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.