[Holly Lin 01.0] No Shelter

by Robert Swartwood

  “I’ll stay while you take a nap,” Nova says.

  “Walter’s not going to give them the flash drive, is he?”

  I don’t know why I ask the question. The answer is obvious. Even if Walter wants to, he can’t get to the flash drive. It’s now in the safekeeping of the United States government, an organization that has always put the many before the few. The lives of two children don’t mean a thing to them.

  “They’re already dead,” I whisper. “They were dead the moment I stepped out of the car.”

  But I know that’s not true.

  For those two kids—for little Casey and David—they were dead the instant they met me.

  Fifty

  I wake to darkness. I’m lying in my bed. The fan in the corner is blowing, set to low. I rub my eyes, start to sit up, but stop when I see that I’m not alone.

  Nova sits in a chair beside the door. He has it tipped back on two legs, leaning against the wall. My eyes are adjusted enough to the dark that I can see his eyes are closed.

  I sit up straight. I do it slow enough that the frame doesn’t squeak. I swing my feet out. I start to stand.

  “Who’s Karen?”

  Nova opens his eyes, stares straight back at me.

  I reach out, turn on the lamp beside the bed, sit back down. The frame squeaks loudly like it always does.

  “What?”

  “You talked in your sleep. You mentioned the name Karen a couple times.”

  “She’s my lesbian lover. There, I’m out of the closet. Happy now?”

  His face remains impassive. His gaze stays steady with mine.

  I glance at the alarm clock. Almost ten o’clock. I’ve been asleep for over four hours.

  “Do you really want to know who Karen is?”

  “Do you really want to tell me?”

  I don’t answer right away. I’d never planned on telling Nova about Karen. The only two people in the world who knew about her besides Walter were Zane and my father. Are Zane and my father, I have to remind myself.

  “It has to do with the first person I ever killed.”

  He leans forward, drops the chair back down on four legs.

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” he says.

  “No, I want to.”

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  But it does matter. It matters because right now Nova is the only person in the world I trust. He is always there, no matter how much I treat him like shit. I never had an older brother, someone to look out for me, to stand up for me. Nova, despite his arrogance, makes the perfect substitute.

  So I tell him about Karen. A shy twenty-one-year-old girl out of Topeka, Kansas. A girl who had blond hair and blue eyes and an accent that grated on your nerves after five seconds. But she had a good heart. She was sweet. She entered the Army because she didn’t do well in school. She tried, but no matter how hard she studied, she always received poor grades. The only places that would hire her were fast-food restaurants and the local mom-and-pop grocery store.

  But Karen didn’t want that. She wanted to make a difference.

  We came to Iraq around the same time. We were assigned the same barracks.

  Within a minute of arriving Karen introduced herself to me and the rest of the girls. She told each of us her life story. She told us about her boyfriend back home who was a mechanic. She told us about how he had promised they would get married after her tour of duty. She told us about the house they would buy, the small yard, the back porch, the children they would have (one boy and one girl) and how during the summers they would rent an RV and one year travel to the Atlantic, the next year to the Pacific.

  None of the other girls cared much for Karen. They especially hated her accent. She would even say things like “y’all” and “how do.” I seemed to be the only one who could stomach her, and because of this we became fast friends.

  Karen wasn’t afraid of danger. She knew how to handle her weapon. She knew how to fight. She could run a mile in under five minutes. She could do fifty pushups without breaking a sweat. For a small, petite girl out of Topeka, Kansas, she was a true spitfire.

  Why I got along with Karen, I still don’t know. Sometimes I thought it was because I was so exotic to her. I couldn’t imagine there being many Asian Americans in Topeka. And if there were, I couldn’t imagine many of them wasting their time with a girl like Karen. But she had her surprises.

  At nights I would lie in my bunk and turn on my iPod and listen to music. Tool, Sublime, Radiohead, Linkin Park, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots. Karen asked me once if she could listen. I gave her my earbuds, thinking she wouldn’t care for any of the songs. But she closed her eyes and smiled and started bouncing her head to the music. When she took the earbuds out, she asked me what my favorite band was.

  I told her it was a toss-up between Tool and Alice in Chains.

  “Both are great,” she said. “I do love Maynard. He’s just so mysterious, you know?”

  And she smiled mischievously, something I hadn’t expected from this girl who I thought only listened to Dolly Parton and Travis Tritt and Garth Brooks.

  I asked her what her favorite band was. She said she didn’t know, she had so many.

  “But do you wanna know what my favorite song is? Lemme see your iPod again.”

  She scrolled through the list and selected a song, handed me the earbuds.

  I put them in. There was a moment of silence, and then I heard the pulsing bass and then the heavy guitars and then Zack De La Rocha started up about how the main attraction is distraction. The song was “No Shelter” by Rage Against the Machine.

  I asked Karen why she liked it so much. She said she loved that one line, the one about the front line being everywhere and there being no shelter anywhere. She said she thought it applied to the entire world. She said that was the main reason she joined the Army. She wanted to do something important with her life. She wanted to try to make shelter in any way possible. If not for herself, then for her family. For her boyfriend and their future children.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth about the song. How it was really about commercialism and the mass media doing everything it can to manipulate people’s minds. How it promoted the government or the Army in no way at all.

  Three months later she was beaten up and raped.

  I pause a moment, waiting to see Nova’s reaction. As usual, he doesn’t give one.

  He says, “Who was responsible?”

  “An American soldier.”

  Fifty-One

  Because of our location in the desert, we had no running water. We had to do our business in the porta potties stationed around the base. One night Karen went out to one of those porta potties. She did her business. When she opened the door, someone was waiting for her. He punched her in the nose. He knocked her down. Then he hit her two more times until she was unconscious and raped her.

  “Apparently it happened a lot over there,” I say. The fan keeps blowing in the corner, making the drapes over the windows sway. “Some women were knocked out and raped and then left there to be raped by whoever else came along.”

  “What was done about it?”

  “At the time? Nothing.”

  I forced Karen to go to our CO. She hadn’t wanted to; she was embarrassed. She said she couldn’t even identify the man if she had to. I wasn’t there when she spoke to the CO. I only found out later what the CO said. He apologized but asked her what did she expect—we were at war.

  I told Karen we would contact someone else, but she told me just to forget it. Her face was pale, her eyes red. The air was so dry in the desert that it dried the sweat off our bodies. It did the same to tears.

  “Don’t make a big deal about it, okay?” She hugged her knees up to her chest. “I’m just gonna forget it ever happened. You should, too.”

  But I couldn’t forget. Now every male soldier I looked at was a suspect. It was stra
nge; the enemy had suddenly become the ones inside our base.

  I started asking around. A few of the girls admitted that they had heard stories of other women being raped in the same way. None ever admitted it was them. But sometimes I could see it in their eyes. A flicker, nothing more than that. It was the same thing I now saw in Karen’s eyes. Before there had been an energetic fire, a passion to try to give shelter to the world, undo all the front lines. But that fire had been extinguished. She became withdrawn. Detached. Distant. One time I found her behind our building, punching the wall. She’d held her broken and bloodied hand up to me and said it didn’t even hurt.

  I called my father. He was stationed somewhere halfway around the world; I never knew the exact location. I told him the situation. I told him what the CO’s answer had been. I told him I suspected it was happening to other girls. He was quiet for a long moment. I could hear the static on the line and pictured a giant black hole between us. Then he said, “You’re a smart girl, Holly. You know how to make it right.”

  There was only one way I knew how to make it right, but I refused to consider the option. It was too extreme. It was too … unlike me.

  Then Karen became even more detached. One of the girls found her in our building banging her head against the tiles. She was sent to the infirmary. She was given medication. It was decided she should return home.

  The day before she left, however, she overdosed.

  I thought about what my dad had told me. How I was a smart girl. How I knew how to make it right.

  I decided that night—just hours after Karen killed herself—how I was going to do that.

  I began making nightly trips to the porta potties. I would wait inside for five minutes. It was stifling hot. The stench was nauseating. I spent the time counting how long I could hold my breath.

  When I opened the door I expected someone on the other side, someone who would try to punch me in the nose, push me down, knock me unconscious.

  But there was never anybody there.

  A week passed. Then another week. I was beginning to lose hope. I was beginning to look at the rest of the male soldiers during the day with hate. They were all guilty. They were all hiding something.

  Finally one night during the third week someone was waiting for me. I heard his boots crunching the dirt outside the porta potties. He was being too sloppy. He was getting away with too much and his ego had grown too big.

  When I opened the door he threw a punch at my face, but I ducked it and kicked him in the balls. He grunted, fell to his knees. While he was momentarily stunned, I withdrew my knife and shoved the blade into his chest. I kept it there and didn’t take it out until he’d stopped breathing. His body went limp. I pulled the knife out, let him drop to the ground.

  There was nobody around. The night was silent. The sky was clear.

  And at once a series of impulses began to race through my mind like a line of dominoes: I wanted to kick him; I wanted to stab him one hundred more times; I wanted to cut off his dick and stuff it in his mouth and leave him out for the rest of his brothers-in-rape to see (this last thought so gruesome and unlike me that for a moment I actually questioned my own sanity).

  In the end, I buried his body out by the generators. I kept his dog tags. His name was Michael Blair. I’d seen him around. I remembered him as one of the few men who had tried talking to Karen when she first arrived. He had a baby face. He had large hands.

  Nobody saw me. I returned to my bunk with a great sense of disappointment. I’d wanted more. I’d wanted to keep him alive longer. At least until I’d tortured him. Until I’d gotten some names, other men who played the same game. Maybe he wouldn’t have known anybody else, but that wouldn’t have mattered. I would have tortured him until he made up a few.

  The next day he was reported missing. Two days later his body was found. The entire base was searched. I hadn’t had time to move his dog tags. I’d placed them in the corner of my locker.

  I don’t know why I kept them, or why I didn’t hide them better. I think by that point I just didn’t care anymore. Before, I hadn’t minded fighting in this war; now I didn’t see the point. We were fighting against one type of evil while another type hid behind their uniforms. It reminded me exactly of what Karen had said about the front line being everywhere. It was true: there was no shelter.

  As soon as they found the dog tags, I was taken into custody. I was placed in a room with a table and a chair. Two MPs came in and shouted at me. They said things about prison. They called me a bitch and a cunt and a traitor. They said the death penalty would be too good for me. Then they left. I was alone for hours. When the door opened again, it wasn’t the MPs who entered the room. It was Walter.

  At this point Nova allows a small smile. He says, “He offered you a job, didn’t he?”

  I nod. I wonder what situation Nova had found himself in that caused Walter to walk in and bail him out.

  “He said he knew my father. He said he knew exactly what happened. He said he understood. Then he asked me if I regretted what I had done. I considered lying, telling him I regretted it deeply. But I didn’t. I told him what I regretted most was that I had killed him too fast. I told him I’d wanted to make him to suffer first.”

  I don’t bother telling Nova the rest. Not about how Walter told me he could use my services. Not about how he would make it appear I would be taken into custody. Not about my year of intense training. Nova already knew about that; he had been through it himself.

  “You can go now,” I say.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you hungry? We can order pizza.”

  “I appreciate everything, Nova, but right now I just want to be alone. Really alone, okay?”

  He watches me closely, considering it. I just told him a story about a woman who killed herself. There is no way for Nova to know I am suicidal too. Or maybe there is. Maybe I am more transparent than I care to admit.

  “Okay.” He stands up. Looks down at the Beretta in his hand. Looks back up at me. “Want me to leave this with you?”

  “I have plenty.”

  He grins. “I’m sure you do. You could probably fill an Easter egg basket with all the weapons you have hidden in this place.”

  “Goodbye, Nova.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Goodbye.”

  And like that he’s gone.

  I wait until I hear the apartment door close before I stand up. I need some water. I need some food. I need to pee.

  I start toward the bathroom when the phone rings. It’s the main line, as my cell has disappeared. I hurry into the kitchen, thinking it’s Walter with some good news, then thinking it’s Walter with some bad news.

  I pause with my hand extended. My eyes once again focus on the Bazooka Joe comic pinned to the corkboard.

  I answer the phone.

  Zane says, “What—you’re not fucking Nova now, are you?”

  Fifty-Two

  A long moment of silence passes before Zane says, “Are you there, Holly?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk.” His voice grows soft, almost thoughtful. “Remember the nights when we spent hours on the phone just talking about nothing?”

  I glance quickly around the kitchen, at all the different places I have weapons stashed. I think about the rest of the weapons—the guns, the knives, even a machete—hidden around the apartment.

  “To be honest,” I say, “it barely crosses my mind.”

  “Oh now, come on. That’s not fair. I hurt you a long time ago and now you’re trying to hurt me.”

  If I wanted to hurt him I would tell him about our aborted child. But I don’t. It’s none of his fucking business, and even if it was, I still wouldn’t tell him.

  “As far as I’m concerned, Zane, you’re still dead.”

  He drops the soft, thoughtful tone. “It doesn’t look like Walter is going to come through in time.”

  Unfortunately this is a corded phone. I
don’t even know why I still own it. It was here when I moved in and I always figured it would be here when I moved out. Now I wish I’d broken down and bought a stupid cordless so I could move freely around the apartment.

  “It’s not that he doesn’t want his kids back,” Zane says. “I know he does. I know he’s fighting to get them back.”

  He’s outside. I know he’s outside. How else could he have known I was with Nova unless he watched him leave?

  “Anyway,” he says, “it doesn’t look like Walter is going to make the deadline.”

  “You said there wasn’t any deadline.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Holly. There is always a deadline.”

  “So why are you calling me?”

  “Because you’ve now become the wild card. Why else do you think your old man saved your life in Paris?”

  I close my eyes and remember the alleyway. I remember the rain and the patterns the red and white lights played against the brick walls. I remember the two officers and how they died. I remember the man who had killed them raising his gun and pointing it at my face like I had once done to someone else two years ago.

  “We always knew you would be the key. Ever since that shit went down in Vegas and we realized it was you guys, we knew you would be the one who would come through and help us get the flash drive back.”

  “Fuck you. Fuck you and my father.”

  “Now, now, Holly. That’s not very ladylike.”

  “You’re a real asshole, Zane, you know that?”

  “Yet you still let me sleep with you.”

  “That was only because I felt sorry for you. You and your small dick.”

  A moment passes where Zane doesn’t say anything, and I start to smile thinking I’ve had the last word. Then that moment passes and I remember what’s at stake. I can’t let my emotions overtake me. I can’t let my anger blur my focus.

  “We could talk shit all night, Holly, but quite frankly we don’t have the time. Or I should say the children don’t have the time.”