“Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’
He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’” — Mark 5:9
He is my age — or younger? —
but walks with a cane, his gait halting and labored.
Crew cuts reveals a white, snaking scar curving around his head.
Muscular and stocky, his right arm thick with rope-like muscles
but his left arm ends at his elbow, interrupted by shrapnel.
Now back on the other side of the sea
he still lives among the tombs of his buddies who were flown home in caskets
now buried in Arlington.
Neither painkiller nor anti-depressants nor a constant string of cigarettes have the strength to subdue the darkness — the dull ache of day, the gripping nightmares of sleep.
It is my third day at the clinic; he recognizes me and wants to flirt with me
but he can’t remember my name.
“Sorry,” he says. “Ever since they blew out part of my brain in Iraq, I forget shit sometimes.”
I nod, say nothing, and do not start to weep until I am safely home.
I imagine him as a baby — tiny, perfect, hot from the womb of his mother and the cosmos.
I want to embrace him, hold him tight against the solidness of my body until his shaking stops and he sleeps in heavenly peace.
I want him to hear God singing over his own shouting. I want to send the memories and images of sand, camouflage, Humvees, explosions, mutilated bodies into the molten earth, the deep, salty waters where they can be lost in Her vastness, absorbed into the Whole where they can compost and decay, transformed into rich, silty, generative soil from which grow June-blooming magnolias, tall stalks of wheat swaying in the Minnesota breeze, migrating flocks of geese.
I want to take the shards of his story, to bury this brokenness and bind his wounds with perfumed oil and soft linen.
to call back the humanity that was boot-camped out of him.
to cast out the cloudiness of brain-injured thinking: call in a whole body, a quiet mind.
to whisper to him the promise that despite the wandering right eye which betrays massive head trauma and the pins in his knee, there is still a heart inside him that was loved into being by She who holds us in rippling waves of grace.
to quiet his howls so he can hear that heart beating, the ongoing miracle of existence.
I imagine him running along Memorial Drive at sunset, sleeping dreamlessly in a wife’s arms, singing throaty songs of resurrection at Sunday Mass.
I want to send him home to his family, to proclaim with wonder the story of descent and return from hell, of being raised from the dead; the story of a demon cast out.