(A Stryker, Colleen remembered. Bodies on bench seats, crammed and jostling, the wheels crunching landscape, the lull of engine strain and the rhythmic clash of gears. Your helmet clacks the armored panels behind you. Clacks the helmets of the troops sitting on either side. Heavy with web gear, mask, Kevlar, weapon; the air-conditioning always out, the cooling vests not worth shit, you can’t believe the constriction, the hour after hour in 125 degrees. In 130, 150, gulping water, so much water; everyone but you can piss without removing body armor. Banging along, pressed against each other, their cock tips dropped into empty Gatorade bottles, sweating, unable to do anything but listen to the chatter of the driver and the M2 operator, trying to dodge the cube of sun blaze from the open hatches above. Sweat and gears, and the trembling need to piss, the consideration of pissing in your BDU pants, terrorized by shame but having to piss so bad you buckle in contraction, so bad you can feel the first blossom of tract infection, and you pray for the strength just to wet yourself. All of this alongside the constant, practical concern about what faceless object will kill you. Not if, not when, but what.)
“Think, girl,” the man had ordered. “Let’s get paid.”
“I,” she had whispered.
He cocked an eyebrow.
“The, um. Warts?”
“Gotta speak up.”
“Plantar warts?” she’d asked. “My feet are still screwed up from them boots.”
“Warts!” The investigator laughed into his lap. “We can work with this. Now, if we was talkin’ Vietnam, hell, it’d just be part of the deal. But today?” His pen slashed at the appropriate form. “Warts it is.”
She had come to the VA seeking counseling. Someone to talk to. Someone who could explain and then exorcise her compulsion to hurt, to trash herself, to do whatever she could to get back to the elating brink of trauma; to random, visceral, adrenalized trauma.
But you couldn’t just walk into the walk-in clinic. You had to go through the process like everyone else: intake paperwork, biomed overview, financial evaluation, wait; benefits categorization, primary physician assignment, claims screening, wait. Instead of seeing a shrink, or even a nurse prac scripting SSRIs, Colleen wasted half the day being humiliated for her postwar weakness. . then shamed into filing for a payout over warts.
Leaving the claims investigator’s office, she’d been dispatched to give blood and urine, meeting the requisite demand of a physical before her claim could be filed with the federal government, perhaps as an action against the federal government, in part because the Feds gave out unnecessary handouts. This was Mississippi, of course.
Meanwhile: wait.
The men who sat around her in the VA clinic lobby were black and white, using canes or in wheelchairs, their pajama pants legs tied in a knot. Elderly wives in cheap wigs sat beside them. The Weather Channel beamed from a wall-mounted television.
They stared at her. She sat in a row-bound chair, adjusting her legs, her ass and her everything, until the clerk finally called her number. He gave her a plastic cup, and pointed to the unisex restrooms. She went inside, noting the chrome handrails by the toilet, her nose sorting the communal bodily smells. Read the posted instructions on how to give a sample: WASH HANDS THOROUGHLY BEFORE TOUCHING PENIS. PULL BACK FORESKIN IF APPLICABLE. URINATE FOR 3–4 SECONDS INTO TOILET. DO NOT TOUCH PENIS TO INTERIOR OF CONTAINER. FILL CONTAINER BETWEEN ¼ and ½ FULL OF URINE FOR DOCTOR.
She pissed on her fingers and knew she’d contaminated things. Wiped herself off and tugged her panties up, and then stared into the mirror until the urge to cry had passed. She returned to the clerk, placing the sealed urine cup on a Tupperware cake tray at the edge of his desk. He ordered her to wait, said they’d call her in an hour or so for the blood draw.
“No worries,” Colleen responded, and marched out the sliding doors. She drove to the string of cheap bars near the campus.
CAST in the seam of hallway light beneath the dorm door, she flipped herself from under the boy. They peeled their clothes off, and she mounted his thin frame. She positioned his erection behind her; he struggled to place it inside.
“No,” she ordered.
“Condom?” he asked.
“Christ, no.”
She moved her pelvis in a slow, circular rhythm, her hands palming his hairless and slightly muscled chest. She pegged him a high school sideliner, only recently divorced from dreams of further athletic pursuit. He groaned and again tried to penetrate. “No,” she repeated, moving atop him, circular and fluid. She reached between her legs for a few seconds, then used her self-slicked hand to cradle him outside of her body; she rocked up and down, his penis gliding between her buttocks and wetted palm. Slipping against each other, he so desperate to enter, she so intent on rupturing this need, so insistent on receiving the pleasure, the puddle, as generated by only exterior heat. His cock lodged tight between her hand and buttocks, Colleen bucked back slightly so that her vagina remoistened him, her hand stroking him as she rode up and down. Her climax began in waves that radiated outward, downward, inward as she grasped him, the tide of elation moving her to spasm; her pelvis backing into him, her gasps her kneaded breasts her hand sliding faster, up and down and up and. . The tickling warmth on her back as the boy came in an apex of deprivation.
He gulped like a child. She shushed him and gripped his involuntary pulses.
Buried in the darkness was the sound of a tiny gear. Colleen knew exactly what it was. Because every troop seemed to have taken the same shots: Vehicle, sand, mortar fire; helicopter, sunset, the Coke logo in Arabic. Interiors of CHU barracks, blast scenes, bloated dead goats and hajis. . as frequently cut by the automatic shutter closure of a dead lithium battery. The tiny rev of a camera gear. Click.
(She had no idea that war and campus were conjoined by a love of slut-shaming.)
She got one good punch in before he covered his face, and another few about his neck before he threw her to the floor. She was silent as she got up, focused on finding the device in the pitch-dark. She kicked open the small refrigerator, using the light to check the closet. He called her a white-trash bitch, and considered forcing her into the hallway, where she’d be poised for ridicule by the brothers. His eye closing from the punch, he instead covered himself with the comforter.
She found the camera hidden in bunched clothes atop a hamper. She threw it against the wall, splintering the darkness with the scatter of plastic shrapnel. He cursed again as she grabbed her clothes and stormed out. She ducked into the men’s hallway bathroom, dressing inside a filthy stall — her bra and panties and one sock absent — then marched back into the hallway, toward the exit. When the boy’s face peered out from behind the metal door she kicked it into him, and he howled in pain. She flew down a flight of stairs and through a large front room, a space defined by worn leather couches, by crest-like insignia and Greek letters on the wall. On a large flat-screen television, SportsCenter chattered away for no one. She marched out of the house, between the white columns and onto the front walkway. She did not know the campus, and was unsure of how far it was back to the bar, and her car. She had not remembered to grab the memory card. She marched past the genteel university buildings, wondering how many more nights out she could take. Headlights passed over her, those of SUVs mostly, stuffed with drunken, privileged kids, kids that were her age give or take, a few of them teasing her clumsy stride. Her footfalls were hobbled by plantar warts. Her shirt clung to her back.