Shane watched as his eye twitched, and he looked down at his cold coffee.
“So,” Murdock grumbled. “Maybe it’s about time you got around to telling me what this is all about. Why I drove halfway to Pittsburgh to not eat breakfast.”
THE LOVE OF THE SUIT Like bundling up for a Pennsylvania winter. First, armor: leggings, collar, breastplate of Kevlar. Then pants with suspenders and spine guard, the diaper that encases the groin. Slip on the overcoat. All of it weighing “half a good woman,” as Ta’amu liked to say. Your buddies helping you in, checking all the zippers, ties, and quick-release tabs in case you caught fire. Finally, pop on the helmet, check the microphone, the air snorkel, and above all, make sure that power fan works and the batteries are fresh because it’s probably 120 fucked-up degrees out. Then it’s just you peering through a visor two inches thick that gets dustier every minute you’re out. Like wearing the chitinous molt of a prehistoric colossus. Ta’amu would babble reassuringly in his ear on the lonesome walk. Just the captain’s way of creating the calm: “I’ve been meaning to give you your performance review: You’re a funny little monkey, Manfuck. Think about the millennium of your progenitors who’ve lived and died, son, so that when the cum spilled out of your mommy’s asshole at the wrong angle a mastermind hick like yourself could be born into the light of consciousness. You are Blown Away, kid. Bombs don’t survive you. You make IEDs IEDon’ts. Just remember, my man, if you offer to carry the weight then you can’t complain about the load.” Then it was just the safe. When all the focus and training came zipping down to a zero-point, a moment of creation. Peeling apart foam chunks to get at the plastic-encased detonating cord of an EFP. The bomb makers versus the EOD. It was a battle of intellect and observation and obsessive skill. He crouched in his own airtight astronaut-suit world, a piercing attention for the detail that tells no story or tells the whole one. You matched wits. There was no syllabus, there were no rules. Only adaptation and improvisation or mutilation and incineration. Blast lungization.
“What do you think it’s about, Kel?”
He threw up a hand. “Hell if I know. Maybe you are writing a movie. People love war stories.”
“It’s good to see you,” she said. “When my partners and I started this thing, this venture, I thought of you. But I’d been thinking of you for a few years anyway.”
Murdock watched through a window as a woman struggled to her car on a walker, helped along by a husband with thinning gray carefully moussed back.
“So this ain’t about Hurt Locker 2: Hurt Harder?”
“Do you remember,” she said carefully, “when we met that weekend in D.C., we had a conversation about what it would take—what would have to happen—to actually change this country?”
He lowered his voice.
“I’d consider myself still a kid at that point. Feeling angry and alone and saying stupid kid shit.” He scanned the Bob Evans to see what the other diners were doing. “My point wasn’t that I wanted to do shit like that. It’s that there ain’t no point in doing shit like that.”
“I’m not trying to sell you on anything here.” She said this with great care, each word handled, examined, and chosen. “I’ve been where you’ve been, Kel. You didn’t have to go to Iraq to feel despair about what’s happened and what’s happening now. All I’m asking is for you to hear me out on this.” She could feel the agitation wafting off him. “And if you don’t like our idea, no problem. You walk away, we walk away. No hard feelings.”
HOME Ta’amu saw that Murdock rarely made calls home, mostly because his mom didn’t have a computer or phone and had to go to the neighbors’ to take the call. He started inviting Murdock to join him on the video phone when he called his family back in LA. This consisted of his wife, the dogs, and like seven little brown kids running around screaming the whole time (though he understood only three of these were Ta’amu spawn and the others belonged to a sister in rehab). His wife was a phat collection of gorgeous curves and beautiful Samoan-next-door features. The first time he made Murdock sit in on the herky-jerky, screen-frozen call, Ta’amu told them this was Uncle Murder, and after the children bombarded him with questions about war and how cool was their dad and did he know how to play Call of Duty and was he coming to Los Angeles with their dad after it was all over, Ta’amu replied that he’d have no white Shit-Demon from the Sticks in his house and the kids screamed with laughter and the wife reprimanded him for cursing, and Murdock had to get up and leave, at which point he began to cry, violently, until Ta’amu found him at the entrance to the HAS and told him to stop being a pussy—of course Manfuck could come visit him in LA. They’d grill steaks.
“Christ, you got a hell of a way of piquing a guy’s interest.” He relaxed back into the booth. “Not just a cerebral hick here. Also an open-minded hick.”
Shane was not satisfied yet.
“Here’s what I mean by that: This is going to be a conversation you can’t ever repeat. To anyone. We don’t know what this thing will be, but I need your word this is only between us.”
“And you got it.”
“I’m not being clear.” She put her hand over his again and squeezed. “This is not about hurting anyone, but we could get into trouble just talking about it.”
“I’m telling you, gal, you got my ear. Start her up.”
“I think you understand, Kel, that you have an important set of skills. First, I tell you the bones of what we’re doing. Then if you dig that, we move on to the next step, and you meet my partners.”
“Who are your partners?”
“You don’t need to know who they are until you need to.”
“Inscrutable doesn’t really do it for me, Alvarez. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m a detail-oriented fella.”
“It’s actually Acosta now,” she said. “You’d call me Shane Acosta.”
THE RON KOVIC FANTASY Whitehall’s self-flagellating term. That once you got home you could take up the righteous cause because you’d been there and you knew. He could only read so much about the fat margins of the contractors making fortunes not just off Iraq and Afghanistan but the empire of bases, exporting their equipment and training to a world hungry for a taste of American military supremacy; or about the symbiotic tether between the Pentagon and petroleum—the work of the oil companies guarded and protected by taxpayer dollars; or how rapid and unchecked free-market globalization incubated inequality, which incubated instability, which would eventually incubate more excuses for militarism. He’d seen the way the American empire operates. He understood its vascular system and the grainy detail of its red cells. He could wage peaceful war against its patriotic heart. “That’s the only impulse to follow,” Whitehall told him. “Find yourself purpose in dissent and dig in. Maybe it feels pointless, but it will give you direction, and really, who knows—it might even bring a couple kids home who would’ve got packed into boxes otherwise. Don’t think about your life before, don’t dwell on the people you lost, over there or at home, and whatever you do don’t start drinking. Once you open the bottle, you’ll never put the cap back on.”
RAGE Shane could sense this restless anger in him, he was sure. His left eye still went through spasms of uncontrollable twitching, and he still thrashed in bed half of every night, and he still got that uncategorizable panic bubbling in his chest in crowds, and he would still hear the distinctive sound of bullets snapping by his head, that noise they made as they broke the sound barrier when they zipped by your ear, and he could still never remember his mom’s face or where she’d first showed him how to tie a turle knot. Because all that rage reading—fuck. How inadequate those explanations ultimately felt for all that he’d seen and lived through. There was still no account, no explanation, and no going back. Just him and his ghosts gazing in shared awe over the edge of darkness.