5

It is a dream of a day in the past. I have woken on a stone cold slab. My face is caked with blood, my hair matted. My face is drawn, a day in this place won't dent me. I've seen too much, too many, too long to even begin to think of playing along. I know that something terrible is happening, and they are looking for someone to pay for it. A road side shooting isn't enough, there are a few of those a week. Blackwater mercenaries are more or less exempt from scrutiny. So too are people like me.

I've been here.

The first time you break the line of human decency is the worst. I remember having to stitch men together after they had been forced to sodomize each other at gun point. The first one, burning from the alcohol I poured on his raw flesh, screaming for God to take him from this earth, was the one I couldn't forget. The pink swellings and red eruptions.

This wasn't that bad.

Finally the Major came in again. He was pristine and smelled sweet.

"Going on a date Major? I hope he's your type." I smirk and my head lolls back and forth.

The Major looks at me carefully. There is a strained look at the corners of his face.

"You aren't helping things by your attitude."

I look at him, blink several times, and wait for him to say the next absurd thing.

Finally I can't help let out a guffaw.

"I'm going to be straight with you major. You aren't going to get anywhere with this KGB routine. Why don't you tell me what you after."

He blinks and sighs.

He gets up and turns his back to me, and then stops at door.

"If I get you a shower and better accommodations, will you cooperate?"

"Cooperate is a loaded word in country. But I can promise that until you do I won't cooperate."

There is a knock at door. The Major leans close and listens to some whispering. He gets a tension across his back. It isn't good news for him.

"I will do it. Come with me now."

It is at that moment that I know I am close to being sprung. If only I can hold on.

I open my eyes to stare at the ceiling. Merc is still asleep, and there is a kiss of dawn about the window. I shake him. Normally letting him sleep would be fine, but I want to be out of this place as soon as we can manage.

The road is a river and it is calling to me.

I want to drive to wash the memory from my face. In that cell I had dreamt about giving the Major a blow job, my knees pressed and pained against the cement floor. I had dreamt it several times. I was so desperate to get out. It was what drove the cold fury when I awoke, because I knew how close to breaking I had been.

Later I hear talking outside the door. I crawl to it and listen. One voice is the Major. He is bargaining for more time, he thinks he has me. The other voice says that State is sending someone down here, and that if I am not cleaned up in four hours, it will look very bad. The Major begs for one more go at me.

He gets it.

6

I am driving, Merc is still lolling and listless. He stares at the mile posts. But this is my native earth, I take us off the interstate and cut south into Kansas. I don't feel quite at home until I am on US 24 and pull into a main street of brick faced buildings, half of them shuttered. A blazing "Colby's" is on the canopy in front of one. Colby Kansas. As good as any a place to have breakfast. It does not take me long to navigate our way to the frontage road for I-70.

There is an old Union Pacific depot, it's slanted slumbering sides and pointed roof. The sides are painted bright white. This is the restaurant that my friends and I spent our time at that one year I spent at the community college before getting up and out. We ate too much fried food, and studied until they kicked us out. I remember the blond maternal looking waitress who indulged us as we laughed to loud and opened our books. Sometimes letting us drink on one free refills coffee for hours.

Pulling in here brings me closer. Closer to where this journey began.

I shake his arm.

"Darling, darling. It's time to get something to eat."

He half rouses and simply looks at me, his eyes hollowed out by fatigue.

"Alright, but I don't feel very hungry. What time do the liquor stores open in this part of the world."

"Later. It's not time for that anyway."

"I'll be the judge of that."

I smile softly.

"When it's time, you won't be drinking alone."

"I've heard you drink pretty hard." He knows it.

"I've been known to."

He decamps his side easily and is around to open the door for me and offers a hand. The return of gallantry to his physical vocabulary is a good sign, I hope.

We are inside among the tables and eating. He has pie for breakfast. Three pieces. Washes it down with more coffee than I have ever seen him drink.

"You know, the world is going to hell."

"Has since the day it was made. What makes you say this? Is it your friend."

"Nope. It's that I envy he got out while the getting was good."

"Don't talk that way."

"What way should I talk? They are putting me back in the meat grinder soon."

He leans over and stares his eyes into me.

"You know we aren't making it out of this."

I stare back.

"I know."

I stare at the dark timbers and out at the stretch of land that recedes out to the horizon.

"You know, out here, it seems like you can see forever."

"You can can. Forward, or back."

"Is that why you drove us here?"

I look down and to the left, pretending to stare at the floor. I look back at him. He is staring down at his coffee cup, a brown ring from the coffee and milk mixture that he drinks.

"Let's not talk about that yet."

"It is better than talking about how the Mets just executed a perfect swoon dive."

"I'll give you that. I wanted to talk about you. I'm so worried about you."

He shakes his head.

"I'm not talking about it. I just need to brood. It was their time. There's nothing to be done about it."

"You seem pretty emphatic about that. Are you sure there is nothing you want to say?"

He breaths out slowly and looks directly back at me.

"What's to say. He died in Iraq, he just didn't know it until he got back here."

"What about his girl friend. I know you had a history with her. It has to mean something."

"Only in that strange way that the past sends you postcards from time to time about the crazy things you do when you get too drunk and have just been tossed aside by a woman you thought the better of."

"Was she important?"

"I thought about marrying her. Even with her kids. Damn I was good to her and her brood, and yet there I was one day, flowers in hand, finding out some other guy had moved it. I don't know where that came from."

"That's harsh."

"It was a bad time. I went through a lot of women that year. I dumped all the good ones. All the bad ones dumped me."

"They must have been good friends to you."

"Yes, she was the best to me. But then no one can be good to a man like an ex-hooker who just doesn't have any inhibitions any more."

"So you had sex with her more than just that once."

"Yes, three or four times."

"Where was your wife in all of this."

"I had met her, but we weren't involved yet."

"What made that change."

He smirks.

"One night she decided it was going to happen. It was going to happen with me. And I didn't have too much to say about the matter."

"I am not sure I believe that."

He pauses.

"Sometimes, even if a man is choosing it, wanting it, driving it, it's the woman who made the choice, and, no matter how strong your will is, you get sucked in. Because it's so flattering, so amazing, just, for once, to be the one who is being wanted."

I hide the frown except for the barest turn down of the corners of my mouth. I'm not sure if this is a moment of genuine intimacy, or just an excuse. But then I let my face grow quiet. In the present, anything he wants to talk about is fine, anything to keep him from going back to that eyes lolled a way staring into the distance. We'd driven that way for hours, me focused on driving along the straight roads of Western Nebraska and Kansas, and he, looking outwards across the wide open space and towards the rumbling foothills on to the south, or across the elliptically flat expanses to the east.

I had looked over from time to time at him in that state, and wondered what would bring him back to me. If it was telling me that his ex-wife was a tigress who pounced, then that would have to do, I suppose.

I breath out slowly.

"And then what?"

"About three weeks in, we stopped having anything to say, so it just popped out."

"What did? What popped out?"

"You know. 'Let's get married.' Just like that."

"I know what you mean. That moment, I look back at it with…" I am not sure I want to go there.

"I know what it must have been like. He was all over you, and you couldn't imagine life with out someone all over you."

I nod and pick up the thread.

"Even though, well, things weren't so good."

"Even the sex."

"God yes, especially the sex."

He smiles in a slight bit of satisfaction, and the rest of the breakfast passes in happy idle chatter. We both complain about how med techs are taking over medicine, about the state of music on the radio we've been listening to, and about how fat kids are these days. The petty grumbles ease the way between us. We drop the check, and are away into the outside world.

7

Maybe even now, I need.

We drove the short distance out of Colby, and on the horizon the late morning came with clouds, and the sun refracted through them. The skins that faced the land were as night, and the curves of the sunlight were as blood. The shafts that broke through the imperfections in the wall pierced the air, and dropped through the land. It is a storm and it cometh from the south. The shafts that pierced the sky were like seven candlesticks, and they burned like seven stars.

The first lightning bolt of this tribulation gyrated from the sky and down into the waiting enclosure of earth. The spirit of the storm swept before it, and the dust was raised by the coming wind.

And up from the land grew a thunder head like a vast cathedral that reaches up towards the sun, and years to kiss that blue sky that it also years to swallow whole. And across the horizon grew pillars up that were as steeples of churches in a nestled city, or as plumes from a rain of bombs in the desert.

I saw the fury that was coming, I saw all my labor and works had been in vain against the torrent of history, against the tribulation of nature, against the revelation of all the greed that binds the world unto one.

And as the next, the second, flash came down from the sky and on to the land, I whispered repenting for all that I had done. I pulled back onto the road, and drove farther along the tabular earth towards my destination.

I had brought the dead back to life, I had died in my heart, and with the second shatter of twisting turning lightning I stopped, and was transfixed at the speed that the cloud grew up from the plains from the south. And it grew terrible boughs at a great height, and was as a tree of power and excellence.

And then as the next, the third flash came down, I remembered the time I spent in that prison cell, whose final outcome I have yet to tell, and I remember the pain and cold an anguish of those long days. I remember being pained to repent for evils I had not done, while being praised for evils I had done.

And with the fourth flash I saw all the men who I had had, all the times and places I had used my sex for gain and profit. To open doors, to close questions, to keep what was not mine. And I felt the air press down on us, and the odors of the land rise up into my nose, and I scanned the in every direction on this bed from which I had sprung in my earth.

And I wished so much to repent of them.

And with the fifth flash I felt the weight of nations. I saw the bodies blasted and bleeding. I heard the screams of the living and the dying as I walked through crowded streets, dividing the quick from the dead, deciding on living and dying, consigning children to silence, saving the wicked because they could be saved, while condemning the innocent who could not. I remember my foot falls on broken concrete and beige dust, and crumbling to powder brick and mud. I remember the crunch of glass and grind of cloth beneath my soles.

And I remember the grim power I had over the twisted fragments of flesh that all screamed to me for aid. I remember bending over and giving such as as could be given. And later crying for the aid that could not be.

And then with the sixth flash I recalled a coming storm, a great mother of a storm, that hung low over the cluttered lands of in the shadow of the Ghraib. I remember seeing a helicopter float down, spraying death into scattering tents, a man hanging out from its door, weapon belching grenades and bursts of fire. I remember hagng out the window, even though he was so far far far away.

I remember screaming. "For the love of God. Stop. Please Stop."

And the seventh flash came. And all these memories were set aside. Set aside by a simple view of a simple silo, that once had been the church to the only God that I knew in that strange summer of life after death. It was round and straight as a shaft, and capped with a curve that protruded into the sky.

The back drop of the coming sweeping storm grew every closer, the first clotted fingers of its swirling front licked over us. But it was at that silo, and at that sign I stared, stared at them as the first time I had been taken to them.

The sign says "Levant."

And the wind in my ear circles and swirls and seems to buzz a hazy memory of a deep soft voice. A voice that now comes back to me, and forms for the first time in all those years a perfect clarity.

"Your mommy is a way now. And you have a nice boyfriend who will be soft and gentle to you, and give you pretty things."

I was seven.

Two days before a tornado had taken our house, my cat, and everything that I had called a life. I had been sent here to live, with a distant relative, and he had driven me up to this place.

Levant. The rising.

I stared at that silo, and realized that I had learned all about rising that I would ever need to know there.