William Vollmann - An Afghanistan Picture Show - Or, How I Saved the World

“Thank you,” I said.

Once when we were hitchhiking, Erica Bright stood on the empty road, ready to play the pretty part (even when it was cold she kept her sweater off so that the drivers would see that she had breasts). She was singing a song by Jacques Brel. Her face was young and clear. She combed her hair, sang a song in Spanish (she knew eight languages); got impatient and sprang upside down, walking on her hands in the middle of the highway, smiling and singing. Then Green-Eyes decided to make me exercise, and she was yelling because I couldn’t twist my neck and arms in the way she wanted. — “You move like a robot!” she cried after half an hour. “There’s no use trying to get you to do anything, is there? You might as well sit down.” —She cheered up, though, a moment later, when I tied a perfect knot (Erica was always making me practice things).… “Good,” she said to me. “Very good.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re being sarcastic,” said Bright. Her feelings were hurt.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” said Green-Eyes. “That really bothers me about you, that you’ll never admit it when you’re being sarcastic.”

“What are you doing with your knife?” said Erica.

“Not much.”

I got up and started walking. It was my plan at that moment to walk into the woods until I died. Erica called my name, tentatively. I kept walking.

“Come back!” cried Bright.

I stopped.

“Let’s just try and enjoy each other,” she said. “Okay?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

Ten days later we were climbing the side of a steep ravine in the mountains, with a frozen stream below and the dusk-blue wall of a glacier above, and it was snowing but we both felt hot.

“Let me carry your sweater,” Erica said.

“No, that’s all right.”

“Come on, we’ll go faster if I have it. Just give it to me.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Erica, smiling at me.

Erica carried my sweater. What did I do for anyone in Afghanistan? Well, once I brought a few armloads of wood for a fire. Somehow this should be worth as much as Erica carrying my sweater, in terms of mass carried over a distance for a utilitarian purpose; and somehow it seems to me that in Afghanistan I never did a goddamned thing.

One night we camped in a boggy, grassy place by the highway near Anchorage. It was finally starting to get dark late at night, because we had achieved the month of August, and the tent, which hung loosely on its poles in the soft grass, took on a primeval quality, the walls seeming like shaggy, wrinkled skins in the dusk and the thick grass beneath our bodies feeling like them; and reeds whispered all around us, reddened through the back window of the tent by the alpenglow. Erica’s features, hard and shadowy and strong, were in relief as she lay beside me. Her sweater looked like mail. She lay still with her eyes closed. We slept late; there were no more river crossings to make. The next morning was a happy one, a relapse in the progress of Green-Eyes’s contempt for me. She talked to me a little, and even smiled at me. She said she’d make breakfast beside the railroad tracks across the highway. When she’d gone I got up and struck camp, shaking the tent fly clean of slugs, pulled my pack on and hiked over. Erica was just fixing my breakfast: a big dish of granola, heaped with brown sugar and beautiful raspberries that she had picked for me.

It was four-thirty in the morning when we struck the tent and left the wooded sandbar. Green-Eyes hustled me along. It was very warm and sunny; the water level was rising fast. Our boots filled up with cold water and gravel in the first channel. Within a few minutes my feet were completely numb. — “Listen,” Green-Eyes told me as we ran through toe-deep streams and gravel beds. “No, don’t slow up, just listen. You hear that noise like thunder coming from the east? That’s the ice beginning to break up for the day. Look, the water’s getting higher! Can you hear how it sounds different?”

We had reached the first of the difficult channels. Green-Eyes tied a bowline around my waist and showed me how to step into the rope to pay it out across my hip. — “ Watch for me as I go across!” she said. “Be ready to pull me in if I fall. If you can’t do it, you’ll have to throw off your pack and run for me. Give me slack when I call for it.”

“Right.”

“Now, remember, you have to pay attention!”

“I will.”

She undid her hip belt and started across. The gray water was rising very quickly now. The stump on the sandbar behind us, which had been dry a quarter hour before, was now almost entirely underwater.

“Tension!” Erica screamed from the middle of the river channel. I could barely hear her. The water roared.

“All right,” I said, pulling in rope.

Erica stumbled in the current. — “No! Slack, goddamnit; give me slack! I tell you to pay attention and you pull in rope!”

“Sorry,” I said. She couldn’t hear me.

I paid out rope, and Erica crossed the channel. — “Come on!” she called. “Hurry!” I started into the water, remembered to unbuckle my hip belt, and crossed slowly, carefully, thinking only left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot so that I would not be thinking about where I was, and I did not look around me more than I had to. Green-Eyes pulled in the rope from her side of the channel. The water was waist-deep. It pushed at me, trying to knock me down. I missed my footing for a moment, aborted the step, and reached with the other toe until I found a rock. Carefully, my arms outstretched in proper Outward Bound fashion, I made the crossing and pulled myself up onto Erica’s gravel bank. I was numb from the waist down.

“You’re going to have to go faster than that,” Erica said.

“That’s true,” I said. “I can see that.” —We went to the next channel at a run. I was terrified. The water was somewhat deeper here, and Erica crossed with difficulty. I could see the look of complete concentration on her faraway face.

“Okay — come on!” she called faintly.

I stepped into the water, my open hip belt swinging loose against my thighs. My pack did not feel properly balanced. The current was very strong. I took another step, and another. The bottom dropped away suddenly, and the water was above my belly. The pack twisted on my shoulders as the river shoved me back and forth. —“Erica!” I screamed from the middle of the channel. I was falling; I fell; the current was pulling me down, and my heavy pack held me underwater, trapping the back of my head against the hard frame so that I could not reach air. The world sang in my ears. I could not get up, and the cold, cold water was paralyzing me. I thrashed stupidly. Then Erica was pulling the rope tight and calling something to me in a firm voice. I couldn’t understand her, but I knew that I had to get up. The water was very cold. My arms and legs still responded somewhat, and I floundered forward, clawing at the rope, until at last the channel was only knee-deep again and I got to my feet.

“Good recovery!” Erica called encouragingly.

“Thank you,” I said.

I waded up onto the sandbar, shivering, and stood beside her, looking at the next channel. The water was gray and swollen; it was quick and calm and deep. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I was going to fall.