When the bombing started, J.T. Carter was deep in the bowels of a bank in Baltimore with a video camera on his shoulder, capturing, cinema verité, the mundane fate of everyone’s rent check.
 
Machine-clatter filling his ears, he stared through the lens at a shuffling deck of personal checks, a non-stop riffling flow like the first flourish of a magician’s card trick, but without end and performed by fingerless giants built of plastic and steel.  Across the room, the girl running the Damaged Item Sorter removed her radio earphones and announced over the rushing roar of a river of money, “Bush done it.  He’s whuppin’ ‘em.”
 
J.T. never took his eye from the viewfinder, just zoomed in a little tighter on the beautiful leafy flutter of paper in the grip of the rattling machine.
 
Later, at dinner with the video crew at a Hungarian restaurant, J.T. observed as if from outside his body as Gloria, the brunette actress who played the bank’s spokeswoman, flirted overtly with him. It was more than just the joking camaraderie that had grown between them during the day. At dessert, she stood behind him and rubbed his shoulders and neck. He stared at the tablecloth, enjoying her touch, but embarrassed. Meanwhile, the waiter, a lugubrious but talkative Eastern European, told in his thick accent, wide-eyed with fear, about his younger brother who was in the U.S. Army somewhere near Kuwait. The crew sat silent or fidgeting.
 
J.T. hadn't had sex in nearly two years. This was January; his divorce had been final last June, after a year of bruising court battles and depressed waiting. For months before that there had been nothing between him and his wife, no kissing, no touching, almost no speaking.
 
Now he was bitterly lonely. In many ways, his life was great; he enjoyed his work as never before, after making a career change a year previous. He had left a corporate accounting job to tackle the world of freelance photography, both still and video. He had even revised his identity; he was no longer Jeff (short for Jefferson) T. (for Thaddeus) Carter, named for stern ancestors in sepia photos.  “J.T.” looked so much better on his new business cards, and he liked how it sounded in the mouths of art directors and communications managers, his clients.  After six months of struggle, the new venture had finally begun to pay his bills, as long as he lived modestly. He felt he had found a sort of balance. But he still lived alone in a tiny drab apartment and had no social life except with his kids (daughter six, son four; fun but not exactly socially fulfilling). He was desperate to be caressed.
 
Also, there was a truth that J.T. was embarrassed about: he had never had sex with anyone but his ex-wife. Back home in rural Utah, in a family of faithful Mormons, that’s what was expected: marry young, as virgins, then be monogamous forever. For all of eternity. Even after he’d left that religion behind, come to live in the capital of worldliness, New York City, and wound up single, still his experience with any other woman’s body was limited to the occasional magazine and masturbatory fantasy. 
 
He wanted that situation to change. A few weeks earlier, on a shoot in Fort Lauderdale, he’d gone alone to a strip club and dropped a hundred bucks on sodas for a blonde with a Dutch accent and muscular thighs, watching her dance naked on his table. Later she’d met him at a coffee shop, told him all about her life, then walked away, leaving him with nothing to do but watch the sunrise on the beach until time for his flight back to New York.
 
So, after dinner, when Gloria whispered in his ear, “Come to my room,” he knew he would go. She was no more than a new acquaintance, with whom he had little in common, but he knew he would go.
 
Two hours later he hung in a tilting limbo, at once both pleasured and split. They had turned on the hotel TV; war news on all channels. They had chatted, kissed, were suddenly naked on the bed, his fingertips on her skin like latte silk, exquisite, smelling fresh from a shower. Her nipples were large and dark, and he thought of gulping rich, sweet coffee, nothing like his ex-wife’s, those sips of pale rose tea. And on TV, Desert Storm was in full swing! Who inhabited his body, doing this? Not himself, not himself. How could such opposites co-exist? Fresh-faced news anchors praising with pride the capabilities of America’s “smart” Patriot missiles—intelligent target-seeking! pinpoint accuracy!—and gravely condescending to those pathetic Iraqi “Scuds,” and the screen showing explosions in cheery green with a video-camera frame like a cross between home movies and Nintendo, and casualties counting up on candy-colored bar-charts like votes, and the sound of war as entertainment blaring on and on and on. And yet, and yet, here was a man—surely just a generic man, nameless, without history, a silly man—making urgent, fumbling love to a stranger in a hotel room in Baltimore. How could anything be real?
 
They didn’t speak. Her eyes stayed closed.
 
Afterward, they shut the TV off and in the blessed silence remembered the fun they’d had working together. He was glad they could return to that and shut everything else out. She clowned, miming the producer’s imaginary shocked reaction to this illicit employee rendezvous. They laughed a lot, then it was a quick kiss and an exaggerated play of stealth as he snuck out of her room to go back to his own and sleep.  
 
The next morning, J.T. said goodbye to Gloria and the rest of the video crew as they left for New York. He felt raw, as if his skin had been scraped, and he didn’t know how to speak to anyone, especially her. What did it mean? A new relationship? Another tour of duty in the battle zone of love? No? Then why not? 
 
He feared he’d been a disappointment the night before, yet she seemed to like him a lot, and there was no doubt he’d enjoyed her body. She was pretty and fun; he liked her. But she hadn’t spoken her feelings. What do New Yorkers do? He wasn’t one yet, not really. He was a Utah boy, and back in that world, there is no such thing as casual sex. Sex is a sacred manifestation of eternal love. Or, if not that, at least genuine relationship. Was he ready for that? Again? Or was this all just too dangerous?
 
He covered his turmoil with smiles and a stolen twinkle of eye contact with her, and the crew drove away. In that tiny glance was an agreement: yes, he’d be seeing her again, and his heart did a little happy dance. Even so, now he was relieved to be alone, alone to follow his plan: drive an hour to Washington DC, see the Paul Strand photography exhibit at the National Gallery, submerge himself in images, be simple, learn something real.
 
Strand was one of the mythic figures, the early giants of photography as a fine art, a pioneer from the days when the world must have been black and white. J.T. wandered as if in a meditation through the hushed, empty gallery rooms, where each warm-toned monochrome print hung in its own spotlight. Some were abstracts of form and line, shadow and light, close-up studies of everyday objects that turned them to classical architecture. Others were street portraits, faces of the rugged, the weathered, the poor, the workers of the world, images driven by the leftist politics that led Strand to become an expatriate at the dawn of the McCarthy era.
 
J.T. loved the fact that Strand had invented a sideways-shooting camera that could appear to be focused in one direction while shooting another, allowing him to capture his subject unaware, unposed, authentic. And he had pioneered documentary filmmaking as well: a man who crossed genres, linked across time in kinship with J.T., or with J.T.’s dreams of himself.
 
Hours passed. It felt to J.T. as if he were in a temple, his own private worship space, and he was fully immersed in seeing, thinking, absorbing into his body the perfect stillness and silence, the form, line, tone, and wordless meanings of the images. Eventually he was full and made his way out of the Strand show into the huge, vaulted lobby of the National Gallery and then out through the glass doors into the bright winter sunshine.
 
He walked from quiet into chaos. It had not occurred to him that the Mall would be crowded, packed from the Washington Monument to the Capitol with demonstrators—a noisy, colorful maelstrom, a circus of political viewpoints, people shouting, singing, handing out buttons and flyers—the whole gamut of ideologies, from the yellow ribbon crusaders to those who demanded we assassinate Bush and spare poor Saddam. Vietnam vets, tie-dyed teenagers, spiky punks, frisbees and dogs and 12-foot puppets on parade, music everywhere, and under it all a vibration of desperate anger, violence barely in check, hatred under the sun in a scene like some upside-down Woodstock.
 
J.T. stood stunned for a moment as if on the bank of a raging river, then he gripped the camera dangling from his neck and plunged in. For a half hour he operated on instinct and adrenaline, grabbing pictures through his wide-angle as the moments presented themselves, squinting, crouching, this way, that, everything on the fly, humans of every sort flowing in a loud, spastic current over him then gone.
 
But his energy couldn’t last. Something bubbled up from his heart and he suddenly stopped amidst the shouts and songs and anger, images of his children in his head along with utter bewilderment. How could it be that in twenty years America had come no further than this? How could we have learned nothing, nothing at all, from the horror of Vietnam? The whole scene was insane, impossible, a terrible recurring nightmare from which there was no escape. He fled.
 
Driving up 95 toward home, J.T.’s thoughts were a jumble: still, silvery forms bathed in spectral light; angry faces, wild motion and blaring sound; dreamlike memories of the night before, Gloria’s skin, hair, laughter, the sweetness of touching. Explosions. Bullet tracers in night-vision green. A blind beggar’s face in crisp sepia. Swirling flags, red-white-blue, peace chants and violent gestures. Deep, long kisses. Something big was happening to him. What did it all mean? His throat too full, he switched on the radio. A mistake. Nothing but dull reportage of death and atrocities in monotone voices, droning on. That was when, glazed eyes on the road, he slipped into the past.
 
I am running, running down a rutted, mountain road, endlessly running and shouting, “Help! Help! My dad is hurt!”
 
It is summer, 1973, and I am eleven years old, helping my dad with the sheep up on Boulder Mountain like I do every year. He is only 42, despite his craggy face like an old photograph and his limp from a sniper’s bullet. We are in the meadow near the camp wagon, and he has suddenly fallen to the ground, grabbing his left arm, moaning, eyes rolled up, pupils invisible. He won’t talk to me; I can’t pick him up; I don’t know what to do, I just run, run and cry and yell.
 
My dad is a strong man, a farmer, a veteran of the Korean War, a survivor of the useless slaughter at Pork Chop Hill. A man with strong opinions but very few words. After a hard day’s work and a silent dinner, he would sit and watch the 10 O’Clock News, a scary dark frown on his brow, and mutter “goddamn bastards” over and over. But I knew he wasn’t talking about the Viet Cong. He was talking about the generals and politicians and corporate bosses getting rich while young men bled and died in the muddy jungles. He didn’t care much for hippies and their protests, but he cared even less about military pride. When we pulled out of the war that spring, he grunted and nodded at the TV, as happy as I’d ever seen him.
 
I stumble and fall, scraping my palms on stones. I get up and run. I run until I think my heart and lungs will burst out of my chest, then I walk a little while, then I run again. When I get to the ranger’s station, it’s almost sunset. My breath is hoarse. I can barely walk or talk, but I say what I need to. As we race in his Jeep back up the bumpy road to the sheep camp, I struggle to keep from sobbing. I know we’re too late, I knew it all along.
 
I had heard the terrible groans from deep in my father’s chest, and then I had seen his lip quiver and heard him moan like a little child. And I had heard that last thing, a small mournful sigh that said all hope was forever gone, and then the words, “Oh no. Not another war.”
 
J.T. twitched, swerved, stomped on the brake as a carload of teenagers careened around him, cut him off by inches, loud music thumping, and sped off down an exit ramp. A hand out the window flipped him the finger. They were yelling, laughing, kids having fun. Eyes suddenly blurry, he wrestled his car to a skidding stop on the side of the highway, heart thumping from the nearness of death. Those teens were who he’d been way back when; they were what his children would soon become. How many in that car would die in a foreign desert, for nothing? Were his children facing a future of bleak struggle, of poisoned water, brown air, endless endless war? 
 
He switched off the radio and leaned his head on the steering wheel, trying and trying to stop his thoughts, to think about nothing but the beauty of art and the imminent possibility of new love, until finally his shaking hands grew calm. He wiped the tears from his eyes and looked up. The road ahead was empty. He put his car in gear, checked his mirrors, and stepped on the gas.
 
 
© Brent Robison 2023
 
This is an excerpt of the novel A Book with No Author by Brent Robison, Recital Publishing 2023.