by Andrew Ervin
Sullivan’s office was over in the executive suite of newer buildings on the western edge of the camp. Brutus’s sometime-girlfriend, a civilian named Magda, occasionally worked there as an interpreter. She spent most of her time in the restricted area, and wouldn’t talk about what went on there. He couldn’t even bring up the topic. The cops directed him into the back of a Humvee, which slid on the ice around the turns. Other soldiers watched without surprise as the three of them passed. Brutus read their eyes: he had had this coming for a long time.
Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan sat smiling behind his desk. Brutus had never even spoken to him, other than “yes” and “sir.” This ought to be good, he thought. He saluted and stood at attention. “Private First Class Jonathan Gibson reporting as ordered, sir.”
Up close, Sullivan appeared cross-eyed; he had the lazy eye of a sniper who had spent too many hours staring down the scope of a rifle either out in the field or from the roof of an embassy someplace. His bright green eyes glowed in violent contrast to the taut, ruddy complexion of his skin. A framed blueprint of a small military bridge occupied the entire wall behind him. Sullivan had overseen its reconstruction over a river in Serbia and was awarded a commendation from the highest echelons of SFOR. Young for a man of his rank, he had a reputation as a cunning, brutal officer. He was the biggest ballbreaker on the continent. It was said that his assignment to Hungary was a form of punishment, or possibly even exile. A soldier in his command had once died under allegedly crooked circumstances. Brutus had to stay sharp. Smile and nod.
“At ease,” Sullivan said. “Relax, Brutus.” His voice was calming in an authoritative way, kind of like how they portrayed Satan’s in old movies. Brutus remained standing. Sullivan saw the surprise on his face. “You don’t mind if I call you Brutus, do you?”
“No, sir.”
Sullivan dismissed the soldiers. He had a large manila envelope on the desk. The words PFC GIBSON JONATHAN and PHILADELPHIA, PENNA. were typed on a white label.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“No, sir.” A million possibilities ran through his mind. They probably knew about Magda. Relations with the civilian population had been forbidden since another G.I. got convicted of rape in Japan some months earlier and set off a diplomatic shitstorm. Word had it that parents in Okinawa, probably in Hungary too, were trying to cash in on the American occupation by sending their daughters out to fuck soldiers and then yell rape. Uncle Sam was known to throw a lot of money around to keep the stories out of the papers. At Taszár, the authorities didn’t care if a G.I. poked another Hungarian honey, not until they needed an excuse to climb up his ass.
Sullivan slid the envelope across the desk. Brutus became aware not only of his own nervousness but also how much Sullivan relished that nervousness. He bathed in it, took strength from it. He was probably stroking a hard-on under his desk. He looked like a snake about to lunge at a rat. A thought ran through Brutus’s mind: a snake without poison is still a snake. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard that. Maybe from his buddy Elvin. He opened the envelope, which was empty except for a single eight-by-ten photo.
“Look at the photograph, Private.”
It was black-and-white and extremely grainy, with a spooky, timeless quality. It could have been taken twenty minutes or twenty years earlier: a hard-core shot of two men, one black and one white, engaging in anal sex. From the angle and quality of the print, he couldn’t make out either of their faces. The black man was getting fucked up the ass, and Brutus knew what was going to happen next.
“What’s the matter, Brutus? That is you, isn’t it? That nigger faggot, I mean.” All the softness left his voice. A thin smile crept across his face.
“No, sir.”
“Do you always catch, Brutus? Don’t you get the urge to pitch once in a while?” Sullivan stopped smiling. “Listen to me. This is you in the photograph. Do you understand?”
“Sir, I—”
“Do. You. Under. Stand?”
Brutus looked deep into Sullivan’s face and saw nothing at all he could work with. His mind raced. A snake without poison is still a snake. It wasn’t him in the photo, of course, but that would be his word against Sullivan’s. How many men had Sullivan pulled this on? How many different people had been in that picture? Did he have another version with the roles reversed in the unlikely case that he wanted to blackmail a white dude? A Latino? Sullivan was setting him up. Blackmail—the word rolled over and over through his mind. He entertained the idea that the white guy in the photo was Sullivan.
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
Brutus did understand. For the first time in his army career, he knew exactly what was happening to him. He was being set up, made into an example at Taszár and at every post Sullivan would have for the remainder of his career.
“You see that it’s you in the photograph?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It pleases me to know you’re as smart as our best testing demonstrates. So you understand that you have officially entered into a world of shit? So to speak.”
“Very much so, sir.”
“And, Private, that I alone can get you out of it?”
“I pretty much guessed that too, sir. And if I’m not mistaken you’re going to make me some kind of deal.” Brutus sidestepped the usual formalities, testing his limits. He wished he had his pistol with him, but didn’t know what he would do with it. Better this way.
“You’re perceptive, Private. But this is not the time to discuss such matters. For now, let’s just say that you are going to help me with something. When you’re finished, you get to keep this photograph as a souvenir. Fuck with me, and this is going on the front page of Stars and Stripes. You get where I’m coming from?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You won’t end up in some cushy, American prison. Oh no. It would please me very much to visit you in the filthiest cell this whole stinking country has to offer, and I will blow you sweet kisses while you’re bent over in front of some skinhead mother killers far meaner than the featherweight in this picture. Dismissed, Private.”
Brutus saluted and turned to leave.
“Oh, one more thing before you go, Private. With a name like Brutus, I assume you’ve read Julius Caesar?”
“Yes, sir. Several times, sir.” He even had “Et tu Brute” tattooed on his left bicep.
“Well. A nigger who reads Shakespeare is like the one monkey out of a thousand that gets lucky at a typewriter and writes a sonnet. That makes you one lucky monkey, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So when I tell you to beware the ides of March, you know you better fucking listen, right?”
“Yes, sir.” Brutus couldn’t stand the sound of his own voice: yessuh, yessuh, yessuh. “But it wasn’t Brutus, sir.”
The lieutenant colonel looked up from the paperwork on his desk. “Excuse me?”
“It wasn’t Brutus, sir, who had to beware the ides of March. It was Caesar.”
Sullivan scowled. “Dismissed, Private.”
3.
“This is not,” Sullivan had announced in his introductory lecture, “a free country.”
The day Brutus had arrived at Taszár, he received an orientation package of army propaganda. More than national defense or fighting wars or peacekeeping missions or any of that, paperwork justified the existence of the U.S. military. He was handed three three-ring binders stacked one on top of the other. That was only the beginning. He pitched most of the material into the garbage, but kept a few pamphlets because of their comic value. One described the dangers of Hungarian women, known to be a predatory race of acid-tongued nymphets interested only in obtaining an American passport. There was nothing a Hungarian girl—especially “a girl from the countryside,” it was stressed—wouldn’t do to sink her claws into a G.I. The handout told horror stories of girls getting pregnant and demanding child support from the U.S. government, of angry fathers seeking retribution (“The honor of one’s fami
ly is extremely important among the peasantry of Eastern Europe”), and of mafioso thugs using their girlfriends as bait to extort money out of the unwitting soldier. “Socially Transmitted Diseases (STDs) run rampant in emerging democracies.”
The battery of physical and psychological examinations, and the innumerable injections, lasted for weeks.
Back before the construction of Camp Bondsteel over in Kosovo, the American brass decided that Taszár Air Base could be another Guantánamo. Originally built for the Red Army in the 1950s, it was conveniently located within striking distance of the Yugoslavian border. The Russians abandoned the base in 1990 and a few years later, Uncle Sam moved in. To the Hungarian government, opening Taszár to the United States gave them a jackbooted foot in the door to NATO. The Budapest media, like the American, was effectively state run and did little to feed the nation’s appetite for political scandal, even in the face of another occupation by another imperial power.
Taszár served for a short time as the operational headquarters for the theoretically multinational force charged with “keeping the peace” in the Balkans. Once things cooled down over there, though, the American government refused to decommission the base. Instead, they repurposed it for use in their War on Terror. It wasn’t like they could illegally intern civilians on American soil—they had tried that with the Japanese during World War II—so instead, they used bases like Taszár. The so-called black sites. The few Brits and Dutchmen Brutus saw around existed purely for symbolic purposes. For obvious historical reasons, there were very few Russian, or even German, soldiers on Hungarian soil.
Brutus rarely had any contact with the foreign troops or with the few Hungarian officers who, in theory, still technically ran the base. He knew the deal. His presence at Taszár represented another step in Hungary’s transition from Soviet satellite state to American satellite state. No one in the army appeared willing to question the exportation of America’s racist, imperialist tradition into yet another foreign land. Most of the other soldiers, even the rare black officer, couldn’t distinguish between Eldridge and Beaver Cleaver.
The whole base reminded Brutus of Eastern State Penitentiary back home. That was the first real prison built in the colonies, but it hadn’t housed prisoners for at least thirty years. He had taken a tour there once with his sister, before she had J. J. The administrators opened it to the public in summertime and at Halloween turned it into a haunted house. Sometimes one of the local universities would rent it out to put on plays and shit, but the theatergoers had to wear hardhats because the place was in such dismal shape. The prison was designed so that a guard in a central tower could see into every cell. It didn’t matter if you were being watched at any given time—you had to behave because you knew you could be being watched.
Taszár worked in the same, panoptic way. The army created a pervasive environment of paranoia. There was one notable difference, though. Instead of just the officers and the M.P.s being able to see everything going on all the time, all of the soldiers—like the prisoners they were—could as well. Everyone knew everyone else’s intimate business. If someone stole food from the mess hall, or snuck across the motor pool to play a little grab-ass with one of the Hungarian civilians, everyone knew about it. The testosterone-powered cycle trapped everyone on the base in a feedback loop of constant surveillance. That included the foreign troops too. The M.P.s didn’t even need to keep an eye on the soldiers. They policed themselves and each other, just like Orwell had predicted. Even if Brutus wasn’t being watched at any given time, the police and Sparky and these other hillbillies could be watching him, and that was usually enough to make him think twice about doing something stupid. His letters from home were read, his e-mails intercepted, and his uppity behavior reported, all in the name of national security. But hanging out with Magda on occasion was the one bright spot in the dreary grind of army life. He heard the racist murmurings behind his back about his dating a white woman, sure, and although no one said much to his face, there existed a constant threat of reprisal from some gung-ho supremacist.
He felt the weight of his pistol bouncing against his hip with each step. Its presence unsettled him not because he didn’t want to carry it, but because he didn’t like the fact that everyone else was carrying a weapon too. There were too many cowboys running around, anxious to lay down their own personal versions of the law. The higher-ups readily encouraged a system of justice that wasn’t based upon any consistent moral authority Brutus could identify. What, in his reading, Paul Ricoeur referred to as “the practical field” Brutus thought of as “the Man.” And at Taszár, each man had become the Man to the other men. Himself included.
When someone got caught fucking up, it was only elevated to the M.P.s if the situation—and the punishment—couldn’t be handled first within the ranks. As a message, a solider might get stuck on shithole duty for a month, or even pistol-whipped while he slept. The inmates ran the jail, which was why it was so dangerous not only letting everyone run around with a firearm but requiring it. West Philly had been the same back in the eighties, when everyone carried a piece because of all the crackheads. There were shoot-outs every night. Elvin got himself shot in the stomach and had a scar from his ribs all the way down his fat belly.
Apart from catching up with Magda now and then, Brutus stayed more or less in line. He sometimes voiced his more subversive political views, but still, he never expected this kind of trouble, least of all from Sullivan and the higher-ups.
Being watched and scrutinized all the time was bad enough, but the people watching him were now better armed than he was. His weapon no longer functioned properly and hadn’t for a few days, since a couple of components got lost the day he left it in his room to go see Sullivan. Huge disadvantage. And he couldn’t just go and order replacement parts either. Questions would be asked, discipline administered. Fuck all that.
He suspected that Sparky found the pieces and dumped them down the toilet. Brutus was already in a world of trouble, though, so he didn’t care if his roommate put the word out, as he invariably would, that his sidearm didn’t shoot. He carried it with him anyway. Like all things in the army, his weapon existed for the sake of appearance. Every day, he regretted quitting college. Every single fucking day.
Brutus had attended Temple University for two years, where he studied philosophy and took computer classes, but he found he learned more on his own, reading whatever he wanted. He dropped out and took a job as a security guard at the Macy’s next to city hall, which everyone still called Wanamaker’s. Every day, on the bus ride to the store, he passed the recruiter’s office. At the Mambo’s urging he went in and, desperate to hear some good news, believed every last lie they sold him. Money for college, if he ever decided to go back. Rapid advancement. No color barrier. On-the-job training. See the world, hold your chin high, become a man. Nothing at all about the army maintaining the last vestiges of the American slave trade.
He signed on. By week three of basic training, the Seven Army Values felt like deadly sins, and he knew he had made a mistake. The limited potential for career growth afforded an inner-city brother in the U.S. Army soon became clear. They made no attempt to pretend otherwise. Now punks like Sparky dirtied their lily-white hands on ink-jet printouts while Brutus stood out in the freezing cold setting rattraps. The local rodents carried a virus that had made several soldiers sick. Brutus had personally baited over a hundred traps, but to date had caught only nine rats. The men who sucked up to Sullivan didn’t necessarily rise any quicker through the ranks, but they did get the sweetest assignments. Sparky sat in ops reading satellite images or monitoring Radio Beograd while Brutus and the other brothers and Latinos caught vermin in the snow or broke up the ice that formed every night on the runway.
Contrary to the propagandists’ advice, Brutus didn’t fear the wrath of Hungarian women and their social diseases. He had been seeing Magda for the past two months. Conjugal relations with members of the civilian crews were expressly forbidden, bu
t when Magda could sneak loose Brutus arranged to meet her someplace quiet. To do so, he needed to cut across the base to get to the prefab buildings where the officers ran their war. In the army, Brutus had learned, if he acted like he belonged in a certain situation, no one would question him. He could do anything he wanted to so long as he did it with a little authority. Put that glide in his stride and he could probably saunter back into Sullivan’s office and wet him on the spot. If his pistol worked.
In the absence of wind, a three-foot-tall cloud of truck exhaust lingered just off the ground. He followed it to Sullivan’s building. Odors didn’t dissipate in that weather, so the entire base smelled like oil and gunpowder, plus cooking grease and fresh paint. His sinuses were so blocked that the stink didn’t bother him as much as usual. He blew his nose, filling a tissue with soot and tar that looked like the resin coating the inside of a glass pipe. Then the oily smell hit him, only for a second, until his nose clogged up again.
Someone had used a cinder block to prop open a back door. A dozen cigarette butts lay crushed on the ground. Brutus slipped inside and, as planned, found Magda in an otherwise unoccupied meeting room.
She was maybe a decade older than him but didn’t show it, and she spoke half a dozen languages. Her father was Hungarian, and although Magda grew up in America and went to Yale, Brutus thought of her as Hungarian. She was real cool, not as materialistic as most of the women he knew back home, even though he got the impression she was pretty well-off. She worked as a translator or a consultant or something like that. It was classified. She was also gorgeous, with the kind of smile that made army life and the rest of the world disappear.