We were sitting at breakfast in a well-known restaurant, the kind where the waiters moved briskly but softly, as if not to disturb the importance of the place. I had met Andy only the night before, at the home of my long-time friend.. He had been polite, gracious, careful with every word—almost too careful, I thought at the time. This morning’s invitation to breakfast came from him. Andy was my friend’s public relations man, and it was plain that he wanted me as a client as well.
For nearly an hour over coffee and toast, he laid out his credentials—articles he had written, strategies he would employ, ways he would shape and project my image. His words came smooth and practiced, each line a demonstration of his professional polish. Then, at a natural lull in the conversation, I shifted to something entirely different. I told him, almost casually, about a hitchhiker I had picked up on a recent trip.
Bob was in his mid-thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, his boots dusted with the road. He said he came from a Minnesota farm, but most of his words carried the weight of Vietnam. He had gone there as a medic. He had come home with scars no one could see. His nights were ruled by a single nightmare—always the same, repeated without mercy.
He told me: the whistle blows for emergency duty; he dresses quickly; the helicopter takes him to the battlefield. The rotors thrum, the ground rushes up, the machine lands near a soldier bleeding out from the chest. He kneels, opens his medicine bag—and it is empty. Empty. He hears the soldier’s cry, a sound raw and unbearable. And at that very instant he wakes, his own voice echoing the soldier’s, his body drenched in terror, his heart pounding as though it would break through his chest. This was the dream that visited him every night. Every night without fail.
When I finished recounting his story, silence settled at our table. Andy’s face shifted, the mask of polish and presentation falling away. His eyes grew wet, and then the tears broke free. “Balbir,” he said, voice catching, “this is also my story.”
The words startled me. He spoke then of his own unraveling. His marriage had ended two and a half years earlier. Since then, he said, it seemed as if everything he touched fell apart. “I cannot do anything right,” he whispered, broken, as though confessing to a crime.
He looked down at his hands for a long time, as if searching for steadiness, then raised his head. A few moments later he asked for a taxi. Without another word, he left the restaurant.
That was the last I ever saw of him.
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