Requiem for an Assassin

Hilger took a sip of his beer and said, “It must feel strange for you to be back here.”
    I figured the comment was an elicitation ploy, an attempt to draw something out of me. But I wasn’t sure what. “Why do you say that?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Memories. My place was the desert. I was in Iraq for the first go-round, and now, you put me someplace with a lot of sand and superheated dry wind, and bam, I go all the way back, body and soul. Like I never left. People who haven’t had that kind of experience…they don’t understand. It’s like they live in two dimensions and you live in three.”
    I knew what he was talking about. The part of you that’s formed in battle will always respond to being back on the battlefield. And when you return, I was learning, it feels as though some fitfully sleeping part of you stirs to wakefulness, while the person you thought you were surrenders as quietly as a dream. Maybe that was the paranoia I was feeling. That older self, the self that had kept me alive in the jungle, in places and circumstances where so many other men had died.
    We started in on the spring rolls. A table full of Americans to our right erupted in loud laughter at something one of their party had said. Hilger glanced over and shook his head.
    “Look at those people,” he said. “Think they own this place, don’t they, think they own the world. Makes me sick sometimes.”
    I watched them for a moment, and found I couldn’t disagree. What I saw was a collection of overfed, overprivileged sheep who were born to whatever they had and whose only understanding of real fear and privation was what they received from images broadcast on CNN between commercial breaks for smile-whitening toothpaste and mountain-fresh fabric softeners. They condescended to the locals because the locals needed their money and had to serve them to get it. They didn’t understand that the service was like what the staff provides to the inhabitants of a nursing home. They confused stoicism with passivity, service with servility, the current world order with some ordained plan. They didn’t realize the people they looked down on now were going to own them a little later this century. Or, at the rate the West was going, maybe just bury them, instead.
    He popped a dumpling into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed it. He shook his head. “Makes me wonder why I bother.”
    I looked at him, intrigued that he was able to laugh and break bread with someone who not an hour earlier had very nearly executed him. I didn’t read this as weakness. On the contrary, Hilger’s easy recovery from our earlier encounter suggested a long and comfortable acquaintance with violence. And more than that, a man so ruthlessly adept at compartmentalizing the personal and the professional that he would be capable of almost anything. If he deemed something necessary, I expected he would act with little compunction and even less warning.
    “Why do you bother?” I asked.
    He looked away, and for a moment his gaze was distant. I wondered what he was seeing.
    “Because things are broken,” he said. “People used to think broken meant a system that could only respond to a crisis. But that’s not broken. Broken is a system that can’t even respond to a crisis.”
    “What crisis are you talking about?”
    He took a swallow of beer. He glanced at me, then shook his head as though disappointed. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”
    “Why don’t you try me?”
    “I’m talking about America. The wheels are coming off, haven’t you noticed? And what are you supposed to do if you care? Join a protest march? A letter to your gerrymandered congressman? What?”
    It’s been my experience that people who can express their political views only in metaphors and passionate generalizations are fanatics. Hilger might have been one of them. Or maybe he was trying to obscure his true affiliations, or his lack of any at all. Or this whole conversation was his attempt to draw me out, to gather intelligence about me. Or all of the above.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “What are you supposed to do?”
    Therapists call it reflection: repeating the patient’s words, rephrased as a question. I had dealt with enough Army shrinks back in the day to find the technique stupid and annoying, and it’s so basic that even machines have been programmed to do it. But it can create a sense of empathy, or in this case its illusion, and draw a subject out.
    It