Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“Do. You. Ever. Feel. Guilty.” He smiled.

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“I didn’t ask about everybody. I asked ’bout you.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I feel guilty.”

“Good. Because guilt is not a bad thing. Guilt can instruct you; you can learn from guilt. Know what I mean?”

“I think so.” She felt something, but she didn’t know if it was manipulated or real.

He smiled. “So here’s what I want to say. Guilt, you can live with. But you can’t live with regret. Can’t learn from it, can’t live with it. So don’t ever feel regret.”

—

The thing was, Perkins could not really understand this man, either. He didn’t know if it was because he had forgotten, or because war was different now, or because the man was black, or because…Well, the man was not right, that was obvious. But you heard things about a lot of them that didn’t seem right. You supported them, absolutely; you wanted to be proud; what happened after Vietnam should never be allowed to happen again — but then you read someplace that they didn’t care about killing civilians, that it was like video games to them. Stuff about raping young girls, killing their families, doing sex-type things with prisoners, taking pictures of it — and then you’d read somebody sneering that “the Greatest Generation” couldn’t even fire their guns, while these new guys, they liked to kill.

—

“Now I have another question. Is that okay?”

“Yeah.”

“When you look out that window, what do you see?”

Jennifer looked and thought; even though he was crazy, she wanted to give a good answer. “Trees,” she said. “Sky. Water. Plants, earth.”

He smiled. “All of that is there. I see it, too. But that is not all I see.”

“What do you see?”

—

In his head, Bill saw a horror movie. It was one he’d seen a long time ago. It was some kind of fight between good — or maybe it was just normalcy — and evil. Evil had gotten the upper hand, and good was going to lose. “We can’t stop them now!” cried the scientist. But then by mistake the evil people woke up something deeper than evil. They woke things underground called Mogred or some shit, things who knew only destruction and didn’t care who was destroyed; they made the earth come open and humanoid monsters without faces came out the crack. They weren’t on anybody’s side, but because evil had annoyed them by waking them up, they attacked evil.

—

Jim saw trees and shining water. He saw lake water, river water, sewage water. He saw the eyes of God in the water, and they were shining with love. In the eyes of God, even the sewage water in the street was shining. In the eyes of God, a woman came out on the street, moving very quick. She pulled up her robe and walked into the shining sewage and pulled a child out by the hand. She led the child and looked at Jim, and the mouth of God roared.

Outside the train window, the mouth of God was silent. It was silent and it was chewing — it was always chewing. That was okay; it needed to eat to keep the body going. And the eyes of God were always shining with love. And the nose of God — that was something you grabbed at on your way to the chewing mouth. Like those people in the old television movie climbing on the giant presidents.

—

The war was like the crack in the ground that let the Mogred out. The crack in the ground had nothing to do with arguments about smart or stupid, right or wrong. The crack in the ground was even sort of funny, like in the movie with shitty special effects, the monsters pouring out the hole like a football team.

—

Who told anybody they couldn’t shoot their weapons? That’s what Perkins wondered. If the American army couldn’t shoot, who killed all those Germans and Japanese? True: Straight off the ramp, chest-deep in the ocean, fighting its sucking wet muscle toward the shore with machine-gun fire hammering down around you and shells slamming your eardrums, pushing on floating corpses as you got close — you couldn’t see what to shoot at then. They hadn’t been chasing a ragged Third World army with inferior weapons and they hadn’t been wearing body armor. They came out of the ocean into roaring death, men exploding like bloody meat, and all of it sucked into the past before memory could grab on to it or the nerves had time to react. At least that must be why he could not recall most of it as anything but a blur.

—

The war was a crack in the ground, and the Iraqis were the Mogred, pouring out. Then somehow he and his buddies had become Mogred. Then it was nothing but Mogred all around, clawing and killing. Bill glanced at the guy sitting across from him; that was no Mogred. No way.

—

“I can’t tell you what I see,” said Jim. “And what I see you will never see. Because I have been touched by God.” There was a wheel of colors spinning in his mind, gunfire and music playing. A little ragged boy ran down the street, a colored pinwheel in his hand. A ragged little boy tried to crawl away, and was stopped by a bullet. Laughter came out an open window. “You never hurt a little animal,” his foster father said.

Unseeing and unhearing, she stared impassively in his face. “By Jesus, you mean?”

He felt himself smile. “Not by Jesus, no. Lots of people have been touched by Jesus. But I have been touched by God.”

Unfeeling spread through her face like ice, stilling the warmth and movement of her skin. With unfeeling came her authority. “How’d you get to skip Jesus?” she asked.

—

“If I told you that, we would have to be talking all day and all night. And then you’d be like me.” He smiled. Ugliness bled through his smile, the weak, heartbreaking ugliness of the mentally ill. Dear God, could they really have sent this man into combat?

—

When his daughter was a little girl, sometimes she would ask him to tell her a war story, her eyes soft and shining with trust, wanting to hear about men killing one another. But he never told her about killing. He told her about the time he was standing guard one night, when he thought he heard an enemy crawling through the brush to throw a grenade; just before he squeezed the trigger, a puppy came wiggling into the foxhole with him. He told her about the time in Italy, when he and his buddies saw a tiny woman carrying a great jug of water on her head, and he’d said, “Hell, I’m going to help that woman!” He’d stopped her and taken the jug off her head and almost collapsed, it was so heavy; his buddies had fallen about laughing….

—

“Were you in the National Guard?” she asked. “Were you a reservist?”

“Naw,” he said. “I was active duty.”

“Well,” she said. “I really appreciate talking to you. But I have to get back to my work now.”

“All right.” He extended his hand across the seat.

“And thank you for your service,” she said. “Even if I don’t agree with the cause.”

—

This pitiful SOB had been in Iraq ? That was one fucked-up piece of information, but it made all the sense in the world, thought Carter Brown as he took the ticket stub down off the overhead. They deliberately went out and got the dumbest, most desperate people for this war — them and kids like his nephew Isaiah who were in the National Guard so they could go to school. Isaiah, who got A report cards all through community college and who would be in a four-year school now if he wasn’t busy being shot at. He tapped the spooky-looking white guy on the shoulder maybe a little too hard to let him know his stop was coming up and — hell, everybody on this train was nuts — the man just about jumped out of his seat.

—

Perkins was relieved to hear her finally become respectful. Even if the guy was half-wrapped. At least liberals had changed since Vietnam. Everyone had changed. His daughter, who used to fight him so hard about Vietnam, supported this war less equivocally than he did. She told him about attending a dinner for a returning soldier who, when he got up to speak, said, “I’m not a hero. I’m a killer. But you need killers like me so that you can go on having all the nice things you have.” Some of the people at the dinner had been disturbed, but not her. She’d thought it was great. She’d thought it was better than platitudes or ideals; she’d thought it was real.