Refresh Refresh by Benjamin Percy

Author:Benjamin Percy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-015-4
Publisher: Graywolf press
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

She takes the bed and he takes the floor. The Pendleton blanket over concrete isn’t very comfortable, but that’s not why he can’t sleep. He rarely sleeps. Nights, a dead man comes to visit him.

Here is the story of the dead man: Darren was working a Karbala traffic checkpoint near the U.S. Embassy when it happened. The day was hot as only the desert can get. He had been searching cars for eight hours, and he was angry and tired and unfocused, until a pistol appeared from behind a rolled-down window. The man screamed something in Arabic and squeezed the trigger. It jammed. Darren’s did not. He remembers the man looking up at him, wide-eyed and surprised, his mouth a black O, the kind of look Darren’s father no doubt wore when the reactor came apart all around him.

Darren wonders what the Iraqi man saw, what he felt? The cold rush of metal into his mouth. The internal blossoming of blood as teeth and gum and bone evaporated, as the back of his head opened up and ejected what looked like a handful of rotten watermelon. Did he feel the wind whistling through his newly rendered cavity?

Darren killed many others, but none whose faces he saw so clearly.

So whenever he falls into dreams, the dead man emerges from the dark, and Darren wakes up with an asthmatic gasp, squeezing his hands into fists so hard the fingernails cut into his palms little half-moons of blood.

Lying on the floor, he recognizes a similar sort of haunting in Roxana. In her dreams she wails, sometimes softly, sometimes at the top of her lungs, like some air-raid siren.

For a while he just lies there, listening. Then he gets up and paces the bunker, back and forth, back and forth, running his hands through his hair like an expectant father. Every few minutes he stands over her and squeezes her shoulder and whispers, “Roxana? You okay?” But she won’t respond. She goes on moaning and he goes back to pacing.

Finally, in a wave of desperation—he wants so badly to silence and comfort her—he scoops her up and holds her in his arms, tight against his chest, rocking her, saying shhh. He doesn’t know if she wakes up or not, but she calms down. Her moaning softens to a sort of purr and her muscles relax and after a good fifteen minutes he sets her down and covers her with a blanket and falls asleep kneeling beside her.

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