Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

He looked up at me. He put his pen down. He stood. He smiled. He said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

Everyone was proud of me. That was the first big change. The guy I bought the newspaper from in the morning was proud of me. “Bring him back dead or alive,” he said. That was the only thing he’d said in months. The commuters on the train were proud of me. So were my parents, including my dad. My landlord was proud of me. He said, “You won’t be needing any weather-stripping where you’re going.” I said, “I sure won’t,” because I was giving up my apartment anyway. And everyone at work was proud of me. The managing director came over to congratulate me, to shake my hand and let me know what he thought of men like me, to let me know that my job would be there when I got back. Later on, Amber and Melissa and Tiffany stopped by, waving those little ninety-nine-cent American flags like they were at a parade. They said, “We get to have another party!” Brittany even came by. “Are you going to send me a postcard?” She made a pouting face like I’d been the one to break her heart once already. “You know I will,” I said, winking. When the phone rang, I imagined that the people on the other end were proud of me, which helped me help them, each and every one of them, even the rude ones, even the dumb ones. I went out of my way to help them. I could feel myself transforming, morphing into someone new. My senses seemed to be heightening as I sat there in my swivel chair — sight, sound, empathy.

When Wally came by with the mailbag, he congratulated me and then said right away, “I’m wondering if you could do me a big favor, Zeke.” Shifting from foot to foot, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind putting in a good word for him with the managing director. It was all about him. “I can answer phones,” he said. He made it sound like anyone could do my job.

“I’ll put in a good word for you,” I said, but I was done putting in good words.

I had five days to go, five days before I shipped out for basic training, and the joke around the office was that I had better ship out before the war ended. We were closing in on their man. He was in the forest for sure. Or the mountains. The joke was that I might not get my office party after all. “You might not even get a tan,” the girls said.

I stayed up late, packing my stuff. There were boxes everywhere, filled with clothes and dishes and mementos from all those extracurricular activities in high school that made the teachers hold me up as an example of someone who was “more than just a student.” It was past midnight by the time I’d finished packing, but I was filled with energy. I took off my shirt. It was cold and the windows breathed, but I felt impervious. I dropped and did push-ups right there, right there on the kitchen floor, because I figured I might as well get started with basic training, might as well start getting back in shape. I hadn’t done push-ups in years, but I was able to do eighteen, no problem. Ten thousand hours with a headset on my head and I still had muscles in my arms, or the potential for muscles. There were some muscles in my legs too, because I did twenty-eight jumping jacks, no problem, working up a sweat and wondering if my neighbors, at midnight, were trying to trace the path my footsteps were making on their ceiling. I wound up going to bed at three o’clock, dreaming symbolically, and waking before my clock went off.

But when I woke, it was to something unsettling: the previous day, we had sustained nine fatalities. We’d never had nine. We’d never even had seven. It’s nothing, I told myself, tomorrow it’ll be back to normal, tomorrow we’ll continue the hunt. This was Tuesday.

Wednesday brought the news that we had lost nine more. The newspaper guy, his face crisscrossed with scarves, peered at me with concerned eyes. There was an article that day, front page, about one of our soldiers, twenty-four years old, who, in the middle of the forest, had become separated from his company while looking for potable water. In his confusion, he had wandered into a town where he was set upon by the locals. Stripping him of his flak jacket, they dragged him on the end of a rope through the streets before displaying him in the square. They were going to try him, they said. After they tried him, they were going to hang him. There was a photograph of the soldier. His face frightened and dehydrated. He looked apologetic, regretful. Staring at his photo on the train ride, I couldn’t get past the fact that there had been no potable water.

Thursday the news was worse, the news was unbearable. The balance had somehow swung in the opposite direction: we were the ones being pursued. The war was going to last longer than we thought. Maybe till summer. Maybe till fall. The experts could not agree. We would persevere in the end, of course, but for now, we were fleeing and they were chasing. The reports came in randomly, if at all. At last count, they had twenty-two casualties and we had seventy-seven. In addition, two of our companies were unaccounted for, and there was news that a general had been shot in the face. Of the soldier who had been captured while searching for water in the forest, there was no news, there were more pressing things with which to concern ourselves. Water was the least of it.

At work, no one said anything. I made it easy for them by staying in my cubicle. The only person who came by was Wally. His hair had grown even longer than before he left. It was in shaggy fashionable curls. His hair was an affront. I didn’t know whether he was coming to see if I had put in a good word for him. I made a point of staying on the phone with a customer who wanted ten tickets to the expo. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I can do ten tickets for you, ma’am.” He stood by my desk, hovering. I wanted him to witness my composure. I wanted him to witness my commission. When he left, I hung up because there was no one on the line.

That night I took my stuff to my parents’ house. Sixteen boxes of stuff. My whole life in those boxes. It was freezing and my car wouldn’t start. It rattled and coughed for a while, and then the engine caught. No one was out on the street. The only things on the street were the flags, blowing so hard they looked like they were going to fly away. They had lost their celebratory quality. They had lost their sense of unity. Now they were holding on for dear life.

“It’s like you’re moving back home, Zeke,” my dad said when I arrived.

It wasn’t like that at all. He was dressed in suspenders because he was a lawyer. My mom was dressed in an apron because she was a stay-at-home mom. My sister was dressed in torn jeans and purple eye shadow because she was a teenager.

I put the boxes in the cellar where my childhood toys were, my baseball card collection, my comic book collection, my coin collection. I’d been a hoarder as a child. Now I would learn to live with nothing.

“Stack them alongside the wall,” my dad said, referring to the boxes. He wasn’t going to give me a hand.

It was cold and clammy in the cellar. I thought about whether the barracks were going to be cold and clammy. That was something I could ask him. There were a lot of questions I could ask him. I thought about how, if I was killed, my mom and dad would have to come down to the cellar and sort through all my stuff, trying to figure out what to keep and what to throw out. I’d want them to do what we did with my grandmother’s possessions. We didn’t bother to look through any of it, we just loaded it all into a truck, mementos and everything, and gave it to Goodwill. My beer can collection, my stamp collection, give it all away.

At some point I realized that it wasn’t going to be cold and clammy in the barracks because it was seventy-eight degrees where I was headed. This failed to hearten me.