As You Were

by David Tromblay

  There’s a telephone in the kitchen, so she stays making pancakes, and because the house is better than a half an hour out of town, she shops at Sam’s Club, so she’s still making pancakes when her husband comes downstairs the next morning looking for his lunch to take to work.

  He works at the hospital where you’ve been admitted, so he gets to see you before she does and before he heads down to the cafeteria to rip out the asbestos.

  He says, “You’ll do anything to get out of doing work around the house, huh?” but brings you a bag of burgers and fries from the greasy spoon diner down the street: you’re hurt, not sick.

  Twenty plus years later, it’s you who sits in the hospital waiting room. They give you a pager—the kind most restaurants use when there’s a line. Each time it erupts with flashing red lights and that unignorable trembling, you’re told when the doctor opens Jeremy up, when his heart is taken offline, when his heart is beating on its own, and when he’s stitched and stapled back together.

  The doctor tells you he fixed seven blockages, but there was another too small to fix, and another yet that’d been clogged so long it bypassed itself. But last month, when the son of a bitch asked you to be his family advocate, Jeremy said he might need two or three stints, nothing major.

  He never makes it to any of your weddings, but he asks you to be his best man. On the day of the wedding, you show up early at his fiancé’s parents’ house to learn a thing or two about a traditional Hmong wedding.

  The first thing you learn is you won’t be his best man; you’ll be his chief negotiator. Not like there are any others from his side of the family. There’s a lot of ceremony, translation, and drinking some shitty beer. There’s an offering of tobacco to the elders and ancestors, which isn’t much different from your traditions. There is a slew of questions lobbed from one side of the table to the other, including whether there are any unresolved issues between the bride’s family and the groom’s. Since he’s a Finlander from northern Minnesota and her family comes from somewhere in Asia, it’s not an issue. There’s lots more drinking, a swallow after every question, making most fade from memory, except the last one: whether she is promised to anyone else. The answer is a quick one: no, she’s ugly, no one else has asked after her.

  With the air callously cleared, the bride price is paid to her parents—five thousand dollars, a sum decided upon by the eighteen Hmong clans, which you get a cut of for your time. Then the men gather around a table of food prepared by the women.

  There’s toast after toast of the same shitty beer and some clear crap that could peel paint. It has a name you couldn’t pronounce if you tried, and the Hmong man sitting next to you does try, but he’s been drinking as long as you have. Several times you lock eyes with Jeremy and tell him it’s a great wedding, a great wedding, really, a great wedding, and then you ask: where’s your wife? Meaning: why aren’t they seated side by side? Why is she stuck out in the kitchen with the other women, simply serving the men on her wedding day? You’re not ignorant of their culture, you’re just wondering why he asked for all this.

  Eventually, it’s announced the wedding party must leave the parents’ home, the way a bartender announces at closing time how you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay there.

  You’ll have to make it home a hundred and fifty miles north, fueled by innumerable cans of crappy beer and who knows how many boiled chickens. On the way to the car, you make sure to tell Jeremy’s new wife it was a really beautiful wedding, she should have been there.

  You do make it home, and when you do, you find what’s left of a pack of cigarettes—the tobacco offering—and your cut of the bride price tucked into a shirt pocket. It’s only a hundred dollars, but you set it aside. At least until you decide to buy some Chinese takeout, kind of like Jeremy did.

  CURSE YOU OUT, DEMON

  YOU WAKE TO A BURST of gunfire, the crack of a carbine, the telltale call of an AK, and thrust a hand beneath the cot to snatch up your M4 and a magazine. Instead, you Tap to Snooze and long for a reason to rise and greet the world. Something worth rolling out of your Sealy, Serta, Simmons, or whatever the hell the salesmen talked you into buying. Whatever it is, it’ll never come close to the rest you got lying on the rocks beneath the back axle of a Humvee deep inside the Green Zone or sprawled across a pallet of Pelican cases that you clipped yourself to with some carabiners on the way back from Africa.

  A pair of boots, encrusted with desert sand, peek out from the closet shelf. They’re discolored, coated with dust, lying atop the cardboard box entombing the pre-lit plastic tree that hasn’t seen the light of day since the last time you saw your son for Christmas.

  You breathe in the world around you, the putrid breath of Bentley, a North American shelter hound you brought home right after things got really bad, right after your two-room apartment got broken into. He knows the dreams are back and nuzzles you with all his ninety pounds, thinking you cannot have nightmares while you are awake. He’s hungry and needs to take a lap around the block, too, so he shakes his head, and the flapping of his ears bounces off the bare walls with a clack, clack, clack sound.

  You miss waking to the smell of FAN hanging in the air: feet, ass, and nuts. Not that Bentley’s breath burns your nostrils any less. But you miss the aroma the detainees cannot detect coming from their clothes, their sleeping mats, their blankets, themselves. It’s the reason the Kurds call them Dirty Arabs.

  They’re literal people.

  The detainees spit on you, but they don’t take a shit and fling it at the guards like they do in GITMO. In White Sands, they tell you the detainees will masturbate into the palms of their hands and toss it through the bars when you walk by. But they don’t. Not here. Not in Iraq. This isn’t like Cuba. They don’t tell you this during training, though. They only tell you what they’ve been told. They try to prepare you for the worst. They inform you of all of the above but forget to tell you they put everyone with hepatitis into cell 3-9 until one does spit, so he can go to the SHU for some solitude, so he can sleep in a little later than usual, forgo a prayer or two or five.

  Their cell chief says, “We are not animals. We are not Afghanis—we do not fling shit like apes.” Yet they cough and hack and blow snot into the one washtub all forty of them use to cleanse their hands and feet before prayer. It’s the same washtub they use to clean the dirt off their garden-fresh vegetables, delivered daily, courtesy of the contracted neighboring farmer.

  Your stomach churns watching this.

  There is one man who disgusts all others. He fasts every day, stuffs food into the lining of his sleeping mat, which you let him keep once you notice him withering away. He prays facing the wrong direction, refuses to shower amongst the others—despite them keeping their underwear on all the while. They cannot be naked in front of other men.

  The other detainees say he has a jinni and will perform an exorcism, if you allow. Of course you will. Your curiosity is piqued. You’re as bored as they. You’re trapped in this prison, too.

  Inside the cell, they lie him flat on the floor atop the red arrow the ICRC painted, pointing his head toward Mecca.

  Despite his physique resembling that of an elderly Christ on the cross, several men take hold of his limbs, hold down his wrists, his ankle, his elbows, his knees. Two other men kneel, cup their hands around his ears, repeat a prayer in stereo.

  The terp says this should not be watched, refuses to translate, walks off.

  The imam stands with his back to the corner of the cell, facing away from Mecca. The thirty-some cellmates thunder the prayer he leads. They stand, kneel, bow their heads to the floor over and again, shaking the catwalk each time they fall to their knees, causing you to close the windows, hoping to muffle the cacophony coming from their cell.

  He sobs, but the voice isn’t his. Neither is the tongue. None of them know what he is saying. You don’t know what they are saying, but the scene still makes your skin crawl. The hair on the back of your neck would stand if it w
asn’t straight-razored off before you took the watch.

  Time stands still until they relent. He’s let up. They pray in silence.

  Every completed prayer done in this life means one less time they’ll have to kneel upon the broken glass they say litters the stairway to Paradise.

  He approaches the bars and pantomimes for a bottle of water. He’s hungry, too. Asks in a rasp to use the WC. Through the terp, you tell him he can use it for as long as he wants.

  Him and him alone.

  You hand him a towel and an entire bottle of shampoo, and he winds his way through a series of steel doors into the WC. The sight of the sprinkling water makes him shed both his jumpsuit and boxers and step beneath the spray, behind the waist-high wall.

  You barely make it out of the way when a cellmate tosses his clothes out the window and into the trash can. Others fold his sleeping mat in two and send it through the bars along with his blanket and pillow. New ones are sent in.

  Everything going in matches everything they sent out, and no one acts the wiser. The cell chief tosses a fresh jumpsuit and pair of boxers onto the floor of the WC right where the soiled pair were shed.

  Impervious, Old Man Christ towels off, dresses, and makes his way back to his mat free of the smell that once radiated from him. It’s the same smell that fills the street as the homeless gather outside the soup kitchen—catty-corner from your apartment—while you walk Bentley before you head to bed. They want a meal and a roof to sleep under for the night. Most of them want to forget the same things as you. Most of them end up bivouacking in the tree line of the park a block north of the place you rent month to month.

  DIESEL THERAPY

  THE VILLAGE OF SULAYMANIYAH is where the food and drink for the detainees comes from three times a day. The caterers tell you not to touch the Arab food, meaning: the food meant for the Arabs locked inside the prison. Why isn’t explained or qualified.

  Strange as it may seem, somehow bits of metal shavings and tiny screws find their way into the bread dough. This happens so often an additional dentist is brought in to help pull all the broken and cracked teeth.

  You warn the caterers one morning, tell them you think their truck is leaking fuel. They say, “No, truck good—zore-bash-ah.” And you ask if they have any extra tea.

  “Tomorrow, we bring special for you. Don’t drink,” they say, pointing to the pots of chai you hold in each hand, “bash-knee-ah.”

  Those who still drink the tea shit themselves silly. Most mornings, diesel drips into the chai, until your commander speaks to the Kurdish commander about responsibilities he’s been tasked with: keeping the detainees healthy and safe until they hang, for one.

  While working your way house to house, searching for five escapees in the neighboring village, an old man yells, “Go,” waving you all away. “We bring...to Suse.”

  Later you learn they were kept in the basement of an abandoned cement factory. One doesn’t make it back. The four who do have to heal some before a retinal scan recognizes them. “Arab fall down mountain,” the villagers say, demanding their reward money for the other four.

  The night the five men broke out the window of their WC, they went unnoticed by the tower guards, made it through the fence and out into what was once Kurdistan. The prison went from a silent building, thought derelict by passersby, to a shitshow of sounding alarms and searchlights. You’re woken and told to go to the cellblock to await further instructions.

  The fluorescents blind you during your dash to your assigned cell block. You don’t ask any questions—you run, high-stepping the whole way there, wearing what you slept in: PT shorts and a brown T-shirt.

  Your rock-hard cock

  Flops

  Flops

  Flops

  From one thigh to the other, over and again, the whole way there, and it won’t go away with the adrenaline flowing and blood pumping and the fear of finding five freed terrorists around the next corner while your M4 sits locked up in the armory collecting dust.

  Your further instructions are to get a flashlight and put on some fucking pants.

  The Peshmerga bring kebabs to celebrate the return of the escapees. The dysentery returns, too. You need three bags of saline to rehydrate and take some off-brand Loperamide appropriately encapsulated in a two-tone brown and beige gelcap to stop up the works.

  The man whose job it is to keep the flies off the food takes too many bathroom breaks, and they don’t wash their hands over there. They don’t wipe their ass either. Instead, they punch a hole into the cap of a water bottle and squeeze, turning it into a makeshift, handheld bidet.

  The next time they offer to cook, you decline.

  You stop eating anything not prepackaged or frozen at the factory and defrosted and boiled at the DFAC. Most days, the food on the steam tables is lukewarm by the time your lunch break rolls around, so you grab what hasn’t yellowed yet, along with a slice of the fruitcake offered at every meal year-round.

  The Loperamide wears off about three days later, and you’ve grown tired of looking for someone to stand your post, walking a quarter mile back to the E5 berthing, removing all the gear, and rolling the dice as to whether there is a toilet available in the latrine. Instead, you grab a bottle of ice-cold mineral water the prison imports from Turkey for the detainees and head into the WC, where you pop a literal squat.

  You shit where the detainees do, in other words.

  Later, when they get a chance to use the WC, you learn their toilets don’t flush with enough force to wash away three days’ worth of MREs.

  “Sergeant, you use WC?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think you have a medical problem. You need to see doctor. I put in Sick Call request for you, okay?”

  This is the guy everyone calls the Big Show because he looks like the wrestler. He stands at least six foot four and wears his hair feathered with a close-cropped beard.

  Before he was the Big Show, he was Will. Will was his codename when he worked as an interpreter for the US Army. But then he sold intelligence to the takfirs or Wahhabis or Al-Qaeda and got several soldiers killed and will one day hang for his crimes.

  He helps you, though. Together you run a tight ship. No riots erupt on your watch.

  One day the SERT commander is making his rounds while you conduct shower call for your cells, handing out Ziploc baggies containing toothbrushes and disposable razors. Each man has a baggie assigned to him, and each man is responsible for its return. If something goes missing, then all of them will be stripped naked and searched by a team of Americans and Kurdish Correctional Police until the item is found, even if there are six inches of snow on the catwalk and all they have to wear is their flip-flops. They learned that the hard way.

  Everyone calls the SERT Commander “Tiny,” even though he stands nose to nose with the Big Show and comes in at about 325 pounds with all his gear.

  That day, Tiny asked the Big Show if there would be any trouble.

  “No, no trouble,” the Big Show said.

  “I’m not worried about you giving me trouble,” Tiny smiled, “but are you going to give the sergeant any trouble?”

  “No, I am good for Sergeant Monday,” he said, taking another baggie and handing it to the next detainee in line. “Are you wanting trouble with me?” he asked Tiny before pointing out, “You are big man. I am big man. We fight: maybe you win, maybe I win.”

  “What about Sergeant? Are you going to fight him?”

  “No! He is no good in head,” the Big Show said, widening his eyes. “He is like small dog.”

  See, once, while instructing a new KCP trainee how to secure a cell after a hygiene call following the midday meal, you yell to the forty men inside, and they get behind the red line.

  Then the KCP nods to you, lets you know they’re kneeling on the floor with their backs to the door, and it’s okay for you to walk through the WC into the cell to secure the inside door while he watches from the catwalk. But when you swing the steel door open
, the Big Show is standing there, puzzled. He asks, “I go behind red line?” You nod yes and step back out onto the catwalk and yell for the terp to tell the trainee again. And the terp tells the trainee step by step how this is supposed to work, again, and he nods again, and you make your way back into the cell again. But this time, one of the detainees stands to pray, and the trainee loses all sense and locks you inside the cell, slamming and latching the door which lets out to the catwalk, punctuating his fear by padlocking the sliding steel bar in place.

  Hearing the sound of metal sliding against metal and the padlock clicking into itself, you move faster than can be put into words, and then scream through the barred window to be let out of the cell.

  But the trainee doesn’t move.

  You scream to the entire prison, locking eyes with the trainee—who is too afraid to move—until someone pulls the keys from his hand and lets you out. That’s when you snatch all five-feet-nothing of him by the collar and march him to his sergeant who marches him to his colonel, who makes sure he never steps foot inside Suse again.

  Back inside the cell, the Big Show stands by the bars, shaking his head, talking about how stupid KCP is, and asks, “What happen I grab you?” raising his open hands to the height of your neck.

  You lock eyes with him and hold out your hand and say, “I grab you.”

  He looks down at your hand, palm up, at the height of his ball sack, and says, “This no good. You do not touch men this way.”

  “If I touch you this way,” you say, folding your fingers into a fist, pantomiming squishing his grapes, “you won’t be a man anymore.”

  The Big Show makes this wobbling hand gesture like Americans do to say something is so-so, but for him, it means he can’t believe this shit. He’s done fucking with you. He respects you. He has to. He’s culturally conditioned to—simply because you grew a pornstache like Saddam once grew, but he thinks you’re certifiably crazy, too, because of the dragon that’s crawling across your skin, and the Popeye sitting next to it, and the anchor and the pin-up girl wearing only a white hat and the myriad of sea life that signifies you’re a Sailor—from the sea, as they say—hezen-daryayi, but they turn it into Has he diarrhea? and they don’t get your ranks, all you petty officers. Petty means insignificant to them, so you let them call you Sergeant.