BRIAN

Sometimes the biggest challenge of the day seems to be figuring out what shows to watch. He sinks into the couch and flips through the five hundred channels available to him and shoves Doritos into his mouth until the bag is empty and his camo shirt is dusted over orange. A few months ago, on the Discovery Channel, he happened upon a program about skinwalkers. These were Navajo witches who scrabbled about on all fours while wearing wolf hides. Their eyes burned against their pale faces like red mites pressed into fungus. They chanted backward chants to raise evil spirits and they unearthed graves and they stole hair and skin and fingernails from the dead and ground them into a corpse powder that they blew in your face to give you a ghost sickness.

He had always been fascinated by the supernatural. As a child he used his allowance to buy Tales from the Crypt comic books and he snuck from his father’s bookshelves novels by Stephen King and he asked to spend the night at a neighbor’s house only because he could rent R-rated horror movies. Nights he often spent with his blanket wrapped around him like a cocoon, the breathing hole at his mouth the only part of him exposed.

In eighth grade he dressed up as an ape for Halloween. He had a full-body suit with shaggy black hair and a mouthful of teeth. No one at school knew who he was. He would walk up to girls and stare at them and say nothing and they would press their backs to their lockers and hide behind their friends to give him a wide berth. Some people laughed but with a nervousness that made their laughter come across as forced and wheezy. It was the first time he felt powerful.

He kept the ape suit in his closet and sometimes he would put it on and stare at himself in the mirror and thump his chest—once, twice—while breathing heavily into his mask. He did not know why but it gave him an erection. Normally his father would not return from work until dinnertime, so he felt safe to walk around the house in the ape suit and watch television and do his homework at the kitchen table, but one day his father came home early and because Brian had the television volume up he did not hear the growl of the engine or the crunch of gravel or even the rattle of keys. When his father pushed open the door to the garage with a pizza balanced in one hand, Brian sprang up from the couch. This startled a yell from his father and he dropped the pizza box on the floor—its cardboard mouth burped cheese and pepperoni.

Moths—Pandora moths the size of hands—fluttered in from outside while his father leaned against the open door and observed Brian with hooded eyes that revealed his curiosity and disappointment. “What’s wrong with you?” he finally said. The ape suit went in the garbage that night, but Brian hasn’t stopped thinking about it—the way an amputee will never stop thinking about a lost limb—remembering the sense of power that came with it.

Over the past few months he has trapped weasel and pine martens and coyote and beaver and even a wolverine. For all except the beaver, which required an open-cut dissection, he sliced around the hind legs below the hock and sliced up the back of the hind legs to the anus and from there stripped the pelt off the hind legs. He removed the tail bone by slicing from the anus along the bottom side of the tail to its tip and then worked it free from the bone. He pulled the skin delicately off their pink bodies as if pulling a damp nightgown from a woman, pausing at the head, where he had to cut through their ear cartilage and around the eyes and through their lips to slip off the pelt completely.

Then came the fat, the flesh, the gristle—scraping it off—and then washing the pelt with soap and water and patting it off with a towel. He keeps several wooden stretchers in the garage and he centered the pelts on them and pulled them taut and waited a day for them to dry and then turned them and waited another day and then wetted their underside with vegetable oil to keep them pliant and brushed their fur with a dog comb so that they appeared fluffy, shiny.

From the Goodwill he bought a mannequin to use as a frame. He had learned how to sew in the service, but never with leather. The Internet told him everything he did not already know, such as how to keep the holes clean by lightly dampening the stitch groove and polishing the diamond awl blade with a block of beeswax before every punch. With a waxed five-cord linen thread that runs from a thousand-yard spool he used a saddle stitch method, pulling snug so as not to break the thread or rip a stitch.

He made the leggings first—from four gray-furred coyotes—and then puzzled the rest of the pelts together to match his upper body, binding the variant furs and their colors to make a patchwork coat that hung from him loosely and would not tear if he ran and contorted himself oddly when climbing a tree or leaping across a canal.

And now he is nearly done, tying off the final stitch for the helmet or mask—he isn’t sure what to call it—made from the beaver he trapped the other day. He is in the living room—seated on the same lumpy couch and watching the same wood-framed Mitsubishi television as he was when his father surprised him so many years ago. Wheel of Fortune is playing. Pat Sajak is making small talk with a contestant, a man from Kentucky who has a wonderful wife and dreams of one day taking a cruise to Alaska. His hands are deformed. They look like fleshy lobster claws. Another contestant spins the wheel for him.

The sun has set. The curtains are closed. The mannequin stands nearby, draped in the hair suit. Its blue eyes stare into a void and its pink mouth puckers into a dead smile. On television the wheel is spinning, and in the living room Brian is scissoring off a loose thread and knotting its end. The category is Action and the puzzle is three words. Brian sharpens a pair of scissors on a whetstone, then holds his fist inside the furred mask to brace it as he scissors two eye holes and carves open a slit for breathing.

The wheel is rattling its kaleidoscope of pie-wedge colors, glittery numbers. It nearly comes to a stop on bankruptcy but clicks forward another notch to the silvery promise of a thousand dollars. “Touching you naked,” Brian says to the television. And then, more loudly, “It’s touching you naked, you idiots.”

The man closes his eyes and lifts his deformed hands as if in benediction. A moment passes before Brian realizes the man is crossing his fingers. “Thumbing your nose,” the man guesses. Lights flash. Bells ring. The audience claps and Pat Sajak smiles and the man does a little dance and throws back his head and opens his mouth to reveal a black cave of laughter that seems to swallow up the screen when Brian punches the remote and everything goes dark.

Brian stands from the couch and approaches the mannequin. He stares into its blank blue eyes a moment before fitting the mask over its head. He surveys his work as a tailor, tidying a sleeve, brushing his hands across the fur, petting it. A musky smell rises off the suit, somewhere between a groin and a wet dog—a smell that surrounds him, minutes later, when he strips naked and steps into the pants and tightens their belt and then pulls on the jacket and finally the mask. The noise and the heat of his breathing surround him and he experiences that old familiar feeling of power and excitement. An erection throbs to life. It is his first in months.

He walks from the living room down a narrow hallway and into his bedroom. There is a full-length mirror mounted on the closet door and he studies his reflection in it. The only source of light is a 40-watt bulb glowing above him. It has about the same effect as a flashlight, throwing long shadows that squirm all over his body when he moves. He likes the way the mask fits snugly to his face, like armor.

When Brian was young, his father took him to a Noh drama playing at the community college. The music was unlike any he had ever heard: the calm murmur of the bamboo flute backgrounded by the sometimes slow, sometimes manic tapping of the taiko drum. And he remembers, more than anything, the masks the actors wore.

In every Noh drama there are five types of masks—gods, demons, men, women, and the elderly—meant to depict the essential spirit of the character. And these five masks were sold afterward in the lobby. He remembers picking up the demonic mask, with its red skin and bulging white eyes. A thin mustache framed its mouth, trailing to its chin. Horns rose from its forehead. In the way of little boys, he loved it precisely for its ugliness. He begged his father to buy him one as a souvenir, but they were too expensive, so he settled instead for a cassette that featured music from the production.

He still has the tape. Its cover is faded and its sound is bothered by the occasional hiss of static, but it plays. His boom box from high school still sits on his dresser and he inserts the tape into it now and turns up the volume.

The reedy whistle of a flute fills the room, followed by a gunshot chorus of drumbeats. He begins to dance. The hair suit weighs probably thirty pounds and at first he slings his arms and bends his legs with some clumsiness, getting used to this second skin—and then he becomes more comfortable, his motions more fluid. Sweat begins to trail down his back and stomach. Beneath the mask his breath is like a great wind.

As the music plays, as he leaps about his room, there is a kind of darkroom going on inside his skull. Pictures get dipped in briny solutions. At first they are white. Then they darken in places to reveal a naked woman with a paper bag over her head, a pistol growing out of a man’s crotch, a Muslim laying down a prayer rug made of human flesh, a camel burning, a six-fingered hand giving him the finger.

And then he goes to the boom box and hits the stop button and feels trembling all through his body a quiet sense of power. He pulls on a pair of white tube socks and then his combat boots, shined to a black gleam.

“I’m going out,” he yells to the house and pauses a moment in the doorway as if awaiting a reply.

Years ago, they decided to have a reunion, his friends from the war. They came from scattered corners of the state but they arrived in Portland at the precise hour—at 8:00 p.m., at twenty hundred hours—at the Irish bar called the Book of Kells whose vast, dark-wooded interior reminded Brian of the belly of a ship. All three were members of the same unit, and though they had not seen each other for many months, they felt instantly comfortable for the history they shared. Two-handed handshakes gave way to hugs gave way to meaty backslaps. Jim was a round-faced man who worked for the Tigard postal service and kept his head shaved and offered an apologetic laugh at the end of every sentence, while Troy was tall and slight with his receding hairline pulled back into a weak ponytail, with punch-colored pouches under his eyes from the long hours he worked as a manager at Kinko’s. They said, “So how the hell are you?” and “You’re looking good,” when they worked their way through the bodies and the tables and found a snug at the back of the bar. A dim light hung over the table and made their skin and their teeth appear yellow.

A waitress in a black skirt and a white collared shirt asked them if they needed a menu and they told her please and then ordered burgers and a pitcher of Bud Light and when she asked if Carlsberg was all right instead, they said, “Sure, sure,” and then gave Jim—who had suggested they meet here—a hard time for choosing a joint too good to serve Bud for crissakes.

At first Brian joked and laughed along with them, when they mashed through their burgers and popped fries in their mouths and licked ketchup off their fingers, but then the beer began to take hold of his mind and his thoughts dimmed along with the lights and he said less and less, simply nodding along with the conversation, rubbing the depression in his forehead.

Troy spoke constantly and had difficulty sitting still. He had always been a nervous man, but Brian noticed now his fingernails chewed down to blood. “You remember that time,” he said. “You remember? With Big Back?” He told the story of the hotel compound where they were stationed briefly. There was no running water, so to reduce the stink, the Porta-Johns were set outside. This lance corporal—a former high school football star who went by the name of Big Back—was in the john with a Hustler when the compound came under mortar and rocket attack. With the smoke whirling and the air shaking and men running in every direction, he blasted out of the john with his pants around his ankles and his dick still in his hand. “Quite possibly the funniest thing in world history.”

Brian had been looking forward to seeing them—he really had—but watching Troy tell rapid-fire stories with a mouth full of food and listening to Jim chuckle—huh-huh-huh, a kind of heavy breathing—made him feel empty, as if the hole in his forehead had opened and his fluids had drained from it and his body could blow away at any instant, a mere papery husk. He had expected the very opposite; he had expected this meeting to bring him some kind of sustenance, like the rare burger that bled on his plate. These were, after all, the men he showered and shit with, the men he bunked beside, listening to them snore and mumble in their dreams. Together they had stood rigidly in formation and played poker with nudie cards and watched burnt-orange tracer rounds hurry through the night sky like falling stars. “How sick are you, motherfuckers?” a lieutenant had asked them during their second tour. “Sick. We’re sick motherfuckers, sir,” they had said. “We bleed green. Corps to the core.” All had tattooed in black ink the eagle, globe, and anchor across their left shoulder.

When the waitress came by to ask if they wanted a third pitcher, Brian was the last one to say yes.

All his life he has lived in this house—this three-bedroom ranch with the lava-rock chimney and the red cinder driveway—located in Deschutes River Woods, a thickly forested development on the outskirts of town. There are no streetlamps here. Only the stars spiraling above him, the moon staring through the trees like a scarred eye from another world. For a moment Brian stands in his driveway, letting his eyes adjust, before loping off into the trees.

In so many ways he seems to lack some retinal nerve capable of seeing the world as others see it. He knows that most people, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night, would feel some level of fear. He does not. If anything, he feels comforted by the black solitude it offers him. When you have seen what he has, and when you know a world away other people are going to the mall and throwing frisbees in the park and drinking coffee in an outdoor café, you come to accept that everything you have ever known to make sense makes probably no sense.

An owl hoots. The wind hushes it. The moon appears balanced on a high remove of rimrock. The world, awash in its blue light, appears drowned in water. He scuttles through the trees, pawing aside branches, dodging roots, leaping over logs and landing on all fours and continuing a few paces as a hunched figure before righting himself. He feels a dark wind moving through him like a cold bellows.

His boots shoosh through the sandy soil and thud against the pitted basalt, keeping time with his heart as he moves north, orienting himself by the stars and the blue-hued mountains glimpsed between the trees. And the moon, always the moon, following his passage.

At the Book of Kells, in the far corner of his booth, his glass sweated in his hand and he shaved the moisture from it with his thumb. When he lifted the glass and brought it to his lips, it left behind a ring on the table, a damp eye peering up at him through the wood grain. He wondered what it saw, what they saw, as they watched him, tried to include him in their conversation. They asked him if he dreamed about the war and he said, “Some nights.” They asked him if he remembered that time Eugene shoved a paper towel up his ass and lit it on fire and did the Dance of the Burning Asshole. “Yeah,” he said after a big mouthful of beer. “I remember.” They were trying to cheer him up, to make him feel good. But he wasn’t giving them anything back, so after a time they stopped asking, glancing at him now and then with expressions made of equal parts concern and annoyance. He was ruining their night. This was supposed to be the time when they found a common medicine in their stories and their bottomless glasses.

He wondered if the war bothered them at all, if they felt damaged by it. Troy had taken some shrapnel to the leg. Jim had lost the hearing in his right ear. But otherwise, they seemed fine. They seemed like men who taught their dogs to roll over, who read the labels on jars of spaghetti sauce at the grocery store and dug dandelions from their lawns with special tools sold for that purpose. He wondered if they felt comfortable and safe, happy. He wondered if they kept their bathroom cabinets stocked with Zoloft and Trazodone. He wondered if they kept guns hidden throughout their houses—behind the silverware, next to the toothpaste, shoved between the mattress and box spring. He wondered if they ever blunted the memories with a six-pack of Bud, a chaser of Jim Beam. He wondered if they ever woke up in the middle of the night and called their wives Iraqi pigs and tried to strangle them. He wondered if they ever dropped to the ground and covered their heads after mistaking gravel popping beneath tires for machine-gun fire.

“So I pull into the parking lot across from the Foreign Ministry and park next to this tan-colored Iraqi Army truck.” Troy is speaking loudly, gesturing with his hands, his fingertips ragged and clawing the air. “I walk across the street and I hear this blam—ka-blam—so loud I can feel it inside me, in my bones. I turn and see the truck still in the air, flipping forward, with a cloud of smoke and fire surrounding it. And my Humvee is toast—all fiery and snarled up. I was that close—a minute away from seventy virgins and a thousand cheeseburgers, whatever’s waiting for me on the other side. IED rigged by magnets to the underside of the truck right next to me. Doesn’t get any closer than that. Except it does. Check this—I feel this heat, this stinging—and I look down to find a hole in my cammies, a quarter-size hole right through the groin burned by a piece of shrapnel.” He bugs open his eyes. “Holy shit.”

It was a story they had all heard before. Brian wondered if at Kinko’s, maybe in the break room, with his jaw thrust forward and his purple shirt tucked in to his khaki pants and a Sierra Mist clutched in his hand, Troy told the story to his employees. “You’re home now,” Brian wanted to tell him. “Stop pretending to be such a badass.” His mouth opened with a spackle of saliva, but the words would not come.

His face felt warm and his mind felt loose and his bladder felt ready to burst, so he excused himself and went to the bathroom and found a stall and sat down on a toilet because he didn’t have the energy to stand. He sat there long after the piss surged and dribbled from him. He rested his head in his hands and listened to the sinks sizzling and the blow driers roaring and the men talking too loudly to each other at the urinals. The bathroom door pushed open and swung closed with the passage of so many bodies sounding like the slow whapping of chopper blades. “I’m tired,” he said to no one, everyone. There was a throbbing behind his eyes. He closed them for what could have been a minute or could have been an hour.

“I’m tired.” The voice was not his. The voice came from the CSH, from the bed next to him, where a man was cocooned in gauze. He had worked as a combat tracker in Saqlawiyah. A sticky IED had melted away the left half of his face. The bomb had been planted in a roadside drain. There was soap powder in it, so the fire stuck to him, leaving behind what looked like chewed gum splashed with red paint. The doctors called him Two Face. He only lived three days and during that time he never spoke except to whisper, “I’m tired, I’m tired.”

His father had said the same thing. His father, who had been drinking, who had lost his wife to another man, the whistle-blowing, flat-topped gym teacher, Lonnie M. Wise, at the elementary school where she taught. It wasn’t anything Brian’s father had done. She simply fell out of love with him. It was as easy as that. She and Lonnie had moved to Eugene to begin a new life together, leaving Brian and his father to their frozen dinners and humps of rank laundry. Brian was a teenager at the time. One night he woke to the noise of glass breaking and his father yelling. He crawled from his bed and poked his head from his room to see a sliver of yellow light in the hallway. He followed it to the kitchen, where he found his father sitting on the floor, his back against the fridge. He was pinching his nose between his thumb and forefinger, trying to loosen some pain there. The room was cold and when Brian looked to the window above the sink he saw half the glass missing, a sharp-toothed hole made by the beer bottle hurled through it. Outside snow fell and the flakes carried through the window into the kitchen, where they swirled about and made the scene before Brian appear like some sad and shaken snow globe.

“Dad?”

His father’s hand dropped and his eyes—hooded, red-rimmed—regarded Brian.

“Dad? Can I do something for you?”

“No.” His father’s voice, gravelly. “There’s nothing you or anybody can—” Here he attempted to sit up, rolling forward with a groan, and then fell back into his seat at the base of the fridge. And no wonder: the kitchen counter was cluttered with bottles of Coors Light, many with their labels peeled off. When his father shook his head back and forth, he knocked aside some magnets that fell clattering to the floor. He laughed without humor. “Look at your old man,” he said. “Just look at him. And listen.” He wagged a finger at the air before him where Brian did not stand, where snowflakes fell like damp pieces of shredded paper. “Listen to him when he says if you’re not careful you can end up in a place you hadn’t expected. You got choices in life. And you can make the wrong choices that seem like the right choices—you can easily do that—and before you can remedy your error you find yourself . . .” He looked around as if to find the word he sought. He picked up a magnet—a clown with a fistful of balloons—and weighed it in his palm. “You find yourself not living the life you expected to live.”

He fell silent for a long time. He bit his lip, as if to chew back the thing he had said, which he maybe realized was not the thing to say to your son, who was only a boy and still blind to the pain of the world. Perhaps he realized that Brian would forever remember this moment, thinking of it off and on throughout his life, the memory crystallized like a snowflake that wouldn’t melt. Memory was his gift and his disability. He remembered everything. He even remembered his dreams so that they blended together lucidly with his waking life. And this moment in particular he remembered because his father had always seemed such an optimist, always smiling, whistling, saying, Look on the bright side. That he carried such sad thoughts inside him haunted Brian and helped him understood the difference between the surface and the core of things, the truth of things. So that when years later, when his father shyly inquired whether Brian might want to come work for him, when Brian said he was thinking about college instead, and his father responded, “I’ll be happy either way. I’ll be happy so long as you’re happy,” Brian recognized this as a lie. If he chose to buckle himself into the white pickup truck and peer into locks and sharpen his tools on doorsteps across Deschutes County—if he chose that life—his father could mend that broken kitchen window, could erase those words uttered from the base of the fridge. His life would be something worth pursuing and those choices he worried over so long ago, those wrong choices would have seemed like the right ones again. Brian understood this and offered up his own lie in response to his father’s, saying he would, he would, in fact he had always planned on working for Pop-a-Lock, but first he wanted adventure, he wanted to learn, so he planned to sign up with ROTC. They would pay for his college tuition and he would give the Marines four years and then he would return to Bend, to his father. He never intended to keep the promise. At the time, whenever he went to McDonald’s for a burger or whenever he saw a garbage truck rumble by on the street, he experienced a horrible kind of empathy, where he imagined his life as theirs—hunched over a grill and flipping patties and smelling like their grease or hanging from the back of a truck that chewed up waste and leaked chicken blood and sour milk, nothing to come home to except a wide-bottomed wife and three squalling children. In Bend, this was the trap that awaited him, no matter what his career. So he pushed it aside and signed the paperwork, never guessing that the towers would fall and in that fiery instant what had seemed like the right choice turned horribly wrong as it left him at this juncture of life, in this bar in Portland, among these men who reminded him of everything he wanted to forget, with a punctured skull and a scabbed brain that could not process friendship or love or any human desire except for want and not-want.

And there was his father again, sprawled out on the kitchen floor with snow drifting in the window, dusting the floor, swirling around the overhead light so that it looked like one of Van Gogh’s stars. “Just go to bed, Brian,” he was saying. “We should both go to bed. I’m very tired.” He again struggled to rise and Brian held out his hands and his father took them and squeezed them, massaged their knuckles, and said, “Don’t pay any attention to your old man. I’m drunk. You can see me, but I’m not here.”

When Brian looked at their faces, he knew this was what they thought: We can see you but you’re not here. You’re not Brian. And in a way they were right.

Troy said, “Feeling okay?”

“Fine. Tired is all.”

They sat in silence for a time, bringing their glasses to their mouths, chewing on the few cold French fries that remained on their plates. Then Troy launched into a story about how after he came home from “the theater”—that’s what he kept calling the war, the theater—he had taken to wearing his uniform. “You guys ever do that? Just put it on to remember the feel of it, the smell of it? Fill up your ruck with stones and march around your backyard and snap off salutes to a tree?” He smiled, embarrassed at what he had said. His eyes concentrated on the yellow depths of his beer, where the bubbles came from, rising up to escape the glass, as thoughts rose up his throat to escape his mouth. “Anyway. I wore it to the grocery store one time. There’s a charge you get, you know? A certain power.” His words were dank and soft, blurring together. “When you’re walking around and everybody’s smiling at you and looking at you with, like, you know, a kind of awe? It’s like you’re somebody, not just anybody. So I’m at the Safeway and this little old man comes up to me and shakes my hand and says, ‘I’m proud of you.’ That was a good feeling.” He gnawed at his thumbnail, clipping it with little bites of his teeth. A line of blood ran from it and he licked it away and then wrapped the thumb in a paper napkin.

Troy was proud of himself, of what he had done over there, whereas Brian felt nothing—not pride and not resentment—only a certain blankness, like the space on a chalkboard run over by an eraser, the words ghostly visible beneath a scrim of white. He took the pitcher and poured another pint. He had to concentrate to keep his aim steady, to keep the beer from overflowing.

Jim and Troy started in on a story about this marine they knew who guarded the U.S. embassy and who went dogshit crazy and drove his car off the edge of the Grand Canyon. “The theater,” Troy kept saying. “The theater.” Brian wondered if Troy heard the word on a news program or read about it in a book and thought it sounded important so made an effort to include it in his vocabulary, the theater. The word bothered Brian horribly—yes, the pretentiousness of it—but more so the way it made him think of Iraq as a kind of stage where they all donned costumes and spoke their lines emptily and drove cardboard tanks you could punch a fist through while blank-faced people sat in the audience and yawned and checked their watches, impatient for the performance to end.

If anything, this was the theater—this world he had inhabited since returning. Like an actor he must think about how others perceived him at any given moment, forcing a smile when a customer cracked a joke, pretending interest when asked about the Trail Blazers, feigning remorse when he accidentally backed his truck over a toy poodle. And on an even deeper level—getting up each morning, putting on clothes, swallowing food, fighting the urge to walk into the forest and find a cave to occupy—all of it a contrived facade. People faked a lot of human interactions but he specialized in a more elaborate kind of fakery. He was faking it now, sitting here, grinding his teeth, making every effort to control himself, knowing that he should feel happy, he should wear a smile, he should not slam his hand palm down on the table so heavily that their pint glasses jump and slosh, as he did now when Troy once again uttered the word theater.

Troy put out his hands as if to catch the pint glasses and the napkin fell from his thumb to reveal the raw wound there. “What the fuck, Brian?”

“Stop saying that.” He only recognized the words as belonging to him after they were uttered.

“Saying what?”

“That word. Theater.”

“You’re really not acting like yourself. You’re acting—”

“Stop saying that word.”

“It’s just a word. What’s wrong with it?”

“It makes me want to kill you.”

The noise of the bar fell away and a stare hardened between Jim and Troy, heavy with meaning, before their eyes swung toward him again. “Where you staying tonight?” Jim said. “We’ll call you a cab.”

“I don’t need you to call a cab. I need you to stop pretending you’re war heroes.” And with this being said, the bar vanished and in its place stretched a great desert where the windblown pumice ate at your skin and the heat made your skin peel away and revealed a redness, your interior. The feel of Iraq settled over Brian, the vastness of the desert and the blue sky hanging over it, the hot wind like the breath of a clay oven, the scorpions napping under every stone. It was a place that did not care about him or about any man because in its age it had seen so many die and so many born only to later die.

Right then the waitress appeared next to him with a smile full of teeth. “You guys doing all right here?”

His hand answered her, leaping off the table to grab her by the forearm. “Have you ever heard of Fallujah?”

Immediately her smile fell from her face. Her eyes crinkled up with pain and panic. She tugged against him. “Please let me go.”

“Al Anbar?”

“Please.”

Her arm was so thin and tender. He knew if he squeezed only a little harder—twisted—a damp snap would come. “See?” he said to the table. “She’s got no clue. Nobody knows there’s a war going on. Nobody cares.”

“Let her go.” This was Troy, his voice deep and punishing. He made a manacle of his hand, locking it around Brian’s wrist, the pain sharp where he dug his fingertips into the veins and tendons.

Brian released the waitress and threw all of his weight across the table—concentrated into a fist that connected with Troy—his mouth, his lips bursting against his teeth. Instantly, blood. His mouth appeared terribly lipsticked. He did not scream but the waitress did, a scream that went on and on like a siren and made every face in the bar swivel toward them.

There was a moment—before his knuckles started to throb, before Jim pinned him to the wall, before Troy ripped a handful of napkins from the dispenser and pressed them to his face, before the bartender pulled the phone from beneath the bar and punched 9-1-1—there was a moment when the world seemed to freeze, everything pausing for the barest instant, as if Brian could still turn around and go back to a more peaceful time.

He hadn’t meant to punch Troy. This was not to say he regretted it, only that he hadn’t chosen to strike him. So many of his decisions now seemed instinctual, processed only on the most basic level, as when the bomb had detonated, when he had thrown up his arms to defend his face—and suddenly he found himself on that road again, when the explosion first took hold of the Humvee, lifting it, ripping it open, making him feel surprised, not fearful or angry or anything else, only surprised, with the first sparks of adrenaline racing through him, as if this were a sudden drop in a carnival ride, metal screaming, the sky and the ground confused, something he would laugh about later.

And then the world was back in motion, careening forward, with Troy yelling at him through a mouthful of blood, “You’re wrong in the head.”

He reaches a meadow, a circle of moonlight, and hurries to the far end of the silvery space where the forest resumes. The shadows are waiting for him there—so dark they seem palpable, like cloaks, something he could wrap himself up in. The shadows are where he feels safest. They slide across his body as if licking him, happy for their reunion. It is difficult to see under the trees and now and then he can hear things crashing about in the undergrowth, but he does not feel afraid, only occasionally startled, such as when an owl swoops through a column of moonlight, its wings silent, its face as broad and white as a dinner plate.

He sometimes stomps through Manzanita thickets and sometimes follows game trails—about a foot wide, packed and furrowed dirt—that curve left and right, rarely straight, an always bending corridor that finds the holes in the walls of the forest. Branches claw at him but his suit protects him, a pliant armor. He smashes through a huckleberry thicket and the smell of the plump, late-season berries stays with him, his fur blackened with their blood. The ground occasionally goes soft with sudden patches of mud, the remains of the storm. The mud sticks to his boots and he stops now and then to scrape it off against a log. He can hear the hiss of the river long before he sees it and when he rounds a curve and descends a slope the trees fall away and the moonlight is all around him. The river is the color of mercury. He jogs along its shore until he reaches a fallen tree broad enough to scuttle crabwise over, into the woods again, now closing in on O.B. Riley, her road, her neighborhood, her.

Something is shifting inside him. Since meeting the woman, Karen, he has had what can only be described as feelings. For the first time in a long time he feels like more than a machine of reflex, more than someone who only wants or does not want. In this case there is want, unquestionably, but underlying the want is a certain human tenderness, maybe. It is a maze of emotion whose end he does not know and whose course he follows through the woods.

He is outside, leaning against a squad car, his hands cuffed behind him. A pool of pink vomit steams at his feet. His mouth tastes like acid. His mind is blistering. A block-shaped officer stands nearby—another twenty yards away, scribbling on a pad, speaking to Troy and Jim, who stand with their arms crossed. Night has settled over the city. Despite the streetlamps, the headlights, the alternating flashes of blue and red thrown from the squad car, the shadows are thick enough that everyone looks like a threat, all the people walking along the sidewalks staring at him, their faces sharp and toothy, their shirts and jeans dark, so that they appear to blend into the night, to fade and reappear from one instant to the next. A car full of teenagers roars by and, red-faced, they howl out the window at him like skinned jackals.

His forehead throbs in time with his heartbeat. His vision rises and falls on yellow waves of drunkenness. He doesn’t feel angry anymore. He feels numb, deflated. So when he hears Troy speaking—when he hears Troy trying to convince the officer not to arrest him, saying, “You can’t go from no law to law. You can’t”—he isn’t thankful so much as hopeful that soon this will all be over, soon, and then he can sleep.

Her house looks different in the dark—squatter, more forbidding—its windows square sockets of yellow light. He crouches in the bushes, thinking he is in the right place, but it isn’t until he glimpses her inside—ponytailed, frowning—that he scurries on all fours into the yard and huddles next to a hedge that runs below the picture window.

He rises inch by inch, so as to appear part of the landscape, and once over the sill peers in the window, beyond the living room, and spies her standing framed in a lamplit doorway. It is as though she is packaged by it, waiting for him.

The moment is fleeting. The kitchen sits to the left of the living room and from it comes a man—a tall, thinly built man with his shirt tucked into his pants despite the late hour. He has his right hand in his pocket and from the way it bulges beneath the khaki fabric Brian imagines him a coin jangler, the type who rolls quarters and dimes around with his fingers, making a song. He addresses Karen without looking at her directly, his eyes flitting back and forth between her face and the floor. Brian cannot perceive his words—they come across only as a low-voiced murmur—but he can read in Karen’s expression an obvious distaste.

This is the husband responsible for locking her out—the idiot, she called him. He certainly looks like an idiot. He looks like an insurance salesman who reads the Wall Street Journal and plays golf on the weekends and keeps careful score with those tiny pencils. Brian feels assaulted by his presence. He looks wrong in the house—he looks wrong next to Karen—like a mismatched piece of furniture.

The man turns to the window as if he senses Brian’s searching stare. But Brian does not duck or scamper off into the woods. Yes, he knows the man cannot see him, can see only a window full of night that reflects a ghostly image of his living room—but even if he could, even if the sun were high and an alarm sounded, Brian would remain footed to this property, unafraid.

The key gives him that sense of access, ownership. He can picture himself inside the house—sitting on the sofa, eating off the wedding china, spitting toothpaste in the sink, shoving his thumbs deep into the eyes of the man until blood wells from them. The vision brings with it a shifting sensation, as though the drudgery of his life is about to change, to take on a new dimension, all because of her.