Four Stages of Decomposition

The first dead body I ever saw was in a ditch, when I was eighteen. I couldn’t see his face. He was turned away from the road, one arm flung over his head, dark hair covering his profile, his body curved into the letter C. I couldn’t see what was inside the C, if anything was bundled up in there, protected by his flesh. Our Humvee was moving too fast for that, even at its creeping pace behind a small herd of donkeys.

He made me feel the way I had when I visited Manhattan, watching throngs of people step over a homeless man as if he wasn’t human. But in Iraq, it smelled more like burning than urine, and there wasn’t any scaffolding or buildings to block out the sun. Maybe that’s why in New York, people lying prone were homeless and not dead. Shade. I watched the flies dance around him, bouncing off his bare feet, through the rearview mirror as we passed, hoping maybe he’d move a little.

“Just watch the road,” the Major said, following my eyes from beside me. “He might not even be dead, you know.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Around Moses, the gunner’s standing legs, headless between us in the turret, I could see the Major lean out his armored door. “Come on! Come on! Move it!” he yelled at the donkeys.

Moses leaned down, peering into the Humvee from the cracks of space around his legs, blocking out the sun that normally filled it. “Those people were definitely dead, Nari,” he said quietly to me.

The donkeys veered off the road, and the Major clapped triumphantly. “Speed up, Sergeant,” he said. “Try to catch the rest of the convoy.”

I glanced at Moses but sped up as instructed. I had to wait until we crossed the pontoon bridge over the Tigris—slowly undulating, my hands sweating and aching on the steering wheel from fear of IEDs floating downriver toward us—to tug on his sweat-soaked uniform and ask what he meant by they.

Moses leaned down and opened his eyes a bit wider at me, maybe in recognition or understanding, and shook his head. He took a bite of some kind of protein bar and then stood up again, his face miles away and hidden from me, replaced by the unending sunshine streaming in around his legs, and I knew it was a child in the C.

⏱

The second dead body I saw was my grandmother’s, or had been, once upon a time. Her face was almost as obscured as the first, but by thick, cracking makeup and stonelike rigidity instead of black hair and flies. She was curled around a tiny, gold cross, but the part of her protecting it was only her hand, not her entire body. Was it the size of the cross that necessitated less protection or was it the smaller size of the need? A child would need more protection than a metal necklace, after all, but would he or she need more protection than the memory of where the cross came from? Or than faith in God?

The air in her little house in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was unmoving and hot. It smelled like moth balls. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why her wake was in her house or to notice how few people were there or to see any of them but her. It did occur to me that I hadn’t seen her in years, that I wasn’t there when she died, that I told her I’d be home soon, but Iraq never seemed to end. Like it was an event and not a place.

Her hand felt like a steel mannequin’s—colder than the room, harder than fiberglass. When blood stops moving, people don’t feel like family; they feel like blocks of ice. A hand like that could protect anything, I thought. She’d never had hands like that in life. They were always frail and shaking. They could hug you afterwards, but they couldn’t keep you safe. They could close doors, but they couldn’t keep them shut. Her hands seemed to know their limitations, always backing away, surrendering, hiding in the closed off rooms around her casket.

My dad’s hands were steel in life. Pushing, slamming, hitting, tearing. The doors covered with painted-over dents, the curtains a collection of re-sewn rips, the windows a patchwork of different vintages of glass. All telling the story around her body. Dad’s hands knew their strength every day he lived, seemed to throb with power. But his hands didn’t try to protect anything. Certainly, not a cross because of the value of a memory or God. Or even the value of the gold. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she would tell me afterwards. “He’s not right, you know.”

I would nod, of course. Grandma was so fragile then, like an entire life was encased in transparent dragonfly wings, and her son had grown so much bigger than her. I would stroke her wrinkled hand to see if it was broken, to make her feel safer. My own hands were too little and inexperienced then to help much, though. Two females on either end of life, our weakest state. I think she appreciated it, anyway. She never said, but I think she must have.

My hands were stronger at her funeral. The Army will do that to you; I told her it would. But they took too long to grow, so I couldn’t protect her. Part of me wanted my dad to feel her hands now. He was older, weaker, after all. He must be. Time wouldn’t protect someone like him. He could see my hands, too. I’d learned how to use them. It was only a passing thought, though, because wolves don’t spend time worrying about sheep. I knew that much. And he didn’t show up anyway.

⏱

The third person was really a mix of six people. I couldn’t differentiate parts after their Blackhawk crashed. Partly it was because of the fire, but mostly it was because of the chaos of the destruction. I couldn’t see if they were protecting anything through the suit I had to wear, sifting through the still warm wreckage. The mask fogged, and I could smell the fuel and smoke anyway. It was white and heavy and hot. All in all, the suit seemed pointless.

Two of them were lovers. I’d seen them together in the female shower tent, reflected in the wind-jostled mirror taped to one wall. The white one gave me the finger when she caught me watching. One of them had a flight helmet with stars painted on the side that she’d left on the bench, its black visor fogging. There were maybe twelve stars in different colors. I didn’t know which woman was a pilot, or if both were.

I saw them together in other places, too. They ate dinner together at the chow hall. They played poker on the headquarters patio some nights. They laughed loudly and even the white one that flipped me off was clearly happy. In a place where the rest of us weren’t. It was hard not to want whatever they knew, what they seemed to understand. To me, they were like nameless Amazons—powerful, strong, secure.

I looked, but I couldn’t find the stars in the wreckage, even though I pieced together the helmets as best I could. None of the identifiable parts had stars. One piece of something had part of a gray triangle on it, but it was hard to say if that was a burned section of star or something else. Something from the game, rather than the players.

Still, I imagined those two women were their own C ’s on either side of all the others, like black and white parentheses curled around every other color in the rainbow. Two mothers holding each other through their children. In a way, they were—so intertwined that they were one body. Anyway, that’s what I imagined as we sifted through the wreckage to find their bones to send home.

⏱

The last person I saw was you. It was just this morning, so there hasn’t been time for any others. Or strength for any others. “You can hold him,” the nurse told me without making eye contact. You were blueish purple with a head full of black hair and tiny, perfect fingers. I held your body, still warm from mine.

“Leave,” I said, I guess too softly to hear. Or maybe I just thought I’d said it. I looked up at the nurse. “Get out.”

She looked around nervously at the doctor, but they both left the room. Left me alone with the son I’d waited to name until we’d met—face to face. And knowing that you’d died without a name because of me, broke me. I covered your face with tears and then tried to dry them off, wondering how my body could produce milk, blood, and tears simultaneously, but couldn’t keep my baby alive. Couldn’t do the one thing it was made to do.

“Hey Mama, we need to take him—” A nurse opened the door.

“OUT. Get out!”

I waited until she was once again safely on the other side of the door, and then I brushed my finger against your little cheeks. Your eyes were closed like my grandma’s. I guess that’s the difference between dying at war and dying in peace—you can close your eyes.

You weren’t curled around anything. That was my job. I was supposed to do that, like the Iraqi father, like the lovers keeping everyone together. They understood. I was supposed to be your C. Otherwise, what was the point of all of it? Of seeing them all, if not to learn? I was supposed to curl around you to keep you warm and safe.

“Nari,” the doctor said, peeking into the room.

“Get the fuck out of my room.”

She hesitated. “Five more minutes.”

“Five? Five minutes? I was supposed to have his whole life.” I threw a book from the nightstand at the door as it closed. But carefully so I didn’t disturb you in my other arm.

In my five minutes with you, I curled myself around you. That’s what they’d taught me, after all. And, as we lay there, I remembered that I’d given her that cross, the one my grandma held in death, underground, safe in her hands. It wasn’t gold at all. It was from a toy machine at the grocery store I bought with two quarters I found in the parking lot when I was a kid.

They took you from me while I slept, set the Bible back on the nightstand. Such sneaky bastards. I didn’t do that. I kept the women with their children, all together. All the bones in one box.

But you know, I’m sure you do. You know that I curled around you until you were too cold, until they had to take you. You know you were safe, hidden by my body, protected by the new strength of my hands. And, I named you and continued to bleed, lactate, and cry until I fell asleep again.

Eventually, I woke up dry, because the sun always wins, but without a chunk of me. You were formed from a slice of my heart, so that part—the little curved sliver of a seed—will be with you in the ground. Like the cross is with my grandma. Both protected and protecting, at the same time. ⏱