when it worked, had three parts. First came The Pledge, where you show something ordinary. Present a box tall enough for a woman. Tie her wrists to the top. Get a dollar from an audience member and mark it. Hold up a simple piece of rope.
Then came the Turn. Here, the ordinary thing become something else. Divide the box with the woman into four pieces and pull it all apart. Insert swords at various angles. Rip the marked dollar in pieces. Knot the rope and cut it.
We’d been interrupted at that point. Now, Mag picked up the loose end. Punctuating the air with the wand he’d pulled from his hair, he said, “Okay, so you got your pledge, then you got your turn. What else you know.”
I had been thinking about this. “That’s the thing, Mag. I don’t remember. I never really did it.”
Mag waited, holding his eye on me. Then, slowly, he tucked the wand back behind his ear, and nodded slow. “That’s alright,” he said. “Takes some time.”
I didn’t remember going back to my room, but a few hours later, that’s where I was. The sky through the blinds was predawn purple and it was still Sunday. I would have a brief one-on-one session with Doc and by late morning we would be driving west in the van, to the aquarium. I thought about Chloe, how she told me over the phone that she lost a back molar, and how quick she had been to announce, “I don’t put them under my pillow anymore.” I thought about asking her why, and then thought better of it.
I hadn’t been sure about the aquarium trip, but Trina, who had pretty much given up asking for anything, had strong opinions.
“Dammit, Woz,” she said, when we spoke the week before, “It’s the fucking aquarium.”
Apparently, third grade had gone at the end of last month, just after I left, and Chloe had been asking to return ever since. But Trina couldn’t get off work on discount days and she couldn’t send Chloe by herself and there wasn’t anywhere near money enough for three tickets.
“It’s what, two, three hours? You better fucking go,” she said, “I mean it.”
So now it was Sunday, and I was going, and I was reviewing my reasons why.
This week’s focus, Doc had said in Thursday’s group, was recapitulation.
“It just means going back,” Doc said, “In time. Not to dwell, though. To look.”
“Why?”
“To frame it. Then you can carry it and move it where you need it to go.” The unframed images, as Doc explained it, just floated around like flammable gas.
After the blast in Kabul, I carried Mennick down the narrow stairway. He had taken it to the head. Later that night, I spat his blood in the sink when I brushed my teeth, and watched it go down the drain. “Instantly,” was the only answer I could offer when Mennick’s wife showed up at the airport, wanting to know how he died.
Review reasons: the point of being here, the point of the meetings, the pills, the waiting in place, the industrial building, was, as Doc put it, “to buy you a little time.” Doc didn’t focus much on adjusting, which he said everyone was already doing in their own way. “The goal is management of what’s getting in the way,” he said. In my case, what was getting in the way was the endless looping slideshow: man halfway to the ground with a hole in his forehead, a little girl watching, the bullet-ridden wall behind her. Moreno’s body in flames. Check for a pulse, twenty rolls of gauze around his shattered pelvis. How many explosions? Time to move. Then the new refrigerator was dented where I kicked it and chow mein spilled across the counter, with Chloe’s door off its hinges and the dog afraid to come near me.
In Tuesday sessions, Doc had been saying that one of the ways to get home was to find the story to land you back in it. He had examples that made sense in the moment, but later, when I tried to do it myself, I had the beginnings and endings exploding like IED’s under the shawls of old women and in the bellies of roadside goats. As Doc told it, “You can’t find peace when you’re carrying a war.” His idea was that a story, if you could frame it, could hold you in place when needed, and be a bridge back home. The known world was split into more dimensions than I could count.
I got up to shower and shave and put on my best t-shirt and good jeans. Real shoes instead of slippers. We wouldn’t leave for several hours, but I wasn’t going to be waiting around in my room. I headed down the hall.
The early risers were a regular group. Picker sat with his back to the wall, closest to the nurse’s station, below the clock, guitar in his lap. Mag was in his usual spot at the window.
I resumed my earlier seat. Across the way from the windows where Mag kept watch, at a chair by the vending machine, beneath a single light, and across from the glow of the nurse’s station––efficient clicks and buzzes, opening and closing of doors––sat Rev, a pimple-faced boy old enough to be called a man but not convincingly. There was something about Rev’s face that called to mind certain cartoon rodents. I couldn’t tell you a time when I’d seen him without his leather-bound Bible in his hand. He arrived a day or two after I did, and he didn’t speak at all for at least a week. When he finally broke the silence, it was to mutter mostly under his breath while rocking back and forth in a rhythmic chanting wave, and occasionally exclaim a coherent line of scripture. A few early mornings, it had been only me, Rev, and Mag in the room. I’d tap my foot and Mag would hum sometimes, real low and deep. Rev read his book and looked up every so often to proclaim.
“Let the sea resound and everything in it, the world and all who live in it,” he cried out.
Picker started picking on his guitar beneath the clock, which appeared to be broken.
“It’s not broken,” Diaz was saying. “Look.”
The second hand was moving.
“It’s just off, which does no one any good. completely broken clock is at least right twice a day. One that’s off is never right.”
Picker resumed his customary refrain, “Sing it now, muse!”
“We the city,” Rev said.
Listening to Rev went hand-in-hand with wondering what part of the riddle was yet to fall into place. Picker continued.
“Get to tellin’ me, muse, the story of–––
Rev went through the motions of thumbing the pages of his bible to find the verse but by then it was clear that already knew most of them by heart.
“Tell it muse, break on through, give it up and bring it new!”
“City doesn’t need the sun,” Rev called out, in his pulpit voice.
“Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, muse––
We all nodded: Diaz, Picker, BigMac, even Candy Crush, who had never looked up from his phone. Rev might be batshit crazy by outside standards, but the boy knew his scripture.
Some time passed. Maybe an hour. It was hard to tell.
“Sing it to me, Muse,” Picker started again.
T-Bone wiped his brow with his finger, shaking his head with a quick sideways twist.
“Sonofabitch,” he said. “That motherfucker don’t get on up offa that tune, Ima put a piece of muse up his ass.”
T-bone would eat anything that came his way, but he almost never failed to comment on his preference for something else.
“Wish this was a steak,” T-Bone would say, at most meals.
I had only been in church on a handful of occasions as a boy, at the Union Methodist on Spring Street, but I was familiar enough with the movements of a traditional service to recognize it when a hush would fall over the room and you could feel the breaths of a whole congregation of neighbors waiting in silence for something to come and move them.
I felt it then. A voice among the congregation answered.
“What muse you know, T-Bone? A-1? Leave him be. He already got enough shrapnel in his ass to cut your dick to judgement day. His song ain’t hurting you none.”
Picker kept on. “Give it to me ––
Mag uttered a low Amen.
“Lay it over me, Muse––
Picker strummed a few more bars wordlessly, dropped the progression, and started again.
“Just wish it was a whole song, that’s all,” T-bone commented, but softer.
“Well, so does he,” came Diaz. “Ain’t you been listening?”
Rev, walking to the john, repeated a familiar verse. “He who has ears, let him hear.”
The familiar hush fell again. Doors opened and closed. A few new guys arrived, heading through the back door for their intake evals.
Eventually, a voice called out, “Hey Mag, what’s good?”
Magic didn’t take orders. If someone pushed him for a show or a sermon, he’d say, “Lost it.” He sometimes acted like he was bored by the idea, but this was all part of Mag’s technique. He knew how to work a crowd for maximum suspense.
“A song, maybe?”
“That’s gone, too.” Mag only sang when the spirit moved him.
“A story?”
“Hmmm. Don’t have one, but I can tell you what happened, case you forgot.”
The congregation waited.
After a beat, someone called out. “Mag, whatchou waiting for?” This from a pear-shaped kid with squinty eyes and a tiny head. He had arrived the week before, and already he was Mole.
“Where to begin, Mole.”
What story do you tell when the main characters are still missing? Consider the still-breathing men in the belly of a tank, moments before the IED detonates directly below them. Is this a beginning, or is this the moment right before the end?
Where story do you give to Moreno, J-Dogg, Ruiz? Their bodies were shipped home in pieces, but I had walked out on both legs. Only Trina was there, waiting. When she looked at me, I could feel her searching for something I knew she wouldn’t find.
“C’mon Mag, start anywhere,” someone called.
Mag’s stories, which tended to be the main events of the waiting room, took certain predictable forms, when it came to beginnings. A knock at the door, an unexpected call, someone waking up. Then a long pause.
“But what happened?”
This was the new kid with one leg gone, who spent most of the day glazed over his phone playing Candy Crush. He was starting to get the drift.
Mag looked at him, one eyebrow raised and half a smile curling over his pursed lips.
The sudden attention seemed to make him bold. He looked up, his face suddenly animated. “Seriously man. No bullshit, something!” Until that moment, I had never heard him speak.
Mag sent the gaze of his eye back over the horizon. “Okay, a phone call.”
Responses were supposed to follow in chorus. Mag would wait.
“That’s right, Mag. That’s the trick.”
“No tricks I told you,” Mag reminded.
A groan wound through the room. “C’mon, man!”
“Ain’t no spectators either,” he said. He took a breath, released it like a sigh. He turned from the window to the room, and the men bowed their heads.
“Yes, yes, that’s it.”
Mag rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s how it goes down. Listen––
Rev nodded, “He who has ears, let him hear.”
“It goes like this,” Mag proclaimed. “You know the story.”
With four tours inside him, Mag had more jungle grenades in his memory and more shrapnel in his legs than ten men––not counting his nuts. He had a way of taking all this wreckage and molding it. His stories varied, depending on his mood and sense of what the room needed. It seemed like Mag was long past the point of trying to tell his story to himself. Leading his audience had taken the burden from him.
“A messenger calls. A woman picks up.”
“Mmmmmh hmmmm, that’s right.”
“A voice addresses her. It’s a stranger’s voice, but she knows in her gut it’s about as expected as anything she’s ever heard.”
“Yes.”
“She clutches the counter, and the voice says, ‘He’s being Medivac’d,’ and the woman can’t help herself. She has to ask, ‘What happened?’ and the messenger has to remind her, ‘Don’t ask.’”
“That’s right.”
“The woman asks why, and the messenger explains.”
Mag bowed his head. I thought of the stages of a magic act, how you start by taking something familiar. He walked a solemn ten paces, slowly on his cane, away from the window. Now he’d turn it into something else. He paused, looked up at the ceiling lights again.
“Go ‘head, Mag.”
One hand on his cane, Mag raised the other before him like he was pointing to a rat on the floor. “He was a man.” As he spoke, he raised it up. “It was war.” Notch by notch until he got to five o’clock. His deepened with each word. There were no other sounds in the room. “Here was something to be.”
“Mmmmmm.”
“Trying to avoid it was like trying to avoid being a food stamp kid from Podunk, Arkansas and still needing to fly.”
“That’s right.”
“See, his Dad once caught him, in superman Underoos perched on the back of a secondhand Lazyboy, ready to leap. ‘What the hell’re you doing?’ Pops shouted, like there was an answer to a need like that.”
Now Mag’s face assumed the scowl of the father in his story, and he strode three paces to his right, quickly now. He paused to stand over Candy Crush. Candy Crush looked up. Mag raised his arms, cane toward the ceiling, head cocked at an angle to the side. Still holding the voice and the face of the father he was conjuring, Mag stared down, and to look at Candy Crush beneath his stare, it was impossible not to notice how a boy could hide scared inside the body of a man.
Mag boomed, “Well?!”
His game abandoned, Candy Crush fixed his eyes on Mag. I recognized the look. He was trying to hold his face still. I’d seen it in Chloe before I left. I’d seen it in the mirror since I arrived.
Mag lowered his arms, letting his right hand hover for a moment over Candy Crush’s forehead, like he was about to drop a blessing.
Turning back toward the center of the room, Mag’s voice grew lower in pitch and louder in tone. “But there it was, anyway.”
“There it was.”
“The problem with Why is it’s a riddle you can’t solve.”
“Amen, Mag.”
“It’ll hijack your dreams and nosedive them straight into nightmares.”
Magic raised both arms to the ceiling, fists clenched, and then he opened them wide, as the cane dropped with emphasis to the floor.
Candy Crush released a guttural noise into his hand, somewhere between a sob and a cough. Other men kept their heads down, rocking back and forth. No one looked. Mag gazed into the seafoam linoleum tiles, one eye slowly rising over the men, over the aluminum supports of the industrial-strength picnic tables, past the working clocks that wouldn’t tell time, and into the spaces between the perforations of the corrugated ceiling tiles.
“The question is, can you hold it still when–––
Now we were all leaning in.
“Can you hold it still when––
“Woz?” The name took a moment to register. It was Doc’s voice, calling me from the back of the room. It was time for my one-on-one.
I looked up. The spell was broken. There would be no more story for today. I went.
Meetings with Doc were called going to the bars, because to get to his private office you had to go through a barred entrance between the waiting room and the administrative and medical offices.
“That’s just a security measure,” Doc had explained the first time. “You know, protocol bullshit.”
Doc wanted to know how the recapitulation practice was going.
“Like a problem I can’t solve.”
Doc nodded. “What problem are you trying to solve?”
“Making it make sense? The story.” I was on my fourth week in and not meaning to come back, and still the best I could seem to do involved keeping the time of day by pills: three prescription vials, one at a time, three times a day: anxiety, nightmares, heart. The days I tracked by what meetings had been scheduled for me.
“Don’t solve it,” Doc said. “You can’t. Just make something new.”
What?
“Something you can live with,” Doc said, “you don’t need to get back to some mythical Before.” As Doc saw it, that was a waste. There wasn’t any sense to be made about what happened over there.
“That’s the story?”
“You want a war story, read the ancients.” Doc would talk about them sometimes in group, and we could never get enough. He told a lot of the Greek ones. The hero Achilles, how he was paralyzed by grief before he was driven mad with vengeance. Ajax, driven to suicide. King Priam, who has to bow to Achilles to retrieve the body of his son. Odysseus, who was ten years in a war he didn’t want to fight, and ten more trying to get home, while all the while his castle was being overrun by the men who slaughtered his sheep, disgraced the home he had built, and tried to get with his wife. The thing we all appreciated about Doc was how he didn’t pull punches and he didn’t pretend.
“You’re starting all over,” he said. “Use whatever you can find from before. Hold on to that, but it won’t be the same shape.”
When our time was up, Doc said, “See you in a little bit.” He would drive the van to the aquarium.
I returned to the waiting room in a moment when it was clear that Mag was waiting for his last sentence to sink in. Picker picked his tune and Rev rocked over the book. T-Bone crunched corn nuts and wished out loud for a steak. I waited in my usual chair, my leg crunching the vinyl as it bobbed over my foot. The fingers of my missing hand still moved toward a fist.
Eventually, Doc came back into the room.
“Okay, boys,” Doc said. “Time to roll out. Who’s riding with me?”
“Where y’all goin’?” Mag asked like he didn’t know.
“Friends and family day, Mag,” said Doc. “Aquarium, here we come.”
“Mmmmmm,” Mag raised his chin toward the invisible coast. “Way out there?”
“That’s right, Mag. Gonna breathe some ocean air today.”
“Can’t nobody say they don’t take care of us when we get back, right boys? I mean, look––
He raised his right arm in a gesture of proclamation. Holding it high in the air, his voice echoed across the room.
“––Free fish!”
Picker’s laugh in this moment was probably the first sound anyone had ever heard him make beyond his endless loop of half-finished notes. Those of us who were riding raised a hand at Mag and Picker and Rev and we followed Doc down the elevator to the main floor, through the double-glass doors to the parking lot.
Then came two and a half hours of desert freeway strip mall, fast food and new communities, the stench of cattle and the rapid fire of big-rig Jake brakes, and we crossed the pass and descended into green, through the valley, toward the ocean.
Trina would be there at the entrance, but just to say hello, hug, and send Chloe in. She would then wait outside with Grady who would prefer to spend his time toddling up to the fountain and laughing at the ducks.
Her skin looked sallow. Even through her makeup, there were dark circles under her eyes. She didn’t search my face anymore, for the thing that wasn’t there. I could tell it was hard for her to even look up, but she did, and she gave an eyeroll smile as Grady squirmed. It was something.
“How is he?” I asked, reaching for Grady.
“He’s okay.” Her sigh was barely audible, but I heard. “Still no words.”
It wasn’t clear if the delay in Grady’s speech had anything to do with the way I dropped him. That was a year and a half ago, before he could even sit up. I had fallen asleep holding him in the middle of the afternoon. I was jolted awake by a sound that might have been a garbage truck or a dumpster lid. Whatever it was, it sent me right back to al-Amin, climbing down the narrow stairs of a hallway smelling like cow shit, with mortar rounds exploding outside the window and the limp weight of Mennick draped over my back. I had him anchored over my right shoulder, and blood poured from his helmet, into my mouth. I slipped on the bottom stair and almost lost him.
A crack and a thud. “I got you, I got you,” I told Mennick. But there was so much blood. He didn’t respond.
Then the frame switched and I was back in the bedroom with Grady’s piercing scream. A crack and a thud. It must have been Grady’s head against the corner of the end table, then to his back on the carpet. Trina must have just gotten home. She came running into the room.
“Goddammit!”
There was no blood. He had cried for a long time and then he stopped. Eight months later, he still didn’t talk. The drop happened a few weeks before I kicked Chloe’s bedroom door off its hinges. Soon after that, she went back to wetting the bed.
The last time I had gone to the Food4Less with Chloe, she wore a cape and a tiara. This was something she hadn’t done since pre-K.
“What’s up with the outfit?” I asked her. This was not long after I got home from the third tour. My head was bandaged and what was left of my left arm was in a sling. Minor injuries, relatively speaking.
Taking my good hand, she looked up at me and said, “So people stare at me instead of you.”
While I was holding Grady by the aquarium entrance, Chloe hung back, looking at her shoes and then up at me with a nervous half smile. I handed Grady back to Trina, who followed him after the ducks. I went to Chloe and got down on one knee, saying “Hey little Tiger.”
She pressed her forehead into the shoulder of my good arm and put one arm across that side of my back. Then she pulled back and reached into her pocket.
“I made you this.” She handed me a piece of white paper folded in neat squares.
It was a pencil drawing. The face looked like a wild pig, but the body was more like a horse. On the end of its wild pig snout was something like and elephant trunk. Wavy elephant ears framed its pig face.
“It’s a Baku,” she said. “It’s Japanese.”
“Is it a monster?”
“No, it’s good. It eats dreams.” She had a book she was reading for a class mythology project. “If you wake up you have to say three times, ‘Baku, eat my dreams.’”
I wanted to ask her to say more, but I didn’t think I could speak with a steady voice, and the last thing I wanted to do was scare her again.
I wanted to give her a story, but I didn’t have any that I could tell yet. A riddle, maybe. She used to love those. I had one about the ocean. I was trying to remember.
You’re on a sailboat, in the middle of the ocean––
We laughed at Grady chasing the ducks. The other men started to follow Doc’s hand signals toward the entrance. I reached out my good hand. Chloe took it, even though she’d told me over a year ago that she was really too old for that now. We went inside.
“My class came here. There’s this really cool exhibit.”
The exhibit was called Strange Creatures. There were different areas according to the categories of strangeness: the shapeshifters, the glowing ones, and the killers. It was geared for kids. The cards behind the specimen jars had comic book lettering and most of the descriptions were followed by exclamation points.
We stood before the embalmed creatures stored beneath a “DEADLY VENOM!” sign.
“The fugu pufferfish carries toxins 1200 X more lethal than cyanide!”
“Cone snail: tooth like a harpoon!”
“Stonefish: Spines like hypodermic needles; the most venomous fish in the sea!”
As far as I could tell, the point was to induce shock and awe at the fact that something that didn’t look like much could be full of so many surprising ways to kill.
Outside, near the tide pools, the view went down to the coast. Waves broke in the distance. Tiny people splashed and ran along the beach.
“Hey Dad, why didn’t the girl trust the ocean?”
“There was something fishy about it.”
We walked past the seahorses, the hammerhead sharks, the glowing jellyfish, and the tiny turtles. I was still trying to remember the ocean riddle.
You’re on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean. The boat has four boards on the side. They are two feet wide each.
We passed through another room with bigger fish, bigger turtles, and coral reefs.
“Come in here,” she said, taking my good hand again, and we entered a room where the window reached from floor to ceiling. Light filtered through the surface of the water, high above the ceiling. People whispered at the window.
“Kelp beds are my favorite,” Chloe said. She read from a card. “They grow best in regions of upwelling.”
We stepped back. There was a carpeted ledge behind us. We sat, and light moved through the water.
I wished I could name some of the fish. Chloe kept reading.
“The larger and stronger the rock on which it is anchored, the greater the chance of kelp survival.”
You’re on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean.
“A place for refuge from larger predators, and also a retreat from violent currents and winter storms.”
The boat has four boards on the side. They are two feet wide each. If the water level rises––
“They fall apart in the warm water, in the summer.”
I don’t know how long we were there, but then I looked up and Chloe was coming back in the room, wiping her eyes with a half-smile.
“Dad,” she said. “Mom’s at the concession stand. She says to find out what you want to eat. She says we have like thirty minutes.”
“Okay, tiger. Come here.” We looked for a little while more, her warm head tucked into my good side.
“Here’s a good one,” I said.
She looked up.
“You’re on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean. The boat has four boards on the side. They are two feet wide each. If the water level rises four feet, what board will the water reach?”
Her mouth fell open while she thought about it.
“Dad, we don’t do geometry in third grade.”
“Hint. It makes no difference if the water rises.”
I watched the idea working through her face.
“Now why is that?”
She clamped her jaw, chewed her cheek. Then her mouth fell wide open, and she looked me full in the eyes.
“The boat floats!”
After that, we ate some fried food and watched Grady with the ducks.
Then it was time, and I stopped trying to hold my face still. Chloe wiped her tears on the sleeve of her shirt.
“Don’t forget about the Baku,” she said.
“See you soon, tiger.” I didn’t know when. “Don’t forget the riddle.”
Doc stood by the van. We climbed in and drove away from the coast, over mountains and through miles of desert. It was during those hours that I remembered something Mag had said to me, about how he didn’t recommend wasting a whole lot of time remembering or making predictions. “All that matters now is keeping watch and making something in-between with whoever’s there with you. If you’re alone, making do.”
“Lemme tell you,” Mag had said to me when I told him I couldn’t remember any magic acts, “The last part is the hardest part to pull off.” The box is reassembled, the swords removed. The woman emerges unscathed. The magician produces a lemon, slices it open, and removes the marked dollar from inside the fruit. The knot is undone, and the rope appears restored to the original length. “It’s called the Prestige,” he said. “That’s where you take the thing you started with and bring it back.”
I must have looked a little too long when he said that because the next thing he said was, “But don’t go getting any ideas or drawing no metaphors, you hear? This is something else entirely. Ain’t no tricks about it.”
Still, it was a start. I would save that for next time I saw Chloe.
It was getting dark when we pulled up the ramp to the center. The sky was purpling and the stars had yet to come out.
The third-floor lights were on, and Mag stood in the window.
Doc parked, we walked across the lot. I looked up at Mag, his wild hair and steady pose.
He knew who he was protecting, and from what.
Cane in one hand, he raised his free hand in a wave as we walked toward the entrance. I stopped to meet his gaze. I opened my hand. Raising my good arm toward him, I held it there, aimed high at our waiting space.