Pig Lab
Late as I was, I figured I’d be walking right into an active scenario. Crazy Omar, maybe. Or Outnumbered and Outgunned. I thought I’d hear the thud of stun grenades and hillbilly shouts of “Allahu akbar! ” I expected to taste the bitter clouds of cordite drifting over the lawn and see the green muzzle flash of machine guns firing blanks on full auto. Above all, I assumed I’d find wounded pigs dying on the grass, and the boys elbow deep in their salvation.
Turned out, however, that I hadn’t missed much. The pig men were in the trailer, knocking out the pigs with anesthesia. The pigs, perhaps sensing the looming betrayal, or at least recognizing a serious departure from their bottle-fed, sunny upbringing, fought back. Hooves banged against the metal floor. Squeals cut through the cool air. Steam leaked through the trailer’s slats. Pig fear had the same sour reek as our fear.
I found the boys stooging in a patch of morning sun at the base of our compound’s tower.
Ted Waters, with his real leg crossed over his mechanical one, eyeballed my approach. “Nice of you to join us,” he said.
Bing Thomas spoke out of the corner of his new mouth. “Look who deshided to show up.”
Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.
I’d planned to arrive early, before the boys and before the pig men, just as I had for the previous pig labs I’d attended in preparation for my troop’s deployments. I liked to give myself time to prepare for the day’s events. The scenarios were nothing more than window dressing—meant to evoke the chaotic night raids that would be our mission downrange. It was the pigs that had me worried. A pig’s face might remind me of Bing’s old face. Or a pig’s leg lying off to the side, detached and jittering, could resemble Ted’s leg. I’d wanted to arrive early enough to think through these possibilities and allow other, half-forgotten things to bubble to the surface. But, just as I was about to leave the house, my wife, Allison, had screamed from the upstairs bedroom.
“Circumstances beyond my control,” I explained to the boys.
The trailer’s back gate swung open, and a pig man wearing a blacksmith’s apron emerged. He’d been blown up, I guessed, then put back together minus some pieces. I suspected this because a curious light shone from around his joints, as if some kind of spell held him together, specifically the type of spell that would break if anyone drew attention to it. He wore a red beard that looked like it had been carved out of wood, dipped in wax, and clicked into place. He approached us on a curve.
“Who’s done this before?” he asked.
I raised my hand.
Red Beard spoke in a low, electric monotone. “Someone besides him, then. Why are we here?”
Officially, we were there to learn—via live, unconscious, anesthetized, and wounded pigs—how to manage battlefield amputations, hemorrhaging, sucking chest wounds, skull fractures, and the like. Unofficially, however, this was a sacrifice—pigs instead of us.
An answer to Red Beard’s question came from behind me: “We’re here to fuck up some pigs.”
No one laughed.
“Who said that?” Red Beard asked.
It was the new guy. Untested as he was, his body was whole, and his mind was intact. As a result, his voice was confident, clear, and amplified by an empty-headed belief in his own good intentions.
New Guy tried to fix himself. “It was a stupid joke,” he said.
From the pig trailer came a bang, followed by a muffled squeal.
“These pigs are our brothers, not jokes,” Red Beard said.
“I’m sorry,” New Guy said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Red Beard nodded, and a flash of light escaped from a scar on his neck.
“Sorry’s not good enough. You can leave.”
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Will Mackin read “Pig Lab.”
Allison’s scream was not that of a full-grown woman, the kind I’d heard on so many night raids. There was no depth to it, no hint of recognition of the horror that had provoked it. It was, instead, the simple, guileless scream of a young girl, which meant that my wife was having a flashback.
I ran upstairs and into the bedroom, where I found the bed empty, the covers flung aside.
I got on my hands and knees to look under the bed, which was supposed to be Allison’s safe place. This had been decided in therapy, which we’d signed up for after Allison had got pregnant, and her memories, which she’d suppressed for decades, had started to become a problem. The therapist was a round, soft woman who sat cross-legged on a fuzzy couch. Allison and I sat on a smooth couch opposite her. There was a glass coffee table between us, and under that was a cardboard box full of toys. A big clock hung on the wall, ticking softly.
The therapist said that Allison needed a place to go where she would feel protected. When Allison couldn’t think of a safe place on her own, the therapist suggested under the bed. I wanted to hug my wife and tell her that everything was going to be all right. I wanted to convince her of this with the kind of hug that was a safe space in and of itself, that would feel like the inverse of all those dark and musty spaces that the boys and I, while rooting out the enemy downrange, had torn big loud holes in. But, as the therapist explained to me, Allison needed to be in a place where no one would try to convince her of anything.
I didn’t find her under the bed. I didn’t find her in the bathroom, either. She wasn’t curled up under the toilet tank, where I’d discovered her once before. Nor was she lying fetal and naked in the cold and empty tub.
In the four months that Allison had been pregnant, I’d learned a few of the things that triggered her flashbacks: Her father’s birthday was one. Her mother’s birthday, just two days later, was another. The smell of spoiled milk (which, until age thirteen, she had thought was the smell of fresh milk); and the sight of the little girl from down the street, standing off to the side, away from the other kids at the bus stop, with her dirty face, uncombed hair, dingy stockings, and untied shoes.
Allison was thirty-one years old, tall with long auburn hair and a bright smile. In the throes of a flashback, however, she became a terrified child. Her heart hammered away, her eyes flickered, and her voice grew tiny and plaintive. The flashbacks often happened at dawn, as the world was coming into focus, or in the evening, when it was starting to dim. The moment a flashback began, Allison would hide. I did not turn on the lights to find her, and I did not call her name, because these were things that her father had done. Instead, I stood quietly and listened.
Explosions had all but ruined my hearing. As a result, there was no such thing as quiet. Sometimes crickets chirped in my head. Other times, a phantom string quartet warmed up. Standing in our bedroom that morning, I heard a pot of water rumbling to a boil.
Then, from the baby’s room, I heard a whimper and a thump.
Pigs were lined up on their backs on the grass, anesthetized, mouths wide open, tongues hanging out, eyes slammed shut. Armed pig men stood at either end of the line. Closest to the fence was a pig man with a rubber hand, who was gripping a hatchet with his flesh-and-blood hand. The pig man at the other end of the line wore an eye patch and carried an M4. These two stood ready to wound the pigs as soon as Red Beard was done saying goodbye.
Red Beard knelt alongside a pig, kissed the top of its head, and gave it a hug. Slowly, he rose to his feet and moved on to the next pig.
I walked over to where Red Beard was kneeling. Eye Patch rocked on the balls of his feet and hummed. Sunlight chimed off Rubber Hand’s hatchet blade. Red Beard’s palm rested on the pig’s chest, right above its heart. My shadow fell on him.
“What do you say we call this off?” I said.
The sun, directly behind me, gave my shadow a halo. Red Beard looked up at me. “How so?” he asked.
“You take the pigs back to the farm, and I take the boys back to the compound. If higher asks me how the training went, I’ll say it was great.”
“But your men haven’t done the training.”
“Yeah, they have. All of them did it, except the guy you sent home.”
“None of them raised their hands.”
“They don’t like raising their hands. It makes them feel stupid.”
“What about good order and discipline?”
The light that shone from Red Beard’s joints brightened.
“Were you like this before?” I asked.
I had been walking behind Ted Waters on that blue night, along the highway outside Marjah, in Afghanistan, when the bomb took his leg. The explosion had balled me up, shoved me aside, and pelted me with hot stones. Aside from a sharp ringing in my ears, however, I was fine. I’d knelt next to Ted as he lay on his back, conscious and bleeding on the pavement. “What happened?” he’d asked me as I fastened a tourniquet around his tattered thigh, then looked at my watch. It was twenty-three minutes after midnight, so I wrote “0023” in grease pencil on Ted’s forehead. “You’re going to be fine,” I’d said. But Ted had already begun to realize that he was not going to be fine. And every now and then since, whenever things were quiet and no one was paying attention, he thought back to a time when he was fine. Now it seemed as if Red Beard were remembering, too.
“You can’t choose the things you want to do versus those things you don’t,” Red Beard said.
“My wife is pregnant,” I told him.
“Congratulations,” Red Beard said. “I have a newborn son myself.”
After Ted Waters and Bing Thomas were wounded, I put them both on injured reserve, thinking that I was doing them a favor. They could retire early with full benefits, and they could have a go at becoming normal citizens. But they refused. They both wanted back in. I thought this was insane, so I made them an insane proposal. If they could get through Hell Week again, I’d sign waivers for the face and the leg. It wasn’t pretty, but they made it.
“We could save them both,” I said to Red Beard. “My kid and your kid. We could stop this nonsense right now and maybe they won’t have to go to war.”
“How so?”
“You take the pigs back to the farm, and I take the boys back to the compound. If higher asks me how the training went, I’ll say it was great.”
I thought of the big dry-erase board hanging in our ops shed, where all our names, specialties, and requirements were gridded out in black marker. A green check mark in a box meant that a particular block of refresher training, required prior to our next deployment—Marksmanship, Free Fall, Clandestine Entry—had been completed. An open box meant incomplete. Bing Thomas had drawn this grid by hand, following each warped line with a slightly more warped line until the grid practically curled under itself. Pig Lab was the last column on the grid. Its deformed and empty boxes appeared to have been crushed under a landslide of green checks.
“Then what?” Red Beard asked.
Of course I’d imagined a world where pigs were humans and we were pigs. Where pigs fought wars while wanting to save their fellow-pigs from death. Where pigs learned from humans how to save themselves.
In this upside-down world there’d be a pig like Ted Waters, who, one blue winter night on a concrete highway outside Marjah, had his leg blown off by a bomb disguised as a guardrail. And there’d be a pig like me, who’d knelt beside Ted and applied the tourniquet just as he’d been trained to do. Then, a month later, in Khost, a pig like Bing Thomas would have opened a booby-trapped door and had his face sheared off. And a pig like me would have picked Bing’s face up off the dirt, rinsed it in cold water from his canteen, and felt the skin flex in the palm of his hand.
Now I was on my back in the grass that grew dark and thick all around the tall, concrete tower. My jaw was slack, my eyes were slammed shut, and my tongue hung out, touching the ground. I tasted dirt and chlorophyll. The black sun shone through my tightly closed eyelids, and I could feel myself gently rising and falling as if I were lying in a rowboat on the ocean. A deep incision ran from the base of my throat to my navel. My sternum was fractured, my rib cage pried open. Cool shadows of puffy clouds floated across my exposed heart, which the pigs took turns touching with their snouts.
With their snouts, the pigs would feel each beat of my heart the way a human would feel a silver dollar that had been flipped in the air then caught in an open palm, flipped and caught, coming up heads or tails, whichever side had been called when the coin was at its apogee. The pigs would know, from my heart’s predictability, that the spark of life is durable. And they would learn that, no matter how bad a situation appears, it could always be worse. I didn’t understand their language, but I knew what the pigs were saying to one another, because it was the same stuff that the boys and the pig men say to one another.
New Pig, who had apparently been allowed back into the group after Red Pig had calmed down and accepted his apology for joking about their human brothers, touched my naked heart with his cold, wet snout, tickling me and making me snicker.
“This one is a rascal,” New Pig said, of me.
“You know it,” Red Pig said. “He opens doors with his hands.”
“Also plays fetch,” Eye-Patch Pig said.
“I never heard of a human that could fetch,” New Pig said.
“You should come out to the farm sometime,” Red Pig said.
Mention of the farm brought to mind a make-believe oasis of sunshine, warm fields of thick, green grass, fat red apples hanging from a tree, oats mixed with brown sugar in the trough, and a cool, clear stream winding through the center of it all.
“Look,” Red Pig said, nodding toward me on the grass, my white heart thudding slowly in my open chest. “That’s a strong, steady heartbeat. He can keep going like that for a while.”
The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and I shivered. I thought of Allison lying in the cold and empty bathtub. As I lifted her out of the tub, she’d pleaded with me to stop touching her.
“Everybody had a turn?” Red Pig asked. No one answered.
“O.K.,” Red Pig said. “Anybody not had a turn, raise your hand.”
The pigs just looked at him.
I sat cross-legged on the shag carpet next to the blue toybox. Its wooden lid rattled.
“No,” Allison said, from inside. She sounded small and far away.
“It’s O.K.,” I said. “It’s me.”
Allison had scooped all the toys out of the box and tossed them on the floor. New toys, like the spaceship and the motorcycle, were piled on old toys, like the cowboy I’d had as a kid.
Once upon a time, this cowboy had bent at the knees, elbows, shoulders, and hips. I’d taken him everywhere with me. Then one summer day, at the neighborhood pool, where I was taking swimming lessons, bullies had pulled my cowboy apart and left all his pieces in a glass ashtray. When I found him, I was inconsolable. I cried non-stop for the cowboy, but also for myself, and for my mother, my father, my brother, my sister. Death would not spare us, either.
My father used a powerful glue to reassemble the cowboy, which twenty-five years later still smelled like orange peels. The cowboy wore the brown vest that I’d cut for him out of felt. The shape of his face was unchanged, but its features, drawn in black ink on soft plastic, had faded away.
“It’s Monday, September 8, 2009. We’re in our house on Rockrose Lane. You’re safe here,” I told Allison through the toybox lid.
“No-o-o-o,” she moaned.
Allison wasn’t big by any stretch. Even pregnant, she maintained her lithe shape from her swimming days. And she’d always been flexible, but she still shouldn’t have fit in the toybox. In the throes of a flashback, however, she underwent some kind of transformation that allowed her to occupy otherwise impossible spaces. I’d seen something like this performed on a TV show called “That’s Incredible,” where a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound yogi had folded himself into a plexiglass cube half the size of the toybox. You could see the yogi through the transparent walls of the cube, his serene face surrounded by limbs like so many spare parts. Allison was similarly contorted whenever I found her mid-flashback. Unlike the yogi, however, she was unable to escape whatever predicament she’d got herself into. When she’d jammed herself under the toilet tank, for example, I’d had to drain the tank, remove it, and pull the bowl out of the floor to free her.
“We love our house,” I whispered through the side of the toybox. “It’s white with black shutters. You painted the front door red. You planted flowers in the beds.”
“No,” she said.
“I’m thirty-two years old and you’re thirty-one. My hair’s falling out. We’re in the baby’s room on the second floor. We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet. We don’t know if we want to know. The baby’s room is yellow, the same color it was when we bought the house. We don’t know what color to paint it yet.”
Allison’s hand shot out from under the lid of the toybox and grabbed me by the collar.
“Quiet,” she pleaded. “He’ll find us.”
Allison didn’t know whether her father was dead or alive, let alone where he might be. I’d tried to find out, secretly. I’d given the spooks at the compound—the same men and women who, at the time, were spending all day and night searching the dark web for Osama bin Laden—Allison’s father’s name. I’d told them what Allison had told me—that her father had driven a van that smelled like buttermilk, that as a young man he’d aspired to join the San Francisco Ballet, and that, later in life, he’d impersonated a dentist in Milwaukee. No detail, no matter how incomplete or far-fetched, was irrelevant to their search. The spooks had plugged all this information into the algorithm—the same system that had delivered us Mohammed Atef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and al-Zarqawi—and it had come up with a brother, working in a muffler shop in Palo Alto.
“He won’t find you,” I said.
She pulled her hand back inside the toybox and its lid clapped shut.
Rubber Hand with his hatchet, and Eye Patch with his M4, had done their work. The hatchet had fallen with the soft sound of dirt filling a hole. The M4 had discharged what looked like powerful gusts of wind. The pig men had crossed paths at the midpoint in the line of pigs, where each, in turn, deferred to the other as if he were opening a door for a lady, before continuing on to the other end. We weren’t supposed to watch.
“Y’all line up on a pig,” Red Beard said.
A dozen pigs lay face up on the grass, hurt, doped, and smiling. I chose one with a freckled belly. A first-aid kit and a bottle of water lay on the grass beside him.
Red Beard held up a first-aid kit. “Same stuff we carry in the field, minus the fentanyl lollipop, which is a controlled substance.”
“Which is the tits,” Eye Patch said.
Red Beard continued. “When I say ‘Go,’ approach your wounded and do an assessment. Pat and swipe. Don’t try to put any outside stuff back inside. Leave that for the surgeons at the CASH. Your job is to prepare your brother for the journey. Project calm. Look him in the eye and tell him it’s going to be O.K. Tell him he’s going to make it. Raise your hand if you have questions.”
No one raised his hand.
“Go.”
My pig was heavier than I’d expected. His practically nonexistent neck bent in a very human way. Otherwise, I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. I raised my hand.
Red Beard knelt next to me, and light shone from his knees. “Whatcha got?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Talk to him.”
The pig looked at me out of one eye.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. “Where’s it hurt?”
The pig blew a pink snot bubble out of one nostril. Red Beard pointed at it.
“What’s that tell you?” he asked.
“Collapsed lung?” I guessed.
“Right on,” Red Beard said. “Now what?”
Inside the first-aid kit was a prepackaged needle that could be used to create a vent in the case of a collapsed lung. I peeled open this package, removed the needle, and held it between my teeth. I felt for the pig’s ribs with my fingertips. Into a soft spot between two ribs, I drove the needle home. There was a pop. The pig sighed and relaxed.
Red Beard nudged me aside. He put his ear to the pig’s chest and listened for a heartbeat. He pried open the pig’s eyelids and stared into his giant pupils.
“He’s gone,” he said.
The pig men huddled by the tower. Eye Patch toed the grass and Rubber Hand hummed “Dixie” while Red Beard wrote in a little green notebook with a stubby red pencil.
It was the same notebook-pencil combination that I used on missions downrange. I wrote call signs, frequencies, rendezvous coördinates, Zulu times, and Julian dates in that notebook’s blue-lined pages. Just strings of numbers, mostly, that would otherwise be shoved out of short-term memory by more numbers. But, when I looked back through those notebooks, the way the numbers slanted or grew large or turned shaky across the page told me all I needed to know about the night on which they’d been written, and therefore served as a kind of memory.
Red Beard waved me over. He pointed the eraser of his pencil at my dead pig, lying in an oval of flat grass.
“Minus this one, your troop don’t make the cut,” he told me.
“You get that guy who saved two pigs?” Eye Patch asked.
New Guy, in his exuberance, had patched a sucking chest wound on one pig then clamped another pig’s severed artery.
“I got him,” Red Beard said.
“We could round up?” Rubber Hand suggested.
“This ain’t tiddlywinks,” Red Beard said.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” I said.
None of them acted like they’d heard me.
“We could redo the first thing,” Rubber Hand said.
“Then we’ll run out of pigs for the last thing,” Red Beard said.
“If I leave now, I can get to the farm and back before you’re done with the next thing,” Eye Patch said.
“This can-do attitude?” I interrupted. “This make-it-happen-at-all-costs? It’s unnatural. We gotta stop.”
“You take one-sixty-five down to sixty-eight?” Rubber Hand asked Eye Patch.
“This time of day,” Eye Patch said.
“Leave the trailer here, and put, like, six pigs in the cab,” Red Beard said.
“I’d knock ’em out first,” Rubber Hand said.
Just then my pig jumped to its feet and shook the wet blades of grass off its back.
“There you go,” Red Beard said.
The sun was on its way up, and birds were chirping in the bare branches of the oak tree outside the window. Allison was still in the toybox, curled up, I imagined, with her knees at her chin and her elbows at her ankles. I talked to her the way the therapist had recommended—slowly and steadily, with a focus on our immediate surroundings and the current situation, in hopes that this intonation of our state of affairs would end her flashback and return her to the present day. I had just started talking about the future.
“I want our lives to calm down,” I said. “I want us to sit on the porch, watch the sun set over the canal, let our kids play in the yard, and . . .”
Boom! Allison’s foot broke through one side of the toybox. Her bare and scraped-up leg hung out from mid-thigh.
Crack!
She elbowed out the front panel of the toybox, then rolled out of the wreckage and onto her hands and knees. Her hair was matted and her eyes were wild.
“There are snakes in the back yard,” she said.
“What kind of snakes?” I asked. I’d never seen one.
“Cottonmouths. They come up from the canal and sun themselves on the grass. You need to get rid of them.”
“As soon as I come home from work,” I said.
“No. Do it now,” she said.
The final scenario was Burning Down the House. Eye Patch carried the last pig up the stairs of the tower all the way to the roof, where he laid it down on the gritty, sunbaked surface. Then he looked over the edge and down at Red Beard, who was looking up at him from a gas valve the size of a ship’s wheel.
“That does it!” Eye Patch said.
Red Beard made a mark in his notebook.
“Come on down!” he said.
Before we’d commandeered it for our purposes, this tower had been a training aid for the fire department. As such, it had been a placeholder for all homes in the area that might one day catch fire. So it was also a proxy for the two-story Colonial, on the banks of the muddy canal, where Allison and I lived. And it stood in for the house three doors down, identical to ours in every way save its crooked shutters and dead shrubs, where the dishevelled little girl from the bus stop lived.
Ted Waters sat on the grass near the fence. He’d undone the rubber bands that held his mechanical leg in place and set it aside. He was scratching the dirt where his shin would have been, watching the situation develop. As Eye Patch descended the stairs of the tower, whistling a carefree, shuffling tune, Ted stood up and hopped over to me.
“Do something!” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“You got a big yard. Take these pigs in. Let ’em grow old.”
Earlier that morning, while I was standing in the back yard with a shovel, cottonmouths had come up from the canal. They’d slithered uphill through the grass toward the house. They’d lunged at me with their fangs out. I’d lowered the shovel and, one by one, chopped off eight heads. I’d left the heads in the grass as a warning to the rest.
“My wife doesn’t want any critters in the back yard,” I said.
“Stand clear!” Red Beard hollered.
New Guy stood facing the tower with his sleeves rolled up, hands on his hips, and chest out. He shouted at us over his shoulder, “Who’s with me?”
Red Beard turned the valve on a six-inch gas line. This fat line fed a series of narrower pipes in the tower, which ran along the corners of every floor, wall, and ceiling, and were perforated to spray gas into the rooms. With the valve wide open this system made a noise like a hovering spaceship.
Bing Thomas ran over to me and nudged Ted Waters aside. The expression on Bing’s face alternated between satanic and serene. His crooked nose honked like a kazoo.
“I ain’t running into no burning building,” he said.
“Fear is an illusion!” New Guy announced.
The igniter was wired to a red button inside a little black box mounted to a wooden post. Red Beard opened the door to this box and pushed the button. The fuse clicked softly. The spark sounded like a stick breaking in half. Then—whoomp!—flames jumped from the tower’s open windows and stood straight up against the light-blue sky.
Heat from the fire warmed my face. It toasted my chest through my shirt. It sucked a draft out of the swamp which smelled like rotten eggs. Pig screams were no different from our screams.
Bing Thomas ran into the tower with one eye shut. Ted Waters reattached his leg on the fly. New Guy didn’t budge, so the boys and I parted around him and came together on the other side. ♦