There is a poster on a wall at your school. In a font of hysterical optimism, it reads Your Future Is a Blank Canvas - The Possibilities Are Infinite!

You review the current circumstances of last year’s graduating class, released to the world like drunks from a holding cell. They sport now the liveries in polyester of McDonald’s and K.F.C. and Walmart. Their crushing reds and greys and navy blues. Or they clock in at the rendering plant, where they will never, ever become immune to the stench. You see kids chowing down on Oxycontin like Skittles. You take the measure of these infinite possibilities and you cut your hair short and you enlist.

Not an escape, no.

But an exit at least.

                                                                                *

The echoing clop of hard heels on long corridors. Honour rolls, gilding on polished mahogany. A senior officer, boot-blacked side-parted straight-backed, watching you from his desk chair. You, he allows to stand.

So, you got a hard-on for bomb disposal, soldier?

I feel my temperament is suited to the task, sir.

Your temperament? Do you have a death wish?

Sir?

This is explosive ordnance we’re talking about. You’re an engineer; why not fix engines?

I am aware of the risks, sir.

The senior officer places something in his mouth, begins to chew. His fingers: nicotine yellow. A slight pattering as he rests his tremoring hand on the desk. The hand, disappearing from view. Are you now? he says, and you are dismissed.

                                                                              *

Sometimes at first you look up. The opium fields shimmering in the heat haze, their Mexican wave of pinks and greens. The expanses of brown sun-baked hard-packed earth. A mean soil, yielding little. A golden eagle, once, its glide and swoop and snatch, its efficient delivery of sudden death to some unsuspecting creature. You stop looking up. Death enough waiting beneath your feet, needing only the weight of a single foot to complete the circuit, to make the sky rain with the brown sun-baked hard-packed earth and human limbs.

You are here to sweep the ground, to look down.

Miller is your battle buddy. Miller has a mascot. A plush bug-eyed luridly purple teddy which holds in its paws a T, the initial letter of Miller’s first name. Your joke with Miller is that this was a 21st birthday present from his momma (Miller is 21). When you say this, he replies, No-no-no asshole, it was a gift from your momma.  Usually on this cue you hurl the ridiculous toy at Miller’s head. Fat fuck, you say, and he laughs and says, Yeah, your momma could lose a few pounds. So: this is the script and by such little predictabilities you gain the footholds by which you clamber through the days looking down, the hot sullen days of sun and dust.

Something you are not visualising whilst you trade momma jokes with Miller: fresh blood congealing on hot sand, its particular thick bright darkness.

The ordnance disposal officer’s lone steps towards an identified device are known as the long walk. These simple words are a perfect rendering. Before your first long walk your imaginings held something of the Wild West. The moment tumbleweed taut, the gunfighter’s leaden steps towards his fate.

It is not like this. There is a stillness in one thing only to think about. No bright lie here of infinite possibilities. Only a stark monochrome. Black / white. Either the device blows, or it does not. This binary is a strange kind of balm to you.

Some of the thoughts you are not having, never have, on the long walk are: Being 12 years old, finally taking the latest bottle from your mother’s locker. Your pride, your terror pouring it down the plughole. Those retching terminal glugs as it emptied. You don’t think about her coming home with a new bottle – there was always a new bottle – finishing it in front of you. Cracking the bottle across your little sister’s nose but addressing you. This is your fault, you hear me? Because she was clever, could plant bombs of her own, primed to blow who knew when, their shrapnel could find its way under your skin, maybe forever. You don’t think about the nurse in the hospital asking your sister when your mother went to the bathroom, Are you sure you really ran into a door, sweetheart? And you nodding for your sister, Yes, yes, it’s true. You don’t think about cleaning up your mother’s mess when you got home, the latest things she had overturned, smashed, left lying around.

You don’t think about how your sister drinks too now, despite everything.

Because of.

You think about your next step and the step after that and there is a settling in you. There is the adrenaline’s hiss and fizz, but there is nothing else in the world.

You lie prone before the device, a pilgrim abasing yourself before a higher power at journey’s end. And like the religious, you are reverent and you are fearful. You use a paintbrush to reveal the device – an ordinary paintbrush, found in any mom and pop hardware store. And you find this beautiful, such a simple thing transformed in your hands. And afterwards, as you massage your aching neck, always you look up and exhale sweet relief and see the sky, daubed with vapour trails, blindly and relentlessly blue. And sometimes you manage to attain the stinking refuge of a toilet cubicle. But mostly you vomit right there in the dirt.

Miller keeps a tally of devices defused. This he records in a small Harry Potter-themed notebook. Miller is writing in the notebook, sipping from a can of Coca-Cola as you walk in. Number seventeen, he says. Can’t touch this, motherfuckers. Miller raises his hand for a high five and you oblige. You say, Aw, I see your momma sent you some Coke in a care package. Miller says, We both know it’s from your momma. Actually, could you tell her for next time: I’m really more of a Pepsi guy. You hurl the purple mascot at his head.

The story will be put around – to the media, to other regiments, to his family - that Miller lost concentration, that he was looking up, that his attention was drawn by a bird, when he stepped on the device. The bird will be something fierce or exotic, say, a golden eagle or, in one version, a brilliantly-feathered Kashmir nuthatch. You will never know why Miller was looking up. Maybe he was simply tired of always looking down. The only thing airborne in the seconds before Miller himself will be a filthy ragged strip of plastic bag. There are never birds around when a device blows. The birds have already gotten the hell out of Dodge.

You try to write to Miller’s mother. You attempt to express something that is not a platitude. Something that does not feel derived from a formula, from the algorithms of sympathy. Good soldier / considerable courage / actions saved many lives / perhaps take comfort. You ban these stock phrases. And can find no words to write in their stead. The strangling infinite possibilities of the blank page. The cursor’s taunting wink. You have no comfort to offer this mother whose son’s viscera litter the earth thousands of miles from home. Who has these words, and where are they hiding them? You lie awake each night for one week, or maybe two or maybe ten – time’s edges are hazing – your back turned always to the ridiculous purple mascot. In the end you mail the mascot to Miller’s mother, unaccompanied by a letter, free from the hopeless inadequacy of words, hopelessly inadequate all the same.

Sometimes Laura phones you from home, and sometimes you answer. Sometimes you say, The connection is patchy, and sometimes this is true. Sometimes on the line there is a crackling which sounds nothing like distant small arms fire, which puts you in mind of distant small arms fire. Sometimes – and you like when this happens, will it to, even - pixellation makes crude blocks of her face. The blessed absence of her eyes, in particular. The pixellation renders her flatly inhuman, as though she is becoming one with the machine. You are a machines guy. Machines you can handle.

There were some issues before you left home. You tacitly agreed on this term, eschewing other more substantial words – troubles, problems – the solid roundness of their Rs and Bs. Unlike the deadweight burden of those words issues has a slightness to it, a wispy quality, as though when you look up the issues might have passed, blown by the wind, dissipated.

On the day after Miller dies: The Skype ringtone, the obscenity of its bright insistent burbling. You take Laura’s call because this is what people do. Stable, well-adjusted adults, people who are doing just fine: they answer when called.

How’s it going over there?

Oh, you know. Busy, busy.

Is that good? she says.

What? you say.

Connection, you say. Can’t hear.

Are you okay?

You count to five, say, What? Then, How’s the weather at home?

It’s goddamn raining.

I miss the rain. You hate the rain. The words leave your mouth just the same, bubbling up from some unfathomable place.

You’re crazy, she says.

Breaking up, you say. The connection.

Everybody is standing at Miller’s memorial service. Everybody is furiously not-crying. The song Miller had specified should be played at his memorial is I Will Survive. When the song begins there is that particular holding back of soldiers awaiting orders. Then for a long and heady moment everyone howls with laughter until there is a turning and it becomes impossible to say whether the tears salting people’s cheekbones have come from laughter, or the other.

                                                                              *

State of play: Seventy-five percent of your limbs are intact and functional. In the interests of balance, it should be noted that there are moments when your glass is three-quarters full and not a quarter empty. This happens in the lulling wash of the opioids, generally in late afternoon when the setting sun throws honeyed slants across the ward floor. Sometimes your thoughts make new shapes from old words. Left leg. Left: leg. Leg: left. One leg left. My left leg is the leg I have left. Sometimes you laugh so hard that a nurse arrives to say you are disturbing the other patients.

There is a pleasant young man standing at the side of your bed holding a clipboard. He smiles in a way that seems calibrated, that makes you wish he would not smile at all. What he asks you is what leisure or recreational activities you engaged in prior to the change in your circumstances and what leisure or recreational activities you think might be manageable in the future with certain adaptations, and that he is here to help you with this in any way he can and of the exciting developments in prosthetics and the related ever-expanding possibilities. The only words which pierce your bubble of pain and pain relief and the ward’s too-white walls are the change in your circumstances. You say, What? Sorry, what? He says you can take a rain check on this and have a good day, sir, and leaves, clipboard held tight to his chest like a swaddled infant.

The shrink or therapist or counsellor or whatever tells you to have a seat, please. You look down at the carpet and are mesmerised. The carpet is a shade that seems more a leaching of colour than a colour itself. This carpet. Man - you say. When you look up the shrink or whatever is making eye contact, is saying nothing, is waiting, maybe, for you to fill the silence with something or other. Again, you look down. As though there might be something there that can be uncovered, and somehow defused.