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  “Where’s Bioko?”

  “It used to be called Fernando Poo.” He giggled and took a sip of coffee. “This is good. Anyway, Bioko is an island off the west coast of Africa. We should be able to claim it within a couple of days.”

  “Bully for us.”

  He chuffed at me and said, “People like you really make me mad. I don’t understand you. We’re out there every day defending this country’s freedom, our way of life, and people like you sit at home and do nothing but criticize.”

  “I just don’t think war is always the answer. I grew up during mostly peace times.”

  “There’s never been such a thing. Since this country was formed we’ve always been at war.”

  “I didn’t think I’d ever have to worry about a draft, anyway. All my life, the military was a profession, just like any other. It might be dangerous, but they’re also getting paid to do it, and they know that when they sign up. Most soldiers have my respect but I couldn’t possibly be one of them.”

  “What if no one signed up? What if everyone thought like you? What then? We could all be speaking Chinese.”

  “If the soldiers in the military are defending my freedom then why does it always seem like we’re on the offensive?”

  “Sometimes it’s not good enough to defend freedom at home. Sometimes you have to promote freedom throughout the world.”

  “Is that what they’re doing in Fernando Poo?”

  “Bioko.”

  “Sorry. Bioko.”

  “Three American tourists were killed in a hotel there.”

  “And we declared war on them?”

  “Right now it’s only a conflict. Tomorrow, the President will probably officially declare war. The people who killed the tourists were citizens of Bioko, or lived there, or something.”

  I started to feel pretty drunk. I had to close one of my eyes. I looked at the television through the open eye. A giant tank ran over a small hut with a thatched roof.

  “If you want to know the truth of it,” I said. “I just don’t understand war. It seems too impersonal to me. And I don’t like violence.”

  “So you admit, sometimes, war is necessary.”

  “I would never admit that. I think there are always other ways.”

  “Well, then, when you get to Grisnos, you can find some other way to fend off those savages.”

  “I will not kill another human being,” I slurred.

  “Then you will most probably die.”

  That was the last thing I heard before I spiraled into drunken oblivion.

  Six

  Pain jerked me from sleep. My head swam. I could still only use the one eye. The living room seemed too bright. The television too loud. The sound of bombs and people screaming and crying. I looked down at the source of the pain.

  Baxter was sawing at my talons.

  What the hell was he using? It looked like a steak knife.

  I tried to slash at his face with my talons but they were all gone. He was working on the last one. Besides, I was still too drunk to move with any real force. I kicked him lightly in the side of the head.

  I tried to ask him what he was doing but it was an incoherent slur.

  “We can’t have you going overseas to represent our country with toenails like those.” Then, after yanking the last talon down to the quick, he said, “Man, they don’t pay me enough to do this kind of shit.”

  I curled my toes in between the cushions of the couch, feeling naked and ashamed. Then I closed my eyes and forced myself back to sleep.

  I didn’t want to be aware of this man sitting only feet from me.

  I didn’t want to be aware of what was happening on the television.

  I didn’t want to be aware of what was happening anywhere except the house I lived in.

  But, for right now, that was where all the really bad shit was happening. It was like I had avoided it for too long and now it was closing in around me in one cacophonous web.

  Seven

  “IT’S TIME TO GET UP! IT’S TIME TO GET UP! IT’S TIME TO GET UP! IT’S TIME TO GET UP!”

  He said it like a million times before I could even respond.

  “I’m awake. I’m awake.” I tried to bat away the sound of his voice with a hand.

  “Then why aren’t you getting up? Get up! Come on. Your ride’ll be here in five minutes.”

  “Five minutes?”

  I sat up on the couch and wiped the sleep from my eyes. Fought the urge to throw up.

  “I was hoping to take a shower. Maybe make some coffee.”

  “No time! You’re the one who had to sleep so late.”

  “Late? What time is it?”

  “Oh-six-hundred.”

  “Six o’clock? That’s earlier than I’ve ever been up.”

  “Better get used to it. You’re on military time now. Up at the break of dawn. Maybe even before, depending on your mission.”

  I stood up. The room spun around me. I sat back down and put my head between my knees. I tried standing up again. I balanced myself until the room quit spinning. I went into the bathroom and pissed, stopped pissing to vomit, flushed the vomit down the toilet, and resumed pissing. At the kitchen sink I ran a big glass of water and drank it down. Then I went into the back bedroom and pulled some fresh socks from my drawer. I put the socks on and noticed that my talons had chewed holes in them on a previous wear. I pawed through the drawer. They were all like that.

  When I got back into the living room, the front door was open wide. Outside, on the street, was a helicopter. It looked like it was missing a blade from the propeller. That didn’t seem safe. Baxter was talking to someone, this man wearing something that more closely resembled an army uniform—olive green and not a sweatsuit. I panicked. I slammed the door shut and locked it.

  A few seconds later, Baxter began pounding on the door.

  “You can’t get out of this. Open this door in five seconds or you’re in violation of all sorts of laws. Now! Open it!”

  I opened the door and took off running through the house. I escaped out the back door. He just told me to open the door, I thought. He didn’t say anything about sticking around.

  I began running through the backyard, still wearing only my socks. I turned down the alley. My neighbor was in his backyard watering his flowers. He lifted his hand in a wave. I didn’t have time to wave back.

  The pilot came charging out of the cross alley. He had a machine gun across his chest. He bolted toward me. I thought about running in the opposite direction but thought he would probably shoot at me if I did. I was out of breath anyway. I had a stitch in my side. My feet hurt. Some soldier I’d make.

  The pilot approached me and wrapped a hand around my upper arm, a bit harder than was necessary.

  “There’s no getting away,” he said.

  “Oh, I know,” I panted. “I was just… powering up for the morning. I like to do that sometimes. Run, you know?”

  “You don’t look like you’ve run a day in your life. I’m Corporal Grimes.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Corporal Grimes. I’m Saul Dressing.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

  He led me back to the helicopter, his hand clutching me the entire time. He motioned for me to sit in the back. I wondered why I couldn’t sit up front.

  “Why can’t I just sit up front?”

  “You can’t do the jump from up front.”

  “Jump?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m not landing this bird in that godless country.”

  “I’ve never…”

  “We’ll talk about it on the way. No need to worry.”

  I climbed in the back and hurriedly fastened my seatbelt. The seatbelt was one more layer between me and what would eventually be the open sky. I tried to imagine falling through the open sky. I started to get a little queasy again.

  “He’s gonna need these,” Baxter said from out on the street and hurled my shoes into the copter.

  I quickly put them on and the h
elicopter began to rise. It was very loud. I looked down toward my house and saw Baxter going back inside. Why was he going back inside my house? I didn’t think he had any right to do that but I was learning that most of my thoughts were wrong.

  Eight

  The helicopter listed badly to one side. I had to keep my feet pressed firmly to the floor so I didn’t roll to the other side. Now that I no longer had my talons, my shoes were way too big. I had to tie them extra tightly.

  Grimes threw something over his shoulder and said, “Here. Put this on.” At least, I think that’s what he said. It was kind of hard to hear him. It landed in my lap. It looked like a headset. Something I imagined customer service people in call centers wearing. I put it on.

  Grimes’s voice crackled in my ear, loud and clear. “We’ll begin your briefing now.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really want to have a briefing. It sounded very boring, official, and would probably make me more aware of the dangers that lay ahead of me.

  “Your operation is simple. I will be dropping you over a country called Grisnos. It’s an arid desert country. Earlier surveillance has revealed the country’s population to be between fifty and a thousand. They are all dangerous and are to be handled with extreme caution and dealt with in the most efficient manner. You are to continue surveying them. When the time comes, they will either have to surrender to us, or you will begin your offensive. The radio will keep you connected to Sergeant Sam Fetch. You are to wear it at all times.”

  Grimes then tossed back a black machine gun.

  “This is your weapon. Besides the headset, it’s the greatest resource you have. Open up the handle and you will find various buttons for everything you need. The weapon is deceptively simple but it contains multitudes. If you need more ammunition, just press the button labeled ‘ammunition’. Likewise for food, shelter.”

  It all seemed very unrealistic. I wondered if every mission was like this.

  “Questions?”

  “Where, exactly, is Grisnos?”

  “I can’t disclose that information.”

  “Shouldn’t I have the right to know where I’m going?”

  “If you wanted to know where you were going, then perhaps you should have done some research rather than drinking your evening away. Perhaps you should have turned the news on every now and then. You might have learned something.”

  “And why, exactly, are we at war with Grisnos?”

  “I thought Baxter already went over that with you.”

  “If he did, he was incredibly vague.”

  “The residents of Grisnos are threatening our way of life, our freedoms.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “You’ll see when you get there.”

  “How much longer is it going to be?”

  “A few hours.”

  I rolled my eyes. If I was going to be there at all, I wanted to be there now, just to get it over with.

  “You might as well relax.”

  “That’s going to be hard.” I couldn’t even sit down comfortably without feeling like I was going to fall out of the copter.

  “I’m finished talking to you,” Grimes said. “I would prefer you didn’t say anything else.”

  That was the first time I’d ever had a conversation end that way. Part of me was mad and wanted to keep talking out of spite. Part of me found it refreshing. If I made it back, I’d have to try that if I ever got stuck in a horrible conversation. I sat back, cinching the seat belt as tight as it would go, closed my eyes, and tried to rest.

  Nine

  The deafening noise and the precarious position of the helicopter made rest impossible. I looked out the window to see if I could gain any sense of where we might be. I couldn’t see anything except a layer of cloud cover. Did helicopters fly above the clouds? I didn’t think they typically flew that high but I also didn’t really know anything about helicopters.

  There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask but Grimes had forbidden me to talk to him so I guessed they would go unanswered.

  My mission seemed suspect and ambiguous. Perhaps I preferred not having my questions answered. To ask questions and then have them answered could imply that I knew what I was doing. I would rather not know what I was doing and use the explanation that no one told me what I was supposed to be doing than to know what I was doing and do it poorly. I wasn’t a soldier. I didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant to be a soldier. I didn’t have the slightest urge to be a soldier. Therefore, I was pretty certain that, whatever I was about to do, whatever mission I was about to carry out, would be done as poorly as any mission in the history of Everything.

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought that could be something to be proud of.

  Ten

  Time was nebulous inside the helicopter. I got tired of staring at the back of Grimes’s head and the cloud cover below was extremely monotonous. I thought about my days at the library. I had worked there for the past ten years and had grown relatively comfortable with it. At first I enjoyed the strange mix of people who came in to borrow or steal books. As the book supply dwindled, never to be replaced, I began to enjoy the solitude of it. Only a few people came in every day. Mapes stayed sequestered in his office for the most part. I was able to read and listen to music. Or simply wander around the library, picking up that occasional book too unpopular to steal. Anything to take my mind off this same solitude that would follow me home and there, in the darkness of the evening, the neighborhood asleep, that solitude would leak slowly from my head and down my spine, spreading out through all my bones and manifest as something that could probably be called depression. And, just before sleep, I would have to convince myself this was life. And these things—loneliness, solitude, depression—were my life’s obstacles just as some people’s obstacles were health issues or poverty or addiction.

  Did all of these things lead to a singular path of insanity? Or was it the realization of this path that makes certain people veer off in another direction and find something that appears as enlightenment?

  Damn it. I wished I had my music or a book now. Those were what kept thoughts like that away.

  Eleven

  My stomach lurched as the helicopter began its rapid descent. For a brief and panicked moment, I thought we were crashing.

  Now angled forward, the helicopter dived down through the clouds and I could once again see the earth below. It was a mind numbing expanse of brown the color of mocha. Somber, dingy, depressing.

  Grimes stood up from his seat and faced me. He wore aviator sunglasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to see his eyes. I hoped the helicopter had some sort of automatic pilot setting on it. He grabbed my shirt and pulled me to my feet. It was hard to stand up. The ceiling of the helicopter was too low to straighten out and I was wildly off balance. Grimes grabbed the machine gun up from the floor and pressed it against my chest until I grabbed onto it.

  “This is where you get out, Dressing.”

  I was seized with fear. This was real. It was happening. And I was the most pathetic man for the job.

  “I’ve never done this. I don’t even have a parachute.”

  “The gun is all you need. I told you that earlier. You could have been exploring instead of wasting your time on soft thoughts.”

  How did he know my thoughts were soft? What constituted a soft thought?

  He opened up the door on the side of the helicopter and began pushing me toward it. I fumbled with the gun. I thought about shooting him but then I would somehow have to figure out how to land the helicopter and couldn’t imagine I would be at all successful with that. One half of the stock flipped open. There were a bunch of bright orange buttons. Grimes stood behind me and gave me a strong push. I was out in the open air.

  When you watch people parachute on television, it never looks like they’re falling that fast. I felt like a stone, rocketing toward the ground. My eyes were watering and I didn’t know if it was from the
air stinging them or if I was crying. Could have been a little of both. I tried to read the minute text above the orange buttons but everything was blurry. I started pressing them. Nothing happened.

  Then something began spooling from the butt of the gun. I grabbed onto the gun even harder.

  The parachute opened with a pop and I almost lost it. The parachute wanted to stay there, the wind holding it up, and my body wanted to keep diving toward the ground. I wrapped my hands around the very end of the stock and my wild sense of panic calmed somewhat. I didn’t want to look down. I looked up, searching for the helicopter, but I didn’t see it.

  I hit the ground and my knees buckled and slammed into my collar bones. Off balance, I rolled to my right, the hot ground scraping at my arms.

  Calmly, oblivious to my fear, the parachute drifted down over top of me and covered me like a funeral shroud. I lay flat on my back and tried to breathe regularly, amazed I was still alive.

  In the distance, I heard a loud crash. I crawled out from under the parachute and saw the tail end of the helicopter jutting up from the ground at an unnatural angle.

  I spoke into my headphones. “Grimes?”

  Flames and smoke barreled up from the downed copter.

  “Saul Dressing?” a voice came through the headphones.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Sergeant Sam Fetch. Congratulations on your safe landing. You’ll be taking orders from me now.”

  “I think Grimes crashed the helicopter.”

  “It’s all part of the mission, Private Dressing.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  “Don’t ask questions.”

  Smoke continued to billow up from the helicopter. I backed further away from it. A loud boom shook the ground as the helicopter exploded in a final ball of flame.