Zero Lines

Fiction by Matt Gallagher
Photographs by David Guttenfelder

The sound of raising blinds wrenched Luke Paxton from the pit of sleep. If he’d been dreaming, he’d already forgotten what about. Bars of dull gray slanted into the room and across the mattress on the floor he’d fallen upon in the empty hours before dawn. He’d managed to get off his boots before crawling into his sleeping bag but little else; the same tee shirt and jeans he’d put on in Tulsa some forty hours prior now clung to his skin with dried, tangy sweat. He pushed his legs down into the nethers of the bag to stretch, yielding a cracking melody of worn bones. His mouth seemed full of cotton balls and his thoughts began grappling for regrets it couldn’t quite form, let alone identify.

No, Pax thought. Not one of those mornings. You’re jetlagged.

“Wakey, wakey, high-speed.” Lee stood against the window, eclipsed in silhouette. He stepped forward into the half-light, sure and stout, seeming to smile with his whole body. There was a magnificent cheer about him, as if he’d come here to coach a Little League game. He gripped an extra-large can in his right hand like a mallet and Pax wondered if he’d even bothered to sleep. Lee crowed upward, toward the ceiling, then took a deep, performative swig, a blend of English and Ukrainian script running the aluminum sides of the energy drink. He wore cargo pants and a black button-down with the sleeves again rolled neatly to the elbows to flash his ink miscellany. They’d called him the Yellow Reb in Afghanistan, to which Lee always had a readymade reply: “Don’t get it twisted, I’m from the winning side of the family.”

Kinda fucked-up, Pax thought in the apartment flat, looking back on it. They’d been young then. It had been a decade ago. Much had changed. But it’s not like I can apologize. That would make things awkward.

He sat up, pulled a flake of dead skin from his bottom lip, and asked what the plan was. 

“Meeting in forty with the recruiter.” Lee rocked back and forth from the balls of his feet to his toes, his voice cutting, excitable. “There’s hot water if you want to shower.” Pax had reached the bathroom door when the other man called after him. “Don’t drink anything from the sink. Old pipes.” He held aloft the aluminum can, his words taking on a cadence of fake reverence. “Courage juice in the fridge—wake up, son! Glory to the motherfucking heroes.”

They’d hadn’t been in country a day yet, and Lee already had a favorite local phrase.

Pax washed himself in the same rhythmic order he’d learned in basic a dozen years before—hair, pits, arms and legs, all under two minutes. Then he dressed, a pair of minor accoutrements going on last: a headband to mask his receding hairline, and prayer beads wrapped around his wrist like a bracelet. He’d come home from Afghanistan with them and much of their turquoise paint had been rubbed off since.

The streets of Lviv were narrow and the Americans pushed down the hills into the city. Both men realized straightaway only dopes greeted strangers here, so they didn’t. A dark, nervous energy churned and Pax focused on it so he could avoid the same thing coming from within. He’d taken his duloxetine, with energy drink, of course, so I’ll be good, he thought. I’m good. He stopped to retie a boot on a hydrant and an old man with skin of leather stepped around him with something like a vulgarity. The boundless gray of the sky beat down with gloom, austere imperial buildings and gothic church domes and pastel houses painted like figurines clashing together in sharp, meandering rows. A cultural fault line, Pax thought, repeating to himself a description he’d read in a guidebook on the plane, “Where East meets West.” The overhead wire of a passing street tram hissed and sparked and Lee made a joke about dying before Ivan even got to shoot at them, earning an open-eyed stare from a nearby babusya holding grocery bags. Pax saw a little speck of sunlight dancing on a patch of yellow grass. It lay under a bus stop poster of propaganda, a colorful sketch of a Ukrainian badger dismembering a Russian bear in a fur hat, limb by limb. When he looked back the speck was gone.

“Fuck, that’s fucking intense,” Lee said. He meant the poster. A good amount of cartoon blood covered it. Pax’s attention, though, had drifted to a young boy being hustled past them by his mother. He was about seven or eight with curls poking out of a knit cap. He clutched a toy train to his chest and inspected every inch of the strange men speaking foreign words in the fleeting seconds allotted him. 

“Hey, dude,” Pax said, as mother and son turned a corner, “maybe watch the cursing?”

“Eat shit,” Lee replied, deadpan. “For one, these people don’t speak English. For two, raw profanity is sometimes the only expression of human decency left to us.” He smiled. “I’m goddamn transcendent like that.”

They passed a casino, the court of appeals, a kebab house, an art gallery. All had been shuttered for the war. The cold began to grip at Pax, he hadn’t layered enough under his coat and had skinny desert bones, besides, but it also felt good, in its way. Because it was new, and different from what life had become. At the bottom of the hill the street lurched into a small square with brown lawns cradled around a monument.

It was a fountain of white marble. There was no water and dark moss stains splotched the basin. A pale column shot vertical and on top of it stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, arms out, head ringed by a wreath of lamps. Her eyes cast downward, hollow and damp, and it was hard to tell if she was crying or just refusing to blink. The statue’s body had been wrapped and taped in case of shrapnel. Sandbags were stacked against the fountain’s base. Lee pulled out his phone and snapped some photographs. Pax thumbed the beads on his wrist and started reciting a prayer out of old habit, first for the bigger stuff, then for himself. He stopped a couple pleas in. What’s the point? he thought. You came here, you decided.

Lee nudged him with his shoulder. “Places to be,” he said, low. Pax nodded. If the other man registered the many side glances he was getting, he made no notice.

They walked north, up a wide pathway framed by dormant chestnut trees. It was too cold for most people to sit idle on the benches but one intrepid couple posed for a street artist’s rendering. A pair of armed soldiers patrolled past the KFC restaurant, civilians parting around them like river water around a stone. More armed men, police in flak vests, stood in front of a large pink hotel with four stars etched into its stained-glass windows. Near another monument of black slab, a man in frumpy khakis observed passersby with naked zeal.

“American government or contractor,” Lee said. “You can tell by the shoes and watch.” And it was true, Pax could see the mighty gleam of both.

The far columns of the opera house guided their way. A minivan was parked across the middle of the path, a big satellite dish swallowing its top. “Shit, fuck,” Lee said, then in a whisper, “Stick to me, no English.” Only then did Pax see the sign taped to the van’s window that read “MEDIA” and all at once a video camera was set on him and a tall woman striding at his side, asking for a few minutes.

“You’re here to join the legion, right? You have that look!” She had yellow hair and little, impossibly white teeth. He couldn’t help but tongue the backside of his own. The army had fixed his many years before but he’d never stopped being self-conscious about them, still found himself probing for the vast gap along the bottom no longer there. He hadn’t taken care of them the way he should’ve. That’s on me, he thought. That’s on me, like so much else. As he kept walking and the woman kept speaking, about how she didn’t have an agenda other than the truth, about how she worked for an unbiased network based in Toronto and wanted the folks back home to know brave men like him had come here to fight for democracy, he thought, a person this striking hasn’t spoken to me in a long time. He didn’t mean it in a sexual way, more the human existence kind of way. People from her class and station didn’t interact with people like him, not if they could help it. Just how it was. He was trying to figure out how to explain this to her in a way that wasn’t aggressive, though now that he thought about it he did sense some of the old hostilities bubbling up, while she so spoke so fast and so pleasant and smelled so nicely of jasmine, when Lee paused in front of a kiosk and spun around with sudden violence.

“Salutations, motherfuckers!” He crowed the words, not unlike earlier with the energy drink in the apartment flat, but now his voice held real menace. “We are lost tourists, here on a dirt-cheap travel package. Could you point us toward Castle Hill? Maybe even spare some coin?” He pantomimed grabbing at the woman’s pockets, nothing serious, Pax thought, but enough for her to recoil away and for the cameraman to step between them. Lee was a big man, he had presence. They’re not wrong to believe him a threat, Pax thought, watching his friend smile wide for full maniac effect. “Spare some coin!” he repeated. A few awkward seconds followed and then they turned into the crowd, leaving the journalists to their own considerations.

“You’re ridiculous,” Pax said.

“I’m a goddamn hero,” Lee said. “Your knight in shining armor.”

Their boots echoed heavy on the cobblestone of the old town. Another Ukrainian child ran by, arms outstretched and pretending to be an airplane. The girl smacked into Pax’s side. Pax bent over and patted her shoulder. Then he said, “Ooga booga.” He’d been hoping for a laugh, a visiting Westerner being silly, but instead the kid scurried away with a look of pale terror. 

Lee shook his head. “Don’t frighten the native youths,” he said. “Counterinsurgency 101.”

The horizon sat low and smothering, blotted by gray thunderheads. Flurries began to fall scattershot across the day. They stopped at the gate of an Armenian cathedral so Lee could take a photo, then again under a bell tower of an Orthodox church. It’s funny, Pax thought, how the older man was drawn to these holy relics but swore if there was a god he’d punch Him in the mouth. Along the church’s façade were homemade memorials, dozens and dozens of portraits of young soldiers in uniform, some children’s drawings in crayon, too, tributes to dead daddies and uncles, a few mommies and sisters, little flags tucked into corners of the wall, horizontal bands of blue and yellow flickering against the gray.

“Can you imagine.” Pax couldn’t help himself. The fallen always turned him a bit maudlin.

“Different than what we did.” Whatever register he was on, Lee met him there. “The ‘Stan wasn’t much of a war but it was the one we got.” He put a hand on Pax’s shoulder. “Now we get to volunteer for real.”

Pax nodded and took a long breath to steady himself but from within he could hear his heart pounding against its cage and he cursed himself for only taking one pill instead of two. Stupid, he thought. Even when you know better you still do stupid shit.

He thumbed some beads and turned to go with Lee down the street. A small group of older kids, teens, maybe, caught his attention. Their secrecy was conspicuous, filing through a spiked, candy cane-striped gate adjacent to a market. What’s that? Pax thought. Let’s check out that. But Lee needed him, and he followed.

They stepped into a cafe. The warmth of the space blitzed Pax’s body and then his soul. Dark wood panels and oak tables and chairs gave the cafe the feel of a forest. Only a couple tables were occupied by patrons. They walked past them and a fireplace, drafts of tidy heat beckoning and serene.

In a backroom they found a man at a table by himself. He looked up and told them to sit. He had arcane blue eyes and strands of white in a sandy beard.

“Welcome to our city,” he said, his English jagged but clear. “You may call me Bogdan.”

Something about him seemed gaunt, even birdlike. He wore an olive-drab fleece and urban-camo pants, a pistol on his hip, a Makarov, if Pax had to guess. Three cell phones and a batch of manila folders lay across the table, next to an empty espresso cup and a half-eaten pastry. Bogdan asked if they wanted anything to drink. Pax said he was fine. Lee requested water.

“Your papers.” 

They handed over copies of their DD 214s. Lee went to explain it but there was no need; evidently the Ukrainian had already screened enough American military records to know what did and did not matter.

“Staff Sergeant Han Lee … US Army infantry. Honorable discharge. Three combat tours.”

“Twice to Iraq. Once to Afghanistan.”

“Check, rog.” The soldier lingo popped light off the Ukrainian’s tongue. He shifted his focus to the next form. “Corporal Luke Paxton, also US Army infantry … general discharge. One combat tour.”

“Fifteen months.” Pax was surprised at his defensiveness but couldn’t help it. It’d been the formative experience of his life. “One fifteen-month tour to the most remote valley of Wardak Province during the height of the surge.”

Bogdan’s eyes crinkled a bit, and he leaned forward in his chair to size up the visitors. Pax held his shoulders back and met the other man’s icy stare, holding his breath. He could feel sweat pooling on his brow and under his pits, it was happening like it always did, and his heart was sounding off again, he could hear it plain as any alarm. They must’ve been able to hear it, too, how could they not, sitting right there. Stupid, he thought, fucking stupid. Why are you always like this? Then a noise of concession emerged from the local’s throat and he reached for the half-eaten pastry.

“I have heard the joke,” Bogdan said. “One American army tour counts as three for your air force.”

That wasn’t the joke but it was close enough. Pax joined the other men in a smile for the moral superiority of the grunt.

“What weapons do you know?”

They replied together. The M4 carbine, of course. The M9 pistol. Claymore mines. They’d both shot AKs in the mountains with Afghan border police, spraying and praying. The M500 shotgun, that was Lee’s favorite, no adornment to it, only power. Various light and heavy machine guns, the SAW, for sure, who didn’t cherish the SAW, both the M203 and M320 grenade launchers, though the latter was shit, they agreed, the side-loading mechanism didn’t work right, it’d been thrust upon them in theater because of big-money Pentagon contracts. The Mark 19, that was Pax’s jam, sit behind a belt-fed automatic grenade launcher and let the baby purr. They’d both trained on anti-tank platforms like the TOW and Javelin but hadn’t used them in the ‘Stan, there’d been no need. They’d fired 60 mike-mike mortars, 80 mike-mikes, too, and in Iraq, Lee had shot the Four-deuce into an abandoned chemical warehouse. The M107 sniper rifle, though neither had squeezed that particular trigger on an enemy profile, only paper silhouettes. They could call for artillery, still knew the 9-line Medevac, direct an attack helo onto target for a gun run. They were infantrymen, paratroopers at that. Weapons were their craft.

“And why are you here?” Bogdan continued, ripping away a bite of food with his teeth. He even eats like a bird, Pax thought. “By choice, you ask for the front. You seek the zero line. This is not normal behavior.”

Lee spoke first. “War turned my grandparents into refugees. If strangers with guns from the other side of the planet hadn’t come to Korea? Shit.” Then he sniffed and crossed his arms. “That’s what I told my ex-wife and kids. They need to believe I believe that. But maybe I just came here to shoot a Russian invader in the fucking face.” A dark relish clambered out of Lee, pervading the table, then the entire backroom. “So I can finally look at myself in the mirror and know, fucking know, that I’m the killer man.”

With that, Lee’s body relaxed, shuddering from the remnant energy. He took a drink of water and sat back in his chair. A weird answer, Pax thought, but an honest one.

One of the Ukrainian’s phones rumbled on the tabletop. He ignored it. The onus of explanation fell over Pax like a cold shadow.

“I came here,” he began, before stopping. Any response he could think of sounded off in his mind, hollow. Lee had told the truth. I should, too, he thought. He tried again. “Well, I came here to help.”

The table turned heavy with quiet. He could tell that what he’d said was wrong by the way Lee was looking at him, or not looking at him, more toward him and behind him and around him but not at him. He couldn’t understand, wanting to help is a good thing, he thought, it’s why their president has gone on television and asked the world for help, asked combat veterans who’d been in the suck to come and fight for them. And he had. Pax shifted toward Bogdan to say that, to ask who the hell was he to be defying his own president’s command, only to see that the Ukrainian wasn’t looking at him, either, but watching something under the table. He followed the other man’s craning to his own lap. He was thumbing the prayer beads wrapped around his wrist, not like the lady at the VA had shown him, but manically, hysterically, one-two-three one way, one-two-three-four the other, rinse and repeat, like he was tapping at a video game, like he wasn’t bona fide at all but a fraud, a bundle of nerves, a betrayer to the profession of arms itself.

The worst part was, he had no clue how long he’d been going on. Two pills, he thought again, two. You knew it and you still didn’t do it. He moved both hands under his thighs and searched for an excuse.

“Old tic,” he tried, which was true, in its way, and then Lee tried, as well, saying, “He’s high-speed, I’ll vouch for him, he more than holds his own when the bullets come,” but the legion man didn’t seem to hear them, instead pushing back his chair and standing with the aid of the table. On the side of his pistol, the right side, he raised his pants to the knee to show his leg, a long metal prosthetic about the width of a broom handle. He knocked against it, twice, as if he was on a neighbor’s porch. It pinged low in response. He raised the other pant leg to reveal a second, matching prosthetic. It echoed the same way. Then he returned the bottoms of his pants to position and plucked at a white strand his beard.

“I’ve been surprised how many arrivals are willing to fight and kill for my country,” Bogdan said, “yet have no idea the war has been going on for eight years. Eight years in the Donbas. That’s where a landmine got my legs. And I am blessed.

“In old Slavic, Ukraine translates to ‘the borderlands.’ I tell all my foreigners this because it is important to know the orc mindset. They do not believe we deserve existence, except to provide for them. We are the wheat people who live in the fields beyond, Banderites and dills too simple to appreciate the wonders of the revolution. This isn’t like the little American wars you fought in, and I don’t mean offense. But those were wars of choice, and you left those countries when the battles ran their course. Here, it’s victory or death. We win, or we see Lviv and every other city turned to hell rubble like Mariupol.” Bogdan resumed his seat at the table. “What kind of choice is that?”

Pax didn’t understand what the Ukrainian was getting at, he hated when people spoke obliquely, the Afghan tribal leaders always did that, so had his fucking boss at AutoZone, for that matter. He’d been raised to say what he meant and mean what he said, both in the army and before it. So he held to the silence. There was authority in the quiet. It forced others to their intentions.

“We were just talking about that outside,” Lee said. “Back home we get called volunteers. But it’s not true. We were paid. There’s health insurance, life insurance, college money. A decent-enough gig if you’re not afraid of real work.” The dark relish from earlier returned but now it didn’t spread from Lee so much as it hovered over him, enveloping him. It was as if he’d been taken up in some bloom, some trance, some creed all its own, and there wasn’t any way he was ever coming back from it. “This, though—this is it. Why I wanted to be a soldier in the first place. Something worth fighting for. You know how fucking rare that is? You can take my passport for all I care, Bogdan. I’m here for the long haul. Gimme a rifle squad, point me to the zero line, and we’ll rack up skulls for the wheat people.”

“Yes,” the legion man nodded. “I believe you.” Then he ran his fingers through his beard and turned again to Pax.

“The discharge listed on your papers,” he said. “Explain this.” 

Pax couldn’t stop himself. He said what he meant and meant what he said, but it was only after saying it—it being, “I don’t see why that’s relevant”— did he realize he’d blown his second shot, the one Lee’s vouching had earned him.

One of Bogdan’s phones rumbled on the tabletop but he again ignored it. He stuck out his hand for Pax.

“I wish you luck finding a way to help,” he said. “My country needs much of it.” Then the Ukrainian’s avian gaze darted away. He told Lee to be packed and ready, there would be a bus that evening.

“You may be traveling with a group,” he said. “Royal marines.” He tilted his neck at a hostile angle. “So they say.”

Outside it took all Pax had not to purge himself on the cobblestone. He felt dazed and was shaking while trying not to, and kept apologizing to Lee, who had a big plastic smile on his face saying, “No problem, man, no problem,” like they’d just been kicked out of a bar instead of being judged worthy or not.

The weather had changed during their time indoors. A fog had descended, bringing the gray of the sky to earth, and a damp wind now lashed the streets. Flurries still drifted here and there, none seeming to stick. A brittle sort of melancholy had settled over the day and Pax kept thumbing at his beads.

“Ain’t no shame in it.” Lee had a hand on his shoulder. “Been there myself. Get yourself right, give it another go. I got a contact with a PMC maybe coming over, too … Blackwater shit, but the side of good, here. All that matters.”

Then he began going on about how he needed to find a surplus store for supplies, and how Pax could stay in the flat for another two weeks, the donor in the States had prepaid for it, and Pax understood this was goodbye.

“I’m sorry,” was all he could muster.

“Stop that,” Lee said, compelling the younger man into a handslap and one-armed hug, and even through the layers of winter clothing, Pax could feel his physical thrill. “I’ll see you out there soon enough. Or not. Do what you need to do, brother. It’s on you.”

Lee gave him a wad of hundreds, a couple grand in total, American dollars. Pax said he didn’t want any charity but the other man insisted. “Can’t say the Yellow Reb never hooked you up.” Then he was gone, walking away with heavy strides toward the wall of dead soldiers. He turned back, once, raising his fist aloft through the gray.

“Glory to the heroes!” he shouted, loud, guttural, and then he crowed, causing a few passersby to widen their trajectory around him. Despite everything, that made Pax smile.

He wandered the old town without purpose, the cold nursing him. He tried to remember that he hadn’t even wanted to fight, not really, not like Lee had. He didn’t need it. He was decent at it, or had been, once upon a time, but somewhere along the line he’d become one of those vets. Washed-up, broken, a man carrying around shards of knowledge that signified nothing and meant only anything to those who’d been there. His own mind had done this to him, not the enemy, not a landmine, but his own consciousness, some defect in his nature. He knew that made it all much worse. Lee had said there was no shame in it. He’d said that for the obvious reason that there was.

Pax was thirty-three years old and certain his best days were already gone. This had been his chance. Now he had nowhere to go but the tunnels of infernal memory.

He walked and walked. He passed a warehouse of relief supplies. He was handed a flier with the location of a speakeasy operating despite the alcohol ban. He watched more scruffy travelers with their rucks and wondered which ones were real and would serve alongside Lee, and which ones were pretend, like him. He found more walls with portraits of the fallen and a flatcar train saddled with old tanks moving east and saw that this old, medieval city he’d never heard of before coming to it wasn’t at war but wasn’t at peace, either. More media called at him and he ignored them. He recognized one guy from the coverage of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he’d been real hysterical about it, and even Pax thought it was crazy his bosses had let him come here so soon after. At the opera house he looked at the winged statues topping it and wanted to know what they represented, but didn’t know how to find that out. He thought about asking a stranger to take a photo of him in front of the building, it was the place for something like that, but he got anxious, didn’t know who might understand him. So he stood there and stared up at what he decided must be angels and thumbed the beads on his wrist, wishing he could just begin again. I’d do it better, he thought. Or at least different. Then he went to KFC to eat a late lunch.

The fast-food worker didn’t know much English, but it proved better than Pax’s Ukrainian, and together they managed to order two drumsticks and a side of mashed potatoes. He found a table in the corner and nestled into the warmth of the restaurant. As he ate, he tried not to think. That’s the last thing I should do right now, he thought. Still, when bubbles of American English floated up and over the table partition, he stopped chewing and honed in. Eavesdropping wasn’t a choice so much as an inevitability.

“This is it. Saigon in ‘sixty-eight, San Juan in the nineties, Erbil for a spell there.” The voice snapped with Midwestern upspeak. “Got here early enough, we’ll be able to watch it roll in.”

“Like that guy with the connect.” This voice was laconic, more neutral. “In Romania.”

“Yessir. All shapes and sizes of swinging dicks, coming in hot.”

“Like that fucking bar in Star Wars.”

“More like Casablanca.” The first voice snickered to itself. “Just need to get the casinos open again.”

“Get fucked, cockwaffle.” Cockwaffle, Pax thought. Never heard that one before. Lee would love it. “I still need to get you back for that night of hold ‘em in Vicenza.”

Vicenza! A small grin now touched the corners of Pax’s mouth. That was where he and Lee had been stationed, home of the 173rd Airborne. Not many people knew the American army kept an active base of infantrymen in northeastern Italy, sometimes even other soldiers were surprised to learn of it, which meant Pax and these mystery men belonged to the same fraternity. A sense of the fortuitous overwhelmed him.

“Hey,” he said, speaking and standing and facing the table of other Americans in one full rush, “You guys here for the legion?”

He’d believed, and wanted, this other table to be holding a pair of veterans not unlike himself, old enough to not be a babyface in the green machine but still young enough to shoot, move and communicate on the field of battle. He’d believed, and wanted, them to be fellow travelers, guys here to do the obvious thing with their rucks and stubble and pirate patches. Instead he found two plump men about his dad’s age. One had glasses, the other a thick gobbler under his chin. They both wore frumpy khakis and fleece vests and looked up at him with something between suspicion and ire.

“No,” the man with glasses said. “We are not.”

“I was in the 173rd,” Pax offered. He recognized this would be a short conversation but manners did matter to him. “I heard you all mention Vicenza.”

“Yes,” the man with the gobbler chin said. “We did.”

Only as he returned to his table did Pax see the men’s silver watches and polished wingtips.

Out in the cold, Pax made a decision: he needed to leave. He still felt ambivalent about the new money in his pocket but it had given him options. It didn’t have to be Tulsa. He could go anywhere to try at something. Ukraine had nothing for him. He had nothing for it. He’d hoped for it to be otherwise, but hopes were like assholes, everyone had one.

Had Lee told him that? Probably, he thought. It was something Lee would say.

First the flat, he thought. Then another duloxetine. And then— 

The witch wail of a siren cut through the city, strident, demanding. Pax hesitated under a naked chestnut tree along the wide pathway while people separated from the crowd piecemeal, some running, others trotting out, all moving with intent.

“Air raid!” a passing voice said to him, and he thought, oh wow, but also, am I that obvious?

Most bodies were streaming for a block of stairs that led down to something like an underpass. Pax began hurrying that way, his hands trembling and his skin raising with goose bumps. In Afghanistan they’d controlled the skies, always. This was totally different. What, he thought, could be up there?

He looked up to try and see, but there was only more gray.

Nearing the Virgin Mary again, Pax saw that not everyone had sought cover. Some Ukrainians had made the choice of nothing. A babusya shuffled along the pathway with an unbothered grimness. A group of teens in emo makeup lingered around the monument of black slab, performatively sharing a blunt. And a street artist, the same one he’d seen earlier, sat on a bench, legs crossed, blinking away at the day. She noticed Pax and lifted her sketchpad at him. Despite himself, despite everything, he took a seat on the adjacent bench.

The artist was sallow and gray, sixty or so, wearing a waxed jacket and a black knit cap on her head, half-cocked. Her fingers were covered in tattoos and she said something to Pax he didn’t understand. He said, “No,” then asked, “English?”

The woman rolled her eyes and said something else he didn’t understand. Then she began sketching. Pax focused, as much as he could, on being normal. He took long breaths to steady himself and adjusted his headband for the drawing. He listened to the thump of his heart and the insistence of the siren. Fuck, he thought, looking up at the opaque sky again, what’s fucking up there? The artist barked at him, probably with a curse, he thought, and he returned his attention to ground level. What had Lee said about profanity? “Sometimes it’s the only expression of human decency left to us.”

But fuck, Pax thought again. Nothing about this feels decent. What is up there?

He slid the prayer beads from his wrist and clasped them between his hands, like jewels. The siren kept wailing and he kept rubbing one bead, over and over, feeling its chipped turquoise paint with a fingertip. It calmed him, as he knew it would.

Sometimes, always when he’d been drinking, usually when trying to impress a woman, Pax would say the beads had been a gift from an Afghan child. A boy he’d become friends with, the son of a respected elder, an ally, a man just like him who wanted dignity and purpose and to leave the earth a little bit better than he’d found it. He’d even given the boy a name – Ali, and Ali was a mischievous sort, peddling the Americans DVDs and cigarettes at a markup. He was a good kid, though, a good kid, part of a new generation of Afghans who’d grow up knowing freedom and democracy and all those other fancy words that sound hollow to people who already have them, but mean so much to those who don’t.

It was a lie, though, all of it, a figment twisted up by some demented corner of his brain. A harmless one, Pax thought most mornings after, but stupid, something I shouldn’t do anymore. Most of the Afghan children his platoon encountered either screamed for chocolate or fled; in the valley over from them, Navy SEALs had wasted some civilians and word had got around. He’d found the beads in the dirt during a patrol through some no-nothing mountain village. Then he’d stuck them in his pocket without bothering to look around to see if they might belong to one of the locals watching them from the windows of their mud huts. He’d brought the beads back to the American outpost and cleaned them under canteen water, to have a war trophy, to have something that proved he’d gone and done something exceptional. It was only years later, driving home from a bar through empty dark, that he considered the possibility that someone else, far across the globe, someone who’d watched the act through a window, maybe believed he’d stolen the beads.

And then he maybe believed he had.

The air-raid siren strangled out halfway through its pitch, replaced by the stun of its absence. Pax held his pose for the artist, realizing his internal dread from earlier had been overtaken by a more corporeal dull ache. Which is good, he thought. I can deal with this. People were trickling back to the pathway. As the artist clucked to herself and began erasing something, hard, a shape appeared to his side. It was a girl, brown hair, flat brow, wearing a large man’s coat down to her knees, her fingers poking out of rolled-back cuffs like little sausages. Her hair was greasy and matted and she smelled of stale urine.

“Hello,” Pax said. She replied in Ukrainian and put out her arms like a plane, lips rumbling to make an engine noise. Only then did he recognize her. She’d bumped into him on the pathway.

“Ooga booga,” he tried again, and this time she grinned wide. A set of crooked teeth splayed out, a not-insignificant gap along the top row. Despite her appearance, she carried herself with an air of pomposity. Pax guessed her to be about eleven.

With her head, she gestured toward his clasped hands.

“Wanna see?” He opened his palms so she could view the prayer beads. The girl stepped forward, her tiny eyes not on the beads at all, but pressing on him, looking at Pax in such a way that made him feel like she was staring through him, into all the moral insecurity that growing up in a free country can instill.

Then came the sting of a slap across his face. As he winced, he felt his hands empty. 

Holding his jaw, Pax looked up. The child was running away from the bench with a second girl, older, bow-legged, the prayer beads in her grip. They turned at the entry of the old town, on the border between cement and cobblestone.

“Heroyam slava!” the girls shouted, giggling together, then they were gone, spirits lost to the gray.

Pax was standing now, tottering, not from the force of the slap, but from its happening, from his unpreparedness for it. His pulse raced and his breaths became shallow and frenzied. They stole my fucking beads, he thought, realizing he was talking out loud, too. “They stole my fucking beads.”

Then he added, “Ali gave me those.”

He leaned against the top of the bench, trying to exhale slow, trying not to cry, failing at both. He reached at his wrist for something that wasn’t there and that made the whole cycle begin again. It felt like his body might explode and if it could’ve, he would’ve let it. A hand was rubbing the center of his back in rhythmic circles and saying something hushed, incomprehensible. He wiped away the blinding tears to find the street artist there.

He managed one clean, deep breath, then another, then said, “Thank you.” The artist began walking toward the old town, pattering like a bird. She waved for him to follow. He did. 

They entered the cobblestoned maze. The fog was heavy and dense. Though she was only steps to his front, Pax could barely make out the shape of the artist. No one else seemed to be walking these streets, the cold of the coming evening had pushed them inside to fires and companionship. They went left, right, past a registration office for refugees, right, left, through a vacant police checkpoint, left, right, right, along another church’s façade with tributes to the dead, left, right, past the café where the justice of the war sat in the back upon his metal legs, right, through an empty market, all the way to the spiked, candy cane-striped gate.

Trepidation laced Pax’s entire being. But he felt something else, too. Something more like thrill.

You came here, he thought. You decided.

He followed the street artist through the gate. He mimicked her exaggerated steps, down a long, dark tunnel, as if they were edging through a minefield. They emerged in a courtyard where there was no fog and it was still day, a childish wonderland unlike anything beyond it. Hundreds of toys filled the courtyard, some old, some new, some soiled from the weather, others store-bought pristine, some placed neatly on bookshelves and cabinets, others bent sideways in the dirt. There were old dolls and theatre masks of tragedy and comedy and plush animals and racecars, surrealist paintings of wheatfields put up in the shelves. There were toys galore and Pax wandered the yard, soul glowing. It was one of the most beautiful places he’d ever been, not in spite of its creepiness but because of it, and it felt holy to him. He picked up a muddy teddy bear and set it upright. A group of robot action figures he knew from his childhood were out of order, bad robots mixing with good, so he paused to remedy that. A rusted-out seesaw that must’ve been made in the Soviet Union occupied one corner of the yard and he traced the fulcrum with his fingers. Under the seesaw he picked up a discarded can of energy drink and read the blend of English and Ukrainian script on the aluminum. It really was called Courage Juice, he saw. He’d just assumed that had been another one of Lee’s maxims. 

A large wooden sign hung from the backwall of the courtyard, a blue-and-yellow flag chalked near it. Pax couldn’t read the sign but someone had drawn out a corresponding graphic for people like him. One toy was going out of the yard; another went in. It’s an exchange, he realized, not a repository. There were many things he wanted to take, one of the robots, maybe, the muddy teddy seemed to want a good home, but he’d brought nothing to offer.

The artist called at him in Ukrainian. He found her amongst a mess of shelves. There, at waist level, or a child’s eye level, depending, sat his prayer beads, chipped turquoise paint and all. The artist clucked at him and he tried not to show his frustration. He knew what he was supposed to do. But he didn’t know how to do it.

Pax searched his pockets: the key to the flat, Lee’s wad of money, his own passport. That was it. He began unrolling a hundred-dollar bill - which he figured would more than cover any toy in the yard, if not all of them - but the artist seemed to scowl. It did feel wrong, somehow, he thought. It wasn’t his money. He hadn’t done anything for it but failed.

He looked again at the items in his hands. He had no other option. He took his beads, wrapping them around his wrist. Then he placed his passport on the shelf.

The artist tilted her head, narrowing her eyes, as if she were seeing him anew. He handed her a hundred-dollar bill, which she took.

“I’m goddamn transcendent,” he said.

Pax left the courtyard, shivering through the cold.

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