II
A week has passed since. Now, I’m here in our bedroom alone, packing. Time is up. Ais went to see her father earlier this morning. He’s some kind of big-shot in the Forces. She seems to think that he can help with all this. I’m doubtful, but there was no convincing her otherwise.
I’m packing in a daze, doing everything on automatic because it’s still not completely real. As I look around the bedroom, everything leaps out at me as if for the first time. A picture of Ais and me taken under a bridge on the Seine, during our trip to Paris a few years back. A pair of ticket stubs to Don Giovanni wedged under a small dish holding a thick red candle, gothic with wax drippings. I remember grabbing her hand in the middle of that opera, and how the shock of that return squeeze lit me up inside like a circuit board. I have a last look at her clothes hanging in the closet. I know what she wears when she feels sad, when she feels happy, I see her old jeans that she wears when she gardens. A wisp of pale blue silk that she wears to bed.
Back in the living room, the Endless War plays on the wallscreen: every channel, every angle, every possible inch of footage. The grinding of men and machines play in the theater of dusty and dead cities. Bombs, gas, beheadings. Spider tanks crash through foreign suburbs burning and blasting, smearing men into red pulp. Witnesses talk of weapons melting men into shapeless lumps and warping buildings. But no one knows anything. The cameras tilt and I see poisoned skies, green and pink clouds boiling over the broken skyscrapers. The talking heads on the screen seem to make sense of it all. As if sitting straight up with a smart suit and tie somehow makes it all legitimate. I see skulls bleeding through their pancake makeup. They sound like addicts convincing themselves before the next fix. I hate them.
Ais comes home little over an hour later. I can’t read her look as she comes in, but my gloomy afternoon has made me greedy for her. I try to see her as anyone else would see her for the first time. Five-five, with short brown hair cut in a pageboy (what a trauma that was!), jeans, pink sneakers and a clingy nylon top with spaghetti straps. She is again close to tears.
“Oh, Dai,” she says and pulls me close. She’s holding me so tight that I can feel her body shake with little sobs. The sound from her phlegmy sniffles is close by my ears.
“He says they’re being really, really strict about the draft, and that Congress has appointed some kind of committee to make sure that the sons and daughters of military officials do not get exempted from service. There’s nothing he can do.” She says it all in one breath, her eyes looking down.
I don’t know what to say. I have gone mostly dead inside. I had thought that I’d prepared myself for the inevitable, but some small part of me still believed that maybe she was going to fix it somehow. But now the finality of it hits home. In six weeks, shrapnel from an exploding shell could dash my brains out all over the jungle floor. Someone I’ve never met could jam my dog tags into my teeth and slam my jaw down tight just before zipping up a body bag. Aisling could be met at our front door by a grim faced man carrying a carefully folded flag and a copy of a form letter from the President.
She recovers a bit and we look at each other, inches apart.
“I’m coming back. Do you understand?” Her eyes are freshly wet and shining as she nods. “I’m coming back.”
We kiss softly, and hold each other for a long while.
I don’t want her to come to the airport. I tell her it’s because I hate goodbyes. But I am afraid I won’t go through with it if she comes.
Breathe out slowly