Jim Parish lost the war at exactly 10:00 PM, on January
12, 1998, the evening of his 35th birthday. He had suspected for some time
that a bomb was slowly ticking away inside him, a device planted years
before, probably all the way back in 1991, when he'd come home from the
Persian Gulf a hero and married Susan, the girl of his dreams, only to
find himself suddenly transformed in her eyes, as sometimes happens in
the flashback nightmares of Vets, into a gook, a towel-head, from the beloved
comrade he longed to be to Susan into an unwilling marital combatant -
The Enemy. He'd never understood the transformation. He had really tried
to be a good husband - caring, thoughtful, hard working, kind. But somehow,
under Susan's defensive gaze, every caring act became a declaration of
war, every thoughtful gesture a trick, work was betrayal, a cowardly retreat
from the field of battle, kindness a subterfuge behind which surely lurked
manipulation, twisted mind games cruelly in-tended to confine her with
dependence, to rob her of her precious freedom and individuality. It was
clear to him early on that Susan resented being married to him, being married
at all (as if he had somehow made that decision in her stead, against her
will), that the expectation of intimacy, commitment, sharing represented,
in her eyes, a kind of emotional prison. Susan saw herself as a POW of
married life, and she'd made it her mission, it seemed from the very beginning,
to escape.
He could have accepted that, then, in the beginning,
if she had simply gone. But she'd wanted the victory. It was not enough
for her to tunnel out of the marriage through years of affairs, betrayals
and lies. She'd had to make sure he would not survive - to come after her,
he supposed, to mete out justice in some post-marital war crimes tribunal.
So, on her way out, she'd laid mines in every corner of his psyche, mines
that went off around him at every turn, every time he flipped through a
photo album, passed a restaurant they used to frequent, or found himself
confronted with a TV ad featuring that model who looked so much like her,
hawking that ridiculously expensive shampoo she had always insisted was
a basic necessity of life. Each subtly hidden tripwire seemed to announce
itself just a moment too late, when the split second need-ed to avoid the
explosion had just irrevocably passed. I can still get you, they seemed
to whisper, just beneath the threshold of his conscious awareness. Then
boom.
He would never have denied her the shampoo, or anything
else, for that matter. He'd wanted her to be happy. But none of that mattered
now; she was gone, out of the picture, free. More accurately, he was out
of her picture. She remained a ghostly presence in his, inhabiting the
shadows of his solitary world, a mental sniper firing from empty trees,
an emotional SCUD salvo nightly polishing the desert sands of his dreams
into hot, black glass. Since they had finally separated, four months to
the day before his 35th birthday, his life alone had been a series of explosions
which he was sure she could hear, if not see from her distant fortress
of freedom on the far side of town. And he suspected that hearing those
booms in the night brought her great satisfaction.
He had learned, in time, not to look at old pictures,
not to go out, to leave the TV a black and silent sentry stand-ing guard
against invasion from the hostile, Susan-infected world around him. He
had slowly built up his own fortress of total isolation, a lonely but safe
haven against a reality she'd imprinted with herself the way the Roman
Legions once imprinted abandoned territory by working salt into the soil,
sterilizing the landscape against any hope of future life.
It was in that lifeless fortress that he'd first heard
the ticking. It was coming from his chest, so, at first, he mistook the
sound for his own heartbeat. But in the dream-sweat predawn stillness,
after weeks of careful listening, he was certain he'd picked out a distinct
counterpoint - Tick, tick - bubump. Tick, tick - bubump. The bomb was lodged
in his heart, all right, so cleverly placed and timed that if he hadn't
drawn within himself, had moved forward with his life as friends and co-workers
had all so cheerfully insisted he should, he would never have discovered
it. Somewhere very early on, probably on their wedding night so many years
before, she had carried out a terrible, covert operation, planted her fail-safe
doomsday weapon deep inside him - not just in his mind, but in his body
itself. The mental mines had never been intended to kill him. To punish
him, surely, to push him to the edge of madness and surrender, no doubt,
but he now realized that their true, secret purpose had been to distract
him, to keep him spooked and jumpy and unaware of her real strategy, to
keep his attention focused on the daily battle for survival until her master
plan could be fulfilled, and the war would be hers.
He considered himself lucky. He knew Susan's pyrotechnic
style all too well, and so he knew with relative certainty that this bomb,
like her many small mines, would require a trigger. It would tick away
benignly inside him until some prearranged event in the environment came
along to set it off. He had a chance. All he had to do to live was to let
nothing in, to seal himself away absolutely, to cut himself off so completely
from life that nothing foreign or dangerous or surprising could ever reach
him. To live, he only had to die to the world.
The letter he received on his 35th birthday did not come
as a surprise. It was from his Persian Gulf platoon leader, Fred Martin,
a man only a year older than himself, but a born officer, a man he'd followed
into and out of combat, ate, slept and killed beside, shoulder to shoulder
during that brief desert conflict. He'd written to Fred soon after the
separation began, shared with him a dutiful report of the whole marital
firefight, seeking the solace and advice of someone he respected, someone
not Susan, of a man who had been like a brother to him in crisis, a steady
and reliable center amidst the chaotic swirl of battle. Fred's wife had
left him two weeks before he'd shipped out to Saudi. She'd been, to hear
Fred tell it, a vindictive, heartless bitch. He'd last seen Fred the day
he'd accepted his honorable discharge to pursue what he'd imagined would
be a life of domestic civilian bliss. Fred had kept the uniform, climbed
the military ladder, made a career of war and discipline. He had never
re-married, never really healed from the original loss. In the end, they'd
turned out to have more in common than Jim Parish could ever have expected.
If he was going to reach out to anyone for support, for a stabilizing hand,
Fred Martin had seemed the natural choice. He'd known Fred would respond,
had counted on it.
But that had been at the beginning, when he still had
hope, before he had discovered the ticking bomb within him, before he'd
begun the necessary routine of cutting himself off, of living without a
telephone, of throwing all intrusive mail away, immediately, unopened.
Commun-ication of any kind was out of the question; his survival depended
on it. But the army base postmark, the crisp, military format of the return
address, had called out to him, practically ordering him to be brave, to
take the risk, to not easily surrender the hill of this proffered gift
of respite and companionship to the fears entrenched in siege around him.
He brought the letter inside, let it sit, unopened, all
day on the kitchen counter, visiting it periodically throughout the day,
checking it for booby-traps, fixing it with a quick, backward glance each
time he left the room to see if hidden enemies might slink like Trojan
soldiers from beneath its seductively sealed fold. By evening, he had almost
convinced himself that it had to be safe, that surely on this, his 35th
birthday, he had earned some relief from his unfair, forced exile. It seemed
only right. And Fred was, after all, his friend, his leader, his comrade
in arms. If he could trust anyone in all the world, it was surely Fred
Martin, a man of integrity and honor.
At 9:57, he opened the letter. For three long, glorious
minutes, he basked in his friend's kind concern, the intimate details of
Fred's own failed marriage, his words of encouragement, even an invitation
to re-enlist, to escape back into the arms of a system that still considered
him a hero, where he would always have a home, could always find companions
who understood and cared.
But as the hallway clock struck the hour, the letter
took a dangerous philosophical turn:
The question we have to ask ourselves, Fred wrote, is
this: Are we fucked up because we find ourselves single at mid-life? Or
do we find ourselves single at mid-life because we're fucked up?
He experienced a moment of complete and terrible silence
in which he heard neither the ticking of the bomb nor his own heartbeat.
He had underestimated her clever-ness.
Boom.