Chapter Twenty-Seven
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Once Jamie Lauder was old enough to drive, he would sometimes do a very dangerous thing: he would wait until he was on a long, empty stretch of highway and then close his eyes.
Sightless, he’d count to ten. If out of fear or impatience he hurried the count, he would force himself to start over and do it properly.
One one thousand, two one thousand. There were a few close calls when another three or four seconds would have meant he’d hit a median.
But still he continued. It was the only way he knew to get rid of the feeling, the urgent heat that would appear in his stomach without warning.
The sensation that if he didn’t do something, anything—only he didn’t know what that anything was—he would explode.
The feeling had started when his father died. For months prior to Bill’s diagnosis, Jamie had sensed something was wrong; Bill simply seemed off . He was tired; he didn’t eat as much and his skin looked strange. There was a stale, almost medicinal scent to him at times.
“You don’t smell good,” Jamie said at the dinner table. He had meant it lightly, the way the family called Lee “piggy” because she hogged dessert.
“I don’t like that,” Bill said. “In fact, I think that is an incredibly rude thing to say.” When Bill stood, to refill his wine, Jamie caught Joan staring at him with compassion and looked away.
He worried she understood not only the depth of his mortification but also that he didn’t hold her in the same awe as he did Bill.
Shortly after, they discovered Bill was sick.
The morning after Bill died, Joan woke Jamie and brought him to Lee’s room.
“Your father passed away last night,” she said.
Lee immediately started crying. Jamie tried to summon tears but didn’t have any and felt that trying to fake them would be doing something awful.
He returned to bed, and that afternoon he ran to the railroad tracks, where a senior at JJS had committed suicide over college admissions the year before.
Jamie touched the dark metal of the tracks, waiting until he could hear the train’s faraway approach, closed his eyes and counted, and then ran home.
It was Bill who first piqued Jamie’s interest in the military.
On a random weekend afternoon in his office, Bill had described for Jamie the roles of the navy, marines, and air force—though in contrast to Jamie, Bill’s study of these subjects was merely casual, a subset of a greater interest in American history.
He lacked Jamie’s penchant for niche obsession; he did not particularly care, for example, why the U-2 required special fuel.
“It flies at the edge of space ,” Jamie said, reading from a magazine.
“Mmm,” Bill replied. It was clear he wasn’t listening. Joan and Lee never even pretended to listen.
After Bill died, Jamie’s interest in the armed forces intensified.
He was small for his age, and like many small boys, he liked to imagine what he might do with big machines.
When it came time for college applications, he debated between enlisting directly or applying to the Naval Academy.
The same month, Joan came home from college information night with pamphlets for Stanford and the UC system.
“Your choice,” she said, dropping the brochures on the kitchen table.
“I don’t want to pressure you like other Chinese parents.
” Though Joan was more a typical immigrant parent than she claimed.
Jamie knew she had not even entertained that he might not attend a traditional college or have a practical major (Bill always said Theo should have studied business) and a practical career.
His entire life, Jamie would have trouble with his desire to please.
He was surprised when Joan was upset about his going to Penn. It had the best business program, and he knew she cared about the “best.”
Because most of the UPenn campus seemed to want to work in finance, soon too so did Jamie.
Senior year, he accepted a job in New York at Goldman Sachs.
He entered into a serious relationship with Chloe Carter, a fellow analyst with a perfect body and anger issues.
His second year at Goldman, Jamie was proofreading a pitch book for Ray Kollani, a sadistic vice president with the face of a movie idol, when the towers fell.
The air outside reminded Jamie of Falling House the night of the fire, acrid and thick with poison.
A year later, he quit to report to Officer Candidate School, to enter the pipeline to become a Navy SEAL.
Jamie didn’t tell Joan he’d left his job until he was already in Pensacola for training.
When he did call to tell her, she hung up on him.
“I don’t understand where this is coming from,” Joan said.
She’d been dismayed to discover that when presented with stressful news, she’d reverted to her own mother’s habit of ending a phone call.
Joan had pressed her face into an oven mitt—the nearest soft object—for several deep breaths before calling Jamie back.
“I’ve always been interested in the military.” While Jamie had anticipated Joan’s disappointment, her hostility took him by surprise. “I was obsessed with the special forces as a kid.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“I think,” Jamie said, “that I’m the authority on my own childhood.”
“And I just hope,” Joan said, “that you don’t get yourself killed. I will pray every day that you are safe.”
It seemed to Jamie that Joan’s accent always grew heavier in such conversations. It wasn’t that she didn’t already have an accent, but it became blunter, more pronounced. “You aren’t religious,” Jamie said, keeping his tone stern.
“I know how much you don’t want to listen to me,” Joan said, voice rising. “No one wants to listen to their parents!”
“If I don’t try now, I’ll never be able to do it. You don’t want me to have some big regret later in life, do you?”
“There are lots of things you won’t accomplish in life,” Joan said plainly. Her choice of career for Jamie had been scientist or physician—she did not find investment banking an admirable profession either.
It was during Hell Week, the brutal five days of operationally taxing, unbearably cold and wet training when candidates were allowed a total of four hours’ sleep, that Jamie first fantasized about quitting.
In the Grinder, the concrete grounds in San Diego where physical training was conducted, there hung a brass bell the size of a basketball.
It was tradition that any member of the class who quit had to ring this bell, and its chime would echo through the courtyard.
Jamie had never seen the bell anywhere but the Grinder until Hell Week, when it was mounted on a truck’s hitch to follow them up and down the beach.
Hell Week began on a Sunday evening, and by Tuesday afternoon Jamie was imagining his hands against the rope.
Thursday, he became afraid he might ring the bell unconsciously, that in his delirium he would wander over and pull.
They were allotted a two-hour block to sleep that afternoon, their second of the week—hungry and feverish, Jamie dreamed that an enormous cheeseburger chased him through the surf.
Friday night, when it was all over, Jamie went to the barracks, where the passing class would be under observation for the next forty-eight hours.
Years earlier there’d been a graduate who’d needed his arm amputated after blood pooled as he lay in a heavy sleep, his arm limp over the side of the bed; as a result, the mattresses were now arranged side by side on the floor.
All week, Jamie had fantasized about sleeping on a real bed. Despite his exhaustion, he dragged the mattress up onto its frame.
“Nope,” a staffer said, and kicked the mattress back to the ground.
His best friend in training, Nick Bregman, pointed a finger and laughed. “Try again.”
“I just want to sleep in a regular bed.”
“You know what I’ve been thinking,” Nick drawled. Seconds later, he was snoring.
Nick’s feet were elevated, as there were drawers placed under the mattresses to keep their legs from swelling. When the staffer had dropped Jamie’s mattress, he hadn’t replaced the drawers, which lay yards away. Jamie, who was already on the floor, felt he could not move an inch farther.
“Are you going to set up the mattress like it was?” Jamie called.
“You’re a big boy,” the staffer responded.
Nick let out another snore. That loud fucker, Jamie thought, dragging his mattress.
How am I going to sleep? Staring down at Nick, who often slept with his mouth open, his arm flapped over the side of the mattress where, yes, it could have led to a dangerous amount of swelling had he been on a raised frame, Jamie felt something close to love: not just for Nick but for the whole training class he’d endured Hell Week with, even the sociopaths, even the jerks.
There was something about being pushed to their physical limits that reduced people to simple machines, and it was easy to love a machine.
On weekends there was a group of six or seven who usually went out, including Dave Strum, who everyone knew was heir to an oil fortune but became extremely sulky if you referred to it; John Cruz, referred to as JC, who had played football for the University of Alabama.
Nick, whose rather distasteful nickname in the platoon was Ted Bundy due to his persuasive talents, was often dispatched to approach the best-looking women: “Come meet my friends,” he’d say.
It really was that simple. And more often than not, the girls would come, and it was all so easy, it was as if Jamie had been waiting to become this person who threw himself into the cold surf; who blew up C-4; who hated cynicism, he realized, he hated it even when it was smart, because Jamie understood now that such cynicism came from behind a desk, a desk meant to reinforce one’s superiority above other, more rudimentary souls, a desk he himself had occupied for three years at Goldman.
Nick snored again. It was louder than Jamie had ever heard, almost one continuous saw.
“Is he all right?” one of the staffers asked.
“He always sleeps like that,” Jamie said. The sound was familiar: it was an amplified, harder version of waves crashing to shore.
Six years later, both Jamie and Nick would be in Iraq.
It was their second operational tour, and a routine was quickly established: on weekends they swam at the recreation center, after which Nick would visit the internet café to email his girlfriend and message other women on Myspace.
Five months in, they flew intra-country, driving armored Ford Explorers onto C-130s to escort one of Iraq’s vice presidents to his home in Erbil.
There the platoon was taken to the bazaar by the vice president’s personal security; Jamie purchased a scarf for Joan and helped Nick select an elephant figurine for his mother.
They returned to Baghdad, the short trip enough to add texture to the otherwise Groundhog Day –like consistency of their deployment, and a week after, Jamie and Nick were on a roof conducting overwatch for the same vice president’s arrival.
Somehow their position was compromised and a grenade tossed onto the roof.
Hours later, Jamie was on a helicopter to a field hospital in Balad.
Though his leg was shattered, he felt fine because of the morphine, his memory periodically wiping clean the events of the last hours before reassembling itself in gentler colors.
As the rotors spun, a song wormed into his brain that matched the rhythm of the blades as they chopped: Well I am , well I am , well I am .
Ba da boom, ba da boom, ba da boom . Well I am, Jamie sang in his head, happy to be alive, until remembering again that Nick wasn’t.