by Amber Dawn
I covered us all with Mama’s leather jacket.
Brooke’s body was never recovered, but her feet, still encased in sodden stilettos, washed up on shore next morning. All the newspapers and local gossips declared that once again we had been caught in the depths of unimaginable horror. I never told anyone about the shark. It was just my way of keeping my family together.
All You Can Be
Mette Bach
Sal Miller woke up clear headed, eyes open, scanning the lines of the bunk bed above her. Its grid horizontal, perpendicular, suspending another private, Rachel (was it?), from Tucson (maybe). Everyone here at Fort Bliss went by last names only, except the ones the sergeant gave nicknames. Identities were niceties (where are you from? what kind of music do you like?) exchanged back in boot camp a long time ago. In the service, conversations were limited, a quality that had attracted Sal, initially, to the idea of an army career. She was not much for getting to know people, not interested, she told herself, but sometimes a fleeting thought would tell her that she was scared, scared of people and the words they spoke and the things they did.
She had enlisted not because she wanted to further the American Empire, but because she wanted, more than anything, to become an engineer like her father. She didn’t like her father, but she liked the idea of building structures, of seeing her visions take shape. She liked the idea of changing the horizon. She liked to think about bridges and suspension, the challenges of gravity, the beauty of mathematics. Her teachers in high school, far away, had called her a genius, but she did not like that label. She liked calculus, trigonometry, drafting, in the same way, she supposed, that some people liked other people.
Scholarships had been offered but not full scholarships, and Sal did not know how to supplement them. She made the kinds of calculations she did not like—how many trees would she have to plant in a summer to make enough money to survive the Ivy League? How many sandwiches would she have to make behind a deli counter? Her teachers, trying to be helpful, suggested loans or getting her parents’ support, but Sal never asked anyone for help.
Instead, she picked up a pamphlet and attended a recruitment meeting. The army offered (offered, as in “it would be our pleasure”) physical, emotional, and educational advancement.
Now, here she was, awake at dawn, minutes before the alarm would sound and the entire barracks would collectively grumble and moan their way out of bed, into their camouflage and boots and into the field. Every morning started the exact same way.
The privates stretched, ran five miles, and stretched again. They came back to their quarters, made their beds, shined their boots, stood at attention for inspection, marched to the dining hall, and ate breakfast. It was an Ayn Rand dystopia.
The alarm sounded. The collective eyes opened. Sal’s daydreaming was interrupted by the sound of fifty-eight feet hitting the ground, lacing boots.
“Miller. Get up.”
Sal tried to sit up, but could not. Her muscles were not cooperating.
“Miller! Get up!”
She tried rolling on her side, but that, too, did not work. She tried lifting her head, but there was a disconnect between what she told her body to do and what she could manage.
“Miller?”
“I can’t move,” she said.
“You’ll make us late,” Private Walker said.
“I’m not doing pushups for you, Miller,” Private Harding added, hovering over Sal’s bed. She ripped Sal’s blanket off and grabbed hold of Sal’s arms and heaved her into a sitting position. Sal’s body fell limp, on its side, the force of her unbalanced weight hurtling her to the floor. Face first, she landed on the cold linoleum-covered concrete.
Walker gasped. “Go get the sergeant.”
A crowd formed around Sal. She could not feel the many hands on her as a number of women lifted her back into her bunk, into her initial position.
“Call the nurse,” one voice said.
“I think we need a doctor,” said another.
Sal woke up again, this time in a hospital bed. She looked around, scanning for a window, a clock, a person, an indication of how she’d gotten there and how much time had passed.
She hadn’t been alone since she left home. She ate, slept, dressed with the others, lonelier than she had ever been. Crowds made her anxious. Here, alone, in the austere room, absorbing the clinical smell, Sal tried to move her arm, but it wouldn’t; tried to curl a finger, but it didn’t; tried to turn her head, but it was impossible.
“That’s quite the predicament you’re in,” the white-coated doctor said, opening the door. His clipboard clutched to his chest, he adjusted his glasses and pulled a wheeled chair close to her bed and sat down.
“What’s going on?” Sal asked.
“You tell me,” he said.
“I can’t move.”
“I see that.” He adjusted his weight from one side to the other.
“Why?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that,” his tone distant, calculating.
“How would I know?”
He reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a lighter. With a flick of his thumb, he held a flame. They both looked at it. He inched it closer and closer to her arm.
“What are you doing?” Sal protested.
“I think we both know what’s going on here.”
“And what’s that?”
“Come on,” he said, inching the flame closer and closer until she smelled the singe of her arm hair.
With a perplexed expression, the doctor let the flame go out.
“Oh. You’re not faking.” He seemed disappointed.
“Faking what?”
“Paralysis.”
“Why would I fake paralysis?”
“Why does anyone fake anything? Honourable discharge? I don’t know. I have to rule everything out.”
Sal wondered if she could change her circumstances with a change in attitude. If she expected this doctor to help her, would he? She expected him to irritate her, isolate her, bother her—and he did. In his hands she placed the fate of her body, which she no longer had control over. If she had control, she would have left the room, stopped listening. Men like the doctor frightened her.
“Yesterday you were fine, and today you wake up like this?”
“Yes.”
Sal could not even begin to explain that her definition of “fine” and his might not be the same. In fact, her definition of “fine” might be vastly different from anyone in all of the barracks.
How could she point out the awfulness of the entire situation to someone who seemed intent on disbelieving her?
“So you didn’t do anything strenuous?” he inquisitioned her.
“Not especially.”
The doctor left the room. Sal closed her eyes and imagined a window to look out of. Instead, she lay on a bed in a room of empty beds. George Orwell was a military man, wasn’t he? No wonder he turned to fiction.
“You’re being moved,” the doctor said condescendingly. He was barely in the room before Sal felt sick. “Dr. Van de Kroop will take you in the Psychiatric Ward. It’s psychosomatic, what you have.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s in your head.”
“I know what ‘psychosomatic’ means. When will I get better?”
“I guess that’s up to you,” he said, one eyebrow slightly raised, creating the appearance of confidence with a practised hint of concern.
Sal was moved to the Psychiatric Ward. Her bed was next to a window where she could look down each morning at her peers, still living the life of the six-a.m. runs.
Sal waited for a door to open. What a horrid metaphor when doors open to hallways like these—sterile, fluorescent, crisp. There are two kinds of people according to rooms like this: those who are psychologically balanced (professionals) and those who need their help (Sal). The door swung open and a long-haired woman breezed through, theatrical, caricature-like. She wore a lab coat over her power sui
t, which gave her an air of self-assurance. Sal had learned to be skeptical of women like her.
“I’m Dr. Van de Kroop, but you can call me Brianna.” She stretched a long thin hand in Sal’s direction.
Sal’s limp body could not return the gesture.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot,” Brianna giggled, nervous. “How are you today?”
“Paralyzed.”
The moment was awkward. Brianna thought that Sal had made a joke, and so she laughed just enough to realize that she was alone in her laughter. She pulled a chair from one side of the room (where they kept dolls and yarn and puzzles) to Sal’s steel bed.
“You seem cynical,” Brianna said, perfectly poised with open body language, eye contact, and a perfunctory empathetic facial expression fresh from college.
“Cynical?” Sal wondered if she needed to remind her that they were in a military hospital, even though it did not look like one.
Cynical. What a dumb assessment. Who isn’t?
“I’m here to help you. Do you want my help?”
Sal’s immediate (yet unuttered) response was no. Instead of saying anything, Sal thought about the question and its implication that Brianna could help. This seemed unlikely. Sal did not respond the way she thought she would.
“Yes, I want your help. I want to sit up and walk again.”
“Then you’re going to need to let me in here.” She tapped her chest above her heart and nodded her head in what Sal gauged as a cheap attempt at manipulation. She did not nod back.
“I don’t want to do that.”
“But you want to get better.”
“I want to take a piss by myself.”
“That’s better than where you’re at right now, isn’t it?”
Sal conceded that Brianna’s logic was superior. Brianna was the kind of woman who displayed zeal in her work, who would gleefully chirp to the other therapists about the “progress” they were making. The very idea of it—of this dividing line, of Brianna “helping” her—sickened Sal.
“Why are you so resistant? We’re trying to help you.” Brianna flipped through Sal’s file.
“I just want to be able to sit up. I wasn’t supposed to be here, like this.” Sal was frustrated by her body’s betrayal, like being held captive within herself.
“Sometimes these kinds of things—hysterical paralysis in particular— manifest themselves to give you an opportunity to reconsider your path.”
Sal had a low tolerance for New-Age mumbo-jumbo and could not help but feel that Brianna had never had to reconsider her path. Outside these walls, Sal wouldn’t speak to a woman like Brianna, but here they both were, doctor and patient. Once inside a psychiatric ward, one no longer has the freedom to debate diagnoses or the very construct of the sane helping the insane. Sal knew that her best strategy was to be amenable.
“What’s going on for you?” Brianna urged, casually leaning against Sal’s bed, looking at her over the frames of her glasses, her face tilted slightly downward in practised perfection.
“I can’t move.”
“And?”
“It’s frustrating.”
“What’s going on for you emotionally?” Brianna asked. Sal knew she better pony up a better response and quick.
“I’m part of the machine,” she said, consciously contemplative. “It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a gun on me. I’m a soldier. For that matter, so are you.” Sal was impressed with the grace of her own rhetoric.
“I’m a therapist.”
“We’re both part of the machine.” Her logic was swift. The dividing line between doctor and patient had happened fast—as these things do—as overnight she went from well to unwell. Brianna had to recognize the absurdity of this system she belonged to. It wasn’t as simple as well and unwell. It couldn’t be.
“Is that what this is about?” Brianna’s eyes traced Sal’s still body. “You see yourself as a soldier and you don’t want to be one?”
“I don’t ‘see myself as a soldier,’ I am one. Don’t you get that?”
“Sal, you haven’t even been in combat.”
This postulation stung. Brianna’s ignorant words were harsh and logical but false. Brianna claimed to want to help but seemed as though she had not given much thought to what the military actually did, what a life of service actually meant. Sal speculated that maybe this denial was why her body opted out. Perhaps on a cellular level, she knew she could not stay.
For weeks, the women spent most of their days together, focused on the project of Sal’s recovery, and they made “great strides” according to Brianna’s reports. Sal had come to understand herself through working with Brianna. She had learned to accept that her body had responded to stimulus she hadn’t even been aware of. She opened up to Brianna, shared secrets as small as her breakfast cereal cravings and as large as her fear of never being good enough. They eased into conversations that felt impossible with anyone else. They had no trouble reprimanding each other.
“When we first met, you gave me the pretty-girl write-off.”
Brianna’s tone was low, personal.
“The what? I don’t know what that is.” Sal found it arrogant of Brianna to refer to herself as pretty, even though it was true.
“You thought you knew everything about me based on what I look like.”
“I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie,” Brianna said. “It’s okay, though. I tried to give you the handsome-girl handshake.”
“You did?” Sal’s eyes widened. No one had called her handsome before, and it fit like her favourite track pants. “I don’t know what that is either.”
“Do I have to spell it out? I thought you were cute.” Brianna smiled, shy, coy. When she avoided eye contact because of nerves, she was even prettier. There was something confident about the risk of her words. Sal had never been called cute, except as a child by her grandparents.
Brianna lifted the sheets from Sal’s side, exposing the skin of her leg.
“Here,” she said, reaching into her lab coat pocket, pulling out a syringe, “I’m going to give you an injection. It will stimulate your muscles. I want you to get better.” Her voice was tender.
Sal felt cared for. Brianna’s attention was lovely and flattering, and even though it was something Sal had not been used to, she felt like it was something that maybe she should get used to. Maybe people were not altogether as suspect as she had believed.
Over the weeks they spent together, Sal started to understand how she had isolated herself and how she could change. She trusted Brianna. She wasn’t sure why, but it seemed impossible not to. Theirs was a symbiotic connection. Brianna confessed that she, too, had been alone, isolated, frustrated with human contact and interaction, unable to find solace in conversation.
“I feel like I can actually talk to you. I never feel that way,” Sal said one afternoon.
“Can I ask you something? Are you a lesbian?” Brianna asked. She had a way of putting Sal on the spot like that, a trait that made her both alluring and frightening.
“I thought no one was supposed to talk about that. Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”
“Maybe I’m not asking in a professional capacity.” Brianna pulled her chair in close to Sal’s horizontal body. Sal could smell Brianna’s hair, a fresh herbal scent. She wanted to breathe Brianna’s hair deep into her lungs, suffocate on her long brunette locks and be enveloped in that mane. Brianna rested her head, unprofessionally, on Sal’s chest. They enjoyed the sound of each others’ breathing.
“Do you believe in fate?” Brianna asked. “Do you think that maybe all this was meant to happen so that we could meet?”
Sal, who had always been an atheist and a practitioner of science, mathematics, and calculable randomness, heard her voice declare without hesitation, “Yes. I believe in fate.”
“I really like you, Sal.”
The phrase, like butter melting on toast, seeped into Sal.
“I like you, too, Brianna. Can I confess something? P
art of me wants to stay here with you forever, even if it means never walking again.”
“Can I tell you something?” Brianna asked. “I want that, too.”
“Can we stay in touch when I get better? What are your plans? Would you ever leave the military?” Sal’s mind flooded with visions of the two of them. They were on horseback, riding through New Mexico, the sun beating down on their warm, free bodies. They were in Alabama, baking pie in their shared home that had once been a salvaged plantation-turned-organic-farm where they would renovate the land, maybe lobby to have it rezoned as park land. They were in Canada, signing papers, declaring their love, celebrating their marriage. All kinds of fantasies seemed possible.
“Of course I want to leave with you. Let’s concentrate on getting you to walk again first,” Brianna said, reaching into her coat pocket for the daily syringe that had become part of their afternoon ritual. “Don’t be scared, Sal.” Brianna placed the palm of her hand on Sal’s arm, tender, light. Brianna radiated heat. Sal’s skin burned hot like the Texas sun. A tiny prick, a cool puncture from the steel tip of the syringe, and Sal felt a refreshing stream trickle into her.
Brianna’s hand was firm as she gave Sal the injection that allowed her to relax. She trusted Brianna. The extent of the trust was surprising. Perhaps it wasn’t trust as much as tension, that she wanted the touching to go further, even as she resisted the desire. How plainly we self-censor, not wanting things that we are told we shouldn’t want. Doctor and patient. Touching. Two military women. Touching. An introverted engineer and an extroverted counsellor. Touching. So wrong. So right.
“If you want me to stop, just say so,” Brianna whispered as she lowered her face to Sal’s, so close that Sal’s whole body, though still, glowed like embers. Brianna’s lips descended, closer and closer until the soft skin of her bottom lip touched Sal’s top lip. Unstoppable, they pressed hard against each other, skin on skin, lips on lips, determined.
