C
OBB DROVE AS
though the devil, with blue lights flashing and sirens whooping, were behind him. He kept to I–95. From time to time, his eyes caught a state trooper’s car lurking in the median strip behind trees and he dropped back to within ten miles above the limit. He crossed North Carolina and was well into Virginia before he stopped. He filled up with gas and then, quite suddenly, when he got back behind the wheel, he found he was afraid to drive on.
He could see Leela sprawled on the hood of his car, her face distorted by the curve of the glass. He knew she was not really there. Her eyes seemed abnormally large and close. His hands were shaking. My God, he thought, what’s happening to me?
It’s not knowing that’s so unbearable
, Leela’s eyes said.
I’m begging you, Cobb.
He had finally done it.
All his life, he had wanted her to know precisely this: the shameful suck of hopeless wanting, the dead weight of things that nothing could change.
And now he had got his wish.
He thought he had never seen anything so terrible or so frightening.
He wound down his window. “Leave me alone!” he shouted. “Life’s shit. Get used to it, the way I’ve had to.”
He saw the motorist at the next pump looking at him strangely.
He managed to start the car. A mile down the road, he had passed a Motel 6. He drove back, in the slow lane, at forty miles per hour. He checked in. He closed the blinds in the cheap and horrid little room and pulled the blanket over his head.
Cobb could see in the dark. He could hear spiders foxtrotting up the walls. The cotillions of ants sounded different: a little soft shuffle here, a slide there. He could see the fine crosshairs of sacking inside his hood.
“You received photographs,” the interrogator said.
“I do not recall receiving photographs.”
“Bullshit. I gave them to you.”
“Is that Benedict Boykin?”
“Surprise, surprise. Answer the question. Did you receive photographs?”
“Yes.”
“Did you study them?”
“I couldn’t bear to.”
“Did you pass the photographs on to your superior officer?”
“The first time, I did. Nothing happened. The second time, I didn’t pass them on.”
“Do you still have the second set?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
“I have them with me. I always have them with me. I never dare leave them anywhere.”
“Do you ever look at them?”
“I can’t bear to.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“I can’t do anything with them while my father’s alive. I can’t make him go through that again.”
“Through what?”
“Hate mail. Slander. Lies about his military record.”
“Call the witness,” Benedict Boykin said. “Calhoun Slaughter, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do,” replied the voice of Calhoun Slaughter.
Cobb twisted violently on his pulley. “Take this fucking hood off me,” he screamed.
“Shut up,” Benedict Boykin said. “Calhoun Slaughter, is your son being honest?”
“Maybe,” Calhoun Slaughter said. “Probably partly. But he’s also yellow. He’s afraid of hate mail. He’s afraid of having his Bronze Star spat on.”
“I can’t breathe,” Cobb gasped. “I can’t breathe. I can’t do this to my father.”
“Bullshit,” Benedict Boykin said. “It’s yourself you’re worried about.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“You’re the only one who can fix it,” Benedict said.
“Dad,” Cobb pleaded, “if I let these photographs out of the box, you know what they’ll say? Like father, like son, they’ll say.”
“That’s the way it plays,” his father said.
“I won’t do this to you or to me.”
“You’d rather live with not fixing it?”
“Isn’t there any other way, Dad?”
“Probably not, son. You’re going to be crucified.”
“That’s garbage,” Benedict said. “There’s a failsafe way,” and Cobb saw that yes, there was. He could let the cat out of the bag and no one need know who had done it.
Cobb called his father from the motel.
“Dad?”
“Where you calling from?”
“Virginia. I’m in a crappy motel. I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to go back to Baghdad. There’s something I think I can do. Wanted to let you know just in case.”
“In case what?”
“In case things don’t turn out. In case there’s shit.”
“There’s always shit.”
“I mean serious shit. I’ve got some photographs.”
“What sort of photographs?”
“Dirty photographs. Torture.”
“Not our guys,” his father said. “We don’t do that.”
“Not our guys. But our guys know about it.”
“Shitheads,” Calhoun Slaughter said. “Military trash. Should be court martialed. What you gonna do with the pics?”
“I’m sending them to the newspapers.” Cobb heard a whistling intake of breath. He heard his father gasping for air. “
Dad
!” he said, alarmed.
“You can’t do that, son,” his father said. “First you gotta send them upstairs. Those are the rules.”
“I did that, Dad. Nothing happened.”
“Shit.”
“You think I shouldn’t do this?”
“I don’t know. A few bad apples. Maybe the dirty stuff’s stopped.”
“It hasn’t, Dad. I saw stuff myself. Our guys know about it. Some of them watch. Some of them took these pics.”
“This’ll get nasty, son.”
“No one’s gonna know who mailed the photos.”
“I wouldn’t count on that. You ready for what could happen?”
“I guess I’ll find out,” Cobb said. “What about you?”
“Don’t you worry about me.”
“The photographs are only part one. Part two is I got a rescue mission in the works. Wish me luck.”
“I wish you luck. You see Leela-May this afternoon?”
“Yeah, you sneaky old bastard.”
“What happened?”
“This is what’s happening.”
“You’re gonna drive me to prayer. Stay safe.”
Cobb dialed Gideon Moore’s number but when Leela answered he lost his nerve.
“Hello?” she said.
Cobb held his breath.
“Is that you, Cobb?”
On the wall across from the motel bed and the phone was a framed photograph of a football game: the Virginia Cavaliers against the VMI Keydets. Cobb squinted and searched for sweater number fourteen, his old number, on the VMI team. The photograph, in color, was faded and stained. It looked decades old, perhaps a glory memory of the motel manager’s youth, a distant victory in a cheap plastic frame.
“Cobb,” Leela said quietly. “I’ve never understood what happened to us. We were so close when we were kids. Blood brother, blood sister.”
He could feel her blood thumping through his veins. He could see sweater number fourteen in the thick of the scrum. What year was that game? He needed to know. Was it possible that he himself was there? He could smell ivory soap. He sniffed his own skin and smelled Leela. When the Keydets won a game,
he used to call her Boston number from his dorm. He never spoke.
Are you a deep breather?
she would ask. She was flippant back then. She had never known fear or want.
“Where are you, Cobb?” she asked gently. “Are you on the road or back in Promised Land? Can I see you?”
Cobb walked toward the photograph, the coiled cord unsnaking behind him, the receiver still pressed to his ear. He read the fine print on the matte:
Championship Game, Virginia Military Institute
. He squinted, his eyes close to the glass. He had played in that game.
“It’s strange,” Leela said. “I can’t stop thinking of all those times, those other times, on the Hamilton veranda…I remember the week your mother died. That was the time we traded blood.”
Now that he was close to the photograph, he could see how fly-blown it was. Insects had left needle tracks. Mold was mushrooming up from the turf. He peered at the figure in sweater fourteen. Its face had been eaten away. There was a stain like a parallelogram where the goalposts were. There was a smear of blood on the frame.
Cobb Slaughter, he thought. Blood brother bloodied. Former VMI football player, erased.
“I can see a parallelogram,” Leela said.
She could not have said that. He knew she had not said that.
“You don’t even have to say anything, Cobb. I know it’s you. I’m glad you called, whatever it means.”
“It’s not a parallelogram, it’s a coffin,” he said, shocking himself. His words were jammed up in the mouthpiece like sludge.
He heard a sound like that of a small bird in the mouth of a cat. He listened to Leela’s breathy silence.
“Say something,” he begged.
“Are you telling me Mishka’s dead?”
I heard him humming, he wanted to say.
“What are you telling me, Cobb?”
He wanted to tell her: the warden says he sings.
“Is Mishka alive?”
He spoke then. He managed to speak. “As far as I know, he’s still alive. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, Leela. Things went wrong.”
“Where is he, Cobb?”
Atonement. That was what he was hungry for. “I’ll bring him back,” he promised.
“Oh Cobb, oh Cobb.” He could not tell if she was laughing or crying. She was babbling. He closed his eyes and listened to her sweet noisy breathing for several more seconds and then he hung up.
He could drive again now.
He knew exactly where he was going.
A
T
G
IDEON’S BEDSIDE
, the nurse adjusted the morphine drip.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” she told Leela. “He’ll be free of pain till then. You should try to get some sleep yourself.”
“I’ve got a pillow. I’ll doze in the chair,” Leela said. “Maggie sat with him all last night. It’s my turn.”
“He’s in a deep sleep. It’ll last for at least six hours.”
“I know that.” It was easier to talk to him then.
“I believe they hear everything you say,” the nurse offered. “They just can’t answer back.”
“I have this memory,” Leela said. She spoke aloud. She stroked her father’s arm, which was ochre-colored, withered as a prune. The skin was so papery and dry that where the edge of the sheet chafed his forearm, his capillary veins leaked blood. “It’s this room. It’s full of my memory.” She put her head on the pillow beside her father’s. “I must have been nearly six. I heard noises in the middle of the night.” Her father’s breath was medicinal and sour. He was exhaling death. Leela moved slightly, so as not to breathe him in. “I tiptoed to the door of your room. Of
this
room.” There was a moon like a yellow plate hanging in the window. There was a little heap of clothing on the floor. She could see her mother’s blue nightgown, her father’s striped cotton pajamas. She kept looking at the soft pile of cloth
because she knew she was not supposed to see her parents naked. “Mama’s stomach was huge as a balloon,” she said drowsily. Her father was kissing it. Her father put his ear against his wife’s belly and his hand was playing with the beard between her legs and he kissed her there too. And then he held himself high up over her and pushed against her. Leela remembered the sounds her mother made and she remembered how she felt heavy between her own legs. When she crept back to bed, she was strangely excited and frightened and she touched herself the way she had seen her father touch her mother. She imagined Cobb kissing her there. She wanted him to.
“I was afraid that’s why Mama died when Maggie came, Daddy. I was afraid it was because I’d seen.”
She wanted to tell Cobb, but never did.
She wanted Cobb, but would settle for almost any boy. She always pulled them down. She always had a mad itch between her legs and she always wanted someone’s mouth or someone’s prick to ease it.
“I wanted Cobb for years and years, Daddy,” she murmured, “and now I want Mishka.”
“Is there something you want?” the night nurse asked.
Leela opened her eyes very wide and closed them again. “What are you doing here?”
“I let myself in. Why did you press the night-call button? What do you need?”
“I need Mishka.”
“I can’t help you there,” the nurse said. She wrapped a black cloth around Gideon’s arm. She pumped the gray rubber ball which was attached. She took a blood pressure reading. She watched the monitor beside his bed. “I’m afraid it won’t be long,” she said. “The music’s a good idea. The dying are aware, I believe. I believe he hears that. What is it?”
“It’s Gluck,” Leela said.
“It’s very beautiful. It’s making him smile. He looks so peaceful. He knows you’re holding his hand.”
“He’s going to get better,” Leela said.
“He won’t get better. In fact, I think you should wake your sister up. I think it’s time.”
“Now?”
“I think there’s no time to be lost.”
The hallway was longer than it used to be and Maggie’s bedroom was very far away. Leela walked and walked and then walked faster. The hallway was thick with Gluck. There were more doors, many more doors, than Leela remembered. She stopped at each one. She knocked. She put her ear against the wood and listened.
Che farò…
she heard Mishka singing behind a blue door.
The door was locked, but when she hefted her shoulder against it, it gave way like a cobweb and she was inside a very small room. The room was empty but picture frames jostled each other on the walls: simple wooden ones, ornate ones, gilt filigree, carved oak. There were photographs of Mishka with Uncle Otto, Mishka with his mother, Mishka with his grandparents, Mishka with Leela. There was a photograph of Mishka and Leela kissing in Harvard Square. There were others, taken in their bedroom, steamy scenes. Cobb must have donated them. There were photographs of Mishka with Jamil Haddad and of Mishka outside the mosque in Central Square. There was Mishka with Youssef Hajj. There was a photograph of Mishka in the Holiday Inn in Beirut.
There were three entire walls of photographs.
The fourth wall was black plate glass. Leela could not see through it, but from beyond the glass, she could hear Mishka singing a lament. She could tell he was singing in pain. She could
hear an interrogator’s voice. She thumped her fists against the glass and the moment she did so the glass turned clear.
Mishka was huddled, cross-legged on the floor, cradling his smashed oud in his arms. He wept as he sang.
“Mishka!” she called, drumming on the glass. “Mishka!” But he could not hear.
It was when she leaned against the glass, sobbing, that the glass gave way. It did not break. It stretched like a membrane and she walked right through, pulling the glass with her like the skin of a balloon.
“Mishka,” she murmured, ravenous. She was unbuttoning and unzipping as she went. She peeled the wetsuit of glass from her body and stepped out of it. She lay down beside Mishka on the floor. He turned to her then and smiled and she pulled his head down between her legs.