“Lovejoy?” Larry asks.
“Yes. You’ve heard of him.” This is not a question.
“Who hasn’t? Lovejoy was a legend in basic training.”
“The bogeyman,” Ross says. “The Mad Blond.”
Mull smiles.
“He’s deserving of every nickname you can give him. Bogeyman certainly works. He’s also a brilliant and patient tactician.”
“What do we need that for?” Philip asks. “We’re not going to war, Secretary.”
Mull tents his fingertips.
“No, you’re not. But that doesn’t exclude danger. It never does.”
Philip can feel Duane’s uneasiness beside him.
“I saw Lovejoy in action once,” Ross says. “He was wearing clown makeup while he punished his platoon. That’s a true story.”
Mull smiles again.
“He’s an interesting man, no doubt. And absolutely the right one for the job.”
“Did he lead the first two teams out?” Philip asks.
“No.” Mull shakes his head. “Nobody has returned to Africa. Nobody who went there for this reason.”
The driver carefully takes a sharp turn and the tarmac and plane come into view. A second brown van is approaching from the other side of the concrete.
Mull is removing documents from a briefcase. He hands them to Philip.
“Please, take one of these and pass them along.”
Philip does. He’s looking at a photo, an aerial view of the Namib Desert. Behind the Danes, packed into a small trailer hitched to the van, is all their gear, supplies, clothing, bedding, etc. Ninety percent of the space is occupied by recording gear, top-line stuff that the Danes have dreamed of owning for their studio. Two Ampex model 350 quarter-inch two-tracks. Five Behringer ECM8000 condenser mics. Three RCA 88-As. An Electro-Voice EV C100. Four GPP 73 preamps. A rare signature Glasgow eight-channel mixing console. A Koz Copicat echo chamber. A Boris 5 compressor. Two 678 Michael governors. The other 10 percent is for living out there; the Namib’s western end is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, and temperatures drop mightily at night.
“It says here it’s uninhabited by humans,” Ross says.
“The area you’ll be going to, yes.”
Larry smiles. “Someone’s making that sound.”
“Likely,” Mull says, and the sadness remains in his blue Superman eyes.
Ahead, through the glass, the second brown van with a second trailer is parking near the plane. Philip watches as the driver’s-side door opens and the driver steps down to the tarmac. He walks to the back of the van.
Back to the photo. The Namib. He reads the notes:
Sand seas. White gravel plains. Mountains. A perpetual layer of mist where the Benguela Current and the Hadley Cell meet.
“A lot of fog,” Philip says.
Mull agrees.
“Good thing your mission is to listen.”
They’ve reached the plane. The driver parks the van. Through the glass, Philip sees a second soldier emerging from the open side door of the second van. Mull points.
“There’s Lovejoy now.”
A dark silhouette with patches of wiry blond hair partially protecting a balding head emerges through the open sliding door. Slumped shoulders. Heavy feet. He looks something like a musician himself, Philip thinks. An old and tired bluesman.
“Is he gonna be okay out there?” Larry says. “Could be a lot of walking.”
Mull watches Lovejoy, too. It’s hard not to. Philip recognizes that there’s something immediately magnetic about the man. The physical makings of an army rogue, a legend. Perhaps it’s the fact that he looks nothing like a legend at all.
“He’ll be fine,” Mull says.
The Danes and Secretary Mull exit the van. The drivers of both vehicles and the pilots of the small plane assist in transferring the gear from the trailers. It’s a long process. And despite the warm air, Lovejoy rests on a brown suitcase, crouched upon it, a scarf wrapped over his shoulders.
“Jesus,” Ross says, thumbing toward Lovejoy. “We’re going to have vultures circling us out there.”
“He looks like a vulture himself,” Larry says.
A third van appears, speeding. The Danes watch its arrival silently. As the last of the gear is loaded onto the plane, the third van parks and two soldiers emerge from the sliding side door.
One, small and squat, with glasses and short black curly hair, struts with confidence toward the others. The second, tall, thin, smiling, his brown hair blown back by the wind, pulls a camera from a case slung over his shoulder.
He snaps a photo of the Danes on the tarmac.
“A rock and roll band,” the photographer says, “about to deploy.” He extends his hand. Philip shakes it. “I’m Private Stein. Jonathan Stein. And I’m excited as hell to meet you guys. Mind if I get a close-up?”
The Danes are used to photo requests. It’s common in Detroit.
“Could be our next album cover,” Ross says.
“Oh, hey,” Stein says. “Don’t even joke about that. I would be thrilled.”
“Photos are bad luck,” Private Greer says, wiping his glasses clean.
“Oh yeah?” Stein says, smiling, bringing the camera to his eye. “Says who?”
The Danes look into the lens.
“Some cultures believe that when you take a photo, you’re saying this period, this phase, is over with,” Greer explains. “So if you enjoy your life as it is, mourn. Because now it will be as it was.”
Stein snaps the group photo.
Lovejoy rises from the suitcase.
“Gentlemen,” Mull says, clasping his hands together. “All aboard.”
11
Ellen watches from the doorway. She’s carrying a tray of food: vegetables, bread, tomato soup, water; lunch. She’d planned on entering with a joke, something spirited to liven Philip’s day, but when she sees him, she pauses.
It’s the classical music, she thinks. The phonograph in the main office, just down the hall from Unit 1. The music is soothing, of course, but Philip, who is healing from so many broken bones, doesn’t need soothing.
He needs a push.
Ellen steps from the door just as Philip’s eyes seem to be straining to see who is in the hall. She carries the lunch tray to the office, enters, and places it upon the closest desk.
The phonograph is set up in the corner, on a short-legged white table. Beside it is a filing cabinet, fake flowers in a plastic vase.
Dr. Szands is not here. The office is empty.
Ellen eyes the box of records on the floor.
Beethoven.
Brahms.
Liszt.
Mozart.
At present, Debussy is playing, and Ellen finds three more records of his music.
But in the back, the very back, she finds what she’s looking for.
Rock ’n’ roll.
The pickings are slim, six or seven albums, but she allows herself to hope that some of her favorite stuff might be tucked back there.
A quick search shows her it’s not. But she finds one that will do.
On the Road with Rock ‘n Roll.
She rises and removes the Debussy without a fade. She replaces it with Mando and the Chili Peppers, fetches the lunch tray, and exits the office.
Even the walk to Philip’s unit feels different when the first chords of the first song roar out behind her.
It’s not the best song she’s ever heard, but it’s got spirit. And if you ask Ellen Jones, what Philip Tonka needs more than medicine right now is spirit.
When she reenters his unit, his head is facing her.
“Holy shit,” she says, and because her hands are occupied she has no free one to bring up to her mouth, to retrieve the swear word.
Philip is nodding his head.
“Did you play this?” he asks.
“You moved your head.”
She crosses the unit and places the lunch tray on the foldout table beside the cot.
It’s as
tonishing. Yesterday his fingertips, today his head. Is it even possible? Should he be healing this fast?
She sits down beside his cot.
“Do it again,” she says. Like she needs proof. Needs to verify that Philip is able to move his head.
But Philip doesn’t do it again.
“Am I the only patient in here?” Philip asks. Terse. His voice is different. Clearer. But something else.
Angry.
Why is he asking about other patients? He’s moving.
“No,” she says. “There are others.”
Philip nods.
He nods!
“And what’s wrong with them?”
What’s wrong? she thinks. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see you shouldn’t be alive and yet . . . here you are . . . asking questions?
“A wide variety of things. Many things. But—”
“Are you hiding something from me?”
“What?”
“Are you lying to me?”
“No . . . what . . . about what?”
“Are there other patients?”
“Yes, Philip. I said there were.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Philip, we’re not allowed to disclose a patient’s—”
“Bullshit.”
“Philip.” Ellen wasn’t expecting this.
“You can’t even tell a man like me? A man who can’t get out of his own bed?! Are you crazy?”
Ellen has encountered hostile patients before. Of course she has.
She searches her head for her professional voice. Barely finds it.
“Yes,” Ellen says. “Even a man like you. Because the injuries the other people in this—”
“Has anyone told my parents that I’m here?”
Ellen doesn’t know this answer.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Philip . . .”
“Does somebody know?”
She can see him sitting in a bar, four or five beers deep, the same frustration on his brow, the same foulness rising from within. He’s justified in his anger, she understands. But there’s something else here, a particular type of rage, like when her alcoholic brother-in-law quit drinking.
“I will find out, Philip. And that’s going to have to do.”
“For who?”
“For you.”
“That’s not going to do.”
Ellen is getting angry, too. She doesn’t want to. Knows better. But the way he’s talking to her, after all she’s done. Six months of caring for him. Six months of driving to and from Macy Mercy. Nights at home alone, wondering if the patient in Unit 1 was going to die tomorrow, praying that he did not.
“I’m not allowed to—”
“I heard you. Not allowed. And would it be so hard for you to break one fucking rule?”
Ellen stands up.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving you alone for a while, I’m—”
“Sit down!”
Now Ellen doesn’t have any difficulty finding her professional voice. The tone of his command, the way he’s taking his frustration out on her, it’s enough to steel her.
One song ends on the record, another begins. The discrepancy between the music and the mood in the unit is big.
“Philip Tonka. You have every right to be angry. But my job is to help you, not to endure you.”
Philip turns his head so that he’s facing the ceiling again.
Even now, the movement thrills Ellen.
The two stay silent this way for sixty clicks of the clock.
“You moved your head,” Ellen finally repeats.
Philip nods.
“You’re getting stronger. Already.”
When he speaks, she hears tears in his voice.
“Those X-rays . . .”
“Yes. Scary.”
Philip breathes deep. Ellen can see him trying, trying to calm down, trying to be patient, trying to accept what’s happened to him.
“Is there an instrument in this room?” he asks.
“Yes, there is. How did you know that?”
“I can hear it. Is it a guitar?”
“It’s a piano.”
“What color is it?” he asks. Memory in his eyes. Fear.
“What?”
“What color is the piano?” He’s yelling again.
“Christ, Philip. It’s wood.”
“They’re all wood. What color is it?”
Ellen looks left, to the back of the unit, to where Philip can’t see.
“Brown wood. It’s not painted.”
“Show me,” he says. Then, gentle, forced, “Please.”
He’s whiter than Ellen’s uniform.
“All right,” she says.
She vanishes out of his field of vision. Philip hears shuffling behind him. Like hands through a purse. When she returns, she’s holding a small square mirror.
“There,” she says, placing the mirror by Philip’s chin, her arms across his badly bruised shoulders.
She shivers at the contact with his skin. Skin she has touched so many times. But now . . . awake.
In the glass, at first, Philip only sees Ellen. Her freckled nose. Her smart, gray eyes. Her raven-black hair. But as she tilts the glass, he sees the piano against the beige back wall of the unit.
He remembers a red piano. Paint flaking. An instrument in a room it had no business being in.
But this piano is not that one. And for first time all day, Philip exhales with relief.
“Why is it in here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why is there a piano in a hospital room?”
“The doctors used to talk about musical therapy. But they haven’t done any more than put pianos in some of the units. Either way, it’s nice to have it. To play for the patients. To calm them down.”
“Hang on,” Philip says, as Ellen makes to move the mirror. “Hang on.”
She knows what he wants to see.
The song playing in the office ends. Before the next one begins, in the silence of the unit, Ellen can hear both of their breathing.
Both are nervous for this.
She angles the glass toward his face.
Philip sees it for the first time. The disfigurement. The asymmetry.
“Jesus,” he says. He closes his eyes.
Ellen takes the mirror away.
She wants to say something, anything to make him feel less . . . broken.
“Philip . . .”
He looks up at her, but his eyes are distant. She knows he still sees himself.
“I’m gonna flip the record,” she says. “Or maybe I ought to put something else on.”
She crosses the unit, frazzled with warring emotions. The argument, the fear, the sadness. And the almost forgotten triumph of him moving again.
“Thank you,” Philip says.
Ellen pauses at the unit door.
“For what?”
“For the music.”
It’s the spaces between words, the downbeats in a conversation in which two people feel bad for having fought.
Thank you.
“One day I’ll bring in my own records from home. Then you’ll hear the good stuff.”
“The good stuff,” he repeats, nodding. And the movement of his head already looks stronger, more fluid, than it did when she walked in.
12
The soldiers are allowed to smoke on the plane. At twenty hours, the flight is trying, claustrophobic, and the Danes can still hear the echo of Mull’s sound in their memories.
The sound inoculated one of our nuclear warheads, Philip recalls. He’s alternately studying the info packet on the Namib Desert and eyeing the faces of the others on the plane who are doing the same.
At 250,000 square kilometers, the chance of finding the source appears remote. Mull has already said twice that the plane will be returning in fourteen days to the hour, and Philip can’t help but think it doesn?
??t matter if they find it or not. The part of him that is supposed to be assisting America and the United States Army has gone quiet. Maybe it’s because the part of him that is leaving Detroit is loud. For a hundred thousand dollars, they’ll try their hardest. But if they don’t find it?
So be it.
The map of the Namib is intimidating. The two thousand kilometers of desert coastline is the lone comfort, as the rest is without landmark. The gradations from yellow to orange speak of how hot it can get in the Namib during the day, and the fact that it’s the world’s oldest desert adds a heat that can’t be quantified.
The information packet lets Philip know that the word Namib means empty. But there’s more: “Nobody knows this for sure. The languages used in the region are so old as to have undoubtedly gone through many changes.” The desert itself has gone through big changes. It was here, during the Jurassic Age, that the continental split occurred. Tracing his fingertips across the paper, Philip can almost feel the violence of that moment in time.
He looks up to see Duane is reading as well. The drummer’s black face is mostly hidden in the shadows of the overhead compartment, and his white eyes travel back and forth across the page like the nocturnal desert bugs described in great detail.
There is life in the Namib. Animals and insects that have become so adept at bearing the great heat that some of them don’t even drink water.
Philip reads on.
In 1908 German miners traveled to Namibia intent on robbing the region of its diamonds. By the 1930s, the diamonds they knew of were gone, but some of the edifices the foreigners erected remain. Philip studies a photograph of what looks like a ranch house overflowing with sand; the color beige pours from the windows, creating solid buttresses that connect with the desert floor.
Larry flips the pages of his packet and the crinkling of the paper brings to Philip’s attention how quiet all the passengers are as they study.
Philip looks over his shoulder to the back of the plane.
Lovejoy sits alone, asleep. He’s no less interesting, no less strange to look at, with his eyes closed. The blondish thinning hair is arranged unlike anybody else’s Philip has ever seen. As if it has fallen from the ceiling to the former general’s head.
Former general, Philip thinks. Demoted.
This is common knowledge to anybody who has heard of Bill Lovejoy. In training camp, soldiers mocked him out of earshot. Called him crazy. What sort of army man, once demoted, remains in the army? Once the ladder has been folded up and there’s no higher to climb?