“Yo, Bobby!”
It’s Pineo. Smirking, walking toward him with a springy step and not a trace of the hostility he displayed the last time they were together. “Man, you look like shit, y’know.”
“I wondered if I did,” Bobby says. “I figured you’d tell me.”
“It’s what I’m here for.” Pineo fakes throwing a left hook under Bobby’s ribs.
“Where’s Carl?”
“Taking a dump. He’s worried about your ass.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“C’mon! You know he’s got that dad thing going with you.” Pineo affects an Eastern European accent, makes a fist, scowls Mazurek-style. “‘Bobby is like son to me.’”
“I don’t think so. All he does is tell me what an asshole I am.”
“That’s Polish for ‘son,’ man. That’s how those old bruisers treat their kids.”
As they begin walking across the pit, Pineo says, “I don’t know what you did to Calculator Bitch, man, but she never did come back to the bar. You musta messed with her mind.”
Bobby wonders if his hanging out with Alicia was the cause of Pineo’s hostility, if Pineo perceived him to be at fault, the one who was screwing up their threefold unity, their trinity of luck and spiritual maintenance. Things could be that simple.
“What’d you say to her?” Pineo asks.
“Nothing. I just told her about the job.”
Pineo cocks his head and squints at him. “You’re not being straight with me. I got the eye for bullshit, just like my mama. Something going on with you two?”
“Uh-huh. We’re gonna get married.”
“Don’t tell me you’re fucking her.”
“I’m not fucking her!”
Pineo points at him. “There it is! Bullshit!”
“Sicilian ESP… Wow. How come you people don’t rule the world?”
“I can’t believe you’re fucking the Calculator Bitch!” Pineo looks up to heaven and laughs. “Man, were you even sick at all? I bet you spent the whole goddamn week sleep-testing her Certa.”
Bobby just shakes his head ruefully.
“So what’s it like—yuppie pussy?”
Irritated now, Bobby says, “Fuck off!”
“Seriously. I grew up in Queens, I been deprived. What’s she like? She wear thigh boots and a colonel’s hat? She carry a riding crop? No, that’s too much like her day job. She…”
One of the earth movers starts up, rumbling like T-Rex, vibrating the ground, and Pineo has to raise his voice to be heard.
“She was too sweet, wasn’t she? All teach me tonight and sugar, sugar. Like some little girl read all the books but didn’t know what she read till you come along and pulled her trigger. Yeah… and once the little girl thing gets over, she goes wild on your ass. She loses control, she be fucking liberated.”
Bobby recalls the transformation, not the-glory-that-was-Alicia part, the shining forth of soul rays, but the instant before she kissed him, the dazed wonderment in her face, and realizes that Pineo—unwittingly, of course—has put his grimy, cynical, ignorant, wise-ass finger on something he, Bobby, has heretofore not fully grasped. That she did awaken, and not merely to her posthumous condition, but to him. That at the end she remembered who she wanted to be. Not “who,” maybe. But how. How she wanted to feel, how she wanted to live. The vivid, less considered road she hoped her life would travel. Understanding this, he understands what the death of thousands has not taught him. The exact measure of his loss. And ours. The death of one. All men being Christ and God in His glorious fever burning, the light toward which they aspire. Love in the whirlwind.
“Yeah, she was all that,” Bobby says.
A WALK IN THE GARDEN
Thursday, 1435 hours
Paradise awaits.
It begins at the foot of a mountain, a slice of which has been carved away by bombardment to expose a field of yellow flowers beneath—it looks as if the entire base is hollow, an immense cave utilized for this pretty purpose. Unreal. Like a puddle of yellow blood spilled from the side of a wounded rock, spread out over a patch of dead ground. To Wilson, who hails from Colorado, where the mountains have snow on their slopes, this mountain is just a big ugly hill. He’s not sure, either, that he would classify the field of flowers as the gateway to Paradise. There seems to be a division of opinion as to what the field is. The bomb they used to open up the cave was something new. Nobody is clear about what happened. According to Wilson’s buddy, Baxter Tisdale, a corporal who’s friends with some of the tech specialists, the brainiacs are talking about paradigm shifts, changes on the quantum level. When Wilson asked what the fuck was all that, Baxter told him to do some IQ, he wasn’t going to attempt an explanation that Wilson, his intellect unamplified, couldn’t possibly comprehend. Wilson was tempted to do as Baxter said. He likes IQ, likes the rush of getting suddenly smart, the way the world fits around him differently. But he doesn’t want to be too smart to do his job. In the morning they’ll walk through the field of flowers and into the shadowy places beyond. Chances are he’ll do IQ at some point before the mission, but right now he doesn’t want to be thinking about that walk too deeply.
Wilson is sitting cross-legged atop a boulder on the outskirts of a mountain village in northern Iraq, gazing west over a barren valley, a position directly across from the field of flowers. He’s shirtless, wearing desert-camo fatigue pants and a helmet, the optics of its faceplate magnified, so it seems he’s looking at the flowers from a distance of fifty feet and not, as is truly the case, more than a mile. Wilson loves his helmet forever and happily ever after. It looks dangerous-robot slick with the tiger stripes he painted on the sides. It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide. An hour before, it reminded him to record messages for family and friends. He sent love to his parents, talked dirty to his girlfriend, Laura Witherspoon, and to his best friend back in Greeley, he said, “Yo, Mackie! I am the magic! My boots store energy—I can jump twenty-five feet straight fucking up, dude! Tomorrow we’re gonna kick some brutal ass! Talk to ya later!” Now he’s in a more reflective mood. The thought of invading Paradise is fresh, but he’s not too sure, you know. Intel is promoting the idea that the flowers are a terrorist hydroponics experiment. That sounds bullshit to Wilson. There’s little doubt the ragheads believe it’s Paradise. If the village wasn’t cordoned off, the entire population would go running into the darkness under the mountain, even though the ones that did so before the Americans arrived never reappeared.
Here and there among the flowers lie chunks of rock, some big as troop carriers. Wilson tells his helmet to go tight on one of the blossoms next to the big rock. It’s long and fluted like a lily, its interior petals convulsed like those of a rose. He’s never seen a flower resembling it. Not that he’s an expert. The weird thing is, there are no bugs. He scans from blossom to blossom. Nary an ant, an aphid, or a bee. Maybe Intel isn’t bullshitting; maybe the ragheads have developed a strain of flowers that don’t need bugs to fertilize them. Maybe they’re like a cool new drug source. Better than opium poppies. Wilson indulges a brief fantasy. He’s back in Greeley, at a party, in a room with Mackie and a couple of girls, and they’re about to twist one up when he produces a baggie filled with dried yellow petals and says, “Magic time.” A few minutes later he and Laura Witherspoon are screwing on the ceiling, the walls have turned to greenish blue music, the carpet is the surface of a shaggy planet far below. He wishes for things he can’t have. That Laura was with him, that he never re-upped. Most of all he wishes that he never volunteered for Special Ops. Depressed, he instructs his helmet to feed him a trippy level of downs via ocular mist. A minute drools off the lip of time. His head feels full of syrup, a warm sludge of thought. He’s got Chinese eyes, he’s nodding like the yellow flowers in the breeze… They’re so close it looks as if he could reach out and snap off a blossom, lift it to his lips and drink secret nectar from the Garden of Allah.