Thomas doesn’t smile. “Or maybe the White House.”

“Which one?” The man is becoming frustrated, losing time, which is money.

“Okay, the Pentagon.”

“Which section?”

“Hell, I don’t know. The Department of War.”

The cabdriver eyes the man in the backseat, dressed in his uniform, wondering why he is lost. “Where are you from?” He sees the other man still standing in the rain as he drives away.

“It’s a place called Dark River. No one ever knows where it is. It’s out West.”

When they pull up and he gets out of the taxi, he gives the cabdriver a large tip.

There are doors and doors and an underground tunnel and somehow Thomas wanders through it all. Security. He thinks of how good he looks today, in his uniform, newly cut short hair, good proud looks. He looks right. He feels the way he did when he first joined, getting his picture taken with the flag. But going into the building at first makes him feel smaller than he felt while he was in the cab, riding without being able to tell the man where he was going. He had planned in his mind what it looked like and not that it was like a prison of deep concrete, then wood, stone, a place of vast scale, not like the rooms he inhabited but one designed to make the army look like it was all clean lines, perfect in scale despite being full with the spirits of the dead. In here is a museum of wars. Files of war. He sees it in his mind like a room one enters underground, then up steps, elevated, but it is still overdone. He should have known there are no buildings here that are not imposing and official.

“Can I help you, Sergeant?” the voice is almost an echo. “You don’t look well.” He can barely see the man behind the desk.

He himself thinks he looks official in his dress uniform, but for a while he is speechless, vulnerable. Of course, he is being watched. There are small cameras. He looks for them as a criminal would, before he enters through security without so much as being questioned, showing his ID. Then he goes into a room where a major sits behind a desk and he tosses his medals on the desk and says, “I want to return these. I want it noted that I am giving them back.”

The major looks up, expecting to recognize anyone in the vicinity, but finds a stranger in their building. “You want to return them? Whose are they?”

“Mine.” He drops them, bends down to pick them up, not at all with the dignity he wanted. He hears Dimitri’s voice in his head. No one gives a damn who killed what, who didn’t. We all did it.

“How did you get in here? This is a secured area.”

He looks suspicious and he knows it. “They saluted me through.” He laughs. “It must have been the uniform.” How far a few silver things, a few bars, a pair of spit-shined shoes can carry a man. Oh, he forgot: “Sir.”