*
I was alone at the Hyde Out when an ex-soldier started talking to me. He began predictably but that didn’t make him any less chilling: “It was crazy over there, man. Fucking crazy.” I wanted him to like me and I wanted the conversation to ramble on forever so I listened and nodded in earnest. I bought him more drinks when he finished his whiskies and he bought more pints when I finished my beers. “We were in a village, some dipshit of a town. Our guns were out and ready because we knew they were around us in the blown-out holes of windows.”
The bartender at the Hyde Out was striking—blond hair and green eyes. She always spoke in calming tones, she listened to my uneven chatter, and she smiled, knowing her smile could make any one of her customers feel better than the condition with which they had arrived. She told me she was going to be an actress. Wrong town, I thought to myself. But when I spoke aloud I encouraged her to push forward with the dream, to place herself center-stage in dramas that would move us to tears, and to become a starlet of the silver screen, a well-dressed icon of our generation.
Sometimes when I came to that bar alone she wasn’t there. My heart would sink a bit and another bartender, not as alive, not as filled anymore with such wondrous dreams, would serve me up whiskey and beer. I had come so far from my side of town that I couldn’t give up and walk home. I wanted to be a beautiful loser. That bar was full of unknowns and I wanted to be part of their family. Anyone could talk to anyone, young to old, sane to crazy, or sober to drunkard.
Smoking cigarettes with the bartender outside in the mild fog, I would look around the avenue and remember my first days in town when I spent time in the fancier bars of Nob Hill. I was clean-cut back then, the product of a prep school chopping block. But time took away my architecture and I turned into a sticky, knowing ooze that slid through the fault lines of an uncertain future.
“It happened like a fucking lightning bolt, like a missile out of the sky. My buddy went down. There was a bullet in his neck and I was holding him. The blood just kept coming out and I was over the edge. I left him there, I left everyone behind and I tracked down that sniper. I was full of rage. I got into position and unloaded into a hole in a building window. No one else on our team went down so I knew the sniper was dead or hurt bad. When I went in there to shoot him some more I saw that he was a kid, maybe 13 years old. I couldn’t shoot him again. I just held him in my arms and that’s the first time, the whole time I was over there that I cried. That’s the day I gave up, after all those years and all that work, I just gave up.”
When I looked into the ex-soldier’s eyes all I saw were the remnants of a detonation. We bought more drinks for each other and we touched hands to arms, as close and sentimental as we could get with him being a soldier and me being an unknown.
“I’m here now,” he said. “Live right up the street. I paint all day long then come down here to talk to you. Or him. Or her.”
*
I talked to another soldier but he wasn’t an ex. He was still in action. His name was Cash and he was Christopher’s brother. He was a Ranger and his work sent him to the nucleus of the war. The combat-jack, Cash told us, was when a soldier took a few moments off from fighting to get himself off. With bullets cruising through the air, there he is in his dusty hole and he’s got his cock out dripping desert cum all over himself. It seemed reasonable to me.
Cash wanted to stop dallying in small talk about the war and get off the couch, get out of his brother’s loft, go hit the streets, get drunk and wile some woman into his arms. He was in between tours and the break wasn’t long enough to relax from the images of bodies that had piled up on his watch. He had to fill his bloodstream with toxins, both real and metaphorical, turning the trip back home into one large blur, a chaotic dream before awaking to desert missions executed with utter precision and tight-lipped secrecy. Someone picked up a copy of The New York Times and remarked at the cover story—there was a bunch of soldiers in a blown-up town and a headline about some minor victory—“I didn’t know the Australians were involved in this mess too.”
“Well,” Cash said, “they might be, but that picture there, those aren’t Australians: those are our boys wearing Aussie stripes.”
Christopher looked at his brother uneasily. He was happy to see him but he didn’t want him to binge. Perhaps he wished they were kids again, trading the frisbee back and forth and dipping headfirst into the Pacific Ocean. I wasn’t getting any writing done so I was happy to indulge Cash. I knew we would go out and drink ourselves into a situation. Just then, a cliché fell out of his mouth: “Man, I’ve been out of the field for a while. I can feel myself getting soft.”
I looked at him, a rock of a man, a chiseled superhero. He surveyed the city’s bars, often courting women who were distinguished products of higher education in bourgeois attire. He culled them into concise romantic encounters and he would be gone before they woke up. A story leaked that while on R&R, Cash had beaten up people near his fort in Georgia and then driven a car so drunk that the police were more mystified with his ability to maneuver the vehicle than angry with his violation of the law. And later, there were stories about him controlling groups of women like platoons, sending some of them out on missions to get him food, laundry, and newspapers while he slept with others. He seemed to vacillate between the perverse desire to control everything and the nihilistic resignation to control nothing at all. I hadn’t been to war but in his eyes I could glean a flickering shadow of my own reflection.
Christopher told me he’d be in bed each night, worrying if his brother would ever be the same. I said he’d be okay but I should have told Christopher to be more honest. The truth was as clear as a director’s dailies: his brother, as likeable and charming as he was, would be projecting a horror film for the rest of his life.
*
I was in New York for three days. My friends had scattered about the city—the artists and liberals in Williamsburg, the frontiersmen in Long Island City, and the financiers on the Upper East Side. I bounced around the boroughs, trying to learn how they saw the world. I met up with a friend who had just returned from Thailand. He worked for a colossal financial institution downtown. This was before the Great Recession. We sat in a rundown bar just a few blocks away from the towers of finance and investment. He said, “This is where all of the bankers come for burgers and beers during work.” The burgers were huge and I found it difficult to wrap my hand around the large cups of cheap beer we were drinking. My friend had returned from the field, deeply embedded in Bangkok. He was not unlike Cash who had made his way back to home-base after his work in Iraq; only Cash traded in bullets and my friend traded in speculation.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Or we’ll be late for our appointment.”
We walked back to his office, back to work, the hazy effects of the cheap beer pulsing through my head. I presented my identification and signed a thick stack of papers to get into his company’s building. We went several stories up into the air. My friend dropped his bag by his office and, after looking at me curiously, he adjusted the collar of my button-down shirt. We got back on the elevator, went up a few more floors, and got off. We walked over to another elevator, a special-issue model. The door was open and an operator stood there, a gray-haired black man, maybe 65 years old. He wore a suit but not an executive’s suit, rather the kind of suit someone in service wears so that it is always clear who commands and who obeys. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you’re right on time.”
We got in the elevator and he took us up a few more flights. He let us off and said, “I will be back in 15 minutes to take you back down.”
The door closed behind us.
We were at the top of the building. My friend led me into the special room. It was so special that he had to schedule an appointment just to get us access. Fifteen minutes and not everyone even got that. I spun around, astonished. The room was cylindrical and its walls were windows that wrapped around the length of the entire space.