Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Ben Fountain

kept waiting for Dime to say something about it, and when that didn’t happen he’d put his fingers to his mouth and feel the bruise on his lips. You couldn’t put this in a movie and have people understand, not based on any movie Billy’s ever seen. If you could then he’d say, Okay, put it in, he could give a flying fuck if people think it’s gay, but it would have to be done with real shrewdness and skill, you couldn’t just throw it out there and expect people to understand, but now Swank has totally screwed up his thinking here. If she plays him and Dime both, where does it go? Like, good luck kissing yourself. Good luck saving yourself. Maybe in the movie they will all just have to lose their minds.

      Fuck it, nobody knows about it anyway. Dime orders another round of Heinekens for the table, though he requires that the empties be cleared away first. After the waiter leaves another waiter arrives and asks would they like coffee. Coffee? Hell yes, coffee! Caffeine being one of the essential drugs. Crack asks if there’s Red Bull and the waiter says he’ll check, which prompts orders for Red Bull all around. Everyone rises to go for desserts but Billy needs to find the head. He’s too shy to ask where it is so he wanders the outer sanctums of the club for a while, which is fine, he needs a break anyway, and viewing forty years’ worth of pro football memorabilia is as good a way as any to numb the mind. There’s a poster-sized photo of the Hail Mary catch, Staubach’s cleats from Super Bowl VI, Mel Renfro’s grass-stained jersey from the Cowboys’ last game at the Cotton Bowl, every item curated with all the pomp and reverence of relics from the Holy Roman Empire. Billy finds the men’s room and takes his time. Everything is so clean. Iraq is trash, dust, rubble, rot, and bubbling open sewers, plus these maddening microscopic grains of sand that razor their way into every orifice of the human body. Lately he’s noticed the crud is even in his lungs. It whines when he takes a deep breath, a faint screeching down there like bagpipes playing deep in the valley, and he wonders if it’s a permanent thing or just a temporary backup in the filtration system.

      He takes a long time washing his hands, watching himself in the mirror. Growing up in Stovall he knew a boy named Danny Werbner, the older brother of his friend Clay. Danny had a distant manner and rarely spoke, but he’d narrowly survived a car accident in which his two best friends died, and for this reason everybody just shrugged off the strange things Danny did. Such as, he’d strip naked in the room he and Clay shared and stare at himself in the mirror for long periods of time, not caring if the door was open or how cold it was or whether posses of younger boys were tromping through. This was just one of the weird things Danny Werbner did, disturbed behavior with its own inarguable logic, Danny staring in the mirror to make sure he was there.

      Billy thinks about this lately when he looks in mirrors. Out in the hall he meets Mango coming the other way with one of the waiters, a stocky young Latino with a gold hoop earring and the high-fade haircut of the ghetto cat. They’re smirking. Something is up. Mango pulls Billy aside, and right there under a photo of Tom Landry shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, he whispers, “Wanna get high?”

      Hell yeah. The waiter leads them through the kitchen, down a cluttered service corridor, and into a junky storeroom with no heat, and from there they exit into a trapezoidal pocket of outdoor space, a kind of hutch hollowed out of the stadium’s armature. It’s a mistake, a design flaw neatly tucked out of sight, hardly big enough for the three of them. The waiter, whose name is Hector, has to bend to clear the I-beam cutting across his corner.

      “What is this place?” Billy asks, because he has to ask something.

      Hector laughs. “It’s not nothing.” He kicks a chunk of wood under the door. “It’s nowhere, man, it’s one of them places don’t exist. Me and some of the guys, we use it for smoke breaks.”

      They laugh. The cold air feels good. A neutered sort of daylight filters down to them, strained and sifted through the steel fretwork. For several moments Billy imagines the stadium as an extension of himself, as if he’s wearing it, strapped into the most awesome set of body armor ever known to man. It’s a fine, secure feeling until his chest starts to labor under the weight of all that steel, but the joint coming around helps with that.

      “Nice,” Mango says appreciatively.

      Hector nods. “Takes the edge off, vato. Gets you through the day.”

      “That it does,” Billy sagely agrees. Certain lights are switching on in his head, others switching off. “That’s some dank-ass bud.”

      “Hey, you know, gotta support the troops.” Hector laughs and takes his hit. “You guys ain’t worried about pissing hot?”

      Mango explains that, no, they aren’t worried about it. Bravo has deduced that the Army is loath to risk all this good PR by tagging Bravo with random drug tests, so for the duration of the Victory Tour they feel safe. “And what’d they do if they nailed us, yo, send our ass back to Iraq?”

      Hector shakes his head with stoned gravitas. “No way, not for a blunt. Even the Army ain’t that harsh.”

      Billy and Mango hesitate. Command seems sensitive about this, Bravo’s imminent return to Iraq. The Bravos are not to deny they’re redeploying if the subject comes up, but higher would prefer to omit this detail from the Victory Tour conversation.

      Mango grins, cuts Billy a look. “Dude,” he tells Hector, “we already goin’ back.”

      Hector squints. “Shittin’ me.”

      “Shit you not. Leaving Saturday.”

      “The fuck you gotta go back.”

      “Gotta finish out our tour.”

      “The fuck! The fuck you gotta go back, after all you fuckin’ done, fuckin’ heroes? Where’s the fuckin’ right in that? You guys done kicked your share a ass, like whyn’t they let you just coast on out?”

      Mango laughs. “The Army don’t work that way. They need bodies.”

      “Shit.” Hector is scandalized. “For how long you gotta go?”

      “Eleven months.”

      “Fuck!” Sheer outrage. “You wanna go back?”

      The Bravos snort.

      “Man. Fuckin’ harsh. That just ain’t right.” Hector casts about. “Ain’t they supposed to be making a movie about you?”

      Uh huh.

      “And you still gotta go back? Fuck, so what happens if you, uh, you, uh—”

      “Get smoked?” Billy offers.

      Hector turns away, stricken.

      “No worries, homes,” Mango says, “that’s a totally different movie.” The Bravos laugh, and Hector smiles bashfully, grateful to be absolved for raising the spectre of their deaths. The joint makes another circuit. The light in their little space takes on a pearly, numinous glow. The war is out there somewhere but Billy can’t feel it, like his sole experience with morphine when he could not feel pain. At one point he even tried as an experiment, stared at his cut-up arms and legs thinking hurt, but the notion simply gassed into thin air. That’s how the war feels now, it is at most a presence or pressure on his mind, awareness without content, an experiential doughnut hole. When he tunes back into the conversation, Hector is asking if they’re going to meet Destiny’s Child, the headliner for today’s halftime extravaganza and currently number one on the national wet-dream charts.

      “They ain’t said nothing about that.” Mango’s English is getting looser, leaning toward the street. Not that he’s slurring, just taking the corners wide. “Ain’t told us much of anything, like we’re supposed to be in the halftime show? They said we’re gonna meet the cheerleaders.”

      “Shit, vato, everybody meets the cheerleaders, fucking Boy Scouts meet the cheerleaders. You guys are rock stars, they oughta get you with Beyoncé and her girls. Shit, heroes ’n’ all, they oughta let you bone those bitches fah real.”

      Bonemfahreal, Billy says to himself. Not possible. Not that he necessarily would