The Third Place Winner
UNH Magazine Spring 2010 Fiction Contest
(Contest judged by Alice McDermott '78G)
In “The Big Light” by Nathan J. Fink ’11G, the reader learns what happened to the narrator’s shell-shocked medic wife. McDermott liked its “wonderfully assured voice and a fine sense of the visual.” She adds that it “succeeds very well in—to paraphrase Conrad—making us see. Conrad also comes to mind in its depiction of this journey into a kind of Heart of Darkness.” Fink is earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) at UNH. He earned a bachelor’s in English from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He has been published in the Wisconsin Review, Eklectica and Black Bird Magazine. He lives in Rye, N.H.
I have to tell my wife it's just a thunderclap, a far off scrap of sound booming the sky overhead. I use my palm to steady her, knead where her shoulder blades hook below the sheets, but she's dreamt herself away from here, lying, I know, somewhere in a desert. It's just as well I go to back sleep.
What the news stations report is that she and four other soldiers were motoring east while their Humvee whipped up a long tail of dust. A British woman, with bangs like brown slag, fills the television with her talk, saying the platoon, Bravo Company, 126th, was scouting a parched scratch of earth near Pakistan when it vanished. On screen are headshots of the unit—my wife is second from the left, hat set forward, hair drawn tight, fastened, and now it's the British woman again. She's on site. There, she says, her arm outstretched, see the break in the mountains? Sure enough, I'm thinking. Beyond her finger rises a cathedral of stone, and if I look closely, a small notch, blue with the bluest curl of atmosphere.
She doesn't say, however, that my wife wanted to be a sculptor. I've seen her, she's good. We met in a ceramics class at Lakeland, one of those Tech schools slap-dashed in a grassy field, this one in eastern Wisconsin. Art—I might've drowned myself for embarrassment. Biweekly, for three credit-hours, I mangled candy dishes, bestowed oblong lids upon maybe sugar bowls; a cow I plagiarized from the real-deal outside the window could've been a propane tank. Who in their right mind requires Art of a computer programmer? Lakeland. Really, it wasn't that bad. Most of the time, I admired a woman across the room, who could, miraculously, I thought, free a human face from a knot of clay. A real talent, my wife.
We went out a few times. Nothing serious. She once recruited my help shoeing replica horses mid-gallop. Another time, junior year it must've been, she arranged thousands of green army men as leaves of a great oak. We lived together at that point, in a drab little farmhouse with crooked doorframes and three generations of raccoons. But that's a different story—a funny story, actually, we get married in that story. This one, however, takes place in Afghanistan, long after some college advisor needled her: Why Art? he said, you'll never make money. It's true, she said and signed up for ROTC. She'd be a medic. She'd work with her hands, make hazard pay. She told me all about it that first night we met for drinks down at the Elbow Room. The world needs nurses, she said. And free tuition, I said, better than pushing a cursor around some computer screen. She laughed, said, no way, not me; that I couldn't endure.
I may have proposed a toast. To belief—to what people believe when necessary and how much they can stomach thereafter. My cramped apartment, say, that we couldn't yet know we'd share a year later; then, the farmhouse rolled up in some mossy hills. And after we settled into married life, when finally her orders to report came, we endured them a cappella—war, we sang, what is it good for!
Truth be told, it was for her hands she feared most. Let them take anything but these, she said, holding them up like soft, pale trophies. It was a Monday and a skin of morning light livened our bedroom. The following afternoon she'd report to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, be briefed then ship out, so we did what we could. We drank a handle of gin and made love—the ravaged, clingy kind, don't go love, but she was already gone, so whatever I held was strictly out on loan. Property of the US government, she joked, and cupped half-moons of her breasts. When she left, I let the television blare nonstop, scoured news networks for mention of Kandahar, Kabul—all things Afghanistan.
Today, now I mean, with my wife on leave, in bed at home, news is reflex. News is 3 a.m., a British woman and a knick in the rock—there, the woman's saying, people have their questions; they have a right to know what happened.
Here's how my wife explained it to me: A month ago, late May, she and four soldiers humped the dust toward Pakistan to investigate a low-frequency radio disturbance, even if there was nothing to disturb but sandstone and scrub brush. Really though, she said the desert is full of things you can't imagine—lizards that swim the sand, insects caning along like old men, mountain goats that perform magical ascents, and then, mysteriously, she said, a golden retriever, but it could've been a cougar, even though retriever was what she saw. In the desert your eyes play tricks on you. All those rocks, she said, all that sand, sea-less and busy, grinds its way into your bones, your brain. At first she saw nothing but dazzling emptiness. Then, one day, one-by-one, the rocks stood up and walked off.
She said the outpost was a long way out, farther, in fact, than she thought possible. They drove and drove, the sun burned up the sky. Around noon they stopped at what looked like a once pomegranate grove, now leafless and electric against the tan sandscape. She said they stopped, ate sand sandwiches and drank sand water and walked around staring at the smooth white stones underfoot. It was then, walking, that David, a corporeal with hair like a tarmac, hollered: is this heel or hipbone, he wanted to know. The men gathered round to speculate, passed whatever it was clockwise. Might be a shoulder, someone said, might be anything, another said, who knew bone could gleam like that? Until, finally, it got to my wife—definitely heel, the Calcaneus, she said, adding, the ball of the hip is larger, like an egg. After that the men scattered. They toed the sand at random, and as it turns out those smooth white stones weren't stones at all. My wife said no one spoke for some time. She gassed the Humvee and watched David lift his knees high while he packed it in, picking only sandy spots to step. Then, grit included, they rumbled farther up the valley, distrustful of the white cobble gleaming beside the road.
She said the air stiffened as they climbed, that on the mountainside they breathed glass and spit sand. Someone joked Afghanistan was the world's biggest whip-it, Oh-man-istan, he said, then laughed the oxygen clean out the cabin. Everyone laughed. It was necessary, my wife said, six months in the desert and green grass could be the funniest thing on earth. She said they laughed until they wept, laughed until the boots started showing up, then no one felt like laughing anymore.
Beige army boots, United States issue, same as hers, set in exact increments—one after another, they flanked the road. Corporeal Brand noticed it first. Partially because he drove, partially, my wife said, because he never spoke; reticence made him blade sharp. You see that, he said and slowed the Humvee, every mile, I've been keeping track. And if it didn't before, the glass my wife breathed now crippled her throat. Corporeal Brand went on: and the thing I can't figure out, he said, is why they're pointing west. Sure enough, my wife said, every dust-caked one in a westerly way.
There were other things, too, roadside: scraps of uniform, the glint of bullet casings like gold fillings, bandanas, chocolate bars, a comb, a can of tuna, eight tins of tobacco and four pouches—my wife kept tally in the grit on the window. There were mess kits, tea candles, a hypodermic needle, an entire med-kit strewn like snow. There were speculative things, things that loosened the fit of reality: a twist of wood became a hand; a stand of scrub brush smoke; and then came the man burned into a rock but could've been a shadow—one long arm out, legs together. He might've been gesturing up the road, where, for all they knew, a US platoon held position on a finger's width of stone. But what sucked the air out of my wife were the stacks of girlie magazines, like a low-slung row houses amongst the rock. Why? I wanted to know. Because it was careful, she said, someone had to stack them.
Bravo Company reached the outpost on foot, parked where a rockslide occluded the road and humped a set of narrow switchbacks up the mountainside. She said they carried what they could: M-16s, 9 millimeter on the hip, extra Kevlar, rounds hanging like jewelry, radios, bottled water, a few vials of morphine and a look shared between them—not me, it said, stick that in someone else. My wife carried the Humvee's ignition key for no reason whatsoever, good luck maybe, who knows.
She said it was tough going, but eventually the debris loosened and a roofline cut the sky above. She said "outpost" was too ambitious, more like "lean-to," four posts and corrugated sheet metal, where the outside was inside and the inside nowhere you want to be after dark. In one corner were duffle bags, in the other a crude bench, some stones and a slat of wood. There were shovels and toilet paper and a scrawl of boot prints, and there was a stillness, as if the air went hard. It hardened around them, my wife said, cemented each soldier over their boots. That's when she heard yipping. The sound of what, she said, a dog? Not possible. My wife scanned the perimeter. She almost spoke. Do you hear that? she wanted say, but the men were busy prodding duffle bags with gun barrels.
The desert can play tricks on you, on your eyes, ears, my wife said, and yet, distinctly, she heard yipping. She asked me if I remembered Sadie. Those photos of me at the lake, she said, you told me when I was ten I was a shoelace. Now I remembered; Sadie is the golden retriever in the pictures. There's one of them on a dock, of my wife's small arms, sun-soaked and strung about that dog, hands knotted in front, and raising the skin of the lake is a ring where just before a fish rolled the mirrored surface. It was Sadie, my wife said, there in the desert.
Sadie?
We can stop this anytime, she said, I know what I saw.
I believe you, I said. Please, go on.
She said she turned, caught a flash of tail flitting through the rocks and hurried after it, away from the outpost. Instinct told her to. And while she couldn't be certain, she said the dust stirred where something went, so she clamored down a crumbling ridge to sandy pitch, searched for prints, and finding none, faced the outpost, which appeared as a diorama before a curtain of purple sky. A diminutive Corporeal Brand traced across the foreground. Midway, he stopped. He pivoted on his heels, slammed his gunstock into his shoulder and drew a bead on my wife. When he raised his left arm, waved, my wife waved back. Sharper than most, she said.
And then came the big light.
It started somewhere behind Corporeal Brand, as a sprig of flame on the far side of outpost. It streaked fast. It towered and threw streamers, almost pretty-like, like a jet being fired, consuming the roofline, the corporeal, and a Boom-Whoosh that boiled alive the sand beneath her and echoed down the valley. A spray of earth rained as my wife lay coiled, clinging to the dim hope she, too, wouldn't be boiled away in the big light. In the Boom-Whoosh of heat and debris and hardened air.
And then, just as sudden, a silence.
When a cool blew in, my wife moved her hands. She said she used them to touch her face. She touched her neck, almost shaping it, she said, walked the fluttering slope of it down her torso, to her thigh, where she snuck a finger beneath her beltline and felt a bruise warm the surface. She must've landed on something, the ignition key, she realized. She'd be all right but lay until a moon rolled halfway up the night, shown bright as bone, and only then did she gain her feet, brush away the sand and climb to where the outpost should've been but said when she got there was bald-faced, glassy-eyed rock. A nothing scab of stone.
So it's no wonder a big sound delivered across the sky, even with me explaining thunderclap, finds her curled at the end of the bed. She must've figured, even then, that storms would never be the same, the thrill of seeing the sky on fire. That on the Fourth of July, before fireworks begin, she'd draw a bath, submerge her ears and listen for whatever knocked around the porcelain, and know beating beneath it all is a human sound, an enigmatic sound, like humping down a mountainside moonlit. A sound, if you believe it, that's a better than celebration. ~
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