Via Dolorosa by Ronald Malfi Page B

happened?” She said, “Tell me something that happened.”
    He thought for some time. He thought eventually of the city. There had been a sadness to the old, broken city. He remembered moving toward the center of the city and into a tiny nameless village and bursting through a wooden doorway, and how the frame of the arch crumbled down, and how the gray-blue dust billowed out in a cough. There had been seven or eight flights of stairs slinking down into the suffocating earth. Endless stairs. The risers themselves were made of wood, suspended by railings bolted to the walls, and were sodden and bloated with water. In the dark, the smell was intolerable. The air was stifling and oppressive, like being trapped in the trunk of a car. How many tunnels did they traverse? Back above ground, and in the too-bright daylight, shooting erupted. They had dropped their rifles into their hands and began firing on a tight wedge of insurgents across the empty marketplace. You could never see the details of their faces. They were dark faces, very dark and almost smeared-looking, and it was as if they had no features. (That was how he had dreamed of them each night, too: smeared and slightly out of focus, like a photograph of someone taken just as they moved their head. All of them—they were phantoms, were ghosts. Ironically, it would be the way he would remember Myles Granger to look on his deathbed, too—smeared, out-of-focus, and not wholly there.) They continued to fire and the rattle of machine guns clattered off. Something on the other side of the village exploded in a dry crunch of smoke and debris. The dust was so thick it was a moving, living thing.
    “You are still thinking,” Isabella said. “What are you thinking?”
    “Nothing,” he said.
    “Nicholas,” she went on. “Why is it men always say they are thinking of nothing?”
    “Why is it women always ask what we’re thinking?” he quipped.
    She laughed. “I like that. I like you calling me woman.”
    “I didn’t call you woman.”
    “It sounds so much like an animal pet name.”
    “I didn’t…”
    But she had already turned away from him, humming to herself. It was difficult now to tell if Isabella was paying more attention to him or Claxton’s CD. She moved away from the edge of the cliff and spoke half into the wind so that he had to strain to hear all her words…
    She said, “Sometimes I think the meaning of life is to run through a succession of ideologies, trying each one on like a new pair of shoes. Slip, slip, slip. We are like Cinderella that way. Yes? And when you finally find the right one, the one that fits, you die.”
    “That’s a hell of a reward.”
    “I would think so. Why would it not be a reward?”
    “Death?” he said. “Death is a reward?”
    “Why not? What is so horrible about death? Do you know something I don’t? Did you see death when you were over in Iraq?”
    He thought, not saying anything…then laughed. When Isabella did not laugh, he said, “Oh. You’re being serious.”
    “Whether death is good or bad,” she said, “it is still something. It is still final. There is no more wondering, and no more waiting with death.”
    “I feel like I’m waiting,” he said. The words were out of his mouth before he even understood them.
    “Stop feeling,” Isabella told him. She crouched in the grass and withdrew the plastic Ziploc bag from her dress. “Feeling gets us in trouble, makes us malcontent. Are you malcontent? Yes, you are. Don’t bother to answer because you are, you are, you are. You sound completely ill with irritation when you speak. It is nearly overwhelming. Now come here.”
    “Where?”
    “Here,” she said. “Stand in front of me. The wind is coming over the hill. Stand in front of me and block out the wind, Nicholas, will you, please?”
    “What are you doing?”
    “Just stand for a minute,” she said. “Why do you always require an explanation? Just do it.” She had emptied the cigarette