Now and Again (21 page)

The breeze was cool on Kelly's brow, but he felt hot, as if the desert heat were trapped inside him or applied like a compress to his body, as if it were a feature of the cloth the uniform was made of or maybe stitched directly to his skin. Sometimes it was a child who leaned in to kiss him, held aloft by a relative who grinned and yammered at him, and sometimes it was a pretty young woman Kelly would have liked knowing before the war. Back then, he would have enjoyed sitting in the shiny car. He would have enjoyed imagining he owned it. He would have imagined one of the women was sitting next to him instead of the soldier and that she was kissing him for real. He wouldn't have minded sitting in the car now if he hadn't had to take a leak so badly, so at the next stop, he jumped out without opening the door and relieved himself at the side of the road.

“Hey! Hey!” shouted the bystanders. “Cut it out!” But Kelly paid no attention to them, looking instead at the glittering sidewalk and imagining a line of ants were enemy forces and he was the mighty rain god, dispatched to do them in.

“What did you do that for?” asked the other soldier when Kelly hopped back into the open car, and Kelly told him he had had to take a leak. He enjoyed kissing the girls a lot more after that.

—A
nd what do you say to the charges?

—Charges?

—Of burning the American flag. Let's start with that.

—I didn't burn the American flag.

—Fourth of July picnic? Coming-home party not so long ago? You have to remember that at least.

—I went to a lot of picnics. I can't be expected to remember them all.

—You met Dolly at a picnic. She was with that tall guy. The guy with the white truck. She came with him, but she went home with you. Surely that must ring a bell!

Of course he remembered meeting Dolly. She had been wearing a cowboy hat and a denim skirt. But there had been so many Fourth of July picnics, so many bonfires, so many flags and banners and garlands and bunting—did garlands and bunting count as flags?

—Is it an American flag if it doesn't have fifty stars?

—Why do you want to know?

—If it's just a paper decoration, is it an American flag then?

—Why the fuck do you want to know?

—Because it makes a difference, doesn't it?

The memory coalesced and then disintegrated: Dolly when she graduated from the nursing program. Dolly back when she was happy and he hadn't yet gone to war. Dolly kissing him and waving. And then the coming-home party, which had taken place two nights before: a bonfire, some bottle rockets and sparklers, plenty of beer and old friends and the baseball game, which started off friendly and then got a little heated. He remembered hot dogs and grilled corn and some little white paper dumplings that exploded on contact when they hit the ground. One of the guys had brought a gun. Danny hadn't touched the gun. He knew he hadn't touched it.

—I didn't touch the gun.

—Did I say anything about a gun?

The napkins had been printed with a holiday motif, but whether there had been thirteen stripes, starting with red, he couldn't say. He couldn't say if there had been fifty stars or some other number. The tablecloths had been red, white, and blue—he was sure of that. And they had stars. He hadn't counted them, but he definitely remembered stars.

He remembered long-ago bonfires and also more recent ones, including one where he had gotten drunk and kissed a girl who wasn't Dolly, something he regretted now. The girl had laughed and said she had to help clean up, so he said he would help her, which is when he had pulled the spangled cloth off of the table and thrown it into the fire, which had flared gloriously toward the heavens. He had thrown the bunting into the fire too, and the paper plates, and the little dumplings and the corncobs and the sparklers—anything that would burn. Anything that would explode. He threw in the napkins, and when the older people had all gone off, the younger ones turned up the music and started to dance.

—Now let's talk about those two boys.

—I wasn't there.

—But you knew about it. You could have told.

—You don't tell on your buddies. No matter what, you keep your buddies safe.

—Then how do you explain Pig Eye?

He couldn't explain Pig Eye. Pig Eye hadn't even been there, and then, suddenly, he was.

S
ummer was almost over, and Penn was still living with Louise. Every time she smiled at him or called him Huggy Bear, he wondered if he had imagined the conversation in the SoHo restaurant. Or maybe Louise had just forgotten it, for whenever the subject of the future came up, she talked as if they were in agreement on what it would look like. He should have gotten a job by now, but interviews made him sweat and stumble over his words, and if he got a call back, he didn't return the call.

“You just hang in there, Huggy Bear,” said Louise. “Something is sure to pop.” She liked to use words that sounded like their meaning. “Buck up,” she would say. “Worse comes to worst, you can always work for my dad. That would be a total hoot.”

Louise threw out the offer like a rope to a drowning man, but Penn knew what was on the other end of it. Louise's father, for one thing, and for another thing, Louise herself. But he also knew that none of it was Louise's fault—the rope alone would drag him under. “Okay,” he would say whenever she mentioned it. “I've got something on the line, but if it doesn't come through, I'll seriously consider it.”

“How seriously?”

“One hundred percent.”

Ever since arriving home, Penn had been glued to the Internet, trying to figure out the depth of his mistake—its meaning and historical context, and if it had been avoidable or fated. If it hadn't happened to him and his men, would it have happened to someone else? This led to questions about the role of an individual tasked with acting decisively and even brutally in service of the state, which fashioned itself guardian of ethics and morality—inwardly for the benefit of its own citizens (and along the way squeezing out outliers and misfits)—but also outwardly, forcing its superior vision onto others who were less enlightened. And what did the use of force say about the possibility of peace and also about the common good?

After studying every aspect of the current wars, he started on the wars of history. He was researching the Gulf of Tonkin, a false flag incident that was used to precipitate the last unwinnable war, when Louise came home with a bottle of wine and two noisy friends.

“I'll introduce you,” he heard her say, but when she called out to him, he didn't respond. “He must be sleeping,” said Louise. And then she added, “I swear, it's like he's living in a different world.”

The women chattered about china patterns and how to deal with overbearing mothers-in-law before the talk turned to J-Lo's skin-care secret. Penn waited until the group stepped out onto the patio to admire the view before slipping Louise's library card out of her purse and leaving the apartment. He walked to the big downtown branch where he had been working his way through the history section instead of looking for a job. It was cool in the library. The shelves of books muffled the sounds.

By the time he had finished with the strafing of London and the Nazi death chambers, he had started to ask silent questions about the meaning of life. He didn't necessarily need to know what that meaning was; he only wanted to know if it had meaning or if it didn't. If it did, how did he explain the Srebrenica massacre or the shooting of Russian soldiers by German generals for sport, and if it didn't, why did he feel so sure it did?

“The answer's here somewhere,” he said to himself. He didn't realize he was speaking aloud until a homeless man who had been dozing in a corner by the restrooms said, “Man is warlike.” The man raised a grizzled hand, using a copy of Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
to shield his eyes from the bright egg-crate lights. “You can read any damn book you want, but that's what it comes down to.”

“What?” asked Penn, startled to find he wasn't alone.

“Peace is an illusion. War is inevitable. That's fairly significant, don't you think?”

The two men stared at each other, the older man seemingly stunned that it was taking Penn so long to absorb what he was saying, and Penn stunned by the realization that the answer he was seeking could be packed into three words. “Man is warlike,” he repeated as the homeless man beamed at him and nodded his head.

Penn pulled out a foil-wrapped bagel Louise had put in his pocket that morning and offered the man one of the halves.

“I started out the same as you,” said the man between bites. “I was home from Vietnam and looking for answers, so I came here. Of course, we didn't have the Internet back then, but I still found what I was looking for even if it took me a very long time to find it.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen years, which is better than never, I guess. Which is how long it takes some people. Maybe even most people, but then again, most people never look. Believe me, I wasted a lot of time searching in the wrong places—bars, mostly—ha! But I finally found what I was looking for.”

“In here?” asked Penn, picking up the volume with the warrior on the cover and weighing it in his hand.

“Yes, but also in here.” He tapped his head. “Man is capable of nobility and high achievement, but the very same man has primitive impulses that can never be eradicated and will emerge full-force under the right conditions. It's useless to ask yourself if human beings are fundamentally good or not. They are fundamentally a lot of things. But death is the thing that gives life meaning. By extrapolation, then, war intensifies life and gives it meaning too.”

A librarian rolled a reshelving cart past and peered at them over the tops of her glasses. “Excuse me, Professor,” she said, “but you and your friend are in the way.”

“Professor of what?” asked Penn.

“Ha!” said the professor. “Life, I guess.”

Penn rolled the foil into a ball and lobbed it at a nearby trash can. “Three points,” he said when he made the shot.

“You owe me more than half a bagel, seeing how I've saved you years of trouble,” said the professor when he had finished eating.

Penn dug around in his pocket for his wallet. He took out all of the money he had and held it out to the professor, whose hand reached for it and then disappeared into his pocket with astonishing speed.

“Thank you,” said the professor, saluting with fingers that wouldn't straighten. “Now, do you want to know what I learned in the next fifteen years?”

“Sure,” said Penn. “Lay it on me.”

“I learned that the system is designed to preserve itself, even if it has to grind you and me up into little pieces.”

“That sounds bleak,” said Penn.

The professor picked up a walking stick that was lying on the floor and started to get to his feet. “They don't really like me in here,” he said. “The mayor is cracking down on homeless people. We give the city a bad name.”

“Where will you go?”

“There's a shelter a few blocks from here, but they don't open 'til five. A better question is, why am I homeless?”

“I'll visit you again,” said Penn, but he knew he probably wouldn't. Man was warlike. How could he have been so naïve as to think he had been fighting for peace? It was only the terms of the next war that were being decided. Everything had happened before. Everything would happen again.

Unless, he realized, someone did something to stop it.

T
he doctor at the clinic abruptly changed Danny's diagnosis from post-traumatic stress disorder to personality disorder. “What's the difference?” asked Danny. “Why the change?”

“I'll give you this brochure to take home with you,” said the doctor. “It should answer all of your questions, but if it doesn't, please don't hesitate to call.”

When Danny called, he was informed that if he wanted to talk to the doctor, he would have to make another appointment, and if he made an appointment, he'd have to make it quickly, before he was discharged from the outpatient program and his benefits were stopped.

“Why would I be discharged? And why would my benefits stop?”

“Don't you have a brochure?” asked the pleasant female voice. “I can send you one if you want.”

“But the doctor was already treating me. I'd like to speak with him.”

“Hmm,” said the voice. “They were already treating you? That would be unusual, given that personality disorder is a pre-existing condition, but give me your name and I'll see what I can do.”

Danny told her his name and she relegated him to hold, where a British voice was announcing the news. Just when he was about to find out whether or not the trailers that had been donated to house refugees from Hurricane Katrina were toxic, another voice came on the line to tell him that in cases of personality disorder discharge, benefits were always discontinued.

“Discontinued!”

A broom handle was sticking out of one of the garbage cans that had been set out for morning pickup, and now he used it to whack at the lid of the can. “We're just like one of these garbage cans,” he said into the phone.

“What?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“We're not as useful,” said Danny. “We're like the garbage in the cans.”

—Don't take no for an answer
,
said the voice of the old drill sergeant.

“I'm not taking no for an answer,” said Danny.

“I'm sorry, sir. It's Regulation Six-thirty-five dash two hundred, chapters five to thirteen. There's really nothing I can do.”

—So you're quitting? I think you should march yourself back to that doctor's office and demand your rights. A soldier never accepts defeat.