Back in One Piece

By Amanda Painter

“So, do you have any idea what your post will be — what your duties will be when you get over there?”

I was sitting next to Ricky on a low bench, the club’s colored lights flashing and loud salsa music pulsing around us, couples twirling to the beat.

“Yeah,” he said. “I jump out of a helicopter or airplane, kill people, get back into the helicopter or airplane, go back to the base and clean my weapon. Then I do it again.”

“Oh.”

The impact of that blunt simplicity reverberated to my core, which suddenly felt empty. I’ve known Ricky more than two and a half years; I’ve known he’s in the army since our first conversation on the dance floor. I knew he was being deployed from Maine to Afghanistan; that was the whole reason I’d come out of my informal salsa-dancing exile that night — to see him off. I should have known this could be the answer.

“For some reason I thought you might have some cushy desk job over there.”

“No — that’s what I had here since there’s nothing going on and they’re closing down the base.”

“Oh.”

I was not ignorant of the fact that Ricky’s seen combat before; I forget whether it was Iraq or Afghanistan. A year or two ago we were talking as he walked me to my car after dancing; I forget which summer. I think he wanted to get together, but I was too caught up in my own little emotional drama to be open to it. He recognized me as someone with a measure of awareness and intelligence in comparison to someone he was describing dating from the Boston salsa scene: the utter frustration — disgust even — of listening to her debate coffee-shop lattes with her friend. “I’ve seen my friend’s head get blown off,” he said.

The remark had caught me off guard then. I think maybe I was a bit frightened by whatever hidden wounds of his it might allude to, whatever ways his psyche has found to cope with first-hand violence. Somehow it was easy to let it slip from my immediate consciousness. It was easier only to see Ricky on the dance floor: his tall, beautiful black body with its slim waist, muscular shoulders and relaxed, confident movements; easy to smile back at his warm, friendly, sincerely open smile; easy to relax into him when we danced close, the faux-sex of salsa safely contained in the framework of formal dance and my instinctual trust in his intentions and boundaries.

I had set myself up for this collision with reality. The floor dropped away for a moment as we sat there in the club shouting in each other’s ears, the incongruity between the setting and the words exchanged a bit too much to reconcile.

We danced twice, and at the end of the evening during a long hug I told him to come back in one piece. It was the best cliché I could grab a hold of at the moment, as my mind tried to fit these pieces of Ricky together; the closest I could come to conveying my wish for his wholeness and healing and peace and my genuine love for his humanity. I hope somehow he could hear all of that through the conga drums and horns thumping through us both.