Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read Free Page B

enemy’s, from which there was no longer any possibility of turning back. I hadn’t been following matters that closely, so I had missed exactly when things had taken a turn. Nevertheless, everyone was saying that the war was going to happen soon and so I said it too.
    Then May came and it got hot and Roberto broke his noseand asked me if I would come visit him in the hospital. “Blood everywhere,” he told me over the phone. Apparently he had been lifting weights at the gym when one of his buddies, in order to emphasize some conversational point he was making, feinted like a boxer and swung at Roberto’s face. The buddy had meant merely to pantomime the punch, but with his arms heavy-light from having just bench-pressed three hundred pounds, he had lost the ability to gauge distance, strength, or speed, and he cracked Roberto right in the nose. I wanted to question the details of the story because Roberto was subject to hyperbole, and also because I was selfish and didn’t want to make the trip across town, but I was the closest thing to family that Roberto had, and on the telephone he did sound like he had a sock stuffed down his throat and up his nose.
    To make matters worse, my car happened to be in the shop, and according to the bus map, I had to catch three buses I’d never heard of. So what should have taken me twenty minutes was going to take an hour and a half. Sitting in the back of the J-23B with the air-conditioning barely working, I stared out the window as we crawled through residential neighborhoods whose houses were all hung with flags. There was no breeze, and the flags hung limply. Some of the homes displayed the MIA and POW flags from bygone wars, and every so often there’d be a sign stuck in a window that said PEACE or NO WAR or something to that effect, but those were few and far between, and for the most part everyone was on the same page. Ten minutes into the ride, I was sweating heavily; rivulets ran from my armpits down my sides and collected in the elastic of my underwear. This is what it must feel like for soldiers on the transport heading to battle, I thought. I was wearing shortsand my thighs adhered to the bus seat so that whenever I shifted, my skin peeled away from the plastic. The other passengers were old hands and obviously knew what was in store for them because they’d come equipped with things to fan themselves, things like newspapers and magazines and even a flattened cereal box. Out of the corner of my eye, the rapid motion resembled birds alighting. Twenty-five minutes into the ride, I retrieved a discarded supermarket circular from under the seat in from of me and tried to use it as a fan, but the paper was too thin and kept flopping over and I wasn’t able to generate any current. I folded it four times and then gave up and tossed it back under the seat where I’d found it. A woman looked at me with disapproval. She was waving a book in front of her face.
    “It was already on the floor,” I said. I smiled.
    She shrugged. She didn’t care.
    At every corner, the bus hit a red light, and we’d have to sit idling for sixty seconds, stewing in the pot, and then once the light turned green and the bus made it through the intersection, it would stop again to let passengers on and off, elderly people who took forever, fat people who took forever, a man in a wheelchair who took five minutes, and by the time we arrived at the end of the next block, the light would be turning red again and we’d have to stop and idle and do the whole thing all over. It was abysmal urban planning, humiliating and crushing. I kept urging the bus forward by tensing and twisting and leaning forward like a bowler who imagines his body language can influence the trajectory of the ball once it’s left his hand. My skin peeled. I blamed everyone: the bus, thedriver, the passengers. I blamed Roberto for breaking his nose. Then I blamed myself for blaming Roberto. It wasn’t his fault. Nothing was his