Silence again, then: “Yes.” I heard her voice in the background. “But I should go.”
“Just one more thing,” I said, not wanting him to hang up. It scared me how irrelevant Redwood had seemed when Alexei was around and how essential he seemed now that no one was around. “I was thinking. Adelaide Scott said it’s good to know what you don’t want, and I don’t want to be a wrecking ball anymore. I want to hang out with someone I actually like.”
“Okay,” he said, quietly. “Well. We’ll talk. But I really do have to go.”
After we hung up, I thought about texting Travis Day, asking him to come over, but I didn’t. That was something at least. Where was my medal? My prize for impulse control? And the night didn’t scare me anymore. It was just wind, just leaves brushing together. My house wasn’t watching me. Nothing was watching me. I was a dumbass sitting by a swimming pool in the dark, feeling unloved and sorry for myself but also, suddenly and pleasantly, invisible.
The War
Alaska
February–May 1943
Six weeks later
In the letter he received with his orders, Jamie had been informed his task was to express if you can, realistically or symbolically, the essence or spirit of war. What the essence or spirit of war was, the letter did not disclose.
He was allowed to state a preference for where he went, and he requested Alaska, not because he thought it the most likely location for the essence of war but because he was curious to see the place that had held Marian’s attention. And he thought he might as well work inward from the war’s edges.
On the naval transport from San Francisco to Kodiak, Jamie sketched soldiers playing cards or sunbathing on deck. He painted them stacked in their bunks, their skin nicotine yellow in the sickly glow of the hanging light fixtures that swung sickeningly with the roll of the ocean. The ship, before, had transported cattle, and Jamie thought its new purpose was not so different, still involved livestock.
He stood watch like everyone else, just as in basic training he’d marched and drilled and shot and jogged like everyone else, had sailed around San Diego harbor in a whaleboat and slept in a hammock. At night, some of the boots had cried but tried to muffle the sound, others ground their teeth so loudly it echoed.
For a week, he saw only water. Despite the spreading V of the wake, despite the shifting colors of the sky and the low passage of the winter sun, the ship seemed to be just churning in place, always at the center of the same flat disk of empty sea. The rest of the world seemed irrelevant. His father’s life had been spent at the center of such disks. Over time, what did that do to a person?
He tried to paint the roar and blast of the engine room, the green-white crust of sea spray that froze to the railings, the band of pale sky at the horizon, the prow chopping down on the whitecapped swells, sending up walls of spray. Titanium white. Davy’s gray. Indigo. Blue black. Some guys heckled him about his sketching and painting; some seemed worried about him. They asked if he knew how to shoot his rifle. He only said yes and no more. He’d been one of the best shots in boot camp, payoff from all the tin cans he’d blasted to smithereens as a child.
In Kodiak, he was told to report to a captain. He showed his orders, explained he was the combat artist.
“Christ, what next?” said the captain. “All right, what do you need?”
“I’m not sure,” said Jamie. “I’m supposed to go around painting what I see.” He didn’t want to explain how, really, the point was to interpret what he saw. The captain didn’t strike him as someone who would relish being interpreted.
“Sounds great. They’ll surrender in no time now you’re here. Carry on.”
Jamie sent off the paintings he’d made on the voyage and began new ones, working with stiff fingers and numb toes through the short, cold days. The inner parts of Kodiak’s harbor were frozen in a flat pane （titanium white） that ended in a crisp edge against the open water （Mars black）。 Slabs of ice, padded on top with new snow, broke off and floated away. Sometimes the glossy black fins of orcas sliced up, rolled down through the water’s surface like the turning cogs of submerged wheels. Bears came to forage through the garbage. Sea lions （Van Dyke brown, a little Venetian red） lay in heaps on the docks and rocks, roaring and biting. The females were smaller and tawnier than the males, bullied and put-upon, with tragic black eyes.
Jamie painted the mud and snow, the barracks and hangars and storage buildings, the jeeps and lumber piles. He painted a trawler tied up next to a submarine, a destroyer plastered with snow along its broadside after a blizzard, two P-38 Lightnings silhouetted against a snowy peak. The snow was white; sometimes the sky was white, sometimes the sea, too. He would need more white paint, more gray and blue and ocher, more Naples yellow for the tender winter light. He hadn’t used watercolors much since his boyhood, but he returned to them, leaving patches of the paper dry and bare for snow, adding faint streaks and blotches of gray to suggest the dimensions of the mountains.