The RPG that detonated against the rock floor fifteen feet to Rensselaer’s left sent out a shockwave and sprays of shell casing. The purpose of the munition is not to kill infantry but to pierce armor. Though magnified by ricochets inside a tank or an armored personnel carrier, the shrapnel is secondary to the overpressure of the explosion. Except for a few small pieces that traveled close to the ground, most fragments were propelled away from the center of the charge at a forty-degree angle, and flew over Rensselaer’s head. The blast, however, hit him full force, lifting him into the air and rightward over the edge of the defile.
With no time to think or fear, because the explosion was immeasurable to conscious thought, he perceived it nonetheless as if it unfolded in slow motion, and felt neither pain nor regret as he sailed over the abyss. The glimpse of stopped time was so comforting as to suggest perfect answers to questions that had not even been asked. Blown into the air, weightless, the world made soundless, he was aware of the complete death of his will, and he felt nothing other than intense relief, gratitude, and joy.
After a moment of gravityless suspension, he fell, back first, looking up into featureless blue. Forty feet down, he landed with immense force in the V shape of a ledge that, partially cleft from the rock wall, narrowed at its bottom. Every bit of air was pushed from his lungs, many of his ribs were cracked, and then the back of his head hit the rock, opening a gash in his scalp and rendering him unconscious. He soon regained consciousness but was totally paralyzed and could not breathe.
Despite the injuries, he felt no pain. Then Holworthy appeared, looking over the ledge and calling soundlessly. Rensselaer couldn’t even blink to let Holworthy know he still lived. It was like a dream in which he knew ahead of time that Holworthy would conclude that he was dead and leave him there. Even if Holworthy knew he was alive, he would have had to leave him, to which Rensselaer had no objection.
After Holworthy left, Rensselaer waited for Hadawi. If they had no way to get him up from the ledge, they would just shoot him as he lay. If they did have the means, they would retrieve and then torture him. But in regard to either possibility he felt perfect equanimity, and that he was the master of the situation, looking from afar in time and distance to events so minor in the sweep of time as almost not to exist.
They didn’t find him. Thinking that, like Holworthy, he had escaped, they didn’t look. He expected them to become very busy below as they took out their dead and wounded; retrieved supplies, ammunition, and guns; and cleared the passage. But no one came. As his hearing returned he heard Hadawi’s army rush away, and like the men scattered below, not all of whom were yet dead, he was left in silence except for the occasional moans and cries of enemy wounded, though by 2300 the cold had silenced them forever.
At four in the morning the temperature would drop into the thirties. Even before midnight it was cold enough in the wind so that a sentry in such a situation who had to man his post without moving would experience hypothermia sufficient to dull his reflexes no matter how much he was bundled up in cold-weather gear.
Rensselaer’s cotton fatigues were of little value against such cold, and wind accelerated by the constricted defile went right through them. He decided to curl up for whatever warmth it might afford. Perhaps if his back were pressed against one side of the V and his knees were lifted into his chest, even the rock would offer some insulation. At least it would block the wind, and in lessening his surface area he would slow the dissipation of heat. Of the many ways to die, cold was not high on his list.
He was afraid to move, because the effort might tell him that he was in fact paralyzed. Not having stirred for hours, he was now forced to try. First, he attempted to lift his arms. He couldn’t. In fact, he couldn’t feel them. He didn’t know it, but their circulation had been compressed as they and the rest of him had been pressed between the sides of the V. All right, he thought, maybe my legs aren’t paralyzed. At the same time that this seemed to him to be stupid—because if he were paralyzed from the neck down it would obviously include his legs—he tried to move them, and succeeded. He was able to lift them, one at a time, a few inches. It caused great pain in his ribs, something he actually appreciated, for it overrode the cold.
When he tried to pull his knees up to his chest and turn to the side the pain became exquisite, and he had neither the strength nor the leverage to do so. Perhaps if he raised his upper body. He tried this. The agony of his abdominal muscles and ribs, and the effect on his breathing, might themselves have stopped him, but these were the lesser part of it. His head was immovable. At first he attributed this to the medically dubious paralysis he suspected but began to doubt when, because of the movement of his legs, his right arm became un-wedged, and thus the pressure on the left arm lessened, and they both began to tingle as if they were Galvani’s frog legs hanging pitifully on what would become perhaps the world’s most famous length of wire.
“Well that’s nice,” he said, moving his arms and discovering that he could still speak. He almost forgot the cold as he entertained the possibility of having “paralysis of the head,” if such a thing existed. It didn’t sound right. Still, he couldn’t move his head. Not only was it immovable, the pain in his ribs escalated when he tried to do so. He thought to move his arms up to it so as to “loosen” it. That didn’t make sense, but he certainly had time to try. Thus, he spent the next hour or so moving his arms, little by little, more and more, freeing and restoring them, until, at about midnight, when he was numb and shivering with cold, he reached his head. He then tried to lift it with their aid. Nothing but strain.
Feeling about, he encountered a slick surface, almost plastic, and much smoother than the rock. Tracing this, he found that it merged into his hair. Then he realized that it was dried blood and God only knew what other fluid, which had soaked his hair as it flowed from a head wound or wounds that he could neither see nor feel, but which bonded him to the ridged and porous rock. Perhaps if he had pulled hard enough he might have freed himself. But he might also have opened the wound and bled out. Most of the bond was out of reach of his fingers, so chipping away at it was impossible.
He now understood that he was going to die like this, and that as he died he was going to be very cold. He had gone from blue to white, neither of which he could see. He had always feared being trapped in a dark compartment, the cold seawater rising until he drowned. At least that would have been quicker. Here, it would go slowly. It’s one thing to be cold if you can move, and quite another if you can’t. And then he remembered.
*
When very hard—some mistakenly said catastrophic—winters struck the Northeast in the seventies, Stephen Rensselaer was in middle school and poorly dressed for the cold. Manufacturing on the Upper Hudson had long since begun its precipitous decline, and his father, a foundryman whose trade was practiced in a nineteenth-century building in darkness periodically made orange by the pours of molten metal, was among the first to be laid off. He never stopped looking for another job, and never refused any work he could find. When the unemployment insurance ran out, the family eschewed welfare. Instead, Stephen’s father cut and aged wood, rented a truck, and sold firewood in Manhattan for fifty cents a split, or the astounding price of two dollars per eighteen-inch log.
Given the time in the woods, the splitting, the aging, gas for the chain saw, sharpening the chain, repairs, renting the truck, fuel for it, tolls, bribing police and the doormen on Park Avenue for a parking space, and carrying up the wood, the price was not so inflated, but it astounded him nonetheless. On school vacations, Stephen sat in the back of the open truck to guard against theft while his father carried the wood into the service elevators. Were the load not that heavy, Stephen would sometimes take it. When Stephen was in school, his father had to pay the doormen quite a bit extra to watch the truck.
At Christmastime, in the cold, as he perched on the firewood piled in the truck, Stephen would watch people walking on Park, Fifth, or Central Park West. There was a visible difference between him and the boys his age whom he saw. They had better haircuts, and puffy jackets. Despite his wool sweaters and blanket-lined denim jacket, Stephen was always cold, and he shivered in the back of the truck. When he could carry up to the apartments, it took a while to warm up, so initially he held himself stiffly, and one could read the discomfort in his face.
On account of more foot traffic and firewood purchases on the west side of Park, the back of the truck was thus open to the north wind and shielded from south sun. On Fifth, there was no choice but to park in the same direction, though on the east side of the street. During very cold days, if the loads were too heavy for him to carry, he would really freeze as he stayed with the wood. His father sometimes let him carry a heavy load in several trips so he could warm up. And sometimes his father turned on the heat in the cab while running the truck just so Stephen could get some relief. Once, he was given a dollar and told to get a hot chocolate somewhere where he could get warm. He found a restaurant on Madison, but the hot chocolate cost $2.50, so he pretended that he had had it, and surreptitiously threw the dollar in with the money from the wood. In the apartments it was wonderfully warm, and he had never seen such beautiful rooms. He felt no envy (never in his life would he feel envy, ever: this was just the way he was) but only delight in the sudden luxury and ease of entering a curated, eleven-room apartment on Park Avenue, in the same way that were he to have seen a painting of Eden he would not have begrudged it to Adam and Eve. It was a different world, and when, once, a doorman had told him that the apartments in one building were “triple mint,” he understood the meaning but thought the phrasing uncomfortably alien.
It was to these apartments that the boys in puffy jackets returned from their shockingly expensive prep schools in Manhattan or New England. From the relaxed way they walked it was easy to see that they were warm. A boy and his sister close to Stephen’s age caught his eye one day when it was sunny and ten degrees and he was facing north. She was very pretty, and had a navy blue band in her blonde hair. Flowing from the bottom of her puffy jacket was the plaid skirt of a school uniform; from his, the bottom of a blazer.
They hadn’t noticed Stephen sitting on the stack of wood in the back of the truck. “Hey,” he called out. At first they kept walking, and then they paused. “What’s in those jackets?”
“Goose down,” the boy answered.
“They look really warm,” Stephen said.
“They are, they really are. You should get one.”
“I’ll give it a try,” Stephen told him. “Wanna buy some firewood? I cut it.”
The boy’s sister had pivoted slightly to her left and now faced Stephen. “Our fireplace doesn’t work,” she said. “There’s a thing in front of it that blocks it up.” He was quite sure that she looked at him with interest. As for Stephen, he could fall in love in five seconds flat, he often did, and he certainly did then.
“Okay,” Stephen told them. “Maybe next year your fireplace will be unblocked.”
As they departed, he began to dream of her, and of puffy jackets. Where he lived on the Upper Hudson there were hardly any down jackets at the time. When eventually he found one in Albany, the price was far too high. There was no way he was going to have anything more than what he already had. With the family food budget of three dollars per day, down jackets would have to wait.
That winter it was sometimes 32° below. Stephen discovered, however, that, just as the initial heat of summer gradually became tolerable, it was possible to acclimate himself to the cold. And just as, by February, cold days in October seemed in retrospect to have been quite warm, the secret was adaptation. He decided to try to teach his body to acclimate not automatically but according to will.
One Saturday early in March, when the next-to-last of that winter’s Arctic fronts descended from Canada and brought very cold air in high, bright sun, it was nine degrees Fahrenheit and the land was covered with blindingly white snow. In a recent thaw, patches of the Hudson had swallowed the snow accumulated on them and re-frozen into glassy ice now unbroken because, on its way north from the Tappan Zee, the little Coast Guard icebreaker had yet to clear the stretch of river at Stephen’s house.
He left for the ice at eleven. As he didn’t have a watch, he took a white plastic kitchen timer, with red numbers and notches, which struck one loud bell after up to an hour of loud ticking. A little ways out on the Hudson he found a snow-free circle about fifty feet in diameter. At its center, he set the timer for an hour, and lay on his back.
Though he was somewhat out of the strong wind, it sought and found the openings in his clothes. In less than a minute, he felt the ice through the shirt, sweater, and jacket that now hardly seemed to exist. When he began to shiver, he sought to stop, but he had no idea how. Tightening his muscles and tensing as one does in the cold was ineffective.
So he tried the opposite. He relaxed, let out a breath, and delayed breathing in. This seemed to work, and he kept it up as it did, concentrating on stopping the blood flow to the surface of his body. Whether or not this succeeded, he felt as if he had divided himself into a surface that although it was cold little bothered him, and an interior, which was warm. He didn’t shiver. His extremities and skin didn’t freeze, but were as cold as they could be without doing so, in a kind of suspension. For a full hour he was still, and when the bell rang he rose on the ice, having taught himself something he had not even previously imagined. Now he would be able to sit in the back of the truck as comfortably as if he were in a puffy jacket. And although someday he might be able to afford a puffy jacket, he knew that he would never really need one. And long after, staying in the cold surf during BUD/S training at Coronado would be a lark.
*
Well past pain, on rock almost as cold as ice, Rensselaer felt nothing except within, where now he seemed to burn. This had never happened on the ice, for he had stayed only an hour. He knew that any great distress might confuse the senses in such a way, though it seemed too early to die. Trying hard to stay conscious, he went through his options. Because he was confused and disoriented by the cold, he would drift off to sleep, then awake later, having dreamt that he asked questions of Katy, or she of him. God, she was lovely, lovely, when first he saw her. The thought of her banished all pain, and the dreams seemed more real than that to which he awoke, until he hardly knew the difference. The questions were asked but never answered. They had to do with numbers, shapes, and lights. And in the dreams she was imperturbable, a savior, an angel.
Whenever he awoke, however, because of his study and practice of celestial navigation, he knew the approximate time. And he knew, therefore, that he was neither in heaven nor in hell. This will end, he would say to himself, and then drift off again, only to awake.
He reminded himself repeatedly that his choices were nonexistent. If no help came—and why would it?—he would have to risk opening the wound. If he succeeded in not bleeding to death, he would have either to climb forty feet up or descend much farther down. He hadn’t been able to see below him, but for an hour in the light he had explored the way up, looking for a route he might follow despite his weakness and his wounds. The ridged but unbroken rock would be unavailing. In and out of consciousness, he discovered and rediscovered that he was going to remain where he was.
Each time he came to this conclusion he felt the relaxation, if not the comfort, of surrender. Then he would go through it all again and again, his only anchor to reality being the clock of the stars, which told him not only that morning would come, but when. And each time he came to and looked at them, he knew from the calculations he made that because his ability to do so was somehow intact, he was still there, he was still who he was, and he was still alive.
*
The first sign of morning was a softening of the black sky. Not that it was gray, or anywhere near blue, but that in their slight dimming the stars seemed to be receding into it, and then to become smaller until, not that long after, they vanished, the brightest among them appearing to sink upward into the gray. First to go had been the Pleiades, the weakest but, in their close embrace that made a smudge of light like that of a disappearing comet, the most beautiful. Of all the groupings, in their softness and sheen the Pleiades were the best.
Eventually all the stars were gone, it was not quite so cold, and the wind began to flow through the cut, south to north, as a warm breeze from the sea pushed like a tide toward the desert. This, too, told him the time.
A ray of sun, deep rose in color but as gently diffused as the Pleiades, struck a triangular outcropping above him on the other side of the cut. As it grew in intensity and the color changed, its faint blush stayed with him. The image was strong and persistent because it was so much like something he had seen long before, something forgotten until now, when, like remembered music, it arose from childhood.
He was far enough gone that he didn’t know why he was there or how long he had been there. That he was dehydrated, feverish, internally battered and inflamed, concussed, and lucky to have emerged from shock, didn’t matter. For having seen only briefly the roseate triangle, he felt only love and steadily growing tranquility. And this is why.
*
The Dutch Reformed Church to which the Rensselaers adhered was in a spare white building with tall, mullioned windows of wavy, antique glass; colonial brass chandeliers; and cushionless pews. That he was there on Sunday mornings was no more unusual than that the night was dark or the day was light. From his infancy, all that was said and sung left him not so much with understanding as with impression and feeling. As he had been born and simply taken into it, he felt the right to reject it, or not, even before he understood what it was. It was just there. He neither rejected nor accepted it, and then he grew very busy as he came into adulthood.
Now he was anything but busy, and in its brief appearance the roseate triangle brought him back to a winter morning when he was seven or eight, long before he had learned to overcome the cold by surrender to it, when it burned his hands with near frostbite, threatened his toes, and once nearly killed him. He was coming home from school, when the temperature dropped so precipitously and the wind grew so strong in a sudden blizzard that he could only crawl the last twenty feet to the front door, couldn’t get up, and was able to pound on it only so softly with his gnarled, frozen hands that had the dog not alerted his mother he would have died at the threshold and been buried by the snow in less than half an hour.
The church was heated by a huge, tiled stove on the steps of which the children were allowed to sit as their parents shivered in the pews. From this somewhat elevated position, his back warm against the radiant tiles, Stephen looked straight west out the side windows and across the Hudson to the Catskills, their uninhabited eastern cliffs and peaks draped in the austere winter cloak of the Hudson Highlands—cold snow grayed at a distance by a plethora of black, leafless trees. Nothing is quite as bleak as the sight of this looming over an ice-choked river, even when the sun is shining, and especially when it isn’t.
Early in the morning, when the stove had not been burning long, the first service had begun just before sunrise. The words of the sermon were interesting to Stephen in the same way that sledding down a hill might be, for the sensation, the patterns, the delight in understanding the meaning of the surface over which he passed without comprehending its depth. In the long run, just to hear the language and the tone was as productive as to grasp the import.
When the sermon came to an end, the minister turned to the choir. As an organ was too expensive and too big, the church made do with a piano. The choirmaster, a woman with blue-framed glasses and a bowl haircut, gestured to the choir and the pianist—another woman with blue-framed glasses and a bowl haircut, who Stephen thought had to be at least two hundred years old—and said, “Lovely Appear.”
The lyrics—“Lovely appear, over the mountains, the feet of them that preach, and bring good news of peace”—made little sense to him. He had never understood all the biblical stuff about washing feet, which in a country where people wore shoes seemed rather odd. And that the focus of such a hymn, its music, its poetry, was on feet, seemed silly. What did not seem so were the image of mountains, especially as he stared at them through the windows, the syntax that archaically, mystically, and beautifully allowed the subject to follow the verb, and the very pleasure of the phrase lovely appear.
In his mind the dross was shed—that is, the feet, preaching, news, peace—and all that was left was the power of lovely appear, the image of mountains, the mountains he saw, and the music. It made a deep impression, for the rest of his life suggestive of the brick and iron of his childhood, the austerity, the love and the struggle, the hard times in the snow, and the unbreakable bond with his parents, who now as he lay on his back in a crag lost in a desert on the Horn of Africa, were long and forever gone, and whom he had always loved more for their vulnerabilities than for their strengths. It was their vulnerability that had led him to a life devoted to protecting even those who would never know what he did, even those who would condemn him while living free behind the battered shield that he and others would hold for their sake and for the mysteriously pleasurable sake of holding fast even unto death.
As a child, he had had no such thoughts, but was lifted by the words sung again and again: lovely appear. The chance that this impression might vanish was forever foreclosed when purely by accident the sun rose from behind the Berkshires and painted the triangular Catskill peak highest in the range with the diffuse and delicate roseate light of early morning. The snow reflected its rays like a glass-beaded screen, and as the hymn echoed through the church, atop the mountain it seemed that a cool fire burned, just as it would many years later on the prominence of desert rock above the ledge where he lay dying.
*
He was comforted by the balance of things, in the appearance of this sign reminding him of his early innocence. It was an emissary, he thought, signaling that between the beginning and the end he had been faithful, and his life had been coherent enough that he could now depart.
The Somalian desert, however, was not too well aligned with the Dutch Reformed Church, the thunderstorms of the Hudson Valley, or the workings of memory in Stephen Rensselaer’s heart. If anything, asserting its vastness, majesty, and age, it remained arrogantly in contradiction. Were he to die here, he would have to die on its terms, not those imported or remembered.
And the first thing the desert did was flood his eyes with light, as the sun, now white, found a way into the passage and broke upon it like a wave. He was already feverish from his night in the cold and now this morning sun made him so much hotter. He was lucid enough to know that sweating would throw his electrolytes out of balance and stop his heart—if not that day, then, assuming he survived another night, surely the next.
The sky soon became the unique desert blue that in its high depths turns black. Gusts of wind sometimes blew sand over him and into his eyes. The sun seemed to be something living, with a will, as did the cliffs, and even the desert beyond the plateau, which, though he couldn’t see it, he knew was there.
The rising, varying structure of the cliffs above, and the sun flashing against crystals in the rock, were like the lights, shapes, and muted colors of a vast city at dusk. So many times he had watched from a distance as the sun, rising or setting, had given life to a mass of buildings and bridges. He was often privileged to see this from the harbors of cities to which he had guided his ship at dawn or dusk. It could be so beautiful and golden as to comfort the deepest distress, for the sight of such a thing meant that the life of the world and the beauties that arose without deliberation or design would continue full force in his absence, their benevolent author lifting from him the anxious illusion suffered by so many that faith and justice rested solely upon their struggles and successes. In short, everything would be all right.
As time went on, he tried to think of Katy and was heartbroken that he could not, for now he hardly knew himself or who he was. By afternoon, without water, in 115 degrees Fahrenheit, he was only a component of nature, a thing like the rock, the sand, and the sun, all of which seemed to take on life inversely with his loss of it, until eventually he and they would be the same.
This was no tragedy, and he felt no fear. Rather, he experienced an increasing velocity. Each time he shuddered with chill in the immense heat, he thought he had reached the jumping-off point from which he would be pulled into the sun and stars. But, each time, he fell back.
The rock against his fingers was so complex, as he had never realized before—its grain, its plains, its ridges—that it seemed like a world unto itself. The heat, too, was no longer just one thing, but rather a thousand different emanations, each with its own message and voice.
Wind whistling against the rock ledges made him hear once more the wind in Athena’s rigging as it made a concert among her stays, her sharp edges, vibrating cables, and buckling sheet metal. It was hard to believe that in these voices that were singing a voice was not speaking. When trembling white lines of foam were scudding across the waves, if you held your mouth open only slightly the wind would seize your lips and speak for you. At times like that, listening to invisible forces and joining in, he wondered if in fact we are instruments of a will of which we cannot conceive, something always there, as if at the tip of the tongue, that takes benevolent delight in vanishing as we close.
Words were soon to leave him, and this he regretted. The last of them he heard as if spoken by wind and water, and saw as if written in the air.
In heartbreak and in memory I am fixed upon the ocean, always the ocean, to which everything flows as it returns in rivers and rainfall and through quiet coastal marshes where waves dance in the reeds.
This was beautiful, but not enough, and, even as he slipped, he knew it.