“Tangiers, how about?”
“Y’know, I been thinking about that. Maybe not Tangiers. Somewhere away from the Arabs, man. Somewhere closer to home. Maybe Mexico.”
“Mexico’s cool.”
“My parents used to take me down when I was a kid. There was a town on the Gulf. Tecolutla. A real zero place. Palm trees, a beach, some crummy hotels. No tourists. I’d like to go there.”
“Might not be like that anymore.”
“Tecolutla’s never gonna change. A few more people… sure. But there’s nothing there. The beach isn’t even that good. Just a whole buncha nothing… and mosquitoes. I could use some nothing for a while.”
“You might get bored.”
“Well, that’d be your job, wouldn’t it? To see I didn’t.”
“Guess we better practice so I can prepare not to be boring. Get to know your ins and outs.”
She doesn’t respond right away, and Wilson wonders if she’s actually considering dropping trou and fucking in the flowers, but then she says, “I’m reading heat. Fluctuating. Like it’s a fire up ahead.”
Wilson switches on his helmet array. A wall of fire over two miles deep, maybe an hour away, extending to infinity. “The suits might handle it, we move through fast.”
“They might,” GRob says. “They might not.”
Through her faceplate he reads a grievous uncertainty, an emotion he refuses to let himself feel. He knows to his soul there’s hope, a path, a trick to all this, a secret adit, a magic door. “I’m not shutting down,” he says. “And it’s no use going back. Like Baxman said, ‘Devil’s loose in the world.’”
“You believe that?”
“You don’t?”
“I saw it, but… I don’t know.”
“What else you gonna believe?” he asks. “That we can walk back out, debrief, hit the PX? That we’re tripping? That we made this shit up? Those are the options.”
Her face hardens and she won’t meet his eyes.
“You wanna hang out?” he asks. “You wanna take a rest, sit for a while? Maybe lie down? Just chill? I’ll do it. I’ll stay with you, that’s what you want. But I’m not shutting down.”
Time inches along, five seconds, ten, twenty, becoming a memorial slowness, a graven interlude measuring her decision. She looks up at him. “I’m not shutting down.”
Wilson sees from her expression that they’re a unit now, they’ve become a function of one another’s trust in a way he and Baxter did not. They’re locked tighter, like a puzzle of plastic and metal and blood with two solid parts. They’ve made an agreement deeper than a week together after the war, one either he can’t articulate or doesn’t want to.
“Fight the fire with fire,” he says.
“Summers back in Arizona, I walked my dog in worse heat’n that.”
“Gotta burn the flames, GRob.”
“Muscle up to that motherfucker… make it hurt!”
“We trained hotter places! We breathed smoke and shit ash trays!”
“We racked out in the fiery fucking furnace!”
“Are you glad about it?”
“Damn straight I’m glad! I got some tunes I wanna play for whatever bitches live in there!”
“High caliber tunes?”
“Golden gospel hits, man!”
“Can you walk through the fire?”
“Can a little girl make a grown man cry?”
“Can we walk through the fire?”
“Aw, man! We are so motivated! We’re gonna be waltzing through it!”
1926 hours
They hear the roar of the fire before they see its glow, and once they’re close enough to see the wall itself, no end to it, reaching to the roof of the cave, a raging, reddish orange fence between them and the unknown, a fence that divides the entire world or all that remains of it… once they’re that close, the roar sounds like a thousand engines slightly mistimed, and once they’re really close, less than fifty feet, the sound is of a single mighty engine, and the cooling units in their suits kick in. GRob’s faceplate reflects the flickering light, the ghost of her face visible behind it. As they stand before the wall of fire, considering the question it’s asked of them, Wilson goes wide on his display screen, taking an angle low to the ground and from the side, looking upward at their figures. It appears they’re in partial eclipse, the front of their suits ablaze, the backs dark, their shadows joined and cast long over the yellow flowers, two tiny people dwarfed by a terrifying magic. He shifts the focus, keeping low and viewing them from the perspective of someone closer to the fire. Their figures seem larger and have acquired a heroic brightness. It’s a toss-up, he thinks, which angle is the truest. GRob says, “I can’t believe this shit,” and he’s about to say something neutral, a mild encouragement, when it hits him, the thing that’s been missing, the hidden door, the trick to all this. It’s so stunningly simple, he doubts it for a moment. It’s an answer that seems to rattle like a slug in a tin cup. But it’s so perfect, he can’t sustain doubt. “Yeah, you do,” he says. “You believe it.”
She stares at him, bewildered.
“Where are we?” he asks.
“Fuck you mean?”
“Hell. We’re in hell.”
“I guess… yeah.”
“The Islamic hell.”
He runs it down for her. The induction of chaos by means of military device, the imposition of distinct form upon primordial matter, the anthropomorphic effect; the villagers believing that the flowers were the gateway to Paradise, and then there it was in its metaphorical form. But in this instance there was a truth congruent to the anthropomorphic effect; the cosmic disruption caused by the materialization of Paradise on the earthly plane brought about the day of judgment, allowed hell to be hauled up from wherever it rested on seventy thousand volts or ropes. Or maybe the villagers lied, maybe they wanted the Americans to think it was Paradise and knew it was hell all along. Maybe that’s why what they told the interrogators was classified.
“So? We been through all this,” GRob says.
“Are we in hell?”
“Yeah… I mean, I don’t know!”
“You do know!”
“Okay! I know! Fuck!”
The way she’s staring reminds him of how Baxter would look at him when he said something Baxter thought was dumb. But this isn’t dumb, this is their only chance, and he continues laying it out for her.
“We’re in hell,” he says. “The Islamic hell. Which means Islam is the way.”
“The way?”
“The true religion. We’re in the middle of a verse from the Qur’an. It’s the perfect fucking irony. An American bomb brings about the Islamic day of judgment. And now the path to Paradise lies ahead. How do you escape from hell? People intercede for you. They make a case you deserve getting in.”
“You’re trashed!”
“How can you not believe it? We’re here!”
She has, he thinks, been on the verge of scoffing again, but when he says this, her stubborn expression fades.
“You see? We’re not infidels… not anymore. We’re believers. We have to believe ’cause it’s happened to us.” He points at the wall of flame. “You said it yourself. We gotta go through somewhere bad to get somewhere good. You felt that. Well, here we fucking are! We have to go through hell to reach Paradise. It makes sense that the last people allowed into Paradise would be infidels… converts. That they’d be the lowest of the low. It makes raghead sense.”
“We’re not converts,” she said. “You hafta take classes and shit, don’tcha? To convert.”
“We been jumped into Islam, we don’t need classes.” He puts his hands on her shoulders. “What’s the name of God?”
She wants to buy into it, he can tell, but she’s hesitant. He asks again, and she says, tentatively, “Allah?” Then she turns away from him. “This is so whack!”