Chris Abani - Song for Night

The moon tracks us in silver paint.

Roll Call — another chapter from the lost manual of John Wayne.

In my platoon there are only twelve of us left so there is no real need for roll call, as one glance takes in the whole group, but I am doing this for me. It hasn’t been that long since I was separated from them but already their faces are unclear. I trouble the cemetery on my arm. This is an exercise in survival. I close my eyes and begin the roll call in my head, one that will include the dead, my fingers counting off in the air.

Ijeoma. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Skin dark as time-worn wood and smooth to the touch. Eyes that never turned hard, no matter what they were beholding, as if she had an infinite capacity for forgiveness. Teeth that stayed white and fresh from the stick that she chewed on almost constantly. It hung from the corner of her mouth like a cheroot in the old black-and-white movies I saw as a child. I remember she tried to smoke a pipe for a while, in the manner of the older female soldiers, but she kept choking so she gave it up. She had a laugh on her that was infectious, like the sudden pealing of a bell, and she was smarter than all of us. She would draw a circle in the dirt with a stick, and picking a star from the sky, she would chart the direction to follow. Even in the middle of the day, she could tell from the shadows what time it was, and she was the only one of us who understood the arcane markings on maps. How concentric squiggles were hills and how high they were. I miss her.

There was Nebu — short, stocky, and angry. Nebu never enjoyed killing, but for him it was his duty so he carried it out methodically and effectively. In a way, this made him seem more ruthless than the rest of us. This kind of dispassion was frightening to us. But he was dependable. A good soldier, and I felt sorry about the mine that just killed him.

Hannibal has a giant personality. For someone no bigger than a Star Wars Ewok, his laugh reminds me of a gorilla. He is also the practical joker of the platoon. He would bury defused mines under us while we slept and let us wake up to the panic that we were resting in a minefield. He also tied an arm or leg behind him and pretended to have lost a limb. He got us every time.

Isaiah is our prophet. He always wears an expression somewhere between the beatific and the deeply frustrated. I can understand that. In camp, before he lost his voice, he would quote from the Book of Psalms, and only the Book of Psalms, but our sign language was too crude for phrases like: I have longed for your salvation, O Lord (Psalm 174); Mercies come unto me, that I may live (Psalm 119); He willnever forsake his children (Psalm 174); How long Lord, shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked glory?

American Express, or Amex, is the kid who can find you anything, anytime, and anywhere. He isn’t one of us in the sense that he wasn’t with us in boot camp and he doesn’t diffuse mines. He is just a kid who has been following us for months now. He is only seven or eight, and in his bedraggled clothes that are several sizes too big, he looks like a scruffy elf. The.45 automatic he lugs around would be funny if it wasn’t real.

Vainly I try to recall the rest but cannot. This is terrible and I feel caught somewhere between helplessness and guilt, betrayal even. How can I not remember people I have fought and died with over the last three years? People I have played cards with, played at soccer, danced with, pillaged villages with? What kind of leader forgets his men? Maybe that is why I cannot catch up with them.

I watch shooting stars like flares filling the sky.

Even before I see the camp, the smell of rotting bodies reaches me. It is a choking stomach-wrenching stench. I gag and hold my hand across my nose. Walking to the roadside, I pluck some aromatic grass from the verge. Crushing it into a field dressing I wrap it around my mouth and nose. When I breathe, a lemon-rosemary tang takes the edge off the worst of the smell. But it is still pretty strong and getting stronger the closer I get to the source. Monkeys call to each other and I stop abruptly as a family of baboons runs across the road in front of me. When they disappear in the forest, I continue.

I see the spire of the church before I see the makeshift buildings. When I round a bend, I see a temporary camp sprawled out in front of me. The camp is in a disused church compound and the forest has been cut back for at least fifty yards and a wooden fence rings it. And just beyond the fence, the river winds around. Everything is still a sparkling white except for where blood has stained some places black.

The sight that greets me is something out of one of the grisly fairy tales I heard as a child. On one side is a big pit dug into the earth from which flames leap maybe ten feet high. It is not clear at first what they are burning because there is so much smoke. Enough to hang like a blanket over everything. Near the pit of fire is a pile of dead bodies. There are flies everywhere, huge blue bottles that hum and dive like enemy planes on a bombing mission. I have to keep swatting to keep them off me. All over the camp, old women have lit bunches of aromatic herbs to drive away the flies and the smell of death, but the belching smoke from the funereal pyres smothers them and they are as ineffectual as an umbrella in a hurricane.

I realize what is going on. Some men are fishing the dead out of the water, others are throwing them on the growing pile, and others are chopping them up and feeding the parts to the flames. I know it is meant well; both to help the souls of the dead and to stop infection and disease from afflicting the living, but it is gruesome and frightening nonetheless. In fact, given that I have seen ghosts recently, I wonder if this is not hell and the people I see, demons. But there is something fundamentally human about them: the looks on their faces or the tired sadness in their eyes, I am not sure which. Some of them stop and watch me as I walk past. A new look has come into their eyes — fear? I want to assure them that I am friendly. I wave at them and continue past them and the pyre, heading instead for an outcrop of stone projecting over the water. I sit there, light a cigarette, and drag the smoke down deeply. Before me is the water heavy with a sun high in the sky. I imagine that in the past children would have played here, diving off the rock into the river below. It amazes me how this very river has flowed through my life.

I can’t stay here, not tonight. I want to double back to the old man’s place, but I need to press ahead, find my comrades. I flick the burning cigarette into the water and turn back to the forest. Still the river flanks me.

This river winds through my journey like an irritant that will not go away, and yet the water will not wash me clean. Not in a symbolic sense, but clean from the dirt here that grits every pore until I sweat mud. Neither will blood, though there is plenty of that to bathe in. It’s not the stench, which after a while becomes bearable. It is the dirt: black soot from everything burning, dust and the loam of the forest, unwashed sex, blood and cordite, smoke, plant and grass stains, and mud for sweat. It all congeals into a second skin that still itches with its newness, like Adam must have felt as God first clothed his naked soul. When my fingernails rake, they first pull away thick flakes of it, then with repetition and increased pressure, skin, then more blood.

I stop by the river and light a cigarette. As I look around, the spot seems familiar. It is made distinctive by the big tree with bright red flowers that we call flame of the forest . They seldom grow this close to a river, preferring to hide deeper in the forest where hunters and startled villagers come upon its flame and are awed by it. It must have been years since we stopped here. Back then the war was only months old and I was still twelve going on thirteen and excited that my pubic hair was beginning to grow out. That’s how you knew you were a man — pubic hair, then armpit hair, then facial hair.