Via Dolorosa (17 page)

“Step into the light, lovely,” Isabella said. For the briefest moment,
Nick thought she was talking to him. But then Claxton, tar-black and
with a nearly hairless body, stepped into the center of Isabella’s lights. She
began shooting photographs. Claxton did not smile and did not even
open his eyes. He moved lithely, sinuously, clasping his hands together at
one point and rotating his arms back over his head. His long, dark, sybaritic body seemed to elongate. His black skin was taut over xylophone
ribs—his black seal’s body. Hands still up over his head, he pushed his
head forward on his neck, his long neck, and managed to lift his right
foot off the ground. The leg bent at a curious angle. Claxton’s right foot
seemed forever long, his toes like enormous peach-colored pearls. He
balanced that way for what seemed like an eternity. There was a strong
wind at the crest of the hillside where the three of them stood, but it did
not seem to have any influence on Claxton; he remained balancing on
one foot, deeply breathing,
hardly
breathing, his eyes still closed and his
wide lips not smiling. Isabella’s flashbulbs exploded over and over again,
the light briefly igniting Claxton’s black skin, over and over making him
look like a skeleton. In fact, Nick thought he could almost see completely
through him each time the flashbulb went off.

Claxton rotated slowly at the waist, his arms still over his head,
his right leg still awkwardly bent. For a split second, Nick thought the
jazzman was going to lift his
left
leg, too. And he would have floated in
the air—Nick had no doubt.

A ghost,
he thought;
a phantom.

“You are a beautiful monster,” Isabella whispered. There was a malicious
laughter in her voice. She moved in circles, powered by her art,
fueled by it, snapping photograph after photograph after photograph.
“Nicholas—is he not a beautiful monster?”

Nick only watched as another flashbulb, like a strike of lightning,
illuminated the dark nest of pubic hair between Claxton’s legs; the Goat-Man’s genitals—lightning-lit, there and then gone—resembled the neck
of a goose.

Suddenly he was dizzy. He felt the world tilt to one side, attempting
to shake him off into space. Legs rubbery, he felt himself slide down
toward the ground, dumped into the wet grass. He had hardly drank at
all and he hadn’t done anything more but inhale the recycled marijuana’s
secondhand smoke…yet he felt as though he had been struck severely at
the base of his head with a baton, just where his head greeted his neck.
In his ears rang the incessant shudder of Isabella’s camera and the din of
her laughter. His vision blurred and became pixilated. Looking up, he
attempted to lock eyes on Goat-Man Claxton’s stoic form, as the jazzman
was the only fixed point he could find at that moment, in an attempt to
prevent the world from continuing to spin out of control. But even that
did not help. Each time Isabella snapped a photograph, the ghost-like
white glow that fell over Claxton’s body was nearly seizure-inducing.

Something happened over in Iraq,
was all he could surmise.
Some
agent has gotten into your brain, into your bloodstream. It is a poison and a
ruining agent and something that has been slowly eating away at you since
you set foot back on American soil. It is just now showing up. You will die
here on this island. You will die here.

It was Myles Granger’s voice.

In his mind’s eye, he saw young Granger as clear as day: his body covered
in a yellow powder, his legs soaked a deep brown-black with blood,
his face pressed, not moving, into the sand. Around young Granger, the
dust was still settling. The greasy, burnt smell of gunfire still clung to the
air. And suddenly Nick was no longer on the island and no longer on
the hill in the middle of the night—suddenly he was back there in broad
daylight, half delirious from the searing pain that coursed up his right
arm, his own mouth and throat dry and filled with dust, suddenly not
sure if he was dead or alive…and if he was alive, for how much longer?
He tried to move—couldn’t. He tried to turn his head and found that,
yes, that was all he could do, all he could move. Something was on him.
Something had fallen on him. He tried to shift his legs. They shifted. His
eyes, though, could not move: he could not remove them from Myles
Granger.

And that sound, that voice…

Lieuten
—

But he was on the island, in the grass, in the dark.

“My poor, funny Nicholas,” Isabella sang.

And his memories now were as faint and as hopeless as the ghosts
of children.

—Chapter VIII—

Later, back in the hotel room, all was black and timeless. In the darkness he could hear Emma’s breathing in bed. It was not the deep, untroubled breathing of someone asleep. He did not say anything and did not turn on the light. Instead, he went directly to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the shower. Stripped out of his clothes, he sat on the edge of the tub. The water was cold and would not get warm. The entire hotel could not get warm. Not since the storm came. Sitting there, he could not stop thinking of Iraq. It was because of Isabella, and all the damn talk of war. He could not stop thinking of Iraq and he could not stop thinking of Emma, either. Both things had become connected in some ubiquitous mental ceremony and he found he could not separate the two. Wetly, his thoughts slipped into one another. He could not separate them. And he could not stop thinking, either. Why couldn’t he stop? Why couldn’t God be kind for once and just allow him to stop? It was all here in his mind and in his soul, and he could not shake any of it. He recalled the Iraqi children. Passively, the children had watched as he and the rest soldiered into the village. Most of the children mastered ways of disappearing, of slinking away rat-like. Those who remained were sentinels of the refuse of their village—protectors of all the unwanted things that defined their lives and the lives of their families and now defined only the war—their souls depleted, their faces
taxidermic
, vacuous, undead. These children would sometimes peer around corners or out of gaping, toothless portals carved along the bombed alleyways. They buzzed around you like flies. He remembered standing ankle-deep in crushed debris and burnt sawdust, the expressions on the faces of the children who remained (when expressions were in attendance) flushed with a confusion of mistrust and false hope. A film of powder had textured the air, and a rising conical of black smoke defined the horizon. Everything was gray and like bone. Myles Granger had attempted to befriend a piss-scared, shaking mongrel: a hand extended, the mongrel snapped at it and hobbled brokenly away. (In the sand behind it, the creature left asterisks of black, diseased blood.) And the whole village smelled of disease. He’d witnessed dead children, injured children. He did not feel sorry for them. He couldn’t. To feel sorry was a weakness none of them could afford. Feeling sorry could get you killed. As
Karuptka
had been fond of saying, “Kids here would eat an American kid alive.” Pitying others was signing your own death warrant. But it wasn’t difficult to avoid feeling sorry, they had found; not really. Because to feel sorry also required a sense of reciprocated empathy, and he knew that did not exist. It was an unspoken universal understanding, even with the children of the village—that here loomed death, black and inevitable for some, stark and capering and not hiding, and that was just the way it was, and no one expected anything to be different. The soldiers certainly knew it. And the civilians had been raised to adopt notions of militia from youth, so they certainly knew it, too. The children knew it as well. In fact, the children probably knew it better than anyone, because it was all they had ever known. They should have been so lost and frightened and confused, but they weren’t, and that only confirmed that they knew it better than anyone.

Nick knew it, as well. You died a long time ago, before you ever pulled on your cargo pants or strapped your rifle over your shoulder; you checked out, bought the farm, long before you ever started out overseas. Knowing this made it easier to move along and to function and to follow things through, because when you physically died, it no longer mattered as much, as you were already dead, and your spirit was already dead…or at least you had come to terms with death as a possibility, a reality. This made survival less of a chore. You made your peace with it that way, too, Nick had come to understand. You made your peace with it long before you were ever truly confronted by it.

He tested the water in the shower. It would not get warm. Touching it brought gooseflesh to his arms.

He recalled the face of the man he’d mistaken for Myles Granger at the Club Potemkin earlier that evening. And in recalling that face, his mind summoned the
real
face of Myles Granger, and of all the men from the platoon. A reconnaissance mission, they’d hit the village close to dawn and spent most of the day in a confusion of cold steel and white flame. He could not remember any order to it—his memory of Iraq was provided to him now in only brief, snapshot images and disjointed conversations despite the frightening clarity of all he did remember. Everything in his mind floated disembodied and unanchored to anything else; it was like thumbing through a history textbook and stopping to read every twentieth page. He recalled
Karuptka
lighting a cigarillo with a silver Zippo, his fingers brown with mercurochrome. He remembered, also,
Bowerman
stretching his calves on a pile of debris, his boots initiating little avalanches of stone while he moaned about the heat. At his feet, the pages of a thick paperback novel rifled in the wind. He remembered Myles Granger looking too young and wet and nervous and sickly—what they all called a “cherry”—and
Oris
Hidenfelter
standing beside him, mumbling, “I’m counting four…five…six,” his lower lip starting to quiver, “you can tell by the shots, and the way the smoke rises,” and no one was really listening to him because they’d all had enough for the moment, “five…definitely five, six…”—and even
Hidenfelter
had had enough but he could not help himself and he could not stop. “I was always shitty at math, but out here, I mean, you start counting an’ hell if you can stop,” he rambled, “and wouldn’t you goddamn know it, but I’ve gotten to be pretty damn good at math, counting and math, just, you know, keeping track of numbers and all.” Someone else got tired of him counting and said it was bullshit, that you couldn’t tell by the shots, no one could tell by counting the goddamn shots, and then
Hidenfelter
had become suddenly somber and said no more.