Greer deals with his fear by talking.
“You guys ever hear of Cemetery 117?”
He’s got a green shirt tied around his hairline, catching the sweat. Nobody responds; they know Greer will tell them about it either way.
The heat is cruel. Mean heat, Larry said.
“They’re quantifying it as three cemeteries in one,” Greer goes on. “Near the northern border of the Sudan. North of us. But close. Much closer than home.”
“How do you know about it?” Larry asks.
“Because I read, Larry. I read the journals. I care about these things. Two of the cemeteries are on one side of the Nile River and the third is on the other, as if the banks were once considered prime real estate for burial.” Greer speaks as if he loves the idea of bones and blood, digging for bodies, and . . . “Prehistoric warfare. That’s what they’re calling it. Fifty-nine bodies they found. Most of them around nineteen years old. A lot of women and children, too.”
“Sounds like any cemetery,” Larry says.
Greer shakes his head no.
“Arrowheads, spears. Listen, every single person was wounded the same way. Each and every corpse they unearthed. Still sound like your neighborhood cemetery in Detroit, Larry?”
“What are you saying?” Philip asks. Duane mutters something. Philip can imagine his friend dropping his gear and strangling Greer. But perhaps Duane is beyond being annoyed. Fear is unique that way.
Greer tugs at the rope around his belly; the tarp drags behind him, makes a steady sliding sound.
“These bodies are close to fourteen thousand years old, Tonka. Fourteen thousand! You think we might’ve made peace with one another by now, yeah?”
He bellows a single syllable of real laughter, a cackling punch that echoes ahead.
Sounds a bit like the tape slowed down.
Philip thinks of his and Greer’s last conversation. The sound as being able to break the patterns of history. Capable of initiating residual hauntings. The Namib Desert is the perfect host for this. The world’s oldest desert. The oldest known people. The first cemetery. The first war.
War and not-war? Is the sound somehow capable of both? Is it able to conjure the soldiers of old wars, all wars, into being, while denouncing them, rendering their weapons unusable?
Why? How? And does any of it matter so long as Ross is missing?
“Lovejoy,” Duane says.
Ahead, Lovejoy is crouched in the sand.
Duane runs to him, wild, and Philip understands it’s because his drummer believes Lovejoy has found evidence of Ross.
Then they’re all running. Larry calls Ross’s name. As if the small, dark object at the former general’s feet is somehow their friend.
By the time Stein catches up, the Polaroid ready, the others have already seen it.
But it’s Greer who can’t resist grabbing hold of it and lifting it to his eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, the way someone says it with awe.
It’s a metal tube, the length of one of Philip’s arms.
Greer doesn’t untie the rope that holds the body behind him, though it’s digging in, irritating his belly. He doesn’t wipe the sweat that drips from the shirt tied around his head. But he does wipe his glasses clean.
“This is a hand cannon,” Greer says, holding it with all ten fingers. The way he says it, he expects that the others must realize the significance of this discovery. If anybody does, though, it’s Lovejoy alone. “This is the first firearm, gentleman. Asian. Quite literally a cannon for the hand. You would put gunpowder in this end and shrapnel here, and when you lit it . . .” his lips curl into an astonished smile.
Stein takes a photo.
“This is absolutely impossible,” Greer says.
“A relic,” Larry says.
Greer shakes his head vehemently.
“It’s mint. As if it were made yesterday. Today.” He rubs his hands together. “Absolutely impossible!”
“How old is it?” Stein asks.
Greer laughs.
“How does the thirteenth century sound to you, Private? It’s not that there’s not a mark on it, that would be the anthropological find of the year. But no . . . it’s that it isn’t . . . hasn’t . . . aged.”
“Keep it,” Lovejoy says. But he doesn’t need to. Greer is already opening his pack, retrieving the necessary cloth to wrap it.
Philip looks to the tarp behind Greer and recalls the historian’s excitement with what he called “verified Civil War boots—verified by me.” He looks to the hand cannon.
A conclusion comes to him. He feels as assured as when he knows the band got the right take:
The sound is not a weapon. It’s the opposite.
But what’s the opposite of a weapon?
Lovejoy is already trekking ahead. His blond hair is transparent under the sadistic sun.
Philip sets his own pack in the sand and removes his T-shirt. He wipes his face with it, then wraps it around his head. He drinks from his canteen. When he looks up again, Lovejoy is vanishing over the edge of a dune, descending, as though on an escalator.
Or like he’s taking the stairs.
35
Ellen is on the couch in her living room, leafing through the drawings she’s done for Philip. Together, they read like a child’s science fiction dream. The evolution of weapons, from wooden spears to nuclear bombs. The man in the Revolutionary War uniform. The hand cannon.
The black hole in the desert.
Ellen hasn’t had a relaxed minute since leaving Macy Mercy. She’s hearing things outside her apartment and in. She lives alone, is used to living alone, is used to the creaks and groans of the building, a neighbor’s dog picking through the garbage, the distant sputtering engine of a passing car. But in the two days since she was fired, she’s been hearing new sounds.
Footsteps? Outside? The creaking of the glass of her living room window? As if the nose of a stranger is pressed against it?
Ellen brings the drawing of the Revolutionary soldier on a sand dune under the lamplight. She shuffles the papers. To her, the black hole is the most disturbing. It was never dark enough for Philip. Ten layers of pencil deep.
Ellen tucks her hair behind her ears, sets the drawings on the couch, gets up. She takes the carpeted hall to the back bedroom, where her suitcase is already open on the bed, a third full. She quit packing once already today. But she’s ready to begin again.
She crosses the room to the nightstand, picks up the phone, and calls her friend Patricia in California.
“Hello?”
“Patty, it’s Ellen.”
“Oh . . . hi. What time is it there, Ellen?”
“Three in the morning.”
“What is it? Are you all right?”
“I need somewhere to stay, Patty. I’m leaving Iowa.”
“When?”
“I’m leaving now.”
Hesitation. Silence. If Patty could just offer up her place, make it sound normal, like it’s okay to leave your life at three in the morning, Ellen might be able to calm down, might begin to see this as the right thing to do. But Patty isn’t doing that.
“Ellen. What’s wrong? Obviously something’s wrong.”
Patricia has kids. Ellen knows she’s thinking of them now.
“Nothing’s wrong, exactly,” Ellen says. “I just need to . . . leave.”
Patricia hesitates. Ellen listens to the static. It sounds like bugs.
“Well, I’m sorry, Ellen, but as you know . . . we only have so much room here at the house. But if you’re going to be in California—”
Ellen hangs up.
She’s heard someone in the hall outside the bedroom.
She steps from the phone, crosses the carpet. The phone doesn’t ring, of course it doesn’t ring. Patricia is probably happy that she ended the call; she won’t be calling back. Ellen reaches the bedroom door and pushes it partway open.
Darkness out there.
Did she turn the lamp
off? She doesn’t remember.
She turns off the lights in the bedroom.
Now it’s dark everywhere.
She listens. Silent. Listens. Doesn’t move. Thinks of Philip telling her to add another layer to the black hole, telling her it isn’t dark enough yet.
You can’t get any darker than black! Ellen had laughed.
Not now. Not laughing now.
Yes you can, Philip had said. You just gotta see it in a place where it’s not supposed to be.
Ellen stares into the darkness of her apartment. She feels like she’s falling, without warning, dizzy, frightened. As if she’s tripped into the black hole Philip asked her to draw and there’s nothing solid, no support, inside it.
“Hello?” Ellen asks.
The last thing she expects, because it’s the worst thing she can think of, happens.
Someone responds.
“Hello, Ellen.”
It’s a familiar voice, but Ellen still screams, as if somehow her voice might give her that solid surface, that something physical to grip in the darkness.
But it doesn’t. And by the time the second voice sounds again, Ellen believes she won’t be leaving Iowa after all.
36
The sun is long past its peak, but Philip isn’t sure this is a good thing. He’s thinking of home, of getting back, of surviving ten more days out here. He’s thinking of Mull telling them the plane will be back exactly where it dropped them off, in two weeks on the hour. And with every step the platoon takes deeper into the desert, dragging the rolling reels behind them, Philip grows a little more nervous, a little more afraid.
Are they going too far from shore? Will ten days be enough time to get back?
We’ve been walking less than a day, he tells himself. Get ahold of yourself.
But how? So many overwhelming images out here . . . so many fears.
A nuclear reactor. A toxic reckoning. Dead bodies, sickness, and ghosts. Implausible artifacts in the sand; impossible ideas about men from other eras, other wars; soldiers frozen in time, always imprints, until just the right sound, just the right frequency rattles their dead bones into being.
And who makes this sound? Who calls to them?
Philip looks down to the hoofprints they follow.
“It’s back,” Duane says, slapping his hands over his ears. It reminds Philip of when Duane plays the drums, rhythm with his hands.
Duane’s right. The sound is back.
And yet . . . it’s far off. In and out. Like it’s been all day. As if they’re still the same distance from its source. No closer to discovery.
And yet . . .
Beyond Lovejoy, ahead, Philip sees a series of dunes, a corner of the desert, as if the former general has reached an end point but not an impasse. Counting five of them, Philip thinks the dunes make a hand, rising, as if telling him to stop.
A flash of light and Philip sees Stein is photographing.
“Shadows,” Larry says, acknowledging a blackness at Lovejoy and Stein’s feet. “Shade.”
“Tarp?” Greer asks.
But Philip hardly hears them. Without knowing it, he’s stepping with the same stride that made the hoofprints. His boots are carrying him toward the same end.
“Water,” Philip says, when he gets there.
Stein snaps another photo and the flash reflects off the dark surface.
“What was that, Tonka?”
Water, deep and blue, so vivid it quenches many thirsts, bodily, emotionally, as the foliage framing the pool wavers from the first cool desert breeze Philip has known.
Behind him, Larry and Greer, Duane and Stein are all talking about mines. Talking about holes in the desert like black holes in space.
But Philip is fixated on the figure swimming toward him.
Curly hair, pale as the old waitress’s at Ronnie’s on Grand Street. Supple fingers that drag him through the water, across the surface, toward Philip. Fingers capable of such sweet guitar.
“Hi, Philip.”
Philip lifts a finger, points, because he doesn’t know what else to do.
“Ross?”
Behind him, Larry says something. Asks Philip a question. Tells him to be careful.
“Come on, jump in,” Ross says. “The water’s fantastic.”
Because the sun is partially blocked by the dunes, Ross is partially shadowed. Beneath the surface, his arms and legs dance distorted, rippling with the unseen waves.
“ROSS!”
The exhalation Philip experiences is unprecedented. All the horrible visions of telling Ruth Robinson what had become of her son, all the sadness, madness, and meanness, are gone.
He steps toward his friend.
Pack and gear be damned. Ross is safe.
And swimming.
“Jump in, buddy. You won’t regret it.”
Smiling, Philip does. As Duane calls out behind him, and as Duane’s voice recedes, Philip jumps.
Then it’s like Duane’s voice is coming from the sky, up high, as Philip understands he himself made no splash, felt no water when he broke the surface.
Diamond mines, Greer had been saying. Some go miles deep.
And the world goes dim, too dim, as the words mirage and fantasy take flight, shot like cannons from Philip’s mind, as the rise of his own scream echoes, and the echo lasts so long he can’t tell where the bottom is, when he will hit, as he falls into a hole in the desert, a hole as dark as delusion.
37
Delores and Ellen sit facing each other across an orange Formica table in a corner booth. The booth is against the window, and early sunlight comes through the glass, creating shadows on the tabletop of the letters making up the daily specials. Ellen, who is facing the bulk of the all-night restaurant, scans the place, continuously, between every sentence it seems. Delores, facing only a handful of booths lining the adjacent wall, looks less frequently, but still looks.
As of now, they are alone. Or, as Delores says, without Mercy.
“You have to be at work soon,” Ellen says.
Delores nods. The bags under her eyes don’t correlate with the sparkle in them. She came to Ellen’s house because she wanted to. And the relief she feels, talking about the hospital, is big. And yet, Delores is conservative, Ellen knows, and watching her tell secrets is like watching a child admit to lying.
“I’ll be there,” Delores says. She doesn’t look at her watch. “I need it understood that I’m here this once. This is my one role in this.”
“Are they going to kill him?” Ellen asks it.
“They could,” Delores says, lowering her head, acknowledging that she’s a part of this, willingly or not, hands in the pot or not; a hospital that could conceivably kill one of its patients.
“They’re rushing his healing,” Ellen says. “It doesn’t take a nurse to notice that.”
Delores tells Ellen about the six shots administered by Szands.
Ellen sees red. Sees herself driving to the hospital. Sees herself killing.
“What are they doing, Delores?”
“Well, it’s like you said; they’re rushing it.”
“Why?”
Delores squeezes her hands tight together. This is hard for her.
“Do you know what happened to him in Africa, Ellen?”
“As much as you do.”
“Do you?”
“What happened to him in Africa, Delores?”
“Philip was part of a mission sent to—”
“I know that much.”
“Yeah, well, they found it.”
Ellen leans back against the booth, thinks of the drawings.
“And so?”
“And so Philip must know where it is.”
Both look out the window as a truck pulls into the parking lot. They wait to see who exits. An older, sturdy man in overalls gets out on the driver’s side, looks up to the restaurant’s sign, crosses the lot.
“They think it’s a weapon, Ellen. Something worse than a nuclear bomb.” br />
Ellen recalls Philip’s six months before waking. The bruises. The bones. How he’ll never look the same as he used to.
“What could be worse than a nuclear bomb?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure there was a time when people asked the same question about guns.”
A pause. A beat between them.
“Is that what hurt him? Whatever he found?”
“It must be.”
“What did he tell the government?”
“They think he’s hiding something. They think he’s very good at saying just enough.”
“What would he be hiding?”
“He says he doesn’t remember where it was.”
“The weapon?”
“Yes. He also says he doesn’t know what it does.”
Ellen thinks about this.
“Then how do they know he found it?”
“Because of the way he was hurt. The army doesn’t know of a weapon that could hurt you in exactly that way.”
At the counter, a man in a suit sips from a coffee mug.
“Why are you telling me this, Delores?”
Delores looks as if, had a dish fallen in the diner, she would shatter along with it.
“I’m too afraid to help him, Ellen. You’re not. You’re stronger than I am.”
How meek she looks, Ellen thinks. How scared.
“So what are you going to do? Continue giving him medicine, drugs? Play along?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“How can you do that?”
“I’m not like you, Ellen! And who knows what they found out there. You want it coming . . . for you?”
“What?”
Delores is crying. But Ellen can’t let up.
“And what am I supposed to do about it?” She’s almost shouting. “I’m on the outside now!”
Delores looks over her shoulder, passively telling Ellen to keep her voice down.
“You can put a stop to it.”
“What? How? I don’t even know what the drugs do!”
It’s Delores’s turn to look surprised.
“Ellen,” she says. “Certainly you know why they’re rushing his rehabilitation?”