There is a courtroom window right behind Pedro Jiménez. When he stands, he blocks out some of the light. The lens takes a moment to adjust. It flares and comes back into focus. His head is bowed. His hands are clasped at his waist. His suit is a hopeful blue. He waits as the jury forewoman steps forth. He closes his eyes while pronouncement is read out.
The sky outside is an immense sheet of gray. There is no movement in the clouds at all.
More cameras in the city than birds in the sky.
What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?
1
He had agreed in spring to write a short story for the New Year’s Eve edition of a newspaper magazine. An easy enough task, he thought at first. In late May he settled down to sketch out a few images that might work, but soon found himself struggling, adrift. For a couple of weeks in early summer he cast about, chased ideas and paragraphs, left a few hanging, found himself postponing the assignment, putting it to the back of his mind. Occasionally he pulled his notes out again, then abandoned them once more.
He wondered how he would ever push into the territory of a New Year’s Eve story — create a series of fireworks perhaps, drop a mirrored ball in a city, or allow snow to slowly scatter across the face of a windowpane?
All the beginnings he attempted — scribbled down in notebooks — wrote themselves into the dark.
2
In early summer he landed on the idea that he could perhaps defy his own notions of what a New Year’s Eve story could achieve and tell a military tale, perhaps the portrait of a soldier somewhere far away, a young American, say, in a distant land. He could find himself, say, in a barracks on New Year’s Eve in Afghanistan, the simple notion of a Marine — let’s say a young woman, slightly exhausted by war, sitting on the edge of a valley, in the cold, surrounded by sandbags, in the vast quiet, looking eastward, under a steel mesh of stars, all silence, not even the thrup of machine-gun fire in the distance, the grim perimeter of the soldier’s reality set against the possibility of what might be happening elsewhere, say, at home in South Carolina, say, a relentless suburb of no great distinction, say, a house gone slightly sour with the years, say, a broken drainpipe hanging down from the garage, say, a boy in the driveway, a young boy, in a striped shirt and torn jeans, with a bicycle lying forlorn at his feet, her brother, or her cousin, or perhaps even her son, yes, maybe her son.
3
Looking out into the Afghan night — although it would be better to be specific, and she could be facing the gothic dark of the Kerengal Valley, maybe even the ridge over Loi Kolay Village — she would draw herself into the savagery found at the outpost of every war, several layers of black pressing down on the already-dark mountains, an area where even the stunted trees might seem as if they want to step off the cliffs and hurtle themselves to the valley floor, the darkness made again more visible by the layer of frost covering everything, the sandbags, the steel rebars, the machine gun, a Browning M-57, the impossible stretch of distance, the enormity of black sky, with everything so cold that the young Marine, let’s call her Sandi, wears a balaclava over her face, under her helmet, and the tip-ends of Sandi’s eyelashes have frozen and her lungs feel thick with ice and when she looks through the small gap in the sandbags her teeth chatter so much that she is afraid she might chip them, a personal dread, since Sandi is hipheavy and small-breasted and unpretty in her own eyes, and twenty-six years old and feeling every single day of it, but proud of her strong white teeth, so that when she takes the upper lip of the balaclava and stretches it down across her mouth, the fabric tastes hard and rough and synthetic against her tongue.
4
Sandi sits alone in her rocky outpost. Unlikely of course, but he knows a few Marines back in New York, and he has heard their stories, and he is well aware that reality so often trumps invention, so he justifies her aloneness with the idea that a New Year’s Eve party is taking place in the village barracks below, and Sandi has agreed to give the other Marines a break, that she will take the post alone for an hour while midnight tips over, while the ball drops distantly, because everyone in Sandi’s unit knows that Sandi is decent, Sandi is cool, Sandi knows the score, and, let’s be honest, Sandi likes her privacy, and she has been given special access to a satellite phone that she can use at the stroke of midnight, since who wants to be alone on New Year’s Eve without a way to at least call home and say — and what is Sandi going to say?
(He has, he must admit, no idea yet.)
What he does know is that the sense of cold seclusion is important: not only because it is a New Year’s Eve story, but because it freezes Sandi in her cube of human loneliness, like most of us, at the unfolding of a year, looking backward and forward, both. Not only that, but the reader must begin to feel the cold that claws Sandi up there on the 308-meter ridge: so much so that she, or he, almost inhabits the very trees that want to step off the cliff. We should feel our own eyelashes freeze, and clench our cheeks to stop our own teeth chattering, because, like Sandi, we have something we must see, or understand, or at least imagine into existence, far away, and we, too, have a distant hope that Sandi will say something into her satellite phone, perhaps not a resolution, but at least a resolve of some sort, a small parcel of meaning.
(Though he still has little idea of what exactly she might say, she is beginning to become a little more complex for him, which he’s grateful for, since deadline is approaching, he has to have it finished by mid-October at the latest, and he hunkers down for three or four days, in late September, in his apartment on Eighty-sixth Street in New York, though he can still somehow feel the cold seeping in from the Afghan hills, and he wants now to capture the essence of what it feels like to be far from home, to be in two or three places all at once, and the simple notion that what we really need on New Year’s Eve is a sense of return, whether to his own original Dublin, or to Sandi’s Charleston, or to his New York, or Sandi’s birthplace which is, let’s say, Ohio, though Sandi of course could be born just about any place, but Ohio feels right, let’s say Toledo.)
5
This he now knows: Sandi Jewell is twenty-six years old, from Toledo, she lives in the south, she’s a Marine, she perches in her camouflage more than 1,010 feet high in the debilitating cold, wearing a balaclava, looking out at the Afghan dark on the eve of the new year, about to dial a loved one on a satellite phone at her side. (He wonders what might happen if once, a year ago, there were three space heaters in the lookout, but they leaked out a light so that a sniper took out another Marine simply by lining up the shot in the center of the heaters, a perfect mathematical triangulation, an incident Sandi might have been aware of when she volunteered to take the outpost, adding another sense of dread to the story — perhaps it could happen again, a leak of light from her satellite phone this time? After a few days he decides against it — it would be far too simple to embrace the ease of death by sniperfire, and what sort of New Year’s story might that be anyway?) The essence of Sandi’s story has begun to place layers upon layers, though he does not know yet who the loved one is, or what might eventually exist between them. Still, a certain mystery has begun to join things together.
6
What Sandi sees, or what he imagines Sandi can see: the boy lays his bicycle down in the driveway, somewhere suburban, a Legoland of houses, on the outskirts of Charleston. It is midafternoon in mid-America, eight and a half hours behind Afghanistan. He is a tall, thin handsome boy. Let’s say he is definitely her son (the desire to talk must be immense, and the potential for tragedy reaclass="underline" what might happen if she doesn’t get to talk to him? What happens if the line goes dead? What happens if a shot rings out in the night?). He is fourteen years old, tricky, of course, since Sandi was earlier established as twenty-six years old. (Is he really her son? Is that feasible? Is it even possible?) The boy lifts the corrugated garage door, his heart thumping in his blue-and-white-striped shirt, and he hears a shout from inside the house, a woman (let’s name her Kimberlee) trilling out to him (let’s name him Joel) to say: Quick, Joel, your mom’s about to call. And Joel is late, he knows he’s late, and he’s old enough now — almost fifteen in fact — to have a sweetheart and to know some things about the complexities of loss. He has spent an afternoon with her down there near the school bleachers on Lancaster Street. He has pledged himself to her, he will be with her later tonight when the real clock (the American clock) strikes midnight, but first he must talk to his second mother in Afghanistan from the kitchen of his first mother’s house.