headhug.com

I submitted this story to my course anthology and it did not get selected (sad). This story was inspired by true events experienced by my good friend Jeff Hunter as a Marine in Iraq. Also it's a bit of an emotional response to my Mom's death a year and a half ago.

A Real Cold Heart

Paul Bustamante

You don’t see any magnificent tunnel of light when you die. At least I haven’t seen one. For me the light is everywhere, and amidst all the darkness behind my eyelids, I can see everything. As the blood flows out of my neck across my sweaty skin, it feels hotter than even the desert around me. I’m going to die. Now that my beginning has an end, I can see the beginning, and I can see the end. It’s the feeling you get when you finish a difficult test. You don’t feel afraid in that moment, you don’t feel happy either, you just feel done, and the burden is gone. It’s how I’ve tried to feel for the last year and a half.

My wife died nineteen months ago. A car accident. At the time I couldn’t believe the simplicity of it. When you’re playing the “what if” game, the first thing you say is, “What if I die in a car accident?” You only say it because it’s the most likely of unexpected deaths. I always suspected that if one of us were to die early it would be from something much more romantic, like some drawn-out disease that would give us months to revel in each other’s love, all the while suffering with each smile, wondering if it would be the last. Or maybe some form of self-sacrifice, like pushing the other out of the way of an oncoming train and getting hit in the process. She was always so creative. How could she let herself die in a car accident?

“What if…?” she asked. “What if I did die in a car accident? What would you do?” I smiled, because it was a stupid question, because there was no way that she would ever die in a car accident.

“Hmmmmm…” I said, “I’d probably be sad for a few days, then go party with some busty hussies and see what I’ve been missing out on…”

Of course I had to rush through the last two words because I was getting punched in the ribs. Amidst my laughter and her violent pouting, I was able to grab her arms and roll over to pin them between our bodies. She struggled halfheartedly and faked as if she didn’t actually want my big body so close to hers. Of course the tension at the corners of her mouth showed that she was fighting a smile. That tension is what love feels like. My soul was basking in it. I planned on spending the rest of the day in that position, with my face so close to hers, pretending like we had something to fight about. I was breathing heavy from the struggle by now, but still emitting laughter through a grin.

“Oh, I’ll give you something to laugh about!” she threatened, and then thrashed about like a snake, to no avail. “Party with busty hussies, eh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “In fact, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.” I rolled away from her as if I was going to get up. “I think I’ll go find me some of them hussies right now…”

The “now” came out half choked since I was tackled from behind and put into a surprisingly strong headlock. She pulled me back to the bed where we preceded to laugh, wrestle, and threaten each other. Finally we ended up in the same position as before, with her arms pinned between us. I was laughing shamelessly, she was still struggling not to smile.

“What?” she asked smugly. “What’s so funny?”

My face was right next to hers, and I kissed her cheek as softly as I could. I relaxed my hold and looked her in the eyes.

“If you died,” I said, rolling my eyes, “I’d go get castrated and live in a small shack in the mountains surviving on nuts and berries, submitting myself to a life of endless misery until the day I could finally die and be with you again.”

She continued to fight the smile, then opened her eyes wide like a puppy and said, “Good.”

Two days later, she got rear-ended by some gawky teenager at an intersection. She was pushed into crossing traffic where she was T-boned by a man in a truck and killed instantly. I could go on about that first, nightmarish week, all the tears, the friends and family that came, how the world seemed to stop moving, and those lonely, confusing months that followed, but what I see right now has little to do with that.

The next year consisted of day after day of waking up, coping with the pain, and going to bed wondering if I could do it all over again the next day. Then one day I got so angry that I punched a wall. I think I did it because I wanted some real physical pain instead of the heavy emotional pain I’d been dealing with. It felt good.

The next day I called the Marines. I was never a violent person, but the pain of those bleeding knuckles was like medicine. I wanted more of it. I wanted to die. It wasn’t the “I’m clinically depressed, help me,” kind of death wish. I wanted to die because I wasn’t happy without my wife, and I wanted to be with her, wherever that was.

I called the recruiter and asked him if I could get assigned straight to the front lines. He told me that this wasn’t the Civil War, and there weren’t technically any front lines to be sent to. I told him that I wanted into the action as soon as possible. He sounded surprised that I would make a request like that without any of the naïve enthusiasm he was used to from the gun crazy kids that he usually recruited just out of high school. He wondered why I didn’t seem to care about all the benefits that the military would offer me. He probably wondered a lot of things about me.

When I got to Iraq, it felt like my entire body had punched the wall this time. It was a wall of culture shock, heat, and reality. I felt like a lost little boy in a world of tension, policy, and procedure. So I just did what was to be done those first weeks, until I figured out the routines and slipped into a comfort zone.

They called me Mimo because I was so quiet. It started out as “el mimo,” which is Spanish for “the mime,” and later they dropped the “el”. I didn’t care. I wasn’t there to make friends. But they respected me. I was smart, I obeyed orders, I didn’t mess around, and I got the job done.

One night, with my pillow holding my neck and reading a book my tent mate, Williams, interrupted me.

“My dad has cancer.”

At first I wanted to pretend like I didn’t hear him. We had lived in the same tent for two months, and gotten along just fine with just small talk. I didn’t have any tears for this guy.

“That’s too bad,” I said hoarsely. I searched my brain for something else to say, but I didn’t have anything. He needed a friend, and I wasn’t his friend. I turned my head back towards the tent, but he wasn’t finished.

“It’s just weird, you know?” I turned my head back to him and he continued. “We come out here, almost twenty or more Marines are dying every day, and my dad is safe and sound back home. But now it looks like the odds of him dying are greater than they are for me.”

He wasn’t looking at me. He was lying on his cot, staring at the top of the tent, as if he were having the conversation with himself. I was about to tell him the first thing that had come to my mind, that the odds of his dad dying were the same as his. One hundred percent. Then I could have barfed up some inspirational rhetoric about living each day as if it were the last. But I was in the middle of feeling perpetually sorry for myself. I was living each day as if it were my last. But all that meant was that I was filled with a sense of hopeless apathy, seeing about as much purpose in my actions as a graduating high school senior sees in doing his homework. So I didn’t say anything sentimental or empathetic. I just nodded my head a little and tried to look thoughtful.

He didn’t say anything, and I was relieved to turn my head back to the tent without anymore soul-searching dialogue. It was a little uncomfortable at first, so I grabbed my book and started reading. After a few minutes I forgot all about the conversation.

Some time passed, and then Williams put his feet down and sat up on his cot. For about one minute he just stared at me. I continued reading, pretending that I couldn’t feel his gaze, but he wasn’t turning away. I finished a paragraph and finally looked at him. He had a blank, expressionless face. I shrugged and lifted my thumbs from the edges of my book in confusion.

He shook his head a little, and said, “Man, you’ve got a real cold heart.”

I lifted my eyebrows, and turned back to my book. He got up and left, just like a scene from a movie where the character delivers some punchy line and then immediately leaves for dramatic effect. I put his punchy line right where I put the rest of my screaming emotions, somewhere inside, to think about later, knowing full well that I wasn’t going to have a later.

The next day I got up to the familiar routine. As I put on my uniform, Williams gave me a polite nod to acknowledge my existence. We were back to our comfortable acquaintance status. Neither of us mentioned the conversation from the night before. Back at base we were briefed, and I happily followed procedures, glad that there was something for my mind to think about, something other than all those screaming emotions that I had been repressing, something other than my “real cold heart.” I had to smirk at the thought of it. It was a stupid thing for him to say. He didn’t know me. How could he even begin to pass judgment on me without stepping into my shoes and living the hell I’ve lived? Cancer. Please. I would have loved to lose my wife to cancer. That’s a sick thing to think, but at least I would have been ready to lose her. At least I would have been able to say goodbye.

I turned my attention back to the road and the city around me, and I reviewed our mission in my head. Supposedly we were going to bust into some building and flush out a tunnel or a weapon cache. We were to send in a breach team to kick open the door and move in to flush out any possible threat. The rest of our platoon would secure the perimeter in case there were any more insurgents waiting in adjacent houses or holes. It was a basic operation, the kind of thing we did everyday.

Kicking in a door might sound like a heroic thing to do, but we did it all the time. It became routine, but we always went about it with a sense of caution. My first door was on a raid similar to this. I kicked it all the way off its hinges, but there was nothing inside, no weapon toting radicals, no tunnels. It was a complete false alarm. You never know what you’re going to get. I was hoping for an army of terrorists. Instead I got two stunned Iraqi women rushing around, trying to cover their faces.

We would go about today’s raid as stealthily as possible, but we all knew that if there were any enemies inside, they would be watching for any signs of a breach. They’d have their guns ready, so we weren’t depending on the element of surprise. I was chosen to kick the door, an assignment I was more than happy to accept. Maybe this would finally be the door with an army of terrorists behind it. Williams was going to be right next to me with his gun aimed inside at any sign of danger and a frag grenade at the ready.

We crept quietly towards the house. It was just another building amidst a zoo of structures in Baghdad. We crouched against a wall and slinked our way towards our destination, our senses on edge.

“Mimo,” I heard from behind me. It was Williams. “Mimo, let me do it.”

I paused, still stuck in mission mode. “Do what?” I asked.

“Let me kick the door.”

“What are you talking about? Why?” I asked anxiously. We needed to get closer and finish the job.

“I want to do it. I want to kick it in.”

I looked back at my commanding officer who was across the street, ready to come charging in at any sign of danger. “No,” I said. “Sergeant told me to do it.”

I started to move forward again, but Williams grabbed my arm. “Mimo, I really want to do this. It’s important to me.”

“Are you stupid or something?” I spat. “If there’s anything behind that door, you’ll be the first one to get shot.”

“I know,” he whispered back.

I looked into his eyes. I could tell that he was scared. It didn’t make any sense to me why he would want to kick this door down. He had something to live for. Someone would have to take care of his mother and younger brother and sister after his dad died. It was my door, not his.

We were losing time. With every second that passed, we were giving whatever waited for us inside that house more time to prepare. We needed to move.

“I’m kicking it down!” I whispered sharply. “Let’s go!”

He didn’t say anything, and I started moving. We continued towards the door. My mind was a mess. I was thinking too much. Why would he insist on kicking the door? I couldn’t stop thinking about the fear in his eyes. It looked exactly like how I felt when a police officer came to my office nineteen months ago and told me that my wife had died in a car accident. That was the day that my life came to an abrupt stop and I became engulfed in a frightening new awareness. No matter how hard I embraced something I couldn’t hold on to anything. It was all sand slipping through my fingers. Why even try to hold on? So I let go. I let everything go. And now Williams was letting go too.

And then I saw the door, looming there in front of me like impending death. It enraged me that Williams thought he could take it from me. That was my door. No way would I let some guy with his one night’s worth of grief come in and take what I had suffered for over a year to claim. He thought he was afraid? I turned to Williams to show him what real fear looked like, a fear built of hundreds of nights of despair as opposed to his one.

But when I looked in his eyes it was his fear that I saw again. His eyes were wide and panicking. It was fear, but I was wrong. It was a different fear than mine. He wasn’t afraid of losing what he loved, he was afraid to die. He was afraid of the unknown. Being afraid to live, that was my fear, not anyone else’s. I was afraid to live because being alive meant losing what you love. Everything that I had seen in Williams’ eyes, the grief, the fear of loss, of living, it was nothing more than what was reflected in my own eyes. And I was running from my fears like a coward.

I looked at Williams. He was waiting for my move, and the door was waiting behind me. There was something behind that door. I wanted it to be a cloud of bullets, and I would gladly walk into it. And I could see that Williams would too. He would walk straight into his fear and face it. And I was running from my own. I was running.

“Williams,” I whispered. “Williams, you can kick it down.”

“What?” he said, surprised.

“You kick the door. I’ll watch your back.”

He paused, then nodded. As he maneuvered around me, I backed up to assume a defensive position, out of the line of fire of the doorway. My heart was beating rapidly. I had stepped aside. I was alive.

“Mimo,” Williams whispered, “Mimo, I’m scared.”

I looked back at him. I was smiling, and all I could think to say was, “Just do your job man. It’s gonna be okay.”

Those words smashed back into me like a burst of light. When Williams’s foot met the door, the bolt broke through the frame, and the door swung open. Williams took a bullet right in the vest and fell to the concrete, struggling to breath. I started shooting into the doorway at whatever was there, fighting for my life. I was shot clean through the neck by someone shooting through a window. I fell to the dust. The only thing that I could see, was everything. I saw who I was. I saw that I was going to die. And the light in the back of my eyes told me the same thing that I said to Williams. I could finally see, I could finally understand. It was all going to be okay.