The Cause Page 3

  He grabs the shiny copper badge on the dark, navy-blue uniform, rubs it softly between his fingers, the blood on the tips already drying in the soft wind. “No time for talk,” he says. “Listen. Tell your mother I’m sorry. Tell her I love her.”

  Pressing on the wound only makes him howl. Then he’s slipping away. Stay with me, Pop. Stay the fuck with me. His eyes flutter, turn inward and gaze up at the sky. “I’m proud,” he says. “You’re a better man than me. That’s all I hoped for.” He gasps. “Remember,” he says. And then he coughs out the words that would stay with me forever: “Do right by your country and right by your family and life should be okay.” I bent down to grasp him in my arms, his head falling limp until I braced it under my arm. We couldn’t have been closer right then, his blood painted all over me. Yet we were universes apart—him floating away, me wishing to vanish with him. With my mother it would be a distance too great to contemplate, a void of silence and space. Wailing sirens came blaring down the road, but by the time they got there he would already be dead, and it would only be the first set of tears the cynic would shed.

  The diesel bus engine droned on, and the world refocused. The headache was back. A couple of kids nattered at each other in the back of the bus, and their mother was squawking at them to behave. I saw the derby-capped bus driver’s yawn through the thick convex mirror, left hand moving to the mouth to cover it. The humming of the motor vibrated the window against my scalp, and I used this time for rest, for absorbing what had to be done. In the end, it was a chance for a rebirth, my Homeland the new father to fight for. I would go to The Abattoir.

  Near the base, I used a payphone and called a secret number. “A-507 entering the Panopticon,” I said. And because the moment burned within me, I added, “I’ll do it for free,” then hung up. I was back on The Farm by mid-morning and packed up my things. Later, as I was walking between the barracks and shooting range, I saw Hassani walking over to his car and ran to catch up to him.

  “I’ve decided to go,” I said.

  “I never really had a doubt you wouldn’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why would you want to be left behind now when you’re out there giving it your all?”

  “It might not be enough.”

  “It certainly won’t be enough,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means The Abattoir will test you in more ways than you can imagine.”

  I smirked at him. “I think I can hack it.”

  Hassani took out his keys from his pocket. “Physically maybe.”

  “Mentally too, man.”

  “Maybe. But what you have to ask yourself is if Isse Corvus is going there for the right reasons.” He looked at me as if he had just decoded my phone conversation to Pelletier. Missing the pencil mustache and the ridiculous cowlick he had going the night of the Timothy Skies dinner, the purposeful stare of interrogator Bloom appeared.

  There was a Sentinel drone up in the sky, and involuntarily I took a quick glance at it before snapping my eyes back into his. “And what reasons do you think those should be?”

  “Well, that’s entirely up to you. But they shouldn’t be anyone else’s.”

  I shook a finger at him in jest. “Have you been digging into my psych profile?”

  Hassani smiled. “A dog doesn’t need to dig a hole to sniff shit if it’s lying right there on the sidewalk.”

  I laughed. “As always, the Hassani snout sniffs one thing, but out of the mouth comes the bullshit of another.”

  Hassani opened his car door. “Think about it.” He held out his hand and I grasped it.

  “Thanks for everything you did for me out here. You were in my corner.”

  He shook my hand. “You’re welcome. Good luck out there.”

  The next morning at 0400, we were taken from Camp Peary in tinted-windowed vans. Most of the guys I was tight with during training were in my vehicle—Brock, Split, Conroy, and Mir. Brock and I were the only brothers out of the thirty-eight going. Bunker was conspicuously missing. Did he have a change of heart?

  We drove in the van quietly digesting talk-show chitchat about Detroit from The Sunday Morning Sun Show. Rioting again, the city completely lawless, another day of a tick-tocking clock until the whole city would explode. Funny how quiet we were that day, lulled to sleep by smooth, rational radio voices telling us how well-contained the situation was, praising the National Guard for their forbearance, castigating the unruly crowd of looters, each sound bite of street chaos clipped of high-toned protest-whistles and low-toned rolling tanks. The squeaky voice of host Barry Winterburn rubbed in our ears. Mir, sitting next to me in the backseat, yawned while fingering a tattoo on his arm of Lisbeth Salander, the classic chick from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Up front, Conroy was looking out of the window at the Department Of Citizens’ freeway banners racing by—Be On The Winning Side of Red, White, and Blue—Join Today and many other adverts from President Donnelly’s PR Tsar.

  “Ten dollar gas,” Mir said, pointing out the window at a gas-station billboard. “Do you believe this shit? It was nine dollars last week.”

  “I hear they’re going to tap the rest of the SPR,” Brock said.

  We fidgeted in the leather upholstery, the itch of collapse on the fringe of our thoughts, how other cities seemed to be catching the cold. While the days of rioting passed through the media innocuously, Detroit had fallen deeper and deeper over the previous weeks. The mainstream news lurched away from it, averting the camera’s eye to newly uncovered celebrity affairs. But the Internet told a different tale, one where a wall of immutability stood firm with static policy and deadlocked government. One blog wrote an article titled, From Bankruptcy to Oblivion, A Hard Look at the Last 10 years of Detroit. It received 13 million hits. But the politicians had written it off, sweeping the city out of the headlines as much as they could. The population seemed willing to go along. Save what can be saved. Amputate the rest.

  The vans rolled on.

  The low-browed Conroy sat picking a thumbnail. Sitting on the window side of the middle backseat, shoulders slumped and yawning, was Brock. Brock was a Brooklyn brother ex-Notre Dame linebacker. Then there was bushy-haired Stanford Mir, crooked-toothed like a British schoolboy growing out of baby teeth. Out of the alchemy of an ugly smile, he forged charisma. Outsiders would say he was charming—but none of them knew he was nicknamed the Peepshow Perv. He was a boy who loved his porn, kept it pinned up over his walls. Then there was me. Full-ride MS UCLA grad in neurology and computer science, studying neural nets and writing a thesis on neuromorphic processors. Would go to work in the Silicon Valley for a while afterwards. Those were the days when Cerberus had one head in his job, another in his Black Hat role in Anonymous, and the third playing in his off-time with the genetic algorithms that would make the core of Rose, an artificial intelligence program. All of us in the van had excelled with our college educations, all in different disciplines—but recruitment paths to The Company were all strangely different.

  Conroy pointed through the windshield. “Take a look at that.”

  A sign on an overpass read, THIS IS THE ONLY COUNTRY WE’VE GOT.

  On the next overpass, there was a woman dressed in rags dangling out over the ledge staring down at traffic. Her feet straddled over a CCTV cam and everyone in the car had a sense of what was coming next. Another sign next to her read, WHY WON’T OUR GOVERNMENT STOP PISSING ON IT. We were in the middle lane and our driver merged left. As we passed, I caught a glimpse of her. Eyes wide and scared, caught up in the river of passing cars.

  “Did she jump? Did she jump?” Mir asked, peeling around to try and gaze behind us. I wasn’t going to look back. Why look backward when you’re moving forward?

  “No,” I said, “but she probably will, and you don’t need to be looking.”

  This was the new form of protest. The papers called them the Windshield Bugs, a group of homeless who had formed a suicide pact to jump when tra
ffic got the heaviest. The banners never lasted long. Before attending to any accident or crawling traffic around the corpse, the first thing the police would do would be to rip down the signs.

  Looking back at that moment now, I remembered how those jumpers had disgusted me. I couldn’t condone their method of protest. I thought their actions were destructive instead of constructive. The show of civil disobedience wasn’t helping solve any sort of problem.

  We arrived at a large hangar on the outskirts of the Norfolk airport. The vans unloaded, and we hopped out and made for the entrance. Bunker still wasn’t there. No one had seen him.

  Inside the hangar, a beaten-up F14 was stripped down to its dull metallic skin, stabilizers taken off, cylindrical like a dead barracuda with the tail chopped off. With all the drones in the air, who needed it? It looked like one of those birds destined to end up in the airplane graveyard out in Tucson. Looking at it reminded me of the little excursion I took after the astronaut Timothy Skies’ launch dinner. Under the moonlight, the dead war birds scattered about the dusty desert, wings still boldly spread out under sparkling star glitter. But in reality they were unaware of history’s juke, left behind to wilt under sandstorms and tumbleweed. It made me wonder about the manner in which we were going to be stripped down and disassembled, and whether any of us would come back feeling young and indestructible like we did now.

  The guys were grouped into different circles talking. Many of the discussions at The Farm were themselves conversational exercises. Today, conversations crashed into one another, a traffic jam of voices in apprehension and excitement about what was coming. We were in jeans and tees, stripped of usual field gear. It loosened the atmosphere and everyone spoke freely. In my group, Split was speaking about the secretive leader of The Abattoir. Split called him The Conductor. Mir said his name was C.

  “Like A-B-C?” Conroy asked.

  “Who knows?” Split said. “But Burns told me the tag Conductor goes back to his asset days.”

  “Burns doesn’t know shit,” Conroy said.

  “Heard it had to be clean,” Brock said. “Couldn’t just clip the target, so the guy walks around town posing as some retarded conductor dude. Tooled around the same office building for ten years until he could get a clean hit.”

  “Ten years?” I asked.

  “Ten fucking years,” Brock repeated.

  “It’s what I heard too,” Split said. “Then he went off and formed The Abattoir.”

  “That’s a long time to be sitting around beating your meat,” Mir said. We shook our heads in agreement. We were knee-deep now, and a lot closer to being thrown out into the undefined. The buzz of it all had us feeling dizzy.

  All of us knew the legends pertaining to The Conductor. Stories that grew like vines around the barracks of The Farm—how he stood circled against four men and kung-fu’d them into oblivion. Gladiator talk of him with swords and shields. They talked of his deeds as if he were Achilles—untouchable, unbreakable, lofted into the realm of great warrior beyond death. But legend is carcinogenic to truth. It takes ancient voices to spread it through miracle or churchlike indoctrination, poisoning real events with myth and improbability. A good legend lifts the realm of reality while maintaining a thin sense of realism, and this is what I thought was going on here. So while I listened, the cynic in me took it all in with sprouting seeds of doubt.

  Split, the Spanish Monkey, bowed out of the circle. Split was a skinny, hirsute Hispanic, ex-Army second-generation Americana go-getter who could talk the ears off an elephant. He ended up being part of the EOD squad in Afghanistan—one of those guys putting on the eighty-pound dome of ignorance in one hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, sniffing out suspicious backpacks and rigged-up cars. He played with wire cutters the way a mongoose played with fangs. Split had cojones of a torro. Bullet-spun eyes doing tangos with pliers, pupils pulsing with each clip, anticipating the burst of a fiery flash. The death faces he saw in the IEDs were snapping shots of him, holding him in the lens for a sticky instant, silent, ephemeral, like a wisp of breath before his internals would be rocketed over a block’s radius. “Blood like dust,” he used to say. “Smithereens.” That’s how the king of nicknames accrued another—Split Smithereens—a name ringing to one day be blood dust on a killing field.

  The social animal of the crew, he made rounds between the huddled groups, popping in and out of circles like a fish-begging porpoise. He stopped to see Briana and Chloe, the two chicks who were accepted and had the nuts to come. Briana had an Indian look where Chloe was Arab-looking. Most of us figured they were being groomed to bait a Middle Eastern prince funding terrorists. Briana was the shorter one—five-foot-four and fast as hell. A chick whose fitness challenged the toughest of the men. She had run the Boston Marathon in two hours twenty-five minutes. She was a flat-chested, loud-mouthed, feisty woman, whom Mir jokingly nicknamed the Energizer Bunny, coming up with it when he said she would fuck like one if any of them got the chance. No one had, but the name stuck and everyone called her Bunny.

  Outside the hangar, the sun was almost up. I walked out into the fresh air and took a deep breath, letting it fill my lungs until they throbbed. Out in the distance, a couple of Stealth drones were high up in the sky monitoring airport landings. I shook my head and turned my gaze and let my eyes chew up the speckled sky where the stars were bursting through. Through my shirt, I felt the cut-out photo of the Earth taped to my chest. It was wrapped up in a protective plastic covering, old and warn. Most of the times, I taped surrogate encyclopedia cut outs, but this time it was the real one, the one I had kept. It was coming along with me for the journey, and it made me recall the first time I saw it.

  I was fourteen, a year after the first family camping trips where, proud-as-a-peacock, I took my new telescope out for my first moon viewings. I was in the library reading an encyclopedia, dreaming of the purity of distant worlds as I read about the Milky Way. A stack of books surrounded me, and I was reading about black holes and quasars.

  Images of the dingy neighborhood floated into my mind—the graffiti on sides of 7-Elevens and squatter houses, trash and litter tossed about gutters and sidewalks, broken 40-ounce bottles like mortar rounds glassed up on pot-holed streets, the broken-down cars on front lawns jacked up, drawn-and-quartered with the tires pulled off. My young mind asked why we had to live there, which led to a simpler question—how could my father, a garbage man, afford a telescope when we barely had the green to make it out of the city? I had never questioned it before that moment.

  He had found it in the bin of some rich house and wrapped it up for me. I thought back—no tag, no operating instructions, no fresh new box. He claimed it on the fruits of his labor, telling me how he penny-pinched for years. I imagined the moment, gazing through his eyes when he found it, a jump of surprise when he saw it poking out of a cellophane bag in a big green trash container. A telescope, he said with glee, eyes lighting up. He probably breathed a sigh of relief. Now he wouldn’t have to scrounge enough money away for a birthday present. He wouldn’t have to renege on promises of payment for good grades. He could stretch the enormity of it out and use it for a couple of years, which he did (“Now, if your grades slip, I’m gonna take it straight to the pawn shop.”). Perhaps he had to scuffle with Charles, his partner. Perhaps he had to make some difficult promises. But one day, like any other when he would burst out of the house before the sun cracked the sky, before the traffic jams veined the city, the morning smog smoked up the atmosphere, he would find something. Later that day, he would bring it back home around mid-afternoon when I was at school. He would smell like banana peels and flat Dr. Pepper, reeking of week-old fish and a thousand other mixed-up smells all clinging to his tan uniform. Work gloves would be shoved in his back pocket, stiff like the tails of two cocks fighting. This gift he would bring back for me and only me. Not for my brother, who couldn’t name another planet other than the one his two feet were standing on, and who hated being dragged away from his ‘hood’ on ast
ronomical campouts.

  That day in the library, when I was fourteen and growing like a weed, I cut out the Earth from the encyclopedia and shoved it in my pocket. I strutted out onto the sidewalk and held it high in the air in front of me. A crescent moon gleamed in the upper atmosphere. The sun-split blue horizon shimmered to a darker indigo over the black expanse. The sky was zipped open by a pair of parallel contrails, ribs holding the guts of the Earth inside. I held the picture over the toenail moon and imagined me up there, looking back at the me down here. In the picture, I saw the Earth as an iris peeking into the dark void, and was awed by the question of God and if there was ever an end.

  Now I was standing outside a hangar watching the day come into focus, the sun crisping a sheet of clouds into a beautiful pink to welcome a new day. Somehow a fiery intuition burning inside me knew this life was over. My hand was still over my heart, feeling the rim of the photo strapped to my chest. The Earth beat under my palm, and I felt I was going to burn up into ashes as the sun crept into the horizon. I thought the moment could last forever, lingering as long as I didn’t exhale.

  Then, a woman’s voice behind me asked, “So what are you thinking?”

  I turned around to see Briana staring at me. “I’m thinking it’s going to be a long flight.”

  “Could be.” She paused a moment. “But that’s not all you’re thinking about, is it?”

  This was Bunny. She had a way of getting in your business. She had her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Temple, and it was just her natural proclivity to be curious. I was silent. Finally, she threw up her arms in the air. “Okay. Keep it to yourself. I won’t press you.”

  “What exactly do you want me to say and I’ll say it.”

  “What’s on your mind—it’s the same as what’s on everyone’s mind.”

  “And that is?”

  She scoffed, blowing air out of her lower lip. “We’re all scared, man. You’re not a wussy if you admit it.”