VILLAGES

PROLOGUE

The first thing he heard was a string bass – one long, low note that was so insistent, so constant, that he could feel it, as much as hear it, vibrating at his core.

It must have been a string bass, because he was at a party, maybe a high school reunion, and there was music, and he danced with a girl.  He knew her, but she might have been any of several girls in his class.  They slow-danced.  She nestled against him, his hand strong on her back pulling her to him, and a staggering sense of longing came over him.  They danced for a long time, whispering to each other in words that only they could understand.  And then, they were jarred suddenly by an alarm, shrill and loud.  A fire drill.  Everybody started moving, hurrying, jostling and banging against each other, and he and the girl got separated.  He was at a wide doorway, the crowd surging around him, pushing him outside.  Somehow, the string bass kept playing, that one droning note.  He searched frantically, but he couldn’t find the girl.  Then his heart broke because he realized that the longing was not for the girl, but for the enormity of everything else – his life, what was, what might be, or might never be, or never even be comprehensible. 

He woke, sobbing, the drone deeper in him than ever.  A nurse hovered over him.  “Bad dream?”  He blinked.  It was all he could do.  She placed her hand on his cheek, and the feel of her calmed him a little.  He tried to raise his head.  It wouldn’t come up.  “I need…”

But she didn’t understand what he needed any more than he did.  She was back with a syringe.  Before he slipped over the edge he heard her say, “We’ll be there in a couple of hours.”  When he woke again they were landing at Ramstein.

 ONE

The stateside hospital was huge – endless hallways that seemed to go nowhere, a cacophony of sounds, people in white and green in a hurry.  But Jonas had his little corner.  There was the physical space of his bed in the ward, then the wheelchair, as they worked over the places where his body had been violated – but more than that, what he came to think of as his area where everything about him existed, body and all the rest.  Ever since he joined the Navy, he had been told to police up your area.  Keep it neat and squared away.  So he worked to keep the mind part of his area quiet, to make it, as much as possible, the absence of things.  For one thing, it helped to deal with the pain, which began to slowly subside as he started to heal.  But it was much more than that.  He lived a great deal in long, blank silences -- not just not thinking, but unthinking.  He lived in the midst of the bustle of the ward and the exam rooms and the grim intensity of the rehab areas, but he let none of it intrude on his area.  He kept to himself as much as possible, avoided conversation.  There was nobody he wanted to talk to.  He told himself he was squared away. 

As far as his body, there were no missing parts except for the little finger and ring finger on his left hand, sheared off by one of the rounds that struck him.  That round, after removing the fingers, had smacked into his left shoulder, passing a millimeter from his carotid artery and lodging between the artery and clavicle. The other had gone in low on the inside of his right quad and exited at an upward angle through his thigh, shattering the femur and just missing his groin. 

There had been surgeries – first in Germany and then again in the States.  He understood the basics from his medic training, but when the healing was progressing and his mind was clear enough from the fog of the meds and concussion, he borrowed an anatomy book and went over what they had done to save him.  They had sewed all the ruptured stuff back together and put a steel rod in his leg.  He would have a permanent limp.  He thought, I almost wasn’t here.  And then he thought, maybe I’m actually not.

The shrink was a young guy, maybe thirty.  Lieutenant Commander Corrigan, making small talk, explained that he had gone to school on a Navy scholarship and was fulfilling his obligation.  Jonas took note of that word, obligation.  Lieutenant Commander Corrigan looked tired, and Jonas figured it had mostly to do with the stacks of folders on his desk and the table behind him, all these guys with missing parts and screwed-up heads that Corrigan was supposed to fix.  The office didn’t help – drab Navy issue furniture, washed-out fluorescents.

Jonas was still in his wheelchair.  Corrigan had cleared a small space on the desk directly in front of him and he had a single folder open, leafing through it while they talked, but he seemed hemmed in by the stacks of folders on either side. 

“How’s the rehab going?”

“Fine, sir.”

“Things healing okay?”

“Seem to be, yes sir.”

“Pain?”

“Some.  Getting better.  Easing off the meds.  Sir.”

“That’s good.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Corrigan looked down again at the folder.  “Do you mind if I call you Jonas?”

“That’s okay, sir.”

“So if it’s okay for me to call you Jonas, you don’t have to call me sir.’”

“What should I call you?”

Corrigan shrugged.  “’Doc’ would be okay.  That’s what they call you, isn’t it?  ‘Doc’?  I’ve never had a corpsman in here before.  So we’re just a couple of Docs.”

“I’m not a doc anymore,” Jonas said, “I’m a patient.”  He held up his bandaged left hand.  “And when I get out of here, I’m gonna be a civilian.”

Corrigan nodded at the file folder.  “Medical discharge.  How do you feel about that?”

“They say I’m unfit for duty.”

“No, Jonas, that is not what they say.  They say the nature and effect of your wounds make it…”

“Same thing, isn’t it?  Guys with missing parts, a corpsman without fingers who can’t walk right?  Unfit for duty.”

“Let’s go back to my question.  How do you feel about it?”

“I’m okay with it.”

“Oh?”

“A-OK.  Sir.”

“You’ve had your war.”

“That’s about it.”

“Well,” Corrigan said, “for now, you’re still in the U.S. Navy, and the Navy wants to help you deal with your situation.”

“What situation?”

Corrigan pursed his lips and scrunched his eyebrows.  “We want to help you sort through things.  The physical, the mental, the emotional.  What happened.”

“And what’s that?  Doc?”

Corrigan lifted the file folder a couple of inches, then set it back down.  “What you did…what you went through…”

“I don’t remember a single thing.”

“Dissociative amnesia,” Corrigan said.  “Inability to remember important aspects of trauma.”  It sounded like he was reading from a textbook.  “It’s common after trauma, and usually temporary.”

“Temporary.”

“Somewhere, Jonas, you remember exactly what happened, every detail of it.”

“Then am I a liar?”

“You’re protecting yourself.  It’s perfectly natural.”

Jonas laughed, no mirth to it.  “Then are you saying I’m two people?”

Corrigan shook his head.  “Not exactly that.  But there’s a disconnect, and that’s what we want to help you deal with.  We want to help you to re-connect.”  Corrigan opened the folder again, flipped a couple of pages, then looked up.

“You really don’t know what happened?”

“Not a thing.”

“Here’s what they say you did, Jonas.  Your platoon came under fire, took a number of casualties.  Disregarding your own welfare – and serious wounds -- you rescued five wounded Marines.  You were hit twice yourself.  Does any of that sound even vaguely familiar?”

“I know I got hit twice.  I can tell that every time I move and look at where my fingers used to be.  But how it happened?  No.  Honestly, no.”

“You know that your unit commander has recommended you for the Navy Cross.”

“Yeah, I heard that.”  He made a face.  “I don’t want it.”

“What do you want, Jonas?”

Jonas sighed.  “To get the fuck out of here.”

“I can understand that.  But getting the fuck out of here doesn’t solve anything.”

“What does?”

“Dealing with things.”

“Look,” Jonas said, “whatever they put in that report, it’s done, and I lived through it, and I’m okay.”

“Do you not want to know?”

“As far as I’m concerned, it just doesn’t matter.”

Corrigan tapped his head.  “Somewhere in here, Jonas, you know, and you know you know, and sooner or later you’ll have to deal with it.  The later it is, the worse it can be.”

“You think I’ve got PTSD.”

Corrigan pulled a piece of paper from the folder.  “In your initial screening, you were positive in two areas.  What we just talked about…avoiding thinking about what happened, avoiding situations that might remind you of it.  And then, feeling numb or detached from other people, from activities, from your surroundings.”

Jonas shrugged.  “Just trying to stay squared away.”

“Any nightmares?”

“Some trouble sleeping,” Jonas said, “but I’ve got meds for that.  They help.”

“Hyper-vigilance?  On edge a lot?  Sad?  Anxious?  Depressed?”

“None of that.  They just say I’m not paying attention.”

Another glance down, studying the paper.  “They also say you’re withdrawn.”

“Just trying to keep my shit together.”

Corrigan looked at his watch, then put the piece of paper back in the folder.  “Tomorrow, you start with a therapist.  I’ll be keeping tabs on things, and if at any point you feel a need to talk directly to me…” he cut a quick glance at the stack of folders on his left, “…we’ll arrange it.”

“Thank you,” Jonas said, and then added, “Sir.”

Charlene Frick, a civilian.  She had some stacks of folders too, but not as many as Lieutenant Corrigan.  For the first session they just talked.  She didn’t seem in a hurry to get to anything grim, and that was okay.

Just before his time was up she said, “Your parents…”

“What about them?”

“You’re not staying in touch.”

“We’re not close,” he answered.

“But they’re concerned about you.  They were here right after you came in, stayed for a few days.  Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“Since then, they’ve been back, but I’m told you won’t see them, won’t answer phone calls, don’t open letters and packages.”

Jonas could feel something lurch in his gut, shit from way back that he needed to keep at bay.  “Tell ‘em I’m okay.  But I don’t want to see ‘em or talk to ‘em.  Not right now.”

“You’re not close.”

“Right.”

“Can you tell me about that?”

He wished there was a window to look out of.  But there was just the walls and a door that stayed shut.  “A couple of years ago my father kicked me out of the house.  And then I joined the Navy.”

“Can you tell me a little more about that, being kicked out?”

“Not much to tell.  We had an argument and he kicked me out.”

“You were…how old?”

“Senior in high school.  Eighteen.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“I wasn’t surprised.  He’s an asshole.”

“And your mother?”

“She let him.”

“You blame her too?”

“I don’t blame anybody.  It just happened, it’s just the way they both are.”

“Where did you go?”

“Stayed with a friend until I finished school.”

“A classmate?”

“A doctor.”

“Can you tell me about him?”

“He was the guy who delivered me.  Did all the doctor stuff when I was growing up.  Doctor Ainsley.”

“So you called him when you were kicked out?”

“He heard.  He came and got me.  It was just a couple of months until school was done, and then I joined up.”

“Someone you trust?”

“He’s always had my back.”

She kept pressing him, trying to nudge him into his past, but he got tired of it.  Can you tell me about…can you tell me a little about…  Well, no, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t.  It was done.  Why dwell on it?  He fell back into one-word answers and then not even that, and she let it go.

But the next session, she brought it up again.  He parried with her for awhile, then grew weary of it, and decided to just go ahead and tell her some of that way back shit, and maybe that would satisfy her and she would shut the hell up about the rest of it.

Rodney Boulware was the closest thing Copernicus had to a genuine sports celebrity.  He played everything in high school, went to Florida on a baseball scholarship, left after his junior year when Cincinnati offered him a pro contract because he had a 98-mile-an-hour fastball to go with a decent slider.  He worked his way up through the minors, Double-A in Waterbury one year, Triple-A in Indianapolis the next.  At the end of that season, with Cincinnati going to the playoffs and one of the relief pitchers sidelined with a torn hamstring in his push-off leg, they called Rodney to the bigs.  He pitched an inning and a half in one game, preserving a Reds win, and two innings in another when they were down five runs and headed back home.  The Reds seemed high on him, and he tried not to be too disappointed the next Spring when they shipped him back to Triple-A, telling him it wouldn’t be long before he was back with the big club.  Then he tore up his shoulder, and when he and Cincinnati finally figured out that it was all over, he came back home to Copernicus to coach the high school team.

Gladys had had an uneven time of it.  She grew up with a sizeable fortune around her, thanks to Copernicus Manufacturing, which made specialty fabrics, including liners for landfills.  When she was twenty-one, just home from college, her father hired a fellow few years older than Gladys – Gordon Laycock -- to help him with his expanding business.  Her father liked the young fellow’s enthusiasm and confident manner, and when Gordon courted Gladys and asked for her hand in marriage, the father was most agreeable.  Seven years and a son later, Gordon took over when the father died of a heart attack at a textile convention in Chicago.  Took over and proceeded to run the business in the ground.  When Gladys’s brother, a neurosurgeon in New Orleans, stopped getting his monthly checks from the business, he came home and started digging.  Gordon had stolen and pissed away most of the money – a good bit of it gambling.  The neurosurgeon made sure Gordon went to prison and convinced Gladys to divorce him.  Also, he shut down Copernicus Manufacturing.

The town never quite got over it – a lot of jobs down the tubes, people moving away.  Gladys, lone among the family left in Copernicus, stayed mostly out of sight until, within a year of Gordon’s incarceration, she shocked everybody by marrying Rodney Boulware.  Her son Byrd was by then twelve years old, and she told friends that Rodney would be a good father, a strong male figure.  Her friends said that Gladys had always seemed like the kind of woman who needed direction.  A year into the marriage, Jonas was born.

People in town thought Rodney was a charmer – good talker, affable, firm-handed but fair with his baseball teams.  He knew a hell of a lot about baseball, and he had his kids doing things they didn’t know they could do, and they won a state championship.  People loved him for that.

At home, he was ill-tempered, arbitrary, intense.  And critical, especially of Jonas, who was skinny and uncoordinated and didn’t give a damn about baseball.  Rodney loved to argue, or rather to lecture.  Disagree with him, and you could count on enduring an hour of relentless harangue, and then days of silent treatment.  Then there was Byrd, son of the first marriage, who was thirteen when Jonas was born.  Byrd was everything athletically that Jonas wasn’t.  Byrd became a multi-sport star, and Rodney was all over it, and let Jonas know he didn’t come close to measuring up.  He wasn’t physically abusive – Jonas sometimes wished Rodney would just hit him and get it over with – but he could cut Jonas down to nothing with words, make him feel small and weak and fearful.  He learned to hate Rodney with everything in his soul.  But also, by the time he was passing adolescence, he developed an exquisite, fine-tuned antenna, the habit of watchfulness, reading people, all the signals.  He began to figure that what made Rodney privately bitter and troubled had mostly to do with his lost life.  Copernicus was a long way from Cincinnati, and coaching a high school team, successful though he might be, didn’t come anywhere close to what might have been.

Rodney sometimes turned his ill temper on Gladys, and Jonas became intensely protective.  He couldn’t change Rodney, felt powerless to fight back in any overt way.  But he could hunker down, stay quiet, not do anything to set him off, and comfort Gladys in small, unobtrusive ways.  She never complained.  She took direction. There seemed to be a kind of fatalism to her.  Jonas came to see that it was a defensive mechanism that worked for Gladys, and so he began to make it his own.  He learned to compartmentalize.  There was Rodney, and there was everything else.  An image popped into his head: Rodney as an outhouse where all the shit was.  And then there was the world outside the outhouse.  Jonas grew in the determination to keep the shit where it belonged.  There was more to life than that.

The only person he talked to about it was Doc Ainsley.  Doc seemed to be around a lot, more than just being Jonas’s doctor, with once-a-year checkups and the occasional visit for a cut or a cold.  Doc was a great reader with a huge library, and when he found that Jonas also liked to read, he started lending books.  He had Jonas reading Hemingway at twelve, Faulkner at fourteen.  Jonas didn’t always completely understand what he was reading, but he knew when he finished a book like that, he felt somehow different.  And what he didn’t understand, Doc could help with.  Doc would send him home with a couple of books, and when he came to return them, they talked about what Jonas had read, how it made him feel, and then there were a couple of more books to take with him.  Jonas came to think of their book times as little islands where ideas danced in the sand.  A long way from the outhouse. 

Jonas endured Rodney for a great long while before things came to a head.  And the reason things finally came to a head, oddly enough, was sports.  Golf.  Jonas defied Rodney – loudly, openly, in front of a lot of people.  And Rodney kicked him out.

“That’s it,” Jonas said when he was finished telling Charlene Frick.  He was drained, his whole body flushed and feverish.  But he was also exhilarated.  It was the first time he had ever said this much of it out loud.  The Rodney thing had always been there with Doc Ainsley, but it was largely left unsaid.  It was enough that the island was there.  But now…I said it, what an incredible fucking asshole my father is, and now I’m free of it.  

“That’s all I’m ever gonna say about that,” he said to Charlene Frick, “so don’t ask.”

Charlene studied him for a moment, and then she said quietly, “Jonas, thank you.  I know it took a lot.  Now that you’ve said it, how do you feel?”

“About the same,” he said.

“What you’ve just shared with me, it’s truly important.  You’re putting together your history, giving voice to it.  Past is prologue.  What we’re after is re-connecting with your past, all of it, leading up to your combat experience.  When we do that, we arrive at the point where the trauma happened, and we can open that up, too.”

“You’re trying to get me to re-live it,” he said.  “Well, I can’t do it.  I’m just a total blank and I have no interest in changing that.  I’ve said as much as I’m gonna about my parents, and I can tell you about joining the Navy, my training, doing my job with the platoon.  But if what they say about when I got shot up is true…”

“It is true,” she insisted.  “It’s all on paper.  Eyewitnesses.  It’s part of your truth, and right now, maybe the most important part.  Jonas, you did an extraordinary thing.  But that extraordinary thing was also horrific.  It almost got you killed.  You’ve got to deal with that on a conscious level.  You’ve got to reconstruct it, so you can see it for what it is…”

That was when he lost it.  “Fuck reconstruct!”  He slammed his hand on the arm of his chair.  “I don’t want to know!  I won’t know!   Doctor Corrigan says there’s two of me.  Well shit, send me two paychecks.  Whoever that other guy is, he ain’t bothering me.  I’ve lost him.  And I’m gonna leave him lost.”

Frick recoiled, eyes wide.  But then she took a deep breath and said, “I understand your anger.  It’s natural.  You should be angry.”

He sat there very still, calming himself, getting himself back in his area.  It took a minute or so, but he got things squared away, buttoned-down.  And then he gave her a big smile that seemed to surprise her.  “Angry?  Well, I’m pretty pissed off at the bastards who shot me.”

“You have a really nice smile,” she said.  “I just wonder what’s behind it.”

“Quiet,” he said.

It went on while his body healed, and Jonas could tell that Charlene Frick was getting weary with it.  She probed and questioned and tried her best, but he made no effort to help her take him where she wanted him to go.  He didn’t, wouldn’t, help.  There was a growing air of sadness about her.  And why not, he thought.  He and all of these other tough cases – limbs gone, bodies disfigured, some of them horribly, psyches blasted, all those folders in her office and Corrigan’s.  He understood perfectly what they were trying to do, help people make some peace with what was left of themselves.  And those who went where he was unwilling to go – re-living horror – it must be a special kind of horror not only for them, but also for Frick and Corrigan and the rest of the mind people.  You could listen to the saddest things on earth and you had to go away and hide before you could cry.  How could you do that and not become a trauma victim yourself?

There was, in the recesses of his mind, that ancient thing, the need to comfort, to tell Charlene Frick that she was a good and caring person and she shouldn’t worry about him, that he was okay.  But he didn’t.  He was through with trying to comfort people, especially if it meant scaring up old ghosts.  In shirking that, he knew he was a failure, and he had spent much of his young life fearing failure.  But this one, he was willing to live with.

* * * * *

Jonas came over time to think he probably did owe Charlene Frick at least something besides the Rodney business.  So he relented a bit and told her about what went on between the time of Rodney and the time he took two bullets.

            The lieutenant’s name was Hamrick, but word got out soon after he took over the platoon that he had played linebacker at some small college in Montana, and that his nickname was “Hammer,” because he liked to hit people.  He was linebacker built, square and low to the ground, and he looked perpetually amped-up and pissed-off.  Pissed off, he made clear, at the bad guys, the people who shot at them, tried to blow them up, kept them eternally on edge, wondering when and where the next piece of shit would come from.  The first time Hammer spoke to the platoon he said, “This thing won’t be over until all the bad guys are dead.  And killing bad guys is the only job that matters.”  Okay, Hammer was gonna be aggressive.  The question: was he gonna be reckless?   

  It took a week to find out.  They were humping it across an open field, chasing a couple of bad guys when the whole world opened up on them – small arms, RPG’s, coming from almost every direction.  Two guys got hit – Vandergriff in his right arm, Figueroa in his groin, just below his flak jacket.  Jonas Boulware stopped the life from pouring out of them with the stuff he had in his assault pack – compresses, tourniquets, morphine -- but when it was over, Vandergriff lost the arm and Figueroa lost his genitals.  Through it all, Hammer kept his shit together, got them disengaged and into defensive position, called in air, secured the area so medevac could come and get Vandergriff and Figueroa.  But the platoon knew to a man that Hammer had been too eager, in too much of a hurry, and suddenly they had found themselves in a really bad place, exposed and vulnerable, and it could have been even worse.  So Vandergriff was minus an arm and Figueroa was minus his nuts, and everybody liked Vandergriff and Figueroa.   Word was that Hammer got his ass chewed at company, but nothing changed, especially Hammer.  If anything, he looked more amped-up and pissed-off than ever. 

It was Lance Corporal Dunhill who finally said it, a couple of days after the ambush, when word came down about Vandergriff and Figueroa.  There were several of them -- exhausted, filthy, and wasted after a patrol -- having some beers, trying to take the edge off.  There was beer because it was the birthday of the Marine Corps.  Everybody got two beers.  By tradition, there should have been rum, but somehow the rum never got past the rear echelon people.  Jonas nursed his beer for awhile and finally handed the can to Dunhill, who had already finished his two.  Dunhill downed the beer in three swigs, crunched the can in his fist, and tossed it into a corner.  Then he said, “That gung-ho motherfucker is gonna be Commandant of the Marine Corps someday, but in the meantime, he’s gonna get everybody else’s asses shot off.”

Everything froze.  Not a muscle twitched.  There was a long, stunned silence and nobody looked at anybody else, waiting.  It lasted until Sergeant Willis spoke up.  “Dunhill,” he said, “if I ever hear anything like that come out of your mouth again, I will kick your asshole all the way into your throat.”  Willis was one hard bastard, a lifer on his third deployment, and nobody in the platoon had the nerve or balls to question him about the least thing.  He looked around at the others -- glaring, icy.  “And that goes for the rest of you sonsabitches.” 

Willis or not, Dunhill had given voice to it, and it was there – a kind of dread that you forced out of your mind and into some hidden gut place when you saddled up and headed out, because if you didn’t, if you thought about anything much except keeping your own shit together, you could lose your ass and the guy’s next to you.  But when the op was over, it was there, a small foul-smelling animal that lurked at your edges, no matter that it violated that most sacred of Marine things, that you never questioned, you just did.

And there was the other thing that added to the dread: Hammer didn’t listen to his NCO’s.  Here he was, fresh out of officer candidate school, raw and combat semi-literate, barking orders, doing reckless and impetuous shit, like he had won the Gulf War singlehanded, and acting as if Willis, the battle-tested warrior, was a rival, a threat to his command.  Everybody knew they wouldn’t have been humping it across that open field like they did if Willis had had anything to do about it.  But Willis was a Marine, the one Marine in the platoon that everybody else trusted.  And he had gone to bat for Hammer. 

Jonas Boulware wasn’t a Marine, he was a Navy man.  His official job description was hospital corpsman, but that was a misnomer because he hadn’t seen the inside of a hospital since San Antonio and Del Mar, where he trained.  They had taught him the basics of trying to keep people alive when their bodies were ripped open, and toward the end, one of the instructors called him a natural.  He wasn’t entirely sure what they meant about that.  They had run his ass ragged until he was lean and fit and taught him as much as they could about battlefields and what made Marines Marines.  They taught him that even if you were in the keeping-guys-alive business, you’d better be ready to use your own weapon to shoot people, because that might be part of keeping your people alive.

When that was done they sent him to a Marine line platoon.  He was twenty years old, slightly-built, and when the Marines first looked him over they seemed reluctant to call him the traditional name, “Doc.”  But after five months of tending wounds, treating everything from blisters to diarrhea, he was Doc Boulware, one of them.  But not one of them.  He was not, and could never be, a Marine.  His job was to keep them alive and functional.  He did his job and was, he thought, reasonably good at it – saved some, lost a couple who were beyond saving because IED’s had blasted the life from them.  He feared sometimes for his own life, but never in the heat of the moment.  He just did what he was supposed to do.

What he feared most, though, was failure.  It was Jonas Boulware’s particular wretched lot, something that had become part of his essence long before the U.S. Navy, to feel an abiding fear of failing other human beings, not being able to give them, do for them, what they needed.  Not being able to make things okay.  And now, after a couple of months of Lieutenant Hammer, he was haunted by the growing notion that he would fail, must fail, and there was nothing he could do about it.

And that’s where the past left him.  Between there and now, here in this big hospital building full of misery, there was nothing.  And it could goddamn well stay that way.

* * * * *

At their last session, two days before he was discharged, he simply said, “Thank you.  I know how hard you tried.  But I’m okay.  I want you to understand that.”  But he could tell she didn’t believe it.

There was one more visit with Corrigan, who said, “The Veterans Administration takes over now.  I want to strongly encourage you to continue with therapy – individual, with a support group, whatever.  There are therapeutic techniques, things that work if you give them a chance, and new ones being looked at all the time.  There are those two people, Jonas, the one you know and the one you lost.  That other one, he’s gonna want back in at some point.  It will probably be the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but open the door.”

“Thank you, sir.  I’ll think about all that, I really will.”

“Where are you going now?  Home?”

“There’s not much there.”

“Then where?”

“Sergeant Willis.”