He’d figured the Wizard for a night owl, and he wasn’t wrong.
“What?” came the bored answer to his quiet knock.
Black took that as permission to enter.
The overhead lights in Bay Two were out, leaving the shadows punctuated only by dusty splays of light rising from a few of the plywood enclosures. Looking left and right he noted that the immediately adjoining hootches were all dark. At least one was emitting snores. He pushed open Brydon’s door.
He was lying on his bunk, hands behind his head, staring at the darkened ceiling. No book in sight.
Black brandished the roster, creased and wilted in his hand.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Brydon exhaled heavily but didn’t answer.
“Why aren’t you on this roster?”
Brydon closed his eyes. He didn’t seem surprised by the question.
“Soldier,” Black repeated, sternly. “Why are you not on here?”
Brydon sighed.
“’Cause I’m a ghost, sir,” he murmured.
“What? What does that mean?”
Brydon didn’t open his eyes.
“Means what it means, sir.”
“What are you talking about? Who’s Traynor?”
Brydon sighed again and shook his head slightly. Black felt his blood pressure rising and had to remind himself to keep his voice down amidst the warren of open-air hootches.
“Brydon, you can’t play games with this,” he pressed. “I remember what you said. You said you’d been at Vega for three months. That’s not true. Who told you to lie?”
Brydon said nothing.
“You know what’s going on, and you’re not telling me.”
Still nothing.
“Why did you say you figured I’d be a captain?” Black asked, urgently. “Why would I be a captain?”
“I think,” Brydon finally drawled, “that I’m all done talking to you.”
Black shook his head in disbelief.
“Soldier, are you seriously invoking your rights against self-incrimination? Don’t do it like this.”
Brydon didn’t respond.
“Brydon, I’m not after you here,” Black said placatingly. “I don’t even think you did anything wrong. Don’t make it go ugly on you.”
Brydon opened his sleepless eyes and turned his head to face Black.
“Lieutenant,” he said flatly. “It has been ugly on me for a long time.”
“What?”
Brydon closed them again and lay back.
“Good night, sir,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
Nothing.
Don’t ask.
“What’s ‘Xanadu’?” Black demanded.
Brydon reacted as though suffering a sudden pain in the abdomen.
“Ohhhhhh . . .” he groaned.
He rolled away from Black, curling on his side like a dog finally released from the beating.
—
You’re getting sloppy.
It was the kind of trivial comedy of errors that got soldiers killed in Afghanistan every day.
All the stuff you used to not screw up.
It was a lapse indeed. Poor attention to detail, and poor communication practice. He’d been so focused on names of all the other soldiers in the unit that he hadn’t even noticed, as he went through his roster with Corelli, that Brydon’s name wasn’t on it.
He’d told Corelli, I need to know how many guys are here right now, today, besides you, without realizing that the meticulous soldier would take him literally and subtract one from his count to exclude himself. Black hadn’t thought to clarify, hadn’t noticed there was anything to clarify.
That’s why Corelli came up with forty-six guys to Black’s forty-seven, when in fact both rosters had forty-seven men on them. Black’s roster, straight from 3/44’s headquarters, was missing Brydon but included the absent Traynor. Corelli’s was the reverse.
He roamed the silent corridors and passageways, moving slowly, more than once absently losing his way and having to turn back, his mind following his unguided path. Questions were piling upon questions now, branching beyond his ability to sort them.
And lies upon lies.
He found himself in front of Lieutenant Pistone’s hootch. His watch told him it was almost three A.M. He let himself in and commenced pacing the room.
Why did 3/44’s headquarters believe two facts that weren’t true?
Who had tipped off Merrick that he was coming to Vega? Had someone down at Omaha radioed ahead to warn him? If so, why did they tell Merrick and not Pistone, the officer in charge of the platoon?
Everything else, he felt sure, started from knowing this.
He slumped down onto the chair against the wall. His eyes roamed the room, pausing at the footlocker, past the picture of Pistone with his girl in the headlock smiling out at Black, and came to rest on the Celtic journal, gathering dust on the end table.
He sighed. The guy obviously had enough on his young plate dealing with sergeants like Merrick and Caine and a crew of soldiers who had no respect for officers. He didn’t need one of his own rooting around through his personal effects.
Stop stalling.
He rose and let himself out for the Porta-Closet. He was so distracted he nearly missed that there was new graffiti text added to the old.
CHUCK
SEES YOU
AT THE END OF THE WORLD
—
On his knees next to the bunk, the picture of Pistone and his girlfriend facedown on the shelf, he tugged Pistone’s footlocker out from underneath it.
“Sorry, brother,” he murmured as he tried the lock.
The trunk came open. Why would it be locked? Pistone had had no idea a stranger was going to be living in his space for the next week.
He peered inside. At one end sat a softball and glove that looked like they’d seen little use. At the other, a pair of civilian khakis and a polo shirt sat folded neatly atop a pair of well-worn loafers. Usually people kept one set of civilian clothes buried somewhere in their gear, for when they went on their proper two-week leave back home. As long as you had something to change into from your uniform when you got there, you could buy whatever else you needed.
In the middle was a stack of books, CDs, and magazines. Something large and hardbound sat amidst them. He levered it out, spilling CDs among the clothes. A photorealistic painting of a school, done by an inexperienced hand, adorned the cover.
FAIRVIEW HIGH
CLASS OF 2001
Pistone’s high school yearbook. Black found it surprising that he would have hauled it all the way up here.
Glory days?
Surprising and kind of sad. He set the yearbook down and milled among discs and magazines, none of which seemed of interest. He stacked everything neatly on the bunk after inspecting each item, until he got to the very bottom of the stack.
There was a book.
He picked it up. It was a thick paperback whose title wasn’t familiar to him. He turned it over in his hands. It had seen some use.
He took a last look in the footlocker to confirm there was nothing else in there he hadn’t seen, and began fanning through the pages of the book. Poetry.
At some point about halfway through, the feel of the pages shifted as they ran past and it became clear that it had been heavily read in one part.
He flipped it back over to find the crease in the spine and began fanning pages again, carefully this time, to find the spot. When he turned the book back over he saw that the inner edge of the page in question was cracking loose from the glue in the spine. He looked at the text.
“Son of a bitch,” he told the empty room.
He commenced reading.
When he finished the section, he went to the beginning of the book and started reading about the author of the poems. It was a half hour before he realized he was still kneeling on the concrete floor. He rose and moved to the chair, sitting hunched over, turning pages.
He sat like that another half hour, then closed the book and sat up. He stared at the wall.
After several minutes, he rose and crossed the room. The door to Pistone’s hootch had a hasp on the inside.
He locked it as best he could using the remains of the padlock Corelli had cut on the first night. It wasn’t much.
He went back to the book and took it to the bunk, where he commenced rereading the dog-eared portion.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
He didn’t leave the room when day came a couple hours later. Nor had he slept when the knock came at the door that evening.