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Doc Bryan is not interested in dead people. They don't have problems he can solve; they don't have problems at all. He'd throw his body on the fire to help a dying man (woman, child), right up until that last breath, the moment when they ascend to that most blessed state of Not His Problem.
This is an obvious fact. He never thought he'd have to explain it to anyone.
The trial by fire for medical students is when you get your first body to autopsy. Everyone in Bryan's year has been counting down to this, cracking zombie jokes to cover up their nerves. There's this funny vibe in the lab when Bryan shows up on the big day, a mixture of fear and bafflement and excitement. It's like being with a bunch of virgins on the doorstep of a whorehouse.
Bryan is assigned to a cadaver and does what is required for a decent grade, feeling nothing but vaguely annoyed that there are so many hoops to jump through on the way to the goddamned degree. Afterward, when he's washing up, he gets the tingle at the base of his skull that means somebody's looking at him. No, that's not what it is. He turns his right hand over and scrubs deliberately under his fingernails. Nobody is looking at him, at all.
He couldn't care less what anyone thinks of him, but he wonders what they expected. Maybe he should've had a flashback, dropped to the floor, rolled under the gurney and sobbed into the drain. That's basically what people think; those are the options. If he doesn't go fucking Full Metal Jacket, if he can get his job done without a schizophrenic break, they will never accept that he's just plain bored. He must be a psychopath. The killing machine everyone is looking for.
It's generally the living people that piss Bryan off.
"So what's next for you?" the reporter asks.
"Off the record?"
"Shit, Tim, of course."
The reporter's voice sounds all worried. Bryan smiles. He pins the phone with his shoulder, lights a cigarette, plugs the lighter back into the dash, and takes his first drag deep and slow. The smoke curls out of his car window, vanishing instantly against the solid gray sky. "You can't be too careful around the liberal media elite," he says.
"Elite?" The reporter chuckles. "I'm two months behind on my phone bill. I'm trying to figure out if I can afford to get my girlfriend a Christmas present and still keep taking hot showers."
"Don't cry poor to me." It's Saturday morning, and the football team is in Ohio, so the campus parking lot is almost empty. Bryan's car is idling in the furthest corner from the gate, but even this spot feels somewhat exposed, the only vehicle in too much space. "I have student loans; you have a book deal."
"That little thing. Yeah. The trick is, though, I have to sit down and write it."
"I have to go to the library and look at photographs of necrotizing fasciitis."
"Check and mate," the reporter says. There's a little noise beyond his voice, like he's outside, somewhere in sunny Southern California. Probably on his way to buy wheatgrass juice. "The strangest part is hearing everybody talk on tape. All your voices sound different. It's like listening to an old Western on the radio."
"Well, we staged the whole thing for you." Bryan knocks a half-inch of ash off the end of his cigarette. "Fake accents, fake names. And fake bullets, definitely."
"You know, a lot of people came up to me when the articles ran and asked me if different things were true, and I kept telling 'em I'm not creative enough to imagine the half of it."
"Nobody could," Bryan says. It's all too stupid. The best men in the best military in the world's history just wouldn't act that way, crack those kinds of jokes, make those kinds of mistakes. It's too improbable to be anything but real. "Everything in Beaver Hunt was true, too, right?"
"Listen, I hope the Rolling Stone articles didn't make anything weird for you." The reporter blurts this out like he's been saving it up for weeks. "I'm hoping that the book doesn't, either."
A vehicle enters the parking lot, an Audi, cruising to a halt about fifty yards away. Single occupant, female. She gets out and walks away, tromping off in those fat, ugly boots all the women are wearing now. From Bryan's vantage point, she looks very young, like somebody's spoiled daughter. He leaves the reporter dangling until the girl is out of sight. "It better make you very rich," he says.
There's a long pause, the reporter presumably trying to figure out whether he's getting his chain yanked (maybe? probably), and exhaling a bit too close to the phone. "I sound like Jerry Springer's final thought, here, but I do care about what happens to you guys. Espera feels like he was railroaded out of the field because of some of the racial stuff I quoted in the magazine, and I just don't want that to happen to anyone. Not without warning."
"Espera does a good job running his mouth all by himself." Bryan pinches his cigarette and tosses it out the window. "I don't give a fuck what they think about me. I'm a student. I'm almost a civilian."
"Which was what I asked you in the first place, and you kinda dodged it. What are you gonna specialize in? What kind of doctor do you want to be?"
"You can't see me," Bryan says, "but I'm rolling my eyes."
A pause. The faint whooshing sound of California on the far end of the line. "There's no master plan?"
Now, with that bullshit question, he really sounds like a reporter.
"I'm a grunt," Bryan says. "I don't make plans, I just work. And I'd like to be finshed working in time to get drunk tonight."
"Understood," the reporter says, meaning he's gonna drop it whether he understands or not. "I'm gonna risk making you roll your eyes again, but what the hell. It's awesome that you're comfortable with the idea of the book."
"It's cute that you think anyone's gonna read it," Bryan says, by way of ending the conversation.
He gets out of the car and locks up and walks away across the lot. The air feels good, like ice water, cold against the heat where the phone touched his cheek and his hand.
There's nobody in the medical library except a couple of extreme bookish types: a twenty-year-old Korean guy; a girl with Asperger's syndrome. These kids have already picked out the PhD programs they want to get into, outlined their research projects in neuropsych or biotech. They won't end up wiping noses, let alone making the rounds of an Iraqi airfield to treat dehydration and diarrhea. Somebody else will do their dirty work.
Bryan takes a seat at the end of a row of computers, logs on, and spends the next couple hours scrolling through journal archives, learning how to tell one near-identical skin condition from another. He takes plenty of notes in his small, square-edged handwriting, These are things he will need to review later: it's hard to keep track of all the infections, all the symptoms, all the tests the body can fail. He lifts his gaze from the screen, looking down the length of the computer table to stave off a headache.
Those kids from his class, the studious ones? They probably never saw a corpse before the other day in the lab.
"You're dead," the Navy instructors used to say, whenever someone moved too slowly in a simulation, spent too long putting in stitches, or held his head too high. You're dead, everybody's dead, the enemy just mowed you all down. Bryan was not trained for leisurely diagnostic procedures, or thorough postmortems. He simply moved as fast as he could when someone yelled for a Corpsman.
Maybe that places him at a disadvantage, now. Everyone else is used to working in walled environments, sterilized to prevent the spread of bacteria and panic. It's hard for Bryan to imagine himself as a scientist. It's even harder to picture himself in a beige office somewhere, with a prescription pad and a waiting room. And patients who would probably, like assholes everywhere, refuse to understand that they could afford to wait.
The library is very still. It feels like the total opposite of an adrenaline rush. When Bryan closes his notebook, he almost expects the sound to echo.
He drives across town in the dark, half-listening to the radio, waiting for the weather report at the bottom of the hour to find out how soon it's going to snow. It's a whole seven minutes, minus commercials, before someone on the radio says something moronic.
They're talking politics, which is stupid in and of itself, and they're claiming that a million people showed up in London to protest the President and the war. He's more or less able to tune this out, until one of the hosts wonders what this will mean for Bush's re-election, and then he snaps the volume off so hard the knob nearly comes loose in his hand. It's not that he's shocked. It's just so blatant how they only talk about the way things look, the surface, the advertising. Like it will make any difference who gets elected. Like that has anything to do with suicide bombers or snipers.
Sometimes Bryan thinks there are conspiracies behind all of this, wheels within wheels. More often, he thinks there's nothing under the surface at all. He remembers his conversation with the reporter and wonders if he was too friendly.
He takes his phone out, the screen's light flashing up on his hands as he thumbs through the saved numbers. Lots of them are in La Mesa, Oceanside. The familiar Pendleton area code. Most of these, he doesn't need to keep. He doesn't exactly count some of these people as friends. But there's no reason to bother deleting them. If they called him, after all, he would answer.
Espera's name is right next to the reporter's, and maybe that's the only reason he presses the button.
"Hey, bolt out of the blue, motherfucker," Espera says, after Bryan identifies himself. This is quickly followed by, "Sorry, sorry. I'm trying to stop swearing so much. My little girl gets mad at me."
"Of course you wouldn't want that, since she can kick your ass," Bryan says. He'd sort of forgotten about the existence of Espera's family. The kid--eight or ten years old--must keep things in some kind of perspective. "Here's my question to you," he says. "You got the military brass on one side and the media on the other. Which handbasket makes it to hell first?"
Espera laughs. "If there ain't already a Vegas line on that, I'm gonna go up there and start one. I'll be taking sucker money like it's a Tyson fight. I got the time on my hands."
Bryan doesn't want to waste time trying to be delicate, and anyway, he knows Espera's bullshit detector is as finely calibrated as his own. "I heard you were out of the field," he says. "Heard they grounded you because you talk like a wannabe Grand Dragon."
"That's right. I'm a racist, so I don't get to shoot at brown people anymore." Espera's tone is so sarcastic it almost wraps around again to become sad. "You know better, man. I'm just like you."
"Hate everybody equally."
"And make sure they hear about it," Espera says. "Dog, I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing, gives me some time with my family. I been cooking dinner a lot. I cook better than Gina, she never uses enough soy sauce." He pauses for breath. "Aw, shit. You don't gotta worry about this kind of thing, since you pussied out."
This is unexpected, but it's not really a surprise. Bryan taps his thumb on the top of the steering wheel, counts to three. "I stopped seeing the point of banging my head against the wall," he says. "We're talking about incompetence on a scale that you can see from space."
"So you picked up your stethoscope and ran home. You just realized that you have to take a ton of shit for everything you get right? I figured that out before I popped my cherry."
"I seem to remember you complaining just as loud as I did. Hell, I read about it in Rolling Stone."
"Read it again," Espera snaps. His voice is getting louder, closer. "I never sat on my ass feeling sorry for myself because I couldn't see the point. The point? That is not my fucking job. What goes down on the ground is my job, and I ain't ever gonna quit on that."
"What were we doing on the ground? Getting screwed. Every idiot with bars on his sleeve was getting in line to screw us. And not one thing they did made sense. Iraq is a zero-sum game. Fucking shoot me for getting tired of playing." A light changes late, and Bryan's foot comes down hard on the brake. He's had this argument before, but only in the back of his mind, playing both sides for hours on a flight from Kuwait to Australia, and on another flight from Sydney to Los Angeles. It sounds different spoken aloud in the closed space of his own car. "Yeah, I quit. It's called having the courage of your convictions."
"Is that what they call it in the Navy? 'Cause in the Corps, we call it being a pussy."
"Whatever you say, I'm gonna make more money and sleep better at night." If he was in a generous mood, he might admit that he doesn't sleep much, but fighting insomnia in a bed is preferable to crashing in a Ranger grave under danger-close missile fire.
"Money and sleep," Espera says. "That's your big fucking contribution? Dog, that's not right. What's your purpose in life?"
"What are you, the Mexican Oprah?"
There's a beat of silence and then they're both laughing. It breaks the rhythm, and when that happens, it's hard to keep arguing even if nothing is resolved. "You're not a stupid dude," Espera says, catching his breath.
"Thanks." Bryan glances out at the street signs and realizes he drove right past the place he meant to turn. He takes the next left hard, without signaling.
"There's another motherfucker in my seat already." Espera's voice contains no self-pity, not even anger now as he assesses reality. "And yours. The machine be efficient that way."
Officially, of course, Bryan was never a part of First Recon, never carried the colors. Still, it's strange to think about the unit deploying again with half a company of strangers, with somebody else on his gun. Another case where official facts are meaningless when you're on the ground. "Well," he says, "Somebody's gotta finish what we started."
"If they can."
"If they can," Bryan agrees. He takes his hand off the wheel to rub his forehead, the lines there digging in deep. "Don't let politics make your decision for you," he tells Espera. "Because that'll always be fucking useless. You have to think about it and, whatever, talk to your family or something."
"Fuck," Espera says. "My daughter's gonna wash my mouth out with soap."
Bryan laughs again. "I'm gonna let you go."
"Yeah. Hey. Stay frosty."
It's Colbert's line, and Espera does a pretty good impression of Colbert saying it. There's no real reason why that should make Bryan's throat tighten up, so he decides that it doesn't. "Yeah," he says. He hangs up and drops the phone into the passenger seat, next to his cigarettes, both hands back on the wheel as he slows down. There's traffic up ahead where the cheap supermarket is. He missed the weather forecast, but it looks like there'll be a storm.
There's a bar near his place that's usually mellow, satellite TV and a menu of local beers, and it would be a great neighborhood joint if the neighborhood wasn't full of goddamned graduate students. Bryan takes his Nittany Pale Ale and a plate of quesadillas to a little square table and sits with his back to the wall.
He gets a few minutes of peace. Then two girls sit down at the next table and start talking very loudly about the menu. And they should know the menu by heart; they're always, always in here. Bryan's seen them at least a dozen times (roommates, maybe lesbians?), and he doesn't know what they study, but they tend to get drunk and tell jokes about Noam Chomsky, which could be psych or philosophy or left-wing asshole studies--he's pretty sure that's a core part of the curriculum.
Bryan drinks his beer, and eats his food, and he tries, but it takes more energy than he currently has to shut out a conversation that's happening three feet away.
"And the article said that they've had a successful trial with virtual reality," the girl with the long hair is saying. "So that might be the next thing."
"Therapy with video games?" the other girl says. "I don't know how that'd work on anxiety, like, I play Tetris and I want to break something if I don't get a straight line."
There are other tables in the room, he tells himself. He could pick up and move to the corner, under the big screen, where he'd only be able to hear the drone of the football broadcast. He doesn't feel much like moving, though. He's sort of curious exactly how wrong people can be about the world. He signals to the bar for another beer.
"Aliens could beam down when you play Tetris and you wouldn't notice. This is based on one of those really detailed war games."
Stress begins around the tendons of Bryan's neck and spreads down, the muscles in his shoulders contracting, pulling inward.
"All I can picture is, like, Mortal Kombat." A waiter comes around and puts Bryan's drink down on his table and a couple of Cape Cods in front of the girls. "But if the idea is that people who got shot can go back and get shot at again without getting hurt, I guess that makes sense," the girl with the short hair continues.
He can hear the ice clinking in her glass, he's eavesdropping that hard. Get up, he orders himself, and walk away. His hands are flat on the table and he goes nowhere.
"It's not so much getting shot at as it is shooting."
The tension is snaking all the way down his spine now, curling up in the pit of his stomach. He downs the beer with a couple deep swallows. He should have ordered two at a time; he's still much too sober.
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah. Everything in the literature," and that's where he loses the thread for a few seconds, thinking, Jesus Christ, literature? His mouth tastes like malt, from the beer, and metal, from the adrenaline. "Way higher rates of combat stress than World War Two," the girl is saying. "And that's gotta be partly because a way higher percentage of guys are actually pulling the trigger. The thinking is, that's what haunts these guys, because it comes along with guilt."
Bryan considers pulling his chair over to their table and describing Trombley to them in detail. No guilt, not even a hint of giving a damn. A vacuum. See where that fits into the fucking literature. He is actually grinding his teeth now, he can hear it amplified inside his head.
"Anyway, so the idea is, the virtual environment lets people relive a traumatic experience in a controlled way instead of having flashbacks from, you know, external stimuli, like a car backfiring." The girl with the long hair leans back in her seat. There's a smug, glossy smile on her face. "That's the theory."
His hand's twisted into a fist, knuckles down on the table, pressing hard enough that he imagines they're scarring the wood. This is adrenaline, too, that and the heat bleeding through his skin. A chemical reaction to external stimuli. This is the theory that he's read in the newspaper, heard from his own mother, at least three lies in one. Every man in a war feels like a criminal. This can be cured with a few hours of talking, or maybe PlayStation. And you can understand a war by reading about it in a book.
He shoves his chair back and stands up. The empty glass sweats in his grip. The girls glance at him, double-take when they realize he's staring at them. Yeah, he's staring. He wants to tell them that he has regrets, all right, and he wishes he'd shot more people, some of the refugees, some of the people he knew they were going to abandon, sick or bleeding in the sand. A quick death, he is about to say. That will cure what fucking ails you.
The way that they stare back at him--he stops. Their eyes are very large and he can almost convince himself that he can see himself reflected in the pupils. A strange guy in a bar who looks drunker than he is, red in the face, shaking a little in the extremities. Fucked up beyond all recognition. Knowledge slides into him, clean and clinical as a scalpel: they don't understand why he's angry. They have nothing to do with why he's angry.
It's a Saturday night. Bryan is free and American and thirty years old. He should be trying to get the girls at the next table in bed, maybe, instead of thinking how hard he'd need to shake them to get them to understand.
He places the glass down on the table, exercising all his willpower to keep from smashing it. He walks out of the bar without settling up or looking back, his peripheral vision blurred and hot. Hitting the cold is like stepping into a wind tunnel. He goes past his car and stops on the sidewalk, watching the moving lights down at the intersection, red and white and gone, burning temporary streaks across his retinas.
The anger, he knows, didn't start with a conversation. It's been there since he woke up in the morning; it's been there longer than he can remember. Something bit into him as a kid and left a faint scar and a permanent, bone-deep infection: the knowledge that part of the world will always be broken. There is nothing to be but angry, and nothing to do but find an appropriate target. He used to whip rocks at the wall of his parents' garage until his palm was numb. He horse-collared guys in high school football games, would go to the bench deafened and grinning under his helmet. He picked fights in bars. He invaded a fucking country. For a little while after that, he was exhausted.
All his life he's been fixing the small things he can fix, to spite the single universal wrong. If he's ever been haunted, his ghost is this pure, untethered rage.
He takes his phone out of his coat pocket and tosses it down at the ground. It skitters away on the pavement, not even breaking, not giving him that much satisfaction. He puts his hands in his coat pockets, working his fists open and his fingers loose. How many times today did someone ask him what the fuck he was doing with his life, assuming he had a plan? A purpose, that's what Espera said.
Bryan blinks a couple of times to get the afterimages out of his eyes. Okay. He knows what he needs to do now.
He picks up his phone, turns on his heel and goes inside to pay the bartender. Pays for a couple of Cape Cods, too, because it is easier than formulating an apology he does not actually mean. He can feel the girls not looking at him, and he doesn't mind, because he's already gone.
He's sitting in his car with his coat on, collar up, letting the engine warm up and the fog fade from the windshield. He doesn't turn the radio on, or touch the phone again. The next person he'll speak to will be his old C.O., who'll be able to tell him how to get back into Iraq.
There will be a mountain of paperwork from the university as well as the Navy, physicals to pass, all the criminal incompetence and wasted time that made him jump ship in the first place. Some things don't change. He is aware that it's a terrible decision to be making. To have made. His breathing has evened out, now, his pulse steadied, but there's a world of difference between steady and serene. It will never be perfect. He will always be angry.
Bryan shifts into gear and pulls slowly out of the parking lot. He's going to sleep very well tonight. Maybe when he wakes up in the morning, everything will be buried in snow.