Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

They had met at a party in SoHo. Vrieger was right that Doug had grown used to girls requiring nothing more than a few minutes of easy flattery before they made it clear they were willing to be led. The thing about Jessica had been how directly she played the game. Her second question was where he lived, and her third when he planned on leaving the party. Back at his apartment they had ordered food and already finished having sex by the time it arrived. She hadn’t slept over that night or any other.

They hadn’t asked each other questions about work or discussed current events or how their days had been. In fact, they said very little to each other at all.

As he described her to Vrieger, her narrow hips and pageboy haircut, he remembered how he’d kept the lights on during sex and how she preferred keeping her eyes closed, allowing him to look at her without being watched. She could give herself over to whatever waking dream occupied her mind, the particulars of which he didn’t need to know. Raised over her in a push-up position, he would watch himself: the pleasing proportions of his biceps; his gleaming chest; the flat shield of muscle running across his abdomen into his groin; and the splendid view of himself disappearing inside her like the fluke of an anchor grabbing the seabed. The tightness and precision of his body felt alive then, and he would come to the sight of it in motion.

They might have continued on indefinitely. But one evening, after leaving work early, Doug had phoned her and she’d said to come by her apartment, which he’d never seen, over by the Hudson on Washington Street. The place was a semi-converted warehouse space with rough wood floors, iron columns, and windows high up the walls. It turned out she was some kind of sculptor. A series of worktables occupying one side of the apartment were covered in small bins of everything from copper wire to sand. On one of them, a few pale white heads, human size and made of wax by the look of them, lay on their sides. She poured wine, and as soon as they’d sat down on her couch Doug had realized that whatever they’d had was over. It had nothing to do with her being an artist or living in that apartment. She could have been a lawyer or an actress or a grad student. It was the specificity of the circumstance that broke the circuit. The particularity of her life, as he could see it now. Like all particularity, it had a terminal air about it. At work, which was to say in his life, his mind glided over the present, headed always into possibility. But that apartment — that announcement of all those specific, irrevocable choices — it demanded that he stop. That he remain still.

“I don’t have a lot of time these days,” he said to Vrieger. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think about relationships much.”

In the pause that followed, Doug began to wonder why he had agreed to come here. Was it out of obedience to his old commanding officer? This made no sense; he wouldn’t have so much as taken a call from the captain. Vrieger’s pull came from somewhere else. As Doug watched him order his third bourbon of the afternoon, it struck him that the thing about Vrieger, which he’d sensed ever since that summer in the Gulf, was how the events they had been through had acted on him like a trance, as if no matter where he might be, no matter what might be going on around him, he was still fixed back in that one place: the Combat Center of the Vincennes , July 3, ’88, his finger on the launch button. The years hadn’t changed that. Doug saw it in the constancy of his gaze at the television: that permanent alert habitual in the survivors of emergency.

“We’re going back in, you know,” Vrieger said. “You understand that, right? We’re going all the way to Baghdad. They’re polishing the missiles as we speak. Fifth Fleet’s already scheduled the hardware for the Gulf.”

Doug hailed the bartender and ordered another beer.

“Cat got your tongue?” Vrieger asked, a note of aggression creeping into his voice. “I don’t know about you,” he went on, “but the ones I remember are the women. The ones in those black sack dresses with their heads covered, just the slits for the eyes. The wailing that came out of them. You remember that? It’s strange, isn’t it? Down on the ground like that by the coffins, being held back by their families, like they can’t control it. You wonder: Why don’t we do that? Grieve like that, I mean. Give in to it. Grief’s like an illness here. A disease.”

The TV camera panned across a column of Israeli tanks filing through clouds of dust into the West Bank.

When his drink arrived, Doug asked the bartender if he minded changing the channel. The guy reached up and hit the Plus button once, leaving them with a close-up of a rotating diamond ring set in a velvet case above another ticker, this one running with product detail and a number to call.

“Is it that easy for you?” Vrieger said.

“What?”

“To turn it off. To forget.”

“Who said I was forgetting anything?”

Placing his empty tumbler upside down on the bar, Vrieger tilted his head to examine the cut of the glass. “Well, tell me then. I’m interested. How do you hold it? What we did.”

This was why Vrieger had called. And maybe why Doug had come.

That summer of ’88, a few days after they had shot down the airliner, a crew member from the USS Sides had told a reporter for some newspaper that he had seen bodies falling from the sky. On their return to San Diego, the entire crew of the Vincennes had been awarded combat action ribbons for their engagement of the Iranian gunboats. Vrieger had won the navy’s commendation medal for heroic achievement. He’d had to carry that around, too, all these years.

Doug took a cigarette from Vrieger’s box and lit it. “You know what the Iranians did?” he said. “After they signed the cease-fire with Iraq? They went into their gulags and rounded up all the political prisoners — leftists, mujahideen, whoever they thought might take advantage of the armistice. And they murdered them all. Either you repented and started praying or they murdered you. Tired old guy rotting in some cell for years? Pop. Sixteen-year-old kids? Pop. Girls? They raped them first and then popped them. Wives brought in to see their husbands hanged. That’s what they do to their own people. I’m not even talking our guys — Beirut, Khobar Towers — none of that.”

Vrieger’s next bourbon arrived. Without the cable news to soak up his watchfulness, he gazed into the amber liquid with a kind of dejected fervor, as if staring into the dark mouth of a tunnel, listening for the roar. “Interesting,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re still bound to the wheel of fire.”

“Here’s where I lose you.”

“Yeah,” Vrieger said, “that’s right.” With a slightly trembling hand, he raised his glass to his lips and drained it. “That’s King Lear being woken by his daughter at the end of the play. When his world has gone all the way to shit. You do me wrong to take me out of the grave, he tells her. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like molten lead.” He paused, his mouth in a slight wince, as if he were physically pained by the words. “You’re still in hell. That’s what I’m saying. You’re still in the hell of revenge.”

According to the clock above the cash register, Doug had been at the restaurant nearly an hour. In a little while, McTeague would be arriving at the office in Hong Kong, getting ready to withdraw a bit more of Atlantic Securities’ money from the market. Doug needed to get back, to look the numbers over once more, to make sure they were reducing their exposure at a quick enough pace.