Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Read Free Book Online

slipping off. He fumbled with the strap, trying to tighten it and keep pace at the same time. Sweat poured down his face as if he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool. He seemed on the verge of collapse.
    “I know that man,” I said.
    “Thank you,” Roberto shouted.
    The man reached into one of the many pockets on his jacket and withdrew a handkerchief. In one clean motion, he brought the handkerchief down across his dripping face. Then he turned and looked at me.
The man I didn’t know
.
    “Hey,” I called. I smiled and waved.
    He squinted. He seemed to be looking at me and then beyond me. The attitude of haughty disdain that he’d had that day at the bus stop had been replaced by a look of fatigue and befuddlement. I wondered if Quincy and Troy were with him, and I scrutinized the lines of marching soldiers. An instant later, the man I didn’t know had passed, and all I could see was his back, with his enormous pack weighed down by the essentials and an antenna sticking out.
    I cried out after him, “I told you there wasn’t going to be a draft!”
    In August something strange happened: it got cold. In one day, it plummeted from a record high of 107 to 95 degrees. This felt like relief. But after that the temperature kept dropping, until by the middle of the month it was fifty-three. In the beginning of the cold snap, everyone was happy, and then everyone was scared. Everyone was saying that if it was fifty degrees in August, what was it going to be in December.
    Things got busy at work and I didn’t see Roberto for a while. We made plans and I canceled plans, and then we made plans again. He said he really wanted to watch that funny buddy road movie we never got to watch. He said he had my money. All of it. Or almost all of it. I wanted to tell him not to worry about it, that it didn’t matter, but it did matter, and Irationalized that paying me back would help teach him something about responsible American citizenship.
    We finally arranged to meet on Saturday morning at ten o’clock.
    The night before, I was lying in bed, watching the news about some bad things that had happened in Maple Tree Heights, when it was interrupted by a special report: the war had begun. The invasion was being broadcast live, lots of lights and flashes and little bursts of smoke from afar.
Rat-a-tat-tat
. Instead of troops landing on the peninsula, as we had been led to believe, they were coming down over the mountains. The peninsula strategy had all been a deft misdirection to fool the enemy. Ten thousand feet high, the mountains were. Up one side and down the other, a hundred thousand troops on the move. It was going to take them a week to make the crossing. What was it like, I wondered, to reach the summit?
    I stayed up late, flipping back and forth between channels. The channels all showed the same footage, and all the experts agreed: “Resistance was futile.”
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” the newscaster said, “blink and you might miss this war.”
    In the morning my car was broken again, it wouldn’t start, and I had to walk to Roberto’s. It was freezing. It might as well have been winter. The sun was hidden and the wind blew hard, whipping the flags around. People drove past me and honked in unity.
    When I got to Roberto’s apartment, I was numb. My nose was running and I had to pee. The gate to the cobbler’s was up, but the shop looked unattended. I pounded my hands togetherand stomped my feet to get the blood going. Five minutes into waiting, I began to suspect that Roberto was about to come around the corner and “surprise” me with another box of electronics. Five minutes after that, I took my chances and shouted up to the window. “
Robbie!
”
    Immediately the cobbler came out. He looked at me and sucked in the sides of his cheeks.
    “The doorbell doesn’t seem to be working,” I said sarcastically.
    He shook his head. “No talk here,” he said. His eyes were tense and bloodshot, and he puffed hard