Most of the time Combat Health Care Specialist Guy Resnick was too stuck in the here and now to notice. But sometimes he’d emerge from his workaday routine, as one wakes from the daydream of monotony, to realize how surreal the world around had become: the corridors of high-rises his company had been maneuvering through could have been Condo Canyon back home—if it weren’t for the rubble and broken windows from previous fighting. In this part of Kinshasa, entire blocks looked as though wrecking balls had left after only beginning the job: doll-housed, they called it, the force of shelling too far away to bring down the entire building, but close enough to weaken its structure so that eventually the front of the building collapsed, leaving the interior rooms exposed like those in a dollhouse. The people, having nowhere else to go, would go about their lives in these apartments, living dolls.
The building that he and the other six GIs in his platoon made their way up was still intact though. All of the buildings on this block still had their glass. On the eighth floor, the family they found living in darkness could have been modern-day cave dwellers if it weren’t for their gaudy dining-room sets. He thought he’d even seen the same glitzy chairs in a store window on Devon Avenue, along with clocks in the shape of minarets, and those enormous suitcases—the size of steamer trunks—used by wealthier Bottom Billion immigrants.
The mother of the family could have been any Muslim mother living above those shops. The kitchen doorway Guy stood in, posed like a sprinter, could have opened onto any Chicago kitchen—if it weren’t so empty; if the Shiite mother and her two sons weren’t staring at him from the gloom of the bedroom where they huddled off to the side; if a broad streak of blood didn’t stretch across the kitchen floor, painted there by the back of Mejia’s head when Guy, T-Ball, and Fred dragged him out of the kitchen, away from the window that had been punctured—a single .308 caliber hole—by the sniper bullet that brought him down while he was going through kitchen cabinets like anyone might, trying to look behind a box of Cheerios.
The rattle of machine-gun fire continued on the street below: a metallic clacking that could have been a Chicago Streets & Sanitation jackhammer if it weren’t one of the FARDC units they’d been sent to support, fighting to eliminate the M23 Tutsis militia that had been driving Hutus out of the neighborhood. He wasn’t even supposed to be here. An Imam had tweeted the URL to the latest “Mohammed is a Homo” video to come out of America, and like always, the riots began. Riots in 16 countries this time, linking up into what some were afraid could be a new regional revolution—like when the Iron Curtain fell—the embassy had been burned—and he’d been redeployed—Today’s Mobile Army!— Rebels in the Congo used the chance of the U.S. army being spread thin to retake control of mineral-rich areas; and Guy’s squadron had been sent to one of them to put a cork in it. A policing action, they called it.
Guy’s unit was the come-along, trailing the FARDC as a rearguard action, going building to building, searching for stragglers or snipers or weapon caches. As they passed the building they were in now, a boy stepped out from the ruins. Dressed in a Sox tee shirt, he could have come from a playground near that Ethiopian restaurant Silpa had taken him to before he shipped out. Standing in the yellow spotter smoke that drifted through the street, the kid yelled out to them the name of the family now huddled in the bedroom off to the side. The father had a collection of DVDs made by snipers shooting Americans, he said. So Guy and his unit made their way up the damaged stairwell to the apartment. While Fred and Amato ransacked the living room, Mejia went through kitchen cabinets, and Sgt. Bee interrogated the family: a woman covered in black—a Muslim among Christians in this French-speaking country—and a boy no older than the one who gave them the tip—they could have been playmates—and another teenage son. As the woman spoke French, she looked from their Congolese interpreter to the sergeant, as though unsure who held the real power over her, who she should make her case to. The interpreter gave no sign either way, as though whatever she said didn’t have the slightest interest to him—French in one ear, English—American English—out the mouth—though Guy wondered if the interpreter’s American accent already condemned him. Or maybe he and the other guys in the platoon were the ones who were condemned, the rednecks among them too give-a-shit or deaf to the interpreter to understand that he understood their cracks about him and his country and its women or about whose side he was really on. Guy himself wondered about this last point every time the interpreter flipped open a personal cell phone to rattle off something in Swahili, a black scarf hiding the lower half of his face. Maybe he was only on his own side. Who’d blame him. They called him Zorro.
The family obviously wondered who Zorro was really fighting for. The older son stared at what he could see of that face as though trying to memorize it while his Mother explained, or so Zorro reported, that her family had lived in this apartment for fifteen years. They had stayed through the fighting, right up to when the local Tutsi warlord ordered his militia to kill Hutus. They were neither Hutus nor Tutsis so hoped they would be left alone but a local Sunni Imam began preaching that Shiites were like Hutus. The neighborhood they had fled to was destroyed by fighting also, so they had come back. But the Sunni family they found living in their apartment wouldn’t leave. After the American army made them leave, the Sunni family told the M23 that her husband sold information to the Americans; they told spies for the Americans that he smuggled water to the M23. Now she hadn’t seen her husband in two days and only Allah knew if he’d been picked up by Americans, picked up by M23, the Imam’s militia, or some other gang, or was lying dead in a ditch. “Will you tell the Americans to help me find my husband?” she pleaded through the interpreter.
Guy didn’t need an interpreter to see the fear in her eyes. He had watched the wheels turn in their CO’s head as he tried to sort it out, tried to judge whether the woman was lying, her husband maybe hiding in the building just as the boy who gave them the tip said, maybe grenade in hand—his ticket to Paradise. Or maybe the woman would like to see them all dead because so many innocent ‘persons of interest’ like her husband and sons had been picked up then never seen again. Or maybe he scrammed when he heard an army coming up the stairs, not knowing whose side they were on. Scared or confused or mistaken about soldiers in his living room, led there by a boy who was really working for the M23, or just helping his own family get a better apartment, or settle a score, or was confused, or simply misinformed, or mistaken—maybe he didn’t even know this family was up here, and had only given them the tip to divert them from a cache of arms, or to lead them into an ambush…. Or maybe he had been sent to divert the Americans so his uncle could finish stealing a car. A lot of killing, ratting, and lying went on to cover ordinary street crime or settle scores. Family feuds. A lot wasn’t. Hard to tell.
While Fred ransacked the apartment, looking for maps or the doorbells used to detonate homemade bombs or anything that would tip the story one way or the other, Guy considered how everything here was a weapon, even the most everyday objects: cars and cell phones, of course, but food was a weapon too, sacks of rice used to award or punish families like this woman’s for information or their sympathies; water was a weapon, so was electricity, and ice in one-hundred and ten degree heat when the electricity, and so the refrigeration, and air-conditioning didn’t work; religions were weapons of mass destruction. Nature was a weapon: terrorists getting the idea from the last bee die-off to genetically alter them to bring on hive collapses the way they once tried to bring down airplanes. Even Silly String was a weapon: those aerosol cans that Guy used to play with as a kid, spraying ribbons of colored foam at birthday parties. Here, GIs sprayed Silly String down hallways in the buildings they searched, like this one, the party-colored foam sticky enough to cling to and expose trip wires, but light enough to not detonate booby traps. Clothes were certainly a weapon: the uniform he wore; the Sox shirt the boy wore, camouflage to make him look familiar? His words believable? Yeah, most deadly of all were words….
Then there had been a tiny tinkle of glass—like a wind chime—and Mejia had dropped to the kitchen floor. They hadn’t even heard a rifle shot, just the tinkle of window glass falling into the sink. When he turned to look, the first thing he saw was a perfectly round hole, the diameter of a pencil’s eraser—a nothing in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
Time blurred: Sgt. Bee yelled at everyone to get down. Mejia was on the floor, a pool of blood widening beneath his head as everyone reacted: Fred and T-Ball getting Mejia by the feet and dragging him to the windowless corner of the kitchen where Guy tore off his flak jacket to keep its weight from squeezing blood from his body. He wiped blood away to find the wound in the back of his neck, applied compresses to the gurgling hole…. While he frantically tore open more bandages, worked to staunch the bleeding, the sergeant must have called in a medivac; though minutes had to have passed, they seemed to have appeared instantly, and out of nothing, as though conjured from the air. An evacuation medic took over from Guy as they got an IV going, got Mejia onto a stretcher; then they were carrying him down to a waiting Humvee. Then they were gone. The kitchen was silent, eerily empty, except for the red streak on the floor. Dust drifted in the shaft of light streaming through the window.
It all happened so fast it didn’t seem real—as though it had never happened—as though a quake had ruptured Time and Mejia had fallen in before it snapped back, leaving everything as it had been before, minus him. Guy, T-Ball, Fred, and Bee were still there, standing around; Zorro was beside the Muslim family, still huddled in the bedroom, still looking back like trapped animals waiting to see what their captor would do next. All that had changed was that Mejia was no longer going through kitchen cabinets. Mejia was gone: replaced by a long red smear on the tile. Guy’s hands were bloody; he wiped them on his pant legs.
Wrappers and the bandages he had used to staunch the wound lay scattered all around. Then Guy saw what shit they were still in. The flak jacket he had torn off of Mejia was on the far side of the kitchen. He couldn’t remember having thrown it, but he must have. And that’s where it landed, on the far side of the kitchen, along with Mejia’s rifle, bolt cutters, and helmet. Four items across a small kitchen, the morning light coming through its single window harsh as an interrogation lamp.
“Shit,” someone muttered, seeing what Guy saw: a helmet, rifle, bolt cutters, and a flak jacket on the kitchen floor, on the far side of a window punctured by a round from a sniper’s rifle. Items they couldn’t just leave behind. The others slumped down along the walls, the wind going out of them.
They would have to retrieve the gear, they all knew. The weapon was a weapon, of course, one that if left behind would end up in the hands of someone in the Imam’s militia. Or in the hands of a carjacker, or maybe that teenage boy huddled in the bedroom, or a hundred other possibilities, but all of them resulting in someone else dead, maybe one—or all—of them. The same was true of the flak jacket, designed to protect a shooter. The bolt cutter could be used to steal explosives. Or steal fertilizer that could be used as an explosive. If a helmet was added to a shirt from another dead GI, a uniform could be cobbled together that would let a suicide bomber walk into a group of….
“Shit,” Davis repeated.
“What the fuck’d you have to throw his jacket for?” T-Ball snapped at Guy.
“If you ever need a medic, I’ll be sure to fold your clothes first.”
“Shut up!” Sgt. Bee yelled. His hand was shaking as he picked up the radiophone and called for another unit to clear the building across from the window, where the sniper most likely lined up his shot.
Sitting cross-legged on the living-room sofa, he gave them the coordinates. They could hear what he was being told: the drones were all occupied, so no overview; another unit could clear the building, but they had their own problems and they’d need time to get there. Deal. “How long?” T-Ball asked as soon as Bee was off the phone. Stupid question, everyone knew. They sat down to wait, knowing that the longer they sat, the larger a target they became. An unmoving target. Word would spread that they were pinned down, and a militia would get a grenade launcher over here, flatten the whole apartment, kill the mom and kid too. M23 Tutsis wouldn’t care if they were Hutus, and Jihadist didn’t give a shit either way. Not even about their own. Making Martyrs, they called it.
Outside, the popping of gunfire started up again. They all fell into their thoughts. Mejia. There but for the grace of god go…. After a while, Fred said, “At least medivac got here fast.” His voice was choked with emotion, the weight of what had happened catching up with them all now that they had stopped moving and had time to think. There but for the grace of god…. A sniffle came from the other side of the couch.
What god?
“He’ll be okay,” Bee said, but everyone knew it was a neck wound. “Ain’t that right, Guy? You had a patch on him before the bullet had a chance to hit the wall. Then the medivacs were here.”
“Yeah, right,” Guy said, his answer sounding like bullshit even to his own ears, his eyes falling on the family staring back, the lack of remorse in their eyes making him understand how others in their place sometimes just went off—the way frustration sometimes makes a person need to punch something—anything—a wall, or a kid.
Then sure enough, Fred popped off: “Make the kid go get it.”
All of their eyes went to the kid, and the mother grabbed him, looking back with that fear that wasn’t sure what the danger was, but knew there was danger.
“Stow it,” Bee said.
“They’re the ones who—”
“I don’t give a shit!”
Then they returned to silence, listening to the popping of gunfire die off, then start again. Somewhere, in another apartment, a baby was crying. T-Ball stood, being careful to stay within the sheltered edge of the kitchen where he, Guy, and Fred had been since Mejia went down. Crawling beneath the living-room window, then along the far wall, then the couch, he worked his way back to the bedroom—was he going to be the one to go off on the family? It’d be just like him, Guy thought, simultaneously hating the hothead for being the one to go off and hoping he would, hoping someone would take it out on these people for making him be here: them and their shitty tantalum and all the others in all the zones he’d been sent into to secure veins of coltan and tungsten and whatever other shit arms dealers said was vital to national security because they needed to make missile guidance systems and GPS systems and even the radio that Fred would use to call in the support to secure an area that was vital to national security because they needed its minerals to make the weapons they would use to secure it and keep the merry-go-round going….
T-Ball emerged from the bedroom with two sheets. He tied them together, and then fixed his hand ax to one end to make a line and hook. From the sheltered edge of the kitchen, he cast his line at the equipment, trying to snag the helmet. On his tenth try he managed to work the helmet close enough to where they could reach it with a broom. After some minutes of trying, he managed to get the jacket. Then the bolt cutter. But the rifle had fallen in an awkward position against the far wall; its barrel seemed to be snagged on something under the stove, its low profile announcing from the start that hooking it would be impossible, and after a while Fred gave up. T-Ball tried. Over and over. Then he gave up too and sat back against the wall, lit a cigarette. Davis took his turn as sentry in the outer doorway.
Fred began to speculate where the shot had come from. T-Ball thought that if they got to the living room windows they could lay down fire at the apartment across the street. He said it in an absentminded, hypothetical way, everyone knowing how stupid that would be, but after twenty minutes dragged into a half hour, then an hour, they began talking about it more seriously, Fred and Davis getting into an argument about which window to direct their heat at. Guy knew why they were on edge. That little prick who had sent them up here could be directing militiamen right to them. By now they would have had plenty of time to round up some real ordnance. They could be in the opposite building at this very minute, aiming a shoulder-launched rocket at this apartment. He couldn’t stop imagining the nose of a rocket screaming at the wall he had his back against. T-Ball, Davis, and the others appeared around him as burning skeletons. “The bullet came from below,” he said. “The entrance wound was below his helmet; the exit wound above his ear.”
“If I keep low, I can get his gear,” Guy said.
Not even T-Ball was expecting this, and he and the others looked first at Guy, then to the Sergeant, who considered it for a moment, then shook it off. As though Guy hadn’t said anything, he continued, “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything. Mejia might have been looking down into the sink, the bullet coming from a higher floor with a clear view into the kitchen.”
T-Ball stretched to see if he could see where the shot hit the wall but before he could argue, Bee cut him off: “We wait.”
The men fell silent again. One thing everyone learned here was that optimism gets you dead. If it looks like a trap, it’s a trap. Guy began to feel it was his fault. They were all going to die because at the moment he was supposed to let his training take over, he’d thrown the flak jacket and it had slid into the kill box of a sniper. Then his mind began to work past this again. A lot of times, snipers shot and ran. Or maybe the same fear of sitting that was eating them had begun to gnaw his ass and he got out of there, seeing a rocket come at the wall his back was against every time he rested his eyes. Yeah, odds were that there wasn’t anything across the way except fear.
But that was optimism talking again. Still, Guy couldn’t help but consider the possibility that there might not even be a ghost across the way: Mejia could have been taken down by a mistake—the FARDC Army down in the street or some other unit mistaking Mejia, visible through the window, as an M23 sniper. Or it could have been an accident, like Davis said, not a carefully aimed, deliberate shot: Cross fire. Friendly fire. The FARDC Army shooting at M23; or the Imam’s militia shooting at a FARDC unit, or another American unit, or no one shooting at anyone. A misfire. Someone celebrating, shooting into the air—what goes up, must come down….
Guy sighed. He was being optimistic again, his optimism enabled by ignoring more likely possibilities: an ambush set up by the boy who’d sent them up here, the boy directing them to where the sniper could get a clean shot, snipers just as likely to sit for hours, motionless as a cobra, if they thought they hadn’t been spotted. Then he realized another possibility: the father could have had a collection of sniper tapes because he was the sniper. He could have gotten out the back way when he heard them coming, then took up a position across the street that would allow him to shoot back into his own apartment. Is that why this one apartment, of all others, had been singled out?
Worry furrowed the face of the Shiite mother in the bedroom. Worry for what? That they’d get him before he got off another shot? Then a call came in: their relief had gotten lost. One other thing: an air strike had been called in on a neighboring apartment block. “That’s just great!” Bee said. “Our own guys can’t find us but an F-16’s going to shoot an apple off our heads.”
“With a five-hundred-pound bomb.”
“Hope it’s one of those smart bombs.”
“A really smart bomb.”
While the others bitched, Sgt. Bee agreed to let Guy go for the gear. And the sight of Guy stripping off his ammo and gear to make himself lighter shut up the others. T-Ball pulled off his own flak jacket, then Fred too. As they helped him wrap them around his legs and midsection, Guy could see Zorro in the bedroom. From the way the woman was going “Ahh”—like pantomiming a patient at the dentist—Guy could tell Zorro was getting them ready for the air strike, reminding them to keep their mouths open so the shock waves wouldn’t blow out their eardrums. The boys already knew the routine, taking up positions deeper in the room in case there was flying glass. Guy took up his position in the kitchen doorway. The plan was for him to wait for the air strike—the blast would surprise the sniper—if there was a sniper—knock him off guard. Or at least make it impossible for him to get off a clean shot.
Guy put his back foot against the doorjamb, a sprinter in the blocks, waiting for the starter’s gun. The light coming through the kitchen window had softened by now to a warm, welcoming glow, the long narrow kitchen stretching out like infinity before him.
What’s the matter with me, Guy wondered, trying to instead concentrate on getting a clean jump. He could have not volunteered, he realized, gradually becoming aware of the others watching him as though he was no longer one of them. Three more sets of eyes stared back from the bedroom, his very presence holding their attention, a range of emotions across their face from the dread of the mother, to the excited expectation of the teenager. Instead of volunteering, Guy thought, he could have just sat back like the others, waited for Bee to pick someone. Odds were, since Guy was the medic, it would have been someone else: Davis the fastest among them; or Fred the screwup, the expendable one; or maybe T-Ball might have lost the lottery, Fate or chance putting the short straw in his hand; and Guy would be sitting there in his place while he, or one of them, stood here in his place. But no, Guy had to open his mouth because— Because something inside him made him feel responsible. Not responsible because, like T-Ball said, he was the one who threw the flak jacket. Stupid mistake. But a stupider way to think, he knew. Say instead that gravity or fate or chance or the evil eye was to blame, making the gun skitter to the far wall. Makes no dif, the others would say, and since they didn’t throw anything, the jacket was the deciding factor: the flipped coin that had turned up heads though he’d called tails. But even if they didn’t say that, he still felt responsible for keeping them safe, the way genes somehow made him go into biology to begin with, to learn to draw blood, staunch its flow. He certainly didn’t have the gene that researchers said predisposed some to take risks, an AGCTAGCT combo that made those people crave adrenaline as a junkie has to have his fix, one of those wrinkles of population genetics that sacrificed individuals to keep the whole healthy, every tribe needing someone who would taste the untested berry, volunteer for the vaccine test, as much as they needed the skittish ones who wouldn’t. Was it his genes speaking when he said he’d go for the gear, a combination of genetic letters his fatal flaw?
His fate?
The rifle lay at the far end of the kitchen, an infinity away, the window with a single round hole making the floor into a vast plain.
A rifle is a thing; a refrigerator is a thing; a rifle wedged under a refrigerator is a third thing that makes other possibilities possible….
Waiting, waiting…. For minutes or longer, he had no idea, losing sense of time the way waiting in a hospital waiting room makes the waiting timeless—just the opposite of the way time had contracted when Mejia was hit—the soft yellow light in the window so normal it could have been full of Silpa’s voice, telling him that everything was going to be all right.
Silpa claimed that some people could hear colors, he remembered. Cognitive science backed her up. He’d never believed it, but if it were true, the soft yellow of afternoon light coming through the window would sound like her. He worked to get back to that voice, imagining the last time he’d been able to meet her in W.2, the two of them on a Hawaiian beach as he struggled to explain the weirdness of helping mothers like the one in the bedroom during the day, and then rounding up their sons and husbands at night. It had been a softened version of what was really bothering him: being called to retrieve body parts from a burnt Humvee. From one of the survivors, a medic like him, he had learned that a young girl had run out from between two parked cars into the path of the Humvee. The driver had slammed on his brakes to keep from hitting her, even though all drivers were trained to not stop for anything: no man, woman, not even baby Jesus. The girl had smiled sweetly, an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile—in thanks? Or because she’d done her job well, setting them all up to die? “Step on it!” the GI riding shotgun had screamed at the driver. A moment later, a grenade bounced onto the hood, a white flash, windshield glass….
The story got to Guy because he could so imagine himself stopping the Humvee instead of running over the girl and getting himself and everyone around him killed; he could so imagine himself refusing to take that chance, flooring the gas pedal and squashing the little bitch like a bug on the grill. He’d been afraid of what Silpa would think if she knew this about him, though, so instead told her a lighter version: his story about the ER doctor back home who shot a mugger. Same moral: here but for the grace of god stands anyone, he had said. She’d remained silent, taking his avatar’s hand in hers, running them through the sand, then answered, “Action without desire,” as a way to explain that that was how the doctor was able to treat his own mugger, doing his duty, a lack of passion allowing him to remain true to himself. She had meant it as a way for him to not blame himself for some of the things he found himself doing, he knew, Silpa somehow knowing there was more to his story than what he had told her, elaborating his story of the doctor as though it were a reincarnation of one of her own: a story about Arjuna, a warrior on the eve of battle, who was seized by pity for those he was about to kill—cousins and first teachers. The bloodshed he was about to begin filled him with doubt. Everyone in India grew up learning about Arjuna and Krishna, his chariot driver, she said: from philosophy students to untouchables getting the story from Bollywood movies. They all learned that Arjuna asked Krishna how he could slay those people facing him when they, when all living beings, were worthy of worship. Even if he was victorious, he said, the blood on his hands would poison all of life’s delights, for the grief of his enemies’ mothers would be no less piteous than the tears of his own mother should he fall. Indeed, Arjuna continued, it could well be that those he was about to slay were the ones who were truly fighting on the side of justice, as both sides claimed. It could well be that he, not they, were the pawns of larger forces; that they, not he, had been wronged, forced to act by circumstance, and that the freedom they won over his body would most embody the righteousness that they both claimed.
With the two facing armies waiting to attack, Arjuna declared that he would not fight, and laid down his bow.
Krishna responded by saying that Arjuna could have no way of knowing who would live, who would die, or whether it would be better for humanity if his side or the other lost. All life is change, he explained, and the wise are not troubled as their spirit moves through youth to age. The soul can be thy friend; the soul can be thy enemy. The pleasures of the world bear within them sorrows yet to come. The good works of man are not his works; the evil works are not his works. They come and go. Not in them do the wise find joy. Pain moves him not; nor pleasure.
As Krishna spoke, he revealed himself in his Eternal form, and Arjuna saw in this humble chariot driver the eyes of innumerable faces—all who had ever lived, who would ever live, the light of a thousand suns. “He who sees one single fraction of me sees all creation, and seeing all creation,” the God said in glory, “that which is beyond the visible and invisible, the Eternal; when all things pass away this remains: I am the silence of prayer; the Himalayas of all that does not move; the thunderbolt of weapons, victory, defeat; the cleverness in the gambler’s dice; the wind of purification; the beginning, middle and end of all that Is. I am Time which destroys all things, puppets whirling forward in a play of shadow. Even if thou dost not fight, all warriors facing thee shall die.
“But fear not, for the man whose peace is not shaken by others is dear to me. The man who is free from vanity, whose soul is as his actions, whose love is the same for his enemies as his friends, this man who sees that the God in himself is the same God in all that is; he hurts not himself by hurting others. Free of selflessness, even as he kills warriors before him, he sees Eternity in things that pass away, including his own life—”
The screech of a jet woke Guy to the blood on the floor before him: beautiful as an abstract painting, a red streak across a rectangle of yellow sunlight. The apartment rattled with the jet’s roar, dust sifting from the ceiling, his heart racing as though swooping up and out of his body to catch up. In the same half instant, he forced himself to focus on the rifle at the far end of the room, glancing at the window to judge his dash. Wait for the blast, wait for the blast, his mind’s eye seeing the jet release its bomb…. On your mark—he ran track in high school—was this the way a fetus feels before it pushes into the light?—Get set—or old people at the moment of their?—wait for the blast—Go!