“OK, OK, maybe I’m just out of the loop on this enfolding treatment, but there’s something fishy about it, and something even fishier about the fact that the administration admits it’s bogus and it is written into the creed or whatever it is that you went around the house practicing for weeks when you were studying for your exam.” Here the old man turned his attention fully to Singleton and, sounding much older, said, “You should’ve seen her studying day and night in her room.” Suddenly Wendy was repositioned by the kitchen table of her youth. She seemed like a teenager in her father’s eyes, and even in Singleton’s. He felt the urge to lead her out of the kitchen and fuck her on her single bed. He could imagine her room upstairs, the small bed with a comforter and a pink dust ruffle, and the posters of the Stones trying to look like the Beatles, and her desk with her pencil can and her old school books.
The old man opened up the subject of war by nodding to the shelves and saying, I got the idea for this setup from looking at a sub galley. A buddy served on a sub and got me on board and showed me around and the one thing that I was impressed with was the fact that the galley had the finest bone-white china, and the best silverware. You had to spend half a year breathing shit air in a tin can and sleeping ass to ass, but at least you got good food and fine dinnerware as part of the deal. My buddy joined the Navy and I joined the Army. He went under and I went over the top.
Singleton knew the old man would use the mention of his friend in the Navy to begin his confession. And he did. The Bulge. The Black Forest silence during those woozy first few weeks when the war seemed to be winding itself down, one city after another liberated. Cold snowy days filled with the camaraderie of newly formed units: boys fresh off the boat, struggling to understand that they were on the front edge of the great push toward the bunkered-down Hitler (rumored to be dead). A few weeks in the Black Forest, and the gung-ho vibe was replaced by fear. The old man paused, trying to find a way to describe the way it had felt. He muttered to himself. He wanted to find a way to say it. He mentioned the snow, of course, and the fresh-faced innocence of his buddies. He talked about the wind through the pines, foxholes, plans for movement when the word came down. Just a bunch of ignorant doughboys, he said. We got there, dug in, and waited. The old man’s words had an offhandedness from countless retellings. Nothing he said sounded doubtful. The story was a block of stone with the following contents: they waited in the Black Forest. Scouts were sent ahead on recon missions. Scouts spotted the German reinforcements. Scouts sent information behind the lines. Brass gave a fuck. Men waited in trepidation. Germans attacked. At this point — again predictably — the story took a personal twist. Singleton already knew from what Wendy had said that the old man had been captured by the Germans. He was a lieutenant and had command of his unit and was captured. He was one of the men who’d let the Germans, dressed as Americans, through the line.
Singleton listened while Wendy, having heard the stories a hundred times (no wonder she’d joined the Corps!), tried to locate something new. There was nothing but lies, Singleton thought, when a man began talking about combat. The truth of what had really happened was beyond words. In the truly mad, like wheelchair guy out there in the yard, the haze of lies was thick and serene. Amputees had a hard time with their stories. The listener knew the story would end with a blast of some sort, a flying sensation through the air, a gaping disbelief as the man groped around to locate his missing legs. The listener was always ahead of the game when it came to a wheelchair guy. (And maybe that was why enfolding didn’t work on them. Maybe the story they had was trapped in the missing arms, lost like some shadow memory of feeling that kept coming back again and again, mirroring the leg, or arm, or hand.)
What bothered Singleton, as Wendy’s father spoke on about his internment, the forced march to Dresden, the escape during the bombings in a firestorm unleashed by his own troops, was the old man’s voice. It seemed to say: I’m going to go deep into the memory and give you my war and my experience and then I’m going to come to a full stop, maybe dab away the tears, and you’re going to say, Man, sir, that’s heavy, and then in turn, as part of the deal, you’re going to have to tell me your story. You’re going to ante up with some words, and the words must convey a sense, at least, that you’re down there in the memory of some hidden truth you’ll never divulge: but you’ll give me a chance to find it, because we went over and saw something that no one else has seen except for other grunts.
In the old man’s voice was the older-vet-talks-to-younger-vet tone, and it occurred to Singleton that there was a generation gap that he might put to use. Maybe, when it was his turn to speak, he could signal to Wendy to say they had to go.
Now the old man was speaking in tight phrases. He was running away. He made a run for it. The guards were lost in the chase. He somehow got out of Berlin. Then he was in the countryside. He hid out. He burgled a few homes. He slept in haylofts. He met friendly peasant types. A month he spent on the lam until he came upon an American unit …
Singleton had his foot on Wendy’s leg and was moving it up along her shin. He couldn’t see much of her face. She had her elbows on the table and was running her spoon around the rim of her empty cup.
The story would end, Singleton guessed, just as suddenly as it began. It would come to a dead stop. The poetry would flutter away and the old man would sit silently, shaking his head at the enormity of his memory. (There was always a head-shake at the end of a war story.) Then he’d say, Jesus Christ, didn’t mean to go on like that. At which point protocol would require that Singleton ask some question that would direct the story back to the Black Forest.
How many were in your unit?
Did you go on a recon?
What’s your theory on the weak link in the chain of command? Or something else that felt detailed, a baton into the hand of a sprinter, so that the old guy would go back around and get closer to the truth of the matter, the big fuckup. No matter what, every grunt had the sensation of having made a grievous error. Maybe it came from being too gung-ho in the moment. Perhaps the error was a misreading of the landscape due to low light. A quick reaction, putting a round through the forehead of your buddy, who had been coming through the dark night to share a cigarette. Maybe it was a fear so deep that it sent you raging into a village to decapitate an old man who had simply been harvesting rice …
What had brought this example to mind from the myriad of possible examples? Jesus Christ, had he gone in there himself? Had he done such a thing? Was that the evil bullshit enfolded in him? The fuzzball in his head, free-floating. Theory had it they wouldn’t enfold the fantastically evil shit. The evil shit had to be presented to the law, or left external (no treatment!). Reenacting truly evil shit (they said) would only leave you with more shit, so it was unlikely that in some secret facility they were making men reenact atrocities in rigged villages with actors leaning over rice bags, or babies stabbed like Christmas hams on the end of bayonets in the Korean War style; no, no, one had to trust that at some level the web of institutional presumption wouldn’t go that far.
Wendy was nudging him gently in the shin, and her father was now finishing up, saying, Christ, did I go on like that? He was rubbing tears from his eyes. The kitchen was nearly dark, a window of lavender light over the sink. Time wasn’t exactly still. But it was stiller than usual and both men felt the weight of the story pushing against the one that Singleton might tell, if he could. The old man’s story sat like the giant boulder of copper that had been found in the Kewana Peninsula and was shipped at great cost down to the St. Lawrence Seaway. It sank to the bottom of the lake. That’s what seemed to be sitting between them, a large mass of some metal alloyed in the heat of history, now gone.