I’m rooted in place because I’ve never really been in serious trouble, unless you count the time I served detention in elementary school because I was chewing gum, and it was all Lilly Morrison’s fault because she was the one who gave me the gum in the first place. “No one?” I say hopefully, conflicted, not wanting to give up Andres yet not prepared for the full scorn of my superior officer. I know I’m going to cave in because I don’t know how not to. It’ll take years before I learn I can stare into the eyes of a man and not give a shit about his authority or opinion, but not now. I’m not there yet.
I nervously kick dust around my boots as he waits, unmoving. I squirm, relent, and whisper, “Andres,” though I don’t really have to. Andres hasn’t gone far, waiting at the mouth of the company building, maybe because he knows I’ll be so easily broken.
In my peripheral I see Captain Wells smirk; it makes his moon-pale face even uglier. “Both of you.” He points at Andres, who is now visible again. “Let’s go talk to Sergeant Daniels,” he says, and my stomach drops.
Captain Wells likes that I’m having sex. He gets a chance to punish me, but it also proves his point. Girls like me shouldn’t be having sex. Girls like me shouldn’t be able to have sex. It must all be lies if I can do it so easily. I can see the accusation in the assured rise of his shoulders. This proves everything, he seems to say in the lengths of his stride.
I want to tell him that it’s the exact opposite. I was a stupid girl before, when I had thought sex was all so sacred and special. It’s for love, I had thought. It was something to be cradled, drawn close to the chest, then passed with the utmost care from my hands to the ones I’ve painstakingly chosen. Idiot that I was then.
Now I know what is mine can never be taken, and if it’s taken, it was never mine. We’re all just meat sacks tied together with skin and tendons, grotesque when you actually think about it, your flesh no more yours than a pair of jeans or a particularly fancy pen. I didn’t understand anything back then. Such blindness was just a defense mechanism, I’ve come to learn. Ways to create roads and pathways so that I would feel safe, saying, “Well, I wouldn’t have done…” or “She shouldn’t have done…” thinking that would protect me, as if I had some measure of control, because if I ever stopped to contemplate, I’d realize that all those carefully constructed roads of wouldn’ts and shouldn’ts create nothing more than a slender, glittering web that can be easily swiped away by a careless hand. Control and possession are nothing more than beautifully decorated delusions. I realize this now.
But Captain Wells wouldn’t understand that, and I can’t find the words to say it anyway. Instead he brings me before Sergeant Daniels, who sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. What am I going to do with you, he doesn’t say, but I feel it in the way his dark eyes wearily stare back at me. I want to respond that at least I’m putting this meat sack and tendons to good use. What does it matter if I lend it out and give a bit of pleasure here and there? But then there’s that hard, dead thing in my chest, and I wonder how much my realizations have cost me, so I look away, breaking his silent gaze, and say nothing.
I absently rub the space beneath my left collarbone, as if I can warm it, thinking that perhaps the thing has grown, remembering when I first noticed it here.
It was on a weekend of R&R that I first noticed it, when I was given a short leave into the Green Zone, where they told us to relax, as if that were possible after they had taken away our rifles. They let us aimlessly wander through one of Saddam’s old officer retreats, complete with movie theater and blue, Olympic-size pool. I had been on R&R once before, when I was randomly almost blown up by a stray mortar, but this time there were no Delta forces situated across the river to volley mortars with insurgents, so the nights were uneventful.
Andres was sent with me on this weekend getaway. I think Sergeant Daniels purposefully arranged it because he knew we were fucking. Dating, actually, but everyone calls it fucking. Sergeant Daniels hated rules that made no sense; he trusted his soldiers were smart enough not to get pregnant. He got to help out one of his soldiers while holding a middle finger up in the air at the command. Two birds, one bullet.
Andres and I sat in the theater and watched Robert Redford’s The Last Castle. They always played military movies, like we’d forget we were in the army if they showed anything softer. I liked the movie but Andres didn’t. Anything that revolved around soldiers rallying behind a single man was bullshit to him.
“None of that would happen in real life,” he complained as we left the theater. We were in PT gear and the rules were flexible here, so no one complained when we held hands.
“This coming from the man who thinks Scarface is the pinnacle of filmmaking.”
“I can’t date you if you don’t like Scarface.”
“Well, then,” I joked with a shrug, and he gripped my hand tighter because we both knew I had all the power here. He always said he loved me first and I repeated it because it was nice to be loved.
The other soldier zeroed in on me as we exited. He ignored the hand-holding. He ignored Andres entirely. He played the kicked puppy well, resting his hand on my forearm, trailing just to the side of me, as if the very act of touching me somehow soothed him. He had a stare that was off. He wasn’t actually staring at anything but instead through it, to the other side of it, as if he could see the inner workings of things that the rest of us were blind to. I know that stare. I hate that stare.
He cornered us at the edge of the theater, spoke about nothing, perpetually holding my arm until Andres stormed off, expecting me to follow, and I wanted to, but my every attempt was blocked with injured protest.
“Please stay with me,” he begged, staring at my cheekbone, tugging at my forearm, and so I awkwardly followed him to his room, not sure how to untangle myself from this situation, or how to ignore his mournful coos and plaintive manipulation, and that’s probably why he chose me—because I didn’t know how to tell him to fuck off.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “I’m safe.”
No one’s safe, I started to say, but I could see already that he was broken; there was no power in the slope of his shoulders, and his head hung forward, as if it were dragging down the rest of his body. “It’s okay, it doesn’t work anyways.” He gestured to the space between his legs. “It hasn’t for weeks. Just stay with me, please?”
“Just for a minute,” I said, afraid to just turn on my heel and leave because he reminded me of a baby bird I had once found on the gravel outside my bedroom window, back before the Army. The bird was gone the last time I checked on it. Maybe it flew away, but a cat probably ate it.
I sat on the bed in his room because there was nowhere else to sit, sinking into the soft comforter that they would never give us outside the Green Zone, and he immediately crawled across the space between us, hunkering down before me and placing his head against my lap. Shocked, I raised my hands, uncertain where to put them, but he didn’t notice. His knees curled upward, as if he wanted to hug them, a half-fetal position with his head pressed against my womb.
I glanced back toward the door and worried what Andres would think. I worried about rumors and insinuations. But I also worried about the baby bird that was going to get eaten by the cat.
“I’m a medic,” he said, his mouth brushing against my knee, one hand curled beneath his chin. “I’ve been on R&R four times now. They keep sending me here. They think it’ll help.”
I didn’t have to ask what the rest and relaxation was supposed to help with—it was written all over his face. “They should send you home.” I finally placed a hand down, letting it rest on the side of his head, fingers sinking into the soft brown hair.
“They won’t. They’ll never send me home.” His voice was so very thin. “I go back tomorrow.”
I waited for the catch, the hook, for him to say he was going to die so why not? Just this once? Give a dying man a good memory. I hardened myself against it but it never came
. Instead he nestled down and began to talk.
“I was there for the UN bombing—”
(So was I, when the explosion shuddered through Baghdad, so loud and instantaneous that it had stolen my breath, my legs giving out so that I crumpled to the ground, hands clamped over ears, and the newly installed glass windows shivered, rippled, miraculously held while rattling in their metal frames. Then I scrambled to my feet, dashing around the corner to my room where I shouldered on my gear, the heavy press of my Kevlar vest smacking against my ribs, then back, running around the corner to stand by the open door, staring slack-jawed at the growing column of smoke, a pathetic imitation of Nagasaki’s mushroom, yet pluming, curling, swelling around itself in inky black lines, already filling the air with the stench of burning rubber and metal, and First Sergeant Bell was screaming, demanding all combat-lifesaver-trained soldiers meet at the aid station, where I reluctantly turned, heading to the station, knowing how to stop a sucking chest wound from a bullet and place a tourniquet on a demolished limb but knowing and doing are two totally different things and I knew I didn’t want to do that, but then there was Sergeant Daniels, grabbing my elbow, saying, “No, she’s mine,” so that he could collect his platoon, ferreting us away to the top of our work building, because Rome could burn and Sergeant Daniels would play the fiddle but only with his platoon tucked safely behind him.)
“—and me and these other medics, we had to run into one of the buildings because there were people in there, you know? Or at least we thought there had to be. So I end up alone in the basement, I don’t know where the fuck my sergeant went, and there’s water up to my thighs, like this cold, fucking nasty water, I don’t even know where it’s coming from. All I’m thinking is there’s going to be a spark somewhere and I’m going to be electrocuted to death, just poof, go up like smoke and no one’s going to find me because this water is black.
“So I pass by this room, I’m calling out for anyone who needs help, and I swear to God I almost kept walking. I stopped for a second and I looked at the guy, and I was like, nope. Just keep moving. No one would even know. I didn’t have to go in there, you know? I mean, I really just stood there and honestly thought about turning around because Jesus fucking Christ. And he was making the most horrible noise, too, like he was screaming at the back of his throat. Or coughing but it was wet and just fucking…
“I don’t know, maybe he saw me, but I couldn’t leave him. He was so fucking dead, he just didn’t know it yet. This metal frame had him pinned down and I couldn’t tell if the rods actually went through his body but the water was rising and here I am thinking I should be worried about him drowning but fuck if he’s not burned over every inch of his body. It’s like his uniform is melted onto his skin and his skin is just melting in general. It’s all stringy, kind of like plastic? You know, like when you were a kid and would try to melt one of your toys? The way the plastic becomes that thick, pink goo?
“I don’t know where the fire came from. I don’t even know where the water came from but he had obviously been there a while and I’m like, shit, how are you still even alive? So I pull out the gauze from my bag. When you have a bad burn patient, you always have to put dry bandages on it. No ointment or water or shit, it has to be dry. And here I am, pulling out the bandages from my bag and I drop them into the fucking water. I stand there, staring at these bandages, and now I don’t know what to do and he’s looking at me, like I’m here to save him and he’s so fucking excited, maybe, or maybe he just wanted me to do something about the pain, and I literally can’t do anything because I just dropped the fucking bandages.
“Then he begins to choke. And I’m thinking he maybe swallowed something in the water so I go to open his mouth so that I can check his airway. When I put my hand on his jaw, you know, to open it, it just…came off in my hand. Like the entire bottom half of his face is just sitting there, in my hand. And he’s still fucking alive. He’s still choking and I don’t know what to do because his jaw is missing, I still have it in my hand because what am I supposed to do with it? Throw it away? He was literally choking on his own skin that was breaking apart in his throat and he’s still staring at me.”
He fell silent for a moment and I realized they really should send him home. Or maybe they shouldn’t. He was dead anyway. His body just hadn’t realized it yet.
“I can’t sleep,” he added.
“Just close your eyes for a little,” I said, lightly running my hand over his head, petting him, sickened. But I couldn’t just leave him there.
But he didn’t close his eyes. He stared, and finally said, “What if I can never feel again?” His voice was ragged, and it planted the seed between my second and third ribs even as I squirmed uncomfortably away from the thought.
But the seedling didn’t really sprout until a day later, when another soldier caught me sitting alone in a room. Andres had gone to get food and this guy plopped down across from me into a wingback chair, the beaten down royal-blue cushions the last remnant of opulence, covered in dust and clashing with the sandy desert uniform. He didn’t share the medic’s gaze; his eyes were blue and direct, they bore through my skull, daring me to look away, the end of an unlit cigarette butt clenched in his mouth.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world to kill a man,” he boasted after a quick introductory exchange, as if he had been waiting to say it. As if my reputation had preceded me, whispers exchanged between soldiers: “Her, that one. Yeah, get her, she’ll talk to you all night long,” as if I were Mother Soldier, here only to be unburdened upon.
“All you do is line up your sights”—he held up an imaginary rifle, one cheek pressed against an invisible buttstock—“and pull the trigger.” He was all tobacco-stained teeth and half-closed eyes as he lounged in the chair. “Easiest thing in the world.”
His grin flagged slightly at the corners, though, pulled down in lines that for an instant made him look very, very old. “I’m afraid to go home, though.”
“That’s crazy,” I responded. “Everyone wants to go home. What could you possibly be afraid of?”
“I’m afraid to see my wife and kids again.” He stared over my shoulder so that I wouldn’t see something very old consume the corners of his eyes. “I don’t think I can ever love again.”
I don’t think I can ever love again. I felt the statement hit me like a slap. It had never occurred to me before then that that could happen, that we could lose our love, but now it was like he had rung a cast-iron bell between my ears. It was all I could hear.
These are the things that are supposed to be ours, I wanted to say, though I’d have to shout to hear my own voice over the noise in my head. The ability to love can’t transfer ownership, I almost said, but instead I leaned forward and gently patted his hand. “It’ll be fine,” I lied, to him and to myself. “Everything will go back to normal when we go home.”
He gathered himself, watching my face; I don’t know what he saw there. Then he snorted, his grin returning full tilt. “Fuck yeah, I’ll be all right,” he also lied with gusto.
And there that hard, dead thing sat. There it grows, a little thing in my chest that I rub, just below the collarbone, as Captain Wells discusses punishments with a terribly disappointed-looking Sergeant Daniels.
The sentence suits the crime—Andres and I are no longer allowed to openly consort. He is grounded to his side of the company and I must stick to the other, and we must be very careful never to let our paths overlap.
Andres huffs, puffs, kicking the wall as Captain Wells strides away, growling, “He can’t even prove anything was happening! He didn’t see shit. It’s his word against ours.” I almost ask him why he even bothers. Captain Wells doesn’t need proof; his word is god.
“But you can pass notes to each other, if you want,” Sergeant Daniels leans down to murmur in my ear; this is his peace offering, spoken softly so that Captain Wells can’t hear as he walks away.
“I get it,” I say to Sergeant Daniels.
; * * *
But I don’t. I don’t get any of it, not then. Years will accumulate while I try to dissect the tinnitus of cast-iron bells, obsessing over my disinterest, my aloofness, memorizing the words for love (عشغ, 愛, amour, amore) though the sounds will roll around in my mouth, incomplete, like some Sanskrit root lost without its suffix, entangling myself in bedsheets and limbs, somehow hoping I’ll eventually find the etymon of the word. Until I’ll realize feeling nothing is something, and I’ll think this is what it must mean to be adult. “Yes, let’s call it maturity,” I’ll coo to lovers, dressing up the growing chasm between them and me as emotional wisdom, knowing it’s all just meat, it’s all cold and hard, and if you don’t know that, you’re the fucking fool, not me.
And when you all look at me with that patronizing sneer, smearing me with your superior pity, saying, “I’m so glad you came home safe,” with one side of your mouth while dropping the words like “hopeless” or “traumatized” from the other, I’ll sneer right back, saying, “You, stupid, blind people that you are, how does delusion taste? At least I know what isn’t mine.”
Rage Against the Machine
Iraq is the perfect place for rage. War cultivates it, nurtures it with careful hands, like a fine pruned flower. I don’t realize how far the roots go, or what will send it blooming.
On duty one day, nearly a year into deployment, I pace the dark hallway of our work building. Sergeant Daniels has turned the entire floor into a skiff, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, meaning the floor needs to be guarded at all times, protecting our equipment and sensitive information. I kick at small bits of debris, watching the white stones tumble down the long hall. I’m bored. I’d read a book if I had one, but I long ago went through not only my own stash but also everything in the company’s library. I hop onto the desk, crossing my legs and balancing my M16 over my knees, just for something to do. The sun shifts, cutting through holes in the walls, flooding sections of the hall with broken shafts of light.
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