FPO AE
I bought a four-band puzzle ring from a shop beneath the Al Asad stadium. The proprietor asked if I was sure the ring was all I wanted or if I might also be interested in a designer suit, fabric straight from the factory, a fraction of retail, custom fit. I told him I was not absolutely sure about anything except that a custom suit would not fit for long. Deployment changes one’s shape—not unlike, I would learn, a homecoming.
I sent the puzzle ring to a girl pregnant with another boy’s boy. Our connection was a strange investment on both our parts—she, a soon-to-be single mother, and I whose future we did not dare discuss. During the weeks before it went off with a letter—all too brief, so she jabbed—I wore the ring on the little finger of my marriage hand, turning it, worrying at the bands and bevel, working my fingernails through the endless braid. I took it apart and put it together over and again, managing the mechanics of the puzzle with the same practiced efficiency with which I could unbuild and reassemble my rifle.
In her reply, studded with a familiar flirtation and polished with just a touch of genuine annoyance, she critiqued the mail for its lengthy delivery—six weeks, really—and while the ring arrived in one piece, the eagle, she suggested, might not be the most postal-appropriate symbol. She thanked me with similar barbs—the pattern is beautiful, but there are no reassembly instructions, and how could anyone resist taking this thing apart?
With a twist and a tap, the puzzle would fall into a jangle of non-precious metals. In a later correspondence, we agreed not to see each other again, preferring the finite to further conversation, distance to expectations, our letters to the breadth of the unknown. If she wore the ring with the kind of fidelity one might have come to expect from stories of wartime romance, the nonprecious metals might have sapped the moisture from her skin and corroded, broken up, dissolved. She might have feared a more fragmentary end. If she did as she suggested and took the ring apart, then I imagine it stayed apart, that she never attempted to rebuild the puzzle but found a way to repurpose the pieces for another strange investment—a moment in a time capsule, an element in a multimedia collage, the totem for an incantation, or the tinny jingle above a camera lens to catch the curious eye of a newborn boy.
