Or maybe I’d be good at pacing the long, carpeted corridors of the Hyatt Hotel between the hours of 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, or staring at the blinking screens of thirty-two security cameras in the basement office of that hotel as they record absolutely nothing for hours on end. I could be really good at something like that, too.
Okay, maybe my part-time, third-shift job at the Hyatt was a step or two backward, career-wise. I wasn’t outside, communing with nature, but at least I could walk up and down the hallways sometimes. At least I wasn’t stuck in a cubicle or inside an armored vehicle. I could move. And hey, at least I had a job. That was more than a lot of vets could say, right? I had a job and a place to live. At twenty-three, I rented a room in a three-bedroom apartment with a couple of eighteen-year-old college freshmen because my drinking habits complemented theirs. It was a good setup. I’d buy them Carlo Rossi wine — the alcoholic grape juice in gallon jugs with the little glass handles. As long as I kept them buzzed, they didn’t seem to notice or care about my increasingly frequent trips to the bar to get blackout drunk.
On weeknights I’d go to the bar because it was how I was keeping myself together. In the days and months and years after war, the simplest things threatened to stir up the past. A car parked on the side of the road that could blow up at any second. An invitation to see a movie in a theater I couldn’t enter without having a panic attack. The red-and-white scarf of a party guest who morphed into an insurgent before my eyes.
But even with all those triggers, going out in public was more tolerable than being alone. Something was gnawing at me from the inside, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It wasn’t just panic attacks and flashbacks. It was something else I couldn’t explain. Something I vaguely sensed but didn’t understand. This thing, whatever it was, amplified the noise inside my head. It was like listening to a tape of recycled thoughts on repeat.
It was your fault.
It was your fault.
You should have been there.
The triggers out in the world were easier to withstand than the thoughts and memories in my mind. I found that I could drown out the noise in my head by distracting myself with some other kind of noise. Like a noisy, crowded bar, for instance. That was usually loud enough to blot out the memories of the noise of Mosul. And if the noise in the bar wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of car bombs, I’d shoot enough Car Bombs until I couldn’t hear shit.
“We gotta go,” said Beck. “We’re gonna be late for your appointment.”
What did an appointment matter when life could be taken from you any second, even if you didn’t deserve to die? You could die just like that, even if you were really young, or a really good guy, or had a wife and kids. That was the reality of it. And so it didn’t really matter if I was late to an appointment, or missed an appointment, or left Beck standing outside my window for hours on end. It didn’t matter if I pounded shot after shot after shot. Or if I took a few Ambien before going out drinking. Or did a little cocaine in the bathroom of the bar, or took some Special K, just to see what happened. Because whether I lived or died was out of my hands, anyway.
And it’s not like I was trying to get drunk or high for fun. Once I’d muted the noise in my head with the noise of the bar, getting drunk or high was the only way I could sleep. Ever since I got back from Iraq, I couldn’t sleep for shit. If the booze and drugs didn’t make me pass out, the sheer exhaustion of filtering that much poison through my insides would eventually knock me out by morning.
I knew exactly what I needed to handle the triggers and keep the bad stuff down where it belonged. I was just a little sleep deprived, that’s all. Especially because now, when I was finally exhausted enough to get some sleep, my sister was standing outside my window, yammering about a goddamn doctor’s appointment I didn’t need to go to.
“Go away,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Silence.
I lay frozen in bed like a deer who senses the hunter. Then, in the long silences that drifted in from the open window, I found the space to finally drift back to sleep. I slipped gratefully into that warm, peaceful state of relief. A place without a past or a future. The euphoric pull of nonexistence, where I could finally and forever forget what happened.
As long as she wasn’t still standing at my window. The thought jolted me awake again.
She wasn’t still standing there, was she?
My heart beat faster as I lay in bed. I could feel the bad stuff rising up. She needed to leave.
When Beck had first brought it up, the whole talking-to-someone thing, I’d put her off as long as I could. It wasn’t too hard. I’d just told her, sure, I’d go to therapy. But the therapist had to be a veteran.
“No problem,” she’d said.
“A combat veteran,” I’d insisted.
“Okay,” she’d frowned, less sure.
“A combat veteran who was deployed to Iraq. And in this century, too. Not, like, during the Gulf War,” I said.
That shut her up — at least for a few weeks while she conducted her search, like an amateur detective. She called psychologists in private practice. She scoured government websites. She spoke with administrative assistants and grad students and doctors.
“Do you have anyone on staff who’s an Operation Iraqi Freedom combat veteran?” she’d ask.
Then, one day, someone on the other end of the line actually said yes.
“Tombo,” she said again, breaking the silence with my childhood nickname.
“GO THE FUCK AWAY!” I roared.
That should have done the trick. It was ironic that I’d become a warrior in a global conflict because my loving, generous, honorable family of origin is possibly the most conflict-averse clan on the planet. Battling head-on and surveying the aftermath just isn’t in their nature. They’re so damn sweet and so petrified of confrontation that they’ll leave things unsaid forever rather than have a brief but potentially uncomfortable exchange. Growing up, fights would often be followed not by a conversation but by a painstakingly crafted letter slipped under a bedroom door. The reader of the letter would emerge to give the writer of the letter a hug, which meant all was forgiven and the whole thing was over, never to be talked about again. Sometimes I wonder if the war I made, and the war that my grandfathers and my ancestors made, was just the expression of a million tiny conflicts that were stuffed down through generations instead of brought to light. Maybe that’s all war is, anyway — people who don’t know how to handle conflict finally handling it the only way they know how.
So there was no possible way that my sister, with that same nonconfrontational DNA, would stay at my window after I’d told her, point-blank, to go the fuck away. She’d shrink like a violet and leave. The next time I saw her, she’d throw me a little shade at first, but then she’d pretend it never happened.
“Tom,” she repeated.
Her voice was strong and gentle, like waves against rocks. Like she was perfectly willing to erode my will over thousands of years.
“Come on. It’s time to go,” she said.
I sat up again. All the way up this time. I don’t know why, but I reached for my shoes and put them on. I stood up and almost puked. I walked out the door and down the steps of my building.
Dark clouds hung low and depressed above faded brick storefronts and pointed rooftops. The wet, soupy remnants of fallen leaves clung to gutters and congregated along the curbs. Tangled green weeds sprouted from the sidewalk cracks. The lingering fumes of alcohol in my lungs were replaced with fresh air that