one way then another, how you could wake up in California and fall asleep in Vietnam. The ludicrous mutability of life. I was, as they say, having a moment.
Maybe that’s just the ordinary awe of youth, though. Maybe it feels that way for everyone, at war or not. Before everything you do or see is a version of something before it. Before you get older and everything calcifies: your personality and memory and sense of the world. I’m too old now to much remember what it’s like to be young, but I still remember looking down at my hands, how they glowed and glowed.
CHAPTER FOUR
R ichard had gotten the call two years earlier. He’d been pissing in the desert, or trying to. The morning breeze blowing across the Sonoran basin was not yet infernally hot, and it wrapped the mangy bathrobe around his legs with a playful caress. Distant cars tooled by on the John Wayne Parkway, which connected Phoenix, to the north, with Maricopa, to the south. The trailer was located in the Interzone, as he thought of it, a moonscape of sand and rocks and distant, spectral mountains. He heard the phone ring inside the trailer, which was strange, since no one ever called him. For a moment, curiosity did battle with the need to piss, but pissing won, handily. He closed his eyes and waited for his prostate to wake up, and as he did, the phone rang again.
“Coming, goddamn it,” he yelled into the desert air.
Inside the trailer, he located the antique, chipped plastic phone, half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes, which was unsurprising, since everything in the trailer was half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes.
“Yeah,” he wheezed.
“Can I speak to Richard Lazar?”
“Speaking.”
“You’re a hard man to track down.” The voice was mild and pleasant, and more terrifying for that fact. Richard’s heart creaked with the tacit assumption that this could only be someone he didn’t want tracking him down. Who would track him down that he’d want to talk to?
“Who is this?”
“This is Stan, at Reiner-Goldwell.”
“What at where?”
“Stan Rosenburg.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?” He sat down on the long sofa bench that ran half the length of one side of the trailer, propping his elbows on a small Formica table. In front of him, on the table, sat the broken typewriter on which he’d written all his novels. Victor, his dog—a fat bearded collie who had with age, distressingly, become a dead ringer for his owner—staggered over stiff-legged from sleep and settled again at Richard’s feet.
“Because I’m your agent?”
“Oh, right. Jesus, Stan.” The name had been hard to place because he hadn’t heard or seen it in almost two years. Since he’d turned in the last memoir draft, in fact. Weekly phone calls had become monthly and then bimonthly, and so on, as reports trickled back that editors weren’t interested in another Vietnam story, or in war stories, period. In the new millennium, the reading public, it seemed, was all warred out. Did he have anything with serial killers or lawyers, or serial killer lawyers? He did not. Finally, having run through his entire list of editors over the course of eighteen months, Stan had stopped calling, and Richard had assumed he’d never hear from him again.
“Okay, he remembers. Listen, I have good news.”
“What?”
“The book. We got a yes.”
“What?”
“Listen, I know I said there wasn’t anything else I could do, but I never stopped believing in it. I still passed it around, now and then. Junior editors and small presses, that kind of thing. Always the same line, ‘No one wants another war story,’ right?”
“I have a pretty firm handle on that, yeah.”
“But listen, then three months ago we invade Iraq. And I’m not trying to be crass here, but suddenly I’m getting calls.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
He could almost hear Stan shrug on the other end of the line, see the long, sleek face, seal-like with
Maybe that’s just the ordinary awe of youth, though. Maybe it feels that way for everyone, at war or not. Before everything you do or see is a version of something before it. Before you get older and everything calcifies: your personality and memory and sense of the world. I’m too old now to much remember what it’s like to be young, but I still remember looking down at my hands, how they glowed and glowed.
CHAPTER FOUR
R ichard had gotten the call two years earlier. He’d been pissing in the desert, or trying to. The morning breeze blowing across the Sonoran basin was not yet infernally hot, and it wrapped the mangy bathrobe around his legs with a playful caress. Distant cars tooled by on the John Wayne Parkway, which connected Phoenix, to the north, with Maricopa, to the south. The trailer was located in the Interzone, as he thought of it, a moonscape of sand and rocks and distant, spectral mountains. He heard the phone ring inside the trailer, which was strange, since no one ever called him. For a moment, curiosity did battle with the need to piss, but pissing won, handily. He closed his eyes and waited for his prostate to wake up, and as he did, the phone rang again.
“Coming, goddamn it,” he yelled into the desert air.
Inside the trailer, he located the antique, chipped plastic phone, half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes, which was unsurprising, since everything in the trailer was half buried beneath a pile of dirty clothes.
“Yeah,” he wheezed.
“Can I speak to Richard Lazar?”
“Speaking.”
“You’re a hard man to track down.” The voice was mild and pleasant, and more terrifying for that fact. Richard’s heart creaked with the tacit assumption that this could only be someone he didn’t want tracking him down. Who would track him down that he’d want to talk to?
“Who is this?”
“This is Stan, at Reiner-Goldwell.”
“What at where?”
“Stan Rosenburg.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?” He sat down on the long sofa bench that ran half the length of one side of the trailer, propping his elbows on a small Formica table. In front of him, on the table, sat the broken typewriter on which he’d written all his novels. Victor, his dog—a fat bearded collie who had with age, distressingly, become a dead ringer for his owner—staggered over stiff-legged from sleep and settled again at Richard’s feet.
“Because I’m your agent?”
“Oh, right. Jesus, Stan.” The name had been hard to place because he hadn’t heard or seen it in almost two years. Since he’d turned in the last memoir draft, in fact. Weekly phone calls had become monthly and then bimonthly, and so on, as reports trickled back that editors weren’t interested in another Vietnam story, or in war stories, period. In the new millennium, the reading public, it seemed, was all warred out. Did he have anything with serial killers or lawyers, or serial killer lawyers? He did not. Finally, having run through his entire list of editors over the course of eighteen months, Stan had stopped calling, and Richard had assumed he’d never hear from him again.
“Okay, he remembers. Listen, I have good news.”
“What?”
“The book. We got a yes.”
“What?”
“Listen, I know I said there wasn’t anything else I could do, but I never stopped believing in it. I still passed it around, now and then. Junior editors and small presses, that kind of thing. Always the same line, ‘No one wants another war story,’ right?”
“I have a pretty firm handle on that, yeah.”
“But listen, then three months ago we invade Iraq. And I’m not trying to be crass here, but suddenly I’m getting calls.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
He could almost hear Stan shrug on the other end of the line, see the long, sleek face, seal-like with
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