Phil Klay - Redeployment

“He’d remember the IED better than I would,” Jenks says, looking at me. I look at Sarah and know for a certified fact I’m not telling this girl shit. “I can’t even tell you that much after,” he goes on. “Scraps and pieces, at best. I’ve been working for a long time to put them together.” He taps the paper but doesn’t unfold it. I know what’s in there. I’ve read it. I’ve read the draft before and the draft before that.

“I know I was in a lot of pain,” Jenks says. “Pain like you can’t imagine. But pain like I can’t imagine either, because”—he reaches up and rubs a hand over his fucked-up scalp—“a lot of the memories are gone. Nothing. Like, system overload. Which is okay. I don’t need the memories. Plus, they had me on a cycle of morphine, an epidural drip, IV Dilaudid, Versed.”

“What’s the first thing you remember?” Sarah asks. She’s talking about the attack, but Jenks is already sliding away from that.

“My family,” Jenks says. He stops and opens the paper, flipping through the first few pages, the pages she’s here for. “They didn’t act like anything was wrong with me. And I couldn’t talk to them. I had a tube in my throat.” He looks down at the paper and starts reading. “It must have been worse for my family than for me—”

“Do you want me to maybe just read that?” she says, pointing at the papers. “Then ask you questions afterwards? I mean, if you’ve already got it written down…”

Jenks pulls the papers away from her. He looks at me.

“Or okay,” she says. “You read it. That’s best.”

Jenks takes a breath. He sips water and I sip beer. Jessie’s scowling at her friend and squeezing Jenks’s hand. After a moment, Jenks clears his throat and holds the papers out again.

“It must have been worse for my family than for me,” he starts again. “People look at me now and think, God, how terrible. But it was so much worse then. They didn’t know if I’d survive, and I didn’t look like myself. When a body loses as much blood as I did, weird things happen. I was holding an extra forty pounds of fluid in my body, puffing up my neck and face like a bloated fish. I was bandaged and oiled wherever I was burned and—”

“Do you remember the explosion itself?” Sarah cuts in. Jenks gives her a flat look. The day before, when he’d asked me to come, I’d told him that if he gave this girl his story, it wouldn’t be his anymore. Like, if you take a photograph of someone, you’re stealing their soul, except this would be deeper than a picture. Your story is you. Jenks had disagreed. He never argues with me, he just goes his own way. I told him I’d come with him whatever he chose to do.

“I’ve worked hard to remember it,” he tells Sarah, flipping back through his pages but not looking at them. “The problem is I’m not sure what’s real memory and what’s my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I’m sure of my bright light. There was a flash, definitely. There was a sulfur smell, like the Fourth of July, but real close.”

I don’t remember sulfur. I remember meat. Grilled meat. So, yeah, Fourth of July. Barbecue. It’s why I’m vegetarian now, and why the hippie chicks in Billyburg sometimes think I’m like them, which I’m not.

“And black hitting so hard,” Jenks says.

“Black?”

“Everything black and quick, a knockout. You ever been knocked out?”

“Actually, yes.”

I let out a loud snort. There’s no way Sarah’s ever been knocked out. I bet her parents had put her in Bubble Wrap all the way to the Ivy Leagues.

“Then yeah. Black hitting you, like a knockout punch to the head, no gloves, but the knuckle is bigger than you are, it hits your whole body all at once, and it’s on fire. It killed the two other guys in the vehicle, Chuck Lavel and Victor Roiche, who were amazing Marines and the best friends I’ve ever had, though I didn’t know they’d died until later. And then there are scraps of memories and then waking up in another country, wondering where my battle buddies are, and at the same time knowing they’re dead, but not being able to ask because I couldn’t move or talk and had a tube in my throat.”

Chuck and Victor were my friends too, and good friends of Jenks’s, but never his best friends. That was always me.

“So the scraps,” Sarah says.

“I remember screaming,” Jenks says, “I don’t know—from the explosion, from later, in the hospital, screaming. Though I couldn’t have screamed in the hospital.”

“Because of the tube.”

“I feel like there were times I was screaming, or maybe times when I dreamed how things should have been.”

“What do you remember?” Sarah turns to me. So does Jessie. “Do you remember screaming?”

Jenks is looking down at his hands. He sips water.

“Maybe,” I say. “Who cares? My A-driver didn’t hear shit. No sounds at all. A thing like that, if you got ten people there, then you’ll have ten different stories. And they don’t match.”

I don’t trust my memories. I trust the vehicle, burnt and twisted and torn. Like Jenks. No stories. Things. Bodies. People lie. Memories lie.

“It helps to put things in order,” Jenks says, one palm resting on his paper.

“Helps with what?” Sarah says.

Jenks shrugs. He’s been doing that a lot. “Nightmares,” he says. “Weird reactions when you hear something, smell something.”

“PTSD,” she says.

“No,” Jenks says matter-of-factly. “Explosions don’t startle me. I’m all good. Fireworks, light and sound, it’s all fine. Everybody thought the Fourth of July would freak me out, but it doesn’t unless there are too many smells. And I don’t lose it or anything. Just… weird reactions.”

“So you try to remember—”

“This way, it’s me remembering what happened,” Jenks says. “I’d rather that than be walking down the street and I smell something and the day remembers itself for me.”

“PTSD,” she says.

“No,” he says, his voice sharp, “I’m fine. Who wouldn’t have a few weird reactions? It doesn’t mess with my life.”

He taps his paper. “I’ve written this twenty times,” he says. “I always start with the explosions, the smells.”

I want to smoke a cigarette. I’ve got a pack in my pocket, my last from a carton I picked up visiting friends in the Carolinas. In this city, smoking’ll kill your bank account way before it kills your lungs.

“So you got knocked out…,” Sarah tries again.

“No,” I say. “He was awake.”

“I was frozen,” Jenks says. “My eardrums had burst. I couldn’t hear.”

“But you heard screaming?”

Jenks shrugs again.

“Sorry,” Sarah says. Jessie’s eyes are on Sarah. She looks unhappy.

Jenks goes back to reading from the papers. “I kept thinking, I can’t move, why can’t I move? And I couldn’t see, either. The only reason I can see today is I was wearing Eye Pro. I had shrapnel in my head, face, neck, shoulders, arms, the sides of my torso, my legs. I couldn’t see, but my eyes worked. I went black. I woke up, still on the road. The smells were the same.”

Your smells are off, I think.

“There was burning inside my body. The shrapnel in my skin and organs was still red hot and burning me from the inside while I burned from the outside. Ammo was cooking off inside the vehicle and one round struck my leg, but I didn’t know it at the time. Honestly, I was so out of it. I feel more sorry for the guys who had to rush in and treat me than for myself.”

This is Jenks’s standard line. It’s utter bullshit.

He turns to me. So do the girls. “It was what it was,” I say. “Not the greatest day.”