But although she knew, roughly, what had happened to him as a prisoner, he'd never told her everything about it. Not about the ropes and not about the rice sacks filled with stones. How do you explain torture? Where your mind went? How you hated them but also yourself for what was being done to you? He'd told the psychiatrists at the base hospital enough anyway; they pumped it out of you before you could poison your family. Some guys even required sodium pentathol. Say it, say what happened. Tell us, young fellow. We know you need to talk about it. But they didn't want you to talk to anyone else about it. Don't tell the newspaper reporters, don't discuss it with other active pilots, try not to tell your wife too much. It was fucking political. But he'd done his best to comply. And even then, the Air Force kept him in the hospital for nine weeks, controlled access to him. No photographs, except for internal medical research purposes, no visits from family members until after his bones had been reset, tendons reattached, after he had been tube-nourished, dewormed, stepped down from the morphine, had his broken teeth fixed. In that time they got thirty pounds back on him. Shave, haircut, trimmed fingernails, new uniform, nice crutches, fifty pills a day, back brace. Then, and only then, had Ellie been allowed to see him. Greatest moment in his life, when he hugged her, felt the kids rush against his legs. As for what had happened, she'd asked, of course, begged him to tell her so that she could understand his long silences. But he'd decided talking would make it bigger, not smaller. Would pervert the perversion, lay language on it, never to be removed. She meant well, she was willing to listen, but finally the experience had been his, not hers. He wanted to get on with the raising of the children, the pursuit of the future. And so they'd never really talked about it, and in the shared history of their lives, his POW experience had become, all these years later, just an anomaly, a strange dark patch sewn into a familiar bright fabric. Moreover, the death of Ben had changed everything, recalibrated their notion of suffering. There was simply life before Ben died and after. In the subsequent years they had become so prosperous, the value of Teknetrix's stock rising so high, that it was as if their faith in the endurance of grief was being tested. Once their wealth reached a critical mass, say ten million, it burgeoned and proliferated, rooting itself and spreading, blooming in the long bull market of the nineties. Ellie would say to him sometimes, "We have so much money and it really doesn't-I mean, I like to see shows and I like our apartment, but you know I-" And then she'd stop and her blue eyes would fill and he'd nod sadly and they both would know that there was nothing they could do. Their boy was gone. Sometimes on those evenings Charlie would feel a strange strength to his erection, getting almost as stiff as he did when he was younger, and their fucking beneath the covers became an erotic communion of grief. Ellie would go back and forth between orgasms and weeping, several times, though his own final spasm contained little that was celebratory or even cathartic to it; he would just give in to necessity. Even as they held their pleasure close to themselves, they knew it was fleeting, they knew that it would only later deliver them into sadness, and that year by year they were losing hold on the things they wanted most. Ellie in these times would wrap her legs around him and beg him please to fuck her so that she could just forget everything, everything except that she was alive, and he would try not to feel his back and do his damnedest and sometimes, rarely, it would work, but usually not. When it did, she cried out and he'd bow his head and feel glad for her yet also aware that he was incapable of such deliverance. It's different if you have killed people, it's different because, although you can suffer the death of people you love, you know that you've caused that same grief in innumerable others, and the weight of that is always there, pulls at you like a stone. It didn't matter that he'd done it for his country. It didn't matter that the war was unnecessary. If he had only known then what he knew now. But that was true of everybody. He had gone to war because he'd loved to fly, and although he had been very good at understanding technical procedures and air combat strategy and the argument that he was protecting democracy and all the other monkey-brain complexity the Air Force filled you with, he had not understood time. Not understood that his actions weren't discrete and perishable but that they would become part of him, forever. He would carry them. You carry your own water around here, his father always said, and he was right. There was nothing he could do now about what he had done then.
For a few years, however, he'd hoped that he might understand his experience as a POW as some form of punishment, but now that idea was laughable, nothing more than a lie; after all, he had lived, and lived well, whereas all those people had died. The only thing that came close was Ben's death. But even that was not enough to balance the accounts. It was not enough to remember the way, in his last week in the hospital, that Ben had curled up on his left side, his hands in loose fists near his face, hunched in against the opponent. At times his crusty eyelids opened, but whatever he saw was not before him in the room. He could no longer talk then, but he seemed to be alert within himself, and his staying in the clenched position seemed his insistence on a bit of privacy while he went about the hard work of dying. His thin beard had become long, and a day or two before the end, Charlie brought his electric razor to the hospital to shave him. Ben's neck was like a baby's, too weak to support his head, so Charlie slipped his hand beneath his son's ear and carefully shaved both cheeks and his chin one last time, so that Ellie would be able to see the face of her son, see the face of the boy in the young man who was now almost ancient. Ben's eyes opened at the touch of Charlie's hand and a curl appeared at the corner of his mouth, the curl of amusement and pleasure that always signified how he felt about things. But this tremor of sweetness on Ben's face was no consolation, for its softness only signified that all things died, even a nineteen-year-old prince. Dying more quickly, in fact, because of his youth. Yes, all earthly things returned to earth, some at their appointed time, others not.