Читать книгу Where War Ends - Tom Voss - Страница 20

8

CIGARETTES

Kimmy arrived at my apartment building after the ambulance left but before I’d finished my last cigarette. My hands were covered in blood. They shook as I took a final drag and flicked the butt into the street, where my friend Connor had been lying moments before. Kimmy stood in the light cast by the streetlamp. She wanted to take me to the hospital, but I just wanted the pack of cigarettes she’d brought me. I was drunk. Connor was drunk. Connor’s blood shone on the wet pavement. It speckled the sidewalk like abstract art, the droplets and splotches expanding until they pooled into a dark puddle in the middle of the street. That’s where Connor had been lying when we tied a T-shirt around his arm as a tourniquet and the wails of the ambulance grew closer. I’d stood over him, watching him flop around on the ground like a fish out of water.

I’d been sitting next to Connor’s girlfriend on the couch upstairs. We were at a party at my friend’s apartment. I don’t remember what we were talking about. We were drinking Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7. The whiskey was harsh going down, oak and cheap charcoal. Had Connor cheated on her, or had she cheated on him? I couldn’t remember. Was she prone to locking herself in the bathroom and threatening suicide if he left her? I think so. It was that kind of relationship.

Connor had been one of my best friends since freshman year in high school. Our core group eventually included Kimmy and her best friends, too. When I was in Iraq and had the rare chance to Skype with Kimmy, she’d usually be hanging out with Connor and our mutual friends. Because of the time difference, I’d mostly call when they were up late partying. It was Connor I’d see standing behind Kimmy on the screen. He’d be taking shots of Jägermeister and prancing around in someone else’s super short denim cutoffs, letting his balls hang out the bottom for a laugh. It was Connor and Kimmy who’d squeal together drunkenly as our friends pulled them away from the computer screen, away from me, to go out to some bar. They’d say goodbye to me, shouting in the general direction of Kimmy’s computer, distracted by whatever the night held in store. I’d sit in a tent on the other side of the world and log off the computer, as alone as I’d ever felt, the sound of their laughter ringing in my ears. Somehow, I felt just as left out now, back home at a party, as I did in those moments when I was far away.

Kimmy hadn’t been returning my calls lately. It was hit or miss. When I got back from Iraq, she tried hard to make it work. She’d call and ask me to go for a walk. I’d say yes, then never show. Or I’d “forget” that I’d made plans with her and go out with my friends instead. She’d cry. We’d talk. We’d try again. But I couldn’t seem to hear her cries the way I had before. I tuned them out to go to war, and I couldn’t figure out how to tune in to them again. When she cried, the most I could do was want to feel something. But I just sat there, watching her hurt, feeling nothing. Then I’d ghost her again. And of course, as soon as she found the strength to give up on me, I wanted her back. I think things were over between her and the marine. But that didn’t seem to matter. I was pretty sure she was gone for good this time.

The face in front of me on the couch grew blurrier, softer. Connor’s girl. Should I tell her that the doctors at the VA had diagnosed me with PTSD? At my last appointment, there’d been a checklist on a table. I had to check some boxes on a piece of paper. Then, quite suddenly, I had PTSD. The diagnosis was supposed to explain everything. But it didn’t. Not even my best friends, not even Connor, could understand what the PTSD diagnosis meant to me. I mean, he’d get it conceptually. He knew I was a different person than I’d been before the war. We could talk about flashbacks and panic attacks. But how could I make him understand what it was to finally be given an answer — the answer — that didn’t even begin to answer my questions?

And where was Connor, anyway?

CRASH!

It sounded like a window shattering. All eight of us froze. Then a mad dash for the door and eight pairs of feet clomping down the two-story stairwell and scrambling into the street past shattered glass. Connor was lying in the middle of the road in a pool of his own blood. He moaned in pain like an animal.

“What happened?!”

He went to push the door open, he said. But the door he pushed was a pull. Later I’d think he must’ve been mad about something and punched through one of the glass panes in the heavy wooden door at the front of the apartment building. I’d think he was jealous because I was talking to his girlfriend on the couch. I’d think it was one more thing that was all my fault.

By the time he got to the hospital, Connor had lost so much blood that they couldn’t give him painkillers or morphine or anything. He’d severed his bicep and nicked the artery that ran through his armpit. He’d need hundreds of stitches inside his arm, inside his body, and outside, too.

I texted Kimmy, my hands covered in his blood.

Connor’s fucked. Have 2 go 2 hospital. Pick me up a pack of cigarettes?

It was the middle of the night. She got there in minutes. She even brought the cigarettes just as I was finishing the last one from my pack. Her car idled in the street as she waited to take me to Columbia St. Mary’s to see our bleeding friend.

I took the fresh pack of cigarettes from Kimmy. I tried to light another smoke, but the lighter kept slipping through my fingers. I sat down on the curb with my feet in the wet street. I finally managed to produce a flame and inhaled sharply. Kimmy stood there, waiting for me. Always waiting.

Milwaukee may as well have been Mosul. Wherever I looked, no matter where I was, someone was dying in the street. The blood followed me across the world. I couldn’t get it off my hands. I said nothing. I felt nothing. I thought nothing, except for the one thought that kept rattling around inside my head. I didn’t think about Connor and the months and months of recovery he had ahead of him. I didn’t think about Kimmy rushing to my side at a moment’s notice, when I needed her most. It didn’t occur to me that even though she’d ended things, she still loved me. What occurred to me that night, on the dark street wet with blood, was that Kimmy had brought me the wrong brand of cigarettes.