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back against a sand
berm before the assault on Fallujah, shoveling cold MREs into his mouth with a
plastic spoon (Jambalaya, dry crackers with a packet of jalapeno cheese, and
water from a canteen). He was talking about a girl, Beth maybe, from home. A
girl he wanted to marry at the NCO club when they got back to Pendleton.
    Well, Rich
wouldn’t be marrying Beth now, would he? Not in Pendleton or any other goddamn
place. Rich from Upstate was leaving half his grey matter in a dusty street in
Fallujah, thanks-just-the-same, and the other half would be planted in a hole
near the VA in Albany. There would be taps, and flowers, and crying parents.
    But he
couldn’t really know that could he? He couldn’t possibly. Any more than he
could know that he, or, no, Sergeant Stillman, was the mortally wounded man in
that same firefight. And then a more terrifying thought occurred to him. What
if he continued to have these nightmares? And what if, as they continued to
unfold the horrible story, he—the Sergeant Casey Stillman “he”—died from the
horrible wounds to his throat? What would that mean for Jack? He remembered as
a kid, turning around with his friends the myth (or was it?) that in those
frightening dreams where you fell and fell, that if you dreamed the part where
your body splattered onto the pavement, instead of waking up with a start, that
you would die in real life. How would that old wives’ tale apply to him now?
The answer felt, for a fleeting moment, to be terribly important for him and
his family.
    Jack shuddered
uncontrollably at the kitchen table, an uneaten English muffin cooling on the
paper towel in front of him. He wasn’t sure which frightened him more, the idea
of going crazy or the thought that he wasn’t. That both realities, his and
Casey Stillman’s, could both be true seemed so insane that he couldn’t even
begin to get his head around it. But neither could he shake the feeling that
the answer to all of this lay somewhere in that notion, as inconceivable as it
seemed.
    Pam had rented
a movie once. They had sat on the very sofa where they had just a day ago made
love, and watched it together (some of it—she had slept in his lap by halfway
through, of course). It was about a woman who saw things through a killer’s
eyes in her dreams. He couldn’t really remember the story, but as he sat there
now, he vividly remembered its premise. The woman had believed, as he did at
that moment, that she was losing her mind—until stories in the paper (it was
never in the TV news in these stories) started to tell of the murders she had
seen. He thought it ended with her teaming up with the cops and catching the
killer. How could Jack’s story end, if indeed he was able to see a battle in
Fallujah through the eyes of a real Marine sergeant there? How could he make
this mean something, be something other than a personal terror?
    Jack picked up
his cup and freshened and diluted away some of the sweetness with coffee from
the pot. Then he walked into the living room, listening as he did for his wife
and daughter. He heard them upstairs, where Pam was changing Claire’s pull-up
from the night into big girl underwear and a pair of farmer’s overalls with
Minnie Mouse on the front pocket (he knew this for sure, for some reason). He
sat on the couch and picked up the remote, clicked it and brought the idiot box
to life. He sat and sipped his coffee (much better now) and flipped through the
channels, looking for the talking heads who might help him sort out what was
going on in his mind. He settled on Fox News when he saw the red banner with Update
in Iraq, printed in boldface across it, along the bottom of the screen. A
retired army general critiqued the offensive in Fallujah, rattling off
statistics and military acronyms, as he talked about the battle as if he
himself had led the charge. Jack snickered and shook his head.
    You don’t know
shit.
     Jack listened
to the arrogant general praise the troops and