Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  I contemplate running. Really running. Ducking out of formation and sprinting, stripping off camo, Gore-Tex, boots, to my green Subaru and putting miles between me and this place. Long, heavy miles where Fort Polk would become smaller and smaller in the mirror. I could go up to Maine, to my father’s place right on the Canadian border. It would be nice up there under the shade of tall trees. Quiet. No people, no questions, just snow and pine. I fantasize solitude until I remember my security clearance and that this is a time of war. The FBI would be notified within twenty-four hours of my absence. I wouldn’t be given the regular thirty days and it would be a federal offense, made all the more criminal because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the government wasted on training me as a linguist.

  AWOL isn’t a viable option. Not unless I want to end up in a small, black prison in God knows where. I hear him and his group laugh, though, and for a moment I pause and wonder if a distant prison cell would really be all that bad.

  * * *

  The investigator finally reschedules our interview. He sits me down in an interrogation chair. It feels like an interrogation chair. His dark wooden desk is huge. He sits calmly behind it, papers meticulously stacked in front of him. A tape recorder whirls between us, loud in the tense silence. I am huddled in the hard wooden chair, arms wrapped around my knees. I look like a child, I know, fists clenched around my uniform pants. I feel like a child, tiny and fragile, staring up at him as he stacks the papers and begins.

  The first few questions are easy enough. Where had I been; how had I known the analyst; how much did I drink. Then things take a turn for the darker and without looking up, with no real warning, the investigator asks, “Do you feel he raped you?”

  I cringe at the word. It hangs in my mouth, heavy and taking up space. I can say all your four-letter words—shit, fuck, cunt—just don’t make me say the R word. I hate saying it out loud, to people in power, who judge me for the word used and resent me for making them face its implications. I swallow the word instead and say, “Yes.”

  He finally looks up and I see the first breath of fight in him. “So you said no.” It’s not a question but an assertion, a natural ending to his sentence.

  My brow furrows slightly. “I said I didn’t know who he was, and that I didn’t understand what was happening. I told him to stop, but I…sometimes when I drink I get confused and maybe I said it in Japanese.” I watch his face darken and I rush to add, “Because, like in Japanese you can say whole sentences in a few words, do you know what I mean? It’s…hard to explain but I just switch over sometimes. If I’ve had too much to drink. Sometimes.” My Japanese had triggered his Spanish; the snarling of “cállate” into my ear is suddenly loud and persistent in the back of my skull. I shudder and look down at my hands, feeling like I have been punched in the gut.

  “But you didn’t say ‘no,’” he pushes.

  “I don’t know if I said ‘no’ exactly, but I did say ‘stop.’ I said I didn’t know what was going on.” I pause, mouth dry, trying to figure out why my heart is racing suddenly, and add, “I pushed at him. Like pushed him away. Or I tried to.”

  “So you think he raped you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  “But you didn’t say no.”

  “It was very clear that I didn’t want…” Again my stomach clenches tight and I’m running out of words. “I didn’t want what happened.”

  The investigator leans back, face closed, mouth slightly pursed. “You understand that in order for sex to be rape, you have to have said no.”

  I’m angry now. My knuckles are white against my knees, boots planted on the floor. “So you’re saying that if someone has sex with a sleeping person or someone who’s unconscious, that’s not rape because they didn’t say no?”

  He glares at me now, as if I’m being a difficult child who refuses to understand reason. “There are different rules for that sort of thing. You weren’t asleep or unconscious.”

  “I might have been! I don’t know how he got in the room and I wasn’t able to…I wasn’t…” Frustration closes off my throat and I turn my face away, ashamed.

  “How did he get in your room?”

  “I said I don’t know.” I want to scream it, but it came out as a harsh whisper.

  “Did you let him in?”

  “No. I mean…I don’t think so.”

  “But it’s possible that you did.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so?” I glance up, wanting him to agree with me, to say that it’s true, I probably didn’t open the door, that I had had too much to drink, how would I have made that walk from my bed to the door, how had I woken from my drunken slumber from someone knocking, how could I have said, Sure, come in, knowing these things didn’t seem possible or like me at all, and yet his jaw is set. He shows me nothing. “But even if I did…” I close my eyes with those words, not wanting to ever imagine them to be true, the thought makes me sick. “Even if I did, that doesn’t mean I wanted to have sex with him.”

  I hate the whirl, whirl, whirl of the tape recorder as it fills the silence and he takes his time, scratching his pen onto paper. “Did he rape you?” he asks again.

  I fucking hate that word. That dirty, soiled, shameful word. Don’t make me say it. “Yes.”

  “But you don’t remember saying no?”

  I drop my head into my hands. We’re chasing our tails, going round and round. It’s getting all muddled in my head. How could it not be rape? I know how I feel; I know I hadn’t wanted…that. That thing that happened. How could that not be rape? “I’m not making this up,” I say, desperate, so desperate to be heard.

  “Did he rape you?” he asks again. And again. Round and round we go.

  I’m lost, so thoroughly turned around that I’ve given up trying to orient myself. I can’t find north. I break. “I don’t know what it was, but I know what he did was wrong.”

  He writes clear and hard onto the paper, and funny how that sentence is the only thing that makes it into the official report.

  * * *

  The investigators want me to be a whore. They’re looking for some sordid sexual past, interviewing anyone there that night, as well as some of my fellow platoon members. They want me to have spread my legs quickly and often. Two CID officers lean against the doorpost of Sergeant Forst’s barracks door, my current squad leader, grinning down at her. They laugh, loudly, so pleased to be talking to her, with her pink, cherub cheeks and wispy pixie blond hair. They look like wolves to me, all teeth, tall to her short, towering—looming really—but no one seems to share my newfound fear of men. Sergeant Forst’s cheeks are flushed; she laughs with them and I know I’m the irrational one. I can’t hear them but it can hardly be official business. I sneak up the stairs to my floor, not wanting them to see me.

  Sergeant Forst fills me in later, that between flirting they asked about my sexual past. Did I have many lovers? Was I promiscuous? How disappointed were they when she told them I had no lovers, that in my six months at the post, I had yet to fall into a single bed? Did they have a box to check about fundamentalist Christian upbringings that preached against premarital sex? How much had that messed up their report then, that I had believed sex was sacred, shared only in love, cherished and hallowed? Not much, in the end. They shifted tactics, countering with, “So she could be protecting her reputation, then. She doesn’t want anyone to know she slept with him.”

  The report will eventually say that Rivera’s girlfriend tells them I would never sleep with the likes of Kevin Hale. “So she’s embarrassed,” they reason, an angle they’ll type hard into white paper, a suggestion that I’m “covering it up” to spare myself the shame.

  I would have been damned had I been a slut, but I was just as damned for not having been one.

  Exodus

  Andres and I had a flirtatious friendship before, but it had never been physical. He’s a handsome Mexican American, short but broad in the s
houlders, with a strong, L-shaped jaw and a slight cleft chin, which is somehow endearing. His barracks room is across from mine, meaning that when I initially arrived at the unit, the first morning when I had to be at formation, he led the way, and then every day since. I lean on him and his friendship because I like having someone to turn to before formation, or during lunch, or after the workday is done. He doesn’t seem to mind me hanging out at his barracks room, sitting on the tile floor as he introduces me to Gael García Bernal, Rage Against the Machine, and Ayn Rand. He’s younger than I am but jaded. He reads older than his age, as if he’s accumulated decades under his young features. And yet, ironically, his only life goal is to be a good father and husband. He wants a big family. He doesn’t tell me why he left Chicago and joined the Army, although he’s adamant it was a mistake. He never seemed interested in anything physical between us, which works for me, because I’m still a little hung up on Jonathan, an ex-boyfriend stationed three states away, whom I occasionally visit on four-day weekends, making the twelve-hour car trek alone, speeding down highways as fast as my Subaru will go because I miss him, yes, but also because this was the only sex I was comfortable with. I learned to justify this premarital sex, to find a way to align it with my Christian upbringing, because this was done in love and something done in love is still beautiful and blessed. Back then, I didn’t know how to make this jump to another man, a different man, especially someone I wasn’t sure I loved yet. It seems less important now.

  So I don’t remember the first kiss with Andres. I don’t remember how it happened, or how we got here, two weeks after I was attacked. Exodus starts tomorrow—most of the unit leaves for Christmas break and I’m getting on a plane in the morning, fleeing for two weeks, but here we are pressed against each other on his bed, one of his hands tucked under the back of my shirt and his palm pressed hard against my spine. I shouldn’t be enjoying this, I think. My sleeping bag is spread out on the floor below, and one of my legs is tucked under the other, pointed downward, and if I can just touch the bag with my toe, perhaps I’ll be transported there and untangled from here. And even still, despite my mind racing for an out, a safe way to unravel limbs and tongues and intentions, there is a spark of arousal that starts small at the base of my stomach, tiny but building steadily. I resent it. I don’t want to be enjoying this. I pull back and notice a red mark on his neck from earlier. I stare at it and grow increasingly uncomfortable. “If anyone asks, make sure you don’t tell them that’s from me,” I say.

  He rubs the mark, slightly smirking. “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to tell anyone,” he promises, but it does nothing to elevate the sudden intense anxiety. I want to check the door to make sure it’s locked, to stare out the peephole and see who’s in the common area. Who saw me come into the room? It feels different now that we’re kissing, now that I’m no longer just sleeping on the floor. I feel like they’ll all see it branded across our faces somehow.

  It never occurs to me that they all probably thought we were sleeping together this whole time. Instead I obsess. I wonder if they’ll even believe him when he says it’s not Dostie, never Dostie. My stomach tightens, knots, and he kisses me again, and I kiss him back, but not really. My body does, but the rest of me races forward, imagining already the knowing smirk of Captain Wells, who will see and say, “That was fast.”

  This is fast.

  * * *

  I arrive home with New England’s Christmas spirit in full swing. The lampposts are dressed in faux-green finery, little white lights wrapped around posts and down the streets. The air is cold, “Carol of the Bells” blasts through speakers, and it’s pretty, and fine, and I pass through it all in a haze. I remember snow, but maybe that’s wishful thinking.

  My mom asks, more than once, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I’m fine.” I intend never to tell her.

  It should feel good and safe here, away from Kevin Hale and the post and the investigation and the stares and the whispers, but it doesn’t; it doesn’t feel very different at all. I’m dragging along a heavy pack that’s strapped down around me, following me wherever I go, and everyone keeps asking, “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?” because they can see the dust it stirs up.

  I look in the mirror one day, as my leave narrows to an end, trying to see what they see. I look the same. Same pale skin, dark hair. Same hazel eyes, oval face. There must be a mark there, somewhere, and I’m just not seeing it because I look the same to me, and yet everyone keeps asking, “What’s wrong with you?”

  I don’t worry that my family will find out. There is my life there and my life here and they’re very separate. I can hide this, bury it, and no one here will ever have to know. I look at my mom and her brow is pinched together in concern. She tilts her head, stares at my face, as if she hopes to read something just below the surface there, but I’m closed and don’t say a word. It’s not because she wouldn’t care—she would. Abundantly so. It’s not because I worry she wouldn’t believe me. She would, with more fervor and righteous rage than a legion of angels. But I don’t know how to broach the topic, how to bring a conversation around to it, or even what to say.

  How do I look my mother in the eyes, stand before her, open and raw, and inform her that her little girl has been raped. How do I stand there then, and watch her cry, and wrap an arm around her, as she bows forward, broken over, and how do I say, It’s okay, I’m okay, when I’m not. But she’d be crying and someone has to stand solid, resolute. I can’t cry when she cries. Our tears have always been allocated between us two, rationed to one or the other but never both simultaneously. At least it feels that way for me, because I don’t cry in tandem.

  So I don’t tell her. Instead, I tell my brother, in a very roundabout way.

  “Mom’s worried about you,” he says. It is just after New Year’s, the night before I leave for Fort Polk, and we’re driving to our aunt’s so that I can say goodbye to the family. I sit back in the passenger seat and stare out the window. It’s night and I can’t see much. I’m tired of having to avoid people’s questions. I’m tired in general. I shrug one shoulder.

  “Some guy broke into my barracks room.” That’s all I say; that’s how I tell him. I shrug again.

  He continues to drive, staring out the dark windshield. He sits there for a moment, as if he hasn’t heard, and I turn back to the window, glaring at the darkness. The unsaid sits between us and takes up too much space.

  “Can I tell Mom?” he finally asks.

  “No,” I say, shortly. It’s a bit unfair, I realize. Unloading this kind of information on him then not letting him do anything with it. I don’t know why I’ve told him. I’m surprised I said anything at all, as if the declaration had grown a will of its own and popped out of its own accord. I sit rigidly, defiant, ready to say it’s not a big deal, dry-eyed, but the conversation doesn’t go anywhere and all my resilience is wasted.

  But when we arrive at my aunt’s, he herds her into the kitchen, sits her down. The room is warm, both in temperature and feeling, with its burnt-amber walls and saffron hanging lights. “Tell her what you told me,” he says. It’s not an order, exactly, more of a suggestion.

  “Tell me what?” Aunty Carol asks, glancing from my brother to me, curious but not alarmed. Nothing seems alarming; no one is crying, or frantic. This is a very ordinary kind of conversation.

  “That some guy broke into my barracks room.” I say it flatly, again shrugging it off. There is a very big divide between what I’m saying and what I’m implying, and I stand in the space in between, able to make light of what is being said simply because everything else is left unsaid. I want to avoid the drama of the moment, the emotions behind these sentences. But this time I add, “I called the military police and they’re doing an investigation.”

  “You have to tell your mother,” she finally says, softly, but she proves just as resilient as me. She doesn’t cry and I’m grateful.

  “It’s just going to upset
her, it’s not like she can do anything.”

  “But she should still know. She already knows something’s not right.”

  “Well, I’m not telling her.” I say it a little too loudly, pressing the palm of my hand against my chest. “You can tell her, if you want.”

  Aunty Carol nods. “Okay, I’ll tell her.”

  “After I leave,” I specify. “Don’t tell her until I leave.” She can tell my mom once I’m gone, so that I can ignore her phone calls when she’s desperate for more information, to know what happened and who was it and where is he now and how did it happen, and I’m not interested in answering any of that so I don’t. For days afterward I’ll glance down at my phone when it rings, see her name, and click DECLINE, then drop the cell into my pocket. I only let her approach when I’m ready, months later, and even then the information I give her is patchy at best.

  I never ask how my aunt told my mom or how that conversation went. I don’t know how my mom handled the information, how she processed it, or how long she waited to call me the first time, or the second time. Or the third. I don’t know who else she told or who she leaned on for support. I didn’t ask then; I don’t ask still.

  * * *

  I arrive back in the barracks at night. Andres waits for me in his room, where I still sleep. I still have no room of my own. I drop my bags at the foot of his bed, glancing at his neck. The marks are gone, the skin clean and fresh. “Did anyone say anything?” I ask in greeting.

  He looks up, for a moment confused, having to drag himself backward into before we left. “Sergeant Pelton noticed. He had this stupid smirk on his face and he was like, ‘That from Dostie?’ like a fucking creeper. I told him it was from some girl up in Lake Charles. I should’ve told him it was none of his fucking business.”