Hard to Say Where the Figure Ends and the Background Begins, and: Grafenwoehr

Helmand Province, Afghanistan

Hard to Say Where the Figure Ends and the Background Begins

The earth is the colorof the sky whichis the colorof the dirt

They tell uswe breathe the dirtup here. Moon dustand dried-up shit.

With intake of breaththe silt. Coats the spongypink of the lungs.

On the dustiest dayswe cough up mud.

If it ever rains itstreaks. Dirty tears.

Some days there's a mountaintipped with wisps of snowoff on the horizon. Some daysjust a flat gray scrim. Hazeover the ghosts of old dead rivers.

The dust chokes out the satellites.Unusable, your dish becomes a nest.No Internet for days—laptops turn to paperweights.We rediscover writing. Tracing the shapes.

In the blackoutsour gray-booted feetlearn the dark and the rocks.

One of my boys brings me an old dead bullet.

I bored a hole through the top, he says,so you can wear it on a chain. With luckthe only one you ever stop.

Children, I tell them in my lecture,many thousands of years agothe people here believed

in a place they called the House of Dust.

The place where all our souls went downto wait for who knows what. Slowlyfeeling the change. Some said the waiting ones

began to sprout soft doves' feathers. As if maybeto fly. One day. Wings the pink and gray.

Of the swirling dirt.

Grafenwoehr

Oh Doyle loves to talk. Even when I close my eyes. "Did you knowdid you know did you. When Mark Twain first came to Heidelberg he.According to my article in The. Per Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton."Forget pretending to be sleeping. Maybe I should just play dead.

Our rented van winds up into the pines and mist. Old Bavaria.It looks like The Sound of Music here. My parents saw thaton their first date. We all know what happened next. Grafenwoehr.A little listless argument over how the word's pronounced.We call it a draw. Everything's so Olde Worlde, white plaster, timber,cuckoo clocks. Everything's a schnitzel. We all buy fancy steins.

Off to the edge of the base the bombs in the woods. The firing range.Sanchez is back. He spends his days with pressure plates.Saran wrap. Stacks of batteries. Cheap plastic clocks.His plastic explosives look like Silly Putty. I imagine rolling a wadover The Family Circus, stretching out an orange cartoon Garfield.As he busies with his fingers Sanchez tells how back in Baghdadthey'd lure simple children into carrying the bombs. Take this.Wear this. If you're good they'll give you candy after.

If you get lost aim for the clock tower. Hermann Goeringbuilt this place to churn out Hitler Youth. It loomsover our hotel. Doyle. Did you know. Did you. Did you know.

Pretend my arm hangs down in shreds. A tourniquet.My wife agrees there's just one hole a tampon goes in.I know you soldiers though. You'll stuff those bullet holeswith Tampax anyhow. Your airway's blocked. Pretend.

Out in the woods we have to run. To keep up. Sanchez does thisall the time. Today he's bored and we're the last. "Look for thingstoo regular, too straight. There's your pressure plate. Boom.Too late. You're dead. Who's next." In every copse a burned-out car.Wooden pop-up target men. Grunts practicing the four-man stack

for door-to-door house clearance. First Sergeant says, "Your best friendwill be a can of smoke." And over all the obstacle courses

the Black Forest. Greenblack spruce with knife-edge limbs, blue mistand fog. Somewhere near in these old woods the bristling boar.The brindled wolf. Ghosts of blue-eyed boys at play. Feinting.Imagining they too could ride the lightning. Once upon a time.