Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack Read Free Book Online

closed.” Lisa kicked a crumpled Coke can. The tin skittered ahead over the pavement. We followed its clunky dance down the street. I saw a poster, faded already and peeling from the side of a building: “These colors don’t run.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Oh, yeah,” she said. “America is like that now.”
    “But what does it mean?”
    “You know, like red, white, and blue,” she said.
    I looked at her.
    “You know how colors run? They fade, they run?”
    “Oh!” I said. “Oh.”
    “Yeah,” said Lisa. “So, the colors don’t run, but also, Americans don’t run. Like that.”
    “Okay,” I said, and laughed nervously.
    “Yeah,” said Lisa.
    We were drawing closer and I was feeling sick to my stomach. Cold was seeping through my jeans and the coffee buzz was fading.
    “Forget it,” I said. “We don’t have to go all the way down.”
    “We’re almost there.”
    “I don’t want to anymore.”
    Walking back we came across a group of tourists. They wore red, white, and blue sweatshirts and stared somberly at the buildings. Their cheeks were ruddy and chapped.
    I met another friend during the gray afternoon, and the two of us stole into a bar. We sat in the flat winter light, the bar deserted around us. I was into my second glass of wine when it came to me that I had to get out. Immediately. Out of New York. Away from the big buildings, the tourists, and the somber, awkward mood. It was more than I wanted: September long gone, and the clump of people who fussed nervously over the leftovers of violence, looking for grief and meaning in a hole in the ground. “I’m going straight home,” I told her. “What do you think?”
    “You should,” she agreed boozily.
    On the curb I flagged a cab to Penn Station and bought a ticket on the next train to Hartford. If you have cash in your pocket you can change scenery just like that, leave and forget. Everything in America is easily gotten, I remembered—as long as you can pay for it.
    I have a friend, a Russian man. He told me about his mandatory stint in the Soviet army. He said, “Every single day was absolute shit. I was beaten and abused. I froze my feet, my ears, my balls off. And yet whenI remember it now, it was the best time of my life. Because I was young and I was overcoming obstacles. When you are young and you live through an unbelievably hard time, you remember it later as the best time of your life.”
    And that was part of it, too. I dreamed about dead children and bullets on mountain passes. But then I was already nostalgic, for Afghanistan and for myself in Afghanistan, for the rush of sights and feelings, the crystal cut of every moment, sun so sharp it sliced newer, flatter surfaces. Now I was shipwrecked in the trappings of home, car, job, and country.
    It was a strange time to come home. From television screens and podiums, politicians urged America to be frightened, and the people nodded and agreed to be afraid. Mortality predictors glittered on the television networks, meters striped in the colors of the rainbow—red for severe, orange for high; angry, flashing hues. Never blue for guarded or green for low. Terrorism had become the most important question—everybody thought so, all at once. I read that terrorism had inspired Americans to appreciate their families; to report suspicious behavior; to eat macaroni and cheese for comfort. People had begun to imagine the country as a place waiting to get hit, defined by impending violence. And yet there was the war. We were warriors abroad and victims at home, and it didn’t add up to anything coherent.
    It was January when I unlocked the door and cracked into the museum vault of my Houston duplex. I could barely shove the door open against the landslide of mail, months’ worth of defaulted bills and defunct magazines and slick department store circulars, all the yellowing
Houston Chronicle
s and
New York Times
es that had come until the subscriptions petered out, shoved through