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Jolt
by Allyson Armistead
A
dead marine lives on
our coffee table.
“Leave him alone,
John,” mom says when I
try to file his photo
away with all the
others, inside the
manila folder she uses
like a morgue. It’s fat,
the folder, stuffed with
reconnaissance she’s
smuggled from the
Pentagon, a catalog of
bodies bleached with
sand. This one’s my age,
eighteen-years-old, his
boot, missing. In the
last forty-eight hours
I’ve eaten a bowl of
oatmeal around his body,
finished my homework
around his body, watched
mom trace her finger
across his body, when I
finally say, “hey mom,”
and then, “I did the
dishes,” and then,
because she’s not even
listening, “alright
then.”
Tonight she puts
herself to bed. Most
nights I have to give
her a little push, snap
two fingers like a
hypnotist. Take whatever
she’s staring at and
hold it up in front of
her like one of those
stuffed rabbits at the
greyhound tracks. She
has the staggered walk
of the living dead, a
slow motion zombie
shuffle, which, in the
real world, is like not
moving at all.
“Night mom,” I say,
and she stares past me
with the spooky glare of
a blind person, eyes
filmed and cloudy,
irises like aluminum. I
mumble stupid
things—“you still have
me; I’m here if you need
me”—and when her silence
is like chloroform, I
flip the switch to dark.
At night, our cul-de-sac
is a battleground. I
wouldn’t have it any
other way. I can hear
Mrs. Norris, the old
lady next door, flipping
on some lifetime movie
and her two-bit
Chihuahua yapping at the
commercials, and so, in
retaliation, I crank up
the volume of my
receiver and blast
surround sound until
Mrs. Norris does the
same. That’s something I
never expected to love
about the suburbs, how
you can fire up your
busted-ass-muffler of a
car and have the entire
neighborhood close their
doors or turn up the
radio or give you a
dirty shut-the-hell-up
stare. It’s beautiful,
really. Every action has
a reaction, the way it
should be. A year ago,
if someone had said to
me, “dude, the suburbs
will be your lifeblood,”
I would have said “over
my dead body,” and
dragged my feet when the
Air Force transferred us
from Colorado. But now,
if you asked me, I’d say
thank god for Mrs.
Norris, because at least
somebody heard
me.
Call it what you
want—post-traumatic
stress, post-war
syndrome, trauma,
shock—my mom hasn’t been
the same since we left
Colorado Springs and
moved to Northern
Virginia. It was 2002
when we came to
Arlington, the same
summer the president
shipped 20,000 troops to
Fallujah because a band
of Iraqi insurgents
thought firing assault
rifles and blowing up
Americans was a good
idea. The Air Force had
promoted mom to
Lieutenant Colonel and
put her
second-in-command of
reconnaissance at the
Pentagon, where, for
twelve hours a day, she
monitors the safety of
our troops from a
geospatial satellite.
“This assignment is
different,” mom had
said, “it’s like
watching a war without
really being there. I
guard this platoon and
try to keep them alive,
but it’s like warning
ants about a water hose.
You see it happening,
and you try to warn
them, and then—it’s like
having no voice to
scream.”
I wasn’t sure what
to make of this; as far
as I knew, this
assignment was no
different than any
other, performing the
same top secret
reconnaissance from an
ergonomic office chair.
She’d always been
intense, the type of
person who sits for
hours and reads a book
without the need for
water or conversation or
a bathroom break. We
used to joke she had the
bladder of an elephant;
she never had to go.
She didn’t have hobbies
like stain-glass making
or gardening, unless you
count moving every six
months and her military
career, which probably
has something to do with
why my dad divorced her
a few years ago and
moved to Atlanta with a
waitress named Lola.
It was only after
three weeks of working
at the Pentagon that
mom’s usual workaholic
status went from
chill the hell out
to a fuck-all disaster,
and all I could think
was Mayday! Mayday!
We have a serious
problem, Houston. I
can’t tell you the day
or moment mom lost her
shit because it was just
there, like when
you come home and see a
withered plant and say,
“when did that happen? I
was watering you.” Mom
had always taken care of
us: the electric, the
gas, the groceries, my
clothes, my books, all
of my stupid kid
shenanigans, even after
dad had left us. But
overnight it was like
she’d been infiltrated
by alien radiation, her
eyes half-open and
listless, wandering
through the house like a
drone. She’d lost
weight, lost color,
stopped washing her
hair. Her bangs—usually
straightened with one of
those flat iron
things—were nappy and
clumped together and
plastered to the sides
of her face like
seaweed. She stopped
cooking on her nights to
make dinner, and,
whenever I made
dinner—now Mondays
through Sundays—she’d
just push around her
couscous into miniature
sand dunes.
I’ve tried
talking—we’d always
talked. I talked about
Arlington, my new
teachers, the
scholarship I could win
in the regional science
fair if I got my shit
together. I talked about
how we should go see the
monuments on the Mall
because that’s what
people do in D.C. She’d
nod and nod and nod
until one night I
realized she was
rocking, the way you see
kids holding themselves
when they’ve got a
stomachache.
Soon she started
bringing home
photographs, images
captured from her
satellite sessions. At
first, they were hard
for me to decipher,
their grainy, pixilated
surfaces like bad
computer printouts or
the blocky shapes of
old-school Nintendo
characters. It was only
when you stepped back
and squinted that you
could make them out, the
undeniable shape of
bodies.
“What are these,” I
asked, and mom would say
in a tiny voice full of
more air than sound: “I
killed them, John. I
killed all of them.”
“You didn’t kill
anyone,” I said, “you’re
in an office; how can
you hurt anyone in an
office? You’re 5,000
miles away, you’re not
even there,” and when I
suggested she talk to
someone, she said
psychological assistance
was the kiss of death,
her top security
clearance as good as
gone.
“What about a new
job,” I said.
“This is the only
job I want,” she said.
“I’ve done this all my
life.”
“There are lots of
jobs,” I said, “look at
the lawyers and teachers
and editors on our
street—suburbanites with
lives,” but
halfway through the
conversation she shut
down like a fried
motherboard, screen to
black, and she’s been
that way ever since.
“Dude, your mom’s
intense,” my friend
Justin says to me
whenever he raises the
subject, which is often,
or at least as often as
he talks about Stephen
Sharpe, the kid in our
class whose weekly
epileptic seizures make
his eyes flip into the
recesses of his skull.
“She must see some
crazy shit,” he says,
and I say, yeah, crazy
shit. “Was she always
like that?” and I say
no, not always, and when
Justin compares her to
Sarah Connor in
Terminator 2—her
empty, apocalyptic way
of staring at things—I
say he’s got a point
there, except the
difference between mom
and Sarah Connor is that
Sarah Connor was all
about her son John
Connor, whereas my mom
barely knows I’m alive.
I’ve tried
everything. It’s like
shaking a corpse, a dead
bird you’re trying to
resuscitate. One of
those dummies in CPR
class that inflate like
real flesh and blood but
then go back to laying
there like rubber
mannequins. Once, I
brought home
flowers—those star gazer
lilies that burst with
pink and orange and
so much goddamn
happiness—but she
only sucked in her lips
and looked at the floor,
which I interpreted as
general indifference.
She’s immune to movies
and music, too, and
usually unresponsive to
turning the lights on
and off and back on
again. She doesn’t say
anything about the 3.9
GPA report card I
hang—purposefully—on the
freezer door, or the A+
biology report I leave
catty-cornered on the
coffee table where the
living room light
emphasizes, at just the
right angle, Mr. Zito’s
glowing remarks.
Sometimes, when she’s
mooning over the
photographs of the
soldiers she’s lost, I
rattle off crazy shit,
just to see if she’s
listening: “hey mom, I
knocked up the girl next
door,” “hey mom, I’m
actually the one
pregnant, can you
believe it? It’s a
fucking marvel of
science,” but she says
nothing, doesn’t flinch.
It’s like she’s a black
hole, indiscriminate to
all matter in the
universe, sucking the
life out of everything
you throw at her.
For this reason, my
favorite time of day is
morning, where, like
today, mom rises up from
whatever dead soldier
she’s mourned the night
before wearing her Air
Force blues. Her hair is
in a bun, her insignia
the color of a knife.
Her stripped down, bony
hand holds a mug of
Maxwell black—no sugar,
no cream—while she fries
a half-dozen eggs in a
Teflon pan with the
other. For a split
second everything seems
normal, everything pop
and grease and breakfast
and I think “she’s
back,” but when she
turns around, her face
is red and skinny and
whiplashed with the kind
of pillow creases you
only get from insomnia
and I think, “we’re
right back where we
started.”
“You sleep okay?” I
ask, but she’s staring
at the CNN broadcast
blaring behind me, a
collage of sand and a
dead convoy of six, of
which her marine is one.
Before we came to
Arlington, we’d eat
breakfast at the table
and do the crossword
puzzle and make up
stupid words to fill in
the squares when we
couldn’t come up with
right ones—“how about
firearms?” “What
about fuckwit;
that’s seven letters,”
and on and on. Now the
game has changed:
there’s me, there’s mom
and the TV, and there’s
one crisis after
another.
“Are you coming to
my science fair
tomorrow?” I say,
because I want to throw
distractions at her when
she’s like this, locked
into the news like a
closed-range missile.
It’s an awesome
fair—$20,000 to the
first place winner,
which is enough to cover
tuition at any state
college for the next
three years. I think
about that first place
ribbon and the fat check
to go with it, and how
even a corpse would sit
up for all those zeros
and say “holy shit
that’s a lot of money.”
“He lives in
Kansas,” mom says, but
she’s engaged in a whole
different conversation
I’m not privy to, her
mouth barely open for
the words to squeeze
out, the effort of
speech exhausting.
“Who lives in
Kansas?”
“—”
“Mom?”
“—”
“Mom,” I say, and
clap my hands to switch
her on like one of those
Clapper gadgets you see
in the commercials.
Right now, at this very
minute, if you asked
about her platoon, she’d
tell you the cause of
death, the color of
their hair, the initials
stamped on their dog
tags, but if you asked
about my science fair—or
the realization that
it’s even happening—she’s
at a loss of critical
information.
“Mom, who lives in
Kansas?” and she jolts
awake for a
nanosecond—“did you say
something?”—and then I
lose her all over again,
the latest casualties
from northern Iraq
flashing red across the
screen.
In the science lab after
school, between the
hours of four to six,
life is how it should
be. If you apply a
stimulus to an organism,
you elicit a reaction,
and this is the most
beautiful equation in
the world. On the back
shelf of Mr. Zito’s
classroom, I keep four
jars of euglena
gracilis, a species
of paramecia that flock
to sunlight the way a
vampire, if one existed,
would stop traffic for a
severed artery.
“Freaking bad ass,”
Justin says when I hold
a jar up to the window
and we watch the ghostly
migration, a cloud of
green microbes swarming
toward the sun. “Dude,
can chicks be like
microbes?” he says, and
I laugh and say why.
He says he’s got a thing
for Betty Adams, but she
doesn’t know he’s in the
same hemisphere, let
alone the same social
circle, which equates to
a status of not
existing, which is a
very shitty place to be.
“The hot girl in
homeroom?” I say, “the
one with impressive—”
“—hands off, man.
Yeah, that’s the one,”
and I say she’s got a
thing for jocks.
“Jocks.”
“Yeah, you’d be
better off joining the
lacrosse team.”
“You think that’d
work?”
“At least you’d be
in the same place she’s
looking.”
The morning of the
science fair, I leave a
note for mom on the
fridge, in the unlikely
event she’ll come. If
mom were a euglena
gracilis and I were
the sun, this would not
be a problem. When I was
a kid, I used to build
catapults out of wood
and PVC pipe and river
rocks for leverage, and
when I held test runs
with an array of stuffed
animals—poor, floppy
bastards—mom had been
there, marveling over
the trajectory of a
flying rabbit when no
one else gave a damn.
Setting up my poster
board in the auditorium
this occurs to me now,
how the smallest actions
used to elicit wonder—a
sneeze brought a
Kleenex; a book report,
a smile; an A+, a hug.
How, not that long ago,
mom had sat up with me
when I had pneumonia,
watching over my
breathing and the color
of phlegm the way she
watches her marines,
holds photographs of her
marines, always her
marines.
At 1600 hours my
display is prepped and
ready in the auditorium.
I smooth my pants and
straighten my tie and
pat the not-too-shabby
Windsor I’ve managed
without any help, which
isn’t bad considering
the last time I wore it
was at my grandma’s
funeral, where mom had
to knot the entire
thing. Parents crowd
around my fellow
exhibitors, ooohing
and ahhing at the
shabby-edged
construction paper of a
board they’re calling
displays. For the last
half-hour Justin has
been driving me crazy,
poking at my jars of
euglena like they’re
backyard Jello molds.
“This shit smells
like ass,” he says, and
I punch his hand away
before he incurs any
damage. He’s wearing a
varsity leather jacket
from Christ knows where,
the sleeves fat and
puffy like a pirate’s
blouse. I figure he won
it in exchange for doing
a month’s worth of some
jock’s homework, an
extra hour of math for
the illusion of
athleticism.
By seven o’clock
the auditorium is
flooded with judges and
corporate reps and army
recruiters who make the
rounds looking for the
best and brightest, for
the next engineer and
robotics genius, the
next Bill Gates. The
next Albert fucking
Einstein. I imagine
myself in a three-piece
suit accepting the Nobel
Prize—thank you, thank
you; yes, it was all
worth it—while mom
(awake, sane, happy)
claps her hands in
undying admiration.
When the judges
come around, I stand up
straight. I enunciate. I
gesture to my
multi-colored bar graphs
and articulate my
conclusions: as you can
see, ladies and
gentlemen, the data
clearly indicate that
euglena gracilis
responds to a steady
beam of light, but not
to darkness, and only
partially to broken or
interrupted light unless
the interruptions are so
rapid that the light
appears constant, in
which case the
euglena gracilis
responds as if the light
was never uninterrupted
at all. I point to my
title, sum up my
conclusions, “If They
See The Light, They Will
Come,” and stand back
and let them nod, let
them take it all in. Let
them bask. Let them
churn.
At the end of the
night the judges have
made their decisions and
pinned ribbons of all
different colors on our
posterboards. I make my
way through the aisles,
elbowing through the
moms and dads of
exhibitors who are
jumping up and down over
Honorable Mentions and
crappy ninety-nine-cent
participation stickers,
smiling like their kids
are the Second Coming. I
push my way to my
display board, hand over
hand, and when I’m there
I see it: FIRST PRIZE,
ZOOLOGY.
An army recruiter,
his hair shaved so close
I can see the eczema on
his scalp, shakes my
hand, gives me a card,
“this is relevant to our
optics unit in the army,
son. Congrats on a job
well done,” to which I
nod and say thanks and
scan the room for
Justin, knowing better
than to look for mom.
He’s gone, left, but
then I see him
talking—TALKING—to Betty
Adams over by her
sister’s science
display. On the way out,
I give him a manly
thumbs-up that says,
“nice jacket, man.”
On the way home I
rehearse the scene. How
I’ll spill the news with
the award check right up
in her face so she can
count the zeros. I’ll
say, “COLLEGE TUITION,
mom, check THAT shit
out,” and she’ll jump
like I’ve smacked her,
like an electric current
has zapped her brain,
like she’s a balloon
I’ve popped with a razor
sharp needle. She’ll
wake up from a 24-year
coma like Robert DeNiro
in Awakenings and
say, “where am I,” and
I’ll say, “you’ve been
gone, but you’re back
now, so you’re here.”
When I open the
door, no one’s home. The
lights are out, my note
about the fair on the
fridge, untouched. The
portion of chicken
casserole I set aside
for her this morning
still in the microwave,
cold and mushy, the
Saran wrap stretched
across like skin.
Outside, mom’s
Toyota is not in the
driveway. I shout to Mr.
Moss who’s unloading
groceries across the
street—“hey, Mr. Moss!
Have you seen my
mom?”—but he says no,
hasn’t seen her, so I
start walking around the
neighborhood like a
crazy person. I look
everywhere: left, right,
house, yard. I think,
“she’s gone and done
it,” done something
stupid. I picture her
curled up under a tree.
Drooling. Catatonic. But
when I see her Toyota
parked in front of the
Donaldsons’ house, I
have no idea what I’m in
for.
The car doors are
unlocked, and mom’s
purse—and half its
contents—are splayed
across the front seat.
“Mom?” I call out,
and two little kids
riding Big Wheels around
the cul-de-sac stop and
look up at me. “Have you
seen a lady,” I say,
“about this big?” and
hold a hand under my
nose. They shake their
heads and ride
away—useless little
punks—so I go up to the
Donaldsons’ front door
and knock.
I’ve only met Mrs.
Donaldson once, when she
came by and introduced
herself the week we
moved here. Her kid is
Joe Donaldson, a
six-foot-four prick of a
guy who was a senior
last year, an all-star
wrestler who thought
Justin was a skinny
know-it-all shit, and
who, because of my
association with Justin,
made my life a living
hell. Mostly, he had a
penchant for
embarrassing you in
public, like the time
Justin—don’t ask me
how—got the sleeve of
his T-shirt caught in
the hinges of my locker.
After ten minutes of
trying to free it, and
figuring I’d just lend
the poor bastard a spare
from my gym bag, I
helped him out of the
neck hole, doing my
goddamn best to avoid
touching his bare naked
torso. Donaldson, after
watching us for god
knows how long, came out
of nowhere screaming,
“well ain’t them a pair
of lover boys!” at which
point the entire school
made kissing noises
whenever they came
within five feet of our
existence.
When he graduated
last May, Justin and I
thanked our lucky
stars—“thank god that
jackass is out of here,”
Justin said—and we
hadn’t heard much about
him except that he’d
enlisted in the marines
and gone to boot camp
and come home last
Christmas to wait for
deployment.
So when Mrs. Donaldson
opens the door to the
former object of her
son’s ridicule and
torture, I brace myself
for surprise, but
instead she welcomes me
inside as though she’s
been expecting me.
“Your mom’s here,”
she says, “she came to
wish Joey off,” and I
don’t have to step too
far inside Mrs.
Donaldson’s badly
wallpapered living room
to see what’s going on
here: mom sitting by
Joe, mom consoling Joe,
mom patting Joe’s back
like he’s a lamb going
off to slaughter. He’s
decked out in desert
fatigues and combat
boots, his brown duffle
bag stuffed like a
turkey. In twenty-four
hours, he’ll be standing
in a shitstorm in the
middle of chickpea
country, under a sun and
sky and a satellite
launched deep in space
where the Pentagon can
magnify his sacrifice.
“I’ll be safe,
ma’am,” he says to mom,
“I’ve got you watching
over me, don’t I?” at
which point mom rubs her
eyes and nods and gives
a smile—fucking
smiles—and I think
how I should thank Joe
Donaldson and his
superhero status but how
all I want to do is rip
his face off.
“Mom,” I say, “we
should go,” and she
doesn’t look up at me,
as if she’s known all
along that I’ve been
here, witnessing. After
a few moments of trying
to place me, Joe, the
big dumb fucker,
says, “Hey! It’s one of
the lover boys!” and I
glare at him as I help
mom out the door,
shoving my award check
deep into my pocket.
On CNN, insurgents fire
assault rifles. On CNN,
a car bomb in Baghdad
blows up seven American
soldiers. On CNN, the
president doesn’t think
pulling our troops out
of Iraq is a good idea.
Since the Donaldsons’,
mom’s gone from
semi-human back to her
usual state of
catatonia, which
involves sleeping for
hours and then staring
at the ceiling in a
thorazine stupor. She
doesn’t stir when I
enter, doesn’t see the
check I wave in front of
her face like a piece of
tantalizing meat. She
only says, “I’m so
tired, so tired,” and so
all I feel like doing is
slamming cabinets,
throwing books, spread
eagling myself across
the floor like a bullet
just ripped open my
aorta.
In my room, I stand
in front of my
full-length mirror and
flex my pathetic muscles
in the only green
T-shirt I own. I stand
with my legs apart
holding an invisible
M16, my eyes squinting
like John Connor when he
sees the T-1000
poly-alloy Terminator
coming right at him,
moments before his
mother snaps awake,
dives head first, takes
a bullet in the
shoulder.
At dinner time, I
think about this as I
open a can of tuna and
plop it in a bowl with
mayonnaise and pepper
and put it front of mom
who stares at it for two
hours with her colorless
eyes. I pour the kettle
for tea, plop in a bag
of Earl Grey. I watch
the brown diffuse like
blood in bathwater.
I think: this is
mom.
I think: we’re
bleeding out.
I think: Joe
Donaldson brings her
back to life.
In June, after
graduation, I tell no
one, not even Justin,
who’s not even around to
tell. He’s always off
with Betty
Adams—enjoying his
status of
on-again-off-again
boyfriend—and so I
go to the recruitment
office alone and sign
the dotted line and
shake the sergeant’s
hand with a strong, firm
grip that says, “fuck
it.”
At home, I wait for
night, after I’ve washed
the dishes, to spring
the news. I wait until
she’s laying on the
couch in her flannel
pajamas, knees to chest,
palms together like a
prayer.
“Mom,” I say.
“—”
“Mom, I have
something to tell you.”
“—”
“Mom, I’ve
volunteered to go to
Iraq. I thought you
should know,” and I hold
up my four-year contract
and wait for her
reaction, for some
semblance of life. They
say it takes ten seconds
to resuscitate a patient
with
electrically-charged
paddles, for the current
to ignite the heart, for
the heart to pump the
blood to your brain, and
when I tell mom I’m
Bravo 11 she jolts awake
and reaches for my
hands, her eyes
moistening with the most
beautiful, human film.
“Oh god,” she
says, “not you.”
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