GITMO

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                                             GITMO

 

     They sent him to GITMO right out of basic. He wanted to go to Iraq, but the orders just came down and that was it. The army was disgusted with GITMO. It was beneath military honor. It was politics and red tape, civilian adulteration. They cast it off on children’s gangs and psychologists. The kids improvised according to their lights. He was in a penal colony at the edge of an island, a prisoner of the army.

     Davis, he would be known by his last name in the service, was eighteen. He had enlisted in the summer after graduating high school. He could have gone to Georgetown or Notre Dame. He had been accepted to both. He would study theology. But, he thought study was traduced or filmy, gloves for the eye. For him, it would be the red or the black, seminary or the army. He had never been in love, or rather he always had as long as he could remember but he thought that for him it just meant being lonely. It was a state of melancholy. It was an abiding loss. What was love a shadow of? What did it remind us of? All his life he had sensed that for his family it was an absence keenly felt. So much about his father seemed subdued, even chastised. His mother seemed to teeter near hysteria; she was giddy within a mood of contraries. He did not feel responsible, not exactly, but as the only child born to an Irish Catholic couple, he felt he must have proved the seal on futility, the impossibility of any measures they might take. The strength to love him was missing, experience had already intervened. He had early been sobered, and thus cleansed of innocence. With fixed clarity, he saw his parents as casualties of disappointment. They had knocked but the door had not been opened. From this he knew he must be wary of wearying. He would seek at the places where the world scrapped against impossibility, where it could only continue to exist as a live birth. 

     His dad was against his joining. He had been in the service, in Vietnam. A few times he said he had served without valor, but only a few times. Otherwise, he never mentioned it. He didn’t want to be glib. This time he said, “Maybe, I should have said more about it, then you wouldn’t have listened to all the bunk about it.” But, he hadn’t listened to any of the bunk about it. It was the silence enveloping his dad that he listened for. There were places in church-those echoing chambers, those murmuring bells-where this silence enraptured like falling joy. Here, tantrums of events and their refuse-voices, footsteps, sermons, choir and organ were repelled. Here was an absolute. Certainly, against this rock, love had floundered for his father. But, it was his certainty that from this rock all miracles rise, and should it be the church or the army, if it were not to be a slow wearying, an abrasion that would dull the senses until sensing at all required shrill sarcasm, as it did for his mother who felt to despair the rote in her own tilting against fungible familiarity, the place to look is where awe has had the stuffing beaten from it.

     “A woman can have a sense of humor, a private sense of humor, even your mother”, his dad went on. Because his father believed his son, his only child was his wife’s practical joke on him. The Irish, a race posting mugs that only a mother might love or those who need a fair share of pity to trip into love, from his Irish mate, from god’s lip to his lap, a beauty had dropped. The bloom never left his son’s cheek and masculine framing to his body never sheared androgyny from it. What else than a joke could he call this retort to the secular calendar? And then she rubbed it in by sending the kid to parochial school. 

     His mother rarely stooped to reason and never seriously. She was more than a parodist; sacrilegious if she could find an audience and more feckless than either. She was keeping her originality. She was a free spirit, an enfant terrible, and causing embarrassment proved vitality. She sent him to parochial school to surprise and jangle a smug modern age. She was that recklessly decisive and egotistical.  

     “Because we’re Irish we don’t submit to god even if we find reasons of our own to believe in him, such as happiness or other  things that can as easily be seen as soft-headedness as majesty. But one day you’ll get the urge to be an Irish writer, it’s a congenital with us, and writing never emerges from a free hand. Besides, resisting god builds individual imagination and character, and come the day, inspires great sex.”

     He blushed at the last, blushed for his father none to obliquely exposed, but had come to believe the Church’s saturation by sexuality was the meaning of the Holy Ghost. And it was only inside the Church that love was addressed in equally dire tones as sex. Outside its walls both seemed twitters and little else.

     Her mischief had gone too far. She had spit into the wind, and plentiful commiseration had blown back on her.

     He thought about things and not always in an adolescent way, or so he figured. Not always filled with self-pity or grandeur. He respected thinkers and anchorites. He respected their extreme doubt and scruples. He respected their bold interrogations and impassioned belief in sin preceding a belief in God and as the necessary belief to summon Him.  He respected their courage to know and so be spared nothing. For this, he believed just about everything about the saints, the miracles especially. He thought the Church emphasized the saints’ ordeal of dying over their acts of charity and their visions, as if had they died happy surrounded by friends, they would have dodged the bullet of loving God and so given us reason to doubt his existence. But the miracle was faith in a god of love.  To those who witnessed this faith it was already a miracle long before being carried into the fire.       

     He joined because of 9/11, because it tore things open. The day tore open, time tore open, impossibly. It couldn’t have happened, not from anything that happened before. Either pointless random events finally spilled over a threshold into chaos or a hand might move through time, composing it against the way things usually were. Miracles could fit. He swung to the red. The gash torn open released the substance between the stars; he would cup his hands in the stygian fount and drink. He thought this might be the last holy war. Not Christianity versus Islam, nothing silly like team uniforms, but everyone thrown into incomprehensible action, moving in the realm of miracles.

     They flew by army transport and were disgorged directly onto the separate runway laid for the penal colony. Across the bay was the rest of the base. Officers and their families lived there. There were swimming pools, tennis courts, movie theaters, a PX, lawns and porches. They would never go there; they might have been lepers.

     They were met by a skillet slap of heat and the barracks mates they were assigned to. A role call divided them to their squads.  The prison was expanding and vets by fours had been moved to new barracks where they would receive four recruits who they would integrate into the program. They humped their gear to open trucks and then humped to eight man barracks that still smelled from paint. The vets looked at the cherries-that’s what they called the new guys- with blunt patience. He got it later. The new guys were bewildered by exile. They had vanity, whatever they had, moiling life, a promise, memories, shock, shame, the whole kit they’d smuggled through basic. Any one of them might have thought people fell short of what they could be. People, at least themselves, had so much left inside that could be violated. They looked at them with bland patience; he’d never been regarded with that degree of pitiless frankness. It was mercy. No stones were cast. The vets had become foreign.  

     “Packages” were dropped off at the air strip. He had landed there just a few hours before, when they were ordered back to receive a delivery. There would be no orientation; there was nothing that could be told. He had taken the time to stow his gear and kick back on his bunk. The heat smothered him. Time eddied. He seemed to be inhaling boredom.  The vets bargained over which cherry they’d get. It was new to them and they embraced it for the waste of time. It was a surprisingly complex auction. They knew each other well, and when it was done there was no grumbling.  When he was on the block, he listened and there was prescience to it, but it was a fortune without lyricism. He was destined to a world without echoes, a stone garden reflecting the cosmos.  

     A dry spit surrounded by blinding glare and on it cages and pens. This land had never been used for anything but a prison. Someone looked and saw a spot where there was nothing that might inspire him to stay alive another minute, and on it he built a prison. No sooner arrived than you thought: if I don’t get some orders soon I’m going to disappear. And that’s the way you knew the Haitians-the boat people. No one told you about them. Once this spot was recognized it claimed the Haitians. A hole had been opened and things would fall into it. Wherever you went you would be swarmed by sand fleas. Everyone knew they had not been left by the Haitians-fleas waiting a million years for a meal in this empty place? Impossible. Not left by the Haitians-these were the Haitians. The Haitians no one ever gave a thought to, brought to a place they could not even be remembered to be forgotten, reduced to their souls. The living soul was a biting agony for the mud it was interred in. Creation was reversed on this spit of Doctor Moreau. 

     Tarmac on a barren peninsula. There was an air traffic control tower. There were hangars and military aircraft. A billion dollars worth of aircraft, sleek fighters, radar jammers, AWACS. A lot of noise could be generated in the senseless glare, like madmen and prophets railing against abandonment. They hopped off the truck and waited behind a chain link fence for the transport.  A prop plane strained down the runway and clambered up the sky. It was on dope patrol. It would rake back and forth over stretches of the ocean. Maybe, it could turn up a fly speck on the salt plane ferrying coveted befuddlement. 

     Miller, another recruit from his barracks, was standing beside him. He hadn’t really noticed him before, but Miller seemed to be condensing alongside him. Miller was a blocky guy, rudely piled. He had his arms crossed over his chest, his hands nearly stuffed into his arms pits. For some reason, he began speculating on the balance of humors to Miller’s internal organs.  Earth, he assayed, mostly earth, and right now at this edge to his homeland, a place where anchorites would launch revelations, he was feeling tossed into vacuum.   

     When the transport came it circled the field and then settled in like a ship sinking. It was too ugly to fly, the blue sky or starry vault should winnow for grace, but hunkering forms have their orphaned canny.  

     The poop ramp was lowered. Inside, the crew was stretching and yawning. They’d been in the air fifteen hours and they were pretty dissolute. The hold was packed solid with stink. He gagged but managed to keep it down. The prisoners were chained crazily around the vast space. There was no army regimentation to it. You were taught how to fold your shirt in the service. You’d think stowing prisoners would be covered in the manual.

     “Tickets, Mr. Tinsley”

     Tinsley was Davis’ journeyman, and as the ranking member in his barrack, the default CO over the other seven bunkmates. He was not an officer; as spc.4, he topped the others by a shim. Never a cruelty that hasn’t first festered within a barren curiosity: The less reflex, the greater aridity to motive and the more desperately expansive the compulsion-a wonder that has died by a thousand cuts. Psychiatrists and forensic psychologists-may have been responsible for this experiment in communal barracks that democratically distributed culpability.

     Tinsley dug some papers from his breast pocket. They looked like a bill of lading, carbons and all.

     “And, Mr. Tinsley, the rest of your fare.” 

     This was money and it turned out to be for hashish.

     The officer vented a piercing whistle. The hold reverberated with the clangor of long chains being pulled through eye bolts; the other squads were making their pick-ups, but this whistle, enviable accomplishment in childhood, a scepter for a boy, pure genii, cut through. Wisdom and anointment to it, once upon a time, and even here, presumption and preemption, and the officer’s face-conspicuously intelligent, the never yet peeled membrane that buffers the speculative, plotting thinker-sharpened into the moment’s point.   

     A pasty, flaccid crewman in a grease splotched maintenance suit appeared, lazily scratching his balls. “What?”

     “Get them three bricks. What? What? So many mysteries in this world for a moron.” The crewman gave him a loopy, nearly amorous smile. 

     “Tinsley, back this way when you’ve got it.”

     “Yes sir, Olsen.”

     The hashish was in a duffel bag. The bricks were neat lozenges with rounded corners sewn snugly into white cloth shrouds. “Take it, Davis”, his mentor told him. “It’s the only honest thing you’ll do all day” and he tossed him an army shoulder bag.

     Olsen was gazing at Davis as the three of them found him amidst the gyring crowd of shackled, orange-jump-suited and black-hooded prisoners being funneled towards the lowered ramp. Olsen had been looking at him the whole time, Davis sensed that, always knowing where he was as happens in rare meetings, even as Olsen was supervising other pick-ups and marking accounts on the clipboard. When he saw that, Davis looked back at him expectantly and maybe happily, the weirdly varying weight of the hash on his shoulder, its right to engender fates like any illicit traffic, to pull rather than be tugged, and then he blushed for his untarnished transparency, his ready greenness.  Olsen, tall, raw-boned, the same pasty pale as his crewmen, a rot to it, an inbreeding defect, maybe the sightless flights, tunneling through a full day’s canopy stretching across generations.  Olsen was studying him, indifferent to the other currents of activity flowing by. Olsen looked completed, crew-cut blond hair, pressed uniform, and maybe mostly against what now rustled and settled inside him-sounds at night and birds in the morning.

      He led them to three prisoners still unclaimed One was chained with his face to a wall, although you could only figure that from the fact that his knees, which he had been made to balance on, bent away from the wall. They all wore black hoods. The next was chained to the wall by his ankles, lying on his back, feet in a ‘v’ above him. The last was spread-eagled on the floor. It reminded Davis of the barbers who sheared his hair for basic. They buzzed it off but made different patterns through the stalks along the way. They’d leave you with a Mohawk for a moment or a monk’s tonsure, a receding hairline, a clown’s fringe. Not more than a moment, but you wondered at the lives on roster passing away, only for a moment, but it queered the final look, parodied it, saddened it, these reincarnations and then the vulnerable, chastened boy at the end, the barbers just bored, bored to distraction, divining like automatic writing. And here, alphabets, hieroglyphics, falls and slumbers, bored crewmen with orange pipe-cleaners knitting patience and epitaphs.

     “This one’s yours, Tinsley. He’s a special threat, so designated. The penitent. Reason to doubt we’ve fixed anything that’s broken. Carry on.”    

     He meant the one on his knees. He couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand on his own,. His knees had frozen bent and when they hoisted him he inhaled a scream. Davis and Tinsley slung him between them and dragged him along like a drunk, Olsen accompanying them to the top of the ramp. He put his hand on Davis’ shoulder. “They’re all queer. Maybe that’s sad.”

     Tinsley swore all the way to the truck. It was like carrying a big bell. When he could keep his knees raised to avoid pain, the prisoner swung between them like a bell without clapper. The prisoner reeked. Maybe, they should have compared toting him to removing a bucket of offal for dumping, the smoking remains like a distillation, the attar from reducing a man to his casing. If a possible bell peals for Davis, what besides literature to prompt imagery for a man’s weight foisted helplessly on him: the wounded, the sick, the despairing, thrown upon mercy?  Even to bearing a cross. The discomfort he feels at hints of intimacy, of ‘knowing’ the prisoner, of having known him, deep slumbers awakening in his marrow, these whispers are somewhat muffled by drops of holy water and humanism.  

     Each set of mentor and recruit has its invalid, a blind, wobbly-legged drunk, and find a body whose spirit has been excised to be a lopsided, shifty bundle, ill-packed for lumping. They manhandle them on and off the truck, frustration tempered and soured by reflexes towards those defeated and helpless, disgust mixed with embarrassment. The prisoners are delivered blind to their cages. There, at the end of a maze, unlocked and left in their shitty, pumpkin-orange jump suits. No numerical sequence to issuing cells, a shuffling of the deck, more security, the army’s battle against coincidence, these guys might know each other, encourage and foment toxic seductions. Yet, accompanying the randomness and the low-budget, lab-rat habitat where they are housed,  is the sense that this is wits end. The mind out-witted.   

      The prisoner’s shackles removed, Tinsley slides off his hood. At sight of his face, Tinsley and Davis cough. The faces of these people, ruder, nobler than ours, the elements have worked on them. There is less expectation in them and less disappointment, the smithy directly at work on them, the nakedness of the constellations in their skies. A slate amalgamation to their features, geographical anointment, and a surprise in what is not relinquished in their eyes and what is, and startled, at least Davis was, by the entablature of any human face free to be studied. But, his mentor was not singed by such faces; by now, he’d watched them drain empty. Faces that, anyway, would have made fine brigands and highwaymen, classical rogues whose lost time you couldn’t fathom or the destined risk they took without a squabble.  This one is different. He is the thief that comes at night through the garden. Only to say, his mentor, eighteen months along at GITMO, caught yet in a garden. Surprised by a devout wish.

     Davis, a thinker of the dreamier, credulous sort, auditing thoughts rather than constructing strategies, and so culpable by his lights for what he saw, responsible for what was visited on him, for his impressions and interpretations? For whom, as yet, not a sparrow falls unnoticed into the sum of chance?  To him this: Had I ever looked at the falcon’s eye when the hood is just removed, would I have seen, reflecting there, returning sky and heaven? 

     The sun is closing shop for the night, hashish and Cuban rum are prescribed for the recruits to slow their brains, considering the brain’s lack of syncopation with tracts abandoned within hours of landing. Davis is supine on his bunk, sweating it through, basting in his underwear. A curdling or coagulating brew, hash and a flush of heat stroke from tarmac idling; mental processes gum up and sink to bilge or sump. His awareness, his awareness of being aware, has been reduced to a ball bearing, a gall stone, and surrounding it is a gray field of buffered sensation verging on nausea. He didn’t want to take hash but he didn’t want to feel subversive towards these guys or aloof, so he did.  He’d never been much of one for buddies, fall all over himself trying to conform, not that afraid, not that enthused or persuaded by the rewards, not a feeling of superiority, more patience for complexity, keep it that way, some distance from introversion-anathema to the Irish-and say he would face what might come. Cleanly if he could, at least without resentment, so he took the hash as a gift not scorned, and now his brain suffers from his presence; a bed rock to it he’d never suspected.

     Tinsley issues them plastic gloves, the kind housewives use to wash dishes; this set was yellow but he had others that were blue or red. Primary colors, the colors of crayons, he got them through the mess crew who had access to all manner of stuff for cash or snuff. Otherwise, the army issued these transparent medical procedure ones made of latex with talcum powder that gave him hives.  Then the new recruits got their utility belts-a wide belt of canvas nylon blend with a nightstick and mace and plastic handcuffs hanging from it.  He gave them their party costumes, white jump suits. The guys were naked except for their olive green G.I. briefs-sweating on their bunks-and Tinsley told them to slip athletic cups on. When they were all bagged in their whites, they reminded Davis of a crew sent in for disease control.

     When he looked at this bunch through sluggish eyes decked out in buffoonery, Davis began to figure that if anything could explain why they were sent here-and nothing really needed to, not the world, of course, and the army didn’t give a rat’s ass about the specific person, but the army as frenzied reason, reason overwhelmed by experience and its grief, fighting against every aspect to life that must resort to wonder or love to justify itself, that army always had its inane reasons-then they were here because they would prosper here. They wouldn’t work so well with a battalion, but by some hook or crook in their being, a particular oddity, they would do well marooned in a shit hole. But, more likely, differences were never considered. Unavoidably, the army is composed of faces and biographies and other extraneous fevers flesh is heir to, and any are sufficient to be tossed into the crock pot.

.    And Tinsley, the CO and haberdasher?  Tinsley was going bald as if by scythe, hairline retreating in one sweep. A redhead, a carrot-red fringe, anyway, zinc was still smeared on his nose. Smooth outlining to him, compass work to it, not female, but similar to soap carving, and his un-glossy white skin of a piece with that. Freely dispensed symmetry, the strength of his thighs, considerable-enough to hoist character attributes into integrity-actions rising from stability, perhaps.  However, meagerness to his face, a weak chin, certainly the petty was not overlooked, punctual execution to stave off collapse, books balanced, leaks mended. And no savagery; if willfully circumscribed at least he might temper rabid originality.  

     A bottle was passed in a communal round and they breached into the night, sweating their whites-100% polyester-so completely that in the strong light of the cages Davis would be able to see nipples, pink patches at the buttocks’ crown and straight-slicked hairs at forearm and thigh. Elastic cuffs, gasket-tight around high boots but collar a crew-neck leaking draughts of stink. He could smell his anxiety. Suits for mad clowns; the cup and his bare ass, the shit-kicker, Iron Maiden boots. He couldn’t orient himself dressed like this.

     At night you could see the prison for as far as the earth would allow before it confessed being just a mote in space by its own curve. There is something savage/divine in approaching strong light from the dark. Davis had felt that before, ritual, perhaps, passage; averting your fixed gaze from a cold light painful to look into. Maybe what church bells summoned or appeased with offerings. Their suits fluoresced.  Moths adhered to them, feathered at his ears. Beetles pinged against him. Bats harrowed the nebulae cast by stadium lights in their scaffold belfries; swarms of enchanted bugs and then the black silhouette tearing the halo. His mother with her own sly wit had sent him to Parochial school some lush nightmares to rehearse and sexual lyricism to imbibe, and so Davis, a few steps ahead of himself and several tangles yet to unravel, enters the stage to act a preliterate script where worship is shown to have followed damnation.

     Long shadows revolve around them. An African-American soldier patrols the perimeter of the prison with an Alsatian guard dog on a short leash. The dog bellows at them, strains at the leash. You can’t reach this dog. His eyes come out at you, pure focus. The dog is chest and wasp-waist, a reduced man cursed to fours or a dog rising to equality, soon upright, already eye to eye. Dogs in worship abut your humaneness, their soft eyes and slavering tongues on the blessing hand, here engineered equal; the army having extirpated their souls. Unheard command, the dog’s haunches slide beneath his rib cage, tail between his legs, craven, his education in terror and loneliness abducts his form.

     “Hygiene”, Tinsley says to the Mp’s at the gate. Scrolls of concertina wire, the gate is simple: chain link door with a sliding bolt. The ‘kennel’ Some guys call it the ‘mink farm’. Minks get skinned.

     Meaty guy, ham hands, pudgy face, lounging before the portal in his black jump suit, his buddies look at the eight in their sardonic whites.

     “Such a wit, Tinsley”, and he checks a book and hands a subordinate some numbered keys.

     The drill: First thing in their cages, the prisoners get beaten a little. Not punishment or vindictive, disregarded, their continued existence fully expressed by the space they persist in, simply inconvenient.  Tell them to remove the suits. They’ve had to pray in this crap because they can’t pray bare-balled. “Take them off.”  They don’t understand American. They get hit when they just stand there. “Take them off.”  They stand there. They get slapped by the nightstick. “Take them off.”  Some try to shield themselves by raising their arms, most don’t except by reflex. Not their first prison. “Side of stick, rib cage, not spine.”  The vets demonstrate the tricks of the trade leaving out the weird polarities boredom will eventually import into every act, the maladies of addiction. They don’t speak American, don’t know where it’s going to come from, guy in front and back of them. Finally, pantomime unzipping the zipper. “Take them off.”  No go. Slap of the nightstick. Still no go. Solar plexus, crumple to cement. “Next time”-talking to your cherry-you kick out his knees together, we got him kneeling, put the stick under his chin, I unzip him. Now, get him kneeling and choked and I’ll train him.”  Why speak at them?  It’s a way to ignore them completely. It aborts rapport. The jump suits are left collared about their throats and dangling like ropy capes down their backs. Parade them to the dog run, a common area reserved for guards. There is nothing besides the dressage of night-sticking to teach. Skill and purpose would be retreats from obedience. This deprivation commits idolatry. Davis shivers; his bones vent a pulse before heart. A fearsome serenity beckons.    

     Tinsley and Davis take the “face”, and the drill falls apart. He doesn’t defend himself.  No defiance, but an unshakeable placidity. Beauty is a symmetry that reverberates into expanding confirmations. Echoes returning inevitably. This is a problem for Tinsley. Its impossibility here, or the impossibility of this place in its light. Not that it can’t be handled with intellectual remove employing the fruits of decadence. But, any effort spent refuting beauty is still too strong a protest, proof its wound has yet to cauterize. And here are all the testimonies to complete greenness, to the doggerel from childhood: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, here an accusation and confession. Then beauty is as beauty does, a slap administered by the prisoner who is trying to assist them, and Tinsley is certain this is to spare them from defilement. A girl’s beauty promises you stuff you are hardly able to admit to, but with enough repeats of making love and post coital relief, you can gain perspective and volunteer for folly. Here, songs of experience are reverberating through the kennel with all the bloom of innocence.

     Tinsley must lead his men through the valley. He has tailored himself for the duty. Meaninglessness has to be axiomatic. The task here was choosing an insanity you might survive into a facsimile of life. Tinsley committed himself to rehabilitating the mundane since mystery leads ultimately to cruelty.      

     Davis hears Tinsley mutter “We won’t survive his mercy.”

     They move the prisoners to the dog run, naked, soiled orange jump suits dangling from their necks. Spotlight from the tower swinging across for fun, sandblasting shadows; the riflemen above make them a stage act, the big top.

     They’re all cast in black and white, a grainy film, and are become Moloch. Davis can’t grasp the stone necessity, the actual iron gravity shackling him. The bloom is off his cheek, his blue lights gouged out and hollows in the shadowy, dry wells. De Lee, another vet, is perfected.  His profound ugliness-as resonant as beauty-was forged by truth. It is tooled for stark events. What had worked on him had suffered exile from light. It crafted a lyre from refuse. His eyes are occluded by light; it bewilders his fingers. Davis knows what De Lee knows as he forgets other things: Only the damned search for the unblemished calf.

     It’s simple, what’s going on.  The detainees are going to be washed and fumigated. They’re naked and cuffed behind their backs. Hadji’s are modest. They take seriously certain stories in the Bible that bemuse Christians. They won’t show each other their loins. Universally they’re more graceful than Europeans; it is to this vestal modesty they refer, not machines and teams. Their movements are textual calligraphy. Their soiled jump suits are untied from their necks and stuffed into plastic bags. Then the hose is turned on them. Powerful blast that rocks them nearly off their feet; they trip back a few steps. The recruits are told to hold them steady and turn them. Bow them to flush the ass. Hipless body, skeleton etched through, bleached by the arc lights from the tower, slight , sinews drawn through, mop of long wet hair; shit and red welts, and rash where the filth has infected the skin, dark nipples, ribs spine and pelvis saddle, starved and stark. And seen for the first time, the stigmata, recognized for the first time, the stigmata, the genitals. And so you recognize the gaze cast on you by the vets at the airstrip when just deplaned you blinked and flinched, when the searing light hit you. It’s pity. Only the scoured can give it, the ones who can’t be released.

     They’ve got the dripping detainees in a line. A female MP comes down the row. The tower light follows her, its operator knows what comes next. She has a crop and tries lifting each prisoner’s cock with it, but their genitals have withdrawn and shrunk. She begins swaying and unzips her black jump suit. She lets it drop off first one shoulder then the other, and peels it down to her waist, swaying. She is outlined by the corona from the tower light. Crumpled prisoners, routed flesh and souls. Blood precipitated to mineral. She is a terrifying sight, a sacrificial altar, the blasphemy of despair. She looks into Davis’ eyes. He ejaculates. Tears from stone. Odd thought as if jissum were ichor hemorrhaging: DeLee’s eyes. His prisoner’s face.

     What might the body be, left to its instincts?  Could you measure the distance from our desires by every clumsy action?  And include the face to mark the radius of wandering confined to our minds. And then the eyes-what we can’t bear to see we’ve done? Not a means for tracing the soul, Then what? A beautiful emptiness, a pause, expectation? Unregenerate faith, credulousness?  His prisoner’s face as likely as the others in its company, of chip and chunk as much as the others, but illuminated by that secret desire to flower already seen and never forgotten.

     Tears from stone. The body before The Flood.  Davis shudders. He is cold. We will excavate the body to find the cold stream. The rest is too hard. Damnation is better than what must otherwise be bourn. Unearth the body before the flood and in the new genesis free mud from wiles.

      “There was a village in the desert. One great tree gave the village fruit and shade. The tree was called the world.”

     It was the prisoner, speaking in deep, lush tones. Davis and Tinsley were marching him back to his cage, naked, his clean prison garb folded in a tight block, stiff as a board, lying across his cantilevered forearms. They leapt at the sound, and even looking at him as he continued, wouldn’t believe he was talking. “Everything we see reflects paradise and is a story retold, Davis.” 

     Had the tree spoken to him, had it declared itself the world or a tree, Davis would not have been more shocked. But, imagine this, because it’s the way it was for Davis: an education in literacy as well, like that proper grammar in Lewis Carroll that successfully wages civility against madness simply by persisting to recognize its fundamental rudeness. Perhaps, this is more or less what trees are saying-they still embedded in Eden-if only an ear with childhood wisdom was turned to them. And when they spoke, the shock would be in remembering

     “You speak American like an American”, Tinsley said.

     “I’m a graduate of the American School in Dubai“. Damn if it wasn’t like negotiating with a magic fish. How in fairy tales when the magic begins it is quickly accepted as the very most natural thing in the world. If you thought of it, that was how it was with miracles. They undoubtedly were everywhere and had once been recognized by their naturalness.  They introduced themselves by charity, so willingly accommodating they became objects of contempt such as familiarity is known to breed.

     Of course the magic in fairy tales precipitates mayhem now we tumble to our original presence. Love at first sight for Davis, that reacquainting with someone across endless deserts of time. The oasis found but the desert, too. And Christ’s curse fell on him. Only your enemy.  

     The prisoner was at risk from everybody, that’s how he got here. They talked with him in his cage, almost whistling-something like that, one of those idiot things recommended to advertise innocence when you’re a kid, when your seams are bursting from contained glee at the mischief you’re up to. They growled curses and drummed their nightsticks against the cyclone fence wire. The prisoner practiced tuning groans.     

     “I blame it on math. It drove me to pilgrimage. I had a gift for it. From my dad?  He’s a business man and has a head for figures. But our talent, I had to find out what it was a remnant of. It’s a shredded remnant of migration. And then I set out to mend the creature that once knew where the seasons’ chariot was stabled and travelled the stars’ flyways. Finally, I felt the wound is our unbalanced childhoods. While we are most delivered to clairvoyant voices, we are most tethered. My pilgrimage is the seed’s to know the flower.”

     He fleshed out math with physics, and withdrawing from each abstraction, turned to optics and music, always circling to avoid the ”V” to vanishing point of pilgrimages flensed to journey. He found the fallen and once raised constellations in every landscape, and delivered himself to metaphysics, turned to each school within the many religions that would recreate the inspiring moment-the ecstatic sects-before they froze into law. He became blind to everything but the heart lost in labyrinths, and so was guilty of a hundred adulteries and blasphemies, until he was swept up from the shore of the Red Sea having been shown the road Moses took by singing to mermaids who rode the white-mane stallions of the combers.

     Along the way, he had found this heart as well in cinema, and here Tinsley jumped at the chance to strut his stuff. Tinsley was a passionate scholar of film-an autodidact-and he had nearly a thousand in a DVD archive he’d set up in his garage. The library was a testament to taxonomy. The army had interrupted Tinsley during the long process of exploring the evolution of cinema. He debated with the prisoner the relative importance of films and actors and directors, but soon grew quiet. It turned out, that listening for the heart bequeathed a median’s voice, and actors spoke their lines again, chillingly present, the heart’s chords playing again. And Tinsley had it for the first time that cinema was Plato’s cave, a thing everybody knows for a while and poor people never forget or give up. He heard the chorus behind the lines.

     Now it was time to chain the heart to the law. Mustafa-irreversibly, the prisoner had given them his name though he suggested he shouldn’t-had followed the storks’ flyway from Europe to Africa-those importers of babies who nest in chimneys left fallow in summer. He crossed borders to find the meridian of the seasons’ cusp, where it announced its imperative to womb and astrology. He told them GITMO was where he belonged.

     Davis showers. The camp showers: A slab of concrete at the side of the barracks, open stalls save for a strip of canvas covering the strike zone in baseball, more or less. Tin roof, exposed pipes, indifferent lighting at night. A congregation of bugs and lizards. Davis, estranged from the experience of showering, less immersed and more conscious of it. Davis thinks: this place is like a toilet stall. He thinks: the congregations in stalls, in closets, belfries, confessionals, the migrations of things to them, to these portals or cloacae. A tree in the desert, he can see that, spokes churning in the mud and stars, the congregation there of phylum and hierarchies. Ourselves no less than a tree a conduit, a bagpipe clarion braying forms to answer its tragedy   The way the body assembles itself, an oubliette, a fountain, a confessional, a congeries of rank fertility excreted from mud, and the body’s acolytes, what’s abroad at night, not least the swan who heard the egg calling from the laurel, the longing Pygmalion driving desire to out, all the beasts of the field who in screwing encounter illumination, who within its corona course with joy. If he is crying, and possibly he is, is it worse here beneath a drowning cascade or are these tears generous with pity for everything? He feels someone staring at him from the skim dark. It’s Doris, the striping MP. She’s made up her mind about him even as he weeps for the prisoner pinioned on the cyclone fence who he loves with his whole heart returning from the desert with an olive branch.

     . Doris is offering herself to Davis, kind of. He’s finally ransoming his time with a tryst at the beach after finding no place where he could retreat, not even the barracks where she called through the screens-heroically if he believes De Lee. They’re sitting side by side, sand still simmering, sand fleas peppering their ankles. Refuse from the civilizations of the world washes ashore forming a hedgerow. The guts, De Lee tells him, listen to her, not a fair note in that body and she cries out for all she’s worth,. It’s a blessing, Davis, inspiring such ugliness to chime past better judgment. What courage she’s got going after a beauty like you. Go ahead, save the two of you, save us all, says rotten-toothed De Lee, slightly swallowing his words, a kind of anti-oratory to everything he says as if it’s either self-evident to you personally or else there’s no point to telling it. He is custodial of innocence and doesn’t hold it culpable. Folly is his single hope. Should we fail to err, we’ll molder without ever ripening. Caution is a mortal sin. His growl threatens a chortle. He’s learned from his own imposed distinction. He’s an advocate for the unspeakable and ineffable in flagrante delecti.

     She’s offering herself, kind of, because she’s not blundering, it’s still a parlay. It’s epistolary, like Paul. She’s a brawny thinker, a Jesuit of relations, carnal and contractual.  It’s a bullheaded push for symmetry. Still, it’s not selfish, though Davis is too green to shade in the degrees of charity or empathy-the balance between feelings and strategy-given in a carnal relationship “I’ll give you mercy. My girlfriend is a poet. The army’s the only place I can be myself. She’s witty and real femme, light as a feather. She didn’t call me brute, but I was loyal even when I fucked other girls. A brute has to love an angel, so why should she waste words?  She has no feelings; that’s why she’s elegant”. “So you joined the army“?

     And he thinks: I’ve never made love to a woman and probably now I could fuck one, and that would have been a feat once, being that wised up that I could fuck a woman for whatever you get out of it when it doesn’t have to mean anything, and even wiser, if it can’t ever mean anything anymore. And that might be the end of mystery, becoming the things that go bump in the night. But that’s not the mystery. It’s what’s happening with Mustafa. It’s still love and it’s clear to me that it’s the resurrection.

     “No.  I joined because I did have feelings. She was getting away with murder and she was so fine. She never needed to be touched but could get so much going from sensibility, so I went where you can’t get away with that.” She had been her lover’s straw dog for a man, and here was Davis, angel in form and all the things a man is and is forced to give up, all the tender things that are natural to the beast, the things her lover couldn’t see in Doris if she saw her as a man, and what the army could restore because of what it was, a man written large, his futility and mortality, his exile in heroism and stoicism.

       “What do you want? I have a loving heart. I’ll suck you off if I disgust you. I can give you a hand job. I’m tender. I’ll hold your cock so you can see the stars. I can beat the shit out of you and push something up your ass. I’ll stroke your hair while you nurse at my tit. There’s no other chance. It’s gone. It always was. Believe me, I’m your mercy like she never was to me.  I’ll save you from that.”

     They sat in the paling fringe of light from the base. In that bloodless light she was reading him ‘The Stolen Child’ when she put her hand on his cock and with loving servility milked him. She continued to read and she looked like a caroler. Finally, she looked up and let him into her eyes and he came moaning.

     She left him afterwards. He was lonely but he knew this was a richer feeling than if she had stayed, and so he wondered about her as if he longed for her. And maybe he did, wondering how she knew and thinking he was alone as she was alone, that she had made him feel as she felt and knowing how someone else feels makes you lonely. She handed him the book her girlfriend had given her without another word. Then she left and he doubted she’d chase him anymore. She loved this girl back in the world and she’d struck a blow for her own worth against that girl’s indifference; a blow for the value of the petty scale where her heart dwelt against the power of poetry, even of beauty, for the fallen form of the body, its expression limited to touch that still might reach you where love had retreated.

      Suddenly, he’s grabbed. “Did you do it, did you?” it’s his outfit, the whole bunch. De Lee has an arm across his shoulders. “He lollygags, we live.”

      They lounge near a plated and ragged palm. Where the light glances on the bay, the water looks like an oil spill, dead still and viscous. Bottles, and cigars laced with hash get passed between them. The fleas bite. It’s an old night. It’s an old sea. A ladling crescent moon labors out from the fallow waters. Davis lays back hash clubbed. Love will emerge from the water, slouching towards the moon. It will not find any flowers. There will be nothing to encourage it. It will force the flowers and then weep regret.

     “We’re celebrating. Doris and our darling Davis are dating. This is why I enlisted.” “Shut up, De Lee, I can’t hear myself fart” says Watson. 

     Watson caught your eye for being handsome, clean lines to strong features, no need for youth’s exoneration or dispensation or bonny high color. Square-shouldered, a square jaw, you could warehouse masculine virtues on his broad back-stoicism, literalness, stubbornness, simplicity-and miss something in his eyes-mischief in a word, but you were right about the shoulders, fortitude there, bravery, and so face to face challenge to his humor.  That first night when Davis and Tinsley returned late from the mink farm, Davis’ transparent skin fever-blotched from purge and epiphany, Watson had sat on his bunk and told him,   “Don’t try to stitch it together, Try valor”, He strapped Davis’ army issue watch on his wrist. They remove them when they go into the kennel. “The army is prudish and civil, like nannies. Imagine. An analog watch. Such faith in faith and recital” Now, he was again trying to mend Davis.   

     “Hey, we all enlisted for reasons-De Lee answering-“Davis and Doris are what the doctor ordered.  I called my mother a bitch. I was twelve, I think. I didn’t just jump in. It was just and I paid for its heartlessness. With my life, it turns out. By twenty-two I had had several lovers. I thought I loved them, one of them especially. I had pure compassion for her; she was a naked soul. Sobbed for the lost chick, tears and snot, gushing from the heart. Our love-making was violent. She was an innocent. It was Saint George and the dragon. She dumped me. She’d been stepping out on me all along. But, I never called her bitch. The whole thing with her was charades, unfit for the bedroom let alone the stinking sewer. I was the innocent for carrying the torch. That you can love so large and clear that you think someone has diminished. My mother, of course, not the girl and never the girl. I had to join the army. Where else can a saint go?”  

     De Lee is laughing. He would have a beautiful singing voice, this mumbling stentorian; the laugh comes unchecked from his gut, a resonant baritone lovely to hear. The interrogation music wafts through the night.      

     Miller, De Lee’s cherry, had an egg on his head frosted with a scab that oozed blood. No one took much notice of such things; the amount of time you were drunk and the work you did, you were always cut and scraped, red-raw and bumpy, bug bite acne and scaling. The army was menial labor. De Lee called Miller ‘deep’ but that just seemed a favor to him; he was a lug. Like an object, he had to be animated by an outside force. His face was broad, but his skull seemed to be under pressure from above, crushed downward, supporting a basket of iron ingots. His eyes were watchful, emptily watchful, without intent or censorship, just stuck on open in harmony with his passive entrancement.

     Things became pellucid as their chores simplified, that is, when they could throw no light. You couldn’t see them or hear them; they were axioms. They were chaining the prisoners in postures that would erode coherency in their bodies. Cuff them tippy-toe high to the cage so their hands puff up and their shoulders slowly dislocate, or crumpled up on the cement floor where their spines rusted and femurs and knees went akimbo. Chaining them was more refined than beating them up. Try as you might to systematize beating them, it remained participatory. The body improvised a bit or was cast to the winds, contingent, fluttering in huffing and puffing time.

     They were becoming ignorant and wise, informed within their posthumous realm. Dreaming and transubstantiation were loose cannons. You prayed for nightmares; they were splendid compared to their lightless routines. Maybe, they were the memories of heroes disgorged upon their deaths. Maybe, that explained Miller, memories or prayers escaping from misplaced destinies, oracles gone searching for newborns on the tit to shape. If you surfaced at night-everyone did, one eye in dreams the other in the slime trough night fever-you heard tears, cries, whispering, a chuckle: Homeless ghosts huddling around darkening embers.

     Miller rolled out of bed and hiked up his fatigues, even laced his boots, eyes open the whole time. He might have gone crazy or just come out of the closet about it, because little in his demeanor changed except that he was acting under his own initiative. Tinsley asked him what he was doing and he answered following orders, and before Tinsley could finish asking whose fucking orders he was talking about, De Lee made the choke it off gesture. My cherry, he lip synched. Miller walked out the door, and De Lee jammed on his boots, and strapped on his utility belt while in motion out the barracks, naked except for his underwear. Mount up. Two overboard.

     Miller walked steadily and resolute, De Lee following a discreet distance behind. After spotting them in the morgue light they had little trouble catching up. When De Lee heard their boots he turned to face them clutching his balls-can the buffoonery-and Tinsley signed caution and quiet. Miller headed toward the sea. As they approached Davis saw there was a full moon trailing a gown of light on the water. You didn’t notice such things in camp. Miller stopped at the edge of the sea. After a pause, he continued into the water and De Lee sprang after him and caught him in a bear hug, cheek to cheek. Miller awoke in a panic, meaning to thrash about, but De Lee had him. It’s okay, sweet baby, we got you. 

     Miller has no practice at sleep walking. He’s never remembered a dream before, certainly never been possessed by one. He doesn’t read poetry. A woman had called him with her singing. She lived in the sea. He could join her. She had a place down there made out of the sky and stars that wheeled through the sea sunrise and sunset. He could stay down there. He’d have to give up some stuff. It seemed worth it when she sang.

     Davis sits in the empty mess hall with the Yeats anthology Doris gave him when she left. Maybe it was some kind of retainer he should take as sincere since the heart burns with the punk kindling it is given, flailing in temper tantrums, plots, allergenic horniness, flickering, guttering.

     The mess hall has plenty of flies; terriers of shit have found the mother lode. They don’t exist in a perpetual frenzy. No less than angels they are compelled to honor a Sabbath based on a cosmic calendar. They rest at night, bejeweling electrical cords, and return to meditation at the first chance if disturbed. Something approaches more penurious than madness with its posh fictions. A thing that rejects even the numinous refractions around shit and blood: A dreadful lucidity. The other stuff is being peeled away. Miller consigned it to the moon. Subtracted at GITMO what might lead a man to intuit benevolence in the world, or, at least, some congruent and so hospitable coincidence wrapped to his existing. What he might use to recall himself, a meal, a wash, a hug, a tuft of grass to sit on, unnecessary blue in the sky, beauty in any guise, are stripped, all those occlusions the soul puts between this fierce lucidity.

      Davis again reads ‘The Stolen Child’. He’s going to write home. Maybe Doris gave him the book so he could figure a way to do it.

     Mustafa is being tortured under interrogation. Now’s the time to squeeze the juice from the fruit before it rots. He doesn’t have to be chained all the time when he’s returned to the cell. Davis doesn’t dream about the moon or about Mustafa. He loves him and nothing in loving him needs caching or escape from this scouring lucidity. No word, no song, no poem or dance, no pulse or feeling in his body that must search for dwelling. Davis is learning to whirl. Tinsley watches for the Mp’s, then they switch and he watches for Tinsley.

     Davis writes the letter. It’s about loving Mustafa. It’s got the sluggish moon and sea in it. It’s got a rock tide has left behind with the dragging gown of the moon stenciled in the wet sand. He doesn’t know how long he works at it. He reads it. It’s about the sand fleas. It goes like ths: We have room for the Haitians because we turned them into fleas. That’s all he wrote. He stuffs it in his back pocket. It’s a message he doesn’t want to lose.

     On his way back to the barracks Davis meets an MP. He shoves him hard in the chest. The MP flips him down in no time and starts jamming his crotch into his butt. He starts to pull down Davis’ pants. Davis laughs and the guy gives up the project. “You’re with Tinsley, you guys are all nuts,  Davis laying on his side propping his head on the flying buttress of his right arm, feeling happy. “Ye of little faith. Eyes that do not see.”  

     De Lee focused on getting Miller discharged. That’s not going to happen, Tinsley tells him. Let’s get him out of here. I want my cherry to go home. They won’t do it; you know they won’t do it. We’re going to talk to some brass.  No, Tinsley says, we’re going to Cuba.              

      The navy runs the cocaine they collect in busts and controls the real port so they make untold millions over-ordering for the PX and the rest of the base, siphoning that stuff and selling it to the Cubans and other South American ports of call, but they do not deal in hash, and have no problem with the army’s puny side show including small whiffs of rum and cigar smoke that doesn’t cut into their business. Tinsley leaves the barracks to make the arrangements and collect the money from his clients. He’s gone until after midnight and when he returns he opens up a foot locker and issues the cherries Cuban shirts and pants on the tab. He measures the clothes against their shoulders and waists, tongue in the corner of his mouth. He’s good at it; the clothes fit, unlike their fatigues. Then comes shoes, and they are an excellent item, a basket weave, six eyelet wonder. Nearly weightless in your hand, tanned leather clear-polished and glowing.  To top it, a Panama hat that he tilts smartly, not rakishly on their heads. Not whoremongers, business agents.

     A couple of days later, at daybreak, they launch from near the air strip, Tinsley still collecting orders. The truck driver forks out a wad of bills and a list. They clink and rattle along, the flatbed loaded with corrugated cartons filled with empty rum bottles. They’ve got Coca-Cola for the poor Cubans who’re addicted to it after all these years, in glass bottles because that’s respectful of transactions and of history. Tinsley is a fundamentalist free marketeer and doesn’t like money but the world has been led astray and he just considers it grease: a dirty, slimy substance that reduces friction. Cartons of cigarettes, no mean outlay and a complete loss but they’re a thing of beauty that does, as beauty is required: blond, fragrant tobacco in their chaste cartridges on regimental parade, the heraldry on the magazines-the old standards confined stateside to dying hobos, jazz musicians and poseurs, all those rank and perfumed, seasoned mourners and torch carriers. A complete loss, brotherhood always is, a victorious army is beneath contempt and eulogy, but the harmonious Sabbath-labor gestating generosity-complete gain. This is currency and capitalism.

     Two Zodiac craft waiting for them on a sand spit, outboards flipped piggy-back. They take off their cocky shoes and pants and load the craft from shallow water, but half beached for an easy shove.  And like it is in this world in which all prayers are confessions of doubt, without further ado they commit themselves to the miraculous mundane-brine, blue, wind and sun, those rampant, miscreant urchins of pre-literate creation.

     Tinsley has the tiller on their boat, De Lee on the other. Watson and his cherry, Yodler, complete their craft, De Lee and Henshaw with their cherries crew the other. The outboards are over-powered and throw deafness over them, a sequestered privacy. Davis is in free fall, suspended with the birds, up with the birds in the blue dome. It would be the frigate birds might bewitch iron to bloom-black bird sailing up, swallow tail, rapier wing and the heart of a corsair worn on his breast-free iron from its drear mongering in chains. There’s a pull goes against its tasks would pop a chiming reveille from it.

     They’re all so lovely. What a labor it is keeping the base from spilling into the sky. This is full time, night and day, and it gets worse, you have to stopper every leak, what punctilious work it is, considering the tremendous scale of life’s inertia. Look at Davis, he’s got his head thrown back to show his white throat, and he is aware of how red his lips are and of every unlikely pastel shade he’s been given for no useful purpose but to bloom. Why, the eyes are made to settle on this flower. No wonder that against this everywhere suction you just have to chain matter to the floor, gravity being insufficient and amenable to interpretation.

       They’re all really lovely. You can’t help laughing.  Why not strap a flamingo to a plow? No, a salmon. Why not strap a salmon to a plow, or make bread from a lily?  Oh yes, several unexploited technologies come to mind before putting boys in the army. How can they resist themselves? Too much is refused through purpose. How futile it is. We’ll all be forgiven.  It pops out with Davis’ laughter. 

     Tinsley catches Watson’s eye and points to Davis. Davis is laughing hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. Davis has just realized they will be forgiven. Beauty is every bit as gratuitous as an empty universe. He’s homesick for GITMO.

     A navy patrol boat is steaming straight at them, churning foam at its bow. At a hundred yards it yaws sharp to port and all hands on deck flip them the bird, which Tinsley pro forma returns. Then the two Zodiacs turn to ride the wake heaved their way. The navy is making a point to the Cubans. They accompany civilian vessels entering and leaving the bay, and the Cubans are not meant to forget it. More important for them to remember, any business done with Americans is controlled by them.

     They’re greeted like a wedding party. The dock is lined with stringy guys in shorts and flip flops, and they rush to tether the boats and help them ashore, elegantly guiding them by the elbow. Ashore, having braved about twenty minutes of polished water and sixty years of interlocutory horseshit, they run a gauntlet of abrazos from leathery guys built like jockeys, ropey muscles and tumescent veins, long-lashed eyes and laugh lines grooved deep as the bone, and smelling like everything good that hunger inspires. Everyone stinks at GITMO. The prisoners do not just smell of shit and urine, there’s another smell that leaks from their pores, a vapor deeper than sweat. It gets worse over time. But, the GI’s stink too. It’s your emotional shadow. It’s different than the smell the prisoners give off, but like theirs it’s worsening over time. Stale, the way stale smells, its denigrating alchemy, and these guys don’t have it.

     The Cubans will unload the boats, but no rush. They’re docked at the funkier part of the port, where the fishermen embark and return. Ships dock farther out where there are some sling cranes to off load pallets from a hold. Tinsley has business to discuss with the harbor master, the one fat guy in the place, but everybody is invited. Tinsley smokes a gigantic cigar with full caparison, savoring it with a gentlemanly mix of gratitude and entitlement. There is a demitasse of espresso on a wooden table that has been brought out on the dock, and Tinsley has crossed his legs at the knee joint to imply stoutness in his thighs. The world over a stout man is a cause for celebration. Cigarettes are distributed along with bottles of coke. This is capitalism, and frankly, the navy has emasculated it with its teleological approach to gain. There is nothing Apollinaire or financial about it when it’s done right, and out come guitars and mandolins, fat snapping in oil drum fryers, and voices singing and laughing.

     Swallows in robust embonpoint flit and dart along splintery quays, roosted in the near-derelict corrugated tin warehouses. Nothing gets done that would refute Ecclesiastes. Things are laid close to hand and what’s not in reach has been forgotten, among them profit that the moment’s tissues can’t bear. Davis roams around the port crossing paths with the other cherries lost in this separate kingdom. He finds Miller at a scanty dump of bleached boards and rusty oil drums. Miller’s eyes are set wide with large irises and slightly droopy lids. They’re unnerving because they have the dilute focus of a grazing animal that is impossible to engage. They’re a strange color, a luminous grey like moonlit fog. Miller says, “Period”. That’s all, just “period”.

     They take a Frankenstein-sutured cab to the town and a thirty year old whore falls in love with Davis for his ridiculous, angelic blondness, or really with its flagrance, its bold and helpless irony. As well as a whore, she’s a polymorphous agnostic, a redoubtable skeptic delighting in surprise, virtue, flatulence, and delight itself.  She makes less than a car washer stateside as a practicing obstetrician/pediatrician. She’s thin and a bit herky-jerky, intellectualized in the way she moves, a bit dowdy, but her angles and cotter pined joints can be stylized into a vamp’s moves, and given an American cigarette she’s game for the theater. Sex is absurd; thankfully, after a while; she can strike sparks off the paradox as parody falters. She comes over to their table. Eight guys in Panama hats with cigars in a square in the city of Guantanamo, and if that’s not a howl then what is? Guantanamo has none of that colonial architecture found in Havana, it boomed along with the American base and there’s nothing endearing about it except this surreal group of guys at the table with their frothy imitation of Cuba Libra, the drink, not the politics. She spots Davis as a virgin, less by his bloom than by that watchful, benevolent omniscience only a virgin can have, although most don’t, and that also occasionally results from suffering violence. Her English is lush; she enjoys the sprung poetry of speaking in a foreign tongue, not just the liberation or costuming, but the whole futile mishap, revels in it, though she is fluent and keen. But, she doesn’t understand the echelons of angels, the disinterested despair in the higher orders, she hasn’t had the chance. Ushering babies onto the carousel with bittersweet grief for their avidity is several spheres below cutting their tethers and launching them into a sidereal oubliette.

     Tinsley’s troops are no longer hag-ridden by imagination. What becomes of a virgin without imagination? A virgin may expect epitome, clarification, the harmony that surrounds satiety. Few are likely to be born immune to the erotic that if only for the instant discovers and reassembles the shattered vessel. Then what of the razed virgin for whom nothing remains echoing? His world already realized, how indistinguishably it might be superimposed on the one sex can offer; the fleshy oracles already having spoken. Glimpsing cradle to grave in an instant, without imagination how will he keep in mind where in that ecstatic grief he is, just which present the body has become in the white light of recognition?

     But, Tinsley supports the reasonable in lieu of the rational, and so the squad goes on a promenade with a bevy of whores. Davis may look at the ankles of his date and the fluting of her calves, and the tendons on the back of her hands and the hazelnut knuckles, and these Cuban girls can flirt better than American girls can these days, be pretty without being sluttish or athletic, and maybe it’s only whores in poor countries that can do that anymore, be happily alluring, because they’re out of date like the cars and are trying to be attractive in a stumbling way that’s vulnerable and courteous, not that it has to work like this, but it is, partly because Tinsley whose got the purse believes in trade, not money, believes in goods for goods. They go to a baseball game in the city’s stadium and it’s the size of a stadium for spring training. Davis never played baseball or went to a game and it shouldn’t be tender to him, but it is, seeing the kids near his age playing the game under the eyes of their families and their old coaches, moving in the open, maybe more than anything else the fielders loping on the stubble in the slow-motion from long distances and premonition, loping long and smooth in the funky stadium, young and loose under the gaze of their families. And he’s got his whore who is luscious undone by a fumble, side-splitting undone or woebegone with empathy for a pointy shouldered fuck-up spotlighted out there in center filed; his whore who shows him her knees and stuffs the overflow of food back in her mouth with her fingers and then licks them clean, not suggestive of anything but pleasure right there, and who gets the something baffled in him by the day, a confused estrangement that resembles shyness and touches his cheek with her palm.            

     The boats are loaded by the time they return to the docks. Tinsley has bundles of clothes he picked up in town. When these are loaded, they’re ready to shove off. The sun has less than an hour of yellow left. They’ll make it easily. Returning at night, someone would shoot them as assholes. The navy patrol paces them, taunting Tinsley through the megaphone. Hey, Tinsley, you got some illegals?  Chinese, maybe, Haitian, what you got? You got some pootang for us? You are a degenerate and a pervert. We got to search your assholes, see if you’re importing communist sperm. Fuck the army and fuck you. And they steam off.

     The way its organized, the cherries lift the cargo from the boats and tote it to the truck and hand it up so the vets can stack it for delivery. It goes like this for a few minutes, ten maybe, the vets stacking, the cherries barefoot, sand caking their feet, a portage caravan, when De Lee looks up from where he’s just aligned a box, and flies out of the truck. No other way to describe it, but Davis is running even before De Lee hits ground, rolls and regains his feet. Watson and Tinsley are right after them. No way Miller could have been gone long, and like that full moon night, he’s walking without haste, steady and sure, but he’s almost there, impossibly, able to fly like De Lee flew, lifted in a penumbra of immunity from causal links. He’d just been toting the boxes and he never broke pace when he handed the last one up, same rote pace exempt from motive and gravity, beneath the attention of physics as so much is that can break its laws without a residue of consequence. He’ll get there before they can get to him; the point is to get De Lee. The fuselage of the chopper is somewhat locust-like, if the catapulting legs were removed, a bundle of shoulder that lifts the axle of the rotors probably twelve feet, but the blades droop at this low rate of spin, and Miller’s hop is enough and his head disintegrates. They all got there the same way. Astrology is the physics of plenitude, but Miller, Davis, and the vets operate in an empty cosmos where nothing intervenes with symmetry. Things complete themselves to extinction because existence is an anomaly.

     Watson, Tinsley and Davis can’t hold De Lee, he’s foaming at the mouth and his eyes are rolled back in his head and a free hand lands like a sledge. They tackled him but Watson will have to choke him. The pilot of the chopper is moving towards them with his pistol drawn. Miller’s corpse was tossed and got twisted like a pipe cleaner doll. The pilot is going to kill them; they put this on his conscience. Somebody grabs his wrist. The sun is big and red. Assume a universe sprinkled with broken glass and a sandy asteroid with a cage. A sun dies every day, but there’s another one evicted for the next day. This is all you get, and the circling absolutes, a rotating chopper. And the moon, but you got to die to get there. That’s your job. The sun’s been rehearsing you.

     If only he’d waited, but he was a youngster with festering energy and energy is always evangelical and incongruent with circumstances. If only he’d waited, with age that maddening sense of self could have worn away, the rage to know yourself as a bride, until one day when you’re not noticing it was simply gone, rage and self, and the murder superfluous. You could live without giving offense to anything.

     Officially, Miller died in an unfortunate accident. Davis becomes De Lee’s cherry to verify the statement. Tinsley will get the replacement. De Lee presses Tinsley to bring him one of those cellophane bags with gum-backed glow stars, planets and comets from the PX across the bay that serves navy families. He sticks the cosmos on the ceiling over Miller’s bed.

     A sergeant comes by with new orders. Davis has seen him during mess over at the NCO’s table. Sergeants age differently than commissioned officers; they put on layers of sullen fat. They’d fit in with a civilian police force; they’re punching the clock and going for their pension. For the next week Foxtrot Squad will be rotating with other barracks patrolling the beaches to protect egg laying sea turtles. They’ll be issued rifles and they’re to shoot any Cuban national attempting to raid the caches. The army is cooperating with an international wildlife fund. They’ll return the rifles before returning to barracks. A gunnery sergeant will collect them by number. 

      They fan out along the beaches, rifles slung over their shoulders, mule dick flashlights slapping their thighs. De Lee and Davis walk through the cloying sand to the stretch of beach they’ve been assigned.  The sun is level on the horizon, huge, a pinkish hue they can look into. It could stop here for the two of them, for ever. All of it that they could have, to have never been, replaced by nothing, not even the inner caress of relinquishing it. The sea is inert and foreshortened. It’s the end of the last day. They sit. They’re not waiting. The last day is over; they’ve seen the sun dying.

     And then she comes with the full moon high, She fights the moon but is hauled up helplessly, dragging her chain-mailed flippers through the sand, victimized matter. The sea is a mirror to blackness, a transparent pane, and she was weightless in the void and now creation rides her, the whole universe forcing this enormous, futile shield out on shore. The sea lanes were measured out later and their geometries applied backwards long after heaven had wrested its toll from darkness, and she is tossed out on the wash of that first violent act as was the grieving moon. She begins digging. She is awful. She has no ghost. She is barnacled and rusted. Her eyes have no light, like the new moon, and they are crying.

     Miller walked into the dying sun. The moon spun the same song for Miller and this other naked piece of matter whose one inspiration into form is pain. The pain came before the soul and will vomit up another heaven when this one dies.

     Foxtrot patrols the rookery for a week. They accompany their charges back into the lachrymose void. They stake the nests with yellow pennants. They interdict sorties by palm rats. Some of the turtles are collared by six-pack corsets, bags, or net floats. They free them with wire cutters and commando knives. Nobody really sleeps for a week. They’re salvaging verses from the siren Miller heard.  

     Davis and De Lee assist in an interrogation. They’re not brought in for the talkie-talk part of the process-assuming there is such a part-their role is additional tenderizing than what they had been applying in the cells. Interrogations are prosecuted in a cell block a half click or so distant from the kennel. It’s designed like a blockhouse; brute hulk of cement without windows. Prisoners are hooded and shackled when they’re transferred there.

     Davis and De Lee wear their regulation fatigues. They’re invisible here. The place is run by civilian contractors and specialists and civilians can’t see soldiers, only uniforms. Davis and De Lee don’t know why regular army is being introduced into this sanctum. Soon they decide its contempt. It’s ambient here, like disinfectant in a hospital.

     They’re directed and monitored by a physician, white smock and a stethoscope dangling from his neck. He wears plastic gloves and he smells from soap and cologne. He has an intelligent face, long and narrow with a high-bridged nose and a sensitive mouth, pale lips held only loosely together, the merest sheen of saliva on the inner labia of the lower one. His skin is lovely and chaste, especially noticeable on his forehead with its filigree of veins at the temple. Davis sees that he is insulted by this assignment, and this is the extent of his participation in it: the injury to his self-regard.  He conducts them with silky gestures of his long-fingered hands that make light of Davis and De Lee, of any will or choice or awareness they might have..

     The least the doctor can do is butt out. His objectivity and callow gravity is rude. At the kennel, they are etching an exquisite figure. Within the refuse they are discerning a shattered figure. Amid the noise blared to exterminate sleep, they can already hear voices. They’re turning into goldsmiths, rapping on the prisoners and heating and tempering them. They are forging a destroyed figure from his scattered parts. How fine this glowing shroud they are spinning from mineral, each blow threatening to rupture it into light. They mean to reassemble him. The naked prisoners, figures of kinship, this intense rejection they require from you-an impossible act with them inhabiting you until you can’t wash without skinning yourself, their blood and muck inseparable from yours. A blood brotherhood of the excommunicated and the damned, palpably abandoned, the lost figure is traced in the filth, shinning within it, and the temporal authorities are clabbering into the abattoir with their campaign for sense.

     The doctor has them water board the prisoner. Board at a slight decline, he tells them without looking up form a clipboard with a check list he’s supposed to follow. Prisoner’s feet strapped to the higher end. Place this rag over his face. Pour water from this pitcher on the rag, just below where you see the nose sticking up. Ecstasy is the oracle and least welcome at its inspirations are those who decrypt meanings separated from song and howl. These excesses, most profligate of them being life, are wasted on the dispassionate. Under this tone deaf guardian, the prisoner drowns and a song is unheard.

     They don’t feel him go. He’s been absorbed by indifference. They take off the rag, he’s supposed to be gagging, but he’s dead. The doctor puts the stethoscope to where his heart should be, in his breast, and it’s not there and he doesn’t start any CPR. He steps back with the same casual boredom of a plate umpire calling a ‘ball’. “He’s dead” he says, and looks theatrically at his fingernails.

      De Lee and Davis undress the doctor with the dominion of tailors, and he doesn’t rebel.  They tie him to the corpse in missionary position.    It’s like dying in a dream. You’re supposed to wake up, but sometimes you don’t and you’re in your corpse and the story continues including these nuptials. The army put him through medical school and now he’s paying the piper. There was this tub in medical school with body parts from several bodies floating in formaldehyde and you could fish out an arm or head and bone up for an anatomy test, and he survived that with just this bad dream that he hadn’t remembered before.   

     De Lee and Davis have just killed a man, and he was their only reason for living. These prisoners have become their sole means of support; it’s one of those everyday travesties like love, always inappropriate, the soiled miracles each day in the life of the soul that happens wherever the will can’t reach. At GITMO each murder buries childish things, until it happens-as it may for the doctor, they’ve given him the chance-as it happened for them and does for the dead and the dreaming, the world can only be remembered as a beautiful song about heaven.    

     The halls in the interrogation unit are cool and still. The prisoners are kept in cells behind solid metal doors. Each cell is sound-proof. Any screams the prisoners hear are piped in. Every sensory input is under the control of the intelligence psychiatrists. Mustafa has been here a week. They follow the halls sliding back the steel shutter on each cell door until they find him.  The sentry is wearing a silver bracelet. He unlocks the door.

     Davis and Tinsley had watched Mustafa twirling in his cage back at the kennel. His face is shinning, head thrown back to the cement ceiling that doesn’t even have Miller’s glued stars on it. Outside Davis tries it, and he gets a hit of heaven, the lift of the centripetal he hasn’t felt since childhood. A hit of heaven but he’s dizzy too fast and he has to stop and he knows he is losing the glow generated by the turbine. The ground rocks and he stands on the cradle or the dinghy or the water itself. He’d forgotten how he used to have the beat of all this stuff, at least the beat, timing his heart to it or vice versa. Running in loops to feel the hand and never outrace it, lifting him when before it would drop him shocked and marooned, lifting him aboard, hand to heart, mate and partner, the first coupling that the next should reawaken and whose chance was lost until now.

     He’s dropped back, wobbling, but he’s got to try again because the feel is there, valid, sweet as natural, supple and coordinated here, at home, lounging out and quick, stretching its limbs everywhere. And he hears Mustafa, and that’s impossible because they always run tapes of heavy metal music and they run it backwards at full volume, and they run tapes of tortured people screaming, but he hears him. Singing. .

     It began there. Because we all heard him in the torture chambers. It begins with us taking him from the kennel so he could teach us to twirl because we fell over when we did it and because Miller sprang into a twirling rotor. We didn’t have any trouble getting him outside because the MP’s heard him too, and they came along. And we were all better at twirling than you would have thought. When you get the spinning down, get the footwork right and let the dizzy go, you lift up and drill down at the same time. You get the genius of a lot of things when you stop being dizzy at the one place where you are because it’s everywhere and you didn’t really fall off yet, so you can lift and drill just like a tree and get it that all that maple is nothing less than this, what you’re up to while spinning, you’re the sap that freed the tree to bloom its twirl, and you hear the singing everywhere.

     What goes around comes around, they say, so it’s never lost. And once we got the momentum it just had to go the way it did. Those big transports seem to float in the sky, bulbous as water wings, and the red sun along with them, the horizon glowing. It could be a dream; so many times you dream the sky as descending heaven, thickening and slow with heaven filling. We got clothes for twirling, give Tinsley credit for drawing the clothes in with the hash shipments. The real articles were located, the flight crews traduced into fable, shipping white and red, sashes and slippers, flowing, white, loose, fantastical for the world, flying to GITMO what grew in the desert flush up against all the stars, spun in the constellations.

     Mustafa never told the interrogators he’d been thrown in the hopper because he was loved. That was why everyone was there, and that’s why we’ve got them all, every last one of those battered and broken luckless bastards, prisoners, guards, and me, Olsen, freeing each other from exile. We bathed them all, and we did it carefully and we clothed them in white clothes from their home, and when we had washed them and put oil on them, we washed each other and it had been a long time for us, we couldn’t do it until we had bathed them. I’d never bathed anyone else before and it comes on you that before this you’ve never really bathed yourself, either. Until now you despised yourself and bathing was inquisition. We are also dressed in white, our uniforms are scattered on the ground.

      

 

                                                                   

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