I awake from feverish dreams to the thunder of jets overhead, which reminds me that I must report to the airbase this morning for X-rays. The daylight world knifes into me. In my nightmare I was captured, put on trial, and sentenced to be hanged for refusing to serve in the war. Awareness of the slaughter in Africa rises in my stomach like nausea.
I roll over to find Sharon watching me, her chestnut eyes slick with tears. I kiss her on each wet cheek, but she refuses to smile. Her worried expression has become so habitual that I almost forget how serenely happy she was—how happy we both were—during those early weeks of marriage before the draft summons arrived.
“Gordon,” she says, “I can’t bear to think of you in jail.”
“Let’s not start on this again.” I’ve run out of reassurances for Sharon, just as I’ve run out of appeals for the draft board. It seems more and more likely I will have to choose between prison and exile, if I am to avoid putting on a uniform and crossing the ocean to kill strangers.
“Tell them your ankle’s ruined. Tell them it aches all the time.”
“I’m not going to lie.” I throw off the covers and begin to dress.
“They’ll never let you do civilian service.” Her voice cracks. “If they honored your conscience, they’d have to question their own.”
“Can we just drop it? I’ve got to catch the bus.” I wrench a shirt from its hanger and button it quickly as I huddle over the radiator. Water gurgles in the pipes, circling round and round through the system, as I keep circling through this quarrel with Sharon.
“Maybe the X-ray will show your ankle’s still a mess,” she says.
“It works fine.” I tug on my jeans, parcel keys and coins and wallet among my pockets, lace my boots.
Lying on her side, head propped on one bent arm, she follows my movements with her tear-slick gaze. “You’re forgetting to limp.”
“Limping won’t fool the doctor.”
“You promised you’d at least try.”
“Maybe the war will end before they arrest me.”
“They’ll start another one.”
“Got to go.” I bend down to kiss her, but she rolls away to face the wall. Pulling the bedroom door closed behind me, I realize she’s right, which maddens me. Right that war has become perpetual. Right that I could try using my rebuilt foot as an excuse for a medical waiver. But a year has passed since the climbing accident shattered my ankle, and the artificial joint no longer gives me pain. The mended bones and tissues have become as numb as the metal and plastic lodged under my skin.
Descending the stairs, I am gripped by the chill of prevision. I can see the next few seconds of my life laid out before me as if in time-lapse photography—my stumble on the stairs, my grabbing the banister, the phone ringing in my pocket. When I answer, I hear the voice I expected, saying words I expected.
“Gordon,” says my sister, “if you think the doctor would fix this report for a fee . . .”
“Not a chance,” I answer, hearing my words before I utter them.
“Then go to Canada. Go to Argentina. They’re accepting resisters.”
“I’d never be able to come home.” I mean to stop there, but I hear myself adding, “Besides, Sharon can’t go with me.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s pregnant . . .”
“My God, that’s wonderful!”
“. . . but the fetus isn’t implanted well, so she might miscarry if she travels.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“We just found out.”
There is a pause, but I know what my sister will say next, and the words duly follow: “That’s all the more reason to bribe the doctor to declare you unfit.”
“I can’t buy my way out.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Okay. I won’t.”
Even her peevish sigh I recognize before it hisses into my ear. “You’re stumbling into this like . . .” While she searches for the word, I hear sleepwalker, and then she says, “like a sleepwalker.”
“Good-bye, big sister.” I want to say more, but I see myself ending the call, and that is what I do.
This clairvoyant spell persists through my hasty breakfast. Then as I wash my dishes, I settle once more into the present moment, no longer foreseeing what will come next. The smell of coffee, the feel of suds on my wrists, the glint of snow-light through the kitchen window—every sensation comes to me fresh.
On the bus ride, as the snowy countryside slides by in stark shades of black and white, I try to read the book I have brought along, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. But I keep being distracted by recalling those moments of prevision. I have experienced déjà vu before, but never for so long at a stretch. When the spell comes over me, it’s as if a switch has been thrown, and suddenly I foresee everything that will happen in the next moment, and then just as suddenly I slip back into my ordinary mind. I’ve read the explanations offered by psychologists and mystics—neurological asynchrony, epilepsy, reincarnation, spirit possession—but the phenomenon still baffles me.
When the bus reaches the county seat, I realize I’ve gone more than an hour without thinking of the war. At least my seizures, whatever their cause, have distracted me from this constant fret.
The moment my boots touch the salted pavement, the switch is thrown again, and I am possessed by foreknowledge. As I crunch over the snow toward the highway, I feel split in two—one version of myself walking ahead, and a second version following, as if dragged along. I shake my head, trying to clear the illusion. But even this gesture I see before I make it.
Standing by the roadside with my thumb jutting in the direction of the airbase, I sense each car a moment before it approaches, foresee its make and color. After twenty minutes or so, when the cold has made my undamaged foot as numb as the reconstructed one, I realize that the next vehicle to appear—a battered van, reeking of paint—will stop for me. I hear what the driver will say as I open the passenger door.
“Damn fool day to be hitching,” he says.
“You going near the airbase?” I ask, knowing his answer.
“That’s exactly where I’m going. Hop in.”
“Much obliged.”
The man turns to me a face already familiar, right down to the broken front tooth and the bruised skin under his left eye. “What business you got at the base?”
I tell him about my synthetic ankle, and the X-ray that will decide whether it is healed well enough to suit the army.
“Got a titanium rod in here,” he says, tapping his gas pedal leg, “thanks to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.”
I wince. “It must hurt in this cold weather.”
“Hurts like hell,” he says. “Every twinge makes me cuss the sons of bitches who sent me over there.”
Hearing his words, I am delivered back into ordinary time, not knowing what will come next. We talk about his folks and mine, about where each of us played high school basketball, about truck stops and hunting dogs. Just as I am preparing to ask him what he thinks of the war in Africa, we draw abreast of a chain-link fence topped by razor wire. I swallow the question. The fence I have seen countless times while traveling past, but this time I am going inside. We turn in at the main gate, which is flanked by two vintage fighter jets.
“Shame to see those planes rust like that,” the driver says. “Give them a good paint job, they’d look like new.”
Abruptly the switch is thrown again. I know the guard will recognize the painter, ask to see my papers, check my name on his list, and then will say, “Physical, eh?” before waving us through. His gruff voice reminds me of the water gurgling in the radiator, circling time and again through the closed circuit of pipes.
“You figure that bum foot will keep you out of the war?” the painter asks as we ease forward.
“Not likely. But I’m hoping my conscience will.”
He snorts. “Conscience? Good luck with that, kid.”
Black pipes mounted on posts snake along beside the road. The painter tells me they carry steam from the heating plant, and I imagine the vapor circulating from boiler to barracks to warehouse to machine shop and eventually back to boiler.
“What are you painting today?” I ask.
“The gym in the officers’ quarters. It’s a bear. Walls thirty feet high.”
“How does that titanium leg do on ladders?”
“Hurts like hell!” he says again, and his laugh rattles through the van.
We pull up in front of the hospital, which might have been blue once but is now drab gray. As I climb out, the painter says, “Don’t think killing foreigners makes you a patriot.”
“I won’t,” I say. “Thanks for the lift.”
“You bet.”
The van pulls away, trailing a stench of burnt oil mixed with the tang of paint.
I spend most of the day in the hospital, waiting for my exam. Every now and again a clerk calls my name, only to direct me to another waiting room. Meanwhile, I nearly finish The Wretched of the Earth, a disturbing book, with its advocacy for violence by colonized people, but it helps me understand the history behind the current turmoil in Africa.
Eventually, I am summoned from the last of the waiting rooms. As I make my way down a corridor toward the X-ray lab, I can already see the caramel-colored face of the technician, already make out her name on the badge pinned to her white coat, already hear the southern drawl in her voice.
“Enjoy that beard while you can,” she says cheerfully. “They’ll shave it off first thing.”
I lift a hand to my chin and pinch a tuft of whiskers. My smile feels as if it has been drawn on my lips from outside.
At her instruction, I pull off my boot and peel away the sock. She has me lie down on the examining table and positions the snout of the X-ray tube over my bare foot. “Now hold quite still,” she says, before disappearing behind a screen. A moment later I hear a brief hiss. She returns, repositions the foot, takes a second X-ray, and then repeats the cycle a third time. Then she escorts me to another room, where a doctor is studying the images of my ankle on a screen.
He turns when I enter, asks me to sit on the paper-covered table with my leg extended. There is a whiff of peppermint on his breath. With gloved hands, he manipulates my foot, rotating it left and right, up and down, testing the range of motion.
“How does it feel?” he asks.
Thinking of Sharon, I am tempted to give the painter’s refrain—“Hurts like hell!”—but I feel compelled to answer, “Numb.”
“No pain at all?”
I shake my head—or rather, it shakes of its own accord. I see myself as if from the outside, sitting on the table, my naked foot cradled in the doctor’s hands. It is as though I am watching a film of myself, every word and gesture already scripted.
He lets go of my foot and turns back to the ghostly X-rays on the screen. “It’s an elegant piece of surgery. This ankle should hold up better than your natural one. Nothing here to bar you from service.”
Leaving the hospital, I walk back toward the main gate. The last light is fading from the sky. I hear the sizzle of pipes overhead, the steam cooling as it circulates from building to building. At the guard shack I pause to show my papers once more, and once more I am waved through.
Near the rusting fighter jets, their engine cowlings clogged with snow, I wait for a ride. As cars and trucks pass, their headlights pick me out of the obscurity for a moment before sliding by. My thumb grows stiff as I wait for the Chevy pickup that finally stops, as I know it will. Likewise, I know beforehand that baby shoes will dangle from the rearview mirror, that the driver, a woman in her fifties, will tell me I remind her of her son, who was killed by a sniper in the Congo, and I know before I speak what I must answer. Hurtling down the tunnel bored through the darkness by the headlights, we exchange our lines, for the film will not stop.
On the bus I am granted a few minutes of freedom. These periods of lucidity occur less and less often, as the spells of foreknowledge lengthen. The view through the window might be of an alien planet, everything in shades of gray, silent and bleak and cold. The focus of my gaze shifts and I see my dim reflection in the glass—empty sockets where my eyes should be, my mouth a dark slash.
At the final stop before my own, an old woman boards the bus. As she teeters along the aisle, her bag of groceries lurching side to side, I know she will ask to share my seat, I will nod yes, and she will settle beside me with a wheeze. As I expected, her bag smells of cinnamon and garlic, and so does her black wool coat.
“No night to be alone on a bus,” she says.
“I’m almost home,” I reply. “My wife’s waiting.”
“Count your blessings. My husband died when he was about your age.” She fishes a snapshot from her purse and holds it out for me.
Reluctantly I peer at the photograph in the dim light. It shows a man in white Navy dress uniform, with a woman in a wedding gown clinging to his arm. I feel certain I have seen this image many times.
“Believe it or not, that’s me,” the old woman says, pointing to the bride.
I am startled to feel tears welling in my eyes. Hoping she won’t notice, I turn away to blink at my reflection in the window.
“A Chinese missile blew up his ship in the Indian Ocean,” the old woman continues. “Where is the war now? I can’t keep track. It’s been going on since before I was born. Took my father, both my brothers, and my husband.”
I want to ease the hurt I hear in her voice, but I can’t speak. So I put on my knit hat and gloves in preparation for my stop.
She lays a hand on my forearm. “Here, let me give you a pomegranate for your wife.”
“That’s kind of you, but really—”
“It’s full of vitamin C,” she says, drawing the plump red fruit from her grocery bag.
“For good health, then,” I say, accepting the pomegranate and stuffing it in my coat pocket.
As she turns in the seat to let me slip by, she adds quietly, “It also brings fertility.”
I mutter thanks and hurry down the aisle. From the sidewalk, I watch the bus drag its rectangles of light into the darkness.
The snow on our street sounds brittle under my boots. My breath fumes, glistening with daggers of ice. The winter’s chill will not let go, nor will the sense of déjà vu. I can read the script but cannot change it. Our front door opens without my key, and I am upset with Sharon for leaving it unlocked. I take off my hat and gloves and boots in the hall before going to the kitchen, where I know she is sitting at the table over a mug of tea.
She flashes me an anxious look. “What did the doctor say?”
“I’m fit for war.”
Her lips crimp tight.
I shrug free of my coat, drape it over a chair back, and lift the pomegranate from the pocket. “A woman on the bus gave me this,” I say, offering the fruit.
Reaching out hesitantly, Sharon cups it in her palm. “A woman on the bus?”
“An elderly lady, returning from the grocery store.”
“Why would she give you a pomegranate?”
“She said it brings fertility.”
“Did you tell her I’m pregnant?”
“Of course not.”
“How odd.” Slowly a smile breaks over Sharon’s face. “How lovely.”
Before she has a chance to ask, I fetch a bowl and knife and spoon, and set them before her. She slices the pomegranate and spoons out a mouthful of seeds, each one coated with ruby pulp. Her lips take on the color of the juice as I tell her about my sense of prevision, how it began as brief episodes and eventually became an unbroken awareness.
“Even now?” she asks. “You know what’s going to happen next?”
“Yes. Each moment is already laid out. I see the two of us here at the table, watch you lift the spoon, hear our voices, as if we’re speaking lines in an old film.”
“Well, get up and dance. Stand on your head. Do something crazy to snap the illusion.”
“I’ve tried. But every time I think I’m doing something truly free, I realize it’s what I’m required to do.”
“Required by whom?”
“By whoever wrote the script.”
Although Sharon faces me across the table, her chestnut eyes don’t look straight at me. All day other people have focused their gaze a few degrees away from where I imagine myself to be, as if I really am split in two, and my second self is drawing their attention.
There is caution in her voice as she says, “Gordon, this is a textbook case of paranoia. Don’t you see? For months now you’ve been feeling caught up in the military machine . . .”
“I am caught up.”
“But it’s not a machine. It’s just a big bureaucracy. It’s not running your life.”
I realize I should try to reassure her. But I feel compelled to insist, “Something is running my life. I’ve lived this day before. Maybe many times. In fact, this may be the only day I’ve ever lived.”
“That’s nonsense. Think about other days. Remember our wedding . . .”
“What if those memories are the illusion? What if they’re planted in our minds to hide the fact that we’re doomed to keep repeating this one day?”
Her gaze rakes across me, then swivels away. “You’ve been under stress—”
Unable to stop, I push on. “Sleep makes us forget today, so we can wake up and live it again as if it were new. But I’ve seen through the scam. I know I’ve lived this day before.”
“You need to rest,” she says carefully. “Let’s go to bed.”
“I tell you, I know!” I slam the table, scattering pomegranate seeds. One version of me looks on, appalled, as the other self pushes back from the table, upsetting the chair, then jerks his arm free from Sharon’s grip and grabs his coat and lurches away.
“Gordon, you’re not going out.”
“I have to.”
She follows me into the hall and crosses arms over her breast, shivering. “Sweetheart, you’re scaring me.”
I should take her in my arms, this woman I adore, and I should whisper in her ear a prayer for our coming child. But I cannot. I knot the laces in my boots, swing the door open, and step outside.
“Please don’t go,” Sharon cries after me.
The door slams.
I blunder forward into the night. Snow is falling, large flakes that sway as they tumble. I tilt my face up to feel them settle on my cheeks, but they make no impression. My feet convey nothing about the ground I walk over, my ears capture no sounds, my nose discovers no smells. My whole body is numb, as if all of me, and not just the artificial ankle, were made of metal and plastic. Only my eyes keep me bound to the world.
I must do something crazy, as Sharon says. For her sake, for the baby’s. So I step into the street just as a snowplow turns the corner and heads my way. In the glare of the truck’s headlights, I cannot make out the driver, cannot tell if he sees me.
Should I stand here, or should I leap aside?
At the last moment I leap aside. Without slowing, the truck rumbles on, spewing snow. My heart thuds. My senses revive. Did I choose to live, or was the choice made for me?
I must go back indoors to comfort Sharon. I will hold her until she sleeps, then I can sleep, forgetting this day, so tomorrow will come as a surprise.
I awake from feverish dreams to the thunder of jets overhead, which reminds me that I must report to the airbase this morning for X-rays. The daylight world knifes into me.