Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Wild Turkey has the team clear the courtyard and prepare for egress to the extraction point. He will experience this night twice, have two simultaneous nights: the one that now occurs and the one that occurs on paper. He will be honest in his report, but in his honesty he will be no more able to separate what actually happened, for the most part, from the false implantation of memory, of narrative memory, which was coeval with the experience itself. And so the truth of the night will forever feel to Wild Turkey somewhere in between the fragmentation of experience and what he remembers: he will have both seen and not seen what he saw, what he smelled. All of this with one lone exception: the moment when the phosphorous strobe, nestled underneath the naked girl’s back and buried beneath the shroud of the soiled bedclothes, ignites, and shatters the night into pulses of pure white light, and the absence of it.

And already, as Wild Turkey watches (though the strobe cannot be watched, though “watching” the strobe would render him temporarily blind, as is the tactical strobe’s function), the team, and Wild Turkey along with it, is leaving, clearing the buildings in the neighboring compound just in case, only to discover empty room after empty room of desks, of broken chalkboards (the mistaken compound a school, apparently). Already they are clear of Ramadi’s outskirts and jogging into the field where the helicopter will briefly land and collect them; already they are back at the operations base, going to sleep; already Wild Turkey is waking in mid-fuck with Jeannie; waking in the invigorated air of Merry’s room after a punch; already he is waking to the town’s lights buzzing with the edge of his pills. He wakes outside the courthouse with Jeannie even though his heart’s not really in it; he wakes on his second tour in Iraq, on a pile of rubble in Fallujah, the roar of heavy metal being pumped at the insurgents, a roaring room of sound all around him, as he closes his eyes again and falls back into the city air’s approximation of Mrs. Budnitz’s rankness; he wakes on the adolescent night he loses his virginity to a sweet-faced girl named Helen, who, out of fear of it hurting too much, gets him off manually and only then, as Wild Turkey drifts on the edge of sleep, mounts him unexpectedly; he wakes in the overgrown baseball field outside the country school, remembering the spring afternoon he woke in the outfield years ago in the middle of a game, the air heavy and perfect with the rumor of rain; in the desert, in the lightning, in his crumbling duplex, in the field, in the many rooms of night, Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up.

Because our town was so small, the Army recruiter, Family Affairs Liaison, and Casualty Affairs Officer were all just one man, who went by the name of Douglas Reeter. This became a problem that winter, after the real fighting started and people had to stop and crane their necks whenever they saw Doug drifting down the half-plowed streets in his ancient Buick, everyone trying to get a good look in order to see by his uniform in which capacity, exactly, he was making his visit. It didn’t take long after the first few casualties for people to let the “t” in his last name slip into the “p” it already seemed to be sliding toward. This was how soft-spoken, dark-haired Doug Reeter became sober, bitter Doug the Reaper, whom no one ever wanted around much, even in off-duty hours. When I lay in bed at night that year of the deployment, I used to imagine what he’d look like in the morning if it was a bad day coming, and I’d dream him up in my room’s half-light, Doug standing before his little mirror in his Class A uniform, the thin manila envelope pale in his pocket.

Everyone could recite those first few by heart. Daniel Willis’s father (helicopter crash); P.J. Holdeman’s brother (bullet through the neck while taking a piss); Jackson Kepley’s dad (grenade dropped in his path out of nowhere during a neighborhood patrol). And everybody had their own private reels too, the confused images drifting across our minds in spare moments — the pause in a teacher’s endless afternoon grammar lesson, the wait while our mothers filled the car up at Bone’s One Stop. Suddenly the air would be full with the concussion of a listing helicopter’s blades, or the unhurried spurt of an artery bleeding out in seconds, or the path of light made by the tops of high alley walls as someone looked up at the sound of something falling. But those were the early days, before any of us knew the Arabic word for “stop” or that you couldn’t shake on anything because the Iraqis supposedly used one of their own bare hands for toilet paper (though none of us could agree as to which hand). It is true, in all eventual fairness, that those first few dead and their stories did briefly hold our imaginations, back when the men of our town were still dying exotic deaths, deaths with details and accounts, before the casualty announcements just became a series of thick letter-codes that didn’t mean anything, really; before the long paper list posted behind the scuffed glass at the armory just read KIA, and IED, IED, IED.

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This is where we lived: New Jerusalem, Kansas. I always liked to imagine the well-meaning if already disillusioned ladies and gentlemen of the New England Emigrant Aid Society cresting Doak’s Ridge way back when and looking down upon the endless plains and the river and the space of mud where they would make their new city of God, really believing (as was their great gift) that it would become something grand. Though they soon enough packed up their wagons and lit out, as they say, for further territories, I also like to think some of that pure hopeful spirit has hunkered down in the low places around here and stayed, however improbably, like the fog does on some familiar summer mornings. Their pluck certainly has, anyway.

Back around the time of the first war in the sand, a representative from the state tourism board convinced all four members of the New Jerusalem city council that our town could be a minor draw on the endless straight-shot of highway that filleted our state. At the town hall meeting he kept saying the word “synergy” and told everyone we needed to use what we had, which was, as of the year before, no longer the chemical plant. All we had was our name by then. So came into being The Old City at New Jerusalem, a replica of the heart of that other Jerusalem, but right here on the plains. This was also how the funds for the new church sanctuary were raised (via a questionable state grant) and a pale brick and mortar Church of the Holy Sepulcher (of the One True Congregation of the Savior and Nazarene) was built, scaled down seriously in size, on the main street off the highway. Besides the church and the “Temple Mount” building (a would-be community meeting space), everything else in the New Old City was a life-size cutout front, like on a movie set. Even our school got into the act. The New Jerusalem Knights became the New Jerusalem Crusaders (“Lest anyone think we were the bad kind,” Samuel Lincoln deadpanned later) and people painted squiggles for imitation Arabic on the signs marking the fake bazaar, which was actually the flea market. Little kids climbed the piled quarry slag of the Wailing Wall and spit down neon soda pop when their friends tried to follow.

Years later, by the time the most recent war had come and the men of our town deployed, the undersized green plaster dome atop the corner of the empty Temple Mount building was faded and chipped, like an obstacle on a putt-putt course. The Temple Mount building itself had been overtaken and commandeered as the church’s fellowship hall, and so it was where the women met, twice a week, for their “Army Wives” support group, even though half of them were really mothers, or sisters, or girlfriends of indeterminate commitment. Those first few meetings, while our fathers and brothers and cousins were still just sitting on some base in the middle of the nowhere-desert (unassigned as yet, somehow still unnecessary), the voices of the women and girls were very serious, telling each other over and over the latest they’d heard or read about the war or Iraq or army lingo or Arab peoples. But soon after, when word sent from the base became either dull repetition of what we all already knew or petered out completely, the meetings took on a different tone. Nobody knew what to say. The support meetings became potlucks and people brought even the youngest kids, who ran around wildly while their mothers stood, staring blankly at the big maps they’d tacked to the wall next to the Useful Bible Verses display, and chewed their macaroni.