The Gulf

This is a sort of experimental piece, tracking the experiences of two brothers. One goes to war, while the other lives out a troubled life in the States.

March. Deployment.
   Kurt Forger hugs his brother, and his anger momentarily subsides. Their cheeks press briefly, and Kurt winces. The bruise reminds him of why he is angry. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, John looks like the same kid who left for basic training, the same soft eyes beneath a smooth brow furrowed in determination. Kurt looks at his face for the last time, perhaps ever, and sees the boy who flew from under his elder brother’s wing too soon. John’s young bride, Angela stands sobbing, whispering promises through a strained jaw and drinking in every detail of her husband that she can. Kurt barely knows the girl beyond her pale, affable exterior. The prior evening, she had sat silently, eyes fixed on her husband’s mouth as Kurt took his brother to task about the war and its premise. They’d stood in opposition, and Kurt had seen his younger sibling as a naïve child. The boy was brainwashed by the army, mesmerized by romantic lies about honor and battle. Kurt had seen these things in the flesh and blood of the boy who sat across the table from him, girl clinging to his arm. He had waited, held the most perilous question as a trump card. “Can you kill someone?” John’s punch had been half-hearted, but it still hurt. And now he sees John leave. After he walks the gangway and disappears into the plane, John becomes an afterimage--a thing of Kurt’s mind, a chimera.

April. Kuwait.
   Kurt sits at a traffic light, and his brother appears in his thoughts, uninvited. It has been a month since he vanished into the plane, spirited away to fight in the Gulf. News has been passed along of his whereabouts. PFC Jonathan Forger is in Kuwait, bored and anxiously awaiting final deployment to an undetermined destination “up North.” John appears to Kurt as he taps on the steering wheel, ticking off a mental list of things to do for the day. The list includes teaching several classes of American Literature to young community college students, office hours, and a rendezvous at a local tavern with several fellow instructors. Kurt feels a great deal of control over his life, and making the list cements the feeling. John, or rather a mental picture of John, intrudes. He is tiny and unarmed, dwarfed by immense machines of war. Tanks and trucks and artillery--all things of iron and steel and grease--crowd around the boy, exposing his softness and fragility. He is silent and featureless, more of a doll than a man. The vision is fleeting and disturbing to Kurt, who feels that he has somehow failed to teach his younger brother about life as he understands it. Kurt: a teacher; a failure. The light turns green.
  
 [At this moment, Private Forger is laying in his bunk, reading Stars and Stripes, and listening to Neil Young’s, “Ohio” on an iPod nano. He is bored out of his mind, but feels anxious at the thought of being assigned to the boiling cauldron that is Baghdad. In the paper, the news is all good.]

May. “Up North”
    The end of the semester brings chaos and giddy sun to Kurt’s existence. Students no longer trudge between buildings, but gambol and chatter like squirrels, enjoying the echoes of their shouts careening off of buildings. Kurt feels the fertile rush in his blood, and the pang of the single man amidst the passion of the moment. Stepping out of a building on campus, he sees a boy of similar build and complexion to John, and is visited again by the wraith that was his brother. John seems larger, a boy still, but of true size. He is armed now, as well. A black metal rifle with curved clip jutting beneath seems heavy and awkward in the boy’s hands. He stands on a bleak, shattered street, alone and conspicuous in his costume. Smoke billows black from the hollowed remains of a car behind him. He is a cardboard cutout in this vision, two-dimensional and mute. The impression is one of a boy in a peril he cannot fathom. Kurt is unaware that he is placing his brother into a photo that had appeared in the morning paper. The soldier, securing the scene of an IED explosion in Baghdad, was not John, but it could have been, with smooth, clean cheeks shining under a dull, heavy helmet. Just a boy. Playing soldier.
   
   [At this moment, Private Forger is pointing his rifle at a building from which sniper fire has come. He is sweating profusely in the rear deck of a Humvee, and he feels paranoia like the breath of wasp wings between his shoulder blades. A bullet from anywhere may take his life at any moment. A bomb may explode. Mortar round, RPG, IED, Bullet. Dismemberment and pain and death hover in his helmet.  He peers into the square of darkness within the window frame and does not know if he can pull the trigger. He says “F**k you, Kurt” through grit teeth.]

June. On Patrol, Baghdad
    Sitting in the outer office of the head of the English department, Kurt thumbs through an issue of TIME. He is nervous about the meeting to come, about his fate as an instructor. Kurt considers himself a decent teacher, one with a close and enviable rapport with his students. He had been warned, however, to keep his political stance to himself, and had slipped more than once. Young, square-headed lads have rebuffed his liberal views, and have openly challenged him in class. How like his brother they are, with their naïve sense of entitlement and faux bloodlust. There, in the pages of TIME, is an article about a mass murder of Iraqi civilians"innocent families gunned down by young, square-headed soldiers. Kurt’s brother appears again, this time as one such murderer. His back is turned in the momentary glimpse, perhaps in the shame of exposure. It is John, though. Kurt has conjured him this time, has placed him at the scene with hot breath and spattered blood on empty beds.

   In the meeting, Kurt is fired, and swipes the magazine as he flees the office.

   [At this moment, Private Forger is on his bunk, typing on a laptop. He has drafted four chapters of a novel that will chronicle his experiences in Iraq. He highlights a passage wherein he has struggled with the idea that he is a part of an occupying, rather than liberating force. Iraqis curse and shout and spit and plead and weep and howl--a universal language of anger and hatred and frustration. Who could blame them? He deletes the passage.]

July. Mortar Attacks.
    Kurt drinks. Ostracized by his former colleagues, he begins visiting a bar that he had frequented as a student. It is, as expected, inhabited by college students. None of them know him nor desire to. They rove the place in baseball-capped packs, boisterous and bold in their dominance of the dim tavern. Kurt sits on a stool amidst them, looking through the TV that hangs from a wall, caressing a bottle of beer absently. Most nights, he drives home to his modest apartment drunk, sleeps on the couch. His bed is unused.

   On a humid night in July, John appears to him at the bar. He had gone all but forgotten during this troth in Kurt’s year, had not visited since last conjured. A commercial between innings invokes the boy this time. An Army of One. John stands tall and straight in his uniform, creased brow overhanging eyes like lightning bolts. The boy is not a boy, not a brother, but a stranger--a soldier. He makes no move, does not speak, but looks directly at Kurt now. He does not flinch. Kurt does. He shrinks from the vision, rubs the thighs of his pants and seeks out the bartender’s gaze.
 
   [At this moment, Private Forger is sitting on a Porto Potty in one hundred and twenty five degree heat. Sweat pours down his face, stings his eyes. He hears the dull thud of mortar rounds and hopes to Almighty God that the enemy has not improved his aim"that he does not die here, of all places. He is angry. Angry that he has not showered in three days, angry that he must endure shitting in an oven, angry that every man woman and child in this country wants to kill him. He is most angry because he does not know in his heart if he can kill them.]

August. Reassignment, Sadr City.
    Kurt speeds down the highway, smiling absently and feeling renewed. An interview has netted him a job teaching English at an area prep school. It will be vastly different from community college, but it's a job. He will move there, as a small apartment is part of the compensation package. Good. Time to get the hell away from the emptiness of the city and start fresh. The radio chatters away, some report on the political landscape that fails to break through Kurt’s reverie. Then the top of the hour news report begins, and brings John back from the void. Ninety soldiers killed in July, caught in a civil war between Iraqi factions. Ninety killed, and hundreds wounded, fighting for their killers. No end in sight. Soldiers stretched thin, pushed to the brink. John appears then, as a noble savage. He sits in the turret of a Humvee, waiting for the bomb or bullet that will take his legs or his life. He appears calm and tired, etched into harder lines and angles by conflict. Kurt slouches in the turret, hiding every inch of exposed body that the metal frame will cover. He chooses not to look at Kurt this time--chooses instead to focus on his life and his death. There is no target painted on his fatigues, but there is none needed. Kurt squints into the sun and frowns at the serpent of gleaming cars.
 
  [At this moment, Private Forger is pointing his weapon at the face of a young Iraqi man. The man is screaming in Arabic, as are several others standing in a small circle before him. Behind them, gouts of flame engulf what was once a Humvee, and the smoke stings John’s eyes. He applies roughly one half of the pressure required to fire at the screaming face.]

November. Leave in Limbo (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?).
   The days leading up to Thanksgiving are unkind to Kurt’s troubled mind. Teaching prep school children has presented unexpected stresses, and the close-quarters of campus living has made it near impossible to drink his way out of the depths of his new reality. These concerns, though, are trivial in comparison with the prospect of reuniting with his family. John has been gone for six months, and Kurt has not attempted to contact his brother once. He has avoided their parents as well, understanding as he does the nature of their affliction. They are, like John and like most who are spun into the web of the war, necessarily positive about it. They cling to threads of truth and half-truth and untruth that save morale from the breaking point. Yellow ribbon car magnets and Fox news and “remember nine-eleven” are the obvious signs of a shared malady. After six grueling months, they are so deeply wound up in these bandages that they cannot peek out of them, lest they lose their sanity.

   John arrives at their home fearing their scorn and retribution. He knows he deserves it. Despite these misgivings, dinner is surprisingly relaxed. They pray for John and his fellow soldiers to live, and to win the “war on terror.” Kurt chews his pot roast with a tight jaw, wondering how anyone can call it a “war” on anything. It is an occupation, an arbitration, a dust storm in which John is a single grain of sand. They catch Kurt up on his brother’s life in the Gulf. He has been emailing them when he can from his “FOB” (they have learned, and use liberally, many army terms, abbreviations and acronyms), offering a sanitized vision of the war as mostly waiting for something to do. John has seen combat, but offers no details beyond that he is unscathed. He is now being told that his mid-tour leave is up in the air. Due back in February, he cannot be sure he’ll be home before April. An empty seat at the table, with plate, silverware and a full glass of pinot grigio, has been set for him.

   After dinner, the air grows turbulent. The kinetic nature of it is like a thunderstorm gathering in the kitchen. Kurt’s mother lobs the initial grenade, questioning him about his correspondence with his heroic brother. She knows that there has been none. Before Kurt can protest, John’s wife Angela steps into the breach. Kurt is surprised at the odd alliance, but grateful. In the few times that Kurt has spoken with her alone, she’s hinted at sharing his indignation at the war. Behind pained smiles, Angela casts herself as de facto mediator. She deflects punitive looks and disarms time-bomb remarks dropped as bait with cheerful small talk. The two women seem to keep one another at a distance, an uneasy détente feathered with mutual respect.

   Later, Kurt follows Angela outside. She sits on the porch, having a cigarette. She does not acknowledge him at first, just sits there watching the wind twist smoke into the night air. Then she begins to talk. She vacillates between pride at her husband’s service, and malice for the Government that sent him to die. She vents rage, fear, and loneliness that she cannot vent to anyone else. She kisses him briefly, violently, before breaking off and grimacing.
   “Oh, God.” She wipes her mouth. “That was so wrong.”
   Kurt is seized by the moment, waiting for a vision that will come soon. “I’m sorry, Ange,” he begins, but is cut off with a wave of her hand.
   “You don’t even get it. It’s wrong because you’re a civilian. A Pogue.” She turns then, picks up her wine glass and leaves him alone on the porch.
   Now the vision comes. This incarnation of John is not John, but the power of his wrath. It is dark and enormous, faceless and falling at him from the night sky. It blots out the stars. The brother who became a soldier has become a rough beast"a force of righteous anger, reaching across from the desert to strike his heart with fear. Kurt sits on the porch, hugging himself until the vision passed. The fear stays with him, though. It has nestled in his heart like a sliver of iron.

   [At this moment, Private Forger is crying silently in his bunk. He cannot afford to be heard in the darkness, and he knows this, so he has balled his fist and jammed it into his mouth. His novel is nearly finished, and will include the horrific vision of an exploding face. The face a man who was maybe thirty, with a trace of a mustache and intelligent brown eyes and a deep hatchet-furrow splitting his brows. He was these things one moment, and a red blur the next. The image will not leave the private's mind.]

February. Freedom Bird. Leave.
   The homecoming. The tears and the ferocious hugs--their parents sweating relief through their clothes and straining, pouring over every inch of John to convince themselves that he is alive, whole. Kurt misses the event, telling himself that he has too much work to finish before making the trip. In truth, he cannot bear to see them together. He calls, promises to meet his brother for drinks.

   On a windy night, Kurt sits in the dark, thinking. He grips the steering wheel of his parked car, feels the faint rumble of the engine through his gloves, feels the great gulf between him and the bar in whose parking lot he idles. The visions have merged now, coalesced into a thing that is his brother, but is more. Now that he is so near, Kurt’s mind has begun to fill in the gaps and solidify the vision. He imagines his older brother inside the tavern holding court on a barstool. The boy is now a man and a veteran. John is taking-in firm handshakes from men, relishing pressed-breast hugs and tipsy kisses from women. ‘You made it, bro!’ they grin, hands waving for the bartender to fill his beer. ‘Got all yer visible limbs, anyway!’ they guffaw, and clap him on the back. John is smiling, back from and death and madness. Did he kill? Kurt has no idea how to walk into the bar"no clue what to say to John if he does. Does he know about the kiss? Kurt is alone and unprotected. He shuts off the engine.

   [At this moment, John Forger is walking toward his brother’s car. A cocktail of giddiness and guilt poisons his stomach. He is home. He is a killer. He did his job and his job was to kill. It strikes him, here in the glare of the orange lights, in the immense embrace of familiar, yet freshly alien soil, as wrong. Yet it is done. Kurt had prophesized the very malady that afflicts him. John is afraid to see what his brother’s eyes will reflect.]

   “Hey.”
  
   The knock on the window makes Kurt jump in his seat. And there is his brother. In the harsh glare of the arc lights, John’s face looks drawn tight against his skull. He is trying to smile, but is not managing. He has aged a decade. God, how he’s aged.