Now and Again (20 page)

Lyle shuffled his feet and brushed the cookie crumbs from his trousers. Then he gave a slight nod.

“The problem,” said the pastor, “is one of grandiosity. Maggie thinks she can know more about these things than highly qualified professionals. That's just wrongheaded, and nothing good will come of it.”

Now it was time to get Maggie to admit her role in things. Now it was time to draw closer to her and to use what he thought of as his boudoir voice, but the version with an implied threat. Finally, a tear rolled down Maggie's cheek and she admitted, “Maybe you're right.”

“It's my business to be right,” said the pastor, slipping into the mode he called release-and-resolution. “But I've been at this a long time. I want you to feel the rightness too. Most of all, I want you to be right with God.”

Now the pastor turned to Lyle. “I have a little advice for you too, Lyle. It's what I tell my midlife crisis couples. We talk a lot about negotiation. We talk about giving your loved one permission to do something a little crazy. Maggie agrees in advance that it will be just one slightly crazy thing, then back to business. And you agree that there will be no questions asked. Do you think you two could come to an arrangement like that?” Price wondered if he and Tiffany would ever come to the point where they needed to allow each other extra leeway. He hoped not, but he had seen enough couples to know that life was predictably unpredictable.

It was nearly eleven o'clock when he told the joke he liked to close that sort of session with. He had a little store of them that proved he didn't take himself too seriously. “How many New Incarnation pastors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” he asked.

Maggie stared at him, but Lyle was smiling already, even before the punch line.

“Three!” declared the pastor in a hearty voice. “One to hold the ladder, one to screw in the bulb, and one to ask you if you've seen the light.”

P
enn sat across the table from the beautiful Louise Grayson, who had waited for him, who had believed his promises that he would somehow put his trust fund and philosophy degree to work building an empire and that he would marry her as soon as he got home. He had been home for three weeks, and so far neither of them had brought up the subject of marriage. If he wanted to talk, she listened. If he wanted to be alone, she went out for dinner with a friend. Night after night he lay in bed, sweating next to the cool Louise, and night after night she brought him a glass of orange juice and a scented cloth for his forehead.

But now Louise had arranged a lunch so they could talk about his future. When her cell phone kept clamoring for attention, she held up a finger and rolled her eyes. “Did I say ivory?” she said into the phone, tapping a polished nail on the tablecloth for emphasis. “I absolutely meant ecru.”

Penn found it hard to follow the conversation—what was the difference between sautéed and braised? Would the vegetarian stuffing work for the gluten intolerant? Did they need one bartender or two? Three servers or four?

As Louise talked, Penn watched the waiters hurry back and forth from the kitchen carrying aromatic dishes and tried to imagine what their lives were like. Across the room, a thin glass window looked onto a SoHo street, with its scaffolding and construction workers and honking taxis and harried pedestrians, all living lives that were opaque to him. It was as if he had crossed into a parallel universe and was searching for a way back. He had assumed the disconnection must have happened in Iraq, but now he realized he had been looking out the window all his life and only rarely making contact: the night he had first slipped the straps of Louise's camisole over her ivory shoulder blades, the philosophy and Latin classes at Princeton, the small brick caretaker's cottage he pictured when he thought of home, even though the tiny building occupied only a forgotten corner of the sprawling Greenwich estate that had been in the Sinclair family for more than ninety years.

“Brides,” said Louise, finally hanging up, and it occurred to Penn that the real point of the lunch was to demonstrate how busy she was, how opposite of needy and grasping, how far from ready to be a bride herself.

“I'll take your word for it,” said Penn, who had a sense that if one of the passersby pulled out a gun and shot through the glass into the restaurant, the bullet would pass right through him, as if he wasn't really there.

“Someday you'll find out for yourself,” said Louise with a laugh to show that she wasn't being serious even though she was.

Louise's happily-ever-after included two cherubic figments of her imagination named Joseph and Jules. Their pink and blue nurseries were oft-visited rooms in her consciousness. She could describe the darling gingham furniture and soft cotton clothing and daily routines with the precision of an event-planning professional, which was what she was, and because she could imagine those things, Penn could imagine them too: the orderly closets and brightly colored educational toys and the children themselves, beautiful and well-dressed, of course, miniature versions of Louise. The event that held the least reality for her was the explosion of a short string of IEDs that had blown five of Penn's men to kingdom come and left two others wandering in a wilderness of misfiring neurons and brain chemicals run amok. While they waited for the main course to arrive, he spoke the sentences he had committed to memory as he was lying awake in Louise's big four-poster bed the night before.

“But that doesn't really change anything,” sniffled Louise, who started to cry before he came to the second clause of the second careful sentence, before he got to the reassurances that he still loved her but that the thing he was had changed so profoundly that the only way to express his love was to leave her.

“Someday you'll see I set you free.”

That had been sentence number four. It had sounded convincing in Penn's imagination, but now it seemed hollow and contrived. He hurried on. “In an ideal world…” he started, but before he could spit out the rest of sentence number five, the red-faced Louise mumbled, “But I don't want to be free!”

Penn wanted to shake her. Freedom! Wasn't that the casus belli that had remained like a golden nugget in the sieve of official excuses once all the silt of lies had washed away? If people like Louise didn't want freedom, what had everything been for?

“I have to do what I think is right,” said Penn, the carefully planned speech forgotten. He was crying now too. He was picturing the life he might have had with Louise. And he was picturing the men he had sent on the mission—proud and insubordinate and radiating energy and health. And then he was seeing the men who had come back from it—shaken men, men who were bloody and frightened and changed. “I made a mistake,” he told her. “I have to try to make up for it.”

“It's not as if you can undo it,” said Louise. Across the street, a man slipped on the scaffolding and caught himself.

“Of course I can't make up for it, but I have to do something. I can't pretend nothing happened.”

A taxi discharged a woman who carried a small dog in her purse. A businessman strode past, talking angrily into his phone. A girl in a yellow dress thought better of crossing against the light.

“It was a war, Penn. Everybody makes mistakes in war—frankly, it's kind of a cliché. And what about the mistake you're making now?”

“It isn't an easy decision—I think you know that.”

“At least you get to make it,” said Louise slowly, testing the implications of casting herself in the victim role. “I just have to live with the results.”

“Id est quod est,”
said Penn. “It is what it is.” He was going over the insubordination incident in his mind. What had made him so sure it wouldn't burn itself out? What had made him think getting the men off the base was critical to preventing trouble? But the supplies had to go eventually—the colonel was right that no time would have been safe. And since the men had been eager to finish the school—at least he thought they were—he had decided he could kill three birds with one stone. If only all he had killed were birds.

“We don't have to decide now,” Louise declared. “Anyway, you're better off staying with me than with your parents. At least until you get settled. At least until you find a job and a place of your own. Then we can talk about this again.”

Settled, thought Penn. How would he ever be settled? He felt like a stranger washed up on a foreign shore, and Louise was either a towrope back to the world he had come from or an anchor preventing him from fully escaping. One day he felt one way about it and the next another. And then it seemed to him that the colonel was right that worrying about such things was misguided. Why did it matter what a thing was like? Why wasn't it good enough just to name it in the usual way without thinking you'd find something else if you peeled away the layers? Sometimes he wished the colonel were there to tell him what to do. Then he would just do it, no questions asked.

D
anny came home from the war with angry conversations taking place in his head. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Pig Eye's body disintegrating in a volcano of blood and guts, and whenever he opened them, he heard a voice say, Why didn't you see him? What are you, a fucking moron? Sometimes the dominant voice was his own, but other times the voices belonged to strangers who were criticizing him for things he did or didn't do. He thought one of the voices might belong to an old drill sergeant, a gruff man no one really liked but they all respected. All of the voices made good points, but the things they were upset about were all things Danny couldn't control.

“You can't control them, but you can write them down,” said the therapist at the veteran's hospital where Danny went when the voices got too loud, when he had to shout to be heard above them, and when Dolly went to stay with her mother for another night. “Writing is as good as therapy, you'll see,” said the therapist.

Danny was already starting to notice things he hadn't seen before. He was already starting to find words for them. The reception desk was gunmetal gray and the sun exploded in at the window and the therapist's eyes were bombed-out black and the atmosphere in the room was riddled with tension. When Danny started paying attention to the words, some of the tightness went out of him. It was like putting the safety back on in order to smoke a cigarette or take a piss.

“Writers aren't the same as other people,” said the therapist. “They use their pain as material. When life deals them lemons, they make lemonade.”

Danny didn't think he was dealing with lemons, but instead of arguing about the exact nature of his hand, he said he'd like to write a play, or possibly a television series. He had an idea for a show where some returning soldiers banded together to stop the war. For the first time since coming home, he was hopeful. For the first time it seemed like he could give the voices a useful task to do, but the voices had ideas of their own.

—I'd like to see you try! one of them said, and another one called the therapist a quack.

—Don't listen to that quack, said the voice.

In any case, appointments were hard to get, and after three months of shuttling between therapists and prescribing doctors, Danny had a diagnosis, but no real understanding of what was wrong with him or how to fix it. He purchased a spiral-bound notebook, and instead of blocking the voices out, he listened closely to what they were saying. At first they berated him for everything he had done wrong in his life, and then they started in on the things he thought he'd done right.

—What are you doing with Dolly, anyway? they asked. Are you trying to ruin her life as well as your own?

Occasionally he heard his own voice rise in explanation or defense, but just as often he silently acknowledged that no defense was possible and merely sat with the sand-colored notebook in his lap and watched the volcano of exploding body parts and wrote the ranting down.

L
e Roy aimed his weapon at the mouse-shaped target on the screen. It was tempting to neutralize it, but no, he'd save it for later—let it almost reach the safe house and get it then. He was creating the game for his programming class, and already he had five levels of complexity when only two had been required. He liked it that in the game world, he could have purple dreadlocks and tattoos and an ability to show mercy but also to make instantaneous life-and-death decisions. He strode across the virtual landscape pushing trees and boulders out of his way and gaining strength and speed by capturing targets. Five points for the square blue ones, fifteen if they were round and red—more if they had little ear buds and a tail.

“What are you up to?” asked E'Laine when she came home from work. “How was the shop today?”

“Good,” said Le Roy. He was surprised to see E'Laine. If he didn't want to be surprised, he had to read the list they made together each evening and he had to set the alarm and he had to take off his headphones and turn his chair so it was facing the door. He knew he'd hit his head and it had changed him, but he liked the way he was now even if certain things caught him unawares. He liked working at the shop's computer repair desk and he liked his online classes and he liked creating games and playing them. He liked the Boolean universe, where things were true or false, yes or no, one or zero—everything logical and ordered according to rules he was learning in his classes.

While he was distracted by E'Laine, his avatar rounded a corner, smack into two of the crosshatched monsters who roamed the hills of his online universe. Luckily for him, a roving robot programmed to annihilate enemy forces saw them and fired, saving his avatar from a serious loss of power. He panned the screen out, saw that the mouselike target was almost at the safe house, took a reading, and punched in the coordinates. Then he hit the enter key and blasted it to smithereens.

“What should I get for dinner?” asked E'Laine.

Le Roy didn't know. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Shall I make lasagna?”

E'Laine was learning. He liked questions where he could say yes or no, either of which would flip open the gate to the next decision point, the one about helping with the dishes, for instance—yes, of course he would! He was learning too. And the one about walking down to the ice cream store and the one about strawberry or fudge brownie swirl. But sometimes she said a lot of complicated things about their relationship or asked the love question, and who knew what that door would lead to. Marriage, E'Laine said, and children and things Le Roy used to care about but couldn't even imagine now.

“Do you want to make the salad?” asked E'Laine. It was a funny question, but he said yes, and then he did want to. He wanted to dice the tomatoes into one-inch squares and measure out the oil and salt with the blue plastic measuring set, everything in proportion, and later, when she was licking ice cream from his chin, it seemed fine to say he loved her even if he couldn't quite remember how love was supposed to feel.

J
oe Kelly arrived home to a parade. He was ushered into a light-blue convertible next to a man in uniform he had never seen before and driven through the streets of Hoboken in a long line of cars on loan from a local dealership. The cars in front and behind were full of people with pressed uniforms and stunned eyes just as he himself was stunned and pressed. They stopped frequently, and every time they stopped, someone would lean in at the window to kiss him, the unexpected proximity triggering his adrenaline button and causing the sweat to pool in his armpits.

“What's the matter, man? Doncha like girls?” asked the soldier sitting next to him in the back seat.