Formation Read online

  He ignores me, pulling at my hips to hitch them up higher, to give him better access. “I don’t know who you are,” I say, and it’s the start of my protest, my way of saying I’m not okay with this, because I don’t know him, and that’s important to me. I don’t have sex with men I don’t know. I don’t have sex with anyone at all, save for the on-and-off-again lover stationed some hundred miles away. This isn’t supposed to be happening. I plant my knees, trying to push up, to low-crawl away, but he bears down, pressing his weight onto my back, pinning me in place. “I don’t know who you are,” I say again, louder this time.

  “Yes, you do,” he grunts between thrusts. “I’m Kevin. Kevin Hale. You know me.”

  I know the name, vaguely, like a dim recollection, some analyst in another platoon but it’s reaching, stretching for a memory. “I don’t know you.” My upper arms hurt, but I don’t know why; the back of my skull hurts, and I don’t know why. There’s a short flash of a memory, of my head bouncing off the white brick wall, of hands digging into my arms, but it’s too fast, too inexact, and instead I try to squirm, shift my hips away. “What the hell are you doing?” I ask, or at least I mean to ask in English, though it probably comes out in Japanese, because I’m drunk still and quick, easily accessible emotions always translate better in Japanese when I’m drunk. Senseless words tumble out because nothing makes sense anyway. もうやめて, I demand, said angrily, said loudly, said more than once, and he’s getting angry now. His body stretches over mine, sweaty, naked flesh rubbing against my back, and I cringe, wanting to swipe away the sweat, the touch of his skin, but I can’t get up, can’t get my limbs to coordinate, to cooperate. “¡Cállate!” he hisses into my ear, lips pressed against the lobe, hot breath ruffling my hair. “¡Cállate! ¡Cállate! See, I can speak another language, too.”

  Then there is another trip into the black hole, moments sliced out of my brain, gone, and the next thing I see he’s pulling out of me, climbing off the bed, not looking at me, seemingly disinterested. I scramble to the far side of the bed, clutching a pillow to my chest, fingers digging into the fabric, using it as a shield against my nakedness. There is a silence as he dresses and I watch warily from my corner. “It’s okay,” I say, for some reason trying to normalize the moment. “It’s not like I don’t know what rape is.”

  He looks up from fixing his belt, flashing a half grin. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  My mouth is wired shut. I want him gone—out of my room, no longer in my space. I pull the pillow tight against me, as if I can drag it into my body and erase the places he has been inside me. He’s dressing too slowly, moving too leisurely. I just want him gone.

  “Call me if you want to do this again sometime,” he casually adds as he grabs his jacket.

  I stare back dumbly. I don’t know who this woman is. I should scream, rage, throw the pillow at him, grab the books off my desk and hurl them one by one at his head, grab the chair by its back and swing it into his chest. But instead I cower, heart pounding painfully against my rib cage as he leaves, hearing the click of the door lock in a way that will never be warm and comforting again.

  I wait. One minute. Two minutes. Until I can’t wait any longer and I scramble off the bed, grabbing wildly at the clothes on the floor, yanking on an oversize black T-shirt, hands shaking. I crack open the door, staring into the empty hallway. The light against the wall flickers and I hesitate, ensnared in the doorway, staring intently at the stairs he had to have used to leave the floor. I stare hard, waiting to hear boots on the steps, a shadow across the wall, so hard that I forget to breathe and I finally suck in air, a loud, wet sound in the emptiness. When I’m certain he’s left, that he’s not coming back, I dash across the hall. I slap my palms against Andres’s door, my throat too tight to scream and my knees too weak to hold my weight.

  The door next to mine cracks open and I twist quickly, flattening against the door, hands clutching at the doorknob that won’t turn. Sergeant Rivera stands in his doorway, dressed in sweatpants and a PT shirt. He regards me softly, saying nothing, his forehead pinned together in sympathy, his eyes telling me he knows. He must know, yet he stands there, doing nothing. How can he know, yet do nothing? I’d spit if I could find the rage in me to do it, but it’s all fled, leaving me trembling on bare legs, knees pressed firmly together.

  Andres’s door opens and I spill into the dark room, arms wrapped around my chest. I can’t form any words; I huddle, head bent down. I rush to his bed, grabbing blankets like shields, rolling them round and round me until I’m a bump under thick linen, knees, thighs, body clenched shut.

  “What happened? What’s wrong?” Andres stands by his bed, asking again and again, but I can’t say it.

  “Kevin Hale just left her room,” Rivera says, standing in the door. “I was afraid this was going to happen.” He shakes his head.

  His girlfriend peeks out from behind him, watching me with sad, dark eyes. A small, elfin girl, she is a military police officer and she’s the one who suggests, “Do you want me to call the MPs?”

  “Wait, he went back there after I left?” Andres asks, fuming. “After I kicked him out?” There is the rage: His teeth are clenched tight; his chest rises and falls rapidly. I hope it’s contagious. I want it to be contagious, but I can’t feel it. I just tremble and snivel. “That fucker,” he snarls, clenching his fists. “I’ll fucking kill him.”

  I only groan, wishing I could disappear, digging down further in the blankets. I don’t want them to look at me. I already hate the lilt in their voices—pity intermingled with outrage. I want to ask why Rivera did nothing to stop it, if he knew. I want to ask why he waited until I burst out of the room.

  It’s Rivera’s girlfriend who actually calls the police. I don’t know if I said yes, if I said I want to report it. I can’t stop shaking; I can’t lift my head. It doesn’t seem real and I want to peel off my skin, turn it inside out and scrape apart my insides, anywhere he touched, ball it up and throw it in the trash. Maybe burn it for good measure.

  If I had been a bit more rational, maybe I would’ve rested a hand on hers, said, “No, don’t call.” Maybe I would’ve just cried it out, scrubbed it away. Maybe it would’ve been okay and I would’ve gotten over it and moved on. But that’s not the way it happened, and which is worse? To be raped—one singular act done and then over with, or to be raped and turn to your command, to your lines of authority, your father figures, your abstract constructs of justice and integrity, to innocently curl up against them, whispering, “Save me; believe me,” and have them stare back at you, stone-faced? To have them hold you at arm’s length and announce, in a joint, resounding voice, “No”?

  * * *

  I don’t act like a rape victim, they say. I’m not sure how a rape victim is supposed to act, but apparently I’m not doing it right. They write that in the report—that I don’t act like a rape victim. The MP demands we conduct the interview in my barracks room. I hesitate at the door, loath to cross the tainted threshold. I pad into the room with bare feet and borrowed sweats. The room is a mess. I see it from an outsider’s eyes—the clothes strewn across the floor, the bottles of makeup scattered on the desk, the shoes that spill out from the open lock closet. It looks disheveled and irresponsible.

  The woman writes that in the report.

  Someone has placed my desk chair in the middle of the room and it’s startlingly out of place. Fingers clutching the bottom of the chair, my bare feet twisting on the tile floor, I stare down into my lap as the officer sits in a chair across from me. I can’t look her in the eye. She is rigid and terse in her black suit. I can’t hear her questions over the buzzing in my head. I ask again to leave the room—the air chokes me. But it’s seemingly important we linger here, facing each other in the midst of the dirty room and soiled sheets.

  I hang my head, muttering responses, not really hearing, not really responding. Maybe it appears suspicious, this inability to uncurl from myself, the unwillingness to engage with the
officer, but I don’t realize I’m already being scrutinized and questioned and mistrusted. I don’t realize it starts this early.

  An MP offers to take me to the criminal investigation department office and I’m relieved to escape the room. I scuttle out the door, shoulders slumped forward, feet shoved into shower shoes. This MP is animated and playful. He grins and assures me everything will be fine. He has a big smile and he makes small talk and I respond because I need to fill the space with white noise. I need it to distract me. I’m grateful for that small talk but it’s the wrong thing to do. “She didn’t act like a rape victim,” they’ll say.

  They’ll write that in the report.

  I don’t cry. I don’t know why that is. I should cry. That’s what rape victims do. They cry but I don’t and I don’t know why. They write that in the report, too.

  They take me to a medical clinic where no one is happy to be woken up at three in the morning.

  I inconvenience everyone.

  They put my feet in cold, metal stirrups. I’ve lost my underwear somewhere. I only realize this when they ask me to pull down my sweatpants. I contemplate that lost article of clothing. How had I gone from my barracks room, into the police car, and to the medic station to only now realize I’ve lost my underwear? Somewhere. I hope they don’t notice, as I place my heels onto the cold metal. If they did, would they think I’m one of those girls, someone who doesn’t wear underwear when she goes out, who doesn’t understand the propriety or necessity? I want my underwear back.

  I squeeze my eyes shut as they probe inside my body with cold instruments. From over my kneecaps, I see the top of an older man’s head and he fingers my vagina with stiff hands. It reeks of violation and I grit my teeth, gripping the plastic sides of the table, wanting to slam my knees shut, wanting to close myself off, close them out, because they’ve cracked me open with metal devices, left me exposed, with my legs flopped open like cold, clammy chicken wings.

  “I don’t see any semen,” the doctor accuses, calling out from the cavern of my body, and I don’t know what that means. He touches the cut at the edge of my vagina, noting the tear in the skin. It stings and I cringe. He pulls out the speculum, the long clamp sliding out with all the breath I am holding, released with a hiss, and I can finally press my thighs tightly together. If I could bind them in place I would.

  They give me shots for STDs, sticking needles in the meaty section of my arms. I sit on the edge of the examination table, shivering in a paper gown. All frowning faces are turned away. No one really looks at me.

  “Do you want the morning-after pill?” someone asks. She pours a handful of white pills into my palm before I answer. “They’re birth control pills but if you take a week’s worth, they do the same thing as the morning-after pill.” This seems sketchy to me. I stare at the pills sitting in my hand, trying to access a clear thought through the fog in my brain. I have the feeling that if I could go back to my teenage self, just scant years before, in the midst of all my Christian upbringing, someone would tell me this is abortion. Everyone would tell me this is wrong, this is murder, and then I drink them down, not dwelling on the moral implications, maybe because I’m still a little drunk or maybe because I just don’t care.

  One woman smiles lightly at me, patting my arm. I don’t know where she came from, this woman who, despite the late hour, is dressed in a pink button-down shirt and crisp brown skirt. She slips me a card. “No one can go through this without help,” she says softly. “You can come here and talk anytime you want. Anytime, okay?” She stresses this, making eye contact, holding my gaze with warm brown eyes. “Don’t let your command stop you.” She’s the only friendly face I see. She’s the only face I remember.

  They let me put my clothes back on and I still can’t look at the people around me. They’re passing shadows of sterile white and camo green. I wish the woman in the pink shirt would come back, but she’s gone and the military police drive me to their office.

  I move in a haze. Time and space have no meaning. I’m working on autopilot, like a little windup toy that moves this way or that, only as directed. They go into another room to do…something. I’m left alone in a bare room with only one cold lightbulb and a wooden bench for company. I curl up on the bench, pulling my knees to my chest, twisting my hands under my head. I close my eyes and I sleep to escape, huddled in that cold, empty room.

  I drag my eyes open when I feel a shadow looming overhead. A shape I recognize as First Sergeant Bell leans over me, bowed at the waist, staring down. He blinks dull eyes, hastily dressed in his uniform, and his white hair pokes out in odd directions. He says nothing. He offers me no consolation; he doesn’t ask what happened. I wish they had sent me someone I knew better, or at least someone who knew me at all. I turn my head away, tightening my fetal position and squeezing my eyes closed again. I notice Captain Wells isn’t here. He sent his First Sergeant instead, couldn’t be bothered to come down himself. I don’t know if he’s supposed to be here, if there’s some military etiquette he’s failing to uphold. Not that he would make me feel any better, with his cold formality. Tonight I suspect he’s just being lazy, sending an underling in his place because he has no intention of rousing in the middle of the night for one of those female soldiers he never wanted in his units in the first place. A former tanker commander, he prefers his units sans women and greets us with both confusion and indifference. Perhaps I should have known then, but I am still naive and hopeful.

  “We’ll do another interview in a week,” says a gruff CID officer, startling me awake. He stands in the doorway, fists planted on his hips. He looks unhappy. “When she’s sober,” he adds. He stares at me on the bench then waves me away. I’m relieved to be released.

  It’s already day, the sun just starting to peek out between the old brick barracks. I crawl into the back of the police vehicle. I have no small talk now. I just want…I realize I can’t have what I want. I can’t curl up in my bed to sleep—that desecrated haven holds no appeal to me. As I stare at my barracks, the windows all black and filled with slumbering soldiers, I realize I have nowhere to go. Simply by habit I drag myself up the stairs, simply by habit I reach my floor. But the door to my room might as well have been made of napalm and fire. I sway in front of it, lost, without a home, and realize I am going to have to sleep on the frigid tile floor in the common area.

  Andres, good, faithful Andres, must have been waiting for me. He must have stood for hours by his door, checking the peephole each time someone stumbled into the common room, because he opens his door when he see me standing there—listless and without purpose. He doesn’t bathe me with sympathy or pity. There is a type of cold fury in him that I appreciate. I want to wrap it around me, like a blanket, in the hope that it will wake me up from this fog. But I’m too numb to grasp on to it.

  “Locke said you can sleep in her room,” he says, knocking on Locke’s door. I think he must be reading my mind. I want to say thank you but I say nothing.

  “I took care of him,” Andres says suddenly. I blink dumbly at him.

  “I went to his room and broke a beer bottle over his head.”

  “You did what?” A hint of…something pierces through the haze in my head. “When?”

  “Right after you told me. I got there before the police did. When he opened the door, I smashed the bottle over his head. He fell on his ass and stared at me like a fucking dumb-ass. I said, ‘If you ever come near Dostie again, I’ll cut you.’”

  I almost smile. “Way to be the stereotype.” I like that I sound normal when I say this. I like that he did it, that my protective, macho friend had risked the police seeing him standing over a bleeding rapist, weapon in hand.

  Locke opens her door and her dark eyes are too curious, too bright. She wants to know what happened, how it went down, giving me that signature half smile. It seems too eager. I’m rude. I don’t answer her questions; I sidestep them and use the shower instead. I stand in the white tiled stall, clothes rolled in a ball in th
e corner. In the movies, the girl always scrubs hysterically, sobbing to herself. I don’t have it in me to do it. Instead I turn the water as hot as possible. My skin burns red and still I stand under the stream. I imagine the skin boiling away, peeling off and falling in wet clumps around my bare feet. I don’t cry. I don’t scream. My body slumps forward, an invisible weight resting on my shoulders, pulling me down, pooling into my fingertips and the bottoms of my feet. I don’t have the energy to cry. I don’t even have the energy to push the scalding water out of my eyes. Even here I’m still not acting like a rape victim.

  Andres brings me clothes from my room and I huddle in an oversize sweatshirt and flannel pants. Everyone’s awake but all I want to do is sleep. I crawl up to the extra bunk, press my spine against the wall, pull the blanket over my head, and escape into sleep.

  * * *

  I never go back into that barracks room. Every time I try, I stand at the threshold, balk, squirm, refuse. Andres, Diaz, and Locke team up to scrub the room clean, pouring bleach over the tiles, tossing the soiled sheets where I had thrown up at some point that night, straightening the shoes and uniforms, washing away any remaining suggestion, but I still won’t go in that room. Andres and Diaz offer their shared room, and sometimes Andres gives me his bed, but more often than not I sleep in the tiny space on the floor between the bed and the metal wall locker. The width is too small for my sleeping bag to fully unfurrow, but I don’t mind the tight space. Sometimes the cold metal against my back is reassuring. From the bed above me, the steady in and out of Andres’s soft breathing comforts me when the room is too black and I can’t fall asleep.

  If the command knows anything of this sleep arrangement, they say nothing, not even to suggest I sleep in Locke’s room instead, where she has a spare bed with no roommate. This suits me just fine. Ever since that first night Locke and I have been doing an uncomfortable dance, circling each other in a sort of silent civility as we briefly greet each other but say nothing real. An ugly word, a word now mine, fills the space between us, pushing us ever farther apart. It won’t be until we’re planted in the dirt of Iraq that our friendship will have a chance to bloom again, when, with the arrival of new commanders and the urgency of war, I will pretend to put all this rape business aside. When I am new again, the chasm between us can be bridged by normalcy.