Blue
The news must have spread faster than a knife fight in a phone booth, as Monti would say.
As Monti would have said, if he wasn’t dead. If he hadn’t died trying to rescue me. If three of America’s finest hadn’t died on a road in Afghanistan, out there on an unauthorized mission to save my sorry ass.
Everybody at Fort Sill seems to know about me. I can feel this wave of abhorrence and outrage that washes over me every time I go from my cell to an interrogation room and back again.
It radiates off every person who sees me—at least I think it does—this palpable reckoning, a swift judgment that has weighed and found me wanting.
There are a few at the base who try to catch my eye with earnest looks of compassion. Those looks are actually far more painful to absorb than the most obvious contempt.
One of my interrogators—a grizzled, middle-aged staff sergeant named Clinton Groves—is one of those kill ’em with kindness types. He’s sitting across from me now, his features fixed in a trademark “I Feel Your Pain” expression that makes me want to reach across the table and choke him to death.
He is waiting for me to respond to the question he posed a couple of seconds ago.
I don’t think he is armed. I could have the job done before the MPs got into the room to save him. It would serve him right for trying to be nice to me.
Instead of wrapping my hands around Staff Sgt. Groves’s well-meaning throat, I squeeze them together in front of me and stare down at my arms sticking out of the old-style, dark green fatigues that are a little too small.
They gave me a buzz cut and made me put on the fatigues soon after I showed up at the base. In contrast to the newer tan, gray, and green uniforms everyone else is wearing, I stick out like a sore thumb, which is obviously the point.
I’m not like any other person on this base. I shouldn’t be allowed to dress like anyone else.
Stop your pathetic martyr routine.
For once, the voice in my head is my own.
My hands are still gripped together, one of my thumbs pushing into the knuckle of the opposite index finger. I can feel the nail digging into the skin, but I’m not seeing the thumb right in front of me. Instead, I am seeing my thumb sliding across Keegan’s lower lip that first time we were on the roof together.
I can even hear the soft, moist sound that came out of her mouth as it dropped open in response to my touch.
I close my eyes, and a shiver runs through me as I watch my pretend thumb move down the soft skin of her neck and linger for a moment on her delicate collarbone.
Keegan. Already, I miss her so much. Already, it feels like I can barely function without her.
But she probably hates my guts now. How could she not, after she tried so hard to keep me from doing this, and I threw it back in her face?
When the old guy walked up to me at the Lawton bus stop and introduced himself as a friend of Keegan’s grandma, I almost started crying.
Robert something. I can’t remember now. He said he was a Vietnam vet. He told me he understood how things can happen that we never intended. He told me I should go back to the girl who loves me.
He told me what Virginia Cooke told him to tell me. But he didn’t mean a fucking word of it. I could see it in his face.
Robert thought I should answer for what I’d done. And he was right. Deep down, I guess I’ve known that all along.
Groves clears his throat and repeats his question. “Specialist Daniels, why did you leave base without permission?”
The question has already been asked and answered more than once, but I guess they’re trying to see if my response will change. There’s a hint of irritation in Groves’s voice.
I stare across the table at my interrogator’s bushy eyebrows; one of them is raised just enough to indicate a whisper of skepticism.
“I was trying to help a girl, Staff Sergeant,” I reply. “An Afghan girl.”
It sounds weak and inexcusable in this florescent-lit room more than 7,000 miles away from Aziza’s village.
“She was being forced to get married to some old guy,” I go on, “some warlord that she was scared to death of. She was just fourteen years old. And she’d told her brothers she didn’t want to do it, and they said if she didn’t, they would kill her. And they would have killed her. That’s why Venla came to me, because the base commander had already said there was nothing he could do. I thought it would be easy to help her out. I thought—”
I’m cringing inside at how lame it all sounds. How the hell did I ever think it was a good idea?
Groves crinkles his nose and twists his mouth back and forth as if he can’t quite decide what to do with his face.
I fix my gaze on the heavy, wrinkled pouches under his eyes and reflect, kind of abstractly, that I sure as fuck don’t want to get old.
Groves’s eyebrows go a little higher; he’s clearly waiting for me to say more.
“I thought I could slip into the village, get Aziza out of her house. I’d been trained to do stuff like that. I was supposed to meet Venla on the road once I had Aziza. It was safer for me to try it than Venla and I—”
“Venla’s the Finnish aid worker who talked you into all this?” Groves is looking down at his notes, but I don’t miss the disapproving tone in his voice.
“Well, she’s the one who told me about Aziza, who introduced me to her.” I lean forward and let the words come out more slowly, a touch defiantly. “Nobody talked me into anything. I made my own choices.”
I’m seeing Venla’s kind, careworn face. She’d been in Afghanistan since 1997, trying to help the neediest of the needy, especially girls and women who had nowhere else to turn. She’d been threatened repeatedly, but she wouldn’t give up and go back to a safe, comfortable life. She loved the Afghan people. She wanted to help them.
I start to add that it was an honor to help Venla. I start to say, like a crazy man, that I’d do it again.
But then the smell of burning flesh—the flesh of my closest friends—sears my nostrils, and I almost vomit on Groves’s knobby fingers splayed out on the table.
“Daniels? You all right, son?”
One of Bryson’s songs, “Fabric of Time,” has been playing in my head a lot lately, especially the lines about lost loved ones and an unraveling sense of the passage of time.
That’s what seems to be happening to me. My mind—and the way I experience life—no longer seems to move logically from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, day after day after day.
As much as I want to, I cannot go back to the way things were before. The way I was before. Maybe that’s why I finally knew I had to turn myself in.
Groves is standing beside me, his hand on my shoulder. “I think we’ll take a break now. Get yourself together, and I’ll be back shortly.”
Get yourself together. Yeah, sure. How am I supposed to do that when I’m falling apart?
~~~
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