I’m waiting for my prescription at the pharmacy, my stomach churning like basil in a blender. I keep an eye on an older man farther down the aisle, rummaging through the antacids. He seems fine. I’m suffocating in here.
A lady over by the contraceptive display jabbers away in Arabic. Her hijab is covering what I know must be a head wound. She’s also missing an arm. I do my best to ignore her. The old guy moves on over to the snack aisle, no threat for the time being.
I hear my name, “Riley Hoffman,” over the store’s PA system. As I approach the prescription counter, I happen upon the lady in the hijab, now accompanied by someone who could be her sister. They’re pointing at me and chattering incessantly. I remind myself to breathe. I feel the perspiration breaking out across my forehead.
Just pick up my prescription and slip out the door.
Too late. Artemis is already filling an order behind the counter. His large black frame blocks out the shelves stocked with pharmaceuticals behind him. Artemis finds a way to really ruin my day, almost every day. I see his camouflage combat uniform peeking out from beneath a spotless white lab coat. His fatigues are bloody and in tatters thanks to a detonated IED years ago.
He leans over the counter, sticking his rotting face close to mine.
“Not a good look today, is it, buddy?” he says.
I leave without picking up the paroxetine.
Artemis appears again back at my parents’ house, where I’m safely insulated in my basement bedroom. It’s like he can’t leave me alone.
“I see you’ve booked a little social engagement later this week.” Artemis is stretched out on the wire frame bed, his head staining my pillow with coagulated blood. His boots, biscuit-colored military issue, shed sand on my sheets.
I shrug. “My mother wants me to meet this girl, says I should get out more.”
He lifts his head and surveys my bedroom. “She’s got a point. You are getting a little stale down here.”
A trio of severely injured women shuffle past us, hurling invectives at me in Arabic. One of them holds out the residual stump of her arm for the rest to see.
Artemis sits up, his entrails leaking out of his abdomen. “Think of all the fun you’ll miss here. Another night playing Overwatch on your Xbox and jacking off. It’s impressive how you can perform both of those at the same time.”
The Iraqis bump into my dresser and deflect off, heading back the other way across the room. Gabbing away the entire time.
Artemis straightens up on his gelatinous legs. He teeters on those unsteady pinions, testing out his equilibrium. “You’re going through with it, right? You have to be getting close to some sort of federally mandated social expiration date down here.”
My mother isn’t forthcoming about my potential “date.”
“She’s unemployed, just like you. You’ll have a lot to talk about.”
“I have a job.”
“Picking up dog poop isn’t a career. Imagine me telling her parents that. I just said that you were in between jobs.”
Whenever the subject of gainful employment comes up with my father, he just shakes his head and asks me when I’m going to move out. That’s why I usually stay hidden in my bedroom when he arrives home, tucked away in the basement, same as I did as a gangly middle-schooler.
The dog-walking has been a good gig for me. I set my own schedule, and I’m out in the open where things aren’t so claustrophobic. The ghosts of the past mostly leave me alone while I’m with the dogs. Not sure why.
And I have one enormous advantage over my competition from the adjacent communities.
Grosse Pointers prefer to do business with their own kind. Especially when it comes to their beloved Tucker or Bailey.
My father’s completely silent on our drive over to the Whiskey Six, a quaint sports bar embedded in the retail district of Grosse Pointe. My mother is primping herself in front of the vanity mirror located on the sun visor.
“Try to be engaging, okay?” she says over her shoulder. “I’d say just be yourself, but we know where that leads to.” I’m riding in the passenger seat in the back, gazing out the window at the storefronts on Kercheval Avenue.
The things I do to placate my mother.
Linda Jevnikar’s already there waiting for us at the bar. I know immediately that I’ve been hoodwinked. Sure, she has some interesting assets, a small waist and diaphanous brown eyes. But there’s no getting around the ridiculous bouffant hairdo. If you remember the girls who sang with the rock group the B-52s, it’s that kind of hairstyle. Swooped up into a conical shape on her head. Not to mention her hair color is Easter egg dye orange.
Then there’s her laugh. Right off the bat, she giggles at my mother’s compliment on her dress. Except it’s a cackle loud enough to startle the other diners and stop their conversations cold. I recall a witch from a Tales from the Darkside episode whose laugh came disturbingly close to Linda’s.
“Oh, Linda and I have talked long enough,” my mother says when our food arrives. “It’s your turn, Riley.”
Except for having ordered fish and chips, tartar sauce on the side, my father still hasn’t said a word.
I jam a piece of too-hot pizza into my mouth, burning the inside of my cheek.
“Okay, I’ll start,” Linda says. “Your mother tells me you’re a Marine.”
I nod and motion that I have food in my mouth.
She lets out a rackety cackle. “Go ahead and finish chewing. I was interested in your fatigues.”
“Our uniform?” I swallow hard.
I describe our military attire, from top to bottom. Linda smiles approvingly. I add in an anecdote about my bootcamp instructor. The first thing he taught us was how to lace up our boots.
“What was your typical day like? Did you have a gun? How big?” This question is accompanied with a rip-roaring cackle. I notice the diners at the next table asking their waiter if they can move to a just-vacated table against the wall.
It’s a mundane explanation. Most of our days were spent cleaning our weapons and preparing for inspections.
The whole terrain was sandy, so you had to try to get every grain out of an object that has endless crevices and compartments. We used baby wipes to remove the built-up carbon from our rifles. Cotton swabs were inserted into those hard-to-reach spaces.
“So you’re telling me that the U.S. military is the biggest buyer of household cleaning products?”
“Probably.”
I’m having a good time, even if I don’t want to admit it to myself.
My mother and Linda excuse themselves to the ladies’ room. They chatter at each other as they walk away, gesticulating in a vaguely familiar manner. I look over at my father, who is slowly eating his French fries, bite after methodical bite. No way I’m going to be stuck with him while we wait for the women to return. I get up and make my way to the back of the restaurant and push open the men’s room door.
“Ocupado, man. You’re going to have to wait.”
This time, Artemis has thoughtfully rearranged the skin back onto his face. I make a detour around him and head to the urinal.
“I’m sorry, dude, but that ugly chick scares me.” He opens his hematic eyes wide in an expression of mock horror.
I finish up, flush, and walk to the sink.
“Her laugh. Riles, it freaks me out,” he says. “Like someone caterwauling through a blowhorn.”
I can’t see Artemis’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, only that big shit-faced grin of his.
Like an oversized Cheshire cat.
I wash my hands and grab a towel.
Doesn’t anyone else in this goddamn restaurant have a pressing need to urinate?
He cracks open the door and peers out. “They’re heading back to the table now. She’s a slump-buster, all right. Woof.”
I throw the towel in the trash.
“She’s gonna change you, man. You hear me?”
He opens the door wide and extends his arms toward the dining room. “Go ahead,” he says. “Unless you’d rather stay in here, where it’s safe.”
“I’m going back in,” I say to no one in particular. I return to my seat and manage to finish dinner without incident.
I’ll admit it was a bit unusual for a Grosse Pointe-bred lad to join the Marines. Every senior in my class was college-bound unless you counted Arnie Glesson, who’d opted for trade school. And me, of course. I had the grades and the ACT score to attend college. That wasn’t the point. I wanted to see new things. Experience the world, not matriculate on a college campus where everyone else came from privileged families. My mother suggested I take a gap year, like some of the neighbors’ kids did after college.
“See Europe,” she said, “or perhaps Greece.” I made a mental note that my mother might be geographically challenged.
My father just told me to man up and go to college or get a job.
I decided to take that gap year, and an extended one at that, and have Uncle Sam foot the bill. Everyone thought I was nuts to join the Marines. I thought it was bad ass. I didn’t anticipate seeing any hostile combat. Boy, was I wrong on that number.
Linda wastes no time in texting me the very next day.
LINDA: I had the most wonderful time.
I ask how she got my number.
LINDA: Your mother, silly. Let’s talk on the phone.
So we do, for almost two hours.
“Weren’t you excited to be in a different country? A new culture?”
“Most of it was insanely boring.”
She’s obsessed with military attire. I wonder if she’s a dog tag chaser. I’ve heard stories of such women but have never encountered one before personally.
“Did you wear those yellow-colored combat boots?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“You know, the suede boots? Very fashionable.”
We wore tan desert military boots, developed for desert conditions. No steel toe to fry your foot in the oppressive heat, and the eyelets were sealed to keep sand from getting inside. They were issued with a buff-colored instruction tag, informing you to change your socks regularly, dry out the insoles from time to time, and not to polish the boots.
“I love the color coordination,” she says.
Artemis makes a point of standing next to my bed the whole time, pointing at his pilot’s watch and shaking his head.
“Time’s a wastin’, Riles,” he says, tapping on the bezel. “We’re supposed to be watching The Walking Dead reruns right now.”
My treatment requires that I periodically visit my therapist, Dr. Alice Kim. The waiting room she shares with an eye surgeon is not much bigger than my closet.
Eight of us are crammed into a room with only six available seats. And it’s warm. Like tropical rain forest warm. I can feel the perspiration dripping down through my eyebrows. The canary-colored walls are closing in. My heart’s doing kettlebell swings in my chest. Is my left arm going numb? I need to distract myself. I try concentrating on another patient’s eye patch. I figure she can’t stare back.
I feel weak, like someone’s sitting on my chest. My breathing’s labored. I’m getting woozy.
I’m going to have a heart attack, right here, in this godforsaken waiting room. I practice the breathing exercises Dr. Kim has taught me. Nausea inches its way up my esophagus.
Should I call 911?
I opt for stepping out into the hallway. Breathe, I tell myself. In and out. Two women in head coverings are watching me. I feel a little better.
At least the mutilated Iraqis are here.
Then I realize these are actual living, breathing Muslim women, themselves avoiding the stifling waiting room by lingering out in the hallway. No injuries, no head wounds.
“You’re alive,” I say without thinking.
They avert their eyes.
I reenter the waiting room, still a little queasy.
Dr. Kim is there, motioning for me to enter her office.
“Ready?”
“I guess. Can you leave your door open?”
“It’s not protocol.”
“Just a crack? Please?”
It’s an appointment of convenience for both of us. The same old questions, the same curt answers. I keep an eye on the door, closed for privacy. Her office is slightly less claustrophobic than the waiting room. If I keep my breathing slow and steady, I can avoid another panic attack.
She perks up when I tell her about Linda.
“This could be a real breakthrough.”
Fine, I’m happy to talk about Linda. It’s not like I’m going to mention Artemis or the dead Iraqi women, so we might as well talk about something.
“How does that make you feel? That’s your first date in a very long time.”
“I guess we’re phone dating right now. She calls me almost every day.”
I leave out some information, like the 1960s hairstyle and her blaring cackle. And her infatuation with all things military.
I’m avoiding a question I know is coming. And I’ll be forced to lie when she gets around to asking it. The truth is, I’ve stopped taking my meds. If I divulge that little tidbit, my treatment could be cut off. My father will raise Cain and perhaps issue an ultimatum for me to leave the house. My world will come crashing down.
It’d be easier just to go back on my meds. But I’m not myself on the paroxetine. I feel fatigued and dizzy. I forget about dog-walking appointments.
I don’t want to go back on my meds.
I depart through the same suffocating waiting room. Artemis is there, sitting in the last available seat. He tilts his head back, aiming a plastic vial at the corner of his putrescent eyelid. He’s stolen someone’s prescription eyedrops again. His chest wound, exposed through a tear in his military uniform, festers with maggots. He stands up to greet me.
“You could have delved into some more sexual problems,” he says, blinking from the assault of medication in his eyes. “Frankly, I was getting bored sitting out here.”
Linda wants to know about all of it. Every gory detail of my time in Iraq.
This is unanticipated. My parents have never asked about my military service. Dr. Kim asks, but I refuse to tell her. Even Artemis doesn’t go there, which I find sort of strange.
But Linda presses me for specifics.
I explain that an IED is a simple contraption, a triggering device made of wood and wire usually hidden haphazardly, undetectable.
They were common, really. Not a week went by without one going off in our vicinity.
It was part of the landscape. Just like the mosques and clay brick buildings. One minute everything was quiet, and then, boom! Chaos.
“Shit,” Linda says. “It didn’t kill anyone you know, did it?”
When Artemis bought it, it all happened in slow motion.
We were finishing up a reconnaissance mission, inspecting the nooks and crannies of a small village, any place where an insurgent might be hidden. Artemis said he’d had enough, that he was heading back to our vehicle. He took a half step, the kind you take when you want to change direction. That was a half step into oblivion.
I turned my face away from the blast, then looked back after the smoke had cleared; then I had to look away again.
The next time I saw Artemis was when I returned home to Grosse Pointe.
“There was no war in Iraq,” I tell Linda. “At least not technically.” The top brass labeled it a counterinsurgency, and it was our job to contain it. Every Iraqi resident, from the guy across the street watching you to the children playing some version of jacks or marbles in the dirt, was suspect. You couldn’t take your eyes off them for a minute. If you did, you might end up like Artemis, a whole side of your body split wide open, your guts oozing out onto the ground.
“Did you shoot anyone?” she says.
Sure we did. We fired indiscriminately first and asked questions later. This resulted in a string of unnecessary Iraqi civilian casualties. Our whole unit was perpetually agitated and on high alert. We were a bunch of pissed-off Marines on the prowl for a scapegoat.
“Did they shoot back?” Linda says. “Were any of your friends hurt?”
“I can’t recall. It’s all a blur now.” Another lie. We say good night to each other and hang up.
“It’s funny, I can recall every detail,” Artemis says. He’s playing Grand Theft Auto on my Xbox, running over pedestrians haphazardly in a low-slung sports car. “I remember lying on the ground staring sideways at a pair of boots.”
“That was the last thing you saw?”
“Yeah. An ordinary pair of military-issue boots. You know, the ones with the tan laces. There was a dog tag tied under one of the eyelets.”
He swerves to avoid running his animated twelve-cylinder coupe into a light pole.
“It was someone trying to provide first aid, I guess,” he says. “I couldn’t tell who it was. The lights went out pretty fast after that.”
I wish to dear God those pair of boots belonged to me. Not a chance, though. I was too busy bending over and puking, trying to forget what I’d just seen.
Linda texts me a few days later. Do I want to go to a movie? I text back that I’m not comfortable in movie theaters. I expect her to ring me up and continue our nightly engagement, chatting on the phone.
LINDA: Fine. I’ll bring over the popcorn.
Turns out Linda isn’t all that interested in popcorn or any of the many streaming options on my TV. She has no qualms about “doing it” in the basement of my parents’ house. Even with my parents directly above us, watching Cake Boss in the living room. She kisses me quickly on the mouth, then tumbles onto my unmade bed. She lets out a snort followed by an ear-piercing cackle. No way my mother didn’t hear that.
We’re risking an appearance by the normally bumptious Artemis. I expect to see him standing next to my bed in all his grisly glory, nodding his head in approval. The Iraqis, they can do their own thing, it won’t bother me. But I can’t shake the notion that Artemis is there, somewhere, watching.
We take turns, Linda and I, performing a time-honored, choreographed mating dance. I unbutton my shirt; Linda lifts her blouse over her head. Her bra slips off. My Levi’s do the same. Linda’s skirt takes some fiddling, but eventually it’s pooled around her ankles.
Problem is, Artemis is lurking in my head. I keep an eye out for him, focusing on the right-side bedpost, where he likes to materialize.
I kneel on the bed, exposed, flaccid, and unable to consummate the act.
“Don’t you find me attractive?”
A real dilemma. Be honest? A better strategy: lie like a rug.
“Of course I do. I’m just distracted.” A partial truth.
“Guys don’t get distracted.”
She begins to whimper, still sprawled spread-eagle across my bed.
“I’ve hit a new low, naked in a musty old basement bed with an unemployed guy.”
“I have a job. I walk dogs.”
That just prompts a rash of uncontrolled sobs. She stutters out something, its import obscured by all the bawling.
I stroke the Creamsicle-colored swirl on top of her head, thinking that might quell her crying.
She sits up and scans the room for her bra. “I thought you were supposed to be some sort of bad-ass Marine.”
Linda marches out the front door in a state of half undress, in full view of my parents. Her parting words, mumbled under her breath, are “I don’t deserve this.”
She’s right. She deserves someone who adores her despite the beehive hairdo and wicked cackle of a laugh. She might have to look long and hard for that person, but that’s what she deserves.
I descend back down to my dungeon of a bedroom and fire up a video game. Save for the explosions emanating from the television, it’s quiet. No one here but me and my Xbox controller.
I expect Artemis to reveal himself, ready to contribute some sort of snarky comment. But he doesn’t, and even the Iraqis don’t make an appearance.
I’m alone for the first time since returning home from Iraq.
Douglas Steward has attended several creative writing workshops, including Gotham Writers Workshop classes. Semi-retired from a career that has included working in the automotive industry, manufacturing technologies, and real estate development, Douglas now devotes his time to writing and taking care of his two collie dogs.