Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

  “It’s like you’re moving back home, Zeke,” my dad said when I arrived.

  It wasn’t like that at all. He was dressed in suspenders because he was a lawyer. My mom was dressed in an apron because she was a stay-at-home mom. My sister was dressed in torn jeans and purple eye shadow because she was a teenager.

  I put the boxes in the cellar where my childhood toys were, my baseball card collection, my comic book collection, my coin collection. I’d been a hoarder as a child. Now I would learn to live with nothing.

  “Stack them alongside the wall,” my dad said, referring to the boxes. He wasn’t going to give me a hand.

  It was cold and clammy in the cellar. I thought about whether the barracks were going to be cold and clammy. That was something I could ask him. There were a lot of questions I could ask him. I thought about how, if I was killed, my mom and dad would have to come down to the cellar and sort through all my stuff, trying to figure out what to keep and what to throw out. I’d want them to do what we did with my grandmother’s possessions. We didn’t bother to look through any of it, we just loaded it all into a truck, mementos and everything, and gave it to Goodwill. My beer can collection, my stamp collection, give it all away.

  At some point I realized that it wasn’t going to be cold and clammy in the barracks because it was seventy-eight degrees where I was headed. This failed to hearten me.

  My mom had cooked a special dinner. “Chicken with stuffing, extra stuffing,” she said. That was my favorite, but I didn’t have an appetite. I hadn’t had an appetite in four days.

  My dad said a prayer, “Dear Lord …” He said some things about the past and the future, generic things that could be interpreted in a number of different ways. “Amen,” he said.

  “Amen,” we said.

  “Dig in,” he said.

  I ate to be nice. I picked, really. Moving the chicken and stuffing around on my plate, hoping somehow to diminish the portion so my mom’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I could hardly swallow. I drank plenty of water, though. Four glasses of water.

  “You sure are thirsty,” my sister said.

  “Is the chicken too salty?” my mom wanted to know.

  “It’s just right,” I said.

  “It’s more than just right,” my dad said. He was always correcting me.

  My sister wanted to catch up on everything, including her special activities in school, especially for the war. Like writing letters to soldiers.

  “Are you going to send me a postcard?” I said.

  “You know I will,” she said. I thought I might weep. But for her it was exciting. She told me about a soldier she’d been corresponding with. I half-listened. She ended by saying, “You’re going on an adventure, Zeke!”

  This was Thursday.

  Friday the news was worse. We had stopped fleeing because there was nowhere left to flee. It was official: we were surrounded. All we could do was hope for the best and wait for reinforcements. Friday was also the day I had my office party.

  I was late getting there because I didn’t want to go. If it were up to me, I would have canceled. To cancel, however, would have been to exhibit my fear. Or despair. I hung out in the bathroom, not doing anything, just standing in front of the mirror, letting the water run over my hands and staring at myself, wondering what I was going to look like with my head shaved and a flak jacket on, wondering what I was going to look like dehydrated. I already looked gaunt and hungover. I didn’t have far to go.

  After a while, Wally opened the door. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. He was standing in the doorway with a sad face, like he knew the end was coming.

  “Can’t talk now, Wally!” I said, as if bursting with enthusiasm. “I have a party to get to!”

  There were one hundred people waiting for me in the conference room, standing shoulder to shoulder. It was so quiet it could have been a vigil. All that was missing were the candles. To their credit, they had spared no expense: there was cake, there was soda, there were signs on the walls that the girls had spent the morning making, and which, through either oversight or intention, all said the same thing: GOOD LUCK, ZEKE! ZEKE, GOOD LUCK! WE WISH YOU LUCK!

  Luck was the thing I needed now.

  As I took my place among the refreshments and decorations, the silence of the room deepened in that uncomfortable way, like when an audience doesn’t know if the play has ended. I was trying to look happy for the fun party, but I could feel my eyebrows raised unnaturally. I was sorry to have put the crowd through this. The crowd was sorry too. Two hundred sorry eyes staring at me.

  Then the managing director began to clap, and the rest of the room took that as their cue to get going with false enthusiasm. They tried to applaud with the same gusto that they had applauded for Wally, but it sounded scattered and hopeless. No one was calling my name.

  Somehow I summoned the energy to raise my hands above my head as if victorious, and basking in the acclaim of tepid applause, I yelled, “Let’s eat cake!” That got everyone stomping and shouting, no doubt out of relief that I was able to show some zest for life. The managing director handed me a slice of red-white-and-blue cake, the biggest slice, of course. I ate it off a red-white-and-blue plate. And when I was done, I ate another. This was my party. The men came to shake my hand, and the girls came to kiss me on the cheek. “See you in twelve months,” they said optimistically. Brittany put one of those American-flag pins in my lapel. She leaned in close and touched me. “Good luck,” she whispered.

  At one o’clock everyone got back to work, and I went to my cubicle to pack up. I had imagined it would take me all day to get everything organized and sorted and thrown out. I’d been in that cubicle two years, after all. It took about fifteen minutes. There were some odds and ends, including a couple of photographs of me and my coworkers on bowling night, when one of the guys had taken the initiative to schedule some work outings, since “work shouldn’t be all about work.” Almost everything else in my desk belonged to the company. I thought about stealing something, a keepsake, but that’s not the kind of person I am. I sat down in my swivel chair one last time, aware suddenly of how soft it was and how well it swiveled. I was going to miss my chair. I was going to miss my desk and headset. My headset smelled vaguely of sweat from having been on top of my head for ten thousand hours. I put it to my face and inhaled. On Monday morning, bright and early, someone new would come, someone who didn’t know me, someone who didn’t know how good he had it. Maybe it would be Wally, after all. Maybe it would be Wally who would sit in my swivel chair, and thumb through the instruction packet, and shake hands with the managing director, and joke with Brittany about his new career. If they mentioned me, it’d be in the past tense. And at ten o’clock on the dot, my phone would ring, and Wally would put on my headset, and he would say for the very first time, “Good morning. My name is Wally. How may I help you today?”

  I went out the side door with my bag of things so I wouldn’t have to see anyone else for the last time and make them embarrassed. I took the elevator down to the eighteenth floor. On the eighteenth floor, I transferred to the freight elevator.

  The elevator guy said, “I haven’t seen you in a while.” It’d been two years since I’d gotten promoted. There was graffiti about pussies all over the walls

  “I’ve been on vacation,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

  He thought I was serious. To him, only a couple of weeks had passed since he’d last seen me. That’s how time moves when you’re in an elevator.

  The subbasement was the same as always, boiling hot, even in the dead of winter, and smelling like envelopes. There were sixteen hallways in the subbasement, and if you didn’t know which way you were going, you could get lost and wander for an hour. I knew exactly where I was going. I found Wally in the bulk section, sitting on a crate while he sorted envelopes, big, little, medium. He didn’t look up when I came over. He was busy with his work, busy tossing envelopes left or ri
ght. One, two, three, he worked. He had concentration. He had work ethic. He deserved to have a good word put in for him. I’d done this for three years. I used to go home each night and wash my hands with lemon juice to try to get the smell of envelope off them. It had felt like a miracle when I moved upstairs.

  For a moment I thought I might pass out, because it was hot in the subbasement, and because I’d eaten a lot of cake, and also because I knew this was it, that my “adventure” was about to begin and there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming back. I tilted slightly, briefly, and imagined myself falling into the narrow space between the big envelopes and the small envelopes. It wouldn’t be that bad, I thought, to fall into that space. It wouldn’t be that bad to do this kind of work again.

  I stood to the side waiting for him to notice me, and when he looked my way, he stood up quickly. I said, “I just wanted to say, see you around sometime, Wally.”

  He put down the envelope he was holding. He put his hands in his pockets. He took them out. His face was flushed from the stuffiness. This was probably what the barracks was going to feel like.

  “Did the managing director ever talk to you?” I asked, as if there was a possibility.

  Wally shook his head.

  “That’s a shame,” I said, but I was relieved. And then I was sorry. “Well, it’s not that bad down here,” I said. I smiled, I chuckled. As if to prove my point, I picked up an envelope, weighed its heft, and tossed it into the medium pile. But before I knew what was happening, I was sputtering, teetering, grasping Wally’s hand, and saying, “I don’t want to die, Wally. I don’t want to die.”

  Wally grabbed me to steady me. He put his arm around my waist. He let me lean straight into him. We stood there like that for a while in the hot basement with the sound of the fan whirring in the background, with me heaving against him.

  I kept waiting to hear Wally offer some words of comfort, of consolation. I kept waiting for him to talk to me about percentages and odds. Instead, he took me by the shoulders, firmly, tightly, looked me straight in the eye, and I suppose to lighten the mood a little bit, he said, “Go kick some ass, Zeke!”

  It was dawn. It was oddly warm for dawn. Twenty-five degrees, maybe.

  I was supposed to catch the bus at the depot—that was the instruction. I fully intended to follow all instructions. At the depot, there were fifty guys like me milling around. No one looked at anyone. Half of us stood there smoking cigarettes. There was a sign that said NO SMOKING, but we knew the basic laws of the land didn’t apply to us anymore. The rest of us slouched in the blue plastic seats, trying to stay awake. A tall man came and sat down next to me. He had a can of Coke that he kept tipping all the way back, as if trying to get out every drop. Enjoy that last drop, I thought. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He said to me, “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “We’re going for training,” someone said, someone who was eavesdropping. Privacy didn’t apply to us anymore either. Soon we’d be showering together.

  “No,” the tall man said to the eavesdropper, “we’re going straight to the forest.” He chuckled like this was something that could be funny.

  When the bus pulled in, the headlights came at us like giant yellow eyeballs. It was a Greyhound bus with an LCD display on the front that said GOD BLESS AMERICA. The bus had been rented free of charge for the war effort so that not everything would have to fall on the taxpayers.

  An officer appeared out of nowhere. His hat was on and his shoes were shined. It was clear he wasn’t a man who had trouble with the early hours of the morning. “Line up and get on” was what he said.

  We did as we were told. This is day one, I thought.

  A fat man sat down next to me with headphones on. He was already out of breath and would most certainly die within days. They weren’t picky anymore. They were taking anyone who wanted to be a soldier. The man bobbed his head to whatever music was on his headphones, and when I looked at him, he pulled one of the headphones off of his ear and said confidentially, “If you’ve got music, you better listen to it now, because they’re going to take it.”

  “Is that so?” I said.

  “That is so,” he said.

  I wasn’t going in for rumors. I wasn’t going in for hysteria. I’d stay above the fray, the paranoia. I wanted cold hard facts. Cold hard facts were going to save me in the end. Facts and luck.

  The officer came through the bus, doing a head count. His gun was on his hip. When he walked past me, the gun was at eye level.

  Someone in the front shouted, “When am I going to get me one of those guns, Captain?” Everyone laughed.

  The bus started, and we pulled out so smoothly. The bus hummed. We made a left and another left. I leaned back in my seat and found comfort in the swaying. Then I drifted off to sleep. But I didn’t dream. And when I woke, we had arrived.

  VICTORY

  The story began to change for me the summer I was working at the supermarket in Montour Heights—that enormous state-of-the-art supermarket that had been built to great acclaim, with its forty-eight aisles, its ice cream parlor, its travel agency.

  It was summer, but it was starting to get unseasonably cool, strangely cool, sixty degrees, fifty degrees sometimes. The days were overcast and the nights were chilly and when I left home in the morning there’d be frost on the leaves. The public pools had shut down and the price of heating oil had gone up and families picnicked in their living rooms in front of the television. It wasn’t unusual to see people on the street dressed in corduroys and sweaters and sometimes gloves and hats. In the evening there’d be smoke coming out of the chimneys. No one cared about the weather, though, because everyone’s attention was on the war. We’d taken the bay, we’d secured the border, and we’d had almost no casualties. Within a week we’d made it within fifty miles of the capital, and a week later we had closed to twenty-five, and it was agreed upon by all the experts, patriots and naysayers alike, that the enemy no longer stood a chance and now was the time to begin discussing the terms of settlement.

  At the supermarket, business was booming. The factories had opened back up along the river like old times, and people had come in from the outskirts to work, and people needed to eat. Before and after our shifts, we would crowd into the break room—the cashiers, the baggers, the stock clerks, the butchers, the bakers, the man who collected the shopping carts—and talk about what was happening and what was going to happen. Fifty of us standing shoulder to shoulder in that windowless room, laughing and joking and breathing a sigh of relief because now that the end was near, it was evident there wouldn’t be a draft. Some of the guys said they were thinking about enlisting anyway, before it was too late, so they could have an adventure. I said I was thinking about enlisting too, which made everyone laugh, because of course I would never be eligible. That summer everyone was happy and everyone was carefree. But then toward the middle of August, things started to bog down due to terrain and logistics, and for a while we advanced no more than a quarter of a mile a day, sometimes not even that, sometimes we lost ground, little by little we lost ground, until before long we were once again fifty miles from the capital. So after that we talked about other things.

  In September Ziggy caught a girl shoplifting. I saw her first when I was coming through the produce aisle with my broom. Her back was to me, and she had long wavy hair that was the color of chocolate, and she had a nice ass, and she was eating strawberries straight out of the bin as if she owned the place. No regard. It was about four o’clock and I was late on my tasks because I’m overworked, but I lingered, hoping I might have an opportunity to chat her up, which is what I imagine whenever I see a pretty girl—imagine but never undertake. I wasted some time sweeping up the stray lettuce leaves, even the ones that had been ground into the floor, which I generally leave for the guy on night turn. My good side was facing her way, so that if she happened to turn around, I would be at my most handsome and appealing, and I would say s
omething in the nature of “What’s your name?” and she would blush and tell me and we would go from there. When she did turn around, however, I saw that her face was covered with acne, like sunburn, painful no doubt, red and splotchy and concentrated around her forehead and cheeks but also her chin and nose. She was staring at me as if about to ask a question, one side of her mouth puffing out like a chipmunk’s because of the strawberry in her mouth. I wanted to look away out of respect. I could detect that underneath the acne she was a very pretty woman, with brown eyes and high cheekbones and puffy lips that were noticeably without blemish. She was wearing a fur coat with an American-flag pin on the collar, and below the pin were her breasts. I knelt down to gather up the pile of lettuce leaves and when I stood up, she was gone.

  That could have been the end if I hadn’t run into her again, not over twenty minutes later, as I was wheeling my trash bin past the row of hot soups. This time she was putting a plastic spoonful of clam chowder into her mouth, tasting it slowly and making a big show of considering its merits before moving on to the next selection. She was trying to appear as if she were having a small sample of each before deciding which one to purchase, but it was clear that she was one of those people who intended to eat an entire meal within the confines of the supermarket. I didn’t appreciate this, because I’m a company man at heart, but she was a poor girl—I could tell that now—and since I have my own struggles, I felt some affinity for her. She was doing her best to conceal the reality of her condition, but I’ve learned well that the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the supermarket eventually reveal all, and seeing her poised above the steaming pots of soup, I noticed that her long chocolate hair was unwashed and unkempt, and her fuzzy coat had tufts missing from the collar and wrists.

  Coming down the aisle was Ziggy, pushing his shopping cart filled with two weeks’ worth of groceries. He wasn’t a customer. He was an undercover, and today he was dressed like a soldier in camouflage and combat boots. Yesterday he’d been a construction worker wearing a hard hat and tool belt. Tomorrow he might come dressed as a baseball player or whatever other profession struck his fancy. Halloween was two months away, but for him every day was Halloween. “Why don’t you come one day dressed as an undercover?” I joked with him once.