Tuesday 08:55
I go back to Banana Girl. She unfiles relevant case folders from the locking filing cabinet that has not been locked both times I’ve seen her unfile from it. She arranges the relevant folders on her desk. She fusses with precise perpendicular placement. There isn’t a mite of mote settled on the desk’s top. As she fiddles the files I think of the first day I became aware of her. Banana Girl. It was during a breakfast chow early one AM when I noticed Marines silent and elbow goading their buddies to follow the collective’s gaze. When I triangulated the leers and voyeured her sitting with Captain K9 a few tables over. When I watched her peel a banana and put the tip in her mouth. Watched her bulge it into the fleshed pocket of a cheek and break it off sideways. Precise mastication. Mandibles moving. Tiny muscles flexing. An unfamiliar Corporal had leaned over to me, ‘She does this every morning. That’s why we call her Banana Girl.’ I think about that banana right now. As she talks. As she scrunches her petite nose like a chipmunk sniffing for a lurking cat. A crinkle precipitating her glasses to slip down her nose bridge. She uses a middle finger between the half rimmed rounded windows to push them back until the earpieces catch and they rest proper and prim and almond-eyed framing. Are her eyes green?
“What did he mean to you? What are you willing to share?”
If I could respond to this I could write his parents. If I could tell them, I could tell them not only was their son an excellent CI/HUMINT agent, not only was their son one of the best Marines I’ve ever served with, not only was their son handsome and smart and kind, but that he was my vicarious moral compass. Planting sage seeds of epiphanies. A sufferanced companion enduring my company. Never withholding yet holding me whenever I’d wake from the re-started nightmare screaming dream routines that began again after the Green-on-Blue from a source meet where we were drinking chai at IP HQ Outpost 2 and source # IC-03778A pulled a pistol on us. And I could tell them their son, my teammate, quick drew and wasted that backshooting mother fucker. Perforated that cunt in the neck and jaw. Drilled that bastard dead. Killed him just before we saw in high pitched monotone with eyes between stung ears that GySgt. XX-XXXXX and our old terp XXXX had their brains spilled on the floor and had sticky ticky bone bits papier mache’d to the walls and to our bodies and it looked like chewed up and vomited shrimp cocktail. Their spilled brains. In raspberry red syrup puddles and pink veined chunks on the dirty white tiles. And I told their son, my sympathetic ear, ‘It looks like vomited shrimp cocktail in raspberry syrup puddles.’ And the cordite clouds and IC-03778A’s shat dishdasha and the ruptured skulls and the sweated fear and the cigarettes still burning in that tiny room. Made me wretch and wretched and fumble tongued. And their son, my hero, he got on the radio and called it all in and got our personal Personal Security Detail in with us in 30 seconds maybe less than half a minute maybe from IC-03778A’s sideblind betrayal and the PSD rushing in all muzzles flagging and, ‘Holy shit, holy shit!’ And how their son, my confidant, hugged me then in my open mouthed paralysis and after again embraced me when the nightmares began again. Not the Liberian nightmares I first feared resurfacing but a new one where my ex would reconcile with me and bring back the kids. The kids I hadn’t seen since before my last but after my second deployment. And she would come to me and make love to me and she would move back in with me and the kids in the old house in their old rooms and the swelling growing bursting heart of redemption and healing and joy before she would say, ‘You fucking cheater! You gave me chlamydia. I’m gone, and I’m taking the kids!’ And I’d wake feeling filled with that delicious familiar purity of isolation and grief and loss glued and scarred to my soul that I first felt when she had left my world all those years ago. I would relive those feelings and wake weeping. And their son, my partner, would hold me and rock me and smile as I stopped screaming but wept kept going for the re-wounding in my being. Smile at me he would. A devastating sublime morose melancholy smile that made my heart chapped yet assured. A smile with such honesty that I wanted him to deliver any bad news in my life for the rest of my life. Bring bad news and just that smile. And then I would recover and breathe down sobbing. And their son, my confidant, would keep this all in his confidence even when I dreamt that dream for weeks and I’d wake loud and he’d hold me each time until I fell back down into darkness and once still holding me when the blue lit chronometer dictated we rise. I want to be able to tell them that. I need to tell them that. Tell them this story. And tell them how because of their shitty six page letter of doctrinal judgment and Ward mandated shunning and unacceptable non-acceptance, because of that, that that was the real reason I had to write them at all. But I can’t tell them that. I don’t want to tell them that. They don’t deserve it.
“He was my best friend here. Best friend for the last few years. We love each other. Respect each other.” I’m staring into an empty half of styrofoam cup cooling caffeinated cocoa. I have pressed my initials into the cup’s pliable side with a thumbnail. “I may have made fun of him a few times. Teased him. I messed up some, too. I lied to him recently. Kinda. Got him to watch a movie. Told him it wasn’t rated R. He can’t watch rated R movies coz he’s LDS. It technically wasn’t rated R. It was the unrated director’s cut. Anyway, he was pissed. Told me so.”
“I would be upset, too. Being deceived by my friend.” Her lips contract into a purple puckered disapproving sphincter. “Is there anything else, anything recent that was upsetting him? CID and the FOB Marshal are still looking for,” her eyes reach up and to the left before returning to mine, “for a reason.” They are green.
“How confidential is this, ma’am?”
“I am only obliged to report potential harm to yourself or others, and illegal acts you witnessed or participated in during this deployment.” A loosed memorization galloping past her teeth. A breath corralled in her mouth. Her pen is poised vertical, a millimeter from paper.
“Last week. I came back from a source meet and found him crying in our room. Holding a letter. He kept apologizing. Didn’t want to talk with me about it. Took off to get cleaned up. He left and I didn’t stop myself. I read the letter. It was from his folks. Calling him out for being queer and how he needed to follow some church stuff about not wearing his ‘garments’ and ‘refraining from self harm’- which is what his religion calls masturbation- and ‘repenting his unnatural attraction’ and ‘asking Heavenly Father for guidance’ and shit like that. He was a good Christian kid-”
“I thought he was - wasn’t he Mormon?” Upward canted aporetic interjection. Maybe they’re hazel.
“…? Yeah, LDS, Mormon, a good Christian kid. And his folks, in the letter, they shit all over him. It pissed me off. His ma said he would be reprimanded. Maybe even excommunicated if he ‘acted on his sinful urges’.”
“Um…so gimme a minute. I don’t…” Her eyes type-read side to down to side to down. Pages turn. She reaches for the burgundy six part folder on her desk. The one that lives in her locking but never locked filing cabinet. The pen is bit across her teeth. “Anudder minit.” Saliva jewels at a lip’s corner. My lids close, I dose...a moment, flutter eyes open. She is still flipping through folders and I inspect my drink. The cocoa has dark brown spots of failed dissolve clinging a dotted incomplete concentric circle round the cup’s inside wall. My hand gyrates, but the black powdered spots fail to liquesce. Only ride the slosh until a watered down dollop slips the lip and a dropping dribble flows along the outer foam surface toward my thumb, abandoning a trail of disconnected rivulets tensed within the shallow fingernail rut of the letter ‘I’. She rests the folder in her lap. “I don’t see an entry for a letter from his parents in the personal inventory. Do CID and the FOB Marshal know about it, or have it?” Her head lists, like she’s straining to drain water out of an ear. One plucked brow arched higher than the other.
“…” Fuck.