Out There: a novel (25 page)

And all the while and every day Jefferson imagined his meeting with Gabriel García Márquez: what Jefferson would say to him, how he would hold his tongue and try to act like neither a second-class citizen nor an intimidated fool. How Jefferson would do his best to remember all he had planned to say.

He guided the motorcycle up and down the curves of the highway, playing with the notions of gravity and the road. Maybe because God knew he’d had enough challenges, or perhaps just because of luck, the Kawasaki did not break down, and he didn’t cross paths with any more bandits. At least half the strangers he met did not know anything about a war in Iraq, and a number had never heard of a writer named Gabriel García Márquez. Even when Jefferson said, “Gabo? No comprende, GABO?” often nothing but a layer of fog covered their eyes. Of those whose eyes lit up at the mention of García Márquez, most said Jefferson was crazy, insane,
el loco
, to drive all the way to Mexico City on a motorbike to try to see a famous old writer who was known to be headstrong and slightly paranoid in his old age and, beyond that, sick as a dog with cancer.

Given all of it together, he chose optimism and blind, intuitive, hope-filled faith. He’d skirted so many close encounters with death; who was to say he wouldn’t be lucky on top of it? Who was to say he wasn’t as lucky as Colonel Aureliano Buendía? What young man who had regularly skirted bullets and shrapnel from all sorts of explosive devices wouldn’t believe in the miracle of a simple conversation with a famous old writer?

Over the course of those several days and many hours, driving those Mexican hills and plains, Jefferson whittled away at his hundred favorite quotes so that it was now a compact Forty-One All-Time Best Quotes, at which point it seemed impossible to eliminate a single one. This was the list from which he’d begun creating the collage. Much of the work he did in his head as he drove the Kawasaki, humming and chanting and singing pairs of phrases, moving this phrase in front and that phrase behind until he had what seemed perfect rhythm and syncopation and meaning. Whenever he took a break on the roadside—when he wasn’t climbing trees or practicing a handstand or pruning a bush gone wild—he recorded his progress. Using extra paper he’d brought along and scissors and tape, Jefferson cut out the lines or portions of lines or words and rearranged them on the page.

Out there
. This had to be the starting place, the opening phrase for the collage. It was followed by the line about all that rain—four years and eleven months and some days, in the novel—and that was followed in turn by
a radiant Wednesday.

These three lines worked together in sequence, but he needed some words to connect them, some words to make them take on a larger shape.
He did not want to call it poetry, or writing, even. In his mind his work was sculptural. He thought of it as trimming an overgrown branch here and encouraging extra growth there. He thought of it as creating in the tradition of carving wood and trimming trees and pruning bushes, only with paper and words. When he referred to it, it was as his collage, but really it was just a poem. He didn’t call it a poem, though. He’d never really understood poetry, and had always thought that people who talked about this or that poet were just trying to sound smart.

Jefferson wanted to be able to share the collage with Gabriel once he got to his house, so he had to focus. It needed to be great. It needed to show how much he loved the writer’s words and how they had saved so many lives.

On the sixth afternoon of his journey, as Jefferson rested under a broad-leafed bush just outside one of those little towns in the lineup to Mexico City, he worked with those three simple lines—the
out there
line, the one about all that rain, and the one about the radiant Wednesday.  He worked to make the lines his own.  He struggled with the part about how long the rain had lasted.  He’d been in Iraq almost exactly three years, but the truth was, the rain had not stopped the day he came home.  If he was honest, he would have to say it was still raining some days.  How many years, months, and days was that?

He added a
had
and an
and then
and a
brought
, and he changed
crossed
to
crossing
and
went
to
running,
because each of these changes helped create the connections and the flow that made sense to him. Finally, he worked in the line that had haunted him for so long, the one about the trickle of blood running under the door and out the street, until he felt the unit of four lines worked together like a song.

And then he took a deep breath and connected those four lines with the few additional ones that followed, the ones he’d been working on since he’d left Santa Fe, and he tried it out loud for the first time. He thought of the singing of his collage as a gift to all the birds and the dogs and the donkeys and the children, for all the teachers and painters and contortionists and soldiers and bandits and seamstresses and herbalists and plumbers and massage therapists and tamale makers who might by some small miracle be listening at that moment—any good creature who might reach out and accept a few good words to lighten her load, or perhaps just to help her feel less lonely as she traveled through the day. It went like this:

Out there.

It rained for more than three years and many months and two days.

And then, a radiant Wednesday brought

A trickle of blood out under the door, crossing the living room, running out into the street.

My heart’s memory stopped then, replaced by

A viscous and bitter substance,

Someone dead under the ground,

Dark bedrooms, captured towns, a scorpion in the sheets.

The smell of dry blood,

The bandages of the wounded,

All of it a silent storm,

Me left,

Out there,

Dying of hunger and of love.

Admittedly, it ended on a dark note and was therefore not complete. He had lots of lines left to go. Ultimately, he would overwhelm the darkness with a blast of strong light.

Jefferson
didn’t know if this was a common experience for soldiers, but for him—despite his faith, despite his sense of a higher calling—there had come a day when he knew it was time to go home.

He was near the end of his second tour, and he’d been thinking of signing up for a third—life in Santa Fe seemed far away and intangible, and besides, he’d begun to think he’d found his calling as a bard of important words among the troops
—
not a healer or a minister, but a recognizer of helpful words.
He had his book, and he knew to expect the unexpected, to expect miracles amidst the loss. Leaving all that seemed the riskiest move he could make, the one most likely to unmoor him.

He didn’t remember the details of where or when, but he’d been there, and there had been lots of blood, and the brilliant screaming had quickly turned to a somber solitary moan. A heavy weight had preyed upon him, and the air turned quiet and slow and gently percussive. Above him a thin translucent presence hovered. He took this to be the barrier between life and death, which though suffocating was not scary. Jefferson had been this close to the barrier many times, and so far he’d suffered nothing more than a few scratches, and gained the insights of light and wonder.

On that day Jefferson had seen a human mass flying through the air at him, propelled by some unseen explosive force. The flying body of a soldier—as Jefferson learned later, a guy named Lincoln from Missouri—pinned Jefferson to the ground, thereby becoming a human shield for Jefferson against any further harm. Jefferson had remained under Lincoln’s body as his last blood and breath rushed out.

And he had pulled together the words that seemed to be swirling about in the air, and he had sung,

One Friday at two in the afternoon the world lighted up with a crazed carmine sun, as thirsty as brick dust and almost as cool as water.

Jefferson had gasped to fill his lungs and tried to move his right foot out from under Lincoln’s ankles, searching to gain purchase between the hard earth and the dying body, and he filled his lungs and bellowed in search of hope, singing,

A sun as thirsty as brick dust, and

almost as cool as water.

A sun as thirsty as brick dust, and

almost as cool as water.

Jefferson had chanted until the dying Lincoln breathed his last breath, and then he’d been able to slide himself out from under the body to find himself inside a small home of windowless concrete block. The dirt floor had become a great pulsing river of blood. He stood on his own two feet and allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness, his nose identifying a horrific smoldering, his ears capturing the transition between somber moaning and a symphonic weeping dirge. And then he saw them. The bodies piled up, draped in tragic, grotesque beauty.

He hadn’t needed to open the book’s cover, even though he stroked it at his chest. He had known precisely the idea called for in that moment. He had sat back down in the dirt and the blood, all quiet, and nestled into the nest of bodies, his arms wrapped around his chest and his chin raised to whoever might be listening in the heavens above, and he had whispered the words inspired by the famous writer who knew exactly what it felt like to go on living in a war-torn world. 
It rained for many years and many months and many days. It rained. It rained. It rained and rained and rained.

Later he learned that in addition to Lincoln, five soldiers had died instantaneously in the blast, and five more had suffered injuries that eventually led them to a slower death or lost limbs. It took a long time for help to arrive, for rescue workers to discover Jefferson alive, though he had no memory of the drive back to Anaconda or what must have been a number of people carrying all those bodies. Later he thought of it as a blessing, all that waiting time, those hours he had hovered in solitude so near to the barrier between life and death.

It was dinnertime several days later when Jefferson took the opportunity to stand at the front of the dining hall and offer his tribute to all that loss in the concrete windowless home. Looking back on it, perhaps it had all been too fresh. Perhaps he should have waited a week or more. But he’d felt a need that evening to express his deepest emotions, the intimacy he’d felt with those young men as death approached and overtook them. He’d thought his fellow soldiers would benefit from just the right words, sung in the holiest of spirits.

He had decided upon a phrase he had recited many times to various members of the Tenth Mountain Division, one of his favorite adaptations. He stood up on the table nearest to him, clapped his hands, and began:

An explosion ricocheted across the land . . .

He was drawing out the one-syllable
land
into multiple syllables in what he felt was an inspired marriage of melody and verse when a soldier from across the room began yelling obscenities as he raced toward the front of the room, toward Jefferson.

It had taken Jefferson several moments to register the other soldier’s voice, but when he finally stopped his singing, Jefferson saw the guy and heard him say, “Stop with the blood traveling over the curbs and avoiding the friggin’ dining room tables’!”

It was a soldier who did not know Jefferson’s name but who had observed him several times in the preceding months and who had studied
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in his freshman English class. The guy’s best friend had been among those killed in the windowless concrete home.

He stood ten feet from Jefferson and screamed. “What is your problem, man? You think you’re some kind of prophet? You think we want to hear about a pistol shot echoing through the house right now?”

Jefferson, still standing on the table, was trying to figure if the hostility he was sensing in the guy’s voice was real. Was he angry? Was the guy going to break down and start crying any minute and apologize to Jefferson, explain that he was just stressed out and sad and confused? Jefferson felt certain the guy did not mean that stuff about pretending to be a prophet. Like Jefferson was crazy or something. The guy hadn’t meant that.

Hadn’t it been a help all this time, his reading of García Márquez’s lifesaving words at just the right time? Hadn’t the other guys realized that Jefferson wasn’t much of a soldier, and that his role as a chanter, a singer, a
recognizer
of important words was so much more important? Jefferson had assumed the other soldiers knew this about him, that he was sort of like a chaplain but with a different Bible.

The angry soldier’s words stung him from across the dining room, the closest thing to a mortal injury Jefferson had suffered. He lifted his eyes to stare into the guy’s angry eyes before scanning the faces across the room, searching for at least one person who understood. Up and down the rows of faces he scanned, finding nothing. Nothing but fatigue and sadness and confusion and anger.

“Sit down, you lunatic!” someone else yelled from across the room.

“Yeah, shut the fuck up!” came another.

They might as well have been improvised explosive devices, stinging through the air, killing him anonymously from across the room. He stared at his feet, jumped down to the floor, and found his way out of the building. It was the last time he chanted in the war zone, though his lips continued to move incessantly and to breathe and whisper the words that Jefferson now knew were for his salvation alone.