5

The dawn came knocking on the long beige horizon filled with cashes in the land which to which clung a stubble of low green. The wheels of the car turned smoothly, the passing lines flickered by with the regularity of a clock. Behind them was San Diego's sprawl, Los Angeles' brawl, and even the inland empire had grown sparse. It was the rains came by aqueduct that had always appalled her, she came from the broad plains that were kissed by the incline to the mountains, no such gift of man's rain had been hers in those years. California seemed Lucifer's Eden to her, a place that was perfect, except that it had no rain. It was unkissed by flood of fertility and moisture. It dug into the ground and found the midas touch of oil and gold, but no water. The flatness and depth of its desert made Chryssie ache for the healthy spun straw to gold of fields of wheat ready for harvest, whose white waves flowed with the wind, the land responding the sky's caress.

She reflected back, lulled by the almost melodic changes in hum of tires on the road, on how she had awoken, when, the world had changed, changed in the blink of an eye. She had gone from nightmare into the quiet trickle of water from the bed and breakfast's fountain, from harsh disgust of inner life, to the warm curve of his chest. She shifted her weight, he legs and fallen asleep because they were trapped under his. She nightmare reached her as a memory in her waking state.

It was easier to admit, as she idly rubbed her hand back and forth across his chest, that she had been in troubled dreams; she had chased by her husband wielding an axe on his hand and by Merc with a scalpel. They had decided to cut her into pieces in that dream. She remembered watching her self be severed, Black Orchid Style. She watched as Merc and Hampton dragged her hips and legs farther away, so that she had a clear view. Then Hampton dropped his desert camo-pants, which were strangely also scrubs, and ran his member up and down her leg. There was a vague clarity to how Merc then bent down and twirled his hands over her public area while merc bent her legs out. In the dream she could feel none of this, it was as clinical as watching a dissection. She simply remembered watching and then watching as Hampton had had fucked her severed lower half far from her body. She hoped no one would ever ask her where this memory came from. Yes, she had seen this happen in the real, the dream merely plastered her vision on to it.

It had been in country, in her year in Iraq.

She had worked as a "contractor," and while any distinction between this and an army nurse was purely coincidental, the pay was much, much better. But she was also not fresh out of school, and Baghdad is a bottomless pit of medical need. it sucks in men, and women, and doctors and nurses, and miles of silk and bandage, and spits out corpses, living and dead. They had responded to a medivac call, a service man was down and two others were pinned by fire. They could only hope that it would clear before they needed to work. But there was no time to wait. The second of the golden hour were bleeding out.

She squatted in the chopper, its blades lazily turning slowly as the turbine engine whined to life. That was the reality of the military, the modern military, it is a gift of the jet engine. Everything was powered by it, generators, choppers, tanks. The whir of the turbofan was the sound of the air-land battle coming to drag its enemies down into the abyss. But for those that live under it, they become like fingers of the beast, the crawling sensation on the skin, the smell of the fuel, the relentless and remorseless hum. The turbine spins up slowly, and then consumes distance and kerosene unceasingly.

And at that moment, squatting there, she felt like a hound on its chain, her movements precisely polished to stay below the blades on entering, to sit just so on take off, and to be ready to uncoil without hesitation as the whir of blades cut and gashed at the air on landing.

The time in the air was spent exchanging the usual bits of pre-knowledge to sort out how the situation was presenting. They knew there had been shooting, they knew that it had been with locals and not with fedaheen or al-qaeda, because "domestic dispute" and some how rattled its way into the sergeant's words as he spat them out two by two. Chryssie remembered how fear and training warred in his voice. She was already calling in her team members to go before the last word burst out.

"Hurry"

There was no hurry here, they always moved at the same speed, it was merely that that speed was chariot yoked to the dogs of war. A speed that plows down the road at sixty miles an hour clad in Uranium, the sky god's armor. A speed that lifts a ton of flesh from the ground and allows surgeons to cut and sew in the air. It is the speed that the ordinary commerce of trains and trucks move, only with an immeasurable and inexorable force.

No, her thought ran, we will not place one footfall before the other any differently than we do on any other day. A maxim she learned balancing on a slack rope between two backyard trees. Every footfall always at the same speed.

And then again, with a whining desperation.

"Please dear God. Hurry."

The bleeding down edge in his voice was distinct and carried with it a sound, a nasally resonance high in the throat. It was the sound of a lover losing her beloved. It didn't mean that this was so here, but the bonds that welded one soldier to another where tinged with erotic clinging need. She had seen that every day for so many years, that it had long since stopped being a revelation.

There is a moment when a chopper plunges down into the ground clutter, where the yellow expanse of Baghdad, a city the color of sand, consumes its horizon and it seems to go on forever in every direction: a low jumble of off orthogonal angles that fit together not-quite in a jigsaw puzzle way. They were coming down in Sadr City, someplace outside of the operational marked area. Someone had come here, and come here for a reason.

Hopping off she and the team hauled medical bags outside of the blade range, and began fanning out to see how unsafe it was, there was a marine propped up against a wall, a bullet wound to his thigh and another to his hand. There were fingers missing on the hand. The blood while copious did not have that pouring out quality, like s sack of grain punctured, that tells the practiced eye that an artery is hit an the victim is bleeding out.

She squatted next to him and dropped her bag. Before she even had anything in hand she pressed fingers to his hand, and coo'd.

"It's going to be alright private."

In that moment he stopped being a victim, and was a patient.

Even as she tourniqueted the hand and had another nurse pack the leg wound for transport, her sight caught a movement in the grey zone of sight. It was that movement, the movement of pouring blood. It came from under the drape of a doorway a few meters to her left. Even as the stretcher was lifted under the private, she was standing up, snatching her medical bag, and walking towards it. She motioned behind her, hoping that one of the soldiers would follow her for cover, but she was not going to wait and let life slip through her fingers if there was any to be had.

The curtain was dirty sheer and the color of saffron spattered with vegetable stains and grease. She could vaguely see a figure making some kind of repeated movements, and murmuring something over and over again. Her hand ripped through the drape, caught a glimpse of an AK-47 lying on the ground, still reeking of discharge and a huge bloody ceremonial sword. Here eyes swiveled to the figure.

And there she saw it, a woman cut in half, the man naked from the waist, fucking the sex of the lower half. Here eyes ran up the torso, one breast exposed, her eyes rolled blankly upwards. Her arms and legs were pulled to an "X" by chains pulled around metal supports.

She could see no other wounds, she had probably been hacked to death. She was close enough now to hear what he was saying, with the few words of the native dialect of Arabic.

"You whore, you whore, you dirty whore."

Before she could even flinch, the surgeon had put a bullet from a Colt .45 through the back of the man's skull. She stood there as the blood simply came forth as if a faucet had been turned, and he fell forward over the body.

Other women might have gasped, or given themselves to emotion. That was not here, or her in this moment, but instead, aware of the cool spin of air over her flesh as she turned quickly to face the doctor, she simply said.

"Thank you, Captain."

"Don't mention it, the marine is going to be fine, we are lifting everyone out, now. There's nothing for us here."

She stared at the swoop of his cheeks, sunken from dehydration and exertion, and the clean coolness to his eyes. She also saw back behind him and knew that no one was looking. She embraced him warmly, letting, for just a moment, her heart race and breath deepen. And then she pulled back, straightened up, and followed him back to the dragon of life that was about to leap into the air.

And in that moment of turning, the mind played that trick, where the curves of a memory have been altered some how, and they morph into the present, into the dirty yellow of the rolling hills of the present, with the wheels turning smoothly over Interstate 10 East.

"Are you back with us."

She paused, pulled her face in and down and then straightened it and looked down the road,

"Honey, I had a dream last night…"

"And?"

"And I want to tell you about it."

She spent the rest of the time in California recounting the dream, and what it had meant to her. She didn't cry. She didn't flinch as she carefully enunciated how it connected to the memory. And then, when she had finished telling the tale she heard only one breath from him.

"It didn't happen quite that way."

She turned and stared at him, annoyed, Her eyes narrowed and she took on that slight nasally edge to her voice which is to her as the hissing is to a cat, or the growl to the dog.

"What do you mean by that, Mister?" She pulled back her lower cheeks and twirled a lock of hair. She was sure in her memory of the events, even as the dream was rapidly becoming like a fading photography printed on fabric, not only was the picture blurring and becoming indistinct, but even what it was write up on seemed to be dissolving.

"You don't remember?"

"No."

"You ordered me to shoot him."

"I'm a civilian."

"I know an order when I hear one."

She startled.

No, not she. I. I did dreamt the dream. I lived the life. I said the words. The even now leap to my mind:

"Captain, rabid dog. You know what to do."

"You know why I did it. It is in the report on the marine: traces of vaginal fluids on the skin, stains from two other blood types on his uniform."

"I'd always suspected you had your reasons."

My voice got Kansas flat.

"They'd been taking turns." It was the same voice I had used that day, in Iraq. I still get flush with a mixture of revulsion and desire. Revulsion, not just at the scene, but for how many times I have spent dark nights dreaming of having men leer at me. How many times I have imagined walking down a street, dark except for the stab of red lights, my body wrapped in cheap, tight clothes that cling in different places as my walk shifts them, the fishnets teasing at my thighs. How I feel the grabs from the eyes of dirty men, despairing men, violent men, waiting to spatter out on me all the hurts of their world. The longing to be slapped and pushed against a wall, un- not ir- responsible for the things that are to be done to me.

Revulsion, because that has been my sex life with my husband, and it leaves me cold. Revulsion because this is the life that turns like a turbine, grinding up young women into walking corpses and bleeding hunks of flesh.

Revulsion because even the whore fantasy is not enough. I remember dreams where I am cut in two, two men turning my lower half between them, penetrating this and that way, bending my knees, twisting my legs, all while I, separated by easy feet from the affair can only watch and critique in my mind, how my lusts overwhelm my body, but have not broken into my intellect. In these dreams, I sneer at the petty pumping motions, the cartoon like clumsiness of their thrusts, the dirt and beard growth and roughness.

Oh how I awake, awake from those dreams burning hot, and aching to be treated like a thing. Able to have seen as if in a movie that which I never really see, the brute penetration, the contact of parts, where the depths of my craving collide, and cock and cunt sound as holy as medical terms, and vulva as filthy as a rap song rant. Suddenly the sensations of my legs quivering, my hips shivering, my sex stuttering, the depth of feeling in my vagina collided back whole with my mind, flooding over me and taking all my logics like waves over sand. Or wind over wheat. Or blood over skin.

That sensuousness of slowly moving blood, blood that moments before lived and breathed. I am a woman, and so, in all its dark corruption, in all its radiant stains, I am a bearer of the cult of blood. And I long for the hard cold slash that will unleash its true power. I nurse wounds, because I cannot fulfill my lust to see them.

That corpse cut in two, those pieces which were once a woman. Well, I am she in those private dreams. I know the writer of the movie told people how he went off on four hour long masturbation jags thinking about the girl who was cut in two and dumped near Los Angeles. I know, though he did not say it, that those dreams had, as often, to be after her death as well as before.

In this reverie, I sat for just a moment, and then to regain composure, I remember pouring in all the cold merciless steel into that voice, with a whine that is the whir of the turbine given human form. Turning, turning, turning, turning.

End of Book One:
California