Chemistry of Fire Read online

  Robert Lossius, the colonel who took me along on a company assault one night, said that when he finished Ranger School, one of his buddies had sat down the next day and eaten seventeen sandwiches. Lossius himself ate so much chocolate cake that he got sick and threw up. He and some other new Rangers threw a beer party the next night. They invited all the new Rangers. But by the time the guests arrived, Colonel Lossius and his roommate had fallen asleep. The other Rangers knocked and knocked on the door, but no one answered. They peered in the window and saw Lossius and his roommate fast asleep, a keg of beer in the middle of the room in a galvanized tub of ice. Nothing they tried would wake the two sleeping Rangers.

  The Airborne in general, and Ranger School especially, creates a cult. When two members of the Eighty-Second Airborne meet, the one of lower rank must say, “Rangers lead the way!” When you are out in the wilderness, wet and freezing, if you rub your Ranger tab, it will warm you up. That’s what they say.

  Warriors care about one another like members of a family, with a tenderness and attention to detail that goes beyond anything seen in normal groups, such as people at work. “Intimacy grows quickly out there,” Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness. The depth of our capacity for aggression is measured by the depth of our capacity for affection. If we did not care about our fellows, none of us would fight to protect the group. Soldiers are fighting not for country, not for freedom, not for justice. They are fighting for those around them. Soldiers who give their lives in battle give them for the soldiers beside them. Flag and country: that’s all a load.

  That primitive tribal element makes it possible to get rational people to go to war. And the quasi-religious processes of military training alter the thinking, the emotions, so that a warlike frenzy may be induced at the will of a commander.

  Earlier in the evening, before the choppers came, I had been talking to a man sitting by a tree near the pickup zone trying to adjust his headgear to fit. He took off the headgear, and I could see that he was going bald. He was no kid. I asked him how long he had been in, and he told me had returned to the army after eleven years out in the world. He’d become manager of twenty-five Godfather’s Pizza parlors in Texas. “I was making seventy thousand a year, putting ninety thousand miles a year on my car,” he said. “I weighed two hundred fifty pounds, and I was miserable. I went to my doctor, and he told me that if I didn’t change everything, I was going to die. But the only thing I knew was the pizza business and the army. ‘Well,’ the doctor said, ‘give it a try.’

  “When I went to the recruiter, he just laughed. ‘You’re going to have to lose eighty pounds,’ he told me. He didn’t think I’d do it, but for the next six months, I did nothing but work out and diet, and when I came back, he didn’t recognize me.”

  Now he was sitting out in the sand at the fall of a cold, wet night, checking his night-vision scope and watching the troops line up at the chemlights taped to the trees. He was lean and fit, and he had found himself. He got up and shouldered his gear and looked around at me. “Well,” he said. “Keep your head down.” He smiled serenely and wandered off.

  His story was not unique. I spoke to a man from inner-city Detroit who had been in twenty-three years. He wore black leather driving gloves with holes in them and had served two tours in Vietnam, forty months, out on special duty as a tracker, hunting down enemy leaders in deep jungle—pacification, it was called. Now he was forty and had five kids, and he told me, “My oldest is Airborne. Yeah, he’s about to put his feet into the air any day now.”

  It may seem as if the army was his only way out of the ghetto, but one summer up in a battlefield laid out on 240 square miles of Wisconsin woods, I’d met another old man who’d been on the outside and come back in, and it was no ghetto he was escaping. He’d had a good executive job on LaSalle Street in Chicago. He’d had the car, the home, the money, the family—the works. He’d throw it all off for going back to war, even though it was only pretend war so far.

  “It’s not uncommon,” a colonel told me.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You just have to like the lifestyle,” he said.

  Before I left, I talked to a military policeman who told me about his father, who was a career air force aerial photographer. He’d turned up in Vietnam to go out on duty, and he remembered standing out on the landing strip loaded down with his M16, his photography gear, his pack and supplies, a .45 pistol, and flares and flashlights. When his Vietnamese counterpart had shown up, the man was wearing nothing but black pajamas.

  “Where’s your weapon?” the air force officer asked. “What are you going to do if we’re shot down in enemy territory?”

  “I’m going to bend over and plant rice,” said the Vietnamese man. “What are you going to do?”

  13

  Ballerina with a Gun

  1 THE BAMBOO ROOM

  I took my mother to the doctor on a hot summer day in 2016. She had turned ninety-five that April. She had suddenly lost her hearing, and I thought she might have had a stroke. It turned out to be allergies, which had stopped up her Eustachian tubes, along with wax, which made it worse. As she was making her way slowly down the corridor of the professional building, she said, “I wish I could get Michael to do some of this.” Michael, the third oldest of my brothers, was a doctor. (I was second, and Gregory was the oldest. Eventually there were seven of us, eight if you count the first one, who died.) Ever since my father had become a professor in a medical school, my mother had believed that doctors were the answer to everything. To my mother, the idea of having a doctor of her very own seemed the perfect secular answer to her Saint Louis Catholic family. In their tradition, the married couple was responsible for having as many children as possible. But in the spirit of tithing, the family was expected to give one boy to the priesthood. My mother’s sister Mae had done that with catastrophic results for my cousin Dennis. Unfortunately for my mother, the moment her children were able to do so, they fled to locations just as far away from her as they were able to get. I was no exception, though I returned in 1969—not because of some noble wish to join my mother, but because I had several girlfriends in her general vicinity and because I suspected that my parents would feed and shelter me until I figured out what to do with my chaotic life.

  “Michael’s not here,” I told her as we made our way out of the professional building and into the vast concrete parking structure.

  “But you’re so busy,” she said.

  “There’s nobody else here, Mom. It’s just you and me now.”

  She stopped and turned and looked at me and then proceeded to struggle on. I had offered her a wheelchair, but she preferred to walk. “You know,” she said, “some people would have given you up for good. They just wanted to get rid of you.” She let that hang in the air. “They would have thrown you away.” I suppose a part of me wanted to know who those people were and what the mechanism of my disposal would have been. But I didn’t have the courage to ask. What if she was talking about her own mother, Edna, who used to take me to a German bakery where plump and aromatic women in flour-dusted aprons made stollen that was a wonder for a three-year-old, thick with fondant and heavy with its burden of dried fruit and nuts? The women would say how cute I was and would hug me to their big bosoms, and I would inhale their sweet and sweaty elixir. They seemed to me so ripe and full and dusted with pollen, as if they, too, were densely packed with fruit.

  Whoever had wanted to get rid of me, I had known that truth even as a child, before I had formed conscious memories. Children are deeply wise. They know what’s going on. That day in 2016 was not the first time my mother had told me about my not being wanted. When I was in my sixties, she told me that when I was born less than a year after my older brother Gregory, people had advised her to get rid of me. She could have given me to the sisters at Saint Matthew’s, or for that matter, she could have left me at the municipal dump in Saint Louis. I was born on a cold December night two years after the end of World War II. It would have b
een easy in those days. I would have vanished like a stone dropped into a well. Not a bird would have stirred in the trees. My disappearance would have become one of those family secrets that remain cloaked in a conspiracy of silence. Everyone senses the darkness that engulfs such a family. Even little children know, though they cannot say what they know.

  When I was perhaps two years old, she found me standing in the bowl of the toilet, flushing and flushing with the water swirling at my feet, puzzled by the fact that I did not go down the drain. Thus would I rescue my mother from her fate. She also told me that at the age of four or so, I said, “Once you’re born, you’re stuck. You can’t get out until you die.”

  My father earned his PhD in biophysics from Saint Louis University, and we moved to Texas, where he took up his postdoctoral position in Houston. People with Mexican surnames were not welcome there, and our family was no exception. I recalled the days of rage when the boys from St. Vincent de Paul school would chase me along the bayou to beat me after school, shouting, “Nigger!” and “Spic!” I learned to run fast. I learned to hide. I discovered a copse of bamboo that formed a spacious hollow enclosed by walls made of the smooth stalks, green and yellow, thick as my arms, a natural refuge from the asphyxiating petroleum heat of East Texas. The bare earth was cool. The tall stalks rubbed against one another in the breeze, making creaks and groans and fluting panpipe sounds. The lattice of leaves turned the harsh sunlight into an aromatic dusk. The wood itself was beautifully patterned in designs that made a secret script. I liked the fact that no one knew this place. I called it the bamboo room. Like my own unconscious, it was a world that belonged to me. At the age of eight or so, in the bamboo room, I first learned how to combine the deep art of dissociation and freezing with the hypnotic magic of language. I learned to make up stories there to escape torment from without and from within.

  But the damage already done meant that other parts of my life veered this way and that in a fashion that baffled and frightened me. I watched myself perform as if I were a marionette on a string. By that time, I was in college with an apartment of my own. I was writing five or eight hours a day, and this perhaps unhealthy compulsion was nevertheless producing a body of work. I won writing contests. It seemed that I was accomplishing something that was promising. “You’re so disciplined,” people would say. But it wasn’t discipline. It was obsessive self-soothing. It was my gateway to the seeking circuit. (You can see the seeking circuit at work when a cat is stalking prey, quietly, systematically, focused on its goal. You can see its opposite, the rage circuit, at work when you step on the cat’s tail.) It’s difficult to injure yourself typing on an electric typewriter, so no obstacle stood in the way of my obsessive writing. It took me out of my disordered self and put me in a state of flow that quieted the rage circuit. Yet the writing was not happy writing, nor was I a happy boy.

  I sent some of my short stories to the Paris Review, and the editor wrote back:

  [The stories] arrived while I was floating around in the South Pacific. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about them. There is a sort of grim scatological and violent overtone to all of them which made it difficult for me to guage [sic] what your own attitude was: “Airplane Story” is a combination of wry humor and blood-chilling violence and I found that inconsistency bothersome; “Running Dog” has lovely lyric writing in it counterposed with violent acts; “A Very Bad Accident” is largely focused on a cripple. . . . I’m sorry. There is superb writing and textures so often, and I hope you’ll continue to send us more.

  Best wishes,

  George Plimpton

  A few years later, he put me on the masthead of the Paris Review, where I briefly kept company with William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and Philip Roth, none of whom I ever met in the flesh. But I hung out at the Plimptons’ apartment on the river on East Seventy-Second Street when George’s infant daughter was in a playpen and he was playing Brahms for her on the stereo set.

  My father was a wounded war hero who earned a PhD against all odds. He moved his growing family into a middle-class neighborhood across the street from the owner of the local Harley-Davidson dealership and also from an anesthesiologist and wedged between the county coroner and a building contractor who was throwing up housing developments just as fast as the laws of physics would allow. But my father by then had come to understand that a Mexican would never become a professor at Baylor Medical School in Houston, despite promises to the contrary. As a result of that realization, he had accepted a professorship at Northwestern University when I was in high school. I later joined the undergraduate student body and worked as an unpaid intern reading unsolicited manuscripts for TriQuarterly, the school’s literary magazine. I had begun to see my work published in small magazines such as Poetry and the Southern Review and others whose names I have forgotten. The first time I saw my words and my name in print, I stood in awe of the mysterious process of which I had somehow become a part. I imagined that the letters had been engraved on the page in a sooty industrial building in downtown Chicago by men in inky aprons, sweltering in the terrible heat of the boilers that kept the towering machine, glistening black with oil, hammering away by day and night. Only much later in life did I, like authors before me, recognize the deeply troubling tone of my work, emanating unbidden from the distorted night shift that was my muse, that unconscious place in the brain where we process what is most urgent. The episode of my life that follows does not surprise me any longer, no more than the attraction between Antony and Cleopatra. But at the time, I found it completely baffling.

  2 WHERE THE FOXES SAY GOOD NIGHT

  I was working late one night, trying to review a pile of manuscripts that the editor of TriQuarterly, Charlie Newman, had told me to get rid of. I was sitting in the magazine’s cluttered basement office in University Hall with its red leather couch and its World War II surplus desk, when a woman of great poise and beauty walked in. I had never seen her before. She was small, about five feet, with a face that had an exotic animal quality to it. She wore a full-length fur coat and red lipstick that popped in the flickering blue fluorescent light. Her black hair was smoothed back from her forehead and held by a tortoiseshell comb, from which it burst into a ponytail. With the hair pulled tight against her skull, the elongate shape of her head and her high cheekbones made her seem all the more vulpine. The way she carried herself with authority conveyed the impression that she was much taller than she was. And much older.

  “I am Mrs. Newman,” she announced in an accent that sounded Russian to my untrained ear. (She was Hungarian.) “Where isss Chah-lee?” She could not pronounce the r in her husband’s name. Charlie Newman was a dissipated, gruff alcoholic in his thirties, who to my youthful eyes seemed as old as my father. Sinewy and cigar-chewing, he had a cinnamon beard trimmed close and wore steel spectacles that caught the light. I couldn’t picture this spectral beauty attached to him.

  I told her that I didn’t know where Charlie was. She seemed to go slack. She collapsed onto the red leather sofa, which expelled a pneumatic exhalation and a musty odor. She sat with her hands in the pockets of her fur coat. Her knees fell apart, making a tent of her black skirt, and she heaved a great sigh as if she was exhausted. All at once, she looked like a doll that had been cast aside. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to rescue her.

  Looking into the middle distance, she spoke softly. “He has a girlfriend, you know. Tula. His student.”

  I did not, in fact, know. I had no idea what to say. But as we began talking, I felt drawn to her in an eerie, almost frightening way. My gut told me that she was not merely attractive but also cunning and even dangerous, like Ecsedi Báthory Erzsébet, the notorious Hungarian countess who was supposed to have bathed in the blood of the children she murdered. The woman before me had a fierceness about her, and she laughed easily, tossing her head with defiant bitterness, her bright eyes sparkling. As she talked, my attraction to her began to build in an alarming, exciting way that I recognized as the feeling I ex
perienced just before I launched off of the high-diving board. (I had no reason to dive at the university’s pool. I was on no team. But some days I would simply climb and dive and climb and dive over and over again for hours until I could barely move. This activated my seeking circuit and induced a calming state of flow.)

  Gradually, she began feeding me morsels of her story. Her name had been Ibolya Zöldi before she married Charlie. The Communists in Budapest had shot her father during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Ibolya had run with her mother and brother, but along the way her brother had been shot, too. She and her mother managed to make it to the border on foot. There they were allowed to enter Austria. Ibolya had been a promising ballerina in Budapest and was even more so once she was settled in Vienna. She was on the verge of becoming a star when Charlie swept into her life and spirited her away. At first she thought it was glorious, marrying a professor, a budding novelist, and being whisked away to America. But they moved into an upper-middle-class suburb, and she was left alone in a big house all day with nothing to do. She knew no one. Her English was not good. She opened a ballet school and taught snotty North Shore girls in a dim second-floor studio overlooking the roof of a light industrial building. Charlie soon lost interest in her. She began to suspect that he had other women.

  A short time after Ibolya and I met, Charlie went out of town, and she invited me to her house for dinner one wintry night. I had a bad feeling about it, but I couldn’t resist. The Newmans lived on a cobbled street in a wooded suburb named Wilmette. Charlie had an Italian hunting dog named Matias (Hungarian for Matthew). It was untrained, and whenever Charlie went out of town, Ibi locked Matias in Charlie’s office, and the poor neglected animal tore everything to shreds in a rage of mammalian separation anxiety.