“At least he’s not singing,” said Ox, trying to be cool. But I could tell it had hit him. He just lay there, curled up as close to Snyder’s remains as possible, and then sobbed while he held the guy’s head against his shoulder.
Normally, I would have been concerned only with
my
injury and screw the dead. Worry about the living, about me. But all I could think of now was that Snyder had given me his last beer. I felt it then, can pinpoint the instant
when Kaz took me and refused to let go, drawing me down into the depths of subterrene so that I could never really leave.
I popped my helmet. The smell was like nothing I had experienced before. Imagine taking everything in a house—the family, the furniture, the carpets, even the dog and cat—and shoving it all into a bonfire along with a thousand liters of fuel alcohol. That’s the smell of war in subterrene, and with every breath I inhaled some of Snyder.
I grabbed his tin and zipped.
“Check it,” said Ox. He popped his lid and joined me—children of Kaz. We both lay there on our backs, our heads resting on Snyder’s armor, and looked up at the ceiling as red tracers zinged overhead and flashes of brilliant grenade light went off like strobes.
I got splashed a couple more times, and so did Ox. We both caught a few fléchettes, and a ricochet took half my right ear off, but I didn’t even feel it; I was too zipped up. Ox even pulled out his player and cranked music. He thought that Snyder had been trying to sing an old, old song, “Kids in America,” but I didn’t know the song, or any kids, and besides, it had all been so whacked that I hadn’t bothered to really try to figure out
what
he was singing. We lay there for what felt like hours, not even noticing when the firing died off.
“Holy shit.” A corpsman looked down at us. He seemed far away and his eyes went wide, so we must have been hit worse than we thought, but there was no way to tell; we didn’t feel a thing. “Stretchers!”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is the war over?”
Ox started giggling and the corpsman just looked at us
like we were crazy. “For you guys it is. Besides, Russians pulled out. Gs pushed them back ten klicks.”
Once they loaded us onto stretchers, Ox turned his head to look at me. “Man. You’re all bloody. I think your ear is missing.”
“What’s that?” I said. “I can’t hear you, I lost an ear.”
Man, did we laugh at that. So hard it hurt my stomach. Then the corpsman injected me with something and the world turned off, went black so that I couldn’t see a thing, but just before I went totally under, I had the strangest thought.
Screw the Pulitzer.
H
eadaches. Hallucinations. Snyder and Burger came to see me every day and stood there all bloody and messed as they grinned because they knew there was nothing I could do, nothing to be done about phantoms in my mind, the products of withdrawal. Ox had been sent to a field hospital closer to the lines, while they’d sent me with the bad cases to Shymkent for a month in bed and recuperation. Two weeks of that was because I kept screaming, wouldn’t shut up. The doctors didn’t know about a la canona, the lack of drugs that makes your skin turn inside out, and they thought I was a psych case, so when the day for my release arrived, one of them said I was supposed to get in touch with Bandar ‘Abbas because they had called my editor’s desk
concerning my mental state.
“Great,” I’d said. “I’ll get right on that.”
“Haloo!” the doorman to my hotel greeted me on my return. “Welcome bag, mister!”
“Yeah, you too.”
My suite seemed smaller. I breathed through my nose, trying to catch a whiff of Marines, alcohol, something,
but all I got was Shymkent and sulfur from the coal-burning power plant. Civilization.
I reached once more out of reflex for my tin—Snyder’s tin—and then remembered. It was at the mine. My suite melted around me and I was right back there, wallowing in the dead and shaking from the explosions. I just went with it, prayed for it to end—
God, bring me back to the real world and save me from Kaz. Or send me back to subterrene.
When the hallucination was over, the sun had set and only the telephone message indicator lit the room.
“I gotta get away from straight.” There wasn’t anyone there, but talking made me feel better, like the sounds of my own voice would keep me company. I’d do the phone call. Make the desk think that it was my injuries that messed me up, that the doc didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d lost an ear, for Christ’s sake, and the desk wouldn’t understand that I needed to be
wired up,
to re-submerge and escape from the sun and snow. To get loose. The Marine supply base was on the north side of the city, and that friendly supply sergeant was in there somewhere. Straight was all wrong, I thought, and I needed Pavlodar, dreamed in subterrene green—the only way. I didn’t know why, but I had this crazy thought going through my head and couldn’t get rid of it: if I didn’t get back to the line with Ox, the ghosts of Snyder and Burger would haunt me forever.
A tired voice answered the phone after I punched in. “Erikson.”
“Hey, Phil, it’s Sc… Wendell.”
“Jesus!” He sounded awake now. “My head case at the front, you going to assemble a story that makes sense for once? I hear you finally went psychotic.”
“Look, I don’t know what the docs told you but I’m
fine. I got shot, and they must have given me something that was past its shelf life. I’ll have the story for you—”
He cut me off in midsentence. “Just shut up. People around here are already talking about it, and we have a pool to guess how long it’ll be before you crash. I didn’t want to send you there; Jackson or Martha should have gotten that posting. I don’t know who’s pulling strings for you up top, but I swear to shit, your ass is mine from now on. Get me the story before tomorrow morning, or you’re done.”
“I’ll have a draft emailed to you in two hours. Look, it won’t even be rough. I’ll give it to you polished.” The lie came to me then, easily, like all of them did. “You won’t be able to reach me once I send it, though. I have a chance to get back on the line.”
“Screw that,” he said. “Screw another promise from the wonder kid. I’ll believe it when I see it, so get it to me.”
Phil didn’t say goodbye; he just hung up. The laptop’s glare blinded me for a second, until my eyes adjusted, and I stared. Blank. I couldn’t remember a damn thing about what I had done, where I had been. There was a vague feeling of terror and of horrible things, but also a sense that if I sat there long enough and relaxed, it would all come back in a wave of shit. It did. I wrote the story while crying, in an hour, and, after sending it, thought about what it would take to make it all go away. I was going back to Pavlodar.
As I walked out the door, my phone started ringing. It was probably Phil, I figured, pissed off about a period I had forgotten, so I shut the door and left.
Son of two parents: reporting and subterrene. I needed the story, needed to see the war, like some psycho Peeping
Tom with an addiction to scoping out unsuspecting housewives—only
my
addiction was watching death in its million forms. Kaz gave me clarity, focus, because it made everything simple. No ass grabbing at the watercooler, no having to worry about shitbags breaking into your computer and stealing your contacts, your research, your story. The irony of subterrene was that it provided the intangible and priceless: decency. Gestures that weren’t only gestures, like Ox’s holding Snyder’s head because it had totally mangled his state, or Snyder’s tossing me a beer because somehow I’d become one of them—worth his last can. Then, just as quickly, Kaz took it away, leaving you with its aftertaste, enough to get you hooked on guys like Snyder and Burger before ripping them from your grasp, as if to say,
Ah-ah-ah, not too much, I want you coming back for more.
And you would. I knew
I
would. Decency was like a drug to someone like me, someone who almost never got to see it and who rarely showed it except in trade to screw you over.
I remember running into a Special Forces guy sitting on the side of the road when I first got to Kaz. He didn’t even look at me. So I walked up to him and laid on my slickest rap, the one I used to hit some source, pry out the information with finesse. He looked at me then and smiled, said really quietly, “You’ll find out, Kaz will suck you in, won’t let go. And you’ll go down smiling like we all do, because there is no world anymore. Except Kaz.” I didn’t get it back then, and didn’t really take it now, but thought I did, only it never became clear until much later what the guy had really been saying. This was only the beginning of a mind trip. Call it false clarity on the way down, a misguided belief that crept in on my way out of the hotel to fool me into
thinking I had it all figured out: you
smiled
at the war because it
took
war to show you good shit, to show you human beings. Back then, I thought
that
was the answer.
The walk to the north side of Shymkent went quickly and it took only an hour to find someone at the Marine supply depot willing to deal. Zip. I bought a month’s worth. The train station wasn’t too far, so I hit it, trying to move fast enough to keep from freezing, and on the way thought about how I would get north.
As soon as I stepped onto the station platform, a colonel slapped me on the back.
“
Stripes,
right?”
“Yeah, Colonel. Wendell. How’d you know?”
He lit a cigar and blew the smoke over his shoulder. “I thought I recognized you, saw you in Pavlodar. Can’t wait to see your piece on my Marines, son.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I just gave it to my bureau. Headed back to Pavlodar now.”
“That might be a problem,” he said.
“Why?”
“Only genetics are being allowed transit passes to the northern sector.” The colonel thought for a second. “But I could get you in
with
them.”
The idea made me shiver. I remembered what I had seen of them, innocent murderers. “Sir, I don’t have a combat suit and it’s freezing.”
“I’ll be back in a second, to bring you a suit.” He pulled me toward a passenger car and helped me get inside. “Get in, hang tight.”
I had my pack and sat on it, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when they did, I nearly freaked.
Wall-to-wall betties, all around me—genetics—who stared at me with a vacant,
I-could-kill-you-or-screw-you-and-not-care-about-either
look.
The suit didn’t fit right. Getting into the undersuit in front of those chicks was another hassle, a tale of embarrassment that I’m sure would have been hilarious to Ox if he had been there. Forty of them, watching me deal with the hoses, my face red.
Horses—they were like horses or mules. It occurred to me after sealing the suit and hanging my helmet that these girls were low, way down in the order of things, lower than grunts. Draft animals. The military had taken a passenger car and ripped everything out except the steam heat and a samovar so they could cram as many bodies in as possible, stack Gs like vertical cordwood one layer thick.
I cracked my first tin, then smelled it. Like a summer vacation, the first bit went in easy, hit all the right mental spots, and I melted from the inside, grinned for the first time since leaving Shymkent—until the girl across from me grinned back. That killed it. I just wanted to zip, to ignore the fact that I had been shoved into a train full of Gs, and never thought the things would actually talk to me. Who knew they smiled?
“You wish for the line,” she said. The others glanced up then, curious.
I nodded. “Yeah. I left a friend there.”
“I left many friends there, sisters. I miss the line too. It is where we find our best selves.”
“Baby, you have no idea how much I understand that.”
It took me a second to figure out why they looked so different this time. “Don’t you guys usually wear thermal block?”
She touched her face, like she wasn’t sure whether she had any on. “Some do, but we all wear helmets in combat. Time enough for thermal block, time for everything. I remember you.”
“Excuse me?”
She reached out and placed her hand on mine. It screwed me up. These things weren’t acting like I thought they would, and it became hard to reconcile that this was a killing machine with her touching my hand, making small talk.
“Do not fear. You are the first man who has ever advanced with us into glory. I remember you from our last action in Pavlodar. You stared at me and I thought you were ugly.” I had to spit, so I did, on the floor in front of me.
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
“It’s zip.” But I could tell she didn’t get it, because her face scrunched, so I tried something different. “Like tranq tabs.”
She got
that
and brushed her hand across my beard, the one I had grown on the line. “We think you are so interesting.”
That was all it took. I changed my mind on the spot, had to grin at how easy a sell I was, because it didn’t take much to get me to change my mind. Sexy, they really were. In a train and without the crap on their faces, it was different from the last time. I thought,
Man, if you guys had any clue how freaky this is for me, you wouldn’t come any closer and would give me a second to normalize.
Beautiful. Check it, you’d think that without hair and in a
combat suit they couldn’t be beautiful, but they were. Like perfectly wired athletes, a high school track team gone bad, and all with the same chiseled face. I didn’t care that they were totally bald. It didn’t matter in Kaz.