“I like you,” I said. “Miss Naima.”
She smiled. We kissed again. I felt her shiver under my hands.
* * *
? ? ?
At Julian’s new job, the bank’s HR department paired him up with a company mentor, another former Marine. They had a program, Julian explained one night on the phone; an affinity group within the practice to ease the transition from military life into corporate America: professional-development workshops, speakers on mental health, yoga and meditation classes.
“He was fat,” Julian said about his assigned mentor, his voice laced with disgust. “Huge beer gut that hung over his pants.”
“He’s a regular person now. A civilian,” I said. “So he ate a few burgers. He’s allowed.”
“You can’t go around introducing yourself as a Marine Corps vet, looking like that. It’s embarrassing,” he said. “He probably had a lame staff job. No way any one of my guys would’ve ever let themselves go like that.”
I thought of Julian’s brown skin, the muscles that felt like fine carved stone beneath my hands. He was proud of his body, a confidence that revealed itself in how he moved, in bed and out of it. I wondered how long he’d stay like that, now that he was a civilian nobody like everyone else.
He kept in touch—mostly through texts; sometimes with phone calls, when he couldn’t fall asleep. Julian drank every night of the week, downing a whole bottle of red by himself at home, or else rounds of bourbon on the company tab at some team-building happy hour. He’d call me drunk, his voice suddenly boyish, full of smiles, rinsed of the nervous energy that otherwise clung to him. Were we becoming friends? No straight guy I’d ever slept with acted like this. Maybe he didn’t know this wasn’t normal behavior, that you were supposed to just ghost.
One time, he sent me an old photo of himself with his Marine buddies. The five of them stood in a row, wearing the same sand-colored digital camouflage coats and cargo pants. Hard grimaces were etched on their faces, five sets of eyes squinting into the camera lens. The picture was taken somewhere in Logar province. Julian was at least two or three shades darker than he was now, or maybe it was the camera’s exposure, or that he was standing next to those guys, the only brown face in the group. An automatic rifle hung in front of his chest, attached to a sling that rested on one shoulder and crossed over the front of the body, the way a woman wore a purse with the leather strap nestled between her breasts. “Everyone always thought I was the Afghan translator,” he said. “They learned, though.” Learned what? I asked. “Not to fuck around with the Filipino captain.”
* * *
? ? ?
He couldn’t fall asleep without the alcohol. Even so, nightmares haunted him. Julian had no peace in bed.
“You don’t want to know what I dream about,” he told me one night on the phone. “It’s messed up.” I was curious. Finally, he relented and described the scenery in his brain under moonlight. This was an especially bad one from a couple nights ago, he said. Severed body parts, a humid butcher shop, everything slick, red. A man with no face hunting him, closing in—
He was right. I wished I hadn’t insisted.
The next day, I called back and begged him to make an appointment to talk to a therapist.
“The VA hospital is a joke,” he replied. “I’ve been through all this. They made me talk to a psychologist before. I lied my ass off—”
“So don’t lie this time.”
He sighed. “It’s not going to do anything. Trust me.”
“Why’d you lie to the psychologist?” I said. “What’s the point of that?”
He said that he was giving serious thought about going back into the Marines. “At least back then I was doing something meaningful,” he said. “I can’t believe I quit to be a paper bitch.”
“Listen,” I said. “I have an idea. Let’s write a movie together. Your stories, everything you already told me, plus—”
“Come on,” he said. “Get serious.”
“I already pitched it to my agent,” I lied. “He’s into the idea.”
“You did what?” he cried. “I never said you could do that. I told you things—”
“It’s not about military training strategies or fighting in Afghanistan. No one cares about that crap,” I said, even though it was the opposite of the truth. Everyone loved a feel-good American war movie. “It’s about Lapu-Lapu, reincarnated as an ex–Marine officer, working on Wall Street.”