The Night Letter

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Lying in his bunk on Kandahar Air Field, Vanderpoel was thinking about Lisa. The separation always felt worse when it was still fresh. The more contact he had with her, the harder it was to break but he thought he had waited long enough to finally call her. Anyway, the connection was always better at the call centers on the larger bases than at the FOB. The time difference was more of an annoyance than the distance but he thought she would still be awake.

The call center was a plywood shack called a B hut that stank like kerosene because of whatever they were treated with to prevent insect infestation. There were about a dozen phones and a dozen computer terminals. There was also a TV room and a video game center in an adjoining structure. Each phone station consisted of a small desk, partitioned with plywood walls like the study carrels in a library. It was easy to hear neighboring conversations, even when people whispered. But it was hard to whisper in an argument and it was common to hear relationships dying in the call center; they fell like wounded birds, fluttering the black feathers of their useless, vermin infested wings. The internet terminals were plainly visible as you walked the rows. No one cared about privacy. In their own obsessed minds, they had the impenetrable, scream proof privacy of their own cubicle hells.

The internet was routed through Qatari servers and were censored according to Qatari law and custom. Most people, especially the third party national hires used the internet for Skype. Before the FOB was staffed with ANA they imported security from Africa. It was common to see the guards Skyping with their lingerie clad girlfriends or women they had never met before. They African guards made quite a bit of money by their home standards. The Afghanis were more modest but they had lapses when lust overcame discretion. Sometimes the U.S. soldiers Skyped with their girlfriends, too.

Vanderpoel didn't like Skype and there were no Skypers here today. He didn't even have to wait for a phone. Even before he picked up the phone he had a foreboding. The receiver was silent and he knew the Americans had suffered a loss. Whenever an American died they cut communications until they could notify the family. It was the silence of death. That explained the almost empty room. He wondered about the dead man and the people he left behind who were about to get the bad news and they didn't even suspect. Once they found out, the government would turn the phones back on and everyone would be happy about that except the family that got the news. Mostly he could not overcome his own selfish desolation at having his plans thwarted. The fact that he could not have her, not even her voice now, made his desire for her treble. He tried to remember the last time he spoke to her and he regretted that it had been an argument. He had asked her if she was going to remember to send him packages this time. All the other men got packages and he thought it looked bad when he got none. He cared more about the idea of getting a package than the contents of it. She had been offended. She was very sensitive to any implications that she was in any way odd. He didn't think not sending him packages made her odd, cold or stingy; she just seldom thought of money because she didn't have to and seldom thought of spending it on others. This could look like selfishness to those who were obliged to think of it almost constantly. What hurt her more was any suggestion that she deviated in any way from normal since that could end up being the first step on the road to calling her crazy. He didn't think that but the appearance of selfishness was a puzzle he struggled with. She always let him pay for dinner as well, even when she didn't eat it. Maybe that was her generous way of accepting his gift, even if she didn't have any use for it. "I paid for it; I'm eating it," he would say and there were nights out he ended up eating two entree at dinner.

He went back to his room to console or torture himself for having missed Lisa. He kept a few photographs of her in the same binder that held his tickets and itinerary. One was a picture of her as a child. Lisa's mother never allowed the children to watch TV, except for British programming. It was all part of the Anglophilia that would send the children overseas to boarding school at the age of ten. Lisa's older brother, when not watching endless rebroadcasts of Dr. Who, would stage plays for them, sometimes even writing them. The children built and designed the sets and played all the roles. Vanderpoel had a photo of Lisa playing Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, wearing a white gown, daisy belt, flower chaplet. Her hair was blonder then. She was believable in the role of the fairy queen. To this day she could recite her lines from memory. It was the only childhood picture he kept of her. In all the others she was frozen in different shades of hair color and weight fluctuations. Their separation had frozen the relationship in time and he wondered where it would go when it started moving again. He remembered one time they had tickets for a ballet and they went shopping for a dress for her but everything she tried on made her look fat and she took to her bed for the rest of the weekend but she had developed such an appreciation of ballet in him at this point that he actually wanted to go and he went without her, an empty seat beside him for companionship and he fended off delicate inquiries from people sounding like they were asking a child about an imaginary friend: "is this seat taken," and still he held hope she would change her mind and come before the final curtain closed but she did not. He didn't know why he remembered that; the memories came in fragments, indifferent to the character of anything so nondescript as happy or unhappy.