“We have better place for you.”
“It’s okay here. Why don’t you bring it here?”
“No, no good here. Much better with us.”
They’re vague, evasive, but in the end he seems to go with them voluntarily—no sound of a struggle. It’s quiet an hour or two and she’s about to nod off when his door opens again. She presses her ear against the grate, hoping he’ll make contact, tell her he’s okay, but it’s only two of the guards who’ve returned to his cell, speaking Arabic. She wonders what they’re doing in there without him. Snooping around, probably. Whatever it is, they stay only a short time.
Moments after they leave, the light in her cell goes dark. They’ve switched off the generator. She has a feeling something bad has happened. If they lured him out of his cell with promises of medicine, only to operate on his arm, they would have had the generator running throughout the course of the procedure; point of fact, the light was on for an unusually long time. Hard to know if it’s a best or worse case. A feeling he’s somewhere nearby, recovering from an amputation he didn’t expect.
Hold on, she tells him silently. Hold on.
She feels herself getting turned around again; mealtimes and the generator cycling on and off aren’t reliable timekeepers, and she no longer has McGinnis with his window to consult. She can’t check with him, tap out a quick T-I on the grate, which two letters were all he ever needed to know what she was asking. He always answered, too, giving her his best guess. Some people would’ve gotten annoyed with the constant requests. She probably would’ve herself. Pestering him with a time check at least once every couple hours.
She misses him badly, her grief strong, and sometimes in the darkness it pulls at her like too much sedative, making the world spin, her body too heavy. Numb, aggrieved, missing her crew whom she loved and hated like family, and also home, her real family. Having as few obligations that way as possible, maintaining a certain untethered distance to home and the people there, was a deliberate choice on her part. She figured it would make the separation less painful not to have one foot on each continent. This was why she never wrote anyone while in Kuwait, not her parents, not her old friends from high school, not even the woman who’d made her promise to write: Liz, the one she’d slept with a few times in the months before deployment.
She misses them all. Even Crump—whatever he is now, it’s not his old self. Missing fucking Crump—the thought of it’s enough to elicit a morbid chuckle. Never would’ve expected to get nostalgic over that fool. One incident in particular stands out for sheer boneheadedness. The party Corporal Treanor threw at his house in Copperas Cove before they left for Kuwait. One last rager. About a third of their company was in attendance, forty soldiers, even a couple lieutenants and senior noncoms put in appearances, and everyone’s spouse or date, if they had them. Two kegs of Belgian, barbecue, Doritos in plastic bowls, a bookshelf stereo bumping a mix of rap and country music in the spotless echoic garage, darts and a pool table for entertainment, the party spilling over into the front yard and back.
She’d brought “my friend Liz” as her date. Because, fuck it. What was the army going to do, not send her to Iraq? Her inner circle in the company already knew or suspected; wasn’t exactly a tough secret to crack. They were either fine with it or, like McGinnis, believed it was none of their business.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is their policy, and that’s gotta be mine, too. Less I know, the better, for both our sakes,” he’d said once, when in a moment of weakness she’d more or less confided in him.
Everyone who mattered probably already knew who Liz was. Besides, the two of them weren’t flaunting the rules. They didn’t make out at the party or otherwise engage in any displays of affection, public or otherwise, not so much as holding hands, which wasn’t really their style as a couple anyway. No one in the company who was savvy enough to guess the truth about them would give a hoot that someone he’d already pegged for gay, was. The army’s actively dangerous homophobia was mostly confined to intramasculine relations. Lesbians were another breed, a tolerated curiosity more than an object of hate and fear. Cassandra had once tried to estimate what percentage of female soldiers were gay and had arrived at one in four. This, compared with the rate among male soldiers, which probably hewed more closely to the population as a whole: one in ten, one in fifteen. The difference was a matter of what type of person was typically attracted to the idea of the military: she thought the army had more than its share for the same reason that professional women’s basketball did. It takes a certain kind, is all.
Crump, as part of her truck crew and therefore a de facto intimate, knew she was gay. At least she thought he had. He got shit faced at Treanor’s, staggering monkey drunk, badgering people to hoist him for keg stands, downing back-to-back shots of tequila, and those just the ones she personally witnessed.
“Well, shit,” he said, cozying up to Liz after being introduced. “Any friend of Wigheard’s is a friend of mine. Don’t get mad, hon, for me asking, but hey, you got a man or what?”
It was early in the evening but he’d already benumbed himself past any minimal amount of suaveness he might have hitherto possessed. Past that—and decency—and into earnest, generally well-meaning jackassery and not giving a fuck.
Liz was easygoing, though. That was what Cassandra liked most about her. The stress-free unflappability. She laughed it off, said, “I’m married. Sorry.”
“Shit,” Crump said, belatedly looking at her hand and finding a ring. “My bad.”
She’d thought he knew. Was just too drunk to put two and two together. Or maybe she’d granted him powers of perception that never existed. It wasn’t like he wasn’t thinking about sex; he hit on pretty much every available woman there, and some who weren’t. By no means alone in his horniness. The collective libido that night spiking off the charts, even for an army party. If he and the rest of them were going to be that amped up during the deployment, man oh man, it would be a long year.
Later in the night, things got absurd when he wandered up to the conversational circle that she, Liz, McGinnis, McGinnis’s wife, and several other soldiers and wives had formed in the backyard near the barbecue. What a bonehead. Hitting on Liz again.
“So. You’re married. Hey, tha’s cool. You know I can keep it on the DL. Ask Wigheard. She knows I won’t say nothing.”
Cassandra had to pull him away from the group and spell it out in private.
“You realize I’m gay, right?”
“So?” he said.
Unbelievable. He still didn’t get it.
“Look,” she said. “Yeah, you’re tanked and an idiot and everything, but you’re being really fucking disrespectful right now.” She made an open face, like, Hello, are you kidding me? and looked at Liz, across the yard, and Liz smiled at her, and then Crump got it. Finally it clicked. He laughed and clapped her on the back like one of the guys. He hugged her and he was so drunk, his skin didn’t even smell like booze anymore but like the stuff booze breaks down into, liver by-products, toxic metabolites, embalming fluid.
“Fuck me,” he laughed. “Fucking my bad. Shit. Huh. Hey,” he said, having a thought. “Y’all wanna come with to the Bunny Club? Some of us are about to bounce that way.”
“I think we’ll pass.”
“Okay, whatever. Don’t act like you’re too good for it.”
“You don’t get your dumb ass arrested,” she said sternly, starting back toward Liz and the others.
“Hey, Wigheard!” he called, loud enough to gain the attention of the entire backyard, slurring out his exit. “Can you fucking believe it? We’re going to fucking Iraq!”
She’s exercising in her cell when she feels the familiar dull ache in her back. Getting her period here and now surprises her as much as it did the first time, when she was twelve. Going to the bathroom and seeing she was bleeding and calling out to her mother, “I got my period!” and her mother calling back, “You know what to do, right?”
&n
bsp; She answered yes—the two of them had had “the talk” a few months before—but the truth was, she had no idea what to do, and it feels that same way now, the same lack of control, the sense of the body’s fundamental unmanageability, its alienisms, the way it imposes. It’s a reminder that she’s a captive twice over; when you’re alone almost all the time, the fact that you’re a being living in a body is easy enough to forget. We first know our bodies by looking at others and by the way others look at us, and absent this reminder, the mind gathers an uncanny strength, growing more expansive until you can be forgiven for disregarding the body altogether, induced by solitude into all sorts of crackpot tangents. Like believing part of her exists as something separate from the physical world. Like her thoughts might of themselves influence events. Like whatever she is, it’s something more than an electrochemical battery, the most complex object known to exist in the universe but, after all, merely a mass of proteins and tangled dendrites and blood.
That the cycle is seed, growth, blossoming, harvest, and decay, her period serves to remind. A progression unvarying and tragically inconvenient. Even now, in this place, her body would seek to reproduce itself.
Annas is in her cell with the door closed before she fully awakes. He’s quicker this time, more determined, with no hesitation. She becomes aware as his besandaled foot presses down on the small of her back to keep her from rolling over, the barrel of his rifle resting on the nape of her neck. The words she first spoke to her mother eight years ago now come out just as involuntarily as they did back then, an exclamation of fact, no shame about it, but a warning, an excuse for him not to.
“I got my period.”
The mouth-breathing fool, he doesn’t understand, his English rudimentary, the idiom lost on him, and her own words fail as he kneels and straddles her and cups a palm on the back of her skull, pressing her face into the pallet, groping her roughly with the other hand, spreading her legs. He whispers in her ear.
“Ugly woman, bad woman. You like this. Yes, you like this.”
He’s mistaken her slickness for lubrication. He’s left the lantern by the door, and he, hunched over her, is blocking the light with his shadow. His cock presses against her through half-unbuttoned trousers. Before he can penetrate her, he has to shift position to better support himself and he catches the black sheen on his fingers in the lantern light. Too excited, he isn’t thinking straight; puzzled by the color, he lifts his hand and sniffs his finger. A beat passes, with smell comes understanding, and he cries out, a pained noise like he’s been bitten, pushing himself to his feet. Once he’s off her he doesn’t seem to know what to do next, lurching around the cell like a house fire has broken out and he needs something to fight it with. He says a word in Arabic that can only be a curse. Buttons up his trousers the rest of the way and wipes his hand under the arm of his shirt. Before leaving the cell he shoots her a look of disgust that surpasses anything she’s ever known.
Her condition, once discovered, sends the entire place into an uproar: she might as well have come down with leprosy. It begins when the old guard Mohammed arrives to change out her waste pail and notices the bloody strips that she’s torn off her pallet and used overnight as pads. He recoils from the pail as if a snake were inside, then leaves the cell; her careful routine is lost in the revulsion of her captors. Before they’ll bring her food or water or decide what to do about the pail, which Mohammed and everyone else absolutely refuses to touch or even to look at for very long—first thing—they confiscate her copy of the Qur’an. Hafs, the unlucky one who gave it to her, is designated to take it back. He appears in her cell looking puffy-eyed and sheepish, apparently roused from sleep specifically for this task. Ordinarily he would be happy to draw duty here, to have any sanctioned excuse to spend time with her; she has a feeling it is, by far, the highlight of his day, teaching her how to recite in Arabic verses from the Qur’an, alternatively asking her about America, practicing his English, but there’s none of that now. She has become a pariah, unclean, unfit even to touch the paper upon which scripture is printed.
He has her move against the wall before he’ll enter farther to place a square of balding velvet in the middle of the floor. He goes back to the doorway and beckons her to come forward and wrap her Qur’an in the cloth. She does this and once again moves off a safe distance. Only then will he fetch the book, accomplishing the handoff as if disposing of a biohazard.
“Is bad for you to have now,” he says, hefting it. “I bring again soon. After.”
“Fine. What I want to know is, when am I gonna get some more water? I’m really thirsty, okay? And I’ll also need some pads. Sanitary pads.”
“What is sanitary?”
“Maxi pads or tampons. Feminine hygiene products, you know, for when you’re on your period.”
“Yes, okay,” he says, tugging nervously at his ear. “Is no problem. I find in bazaar.”
“Good. Thank you.”
He lifts his brow like he’s partially relieved, heading out.
“Hafs, wait a second. How’s McGinnis doing?”
He stops in his tracks. At first she chalks up his startled reaction to generalized anxiety at sharing the same room with a menstruating woman.
“You all took him out of his cell, right? To fix his arm.”
His eyes narrow, a sideways glare. “How do you know this?”
“Just ’cause I heard his door opening and closing a bunch, but then it stopped all of a sudden,” she says, mind racing toward an explanation for her knowledge of McGinnis’s situation that doesn’t involve communicating with him through the pipe. “I saw his arm when we made that video with all of us. It looked like he’d cut it or something pretty bad. I figured you all had moved him to do something about it. So I’m right?”
She hopes he’ll buy the lie, cursing herself for asking about McGinnis in the first place, and apologizing silently to her sergeant for possibly, inadvertently, diming him out; Walid specifically warned them against trying to talk to each other. Why couldn’t she have left well enough alone? Plenty of problems as it is. Must be slipping, getting reckless, but she has to know.
Hafs tilts his head, frowning, playing with his ear again. “Yes,” he says. “His arm was cut.”
“Is he okay now?”
“Is no problem.”
She has come to recognize this phrase as a manifestation of delusion, his refusal to acknowledge the horrific things happening all around him. If she needs further confirmation, there’s the way he avoids her imploring look as he moves toward the door. Something is very wrong with McGinnis. That much is certain. She tries a final time to get it out of him.
“He’s going to be okay, though, right?”
“Mohammed, he is bringing the food and water. Later, I bring the insanitary pad.”
Blindfolded with a red ski mask turned around backward she’s removed from her cell at gunpoint with at least two guards trailing in the hallway but it could be more; it’s difficult to judge their numbers by footfalls. Hafs is in front, heading up the procession. He leads her with voice commands and one of her hands clasped on his bony adolescent shoulder.
“Here are stairs. Careful.”
She takes mincing steps until the toes of her sandals meet the edge of the bottommost step, and she ascends. She’s made this climb before, but they’re not going to shoot a video now. In the hand that’s not on Hafs’s shoulder, she carries her waste pail. Her blankets are rolled, tied in a loop, and slung across her back. The guards are taking her outside, relocating her to a storage shed hastily prepared for her as a kind of quarantine. This is how they’ve resolved the dilemma of how to empty her pail. Put her outside. Make her do the dirty work herself.
When she acclimates to the sun enough to inspect her new cell, the shed, she finds it’s been emptied of its contents, if there ever were any. Two walls are brick; two are corrugated zinc, as are the doors. The thatched roof has fallen in places, letting in sunlight and the weather, and the guards have cut
jagged holes in the doors, looped a chain through these, and padlocked the chain on the outside. The holes are big enough to look out of, and so is the gap between the door and the ground, if she lies flat with her cheek to the dirt.
She does this for a long time. Her first view of where she’s being held, the environs. The terrain seems unlike any she encountered on the march up from Kuwait or during her short stint at Palace Row. It’s clear she’s somewhere in the countryside but this is much lusher country than southern Iraq or the hardscrabble outskirts of Baghdad, this gapped view of hers, with palm trees shading the corner of a concrete structure that she takes for her recent prison. Other than this industrial-looking building, however, and the trucks parked near it under a camouflage tarpaulin blind, there’s no sign of human habitation, only an overgrowth of dun and green and the wet stink of mildew.
She comes to hate that smell. Hard as it is for her to believe, before the day is out, she comes to wish she were back underground. Not that it wasn’t just as damp there, water condensing on the walls and the broken fluorescent ballast and dripping a fine rusty mist that, she now sees, turned her skin carroty orange, but as the morning passes into afternoon, the temperature in the shed climbs until the zinc walls are too hot to touch for more than a second. A guard posted outside, a short white man whom she’s seen before but whose name she doesn’t know, looks in on her once in a while, scolding her in some Eastern European language every time he catches her with the hijab off and the abaya pulled down around her waist, exposing the dress beneath, which is all she can do for relief from the heat. He won’t have it. By gesture he makes clear he wants her fully covered at all times. She quickly gives up trying to curry favor with him and instead concentrates on locating the most comfortable spot in which to rest. Her wool pallet is just a little hotter than the hot dirt floor and so she abandons it and lies in the dirt like an overheated dog. Much too hot to walk or do any other form of exercise. She falls in and out of sleep, drooling imbecilic in the dirt. The stifling oppressiveness begins to subside only late in the evening. After which time the chain rasps through the doors and she’s given a fresh pitcher of water and a cold glob of rice in a plastic sack. The white guard and the old one named Mohammed wait as she consumes it. Then she’s blindfolded with the ski mask and taken at gunpoint and made to empty her waste pail with used pads in a pit dug in a field behind the shed. That task complete, they lock her in for the night. She can’t believe they would house her out here rather than in the more secure underground cell, that they would take this risk over simply living under the same roof as a menstruating woman. None of it makes sense to her. She’s never been one to abide the compulsion of taboo. More like one to break it.
Spoils Page 18
