The Disappearance of Grace (2 page)

“Una birra,” I say. “Due birra. Tres. Quatro birra…And a fucking shot of Jager!”

“Most certainly,” he follows up in his perfect King's English.

While he retrieves the beer the tourists gradually resume their conversations. And Grace sits stewing. I like it when Grace stews. Gives me time to think. Probably if we were back in America, back in upstate New York, she'd have stormed away by now to the apartment we share in Troy. Maybe she'd secretly place a call to her ex-husband Andrew. But she isn't going anywhere and she's not making any calls. Not in lovely, scenic Venice.

She exhales after a time, lights a cigarette, slaps the lighter down on the now clean table. The waiter is back.

“Una birra,” he states. “And one
fucking
shot of Jagermeister.”

Grace and I both burst out laughing. A waiter with a sense of humor. As he sets the drinks down onto the table, I hear Grace reaching into her purse.

“Remember,” I say, running both my hands over my military short salt-and- pepper hair. “Tip's included in the bill.”

“Grazie,” she says politely. Tyler School of Art, undergrad. Vermont College, Master of Fine Arts in poetry. A dual artist is my Grace. Funny, I didn't meet a soul on my side or theirs in Afghanistan who went to Tyler or did an MFA in writing school. But I did have a guy in my squad who made it through one year of ju-co where he was studying accounting. Stepped too close to an IED and lost both his legs all the way up to the business part of his groin.

Grace smokes for a while.

I think about asking for one, but then I'll want to smoke the crap out of a whole pack and I'll want to drink more Jager and more beer and my dark mood will darken further. Getting hammered in Venice without the use of my eyes is not my idea of a good time. Not now. Not when Grace and I are supposed to be getting re-acquainted after my tour in Indian country for fourteen months. Not when we're supposed to be forgetting the mistakes and missteps that occurred during those fourteen months when we lived together but so very far apart. Not when we're supposed to be so in love again.

I drink down my shot of Jager, set the now-empty shot glass back onto the table. I feel the slow burn in my chest and throat. I've forgotten how soothing yet fiery hot a chilled shot of Jager can be. Maybe another will be doubly soothing, doubly fiery. For now I sip my beer.

Grace stamps out her cigarette, exhales the last hit of ash and nicotine so that I catch a good strong whiff of it.

“What exactly is it you've been trying to tell me, Ms. Grace, my lovely wife to be? Or put another way, what is the nature of the message you are trying to convey with your object identification game?”

I sense a big fat sigh.

“I'm not entirely sure,” she says. “But did you have to drop the ring like that?”

“Grace Blunt. Have I embarrassed you?”

I hear her shifting uncomfortably in her chair.

“Well have I?” I push.

“Maybe a little, but…”

One of those dreaded dangling buts. I know what's coming, so I turn away, as if looking away matters at all for a blind man.

“But what?” I whisper.

“But you're going to be my husband, after all,” she exhales. I hear her stamp out her cigarette. She feigns silence for a weighted minute. Until she says, “Don't look now, but I believe we have a secret admirer.”

“You'll have to describe said admirer. I can't exactly look right now.”

“He's a man,” she says. “Standing by the fountain outside the café. He's got a short beard and dark hair. He's dressed in a long overcoat and he's been staring at us for a while.”

“How do you know he's staring at us? Could be staring at anyone.”

“True that. But I feel like he's staring at us. I haven't said anything about him until now, because I thought he would just go away. But his eyes are glued on us. Dark eyes. Glassy. Glued on me.”

“You think everyone is staring at us. At you.”

She's quiet for a moment.

“He still there?” I say.

“Yup,” she says.

“Invite him over.”

“No, thanks. You're enough strange company for one afternoon.”

“Who knows,” I say, “maybe he's a criminal bent on snatching us up and demanding a huge ransom.”

“Very funny.”

“He still looking?”

“Yes.”

“Keep me apprised of the situation, please.”

“I will,” she says, the nervousness in her voice sending a slight chill up and down my backbone. “Not that you can do anything about it,” she adds. “Not in your blind as a bat condition.”

Chapter 2

MOMENTS LATER, GRACE LIFTS my hands from where they're resting on the table and positions them around my drinking glass to make it easier to find. It's an act she performs gently, naturally. But I don't need her charity.

“I can find my own drink even in my
condition
,” I snap, releasing the glass. “I'll need the practice in the event my eyesight is gone-baby-gone for good.”

I extend my arms out over the table, pat it with my fingers, pretending to search for something, anything, like a man trying to see his way in the pitch dark. Until I find my glass. I play the role of the blind man, as if this come-and-go condition were all made up.

“That guy still staring at us?” I ask.

“He is.”

“Ignore him.”

“I've been trying to do exactly that. But it isn't easy.”

“It is easy. Just close your eyes, baby, and try to be just like me.”

Chapter 3

ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE heavyweight silences. It lasts for a minute or more.

Then Grace breaks it by saying, “I'm not trying to insult you, Nick. It's just difficult for me. We haven't been back together for a very long time. Give me a chance to understand. You're a different man now, Nick. A closed-in man. A protected shell of yourself. It's impossible for me to know what you're feeling. I don't know what you're seeing inside your head.”

What I see is nothing. The nothing I see is not cold, absolute black. The nothing I see is dark gray and lifeless. When the lights go out in my head, the only sign of life I can gather up is to stare straight up into the sun. And in Venice in the early winter, I have yet to experience much sun.

But here's what I imagine: Grace's fingers fiddling with her engagement ring. A nervous habit of hers that I recall from long ago. Before I ordered the airstrike on the Taliban stronghold situated on the top of mountain I no longer recall the name of. Mountain 346.1/B or some such Army nonsense. Just a hill really, with an ancient village situated on top of it. A village made of stones fitted together without mortar and thatched roofs and dirt floors. A village surrounded by terraced gardens, dogs, horses, chickens and the occasional cow grazing the property. In the center of the place was a well with a good old fashioned hand crank made out of wood and rope.

I ordered the airstrike because of the constant small arms fire we were taking from this village in our encampment and from the more than occasional all-out, night-time assault.

“ Fix bayonets, boys! They're coming for us tonight!”

We'd been up inside the place once before to offer our assistance. To assure the village elders that we were friendlies and that we had come to liberate them. But the women just stared out at us with brilliant blue eyes from behind robes and burkas that covered their entire heads and bodies. The men pulled on their gray beards and reluctantly shook our hands with loose, callused fingers. The little children poked their heads around the corners of the old buildings, giggled and scattered off. Kids are the same wherever you go.

I ordered a strike on the village. But then, I had no choice.

When it was over, we climbed the hill and inspected the ruins. The dead lay very still on the gravelly floor near the well, the stone building behind them pulverized. Two of the women had been hit and their burkas were torn away from their disfigured bodies. We found a cache of arms, AK-47s, and wood boxes filled with ammo belts. We found materials for making IEDs. Empty Maxwell House coffee cans filled partially with nails and screws, plastic explosive, electronic detonators, cell phones, wires, plus land mines, and unexploded ordinance. The ordinance we found consisted mostly of RPGs, sabers, knives and pistols. Even slingshots made from tree branches and thick rubber bands.

And one more thing too.

A child.

A child of no more than two or three. One of the little kids who poked his head around the corner of the building to get a glimpse at the soldiers from far away. Soldiers from America. He lay on his back, face dusty and puffy and his thick black hair parted to one side, his blue eyes still wide open, arms extended over his head like he were laying in his crib for a mid-afternoon nap. It's too true, kids are the same anywhere life takes you. But as for his feet…well…I might be blind at present, but I see those feet so clearly in my head like I were looking at them right now. They were no longer the feet of a toddler.

Days later, while on patrol, I suddenly became blinded. No explanation for it, other than my eyesight decided to pull an Elvis and leave the building. My sight returned a few hours later but then it left me again the next day and didn't return for a week. That was six weeks ago when they promptly shipped me to Frankfurt and the American GI hospital there. The doctors haven't figured out exactly what's happened to my head since MRIs haven't revealed anything wrong in particular. Just another case of hysterical blindness that required a little R-and-R for repairing. So said my ever-hopeful Army shrink.

They thought a nice relaxing vacation might do me some good. Of course I couldn't do it alone. Not in my condition. That's when they surprised me with Grace. They paid for her to make the trip from New York to Germany. From there we took the trains through Munich and the Alps to Venice, all the time my eyes going in and out of sight like light bulbs about to burn through their filament, but never quite burning out.

Lately I've been more blind than not and my eyes are changing. They are reacting to the near-constant darkness. I don't have to see my eyes to know how they must appear to Grace. The irises are growing unnaturally white, the pupils drifting, seemingly separated from the rest of my body. The longer my blind periods last, the more chance my eyes have of malfunctioning for good. My condition is inoperable and sadly at the mercy of fate and God. The memory of eyes is fleeting. They are a use-it or lose-it organ. And I'm currently losing the battle.

“Close your eyes, Grace. See for yourself what your memory drags up from out of the past.”

Once more I hear the sound of her hands tap-tapping the table. She's growing more nervous than before. She's playing with the diamond and growing agitated. As for me, I want another beer.

“Close your eyes. Stop looking back at the man in the overcoat and tell me what you see.”

Her table tapping stops. She begins to speak slowly, softly, almost whispering, and I know she has closed her eyes. My gut speaks to me, like a good soldier's gut should. Grace is pretending to be like me.

She says, “I still see that man standing by the fountain. I see him even with my eyes closed. It's frightening, Nick. He's scaring me.”

Okay, this is getting serious. I down the last of my beer, knowing that the afternoon party is over.

“Is he still looking at us, Grace?”

“Yes,” she says. “With blacker-than-black eyes.”

“Are you still scared?”

“Scared isn't the right word. Just creeped out.”

“It's Venice. He's probably just a weird tourist.”

“Then why keep staring at us like that?”

I turn and try and get a look at him. But of course, all I see is darkness. Still, you can't stop instinct.

“Maybe we should leave,” I say.

“Not yet,” she says. “We still have work to do.”

“Back to the object identity lesson,” I say. “Can it be over with yet?”

“Feel this,” Grace says yet again. Her voice is losing some of its insistence, her tone softening. Like the soft whisper I recall so well from our time together before the war. She reaches out and takes my hand into hers. This time there is no object to push into the palm of my hand. No engagement rings, no photographs, no drinking glass. Nothing. There are only her hands. Her hands are not trembling. They are the hands of a calm, secure woman. A woman secure in her love for her future husband and so very sorry for what happened when I was away. The hands are thin and soft and smell of rose petals and they beg of forgiveness. The hands are the way I remember them and in many ways I want never to let go of them again.

“What do you feel?” she repeats.

What I touch is simple and pleasant. Grace's warm hands.

What I feel is not so simple. What I feel is what I want. I want Grace back entirely. But right now anyway, the memory of a destroyed village and a little boy who became its most precious casualty will not allow for that. I would stand up and kick this table in if I thought it would make any difference in the eyes of God.