Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

We held each other close, body against body, no counter-top between us, and I ran my fingers through her hair. It was fake hair all right, no doubt about it, stiff and synthetic in my fingers like the bristles of a brush, and it smelled faintly chemical.

“I’ve always loved your hair,” I whispered. And we floated in our little rowboat out into the sunshine.

The line to Kingdom Coming wrapped three times around the fence. We held hands and stood close and waited. Every ten minutes we’d hear the sound of the wheels rumbling, and then the train would come flying past our faces like it was shooting up to the moon. Each time Zlottie would gasp with glee and I would tremble with horror.

We moved a few steps. We waited. We held hands. We moved a few more steps.

Eventually she had to pee, though she hadn’t drunk a thing. I watched her ass swish away in that black skirt.

The second she was out of sight, I heard someone calling my name. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!”

Who could it be but Pink again, pushing that same stroller with that same baby, still sound asleep and its face smeared with jelly. He was wearing another enormous watch, this one with diamonds, and he shook my hand hard, with deep feeling, as if he hadn’t just seen me. He looked at me with half-sad, half-high eyes. “Did you hear what happened to Joey Joey?” he said.

“That’s old news, Pink,” I said.

“He’s dead,” he said. “He got killed.”

He said something else I think, a couple other things, but I couldn’t hear too well because the roller coaster was coming over my head with everyone screaming, and it drowned out the sound. All I could make out were Pink’s lips moving inside his face, thin lips and bad teeth, jelly in the corners of his mouth. When the roller coaster was past us, he held out his hand again and we shook. He did all the shaking.

“See you around sometime, Nick,” he said, and he wheeled his little baby away.

I stood there for a while. Not thinking anything, just standing there. And then I took out my BlackBerry and I checked my email. I don’t like checking my email on my day off. My inbox was empty anyway.

“The line moved up, mister,” someone said behind me, and I saw that the line had moved up.

I turned off my BlackBerry and put it in my pocket, but once it was in my pocket, I took it right back out and turned it on and started typing. “I regret to inform,” I wrote in the subject line.

I wrote about how I had just received the tragic news that Joey Joey had been killed in the line of duty. I wrote in business-speak because that’s the way you have to do this when you’re an assistant manager. I wrote some nice things about Joey Joey, about how he was a good worker, about how he was going to be missed. I ended it by saying, “Condolences to all the associates.”

When I was done, I didn’t read it over, I just sent it out. I sent it to every one of my contacts. Five hundred people I sent it to, including the district manager. Sure enough, half a minute later it came right back to me. “Fwd: I regret to inform.”

“It’s our turn, Nick!” Zlottie was saying. She was standing next to me, looping her arm through my arm, and guiding me up the stairs to where Kingdom Coming sat waiting.

We took our seat in a shiny new soft black car. All the kids were chattering in anticipation, and all the grown-ups were chattering too. An attendant came by to secure us with the thickest restraining bar I’d ever seen and which clicked into place with a mechanical precision.

“Are you ready, Nick?” Zlottie said.

“Sure am,” I said, and a few seconds later I could feel the contraption engage and the vibrations begin, and then the entire train, with all fifty-some people aboard, slowly started to crawl up that very first slope, as if we were merely setting off on a placid and uneventful journey.

To get to the hill you have to first take the path. The path is narrow and steep and lined with trees that are so dark they could be purple, and so dense it feels as though you’re walking alongside a brick wall. You can’t see in and you hope that no one can see out.

The first time I went up the path, it was terrifying. I could barely take a full breath, let alone put one foot in front of the other. If I’d had to run, I wouldn’t have remembered how. Besides, I was loaded down with fifty pounds of equipment that clanged and banged with every step. I might as well have been carrying a refrigerator on my back. But after the first month, the fear dissipated and the path started to become fascinating, even charming. I was able to appreciate the “beauty of the surroundings”—as the brochure had said — even the trees that I was constantly bumping against. “What kind of trees are these?” I asked out loud. I wanted to learn everything I could. I wanted to get everything there was to get out of this experience.

“Christmas trees,” someone answered back. He was being funny, of course, and everyone laughed, even though we were missing Christmas.

The sergeant wanted to know what was funny. We told him nothing was funny, sir. He said that that was true — nothing was funny, that if you could get shot in the face at any moment, then nothing could be funny.

So we were quiet again, the fifty of us, we were fearful again, but that didn’t last too long, because fear can’t persist unless you have at least a little evidence to sustain it. Fascination can’t persist either. What can persist, however, is boredom. I had come all this way hoping for something groundbreaking to happen, and nothing had happened. Now twelve months had passed, and tomorrow I was flying back home.

That’s what I was thinking about when I walked up the path for the last time.

I was also thinking about Becky. “Ooh,” she had said when I told her the news. “You’re going on an adventure, Luke!” She’d clapped her hands like a little girl. “I sure am,” I said.

We’d run into each other in the lobby. She was coming down with a cigarette and I was going up with a sandwich. I hadn’t seen her since the afternoon I’d tried to casually ask her out and she’d said no, point-blank. “Do you want to get some ice cream?” I had said. I’d known her since high school, and the Mister Softee truck was parked right outside.

“No, thanks,” she’d told me. “I’m on a diet.” I couldn’t tell if that was an excuse. Her body looked fine to me.

Six months later, though, she was all smiles, standing close to me in the lobby and batting her eyelashes as the other office workers came and went around us in a big wave of suits.

I was deploying in two weeks, but I tried to make it sound as if it was no big deal. In fact, it was no big deal. Everyone thought that the war was coming to an end. Everyone thought that it was only a matter of time. We’d taken the peninsula and we’d secured the border and we’d advanced to within twenty-five miles of the capital. Any day now, everyone said. My main concern had been that I wouldn’t make it over in time to see any action.

She said, “You going to keep in touch, Luke?” And she made a pouting face, as if I’d been the one to turn down her invitation for ice cream.

“You know I will,” I said.

She had big lips and long lashes. She had a little gray in her hair, but I didn’t care about that. She’d been married and was now divorced. I didn’t care about that either. I’d just hit twenty-seven and was getting soft around the middle. I was hoping to get back in shape. “Push yourself to your physical limits,” the brochure had said.

She wrote her email address in purple ink on the bottom of my sandwich bag. When she walked off, I took a long look at her ass. She didn’t need a diet.