Sparta - Softcover

1


There was a change in the engine pitch. The droning roar turned lower and more purposeful: the plane was changing angle. They were leaving the level flight path, nosing downward. Conrad felt an uneasy drop inside. After a moment he realized he was bracing himself against the seat, feet pressing hard against the floor as though against brakes. He made himself relax.
He leaned toward the window, looking out: until now, there’d been nothing to see. They’d left Frankfurt at night and had crossed all of Europe in darkness. The whole continent had lain below them, dark as the night sky itself, revealed only by constellations of city lights. By daybreak they’d been high over the gray emptiness of the Atlantic, far above the miniature waves and the distant, frozen whitecaps. Now they were over land again. Nova Scotia? Newfoundland? Anyway, North America.Home ground. Again Conrad felt the uneasy drop.
Below him lay dense green forest, broken only by the drifting silver shapes of lakes. From here the lakes seemed to be in motion, languidly swirling and eddying, as though the edge of a swamp had been stirred with a stick. All around them were woods.
Conrad imagined walking through the trees below: the leafy, springy duff, soft underfoot. The clean, aromatic tang of balsam, flecks of sunlight scattered across the dim trunks. The soil beneath these trees was always in shade. The air was always cool.Always cool. The notion gave him a kind of vertigo, and he closed his eyes.
What came into his mind was the place he had left, which was still there. He was here, descending over this place, cool, verdant, silent. The place he had left, which was still there, was arid, brown, deafening. Suffocatingly hot, heat pressed over it like a mattress. At this moment, while he was here, that place was there. But he could not hold both places in his mind at once. Trying to do so felt risky.
Conrad turned away from the window and looked at the man beside him, who was asleep, out cold.
Corporal Paul Anderson, Conrad’s second-squad leader, was slumped in his seat, his big head flopped sideways, wide chin sunk in his neck. His white-blond eyebrows were bright against the charred red of his sunburned face. His hair was blond, like his eyebrows, but it was barely there, buzz-cut, shaved down to a pale mist over his skull. Anderson’s lips were slightly parted, and saliva glistened faintly at one corner. He was a nice kid from Minnesota, quiet and reliable. Ordinarily, Conrad would have been sitting next to another officer, but there was an odd number of them on the flight. Conrad had taken his seat and beckoned to Anderson, who was also odd man out, without a seatmate. Anderson had barely moved since Germany; none of them had. The plane was full of sprawling, loose-lipped Marines, lost, gone, dead to the world.
Conrad liked seeing them like this: sleep was like salary, his men were owed. They were infantry grunts, and they’d been seven months on duty without a single day off. They deserved to sleep for months, years, decades. They deserved this long, roaring limbo, this deep absence from the world, from themselves. This plane ride was the floating bridge between where they’d been and where they were going—deployment and the rest of their lives. They deserved these hours of unconsciousness, this gorgeous black free fall.
There was something else they deserved, something he couldn’t define. They were all, himself as well, part of something large and interlocking, in which movements were slow and tectonic. Deep, shifting currents would carry them on to some form of deliverance. He trusted in this. He couldn’t define it or identify it, the movement or the destination, only sense it. His brain felt blurred, as though the plane were flying too fast for his thoughts.
Everything in his mind felt provisional, in fact. Lack of sleep: it was hard to think. His thoughts felt loose and shifting, temporarily in place. The way everything in-country had been provisional, nothing certain. Life had been improvised, moment by moment, for seven months. Tension was the steel skeleton on which everything else hung. He woke up early to it each day, white heat beating into the roof, urgency already flooding through his system. Fear. You didn’t call it fear, but that’s what it was. All that was over now, but the habit was hard to break. Was it a habit or a way of life? He wondered how long it would take to become a different person, how you’d know when it happened.
The flight attendant appeared in the aisle. She was blond but old, with waves of dry, ashy hair. Her face was small and foxy, she had a pointy nose and a thin, tidy mouth. She was wearing a sort of uniform, navy vest and skirt, long-sleeved white blouse. Smiling, she leaned into the little private space made by the high seatbacks. Her face drew nearer to Conrad.
“May I take that glass, sir?”
Her chapped lips were outlined in neon: her pale orange lipstick had worn off in the middle. On her vest was pinned a small winged gold emblem. Conrad glanced at it, automatically checking for rank, but of course she had no rank. It was an airline pin, she was a civilian. For some reason this irritated him, his glance, his realization. Irritability was also a result of sleep deprivation.
Conrad held out his glass, and she reached for it across the sleeping Anderson. She glanced down at him, then back at Conrad, pursing her mouth in a conspiratorial smile.
“Anything else I can get you, sir?”
She was half whispering, and her manner was both patronizing and intimate, suggesting that she and Conrad were partners, sharing a kind of parental responsibility for the sleeping Anderson. As though Anderson—who was a lion in combat and had once saved Conrad’s life—were a small child. A tiny black point of anger flared in Conrad’s chest. He looked at her without smiling.
“No, thanks,” he said.
She still hovered, but Conrad said nothing more. She leaned in farther toward him, and a small gold cross on a chain swung out from her neck. She was too close, and he could smell her perfume, sweet and fruity.
She spoke confidingly. “You know, I just want to say thank you.” Her voice was husky. “For what you’ve done for our country. All you boys. Helping to make us safe back home.”
“Thank you,” Conrad said, nodding; the black point was sharp inside his chest.
“Really.” Beneath her eyes were dark smudges of mascara, defining the wrinkles.
Conrad said nothing, gazing back. She waited, too close. They were alone in the space between the seats. Conrad breathed through his mouth so he wouldn’t smell the perfume.
“Thank you,” he said again, to make her leave.
She looked at him, her small blue eyes bright and liquid. She waited, but Conrad only stared, and her smile faded. She drew back, and the little cross swung back inside her blouse. She was still smiling, but now the smile was impersonal. She put the glass onto her stack and moved to the next row.
Conrad wondered if she’d say the same thing to the next officers. What was it that she thought they’d done to make her so much safer? He thought of the woman with the basket, Olivera whispering. The dog. The brown streets of Ramadi, the blowing trash.
He looked out the window again. They were now descending rapidly. Along the coastline was a filigree of miniature bays and islands edged with bright foam. At the shore the water was turquoise and transparent, but as it deepened, it darkened to cobalt, becoming opaque.
Conrad felt his chest constricting, the point of anger widening. He thought of her fruity perfume and the little gold cross swinging out from her collar.
His breath began to feel trapped....