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THE HUMAN RESPONSE

“FIFTEEN MILLION,” ALBERT IS saying as Billy and Mango resume their seats. “Fifteen cash against fifteen percent of gross, a star can do that when they’re running hot. And Hilary’s running very hot these days. Her agent won’t let her read without a guarantee.”

“Read what?” Sykes asks. Albert’s eyes slowly track that way, followed by his head.

“The script, Kenneth.”

“But I thought you said we don’t have a script.”

“We don’t, but we’ve got a treatment and we’ve got a writer. And now that Hilary’s interested, we can slant it in a way that really speaks to her.”

“I love it when he talks like that,” says Dime.

“Look, the script’s not the problem, just telling your story’s gonna make a compelling script. The hard part’s getting the damn thing in her hands.”

“You said you know her,” Crack points out.

“Hell yes I know her! We got bombed off our ass a couple of months ago at Jane Fonda’s house! But this is business, guys, everything she reads has to go through her agent, and he won’t let her so much as touch a script unless it comes with a firm offer from a studio. That way she knows if she says yes, the studio’s on the hook. She can’t get turned down.”

“Uh, so, do we have a studio?” Crack asks. He knows he should know this, but everything about the deal seems so abstract.

“Robert, we do not. There’s tons of interest out there, but nobody wants to commit until a star commits.”

“But Swank won’t commit until they do.”

Albert smiles. “Precisely.” The Bravos emit an appreciative ahh-hhh. The paradox is so perfect, so completely circular in the modern way, that everyone can identify.

“That’s kind of fucked,” says Crack.

“It is,” Albert agrees. “It’s totally fucked.”

“So how do you make it happen?” asks A-bort.

“By making it inevitable. By making it a goddamn force of nature. By scaring these guys so bad that somebody else is gonna buy it that they have to commit or their heads’ll explode.”

“People,” Dime announces, “I think I just figured out what Albert does.”

Billy and Mango are sitting at the end of the row, then it’s Crack, Albert, Dime, Day, A-bort, Sykes, and Lodis, then an empty seat for Major Mac. Billy has noticed that Albert is never far from Dime. Not that Bravo needed proof of how special their sergeant is, but it arrived anyway in the form of Albert and his instant fascination with the Bravo leader. Billy has decided that Albert is gay for Dime, in a nonsexual sense. Dime interests him, Dime the person and Dime the soldier, the entire phenomenon of Dime-ness loosed upon a square and unsuspecting world. In the pantheon of Albert’s attentions, Dime comes first and Holliday a distant second, and even that seems more of a proximate sort of interest, conditional, complementary, a function of Day’s black yin yoked to Dime’s honky yang. Day deigns not to notice his secondary status, like now, for instance, as Albert and Dime huddle in intense conversation while Day perches on his seat back surveying the field like an African king high on his throne, looking down on all his little subject bitches. And as for the rest of Bravo, they might as well be so many shares of corporate stock that happen to talk and walk and drink a lot of beer. “Dime the property,” as Day muttered to Billy last night, in a rare drunken moment of resentful candor. “The rest a you just the produck.”

Which made Shroom what? Shroom and Lake, were they produck too? Bravo’s talk these days is so much about money, moneymoneymoney like a bug on the brain or a hamster spinning his squeaky wheel, a conversation going nowhere at tremendous speed. Billy would just as soon move on to other subjects, but he won’t call his fellow Bravos on it. The way they obsess, it’s as if a big payday involved more than mere buying power, as if x amount of dollars cooling in the bank could bring your ass safely through the war. He intuits the spiritual logic of it, but for him the equation works in reverse: The day the money comes through, the actual day his check clears, that will be the very day he gets smoked.

So he attunes to the movie talk with pronounced conflictedness. Bravo peppers Albert with questions. What about Clooney? What’s going on with Oliver Stone? How about the guy who said he could get Robert Downey Jr.? Then the distinguished-looking gentleman seated behind Albert leans over and asks if he’s in the movie business.

Albert freezes, head cocked to the side as if he’s heard the call of some rare and wonderful bird. “Why, yes.” he answers sweetly. “Yes I am in the film industry.”

“Director? Writer?”

“Producer,” Albert allows.

“L.A.?”

“L.A.,” Albert confirms.

“Listen,” says the man, “I’m a lawyer. I do white-collar criminal defense and I’ve got a great idea for a legal thriller—type script. Care to hear it?”

Albert says he’d be delighted, as long as the lawyer can describe it in twenty seconds or less. Meanwhile a couple of dozen Cowboys players have taken the field and begin warming up. This isn’t the real warm-up, explains Crack, who played a year of college ball at Southeast Alabama State, but the pre-warm-up warm-up for the guys who need some extra loosening up. Billy’s attention is soon drawn to the Cowboys punter, a slope-shouldered, moon-faced, paunchy fellow with hardly any hair, the kind of guy you’d normally find behind your supermarket meat counter, except this guy can kick a football to oblivion and back. Foom, the soggy thump of each kick resounds in Billy’s gut as the ball rockets off on a steep trajectory, up, up, onward and upward still, your eye falters at the spot where the ball should level off and yet it climbs higher still as if some unseen booster charge has fired and straight for the bottomless dome it goes. Billy tries to mark the absolute highest point, that instant of neutral buoyancy where the ball hangs or dangles, actually pauses for a moment as if measuring the fall that even now begins as the nose rolls over with a languid elegance, and there’s an aspect of surrender, of grateful relinquishment as it yields to the gravitational fate. After seven or eight kicks Billy feels a kind of interior vaporization taking place, a dilution or relaxation of self-awareness. He feels calm. Watching the kicker is restful for his mind. The peak moments give him the most intense pleasure, a bristling in his brain like tiny lightning strikes as the ball sniffs eternity’s lower reaches, strokes the soft underbelly of empty-headed bliss for as long as it lingers at the top of its arc. Billy can imagine that’s where Shroom lives now, he is a citizen of the realms of neutral buoyancy. It’s sort of a childish and sentimental thought, but why not, if Shroom has to be somewhere then why not there? Bravo has long since been reduced to bestselling produck, but even the long arm of marketing can’t touch Shroom now.

It’s a Zen thing, watching punts, as absorbing in its way as watching goldfish paddle around an ornamental pond. Billy would happily watch punts for the rest of the afternoon except the fans behind him start pounding his back, crying, Look! Look! Check out the Jumbotron! And there on the screen loom the eight operational Bravos literally bigger than life, plus Albert, who’s smiling like a proud new papa. Small pockets of applause spark off here and there. The Bravos assume postures of masculine nonchalance. Mainly they’re trying not to stare at themselves on the screen, but so pumped with the moment is Sykes that he starts mouthing off and flashing gangsta signs. To a man Bravo tells him to shut the fuck up, but after a moment the screen cuts to a flags-waving, bombs-bursting cartoon graphic against a background of starry outer space, and from within these inky depths enormous white letters suddenly zoom to the fore

AMERICA’S TEAM PROUDLY HONORS AMERICAN HEROES

which disappears, clearing the way for a second wave

THE DALLAS COWBOYS

WELCOME HEROS OF AL-ANSAKAR CANAL!!!!!!!

STAFF SGT. DAVID DIME

STAFF SGT. KELLUM HOLLIDAY

SPC. LODIS BECKWITH

SPC. BRIAN HEBERT

SPC. ROBERT EARL KOCH

SPC. WILLIAM LYNN

SPC. MARCELLINO MONTOYA

SPC. KENNETH SYKES

As if drawing down energy through the stadium’s blowhole, the applause slowly gathers volume and heft. People moving in the aisle stop and turn their way. The fans behind Bravo come to their feet, the prompt for a slow-motion standing ovation that rolls through their section in a gravity-defying backward wave. Soon the Jumbotron cuts to a hyperactive ad for Chevy trucks, but too late, people are already heading Bravo’s way and there is just no help for it and no escape. Billy rises and assumes the stance for such occasions, back straight, weight balanced center-mass, a reserved yet courteous expression on his youthful face. He came to the style more or less by instinct, this tense, stoic vein of male Americanism defined by multiple generations of movie and TV actors, which conveniently furnishes him a way of being without having to think about it too much. You say a few words, you smile occasionally. You let your eyes seem a little tired. You are unfailingly modest and gentle with women, firm of handshake and eye contact with men. Billy knows he looks good doing this. He must, because people totally eat it up, in fact they go a little out of their heads. They do! They mash in close, push and shove, grab at his arms and talk too loud, and sometimes they break wind, so propulsive is their stress. After two solid weeks of public events Billy continues to be amazed at the public response, the raw wavering voices and frenzied speech patterns, the gibberish spilled from the mouths of seemingly well-adjusted citizens. We appreciate, they say, their voices throbbing like a lover’s. Sometimes they come right out and say it, We love you. We are so grateful. We cherish and bless. We pray, hope, honor-respect-love-and-revere and they do, in the act of speaking they experience the mighty words, these verbal arabesques that spark and snap in Billy’s ears like bugs impacting an electric bug zapper

No one spits, no one calls him baby-killer. On the contrary, people could not be more supportive or kindlier disposed, yet Billy finds these encounters weird and frightening all the same. There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year. For these adult, affluent people he is mere petty cash in their personal accounting, yet they lose it when they enter his personal space. They tremble. They breathe in fitful, stinky huffs. Their eyes skitz and quiver with the force of the moment, because here, finally, up close and personal, is the war made flesh, an actual point of contact after all the months and years of reading about the war, watching the war on TV, hearing the war flogged and flacked on talk radio. It’s been hard times in America—how did we get this way? So scared all the time, and so shamed at being scared through the long dark nights of worry and dread, days of rumor and doubt, years of drift and slowly ossifying angst. You listened and read and watched and it was just, so, obvious, what had to be done, a mental tic of a mantra that became second nature as the war dragged on. Why don’t they just . . . Send in more troops. Make the troops fight harder. Pile on the armor and go in blazing, full-frontal smackdown and no prisoners. And by the way, shouldn’t the Iraqis be thanking us? Somebody needs to tell them that, would you tell them that, please? Or maybe they’d like their dictator back. Failing that, drop bombs. More and bigger bombs. Show these persons the wrath of God and pound them into compliance, and if that doesn’t work then bring out the nukes and take it all the way down, wipe it clean, reload with fresh hearts and minds, a nuclear slum clearance of the country’s soul.

Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives. Billy knows because here at the contact point he feels the passion every day. Often it’s in their literal touch, a jolt arcing across as they shake hands, a zap of pent-up warrior heat. For so many of them, this is the Moment: His ordeal becomes theirs and vice versa, some sort of mystical transference takes place and it’s just too much for most of them, judging from the way they choke in the clutch. They stammer, gulp, brainfart, and babble, gum up all the things they want to say or never had the words to say them in the first place, so they default to old habits. They want autographs. They want cell phone snaps. They say thank you over and over and with growing fervor, they know they’re being good when they thank the troops and their eyes shimmer with love for themselves and this tangible proof of their goodness. One woman bursts into tears, so shattering is her gratitude. Another asks if we are winning, and Billy says we’re working hard. “You and your brother soldiers are preparing the way,” one man murmurs, and Billy knows better than to ask the way to what. The next man points to, almost touches, Billy’s Silver Star. “That’s some serious hardware you got,” he says gruffly, projecting a flinty, man-of-the-world affection. “Thanks,” Billy says, although that never seems quite the right response. “I read the article in Time,” the man continues, and now he does touch the medal, which seems nearly as lewd as if he’d reached down and stroked Billy’s balls. “Be proud,” the man tells him, “you earned this,” and Billy thinks without rancor, How do you know? Several days ago he was doing local TV and the blithering twit-savant of a TV newsperson just came out and asked: What was it like? Being shot at, shooting back. Killing people, almost getting killed yourself. Having friends and comrades die right before your eyes. Billy coughed up clots of nonsequential mumblings, but as he talked a second line dialed up in his head and a stranger started talking, whispering the truer words that Billy couldn’t speak. It was raw. It was some fucked-up shit. It was the blood and breath of the world’s worst abortion, baby Jesus shat out in squishy little turds.

Billy did not seek the heroic deed, no. The deed came for him, and what he dreads like a cancer in his brain is that the deed will seek him out again. Just about the time he thinks he can’t be polite anymore the last of the well-wishers drift away, and Bravo takes their seats. Then Josh shows up and the first thing he says is, Where’s Major McLaurin?

Dime is casual. “Oh, he said something about needing to take his meds.”

“His meh—” Josh begins, but catches himself. “You guuuuyyyyyzzzzzz.” The very picture of young corporate America on the move, is Josh. He is tall, toned, handsome as a J.Crew model, with a nose straight and fine as a compass needle and a brilliant shock of glossy black hair, the sight of which triggers subliminal itchings in the Bravos’ peach-fuzz scalps. It has already been a matter of some debate as to whether Josh is gay, the consensus being no, he’s just your basic corporate pussy boy. “He’s whatcha call one a those metrosexuals,” Sykes said, whereupon everyone agreed that Sykes was gay just for knowing such a word.

“Well,” Josh says, “I guess he’ll turn up. You guys feel like getting some lunch?”

“We wanna meet the cheerleaders,” says Crack.

“Yeah,” says A-bort, “but we wanna eat too.”

“Okay, hang on.” Josh consults his walkie-talkie. The men exchange WTF looks. The vaunted Cowboys organization seems to be winging it with Bravo, the planning somewhere between half-assed and shit-poor. During a lull in the walkie-talkie confab Billy motions Josh closer, and the ever-alert Josh flexibly squats by his seat. “Advil,” Billy says, “were you able to find me any—”

“Oh shit,” Josh exclaims in a hot whisper, then “Sorry,” in his normal voice, “sorry sorry sorry, I’ll definitely get that for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Still hungover, dude?” Mango asks, and Billy just shakes his head. One night, eight men, and four strip clubs, all to no real purpose except that transactional blow job there at the end, thoughts of which make him want to shoot himself. Like a dental procedure it was, a blunt-force plumbing job, the memory of that girl’s head bobbing in his lap. Bad karma, for sure. Billy has overdrawn his karma account, that running tally of good and evil that Shroom described to him as the expression, the mental crystallization, as it were, of the great cosmic tilt toward ultimate justice. Billy scans the field but the punter is gone. His gaze sweeps the stadium’s upper reaches where the punts topped out, but it’s just air, he needs the concrete marker of the punts’ arc to get that vibe of Shroom hovering on the other side.

Shroom, Shroom, the Mighty Shroom of Doom who foretold his own death on the battlefield. When their deployment was done and he got his leave he was going on an ayahuasca trek to Peru, “going to see the Big Lizard,” as he put it, “unless the hajjis send me first.” Unless. Guess what. And on that day Shroom knew. Wasn’t that the meaning of their last handshake? Shroom turning in his seat just as they hit the shit, Mango already opening up on the .50 cal as Shroom reached back and took Billy’s hand. “I’m going down,” he yelled into the racket, which at the time Billy heard as it’s, “It’s going down,” his ear rounding off the weirdness so the words made sense. Later he’d cycle back to that moment and know it for what it was, the words and Shroom’s eyes with their hint of far remove, like he was looking up at Billy from the bottom of a well.

If Billy thinks about this for more than a couple of seconds a synthesized hum starts up in his head like a tremendous swell of organ music, not the sickly calf bleatings they played at Shroom’s funeral but a thunderous massing of mighty chords, the subsurface rumble of a tidal wave as it rolls unseen through the ocean depths. Spooky as all shit, not that he fights it; the big sound might be God banging around his head or some elaborately coded form of essential truth, or maybe both, or maybe they’re one and the same thing, so put that in your fucking movie, if you can. Were you good friends? asked the reporter from the Ardmore Daily Star. “Yes,” Billy said, “we were good friends.” Do you think, about him a lot? “Yes,” Billy said, “I think about him a lot.” Like, every day. Every hour. No, every couple of minutes. About once every ten seconds, actually. No, it’s more like an imprint on his retina that’s always there, Shroom alive and alert, then dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, his face eternally flipping back and forth. He saw the beebs dragging Shroom into the high grass and thought Oh fuck or maybe just Fuck, that was the extent of Billy’s inner reflections as he scrambled off his belly and made his run. Weirdest thing, though, he retains this sense as he got to his feet of knowing exactly how it was going to turn out, the visualization so intense that it shook loose a kind of double consciousness that lingers to this day. His memory of the battle is mostly a hot red blur, but the premonitory memory is sharp and clear. He wonders if all soldiers who do these radical things get a brief sightline into a very specific future, this telescopic piercing of time and space that instills the motivation to do what they do. The ones who live, maybe. Maybe they all think they see, but the ones who don’t make it, they were wrong. Only the ones who survive are allowed to feel clairvoyant and canny, though it occurs to him now that Shroom, too, saw with equal clarity, just with the opposite result.

Hooah, Shroom. It feels like too many things to have to think about at once, movie deals and interviews and what it means to wear a medal plus that hard-core thing underneath it all, the primal and ultimately unfathomable facts of their engagement on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal. Your mind is not calm. You aren’t sick but you aren’t exactly well. There’s an airy sense of dangling or dangerous incompletion, as if your life has gotten ahead of itself and you need some time to let it back and fill. This feels right, this grasping of the time problem, here is the possible square one on which to build except Josh gives the word, Lunch!, and they rise. Little rockslides of applause tumble across the stands, and Sykes, the butthead, waves to the crowd like it’s all for him. Josh leads them bravely onto the stairs and it’s a long slow slog to the top, trudging upward in column like those poor doomed fucks near the end of Titanic striving against the horrible voids of sea and sky. If you relax even for a second, it will take you, thus a strategy is revealed: Don’t relax. Once they reach the concourse Billy feels better. Josh leads them up a spiral ramp where the wind shears into tight coiling eddies, tossing trash and dust around in little tantrums. A kind of coagulatory effect attends Bravo’s route as people stop, shout out, gape, or grin according to their politics and personality type, and Bravo blows through it all, polite and relentless, an implacable flying wedge of forward motion until the crew of a Spanish-language radio station grabs Mango for an interview, and all that good clean energy goes to hell. People gather. The air turns moist with desire. They want words. They want contact. They want pictures and autographs. Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want. With his back to the railing Billy finds himself engaged by a prosperous-looking couple from Abilene who have their grown son and daughter-in-law in tow. The young people seem embarrassed by their elders’ enthusiasm, not that the old folks give a damn. “I couldn’t stop watching!” the woman exclaims to Billy. “It was just like nina leven, I couldn’t stop watching those planes crash into the towers, I just couldn’t, Bob had to drag me away.” Husband Bob, a tall, stooped gent with mild blue eyes, nods with the calm of a man who’s learned how much slack to give a live-wire wife. “Same with yall, when Fox News started showing that video I just sat right down and didn’t move for hours. I was just so proud, just so”—she flounders in the swamps of self-expression—“proud,” she repeats, “it was like, thank God, justice is finally being done.”

“It was like a movie,” chimes her daughter-in-law, getting into the spirit.

“It was. I had to keep telling myself this is real, these are real American soldiers fighting for our freedom, this is not a movie. Oh God I was just so happy that day, I was relieved more than anything, like we were finally paying them back for nina leven. Now”—she pauses for a much-needed breath—“which one are you?”

Billy politely introduces himself and leaves it at that, and the woman, as if sensing the delicacy of the question, doesn’t press. Instead, she and her daughter-in-law embark on a spoken-word duet of patriotic sentiments, they are 100 percent supporting of Bush the war the troops because defending szszszsz among nations szszszsz owl-kay-duzz szszszsz szszszsz szszszsz, the lady keeps leaning into Billy and tapping his arm, which induces a low-grade somatic trance, thus he’s feeling comfortably numb when the lid of his skull retracts and his brain floats free into the freezing air

PACK YOUR SHIT!

No matter their age or station in life, Billy can’t help but regard his fellow Americans as children. They are bold and proud and certain in the way of clever children blessed with too much self-esteem, and no amount of lecturing will enlighten them as to the state of pure sin toward which war inclines. He pities them, scorns them, loves them, hates them, these children. These boys and girls. These toddlers, these infants. Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.

“Dude, that lady back there,” Crack says when they’re moving again, “the blonde with the little kids? When her husband was taking our picture she was totally grinding her ass up against my rod.”

“Bullshit.”

“No lie! Like instant wood, dude, she was shoving her ass right in there. Five more seconds and I woulda come, I shit you not.”

“He’s lying,” Mango says.

“Swear to God! Then I’m like, hey, give me your e-mail, let’s stay in touch while I’m back in Iraq, and it’s like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Bitch.”

Mango demurs, but Billy thinks it’s probably true—women will do some crazy shit around a uniform. He drops back a couple of paces and checks his cell. Pastor Rick has sent him another Bible text—

Know that the Lord is God!

It is He that made us and we are His.

The guy is relentless, he is a used-car salesman in sheep’s clothing. Billy deletes the text, wondering if it’s bad luck to dis a preacher, even a worthless one. “Aren’t you cold?” a passing woman asks, and Billy smiles and shakes his head, No, ma’am. Truly he’s not, though he doesn’t begrudge the fans their sumptuous fur coats, their puffy parkas, their bear-paw mittens and ninja masks. A lot of men are wearing fur, now there’s fashion for you. Major Mac suddenly falls into step at his side.

“Major McLaurin, sir!”

The major gives him a dopy look. Billy remembers to raise his voice.

“WE WERE WORRIED ABOUT YOU SIR! WE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE YOU’D GONE!”

The major transitions to frown. “Look alive, soldier, I’ve been right here. Get those cobwebs out of your eyes.”

Affirmative and copy that, in the major’s mind he’s been right here and for a grunt that’s all that matters, roger SIR! Billy becomes nervous and awkward, hyper as a setter pup, while the major strides along in brooding contemplation of his shoes. Try, fool, Billy tells himself. Like when’re you gonna get a better shot than this? He needs knowledge that Major Mac might have, knowledge and guidance having to do with death, grief, the fate of the soul, if nothing else he seeks the means for verbalizing such matters without shitting all over their very real power. When people ask does he pray, is he religious or specifically saved or Christian, Billy always says yes, partly because it makes them happy and partly because he feels that’s pretty much the truth, though probably not in the way they’re thinking. What he’d like to say is that he’s lived it, if not the entire breadth and depth of the Christian faith then certainly the central thrust of it. The mystery, the awe, that huge sadness and grief. Oh my people. He felt Shroom’s soul leave his body at the moment of his death, a blinding whoom! like a high-voltage line blowing out, leaving Billy with all circuits fried and a lingering haze like he’d been whacked by a heavyweight who knows how to hit. A kind of concussion, is what it was. Sometimes he thinks his ears are ringing still.

The soul is an actual, tangible thing, Billy knows this now. For two weeks he’s been traveling this great nation of ours in the good-faith belief that sooner or later he’ll meet someone who can explain his experience, or at least break it down and properly frame the issue. There was Pastor Rick, to whom he confided in a moment of weakness, but the pastor turned out to be an egotistical pain in the ass. Dime is too close to it, and anyway Billy needs more of the profile of the stable adult. For a while he thought Albert might be the one, a man of wide experience and impressive education who seems to know so much about so many things and can talk the sun down and up again, but lately Billy despairs. It’s not that Albert lacks compassion—though there is that cool way he looks at you sometimes, like you’re the next bite on his hamburger—but rather the irony with which he views all sides, including his own. Albert is wise to himself, as any man of the world must be, but it’s this ingrown worldliness that limits him in precisely the way that Billy needs him most.

Which leaves Major Mac as the best available candidate, Major Mac the sphinx, the zombie, the rarely speaking and never-taking-a-piss wraith, the guy who seems about 60 percent there about 40 percent of the time. That Major Mac. Thus it’s in a state of extreme frustration that Billy accompanies the senior officer along the concourse. He wants to know what happened that day in Ramallah. Did the major lose men that day? Friends? Did he watch them die? Billy feels a terrible need to connect, heart to heart, man to man, warrior to warrior, he craves that rough and necessary wisdom and yet can barely manage small talk with officers, much less crack the code of the major’s vacancy to access something so personal and real. How is he supposed to break the ice? YO MAJOR, CHECK IT OUT, THEY GOT HEINEKENS ON TAP! He feels his chance slipping away as Josh diverts them down a side corridor to a restricted-access escalator. A pair of beefy, unconfident security men in coats and ties glance at the Bravos’ game credentials and wave them on. “Dude, stairway to heaven!” Sykes cries as the escalator rides them up, yuk-king like he’s the soul of wit. Standing one deferential step below the major, Billy decides it’s hopeless. He lacks the nerve and he lacks the bullshit, plus there’s the major’s disability and the corresponding sense that certain subjects should not be discussed at roadhouse volume. Death, grief, the fate of the soul, these beg congress in tones of sober thoughtfulness, you can’t scream back and forth about such matters and hope to get anywhere.

So he says nothing, not that the major notices. They step off the escalator onto something called the “Blue Star Level,” and Josh leads them to an elevator marked RESTRICTED—STADIUM CLUB ONLY. He swipes a card through the little access gizmo and everyone boards. Two well-dressed couples join them for the ride up, they are old enough to be any Bravo’s parents but money shaves off a good ten years. No one acknowledges anyone else. The doors close, concentrating the women’s perfume, a shrill citral musk like lemon trees in heat. The elevator has just clunked into gear when necessity rumbles Billy’s bowels, precursing a monstrous anal belch. He clenches with all his might and hangs on. An almost imperceptible tremor runs through the Bravos; several more are stiffening, shifting their feet, opening and closing their fists. Oh God, please God, not here, not now. They grit their teeth and stare straight ahead. What is it about close confines that so reliably excites the fighting man’s lower GI tract?

Dime speaks with the steel of a man born to lead. “Gentlemen.” He pauses. “Do not even think about it.”