Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [16]
I have a friend, a Russian man. He told me about his mandatory stint in the Soviet army. He said, “Every single day was absolute shit. I was beaten and abused. I froze my feet, my ears, my balls off. And yet when I remember it now, it was the best time of my life. Because I was young and I was overcoming obstacles. When you are young and you live through an unbelievably hard time, you remember it later as the best time of your life.”
And that was part of it, too. I dreamed about dead children and bullets on mountain passes. But then I was already nostalgic, for Afghanistan and for myself in Afghanistan, for the rush of sights and feelings, the crystal cut of every moment, sun so sharp it sliced newer, flatter surfaces. Now I was shipwrecked in the trappings of home, car, job, and country.
It was a strange time to come home. From television screens and podiums, politicians urged America to be frightened, and the people nodded and agreed to be afraid. Mortality predictors glittered on the television networks, meters striped in the colors of the rainbow—red for severe, orange for high; angry, flashing hues. Never blue for guarded or green for low. Terrorism had become the most important question—everybody thought so, all at once. I read that terrorism had inspired Americans to appreciate their families; to report suspicious behavior; to eat macaroni and cheese for comfort. People had begun to imagine the country as a place waiting to get hit, defined by impending violence. And yet there was the war. We were warriors abroad and victims at home, and it didn’t add up to anything coherent.
It was January when I unlocked the door and cracked into the museum vault of my Houston duplex. I could barely shove the door open against the landslide of mail, months’ worth of defaulted bills and defunct magazines and slick department store circulars, all the yellowing Houston Chronicles and New York Timeses that had come until the subscriptions petered out, shoved through the slot and drifted against the door like blown snow. The answering machine was littered with September 11 messages, the voices still wet with emotion that had since dried out, like fossils from another time. I wanted to tell you we’re all right. I wanted to tell you I love you. Where are you?
The country moved forward around me. The Enron story was breaking in Houston and I couldn’t muster any interest. This is a great story, reporter friends said, you’ve got to get a piece of it. I shrugged.
My neighbor, Duc, had moved to Houston from Brooklyn. Until September 11 we had never had a serious conversation. We cut up, watched The Simpsons, drove down to Galveston with raw chicken and string to catch crabs.
Then it was January and we were sitting in a cluttered bar and Duc had just come back from visiting New York. We were talking about the war and how Osama bin Laden was nowhere to be found, and then everything got tense. Nobody wants to talk about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, I said. That’s because who really cares, Duc said. You don’t mean that. Yes I do. They can’t kill that many of our people and get no reaction. But a lot of the people getting killed in this war didn’t kill our people; there’s a difference between Afghan civilians and Al Qaeda, don’t you understand that? I don’t care, he said. And his eyes flicked and I thought I saw tears buried down behind them. I went to New York. I saw the firehouses. Whatever happens to those people, they deserve it. And I sat there thinking that the country was in bad shape, really, if sardonic Duc had turned so dead serious. We sat there, each cradling our own ugly memories and resenting the other’s, suddenly nothing to say. I swallowed at my beer, resentment growing in my throat, the jukebox wailing. But this was America now, America at this moment, altered. The emotions were not the same. You behaved one way if you were attacked, and a different