What I already knew, and what Jude was soon to discover, is that reading is a great way to distract the mind. The closer we got to deploying, the more we emphasized spending every available minute with our noses in a book. As I drifted into numerous fantasy worlds, it became easier to not preoccupy my brain with all the bad things that could happen when we got to Iraq. The ideal soldier would keep his mind on the mission, and do a mental run through of how he or she was going to react in any given situation. That’s how they stayed calm, and that’s what made them good soldiers. I was not a good soldier, and so that kind of exercise simply scared the shit out of me. To think about all the different things that could go wrong made me freeze up. I’d get a weight on my chest and start gasping for air, and when I tried to calm myself down, the only activity my brain seemed willing to participate in was to catalogue every gruesome image from every war movie I’d ever seen. I could feel bullets distort the air around my head. I could hear their angry hiss. I could see thick streams of blood spouting from empty limbs. I could hear the scared voices of boys crying for their mothers. I could see bodies on the ground and the swaths of dust that took no hesitation in devouring the pools of warm blood.
Better to just read. Fantasy books. What isn’t real can’t hurt you, but it sure can distract you. That was my distraction of choice, and I wasn’t the only one.
When the rest of the unit were playing video games and bragging about all the intercourse they had had with everyone else’s mothers, Jude and I were swapping novels. They kidded us about being nerds, and we pointed out that they were playing video games and then we’d laugh. A nervous laugh, pre-war. I was glad that Jude had gotten into the fantasy—it made it easy to talk to him and acted as yet another distraction from the waiting hell. It also gave us something to bond over. It made us different. He liked the different structures and myths that made up each work—cosmology, economics, politics, religions, geography, technology, and so on—whereas I liked the magic and the dragons. Mostly the dragons. There’d be some sword fighting and some romance and some betrayal and I’d be reading it like, Where are all the fucking dragons at?
Jude laughed and said I had to think about more than just the dragons, but whatever. It felt good to have somebody there.
On the eve that we arrived in Iraq, I came across a character in my fantasy novel that was a soldier—a good one. She’d seen a lot of war and so she’d seen a lot of death. Swords and shields and all of that. She was focused and calm in her duty, like I should have been. This woman was captured by the bad guys (heaven forbid) and they were throwing all these politics at her about what she could do to save her life—what they wanted her to tell them—but this character didn’t care. She was stone cold. She laughs in the face of his captors and says, You think that I think of my life as some kind of precious thing?
She said that right to their face. It wasn’t a bluff either, I tell you. This girl was as genuine as any fake character could be, and all I could think about was the heaviness of the question she posed. I wondered how much death can one person see before they can no longer value the gift of life. And can someone even know when they get to that point? I guess that’s what really gets me—the possibility of something once precious being cast into the wind without a thread of recognition or regret. If something like life can lose its value then nothing is sacred.
Then again, it’s easy for a character that’s not real—that has no life—to cast such a gift out. After all, she is just a bunch of words. And her words are just the words of more words. Can that be precious?
That character made me realize something though. I never aspired to being any kind of war hero or five-star general. I planned on spending the breadth of my military career as close to the bottom rungs as I could. I’d rather have my life in someone else’s hands than anyone’s life in mine. When the warm blood of fellow soldiers started to run into the sandy streets, I wanted it to stay on those streets and not on my hands. It takes someone special to order men to death. A real conviction that I never possessed. And it doesn’t matter if I trusted those people or not. My life was going to be threatened, and when the time came I was going to do all I could to preserve it, simple as that. It didn’t matter to me whose hands my blood ends up on, so long as there is none on mine. I don’t know if that worked out for me though, keeping the blood off, because when Jude died over there in that hell hole, it did a number on me.
Paths for the Blind
It was dark, and under a starred night sky walked Silvio in the manner of a man more insane than he is—hands deep in his pockets and neck flopped back so as to appreciate the sky above while maintaining his wobbly, sickening gait. Where he saw only minor fragments of light were gas giants, and between those, in the cavernous black dark, hid the cosmic dust of entire galaxies that swirled and blossomed in a way that only gravity could manage. As he looked into the resonant ink, he couldn’t help but wonder at the worlds it held, and his own longing for them. But for what good was his longing? What good was he? If he were to journey to some far-off, wondrous planet, what could the individual saint offer there? Of all of Earth’s marvels—staples in his life—he could reproduce none of them. On those distant surfaces, he could expound for days on the qualities of the automobile, and the airplane, and the firearm, and how doctors could perform surgeries with utensils that worked at a microscopic level, and when the planet’s natives asked him to duplicate any of it, he could not. And if they gave him everything he needed, how long then? Could he create a refrigerator if he gave his life to the task? A telephone? Certainly not a microwave. So what was he without the all of human achievement at his back? The best he could hope for was to create a piece of art that encompassed the empty struggling of his humanity and hope that their species could relate. They too must appreciate the unnerving size of it all. They too must carry around with them the questions that have no answers. Always carrying them, everywhere. And him, just a scared rocketeer who hauls tired human relics that process food and process words and compress air and play music and track time and capture photographs—all on the verge of extinction within his incapable hands. He’d try to tell them how many years and lives were given to the development of each product, except that he himself didn’t know, and so he would tell them nothing.
He paused in his walk and blinked hard, because even if he summoned an astronaut’s bravery, he first had to choose a point of light that they’d assure him was a planet. Out there, where there were as many stars as grains of sand in a desert, or some other incomprehensible amount that meant a vastness beyond his or any person’s grasp. And no amount of lenses could see to infinity and did he even want to know what waited beyond that weighty nothing?
He reached the entrance of the church and gave one last look at the sky before going inside and putting its high roof between him and it all. Inside, on the far side of the nave, Silvio could hear rummaging in the back room. He walked on light feet through the pews and found the old man dusting around the church’s gold tabernacle. Silvio leaned in the open doorway and cleared his throat loudly, but the old man held up a single finger to suggest that he needed a little more time. The small tabernacle’s doors were open, and the old man navigated around its interior with a white, linen rag. He said that even God’s apparatus is susceptible to dust. Next to the tabernacle were a pair of beautiful chalices with sterling cups and a matching, gold-plated dish. The old man picked up a small spray bottle from next to his feet, gave the rag two spurts, and then set about polishing each piece of the ornate silverware. Silvio grew bored watching him and wandered back into the muted nave. He patrolled up and down the pew aisles running his finger along their narrow backs and eventually took a seat in the back row. Several minutes later the old man appeared from the back room and he too moved between the pews with his large, dusty rag which he ran delicately over the smooth and lacquered wood of the pews. Silvio watched him. Then he said, You ever just look up at the stars and wonder about it?
The old man pressed the white cloth over the dark wood of the final row’s leg support and he said, I like looking at the stars as much as the next person.
Is that a lot?
I suppose not.
They were the only two in the church’s dim lighting. The old man took