Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

Several years later, when they were married and living in Kingston, New York, he asked Mira if she’d intentionally sat beside him in the dining hall all those years before.

‘Of course,’ said Mira. When she laughed, a beam of light from the kitchen window turned her eyes to gold coins. ‘The cafeteria was empty. Why else would I have picked your table?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Daniel, embarrassed for having asked, or for having doubted her. ‘You might have wanted company. Or sun. It was sunny, I recall.’

Mira kissed him. He could feel the cool strip of her wedding ring, a gold band that matched his own, on the back of his neck.

‘I knew exactly what I was doing,’ she said.

Ten days before Thanksgiving, 2006, Daniel sits in the office of Albany MEPS Commander Colonel Bertram. In his four years with the Military Entrance Processing Station, Daniel has only visited the colonel’s office a handful of times – usually to discuss an unusual case, once to receive a promotion from physician to chief medical officer – and today, he hopes for a raise.

Colonel Bertram sits in a leather chair behind a glossy, wide desk. He is younger than Daniel, with a clean shell of blond hair, shaved at the sides, and a tight, wiry frame. He looks scarcely older than the eager ROTC graduates who arrive by the carload for assessment.

‘You’ve had a good run,’ he says.

‘Pardon?’

‘You’ve had a good run,’ he repeats. ‘You’ve served your country well. But I’m going to be blunt, Major. Some of us think it’s time you took a break.’

Daniel commissioned after medical school. For the first ten years of his career, he worked at Keller Army Community Hospital in West Point. This was the kind of work he had always imagined doing, high-stakes and unpredictable, but he was depleted by the hours and the relentless suffering. When a job opened up at MEPS, Mira encouraged him to apply. The position wasn’t glamorous, but Daniel came to enjoy its stability, and now he can hardly imagine a return to the hospital – or, worse, a deployment.

Sometimes, he fears his preference for routine is cowardly. The paradox of his job – confirming that young people are healthy enough to go to war – is not lost on him. On the other hand, he also sees himself as a guardian. It’s his job to act as a sieve, separating those who are ready for war from those who are not. Applicants look at him with anxious hopefulness, as if he can give them permission to live, not license to die. Of course, there are some whose faces show pure terror, and in them Daniel sees the military fathers or dead-end poverty that brought them to the armed forces in the first place. He always asks them if they’re sure they want to go to war. They always say yes.

‘Sir.’ For a moment, Daniel’s mind goes dark. ‘Is this about Douglas?’

The colonel inclines his head. ‘Douglas was fit. He should have been cleared.’

Daniel remembers the boy’s papers: Douglas’s spirometry and peak flow tests were far below normal. ‘Douglas had asthma.’

‘Douglas is from Detroit.’ Colonel Bertram’s smile is gone. ‘Everyone from Detroit has asthma. You think we should stop letting kids in from Detroit?’

‘Of course not.’ For the first time, the gravity of the situation becomes clear to Daniel. He knows that enlistment is down by ten percent. He knows that the military has lowered standards for the mental aptitude exam – they haven’t admitted so many Category IV applicants since the seventies. He’s heard that certain commanding officers have written waivers for misconduct convictions: petty theft, assault, even vehicular manslaughter and homicide.

‘This isn’t just about Douglas,’ he says.

‘Major.’ Colonel Bertram leans forward, and his commander’s pin – a wreathed star – catches the light. Daniel pictures the colonel hunched over his desk with the pin in his hand, scrubbing it with a cotton ball doused in silver polish. ‘You’re well-intentioned; we all know that. But you come from a different generation. You’re conservative, and that’s fair: you don’t want to see anyone go down who doesn’t have to. Some of these kids aren’t right, I’ll grant you that. We screen for a reason. But there’s a time to be conservative, Major, and this isn’t it. We need guys, we need numbers, for God and country, and sometimes we get a guy come in here with a bad knee or a little cough, but his heart’s in the right place, he’s good enough – and right now, Dr. Gold, we need heart. We need good enough. We’ – the colonel picks up a stack of forms – ‘need waivers.’

‘I write waivers when they’re merited.’

‘You write waivers when you think they’re merited.’

‘I thought that was my job description.’

‘You work for me. I give you your job description. And I’m sure you don’t want an Article 15 sitting in your file, stinking like shit.’

‘For what?’ Daniel’s mouth turns to chalk. ‘I’ve never gone against the code.’

An Article 15 would end his career in the military. He’d never get a promotion; he could even be discharged. Regardless, he’d be disgraced. The humiliation would burn him alive.

But his pride is not the only issue. Mira works at a public university. When Daniel left his job at the hospital, they had more money than they needed, but since then, he and Mira have taken on Gertie’s living expenses. Mira’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, too, and her father with dementia. After her mother died, they moved her father into an assisted living facility whose annual payments have swallowed much of their savings and will continue to do so: her father is sixty-eight and otherwise healthy.

‘For insubordination.’ A wedge of egg white quivers below the colonel’s lower lip. He lifts the tinfoil in which his sandwich was wrapped and folds it in half. ‘For a failure to comply with military standards.’

‘That’s a lie.’

‘I’m a liar?’ asks the colonel, quietly. He still holds the piece of tinfoil, folding it over and over again.

Daniel knows he’s been given an opportunity to correct himself. But the thought of the Article 15 blazes inside him. He is riled by the threat of it, the injustice.

‘Either that or a sheep,’ he says. ‘Doing whatever leadership tells you.’

The colonel stops. He puts the piece of foil, now the size of a business card, in his pocket. Then he rises from his chair and leans over the desk toward Daniel, his palms flat.

‘Your duty is suspended. Two weeks.’

‘Who will do my job?’

‘I’ve got three other guys who can do exactly what you do. That’ll be all.’

Daniel stands. If he salutes, Colonel Bertram will see that his hands are shaking, and so he doesn’t, though he knows this will make his situation much worse.

‘You must think you’re a special fucking snowflake,’ the colonel says as Daniel turns toward the door. ‘A real American hero.’

Daniel walks to the parking lot with his ears ringing. He lets the car warm up and stares at the Leo W. O’Brien Federal Building, a tall glass square that has housed the Albany MEPS since 1974. After a renovation in 1997, Daniel was given an expansive new office on the third floor. Downtown Albany isn’t much to look at, but when Daniel first sat in that office, he was filled with purpose and surety – the sense that his life had been leading up to this moment from the beginning, and that he had arrived here by making a series of smart, strategic choices.

Daniel reverses out of the parking lot and begins the fifty-minute commute to Kingston. What will he tell Mira? Before today, men sought his counsel, asked for his consent: he was an oracle himself. Now, he’s indistinguishable from any other man, like a priest divested of robes.