We Salute You is printed for each U.S. port of troop entry — L.A., New York — Newark, Boston, Houston, Seattle, even Detroit. It’s twenty gray newsprint pages (an online edition’s in the works) full of important phone numbers, e-mail and postal addresses for whatever geographical area the trooper or marine or airman first puts a foot down on home soil. Panic attack, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse helpline numbers are included. Veteran-friendly taxi companies. Directions to transportation hubs. Numbers to purchase a phone card. Every church you can think of, including Muslims, atheists, and Agnostics Anonymous. All these numbers are, of course, obtainable by anyone — though not in such an easy, free-of-charge, depoliticized format. There’s also plenty of less expectable info. Clean Vietnamese massage boutiques. Outfitters for mule pack-ins to the Sierras. A clearinghouse for online sites to help you find a former girlfriend who’s abandoned you. Chat-line numbers dealing with revenge issues. Private phone numbers of all U.S. congressmen and senators. Sites for how to buy Cuban cigars and condoms by the gross. There’s an LGBT strength-in-numbers line. Even a number for a Socrates Death-With-Dignity support league, where psychologists with degrees from Oberlin and Macalester try to talk a soldier back from the brink while seeming to understand that death might seem the only option.
Our mission, of course, occasionally fails. One young sailor from Piscataway, three days out of Kandahar, stuffed the exhaust pipes of his Trans-Am with stolen copies of We Salute You’s and slipped the surly bonds in the Washington Crossing State Park parking lot — a note taped to the steering wheel saying “Here’s the future. Get ready for it.” There’s nothing you can do when someone’s ready to go, though possibly a handshake didn’t hurt.
MY CAR CLOCK NOW SAYS ELEVEN FIFTEEN. THE striper guy is stowing his gear in his bucket and notching his hook to his rod handle. The tide’s come in. He’s fished with his back to the mayhem ashore as if it wasn’t there.
The tiny, distant beach figures with the trotting dog alongside have come clearly into view. They turn out to be the Glucks, unsociable neighbors from when I lived here. Arthur’s a defrocked Rutgers professor (plagiarism — the usual “overlookings” and “carelessnesses”). He’s trudgering along with his plump wife, Allie Ann, and an all-but-immobilized, low-riding fat brown dog I’d have sworn they had ten years ago, which would make it eighteen. “Poot.” The Glucks, who must be in their late eighties, are preserved not much better than their dog and are walking with old-age difficulty along the tide-narrowed beach, arms looped, chins lowered, dressed like Eskimos, leaning into each other so that they look like one lumpy human package. Are they here, I wonder, to survey the ruins? Their house has vanished. Or did they get away (like me) and buy into staged-retirement in Somerville that buses them to the Whole Foods, keeps Columbia-trained M.D.s onsite 24/7, and lets them keep their ’95 Electra ’til the State takes the keys. I’d rather jump in my watery basement hole than talk to them. What rueful recognitions would glint in their beady eyes? “Oh, yes of course, Mr. Bascombe. Of course, of course, OF COURSE!” How many old acquaintances, neighbors, former teachers, fellow marines have we all caught a glimpse of in an unexpected place and dived in an alley rather than face for a second? All because: (1) We don’t want to; (2) There’s too much unsaid that doesn’t need to be said — a Chinese wall of words that would fall on top of us and we’d die; (3) We know others feel the very same way about us. We’re, most of us, the last persons anyone in his right mind wants to talk to on any given day, including Christmas.
I ease down in my seat and raise my window in case the Glucks see me. But they don’t so much as glance at my car, parked fifty meters from where their house once staunchly stood. They plod along the empty beach like specters, their dog at their knees. Where would they be going but back into the fog?
And then all of a sudden, I don’t want to be here anymore — at all. Whatever inland protections I’ve come armed with have worn away and rendered me — a target. Of loss. Of sadness. The thing I didn’t want to be and explicitly why I haven’t ventured down here in these last weeks, and shouldn’t have now. I have these sensations more than I like to admit, since they make me feel that something bad is closing in — like the advance of a shadow across a square of playground grass where I happen to be standing. When the shadow covers the last grass blade, the air goes suddenly chill and still, and all is up for me. Which will ultimately be only true. So who’d blame me for feeling it now, and here?
But I’m ready to cease and desist. Being here makes me feel guilty-without-context. Like being present when someone you know, but don’t know well, all at once falls into a pit of despair and starts blubbering, and you can’t do anything except wish the hell he or she would stop. I feel not a straw of blame for anything hereabouts, yet somehow feel implicated by everything’s dilapidation and sad future. This is more than I bargained for — much more — yet doesn’t seem actually to be anything. Just stupid, stupid, stupid. I am. Again.
Though should I just sit — motor thrumming, hoping the continental edge will re-buoy me? Should I turn on the Fanfare again (Obama used it for his Lincoln Memorial speech, where it worked)? Should I climb out into the foggy chill and have a poke round my old edifice, possibly spy something I left a decade back? A plastic laundry hamper? A bicycle pump with Bascombe painted on in red nail polish? What the fuck am I supposed to do? Anyone else would drive off. I’m worried, of course, about picking up a roof tack in my radials.
OUTSIDE MY CAR WINDOW, ARNIE URQUHART, OR A man I take to be him, stands, talking, silenced by my closed glass. (Where’s the Lexus hidden?) He’s pointing beyond the berm and the ruin of my old house — his old house — a stack of sticks rained down from the sky. Conceivably I’ve fallen into a carbon monoxide fugue. Has he been here long? Have we had our meeting already? Have I made everything right by him, the way I once did?
Arnie seems to me to be talking about the Twin Towers, which is possibly why he’s pointing north. I used to believe I could see them from my deck, though it was only clouds and light playing tricks. “It must’ve taken some real nuts to do that,” Arnie’s saying, as I lower my window. We’re suddenly very close to each other. “That huge skyscraper just coming right at you, three hundred miles a fuckin’ hour. Fascinating, really.” I can’t open my door because Arnie’s in the way. A current of damp, foggy ocean air sifts around me where I’ve been warm in here. When I was in college in Ann Arbor, I loved the cold. But no more. “We bring our disasters down to our own level, don’t we, Frank,” Arnie’s saying. “But those poor people really couldn’t. So we’re lucky down here in a way. You know?” Arnie turns toward the wrecked corpse of his house. “Remember that place? Boy, oh boy.” Out of the ocean’s hiss, a foghorn moans. Surprising it would be working when nothing else is.