We wandered home from our jobs—tossing alfalfa bales into trucks and filing paperwork in legal offices and draining oil from diesel engines and serving steak-and-egg platters—we wandered home from our jobs here in Tumalo, Oregon, and opened our mailboxes to find, among the bills and catalogues, the same sand-colored envelope. In its center, slightly off-kilter, as if pressed there hurriedly, our names and addresses appeared printed on a label. There was no return address, but stamped in the top right corner we read the country of origin—Iraq.
We dropped the rest of the mail. Envelopes fluttered and spun to the porch, some of them sliding through the cracks and into the darkness below. Maybe a J.Crew catalogue broke open between our feet to reveal a woman in a red bathing suit, her eyes closed, her body sprawled out on a scarred wooden table.
None of us had heard from Alyssa in several weeks. Not even Jack, her fiancé, who worked as a loan officer for the Deschutes County Bank and who ran every evening through the streets of Tumalo in his short yellow running shorts. And though all of her letters came as military post, we couldn’t help but hope this envelope contained some message from her.
Perhaps Jack held it with the tips of his fingers and brought it to his nose, imagining he could smell her herbal shampoo, the grape gum she occasionally chewed. And then perhaps, like many of us, he turned the envelope over to see if its back would reveal anything. Inside it, something shifted, scraping against paper and making a hiss, a sound associated with flat tires and coiled snakes. We all saw this as a bad sign and in fact it was.
We roughed our fingers across the envelope’s length, opening a ragged slit that revealed not a letter, nor a photograph, but a DVD. It was blank on both sides. Its silvery surface caught the sunlight and made our reflections squint painfully back at us.
Illustration Emily Eibel
All around town phones began to ring. Their noise filled the air, like so many sirens set off at once. But Jack didn’t pay attention to the chirp of his cell coming to life. Nor did he notice when a gust of wind sent the bills he had dropped into the air, where they took wing, swirling and flapping around him like trapped birds before finding their way through the porch railings and into the yard he shared with the adjoining duplex. And when he keyed the lock and opened the door, he didn’t close it behind him. Instead he studied the disc, weighing it in his open hand, before hurrying to the living room to play it.
Some of us retreated to our couches, our remotes held out before us like plastic guns. But he sat only a foot before the television, waiting for the screen to come alive, checking and double-checking the empty envelope to see if there was anything else in it. There wasn’t. Just a shadow. The DVD player seemed to take an eternity to load.
At last—it began. And he saw what we saw:
A whitewashed cinderblock wall replaced the darkness of the screen. Alyssa knelt before it, her hands bound behind her back. She wore camo pants and a tan T-shirt. We recognized her immediately, our Alyssa, who some of us knew from school, some from church. Hanging up the pump at the gas station. Ordering a soft-serve vanilla cone at Dairy Queen. We recognized her, despite her appearance.
Her left eye had closed upon itself like a purple fist. Her lip had broken open and a line of blood ran from it, down her chin, her throat, dampening her shirt collar. Her hair had been cut raggedly from her head, perhaps by a knife, etching one vast scab onto her skull, its redness interrupted by the occasional brown tuft. She was trembling as if cold. And yet, somehow, her shoulders remained square, her eyes fixed directly on the camera.
Jack reached out a hand to touch her, his finger sizzling against the static of the television screen, the hairs on his knuckles rising.
Behind her stood three men in black track suits and ski masks. Two of them held assault rifles; the other, a machete. He was the one—with the blue blade dangling from his hand—who stepped forward and began speaking to the camera in what we guessed was Arabic. At first his voice was calm, almost soothing. Then it began to rise in volume. The machete flashed when he swung it back and forth, carving up the air. He punctuated his speech by spitting, and then the room went silent except for his heavy breathing.
The camera zoomed in on Alyssa. Her face filled the screen. We could see every detail of her—the pores and moles—the muscles bunching around her mouth when she said, “My name is Alyssa Miller. Private First Class. 2nd Battalion, 34th Marines. Parents: Bob and Arlene Miller of Tumalo, Oregon.”
The words came slowly, with shuddering breaths between them. When she finished, the camera tracked out, revealing the man with the machete now looming over her. Her mouth opened, but before she could say anything more, the man seized her by the shoulder with one hand and lifted the machete above his head with the other. It made a silvery arc when it dropped to her neck. A second mouth opened there. From it came an arterial surge of blood—once, twice—indicating the fast beating of her heart. And then the machete rose and fell again, this time cleaving through so much bone and muscle that her head tipped over and rested against her shoulder, as if she were horribly tired.
The blade was stuck, caught in the chink of vertebrae. The man readjusted his posture and sawed back and forth until the blade came loose, tearing her head from her body completely. He gripped it by the ear and shook it at the camera while chanting in a ciphered language. In the background her body slumped forward.
Some of us ran into the bathroom and shut off the light and closed the door. And some sank into various postures of collapse, pressing our fists against our eyes, pulling at our ears, trying to rough away what we had observed. Others splashed cold water from the kitchen sink against our faces and then slowly dried off with a hand-towel hung from the oven door. But Jack remained seated before the television, long after the screen went dark. He looked inside the envelope again. His phone rang. Maybe it had been ringing all along. He flinched at the noise, but did not move to answer it.
He wasn’t sad or angry. He wasn’t anything. He was just looking at the television when a cold wind came through the open door and caught his attention.
He didn’t think about what he did next. He just did it. He rose from a crouch and walked across the living room and out the door and down the steps, his pace gradually building speed.
* * * * *
We lived in trailers and pre-fabs and ranch-style homes and duplexes that ran up against alfalfa fields and sagebrush flats. Most evenings, when Jack ran his three-mile loop, children played in the streets while men read newspapers in their easy chairs and women stood in their gardens, trading gossip with their neighbors. But not today. Today everyone was huddled inside their living rooms, watching the television—their uncurtained windows emanating a cold blue light—when Jack hurried along the sidewalks, the empty streets.
A cool, October wind blew and carried the smell of bitterbrush into his lungs, souring him. The trees were bare-branched. The lawns were splotched with cancerous brown spots. The sky was full of clouds and the mountains were full of snow so that he could tell them apart only by guessing.
He could feel something coming alive inside him—something like a cigarette thrown in a trash can, tiny and unseen but smoldering away next to a crumpled-up piece of newspaper—and he tried to ignore it. He tried instead to concentrate on his feet—only his feet—lifting them up and slamming them down while thoughts of Alyssa flitted around the edge of his mind like moths batting against a lamp-lit window.
Rather than yellow running shorts, he wore khakis and a collared shirt. And rather than New Balance sneakers, he wore Nunn Bush dress shoes. His feet slipped around in them as the laces loosened and finally came undone, so that first one shoe and then the other kicked off and he continued his fast jog wearing only socks, his feet thudding against the concrete. In each leg a thistle of pain spread upward, rooted in his heel and flowering through his calf.
It was early evening, but he felt as if he were hurrying through the woods at midnight while carrying a flashlight that created a tunnel of light inside of which reached blackberry brambles and low-slung branches, leaving everything around him a great black mystery.
He did not feel our eyes on him when we rushed to the windows and drew aside the curtains, seeking in his expression some sense of how he saw the world around him and finding only the dark void of our television screens. Oh, terror—the feeling that follows the realization of absence—we knew you then. You found us.
You found him, with his vision two-layered, as he saw the video, the images from it tumbling out in pace with the squares of concrete beneath his feet. He ran faster and a capillary in his left eye burst and he began to cry blood. A diesel pickup roared down the peaceful street, with its trimmed hedges and friendly streetlamps, but otherwise his feet thudding against the concrete and the breath rasping in and out of his mouth were the only sounds.
Benjamin Percy has published two short story collections (Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk), and has a novel, The Wilding (Graywolf Press), forthcoming in 2009. He teaches at Iowa State.
