The Evil Hours Read Free Page A

meant. The movie explosion had gone off, just as it had in Saydia, and it had given me a glimpse of my own death. But before things could go any further, my brain would shut everything down, like an overloaded electrical grid; everything would go dark, and then I would wake up. It was just as Freud had noted nearly a century before: one’s own death is unimaginable.
    For months after the movie, my unconscious debriefed me like this. It didn’t happen every night, but it occurred often enough that sleep became an ordeal, something to be worked up to, like an athletic contest. It got so that preparing for bed was like getting ready for a night patrol. I would set my alarm, put up the blackout curtains, close and lock every door and window in the house, recheck them, and ensure that all the paths in the house were clear and all the shades were drawn. After all that, I would take my sleep medicine, usually a mix of prescription and nonprescription pills, depending on my mood, and then put my earplugs in and my blinders on and pray that my mind would behave itself for the next eight hours. Part of me got a black pleasure from it, as it made me feel that it was somehow an honor to be haunted, as if the war had touched me so deeply that it had granted me access to the darkest chambers of the mind. Part of me was ashamed of the dreams, of the realization that I was trapped inside a cliché: the veteran so obsessed with his own past that even his unconscious made love to it every night.
    There were other hints that I was on the far side of something. These usually came in times of uncertainty or stress, such as when I received three ludicrously expensive parking tickets in a single week, when I got the cold sweats during a bumpy airplane ride over Cape Cod, or when I saw the fear on Erica’s face whenever I got angry, which was often.
    For several years after the war, Erica and I lived in a kind of postwar bliss, happily trapped in the time-capsule of our love. We had met before my final trip to Iraq, and I was immediately taken by her beauty, her wide-ranging mind, her joie de vivre, and her exquisite wit, which made her seem at times like a dame from a hard-boiled detective novel. From day one, we shared a bond that seemed immune to the normal laws of life and career. Coming home to her, my life seemed to make a certain kind of sense, as if the world had kept its promise. When she picked me up at LAX in 2007, I saw her standing behind a gate in baggage claim, blushing hotly, angry at me for the ordeal I’d put her through. Finally, she relented, greeting me with her trademark “Hey, bub!” and kissing me wildly.
    Women have always played a pivotal role in the drama of homecoming from war.In Homer’s
Odyssey
, Odysseus’s ten-year journey back from the Trojan War doesn’t end when he sets foot in his hometown of Ithaca, but rather when he is finally reunited with his wife, Penelope. Men, left to their own devices, turn into emotional nihilists: wild, cruel, and death-obsessed. Looking back on those heady days after I returned from Iraq, I can see that the drama of my reunion with Erica was an elemental experience on par with the war itself, a struggle to reconcile the two halves of myself—the dark with the light, the hard with the soft, the very masculine stoicism that war demands with a woman’s sensitivity. I’d always admired her tough exterior, but Erica’s presence somehow had a softening effect on me in the months after I returned, almost as if her sarcastic demeanor allowed me to lower my guard. I couldn’t relate to others after what I’d been through, but Erica had been in it with me from the very beginning. She had seen me preparing my gear for my long months in the field before I left. She had read my strained emails from Fallujah, listened to me on the phone from Baghdad as I tried to reconcile what I was seeing every day with what the media was reporting. It