Reach Out and Touch Someone

BY JOHN MILAS

I’m in the grocery store again, like most nights. Cashiers scan items non-stop, their registers giving off incessant beeps and tones as the customers swarm in. Brittany stands at the end of my line with her arms crossed, waiting for me to ring up the people ahead of her so we can talk, but the line’s not getting any shorter. In fact, it’s growing. And all I can think about is getting out of here and running to the bathroom because I have to piss, but Brittany’s in line waiting to talk to me and this is also a pressing issue. The next man empties the groceries from his cart onto the belt and hands me his wallet. I can’t read the numbers on his credit card; they blur together. The colors smudge against my fingers like cold wet paint, but it’s really just the coldness of the metal zipper against my finger. My body jolts awake inside the sleeping bag, back into the cocoon of reality. I’m lying on a cot in our tent thousands of miles from that grocery store, my hand reaching out into the darkness. I lower my arm and lay it across my chest.

Down the row of cots, someone snores and someone’s watch alarm beeps, but doesn’t wake him. I hit the Indiglo button on my G-Shock and it reads zero three forty-five. The canvas tent flails back and forth in the wind. My heartbeat winds back down. Every night, some dream about high school. Failing grades, forgetting my locker combination, or working my old job at the grocery store. Never anything about the war. And gone are the days of good dreams about Brittany. They’re all bad now.

In the pitch black I unzip the sleeping bag and set my feet down, sliding them around on the dusty floor, feeling for my flip-flops. The plastic thong of the sandals cuts against the skin between my toes, a spot where athlete’s foot has started to flare up. Next I reach down for the M16 on the crossbars under the cot where I always leave it. Never in my sleeping bag like some idiots. I sling it over my shoulder and stand up. At the foot of the cot rests my flak jacket with a small pocket on the front holding a black Sharpie and a flashlight with a red filter. I grab both and use the red light to navigate my way between rows of sleeping marines and out the front door.

Wind sweeps over the desert outside, the tent shuddering behind me. Portions of its walls bulge outward and then cave back in like a giant lung. A lone streetlamp lights the area, occasionally dimmed by the amount of dust blowing through the air. Our tent sits at a dirt road intersection, diagonally across from the chow hall tent and down the row from the nearest head, a bit of a walk from the phone center, which has been closed for the last week and a half. No internet either, no way to contact Brittany in River City. People keep dying in Marjeh.

It’s a cold walk in just shorts and t-shirt, dirt and sand biting at the backs of my legs as I shuffle along in the dark. After passing more tents and plywood structures I make it to a group of three cargo containers hooked up to two large water tanks, one labeled gray, one brown. Wooden stairs lead up to a door on each container, above which is stenciled either Men or Women. Inside, a row of sinks and stalls stand opposite each other with barely a shoulder’s width between. I keep one eye closed as my vision adjusts to the fluorescent light, and proceed to piss for what seems like five continuous minutes, and then I get down to business in one of the stalls.

When I first got to Afghanistan I felt self-conscious jerking off due to the complete lack of privacy. It seemed like too much of a covert operation to be worth the effort. I learned the hard way, though, after my first wet dream. Waking up in a tent full of other men and having to sneak out to clean myself off, I realized jerking it daily was just as much a necessity as any basic hygiene practice. At first I tried picturing Brittany, although I told her never to send me any photos in case they ended up in someone else’s hands. The tradeoff is that I don’t see her as well in my dreams anymore. She fades from my mind sometimes, between the occasional trip to look at her Facebook pictures in one of Leatherneck’s internet centers. Some days she’s lying on a beach. It’s spring break and she’s making a sand castle. We don’t play with the sand here. Or she’s sitting at a table with her friends and there’s a bit of lens flare washing out the picture, but I can see that they’re in a bar all drinking from the same pitcher of blue through long white straws. But the internet is off now and I can’t see her face, and I can’t call her because people keep dying. She’ll ask me why I haven’t called in so long and I’ll have to explain to her that when people die they shut the phones off and they shut the internet off. People didn’t die before, but they do now, at least last week. I’ll have to explain that I stood next to a C-130 on a silent runway and saluted caskets as marines marched them up the ramp. The ones who got shot or blown up earlier in the day before they had the chance to get out and use their GI Bill. I’ll tell Brittany about the prayers, the Christian prayer recited in English for the dead Americans and the Muslim prayer sung in Pashto for the dead Afghans. I’ll tell her everything, but first people need to stop dying.

After I finish in the stall I study the bathroom graffiti. All kinds of dicks struggling for space on the wall. Dicks with faces, dicks tied in knots, dicks with more pubes on the shaft than on the balls, and even a clearly labeled chode making an appearance. I take out my sharpie and add one or two of my own. When I’m done scribbling on the wall, another bit of graffiti catching my eye below the drawings: RIP LSP ‘88-‘10, a memorial for someone dead as of this year. The black letters are faded, framed by a newly drawn red tombstone added in the past day or so. The grunts pushed into the city of Marjeh to drive out the remaining Taliban a week ago. There will probably be more caskets on the runway tomorrow, and the next day and so on. My shift on the flight line starts at noon and goes till midnight, seven days a week and straight into oblivion. I don’t know what day it is. I don’t even care.

I leave the stall and look at myself in the mirror, the reflection of a gaunt twenty-one year old washout with a black rifle slung across his body. Bags under red eyes, yellowing teeth, the line of a farmer’s tan at the base of his neck. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen him, but it’s been a long time since I really looked at him. He could have chosen to be anywhere but here. I brush the back of my fingers against my jaw, skin feeling smooth. I could get away without shaving tomorrow if the first sergeant doesn’t notice, which will allow a few extra minutes of sleep before waking up to catch the bus to Bastion. Maybe I can tell Brittany about the grooming standards, how it’s more important to our so-called leaders for us to have a clean shave and a fresh haircut than for us to eat or sleep. But if she talks at me like she normally does then I won’t have to explain anything. I’ll hear her voice over the phone until they tell me my time is up, and then I’ll tell her my time is up, sorry, and it’ll be another week or two before I can call out again.

Back outside the wind’s dull howling has died down, but a new sound emerges in the gloom. A low squeak echoing in the distance, accompanied by the occasional metallic groan, like a ship’s hull buckling as it sinks to the ocean floor. Something big, a tank probably, wandering the streets in the small hours. The click clacking of its treads reverberate ahead, and I can just make out the shape of its silhouette before it crawls under the lone street light down the road.

Inching towards me, a lone M88 Hercules hulks like the bastard child of a tank and a house-sized turtle. A tow truck for tanks. It crawls into the light and reveals itself, engine roaring within its armored carapace. I’ve only glimpsed pictures of these things before, but pictures do them no justice. The beast rocks back and forth, coming down the road straight at me with no discernible windows or portholes. No trace of humanity inside. A cloud kicks up in its wake, radiating out from behind and blanketing anything nearby with dust. Every so often it makes a steering adjustment, jolting to the left or right to stay even with the road. It makes no attempt to conceal itself or appear streamlined or tactical, because it doesn’t need to. Nothing could ever stop it. Nothing would cripple its ability to roll along indefinitely, to smash through any barrier in its way, man made or not, to deliberately seek out and crawl over land mines for the mere novelty of taking no damage from their blast. The Hercules has no cannon because it needs no cannon. It will come and go as it pleases. The driver’s probably eighteen years old. Maybe I’ll tell Brittany about the Hercules, about the kids operating it who could’ve been sitting in high school health class a year ago at this time. Now they’re on the other side of the world, dreaming about grocery stores and girlfriends.

I hold my hand up as it approaches, a motionless wave of acknowledgement as if to say, Dear God I’m glad you’re on my side because if you weren’t I’d be in trouble. No sign of a return acknowledgement, as if there really are no windows or ways to see outside, or they just don’t care. The Hercules rolls by, its trailing cloud of dust enveloping me, leaving a fine coat of particles on my skin, and more importantly my M16, although I’ve stopped cleaning it at this point anyway.

I brush myself off as the thing disappears down the road, a futile effort as more dust swirls around into my eyes and up my nose. I cough and sneeze and spit, dirt crunching between my teeth. I pat my shirt and shorts and slap the side of the rifle to shake off some of the powder, and then something taps me on the head.

I spin around, unslinging the rifle, ready to use it as a blunt object since I’m a pogue and don’t carry ammo on me. Some dust still hangs in the air, but not enough to block my view of the immediate area. I’m still alone. The Hercules engine fades off and now the tents flap around me and fill any silence not already filled by the constant drone of diesel generators in the distance. One of my sergeants believes in ghosts and says they touch his feet and his face during the night. He’s full of shit, but I swallow and clench my teeth and look back and forth and over my shoulder to make sure anyway.

Something taps my foot, and I jump and fling off my shower shoe thinking it might be a camel spider, the shoe bouncing against a nearby concrete barrier, the cold dirt sucking body heat from my bare foot. There’s no camel spider, but I catch sight of two objects on the ground, what appear to be cards of some sort. I look over my shoulder to see if anyone’s messing with me, but there’s no one there.

The closer of the two cards sits with a white side facing up, some fine print stamped on it. I turn it over with my foot, a blue AT&T logo taking up most of the other side. Normally my parents mailed them to me and I used up the minutes at the phone center. You call an eight hundred number from a phone and the next thing you know your girlfriend or parents or future ex-wife or grandma could hear you out for a while. I pick up the cards and thumb the dust off.

“Thanks I guess,” I call out to whoever’s there, and then, “Wherever the…” but I cut myself off at the appearance of more calling cards scattered around on the road. These were not there before the Hercules came through, I’m sure of it, because I walked by that spot after I woke up. Another tap, this time on my shoulder. A card spinning to the ground in my peripheral. I squint and look for whoever’s putting in all this effort to stay hidden but can still find no one. More cards appear on the road, but I haven’t seen them flung from behind any barriers and then a skittering comes from overhead like the sound of moths bumping into each other under a light. I look up.

A mass of AT&T calling cards cascades out from the blackness above, almost twinkling as they spin between their white and blue sides, clumps of them raining down. The air works its way between and fans them out in scattered formations. They rock back and forth, some flipping end over end. More and more flutter in the air as if a giant bag of calling cards had ripped open in the sky.

They land on our tents, sliding down the canvas. They pile like hail at the base of the HESCO bastions. A few spin down the back of my shirt and I untuck it to make sure they fall out. The shoe I kicked off a second ago is now covered by the cards, lost forever unless I sort my way through the pile. I kneel down and scoop up a handful as they fall around me like plastic snowflakes, all these calling cards and no phone to call with.

 


John Milas b&w (2)

John Milas grew up in Champaign, IL. He enlisted in the Marine Corps and served four years before returning home to study writing at the University of Illinois. He has work in Chicago Quarterly Review, Red Savina Review, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. Learn more at johnmilas.com.

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