Via Dolorosa by Ronald Malfi

while I had no inkling as to what had happened to me while I was unconscious. And for a brief time, I was thankful I could not remember. Then I developed the film in my camera, and it was all right there and there could be no mistaking any of it.”
    The bartender set her drink down in front of her.
    “Pamplona is a wonderful place,” she said, and downed half her drink in a single gulp. “I suppose in my own way I have run with my share of the bulls.”
    “Where’s the site?” he asked.
    “What site?”
    “The site of the shoot. Where are you shooting tonight?”
    “You do not even like jazz, Nicholas,” she said.
    “No,” he said, “I like it fine. Really. I said I didn’t know it, but now that I know it, I like it a lot.”
    “ Ahhh ,” Isabella said. “Now that you know it.”
    “Well, I could learn it.”
    “Oh,” she said, smiling, “yes. Oh, yes. I can see that.”
    “I even have some Glenn Miller albums at home.”
    She laughed at him.
    “What?” Her smile forced a smile on him, too.
    “What, what?” she said, mocking him. “Como?” Then: “Nothing. Just—nothing. Nada. It is only that you are just like a man.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Trying so hard,” she said.
    “Trying?”
    “Trying so hard, just like a man.”
    “What I meant was—”
    “Shouldn’t you be sleeping with your wife right now?”
    He watched her and felt himself turn away from her and look out across the club. He said, “I don’t want to go back.”
    “Ever?” she said.
    “I don’t know about ever,” he said. “I just know about now, right now. And I don’t want to go back right now.” He looked at her. Said, “I can’t.”
    Isabella said, “Tell me about the war.”

—Chapter VII—

    There was a steep hill behind the Club Potemkin that climbed to the black sky brilliant with stars and overlooked, precipitously, the endless band of ocean. Nick walked, Isabella’s camera case around one shoulder and an accompaniment of battery-powered lights strapped together over his other shoulder. Along with the lighting equipment, Isabella had packed a portable CD player. Now, the volume turned low, the body of the CD player thumping discretely against Nick’s left thigh with every other step he took, they listened to Claxton’s latest album, Mephistopheles, as they walked. Beside him, Isabella moved quietly through the wet grass in her bare feet, carrying nothing except a small black purse and the hem of her dress.
    He said, “Iraq was desolate and like an abortion. Which was good, I guess. It’s easier to fight on ground that isn’t alive. You don’t feel as responsible.”
    “For what?”
    “For everything,” he said. “For anything.” He found her questions to be nearly childlike, but also something of an insincere nature, as if she were really only playing with him, prodding him, seeing which way he would go. And this was something that had registered with him in the first few minutes of their initial encounter that day at the hotel café.
    “Then what do you feel like?”
    “Nothing much,” he said.
    “That is the bullshit, Nicholas.”
    “It’s just hard.”
    “Hard how? What do you mean?”
    “Hard,” he said, and found he could only repeat it: “Hard. To talk about, I mean.” And he considered. “You feel like you’re in some sort of purgatory. You feel humbled and weakened by your humility. Oddly enough, you feel peaceful but sad, too, and all at the same time. In some ways it’s like being trapped in an everlasting imperfection—a purgatory. There isn’t the intensity that everyone assumes with war. I mean, there are times like that, yeah, sure, but overall, you’re just lulled by this sense of powerlessness. Like a child being coaxed to sleep in the middle of a house-fire. And for whatever reason, you’re okay with it.”
    “Because it’s too much power to have,” Isabella spoke up. “Yes? And you are glad you do not have it, or at least you do not have all of it.