The names prove history. They prove lies.

“Where were you then?” Thomas asks.

“What about you?”

It was the end of the war.

He thinks of all the men with stripes and bars and shining medals. He thinks of seeing the fire of a village burning. Shapes in silhouette in smoke and fog. He thinks, for some reason, of a human nerve, the way it branches off, the way you see it in your dilated eye, a tributary that makes all the difference between pain and no pain, memory and no memory, vision or none.

On this night the fireflies come out in a familiar, humid jungle smell. DC is built on a swamp, a jungle where you can watch the plants grow. Oh, they are beautiful, the insects lighting up between the leaves of trees, a reminder of the light still remaining in the world.

A wall is to keep things out. A wall is to keep things in. Here are the names of all the gods who have left the world. It is a map, right, wrong, changed, earth opened to geographies of other kinds.

Humans have carved on stone throughout all their brief existence. Here, instead of these names, should be handprints, spirals, buffalo, horses, or whales like the stones in sacred places.

Back in the motel he doesn’t recognize himself but knows he is Thomas when they call to him in his own room. He goes over the walkway to one of their rooms. They are subdued, drinking beer from the cooler, turning on the TV, changing the channel, sitting around in T-shirts, making jokes as if they are uncomfortable with silence, with their memories.

He thinks of the boy he’d thrown out of his way. He had saved his life, the boy whose name was not on the wall, and Thomas was thus decorated and also wounded, but he had taken his medals and ribbons from his father and pushed them into the back of a drawer behind screwdrivers and wrenches. Ruth would never see them. No one ever would have known he had them if it hadn’t been for his father, who showed them to everyone.

Dwight is now in the room putting down a Bud. “The men in my platoon stole food from a truck going to a camp for villagers. We ate cheese!”

Someone laughs. “Yeah, like it was their traditional food.”

They are drinking beer. They don’t see the despair on his face. Just as with the others years ago, they don’t know Thomas any longer. But he knew them and he knows Dwight too well, the liar, the thief.

“She looked just like my sister. How could I kill her?” Dwight says this in wonder. “But I did it. More than once. But you know those gooks. Hey, I hear one came to see you, Thomas.”

He is quiet a moment and so is everyone else.

“Well, it’s not worth thinking about it anymore, is it?” says Dwight. “It was just a dream. That’s what I tell myself. Who decides fate? It’s you or it’s Charlie. That’s all.” But Thomas sees his ghosts all around him. The old man ghost. The infant ghost. The girls. Dwight is heartless. The man without a heart. The liar about the whales.