The Reaper don’t sleep. He waits.
                Port-a-john graffiti, Sector Bravo, Balad Air Base, Iraq, 2006


     I found the chaplain exactly where I expected to find him, inside the chapel tent (the one with the helpful Chaplain on Duty sign out front). He was seated on one of the folding metal chairs that served as pews, reading a Stars & Stripes. When our eyes met, I nearly to-the-rear ‘arched it. He was a tad fresh-faced and wore the same dippy, FNG expression I probably wore when I first landed in Iraq six weeks earlier.  His fatigues cemented the impression. They were neatly pressed, unpowdered by the desert dust that managed to cling to everything else. He looked much too young and clean to be hefting my troubles onto his shoulders. But he tossed the paper aside, beckoned me forward and said, “Come on in, sergeant.  Nobody here but us infidels.”
     I approached him, cleared my throat and asked if he’d hear my confession.
     “Happy to. Grab some chair. Lay it on me.”
     Lay it on me? I had been crossing myself when he said it and I stopped in mid-cross. I searched out his rank. Captain’s bars on the collars and a cross above his nametape. Still, I decided to confirm his creds and asked if he was Catholic.
     “As the Pope,” he said. He smiled a goofy-toothed smile and sleepily winked both eyes at me - which I took, for some inexplicable reason, to be an imitation of the Pope.
     Like I said, I didn’t have time to be choosy. I sat behind him, keeping a full row between us as if it were reserved for my sins. There was no sound except for the rustle of the tent flaps in the desert wind and an occasional creak of the ceiling braces. The tubular canvas vent that stretched the length of the roof hung deflated like the wounded heart valve of a giant. It was too cold for air-conditioning although that would change a few minutes after the sun came up.
     I told the chaplain that I’d been having them since I first arrived in Iraq. The funeral fantasies. They started simply enough, dancing across my mind’s eye with the fogged-up quality of a TV movie daydream. A solemn viewing room, an array of padded armchairs, all facing my prominent, flag-draped casket. In the reserved front row sat my older brother, Steve, my mother, and my mother’s third husband who I always called “Number Three.” He never took offense, though, and even made like the joke was his idea, sometimes wearing a baseball cap with a big ‘3’ on it. I laughed whenever he did that because it wasn’t very funny.
     Anyway, as I said, these first fantasies weren’t too detailed or well attended. Just a few people and maybe a funeral home employee or two. There was usually an easel beside the casket with a poster board of pictures, nothing I could make out. The only person who wasn’t there that should have been was my girlfriend, Paula, who had refused to see me off when I got the call to deploy. She had made out like the damn war was my own personal invention, something I had cooked up just to get away from her. She had been picking away at me for a marriage proposal, dropping hints left and right about the need to stop living in sin, to preserve the line of succession, to produce an heir to the family crest. Or whatever. And this deployment, which some guys were whining their way up the gripevine to get out of, meant that the succession would have to wait a little longer. I guess she—
     “What do you do?” the chaplain asked me. He was still sporting the goofy smile only it had gotten broader, as if my confession of a morbid death fantasy was akin to me telling him the one about the rabbi, the priest and the minister sitting in a rowboat. I sighed in a way I hoped signaled dissatisfaction with his customer service. He stopped smiling. “Your job, I mean,” he said, readjusting himself on the chair. “In Iraq.”
     My job, of course, didn’t really pertain to the fantasies, but I took pity on him, figuring even priests had warm-up routines. I was an emergency ordnance disposal technician, I explained. My unit took unexploded IEDs, rendered them safe, then detonated them in the northwest corner of the airfield, usually at high noon although we began to stagger our activities when the Hajis outside the wire started timing their mortar attacks around the detonations.
     “Sounds dangerous,” he said.
     I told him sure, that it was, sometimes. What the hell wasn’t in this place?
     “Say, were you involved in that incident last week?” he said, snapping his fingers in an attempt to recall. “It was in the base flyer. A young tech sergeant was killed.”
     I knew right away who he was talking about. The young tech sergeant was Ray Boyle, my supervisor. Well, former supervisor I should say. I told the chaplain all this, but also that it really wasn’t important – because it wasn’t – and did he mind if I went on.
      “Of course. Sorry.”
     I took a deep breath and went on. So during my first month in-country, after dodging more mortar rounds than I could count, after safeing and blowing up about two dozen IEDs and other assorted explosive remnants of the late Iraqi regime, the fantasies grew more elaborate. And crowded. Now the viewing room was full, all the seats taken, and there were people standing in the back, a couple of them wearing dress blues heaped with fruit salad. Each corner of the room was jungled up with flowers and the nagging sound of organ music yawned out of speakers in the ceiling.  I noticed quite a few of the people in the audience were fanning themselves, and those who weren’t fanning themselves were sweating. The room didn’t appear to have A/C which, believe me, you just didn’t want to be without in that part of West Texas. Anyway, this was the extent of the fantasy at that point. Everyone (except Paula) just sitting there, fanning or sweating, staring at my coffin, waiting for something, anything, to happen.
     And maybe that would have been the full life cycle of the fantasy except that this was about the time in my deployment that Ray bought it during the botched IED demolition. From then on, the fantasies came salted with striking, detailed sensations. I began to hear an indistinct whisper beneath the organ music and I started smelling sweat in the room, mixed in with the flowers and something else. Something that tingled the nose a bit. Something pinched and stricken.
     Then the music stopped and I could hear everyone sniffling back tears. Someone groaned, probably from the heat. And a lone priest, bible clutched to his chest, floated up the center aisle to a podium near the casket. He flipped on the microphone which squealed briefly. Then he coughed into his fist, apologized for the lack of air-conditioning and suggested that “we hurry it up before things start getting ripe.” A soft laughter rippled through the crowd and, of course, I’m thinking, Say what!?
     And right then, from somewhere in the back of the room, just as the priest was asking those in attendance to bow their heads in prayer, a baby begins to cry. It was one of those full-throated, starving squalls that goes on forever and gets pulled across the inner core of your nerves like a wire brush. It was --
     “Did you know Sergeant Boyle well?” the chaplain asked me. I stared back at him. Jesus, was it dumb question night? He looked and sounded so disconnected that I almost said so. I mean, I had a lot to unload and was just getting into the real crazy part of the fantasy.
     Sure, I told him. Ray was my super-duperest bestest friend. And the chaplain seemed to accept this because he nodded and even sagged in the shoulders as if relieved.
     Which was okay, anything to get him to hear me out. After all, Ray wasn’t any more my best friend than the chair I was sitting on. In fact, I hated the guy. He was short-time, only two more weeks and a pause-for-the-cause from being back in the world. His six-month deployment had been rough, losing a couple of guys early on to an errant hand grenade that exploded as they were setting the comp-4 charge. The event had made him homesick and lax with the tech data he was supposed to be following. He began to cut corners on the range and his after-action reports to our commander were sloppy, rife with grammatical mistakes, mostly because he was cutting and pasting from previous sloppy reports.
     Plus, instead of plying me with the wisdom he had picked up on his tour – things like when to deploy a robotic defusing device and when to simply withdraw and blow the target in place. Or how to pick out a fake IED and how to detect a real IED made up to look like a fake IED or even – for the insurgents with way too much time on their hands – a fake IED made to look like a real IED. Instead, Ray spent most of our cross-over talking about his wife. Hell, make that all of the time. And the closer he got to climbing aboard that freedom bird, the more impatient he became, always fretting to wrap up whatever task we were assigned.
     So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that when a scheduled detonation didn’t blow one morning, Ray scrambled out of the observation bunker to check the det chords, never bothering to safe the charging handle. There were three of us that day. Me, Ray, and a young airman fresh out of tech school who didn’t know his ass from a blasting cap. Still he knew enough to join me in yelling for Ray to stop, to get back into the bunker until we’d gone through each of the safeing procedures.  We yelled, but Ray didn’t listen. A delay would have meant radioing it in to flightline ops and returning in the blistering afternoon sun to try again. And Ray, like every short-timer in every war ever fought, didn’t have time for delays.
     So we just watched stupidly as Ray Boyle jogged out about a hundred yards from the bunker, leaping into the disposal pit like a dog after a bone. Within a minute, he stood straight up, his head poking out of the pit, and offered us a big thumbs-up. He had found the problem, identified the disconnected link in the comp-4 train. He had proved that he didn’t need my concern or the plodding safety steps laid out in the tech data. He was King of the Short-timers. Nine more days and a fucking wake-up.
     And then…well, then Ray was gone, replaced by an enormous, booming splash of dirt and debris. And brother, when I say, gone, I mean gone. Obliterated. Vaporized. Disappeared. Snatched away in a blast that was meant to take out a tank.
     I scrambled out of the bunker first, panting, my mind a vacant hum of useless images from some buddy care training manual. I kept telling myself I’d have to hurry, to render first aid, to radio in for medevac. I even imagined that when I found him, he would be intact, maybe even trying to mouth something at me, begging me to tell his wife that he loved her. Or maybe he would tell me to be careful or even that we could have been, should have been, friends. Who knows? Because what I found was only partially recognizable. Pink ribbons of muscle, fat and tissue.  Splintered bones that glistened with blood and sand. A boot. A hand. Part of his ribcage with strips of his uniform and his organs still attached. The things of nightmares and dark thoughts.
     I don’t remember screaming or sinking into the sand at the base of the pit, the sand now painted over with blood. And I hardly remember refusing to get out of my bunk the next day, cocooned in my sleeping bag, crying and trembling, rubbing my eyes raw as if to erase what I’d seen. But that’s what apparently happened.
     My commander showered me with three days of leave which was probably the last thing I needed because it gave me time to work on my fantasies. To hide inside of them constantly. Over and over. Each time, the details crystallizing, the voices becoming more pronounced and absurd. It was about this time that I began to build them into living visions, to decorate them with clarity, with pieces of my life.
     It was about this time that the people who knew me began to speak.
     Everyone had something to say in these fantasies, except my mother who wouldn’t stop crying. After she had been invited to the podium by the priest, she broke down without saying a word. She had to be escorted away by Number Three.
     My brother Steve came next and he took the cake. He plucked the microphone off the lectern and stepped out in front of the coffin, unfurling the cord behind him with a flourish. From center stage, he began to work the room like a stand-up, and I have to admit, I don’t remember him ever being so funny. He started off by talking about our youth and the crazy things we used to do together. The belly flop contests down in the shallow creek behind the house of my first stepfather (Number Two). The time we pelted old Mrs. Berger’s house with dirt clods until she set loose Gonzo, her fearsome – and some say rabid – Great Dane on us. Even the time, as an Altar boy, I secretly removed the tongue of the sanctus bell just before mass. And then stood struggling not to laugh when Father Frazier shook the bell, as though he were strangling a cat, cursing under his breath in a futile attempt to make it ring.
     Steve even made a joke about the baby crying in the back of the room, saying, “Don’t worry, kid, at least you didn’t have to put up with his jokes.” Or something like that.
     Anyway, it was all fine until he launched into the story about the day he talked me into sitting in my grandfather’s wheelchair and going out to an El Paso Diablos baseball game with the sole purpose of scoring some autographs. The theory was that the ball players would sign a program or pennant from a kid in a wheelchair quicker than any other and damned if that wasn’t true. But I never felt right about doing it because 1) my grandfather had just died and the wheelchair smelled vaguely of old man urine and 2) it just wasn’t right.
     But see, here’s the kicker: there’s my brother telling this story at my wake and he’s got this room full of people laughing uncomfortably and believing that the whole thing – get this – was my idea, not his. He even had the stones to say that he had tried to talk me out of it because, after all, my grandfather had just died and hey, it just wasn’t right.
     So I’m yelling back at him from somewhere in the fantasy, somewhere up in the syrupy etherworld, only he can’t hear me. Nobody can hear me. Because I’m dead and locked away in that flag-draped coffin. But I’m yelling anyway. Tell them the truth, Steve! Tell them what really happened! Tell them—
     “Where was he from? Sergeant Boyle?”
     This was the chaplain, interrupting again.
     I scoffed, rolled my eyes and looked up at the tent ceiling in an appeal to heaven. I asked how the hell would I know.
     “He was your best friend.”
     I told him, yes, but it never really came up.
     “Wife? Children?”
     I said I guessed so, and then glanced down at my hands, trying to control my growing irritation.
     “I’m sorry,” the chaplain said again, although he didn’t sound very sorry this time. “Maybe that wasn’t part of your story.”
     I shot him a look that said, Gee, ya think? Of course, I could have spent the next few hours on Ray and his happy little family life. How could anybody miss it? Like I said, he’d blather on about it constantly. His wife’s name was Rae Dawn. Like the actress, Ray would say. He also said that people back home called them Rae-Ray as a joke. Pretty funny, huh? Ray sure as hell thought so because he always laughed like a loon when he said it.
     And then came the pictures that he carried around with him, whipping them out of the side pocket of his fatigues like a gunslinger. An accordion of plastic-encased snapshots of Ray-Rae. At the high school prom. At their wedding. At Waikiki Beach on their honeymoon, the pristine surf lapping at their sunburned calves. I usually looked at the photos out of politeness and also because I wanted to see what kind of woman would put up with such an ass. And she wasn’t all that bad looking, this gal.  Silky, white-blond hair, big blue eyes and milk fair skin, the product of some aggressive Nordic inbreeding. In fact, the only thing whiter than her skin was a set of perfectly pampered teeth that flashed in every shot.
     The last photo in his lineup showed a plump and clearly pregnant Rae. Eight months if she was a day. So where were the photos of the offspring? The roily little addition to the happy twosome? Not in Ray’s photo pack. That’s because he had given specific instructions to his wife not to send or email any photos of his new daughter who’d apparently been born soon after Ray deployed. If you asked him why, he’d talk your ear off explaining it. The reason was that he wanted his first sight of the baby girl to be “in the flesh,” face to face, eye to eye, receiving the baby into his arms like a king receiving the heir to the throne. Or whatever. He was extremely proud of this little scheme of his, believe me. Lot of good it did the son of a bitch.
     But like I said, none of this had anything to do with my fantasy – especially the one I experienced a few days earlier, the one that got me seeking out my religious roots at three in the morning.
     In this one, Number Three was up on the podium, having taken over from my lying sack of shit brother. The old guy apologized to my coffin and said that my mother had planned to speak, but she wasn’t able. So he was going to do it for her.  He said that he knew I didn’t always think of him as someone to trust nor certainly as a father figure, but that he always respected me. He also said that even though he didn’t think too much of the war, seeing me in my desert fatigues, piling my duffle bags into the car that would take me to the base and away from the world, he suddenly experienced an intense desire to be in my boots, to be me. Or at the very least, he wished that he had the courage to do what I was doing.
     And I’ve got to say that this part of the fantasy was the hardest to take. I mean, Number Three didn’t know me as anything but a punk, an ungrateful smart-ass stepson who made fun of him at every opportunity. But here he was saying how much he respected me, mainly for the way I never talked about the war and what it meant or how it started. Just that the call had come and I had answered because years ago, on some enlistment form, copied out in triplicate, I had sworn that I would. I went because I swore I would. Because it was my duty and duty, to me and to those who were going with me, was enough. And he was right. Duty was enough.  Too simple to explain, but enough.
     And it got me thinking, were these his words or the words I wanted him to say? And did I want him to say these things because I really wanted Paula to hear them? To her, duty was simple all right -- a simple excuse to run away from her and from my responsibilities and from a life as perfect as Ray’s, from a sinless existence, a beautiful baby, and a honeymoon in Hawaii. Duty was a prank, a semi-literate, heartless, split-personality principle better suited to ancient libraries and dead heroes. After all, if duty was enough, then where the hell did she fit into it? Didn’t this selfless, duty-bound world have a place for her? For us?
     But all that was being overpowered and strangled in the grip of Number Three’s words, in this great, booming speech I was feeding him. And as he got rolling, I gazed out across the room and voila! -- there’s Paula, in the front row, blurred in my vision because I was forcing her to be there. Forcing her to cry at the points being driven home by Number Three. But before she looks up, her eyes blinking with tears of understanding about how inconsiderate she had been, all of a sudden there’s this whimper and cry from the back of the crowd. Sure enough, it’s that damn kid, starting to cry again. Number Three stumbles a bit, smiles and tries to go on, but that damn kid keeps crying in the back and it’s really whacked because I’m trying to force it to stop, but--
     And here – you guessed it – the chaplain breaks up my momentum. He coughs loudly. He shakes his head and holds up a hand for me to stop. Not to ask forgiveness for interrupting me again. No, more like a gesture that he’s heard it all before, that I was stating the plain and the obvious. I might have just told him that it was going to be hot today or that the thing beneath our feet was planet earth. Even so, I expected something sage to come out of his mouth, something eternal. Hell, I’d settle for helpful. But instead he said, “They shouldn’t bring them to funerals. Kids, I mean. Especially babies. Especially crying babies.”
     I agreed, of course, even though the statement seemed a little harsh for a man of the cloth.
     “Do you have kids?”
     I shook my head and told him nobody I knew – no one who would come to my funeral anyway – had a baby.
     “You mentioned that Ray had a baby.”
     I shrugged, as if to say, So?
     “Maybe that’s the answer.”
     Without hesitation, I told the good father that with all due respect, that wasn’t the answer because that wasn’t the question. Besides why would anyone associated with Ray Boyle – who hailed from Buffalo, New York – be anywhere near my funeral in West Texas?
     “I thought you said you didn’t know where he was from.”
     Or wherever, I said. The point was that Ray was already dead. And if I was somehow channeling Ray’s funeral, then what was he doing in my hometown being buried in front of my family? Well? I said. Let’s hear it.
     The chaplain sighed. “I never said anything about this being his funeral. I just meant that maybe you…” He struggled to find the words and I told him to say it. To say whatever it was he meant. That’s when he snapped his fingers, this time with an accommodating expression of awe, and said, “What about Paula? Do you think maybe she’s, you know…”
     He never said the word he was groping for, which was ‘pregnant.’ And that was okay, too, because even though in a weird way I had been thinking the same thing, I was also ready to call him crazy, to tell him that he needed to lay off the communal wine. And I probably would have, except that before I could, a faint sound cut me off – a sound that I knew all too well. It was the pop of metal on metal, a muffled hiss, the hot whisper of Death arcing blindly through the air.
     Then came the warning siren, always a hair too late.
     I steeled up in my chair, bracing for the distant explosion of a mortar round.
     But the explosion wasn’t distant. This time the blast rocked the inner compound – no more than fifty feet away. In the split second that followed, I found myself marveling at the tremor buzzing up my boots. The little rat bastards usually tried to hit the flightline or the hospital. Rarely did they lob stuff into the base interior.
     The chaplain wasn’t as reflective, having been here long enough to know that where there was one round, there was usually two or three others, walked toward us, like the staggering footfalls of angry, drunken men. He sprang up from his chair, searching for a place to dive. When he saw I wasn’t moving, he shouted at me. I didn’t hear him because another round landed just outside the tent.
     I shouted back at him not to worry, that one of those things practically had to land right on top of your head to kill you. But he just stared back, wide-eyed and pulsing, his face an event of terror. He was scared alright, but there was something else there. Righteousness, maybe. Paranoia. Or maybe something as simple as the repudiation of fate. Of duty.
     Whatever it was, it got him moving. He lunged at me, tackling me right off the chair to the ground, throwing his body over mine. And it was probably a good thing he did, because the next round landed atop the far corner of the tent, shattering the metal tent frame and our eardrums in an instant.
     We both lay there for a moment, numb and unmoving. Blood hammered away from my heart and up the core of my spine, smothering all sound. And when my ears began to work again, the first thing I heard, beyond the useless sirens, was the chaplain’s taut whisper, urgently reciting a prayer, one of the psalms I think. “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” he stammered. “Who shall frighten me? The Lord is the defender of my life. Who shall make me tremble? Who shall make me tremble?” Apparently it was the insurgents because the priest's heart was racing, pounding against my chest.
     But maybe the prayer wasn't for him. Maybe it was for me. Because I felt no fear. I felt cocooned in his terrified hold, in his absence of peace. In his wisdom. And I knew that I wanted nothing more at that precise moment than to see Paula again. To take hold of her. To gather her in and delicately place my open hand atop her rounded belly, the place where my child moved and lived in an airless serene existence.
     The tent wall behind the altar suddenly rushed up and away in the booming reverberation of another round. Slowly, the gray mist of gunpowder drifted away from where the altar had just been, revealing a mosaic of debris, shredded tent canvas and a tumble of twisted chairs.
     Now I felt the chilly desert wind on my face. I knew that the insurgents were doomed, but I also knew that if the predators didn’t get them in that instant, then the next round might just be on top of us. This logical thought faded quickly, however, and I was back home again, back in the funeral home. Only this time, I wasn’t floating above it all. No, I was lying in the open coffin, looking up out of its padded rim.  Up at the people filing respectfully past me.
     And there isn’t any sound here in this fantasy, even though I can see people crying. The baby is here too, except it’s not crying any more. In fact, as far as I can tell, the baby is the only one not crying, perhaps because it is cradled in its mother’s arms and its mother, who I can see clearly now, isn’t Paula. The baby’s mother is Rae. How did I know? I saw her damn picture enough, didn’t I? The thing was practically shoved in my face. And now she’s looking into the coffin. She’s looking down at me. And I want to say, wait a minute I’m not who you think I am. I wasn’t even his friend. But she doesn’t hear me because I’m dead. Ray’s dead. In fact, Ray’s more than dead. He’s gone. There’s nothing left of him. But she keeps looking down into the open coffin anyway, directly into my face.
     And then she holds up the baby in her arms, and I can’t quite make out its features, but since I know it’s a girl, I force myself to finally see the little thing and she has the fairest of skin like her mother but also Ray’s dark eyes and a wisp of white-blond hair as thin as rice paper. And she’s wide-eyed and her mouth is open as if she is mystified because that’s what babies become when they stop crying. They become mystified by their own ability to interact and affect the world.
     And here’s where it all gets serious, because I see this face, this child’s face and beside the child’s face are the lips of her mother, whispering something, some secret about war and confession, about kingdoms and the duty of men, a secret that is just outside my hearing, and the mother swallows back the faintest threat of tears, and gathers up a will and courage that I know belongs only in fantasies, to speak softly but clearly into the baby’s ear, until I hear her voice, this single voice alone, within all the impenetrable and ruthless silence.
     “Say goodbye, my little angel,” she says to the baby and to me and to the world.  “Say goodbye to your father.”