I Am the River Page 4

  “Just because the jellyfish is soft,” a voice says, “it is a mistake to assume that it is harmless.” The voice isn’t from Massaquoi or the other doctor or their voices combined. I don’t know whose voice it is.

  “What did you say?” I ask, looking up at the doctor. It’s the man doctor. Dr. Man.

  Dr. Man frowns, puzzled. “I didn’t say anything. You just did.”

  “No, I did, but then, someone else…” I stop and wait for the other voice to continue, but it doesn’t. Was it me? The other me, outside the River?

  “Is this part of the pantomime?” Dr. Massaquoi says. “The play at insanity to shirk your responsibility to your nation and to the truth of this rather serious matter?”

  I continue looking at her, not really grasping her words, my mind still replaying what the other voice said.

  She waves her hands dismissively, resetting the conversation. “Okay, I’ll be direct, so you don’t get confused, so you can’t claim confusion, and so you do know what I’m talking about.” She pokes her fingers down at the thin closed folder on his desk. “Why were you found in southwestern Laos, a country in which the United States military is not allowed to operate? Who took you there, and what were you doing, while violating international sovereignty and putting your country in a potentially embarrassing and dangerous situation?”

  I scan the walls again with a different focus in these new eyes. No advanced degree or certification in sight. No medical license. Nothing medical at all. Just those interchangeable photographs. Just like I thought.

  Faced with my distracted silence, the doctor presses on, like he did so many months ago. I know what he’s going to say, of course, because he’s already said this to me before I was sent to Dr. Massaquoi. “You’re facing charges of cowardice in the presence of the enemy. Do you know what that’ll do to your fitness report? Do you know that this means no fire team will take you, that your only option is a court martial and public humiliation?”

  “You’re not a doctor,” I say to him. His eyes narrow, then open up again inside the skull of Dr. Massaquoi.

  “Where were you serving, and with whom?” she asks. “Who was your commanding officer? What was your mission? Why does your file report you ‘reassigned without comment’ as of five weeks ago, with no record of a new platoon or any assignment at all? What was this reassignment?”

  “You’re not a doctor at all, are you?” I say to her, because she needs to hear it, too, even though she already did when she was Dr. Man.

  Another smile, from both of them, in different pictures on the walls that I can’t see. Each one of them tighter than the photographed occasion demanded, because they were smiling back from the future, and from the future forward, after both emerging from the River.

  “You’re the gutter dog, dressed like a lamb.” I tell this to both of them, but only Dr. Massaquoi has the courage to hear it.

  Her eyes flash behind those small circles of glass, colorless and cold. “Insults and metaphor all in the same sentence. I see I’m dealing with a very special sort, here.” She picks up an orange that was resting behind the base of her lamp and regards it like Hamlet with old Yorick’s skull. When she speaks again, the doctor’s—the officer’s—tone returns to that practiced note developed in preparation for his role. “Why did Company Command send you here, Specialist Broussard? Why did they really send you here?” Here it is, the fourth quarter of the game.

  “I told you, I don’t know.” If she’s going to continue the charade, I can too. Free air conditioning is free air conditioning.

  “No one is sent here without a very good reason, which most certainly does not include insomnia,” Dr. Massaquoi says, opening up the folder, which contains only a few pieces of paper and some photographs. I have a good idea what those photographs are, but can’t figure out how anyone got them. Nobody out there from our side was left, and without a witness, that ridge top would disappear back into the jungle without a sound. I’m the only one left who would know, and I don’t. “Your file says that you are indeed here for a very, very good reason.”

  “If you say so.”

  “No, I don’t say so, but your superior officers do. The field report does.”

  “They don’t understand.”

  “They don’t understand what?”

  “They don’t understand what…what happened to me. What’s happening to me.”

  “Because you won’t tell anyone what happened to you.” She almost purred, sounding genuinely concerned. The River told me otherwise.

  “Wouldn’t help. I’m talking about now. After.”

  “And I’m only interested in then. Before.”

  “Then there’s no reason for me to be here.”

  Dr.—Officer—Massaquoi exhales, smoothing out his impatience. “What did happen to you, Specialist Broussard? Out there. That might be the best place to start.”

  “We got overrun.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Dr.—Officer—Man asks.

  “Our squad.”

  “Was it a squad?” Officer Massaquoi asks. “Not a platoon?”

  I shake my head. She writes something down.

  “This squad wasn’t U.S. Army,” she says, a statement, not a question. She’s trying to lead from the rear, just like all the rest. She’s clearly different from them, in their eyes and probably in her own, but she’s just like the rest underneath.

  I shake my head again.

  “What branch? Under whose auspices?” Her pen is poised over the page. Seconds eat deeper into the fourth quarter.

  I look straight ahead. I’m not even sure myself. Not totally. But I’m not telling her that. Motherfuck this traitor. Some things are thicker than duty, and one of them is blood.

  “Why did you let your squad down?” Officer Man asks.

  “I don’t have an answer,” I say.

  “Who recruited you?” Officer Massaquoi asks. “Who organized this squad? Who was your commanding officer?”

  Augustus Cornwallis Chapel. My mind screams these three names that make up one so loud I assume the woman they found to be the perfect ringer behind the desk can somehow pick them up with her own antenna. But my lips know to keep shut, taisez-vous, fight through that urge to empty my entire limbic region and the poisoned River that cuts right through it, to melt this woman’s ears and eyes and glasses and face like tossing a candle into a swamp fire. I chew on the inside of my cheek until it bleeds, giving me a thoughtful expression as I devour my own flesh. Salt and copper. The AC shuts off, making it quieter than the presumed quiet was a second before.

  Officer Man scans the report. “You had a direct line of fire, and refused to take the shot, later claiming that your magazine had jammed.”

  The AC shuts off again, in another office that’s this exact office, letting loose the low rumble of moving water. I start to get dizzy, and grip the arms of the chair, trying to keep my organs straight up and down like they were in the waiting room.

  Officer Massaquoi turns a page, the paper crackling in the ozone. “A Laotian militia found you wandering hundreds of miles from the nearest American front line. We assumed you went AWOL from your platoon, but we can’t find you assigned to any active platoon, company, or battalion after your detainment at Quang Tri. You literally fell off the map of Southeast Asia nine weeks after landing here.”

  My head is buzzing. Something is trying to break through, riding the taste in my mouth into the outside world. Blood. Liquid moving very, very fast.

  “Intercepted reports from the North Vietnamese active in western Laos near the DMZ discuss a victory over American forces on the Laotian side of the border. This isn’t aircraft they’re talking about, but boots on the ground. Soldiers. We assumed a rogue fire team. Hotshots who chased the NVA over the border and then ran into Tank Brigade 202. But we don’t have any reports of this on our end. No missing soldiers, other than a few scattered throughout the country, and a few in the rear.”

  I know of five soldiers that went missing i
n the rear, plucked from holding cells and eternal KP duty and fake doctor’s offices just like this one by a gray-eyed, blood-soaked angel of mercy, and then disappeared for good in the front where there weren’t any lines. Medrano. Darby. McNulty. Render. Me.

  “Your inactions led to the death of three good men,” Officer Man says. “Good old American boys. Future leaders, masters of industry, not the rabble you run with.”

  I snap my attention to him, just like I did last time, but this time find Officer Massaquoi. The River keeps twisting.

  “And then we find you,” she went on, scowling. “On the far end of Laos, near death, presumed criminally derelict or perhaps on the run from a failed objective that has no record of existence in a country where we have no authorization to operate.”

  I’m following along with her words, mirroring them inside my mouth, knowing what she is going to say as she says it. Déjà vu of a déjà vu, spiraling down from the place where the new knowledge waits to reveal itself. Headwaters. The messages and the marching orders come to me from upstream, where the fire starts before it gently heads my way.

  She holds up the orange again. It’s just as round as her perfect little head. “When delivered to Udorn Air Force Base, you told your intake officer that you… How did you put it…” She holds up the paper to the lamplight on his desk and aims those reflective lenses at it. “‘Peeled the skin off his head, off his face, like opening an orange.’” The lit glass circles return to me. “Do you remember doing this?”

  “I do not, ma’am.”

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asks.

  “I do not, sir.”

  “Do you think you’re capable of such things?” she asks. “Doing what you said you did?”

  “I do not, ma’am.”

  “Nothing,” he says flatly. “Which is all you are. So much chaff for the mill.”

  “If you say so, sir,” I say.

  “And yet, you said it,” she says.

  “If you say so, ma’am,” I say.

  “You don’t remember a good amount of very important things, do you?” Both of their voices now, layered in with that other voice, bringing it down an octave and giving it a tail of reverberation that fidgets across the floor.

  “I don’t know,” I say to the pair of glasses, unsure of who I’m talking to, and not caring either way. I know how this turns out. “I told you…I told all of you. They told you, I haven’t been sleeping very well. Sleeping much at all. I can’t…I don’t…” How does one explain this to a set of ears that can’t possibly understand? A set of eyes that haven’t seen anything like I’ve seen? “I can’t.” It’s all I have. Language becomes worthless at a certain point, especially when I’d be doing this again.

  “What were you doing in Laos?” Officer Massaquoi asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you do know. Of course you do,” Officer Man says.

  “No, I truly don’t.” I don’t. Not really. I have an idea, but I never really understood any of it. It was another man’s dream that wasn’t ever fully explained, and went sideways before any explanation of why could be offered.

  “What was your mission? Who was your commanding officer?” She raises her voice. The pressure of the final quarter. There would be no overtime. Not for her, anyway.

  I say nothing. Chapel’s face strobes across the interior of my skull, bouncing off spongy gray matter and working its way down to my mouth, which I close. She and he and them all can go straight to hell. They wouldn’t get at Chapel. None of them would. Not even me, and I wish I could, to ask him a great many things, probably at the end of a barrel.

  Another long stare from those two shiny disks floating behind the lamp. “What are we going to do with you?” the jack-o-lantern says. I blink, and the face behind the glasses is male, Asian. I’ve never seen this man before. He nods and closes the file, saying something that sounds Chinese.

  My eyes are drawn to the paperweight. That jellyfish stuck inside the glass, surrounded by air. Officer Massaquoi’s gaze follows mine, then she stands up, pulling down her shirt and smoothing her tie.

  “Wait right here,” she says, walking briskly to the office door.

  “Where are you going?”

  Officer Man turns. He speaks with all of their voices. “To get you the help you need.”

  A figure exits into the hallway, closes the door and locks it from the outside, leaving behind a slight smell of perfume, or maybe cologne. And sweat. The AC kicks on again. The River below my feet is gone.

  I pick up the paperweight and feel the weight of it in my hand. Artificial in its heaviness. The hardness of the glass. The pink creature inside looks like it’s still alive, caught in the middle of a dance. The Chinese man is standing in front of me, next to the desk, wearing a white lab coat because that’s what doctors are supposed to wear. There is brown medicine bottle in his hand, and fear in his eyes, trapped behind those lenses.

  Less than a minute later, the outer door opens and Officer Massaquoi reenters her office, two MPs holding M-16s standing close behind her. The office is empty and still, aside from the fluttering of the curtains, letting in a humid breeze from the broken window behind it. The paperweight is gone.

  7. Hard Like a Jellyfish

  I run up the alleyway, stripping off my blood-splattered over shirt, shoving it down inside a sewer drain. The short-sleeve shirt underneath is clean, covered in flowers. A tourist disguise for an illegal import. It’s dry as fresh laundry. I never break a sweat doing work anymore.

  “Just because the jellyfish is soft, it is a mistake to assume it is harmless.”

  This was my voice. He had no idea what I was saying. I didn’t either. He had an excuse. But I did, too. That’s what I tell myself each and every time.

  I pass a man sprawled on the bricks, face up. Eyes open. Could be dead. Probably dead. Might have seen me. Will be dead soon either way.

  The thing isn’t behind me. Not here. Still inside.

  Inside.

  What I did inside…

  I did it for it.

  That thing.

  That horrible thing.

  I don’t know what that thing is but I really do know what that thing is.

  Still inside.

  Inside is where I did it.

  It for it.

  Pulled the weight from my pocket.

  Gripped it like a baseball.

  Aimed for the glasses, where the two lenses meet.

  Buried it in the Chinese man’s face.

  It crumpled like a hollow egg.

  Hand stuck inside the front of a man’s head.

  Didn’t know a face was so fragile.

  Nose and lips and eyebrows pushed in.

  A jawbone grinning, because it knows the secret.

  Eyeball fell onto the chair.

  Felt brains on my fingers.

  Wiped off a man’s memories on the front of my shirt.

  Set the paperweight on the edge of his desk.

  A jellyfish still drowning inside glass.

  Glass like water, bubbles like air.

  Dancing.

  Not dead yet.

  It’s not dead yet.

  It is not inside anymore.

  It is now behind me.

  Following me into the floating city.

  Following me ever since that day in the jungle.

  Will follow me until I die.

  And become not dead again.

  With it forever more.

  I break from the ally onto the crowded street and immediately eyes turn on me. I am used to this. My heart beats too fast. Need to check in, get paid, go home and stay up. Watch the corners of the room and fight when the time comes.

  I walk deeper, deeper into the city that becomes unmoored from solid land and begins to drift, filthy water holding up the flowers and flesh floating on top.

  Got to get paid. Got to fix myself right and get behind the sandbags, rifle at the ready, and scan the perimeter. Black Shu
ck comes in under the wires, just like they did.

  8. Roman Candles

  The trio of choppers hugged the top of the uneven tree line in single file, staying below the radar and moving fast enough that the SAMs would never be fired in time. The stuttered roar of their engines sets upon the silence of the lightless hills, echoing back from the sudden rocky peaks with a madman’s cackle, and was gone just as the night shrank back, leaving everything uncertain in its wake.

  The bay door was open and the airman who arrived with the chopper was manning his M-60, looking through polarized sunglasses at a black sky without sun, barrel pointed down into the void and the impression of trees cloaking the skin of the earth like fur. No cities or villages. This was a prehistoric darkness from a time before man mastered fire.

  The five soldiers in the third helicopter sat in silence, each huddled low inside themselves, sorting through the recent past, maybe allowing themselves to reach back toward home, and all wondering what waited for them when the choppers touched down in a secret place never shared with them. They traveled on faith, in desperation, and with some queer sense of loyalty to an unknown father.

  The emergence of flickering lights far in the distance caught Broussard’s attention. The night sky to the east was cut by green tracers, perforating the air in a silent sway, seeking the out the roaring aircraft that descended from outer space to eat up their world.

  “Free fireworks, y’all!” Darby shouted, the pierce of his voice through the monotone roar startling everyone. “Just like the Fourth of Ju-ly!”

  The far horizon erupted in a line of orange as napalm coated the ground, incinerating everything for what was probably five hundred yards. Could have been inches or miles at this distance.

  “Bring the smoke!” Darby howled. “Bring that holy smoke, you zoomie motherfuckers!”

  The man’s eyes lit up, feverish with the knowledge of what that fire was doing. Broussard imagined it himself, piecing together images of what he had seen already in this war, adding in snapshots like a slideshow. He tried to share in Darby’s enthusiasm, in his pride for the military might of the country that sent them all here, but he couldn’t. His stomach turned instead, which only made him sicker, this time with shame. Men like Darby were made for war, descending from a long line of men who set off into the unknown to find and make more of it, hoarding every inch of ground that was left behind them. Broussard wasn’t one of those men, so he closed his eyes.