Rose (from the Munich Tales)

ROSE
By Michael Kroetch

He was gripping the arm of the couch in the hospital waiting room so tightly that the tendons of his fingers had turned purple. In addition, he was tapping his foot because he had to pee. He was also staring at a photo of a tank that had been blown up in a desert—the news magazine on his lap had been open to that same page for ten minutes. He couldn´t take his eyes off the photo. For him the tank´s wreckage shared the same kind of beauty as a rose that had been dried between the pages of a dictionary. He hated this kind of beauty. He kept tapping his foot. He could feel his face starting to contort from the pain in his bladder. He didn´t want to look up from the photo. He was starting to feel trapped inside that burning tank. They´d said they would give him word soon. It had been too long. He couldn´t go pee and miss word from them. He crossed his legs, trying to stop the pain. The tank´s ruin did not change, but the longer he looked at it, the more detail he could see in there near the flames. There was a hand. It was blurry, but he knew it had to be a hand. Someone was inside the tank and this was their hand. It was holding onto the side. They were trying to pull themself up and out to safety. He looked at his own hand on the couch. He wold do the same if he were that person in that tank. Maybe he was in a way? No. He was not the one in danger here. His son was. His son´s heart had blown up from the inside. Maybe now his son´s heart was the dead rose flattened inside a dictionary? He didn´t know. He knew he hated the photo for being so beautiful and having that enemy hand in it there among the flames. He was supposed to hate the enemy, but he didn´t. He hated the photographer instead for taking the picture. He didn´t want to be here, he wanted to be there in the other room and take the place of his son and have the grenade go off inside his own chest instead and be blown up so he was nothing but a dead rose carried away in the desert wind—and his son be safe. He wanted everything to be back before any of this had happened, or to be ten months or ten years from now when everything was over. He just didn´t want it to be now. Plus he had to pee so bad wanted to break open the emergency box on the wall, pull out the red axe, and chop out his bladder right here in front of everybody else also waiting. Oh God, he had to calm down. He looked again at the destroyed tank photo. His son had wanted to be a soldier. He had not let him. Now he was glad. If his son´s heart had exploded on him in the desert what would they have done? At least here they had machines and dictionaries that it could be pressed inside of and preserved and possibly saved? He didn´t know. They said soon and it was no longer soon. It was late. But he had to avoid that word and what it meant. He knew the hand in the tank photo was the hand of his son. His son was still alive in the wreckage of that burning body, still trying to pull himself out of the flames. He knew as long as he kept looking at that hand that everything would be all right. He knew he did not have much control, but he could do this much. He could keep himself from peeing and keep his eyes on the hand. He had to.