Two months ago I submitted a piece of fiction to the New Yorker, one of the most powerful arbiters of taste when it comes to contemporary fiction. Today I got the following rejection letter, the only such letter that has ever given me a confidence boost.
We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it. Your prose is quite good.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Here's the story:
We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it. Your prose is quite good.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Here's the story:
Bathroom Graffiti Iraq
She is wearing purple eye shadow the night before he will be deployed to Iraq for his second tour. He will remember purple eye shadow because she looks down so often as they sit across from one another in the diner booth. Jamie stares out the foggy window. He is soothed by the orange glow of a streetlight and the snow settling atop the roof of her old Volvo wagon. It’s hard for him to look at her too. Her hands are cold and soft as forest duff within his, almost as cold as the Formica beneath his knuckles.
They order cheeseburgers and hot chocolate. Kate takes the curl of receipt paper and writes something in tiny meticulous letters then takes a photo from her purse and hands it to Jamie with the receipt. In the photo she lays naked on her side. The movement she made across the room after hitting the timer lingers in her pose. She is propped on her elbow, her eyes are distracted. She was already thinking about jumping up to review the picture on the camera’s screen. It was her third try. Jamie tells her the picture is perfect because the dim, grainy, red tinted light is the exact light he sees her in when he closes his eyes to imagine her.
He reads the poem written on the receipt. She tells him that it was her father’s favorite poem, that when he was a Marine, he kept it with him always.
During the flight to Baghdad Jamie copies the poem onto the band inside his helmet.
I lived my days apart,
Dreaming fair songs for God
By the glory in my heart
Covered and crowned and shod.
Now God is in the strife,
And I must seek Him there,
Where death outnumbers life,
And fury smites the air.
I walk the secret way
With anger in my brain.
O music through my clay,
When will you sound again?
Back in Iraq Jamie felt like he could breathe again. Back to Husaybah, Ramadi, Baghdad, Ramadi again, where bombing raids shrieked and thumped the night. With first light came mourning wails rising to frenzy with the sun that dissolved all hope of nightmare.
On foot patrol he learns to distinguish the different timbres and pitches of mourning. He watches fathers beat their chests until ribs crack, mothers tear out hair, knock themselves unconscious against walls. Wives shriek blades of resentment and anger. But for Jamie the lamentations of husbands are the saddest and most terrible because such tenderness in these coarse, chauvinistic men is so unexpected, and so near in quality to the withering germ of tenderness within himself. Siblings and children weep gently at first and begin their pain songs timidly as if reciting scripture, but soon they too are pulled into the whirlpool of grief as the tyranny of absence bangs through their soft minds.
In Baghdad, members of the Madi army wear suicide vests so that if injured in battle they can detonate themselves when American soldiers approach. In the past it was policy to leave the dead for Iraqis to clean up. Now it is Jamie’s job to arrange C4 explosives on their bodies and blow them like the dozens of front doors he blew while on routine raids. Jamie voluntered so often that after the first week the commander stopped asking, “Whose gonna make me some of that pretty pink mist?” Jamie will walk through it, inhale it, taste it. He doesn’t think about why. It satisfies him like picking off scabs.
Bathroom Graffiti Iraq:
Above the dual toilet paper dispenser there is a horizontal black marker line angled on each end with vertical arrows pointing down at the two rolls. One roll hangs unfurled like a thirsty tongue into a puddle on the floor where it soaks translucent. Above the black line is the heading: RE-ENLISTMENT PAPERS.
Facing Jamie on the inside of the stall door someone has written very neatly: Blackwater operative gets $30 an hour that’s 30x24x30x12= $259,000 a year. I’m in the wrong line of work.
In large slanted letters below this, someone wrote: You pussy fucking coward, where’s your dignity, what happened to the sacredness of duty, we don’t want you pussy fags here anyway you must be an army grunt. I ain’t dying for you no way. You don’t count here!
Next to this Jamie wrote:
Where death outnumbers life,
And fury smites the air
I walk the secret way
With anger in my brain.
Above this, with an arrow pointing down, someone wrote: WORD
