During his years in the Soviet army is when Leo first came face to face with fate. He’d entered the army when he was barely twenty on a drunken whim. A few months of training with his buddies had landed them in Berlin, and landed him in the deserts of Uzbekistan on a mission nobody could name. Leo had never been one to question things. He watched the expanse of sand reach around the edges of the earth and thought that maybe this was the essence of all things, that perhaps his other existence had been just a mirage, a kind of elaborate fata morgana. It was at that moment that fate had appeared to him.

“She’s a hawkish old hag,” he told Sarge, his commanding officer, a goat of a man who had a passion for gardening and a habit of swiping small objects and stashing them under his mattress for a rainy day. “She’s got heels and pearl necklaces and a sports car and servants running everywhere. She’s a kind of spoiled savage, I think.”

“She came to you, did she?” Sarge asked, staring into his oatmeal with the concentration of a pilot trying to land Sputnik.

“Yes. I guess. I mean, I know she wasn’t really there, not like a real woman or anything, but you know. I think it was some sort of a sign.” Sarge nodded, but it wasn’t clear if it was in agreement, or just to keep the conversation going.  In either case, it stopped, Leo having gotten momentarily lost in the cacophony of his own thoughts.

At the end of every meal Sarge filled his water glass from the communal pitcher and headed into the barracks. At first Leo thought this was to honor the stringent hydration requirements, but one of the other boys explained that a few months ago Sarge had requisitioned some army dirt on the pretense of “location revitalization” and had deployed a vegetable garden underneath his bunk. The tomatoes were starting to swell on the vines that had crawled up into the mattress springs, and the officers’ quarters were beginning to take on the distinct odor of an omelet fresh off the frying pan.

The first few weeks on base, months before his encounter with fate, Leo had spent his nights awake, the heat searing into his eyeballs, and listened to the guttural snore of one private Schulman, whose heft had almost kept him out of the service entirely, and who currently slept on the floor for want of a cot that could reasonably hold his weight. Leo would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the white sliver of a moon cutting through a crack in the wooden slats. He imagined that beyond the sand, beyond the scorpions and snakes, beyond the moisture-free air that rose in clouds off the dunes, there was a world he had not seen. He could not grasp these thoughts, entirely, and so tried his best to keep them out of his head. By day he took sips from his neighbor’s smuggled stash of Fanta and read, cover to cover, the stack of Vonnegut novels that he had found hidden underneath his mattress. He had never been a reader, but found that the words, even those he didn’t understand, were a descent way to keep things from getting too complicated. When he got to thinking about things, which was not very often, or when loneliness gnawed at the edges of his waking, he’d find Sarge – who would inevitably be sweeping his hut or shaking out his sheets – plant himself in the doorway and ask, without hesitation or explanation: “Any orders this morning, boss?” Sarge would always oblige with an order, whether out of a perverse sense of duty or just to get Leo out of his hair, neither man would ever quite know. And so it went: Leo would sweep the latrines, refold the linens, count the dinner trays, and hand out the mail, and forget all his troubles in the doing.

So it went, that is, until fate sauntered into Leo’s life like an overfed maitre d’ at an initiation ball and planted her wide rear end too close to his bunk. He woke up mornings to the gurgling in Private Shulman’s throat, and pictured her, wide thighed and narrow eyed, watching him from somewhere just beyond the haze.  He suddenly felt small like an ant, like someone could step on him and sweep him up with the dust they were constantly purging from the barracks.  The magnitude of this feeling was so far greater than any he had known, that he felt, for short and terrifying moments, like everything around him was collapsing into dust.

NOTES

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

One afternoon he was in the dining area wiping down the dinner trays when he heard the scrape of a wooden chair on the cement floor behind him.  The whole encampment had been put on severe water rations due to a helicopter malfunction earlier in the week, and the sand had settled, so that everything made the same grating sound as the grit between one’s teeth.  When Leo turned to see what was happening, he found Sarge reclined in a wooden dining chair, picking dirt from underneath his fingernails with a hunting knife.  He was out of uniform – a pair of khaki shorts, a yellowing wife-beater, and no shoes.  The wife beater was too small and chest hair, scraggly and white, protruded from around the edges.  Sarge’s right foot was pulsing as if he had a nervous tick.

“Boy,” Sarge said without looking up.  After some moments of silence he rested the hunting knife carefully on the thigh of his non-dangling leg.  Leo did not know if Sarge had meant “boy” as an interjection, or a direct address, but suddenly he felt like he wanted to get closer.  He picked up a chair from a nearby table and pulled it over to where Sarge sat.  They sat next to each other, facing the stack of uncleaned trays, as though they might have been at a movie theater, or on a train, or watching the Kirov Ballet – a young man in an army uniform and old man in khaki shorts balancing a hunting knife on his thigh.

Leo suddenly found that he didn’t want to be alone.  It’s not that he was needy, but the silence started to get to him, to feel grotesque like an amusement park deserted for the off-season.  No matter how vehemently one told oneself that the kids were warm at home, occupied in more weather appropriate activities, one could not shake the feeling that something ghastly was taking place.

Private Culder became known as Ansel Adams because he always had a picture in the breast pocket of his uniform, of this little girl with pig-tails and bows tied around them, and a crooked little smile, wearing a dress with lace on the sleeves.  He held it sometimes during meals, cradling it between his ring and index finger and trying to read it, as though it were his ticket to somewhere far away.  Leo sat with him at lunch, neither of them talking, and Private Culder looking at that picture smiling somewhere deep inside so that his face had that soft look about it, like the stars of old black and white movies.

On the fourth night after Leo’s departure the moon was so bright that it kept the entire base awake.  Private Shullman, having gotten weary of sleeping on the floor, had tried to sneak onto Leo’s bunk, but the aluminum legs had buckled underneath his weight and he had broken his left wrist trying to catch his double-wide torso at it tumbled to the floor.  Sarge, before he finally fell asleep, pulled out the Vonegut book that he had swiped from Leo during one of their lunches and leafed through it to see if there was anything in it worth his time.  He found a Fanta label tucked into the pages, towards the back, and held it up to the flickering fluorescent.  It glowed an orange that he had not seen in years.  He placed it carefully into the “miscellaneous” box he kept beneath his bed.  He was thinking about his good fortune as he drifted off to sleep, the Vonnegut slipping from his hand and through the crack between his mattress and the bed-frame.  That is where, some years later, a young soldier by the name of Gibbs would find it and toss it out wih the rest of the trash.

One afternoon Private Schulman returned to the men’s quarters after his afternoon, post-lunch stroll, to find Leo crouched on top of his cot, fully dressed, shoes and all.

It happened on a particularly cloudless afternoon. The air hung above the sand so motionless and clear that Leo had the distinct feeling of being under observation, an experimental outpost only coincidentally stationed on earth. Leo had eaten his lunch in relative proximity to Sarge, and had headed out towards the watchtower, a structure that reminded one, more than anything, of a ruined playground fixture. There had been no need to build it to stand at any serious height – given the incontrovertible flatness of things – so it perched unceremoniously on a pile of discarded pipe and planks, gathered together like a bird’s nest9 around an egg. Leo climbed the tangle of debris and ducked into the low entrance to the observation deck. It was hotter than usual and he was starting to sweat.

He had sat there for about 20 minutes and was starting to doze off when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a movement out beyond his enclosure. He lifted his head to look at it, but the desert was clear and silent.

“Hey!” he yelled out into the open desert. “Hey, wait a minute, lady!” Leo scrambled to his feet and dove for the opening that let him out into the tangle of pipe and then the open desert.