by Val Candon
“I’m gonna tear apart the carburetor,” my husband announces and starts covering the faded living room carpet with old newspapers. In the backyard, an old rusty Toyota pickup sits lifelessly on a trailer bed like a taxidermied carcass.
“Now? It’s midnight!”
“I have my headlamp.” He points to the rectangular gadget strapped to his forehead and grins.
“Yes, no…I didn’t mean it that w—” I sigh. “I see that. It is essential, of course, that one have a headlamp in the middle of one’s brightly lit living room. I meant, come to bed.” I lift myself up from the rickety old couch—a lone survivor of the move from the old apartment—indicating my own intention to do so.
“Shortly,” he says.
“We both know what shortly is code for.” I stare at the news articles of a possible nuclear war, unhinged hurricanes, and what has become the daily dose of mass shootings scattered on the carpet, about to be stained with rust and machine oil.
“What do you want me to say? I got a weird second wind.”
“I want you to say that you’d rather be upstairs falling asleep with me than drinking yourself into the gutters.” I know the steps of this dance so well that the words come out of my mouth pre-formed.
The first time my husband returned from deployment, his smile was so wide it threatened to swallow the Sahara Desert. He wrapped me in his arms and lifted me off the pavement, my legs dancing in the air. Then we walked to the neighborhood pub, holding hands, laughing gluttonously. He had managed to cross the invisible bridge between past and present. He was home.
The second time, he disembarked the military bird with hollowed eyes, moats of webbed lines around them. He smelled of aircraft fuel and dejection. In the days that followed, he said little, ate less than he drank, and slept nervously with teeth gritting like millstones. Buried in his irises trudged the ghosts of those whose bodies would not see proper burial.
But he went again. Disillusioned. Disabused of any remaining faith in the standard issue military platitudes of honor and integrity among brothers. He went because he had committed to go, because faith in his own words was all he had left. Nine months later, I collected him from the airport—commercial flight this time, three months into the deadliest pandemic of the century. He was red-faced, drunk, and spewing profanity, his body no longer a functioning container. The second he was spit out by the sliding doors separating hungry greeters from the sterile orderliness of passport control, he headed straight to the exit, abandoning his luggage on the carousel.
“I’m not—”
“Just stop.”
“I said I’m not going to drink!”
“Don’t raise your voice at me. I have done nothing to deserve being yelled at, all I do is try to help.”
I do. Perpetually, infuriatingly, and with the self-righteous cruelty of someone burying any awareness of the fact that nobody can save anyone from themselves.
“Oh my God.”
“Oh my God what? Do you hear how dismissive you sound right now?” Anger and despair have become the twin strands of my DNA’s double helix, and, just like DNA, I can’t seem to outrun them. Trauma has an insidious ability to alter our genetic code, contemporary science holds.
“For fuck’s sake, Kate! You know I can’t sleep.”
“Yes, Oliver, I know. We all know. Everybody in the whole world knows that Oliver can’t sleep. And that his knee is torn up. And his lungs are full of shrapnel and titanium residue. Not to speak of his bulging discs, or the stomach hernia, the COPD, the sleep apnea, the PTSD…I know all of it, I was there, remember? Waited, baked cookies. And I am still here, at every doctor’s appointment.” I am starting to sound hysterical and I know it. “This…mess…doesn’t only affect you. I don’t know how…what to do anymore…”
“Could’ve just gone to bed.”
Could have. Past modals are the most powerful grammatical structure. Modals of lost opportunity, they are called, appropriately. Expressions of that which never happened are now our daily verse. His I wound have helped you and You should have woken me up; my I could’ve shown more compassion. The things that could have happened but did not, symbols of time’s betrayal. The trajectory not lived. The parallel life that kept moving while ours is standing still. He would have been there for me, had he not enlisted alcohol in his battle to stop the imaginary undoing of horrible deeds in his mind. I would have been more empathic, had my fear not been whispering in my ears that if he only tried harder, perhaps time could resume its forward motion again.
“I’m not your project, Kate. You can’t just fix me.”
“I know that, don’t you think I know that?”
“Again, not sure what you want me to say.”
“When I was in undergrad, we had this professor—she was an oddball, and that is putting it mildly—but she did one thing right. She took us all, the whole class, to the Creedmoor Living Museum. All these people, psychiatric patients, who had no idea if they would ever leave, if they’d ever get well enough to spend Sunday mornings eating brunch with their families. They had been granted this one freedom, to create. And I remember, at the very entrance, there was a painting of Superman. Except for, it was not Superman as we are used to seeing him; it was Superman reimagined. Aged. Battered. His mind and body shattered by all the ugliness, all the wrongs he could not right, the wrinkles in the world he could not iron out. So there he is, right? Superman, with his cape all mangled, as he slouches on a chair. Beer belly sticking out like a cannonball, all scruff and matted hair. Deep craters under his eyes. He is holding a beer bottle, shattered glass littering the ground below him. And he looks in the distance but he can’t see. There’s nothing there. All empty, like life sucked the soul out of him.” I stop, waiting for the image to sink in. “I didn’t know it then, but I think a Veteran must have painted it.”
“I’m sorry, love,” he says at last. “But betcha he didn’t have a carburetor.”
Then he slowly lowers his body amongst the nuts and bolts and springs on the floor, gasping, his stiff knee refusing to bend a certain way. He is forty.
This story has no end. Time shrinks and stretches in confused patches, but an end presupposes a beginning or a middle, a coherent timeline, a story of the self which unfolds forward. For those suspended in time, there is only the interminable now. And the present is a rusty truck’s malfunctioning heart with its contents—or the contents of my husband’s heart, I don’t know—spilled on the loose sheets of newspaper on our living room floor, longing to be put together and made whole again.
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Originally from Bulgaria, Val Candon has been living in New York for almost twenty years. As an immigrant herself and a military spouse, she is deeply interested in stories of displacement, survival, and transformation. When not writing or reading, she is also a practicing clinical psychologist with a focus on trauma and posttraumatic growth. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling to exotic destinations with her husband, trying new foods, and befriending the chipmunks who live under her porch. She insists that all typos in her work are her cat’s.
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