Now and Again (32 page)

“Not that that's relevant,” said Kelly, but Danny wanted to know what had taken Odysseus so long.

“It's not that he couldn't get home,” said the captain. “It's that he didn't want to. He knew he couldn't be a hero sitting around at home.”

On the drive north the next day, Penn was acutely aware of the three big men with him in the van—of the body odor and the restlessness. It was as if the vehicle contained live but quiet rounds. They had been driving for an hour when Kelly asked where they were going.

“We've got to establish an outpost,” said Penn. “The question is, where should it be?”

Instinct was taking him north, toward Louise in New York and his family in Greenwich as if that was his destiny, but he couldn't decide if he was trying to become something he wasn't or trying to avoid being something he was. Then Le Roy was hungry, so they stopped and bought sandwiches, and then they stopped for gas, and a little while after that Danny said he wanted to get out and walk around. Kelly wanted to keep going, but Le Roy had to take a leak.

“We were just at the gas station for Chrissakes,” said Kelly. “Why didn't you do whatever you had to do there?”

“Anybody got an empty bottle?” asked Le Roy, which caused Penn to declare, “We're almost there,” even though he still had no idea where they were headed.

WELCOME
TO NEW JERSEY
said a sign. “New Jersey,” said Penn. “Why the hell not?”

He parked the car on a street lined with dilapidated buildings, which, on closer inspection, showed small signs of improvement: a repaved driveway, windows with yellow stickers in the corners, a fresh coat of whitewash on the brick, a woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, a sign that said
GROW WITH TRENTON! LOCATE YOUR BUSINESS HERE!

“This could be it,” said Kelly, and Penn agreed that it could be. It was as if Louise's magnet had been turned around and what he felt now was its strong repellent force, a sensation that caused him to view the railroad tracks that divided the neighborhood and the litter caught in the uncut roadside grass and the boarded-up community pool and the men loitering on the corner as selling points, at least in an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of way, so that even if Louise was hardly his enemy, he knew that by saying yes to the neighborhood, he was taking a stand against some of the things she stood for—unearned privilege, for instance, and willful ignorance of how most people lived.

They spent the night at a motel near the highway, and the next day Penn rented space on the first floor of a warehouse and the group dug in. In anticipation of winter, they purchased a portable space heater and weather stripping for the windows. They bought a mini fridge and a microwave from Best Buy, cots and plastic storage lockers from Target, and heavy-duty sleeping bags from REI. They arranged the cots and lockers along one wall and set up folding tables and chairs and computers from an office supply store along another. They bought desks off of Craigslist and argued about who was responsible for which chores and what were the consequences for laziness or dereliction.

“This ain't the army, man,” said Kelly.

“I know, I know,” said Penn, backing off.

But a natural discipline seemed to take hold of the men according to their interests and abilities. Penn went out early and came back with breakfast. Then he set to work identifying donors to solicit and causes to promote. Danny installed the weather stripping and cleaned because he had the strictest standards for how those things should be done. Le Roy ran five miles every morning before gluing himself to his computer for the rest of the day. And Kelly set up the office space and worked the longest hours, making spreadsheets and organizing files and researching how Internet advertising worked. “Who said I can't be a businessman?” he asked when the first check arrived in the mail. “Who said we can't make this sucker pay?”

The room had barred windows on three sides, and to the north, it looked out onto a railroad track. Every hour or so a train rumbled through, shaking the glass in the windows and causing Danny to dive for cover behind a couch they had found discarded on a curb.

“Hit the deck, Danny!” Le Roy would say if Kelly didn't say it first, and then Kelly would say, “New Jersey! At least it ain't the fucking Bronx.”

The neighborhood was just squalid enough for Penn to imagine that they were still fighting for their country—particularly at night, when the businesses were shuttered and feral cats ransacked the garbage cans and the only light came from a lone streetlamp halfway down the block. Every now and then Penn would shout, “Into the breach, boys. Let's stop the goddamn war!” He was mostly play-acting, mostly putting on a personality he had first observed in his father at the yearly picnic he held for the families of his employees on the sweeping grounds of the Greenwich estate. “Who's ready for the sack race?” the old man would call out. “Who wants to win a prize?” And the children would flock to him as if he were good with children, which, on that one day of the year, he was.

One evening, something unusual in the cocoon of nighttime stillness drew Penn outside, where he walked up and down the block, checking that the grilles on the ground-floor windows of the businesses were secure and across the tracks to a dilapidated apartment house where a woman was sitting in the darkness smoking a cigarette and sobbing.

“I thought I heard something,” said Penn.

“It's just them cats,” she said.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Ever'thin's okay.”

“We're just down the block if you need anything.”

“I'll remember that,” she said, but she never came asking for anything, only waved at Penn when he walked up the street now and then on what he called “patrol” or when he went the long way around on his morning coffee run so he could see her sending her three kids off to school. Each time, she waved to him before going back inside the building, and one day Penn realized that what she needed wasn't him patrolling the streets at night. What she needed was a job. “Hey,” he called out the next time he saw her. “You don't know anybody who wants to cook and clean for a bunch of ex-soldiers, do you?”

“I jes might,” she said. “I jes might know someone like that.”

Meanwhile, the upstairs tenants clomped up the warehouse stairs to their office in the morning and down again in the afternoon in pursuit of their own entrepreneurial dreams, and now and then they said, “How ya doin'?” when Penn ran into them on the front walk, where some faded hydrangeas from an overgrown bed spilled onto the pavement. Across the street, a car parts salvage business had taken over an empty building, and two months after the soldiers moved in, a commercial laundry service opened up. In the white-gray light of early morning when he was on the breakfast run, Penn allowed himself to think that something good was starting up—the website of course, but also the little neighborhood near the tracks.

T
he first thing they put up on the site after the pictures from the protest was a schedule of other protests. Then they created a message board where returning soldiers could post their stories of the war. In the back of his mind, Kelly was wondering how they were going to make a bunch of stories pay, but for the time being he was happy just not to be living with his folks.

“I'm going to post something,” said Danny, who had put aside the television pilot and was working on an epic poem. “Think of the
Odyssey
—if it was written by Eminem.”

Kelly was still working out the angles of the site. “How do we know if the stories are true?” he asked.

“What's true?” countered Danny. He stood up in the open space between the desks and read from his notepad:

“I'm not sure the personal stories need to be true,” said the captain. “The idea is for soldiers to share their experiences. It's how they see what happened that counts.”

“The documents don't need to be true either,” said Le Roy. “They only need to be authentic, so I'm studying up on that.”

At a pause in the conversation, Danny continued reading.

The train went through, blaring its whistle at the crossing and startling even Kelly. “Man, that sounded like incoming artillery fire,” he said.

When the glass had settled back into its wooden frames, Danny climbed out from behind the couch and said, “Anyway, I figured that since it's impossible to forget, maybe I should be trying to remember.”

“You didn't know about the grenade,” said Penn. “There's no way you could have known.”

“That's the point,” said Danny. “What do any of us know—me or anybody else? We run around with guns and battle plans and grandiose statements about liberation, but we might as well be kids running around in the dark. So now we post the stories and we write the poems and we dig through the official record for shards of truth or evidence of wrongdoing—and what? It doesn't change anything we did. The damage is done.”

“The blast was going to kill him anyway,” said Kelly. “Even if you hadn't stopped the truck.”

“He might have had a chance,” said Danny. “He might have had a fighting chance.”

“He had zero chance,” said Kelly. “Not even one in a million.”

“And those shards of truth might change things,” said the captain. “Not the past, but the future.”

“What's true?” Danny asked again.

“I'm thinking it's all of the personal narratives together,” said the captain, “each of them a tiny pixel in the bigger picture of what is what. And then the documents tether the narratives into some kind of objective framework. They allow people to look behind the personal accounts and the news stories to see if what we're being told is true.”

Le Roy was still going on about authentication. “I've got a good guy working with me on that, but he tells me we need some kind of anonymous drop box. People can't just email us top-secret documents. And we don't want to know who the leakers are—we need a system where they can't be traced.”

Kelly noticed how everyone occupied his own boxcar of thought: The captain had some theory of journalism in mind. Le Roy was obsessed with the mechanics of collecting and disseminating information. Danny was interested in stories as catharsis and art. Kelly wasn't sure yet what he was interested in, but money was never far from his mind. “Speaking of stories,” he said, but just then the single mother from down the block arrived with the dinner she had cooked for them, and Kelly didn't finish what he was going to say.

“You boys are in for a treat,” she said, putting a pan of lasagna on the table. “Mmm-mm. I outdid myself today!”

The first document to go up on the site was Penn's old email to himself describing what had happened with the convoy and the IED, juxtaposed to the official version of events.

“Are you sure you want that up there?” asked Kelly.

“Yeah,” said the captain. “I do.”

“Kind of like a confession?” asked Kelly.

“Yeah,” said the captain, “kind of like that.”

The captain was headed out on his evening patrol, so Kelly pulled on his jacket and followed him down the walk, kicking at the hydrangea heads, which had turned brittle and brown as the season deepened. He was surprised to see that night had fallen and the cloud cover had given way to a clear blackness that dissolved at the edges where lights from the city center fought back the dark. “I was thinking,” he said. “Could be it's better to leave the ghosts alone.”

“How does that help?” asked the captain. “Ghosts are creatures of darkness. They might not ever disappear completely, but they lose some of their power in the light.”

They walked across the tracks and turned down toward the river, past the boarded-up community pool. “We should get that pool reopened,” said Penn. “That's something the neighborhood kids would like.”

“Every kid should know how to swim,” said Kelly, but he wasn't thinking about the neighborhood kids, he was thinking about the two teenagers on the bridge. Danny hadn't been there, but he had. “The thing is, those boys didn't do anything but throw some rocks into the weeds, but it didn't matter. I remember saying, ‘Wait a minute,' but I wasn't thinking, Let's not hassle those kids. I was thinking, I hate fucking hajis. And I was curious about what Harraday would do and also kind of detached, as if none of it was really real.” And then he laughed and said, “What's real?” the way Danny would have said it.

“Let it be, Kelly,” said Penn. “Whatever it is, there's no sense dredging it all up again.”

“I thought you wanted to let the ghosts out.”

“Only if it helps, man. Only if it helps.”

“They wanted us to be afraid, and so we wanted them to be afraid too.”

They stood smelling the coming winter and listening to the wind moving through branches that still held a few papery leaves and watching the river roll underneath the railroad bridge. Then Sinclair said, “What's to say that the stars above us aren't the bright points of swords aimed at the earth by alien forces.”