“The soldiers in my squad are all dead.”
Dr. Massaquoi leans forward in her chair. I can smell her perfume now, the scent of someone else. She’d never buy it herself. They added it later as a prop. “That we can’t figure out who or what your squad was or is presents quite the conundrum for the U.S. Army, as well.”
“That to me sounds like a U.S. Army problem.”
“But your squad wasn’t U.S. Army. Not even by the most loosely applied interpretation. This is a you problem, and will remain so until you give us some answers.”
I look at the jellyfish again. Mush frozen in mush that hardened when it cooled. Ancient baby stuck inside a coffin egg, and we’re all gawking at it.
“Just because the jellyfish is soft,” a voice says, “it is a mistake to assume that it is harmless.” The voice isn’t from Massaquoi or the other doctor or their voices combined. I don’t know whose voice it is.
“What did you say?” I ask, looking up at the doctor. It’s the man doctor. Dr. Man.
Dr. Man frowns, puzzled. “I didn’t say anything. You just did.”
“No, I did, but then, someone else…” I stop and wait for the other voice to continue, but it doesn’t. Was it me? The other me, outside the River?
“Is this part of the pantomime?” Dr. Massaquoi says. “The play at insanity to shirk your responsibility to your nation and to the truth of this rather serious matter?”
I continue looking at her, not really grasping her words, my mind still replaying what the other voice said.
She waves her hands dismissively, resetting the conversation. “Okay, I’ll be direct, so you don’t get confused, so you can’t claim confusion, and so you do know what I’m talking about.” She pokes her fingers down at the thin closed folder on his desk. “Why were you found in southwestern Laos, a country in which the United States military is not allowed to operate? Who took you there, and what were you doing, while violating international sovereignty and putting your country in a potentially embarrassing and dangerous situation?”
I scan the walls again with a different focus in these new eyes. No advanced degree or certification in sight. No medical license. Nothing medical at all. Just those interchangeable photographs. Just like I thought.
Faced with my distracted silence, the doctor presses on, like he did so many months ago. I know what he’s going to say, of course, because he’s already said this to me before I was sent to Dr. Massaquoi. “You’re facing charges of cowardice in the presence of the enemy. Do you know what that’ll do to your fitness report? Do you know that this means no fire team will take you, that your only option is a court martial and public humiliation?”
“You’re not a doctor,” I say to him. His eyes narrow, then open up again inside the skull of Dr. Massaquoi.
“Where were you serving, and with whom?” she asks. “Who was your commanding officer? What was your mission? Why does your file report you ‘reassigned without comment’ as of five weeks ago, with no record of a new platoon or any assignment at all? What was this reassignment?”
“You’re not a doctor at all, are you?” I say to her, because she needs to hear it, too, even though she already did when she was Dr. Man.
Another smile, from both of them, in different pictures on the walls that I can’t see. Each one of them tighter than the photographed occasion demanded, because they were smiling back from the future, and from the future forward, after both emerging from the River.
“You’re the gutter dog, dressed like a lamb.” I tell this to both of them, but only Dr. Massaquoi has the courage to hear it.
Her eyes flash behind those small circles of glass, colorless and cold. “Insults and metaphor all in the same sentence. I see I’m dealing with a very special sort, here.” She picks up an orange that was resting behind the base of her lamp and regards it like Hamlet with old Yorick’s skull. When she speaks again, the doctor’s—the officer’s—tone returns to that practiced note developed in preparation for his role. “Why did Company Command send you here, Specialist Broussard? Why did they really send you here?” Here it is, the fourth quarter of the game.
“I told you, I don’t know.” If she’s going to continue the charade, I can too. Free air conditioning is free air conditioning.
“No one is sent here without a very good reason, which most certainly does not include insomnia,” Dr. Massaquoi says, opening up the folder, which contains only a few pieces of paper and some photographs. I have a good idea what those photographs are, but can’t figure out how anyone got them. Nobody out there from our side was left, and without a witness, that ridge top would disappear back into the jungle without a sound. I’m the only one left who would know, and I don’t. “Your file says that you are indeed here for a very, very good reason.”
“If you say so.”
“No, I don’t say so, but your superior officers do. The field report does.”
“They don’t understand.”
“They don’t understand what?”
“They don’t understand what…what happened to me. What’s happening to me.”
“Because you won’t tell anyone what happened to you.” She almost purred, sounding genuinely concerned. The River told me otherwise.
“Wouldn’t help. I’m talking about now. After.”
“And I’m only interested in then. Before.”
“Then there’s no reason for me to be here.”
Dr.—Officer—Massaquoi exhales, smoothing out his impatience. “What did happen to you, Specialist Broussard? Out there. That might be the best place to start.”
“We got overrun.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Dr.—Officer—Man asks.
“Our squad.”
“Was it a squad?” Officer Massaquoi asks. “Not a platoon?”
I shake my head. She writes something down.
“This squad wasn’t U.S. Army,” she says, a statement, not a question. She’s trying to lead from the rear, just like all the rest. She’s clearly different from them, in their eyes and probably in her own, but she’s just like the rest underneath.
I shake my head again.
“What branch? Under whose auspices?” Her pen is poised over the page. Seconds eat deeper into the fourth quarter.
I look straight ahead. I’m not even sure myself. Not totally. But I’m not telling her that. Motherfuck this traitor. Some things are thicker than duty, and one of them is blood.
“Why did you let your squad down?” Officer Man asks.
“I don’t have an answer,” I say.
“Who recruited you?” Officer Massaquoi asks. “Who organized this squad? Who was your commanding officer?”
Augustus Cornwallis Chapel. My mind screams these three names that make up one so loud I assume the woman they found to be the perfect ringer behind the desk can somehow pick them up with her own antenna. But my lips know to keep shut, taisez-vous, fight through that urge to empty my entire limbic region and the poisoned River that cuts right through it, to melt this woman’s ears and eyes and glasses and face like tossing a candle into a swamp fire. I chew on the inside of my cheek until it bleeds, giving me a thoughtful expression as I devour my own flesh. Salt and copper. The AC shuts off, making it quieter than the presumed quiet was a second before.
Officer Man scans the report. “You had a direct line of fire, and refused to take the shot, later claiming that your magazine had jammed.”
The AC shuts off again, in another office that’s this exact office, letting loose the low rumble of moving water. I start to get dizzy, and grip the arms of the chair, trying to keep my organs straight up and down like they were in the waiting room.