ESSEX HAD BEEN ALLOWED one call when he arrived at the marine depot. He was not to converse but to read the paragraph they handed him and nothing else.
I HAVE ARRIVED SAFELY AT MCRD SAN DIEGO. PLEASE DO NOT SEND ANY FOOD OR BULKY ITEMS. I WILL CONTACT YOU IN 3 TO 5 DAYS VIA POSTCARD WITH MY NEW MAILING ADDRESS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT. GOODBYE FOR NOW.
After that, all non-written communication had been cut off. He wanted to tell Kirsten about the whole initiation thing and how the marines were really good at it, mostly because he thought she’d appreciate that (she certainly didn’t appreciate anything else about the marines), but despite his good intentions, when he sat down with pen and paper his stamina for the story flagged. He had never written a long letter.
After his thirteen weeks of boot camp he was to be sent to Camp Pendleton for the next phase of training. Essex asked his drill sergeant if it was true. You don’t need to know fuck all, recruit! Because it is no longer your job to ask why things happen to you. Things will just happen to you. Then the man pointed to the ground and told him to do push-ups. Essex did as the man asked. A great calm flooded him. There was no decision for him to make. His preferences, his expectations and opinions, they no longer mattered. Kirsten had trained him to be the center of his own story, but he’d never really believed it. Now he was the center of nothing, and it was okay.
In the barbershop on base there was a sepia photo on the wall of a man long dead with thick lips and big ears in a wool-and-leather hat. With his hide strap across his chest, trim as a mailman, the man in the picture stared past Essex in the barber’s chair. At his neck, a kind of priest’s collar with an eagle, globe, and anchor on either side. A patch with a star holding an Indian inside. Stars on his shoulders too, each button an eagle, globe, and anchor stacking like sefirot down the front of his chest.
“Who is he?” Essex asked the barber.
“That’s John A. Lejeune. The ultimate marine’s marine,” said the barber.
Essex wanted to be a marine’s marine. It wasn’t likely.
John A. Lejeune entered and left his mind at various points during the day. Sometimes he watched Essex in silent approval. Essex imagined his praise, spoken in code, nothing said, all understood.
It was week ten, just before the Crucible, his final test before becoming a marine, that the ghost of Lejeune visited Essex. Covered in Indians and eagles, anchors and stars, he waited for Essex to do something, but Essex didn’t know what the man wanted him to do. He asked him, but John A. Lejeune looked through him like he didn’t see him at all. A wicker man of leather, each eye a solar eclipse.