Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

I took him by the shoulders then, squarely, masculinely, and to lighten the mood a little, I said, “Go kick some ass, Wally!”

I had been right: he didn’t die. In fact, he was reborn. Here he was, entering the conference room unscathed, smiling, blushing hard, his head buzzed, his face tanned, waving his hands in the air like he’d just been having the time of his life. One hundred people cheered him all at once, one hundred phone operators clapping and stomping until the room shook.

“Wally, Wally!” they called, “Wally, Wally! U.S.A.!” Even the cleaning girls had stopped by, Maria and Olga, clapping, thanking him for everything he gave. I clapped too. I stomped my feet too. Because this is how you get caught up.

He was a changed man. You could see that right away. He was electric now. He was fluid.

“Where’d you go, Wally?” I thought as I pounded my hands. “What’d you see, huh?”

“I’ve been places, Zeke,” his grin seemed to be saying to me. “I’ve done things.”

He looked like he’d lost weight. That was what he’d done. He looked like he’d put on muscle too. His gut was gone and his jaw was hard and he didn’t resemble a large baby boy anymore. If his nose was running, I couldn’t tell. Apparently neither could the girls who were throwing their arms around his neck and kissing him, one after another, including Brittany, the prettiest of them all, the one I’d gone out with two years ago when the managing director had given me free tickets for a show that had come to town. We’d gone to Applebee’s afterward, Brittany and I, and I’d told her, “Order whatever you want. It’s on me,” because I wanted her to know that this was a date, that I had designs on her. But for whatever reason, our outing never seemed to rise above coworkers with free tickets gossiping about the workplace, and I ended the night kissing her on the cheek.

Now she was kissing Wally on the cheek, damn close to his mouth, leaving her lipstick on his face, and when she was done, the next girl stepped in, and when all the girls were done, they moved back in a circle to give him some space to breathe, so he could compose himself amid all the attention, and he stood in the center of the conference room, as if under a spotlight, while we waited for him to say something profound about his experience. But of course he didn’t know what to say, profound or otherwise. He looked around at a loss, lipstick all over his face, staring blankly at a roomful of people he had only ever delivered mail to.

It was the managing director who broke the silence by raising a plastic cup of soda, saying how he was happy to have Wally back, how Wally had sacrificed for us, how it was a shame that after everything he’d been through, he had to come home to such cold weather.

But Wally didn’t look like he’d been through much of anything. He didn’t have one scratch on him, as far as I could tell. He looked like he’d given little and gained a lot. As the managing director droned on, I contemplated how, if I ever went over there and came back with a tan and no scratch, I would be ashamed of myself. I would be embarrassed. I would make sure I got a scratch even if it meant I had to inflict it myself. And then I’d stand in this conference room, the way I had stood onstage at my high school graduation, and give a speech about country and family and friends. Society too. “It’s you I want to thank,” I’d say. That would bring the house down.

“You’re going to be losing your tan,” the managing director said in conclusion, and slapped Wally on the back. At that, the room laughed, clapping and shouting, with Wally standing in the middle of it like one of those things in a snow globe, with applause showering down around him.

“What’d you see, Wally?” I asked out loud. No one could hear me. “What’d you do, huh?”

For a moment our eyes met and he smiled at me.

“Why, I killed a man, Zeke. That’s what I’ve done.”

Then the applause stopped, it stopped all at once, because the break was over and it was time to get back to work. The phones were ringing.

The phones kept ringing and Wally’s hair grew back. In February the temperature dropped to zero degrees. For three straight days it stayed at zero. Then it dropped below zero. The roads froze and the pipes burst and the circus was canceled. Whatever commission we had earned had to be returned. That was company policy.

We continued to get closer to catching their man. We even had him surrounded once, briefly, but he was wily and managed to elude us. Not to worry, we were getting closer. Any day now.

Other than that, not much changed.

Then one morning, toward the end of the month, I woke as I always did to the sound of my alarm going off. It was six-forty-five. Wrangg, wrangg; wrangg, wrangg , the alarm went. The alarm could have been the telephone ringing in my cubicle. Lying in bed with my eyes closed and the covers pulled up around my chin, I listened to the winter sounds: the wind and the windows and the salt trucks. I tried to recall what my dreams had been from the night before, but as usual, they were fading — I could remember only symbols. Paperweights. Redwoods.

At 6:50 my snooze went off and I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while, following my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps going back and forth.

At 6:55 I had no choice but to get out of bed and go into the kitchen and go into the bathroom and go back to the bedroom, where I wondered if the neighbors in the apartment beneath mine were staring up at their ceiling.

“What’s the word today, buddy?” I asked the man on the corner selling newspapers.

The word today was not different than the word yesterday. The word was that it was seventy-eight degrees over there and it was minus two over here.

“What’s the word today, Zeke?” my fellow commuters on the train asked me.

The word was that they had four hundred and twenty-six casualties and we had three.

Above my head were the same government advertisements, and outside my train window was the same frozen landscape, except for the American flags, which were blowing fast. We pulled into the station at 8:34, just like we always did. And just like we always did, we crowded through the train door, every man for himself, and raced up the stairs because we were cold and because we had snoozed too long and cut it too close.

In front of us were our office buildings all lit up, including mine, and which, in a few minutes, I would be entering and riding the elevator to the forty-eighth floor, the elevator that went almost as fast as the train, as if I were being transported somewhere urgent.

But today, when the crowd turned left, I turned right. I took the side street that led to the boulevard that led to the waterfront. I was going to be late for work, but that didn’t matter. Years ago I had cut school with Wally and we had come down and hung out by the waterfront and taken off our shirts. He’d been flabby and I’d been muscular. It had been a strange feeling to be free when everyone else was captive, and I’d had the idea that this was what it meant to be an adult.

Now sheets of ice were floating on top of the river and the wind was coming off hard. I had to bend in half against the wind that went under my coat and around my suit and tie. I walked fast and my breath came out white. My fingers felt like they were burning in my gloves.

The sign was plainspoken and unadorned. CAREER CENTER, it said. There was an American flag in the window, the window was fogged. I pushed open the door and entered a room where a man sat at a desk. He was sitting cockeyed to the desk, because he wasn’t cut out for office work. He was dressed in a uniform. His hat was off and his head was buzzed. On the wall behind him was a picture of young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders.