“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said.
“What is, Father?”
“The truth.”
“I don’t know what the truth is anymore.”
“The truth is that everything they told you, about how you were doing your country a service by going off to fight the Russians so they couldn’t steal our resources, it was all bullshit.”
It was strange to hear a priest curse, but in a good way—a way that made you trust him. “I’m not military, Father. I’m a civilian. They didn’t tell me anything.”
“Oh.” He paused to drink from a flask and then winked at me. “Then you don’t have anything to complain about. You should have known it all along, that the truth was nothing but a fucking joke.”
As soon as he walked out of sight, I turned a corner. I didn’t know what the world held, but I knew that the guy had been right and that if a priest could have it wired that tight and swear like a Marine, maybe things would be OK. Not great, but not all bad either. There was still one more day before we docked, and I spent it sleeping.
This time there weren’t any nightmares.
T
he maglev from Norfolk made a hissing sound that I had forgotten about, the first reminder of a world buried for years, a time capsule that seemed bigger and shinier than I had remembered. At first guys like me—men in khaki uniforms and flip-flops heading for northern destinations—filled the car, but the train stopped every once in a while to let them off and to allow civilians on board, forcing us to mix with regular people. They seemed like children. Civilians smiled at everything and had a way of laughing that made us marvel, astonished us with their ability to convince us that
here
were people who really
didn’t
have a care in the world, who felt no weight other than that of the decision of what to eat for lunch. They complained about the car’s temperature, about the food, or whined about how it was behind schedule, and more than once I looked down at the floor, ashamed because I didn’t know that you
could
complain about such things, because after where we had just been, the temperature seemed a silly thing to worry about, the food tasted real, and who cared if we were off schedule? At least nobody was shooting at us.
At one stop, a girl sat in the aisle seat next to me. Her blonde hair was perfectly straight, and I smelled it from that close, barely able to keep myself from burying my nose in her neck after having been immersed for so long in only the stale air from my suit. She began putting on lipstick and I stared at her reflection in the window, terrified, because what if she talked to me? What the hell did I have to say to anyone not from the tunnels? When she finished and looked around the car, my hands started shaking again, and I pushed them under my legs, praying for them to stop.
“Are you a soldier?” the girl finally asked. Our train had reached its next stop and she wasn’t really focused on me, but instead watched to see who got on.
“Pretty much.”
“Are
all
you guys soldiers?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you come from?”
“We just got off the boat from Iran.”
She looked at me then and I imagined that she saw through, and could she have sensed the rot in my head, smelled it faintly, even over all her perfume? I wished that I could crawl under the seat in front of me to hide. “What happened to your face?” she asked.
“I was wounded, in battle. Well, a few battles, actually.”
“Really? Was it scary?”
I just stared at her. My mouth had stopped working, like somewhere between my brain and lips the nerve impulses jumped the tracks, synapses mutinying to sabotage my voice. But that couldn’t have been the case, because my jaw worked up and down, trying to talk, but the only things I could think to say were too horrible for
her, because what did
she
know? I’d infect her. This girl was something unique, because I hadn’t seen anyone untainted by Kaz in so long that it was like looking at a snowflake, which, if I breathed on it, would melt into nothing. After a minute of silence, she rolled her eyes and looked away, and I turned back to the window to watch the cities flash by. Ten minutes later the train slowed and she got up to leave.
“Your stop?” I asked.
“No. I’m moving to another car.”
Once she had left, I whispered, “Yes. It was scary.”
Union Station in D.C. was like a mental collision, a light show that slammed into my retinas, making me blink as I stepped from the platform into the main station, where news and ad-screens, plastered to every flat surface, blinked images as quickly as you absorbed them. It was raining. I stood at the front door, staring into the street as people pushed by in a rush, and felt the panic begin in my feet, locking them in place with the thought that to move outside would mean being seen by everyone who looked at me. Instead I turned and headed for a men’s store. It had become clear that the khaki uniform—or maybe something about my face—made people stare. Maybe if I looked more like them, they wouldn’t notice the scars, wouldn’t put two and two together to realize that a ripped ear and a uniform totaled to the horrors in which I had participated, ones that I didn’t want anyone to ask me about again since my experience with the girl on the train.
An elderly man stood behind the counter and sized me up. “Just come back from overseas?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“And you want clothes. Want to get out of your uniform.”
“Yeah.”
“You have any money?”
“I don’t know.” Somewhere in all the mess of getting Sophie out and fighting to retain my sanity on the ship, I had forgotten my bank balance, but had a vague sense that there should be plenty of money as I handed him my card. It took him a moment to run it through his computer.
He handed it back. “You’re rich.”
“I inherited some, earned the rest. And there’s not much to spend money on in Kazakhstan.”
“Well, what are you in the mood for? Suit? Business casual?” He listed a bunch of other stuff and my eyes fixed on the floor; then I closed them, trying to focus on the words but failing. Finally he sighed before holding up a scanner to pulse me for measurements. “I’ve got some ideas. Come this way.”
We got to the casual section and he started handing me shirts and pants. “Try these. And we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately; you might think about a coat. Or at least an umbrella.”
He showed me a dressing room and, before shutting the door, patted me on the shoulder. “I was in the service too. A long time ago. How long have you been back?”
“A day.”
“It’s not like home anymore, is it?”
“No. It’s not.”
Before closing the door, he sighed. “It will be, but it’ll take time.”
“Maybe the clothes,” I said, “normal clothes, I mean.
Maybe having these will make it a cakewalk.” But the man just shook his head.
Styles had changed. Not in a major way, but enough that I felt odd in a shirt that seemed two sizes too large until the old man assured me that everyone wore them that way. And pants were shorter than I remembered. He handed shoes over the door, and they looked like blocks of plastic, thick-soled. How long had it been? A couple of years at the most, but it dawned on me that in all that time, I’d been cut off from the real world—no news feeds in the past year, nothing except a few emails from home, dispatches from a world for which nothing could have prepared me. The changes were subtle—so subtle that if you’d been in the peace world the whole time, there wouldn’t have
been
any noticeable changes—but to me it was obvious. I was a foreigner.
When I stepped from the dressing room, he handed me a bag with the rest of the clothes and then held out an umbrella. “I’ve already charged you, gave you the employee discount.”
“What war were you in?” I asked.
“The last three. And you might not believe it, but I miss them.”
“What?”
He looked over my shoulder, not focusing on anything, and then I knew that this guy understood and wasn’t full of it, that whatever he said came from experience, because he had the look. It was faint, faded, but there. The guy’s face made me want to stay and never leave. “You’ll take, eventually. It’s not going to settle in for a while. But one day you’ll forget about everything except the good stuff, and believe me, there
was
good stuff, and even the ones
you lost won’t be so scary to think about anymore, and then every once in a while you’ll start smiling again. I did, anyway.” He looked back at me and clasped his hands together, his face turning red as if he’d said something that embarrassed him. “Well, on your way, I guess. Good luck.”
When I stepped into the street, the rain hit me in a cold wash, underscoring the fact that I hadn’t felt it in so long because the helmet and suit had always kept me insulated from the world. It took a second to pop the umbrella. The rain pelted it, increasing in volume until the handle vibrated with the impacts, sheets of water falling off the edges on all sides. Cars crept by, three-wheelers whose plastic bodies looked insubstantial compared to the monsters of Kaz—the APCs and tanks, and even the scout cars—and mentally I estimated how easy it would be to take them out with just a carbine. Yet the drivers seemed unconcerned by the lack of protection. Some of them talked on phones or laughed, while a few looked about to kill, maybe angry because of all the traffic, but none of them seemed to realize that a single plasma round would burn them all in an instant, and I wanted to shout it at them, shake them by their collars. They all looked crazy.
A group of men loading a truck nearby hadn’t registered until one of them dropped a box so that it slammed to the concrete sidewalk with a bang, and I dove into the street, rolling as close as I could to the gutter, where a small river of water soaked me. One of them saw it and helped me up, handing me my umbrella.
“You OK?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you do that?”
What I couldn’t tell him was that for a few seconds the scene had transformed from D.C. to Almaty, the cars into lines of Marines on the retreat, and the bang into a bloom of plasma that charred everything in a ten-meter radius. Instead I said, “I don’t know,” and wandered off, looking for a cab.
But the cab was dirty, its driver an immigrant whose accent sounded Russian when he asked, “Where to?” and it made me close my eyes to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t war, this wasn’t Kaz, and he wasn’t a Russian genetic. Where
did
I want to go? I didn’t want to see my mother, not yet, but there was someone else.
“Five hundred block, Fourteenth Street, northwest.”
He gunned the engine, its whine filling the tiny passenger space so that closing my eyes didn’t help, and when I opened them, I would have sworn for a second that it had turned into an APC, with rock walls on every side as we descended into the tunnels. When he spoke again, it all melted away.
“You heard about the Chinese?”
“What about them?” I asked.
“They’re at the Urals now. Not long to Moscow, and it went nuclear a few days ago.”
It took a second for the words to make sense, but the thought of Chinese in Russia seemed so bizarre that I shook my head, trying to make it stick. “What are you talking about? The Chinese invaded Russia?”
“Yeah, where have you been? It’s all over the news.”
“Did this happen just over a month ago?” It had all begun to click—why the Russians had pulled out of Uzbekistan, why they hadn’t kept chasing us to Bandar.
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right.”
“God bless the Chinese.”
“Bullshit.”
The rest of the ride was quiet. I must have offended him, because the guy lit a cigarette and blew the smoke back on me, every once in a while glaring into the rearview mirror, but I didn’t care. It felt good to know that Pops was getting it, the Chinese pushing through his territory, taking it all, and it didn’t matter who was invading, because it could have been aliens for all I cared; what mattered was that they were losing. It made me smile. I imagined their boy-thing genetics being washed in thermal gel, or having tanks drive over their smiling faces, and it felt like finally everything was being put in its proper place, like maybe there was a reason to hope after all, because the Russians had made a critical error. They’d pushed too far, too hard, overextended. But the joy the news had brought was short-lived, and before I knew it, my thoughts turned back to uncertainty—of what I’d say when I got to my destination.
Half an hour later the cab stopped, pulling over to the curb, and I paid the guy before climbing out onto the sidewalk, where I stared up at the building that had once been like a second home. The lobby was black marble, and a receptionist glanced up before returning to her computer, leaving me to head for the bank of elevators on my own. A crowd of people waited there. I recognized some of them but couldn’t remember their names, and they had no idea who I was, other than a man who was soaked by the rain and whose face showed the scars of something awful.
I got off at the third floor and entered the suite. The words “Stars and Stripes” were printed on the glass door
in large black letters. The place hummed. People laughed from behind cubicles and I smelled a whiff of coffee, which made my mouth water a little because I hadn’t had any in so long. Finally someone saw me standing there and came over.