RainStorm

have lived, and today he
    would be married, to a pretty Vietnamese girl, a fighter, as he had
    been, and they would have three or four children, who would
    revere their parents for the sacrifices they had made during the
    war. Maybe his first grandchild would have been born recently.
    Maybe he would have wept with terrible joy as he hugged his
    child's child to his own thin chest, thinking how strange life was,
    how precious.
    Maybe.
    I sighed, watching Crawley's oddly canted form. He looked relaxed,
    somehow, untroubled, as cadavers often do.
    In developed countries most people live their lives without ever
    even seeing a body, or, if they do, it's an open-casket affair, where
    you have context and witness only the peaceful, ruddy-cheeked
    facade of the mortician's artifice. When Mom and Dad die, they're
    taken care of by strangers in a nursing home two towns over. The
    kids don't have to see them go. They don't even have to see them
    after. They just get a "we're sorry to inform you" call late that night
    from the institution's management, for whom such calls are as routine
    as putting out the weekly garbage is for a suburban homeowner.
    The funeral home picks up the body. The cemetery buries
    it. Unless you're a professional, you might live your whole life
    without seeing someone in the moment of leaving his own.
    People don't know. They don't know the way the jaw goes slack,
    how the skin turns instantly waxy and yellow, how readily the eyelids
    close when you ease them shut. They don't know the awful
    smell of blood and entrails, or how, even if you can wash the stench
    from your skin, nothing can ever cleanse it from your memory.
    They don't know a hundred other things. You might as well ask
    them about the mechanics of butchering the animals that become
    the meat on their supper tables. They don't 'want to see any of that,
    either. And things are set up so they don't have to.
    Sometimes I can forget the divide this knowledge produces, the
    way it separates me from those unburdened by its weight. Mostly,
    though, I can't. Midori sensed it even from the beginning, I think,
    although it wasn't until later that she fully grasped its essence.
    Yeah, sometimes I can forget, but never for very long. Mostly I
    look at the innocents around me with disdain. Or resentment. Or
    envy, when I'm being honest with myself. Always with alienation.
    Always from a distance that has nothing to do with geography.
    I walked over to the door and looked through the peephole.
    There was nothing out there.
    I let myself out, checking to ensure that the door had locked
    behind me. I left through the front entrance, just another resident,
    heading out for the evening. Someone new was at the front desk.
    Even if the college girl had still been there, she wouldn't have recognized
    me. The light disguise I had been wearing earlier was gone,
    of course; but more than that, I was a different person now. Then, I
    had been a timid immigrant in a cheap, ill-fitting windbreaker, a visitor
    to the building. Now I walked as though I owned the place, a
    resident in a professional-looking overcoat, on his way out to a foreign
    car and thence to an important job at the office, a responsible
    position that no doubt occasionally required evening hours.
    I left the building and crossed the street. I took off the galoshes,
    put them in the briefcase, and got in the car. I drove a few miles to
    another strip mall, where I changed into some of the clothes I was
    traveling with: gray worsted pants and an olive, lightweight Merino
    wool crewneck sweater. I slipped the overcoat back on and was glad
    for its warmth.
    For the next hour or so I drove around suburban Virginia, stopping
    at gas stations and convenience stores and fast food places,
    depositing a relic or two from the Crawley job at each of them until
    the briefcase was empty and it, too, had been discarded, in a dumpster
    at a Roy Rogers. I pitched it in with the other refuse and
    watched a small avalanche of fast food wrappers cascade down and
    bury it.
    I walked back to the car. The leafless trees along the road looked
    skeletal against the night sky beyond. I paused and stared for a long
    moment at that sky, at whatever might lie beyond it.
    Oh, did I offend you? I thought. Go ahead, then. Take your best shot.
    I'm right here.
    Nothing happened.
    A minute passed. I started to shiver.
    Suddenly I was exhausted. And hungry. I needed to get something
    to eat, and find a hotel.
    I got in the car and