Officer Massaquoi turns a page, the paper crackling in the ozone. “A Laotian militia found you wandering hundreds of miles from the nearest American front line. We assumed you went AWOL from your platoon, but we can’t find you assigned to any active platoon, company, or battalion after your detainment at Quang Tri. You literally fell off the map of Southeast Asia nine weeks after landing here.”
My head is buzzing. Something is trying to break through, riding the taste in my mouth into the outside world. Blood. Liquid moving very, very fast.
“Intercepted reports from the North Vietnamese active in western Laos near the DMZ discuss a victory over American forces on the Laotian side of the border. This isn’t aircraft they’re talking about, but boots on the ground. Soldiers. We assumed a rogue fire team. Hotshots who chased the NVA over the border and then ran into Tank Brigade 202. But we don’t have any reports of this on our end. No missing soldiers, other than a few scattered throughout the country, and a few in the rear.”
I know of five soldiers that went missing in the rear, plucked from holding cells and eternal KP duty and fake doctor’s offices just like this one by a gray-eyed, blood-soaked angel of mercy, and then disappeared for good in the front where there weren’t any lines. Medrano. Darby. McNulty. Render. Me.
“Your inactions led to the death of three good men,” Officer Man says. “Good old American boys. Future leaders, masters of industry, not the rabble you run with.”
I snap my attention to him, just like I did last time, but this time find Officer Massaquoi. The River keeps twisting.
“And then we find you,” she went on, scowling. “On the far end of Laos, near death, presumed criminally derelict or perhaps on the run from a failed objective that has no record of existence in a country where we have no authorization to operate.”
I’m following along with her words, mirroring them inside my mouth, knowing what she is going to say as she says it. Déjà vu of a déjà vu, spiraling down from the place where the new knowledge waits to reveal itself. Headwaters. The messages and the marching orders come to me from upstream, where the fire starts before it gently heads my way.
She holds up the orange again. It’s just as round as her perfect little head. “When delivered to Udorn Air Force Base, you told your intake officer that you… How did you put it…” She holds up the paper to the lamplight on his desk and aims those reflective lenses at it. “‘Peeled the skin off his head, off his face, like opening an orange.’” The lit glass circles return to me. “Do you remember doing this?”
“I do not, ma’am.”
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asks.
“I do not, sir.”
“Do you think you’re capable of such things?” she asks. “Doing what you said you did?”
“I do not, ma’am.”
“Nothing,” he says flatly. “Which is all you are. So much chaff for the mill.”
“If you say so, sir,” I say.
“And yet, you said it,” she says.
“If you say so, ma’am,” I say.
“You don’t remember a good amount of very important things, do you?” Both of their voices now, layered in with that other voice, bringing it down an octave and giving it a tail of reverberation that fidgets across the floor.
“I don’t know,” I say to the pair of glasses, unsure of who I’m talking to, and not caring either way. I know how this turns out. “I told you…I told all of you. They told you, I haven’t been sleeping very well. Sleeping much at all. I can’t…I don’t…” How does one explain this to a set of ears that can’t possibly understand? A set of eyes that haven’t seen anything like I’ve seen? “I can’t.” It’s all I have. Language becomes worthless at a certain point, especially when I’d be doing this again.
“What were you doing in Laos?” Officer Massaquoi asks.
“I don’t know.”
“But you do know. Of course you do,” Officer Man says.
“No, I truly don’t.” I don’t. Not really. I have an idea, but I never really understood any of it. It was another man’s dream that wasn’t ever fully explained, and went sideways before any explanation of why could be offered.
“What was your mission? Who was your commanding officer?” She raises her voice. The pressure of the final quarter. There would be no overtime. Not for her, anyway.
I say nothing. Chapel’s face strobes across the interior of my skull, bouncing off spongy gray matter and working its way down to my mouth, which I close. She and he and them all can go straight to hell. They wouldn’t get at Chapel. None of them would. Not even me, and I wish I could, to ask him a great many things, probably at the end of a barrel.
Another long stare from those two shiny disks floating behind the lamp. “What are we going to do with you?” the jack-o-lantern says. I blink, and the face behind the glasses is male, Asian. I’ve never seen this man before. He nods and closes the file, saying something that sounds Chinese.
My eyes are drawn to the paperweight. That jellyfish stuck inside the glass, surrounded by air. Officer Massaquoi’s gaze follows mine, then she stands up, pulling down her shirt and smoothing her tie.
“Wait right here,” she says, walking briskly to the office door.
“Where are you going?”
Officer Man turns. He speaks with all of their voices. “To get you the help you need.”
A figure exits into the hallway, closes the door and locks it from the outside, leaving behind a slight smell of perfume, or maybe cologne. And sweat. The AC kicks on again. The River below my feet is gone.
I pick up the paperweight and feel the weight of it in my hand. Artificial in its heaviness. The hardness of the glass. The pink creature inside looks like it’s still alive, caught in the middle of a dance. The Chinese man is standing in front of me, next to the desk, wearing a white lab coat because that’s what doctors are supposed to wear. There is brown medicine bottle in his hand, and fear in his eyes, trapped behind those lenses.
Less than a minute later, the outer door opens and Officer Massaquoi reenters her office, two MPs holding M-16s standing close behind her. The office is empty and still, aside from the fluttering of the curtains, letting in a humid breeze from the broken window behind it. The paperweight is gone.
7. Hard Like a Jellyfish
I run up the alleyway, stripping off my blood-splattered over shirt, shoving it down inside a sewer drain. The short-sleeve shirt underneath is clean, covered in flowers. A tourist disguise for an illegal import. It’s dry as fresh laundry. I never break a sweat doing work anymore.
“Just because the jellyfish is soft, it is a mistake to assume it is harmless.”
This was my voice. He had no idea what I was saying. I didn’t either. He had an excuse. But I did, too. That’s what I tell myself each and every time.
I pass a man sprawled on the bricks, face up. Eyes open. Could be dead. Probably dead. Might have seen me. Will be dead soon either way.
The thing isn’t behind me. Not here. Still inside.
Inside.
What I did inside…
I did it for it.
That thing.
That horrible thing.
I don’t know what that thing is but I really do know what that thing is.
Still inside.
Inside is where I did it.
It for it.
Pulled the weight from my pocket.
Gripped it like a baseball.
Aimed for the glasses, where the two lenses meet.
Buried it in the Chinese man’s face.
It crumpled like a hollow egg.