“Screw it,” the guy said, dumping his rations too. “It’s still cruel, but I’m not hungry anymore.”
The column made its way as quickly as it could toward
a new bridge, one that had been recently erected so that we could access the military’s sceondary port on Qeshm Island. We rolled across and I glanced back. It was the last time I’d see Bandar, and I already missed it, knowing that this was another one of those special moments, a transition from one major set of events to another—like saying goodbye to your first girlfriend after high school and promising to call every day but deep down knowing that you wouldn’t. Bandar was where we had made our first deal, without even knowing it. We’d all stepped off a boat, civilian and military, and walked up the hill to whatever waited for us and subconsciously signed off on an agreement to leave the world behind and go down the rabbit hole.
A sign announced that winds were blowing to the north, and I took my helmet off, letting the breeze dry my tears. Sophie touched my face with a warm gauntlet.
“They are still here,” she said, and then touched my chest. “In here. All of them.”
“I know. It’s not why I’m sad.”
“Then why?”
“Because I don’t know where
I
am. And you’re right, I think too much.”
When we saw the port, I started feeling better. The APCs wound through a mountain road, and at one point it looked over the piers, new ones that had been erected to handle transports and warships, huge things that resembled footballs half submerged, with openings to let their weaponry breathe. The docks swarmed with Navy personnel, and as I watched, they pushed APCs and tanks off the end of a pier, into deep water. The sight made some guys laugh. Soon we’d be down there, waiting again for
however long it took for a clerk to enter our names into the system, assign us a berth for one last trip. I didn’t laugh. Sophie wouldn’t get a berth unless we figured something out quickly, but then I had no way of knowing that someone who I hadn’t seen in a long time waited down there, someone forgotten, someone who always had all the answers.
Dan Wodzinski’s voice rang out, cutting through all the noise of Marines and Legionnaires as they jostled for position in the crowds, waiting to board one of the ships.
“Oscar Wendell!”
I saw him and grabbed Sophie’s hand, dragging her with me and telling the Brit and the kid I’d catch up with them later. When I got close enough, Dan hugged me.
“Jesus. When I saw you, I almost didn’t recognize you; you look half dead.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Came back. I had to see the final days, you know? I left after the last time I saw you, and thought I’d never come back, but something about this. Just had to be
here,
you know? Report it all. Funny, but nobody else is around. The story’s dead and everyone thought I was crazy to want to cover it.”
There wasn’t a lot of time. We had spotted Special Forces patrolling the docks, and every once in a while, they’d zero on someone who still had his lid on, asking him to remove it. I grabbed Dan by the collar.
“I need your help.”
“Sure. With what?”
“This is Sophie. She can’t take her helmet off because
she’s a genetic and if Special Forces spot her, they’ll kill her. We need to get her out of here.” When I finished, I assumed that he’d tell me to get lost, or give us up on the spot, but to my amazement he just nodded and turned to walk in the opposite direction, away from the military section of Qeshm port. When he saw that we hadn’t followed, he stopped.
“Are you coming or what?”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“There’s a way to get her out; she’s not the first, you know. Hundreds of them escaped, and most are heading for Thailand. The Thais have some enlightened position on genetics and offered them amnesty as long as they’re willing to serve in the army as instructors, to help them in bush wars with the Burmese. I think I know a way to get her there.”
“See?” Sophie whispered as we jogged to catch up with him. “All you had to do was trust.”
“It won’t be easy,” Dan continued, “but a bunch of Korean ships just docked here a day ago, hoping to get some salvage deal for the vehicles and equipment we’re discarding. Find the right one, a captain willing to take a chance, and she’s in. I hope you have money, though.”
I thought for a second. “You have a satellite phone?” He tossed me one and I struggled to remember a phone number I hadn’t called in years, trying three times before getting it right as we moved into the civilian port area. Ten minutes later I hung up. “I have money. Haven’t had anything to spend it on since I got here, so it should be enough. In fact, I’m loaded.”
“Good. You’ll need it. Thank God these guys all speak English.”
I wouldn’t have known where to start. Sophie moved close to me and it wasn’t clear if she was afraid, but I figured she had to be, because this was it, and either it would work and she’d disappear and I wouldn’t know when I’d see her again, or it wouldn’t and she’d die. There was a lead weight in my gut and I wanted to run back into the desert with her, just bug and figure out a way to live in Iran with the blind kids. Instead we walked the quay and looked at the ships. Dan pointed to one that was dirtier than the rest, an old fishing vessel that had so many APCs stacked on its deck that it seemed about to founder, and the vehicles hung over the edge so that their front wheels spun slowly. The captain stood at the gangplank and pulled on a cigarette while his men prepared to cast off; he smiled as we approached, showing teeth that were somewhere between yellow and brown.
“You headed to Korea?” Dan asked.
He nodded. “Pusan. Long trip.”
“Any chance you’d take a passenger?”
“All of you?”
Dan shook his head. “Just one. A girl.” He gestured for Sophie to take her helmet off, and when she did, the captain’s smile disappeared.
“No way. Too risky. Bad luck.”
“We’ll pay. A lot.”
The captain thought for a moment and then glanced over our shoulders, back at the warships. “Anyone see you come here?”
“No.”
“Pusan is a hundred thousand. More for me to take her all the way to Bangkok.”
And then she was in. As Dan haggled for us, I pulled
Sophie to the side, between a pair of huge crates, and kissed her when she started crying. We stood there for a minute before she looked at me and smiled.
“Will I get to Thailand?”
“We’ll get you to Pusan,” I said. “And we’ll have to figure they’ll do what they promise and take you to Thailand from there.”
“You’ll come for me. Soon.”
“As soon as I can. I’ll head for Bangkok and the first of us to make it will find the other. I’ve been there once before and stayed at the Mandarin Oriental. Just go there every Sunday at noon and we’ll meet in the lobby.”
Dan walked over and put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s time. Two hundred thousand, Oscar.” He handed me a slip of paper with the name of a bank and an account number, and as I phoned in the transfer, my voice trembled, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might never see her again. Everything happened quickly from there. Once the captain confirmed the transfer, he ushered Sophie onto the deck, and before she disappeared below, she glanced at me one last time, just for a second, with a look of terror that burned into my brain.
“It’ll be OK, Oscar,” said Dan. “She’ll make it. There wasn’t any choice, anyway.” A horn sounded from the military docks and Dan pushed me toward them, breaking into a jog at the same time. “That’s for us.”
You would have thought that Marines and Legion troops were all muscle, like heavyweight boxers with no necks, but they weren’t. Before they loaded us onto the ship, we lined up for delousing and a trim, and everyone, including
me, the Brit, and the kid, had to dump his suit and undersuit into a mountainous pile at the quay’s edge and stand naked in line. Dan laughed as he watched. The Navy turned hoses on us one by one and sprayed a mixture of cold water and chemicals so that we all bellowed with pain, the water pressure great enough to make it feel like a stream of needles. From there we moved to barbers, who shaved us all down with electric razors until our skin had been exposed from scalp to cheek. There wasn’t a big guy in the whole group. All of them looked like scarecrows, with thin wiry builds and the kind of body that comes only from months on the march and a constant worry of death, the skin pale from an internal disease of the mind and near-total lack of sunlight. After the haircut, they issued us khaki uniforms, and I slid my only remaining possession, my wallet, into the front pocket. A line of clerks waved us onto a ship and we stepped aboard with uncertainty, unsure of what waited for us belowdecks.
On our way down I passed a stainless steel cabinet, its face so shiny that it acted like a mirror, and I froze. Whoever looked back wasn’t me. Thermal gel had pockmarked his face, the right ear looked ragged where the bottom half had been removed by fléchettes, and his cheeks had become so sunken that his head looked more like a skull than anything of flesh—something resembling an old Abraham Lincoln. Dan pushed me forward so the line would keep moving, and I stumbled on, dazed.
“That doesn’t look like me,” I said.
“It’s you. When’s the last time you used a mirror?”
“Months. Maybe years.”
“Well, take it from me, Oscar—it’s you and you’ve changed.”
We got to our berthing area, which happened to be in one of the cargo holds that had been packed with crates, each of them marked with the symbol for the metal it held. In a way, we were all rich. The kid and the Brit found flat spots to lie down, and Dan and I sat next to them, waiting for the ship to begin moving. It was my last moment of fear that we’d be attacked without any way to defend ourselves, and the thought that we couldn’t see outside made me sweat. I looked around for Sophie, panicking when I couldn’t find her.
Dan handed me a cigarette. “She’ll be all right.”
“Sophie make it out?” the Brit asked. I told him what had happened and he smiled. “You did well, mate. Not bad. Hell, we all did. I didn’t expect any of us to make it out, but here we are.”
I introduced them finally to Dan, and we all talked for a while, until the ship got under way. The engines thrummed throughout the hold, shaking the crates underneath us, and we felt the gentle bump as the vessel pulled away from the quay. After an hour we must have made it to deeper water, where the swells rocked us back and forth, and every once in a while, a Navy guy would shout from overhead to stop smoking, and someone would shout back to go to hell. I was about to fall asleep when Dan tugged on my shirt.
“It’s over. You’ll be home soon.”
“I know.”
“You haven’t been back in a while, have you? How long?”
“A year or two.”
Dan sighed. “It’s different, Oscar. Not bad, just… weird. Nobody even remembers that this war happened, and there’s a backlash against genetics, to the point where
within a couple of years the major powers will probably sign a treaty—banning their production.”
“That’s OK with me. I won’t be staying long. Just long enough to tie up loose ends at home, then head for Thailand.”
“Just don’t forget that it’ll be cool no matter what.”
“No it won’t. Nothing’s cool anymore. Never was.”
Dan nodded, pulling on his cigarette before blowing a series of smoke rings. “I’m not going back to the States.”
“Where, then?”
“I met a girl in London. I think I’ll leave the ship in England.”
“How long?” I asked. “Before we get there?”
“I don’t know.”
Our return trip took over a month. The truth is that I don’t remember much of that trip, because the accumulated exhaustion hit me all at once, and my body released all its tension at the same time, so I slept for most of the voyage, threw up a lot when I was awake, and smoked with the kid and the Brit for the rest of the time. Dan and the Brit left us in England. The kid and I said goodbye to them and we promised we’d keep in touch, but it wasn’t true, because the fact was that I didn’t want to keep in touch with them—maybe someday but not soon. Already my mind had convinced itself that none of the war had happened and that it would be safer to stay away from the things that reminded me that it
had,
and that I was its product. A stillborn son of conflict. When we crossed the Atlantic, there was the added bonus of watching the kid unravel and having to hold him in the middle of the night while he screamed that he didn’t want to go home and could someone give him some armor because
he didn’t want to die when we got to port. I promised him that there would be armor waiting when we got there, but eventually enough guys in the hold complained about his shouting that a pair of corpsman showed up one morning to take him to sick bay, where I suppose he passed the rest of the trip on psychotropics. It was the last time I saw him.
About a week out of Norfolk it hit me that I’d be heading home. Until then it still hadn’t felt real, and for the first time in months, I needed to get high, so I spent my days scrounging in the hold, asking everyone if they had any drugs—but they didn’t—and then working the rest of the ship with no success. My father was dead. Sophie was too, for all I knew, and although part of me missed her to the point where it felt like an ulcer eating its way slowly through my soul, another part felt terrified by the prospect of finding her. What if it had been all about the war and had nothing to do with love? What if we met in Bangkok and it hit me that she was a genetic, a thing, not real and just as disgusting as I had once thought they were, as everyone thought they were? Ox and Bridgette laughed at me in my dreams until one day a chaplain showed up, making the rounds and talking to everyone before we docked the next day. He stopped and glanced up at me as I looked down from my crate.