I slung Jake over my shoulder and we ran for cover, hunkered down in a dark building. I set him on a table and took a look at him, and it was worse than I’d thought: he was in poor shape and bleeding bad. I dug in my pack, poured coagulate on the wounds, pulled out a shard of wood that was stuck in his armpit. Part of his face was gone, too. That was the hardest part, seeing his eye and part of his cheek ripped right off. I gave him some water and then held his hand and sat next to him.
After a while the skirmish died down and people were back on the streets, resuming their lives because that’s how it went. When things got heated, civilians would scoot off the streets, and real quick, it would be clear and quiet except for those of us who were fighting. But once things settled down, people were back out again, resuming their everyday business, which always struck me as strange, how they could live like that, though I guess they had no choice.
No one knew we’d gotten pinned down there, with nowhere to go and the radios lost in the blast. Before long, we ran out of water, and Jake’s face and leg were looking bad, his whole left side a bloody, charred mess, and the flies were seething now, too many for me to keep away from him. That bothered me, the way they just descended upon him, like he was already dead, and I couldn’t keep them back. How long, I remember wondering, how long until he’d die on that table on that unknown street in an unknown town.
It was December 14th and things were looking bleak. Jake started reciting Psalm 23, which if you don’t know it, is a death song, in my opinion. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I told him to quit it. Bent down and got right in his face with blood and sand and muscle and bone and looked through all of it and said, “Don’t you dare.”
He changed his tune.
“‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.’ Is that better?” he asked, looking at me. His face monstrous. The left eyeball a space of dried black blood but the right one, the same: kind and knowing. And yet he was smiling, I could tell. He’d been a handsome devil, before.
I squeezed his hand. “Sure, brother.”
“That’s Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
“Tell me about him.” I said this to get him out of the mode where he was brewing an infection and knew it and therefore gearing up to let go. I needed him to shift into English-teacher mode. I needed him to stay alive.
My tactic worked. He started talking about Hopkins and the Victorians and sonnets, none of which meant anything to me, but with him distracted I could scout the building a bit and not worry about him dying on me.
And so it was that Jake was talking poetry when I crept up and up, four flights of stairs to peer out a window. I had a pretty good sense of where we were but I knew I could confirm it from a higher vantage point. Once I got a look at things, I knew I could navigate our way back to base. Anyhow, like I said, people were back on the street. The bazaar was open, three kids were kicking a ball. From up there, I saw two figures closing in on the building, and they were headed right toward the entrance close to Jake. Jake lying on a slab on the brink of death and both of them sneaking, heads tucked, shoulders down.
Quick quick I darted back down the stairway, skipping steps, all those flights, and into the room and all I had was my AK, which would’ve alerted everyone that we were still there. And I couldn’t have that happen, not with Jake incapacitated and hours to go until nightfall. I remember running my hand along the wall in the stairwell, the steps that turned and turned. The rough feel of the stucco on my fingertips, the sound of my boots echoing down and down.
By the time I reached Jake they were both there in the room, standing over him and I thought he was dead already, that they’d finished what little was left of him, and a sudden fury swept over me, a thing so forceful I lost sense of everything I knew and was and all that was left was that room: my friend on the table, two people there to cause him harm, the flies that hummed and feasted, the heat.
I killed both of them. A man and a woman. Quick, but still.
The thing the woman had been carrying—it was a cake. Later, I fed it to Jake, crumb by crumb, because he wasn’t dead. They hadn’t touched him. Looking back, I’ve tried to convince myself that maybe they really would’ve hurt Jake, after all. Maybe both of us. Maybe I could’ve told them to get lost and they would’ve walked out of there and then told someone, and Jake and me would’ve gotten strung up in the streets. Regardless of what would’ve happened, though, whether they were there by accident or there to harm us, the fact is, I killed them, and I have to live with it.