Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

The figure in the distance was motionless. Perhaps all the salt was spread along this short stretch of the outskirts of Al Tafar. We were very close to the orchard and my legs were still quivering with fear. “Murph, what’s he doing?”

He lowered the rifle. His mouth was open. He closed it, then spoke. “I don’t know, man. He’s got a fucking body.” Murph looked at me, wide-eyed. “And he’s not smiling anymore.”

Richmond, Virginia

Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed. I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind’s mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it’s hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war: the old life disappearing into the dust that hung and hovered over Nineveh even before it could be recalled and longed for, young and unformed as it was, already broken by the time I reached the furthest working of my memory. I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember.

The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It’s imagination or it’s nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that must must be its own permission.

Forgiveness is an altogether different thing. It can’t be patterned, as a group of boys can become a calculus for what will go ungrieved, the shoulders slumping in the seats of a chartered plane, the empty seats between them, how if God had looked on us during that flight back home we might have seemed like fabric ready to be thrown, in the surrendered blankness of our sleep, over the furniture of a thousand empty houses.

I’d been looking out the window for a glimpse of the ocean ever since the plane’s wheels left the ground. A dull cheer rolled from the first-class cabin back to the rear of the plane where the enlisted men sat. The huff of breath that exited our bodies became a grasp at joy when the plane dipped into the air and separated from the earth. The officers and senior enlisted men turned over the backs of their broad chairs, waved their hands and yelled, and we began to yell and smile, slowly, as if our bodies were underwater.

The plane reached cruising altitude. The flight from Germany to the States was relatively short. The Atlantic Ocean was our last obstacle to home, the land of the free, of reality television, outlet malls and deep vein thrombosis. I woke with my head against the window, unaware that I’d been sleeping. My hand went to close around the stock of the rifle that was not there. An NCO from third platoon sitting across the aisle saw it and smiled. “Happened to me twice today,” he said. I did not feel better.

I looked at the battalion scattered throughout the plane. How many didn’t make it? Murph. Three specialists from Bravo company who’d been killed by a suicide bomber in the chow hall. A few others scattered over the year. One from HQ company killed by a mortar on the FOB. Another I didn’t know but had heard was killed by a sniper. Ten more? Twenty?

Those that remained were dark against the blue seats and thin squares of blanket covering them. They twitched and grunted and rolled within the confines of their business-class chairs. I looked out the window and saw that it was not yet night despite the fact that my body had sensed its coming a few hours before. We traveled with the sun, uncoupled from its dictates of light and dark for a little while. I watched the broad ocean spread out beneath me after the clouds thinned. I focused for what seemed like hours on crests becoming troughs, troughs tilting to become whitecaps, all of it seeming like the breaking of some ancient treaty between all those things that stand in opposition to one another.

A group of clerks who remained awake had taken to ringing their assistance bells incessantly so that the attendants would be forced to make their rounds and lean into them, the smell of lilac and vanilla descending heavily from their tanned chests. The older ones performed this task by rote, pushed wide their shoulders, showed skin like browned wax paper.

The clerks must have tired of their game after a while because it grew quiet. Only the deliberate hum of the engines filled my ears. I began the same thought over and over as we breached the sand and rock and thistle of the coast, but could not complete it. I want to go…I want to…I want…I…and then the coast greened as we flew farther inland. The earth was pocked with blue pools, the brown squares of ball fields and mazes of houses arrayed like strange reproductions of themselves. And green. It was impossibly green. There seemed to be trees growing out of every inch of the land. It was spring and some bloomed and from this height even the blooms were green and it was so green that I would have jumped from the plane if I could have, to float over that green briefly, to let it be real and whole and as large as I imagined. And as I thought of my descent, how I would take in that last breath of green before I scattered over the earth, I remembered the last word — home. I want to go home.

“Wake up. We’re here,” the LT said. I looked out the window and saw a sign left open to flap and tatter in the wind outside the terminal. It thanked us for our service and welcomed us back to the States.

That was it. The doors opened and we lurched down the gangway toward the bright shine of the airport. It glowed on the inside, and the curl of small neon letters against white walls and white floors addled my thinking. My mind clouded over. I saw a nation unfold in the dark. It rolled out over piedmont and hillock and fell down the west face of the Blue Ridge, where plains in pink dusk rested softly under an accretion of hours. Between the coasts, an unshared year grew like goldenrod and white puffs of dandelion up through the hardpan.

We filed in through a special gate and stood in the cold wash of the artificial lights and listened to them buzz and hum. A few last words from the officers and senior enlisted men and then we would be released. The usual had become remarkable, the remarkable boring, and toward whatever came in between I felt only a listless confusion.

The LT gave a safety brief. Standard stuff: “Wrap it up. Don’t drink and drive. If your old lady is pissing you off, remember…”

We answered in unison, “Instead of a slug, give her a hug.” We’d stood tightly in formation until the first sergeant barked “Dismissed,” but we did not scatter in all directions at once. Instead, the remains of our unit dissolved slowly, scattering from its center the way a splash of oil might over water. I saw confusion in some of the other soldiers’ eyes. I even heard a few say, “Well, what now?” It crossed my own mind, too, but I put my fingernails into my palms until the skin broke, and I thought, No way, no goddamn way, something else now.