“She’s overheated—Mavis slammed his gun and racked the slide—she’s gummed up….Dust was always jamming our guns and the jury was out on whether we needed more lube or less. Nobody could agree. Mavis was about to load a new round when Tippet and Galbraith tore out from their cover and hammered the ground between us and the Taliban for what seemed half an hour but was only, I’m told, nine minutes.

“But in that nine minutes I lost sight of Elwyn and that was because, as I saw when I finally walked over to where he’d been crawling in search of his arm, he’d rolled over into one of the dried-out gullies left all over the place by a combination of long-gone rains and ever-present wind. He fitted right in there like he’d been top-loaded into that all-dressed steamie you just ate.

“If Elwyn hadn’t been unarmed and destroyed and half buried in that natural-looking, gravelike hole, he might have been a little bit interested in my telling him that for those few minutes of crawling, he lumbered just like one of Mavis’s handicapped scorpions.

“Like I said though, I did not have two minutes to grieve Elwyn.

“You become a body and then you become remains and when you’re finished your five seconds of being remains you’re shucked into that unreal realm of glory in which we’re all supposed to have believed from the start of our deployment. The never-never land of departed souls, more significant dead than when we farted or slept or gulped pineapple ham rations and masturbated together. Departed, we attain an importance reverential and unreal and in the past tense which is always somehow fictional.

“I didn’t have two minutes for grief, but I did ask Mavis this: What’s the name, the species, of the scorpions in your night races? He told me the word but I handed him my arm and said, Shut up and tattoo it. When he was done I said, Great. Glorious. A big, long crazy wild Latin name, Elwyn would’ve loved it.”

Harold reads my arm: “Leiurus quinquestriatus…Is there an English translation?”

“That’s the first thing I asked Mavis. What’s the common name? He said, I’ll tattoo that for you as well, but I said just tell that one to me. And he said it’s Deathstalker, lemme add it on for you, and I said no, don’t tattoo that on me, I want to keep that name to myself. I wanted to whisper that one at night to Elwyn. I wouldn’t have it written. I wouldn’t in any way expose it to scrutiny beyond that of my own private remembrance.