Free Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery Page B

candor.”
    “I have no opinion.”
    “You must feel something.”
    “I do not, sir.” She was lying. She felt everything.
    “…”
    “…”
    “Well done,” the field commander said. “Whether it’s true affects nothing.” A delusion, she could see it in the twitching of an eyelid. “You have shown yourself to be an exemplary soldier, Sergeant. There will almost certainly be a promotion for you when this is over.” Another delusion. This one she saw, too, in a movement in his throat, the way he could not look at her when he said it.
    She told herself she should not ask, should not push, but could not help herself. “When what is over, sir?” she said.
    The field commander’s lip began to quiver again, for a moment, and she saw that the war had taken it all from him, all that he was before it began. Hollowed him out and beaten him into a mimicry of its own shape, until he could not imagine living without it. Could not fathom a place where no bombs fell, where bridges were built over water unchoked with metal and corpses. Where no smoke hung over cities and fires were for warmth and food. It had all left him. The war had seen to that, and it would never let him go. He would walk around its tautology—we fight because we fight—for the rest of his days.
    “The operation, of course,” he said. “What did you think I meant?”
    “Nothing,” she said.
    There had been times, she thought, when the war had come for her, too, commanding her to submit. Give herself to it. A hot finger running along her cheek. In Baltimore, when she saw what her fellow soldiers had done. Again, in a long fight with a sniper nested in a boarded-up gas station in Wilmington. She lost four people. The sniper was eight years old. Then in Harrisburg, over a simple thing: a man standing in the street in a tattered coat, crying. Kneeling and hugging himself, shaking with sobs. The war spoke to her then. Do not ask how he came to this place, or how you got here, either. Do not ask. But she remembered anyway, remembered being in a kitchen when the war began. An iron pan on a woodstove. Potatoes in hot bacon fat. Half an onion, facedown and browning at the edge. Cooking for her father, who was upstairs, bedridden with pneumonia. He would die within the month, leave her alone in the empty house. The crops she did not know how to keep, eaten by animals. She would enlist a few months later. But four years before that, she was on a plaid blanket in a field of milkweed, naked but for her shoes. Her boyfriend next to her, dozing in the sun. His arm flung over his face. His car in the gravel by the side of the road, on its second-to-last tank of gasoline. A mosquito biting her ankle. She wanted them never to leave that field, the blanket, told him that. Told him, too, about the children they could have, the little wonders. She could not wait. Two months later, he left her, because it was too much for him, too much at once and it scared him. But she kept that memory close now, because the war could not get to her in that place. When the fighting was over, she thought, she would find him and thank him for rescuing her. Tell him it was all right. Then she would leave him alone and go, wherever she wanted. Thus could her history save her, and all of us, from annihilation.
    I found her fifty-five miles south of here, sick and limping from a bad ankle. Helped her prop it up on a broken chair. Placed a cold rag on her head to ease her fever while another man held her head, spoke to her in a voice unafraid of how much he cared for her. The next day, while it rained outside, enough to drown the world, she told me everything, everything she knew. I’m not sorry I didn’t give up. I know it has to get better. I just wish I had children to see it for me.
    She left the field commander’s office. Outside, four soldiers were waiting for their audience. One was wearing only one boot, joshing with the others. Trying to get a rise out of them. The uniform of