T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

The people on the bridges and boats and roofs looked like all the people he had worked with in the last few months in the shelters and stores and movie theaters. He’d always thought America’s poor weren’t really that poor. They didn’t live three generations deep in one stone apartment. They had running water and electricity. Their schools and nurseries weren’t bombed out. America’s poor had cars with stereos and phones with cameras. America’s poor had cable TV. America’s poor had credit. They had opportunities and choices. But looking at the TV, it appeared that while America’s poor had a better standard of living, they were largely the same as the poor elsewhere in the world — powerless to decide the basic direction of their lives. Like when the KPT tells an Afghan village, Sorry, road come this way.

“I’m going back now,” said Ines.

He’d often faked the funk with Ines, like mumbling the lyrics to unknown hymns. But this, he agreed, this was too much. Even so … “You can’t help everybody.”

“Everybody I help matters. Like the starfish.”

She loved to tell the story of Loren Eiseley walking along the beach, throwing starfish into the surf. A man tells Eiseley, Why bother, this beach is strewn with stranded starfish. You can’t help them all. Eiseley tosses another starfish into the sea and says, Helped that one. Achilles liked that story, but this was different. “The city is closed. You can’t get in. It’s impossible.”

“Impossible? Where is my Achilles?” She held her arms above her head. “We’ve got to try. That could have been us.”

“You evacuated. You took precautions.”

“I could. Not everyone had the choice.”

Achilles nodded. He had so little time to do what needed to be done. “Let’s leave in the morning.”

She initially scoffed at that suggestion, accepting only after much pleading on his part. He tried to explain that while people were evacuating they shouldn’t have to fight the stream of rescuers coming in. And it was late afternoon already. It would be better to drive during the day because they didn’t know the extent of the damage to the power lines. Ines packed and set their suitcases by the door. In the morning, all they would have to do was shit, shower, shave, and hit the road, dropping Sammy off on the way. After they’d agreed to wait, Achilles excused himself to run an errand.

Marcus wasn’t working, and the attendant on duty was locking up when Achilles reached the morgue. But it didn’t take much persuading; Achilles merely explained that he’d received a phone call. The man unlocked the door and ushered Achilles into the morgue. The shooting victims were gone, as were the other bodies he had seen. The kid destined for Potter’s Field was still there, but Troy was gone. Achilles checked each drawer twice.

“My brother was here three days ago,” said Achilles. “Where is he?”

“Claimed?” the attendant said, his patience wearing thin.

“He couldn’t have been claimed. No one knows he’s here.”

“He’s here, he’s claimed, or he’s waiting to be transferred to Potter’s Field.”

“Where are they held for that?”

The attendant lead Achilles down a series of narrow halls into a section of the morgue that was a bit warmer. Being underground, it wasn’t hot, but it clearly wasn’t air-conditioned like the other section. After sorting through a series of keys, he unlocked a door leading to a small room no larger than a walk-in closet.

The shelves were lined with wax-coated gray cardboard boxes the size of magazine holders. Each one had a single white label in a metal frame, and the shelves were labeled by month, like an archive. Achilles ran his fingers along the labels, high and low, scanning the dates. He found one dated the day Troy would have been brought in, but as he removed it from the shelf, he noticed one beside it with the current date. “Is … Is this the day …”

“It’s the date they’re cremated. We bury them once a year.”

“God, how do you know who is who?”

The attendant shrugged, “They’re unclaimed.”

“How many this week?”

The attendant shrugged again.

Outside, Achilles called his mother, holding his breath as she answered and immediately started complaining about the county’s decision not to repave the local road, the taxes going up for the dump, and the speed demons who had taken over the highways. That off her chest, she asked Achilles how he was doing. Before rushing off the phone, all he dared say was, “Been better.” As much as he’d dreaded the sorrow he expected to hear in her voice, this was worse.

He and Troy had argued the day before Troy enlisted, Achilles calling him a coward. He thought nothing more of it until the next day, when they were supposed to go to a movie. Troy didn’t show. Achilles checked the fridge, where the family left notes for each other, but there was nothing but the running grocery list: bread, Velveeta, butter … He never guessed that Troy was at the recruitment office, but when he returned to the hotel and found Ines gone, he didn’t need a note to know where she had gone.

Sitting on the bed in that empty hotel room, as the sun faded and the shadows crept across the floor, across his feet, then up his legs and chest, at last swallowing his head, a new sensation settled over him, one he couldn’t name.

Were it only so easy to have never been, or vanish, to really be invisible, singed, the pink of his muscle showing where the charred skin had cracked off, Achilles bleeding out with Jackson holding his hand, murmuring heartfelt but pointless reassurances; Achilles’s parachute burning out over the airstrip — at that height, even water is a solid surface — a hole where his Adam’s apple had once been; Achilles falling in Kurdan, one clean shot catching him in the middle of his favorite song; Achilles drowning in the Khyber Pass; Achilles asphyxiating in that camelback; Achilles trapped in Wages’s attic; Achilles incinerated by the foo gas at Mosul; Achilles ambushed in Logar; Achilles’s vehicle hit by the RPG in Konar, one remaining hand carefully bagged by Private Kevin Wexler; Achilles in the Black Hawk that crashed in Qalat; Achilles falling to hostile fire in Zakel; Achilles in that accident in Marjah; Achilles electrocuted in Jelewar, the smell hanging in the air for three days, being disturbingly enough not unpleasant, if you didn’t know what it was; Achilles struck by indirect fire in Kheyl; Achilles shot by that sniper on Paktika; Achilles killed by the suicide car bomb in Tagab; Achilles killed by the accidental discharge at Camp Bulldog; Achilles killed by friendly fire in Gardez; Achilles killed by a satellite-guided bomb at Takur Ghar; Achilles killed by a fall in Shkin; Achilles catching the brunt of the suicide bomber in Helmand, the makeshit bomb in Zhari, the missile in Zabul; Achilles decapitated by the flying door, his arm torn off by a.50-cal round, the limb accidentally misbagged, which no one notices until Mrs. Henry Lee receives her husband’s remains, finding among them Private Henry Jones’s arm; Achilles blinded by a Browning as it stovepipes; Achilles walking into a minefield with Troy nowhere near; Achilles killed by a self-inflicted wound in Deh Chopan, in the latrine; Achilles no more, like the rest of them, in less than the time it took to light a cigarette, open a beer, unlock a door, cock a gun, rally up. If only it were so easy.

After he enlisted, Achilles’s father took him out alone. They cleaned up the rifles and marched through the wood behind the house, stalking silently. It was deer season. Three days of hard rain followed by a freeze had left the ground too hard and leaves too brittle for them to stalk quietly. So they’d waited for another light rain to soften the earth. The early October air was brisk and the ground right, firm but not too hard, making it easy to move stealthily through the leaves, the only sound that of their legs occasionally rubbing together. They wore bulky, water-resistant hunting bibs, waddling to avoid making unnecessary noise. Trekking single file, they hugged the shadows of the pines, avoiding the open areas where the sun fell though the bare limbs of the fallow white ash and beech. Only ten minutes from the house, the tree line stopped abruptly at a new chain-link fence with No Trespassing signs posted on it and, beyond it, a row of concrete slabs lined up like a giant hand of solitaire. His father kicked the fence, cursing. His nose was red from the cold, and congested, so the curse sounded more like a quack. Turning to Achilles, he said, as if it were his fault, “I’m sorry, son. Bad intel.” He pointed to a young tree on the other side of the fence, a few branches distorted from growing around a metal post. “That’s my damned tree. Look what they’ve done to it.”