Heaven Should Fall

not to hold, not to carry, not to save. And so he put a bullet in it, and in doing so joined most of them, and left only one behind.

Chapter 20

Elias

Today is the day I will die. The words scrolled through his mind every morning as he awoke, like the news ticker on CNN, steady and plain. With his arms still tucked beneath his pillow, his face pushed into its foam, he would mull on the thought until he had accepted it. Some days it was easy, especially if the previous patrol shift had gone very well or very badly. A good day meant he was ready to die. A bad day meant he might as well.

He rolled out of bed and followed the smell to the bathroom. Above the urinal was a message scrawled in thick marker: VALOR HONOR DUTY QUIT WHINING, followed by a second message scratched beneath it in ballpoint pen, in shaded block letters to make up for the wimpier medium—FUCK YOU SIR.

Get dressed. First smoke of the day. Three doughnuts and an omelet. And it was time to go on patrol.

* * *

Before he’d deployed, Candy had given him a book of daily devotionals to take with him. Each day had a Bible verse and inspiring story and ended with some kind of affirmation, like “I know that my redeemer lives” or “I dedicate this day to you, Lord.” After a while it got to be too much to lug around, and he gave it away. The skills of being a soldier were straightforward, but the brain game was a paradox. He never prayed for his own safety, because it somehow felt cowardly, but the whole day became a long rosary for every soldier who crossed his path: Protect him today, Lord. And him. And her. And even though he began every day with an affirmation that he would die, he knew that wasn’t the struggle; there were harder things to reconcile. At the end of it all, you die whether or not you’re prepared to. But he still couldn’t bring himself to think upon awakening, Today is the day I’ll kill somebody.

* * *

His patrol shift was set to end at seven. The day had been slow, hot and boring; they had spent the shift driving around the desert in the Cougar—an imposing hulk of a vehicle, solid as a safe at Fort Knox, with Elias in the machine-gun turret at the top. Now the sun was setting behind the western stretch of land not marked by any mountains, and bands of tangerine and gold streaked the sky. Sunkist, Elias thought. The sky looked like the soft-drink can, and the small fireball of a sun completed the image. The suffocating heat was starting to dissipate ever so slightly; the sweat that trickled to his jaw felt cool. This side of the landscape was disorienting to him, so flat and singularly pale, a planet other than his own. He could sense his pupils contract and open again as he looked at it, like they couldn’t figure out what they were seeing or determine whether to gaze close or far. He was tired.

Elias pushed the sweat from one eye with the heel of his hand and scanned the perimeter. All at once—it was unmistakable—he saw the figure of a man disappearing into a ditch. A crumpled sheet of plastic lay on the other side of the road: the hallmark of a hidden IED. Without hesitation he swung the gun into position and fired on the man, rattling out a volley of bullets at the ditch. The staff sergeant shouted his orders to him quickly: “Don’t kill.” He was an insurgent, and the captain wanted him brought in for interrogation. “Shoot near him until the Buffalo gets here to neutralize it. Keep him down, but keep him alive.”

“He’s wounded already,” Elias called back, but the answer was the same.

The man’s dark head appeared at the edge of the ditch, and Elias greeted it with a fresh round of rifle fire. Minutes stretched on in silence. The sun drifted lower; the sky was a Sunkist can no longer. Darkness was falling over the desert like a hand descending. Elias fired again, watching the bullets skim the sand like flat stones across the quarry lake.

An hour passed.

Two.

The desert around him was black as blindness. He watched the man now through night-vision goggles, which cast the landscape in Ghostbusters green. Now and then the radio crackled, promising the Buffalo to relieve them in short order; his stomach growled protests that he ignored. The man kept peeking out at intervals, eyes frantic and forlorn, and each time Elias shot over him again. Beneath the starlit sky he felt all the exposure of a stage. Darkness and isolation caused paranoia to rear up inside him, and as time wore on he began to feel jumpy on the trigger, desperate for resolution. Just kill him, Elias came the voice in his mind. End this thing. Kill him and you can get back in the Cougar. Chill out and wait for dinner.

But that wasn’t the order.

The ghoulish palms and scrub trees rustled in the wind. In the strange glow of the goggles the desert offered up the starlight with a sheen that looked like ice. Fatigue and hunger wore at him, and some irritating corner of his brain, exhausted to the point of delirium, had decided that the desert was the quarry lake in winter. Each time the man ducked back into the ditch it seemed as though he were slipping underwater; strange thoughts invaded Elias’s mind, whispers that didn’t follow logically. You can’t shoot here on private property. He would have drowned by now anyway. And then the man’s eyes would glow deerlike above the ridge again and Elias would barrage the sand in reply. Because it was sand, he reminded himself. Even at home, the lake wasn’t there anymore. The county had drained it when the Vogel girl went under. He thought back to the sight of the girl skating on wobbly ankles across the open ice, her arms out at a low angle for balance. To the way his sister’s eyes had followed her all afternoon in the manner one watches a kitchen fly, calculating where it will land.

From the ditch he heard a few broken phrases, weakly shouted. None of it was intelligible. Most likely the man had looked up at the stars, considered his wounds and his odds, and decided to talk, but they couldn’t be sure. They couldn’t leave the vehicle until the ordnance was disposed of, and they couldn’t give the enemy the chance to get away. A hand clawed at the ground above the ditch, then vanished at the clatter of the rifle.

Why didn’t you help her? he had asked Candy late that evening, once it was all over. Only in his mind had he asked the real question: How could you just stand there and do nothing when you know somebody’s dying?

I did, she had replied. I called for help.

The third hour turned over, and at last the Buffalo rumbled into sight. “Good job, soldier,” the staff sergeant said to him as he ambled down the turret and collapsed onto the bench. Somebody handed him a Red Bull, and it kept him awake long enough to get back to the barracks.

The air conditioners greeted him with a blast of wet cool air and all their incessant grinding. He squirted some peanut butter onto a packet of crackers from field rations, smoked his last cigarette of the day and stripped down to his undershirt and boxers. At the urinal he recycled his Red Bull—VALOR HONOR DUTY QUIT WHINING— before falling into his bunk and pressing his face into his pillow. He was still alive.

With his sleep came his dreams. He dreamed of kneeling on the rifle range with his father beside him as he shot and missed, shot and missed. Everybody was watching. With each shot the helplessness doubled in his belly and doubled again, infused every moment with the dread of the inevitable. He dreamed of the man’s dry hand against his skull, pounding his forehead against the stump—not of the pain so much as the humiliation of his sister watching it all and knowing her brother had failed, feeling pity for him. He dreamed of her curling up behind him, offering him her love as he feigned sleep to ease the embarrassment of accepting it.

And when he awoke the next morning, the dream dissolving with the light, he understood the man in the ditch had felt just as he had—helpless, desperate, abandoned—but no, a hundred times worse, and without the glimmer of love to comfort him at the end of what he had endured. Elias pushed this away and forced a new thought, a dependable thought: Today is the day I will die. And it was easy to accept that morning, because he knew, in a small way, he already had.