One September Morning. Rosalind Noonan

at the dark spot on the ground, which seems to darken and grow before his eyes. Like a curse, a scourge, it will never go away.

      What’s that Shakespeare play where the woman tries to scrub out a bloodstain but can’t get it out? “Out, damned spot! out I say!” Emjay can still hear his junior high teacher acting out the scene for the class. Lady Macbeth, he thinks. She became a chronic hand washer. Shakespeare’s attempt to point the finger at obsessive-compulsive disorder before Freud was even born. Emjay doesn’t have an advanced degree in psychology like Doc, but he’s read enough to know about the psychosis of the month. When you live on a chicken farm there’s a lot of time for reading, and unlike his old man, he wasn’t ashamed to make the trip into town and borrow a bunch of books from the library. That old library became his refuge, a safe place to go when the old man was on a tirade and his friends dried up. By the time he finished high school he’d read through more than half the fiction section, women’s books included. Not that he was like that or anything, but Emjay didn’t really care who was telling a story, as long as it was interesting.

      Yeah, that was Lady Macbeth, scrubbing the skin off her own hands.

      Could use a neurotic scrubber like that to work on the stain three stories below.

      And all because of…what?

      The army wants to make it sound like a raid gone bad, an insurgent who turned on them, but Emjay knows better. The man he saw running away was no Iraqi insurgent.

      “It was one of our own, sir,” he told Lt. Chenowith and Col. Waters at the debriefing.

      Waters sat back in his chair and pressed a finger to the bridge of his dark glasses. “What are you saying, Corporal? Do you mean you saw a U.S. soldier shoot John Stanton?”

      “No, sir, when the shots were fired I could only see the muzzle flash. But I saw the gunman running away.”

      Chenowith leaned over the table of the briefing room, a small spartan space in a bungalow that held only the table with an ancient slide projector and a few wrinkled maps and satellite images on the wall. “Did you see who it was?”

      “No, sir. Only that it was one of our guys. An American.”

      Col. Waters rubbed the stubble on his chin, considering this. “And why would an American soldier kill John Stanton?”

      “That I don’t know, sir.” Emjay set his teeth tight, bracing against the colonel’s disdain. Either the man didn’t believe him, or he was furious that Emjay would open up this can of worms in his company.

      “Have you mentioned this to anyone, Corporal Brown?” asked Waters.

      “No, sir.”

      “Good. Information like this is of a sensitive nature. You’re to repeat it to no one, understand, Corporal?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Chenowith squinted at Emjay, then turned to the colonel, who opened a folder and started leafing through it.

      “You’re dismissed, Corporal,” Col. Waters said.

      Dismissed…just as the truth had been dismissed.

      A man killed in cold blood, and damned if the army would do anything about it because, if the truth got out, they might look bad.

      The stain blurs and moves before his eyes, and Emjay crawls on his belly to the edge of the platform, staying low in case another phantom bullet flies through the dark warehouse. His fingers dig into the dusty wood of the platform of the warehouse that used to hold dates. Canned dates, it seems. Which led to the usual wry comments from jokers like Lassiter, who made cracks like, “Now there’s not a date to be had in Iraq,” or “This building couldn’t get a date now if it were the last warehouse on earth.”

      This dark, dismal place. Nobody would have figured John’s life would end here. A life so huge isn’t supposed to fade out in a dark dead end like this. John was a freakin’ football hero back home, a rising star on the Seahawks. Even Emjay had seen him play once or twice on television.

      Not that John ever allowed anyone to grant him special perks. “I played football,” he used to say. “Big fucking deal. It’s inconsequential compared to what American soldiers have been doing to protect our country from terrorists.” John hated to be pumped up or given special treatment. He often took the night shift, which nobody else wanted. He was always good that way, volunteering for the shit no one else would do. A team player, a good guy.

      Those bullets that took him out nicked the heart of this platoon.

      Emjay stares down at the spot and wonders if he did the wrong thing. Maybe he shouldn’t have applied pressure to John’s chest. The head wound might have been the thing that killed him, but Emjay hadn’t seen it, with blood everywhere, everything so dark. Or he could have gone to get Noah—get real help instead of trying to stop the bleeding himself. And then there were the seconds wasted when he scrambled for John’s NOD to get a look at the shooter. What a boner move! He could’ve saved Stanton.

      Instead, he did the unforgivable…let his partner die.

      The silence of the warehouse says that he’s alone, but Emjay stays low and crawls closer to the edge so that one arm can dangle over the site. Letting it drop down to the pull of gravity is somehow freeing. He watches the brown skin on the back of his hand swing to and fro, a dark pendulum in the darkness, ticking off the seconds until eternity. Resting his jaw on the edge, Emjay watches the patch of blood and fantasizes about flying down to it. Splat, right on top of it.

      A one-way ticket home sounds sweet right now.

      You are not supposed to kill yourself in the U.S. Army. The officers got in hot water for that one, and if the public found out about it there was hell to pay in the public relations office—probably bad for recruitment. Rumor has it that a marine committed suicide, right here in the Al Anbar province back during the first invasion. That’s why most companies have a shrink like Doc, tagging along to help them with their problems.

      So Emjay is supposed to talk to Dr. Jump if he has any thoughts of suicide. Which would be great, except that Emjay does not talk to anyone but John. He doesn’t trust Doc. Doesn’t trust Lassiter. Noah Stanton is totally closed off. Gunnar McGee is a moron and Hilliard is in love with himself and Spinelli is just a scared kid who wants to run home to his mama.

      John was the only person who made the days bearable, the nights peaceful. Once, when Emjay asked him how he could shut his mind down and sleep at night, John just said: “You gotta sleep, buddy. Regenerate. Tomorrow’s trouble can wait till tomorrow.” Somehow Emjay had found his words soothing. John could convince you of just about anything. And Emjay had started finding a way to sleep with John around.

      But no more. Never again. Can’t sleep or eat. Can’t even breathe half the time. His heart thuds in his chest, his breath burning. Christ, why can’t he breathe? Can’t get air and can’t move from this spot. A panic attack, something no soldier is allowed.

      But it hurts to breathe.

      He tries to distract himself, focus on the bloodstain. Lose himself in the dark abyss of the warehouse—four stories of half-empty shelves and pallets that hold a sickeningly sweet odor. He leans over the edge, feeling gravity pull on his thudding heart. From this height, what kind of damage would he do?

      Broken bones, maybe. The right break could get him home, in physical therapy. It needed to be bad, because after an incident like this he was going to be marked within the platoon as as a malingerer, a loser faking an injury to avoid duty.

      Or there could be spinal damage. A wheelchair for the rest of his life. That’d suck.

      Could bust his head open. That would probably kill him.

      And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, to end the fear. Take out the unknown.

      Kill the pain and go home a hero.

      He shifts his weight closer to the edge and lets his head dangle, free.

      Free.

      Just