I walk to the kitchen instead of going in the living room, and put my backpack under the bench where it belongs. Then I take some of the toast Mrs. Delain has left for us on the table. When Daniel comes in, he races right by the toast because he is so excited about the Legos. He throws his backpack on the floor and races up the stairs to get the backhoe. We haven’t done our homework yet, but Mrs. Delain is busy, so Daniel might just open the box right now. I go up the stairs quick just in case.
30
Luis
I LEAVE WALTER REED
on Friday morning, March 20, five months after I arrived. I still don’t remember anything about my last days in Iraq, or the week I spent at Landstuhl, or even the first days in DC. Dr. Ghosh says I probably won’t remember. I still know that I shot myself, but not like I knew it when I first realized it. Then it felt like a memory, even if one without any details, but now it just feels like a piece of information. It could be about anyone—but it happens to be about me.
I’m not going back to the Army, though. I’ve been given a general discharge, and at least for now, there’s no investigation into anything I did. Not what I wrote in my letter, and not what happened to Sam. I suppose there’s nothing to investigate with Sam, and I’m guessing that there’s no reason for the Army to open a can of worms over a note that a suicidal soldier sent. Nothing corroborates what I wrote, nobody has protested. It’s a bit like a loaded gun there in my file. I guess it could be found and turned into an investigation, perhaps a court martial, at any time. This should bother me, but it doesn’t. See, I’m not trying to get away with anything.
I’m glad to be getting out of rehab, I’ve been ready to leave for a while now, but the actual leaving is still emotional. People keep dropping in to say good-bye, at the end of whatever is their last shift before I leave. Alison gave me a book. It’s called
Soldier’s Heart: Coming Home from Iraq.
The print is pretty small, so she said she hoped it would motivate me to keep working. I don’t need motivation. I will read and write again. Terence came by at eleven last night. I hadn’t seen him since Monday, when I wouldn’t open my eyes, and when he first came in, I felt awkward. But he acted like nothing happened, and he gave me a big hug, and told me that I’m going to have a good life and that I deserve it, at least as much as anyone else, and to please remember that for him.
It’s Dr. Ghosh that I’m dreading saying good-bye to. I don’t need to talk to Dr. Ghosh the same way that I did. In fact, I’m ready
not
to be talking to him like that, but, still, he’s the closest thing I ever had to a dad—which he doesn’t know—and I wish there were some way that he wasn’t a doctor, and I wasn’t his patient, and that we could just be friends or something.
He comes in very early, about five in the morning. I’ve been lying awake, thinking about what is to happen today.
“Good morning, Luis.” His slightly clipped accent is so much a part of my days here, a part of everything that has happened. I suppose that every Indian I ever meet will now remind me of him.
“Hi, Dr. Ghosh.”
He sits in his usual chair and stares out the window past my bed for a while.
“You’re going to be all right, Luis. You’re a good man.”
I don’t say anything, and he watches out the window awhile more.
“I’ve been talking to Bashkim’s principal, Dr. Moore. You could meet her if you like. She’s quite an unusual woman.”
I think about that. Meeting Bashkim’s principal. I can’t quite imagine it. Imagine why. Would I meet Bashkim too? I’ve been wondering if I’ll meet Bashkim when I get home, or if the letters now are just at an end. His situation is terrible. It doesn’t seem like meeting me would fit in.
“I believe that coincidences can be powerful, Luis. I don’t think they’re entirely random, nor do I think that they must be acted on. I believe the strangest coincidences are opportunities. I wanted you to know that. There is something unusual about you having written that letter to Bashkim and about what has happened to Bashkim now. You have a great heart, and there is a child whose heart has been broken. Perhaps this is not only a coincidence.”
Dr. Ghosh has never said anything like this to me before. Our conversations are about how I think, and I see now that I don’t know very much about how he thinks. And I don’t know what I think about what he has just said.
Making something up to Bashkim, for what I did to him, changed a lot for me. There were a lot of dark days here, right to the end, but the days that weren’t dark began after I started writing to him. I haven’t really taken in what happened to Bashkim; what we learned from Dr. Moore on Monday. I don’t know what to do with it. I keep thinking about how the officer who shot his mother was in Iraq. I wonder which unit. I wonder where he was. I wonder who he lost. I wonder what he saw.
Dr. Ghosh is still sitting there, not looking at me, not looking out the window. I realize that we have become friends—whatever that means in our situation. But it means something. I trust him, and he trusts me. I can feel it.
“Dr. Ghosh. I don’t know how to say good-bye to you. I don’t know how to thank you.”
He turns to me then, listening.
“You are the first face I saw. I wanted to die. I wanted to die so many times here.”
That is all I say. That’s all I get out. Nothing that I want to say. Nothing about what he means. I’ve been practicing in my mind, trying to find some words, but they’ve all been taken, all used for ordinary considerations that mean nothing in comparison to what he has meant.
We say “Thank you very much” and “I so appreciate what you have done” to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offer us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn’t there be another language for this? Different words altogether? And if I use the same old words, did I change what I was trying to say? Did I make it a same old thing?
I should not risk words. But some come out.
“I wish you were my father.”
The faintest surprise scrims his face. A pause.
“I would be proud to have you as a son.”
MY ABUELA COMES AT ABOUT
ten. She has flown out to bring me home. She surprises me by saying that she’s just been in Dr. Ghosh’s office. I wonder what they discussed, and who set up their meeting.
I suppose that Abuela knows everything now. She knows about Sam, and if she knows about Bashkim, then she would have to know about the other boy. Without the one, there would be no reason to know the other. And why am I so certain that Dr. Ghosh has told her about Bashkim?
I know that she and Dr. Ghosh have been speaking to each other for a while. They don’t talk about it, but they don’t not talk about it either. Abuela might mention something about Dr. Ghosh, or vice versa, and I never know if these are slips, or if they’re trying to find a way to tell me that they’re in conversation—that I might as well include Abuela in my thinking about Sam and Bashkim and the boy in the market. Perhaps, but I’ve been careful to ignore these hints. I’m not ready to talk with Abuela about these things. I can’t bear to look at Abuela and admit what I did.
Dr. Ghosh says that secrets aren’t healthy, and it’s because of him that I won’t lie about anything that has happened. Not lying is not the same, however, as telling, and I’m not ready to tell. It’s partly being a patient. I have so little control of what is private, so little opportunity to be unobserved. If I told Abuela something while I’m here, or Terence, who is someone I could imagine telling certain things, then I could do nothing about the response. I couldn’t get away from it, from whatever the reaction might be. Being able to close your eyes just isn’t fucking enough.
THE FLIGHT HOME IS A
lot harder than I expect it to be. The airport is exhausting, and there’s too much to look at. By the time I board, my head is pounding, and the six hours of sitting straight depletes me. I can’t make it up the gangway without a wheelchair, and my final return home from Iraq is punctuated by my abuela’s ragged breaths as she pushes me into the terminal.
Home. For a Las Vegas kid, the lights and sounds of a hundred slot machines are more natural than rain, and a public space backgrounded in the bells and chimes and gravel rolls of bored travelers standing at kaleidoscopic games is as commonplace as sky in Montana or snow in Vermont. Even so, I’m overwhelmed by McCarran Airport on a Friday evening. The crack of a suitcase dropped on its side makes me jump, and the clanging of coins sliding into a metal tray brings out beads of sweat on my brow. I don’t know how I will make it to the baggage claim, and I wonder if Abuela plans to hail a cab. I’ve seen the long lines of people waiting for taxis, the cabs rolling in twenty at a time to pick them up, the traffic guards and the exhaust and the airport security yelling at people to hurry along or slow down or wait a minute.
Six months ago, I was the guy who ran down ninety-one IEDs in Iraq, and now I’m the guy who can’t get through an hour in the Las Vegas airport.
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER MY
abuela has kept my homecoming a secret or just told everyone we know that I’m not to be disturbed the first night, but the house is dark and quiet when we arrive, and we have the evening to ourselves.
My room is more or less as I left it four years ago. Which hits me hard, since I’m not here on leave, and since the progress that seemed exceptional at Walter Reed now seems like a lot more disability than I was thinking I had. What am I going to do? What happens next? What about what I’ve already done? I’m trying not to go down, down, down that road, but I’m thinking about Sam, and about the market, and about Dr. Ghosh, and about the end of being a soldier, and about my mother, and I don’t know what to do with this much pain and this much failure. I’m twenty-two years old, and there’s nothing left to hope for.
I have a trick I use when I’m feeling this way. I think about that little girl I heard in the hall in the hospital, the one who liked her dress. It’s fucking loco, but if I imagine her voice—I just try to hear that little-kid voice in my head—I feel better. I don’t know how long this trick will work, but Dr. Ghosh told me that using whatever works is a good idea. He calls this the postwar version of survival skills.
THE VISITORS START THE NEXT
day. My aunt Rosa brings tamales and her three dogs. I have some bad memories of dogs in Iraq, but one of the dogs, who has a thin brown nose and a black coat, sits next to my chair and lays his snout on my thigh. He doesn’t move for the entire visit. It feels just like someone’s hand resting there, reminding me to stay calm, like one of my therapists encouraging me to see if I can push just a little longer and just a little harder, and though I’m afraid to move, or pet the dog more than the slightest bit, in case it should decide to move away as mysteriously as it decided to stay near, I feel better. I sit there while my cousins and my uncles and my abuela’s friends talk and laugh around me, and I think about how nice that dog’s head feels on my knee. Maybe the point is just to get through one hour, and then another, and not think farther ahead than that.
That evening, the clouds streak neon peach against a turquoise sky, and I slip out the door, and sit on the large rock where Abuela used to take pictures of me for our Feliz Navidad cards. The sky is crazy colorful, and I think how long it’s been since I’ve seen the world like this. Out my hospital window, the sky was often gray, and even when it was blue, it wasn’t turquoise, the clouds didn’t heap on top of each other so improbably, the sun didn’t turn everything into a screaming, Strip-muffling blaze.
Iraq’s a desert, and sometimes it even felt like Vegas. It was comforting, when I was scared out of my mind, to see the sky go on and on, to see the ridged angles of flat brown bluffs against the blue of a desert firmament. There was a guy from Nebraska in our unit, and one night he told us that the first time he ever went west, in a car with a friend from high school, he had to lay down with a towel over his head when they drove through the Rockies. The sight of all those mountains made him sick, made him feel like he was about to slide off the world. This is a guy who was the first one to volunteer to take a new position in the middle of a firefight. I mean, he was crazy-ass courageous, and he had to lie down and hide when he drove on an American interstate through the mountains.
But that’s the thing, how you feel about the place that’s home. About its sky, its air, its smell, the color of the light, the way the rain falls (or doesn’t), whether it’s hot or cold. For a lot of guys, Iraq might as well have been the moon. They had to get over that, past it, the way the land felt so strange, the sky so vast, the heat so overwhelming. At least I didn’t have to deal with that. It was almost the opposite—for guys like me. I mean the heat was hell, it’s really brutal there, hotter than Vegas, but the idea of heat wasn’t scary, it wasn’t strange, it didn’t ever feel like a place humans weren’t supposed to be.
I get up from the rock. It’s hard for me to sit without something behind me still, and I walk down the block, past all the lookalike houses—this one with a red door, that one with an overgrown olive tree—the details that keep you oriented in Vegas, so you know where you are, know which house is yours, and I watch that sky. I watch it go from brilliant to bright, from neon to glow, I watch it slowly fade, turn gray, then darker, somber, black. And when the street is dark, when not a single car passes me for minutes on end, I turn and I walk my crooked uncoordinated brain-fucked-up walk back to the house I grew up in—the one with the big rock in the front. Back to my abuela, back to whatever life I am about to lead.
31
Roberta
THERE’S NO CHANCE THAT
Nate Gisselberg won’t be exonerated at the coroner’s inquest. There’s no possibility that Arjeta Ahmeti’s death will be declared needless. This is just what Vegas is.
For all the national reporters writing breathlessly that the era of diamond belts, alligator shoes, and bad toupees is over, for all the financial shows intoning the rise and fall of Wynn Resorts stock, for all the revisionist architectural tomes declaring the Strip a new Americascape, Vegas is still a town where everyone knows who was living here in 1960; where nobody forgets whose father worked for whose uncle; where the only ones who really understand why this casino makes money, why this charity is funded, why this hopeful is anointed, are the same ones who also remember that Mormon bishops ran the gaming commission, that the Las Vegas mayor was Tony “The Ant” Spilotro’s lawyer, that a gangster funded Sunrise Hospital, that all of these entities—the Mormon Church, the Eastern mobs, the gamblers, the bar brawlers, the hustlers, the dreamers, the cathouse owners, the losers, the crooners, the onetime murderers—they built this town. Nothing in nature disappears. Helium becomes carbon becomes diamonds become rings. Bodies become bones become dust becomes earth. And in Vegas, murderers become patriarchs, card sharks become benefactors, the unredeemed become the redeemers.
And cops are not convicted of excessive force.
It’s true: it’s not a small town anymore. For decades, people have been streaming in from all over the world, from every country on the planet: stateless people, desperate people, eager people, ambitious people. They come for easy work, for the ability to pay someone off, for the chance to start over. They come because they are rich, they come because they are poor, and some day, maybe even some day soon, all these hundreds of thousands, millions, of newcomers may even wipe clean the slate drawn by Vegas’s earliest dreamers. But not yet. Not yet.
Arjeta Ahmeti has no chance of vindication in that coroner’s inquest. Not in this town. Not at this time.
AND SO I TRY TO
figure out what will happen to Arjeta’s children. To a little boy she must have cherished, to a little girl who will not remember her. Of course, the system doesn’t need me. Children whose mothers die go to their fathers if their fathers are alive, if their fathers haven’t done anything wrong. Wrestling those children from such a father would take years. Things would have to go very badly, over and over, for Bashkim and Tirana, before their father would lose his right to them.
So what am I doing?
Why am I part of this story?
Why did I ask to be their CASA?
Marty says I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, and that there just isn’t anything that can be done about these children, no matter how badly I feel. The first time he said it, I got mad. It felt like he was saying my work didn’t matter. But that’s not what he meant. Marty knows the system as well as I do, after all this time. And the bottom line is that Sadik Ahmeti has the right to his children.
But I’m not ready to give up. I’m just not giving up on the Ahmeti kids yet.
I MET WITH SADIK AHMETI
again last week. He’s not at Desert Care anymore. He’s staying in the Budget Suites, and the Albanian Society is paying his weekly rent until he can get set up with a Section 8 apartment.
I know that Budget Suites well. I’ve been there many times. A lot of kids that end up with a CASA start out in the Budget Suites. Furnished apartments. Weekly rent. No down payment. Filthy kitchens where you might be able to save a little money doing your own cooking. The Budget Suites at the south end of the Strip are one of the stops in the trek that down-and-out families make through this town. Some of them start there, when they drive in on I-15 with all their possessions crammed into a twenty-year-old minivan, hoping to start over. Some of them end up there, after they lose their home or are evicted from their apartment, before they end up in one of the homeless shelters or in a makeshift tent at the edge of Sunset Park.
Yeah, I know the Budget Suites.
Mr. Ahmeti has one of the small units facing Las Vegas Boulevard on the second floor. It’s just one room, with a microwave and a fridge along the back wall, and a bathroom with a shower tucked in the corner. There’s a big dip in the middle of the bed, with a dirty white cover dragging on the floor. When I arrive, Sadik is curled up on the one chair in the room. He’s got his head in his hands, and although he called to me to open the door, he doesn’t respond when I say hello.
“Mr. Ahmeti, it’s Roberta Weiss. I’m the court-appointed advocate for your children.”
He doesn’t move.
“Mr. Ahmeti, I was hoping we could talk about your children. I’ve been to see them several times. I know you’re going to see Bashkim soon.”
Nothing.
“I’d really like to talk. I’d be happy to take you to lunch. We can go anywhere you like.”
Still, he doesn’t move.
I’m not sure what to do, but I sit down on the edge of the bed—there’s nowhere else—and wait. I’m a little irritated that he’s ignoring me, but he’s just so damn pathetic, the place is so damn pathetic, and I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by his situation. He should probably still be at Desert Care, he clearly needs help, but it was amazing that Lacey was able to get him a stay as long as he had. There just isn’t anywhere for someone like Sadik Ahmeti to go.
“I heard that the Albanian Society is helping you out. Has someone been to see you? Do you have someone who comes by here?”
This is his only hope. The Albanian Society. How big could that be?
“I don’t want to see no one. I told them. I’m American.”
This is a guy who knows how to make friends.
“I’d like to talk about Bashkim and Tirana. Could I take you to lunch?”
“I ate.”
“Is there something else you need? I have a car. I could help you with an errand?”
At that, he looks up. Incredulous.
Part of me wants to take this guy and shake him. There’s something about his weakness, his fury, that makes me angry, and at the same time, it makes me want to cry. I start wracking my brain, trying to think of services that he might qualify for, somewhere he could go, get some help. And I’m panicking too, thinking of Bashkim and Tirana. I had hoped he would be better and that we could talk about where they would live, how he would manage with two small children.
There’s just no way.
He’s not going to be able to do it.
But the court is going to give him those kids, and it won’t take them away until something terrible happens. Until a lot of terrible things happen. I can’t stand this.
“Mr. Ahmeti, I understand you’re waiting for an apartment. How do you feel about that?”
He looks at the floor and then he makes the effort to raise his head, to look straight at me. But he doesn’t speak.
“You’ll be able to bring Bashkim and Tirana home when you have an apartment. Have you thought about that?”
He makes a low sound, half roar, half cry.
“They’re mine children. Mine children should be with me. They should be with their nene. I’m American.”
He starts to stand as he says this last, his voice rising, and as thin and sad as he is, he’s still frightening. But then he sits back down, his hands over his face, and after a moment, I realize he’s crying. I know he’s an angry guy, I know he must have hurt Arjeta, but right now, what I see is someone pitiful and powerless and poor, someone who’s never gotten a break.
Sadik Ahmeti’s not going to give up those kids. But he sure as hell can’t take care of them.
MARTY’S OUT OF TOWN, SO
when I finally get home, I take last night’s spaghetti out of the fridge and pour myself a glass of wine. It’s a perfect March evening, windless and purpling and clear, and I sit outside, drink in hand, plate untouched, and try to let the day slide off me.
Visiting Sadik has shaken me up. I think of myself as one of the good guys. I’m proud of who I am, of what I do. Truth told, I’m pretty damn sure of myself. The beauty of being a CASA is that I’m almost always on the right side, defender of children. Plus, as a CASA, I’m a volunteer. Which means I don’t have a boss. I don’t have a client. I can’t do anything I want, but I volunteer as a CASA because it gives me a lot of room, I can operate on my own, I can do what I think is right.
But what is right?
Should I try to find some way, some legal way, that I can take Sadik Ahmeti’s children from him? A guy who spent two decades in a police state prison for trying to do the right thing? A guy whose wife was killed by a traffic cop?
Should I accept that there’s no legal way to take those children from him? Should I accept that he’s a guy who’s never going to let anyone help him, even if I found someone, someone in the Albanian Society, who was willing to step in? For sure he’d mess it up.
Am I supposed to look away while an eight-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl are sent to his care?
Poor Arjeta. She had no way out.
I see a lot of desperate people. I see what happens when people get desperate. And right now, I let myself think about Arjeta Ahmeti. I imagine her as someone sailing out into the world, all alone on the little boat that is her one life. I imagine her running crouched out from the shore, then hopping in the vessel, putting a paddle to the rough sea, setting sail, losing the wind, stopping to rest, continuing on, all alone, a boat no bigger than an almond, a sea larger than the sun. When I have all that in my mind, when I think of Arjeta, alone in America, two children who needed her, a husband so wrecked, then my heart fills, and cracks, and fills again.
How can I quit, knowing what Arjeta lived?