Dahlia lay back in the grass, staring into a sky so black it was purple, watching Perseus and Cassiopeia chase each other across the galaxy. “Hey—you guys want to fire another bowl? Maybe do some shots?”
“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Let’s party like it’s 1999.”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said.
“Girl, you got to live a little,” Dahlia said. “It’s a gorgeous night, we’ve got plenty of stuff to keep us going, and when was the last time you partied till dawn? C’mon. Sunrise. I want to feel like I did something epic for once.”
“Let’s do it, man,” Mel said.
“Yeah,” said Wendy. “C’mon.”
“You think the boys’ll want to?” Rachel asked.
“Fuck the boys,” said Wendy.
“I suspect they will,” Dahlia said, “but regardless, Wendy’s right. Fuck ’em. We can have us a girl’s night while they, whatever, jerk each other off and talk about computers.”
“They’re in there now,” said Rachel.
“Where?”
“They’re on the computer. They’ve been in there awhile.”
“I bet Matt’s showing him that dumb program.”
“It’s not dumb,” Wendy said.
“That’s sweet, Wendy, but it kinda is. It’s just blobs of color you can’t tell apart, and it doesn’t even really work. Plus, he can’t seem to finish. I mean, I don’t want to talk about him behind his back…”
“Even though that’s what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe you’re right. I’m just tired of hearing about it.”
“I’m guessing Aaron will be too in about five minutes.”
“So let’s get lit then before they come out and start talking about complex visual representations of turbulent systems. Please.”
There was a line of men in prison garb kneeling, black bags over their heads, their hands zip-tied behind them. Someone whose face was out of the shot was standing over them prodding one in the back with a baton.
“So, you get a bunch of new guys in and you have to establish control. You can’t fuck around. We’d line them all up and get them down and scream at them for about twenty minutes, poking them with batons and kicking them, then we’d leave them there for a few hours with a couple dudes and if they moved, the two guards would scream at them and knock them down. Click forward.”
One prisoner was standing in front of the line of kneeling prisoners. The kneeling ones’ hoods had been removed and they all looked up at the man standing over them. A male American soldier stood behind the standing prisoner, a female soldier next to him. The soldiers wore blue surgical gloves. The male soldier had a pair of scissors.
“This is sort of a mass technique we developed with the OGAs for when a bunch of fresh pucks came in. So after fucking with them for a while, we take one out of the line, the biggest fucker in the group, and stand him up in front. Then we take off their hoods, right, but not his, so they can watch. Then your point man here, with the scissors, Grimes in this case, he cuts open the prisoner’s outfit and strips him and whichever female we have, that’s Littleton, she points at his cock and laughs. Click forward.”
The standing man was naked now except for the hood, and the female soldier was pointing at his genitals and laughing.
“It’s all a big show we put on. We—Grimes—pokes this guy in the ribs, pokes him in the butt, while Littleton laughs and points at his cock, then we give him one good whack in the belly and he goes down. Bam. Makes a huge impression. Next.”
The naked and hooded man was on the ground and Grimes’s boot was slamming into his stomach.
“That’s a good one. Action shots are hard. The boot’s a little blurry but you can see the impact. I like that picture. That’s a good one.”
“That’s fucked up. This is fucked up.”
“Yeah. You mentioned that. Next.”
Matt clicked forward to a close-up head-and-shoulders of a mangled, bloody face. A middle-aged man with a thick gray mustache.
“That dude died. I mean, he was dead when I took the picture.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Fuck no. We just stressed him to the point where his body failed. He was kinda old, anyway, and the older ones can’t take much. I wished we’d had dogs. Dogs would have made life so much easier. We complained about that all the time, but our battalion K-9 had been tasked out to some other bullshit. It’s totally easy to stress dudes with dogs, and you don’t even have to touch ’em. Dogs scare the shit out of people. Next.”
Matt clicked forward. Another dead man. He clicked forward. Another man in a stress position, head hooded, passed out and dangling. He clicked forward. Two American soldiers punching a man in a hood. He clicked forward. Naked men piled on top of each other.
“That’s like the photo,” Matt said.
“Yeah. That’s basically ’cause we were bored. I mean, one of our OGA dudes came from Abu G, and he gave us guidance on a bunch of shit he said worked really well over there. Naked Dog-Pile, Electric Wire Box, Fake Menstrual Wipe, shit like that. But a lot of shit we did ’cause we were bored. I mean, plus all the normal shit—sleep deprivation, hostile environment, loud music, stress positions, beatings, immersion—you know, the basics.”
“Immersion?”
“It’s like waterboarding. You put their head in a bucket of water long enough to fuck with them, then you take it out. You gotta be careful though. It’s surprisingly easy to drown a motherfucker.” Aaron waved his hand impatiently. “Next.”
Dahlia got the bowl out and tapped the old ash and packed it fresh. She handed the bowl and the lighter to Mel, who passed it to Rachel, who passed it to Wendy, then Dahlia, then back around again. Everyone was silent, focused on the smoke drifting into the night, the streaking stars, the rustling trees, the skunky savor.
“I think that’s cashed,” Rachel said, tapping ash.
“Fuck yeah,” Mel said.
“Hey, I was thinking,” Dahlia said, “if we’re gonna watch the sun come up, we should hike up on the cliffs.”
“We can look for the cuckoo,” Rachel said.
“The cuckoo cock.” Mel burst into laughter and fell over.
“We can see rosy-fingered dawn,” Wendy said, “traipsing light across distant horizons.”
Mel laughed harder.
“I love the dawn,” Rachel said. “It’s so, like, nascent.”
Mel kept laughing. Rachel petted Xena.
“I think I finally got it,” Wendy said. “It’s not that you’re all in my mind, but it’s like the yous in my mind are reflections of the yous in reality. All I can see are the shadows you cast. None of this is really happening except how I make it happen. That’s not right. It’s happening, but I make it happen in my mind at the same time. It’s happening but it’s me.”
“I gotta get up,” Dahlia said. “I gotta move around.”
“What are they doing in there?” Rachel asked.
“Yeah, go get the boys.”
“Go get the cuckoo cocks,” Mel giggled.
Dahlia stepped off toward the house.
Matt clicked forward. More pictures of Connie, of Aaron’s fellow soldiers, of the gray concrete halls and brown outer walls of Camp Crawford, more pictures of hooded men, bleeding men, men in handcuffs. He clicked forward. A thin, mustached man stood handcuffed to a head-level cell-door crossbar.
“That’s the Professor. Puck named Qasim. He got picked up on a raid in Baqubah. He tried to tell us the first couple days how he worked as a terp for the Americans in Baghdad and he was in Baqubah because his wife was sick or some shit, and it was all a big mistake, he just got caught up in things, he didn’t even know the guys they picked him up with. The OGA fucks, on the other hand, said according to their information he’d been using his position as a translator to pass intel to al-Qaeda. We fucked that puck up.”