Read an Excerpt
From "The I.E.D."
1.
What is he looking at? The maze of light made overhead by the high mud-brick walls of the narrow alley that the line of men, generously spaced, are navigating. It is the early part of late afternoon, the heat subdued into a smoldering focus by a low ceiling of clouds, everything very dry. The dust from the passage of something or someone—recently? hours ago?—floats through the diffuse angle of light at the intersection of the alleyways, giving the air there a sort of grain, causing it to briefly coruscate. But that is only at the border of what Abrams is looking at as he feels the strange texture under his boot, the slight resistance of the rectangular metal contact plate.
Though it’s not a maze of light he can really see, not completely, at the moment, just one he imagines. The part he can see is, he supposes (or was supposing in the microseconds before registering the change under his foot), only one corridor of pallid, blue-tinctured light. Further along, he can also see the beginnings of a perpendicular corridor, another alley. Together they make one small corner of the maze.
It is enough: the narrow, dirt-floored alley, cast partially into cool shadow by the obstruction of the high walls on either side, though Abrams is not standing in the shadowed area. It is almost pleasant, the quiet at the end of their patrol, the stillness of the village around them, the genial fatigue of the men, which is a kind of gladness, Abrams has always thought. And it is this moment of mindfulness—when Abrams looked up from the ground in front of his feet and noticed the alley half in shadow and the glad slump of the shoulders of the men in front of him at their delicate distance—which caused Abrams to look further upwards, to allow his face to continue on its vertical pivot enough to take in the sky, the light, the unparsable complex of sky and light framed in that curious way by the tops of the wall into a kind of maze. And it was exactly then that he felt the slight slip, the sudden ease of friction beneath the ball of his right boot afforded by the metal contact plate.
Though that’s not quite right either because it implies a false linearity, or, even worse, a causality, when what it is surely more accurate to say—accuracy being meaningful to Abrams—is that there was a sensory-cognition master fade type situation going on somewhere in his cortex, the phrase maze of light fading out even as contact plate or, more simply, IED faded in. That is to say that even as maze of light was dawning on Abrams (seeming, in fact, to fall down out of the vision in order to describe it) IED was beginning its scaled march into attention, so much so that the two thoughts may be said to have been coeval.
Neither is the irony lost on Abrams that it was a moment of actual mindfulness (and not distraction or carelessness) which possibly led him to place his foot on the small stretch of shallow dirt that hid the contact plate. He can still hear the instructor during the lengthy pre-deployment training exercises in the real alleys of the fake village in the Arizona desert. Specifically, that in order to never ever be caught unawares by the presence of an improvised explosive device while on patrol in The Shit, they needed to first and foremost learn how to cultivate a state of extreme mindfulness in which each of them could stare at the ground, the dirt in front of their feet (carefully stepping only in the compressed boot-shapes of dust left by the man ahead in line), for hours and not become zombiefied or otherwise rendered even marginally senseless to the small hints or clues of micro-terrestrial disturbance that would signal the presence of the device.
Abrams himself had thus far handled the weeks of their patrol assignment by allowing himself to focus so hard he lost scale. In his vision the miniature landscapes of the dirt became actual landscapes; the ridges and mounds, the troughs, the swales, all began to loom, began to feel like the sprawling life-sized features of an entire world.
No, what Abrams and the other men actually needed was a sort of mindlessness, an absence of thought that would allow them to stare at unremarkable stretches of dust and dirt for hours at a time without developing an acute awareness of (and appreciation for) the minutiae of the moment, or the light, or the other men, or any of the marginalia of actual experience that is mindfulness. It now seems a strange irony that such a human moment—the maze of light, the pleasant pre-prandial lull of the village, the alley wearing its stole of shadow, the pleasant cutting scent of the other men’s sweat; moreover, the noticing of all this—has possibly led to Abrams’ imminent cranial evacuation by way of shrapnel moving through the tissues of his face at unimaginable speeds.
Unbidden, the flash of memory: Mrs. Clowney (sharp-faced, gently obese English 9 teacher). She is repeating, somewhat smugly, the true definition of irony. Irony is when the audience is aware of something that the player on stage is himself unaware of.
Unbidden, also, the related memory of Mrs. Packard, Abrams’ third grade teacher, trying, for some reason, to impress upon the class the unthinkable speed of light. She is standing at the classroom’s light switch, flipping it on and off, which sets off tremors of giggles. Abrams raises his hand (the teacher’s face falling at another of his questions) and asks which is faster, then, the time it takes the electricity to go from the switch to the light, or the time it takes the light from the light bulb to reach their eyeballs, or the time it takes the students themselves to know that the lights are on? For a moment, Mrs. Packard, in her sturdy floral dress, goes silent, her face bled of its excitement at her own lesson. She clasps her hands in front of her in a way that Abrams understands on some level as a sign of vulnerability, which makes him feel really bad the rest of the day every time he looks at her, though of course he can’t quite explain why.
Later, when he learned about it in college, Abrams couldn’t believe how slowly one’s perceptions and conscious sensations move into our attention, outpaced often (always?) by even our own reptilian subsystems. Also in college, Abrams, long suspicious of Mrs. Clowney, ended up looking up the definition of irony, finding its root to be in e????e a, meaning “dissimulation” or “feigned ignorance”, which Abrams thought sounded more like it. His body (specifically his foot) knows before he does, but cannot bear to short-circuit his mind’s self-myth of mastery, and so must feign ignorance, must wait until the phrase IED finishes its patient fade into Abrams’ mind, maze of light still echoing in some synaptic hallway.
2.
But does his foot know? Is it reacting? The extraordinary efficiency of the human sole cannot be denied. Think of the things it is capable of—eloquent distribution and redistribution of weight, shifting phalangeal deployment, a notable ability to take the changing physical demands of a normal day (sprinting toward a bus stop in wooden-soled business shoes) in stride. That Abrams has become aware of the contact plate at all is in fact proof of his foot’s intelligence.
And yet. And yet his right foot, encased in its boot, is not stopping, is not pausing in its rolling heel-then-arch-then-toe impression into the dirt. The heel strikes—it has no reason to pause. Even when the arch, or mid-sole, falls, is pressed into the dirt—still no cause for hesitation. But then, finally, the ball. The hinge of the cuneiform bone (beautiful term) extending into the gentle metatarsal has pre-determined Abrams’ fate. The application to the ground of the plantar fascia (horrible term) may not be stopped. And so the ball of the foot, the ball of the boot’s outsole, falls, and Abrams’ weight begins to shift onto its pad, and the strange texture beneath.
But already Abrams’ heel is rising (has risen) from the location of its initial strike, separating itself from the dirt, and the cuneiform bone is pulling at the local terminus of the metatarsal, taking it along in its launch back into the air and light.
This moment Abrams does truly grasp, understanding pluming up through all levels of processing—he can feel it in the arch of muscle between his shoulders. It is a kind of resignation—bodily, mentally—intuitive, but encompassing in its intuition. It is the feeling of helplessness at time passing, of the loss of experience even as it occurs.
Abrams has been aware of various declensions of this moment his whole life—one of which scenes now cloud-shadows its way across his interior vision.
He stands in an abandoned lakeside dairy, repurposed for the night into an event space for his best friend’s wedding reception. He stands at the edge of the main, high room, a cuneiform alphabet of pipes still decorating the walls and ceiling; he stands there with Sarah, his girlfriend, whom they do not know is sick yet, taking in at once the writhing organism of the dance floor, the large glass windows of what was once (he guesses) a loading bay. Beyond: train tracks, the black expanse of the lake, only a field of absence in the dark. It has been a wonderful wedding, held out of doors in the uncharacteristically brisk late August day, on a grassy knoll outside of a relative’s cabin. Beyond the pastor on the little platform there was the lake, its waters lacerated by the small, sharp edges of the wind. And now: the night in the abandoned dairy, the reception. Earlier, someone passed out toy kazoos before the bride and groom arrived and when they finally entered everyone played “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Those without kazoos had sung. And now here Abrams is, standing very still. Sarah is exhausted, draped over a chair beside him. They do not know she is sick yet.
He can feel the mass of experiential detail swelling, as he stands there, a sundae in a Styrofoam bowl from the make your own sundae buffet melting in his right hand. He’s waiting for the train. It has come through once, not slowing, very early in the event, right after he and Sarah arrived. The tracks, once laid for easy loading from the dairy, pass within feet of what is now the wall of glass. It is fiercely loud, piercing in its intensity. It is truly a blast of motion, so near and pervasive that one’s body seems a participant in its very direction, to the point where the explosion of dark metal (and sound) seems to be emanating from the atoms of one’s own body. For a few seconds, while your consciousness is still catching up (slow, so slow), you are the train, barreling into the nothingness of the night by some propulsion that is beyond will or intention. The waiting has become excruciating.
The waiting has become torturous, less due to anticipation than the nagging sense that Abrams has understood the experience too late, that it is even now slipping from the grasping parts of his memory. He will never be in this abandoned dairy again, he knows. There can be only tragic falling offs from this night, from the train’s transcendent passage. Even the passage he is now waiting for, if it in fact it ever comes, will be over almost even as it begins, exactly because Abrams has become aware of its singularity. It feels ridiculous to be made panicky by something so abstract and common as the passage of time, but the simple fact of it—Abrams grasping it on a muscular level—deflates the experience for Abrams even as the train does arrive, and the dancers are shattered into fear and surprise, and Abrams tries and fails to itemize his perceptions and observations and the ironies of the moment so extensively as to slow time to the point of cessation. Of course he fails, he must fail, and the rest of the night feels like a letdown; had already felt like a letdown, even before the train recurred.
But Abrams’ sense of anticipatory nostalgic loss is not altogether unpleasant, in its way. He doesn’t know when he developed it, how young he was when he first understood. The relaxation that he experiences in the moment of his knowing about the contact plate beneath the ball of his right foot and that same foot’s continued motion, is—it must be said—distinctly pleasurable. Another cloud-shadow of memory darkening the screen of his mind: the sweltering parking lot in Minneapolis, some forgotten road trip with his poor, nervous mother.
He is standing outside one of those old-fashioned Dairy Queen stands, this one planted in the middle of a grey concrete parking lot that seems to Abrams as vast as the sea. He is a little boy, and the stand, with its antiquated retro neon signage, looms above him spectacularly. His mother has let him order for himself, and in something like a fit of pleasure Abrams speaks up and asks wildly for the combination he’s noticed on the menu board, the synthesis of two of his favorite treats—a vanilla ice cream Blizzard, with (the electric quiver of joy) Nerds in it. ‘Nerds’ being the sour, granular candy popular at the time, which came in unexpected marriages of colors; a small mountain spread in the palm of one’s hand turning into a pointillist portrait of some alien, lustrous landscape. A great deal of the pleasure for little Abrams is to be had simply in the breathless idea of such a thing: the play of the possible visual alone (the sharp, glossed color of the Nerds, implanted delicately in the creamscape of the vanilla ice cream) making his skin tingle. But also the taste—previously unthinkable—the contrast at once of the milky, cold, sweet vanilla against the eye-squintingly sour acid of the Nerds: an oral chiaroscuro never before conceived of by the staff of all other Dairy Queens Abrams has ever visited. This all not to mention the texture, the queer graininess of the ice cream with its hard secret of Nerds, the sensation carrying with it the unmistakable sense of transgression, as if eating rocks and dirt. And all of this present just in the thought, the galaxy of delight expanding rapidly, anticipatorily in Abrams’ mind and nerve centers as he orders—nervously, having to repeat it again louder for the visored teenager at the till. Abrams speaks his order again anxiously, as if something might happen, like a jealous deity might perhaps strike him down for requesting of the world such a thing as a Nerd-filled Blizzard, offered almost clandestinely by only this particular Dairy Queen.
And so Abrams stands there on the concrete sea, in the sweltering heat, and looks down at his narrow cup, the red spoon stabbed into the blank territory of pleasure. Abrams feels the anxiety of the first bite spreading over his body like a very tiny horse race across his epidermis, Abrams tracing its progress from the environs of his anus up into the space below his belly button and then across the plain of his chest. He can feel his intestines spasm. He looks down into the cup and uses the spoon with its garish red to swirl the already melting contents. Shockingly, something Abrams has not foreseen: the color-coating of the Nerds, enveloped by the ice cream, has begun to bleed into the pure bed of ecru. Each individual Nerd leaves an arcing trail of hue, dissipating in intensity and, worst of all, revealing at the core a heart of whiteness, together which all collectively sit on the field of ice cream like teeth thrown across an unwashed linen sheet.
Abrams supposes that this feeling, this loosening from between his shoulders through his core and reaching finally his sphincter, is what makes men, particularly soldiers, defecate in the process of their deaths. It is a kind of peacefulness, it is true. There’s nothing particularly special or original about the pleasure in abandon, Abrams knows. Perhaps there lies within the sensation of knowing, of (literally) striding forth into the moment of his fate, some sort of masochistic desire, a sense in which Abrams’ appreciation of the maze of light and the calm fall of shadow was in fact beckoning the violence of the thing in the dirt which he cannot see. A death wish. Perhaps this is what—underneath all the paroxysms of memory—he’s really wanted. Why else can he not stop his foot, really?
Just as he cannot stop now the memory of Lara Fugelsang, the tall, severe-faced, blonde lesbian in the philosophy seminar he’d taken back in graduate school.
“Hate-fuck” is not a term Abrams would ever use of his own accord, but he cannot deny the perfect marriage of phrase and meaning. It’s the ‘fuck’ that really does it, turning against and engorging the prim breathiness of ‘hate’. ‘Fuck’: the initial, lurid excitement of that labiodental fricative—that turbulent airflow—overtaken and quickly dominated by the velar expulsion of hard-edged fleshliness. It’s not a mistake that the word is both transitive and intransitive; the dominated and the dominating, act and actor and acted upon. Of course it’s Germanic. The act is Germanic, never more so than in this construction.
(CONTINUED)
