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     I’m finding that I wake up late, usually around 0300, almost every night now. Sometimes it’s from a bad dream, a dream with explosions pounding the walls of my skull, sweat breaking on my skin as I awaken with wide eyes and shaking hands. Sometimes it’s from a dream of Rita and our life together.

     Normally I take a few moments to get my bearings and let the sensations recede. Restless and unable to go back to sleep, I wander outside to watch the stars glittering in the Kuwaiti night. I light a cigarette and revel in the peace of night—it’s my favorite time of day now. All is quiet, even in the warehouse, most people sleeping, the occasional snore or shift of a listless body immersed in a dream of home—of green fields or a lover’s arms.

     A cough breaks the silence as I reach my bunk, pull off my boots, and slip into my sleeping bag, using my laser pen to guide my way. I pull my poncho down from where I tucked it under the edge of the mattress above me, closing the door to my makeshift sanctuary, the left side hanging limply like its partner—a blue bed sheet I had stolen from Anaconda.

     I’m sealed in. I feel safe. I have my privacy.

     I feel drowsy, yet I can’t sleep. My eyes close but soon they open again and I am wide awake. I hear explosions. I feel my bunk rattling. My heart pounds, my breath seizes up, and my eyes search the darkness, frantically attempting to find something solid for my sanity to grasp onto. A moment passes and I realize there were no bombs or explosions. There was no reason to be afraid. It was just another dream. I can hear the silence of Camp Doha. I wipe the sweat on my brow and close my eyes again, hoping not to dream...

     I used to love my dreams. Now I’m afraid of them, afraid I’ll wake to find that being here was just a dream and that I’m back at Camp Anaconda, in that hell on earth. I’m afraid if I go to sleep, the mortars will begin again, relentlessly marching nearer. It seems as if every night I wake up trembling, eyes wide in the dark, curling up in a ball on my side and rocking back and forth in my sweat until the sounds of explosions leave my rattled skull.

     Sometimes I feel like there is something wrong with me. I don’t know what it is but I can feel something in me that’s growing, blooming. I’m scared because I don’t know who I am any more.

     What is happening to me?

     A hot, heavy, mid-summer day in New England. Stifling and oppressive, like the internet tent in Iraq.

     I’m driving past the Mobil gas station down the street from where I grew up, at the intersection of the two main roads that wind through and around my hometown. A small, not quite dilapidated place with a convenience store I’ve been to a hundred times. Across the street, the same school bus parking lot. The same four-way traffic light, same left and right turn arrows emblazoned on the same sign.

     A crossroads of eventuality.

     As I pass by, I slow down the car and look inside.

     Through the windows, I see the cashier behind the counter. A young woman. She’s slumped forward, resting on her elbows as if in prayer, head bowed to the countertop. She’s flipping the pages of a magazine.

     Something has changed here. Even though I’ve been here before, it looks, feels altered. I can’t put my finger on it. Nothing tactile, just an impression of ambience.

     The texture of sensation.

     Or maybe it’s me. I don’t know yet, but it’s growing within. Yearning. Thirsting. I’m different now, somehow, after I watched those bullets spill onto the coffee table.

     A peculiar variant of essential nature.

     I think you know what ya gotta do, my boy. Take that chance. I didn’t get ya through that fuckin’ war for nothin’.

     So many ghosts. Alive and dead at the same time.

     Stepping on the gas, heading toward the Burger King and ultimately the levee where we took our walk so many years ago, I hear the chirp of a bird.

     Light, cheerful, and peaceful.

     But there’s gunfire on the perimeter.

     The Hawk’s taking off, the winking, red tail light fading.

     Whop, whop, whop go the rotor blades.

     And the mortars are coming in.

     Bwoom.

     Shock waves of fury.

     “Jack’s dead, Dana.” 

     “What?”

     “He’s dead,” repeats the distant voice.

     Silence.

     “Okay, Libby, I gotta tell ya, that’s some kind of fucked up sense of humor.”

     “I’m not joking, Dana. He’s gone.”

     A pause.

     “I - I don’t understand. Really, what’s happened?”

     “No one seems to know yet, but I do know he did it this past weekend, sometime on Saturday or Sunday.”

     “Did what?”

     “He shot himself.”

     From the other end of the line, those stark three words rebound through the house on the winding road. The house on top of a short hill surrounded by oaks, birch, and hemlock. With the swamp in the back woods. The neatly placed trash and recycle bins by the side of the driveway. And the tall, bushy Rhododendron out front—big, ruffled white blooms with little stalks capped in yellow. The house where I grew up. Where Jack and I spent so much time—sleepovers, birthday parties, cub scout meetings with snipe hunts, movies, and backyard campouts. 

     Where we talked for hours about our imagined dreams.

     Now, the house is dark except for a soft, mosaic glow emanating from one window. A glow stealing its way through the black grass of night. Overseen by the pale gaze from a nearly full moon.

     Icy and prickly. 

     “Jack - shot - himself?”

     “Yeah, he did. I’m so sorry, Dana.”

     “But I just talked to him. How do you know?”

     “Avery told me, and I told her I’d tell you.”

     The phone almost slips from my hand, my mind calculating through a growing fog. “But it’s Tuesday.”

     “Yes.”

     “How come I’m just finding out now?”

     “It took me a little bit to find you.”

     Skepticism feels more rational than truth to me. I’m having a hard time feeling the floor underneath my socks. White? Cotton? 

     Are those toes moving?

     “He didn’t call me,” I murmur, more to myself than Libby.

     “He didn’t call anyone. Well, that’s not exactly true. Avery has been looking through his phone records and he made a whole bunch of calls the week before. But not to anyone he was close to. He didn’t call Avery, their mom—”

     “Joan.”

     “Yes. Nor me. And apparently not you.”

     “Why?”

     “I don’t know. I know he’d been having some problems.”

     “Yeah, I get that, but those things pass.”

     “We know that.”

     Fingers tingling. 

     My heart’s beginning to pound. 

     “Jack’s dead?”

     “Yes.”

     The kitchen is swimming and my eyes are blurring. Darkening. Dizzy, I steady myself by grasping the edge of the sink. A blank stare. No feeling. Then turning, I slump to the floor. Slow. In a daze. My eyes wide open, my back resting against the cabinet, my legs spread open. One hand palm up, resting on the cool, gray-colored, tile floor.

     Helpless and lifeless.

     “Jack’s - dead,” I whisper.