The Evil Hours Read Free Page B

was as if I didn’t need to tell her what I’d been through. She already understood, somehow. We had survived the war. Whatever followed would be child’s play, surely.
    Then, in 2010, right before the holidays, Erica disappeared. Her car was gone and there was no answer when I called her cell phone. Two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, she phoned from Las Vegas to tell me it was over. She was tired of my secrecy, she would explain later. “You go off into this other place, and it’s like I can’t reach you.” Oddly, this turn of events, while certainly disappointing, was not overly shocking to me, and even when it finally sank in that Erica would not be returning and that our pantomime of connubial bliss was over, I didn’t cry. Tears had become something beyond my ability. In these sorts of situations, I did exactly as I had been trained: I went numb and waited for the time to pass. When I explained Erica’s departure to my friends, their jaws hit the floor.
She just disappeared? Like
poof?
For two weeks? Not even a note?
    It was a rotten deal, no doubt. Yet something in me knew that Erica had been capable of this sort of thing all along. That she would surface with a phone call from Vegas seemed somehow in character for her. I had always admired that hint of the femme fatale in her, so what right did I have to be surprised? I knew in some objective way that I had seen a lot of awful things happen to a lot of people, so when chance turned on me in the form of a capricious woman, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. This world was designed from the ground up to hurt us, to break us, all of us, into the tiniest little pieces. What made me think I was so special? Who was I to think that I should be spared? That was like going out into the rain and expecting to not get wet.
    There had been other reasons, other complications, to be sure. I was a working writer, a career choice that often came with an unspoken vow of poverty, which put a lot of pressure on our relationship. The writing, whatever else it did, took me to the same place that a lot of veterans ended up: the dark cave of my head, where the only sound was the echo of my own voice. It takes a long time, too long, to learn that the brain’s job is to hide the truth of trauma from you and that no amount of thinking, however penetrating and well informed, is going to help you locate it. Nobody ever said that nightmares tell the truth, or even a portion of the truth, though their allure is that we think they do.
    I can see now that Erica was simply unprepared for what was coming, the sheer weight of all my unprocessed dread. Not that I was prepared. Who could be? I’d been surrounded by death for so long that I’d forgotten how to live. Living, I was learning, was harder than just surviving. It reminded me of something I’d heard a Vietnam vet say: just because your body was safe didn’t mean that your mind was. I had been changed and expanded by the war, but it was an expansion that seemed to have put me out of balance with the world, with Erica. I hated her for leaving, but what could I do?
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    Relationships, when they end, are not unlike car crashes. Hidden energies only hinted at in regular motion are violently released, demolishing the carefully constructed bodies we depend on every day. With Erica gone, everything became more difficult. I felt for the first time that I was alone in dealing with all the pain and uncertainty in my life. My nightmares and general disaffection with the world seemed to double. Occasionally, at sunset, I would hear the Muslim call to prayer, even though I lived dozens of miles from any mosque. As a journalist in Iraq, my greatest fear had always been that I would be kidnapped and tortured. In Erica’s absence, this healthy awareness of my surroundings blossomed into a consuming paranoia that I was being followed whenever I left my apartment.
    The morbidity of my imagination was