I call John.  He tells me there is a group of Vietnam, the Nam, vets who meet every Tuesday.  He invites me to come along.  He says there is free coffee.  He knows I like coffee.  That war was thirty years ago.

They say that PTSD is reliving or reacting to a moment from the past.  Thirty years is a long time in the foxhole.

John repeats things.  He repeats comments.  About how he had trouble sleeping.  About how he would walk the perimeter.  There is a counselor in Staten Island he’d like me to go see.  He thinks I might be a good fit for a counselor he knows in Staten Island.

******

I ride the subway.  In Manhattan there is darkness out the windows, and inside, the people sway like reeds against an invisible tide.  A woman reads, feet together, back straight.  A man with a tie and not much hair stands by the door, a leather case in his hand.  Faces stare across at one another, but not at one another.  Out in the darkness.  A handsome girl with a cloth bag on her lap leans back.  Eyes closed.  Eyes stare.

The subway rolls.  Heartbeat. A mother’s sway.  A lullabye.  I close my eyes.  

The Manhattan Bridge comes and the N line goes above ground over the East River.  I feel the warmth on my eyelids.  I’m flying.  I let the sunshine fall on me.  I am here, I think.  I let the city carry me, these people, this car, these rails, this river. 

******

I go.  The meeting room has hardwood floors and it’s just like I imagine it.  The circle of chairs.  The bad coffee.  I try to be late, but I’m the first one there, and for a few minutes it’s just John and me.  He says I’m glad I am there, but he looked surprised to see me and in a moment I know I wasn't supposed to come.  He sorts papers in the ratty briefcase on his lap, the kind with latches. 

Others arrive.  I meet the others.  They are old, my father’s age, but none of them look like my father.  They all meet each other, shake hands, sip the bad coffee.  When they meet me they give the same look John does.  These are a different type of people.  I don’t want to be here.

I sit in the circle.    Things quiet down.  Others sit.  John introduces me.  He says what I am and why I’m there.  He says maybe the other men there can use their experience to help me.  Some nod and smile.  The one in the corner with the short hair cut picks at the rubber on his shoe.

Thirty years.  They are still here, in this room with the hardwood floors that echoes when people talk.  

******

We are out West.  This is years ago.  It is late at night and we sneak out of her parent’s place in Missoula.  It is summer.  She is wearing my shirt and boxers and has the blanket from the bed wrapped around her because up here, even in June, the night is still cold. 

We sit on the edge of the lawn, on the steps that go from the yard down toward the barn where the grass is higher and the path a little less maintained.  I light two cigarettes.  They are hand rolled.  Buglers tobacco with the baby blue cover.  The paper sticks to my lips until it is moistened.  I hand one to her and she pulls me under the cover with her and we smoke. 

We don’t speak.  We look at the stars in their deep blue home above the black velvet mountain tops.  I feel the warmth of her skin on me.  I feel the sting of the hard tobacco and watch the smoke roll out into the clean air.  We are together and okay.  The world sleeps. 

******

 This is the memory I recall to them.  About the Buglers tobacco.  About Montana. 

John is quiet.  They’re all quiet.  Is there anything else?  He asks.  Did I want to share any other experiences? He repeats.  Iraq, he means.  The Nam, he means.  A single year in a life of twenty-seven, of fifty-two, of sixty-three. There are better years I can choose from.

John says okay, but in a tone that it is not okay.  The man beside me talks now. 

He said he feels good because he put himself outside a memory he had, the one in Quang Ngai when he woke up and the guy in the foxhole next to him, Johnson, was gone.  Disappeared.  No one ever found him.  Johnson was there pulling guard, and then he wasn’t. 

The man had woken his wife up in bed and breathed heavy and yelled out in a whisper ‘Johnson!’ like he did that night because in the Nam you don’t yell, not ever, but you do whisper loudly. But instead he was there, in Queens, and Johnson wasn’t there but Sandra was, like she had been for twenty-three years.  

John says that was good, that perspective.  For him to know it was a memory. Disassociation he calls it.

Everyone watches him talk except the man who was picking his shoe.  He looks at Johnson and then John and then at me and he looks angry, like I had said my part wrong.  He rolls the bit of rubber in his fingers back and forth, and then drops it and looks back at his shoe and picks at another piece.

******

 I excuse myself and get coffee.  I excuse myself and leave, back outside the community center, back out down the street to where the N line is and I ride it across the Manhattan bridge just as the sky goes from orange to pink to blue and then darkness until I come out again and I walk straight because I know where I should be.   

I walk out of Astor and I turn east.  I know John will call.  But it's okay.  

I walk up the stairs to our apartment.  The lights are off.  She is asleep.  I take off my shoes.  I set my keys down quietly.  I don’t want to wake her.  I undress.  I crawl under the covers. 

She turns over and rests her arm on me.  She puts her head on my shoulder.  She is warm.  She is always warm. 

I kiss her.  I watch the city’s lights play on the ceiling.  I am here, I think.  I am here.  I close my eyes.