Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

He put down the envelope he was holding. He put his hands in his pockets. He took them out. His face was flushed from the stuffiness. This was probably what the barracks was going to feel like.

“Did the managing director ever talk to you?” I asked, as if there was a possibility.

Wally shook his head.

“That’s a shame,” I said, but I was relieved. And then I was sorry. “Well, it’s not that bad down here,” I said. I smiled, I chuckled. As if to prove my point, I picked up an envelope, weighed its heft, and tossed it into the medium pile. But before I knew what was happening, I was sputtering, teetering, grasping Wally’s hand, and saying, “I don’t want to die, Wally. I don’t want to die.”

Wally grabbed me to steady me. He put his arm around my waist. He let me lean straight into him. We stood there like that for a while in the hot basement with the sound of the fan whirring in the background, with me heaving against him.

I kept waiting to hear Wally offer some words of comfort, of consolation. I kept waiting for him to talk to me about percentages and odds. Instead, he took me by the shoulders, firmly, tightly, looked me straight in the eye, and I suppose to lighten the mood a little bit, he said, “Go kick some ass, Zeke!”

It was dawn. It was oddly warm for dawn. Twenty-five degrees, maybe.

I was supposed to catch the bus at the depot — that was the instruction. I fully intended to follow all instructions. At the depot, there were fifty guys like me milling around. No one looked at anyone. Half of us stood there smoking cigarettes. There was a sign that said NO SMOKING, but we knew the basic laws of the land didn’t apply to us anymore. The rest of us slouched in the blue plastic seats, trying to stay awake. A tall man came and sat down next to me. He had a can of Coke that he kept tipping all the way back, as if trying to get out every drop. Enjoy that last drop, I thought. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He said to me, “Do you know where we’re going?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“We’re going for training,” someone said, someone who was eavesdropping. Privacy didn’t apply to us anymore either. Soon we’d be showering together.

“No,” the tall man said to the eavesdropper, “we’re going straight to the forest.” He chuckled like this was something that could be funny.

When the bus pulled in, the headlights came at us like giant yellow eyeballs. It was a Greyhound bus with an LCD display on the front that said GOD BLESS AMERICA. The bus had been rented free of charge for the war effort so that not everything would have to fall on the taxpayers.

An officer appeared out of nowhere. His hat was on and his shoes were shined. It was clear he wasn’t a man who had trouble with the early hours of the morning. “Line up and get on” was what he said.

We did as we were told. This is day one, I thought.

A fat man sat down next to me with headphones on. He was already out of breath and would most certainly die within days. They weren’t picky anymore. They were taking anyone who wanted to be a soldier. The man bobbed his head to whatever music was on his headphones, and when I looked at him, he pulled one of the headphones off of his ear and said confidentially, “If you’ve got music, you better listen to it now, because they’re going to take it.”

“Is that so?” I said.

“That is so,” he said.

I wasn’t going in for rumors. I wasn’t going in for hysteria. I’d stay above the fray, the paranoia. I wanted cold hard facts. Cold hard facts were going to save me in the end. Facts and luck.

The officer came through the bus, doing a head count. His gun was on his hip. When he walked past me, the gun was at eye level.

Someone in the front shouted, “When am I going to get me one of those guns, Captain?” Everyone laughed.

The bus started, and we pulled out so smoothly. The bus hummed. We made a left and another left. I leaned back in my seat and found comfort in the swaying. Then I drifted off to sleep. But I didn’t dream. And when I woke, we had arrived.

The story began to change for me the summer I was working at the supermarket in Montour Heights — that enormous state-of-the-art supermarket that had been built to great acclaim, with its forty-eight aisles, its ice cream parlor, its travel agency.

It was summer, but it was starting to get unseasonably cool, strangely cool, sixty degrees, fifty degrees sometimes. The days were overcast and the nights were chilly and when I left home in the morning there’d be frost on the leaves. The public pools had shut down and the price of heating oil had gone up and families picnicked in their living rooms in front of the television. It wasn’t unusual to see people on the street dressed in corduroys and sweaters and sometimes gloves and hats. In the evening there’d be smoke coming out of the chimneys. No one cared about the weather, though, because everyone’s attention was on the war. We’d taken the bay, we’d secured the border, and we’d had almost no casualties. Within a week we’d made it within fifty miles of the capital, and a week later we had closed to twenty-five, and it was agreed upon by all the experts, patriots and naysayers alike, that the enemy no longer stood a chance and now was the time to begin discussing the terms of settlement.

At the supermarket, business was booming. The factories had opened back up along the river like old times, and people had come in from the outskirts to work, and people needed to eat. Before and after our shifts, we would crowd into the break room — the cashiers, the baggers, the stock clerks, the butchers, the bakers, the man who collected the shopping carts — and talk about what was happening and what was going to happen. Fifty of us standing shoulder to shoulder in that windowless room, laughing and joking and breathing a sigh of relief because now that the end was near, it was evident there wouldn’t be a draft. Some of the guys said they were thinking about enlisting anyway, before it was too late, so they could have an adventure. I said I was thinking about enlisting too, which made everyone laugh, because of course I would never be eligible. That summer everyone was happy and everyone was carefree. But then toward the middle of August, things started to bog down due to terrain and logistics, and for a while we advanced no more than a quarter of a mile a day, sometimes not even that, sometimes we lost ground, little by little we lost ground, until before long we were once again fifty miles from the capital. So after that we talked about other things.

In September Ziggy caught a girl shoplifting. I saw her first when I was coming through the produce aisle with my broom. Her back was to me, and she had long wavy hair that was the color of chocolate, and she had a nice ass, and she was eating strawberries straight out of the bin as if she owned the place. No regard. It was about four o’clock and I was late on my tasks because I’m overworked, but I lingered, hoping I might have an opportunity to chat her up, which is what I imagine whenever I see a pretty girl — imagine but never undertake. I wasted some time sweeping up the stray lettuce leaves, even the ones that had been ground into the floor, which I generally leave for the guy on night turn. My good side was facing her way, so that if she happened to turn around, I would be at my most handsome and appealing, and I would say something in the nature of “What’s your name?” and she would blush and tell me and we would go from there. When she did turn around, however, I saw that her face was covered with acne, like sunburn, painful no doubt, red and splotchy and concentrated around her forehead and cheeks but also her chin and nose. She was staring at me as if about to ask a question, one side of her mouth puffing out like a chipmunk’s because of the strawberry in her mouth. I wanted to look away out of respect. I could detect that underneath the acne she was a very pretty woman, with brown eyes and high cheekbones and puffy lips that were noticeably without blemish. She was wearing a fur coat with an American-flag pin on the collar, and below the pin were her breasts. I knelt down to gather up the pile of lettuce leaves and when I stood up, she was gone.