Heaven Should Fall

counting down the hours from the minute I got there. Fielder was in, too, but everybody knew my brother was coming back from the war, and for once he kept his mouth shut so as not to sound like a jackass. At three o’clock sharp I left to pick up Jill and rush over to the airport, then as soon as we got Elias settled in I took Jill back to her dorm and he and I went out to get cheesesteaks. That was his singular focus: it was as if he’d spent three years in the Middle East mainly missing that specific food product. Other than the cheesesteak talk, he was pretty quiet. Unnaturally quiet. Elias was one who, in his ordinary life, would talk until your ears fell off. You had to get him started first, but if you said to him, say, “Elias, tell us again about that time in high school when you tripped and fell on your face on the track while the cheerleaders were practicing,” he’d stretch out the story to twenty or thirty minutes even if he knew you’d already heard it a dozen times. But today he couldn’t be provoked by that kind of stuff. He just wanted the cheesesteak.

So I filled the silence by talking about myself instead. After dinner I told him there was a place I wanted to show him. I drove west on the parkway until the hospital appeared above the trees. Took that exit, then the one onto a road that seemed to go nowhere, then an access road. With every turn we climbed higher up the hill. At the top was this gigantic blue water tower shaped like an upside-down teardrop. The sun was setting and the clouds were blazing pink, like radioactive cotton candy or a scene from Fantasia. Under the tower was a parking lot made out of rough construction sand, no painted lines. Nobody ever parked there except maintenance workers, but damn, was there ever a view. I got out, and Elias slammed his door at the same time I did.

We walked to the crest of the hill, that blue bulb looming above our heads. Electrical cables looped up and then down the hill, past some sort of concrete-block structure surrounded by razor wire, an electrical substation probably. But past that, way down in the distance where the land was low, there was D.C. Staggered roofs, a thousand lights—ten thousand—glowing like fireflies, double headlights cutting through the dusk. The memorials, white marble all lit up, made a compass rose: the Lincoln Memorial a cube, the one for Jefferson curved like a lens and farthest away, the needle of the Washington Monument pointing at the sky.

“Goddamn,” said Elias. “Terrorists’ wet dream, this little crow’s nest here. Can’t believe they don’t have it secured.”

“Nothing you can do from here.”

“You can look.” Elias took a few steps closer, then stopped and crossed his arms. A siren blazed down the parkway; the sound, from where we stood, was lonesome.

“That’s my city,” I told him. “Someday, man, that’s gonna be my fuckin’ chessboard. Not a room I can’t get into or a rope I can’t get past.”

“You planning on getting elected king?”

I laughed. “No, I’m gonna be like Ted Kennedy. Not right away. Not even real soon. But eventually, over time.” I pointed toward the Jefferson Memorial. “That’s where I proposed to Jill.”

Elias nodded. He slid a box of cigarettes from his pocket and clenched one at the side of his mouth, then asked, “You want one?”

I hesitated. Sophomore year I’d worked late nights on a contentious campaign for state delegate. That season, I’d picked up the habit from the other staffers. I told myself I’d quit as soon as the election was over, and I did. But goddamn—was it ever a murderous struggle. I didn’t have the money to support the addiction—that was the bottom line. Otherwise I would have kept it up forever. It gives you something mindless to do when you’re sitting around waiting for things to happen, and there’s a lot of that in politics. It helps you focus and relax at the same time. In no time flat I had gone from being a nonsmoker to the guy who rolled out of bed and lit up before he peed. I’d stayed away from the stuff ever since I quit, because it was so hard the first time I figured I couldn’t quit twice. But this was Elias. That’s the other thing smoking does—it helps people bond.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

He handed me a Marlboro and his lighter. As soon as I lit up, the pleasure of it was visceral. Tasting the smoke in my mouth was like sex after months of jacking off. Sex with the wrong person. Right away I knew this had been a bad idea.

Elias exhaled through his nose like an angry bull. “Mind if we sit down?”

We sat on the bristly grass on the curve that overlooked the city. For a few minutes neither of us said a word. I asked, “So how was Afghanistan?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“’Course I do. Not like you ever wrote.”

He shrugged. “It sucks. It’s hot. Sand shits up everything you brought with you inside of a month. And the people. It’s still the Stone Age over there. Trying to fix anything’s like pissing in the wind.”

“So what do you think about how the president’s allocating troops? Do you think he should have gone with Congress’s recommendation instead?”

Elias gave a slow shake of his head. “Man, politics is your bag, not mine. I don’t give two shits.”

“How can you not care? It was your job.”

He shook his head again. I rested my arms against my knees and looked toward the city. From the roof of a building near the Washington Monument, a flag flapped like crazy in the wind. The dark and the distance obscured the details, the stripes and the stars, the color. It had to be American from the soil it was on, but in the dark you’d never know.

I tried to change the subject to get him talking again. “What did you think of Jill?”

“She’s cute.” He paused and looked out over the city. “I’d do her.”

I grinned. “Yeah, she’s cool.”

“How long have you been with her?”

“About a year. She was friends with somebody Stan was dating, so they introduced us.”

“White chick?”

I snickered. “Of course. As soon as I started seeing her I deleted all my booty-call numbers from my phone, changed around my work hours to spend more time with her, you name it. It was crazy. I was eat-sleep-and- breathing her.”

“You felt the same way about Piper.”

I crushed out the smoke against the earth. “Not even close. Anyway, Piper’s long gone. And I was in high school then. That doesn’t count.”

Elias gave a scornful laugh, exhaling hard, clouding the air between us. “Man, don’t ever say it didn’t count. Don’t fucking insinuate it wasn’t worth your while. I’m not sure which one of us would get a bullet in the head over that one.”

“All right, all right. Sorry.”

The silence pulled tight. Elias said, “I’m just messing with you.”

“I know,” I said. But it sounded unconvincing. “Hey, want to get a beer?”

Elias laughed again. “Man, I don’t want to get a beer. I want to get hammered.”

“All right, then.” I held out my fist, and Elias bumped it. “This one’s on me.”

* * *

The next morning I drove Elias to the bus depot. I felt hungover as all hell. Elias, though, had put back twice as many and still looked okay. He had changed back into a tight brown T-shirt and fatigue pants that tucked into his boots. With him slouched in the seat, one foot resting on the opposite knee, it was more obvious than ever: dude was ripped. In my mind my brother was still the fat kid, the one everyone teased about his jelly-belly gut and man boobs, but now I felt out of shape next to him. He must have done nothing in the desert except lift weights.

When we pulled into the drop-off lane, Elias didn’t get out right away. He just tapped a finger against the window frame and stared at the low concrete building.

“Tell Mom and Dad I said hi,” I said to him. When he didn’t respond, I added, “And take it easy, all right?”

He grunted. After another few beats of silence, he said, “Bus isn’t here yet.”

“It doesn’t leave for twenty minutes. People say they usually run pretty tight. I’m sure it’ll get here in time. If it doesn’t, give me a buzz and I’ll come get you.”