Thank You for Your Service (14 page)

He walks with a cane that he used once to smash his mother’s curio cabinet. He had gone to live with her after the rehab center. “Get me breakfast,” she would say on occasion, as if she were the one who couldn’t walk very well. “You don’t love me. You don’t care,” she would say when he didn’t bring her breakfast. One day she came home from having her blood drawn, sat next to him, and said it hurt so much she couldn’t move her arm. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he said. One day she came home with a bumper sticker on her car that said “Proud Mother of a Soldier.” “Mom, take that shit off,” he said. He lived with her for five months, and then he smashed the curio cabinet and pushed over the dining room table and moved to the double-wide.

He has two teenage sons from a first marriage who live nearby and sometimes visit him, but he wishes they would visit more.

He has an aide, paid for by the VA, who helps him with his leg brace, his arm brace, his hand brace, his clothing, his shoes that she double-knots, his medications, and his food. Sometimes, when she takes him to lunch in the nearby town, he asks her to dress him in a T-shirt that says “What Have You Done for Your Country?” on the front and “I Took a Bullet in the Head for Mine” on the back, so people who stare at him won’t think they’re looking at the results of some drunk in a car wreck. She takes him to Subway or Chick-fil-A and brings him back to the double-wide and then leaves him alone for the rest of the day while she goes on to her other client, a ninety-one-year-old ex-Marine who likes to tell her about the time he was shot in the shoulder in World War Two and the medic told him to bite down on something as he heated a knife and cut out the bullet. “Same time tomorrow?” she always says when she leaves.

He puts his wallet in the same place every night so he’ll know where it is in the morning.

He owns a giant TV and likes to watch a show about Vietnam vets who join gangs and get in trouble as he thinks,
Is that why I was shot? So I wouldn’t become that?

He has a computer he uses to introduce himself to women on dating sites. He is always honest, saying he got injured in the war, and in six months, there’s been one response, from someone who wrote back, “Thank you for serving our country.”

He calls women he grew up with who promise they’ll come to see him and never do. The one call he can count on receiving is from a woman he met in one of the hospitals, who always calls him on the anniversary of the day he was shot. “Happy birthday,” she said on the most recent call, his third anniversary. “You’re three now.”

He still has the helmet he was wearing when he was shot, which has the hole where the bullet went in and the hole where the bullet went out, and which he uses every Halloween as a candy bowl.

He wishes he had his dog tags, but Maria took them when she left. “I want them back,” he said on the phone. “I don’t have them,” she said.
“What’d you do with them?” he said. “I threw them out,” she said. “Why the hell’d you do that?” he said, and added for good measure, unable to stop himself, “Bitch.”

He was suicidal for a while, but isn’t so much anymore. One time, when he wasn’t yet walking, he tried to tip over his wheelchair, hoping he would bang his head hard enough on the floor to die. One time, when Maria was still taking care of him, he asked her to bring him a pencil so he could stab himself in the neck. One time—his last attempt—he tried to bite through his right wrist.

He’s not as angry anymore, either, he says, although sometimes he is, and he’s not as depressed anymore, although sometimes he is that, too. Mostly, he is alone, just alone, and sometimes he thinks about how he joined the army to become a mechanic, and if he hadn’t switched jobs, none of this would have happened, so it’s no one’s fault but his own. “Everybody tells me it’s not my fault. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.’ Yes, it is,” he says. “It’s always in my head. I’ll sit here for hours. If I hadn’t done this. If I hadn’t done that. I’ll drive myself crazy.”

He has a psychologist to help him with this. Her name is Andrea Elkon, and she knows, like everyone knows, that everything he is going through—the paralysis, the depression, the suicidal impulses, the mood swings, the outbursts, the fury—is the result of what the bullet did to his brain. It
isn’t
his fault. “He’s such a success story in so many ways,” Elkon says, but getting him to understand that has been difficult because his self-awareness was affected as well. “Really, the crux of our therapy has been making good choices. It’s that basic,” she says. There was the choice to get divorced. There was the choice to leave his mother’s house and live on his own. There was the choice to get an aide and accept her help. And now comes his newest choice, to go see Adam Schumann. “I think Emory is incredibly indebted to Schumann. I mean he tears up when he speaks of how grateful he is,” she says. However, she goes on, “He has some guilt about Schumann’s condition, that Schumann is like he is from having to carry Emory down the stairs and have blood in his mouth.” And so she has mixed feelings about the visit. The benefit: “Being able to say thank you.” But: “He can’t ever predict how he’s going to relate to someone. If the environment gets emotional or volatile,
Emory doesn’t have the impulse control to walk away. He could get emotional, angry, agitated. He’s unpredictable, through no fault of his own. When you put somebody with a brain injury in an unpredictable situation, there’s no telling how he’ll react.”

And that’s who goes to see Adam, who pulls up to the airport terminal in Kansas City a few minutes after Michael arrives. “Let me get up,” Michael says to the attendant wheeling him through the airport when he sees Adam through the terminal window getting out of his car. “Stay in the chair,” the attendant tells him as he tries to stand up. “Stay in the chair. Stay in the chair.”

The next morning, Adam knocks on Michael’s hotel door to take him to breakfast. He can hear Michael moving around inside. He knocks again. Eventually the door opens, and there’s Michael, dressed only in shorts.

“Hungry?” Adam asks him.

“Yeah. I gotta get dressed first,” Michael says, and it takes a moment for Adam to realize he needs help. “If you don’t mind?”

“Nope,” Adam says. “How’s it work?”

He comes into the hotel room, and Michael shows him one of his braces, next to his cane. It is the one to hold his useless left arm in place, like a sling of sorts. Michael sits in a chair. His hair is buzzed short, and chunks of it are missing where he is scarred. He has another scar on his neck from the tracheotomy and a rectangular lump on his back, inside of which is a pump that pushes out doses of a drug to help reduce his spasticity. Tentatively, Adam slides the brace up Michael’s arm and tightens its straps across his back, just under his shoulder blades. “Like that?”

“Yeah,” Michael says.

“How tight do you want it?”

“Snug.”

Adam tightens the straps more. “Goddamn, that’s gotta be uncomfortable all day.”

“Yeah it is,” Michael says. “Make it a little tighter.”

“Okay,” Adam says.

Next, he kneels and straps the second brace around Michael’s lower leg. “Snug,” Michael says again, and Adam tightens that, too.

He helps Michael into a T-shirt.

He ties Michael’s shoes.

He helps with the third brace, which has been designed to keep Michael’s fingers from curling into a claw. “Can you move your fingers?” he asks.

“No,” Michael says, and then, reconsidering the mystery of who he has become, says, “If I yawn, they’ll move a bit. So that gives me hope. And when I ejaculate, my foot twitches.”

Adam looks at that foot now, which he is glad to see is as steady as can be. Bit by bit, he is getting used to this man whose blood he still can taste. He straightens up. “Does one side of your dick not work?” he asks.

“No, it works fine,” Michael says, laughing. He is getting used to Adam, too.

The ride home from the airport had started awkwardly. “Well, the weather’s supposed to be pretty good this weekend,” Adam said once he got Michael in the car. “You hot? Cold?”

“I’m all right,” Michael said.

“This drive takes forever, it seems like,” Adam said after some silence. Ten minutes down at that point. Two hours to go until Junction City.

But Michael hadn’t come all this way not to talk about what had happened, and soon he was saying, “My first deployment, I didn’t get a scratch on me. My second more than made up for it.” And Adam, who talks to no one—not Saskia, according to Saskia, not therapists, according to therapists—also wanted to talk.

“Yeah, my first two were good. The third one broke me mentally,” he said.

“I went through a suicidal stage,” Michael said. “At one point I tried to bite through my wrists.”

“I heard about that. It made me sick. It made me sick. I feel like I’m responsible for that,” Adam said.

“But you’re not.”

“I know.”

And it was at that point that Michael told Adam what he remembered
of that day, that he kept saying, “My head hurts,” and Adam kept saying, “You’ll be all right,” and that once Adam got him down three flights of stairs and he had been placed on a litter, Adam tripped over something and nearly dropped him.

Adam remembered that, too. He remembered all of it. He remembered that the gunshot seemed the loudest he had ever heard in his three deployments and thousand days of combat. He remembered running with his eighty pounds of gear up to the roof of the building. He remembered grabbing a corner of the litter Michael had been put on and that Michael kept rolling off of it as he went into and out of consciousness, making it impossible to maneuver him down the stairs. He remembered putting the litter down, stripping off his gear, and telling some other soldiers to hoist Michael onto his back. He remembered the sudden dead weight of this dying man. He remembered his mouth filling with blood and gulping for air as he moved down the stairs and his mouth filling again. He remembered the taste of the blood, the smell of the blood, the heat of the blood, and the wet of the blood as it spilled down his chin and onto his uniform and through his uniform and onto his skin. He remembered helping to lay Michael back on the litter at the bottom of the stairs and saying, “You’ll be all right.” He remembered picking up the end with Michael’s head, which was the slippery end, and his legs turning to jelly as he stepped through the door, and he remembered the rest of it, too: tripping over something unseen, Michael falling, the floor a few inches away, the coming crack, the coming thud, the coming death blow, the coming blame, and somehow he lunged and caught Michael in time and spent the rest of the day feeling ashamed.

None of which he said to Michael. Just: “You were a big motherfucker, man. How much did you weigh? Two thirty?”

“Two twenty-five,” Michael said.

“Yeah, I almost didn’t recognize you. From then to now,” Adam said.

“A lot has changed,” Michael said.

Now, the next morning, after helping Michael get dressed, holding doors open for him, closing doors for him, getting him into and out of a car and into a restaurant booth, Adam listens as Michael makes a confession.

“When I got out of my coma, I began having all these nightmares about your dropping me,” he says.

Adam looks at him, stricken.

“I’m fucking with you, man,” Michael says, laughing, and tells him the real dream he had. “I don’t know if it was your hand, DeLay’s hand, or Stern’s hand, but I had all these nightmares about a hand drenched in blood, and I would wake up screaming.”

“I was covered in blood head-to-toe that day,” Adam says.

“My psychologist said this might be good for both of us because the last time you saw me, you saw me at my worst,” Michael says.

“All day, my guys kept asking me: ‘You think he’s gonna be all right?’ ” Adam says.

“I look at it as shit happens. It wasn’t my time,” Michael says, and gives Adam some advice. “Don’t ever try to bite your wrist. That shit hurts.”

He laughs again and digs into his breakfast. Lots of eggs. Lots of potatoes. Lots of ketchup on those potatoes.

Adam watches. He’s not hungry. “Let’s go fishing, man,” he says after a while.

In the car now, Michael holds out his right hand, the one he bit, toward Adam. He wishes he could have tried it on his left hand, he says, because he wouldn’t have felt his teeth and might have been able to finish, but the right one was the one he could lift to his mouth.

Adam takes Michael’s hand.

“I appreciate it,” Michael says.

Adam’s eyes redden and fill with tears.

“Somebody had to do it,” he says.

The following morning, Adam is once again at Michael’s hotel room door.

“Another damn day,” Michael says.

“You got some shaving cream on your ear,” Adam says, coming into the room. Before Michael can ask, Adam cleans him and starts helping with his braces, and this time there isn’t a tentativeness to anything he is
doing. Instead, there’s a tenderness that had begun when they were fishing the afternoon before.

They had pulled up as close to the big lake as Adam could get his truck, but there was still a distance of ten yards or so to the water’s edge. Adam held on to Michael and guided him over the rocks and ran back to the truck for a folding chair. He helped Michael into the chair, baited a fishing pole, cast it, and put the pole into Michael’s right hand. “Want to reel it in?” he asked when nothing was happening. He held the pole while Michael worked the reel. He netted some baby shad and used one of them to re-bait the hook. “Want me to send it back out?” he asked, and then he stood next to Michael attentively, as if watching another man fish was the most interesting thing in the world.

Saskia was there, too, watching from the front seat of the truck and trying to get her head around the way Adam was behaving. Was this the same man who smokes in her car? Who was too distracted last night to notice her suffering from a migraine? Who can’t even bring her a cheap chocolate bar from Walmart as a surprise? Who knew she was coming along and packed only one chair? She had no idea that he was still capable of such devotion. She wanted to like him better because of what she was seeing, but she couldn’t help it. Part of her felt hurt, and the other part felt petty for feeling hurt, and she wished there was a part left over for grieving but that didn’t seem to be the case. As for Michael, and his scarred head, and his slow way of moving, and his “I Took a Bullet in the Head for Mine” T-shirt, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him, except at one point when she typed a message to Christina on her cell phone.