Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

Everyone else was there, one hundred people standing shoulder to shoulder, surrounded by an overblown display of congratulation. If you didn’t know it was January, you would have thought it was the Fourth of July. There was an American-flag cake in the middle of the table, three feet long and three inches thick, there were red-white-and-blue plates and napkins, there were red-white-and-blue cans of Coke, there were little ninety-nine-cent American flags. Hanging on the walls were the red-white-and-blue handmade signs telling Wally what a good job he’d done.

  Three of the girls came my way. Amber and Melissa and Tiffany.

  “Here you go, hon,” they said.

  “Here you go, Zeke.”

  “Here’s one for you.”

  They stuck an American-flag pin in my lapel. They touched me and leaned close.

  “What I really want is a slice of that cake,” I said suggestively.

  “That’s for later, hon.”

  They had French manicures, they had highlights, they smelled like apricots.

  Twelve months ago, almost to the day, we’d clumped together in this same room, one hundred of us, saying goodbye to Wally. Everyone had cheered. Everyone had stomped their feet and chanted, “Wally, Wally! U.S.A.!” I’d done it too, despite myself. That is an example of how you can get caught up in the spirit of the moment.

  About an hour after his going-away party, Wally had come into my cubicle and stood by my desk, close to my desk, playing with my paper clips and waiting for me to get off the phone. When I hung up, he said, “I just wanted to say, see you around sometime, Zeke.” He had his mailbag slung over his shoulder, half filled with mail. He looked like a paperboy. I’d known him from the neighborhood when snot had dripped from his nose even in the summertime, when he’d been undersize and chubby and the teachers had thought he might be retarded. Everyone had made fun of him except for me. I’d had compassion for some reason. I’d been the one who had chased down two boys who’d been jabbing him in the belly with sticks. “Aw, we was just playing around.” Those boys were bigger than me, but they cowered. By high school I had built a reputation for being fearless and exceptional. I’d been the one who had stood onstage at graduation and told the other students what life held in store for them. “Give your best, get your best!” I’d said. The parents had loved that. But it was Wally, slow and runny Wally, who, on his own initiative, had gone down to the Career Center one morning before work and signed up for the army, and I was the one who sat at a desk all day long with a headset on.

  So when he came into my cubicle to say goodbye, I said, without missing a beat, “I’m real proud of you.” I tried to say it like I meant it, hoping he wouldn’t detect that underneath was condescension, and underneath the condescension was jealousy, and after that lay melancholy.

  The next thing I knew, he was sitting down on the floor, Wally was, sitting down between my cubicle wall and desk, wedging himself in as if playing hide-and-seek, hugging his mailbag to his chest with both arms and squeezing his knees up to his chin, all the while whispering something over and over, something that I had to lean down to hear, something about being scared, Zeke, about not wanting to go, Zeke.

  “I don’t want to die, Zeke,” he nearly hyperventilated. He looked at me with baby-blue eyes that were filled with tears.

  I stood up so fast that the wire from my headset caught around the arm of my swivel chair and yanked the headset off my head like a rubber band. “You’re not going to die!” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am.” He said it like he knew it.

  After that, I didn’t know what to say. What I really wanted to do was jab him in the belly with a stick. Maybe he was going to die. Maybe this was what his whole life had been leading up to and he was going to be one of those unlucky soldiers who caught it, one of those few unlucky soldiers who never made it back out of the five hundred thousand who did. He’d come back in a coffin with the flag draped over the top. I’d go to his funeral. His dad would hug me and say, “Thank you for everything.”

  “You have a greater chance of dying in a car crash,” I said. But Wally didn’t want to hear about odds. He shook his head, his lips trembled, snot leaked out. I squatted down like an elementary school teacher would, hand on his knee, firm but consoling tone. “You’re not going to die,” I cooed. I mustered compassion from somewhere, and I must have said it with enough conviction that he appeared to believe me. A few moments later he rolled himself up off the floor, wiped his nose on his hand, wiped his hand on his pants, tucked his shirt into his pants.

  I took him by the shoulders then, squarely, masculinely, and to lighten the mood a little, I said, “Go kick some ass, Wally!”

  I had been right: he didn’t die. In fact, he was reborn. Here he was, entering the conference room unscathed, smiling, blushing hard, his head buzzed, his face tanned, waving his hands in the air like he’d just been having the time of his life. One hundred people cheered him all at once, one hundred phone operators clapping and stomping until the room shook.

  “Wally, Wally!” they called, “Wally, Wally! U.S.A.!” Even the cleaning girls had stopped by, Maria and Olga, clapping, thanking him for everything he gave. I clapped too. I stomped my feet too. Because this is how you get caught up.

  He was a changed man. You could see that right away. He was electric now. He was fluid.

  “Where’d you go, Wally?” I thought as I pounded my hands. “What’d you see, huh?”

  “I’ve been places, Zeke,” his grin seemed to be saying to me. “I’ve done things.”

  He looked like he’d lost weight. That was what he’d done. He looked like he’d put on muscle too. His gut was gone and his jaw was hard and he didn’t resemble a large baby boy anymore. If his nose was running, I couldn’t tell. Apparently neither could the girls who were throwing their arms around his neck and kissing him, one after another, including Brittany, the prettiest of them all, the one I’d gone out with two years ago when the managing director had given me free tickets for a show that had come to town. We’d gone to Applebee’s afterward, Brittany and I, and I’d told her, “Order whatever you want. It’s on me,” because I wanted her to know that this was a date, that I had designs on her. But for whatever reason, our outing never seemed to rise above coworkers with free tickets gossiping about the workplace, and I ended the night kissing her on the cheek.

  Now she was kissing Wally on the cheek, damn close to his mouth, leaving her lipstick on his face, and when she was done, the next girl stepped in, and when all the girls were done, they moved back in a circle to give him some space to breathe, so he could compose himself amid all the attention, and he stood in the center of the conference room, as if under a spotlight, while we waited for him to say something profound about his experience. But of course he didn’t know what to say, profound or otherwise. He looked around at a loss, lipstick all over his face, staring blankly at a roomful of people he had only ever delivered mail to.

  It was the managing director who broke the silence by raising a plastic cup of soda, saying how he was happy to have Wally back, how Wally had sacrificed for us, how it was a shame that after everything he’d been through, he had to come home to such cold weather.

  But Wally didn’t look like he’d been through much of anything. He didn’t have one scratch on him, as far as I could tell. He looked like he’d given little and gained a lot. As the managing director droned on, I contemplated how, if I ever went over there and came back with a tan and no scratch, I would be ashamed of myself. I would be embarrassed. I would make sure I got a scratch even if it meant I had to inflict it myself. And then I’d stand in this conference room, the way I had stood onstage at my high school graduation, and give a speech about country and family and friends. Society too. “It’s you I want to thank,” I’d say. That would bring the house down.

  “You’re going to be losing your tan,” the managing director said in conclusion, and slapped Wally on the back. At that, the room laughed, clapping and shouting, with Wally standing in the mid
dle of it like one of those things in a snow globe, with applause showering down around him.

  “What’d you see, Wally?” I asked out loud. No one could hear me. “What’d you do, huh?”

  For a moment our eyes met and he smiled at me.

  “Why, I killed a man, Zeke. That’s what I’ve done.”

  Then the applause stopped, it stopped all at once, because the break was over and it was time to get back to work. The phones were ringing.

  The phones kept ringing and Wally’s hair grew back. In February the temperature dropped to zero degrees. For three straight days it stayed at zero. Then it dropped below zero. The roads froze and the pipes burst and the circus was canceled. Whatever commission we had earned had to be returned. That was company policy.

  We continued to get closer to catching their man. We even had him surrounded once, briefly, but he was wily and managed to elude us. Not to worry, we were getting closer. Any day now.

  Other than that, not much changed.

  Then one morning, toward the end of the month, I woke as I always did to the sound of my alarm going off. It was six-forty-five. Wrangg, wrangg; wrangg, wrangg, the alarm went. The alarm could have been the telephone ringing in my cubicle. Lying in bed with my eyes closed and the covers pulled up around my chin, I listened to the winter sounds: the wind and the windows and the salt trucks. I tried to recall what my dreams had been from the night before, but as usual, they were fading—I could remember only symbols. Paperweights. Redwoods.

  At 6:50 my snooze went off and I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while, following my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps going back and forth.

  At 6:55 I had no choice but to get out of bed and go into the kitchen and go into the bathroom and go back to the bedroom, where I wondered if the neighbors in the apartment beneath mine were staring up at their ceiling.

  “What’s the word today, buddy?” I asked the man on the corner selling newspapers.

  The word today was not different than the word yesterday. The word was that it was seventy-eight degrees over there and it was minus two over here.

  “What’s the word today, Zeke?” my fellow commuters on the train asked me.

  The word was that they had four hundred and twenty-six casualties and we had three.

  Above my head were the same government advertisements, and outside my train window was the same frozen landscape, except for the American flags, which were blowing fast. We pulled into the station at 8:34, just like we always did. And just like we always did, we crowded through the train door, every man for himself, and raced up the stairs because we were cold and because we had snoozed too long and cut it too close.

  In front of us were our office buildings all lit up, including mine, and which, in a few minutes, I would be entering and riding the elevator to the forty-eighth floor, the elevator that went almost as fast as the train, as if I were being transported somewhere urgent.

  But today, when the crowd turned left, I turned right. I took the side street that led to the boulevard that led to the waterfront. I was going to be late for work, but that didn’t matter. Years ago I had cut school with Wally and we had come down and hung out by the waterfront and taken off our shirts. He’d been flabby and I’d been muscular. It had been a strange feeling to be free when everyone else was captive, and I’d had the idea that this was what it meant to be an adult.

  Now sheets of ice were floating on top of the river and the wind was coming off hard. I had to bend in half against the wind that went under my coat and around my suit and tie. I walked fast and my breath came out white. My fingers felt like they were burning in my gloves.

  The sign was plainspoken and unadorned. CAREER CENTER, it said. There was an American flag in the window, the window was fogged. I pushed open the door and entered a room where a man sat at a desk. He was sitting cockeyed to the desk, because he wasn’t cut out for office work. He was dressed in a uniform. His hat was off and his head was buzzed. On the wall behind him was a picture of young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  He looked up at me. He put his pen down. He stood. He smiled. He said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

  Everyone was proud of me. That was the first big change. The guy I bought the newspaper from in the morning was proud of me. “Bring him back dead or alive,” he said. That was the only thing he’d said in months. The commuters on the train were proud of me. So were my parents, including my dad. My landlord was proud of me. He said, “You won’t be needing any weather-stripping where you’re going.” I said, “I sure won’t,” because I was giving up my apartment anyway. And everyone at work was proud of me. The managing director came over to congratulate me, to shake my hand and let me know what he thought of men like me, to let me know that my job would be there when I got back. Later on, Amber and Melissa and Tiffany stopped by, waving those little ninety-nine-cent American flags like they were at a parade. They said, “We get to have another party!” Brittany even came by. “Are you going to send me a postcard?” She made a pouting face like I’d been the one to break her heart once already. “You know I will,” I said, winking. When the phone rang, I imagined that the people on the other end were proud of me, which helped me help them, each and every one of them, even the rude ones, even the dumb ones. I went out of my way to help them. I could feel myself transforming, morphing into someone new. My senses seemed to be heightening as I sat there in my swivel chair—sight, sound, empathy.

  When Wally came by with the mailbag, he congratulated me and then said right away, “I’m wondering if you could do me a big favor, Zeke.” Shifting from foot to foot, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind putting in a good word for him with the managing director. It was all about him. “I can answer phones,” he said. He made it sound like anyone could do my job.

  “I’ll put in a good word for you,” I said, but I was done putting in good words.

  I had five days to go, five days before I shipped out for basic training, and the joke around the office was that I had better ship out before the war ended. We were closing in on their man. He was in the forest for sure. Or the mountains. The joke was that I might not get my office party after all. “You might not even get a tan,” the girls said.

  I stayed up late, packing my stuff. There were boxes everywhere, filled with clothes and dishes and mementos from all those extracurricular activities in high school that made the teachers hold me up as an example of someone who was “more than just a student.” It was past midnight by the time I’d finished packing, but I was filled with energy. I took off my shirt. It was cold and the windows breathed, but I felt impervious. I dropped and did push-ups right there, right there on the kitchen floor, because I figured I might as well get started with basic training, might as well start getting back in shape. I hadn’t done push-ups in years, but I was able to do eighteen, no problem. Ten thousand hours with a headset on my head and I still had muscles in my arms, or the potential for muscles. There were some muscles in my legs too, because I did twenty-eight jumping jacks, no problem, working up a sweat and wondering if my neighbors, at midnight, were trying to trace the path my footsteps were making on their ceiling. I wound up going to bed at three o’clock, dreaming symbolically, and waking before my clock went off.

  But when I woke, it was to something unsettling: the previous day, we had sustained nine fatalities. We’d never had nine. We’d never even had seven. It’s nothing, I told myself, tomorrow it’ll be back to normal, tomorrow we’ll continue the hunt. This was Tuesday.

  Wednesday brought the news that we had lost nine more. The newspaper guy, his face crisscrossed with scarves, peered at me with concerned eyes. There was an article that day, front page, about one of our soldiers, twenty-four years old, who, in the middle of the forest, had become separated from his company while looking for potable water. In his confusion, he had wandered into a town where he was set upon by the locals. Stripping him of his flak jacket, they dragged him on the end of a rope through the streets before
displaying him in the square. They were going to try him, they said. After they tried him, they were going to hang him. There was a photograph of the soldier. His face frightened and dehydrated. He looked apologetic, regretful. Staring at his photo on the train ride, I couldn’t get past the fact that there had been no potable water.

  Thursday the news was worse, the news was unbearable. The balance had somehow swung in the opposite direction: we were the ones being pursued. The war was going to last longer than we thought. Maybe till summer. Maybe till fall. The experts could not agree. We would persevere in the end, of course, but for now, we were fleeing and they were chasing. The reports came in randomly, if at all. At last count, they had twenty-two casualties and we had seventy-seven. In addition, two of our companies were unaccounted for, and there was news that a general had been shot in the face. Of the soldier who had been captured while searching for water in the forest, there was no news, there were more pressing things with which to concern ourselves. Water was the least of it.

  At work, no one said anything. I made it easy for them by staying in my cubicle. The only person who came by was Wally. His hair had grown even longer than before he left. It was in shaggy fashionable curls. His hair was an affront. I didn’t know whether he was coming to see if I had put in a good word for him. I made a point of staying on the phone with a customer who wanted ten tickets to the expo. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I can do ten tickets for you, ma’am.” He stood by my desk, hovering. I wanted him to witness my composure. I wanted him to witness my commission. When he left, I hung up because there was no one on the line.

  That night I took my stuff to my parents’ house. Sixteen boxes of stuff. My whole life in those boxes. It was freezing and my car wouldn’t start. It rattled and coughed for a while, and then the engine caught. No one was out on the street. The only things on the street were the flags, blowing so hard they looked like they were going to fly away. They had lost their celebratory quality. They had lost their sense of unity. Now they were holding on for dear life.