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hand, and that blood gathered into runnels and ran down my face and into the corner of my eye and onto the snow. He stood over me with his feet on either side of my body, just looking at me. He shook the sting out of his hand in the cold air. “Report me if you want. I don’t even fucking care anymore.”
    I lay in the snow for a while longer, picking out the constellations bright enough not to be obscured by the artificial light pouring out from the barracks windows and the streetlamps lining the nearby avenue. Saw Orion, saw Canis Major. When the lights went out in the barracks, I saw other stars, arranged as they had been a million years ago or more. I wondered what they looked like now. I got up and dragged myself up the stairs and into our room. Murph sat up, but the lights stayed off. I took off my uniform and threw it in my locker, then slid under the tight folds of the sheets.
    “Tonight was good,” he said. I didn’t answer. I heard him turn in his bunk. “You OK?”
    “Yeah, I’m good.” I looked out the window, through the tops of the evergreen trees arranged in rows between the barracks. I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn’t mind. The world makes liars of us all.

3
MARCH 2005
    Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
    It wasn’t long after I left Al Tafar that I began to feel very strange. I first noticed it on the highway between the air base and the town of Kaiserslautern. The trees outside the window of the taxi made a silver blur, but I could clearly see the green buds of spring as they untethered themselves from the remains of winter. It reminded me of the war, though I was only a week removed from it, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my memories would seem closer the farther I got from the circumstances that gave birth to them. I suppose, now, that they grew the same way other things grow. In the quiet of the taxi, the thin trees made me think of the war and how in the desert our year seemed like a seasonless thing, except in fall. There was a sharp disquiet in the way days passed into other days and the dust covered everything in Al Tafar, so that even the blooming hyacinth flowers became a kind of rumor.
    I imagined it would be easier then, to arrive in a temperate place so obviously passing from winter into spring, but it was not. The wet, cold air of March in Germany shocked my skin, and when the LT said we wouldn’t get a pass even though we couldn’t leave until the next day, just wait it out, I decided I’d earned one anyway.
    I’d had to walk a half a mile or so to get out the security gate and another two until the first row of buildings appeared on my left. The sky was now less brightly lit, and there was a steady, fine mist that hovered in the air. In the plane, the sun had a kind of buoyant dominance, but it had hidden itself away beyond clouds that appeared like pale, soot-colored sketches of themselves. The buildings were more colorful than I thought buildings could be, with light pastel trims, and rich creams and yellows thickly painted on the stucco walls. I walked toward the town, past softly lit cafes emitting deep, hearthy smells, past solitary people walking on the street, the collars of their slickers pulled tightly around their necks, their eyes pausing to evaluate me. Without fail, they turned toward some other ending for their travels.
    It made me feel fine to be walking alone in the rain that day, alongside the tall, ordered rows of pines and birches, and I began to feel a kind of calm when I passed the townspeople. I couldn’t have placed it then, but now, looking back, there was peace in the absence of talk. We passed, and our eyes would meet briefly, the sound of my boot heels amplified by cobblestones or alley walls. Then they would fall away from one another, our eyes, and they would know me by my skin, tan and sun-beat to linen, an American, no