Atlas

You go to the war because you’re poor. You start out poor and you’ll go to the war. All your family in the world is a sister and Uncle Sam, and it’s your uncle who has your back. He’s the doctor at Fort Benning who puts you on double rations because you’re built, he says, like a mosquito hawk, and he’s the D.I. who smokes you all night, hanging water jugs off your wrists, because that morning you fell out of line to use the head. The smoking takes you up against a wall in yourself, a limit of exhaustion, without breaking you apart—and later, once you get your arms back, you feel joy. You just learned to keep yourself. Then basic training is done with and you’re overseas, sprinting through the dark and bleeding in the sand, and then your tour is done with and you’re back home in El Paso, because no other city remembers your name in its nighttime prayers, out with your sister and her husband at Arturo’s, because what else is there to do in the dark, drinking Bud and scratching your forearms under the counter and thinking about shooting pool if the college kids ever get off the table, because you’re home now and your uncle is done with you.

Brent, your sister’s husband, is old enough to be your uncle. He takes up the stool next to you and leans his corduroy sleeves on the bar and tells his beer about the country. It’s the only thing that ever listens to him, that mug of Bud Light, but he’ll talk as long as it’s there. If you tune in you’ll hear things like, “a plan, a systematic plan to distract the electorate with, with non-issues, so as to keep them voting against their own actual economic interest”—and then you tune back out. The kids who take his writing class at UTEP must bite their lips bloody trying to keep awake.

Liz sits next to him in her dark eyeliner, in her heap of dark bangs. Okay, Brent, she’ll say, or who do you mean, Brent, or how do you know that, Brent. She must have more to say—you remember her as a talker—but Brent doesn’t leave anyone else much talking room. His mouth seems to have been open as long as you’ve known him, with the same word always falling out and bouncing off the air and falling out again. When you left for Fort Benning he was just your sister’s old writing teacher who’d started hanging around her in the evenings; now you’re home and he’s married to your sister and he still has the same word in his mouth. It was your first thought, that afternoon you brought your bags to their door and he took you back to the bed you’d be sleeping in—you thought, the guy doesn’t move through time.

“You have to think critically,” he tells you. “You have to see past the slogans.” With you his voice always takes on a pleading edge, because you won’t agree with him, and you won’t argue with him. He wasn’t there. Easy to disbelieve in America when you’ve never been out of it.

“Just their vocabulary ought to clue you in. They want you to believe it’s a war like, that this is World War Two. And it can’t be. We aren’t fighting an enemy state.”

“He knows who we’re fighting, Brent,” says Liz. “He don’t need a lesson on it.”

“Perspective, hon,” he says, “this is critical perspective,” and gives you a jolly smile, this fattish goateed teacher who beds down with your sister every night and wants to be your friend. Liz sips her cranberry juice and drops her hand to the bulge where your nephew or niece is growing, and the three of you turn quiet and listen to the oil of time oozing past. By the calendar you’ve been home three months, but these nights all have a way of becoming the same night, the same four or five beers’ worth of dark hours at Arturo’s, getting talked at by Brent, watching the TV’s underwater flicker on Liz’s face, wanting to go shoot pool but not getting up because you’d rather keep a wall at your back. It all reminds you of something Holmes once said—that time will never end but the world can only take so many shapes, so you have to be sure of everything you do because it’ll come back again and again forever. Of course Holmes might have been kidding. But maybe it’s true even so, that this is eternity and no one knows it. No heaven, no hell, just Arturo’s.

“You got another interview tomorrow?” Liz asks.

“Where’s it at?” says Brent. “The construction outfit? I mean, I’m sure that would be fine, but I was going to say that just today I talked to my friend at the advising center. I told her how you’re good with numbers and everything, and she’d love to have you in for a talk. Just to float some classes. Because I did a bit of research too, actually, on the Army tuition program, and they’ll cover up to two-fifty a credit. That’s math you can do, right? Because as far as living expenses, Liz and I don’t want you to worry for now.” He grins as always, wanting you to pick up his half-jokes. He thinks it’s a kindness to remind you how every bite you eat and every minute you sleep is on his dime.

“Being where you are,” he says, “I think you have an opportunity—”

“Let him do what he wants,” says Liz.

“Sure,” he says, too quick, and drops his head. “Time for another round?”

He goes over to the tattooed bar girl and waves his heavy arm at the tap, and you think of Holmes. One of the thousand things Holmes could do that you can’t was to hold up an argument. His words wouldn’t always make sense afterward, when you thought them over, but in his mouth they sounded certain. He seemed to be speaking your own soul.

“I didn’t mean no pressure about the interview,” says Liz. “You can stay with us as long as you need. You know that.”

Liz with her powdered skin and plump cheeks, her soft drooping eyes: all you’ve got in the world. No, that isn’t true. You have a working twenty-two-year-old body, a G.E.D. and a service record and a head for numbers. So where’s the glue to hold it together?

“Brent don’t mind neither. I promise. He wants to see you on your feet.”

Brent jokes with the bar girl while the pitcher fills up. He didn’t start out poor, and he didn’t go to the war. He went to school up north somewhere, came out to teach in El Paso, found a cheap duplex and a wife with a steady hairdresser’s paycheck and set himself up a home. It’s all big cluttered rooms in their place, too dim even with the lights on, all shelves and creased-up paperbacks. Ever since you were a kid you’ve had trouble reading. Your eyes don’t grab the letters somehow, the words jump around the page and don’t turn into sounds. So it’s depressing to sit by yourself around these hundreds of books that Brent must have read back in his twenties, and most of the time you end up in a corner of the living room, keeping quiet while he reads the Internet and listens to National Public Radio and gets more and more exercised about the people who are driving the USA off a cliff. And he really does care about the USA. He cares about a lot of things. He just doesn’t know about the heat, how the sun washes the color out of the sky and dust gets up your nose. Right when you sneeze there’s a crack and a jolt, and for a second you’re confused because the jolt seemed like part of the sneeze, and then you look off to the side because you thought Holmes was pointing to something. But Holmes isn’t moving. His clear eyes are aimed at you and his lips are parted a little, about to speak, and the mess under his chin is bright and wet. You grab his hand, hard and warm, a person’s hand, and he still smells like a person, old sweaty Holmes on the hot road, looking and not looking at you like he’s about to crawl out of his own frozen skin. The guys in the back seat are standing up and grabbing for the wheel, and someone’s laying down fire—but who’s the enemy, which of those outlines is the enemy, on the road, beside the road, in the doorways, cutting off Brent at the bar. You jump off your stool, grabbing at your ankle, and find your balance crouched on the floor. Then you rise slow, with a hot face. The two Mexicans at the bar give you flat looks, pull at the brims of their caps and turn away.

And here’s Brent with the pitcher. “Hey,” he says, “did something—?”

You’ll handle him in a minute. You need to go to the bathroom. And the bathroom is another pain in the ass because of another stupid coincidence, like the forever stupid coincidence of Mexicans looking like Iraqis and the desert here looking like the desert over there. The problem is, you have to do your business without turning the light on, because over the urinal there’s a sign you don’t want to see. It advertises an Atlas Gym, not a local place, with a drawing of a kneeling muscleman, head down and the world on his shoulders. When you were a kid, at school or church or one of the foster homes, you had a book of maps with that same figure on the back. You mentioned it once to Holmes, after you’d been out humping your packs all day, and he laughed and told you everything you’d never known: that Atlas was a prisoner in ancient times, that he’d fought the holy gods and been given that job as punishment. For the sweaty two of you, with shoulders rubbed raw and grit in your eyes, it made a lot of sense.

“Because what keeps us out here?” Holmes asks. “Why are we fighting?” When you don’t answer he lifts his fingers and says, “Code of Conduct training—love of and faith in our country. A conviction that our cause is just. Belief in our democratic institutions and concepts. Right? So the question is, how does that get us out to the sandy asshole of the world? And you know how. The enemy took it to us, so we have to take it to the enemy. We fight them here, lest we fight them at home. Because this out here—” He spreads his fingers over the palm trees, the jumbled white roofs and colorless sky. “This is the absolute edge of the world. Just like for Atlas. They had him out on the rock of Gibraltar, the edge of the Mediterranean, which was the edge of the world in those days. That’s where he held the sky up. Because otherwise it would come down on the folks at home.”

Holmes did more reading than anyone you knew. Socrates and Zarathustra, the life of Jesus, Egyptian pyramid power and the Chinese art of war. There was always a battered volume or two in his pack—no joke, on a long day of patrol, to load an extra pound in your pack—and any spare moment he’d pull it out, flip it open while he lit his cigarette, read favorite parts aloud. He never stopped trying to lend them to you, though he knew what a slog it was for you to read through anything. He was tough. He wanted to break your barriers.

Remembering this, you’ve pulled a small can of lighter fluid from inside your jacket and shaken it cold against your palm. On its own the fluid makes you sick, just like drinking makes you sick, but together the two seem to balance out. When you spray your nostrils and breathe in, the beer, which had been huddling your brain like wet cloth, lifts with magical speed and makes you into a weightless shower of sparks, a huge smile zooming up like a pair of bat wings. After a second it dips down and you spray again and zoom again, not quite as high this time, until you end up perched on a ledge with all your edges tingling and a red-blue grid in your eyes like a broken video screen. Sometimes your dreams are like this. And even your dreams the Army wanted into; they asked about nightmares on the post-deployment sheet, the one where you marked everything “no.” To wake in the dark, broken up and not knowing where you are, isn’t the same as having nightmares. Because you know how those people end up.

Tucking away the can, you feel like forgiving the world. Is it the Mexicans’ fault they look like Iraqis? Doesn’t most of the world look that way? Same inky hair, same toasted skin, just the eyes and noses pushed or pulled one way or the other. Even the mustaches—all over the world, any country you like, everyone’s growing Saddam mustaches. You giggle, picturing Brent with a Saddam mustache, Liz with a Saddam mustache, their unborn kid with a Saddam mustache, press together your buzzing lips and spurt out another laugh—yes, you’re feeling worlds better. In fact you could stand to turn the light on. You step back to the door, soles sticking a bit in the floor muck, and feel for the switch. The fluorescent rod flashes once, twice, then holds steady over the mirror, the urinal with its pink cake, the Atlas sign with its kneeling muscleman, Holmes kneeling in the same pose next to the urinal. For a second he keeps still, head down and arms up around an imaginary globe, then lifts his head and grins at you.

“Thought you were never going to turn it on.”

You grin right back. Your smile is for the whole world, but above all for him. He cocks his head at the Atlas sign.

“Didn’t forget our pal here, did you?”

It’s a joke. It’s all an old Holmes joke. He drops his arms and you reach to help him up. He looks just as you remember: olive-skinned with heavy cheeks and brows, geared up for patrol in his helmet and field jacket, the flak vest bulking up his ribs. When you hug him he’s warm and solid as a man ever was.

“No kisses now, you fag.” There’s the same quickness in his lips and eyes, the same half-checked mocking spirit. Someone bangs on the door and you freeze, ashamed, but Holmes pushes on past and opens up. The guy outside smirks at the two of you—you can hear the joke he wants to make—but Holmes stands tall in his body armor and makes a terrible face, bunching down his eyebrows like a Halloween mask, until the guy drops back, quelled. You march outside. In the dim light you can just make out a flesh-colored bandage on Holmes’s throat, covering a good patch of skin but well camouflaged. It’s not something anyone else would notice.

How are you going to sit him down with Liz and Brent? But he understands everything; he goes right up, shining welcome out of his face like a big brown sun, and introduces himself as your war buddy Specialist Holmes. Brent shrinks a little behind his goatee and you have to smirk; you’ve wanted to see that for a long time. But then he collects himself and stands, shakes Holmes’s hand and says it’s a real honor. Can he buy Holmes a beer?

“I would let you do that, Brent. That’d be right kind.”

Brent goes off. Holmes makes small talk with Liz, asking the simple questions—what do you do for a living, how’s El Paso suit you, when’s the baby due. After a minute she drops her surprise and starts telling him things you didn’t even know, that she isn’t planning to work her whole life at the hair salon, that once the baby’s old enough she wants to start night classes and finish her associate’s degree. What she really wants is to get the hell out of Texas and move to San Diego. When she closes her eyes at night she sees palm trees, ocean waves. Her cheeks draw in, her eyes turn bright and she looks suddenly beautiful, which isn’t how you usually see your sister. You understand it’s Holmes making it happen. She’s reaching into herself and bringing out this beauty because Holmes is making her love him, just like he made you love him. And here’s Brent with his beer.

“You don’t know what it means,” says Brent, “to meet one of our boy’s comrades in arms. The stories you must have.”

“Ah, stories,” says Holmes. “Well, he was great over there.”

“We know he’s great,” says beautiful Liz.

“But do you really?” asks Holmes. “Because I think you look at him and say, here’s the kid who’s staying with us. A young man now but still kind of a kid, not too smart, not too dumb, doesn’t cause trouble around the house but needs to start pulling his weight forty hours a week like everyone else. Am I right?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s fair,” says Brent. “We don’t begrudge him a place to sleep.”

“And I respect your not begrudging, but that’s not the same as being glad. You can love somebody and still think, in the end he weighs so many pounds and when’s he going to start pulling them. But listen.” Holmes drops his voice. “You don’t know what he did over there. Ever hear of a place called Abu Amri? Well, you wouldn’t. It’s a little village that never got in the news because it never had a scandal. Just plain everyday fighting and dying. One summer morning your boy is driving a Humvee into Abu Amri—one of our shit Humvees with no armor, that we had to armor ourselves with sandbags and scrap metal pulled off Iraqi tanks. We called it the cardboard coffin. And the cardboard coffin tripped an IED.” Holmes folds his hands and sweeps his eyes around. “Now you can ask a hundred times what happened next, and you’ll get a hundred different answers. In combat you don’t have a map, you don’t know where anything is except the spots on your body where you might get hit, and all you can do is try to keep those spots in front of you and not behind you. One man was killed right away in the Humvee—shrapnel through the neck. And maybe the Humvee was still in driving shape, maybe not, maybe it was on fire, but anyhow your boy finds himself out of the vehicle, against a wall with a firefight on. Thirty yards past a stretch of weeds is a little square window, and death is coming out from inside it. Flash and bang, hold off, flash and bang again. Dirt flying everywhere. The sergeant’s yelling that we can’t engage, there’s no air support, everyone fall back in the Rhino Runner and drive out. But what does your boy see in the weeds?”

Holmes raises his eyebrows at Liz and Brent, and for a moment you think they might answer. “What he sees out there is an Iraqi family. A man and wife and child. They’re crouched down in the dirt, too scared to move, and the kid is huddled up between her parents but even so your boy can see she’s been hit. There’s blood all over her hands and clothes. He doesn’t think. Because if he was thinking he would move the hell out, run back along the wall firing bursts at the window and load himself safe in the Rhino. But what does he do instead?” Holmes nods. “Yeah. He drops his rifle loose in the sling and runs into the weeds. He grabs the kid from her father just yards from that window, then turns around and runs back, not lifting his head and not firing a shot, just carrying the kid on a steady course back to the Rhino. And she turned out to have a punctured lung. Getting her to the field hospital saved her life.”

Holmes bows his head and turns up his palms, as if presenting your soul. Liz stares at him, then gives you a look like you haven’t seen since you came home. “We never heard,” she says. “He’s a hero.”

“I—wow,” says Brent. “How could you never tell us?”

“He’s modest,” says Liz. “Look, he’s embarrassed.”

“He’s like Atlas,” says Holmes. “Old Atlas carrying us all on his shoulders and never saying a word.”

“Now don’t leave yourself out,” says Liz. “You must have carried your share.”

“Well,” Holmes laughs, “I’m not here to praise myself. I did my job like anyone.”

And how unspeakably generous of Holmes, to say all this for you and not a word for himself when he was the real hero, when he was lying dead in the Humvee that whole time. It’s almost awful to get so much love. But Holmes has a message for you in his eyes, and that message is: go ahead and take it. Be strong and take what’s yours. And it comes to you that you don’t hate Brent, that Brent is honorable, and you don’t pity Liz, she has more strength in her than you ever imagined, and it’s no shame or hardship to live beside them, there’s a place in El Paso even for you.

“It’s funny about Atlas,” Brent says then. “If you mean the mythological figure. Because it’s a misconception, actually, that he holds up the earth.”

“Is that so?” says Holmes.

“He holds up the heavens,” says Brent. “You’re probably thinking of the famous sculpture in Naples, which I was lucky enough to see once—and he is holding up a sphere, but it’s the celestial sphere, you know. With constellations.”

“Well,” Holmes says, “who ever would have thought.” Then he jogs you with his elbow. “Hey, you got your huffer out here?”

But he shouldn’t ask that now. Not in front of everyone.

“What, you ashamed?” He leans into you, not quite angry, just wanting to remind you that he can do as he likes. So you reach in your jacket and hand over the can. Liz and Brent peer a little as he shakes it up, trying to figure out what it is, and Liz gives you a shocked look just as he opens his mouth and sprays in. He shuts his eyes, giggling low, then opens them to show wide pupils dancing with light.

“A big job for a big man,” he declares in a sepulchral voice. The cold spray ices up the voice box for a second. You look around the bar to see if anyone has their eye on you, but it’s just the usual college kids and ball-capped Mexicans, the TV’s aquarium shimmer and time clutching it all, catching everything in its gears and ratcheting it back over and over.

“Well, I teach writing at the university,” Brent says. “To a lot of returning soldiers. We’ll do exercises where they write out their memories—”

“Oh, memories,” says Holmes, “if it’s memories you want, I can go all night.” No one answers. “Let’s talk about the cities,” he suggests. “Let’s talk about the fucked-up police work you have to do in the cities. Because any of those trucks could have a bomb in it, any of those women could be dynamited up under her robe, and how are you going to check them all? Every family’s allowed one AK-47 in the home. More than that and dad’s coming back to the base. And it’s not like these people are in a real army, they’re a bunch of bus drivers and shish kebabbers who got talked into their bullshit uprising, so you can’t even call them POWs. They’re persons under captivity. And the only consolation in being a fucked-up policeman is that no one wrote any rules for persons under captivity. So you can do what you want.

“But Christ!” he shouts, slapping the bar. “All they want is to cut each other to bits. It’s not a city, it’s a rat trap with a thousand walls. And walls mean nothing over there, the goddamn ten-foot concrete barriers disappear when they smash a truck in. So this is no help.” He bangs on his helmet. “And this is no help.” He slaps the flak vest. “Only if they’d give you night goggles. I mean real night goggles. Because walls don’t mean anything, and trucks don’t mean anything and people don’t mean anything, they’re just how the bombs move, and you need some goggles that would peel off the appearances and show the naked bombs. Get it? The cell phone wired to a ball of nails. The dynamite belt coming up the sidewalk. The truth of things.”

He’s been loosening the helmet and vest as he talks, and now he shakes them off along with the field jacket, changing his shape. Under the gray tank top you see his natural bulk, the muscles climbing his arms and shoulders and holding up his square head like a mounted cannon. He drops his gear on the floor, loud, and people glance your way.

“So let’s talk truth,” he says, stretching his arms. “Because the truth is, after you’ve been out there all day you want to unload, and with no drink per General Order Number One and no pussy per General Order Number One and the base full of other people’s pucs who don’t speak English, and you don’t know what they’re in for but for all you know they were setting up RPGs on the corner—well, you start things. Just smoke them a bit, like we all got smoked in training. Tie rags over their eyes, put them in stress positions. Hang water jugs off their wrists. Strip them—” He halts as if ashamed, but his face is set in anger. “You know how it works. Ben looks at Darryl to see if it’s okay and Darryl looks at Mike to see if it’s okay, and no one’s around to say it’s not okay, but everyone knows Command wants them demoralized when intel shows up. So we get a couple of them stripped and cuffed in the holding cell, scrawny fucks starved on flatbread their whole lives, with sad little dicks hanging down like bits of yarn. Someone’s talking like they’re Ken dolls, make Mohammed Ken marry Osama Ken, and in the middle of this a squad comes back from patrol with a kid who’s new to the unit. Texas boy, in fact. We called him the Queer Steer, though who knew what he actually was. He just had the look, freckles and eyelashes and big lips and all. So the Queer Steer’s in the next room trying to put away his gear and we’re laughing and calling him to come in, we got a couple of boyfriends for you, and his face gets pink and he kind of shakes his head without looking up. It’s funny, soon as a guy shakes his head without looking up, you know you can do anything. So we grab him by the shoulders and pull him in, yelling the Manwich sandwich, it’s time for the Manwich sandwich, and the Queer Steer’s shouting for us to let go, kind of squirming and trying to get an arm loose, which just makes it funnier since any of us could hold him back with one hand, and we all circle around him, almost pushing him on top of the pucs, and the pink drains out of his face. We all get quiet. The pucs have been quiet the whole time, except the one on the bottom is whimpering a little. You’d think they would holler in their language or something, but all they do is whimper. The Queer Steer stares at us, stares down at those skinny backs and asses with nasty curls all over them, and finally he says—I don’t go for this. Fuck you if you think I go for this. So he pulls back his boot and kicks the top puc in the ribs. And we all take turns. Finally we turned out the lights and beat on them with chem sticks until the plastic broke and spilled the glow-in-the-dark yellow shit all over them. That was funny as hell, seeing them glow, but next morning they had burns all over. They were curled up on the cement with their backs blistered up, not moving a muscle. And then intel came and got them.”

For a while Brent’s been opening his mouth in the goatee and shutting it again. Holmes reaches for his mug and downs the whole thing in a long swallow. “But that Texas boy,” he says, wiping his mouth, “on my honor we never called him the Queer Steer again. Matter of fact, he and I got to be friends. We’d go on patrol together—” His head falls into a reminiscent shake; then he pulls up the wicked grin and leans forward. “So who do you think that boy was?”

Brent doesn’t answer. He and Liz look like they’ll never speak a word again. Above the bar are some Christmas lights strung over a cow skull, blinking left and then right, and to follow that sequence, to think how it spins itself eternally out, makes you want to shut your eyes for good. You shift your left ankle. About the hunting knife you carry there you feel like you feel about the huffer; sometimes it gives you comfort, sometimes you’re ashamed that you can’t leave it at home. But this is the world you have to get through. Finally Brent draws breath and speaks.

“I think it’s time for you to go home,” he says.

“You don’t like my story?” asks Holmes.

“I think it’s time for you to finish your beer and go home. I don’t know if you’re making things up, and I don’t really care. I’m done talking with you.”

“Well.” Holmes lifts his brows, looks at Liz, looks at you. “Pardon me for giving you some news. Pardon me for thinking you’d be curious—” he straightens on his stool— “about what it’s like when you’re out holding up the goddamn world.”

“Not the world I know,” says Brent. “And not the boy I know. I don’t care what you tell me. He’s home now.”

What’s happened to Brent? Where’s the fattish teacher whose face you couldn’t stand? It’s like you’re seeing him in X-ray, with his inner outline shining through the heavy face and dumpy clothes and revealing what you’d never have guessed, that he’s a man. His sheltering arm is stretched in front of Liz, still beautiful as you’ve never seen her, and it seems you must have been wrong about Holmes’s purpose. You thought he was coming out as a voice to speak the truths you couldn’t. But maybe he’s more like an X-ray light, and maybe the things he shows you would never have seen on your own.

“You might be home,” says Holmes. “But your boy isn’t. You don’t get this, that you can look straight at somebody and not have a clue where his world is.” He lifts a hand and lets it linger at his throat, brushing the bandage. “They told us we were all together out there, but that’s a lie. Everyone holds up his own world. And that’s the funny thing. Because if you’re holding it up, what’s holding you up? Why doesn’t everything fall down together?”

Brent draws his arm tighter over Liz. Is that a real question? Is it a question you asked yourself as a child, tormented by the map book with its unreadable names?

“All you can do is hold it together. Look!” Holmes lifts his arms around the imaginary globe. “He’s not holding it up, he’s holding it together. Because it wants to come apart. If he lets go, everything goes.”

Slowly Holmes brings his arms down, pulls the left in close even as the right keeps moving, reaches under his pant cuff and comes out balancing the bright lines of your hunting knife. Brent goes stiff, pushes Liz behind him and sends his free arm roaming over the counter until he finds a glass mug. That’s all? Not even a bottle to break? People have been looking your way more and more and now someone calls out—seeing the knife glitter, surely, under the Christmas lights and the TV screen—and all the talk in Arturo’s cuts out like an unplugged stereo, leaving only the murmuring television and a few whispers that won’t come into the open because Holmes is looking around the room with the knife in plain view, challenging it to rise against him. Slowly he gets to his feet, straightens his body and spreads his great arms.

“Just me holding it together,” he calls to the room, hefting the blade with little gestures, tossing and dropping the point. “My world over there, my world over here.”

And you know he’s right. He could stick his hand right through the bar if he wanted. He could wish away the tables and chairs, the lights and people, your own watching eyes, all with a word.

“No,” Liz says.

Holmes swings his head around and aims it down at her, at brave Liz with both hands on Brent’s shoulder. “You never knew my brother,” she says. “Someone with his face, maybe. Someone with his eyes and his name. But not the boy I know.”

Up go the corners of Holmes’s quick lips, into a tight agony of a smile. It’s funny to him, hellishly funny that she would try this defense. And he’ll answer with the knife. You see his giant’s height looming over the bar, his frozen muscles bunched out with the world’s weight, about to lift the blade and not lifting it. Why not? The Christmas lights blink over his body, back and forth, and right then you understand something about time in El Paso. You thought it was Brent who wasn’t moving. You thought time stopped around him. But your angle was wrong. Everything’s moving, everything’s always moved except for Holmes and except for you. He can’t touch Liz and Brent because they’re already gone from here.

A thirst breaks loose in your throat and fills your eyes—who knows how long it’s been caught there. Now you know: Liz and Brent are out in America, moving on through time, and you’re still underneath in America’s shadow. Your tears break the bar into a wash of shapes, words too blurry to read. Let them go. You sniff and dust fills your head, you stand and feel the old sun around you. It’s a long time you’ve wanted to be back in the clean sand with no questions. Your heart thumps madly, but your movements are sure; you creep up to where Holmes sits crouched, with both his palms up and the knife resting across them. Poor Holmes, with all that muscle and nowhere to turn it.

“Can’t I let it go?” he asks the knife. “If it’s only my world?”

You take him in an embrace, warm and solid as a man ever was. His big hands give up the knife, and he waits dumbly for you to find his throat and begin cutting the bandage away. It’s stuck tight and the job takes a while before you can let him drop. The bright wet covers his throat just as you remember, but he’s no longer about to speak. He was wrong about the world. Once you’ve lifted it up you can’t let go. It’s no longer yours to put down. That’s how simple it is, simple as carrying that child out of the firefight, and knowing it earlier would have saved you a lot of heartache. But nothing will be lost now. When your flesh is gone you’ll hold it up with your bones. Your heart is still thumping madly, trying to get out of you, and you swing the knife inward and set it free.