In Country 01

I look at the sunlight of a dying day as it flows over his body, it’s finely chiseled contours, the little swoop by the sides of his abdomen that hint that there is still muscle beneath the slight layer of softness that age has provided him. I can’t bear to look for too long, but instead turn to the side of my bed, and begin brushing my hair. It is long, and still blond enough. I have had long hair for along time, so the even strokes of the brush, slowly easing out the tangles from the sweat soaked afternoon is a ritual, it calms me.

“My husband would kill me if he knew.”

I say that to the air.

“But he isn’t here.”

I brush another long stroke, and then stop. Those hands of his are on my hip, and caressing over the curve of my figure, and then down my thigh, and then back up again. Those hands of his. Those hands that can sew together dying flesh, torn by metal or wood or stone. IT is those hands that I dream of.

“Yes, he’s in country. This is the moment that makes me feel guilty, every time.”

“So was I. What are you going to do?”

I try and resume the brushing, but my perception’s focus is more and more and more and more upon the point of contact of the tips of his fingers on my curve, as the play up my waist, which no longer has the same swoop it did when I was reeally still young, but more than most women, I think, my age can really claim.

“Nothing until I have to, until…”

I roll back over on my back, and stare up into his blue eyes, and the features that are finely etched, but filled with imperfections that prevent it from being gorgeously magnetic. He is still handsome. And for some moment, my man, even if I can’t really feel myself to be his woman. Or not completely his woman. I am drawn to wanting to say something affectionate. His hands move down my body and begin wirling in that triangle of curly pubic hair. I did not have a name for that place on my body, until he gave it one. My husband had no sense that I had nerves anyplace, except my lips, nipples and vagina. He taught me how there were nerves, and tissues and a whole connectedness, with that same stroking motion he is using now.

“How did you feel, when you came back, and your wife left you?”

He gazes down into me, and hard into me, and his fingers never stop picking the dried white flecks that are the remains of sex from my hairs.

“Feel? I didn’t feel at all.”

I breath out slowly and almost manage a sigh. He continues.

“Being there changed me, I expected it.”

“Did you know? I mean that she had taken up with someone else? While you are there?”

“I still don’t know, you never can.”

I pause for a moment.

“You must have felt something.”

“Not until I met you. She went off with someone else. Maybe he was more like the man she fell in love with than I am now.”

“You’ve said this before, what do you mean?”

“I am quieter now.”

“I like you quiet, sweetie.”

He straightens his fingers through my pubic hairs, and without asking or needing to ask, because to move them in a slow spiral on the surface of my outer lips. I can’t help not wanting him to, but there is a thrill that rises on my neck, and I want him not to stop, more than anything, I want him to continue, but hold right there, and not use this as a prelude to another round of. Of love making. Yes. That is what it is. I open my lips to say something. I stop. I start on something else. I stop again. He fills the space.

“I used to talk about everything, I had opinions about life, art, politics, the world. I don’t now.”

“I like you quiet.”

“That’s because that is what you need, a man who is quiet so you can only half fall in love.”

That stings, I start a third time to say something, this time more bitter than the last. I stop again, and then start a fourth thing.

“But I have. Just not with you. With… with this. With us. I’m in love with us. Which is why I don’t want us to end.”

There is a rustle as his hand moves. He lowers himself down as if doing a push up, kisses my neck, suspended above me, not touching me except at the point, and then lifting himself away.

“One of the us is going to end very soon.”

“No, he is stuck there.”

“I’m going back there. And that will mean you will find someone else.”

That stings again, but even as my intestines churn with the nausea of self-realization that I need a warmth beside me, and within me, or I will curl up and vomit until I feel like dying, talks in the back of my mind, I deny it. In that moment, I decide to deny it, and make one of those promises that is only true going forward. I feel a hardness sweep first inside of me, and then become a tautness over my chest and breasts and down my legs.

“I’m not going to do that.”

My chin bends inwards as a way of emphasizing the earnestness of the statement, and I look back up into those eyes with a challenge.

“So what are you going to do, delay with both of us until we both come home?”

“Half of me wants one of you to just shoot the other.”

“It will have to be him, I’ve had my fill of blood and killing for any reason other than pure necessity.”

I start to turn away again, but his hands are upon the curve of my hips, he presses them down to the bed, and places his lips on the outside of my sex. What follows is pure pornographic moment, I can’t describe it, or, I don’t have the courage to describe it.

But this is what I felt, I felt first the softness of his lips along the rills of my skin. I felt my skin part, and the tight muscles around my sex spasm. I felt a warming, a tickling. In that instant I went from wanting him to barely touch me, to wanting every inch of my skin on his. I wanted to be in his pocket all day long. I wanted to want. But still, it is only the lips that touch me.

And then I feel a hard tip of tongue slide down through opening gap. It plows me skin apart, and tocks, pearl to pearl, hardness to hardness. Oh yes, I am hard at that point, and running into my body, a gripping feeling, as if I am gripped around myself.

I am taken by him, even though, it is only the tip of his tongue that touches at the tip of my pearl. It has become that, a pearl. Hard, and layered up from all the ages of my body and the bodies that came before me. I feel my consciousness drop down my body, down inside me. I feel the blood collapse into my core, and then pulse out. My toes stretch, and then curl. I wiggle them to prove they are not frozen in place.

Then the broad expanse of his tongue is on me, washing over that excited point, but rising up, passing over the thickets of my pubic hair, up to my navel and then down again. And then the hard tip on my burning point. I feel myself open like a rose, the petals spread to catch this rain that has come again. A pulse like waves from distant storms rolls up me, it is not that climax, but the warning that of in some distance, perhaps carried by different winds, it is coming.

How long he spends touching the petals of my rose I can’t recall.

What I feel is dirty, shameful and as addictive as anything I’ve ever known.

I gasp, because, not because I feel it, but because I want to tell him not to stop, and I can’t wrap my lips around the words. He spends long minutes praying at the temple of my body. I forget the motions and precisely what he does, and even my gaze losses focus. I don’t want to remember, and I try not to think about my husband or what this means.

“I want you then.”

He pulls himself up again, and is again suspended over me, close enough that the radiant heat still comes off of him to me. He stares up along my geography, I look down. I stare down. I cry.

The tears force my eyes to close and I am sobbing.

“Why did this have to happen to us? Why this war, now, to us?”

“Which us? I don’t think your marriage was going to live. How you put up with his affairs I don’t know.”

“He needed them, and I needed him.”

He shakes his head.

“You needed him, so he could have them.”

I open my eyes again, I take aggressive action and slide myself back down under him, my legs dangling down the foot of the bed.

“Don’t go back there.”

“I made a promise, even if Americans can’t keep theirs to me, I have to keep mine to them.”

“I’m breaking a promise by being with you.”

“It was a promise that was already broken. You want the name of his woman in the Green Zone? I can give it to you. Doctors know everything.”

I pause and stare up in earnest.

“Like what.”

He runs his hand around a hard roundness on my tummy.

“She’s pregnant, and so are you.”

Signed — Liberty

In Country 02

2

There is a shadow.

It is a plane.

And it is flying far too low.

God Bless them all.

And all heads turn, because it cannot be, but we know in a sickening sense that it must be. Because nothing else could be it. The accident we’ve all feared in our sleep, when something goes horribly wrong. The pilot he must be asleep.

It lolls in the air and mists on impact, the massive building billows out. There is a horrible light. And then a shroud that is pieces of people, we can feel the spatter, and the spray. Stuck looking up, in terror and in awe. How could such an accident happen, a once in a lifetime moment of failure? There is disaster here, in Manhattan. The American Alps one writer called them.

There is a shadow.

It is a plane.

And it is flying far too low.

God Bless us All.

I startle to the sound of nothing but the banging of a unlocked door. Dark floods my eyes, there is light from a passing car shuffling along the wall. It was a dream. Thank god. I had to be a dream. A terrible dream. One vision, nothing like that could have happened.

I blink.

There is a white smear across my vision

I blink.

There is a white smear across my vision.

There is grey snow falling from the clouds. Grey snow in September. And the clouds are far too low. It irritates my eyes.

“It’s alright there little lady. You just passed out.”

There is a a severe constriction over my mouth and nose, I feebly flail an arm up. But the helmeted man easily restrains it. He smiles, despite the soot on his face, and the hellish flakes. His face is close, far too close.

I read the tag, in bright yellow. Hampton. I will remember that. Hampton. I sigh and let my head fall back and stare up. There is an umph and lift, and I am inside ambulance. There is a rattle as the whole apparatus is slid into place. I can see the scene of rampant rain of particles down. But it is just bits office detritus, just bits of the files and folders of life. I am crying, half in pain and irritation, and half in a pang for all the people must be in the towers. How many would die today?

I resolve to not let my blood sugar drop like that from dieting again. I’ve never been so thin. I’ve also never let myself pass out before.

The ambulance pulls away, and after a slow start it seems we are moving.

There is the roar of something I have not heard, not since I was a young girl. it was on the plains, in Kansas, during a sickening green storm that seem to stretch like a wall forever and back again; it looped back around on itself. I stared at it, my nose to the screen door. My mother pulled me down as a finger stretched and slithered down from on high. I heard something that the adults had read one day in Sunday school.

“God has judged your kingdom. And finished it.”

It seemed like the pen of god, or the finger of the devil. I have a falsely clear vision where I can see the white feathers like a quill arabasequed around the black jet. I was yanked and saw a swirl of our yellow and white kitchen, with the calico curtains and the speckles on the hard linoleum. Down steps, into a stony dark that smelled of urine and moss.

There was a deadly quiet for a long time. And then the floorboards started to rumble. My mother covered my face and my eyes, though I fought for breath and light. What I wanted to see. Finally I pulled out of her grip and there that roar. Air tortured to a pitch that there was not reality to it. On one hand it seemed as thick as milk, filled with scents and smells that were conjured up from seeming nowhere. The world had never had such a vivid scent. I could smell my mother’s sweat, I didn’t know she had that scent. I could smell the mice, smell them. I could smell the grime and the dirt. I could smell the metal on the cans stored down there, I could feel it all rushing into my face. Into my body.

At the same time it seemed as if all the air were trying to smash it self through my ears, and pull my brain out through the small canals that carry sound into my head. The space inside my head had never felt so big before.

And that was the roar. The roar was not a sound, it was my teeth rattling against each other. It was my hands shaking. It was light pouring through the boards of the ceiling. How did that happen?

There was a moment of pause, but it felt like the top of a roller coaster, it is not actually quiet, it is just that the rattle has subsided enough that it feels like silence, even as your bones rattle and tingle, even as you can hear banging and breaking and shattering. Even as there is light in the darkness, and the darkness knows it not. Half blind, the roar begins again almost as soon as it the pause made itself felt.

My face is buried back in my mother’s soft folds around her chest. I didn’t know the names then.

Later when we emerged, there was no house, just some boards sticking up like saplings stripped of leaves. My mother covered my eyes almost as quickly. Years later she would tell me the truth.

The truth about why I never saw my cat again.

That sound. It snapped me back to what was then the awful present. The present I knew with that rattle not to be a dream, but forever visited again in nightmares. That roaring rattling, you don’t hear it but feel it… crunch. A sheet of white darkness passes in front of the windows. It would be weeks before I could bear to watch the video. Then I watched it as obsessively as I watched the grainy television footage of the tornado that claimed my childhood house.

But each time I watch, not the collapse which was an unreal moment to me, but instead that lolling turn moment, that belly lufting lurch and spray moment.

Of a shadow.

That was a plane.

And it was far too low.

You don’t know what white is until you’ve been installed in a chaotic emergency room, and been poked and prodded in calm hysteria, after having seen the world come to an end around. I joked easily with other people. Several times I pushed other patience to the attention of the intake.

“You look like you’ve been through this before.”

“I’m a trauma and triage nurse. Yes.” Since I was seven I have been going through this.

“So you know we have to check you out completely.”

“I’ll be a good patient, but that older woman over sounds like she is having trouble breathing and might be on the verge of acute respiratory distress.”

The intake did a quick auscultation with the steth. Long elegant fingers crooked just so. Precise movements. Too precise. She had to be new. R1 or R2. Welcome to the Super Bowl Dr. Washington. The whole world is watching. I could tell she could feel the eyes that had to be on all of us.

“Only minimal rales. But I will get her down to radiology, that is the only way to check.”

“You are going to see a lot of that. Lungs burned.”

The tight black curly hair of the intake seemed to bob differently from her face. Her round fat black cheeks seemed to give a her a more uplifting spirit than the frown on her lips.

“You are good. You sure you don’t want to lend a hand? We are swamped here. I’ll push the paper.”

I looked down at my body which had become torqued about as I had been talking.

“Doctor Washington, you have yourself an extra pair of hands.”

And that was how I ended up on intake, with an R1 who had worked fewer double shifts than I had worked three alarm fires.

It was six hours later that a huge hulking figure was wheeled in. All heads turned, as they did for everyone who wore a uniform that day. We could not help it. A firefighter was wheeled in and swooped into the process, without waiting or hesitation. Even amidst the croaking cries and sobbing.

We had to cut him out of his fire fighter’s gear. I saw the tag, I felt a screaming shock run up my arm from the scissors. It said “Hampton.”

Suddenly the world moved far more slowly, as if everyone else was a child’s toy running out of battery or spring. The procedures for cutting someone out of garments were fluid and easy. It was the natural thing to. The other nurse seemed to be barely moving, I had the jacket open and my hands under probing to feel if the heat had blasted it to his body. When the heat from his chest was normal and the inside of his suit was cool, I knew that he had been knocked about, but not flash burned.

He was going to live.

I don’t need to tell you that when I got off that I waited by his bed that night until he stirred. His voice was still soft, but his fingers intertwined around mine. I found out the next morning that I was not flying back to San Diego any time with a definite date. The world stood still. But we did not. On September 22 we were married in a small civil ceremony. There was a weight on my finger that felt like it made me lighter than air.

But even then the pieces of trust were shattering into the night. It didn’t occur to me to ask how Dr. Washington managed to be there, I was happy to see her. But I hadn’t asked her. My husband later would mumble something about a fraternity of that day. I accepted it. I should have heard another word starting with “frat.”

I had a dream. That moment almost the whole world had a dream. A dream of pure illusion. We thought there was one vision. For a moment the who world was five again, believing in the monster under the bed, and Santa Claus. We were all one flesh. One bone. And so how could we two not be made one flesh?

The night he proposed was magic, we were at a restaurant more expensive than either of us could afford, but the owner wasn’t taking any money from heroes of 9/11 that day. The carpet was a satiny red velvet color, the walls of a paneled darkened wood. So were the chairs to made of a rich mahogany. I bought a tight tight long white sequined dress. I put it on, alright, I had a friend zip it up because it felt like I was being sutured into it. All the while I worried whether it made my fundament look like it needed a “wide load” sign. But from the stares I got as I walked, I knew that if I did, that was a good thing.

After the main meal, I draped myself over his shoulder as the brought out a white cake with a sparkler. He looked back, I could feel his eyes roam to the white curves of my breasts, allowed to nestle with only the most minimal strapless bra. I could feel his desire fall down the darkness like an abyss.

I coo’ed “Happy Birthday to You” slowly in his ear, and then gently bit his ear lobe. He whispered back that he wanted to marry me.

I said “Of course.”

There I lay draped over him. The room had gotten far too warm. My skin was far too flush. I was having trouble breathing, when breathing out would only go so far. The exposed skin of my shoulders and cleavage felt eager for the slightest touch of cool breeze. As if he read my mind, he blew gently across the rift of my décolletage, making a whispy caress across the arc of my right breast, and making me flinch. A tickle kissed my cheek, and then like a spirit felt like it was drawing forward across my face.

The back of hand slide around the shape of my behind, first on hemisphere, and then the other, coming to rest palm and fingers open upon me as if I were the fresh soft globe of a white fleshed peach. I could feel his face tilt up in expectation. My whole being swooned down, as I tilted my head and brought my lips to meet his.

He sucked on my lips. It was impossible to breath just through my nose, and my lips parted slightly drawing air in. His were already parted and his tongue entered my mouth as if had been waiting for that precisely that moment.

Oh if only our lovemaking was like this.

But it was if our sex were like drinking. The first bottle you open is the best, and by the rest, you are too drunk too know.

We went back to the hotel I was staying in, he told me his apartment was closed off. The ride in the cab back was tumble of searching for the position where our bodies fit. Each one twisting around an unbreaking contact of our lips, closed, or tongues painting passion across the other. When we almost were there I had to break contact to tell the cab driver, and instantly my husband to be was feasting at the nape of my neck. My head felt clouds rolled and spun through it, chasing each other and turning in tight circles. I could no longer think, the back of my mind burbled words, while the front was only clear enough to fumble with my purse and pull out the bills needed to pay for the trip.

We skipped up the stairs to my room in a giddy laughing dance. The door was closed, and I was half bent back against the door, closing it with my hips and feeling a click that told me I could rest the rest of my weight against it.

I didn’t even realize how fast my cloths were off, he virtually peeled my like a banana. I was stripped to my waist and my by now half twisted off bra felt like it sprung away from me.

His mouth was upon my nipples. Teasing and suckling upon then. The light flush on my face was overwhelmed by a flowering of sensation on the one he held in his mouth, and then the other that he pinched between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it back and forth, as if were dial, and he were seeking the station that played my inner most needs.

My own hands were sliding the dress over my curves, there was an aching in the bones of my pelvis and legs. An aching in my heart which stopped beating hard, and fluttered with the assault on my breasts by his hands and mouth. There was a moment of perfectly precise memory as I stared across the small hotel room, its cheap carpet littered with the remains of our noon meal together, and my own things precisely and neatly laid out. The bead tightly made, our clothes loosely thrown over it in a heap. I vaguely remember stepping out of my dress and panties, and him bending down and throwing them on the bed over his shoulder.

His hands raced up the insides of my thighs, pressing my legs apart as he went. I slipped down in gulps. It felt like the point where they joined was sweating, and blushing at the same time. Oh yes, I was ready for him. Not just wet, but open, as a child’s mouth is open and eager for the first large bite of praeline ice cream, with its soft white smoothness set with sweet crunch.

The next sensations were indistinct, I had given way. I felt his legs wedge between mine, and the tip furrow through my pubic hair several times, but clumsily, as if he had aimed and missed. I ran my hands softly between our legs, over the surface of his sex, and directed his prong directly at my all to hungry self. I swallowed him between legs in a single swallow.

The minutes that came were an uncounted repetition of exactly one pumping motion, as if he were an engine with only one speed. Each one jold my hips up in a role against the door, and ended with a clasp between the crook where his erection met his body and the now burning spear of lust. From this collision a peculiar slush of pleasure shot up which was peculiar clarity amidst a more indistinct haze of pleasure of having him inside me.

It went on like this until he flagged and slowed, and withdrew.

“Did you?” His eyes seemed to plead.

“Of course.” I patted him on the back. He scooped me up and gently placed me on the bed, and was kissing me again. We would couple again, but it would be the same in the hard folds of stiff sheets as it had been against the door.

I drifted to sleep after that time. The rest of the days until we were wed were more or less in an erotic fuzz, where I was thinking of him having me, or enjoying the feeling of his praying at my body.

I remember the ceremony vividly. But the night after? I can only remember his roman nose, his smile and smiling eyes. And how close they were.

And the peculiar shadow that neon makes on a man’s face, it was a cheap hotel and we had no curtains. That shadow and orange bright light are the face of my husband as I remember them.

There is a shadow, on his face. And it is far too close.

Take me darling.

God bless us all.

In Country 03

3

In the hallowed darkness he came to me, his lips sliding over a curve I had forgotten I had. They were roughened by fire and age, burned by magnesium sun, and ragged tipped. His hands were hard and they rode over my contours and I responded by coming to wakening desire. I was flush in so few instants, that it seemed as if I was a blaze. How quickly this peak came was shocking and striking.

His fingers pinched my nipples without ceremony, but also with a subtle softness. How could such gentle torment by both a pleasure and a pain. My breathing fell to cadences of easy rising and falling. It is the air of other planets that poured forth as tormented soot on the terrible day we met, is that air I swallowed in gulps and gasps as he pressed his arms over me. How is it that a body becomes flesh, a thing that changes from that which is I, to a wavering ripple that is a thing, under some other command, a wave that he, he, he commands. Its resonance flows up into my thoughts and sensations.

I am become sensation. As brusque as that evening’s coupling had been, this was so far different. Me feet felt distance by miles, and I felt as if my wide world was a white room and I was staring down on myself, isolated and offset against a blinding glare that could only be felt, not seen.

I grow dizzy as there is too much to feel, and yet it is like the voice on a distant radio, there are waves from a farther shore.

It is at this moment that I can feel his legs wrapping around mind, sliding forward and backward. I am opening, the taut closure of walking, waking, and all the day softens. A languor flows as if paint poured from high upon a ladder down onto a waiting canvas comes. I spread myself down on to the bed, into the hollows of the mattress. I am not aroused, but yet without resistance, he could take me now, and I would accept the dry rough painful penetration that would come with it that assault as rapturous rape.

But this is not what comes.

Instead there is a pressure of yielding steel, it presses at my midriff, plows through the curls of my other hair, stroking over and over again. Over and over again, pulling at the twinges of my flesh, tugging at the folds and turns of my sex, changing their sullen silence, a forgotten place in my forgotten lands, to a ripening sensitivity.

And that tender violation, of myself against myself, that, that that is all I can think of. Though it is not all I feel.

Finally how finally he places his lips to the lips of my face, and pulls at them. First with his lips alone, and then with this teeth. They barely scrape and then finally grasp my lower lip and separate it from my teeth, his tongue slides within and around it, and finally thrusts within my own. I can feel his hands first grasping and chaining my wrists, and then one free, with the other pinioning, slides up my arm, and down again. He is inside of me in that instant, I did not even know how it occurred.

And then I awaken. It was not like this. My husband never came to me so, my flesh never sang these movements to him. This is only a dream, a wish made into a dream… that some how my love of this moment could have, should have, and in another world, would have been the man for whom I gave my vows.

I am coming from this warm wish into a desiccated consciousness. It is still dark, but it is closer to morning that midnight. Somehow I know that this darkness and our, my lover and I, time has almost come to an end. The dawn will sweep through the room. I can wish that somehow, my husband had, that first night been with me as this, my lover is with me in this night. But he was not, is not, cannot and never was. I was not, am not, and never was in love with Hampton, only infatuated with the fire that had cauterized my eyes, and blinded my heart. It is not that holy day of matrimony that was in the shadow of falling towers, but instead, another morning come, when I must live that first day having pledged in love to this the man, who has finally taken me.

I realized as I woke up that I had been dreaming about how my husband and I had met. But in the dream, yes in the dream, the love making had been not my husband, but my doctor. Alright say the name, the name of the man who I love now: Captain Doctor Mercury West. I Chryssie Rutenberg love Merc West. I love him.

There is brute pounding on the heavy metal door of his motel room. A Spartan and orderly affair, with a bright glowing from outside, it is still something called night.

The pounding continues. It is too brute and blunt for it to be flesh or bone.

I can hear his voice explode out.

“What do you want fuck up?”

There is a clean click of the keys turning and the door opens with cold phosphorescent light pouring in.

“That’s Colonel Fuck Up to you,” and then there is an emphasis on the next word, “Capitan.”

It is a voice I know fairly well, It has a flat “military officer with the edges filed down by being groomed for the fast track,” sound to it. And yet you can hear the drawl of north Texas inserted in every possible pause. Col. Beck. Yes, that’s him.

I pull my head, and I am blushing like I am sixteen and caught by my parents. I instinctively draw the sheets up over my chest, over my large breasts, of which I have been increasingly self conscious of as I have grown rounder and softer with being older.

I am looking at a very broad shouldered outline, I appreciate the contours of power, from the bulge of his shoulders and biceps. Down the sides of his barrel chest, down around his holstered pistol. He’s armed, that means he’s here on business. At, glance at the clock has read numbers burn themselves into my eyes, 3:52 AM.

“Captain, I’m here to tell you something that you and Mrs.” he pauses at the irony of that particular word, and continues, “that you and Chryssie have a more than passing interest in. Something she’d already know if you two hadn’t been out here swapping spit.”

Merc was suddenly all business.

“What’s that Colonel?” He was already rolling to a sitting position and pulling on pants.

“You don’t really need to do that.” Pause. Pause. Pause. “You see, her husband had his hand taken off in country.” A smirk is audible even though not really visible. “He stuck it someplace it shouldn’t go. They are lifting back to Ram already.” That’s Ramstein AFB in Germany.

“He’s going to be here?”

“That’s right Captain.”

Merc scratches behind his ear, he has put on his shirt and starts buttoning it up methodically.

The Colonel lifts a hand to his lapel.

“See this bird? I got it by not caring about how subordinates got the job done. You and Ms. Chryssie here are going to have to make some decisions. I don’t care what they are, so long as this thing doesn’t show up as an incident on my personnel report. The last thing I need is some perfumed prince wannabe crawling all over me for not taking care of these things.”

“Well it isn’t exactly as if we’ve been secretive.”

“That’s not my problem. So long as this stays not my problem, I don’t care what y’all decide.”

I pipe up.

“How long?”

“At least a week there, then back to Walter Reed. But I imagine he’s going to request, and going to have granted, the request, to be back here as soon as possible, or have you offered a civilian position close to where he is in PT and recuperation.”

There is a general silence.

The Colonel picks it up.

“I can get you back in country. There is a plane leaving Friday, and it isn’t as if I can’t fill a seat with a top notch medivac surgeon. You’ll be safer in the wastes of Al-Anbar at a FOB than you will be here.” FOB is “Forward Operating Base,” meaning out deep in country.

I reply. “That can’t be true.”

The Colonel steps in, slams the door closed with the back of his boot and turns on the light, figuring correctly that everyone is as decent as they are going to get. The three of us form a triangle, with Merc already unconsciously standing at attention, the Colonel at an easy stance by the green fabric upholstered chair by the door, and me my knees drawn and covered by a film of blankets and sheets.

“Look.” The Colonel begins. “In uniform Hampton is a good man. The kind of man who can always be counted on to put himself in harm’s way and never complain. He’s drawn soft duty, but not for want of trying to get himself in trouble. Out of uniform, pardon to Ms. Chryssie about this, he’s a dick a mile wide and ten miles long.”

Merc nods without humor, but lets the Colonel finish.

“He’s going to want to do one thing when he can, and that is put a shotgun on your underbelly and plaster your balls through your palate.”

“I’d say that’s about right. Yes.” This is a flat agreement from Merc.

“In country is the safest place for you. Unless you want to suddenly declare that you are queer and get booted sky high from the service.” There’s no chuckle, no irony. Yeah, the Colonel could arrange that.

“Then what?”

“You’d run.”

Pause. Pause. Pause.

“You’d run.”

I stare down at my exposed toes, the red nail polish staring back at me. My head is resting on my knees by this point. Who needs me more? My baby, my love, or my husband? I don’t doubt I can’t do anything for my poor lost country by now.

Or me? What do I need? It’s a question that makes me feel a blank black hit on my forehead.

I don’t know.

“I’m going to leave you two to talk about things. But I’m will tell you that if you go to Walter Reed, Chryssie, there isn’t anything I can do to protect you.”

“Protect me?”

Merc supplies the punch line.

“From your husband. Hampton is going to break whatever is in reach.”

The light stays on, but the Colonel turns and opens the door, looks back over his shoulder. “I wasn’t here. You didn’t here this Captain. And Chryssie, check by home every day from now on. Hampton is going to feel very funny if he gets to Ram and there isn’t a message waiting for him as soon as the morphine clears his brain.”

I whistle out.

“Yeah. OK. That would be bad.”

Sudden my husband is a patient that I have to puff the pillows for, regardless of exactly how I am doing it.

Two days are eaten away in preparation. He leaves in the morning. I avoid thinking about it. I draw extra duty one day, and stay late the next. Every moment in uniform. The show must go on. Even though I am all empty places, my head pounds, even though I know there is nothing wrong.

I can feel the second hand with each weighty tick on the old analog clocks. The bang and stop, I keep looking up, wishing that they would pass faster, but that there would be more of them. Through all of this, drawing syringes, distributing meds, the host of small actions that make up a shift of someone who is well underutilized.

But even with this, my smile stays plastered in. It is a trick I learned from a Georgia girl, she told me that it was expected of women there. “Just dig your dimples, hun.” If you can feel those two points just beyond your lips, and dig them in, you stay smiling. No matter what.

I look at the clock. It giggles back at me blankly. At the last moment late at night, I leave and trail out to the parking lot, my head hanging down. There are a scattering of other vehicles, mostly the SUVs and trucks that are polished and painted. The kind that have never see the grooves by the side of the road, much less actual dirt.

There is a car with an engine running. I don’t recognize it, but it swoops out of its waiting spot. My heart jumps and I am frozen, but with a smooth swerve the passenger’s side arrives at the exact distance. I can see my doctor through the window, and I calm down. He’s rented a car. It takes me only a moment to settle into the grey cloth interior. The seat belt is across me almost before we are moving again, my bag down between my knees.

“Our time is running out.” His voice is flat and yet emphatic in the way he punches his words.

“It has gotten away from us. He is going to need me.”

“Don’t lie to yourself.”

There is an uncomfortable pause. I want to talk about it. I want to explain why I have to go back to Hampton. If only I can repeat it enough times, maybe it will start to feel more true. But this must be what he means about how he is quiet. No, he is Quiet. I feel the quiet stifle my ability to talk, chatter or even do more than pant out shallow breaths.

His finger on my cheek as he drives with one hand along the interstate. We pass the exit where his motel was. We are going deeper into the night. Our love must die.

The lights flicker on the yellow stripes that form a heartbeat of travel. I want to just stare out the window with fatigue and boredom, as I am being driven home. But the dryness behind my eyes eats at me, too much coffee and too many cans of coke have left my mouth sticky, and my head… I stop focusing on my aches and pains and try to rekindle the conversation.

“Where are we going?”

For a moment I drop into the land of fear again, as if he might be taking us nowhere. He’d once said something about not wanting to live any more with out the love of his life. He’d had a very dark countenance that day. I’d never seen him like it, drunk or sober, since.

I looked over at him next to me, seeking that same face. Instead his jaw was clenched in the same tight determined look I had seen him in when sewing someone’s thumb back on to his hand. It was not Merc the desiccated, but Merc the man on a mission. I didn’t know if I wanted that one, some vulnerability might have been more comforting.

“I love you.”

He turned towards me, and that hard face melted.

“I know. But I know that doesn’t mean anything.”

I feel a punch in my stomach, and I feel like I am going to throw up. It’s not the pregnant wretch, and it isn’t the losing the baby wretch. I know both of them.

I need to cry, my eyes bunch, but no tears come. My throat opens, but I can’t force any air out. I double forward, but not because I am in pain. Finally sobbing comes, and with it a few brief words from closed eyes and mouth.

“But I love you.”

The car drives on, oblivious to the heaves coming up from my diaphragm.

In Country 04

4

I am lying in this bed, and I am a blank page. My skin are the soft sheets of old vellum, waiting of the illumination to be applied. My hair is the dark cover, waiting to be caressed. His fingers turn my pages beginning from the back, turning me over and over. My mind wanders, we begin from the ending, from this, this holy now which consumes me. I want nothing more than to feel the kisses fall on my neck like a shower, each a brief raindrop in the desert of my skin, which soaks the touch and for a brief moment bears its trace, only to fade to color.

But each kiss is absorbed more slowly than the last, the redness flowers more readily with each succulent touch, and my breath rasps more and more, until there is rolling from my chest and through my throat a singing moan. It has been said a million times, because it has been true a million times a million times. The winter of my fears and wretched pain is ending, and I am spring on the surface of my skin.

I blush.

I lower my chin.

I look into his eyes.

They seem to stretch from horizon to horizon as I look up, on him, my sky. My hips slide back and forth, burrowing into the folds of the sheets, that hold a sensuous sheen, and whose turns become fingers that reach around me, and play upon me.

I look into his eyes, and there examine the wiry muscles of his iris, that radiate from dark pools. I examine them for flecks and imperfections, confident that if there is any lie to his passion, any reservation to his giving of himself to this, this moment, to me. I am sure that I will see a trace of pulling back. A tightness about his cheekbones.

But there is nothing, his face has softened since earlier in the evening when we threw elbows at each other in words. There had been a long silence in the car, and I stared into the clear still air of night as we turned off the highway and on to the state road, and then on to a road smaller still, and finally stopping at an almost dilapidated Spanish style building that was clearly some kind of lodging. It turned out to be an owner occupied bed and breakfast with three rooms on a back wing. However unpromising the outside had been, I distinctly remember tiles hanging loose and plants clearly left untended, the inside was different, with wood floors in polished varnish and deep rutted grains, stone fireplace cleaned to within an inch of perfection, and the bedrooms could have been stocked by the kind of upscale store that flourishes in the clean white bright malls of the California coast.

There was even a fountain in the common living room, which occupied a story and a half and had a balcony from which the owners could walk out of their master suite and look down at the assembled guests. It simply could not have been both more to home, and more tasteful.

We retreated almost at once to our room, and within moments both anger and clothing had been peeled away.

There was almost no pause until I was clasped beneath him, his weight pleasantly pressing upon me, my legs spread and straightened down and slowly, almost imperceptibly, widening, pressed by the energy of a molten warmth.

My face flushes as he begins kissing his way down my neck. I stare at the ceiling, dreamily letting my eyes follow the swirls of the stucco, and the turning to gaze at the petals of the magenta flowers that blossom along the walls, and then to the side to soak in the mission oak dresser and night stand. But with each kiss, he descends that fraction more, and with each turn my head lolls back and forward with more speed and less purpose, until I am thrashing it back and forth, my skin dancing with sensation, the tips of my ears, my nose, my fingers, my toes, now buzzing with a tingling anticipation.

Finally, as an explorer that leaves a track on freshly fallen snow, his lips have reached the curve atop my breast, his neck brushes against my nipple. My eyes no longer hold my attention. I am brushing his hair with my fingers, feeling his legs curl around mine. I am consumed with the reports that are flung from every distant outpost of my body, each with different touches to report. He is enrapturing me, he is wrapped around me, he is ready to rupture that bubble that I build around my body, defying others to contest.

But intimacy even as it caves in on me suddenly becomes unbearable.

“Wait. Stop. We have to talk.”

He continues noiselessly with the single kiss just moments from my nipple. And then, he looks up and gazes into my eyes again, his face framed between my breasts.

“Yes.”

“We were just, so… harsh to each other in the car. I can’t change gears so quickly.”

It is at this point where Hampton would just trump my words by rolling out of bed, daring me to prove them. And somehow knowing I would not. But Merc simply pinched my nipple lightly, and teased it back and forth.

“I brought you here for a reason.” Ignoring my statement, but not my question.

“And that is?”

“The Colonel has given me two weeks leave. I can drive across country to Washington DC. We can talk all you like on the road. We can say good bye, or you can change your mind. Or we could both be killed in a car accident.” He smirks a bit at that last. “It’s safer than being in country, don’t you know.”

I stop and ponder the revelation, mentally kicking myself for not realizing a plan when I saw it.

He kisses his way down my midriff, and then simply drags his tongue down the curve of my tummy, straight through my forest of pubic hair, giving me a momentary tickle, and then knowing that he could simply proceed, simply settled his face and tongue on my clitoris, spiraling around and around and around, until my head grew light, and I grew dizzy, and it almost felt as if I was being spun around.

And again I stare at, not into, his eyes, sure I would find any trace of deception.

But he turns his head and kisses me full on the lips, and I know that I know nothing, that a thousand times I have let myself be deceived before, by him, by Hampton, by every other thing on this earth. The only time I broke no lies, is when I am pulling the quick from the dead, dividing those who live, from those who will be tossed into death’s cruel night. I shudder at the smells of blood in my memory.

Yes it is that memory, the one that begins the others in the feel of death.

I was young, it was my first time as the nurse in an ambulance. It was on the broad endless plains of Western Kansas. There had been a shooting. We did not know the details. I rattled in the back of the ambulance, hanging on crackly static from an ancient radio, waiting for the heavy voices of police officers, waiting to hear if we would even be allowed to try and do our work. We had to wait until the area was secure for that.

The driver swerved to avoid something on the road, I had to catch myself to prevent my hips from banging into the side, I wobbled on heels to high for this. I hung on, but slipped them off, and reaching around into my bag, pulled out my still white and new sneakers. I felt around again, and found the socks that I could slip over my still too white stockings. Oh, I was so new I sparkled and radiated a virginity in the valley of life and death.

We arrived, people in the east do not know how far it is from any one place to any other in Kansas plain. It was a box-like house, with wood sides that had peeling paint, that even in the dark could be seen as black freckles all over the skin of its face. The lights were on, the whole house had spears of light piercing out into the darkness, playing on the faint fog in the air.

The sky was a black blue, blotted with low night clouds, and the moon was just rising, a kind of mouthy grin of a waning half.

It was the black white of death, come to swallow me. And as soon as my feet touched the gravel of the drive way, and I began, by training and habit to move with soft rapid steps towards the stoop, towards the officer who stood above a twisted figure writhing on the ground, I could feel the first shell of my innocence ripped away. It was the air washing away the hot house moisture that had built up, staring at the paramedic in the back of the ambulance. The were behind me, reading the stretcher. But I was kneeling by the figure before they were even half way to the stairs.

The motions of checking the signs of life are so ingrained that I forgot that I did them, and read out the ebbing vital signs with precision that told me that we were only a short distance from that door.

I saw a black mass and without even thinking reached up and tilted the officers flashlight on it. The bare incandescent bulb shows a gash in his abdomen right above his liver, the blackness seeping out. This was no gunshot wound. I could see his skin was already pallid. I thrust my hand in to search for the arteries that my instinct knew had to be severed.

I could feel the feeling of a body ripped, not the smooth contained way that organs are when whole, but tangled blobs of viscera, fat and flesh. My fingers had plunged through the surface of his skin, and the rim of penetration went up to my wrists. I did not even remember having put the latex glove on, it had been so automatic in the moments that the ambulance had slowed.

The latex divided my hand from its real sensation, but I found what I was looking for, and pinched of the largest of the torn arteries, and held it closed. With my eyes I surveyed the writhing figure for other wounds. But this was enough. Mercutio was right: it isn’t as wide as a door, or as deep as a well. But it is enough. It will do.

I turned and road his turns as the paramedics slipped the stretcher under him and began to strap down his limbs.

The officer said “we have another one. He’s just as bad.”

And there I was, I motioned to the paramedic to get gloves on.

“You are going to have to take this.”

He just stared at me. He’d never seen anything like it. We don’t see that that much in Kansas, where fewer people live in a tank of gas in any direction than can be stacked in one block of New York Cities alpine island.

Finally he fumbled and found the gloves on his belt, his face was black from not having shaved since morning, even though his skin was tender as a peach on the plains, waiting to be blasted by the wind. I realized that I was “the nurse” and the authority in his young world. But even as he was reaching down to the gloves I could feel the writing stop, the thrashing grow stale, and every muscle slip loose from marionette strings of nerves and brain. I felt a shard of glass slit the latex and ooze blood into the glove. That is what it was, there was some how shards of broken glass inside him, slicing and shredding with every twist and turn, like the devil’s scalpels vivisecting him.

He was bleeding out. I had missed some other vital cut. There was nothing we could do for him. CPR would spurt the blood right out, and only kill him faster. Before the plasma could even be shot into his arm he would be gone. There was someone else. We could try and save this one, and fail. Or we could try and save the other.

I separated my hands, I felt the last tension of his life flow down like a pressure. The eyes grew still. And he was not among us any more.

I remember telling this story to Hampton, and he shrugged and told one of his own, a guy to a guy about the frontiers of survival. Oh my dear doctor understood, and told me.

“Yes, I remember the first time I had to kill a man.” He kissed me, and I replied.

“I’ve always wondered if pulling the trigger is any different. I mean than being there, in that place, having to let go, and see him let go.”

“It’s easier when you have to pull the trigger. More distant, with only the momentary connection to his convulsion. No, ” that perfect pause of his for emphasis, “killing a man with your bare hands, that’s the hardest thing of all.”

That distant night, we saved the other patient, whose gunshot wound had miraculously slipped through his body, and while it tore the flesh and bleed from a thousand little veins, had not touched the central stuff of life.

But that was that moment of my life. Learning to kill, and learning to die. The girl who went out on that ride never came back, and from their on in, I used my middle name, because, as my mother had over and over again told me, it was on the night of broken glass, that the journey down to evil began. I was born Angela Crystal, but the first name never seemed to fit any more.

In Country 05

5

The dawn came knocking on the long beige horizon filled with cashes in the land which to which clung a stubble of low green. The wheels of the car turned smoothly, the passing lines flickered by with the regularity of a clock. Behind them was San Diego’s sprawl, Los Angeles’ brawl, and even the inland empire had grown sparse. It was the rains came by aqueduct that had always appalled her, she came from the broad plains that were kissed by the incline to the mountains, no such gift of man’s rain had been hers in those years. California seemed Lucifer’s Eden to her, a place that was perfect, except that it had no rain. It was unkissed by flood of fertility and moisture. It dug into the ground and found the midas touch of oil and gold, but no water. The flatness and depth of its desert made Chryssie ache for the healthy spun straw to gold of fields of wheat ready for harvest, whose white waves flowed with the wind, the land responding the sky’s caress.

She reflected back, lulled by the almost melodic changes in hum of tires on the road, on how she had awoken, when, the world had changed, changed in the blink of an eye. She had gone from nightmare into the quiet trickle of water from the bed and breakfast’s fountain, from harsh disgust of inner life, to the warm curve of his chest. She shifted her weight, he legs and fallen asleep because they were trapped under his. She nightmare reached her as a memory in her waking state.

It was easier to admit, as she idly rubbed her hand back and forth across his chest, that she had been in troubled dreams; she had chased by her husband wielding an axe on his hand and by Merc with a scalpel. They had decided to cut her into pieces in that dream. She remembered watching her self be severed, Black Orchid Style. She watched as Merc and Hampton dragged her hips and legs farther away, so that she had a clear view. Then Hampton dropped his desert camo-pants, which were strangely also scrubs, and ran his member up and down her leg. There was a vague clarity to how Merc then bent down and twirled his hands over her public area while merc bent her legs out. In the dream she could feel none of this, it was as clinical as watching a dissection. She simply remembered watching and then watching as Hampton had had fucked her severed lower half far from her body. She hoped no one would ever ask her where this memory came from. Yes, she had seen this happen in the real, the dream merely plastered her vision on to it.

It had been in country, in her year in Iraq.

She had worked as a “contractor,” and while any distinction between this and an army nurse was purely coincidental, the pay was much, much better. But she was also not fresh out of school, and Baghdad is a bottomless pit of medical need. it sucks in men, and women, and doctors and nurses, and miles of silk and bandage, and spits out corpses, living and dead. They had responded to a medivac call, a service man was down and two others were pinned by fire. They could only hope that it would clear before they needed to work. But there was no time to wait. The second of the golden hour were bleeding out.

She squatted in the chopper, its blades lazily turning slowly as the turbine engine whined to life. That was the reality of the military, the modern military, it is a gift of the jet engine. Everything was powered by it, generators, choppers, tanks. The whir of the turbofan was the sound of the air-land battle coming to drag its enemies down into the abyss. But for those that live under it, they become like fingers of the beast, the crawling sensation on the skin, the smell of the fuel, the relentless and remorseless hum. The turbine spins up slowly, and then consumes distance and kerosene unceasingly.

And at that moment, squatting there, she felt like a hound on its chain, her movements precisely polished to stay below the blades on entering, to sit just so on take off, and to be ready to uncoil without hesitation as the whir of blades cut and gashed at the air on landing.

The time in the air was spent exchanging the usual bits of pre-knowledge to sort out how the situation was presenting. They knew there had been shooting, they knew that it had been with locals and not with fedaheen or al-qaeda, because “domestic dispute” and some how rattled its way into the sergeant’s words as he spat them out two by two. Chryssie remembered how fear and training warred in his voice. She was already calling in her team members to go before the last word burst out.

“Hurry”

There was no hurry here, they always moved at the same speed, it was merely that that speed was chariot yoked to the dogs of war. A speed that plows down the road at sixty miles an hour clad in Uranium, the sky god’s armor. A speed that lifts a ton of flesh from the ground and allows surgeons to cut and sew in the air. It is the speed that the ordinary commerce of trains and trucks move, only with an immeasurable and inexorable force.

No, her thought ran, we will not place one footfall before the other any differently than we do on any other day. A maxim she learned balancing on a slack rope between two backyard trees. Every footfall always at the same speed.

And then again, with a whining desperation.

“Please dear God. Hurry.”

The bleeding down edge in his voice was distinct and carried with it a sound, a nasally resonance high in the throat. It was the sound of a lover losing her beloved. It didn’t mean that this was so here, but the bonds that welded one soldier to another where tinged with erotic clinging need. She had seen that every day for so many years, that it had long since stopped being a revelation.

There is a moment when a chopper plunges down into the ground clutter, where the yellow expanse of Baghdad, a city the color of sand, consumes its horizon and it seems to go on forever in every direction: a low jumble of off orthogonal angles that fit together not-quite in a jigsaw puzzle way. They were coming down in Sadr City, someplace outside of the operational marked area. Someone had come here, and come here for a reason.

Hopping off she and the team hauled medical bags outside of the blade range, and began fanning out to see how unsafe it was, there was a marine propped up against a wall, a bullet wound to his thigh and another to his hand. There were fingers missing on the hand. The blood while copious did not have that pouring out quality, like s sack of grain punctured, that tells the practiced eye that an artery is hit an the victim is bleeding out.

She squatted next to him and dropped her bag. Before she even had anything in hand she pressed fingers to his hand, and coo’d.

“It’s going to be alright private.”

In that moment he stopped being a victim, and was a patient.

Even as she tourniqueted the hand and had another nurse pack the leg wound for transport, her sight caught a movement in the grey zone of sight. It was that movement, the movement of pouring blood. It came from under the drape of a doorway a few meters to her left. Even as the stretcher was lifted under the private, she was standing up, snatching her medical bag, and walking towards it. She motioned behind her, hoping that one of the soldiers would follow her for cover, but she was not going to wait and let life slip through her fingers if there was any to be had.

The curtain was dirty sheer and the color of saffron spattered with vegetable stains and grease. She could vaguely see a figure making some kind of repeated movements, and murmuring something over and over again. Her hand ripped through the drape, caught a glimpse of an AK-47 lying on the ground, still reeking of discharge and a huge bloody ceremonial sword. Here eyes swiveled to the figure.

And there she saw it, a woman cut in half, the man naked from the waist, fucking the sex of the lower half. Here eyes ran up the torso, one breast exposed, her eyes rolled blankly upwards. Her arms and legs were pulled to an “X” by chains pulled around metal supports.

She could see no other wounds, she had probably been hacked to death. She was close enough now to hear what he was saying, with the few words of the native dialect of Arabic.

“You whore, you whore, you dirty whore.”

Before she could even flinch, the surgeon had put a bullet from a Colt .45 through the back of the man’s skull. She stood there as the blood simply came forth as if a faucet had been turned, and he fell forward over the body.

Other women might have gasped, or given themselves to emotion. That was not here, or her in this moment, but instead, aware of the cool spin of air over her flesh as she turned quickly to face the doctor, she simply said.

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Don’t mention it, the marine is going to be fine, we are lifting everyone out, now. There’s nothing for us here.”

She stared at the swoop of his cheeks, sunken from dehydration and exertion, and the clean coolness to his eyes. She also saw back behind him and knew that no one was looking. She embraced him warmly, letting, for just a moment, her heart race and breath deepen. And then she pulled back, straightened up, and followed him back to the dragon of life that was about to leap into the air.

And in that moment of turning, the mind played that trick, where the curves of a memory have been altered some how, and they morph into the present, into the dirty yellow of the rolling hills of the present, with the wheels turning smoothly over Interstate 10 East.

“Are you back with us.”

She paused, pulled her face in and down and then straightened it and looked down the road,

“Honey, I had a dream last night…”

“And?”

“And I want to tell you about it.”

She spent the rest of the time in California recounting the dream, and what it had meant to her. She didn’t cry. She didn’t flinch as she carefully enunciated how it connected to the memory. And then, when she had finished telling the tale she heard only one breath from him.

“It didn’t happen quite that way.”

She turned and stared at him, annoyed, Her eyes narrowed and she took on that slight nasally edge to her voice which is to her as the hissing is to a cat, or the growl to the dog.

“What do you mean by that, Mister?” She pulled back her lower cheeks and twirled a lock of hair. She was sure in her memory of the events, even as the dream was rapidly becoming like a fading photography printed on fabric, not only was the picture blurring and becoming indistinct, but even what it was write up on seemed to be dissolving.

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“You ordered me to shoot him.”

“I’m a civilian.”

“I know an order when I hear one.”

She startled.

No, not she. I. I did dreamt the dream. I lived the life. I said the words. The even now leap to my mind:

“Captain, rabid dog. You know what to do.”

“You know why I did it. It is in the report on the marine: traces of vaginal fluids on the skin, stains from two other blood types on his uniform.”

“I’d always suspected you had your reasons.”

My voice got Kansas flat.

“They’d been taking turns.” It was the same voice I had used that day, in Iraq. I still get flush with a mixture of revulsion and desire. Revulsion, not just at the scene, but for how many times I have spent dark nights dreaming of having men leer at me. How many times I have imagined walking down a street, dark except for the stab of red lights, my body wrapped in cheap, tight clothes that cling in different places as my walk shifts them, the fishnets teasing at my thighs. How I feel the grabs from the eyes of dirty men, despairing men, violent men, waiting to spatter out on me all the hurts of their world. The longing to be slapped and pushed against a wall, un- not ir- responsible for the things that are to be done to me.

Revulsion, because that has been my sex life with my husband, and it leaves me cold. Revulsion because this is the life that turns like a turbine, grinding up young women into walking corpses and bleeding hunks of flesh.

Revulsion because even the whore fantasy is not enough. I remember dreams where I am cut in two, two men turning my lower half between them, penetrating this and that way, bending my knees, twisting my legs, all while I, separated by easy feet from the affair can only watch and critique in my mind, how my lusts overwhelm my body, but have not broken into my intellect. In these dreams, I sneer at the petty pumping motions, the cartoon like clumsiness of their thrusts, the dirt and beard growth and roughness.

Oh how I awake, awake from those dreams burning hot, and aching to be treated like a thing. Able to have seen as if in a movie that which I never really see, the brute penetration, the contact of parts, where the depths of my craving collide, and cock and cunt sound as holy as medical terms, and vulva as filthy as a rap song rant. Suddenly the sensations of my legs quivering, my hips shivering, my sex stuttering, the depth of feeling in my vagina collided back whole with my mind, flooding over me and taking all my logics like waves over sand. Or wind over wheat. Or blood over skin.

That sensuousness of slowly moving blood, blood that moments before lived and breathed. I am a woman, and so, in all its dark corruption, in all its radiant stains, I am a bearer of the cult of blood. And I long for the hard cold slash that will unleash its true power. I nurse wounds, because I cannot fulfill my lust to see them.

That corpse cut in two, those pieces which were once a woman. Well, I am she in those private dreams. I know the writer of the movie told people how he went off on four hour long masturbation jags thinking about the girl who was cut in two and dumped near Los Angeles. I know, though he did not say it, that those dreams had, as often, to be after her death as well as before.

In this reverie, I sat for just a moment, and then to regain composure, I remember pouring in all the cold merciless steel into that voice, with a whine that is the whir of the turbine given human form. Turning, turning, turning, turning.

End of Book One:
California

In Country 06

Book Two
The West

1

Chariot fire was still noon bound when we hit the flat basin from which rises a city built on sin: the pseudo-country that turns electricity into unhappiness faster than any other device known to humanity. It’s stratosphere tower to nowhere isn’t even useful as a radio beacon, because the mountains that surround Las Vegas loom above it. But I can’t help it, I love Las Vegas.

Even the sand is different here from California’s inland empire, which had eaten hours with the engine humming and the air conditioner flattening dried sweat hair down on my forehead. We spun down the roof of the convertible as often as we could, until the blare of heat and light over came us and we had to pull over to bring the white ragtop of the Mustang above us, creating a shade that was a cloistered parlor in which we just chatted. The weight of the dawn, was receding and gone.

Each time he turned the ignition, sped us back up, and the road became once again arrow taking us to nowhere except everywhere, I felt a roll in my midsection that purred up from my hips, reaching my ribs and then falling like a wave. The Pacific was far behind, but I felt an ocean within me, pressing and rolling. And the winds are fanned by the fan of horsepower, I don’t know how many. It isn’t the size of the engine, it’s how it moves you.

He still spoke in phrases tossed off. So did I, but we could volley back and forth, creating rallies of words. The were training wheels conversations, about little things like the veal at a restaurant, or the furniture. I spun my hands idly through a copy of Elle, the fashions were dowdy, checkered and black and white, with poor cuts. Who ever was buying this had. To get. A life.

A long gold dress by Shoji with an asymmetrical top stood out, a real woman might actual wear it and look good. I stared down at it as we spun up the odometer and down the miles to the place my mother always called “Strip City.” I later found at she had done a stint as a show girl there. I guess she meant it as if it were a good thing. My father had met her, I learned when he tended bar for a little while after ’Nam. The conflict that always called “the war.”

And there it was, a fleck of sparkles coming out the desert with an impossible sharpness. The land was surreal to me, as if the sky were changing colors and we should be in a frame of Natural Born Killers, one of my favorite movies of all time, because it was about being about. Now I think the only problem with the film is that it wasn’t set in Iraq. It’s the movie I’d write: a remake of Natural Born Killers set in country.

It was the colors, the movement and the sheer sensuousness of the moments of impact. I can remember the first time I laid my body open to a man, I did not know what to do, but I was not frightened. He was not touching me at any point, except with the very very end of him, and there was a moment where it felt as if a needle was going to enter my body. No, larger than a needle, deeper. Wider.

I was about to be stabbed. And I wanted it so much. I felt the shiver, in the same way that the shiver comes when, on a hot day, a dog licks up along the fingers, with a sloppy cold tongue and the touch of a cold nose. There is a moment where the skin sings as the wetness dries to the air, and feels the kiss of air. Then a tightening as the realization of what is, and is about, and has just, happened. And then all eases in a flooding flow, and somewhere, as if a small man was painting the roof of the skull with the colors of sensation, that moment of letting go.

Those colors that the desert has, and the movie had, and my memory holds in sepia. Were right there before me. I could not help feeling myself sink into the car seat, and feeling the vibration as a rumbling touch. As if Merc were touching me through the car, with each throw of gears and taint of accleration.

I whisper to the air. “Stab me.”

I am breathing in, and the air almost sears my lungs it is so dry. I remember Kansas and the way it was rich in moisture, without ever being humid. The air was heavy with the mist of potential, the land pregnant with rich black earth. Last night when I sucked and swallowed, it was the taste of that morning mist that came to mind. A taste of bitter, without having a taste at all. When I fell to sleep in his arms it was that idyllic summer somewhere in my childhood that appeared before my eyes, arms and legs crooked and sprawled, my teddy bear nestled by head, a smile on my face, looking at the mirror hung near the bed as my father turned out the light.

Buildings have stopped huddling together, and now string out like pearls, on our right the first casino pops up and out and beckons to us. But Merc doesn’t even notice it. He’s a man with a mission, and he knows where we are going to land.

The strip started to take a shape as we barreled down the road and between the other cars that seemed to be standing close to still. I idly remembered spending New Years 2001 here, watching the fireworks leap up from the great vast pyramid. I realized that I had begun to lay back and twist my hair again, because when the car veered through three lanes and to the exit.

I startle up.

“The Flamingo. It’s not quite seedy but definitely not respectable.”

I smile.

“Now I know where to find you if you decide to drink your life out in Vegas.”

“A man has to keep his sense of romance.”

“I’ll get lipo and be a hooker here with you if you do.”

“You aren’t ugly enough. And you don’t need to just dance.”

“Junk in the trunk.”

“Something to wave and say hello to all us guys in the audience.”

“My mother was a showgirl in Vegas when she met my father. Originally they told me they meet in New York City as students. I think they did, they just didn’t do anything but fuck one night during the summer of love. I’ve often wondered what that was like.”

“I’ve never wondered what it was like.”

“Why not?”

“We’ll get a remake sooner or later. That’s the only thing they do now. Remakes.”

“What makes you say that.”

“That’s what this is, a remake of Vietnam. Bouncing baby boy Bush proving he could win the war he didn’t fight.”

“And what do you think.”

“We’ve already lost the war. And it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”

“I didn’t know you voted for Kerry.” I chuckled. My parents did, breaking their habit since Reagan of voting for Republican Presidents.

“I didn’t. I won’t vote for a hippy no matter how many purple hearts he faked.”

I stopped talking.

We slow into the parking lot. There is a big orange “Hooters” hotel sign next door in one direction, and the airport is close by. Hooters has always offended me, because it promotes the idea of vapidity as a feminine ideal. I can say so, because, well, I am not short on cleavage. More than part of me wishes that we would just hop a plane to someplace else, far away from here and all our problems. But then I look away from it at the distant wall of hills, and I want to see them flicker by. I think at that moment, the road took hold of me, and a short flicker of images of places I had been, and will be again, drew my sense of self back, back into my skull and away from my face. Perhaps that isn’t the right way to say it. But so it is.

Behind is the Pyramid, that looks sleek and glowering by daylight. Peeking through the clutter is the façade of New York, New York.

For a moment a trick of the air rising up from the strip makes it look as if the Eiffel Tower, visible in the far distance, has split in two. I startle and expect it to topple over for a moment, and then the illusion passes.

The car peels off the interstate.

The engine settles to a stop. He turns and looks at me.

I know that look.

It is 11:13 and too early to start drinking.

I have my hand on his. I want to tell him it is alright, the shock of last night’s dream is over, and he has talked to me enough, I’ve reached equilibrium and peace. I feel a turning in my intestines. I’m distinctly not hungry for food.

“Lunch.”

I smile wickedly. “Dessert first.”

And that’s what we did. There are mirrors on the ceilings there, carved up by slats of woods to look like palm tree designs.

It was almost without formalities that he was back on the bed, having fallen backward in mock response to my touch. I was smiling and giggling as I parted enough buttons down my front to expose my bra.

Sometimes it is about you, the waves the warmth, and some inner sea whose time and tides have reached a certain crest of the moon.

Sometimes it is about him, his flesh shining and taut, needing to be sprung and scattered about the room, like a deck of cards bent and shot outwards.

I, this moment, I could feel my knowing smile, I could look down on his half expecting, half grateful face, and know that it was about him, and about my ability to take all the ligature marks that wind around his spirit, and massage them out with my mouth and hands.

And it is not long before, almost suppressing laughter of pleasing superior joy, that my palms are on him on the way down, my fingertips dragging on the way up. I am swirling my tongue around him, moistening my lips. Sometimes I let him last along time, and sometimes, he needs to leap up into me.

And so it is with an easy detachment that I look at the lines that cut through his crest, the almost lip shape that is at the opening, the twin curves like miniature hips on the underside. I swoop and kiss it, I lick it in strokes. It is not the sensation on me that floods into my mind, it is not the sensuality. It is that I know these droplets of affection are bringing forth a flowering quiet need in him, a longing for me, a collapsing of the busy busy busy of his brain that plans and thinks and manipulates the world. He is a child and I can tell he is floating, unmoving, not wishing to break what ever this, the magic spell is upon this moment. It is not how he touches me, but how my touch is on him.

But the scent is there, that peculiar odor that is not an odor. That makes me feel light headed, as if I am breathing and the air is rushing up into my brain. I lay my lips and mouth on to him, never losing contact again. And the scent grows stronger, and becomes a kind of taste.

Even as his torso swings between relaxed and released, I stop the smooth motions.

“You know what?”

His eyebrows raise and he almost manages to open his mouth and say something.

“I want you in me.”

Perhaps more prelude would make it easier, but I am ready enough, open enough to push my weight straight down on him, my hand guiding him to the right spot, and simply bounce up and down. Yes there is a tightness and first, and a pinching as his tip presses, through, and I have to wiggle up and down to ease the catches of tightness. Yes there is a slight chafing. But while nose winces for a moment, that is all it is. Like a needle sliding in, there is a contraction, and then a giddy dizziness in the stomach, but then it is done.

And then there it is, that lovely rolling sensation upwards. That contraction that starts in the deep muscles below the hips, that races upwards, pulls in through abdomen and flowers in the chest. When I inhale, there is a purring electric motor inside me, in my core.

It doesn’t take long before the moving takes over. I never get to that hot overwhelming wetness that every porn star and porn story seems to pass, through. Instead there is a thick almost dry tightness to our coupling, a pulling at my skin and folds, that tugs and pinches and send sharp sensations which have not identity as pain or pleasure, but simply part me as if a skewer were slid up through my body and all the way to the top of my skull.

Mmmmm.

It takes only a few moments of this tight tight tight connection before he spasms and contracts. I settle myself over his chest easily and twirl my fingers through his hair. My skin is warm, cooled by the dry hotel air, my face is bright, and I know I can’t stop smiling as I stare at his profile, his sharp nose, his warm lips, his strong bones.

Moments later, he is asleep, his features untroubled by these shadowed days. I smile and smile until I, too, drop to a short kiss of sleep.

But the dream still has a hold of me. In that dream I am still riding him, he is still laughing, and the sun seems to pass in time lapse, rapidly spinning form day to night to day again, streaks of neon come and go. But I realize as I stare out the window that time is not going forward but back, and his face is not the face of Merc. But it is another face. I face I don’t recall, recalling. But it is a face I know.

I ride harder and harder, pleasure turning to pain, want turning to a burning acid agony as if I must go, not because I want to, but because I cannot stop. I feel, even in a dream, the coring of hair cross my tender lips, and wet lush want turning to a dry arid crackling itch.

The movement of the sun stops. It is dark, even the lights from the airport have stopped moving. I drift and look at a giant wall clock which was not there before It is 2 AM. I stop moving, and this, still in a dream stare at the ceiling. There are four figures lying in the bed, all of the them naked. All of them me. All of they laying in contorted curves which suggest that they are dead or asleep after coitus. I cannot tell if the dark color on them is skin or blood. All is black.

I wake up, and am nearly blinded by the light. Only an hour has passed, I head to the shower to clean myself, feeling the chaffing of dried sex between my thighs with each step.

I came out, and chariot fire had just hit the long window. Mer c was already up and lacing his boots. Obviously heedless to not having showered or cleaned in any way not available to the bed side.

He looked up at me with those piercing eyes of his.

“What? Handy wipes.”

I give an indulgent grin. Or maybe it was a smirk.

“Let’s see if there is any action in this town.” I pivot my hip out and lift my purse up by one finger and bend my elbow. I hope I look saucy and seductive.

Maybe I just look fat.

In Country 07

2

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

Dahin! Dahin!

The swirl of sound and lights has come, the twirling machines that churn desperation, boredom and loneliness into fear, depression and loss. At an astounding profit. They turn, the wheels. And the human machines, the dealers that sweep the cards out one by one, they too turn by the hour, and rake in the harvest of woe.

We twisted our way through the growing thongs of people, I allowed the flicker of haggard faces to flow across my vision, picking out the runs in the stockings, the pulls in the exposed thighs form too short denim skirts, the fatigue from coffee and cigarette induced awareness on the cocktailers, dealers, patrons, and on and off duty everyone. I let Merc pull me by the hand through it, over the reek of smoke, across the carpets that sheen with the oil of their birth, twisting through the maze of polyester and rayon that clings with sweat and becomes a shroud that bags in the scents of crowded animality trapped in human bodies and a city of the damned.

And to think, once, this place was magic for me.

Merc tugs at my arm for a moment, and turns to face me.

“I’m going to visit the necessaries. I think you should too.

I nod, always a good idea before any adventure. We’ve been down here drinking coffee long enough, that it is a very good idea at this moment.
We wheel and wend our way out of the congestion and part with a short sweet kiss. I look into his eyes, flutter my eyelashes and smile. We break contact. I am into the ladies room.

I sit and thumb through my copy of Elle from my had bag. I go through the motions, stand up. Redo my lipstick, it is the only makeup I tend to wear.

By the time I walk out I feel lighter and happier. I push the door open slowly and start to look both ways, expecting him to be out there waiting for me.

Instead there is a confusion of bodies and uniforms. At first I think they are security guards, even the pistols don’t change that impression. They I realize that the two men barking orders are police officers, a third one has the men’s room door propped open, and a fourth is escorting a man out of the washroom. He is tall, very thin, gaunt of feature, with wisps of white balding hair, and a white stubble of a day old beard. His suit is far to good, and of a particular texture of woven tweed. I see him handing a business card to the officer and hear him say, “So what do you think of that?” The officer glances at the card, but keeps his face stern and intones “Over to the side. I need to ask you a few questions. After him a very young, very tall, very dark man with tight curly hair is being escorted out. He has a broad nose and his black skin shines with sweat and something else.

Merc is standing talking to another officer. It is clear something was set up, and we had walked into it. I can barely hear Merc talking.

My staring has caught the attention of an officer.

“May I see some ID, ma’am?” His voice is flat, polite and even. I don’t even have to fumble, my ID is in my just closed handbag, in a special pocket. He looks at me. Looks at the ID. Looks at me. Looks at the ID.

“Do you know anyone here?”

“Yes.” I point to Merc.

“He’s a doctor with the army. He’s on leave with me until he goes back…” I was about to say “In Country,” but I catch myself. “He’s going back to Iraq in a week.”

The officer nods. “Stay right here. I think we’d like to get you two together and out of here.”

There is a slow waltz of officers and whispers into the ear and nods. I hear a short. “You can go. But you need to give a statement later, so don’t go too far.”

“I’ll do that now then. I don’t mind.”

“We’d appreciate it if you did that later.”

By this point a collection of officers were escorting the tall older man away. The treatment of the younger man indicated, by a kind of easy familiarity, that he was an officer. They pretended to question him. But his body was too relaxed, and they were almost smirking as they talked to him.

Vice.

Someone had just been busted asking for sex.

Merc was up to me.

“I’d like to go down to their station and get the legalities out of the way.”

“What happened?”

“It seems the assistant to the junior Senator from the Great State of Nevada likes to get very personal with his boss’ male constituents. That must be why he’s against gay marriage, it would take all the fun out of gay sex.”

I look at the retreating crowd of police officers. They disappear into the swirl of bodies.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

I overhear some chatter. It seems the story is spreading quickly. Questions as to who the man was, which party he was a member of. Whether it was a set up.

Merc turns to me.

“I think we can let the vice detail do their work.”

We are out the door and into the garage as quickly as the tumult of bodies allows.

But even in the garage there is no escape, a man with a microphone is there, and behind him a television mini-camera.

“Can I ask you a few questions?”

Merc scowls, but he stops.

“Sure.”

The reporter pushes the microphone into his face.

“But turn that off. What I have to say isn’t family friendly.”

The camera is duly pointed down, the microphone dropped. Some juggling of hands produces a notebook, a pencil and a card.

“First, if you do decide to talk on camera, here is my card.”

Merc glances at it, sees the large number of the television station and looks back up.

“I will say this. The man in question was soliciting to people as we walked in. I brushed it off.”

“You don’t have any problems with… you weren’t offended?”

“None of my business what he likes to do.”

“So you don’t care one way or the other?”

“I’d prefer people not ask randomly.”

“So then what happened?”

“I hit the stall, I really needed to go.”

“Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

“I heard the whole transaction. A man came in, I saw only a glimpse through the crack of the door, but I could tell he wasn’t what he seemed to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a doctor with the army. You can always tell people who have training.”

The reporter nodded slowly.

“So what happened next?”

“The Senator’s aide propositioned him, the same way he did me?”

“How was that?”

“He said, and I quote. ’You deserve a break today.’”

There was a slightly muffled guffaw from the camera man, but the reporter went on. I watched the beer belly on the camera man jiggle with ripples of suppressed laughter. His black beard growth was scraggly, his hair unkempt. He was clearly enjoying his day immensely.

“And then what?”

“The undercover officer…”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. He said, and again I quote. ’Where?’ And then the tall thin man said. ’Fifty dollars in the stall.’”

There was a pause, Merc continued.

“They got into the stall, I heard some shuffling of clothes. And then from the tall man. ’Awww shit.’”

“And?”

“No more to tell, the officers came in just about then. And all I heard was. ’This is a Clark County set up! You fucking partisan hacks will never get this to stick.”

“So it was clear that he is a Republican?”

“I would guess it was pretty clear to anyone in earshot. He kept saying it over and over again how the ’Liberal media’ is out to get him.”

“And your thoughts on that.”

“If your liberal media can get us out of Iraq, I’d be much obliged. I’m sorry, I don’t have anything more to say.”

The reporter looked disappointed, perhaps hoping for a more graphic description. He seemed to think that Merc saw more than he had let on.

I was fairly sure that this was true from Merc’s face.

The door to the casino opened as the reporter and camera man waded into it.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

The wheels had turned again, and someone’s luck had just run out.

By the time we were in the car, it was already on the radio. Republican Senator’s aide allegedly caught soliciting. He was also the state campaign chairman for some presidential hopeful, and the cut to a political science pointy head for commentary on what this would do to the presidential….

We were turning our way through the city streets.

“I need to return this rental car. We are going to be borrowing a friend’s BMW for the rest of the ride.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“I have my reasons.”

The traffic clears away as we drive away from the strip. The pressure on my face abates, I can feel road in front of us. And that is what I want so very badly. Road in front of us, and this shining city of sin behind us.

But Las Vegas wasn’t finished with us yet.

3

Give me light.

I was dreaming and fell through a giant face, like breaking the surface of the water. My cheeks bleed tears white and burned pressed to memory’s steel ice.

Give me light.

I fell upwards through into being awake. My eyes open and I am not awake, but only at another layer of the dream. There is white white white, and a giant screaming face. The face of the man I had seen arrested hours before, screaming out of a nightmare vision. On the white on white I see marching figures, in an endless parade. They are ghosts from some other Auden age.

His lips contort and wrap back and forth, over enunciating his words. But I hear the sounds, and they make no sense at all. He scoops and bobs his head and accents the commands. Orders from out of the nowhere, and into the here.

Give me air.

Give me light.

I drown and gasp and gulp for air. I suck in the space and cough. I feel a wave from deep in my stomach, it howls up my throat and discharges like a jet engine that has lost power and smokes into a ghastly whirring death. Yes I remember that sound, and now it is coming from within me.

The burning, appalling burn, becomes a wave of nausea.

My eyes open, truly open. I am staring a the floor of orange carpet, and turn over too look up at the mirrors at the ceiling of the room. The orange cast comes from sunrise. I remember the night. We must get ready to go soon. Our goal is Yosemite.

There is light, but it is fading. I look around, and do not see Merc. I startle and then settle. I hear him getting ready. I roll my feet slowly to the floor and begin to assemble my wits. My insides churn. I almost wish for a moment of shocking violence to bring me out of this sense of roiling helplessness. But alas, we are not in Country.

Some where in a lonely hotel room I am still there, at the moment. I can draw back my vision and see myself standing there. There is silence, but inside there is a swirling siren in my head. I feel a flash of heat that floods down my face and across my body. I feel my stomach drop about two feet. No. That’s going to happen in the future. It didn’t happen in the past.

I am spinning, having lost track of past and present, whether I am awake or falling back asleep.

My eyes open again, I am looking at the Merc’s face.

“You passed out. Are you sure you are alright?”

“I had a dream.”

“So did Martin Luther King Jr.”

“It was two dreams. The first part just came back to me. I dreamt that a plane hit the Stratosphere tower we were there. I fell through the floor and into a wave of white. And there was the face of the man they arrested today.”

“Did he remind you of anyone?”

“I don’t know.”

“No one else does.”

“It’s going to happen in the future.”

“You know I don’t believe.”

“No. I mean our child. My past doesn’t matter now. I have a reason to be. It’s going to happen in the future, the meaning of my dream.”

“You were just reliving that day.”

“No, I was pre-living something.”

“I’m confused again.”

“There is another moment coming, another collapse.”

“Shit. Anyone who has been to Baghdad can tell you that. That’s what the surge was about, because the city was spinning out of control. It wasn’t to accelerate victory, just delay defeat.”

“How closer are we?”

“To losing the war? We lost it already. We put the enemy in charge of the country.”

“So were falling spiral?”

“Destination unknown.”

“So where are we going? Why are you going? Do you have some kind of Rhett Butler complex?”

“No. I’m going back to be there at the bitter end.”

“That’s what I was seeing. There is going to be a moment. A moment when we see a shadow, and feel it splay into pink mist.”

“I already have. There was a friend, he slipped away under my fingers. I knew there was nothing that could be done. So I sat there, watching him turn back and forth against a baked beige wall.”

I see his eyes have gone million miles gone. They scream one thing:

Give me light.

“Tell me dear.”

“He was a shining light. Brilliant. Tactically, intellectually. He lead us when we had given up on finding people. He had the words. All the words I don’t know. All the words I wished I knew. All the words I wish I could say.”

“What did he say.”

“When I found him, he’d stitched a boy’s in place and restarted his heart. A sniper caught him and ripped enough of his mid section out to fill a butcher case in Chinatown. He lolled and smiled. He breathed out of half a lung. And was drowning in the other.”

“What did he say?”

“He smiled at me.”

He slipped into another voice. He gained an accent I did not know he had.

“The wings have come for me. I stand on the mountain and there is the breath of cold that shrouds my feet. These garments of flesh are not my own. I trade my life for his. Save him from this day. There is light on his face.”

“I told him nothing, I had no lies to tell.” Pause. “He bled out, still smiling. But he was right, the blood was coming back to the marine’s face.”

“And the patient lived?”

“Lived through that day. Lives to this day. Though he’s due for another tour.”

That was silence until we were hauling ourselves out. I looked back at the closing door, wishing we had found some debauchee to share what we had shared there. Not because, but because not. Because what’s the point of going to sin city without doing something you are ashamed of?

As I walked out with Merc I saw faces in the casino, pretty faces, once. Handsome faces… once.

Worn by waves of desperation. Staring into the machines. Everyone saying the same thing.

Give me light.

One moment I could feel his eyes on the seam of a long pair of black stockings. I pressed my lips to his in a dangerous flame. That shapely backside and long legged wonder turned around to reveal a haggard 50 year old face, with a long nose and the sunken cheeks of a cocaine user.

Her eyes danced, she was beyond caring. In the background, bells rang and she tossed her peroxide blasted wires back. She had found in decay a reality of happiness. She petted the hands of the patrons and giggled like a girl.

I knew from her walk that she never went to bed alone unless she wanted to.

She was the light.

I could tell that no words would pass between them, that Merc took her in his mind. I could see the tightening of his jaw, the flare in his eyes.

I remembered how the first time we were together it took ours to uncoil the tension, and then it became a fluid lucidity of motion. How once freed from what ever chains that bind him in the waking world, he was a different man. He spoken during sex, he talked to me, whispering in my ear. He recited poems, perhaps memorized in quiet rooms of his childhood. He told me about his travels, about his dreams. He did not speak so at any other time.

I remembered how he had the peculiar habit of turning his hips under my hands, and using this leverage to grind into me. It produced a wincing sensation, that shot up through my body with hot stiff intensity, almost pain, and then a flooding relaxation as the pressure ebbed away. Then that strange shift of motion and sensation, as the focus of my pleasure shuttled from high to low. That particular sensation of his outer skin dragging on my inner skin that enveloped him, and the pleasing realization in my mind that I was enveloping him. And the beatific look upon my face, and the serene smile that, in that instant, I was his world.

I felt calm, even knowing his attention, because he was looking, not at her, but what he hoped I could always be: his lady of redemption.

From what, I did not yet know.

And as he watched her, I saw his lips barely move and form shapes and syllables. But they did not add up to words. He turned away from her and focused on the flooding reality of sunlight that poured through the glass doors.

We cleared the entrance to cross the street and get coffee. The sun blazed straight down the open pavement. And there was light sweet dry light.

I could not help, I sank to me knees in prayer. To which deity I do not know.

Let there be light.

Instead there would soon be noise. That is what we had been trying to escape, but could not: Iraq.

The Kingdom of Noise.

In Country 08

4

Maybe even now, I need. All, everywhere, is designed, everything. That holds events and plans. Even lost ideas are designs entering oblivion. And chosen in letters, engraved on stone.

But only under limits of meaning. Even now, everyone needs.

Hasn’t everyone made up reasons inside? And chosen an inside, outside, insane stain. A lie, gestates, enters, ends the endless kinetic ethics.

Pray on lies, lies as stars, Demanding in phases the infamous maw of useless states, praise such useless choices as sound. And in death intone: “Please rape our insides. Assassinate, plunder, slake every need.”

Have everyone rape. Onward, onward, now.

Although understanding topple our senses, defeat everything, hold endless lessons or reasons in abeyance, to each understated choice ending comes under starry scintillation in night.

Thank you Dr. Shay. I will come home now.

I wake to see his iris eyes hang over me like an early twilight sky, with blackness engulfing overhead, and fringes of darkest blue around. An alarming wave rises from my body, I am having sex, even though I have been asleep. My body’s moisture has eased the slow and steady sliding of him into me. But my mind is not aroused, but looks disdainfully from the sidelines.

The day before had seemed wasted, with to and fro and waiting for statements to be made and given. But the evening had been one of pulsing excitement, we had cruised the strip and settled into a pounding acid house dance club, ripped with blaring blue lights. We were going to party like it was 2002, and the blasting blaze of blue is every where.

The bodies are not quite packed in yet, but they are sweating in the heat, and the small bubbles we put around ourselves in waking ours had begun to collapse under some insane pressure of heat and need.

One seemed to clear a space, to like a dervish spin to another time, and in another motion. With another energy, creating a divine wind. The blades of her hands made angles to her arms. The twist of her round, round hips swirling a shape that was like the torquing of the bends of a twister as it lands. Some one had sown her with the wind, and there she was, the whirlwind: her dark skin shown with a kind breathe of sweat, her fountains of henna washed locks shook and shimmered as she danced, her eyes on her own breasts, her own orange and multi colored sort dress. There was that bright smile of self-love on her whole countenance.

Like any woman, I could tell that the man on my arm had noticed her, Her angular arm gestures, something about her, which I knew to be the perfectly toned legs and muscles, her perfectly smooth skin that glowed in the snap crackle pop of the dance floor light. Others pressed aside to watch her movements.

She was not that tall, but she swept the floor in front of her, her plunging neckline implying not availability, but a taunting flavor that is the sweet smell of confidence. Her rounded cheekbones carried the touch of affluence, but her tapered waist said that she was on the machines every day. Beauty was clearly her profession.

I reached my hand around Merc’s seeking reassurance and trying to sense his own pulse. I found myself pulled around, his hand on my spine, his fingers intertwined with mine, his eyes on mine, my hand raised into the just so place of the tango, that dance he had taught me. I was pulled forward in my chest, and rocked back in my hips. I could do nothing but follow.

Then and only then did I notice that the pumping speakers were pushing out some dance music cover of “Roxanne.”

“It’s a tango.”

That it is.

He circled one foot back and stepped forward, I retreated. A foot fall left, a foot fall left. I pull up, crossing my legs and pressed my thighs together. He let me drop down but almost with out pause, he shifted off of sync and I fell into ochos, me feet falling alternately into place. Eights. My hips spin in figure eights, tracing them in the air.

With that space we invaded the woman’s bubble. I could feel the fingers of our space break through into hers, like claws that rip the flesh off a rabbit, or the tendrils of dawn the rip away the night. Eyes followed us as he spun me, and drove me around in a circle. It was a thunder run of a dance, twisted turned and ever rotating.

The whirlwind pushed out from her, and I could feel him look at her in the way that men look at women. I saw her movement, a thousand small details, her costume, her make up. He saw… something, I know not what. But with every turn, he pulled his eyes back to mine. And I kept mine locked upon his face. Until his glances grew less frequent, and finally were only for the purpose of guiding me through the curves and slides and openings of the gaps, like foam on the sea, that opened and closed.

I expected the woman to react, to sour her face, or in some way observe our intrusion. But instead, she merely radiated, danced the same dance. Then I noticed she had begun to turn her self contrary to our motion, so that there were wheels within wheels.

Merc and I would dance, sometimes holding attention, but later retreating into the packed down. His hands on every point of my desire, his legs intruding between my own, his palm now on my back in a formal dance, then along my arms in a free form flow.

And in these fluid moments I look up at the glittering lights of the dance floor, that spin and sparkle, glaze and glamour. And in one such glance, I see not the black of boxy artificial ceiling and supports of lighting, but the deeper hues of some forgotten night sky, with pin point stars that stare down at me. I am being fucked. I do not know by whom or when. There is a rustling sound of the wind whispering through. Something. I know not what.

And then the memory snaps away and fades to the spinning present of the dance.

By the end of the night we glowed with perspiration, and every other moisture that raises and rises. My skin was stretched from waves of sweat and drying, my nipples aching from so many quivering moments when I saw some particular curve or stance of his body. He drove me that night. Oh god how he drove me.

Back in the room, I was peeling off my clothes as I walked in, carelessly tossing them aside on the way to the bed. I would not accept delay even for another instant.

I looked back to see that look that men have when half surprised at their handiwork, half smugly confident, realize that their woman is pulling them like an undertow to the bed with no transition from public foreplay, to immediate intimacy. I let the corner of my mouth form a knowing half smile. It is a thing I saw my mother do with my father. I have done it so often now, that it is my own.

In a few moments his face was above mine, his features the clouds of a rolling storm. He looms over me, his nose strikes down towards me.

Maybe even now, I need. I want to bite his nose, recoil, and spread my legs farther and farther apart, and roll my body farther and farther up into him. All at once, and in some or any order. I press my whole body up, I feel my softness crush up into his almost unyielding chest,

He is plowing up and down across my midriff, suddenly I have the intense urge to pee. I can’t help it.

“Let’s take a shower together.” This is my old strategy to keep the mood up, and still not spend half an hour thinking about nothing but holding it in.

He rolls off of me, and in a cat quick motion plants his feet on the floor, grabs my wrist and pulls me up to standing. It feels like I am flying for a moment, and then I land, giddy.

“How do you do that?”

“It’s easy with an angel to make her fly.”

I almost want to blush, I drape my naked flesh over his shoulder and push us with little steps into the bathroom. As he is getting the water started, I do the necessaries and almost hop in, the water splashing off the sweat.

“You know, I had my claws out with that dancing girl. The one with the hot floral skirt and all the moves on the dance floor.”

I wrap one leg around his and draw the cleft of my legs over his

He shakes his head.

“No, she is too much like my ex-wife.”

“What ex-wife?”

In Country 09

5

Blazing Hyperion struck his palm and enveloped the car as we burned east towards it. The light coming over the horizon and slapped me in the face as it pounded into the windshield. Long lazy miles behind us was the border into Utah from Nevada. Las Vegas, that city of lies, was fading as an object of desire in my mind. There was still a twinge back.

Maybe even now, I need.

That night we had driven out to the Hoover Dam and sat below its mass. There we had had a smoldering conversation. I remember it beginning with my accusation.

“How could you lie to me?”

Merc looked back at me with a bare calm.

“I’m a lot worse at it than you are.”

“I don’t lie to you.”

“Um no, you are just a good deal more able to not talk about the parts of the truth that you find inconvenient to remember at any given moment.”

“Oh my god, And I was thinking of spending my life with you. How can you say that?”

“Well maybe,” and his voice developed that twirl around it. “Lady Mercy can explain it to me.”

I stopped cold.

“How did you hear about that.”

“It’s not hard. I know enough company people. That’s who you really worked for in country isn’t it? The company.”

“No, I was still just a contractor..”

“And what did you do?”

“Like you , whatever I was told.”

The ground hummed with a power, one that only the most sensitive of nerves would feel. Or perhaps the most guilty. That had been my initiation into a strange and dark society. It had begun easily enough. I had seen what contractors were paid for going in country. Hampton was already stationed there, and I was at loose ends here in the United States. The process of getting the job had been strangely easy. My resume wasn’t as good as I would have liked it to be, but there seemed to be little and less of the kind of inquiry I expected, and a good deal more waiting around to here back on “references.”

It was only on the third hop over that I knew something was very very wrong. No Spartan accommodations. Instead I was ushered into a corporate jet with full swivel chairs and desks. The flight crew could have gotten work at a fashion magazine. The fellow passenger were men who had seen either a great deal of sun, or a great deal of hard decision making. They were smiling happy, upbeat in an off hand kind of way, as the told jokes that involved body parts as the punch lines.

There suits were immaculately pressed, or they were wearing the kind of garb that spoke of hard living in the bush: khaki, desert camo with multiple patches, hands that were roughed from wind and wear. Weapons were visible. M-16’s with complex sights, RPG launchers. There seemed to be no interference from the local airport authorities. We were not at a military base.

I was ushered in to a seat by a leggy, and very attractive blond woman who had a strong Slavic accent. Her blond hair was cropped close with just a suggestion of bangs, and here eyes were an ice blue. Her smile however, was not just painted on. She clearly enjoyed whatever it was she was doing. It was the series of scars on her hand and along her neck that told me that she was no strange to harms way. Make up could lighten them to the outline of perception, but not eradicate them. She was lucky to have escaped with the one that had just missed her carotid artery.

I settled into my seat, and began to rifle through the papers in my brown leather briefcase, not the hard masculine kind, but one that resembled an oversize purse. It was merely for a sense of security. I felt out of place, even though men and women of hard extraction were no stranger to my eyes. I merely had been expecting a more utilitarian approach.

A blond haired, strong jawed man sat down across from me. He waved me down and beckoned for a drink. He merely made some gestures with his hand, and the AOK sign. He clearly was known to the crew on this flight.

He looked at me and smiled, is broad face filled with a beaming confidence.

“Mr.s Hampton, we are very glad you can join us. This is special work.”

I looked over the rims of my glasses and gave my voice the most professional cast I could. Which was considerable, I was used to getting my way with it form doctors.

“And what work is this?”

“You have to understand that what we do is completely confidential. First I’m here to deliver your credentials to you.”

I glanced at them, it was a Top Secret clearance with enough pretty code words on it to fill a small guide book.

“I thought I needed…”

“We didn’t think you had a need to know about the clearance until you were on your way. Formalities can also be security risks.”

I simply blinked and looked. What ever it was I was basically cleared to listen to anything about anything. No wonder the door had been clear. People who were in the magic circle of trust for the intelligence community were few and far between.

He hesitated. And then the explanations came. I was going to be working for a contracting company, not the government, but in fact my orders, and they would be orders, would come from the national intelligence community, no specific agency. That way it would be harder to trace the results. The official employer was not even an American company, but one from South Africa called “Executive Outcomes.”

Mercenaries. I was a soldier of fortune in name and fact. The papers I read on that flight detailed the series of “extreme intelligence” gathering activities. They explained that we had a human intelligence deficit, and that it had to be rectified in order to reduce the fatalities from “AQ-I.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

At the end of allowing me to peruse the papers and then a short verbal explanation, interrupted by some questions from me, he looked straight at me and asked.

“Do you think you can accept this?”

The plane was well in the air, it wasn’t really a question.

“Well?”

At that moment Merc’s face in the present overlapped on that face from the past and I was thrown into the dark present, the moon, not the sun, illuminating his features like crags in a stone cliff.

“That wasn’t really a question was it?”

“Not really.”

“I worked as a contractor, our orders were from all over.”

“And so that shoot… you know the one I mean…”

“The woman we found cut in two was a person of interest.”

“She was an asset.” I winced, having been again caught shaving the truth.

“How do you know?”

“They found the ram disk in her intestines when the autopsy was done. “

“You weren’t supposed ot know about that.”

“All Doctors Talk.” He mimicked one of my favorite warnings about nurses.

“That’s true. So I’ve admitted it, I was Florence Nightengale for the spooks.”

“No, that’s not all.:

“Do you want the details?”

“Just the Lady Mercy part.”

“One of my jobs was reviving people who were under interrogation.”

“you brought them back from the dead.”

“Yes, several were clinically dead when I finally was allowed to work on them.”

“So that’s who were. Lady Mercy.” He said it as if there were stories about me. There probably were.

I tried to muster a devil may care smile. It didn’t work.

“What does this have to do with your hiding your marriage from me.”

“That’s why we came out here, isn’t it? Truth in a time of secrets?”

“How could you.” My mind ran through the five way of saying that with accents falling on every different combination. I don’t remember which one finally slipped out.

“How couldyou.” His accent fell deliberately on the last word.

“It was my job.”

“It was my life.”

I stomped my foot, my voice took on a whiny edge.

“I’m not accepting. That. Or any other dodge.”

He stared back at me, and finally dropped his gaze.”

“You are right, I’ve got an excuse for all occasions where Tieisha is concerned.”

“Finally, she has a name.” I enunciated each syllable.

“She’s got a great deal more than that.” He was clearly having difficulty. His lips were dry. I realized I was pushing to hard, and being, well, a bitch.

That didn’t, in itself, make me want to stop. Instead part of me wanted to keep twisting, to see how much more there was. And then the darkness at the edge of the loud lights got to me. Outside what every light there was for us, there was nothing but darkness in my life. Outside of this one space, this one place, this one time, this one person.

I had been Lady Mercy slamming adrenaline into stopped hearts, and oxygen into collapsing lungs. Blood into bleed white prisoners, who ere interrogated even as their wounds were taking them from life.

Why not here. Why not now?

The next morning as I felt the flooding light on my skin. The warmth that washed away the cold. I remember how I had embraced him, and taken him back into that magic circle of my affection. How he cried. How over the course of those dark hours the story had cone out. And no, it didn’t threaten our present..

He had been married. He had an ex-wife, and two children. She was remarried. It seemed safe.

Or so I thought.

6

In the Senate today, they voted for war.
For more and more, they voted for war.

In the Senate today, they voted for war.
For more and more, they voted for war.

In the Senate today, they voted for death,
’til none of us are left, they’ll keep voting for death.

In the Senate today, they voted for guns,
like exploding suns, they voted for guns.

In the Senate today, they voted for lies,
you should hear their cries, as they voted for lies.

In the Senate today, they voted for kings,
and the destruction he brings, they voted for kings.

In the Senate today, they voted for debt,
as there was not enough yet, they voted for debt.

In the Senate today, they voted for wrongs,
the bards will sing songs, over so many wrongs.

In the Senate today, they voted for fears,
to stretch onward for years, they voted for fears.

My tears they do not reach the ground,
this air is so dry, the sand is so tight,
the decision is nigh.

My tears they do not reach the ground,
falling on the bodies of the fallen.

My tears they do not reach the ground,
so covered with blood, and buried by rocks.

My cries they are not heard,
nor his or hers, nor ours nor yours.
Your child you will not save,
from the fate of an Iraqi grave,
so throw the sand into his face,
the Senate voted him from the human race.

And when his shattered body into my care comes
while bullets fly and machinery hums.

In the Senate today, they voted for wars,
it was just one of their chores:
yes, voting for wars.

In the Senate today they voted for lies,
so each of us dies, supporting their lies.

I scrawled these words in bitter pencil as Merc drove us through the winds of the painted desert in Utah, as the mountain folds were gilded with snow, as the basin grew stiff with salt. As the air grew acrid and bone dry.

It felt like in country.

And thus, like home. We listened to the radio, NPR, at my insistence. The anger hummed between us.

We blazed past the Mormon City, and farther out into the distance. We stopped at the most hellish of motel hovels. Yellow paint and thin wall.

I think someday, I will be able to tell what he did to my body.

And it was exactly what I wanted him to do.

On those polyester sheets he tied me, bound with the belt on my arms, and then with twine to my legs spread “Y”. He pulled them tight, and I could feel the ligature bruises welling into existence on them. He pulled, and with each pull heightened my separation, my exposure. He turned on the television, loudly, it was to the History Channel, they were fighting the Second World War again, the bombs ripped, the bullets screamed.

And with each one I felt an interior flinch, and a quivering at the entrance to my sex, a shivering in my ribs, and rattlingling shake in my legs, as my muscles were straining at the tightness of the bonds.

The quivering in my vagina, became wetness in my cunt. Yes, I felt that transition from my self in my mind, knowing and dreading, waiting and wanting what was to come, to that sailing soup of being overwhelmed by the sheer wall of sound, the taste of burning pain in my joints, and the overwhelming craving to be taken.

I gasped moans at close, but irregular intervals, as he pulled each bond more tightly. I looked up at each, saw grooves and splinters cut, and knew that we were far from the first to trod this particular path in this particular room.

He took out one of his straight shaving razors, the old fashioned kind that he still used. He drew straight sharp lines down the back of my legs, I could feel the skin pucker and divide, and then open. As I was open. The skin pulled away from skin, as my lips pulled away from each other. The moan started as a warble in my throat and raced up to a wail in my head. The moan started as a warble in my throat, and then descended into a growl in my chest.

His teeth were next biting into my neck, his weight descended on top of me. There was no further prequel or preparation. He was hard and inside me. I was around him, I felt the traces of blood lubricate the motion of his legs on mine. I felt the soft rolls of my round hips conform to the pressure of his chest. He pushed my face into