Hide! You're a Woman

by Seetha Anagol

The Jeep tailgates us. I cower further down in the backseat of the taxi. We are in the Bandipur National Forest, bordering the State of Kerala, in South India, on our way to Calicut.

We race past the tall, dry sandalwood and teak trees, blurring browns, yellows and greens. The gray langur’s chatter is muffled and the occasional jungle fowl pierces the forest with its shrill ku kayak kyuk kyuk. The unexpected drop in temperature makes me shiver, and I cling to the warmth of the setting sun. Pulling the loose ends of my cotton saree over my head and shoulders, I bob up to check on Senthil, the taxi driver.

The headlights are on. Senthil glances in the rearview mirror, once, twice, and wipes his forehead with a brown hand-towel. With his free hand, he maneuvers the steering wheel deftly over the dirt road.

“Don’t look up, Madam. Please.” His thick, deep southern accent annoys me. I am already edgy with the tense situation in which we’ve found ourselves. I recoil from his warning and sink further into the seat.

The drunken yelling and singing from the jeep gets louder. I no longer hear the monkeys’ chatter.

This is the mid-90s. Non-profits working for the empowerment of women are preparing a policy document to present at the United Nations Conference in Beijing. A coordination unit has been set up in New Delhi and in Bangalore to execute the task, with support from several national and international donor agencies.

I have the exciting and critical task of coordinating the effort for non-profits in South India, with the assistance of an able, but small team. The time frame to complete the task is fast approaching. I’m scheduled to reach Calicut by dusk to meet with women’s non-profit organizations from neighboring areas, which work to improve the lives of indigenous tribal and rural women inhabiting the region.

Getting plane or train tickets to Calicut on short notice is impossible. The only option is a taxi. The shortest route cuts across the forest, where bandits and hoodlums haunt the road and rob tourists. I’ve been warned that to travel here  is unsafe for a woman.

The deadline to complete the assignment and my belief in the work we are doing propels me to make the trip despite the danger. Our office checks the taxi rental company’s credentials before hiring one. The rental company assures us that they will assign Senthil, a very reliable, safe driver. He often ferries passengers on this route to and from Bangalore to Calicut.

Shrinking down in the resin seat, I stare at the zig-zag patterns on the jute-mat at my feet and pray our tires will not blow out on the mud track.

Senthil hisses under his breath. “Oh, no … they’ll bang our car if they get any closer. I see their side flaps are folded all the way to the roof. The crazy men are waving toddy bottles in the air. Mam, hide! Please. At no cost should they see you.”

We are way past the police check post, where Senthil stopped briefly. Two guards snored on aluminum, green chairs, in their creased uniforms, basking in the late afternoon sun. One of the officers inspected the travel documents.

The Jeep was parked behind us at the check post. The men stepped out of the Jeep to smoke beedis. I got a quick peek through the side-view mirror and sighed. Five men in total. One had a baseball cap on, another wore khaki pants and a safari shirt. I assumed the man with the goatee was the driver, who had gone to pee behind the bushes.

“Bad men, bad business.” Senthil wrinkled his bulbous nose and turned on the ignition.

I shook my head. “Did you see how they tossed the cigarette butts and plastic bags out by the dirt road? Drinking in a moving vehicle? Tch.”

“Bad men, bad business.” After a pause he added, “Mam, these men can get nasty when they drink … um … toddy. Believe me, I’ve got into a fight or two with drunks on the road. I don’t want them to see you alone in this car … um … they even rape women in gangs, you know.” Senthil looked at me in the rearview mirror. His face was grim.

I nodded my head and closed my fists in frustration. Why do we women have to watch our backs always, the fear of assault, sexual or otherwise, restricting our movements at every step? Sighing, I distracted my mind by going over the approaching conference activities: need to get input from women’s groups in Hyderabad and Chennai, approve posters and local women’s stories to be published by our office, audit of budget for the first quarter, attend forthcoming regional preparatory conferences in Bangladesh and Malaysia ....

My distraction is interrupted. The Jeep is now next to us, side by side, sharing the narrow jungle path. Senthil is silent, almost in a trance. He maintains a steady pace with his foot on the accelerator. Why can’t he slow down and allow the Jeep to pass? Is he afraid that they will go ahead, block our way and force us to stop the vehicle? My heart is racing. My pale fingers clutch the folds of the crumpled saree. My tongue is as dry as sandpaper.

A moment later, our taxi jerks to the left of the road, as Senthil makes room for the Jeep to finally pass us on the right. The tires screech and groan. My elbow knocks hard against the side-door. A numbing tingle runs up my arm. I clench my teeth and choke on the dust in the air, kicked up by the vehicles.

The knots in my shoulders tighten and my legs are asleep. But my mind is hyper-alert. I thank my stars that the doors are locked. Huh, small comfort. Like it would prevent the bad guys from getting to me! I hold my breath. What’s next?

Piercing honks. Shrieks. “Woohoo, we did it! You slow idiot.” The Jeep zooms ahead. The sounds fade in the distance.

Stunned into silence, we don’t speak for the next half-hour. When at last I return to an upright position, I’m a tangled mass, emerging out of the rabbit hole—vertebrae by vertebrae. Stretching my aching limbs, I look out of the window the same time as Senthil does. The Jeep is nowhere in sight.

“Those drunken rascals just wanted to race us.” He wipes the sweat off his forehead again with his hand towel. “Whew.”

I attempt a weak smile. Both of us reach for our bottles, gulping water down parched throats like thirsty crows.

The women from the non-profit groups in Calicut include several demands in the draft policy document, mainly the immediate closure of toddy shops in Kerala and measures to stop violence against women. On the return journey, I’m in no hurry to take any short cuts, so I direct Senthil to drive the longer, but safer route.

Seetha Anagol lives in Annapolis, Maryland with her husband and daughter. Her short stories and personal essays have been published in newspapers in India and the U.S. She has just completed writing her first novel. 

Fragile Landscapes

by Gillian Haines

“The war made us all sick fucks.” Wulf rubbed his shaven head and revealed a shrapnel wound that skipped and puckered along the pale underside of his right arm. “I’m glad it’s starting to come out. You should check out the articles I’ve been reading. One in Men’s Health describes this soldier in Iraq. He zeros in on this kid just as the kid takes aim to kill him.” Wulf’s freckled hands grasped a phantom M16 and he mimed looking through the sights. “The soldier doesn’t miss, the kid dies, and the soldier ejaculates. He’s horrified. Ashamed. But later, he can’t climax without that image.”

Wulf dropped his voice to a tired whisper. “It’s not just that. There’s two things going on. National Geographic says soldiers are brain-damaged by their training even before they get to war. Every time something goes off, you lose something. You can feel it!” he said, placing his hands on his ribs. “Those I.E.D. blasts! After every battle, blood comes out your ears, nose, and throat. How can we not be fucked up?”

He looked at me without blinking for a long time, and I nodded. He’d been issued prison coveralls too small for his bulging thighs.

“I’ll read them,” I promised.

Eight years ago, when I first volunteered to visit four inmates, I wasn’t sure why I felt such a tremendous pull toward confined men when I was already giving too much to a husband who was trapped in a different type of ruin. I didn’t think it was because I grew up in a country founded by convicts, or even because the government had hung my great uncle for setting fire to a hayrick. Only now can I admit that suffering had isolated me and I thought I could understand the loneliness of prison.

I sighed. I hated that plain white, windowless visiting room. Above us, a florescent light buzzed and flickered. Those lights that cast no shadows seemed to undress us. “I’m so sorry. I understand your disgust for people who don’t want to know about what soldiers have to do.”

He nodded.

“You say were a good soldier and you were promoted to Sergeant. What made you good?”

“The ability to keep calm in chaos—the worse it gets, the more focused I become. I kept my team together and did the job, whatever the goals.”

“That steadiness in a storm, I’m like that, too. When my husband was in the ER, the family in the room next door shrieked hysterically. They carried on so much, the doctor threw them out. In that instant, I knew the icy calmness I felt was essential.”

John, my husband of twenty years, had lost a fifth of his brain to a stroke on the day we moved to Tucson, ten years prior. He’d been a genius. He still scored in the ninety-ninth percentile for some cognitive tasks but he scored in the first for quite a few others. His fertile mind had been excavated and I was still seeking him in jagged crevices. Peering into sinkholes. Truth be told, I was looking for myself in those same places. I left Australia to follow him and in America, I gave up a job to look after him. I’d been the wife of a charming professor but suddenly I’d not been able to leave his side. Even after he’d shrugged off paralysis and returned to academia, his disasters consumed my life: dousing bonfires he lit in the fireplace, turning off our stove’s hissing gas jets, racing across town to deliver anti-seizure meds that he’d forgotten to swallow, and shrieking as he readied to throw our daughter into the air and into the whirring blades of a ceiling fan.

Early on, I sometimes had to drag myself to prison, wrung out and depressed. But then I’d started to look forward to going. I wanted to know how the men were doing. I’d become used to bearing the weight of their conversations. At some level, I knew they made me stronger. I listened with my ear and my heart and I forgot myself. The prisoners’ complications made mine simpler. By making space in my mind for their voices, I re-set my attention away from the hurried world where I lived—a world that judged before a thought had been completed—to a place of receptivity and openness, where two people paced their breath and pulse. 

 I gazed at Wulf, relaxing in his seat while I perched on the edge of mine, despite an ache in my lower spine. There were no tables. Just four mandated feet of space between our knees. Although Wulf took his ease against the backrest, I had no doubt of his complete attention. He ignored the many distractions across the aisle—shapely ankles in strappy red shoes, lustrous brown hair pinned with a yellow flower, bright swirls on a floral dress—distractions he must have hungered for. Such intense focus was rare, even on the outside.  

“Keeping your men together must’ve been a challenge. Some must have been terrified.”

 “They watch. They take their cues from you. You have to tell them it’s all right, even if it’s not.”

I nodded. When my husband’s body had first writhed as though captured by an invisible predator intent on breaking his neck, I’d squeezed my eight-year-old daughter’s hand. John’s rehab hospital had trained me for that moment so I was able to say, “It’s a seizure. Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’ll just be a few minutes and Dad will be okay.” She had stared at me, wide-eyed and unblinking.

“Were you scared?” I asked Wulf.

“No. I trained for it all my life.”

“But at first. You couldn’t have imagined what it was really like. Surely, then.”

“Maybe. But your training takes over.” He laughed. “It doesn’t prepare you for the stench. Dead people stink! Everyone releases liquid shit when they die.”

Across the aisle, a baby wailed and a prisoner placed it over his broad shoulder. It quieted immediately, hanging like a limp comma in a pale blue onesie.

 Wulf snorted. “The Hajjis stink when they’re alive. Urgh! Sweat and piss, they don’t wash much.”

I didn’t react when he bad-mouthed his enemy. It was probably essential if you were going to kill someone. And I didn’t want to silence him.

“When you survive a battle, every cell feels alive. It’s a rush! Sexual arousal is common.” His eyes never left my face, gauging my reaction.

I nodded soberly.

“Rape happens every day. It’s not the rare thing the news makes out. Rape and killing. The Hajjis hate us and we hate them. You get to a stage where killing means nothing.”

With all my heart, I hoped this man I cared for was a soldier who had never raped. Maybe I was a coward but I never asked. In prison, the fortress of boundaries, I drew a line I never crossed: only ask when you can deal with the answer.

But without realizing, I crossed that line. I asked Wulf why he was sent to that prison, a facility that specialized in sex-offenders, snitches, ex-gang members and the chronically ill. I thought his war wounds had been the ticket.

His handsome face went wooden. Wulf always looks me in the eye but for a long moment he couldn’t. Someone thumped the vending machine. The microwave pinged and the smell of bacon disturbed the layered flavors in the air: a woman’s floral scent and the reek of a full diaper.

Wulf looked back at me and raised his chin. “Conspiracy to transport a minor over state lines for unlawful sexual purposes.”

I felt like I’d trodden on a landmine. His forty-five-year sentence was so long I’d wrongly assumed he’d done something traitorous. In all the years I’d known him, he never flinched at my probing questions and was prepared to show himself in unflattering ways. We’d talked about sex and lovers using anatomical terminology, not interested in salacious details but curious about the rules of intimacy, the accommodations and the friction. I never detected an unhealthy interest. When he said his cellie was a gunner, a prisoner who masturbates in public, Wulf was so indignant. He said he wouldn’t live with a guy who jerked off where people could see and he forced the guy to stop. I’d believed that meant Wulf wasn’t a sex-offender.

I don’t know how I replied to Wulf’s tense recital of his crime. Somehow I continued the conversation but afterward, I didn’t remember a single thing. I kept my appointments to visit other inmates but was ensnared by a numbing fog. I know I laughed with them but the only thing I remember is that the Kung Fu shoes had gone. Prisoners now wore pale grey Crocs. I drove home troubled, feeling slightly nauseous.

I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I’m naïve. I went over all my interactions with Wulf but found nothing creepy. Quite the opposite. We had different values and disagreed about everything but he never got angry. He’d crossed boundaries I couldn’t imagine: from idealist to cynic, patriot to mercenary, protector to killer. I thought violence was a sickness and he thought it was the only way. But he protected mentally feeble inmates from prison bullies. He gave welcome packages of shower shoes, soap and deodorant to new men in his block and he told them how to survive. He gave prisoners ideas on setting up businesses and had shown the newest one how to iron tortillas to make burritos.

I shook my head. What sex crime could be so horrendous that just planning it got him forty-five years? What troubled me most were my feelings. I still cared for him, the worst kind of sex-offender: one who had hurt a child.  

Home life with a man who’d become like an autistic person had prepped me for prison. I got better at relationships with men I couldn’t fathom. And over the years, I’d already worked hard to understand rather than condemn Wulf. When I learned that he didn’t believe women belonged in the army, I was surprised. His blue eyes had shone. “I’m reading this real good book on the differences between the sexes. It supports what I’ve always thought: a division of labor makes sense. Women can’t carry the weight in my pack and every woman in the army has mental issues.”

When I challenged him, he listened good-naturedly and let me tease him about outdated attitudes. This willingness to banter made it easy to accept his sexism. But when he absorbed the racist prison code, I was dismayed.

“I’m not ignorant,” he’d said. “I’ve met two blacks in my life that I liked. I understand what you’re saying about pre-judging.” The freckled pink skin on his bald head shone as he turned to the right and then to the left. “You say this. But now I live with them, I see that. They’re noisy, they steal, and they don’t raise themselves up.”

Oh, yeah? And I guess Obama raised himself too high. But I tried to imagine what would happen to me if I were locked up in a place where fear forces you to form alliances based on color. When your life shrinks to the size of a prison bunk, it’s not just your joints that knot. Your thoughts become contorted, too.

“You give me so much trouble,” I’d said. “I keep leaving here thinking, how can I care for you? You’re sexist. You’re racist. You’re suspicious of altruism. And you believe in eugenics, for goodness sake!”

An amused expression had animated his face. “I keep telling you, you haven’t had the experiences I have.”

          “You know, that’s a bit…” I’d paused and then went for it, laughing. “It’s arrogant. I will go to my death bed believing in kindness!”

Wulf had looked at me with such a glint in his blue eyes that I thought he wanted to scratch me behind my ears. “Look, I’m glad there are people like you. It makes everything I’ve done worthwhile.” In his mind, war was worth it to protect goodness, a worn and faulty rationale for violence, but I didn’t say so.

At some unknown point, we’d shared so much of ourselves, we became friends. “You’re it,” he’d said. “I need you. I need to talk to you about what’s going on because you’re all I have. You have no idea what you do for me.” Like most prisoners’ families, Wulf’s abandoned him when he needed them the most.

Ours was a strange friendship. A friendship that would never have had a chance if we’d met outside prison. But Wulf allowed me to witness his struggle to make sense of a thwarted life, even as I fought to love a husband diminished, a man whose needs thwarted my own once-cherished hopes. Wulf helped me inhabit more of the person I wanted to become.

One day, he had exhaled loudly and looked away. “I miss fighting.”

My smile disappeared. He knew I was a peacenik. “How can you miss war? The fear, the danger? The killing?”

“If I was out today, I’d sign up in a minute! For anyone.”

“As a mercenary?”

“Yep.”

“But you have sons! How could you kill other people’s children for a cause you don’t believe in or understand?”

“You think government-sanctioned killing is more legitimate than killing for money?”

My spit had evaporated. I slumped backwards and remained there while he watched me. “With wars fought over oil, you’re right.”

He nodded quietly.

“But that doesn’t make it okay! It’s not good for your soul.”

“It happens all over the world. Right now. And I’m good at it. Look,” he regarded me intently. “I don’t take pleasure in killing. I’m not a sadist. It’s a job. And I miss it. The intensity. It’s not fear. When you know you might die today, everything becomes crystal clear. It’s powerful to be with men who are good at what they do and who have accepted death.”

Shocked and at the same time, riveted, I tried to understand. “War must heighten everything. You live in the moment. And when comrades share that profound clarity, when they share the danger, and you trust them to watch your back, it must seem like a special brotherhood. Is that what you mean?”
          I watched his eyelids open very gradually until blue eyes locked onto mine. To call it a blink would describe the action but not the duration. At the same pace, he recaptured my own eyes and held them, nodding silently.

I understood that shared adversity unites. John’s stroke had been mine, too.

But I’d always imagined that soldiers overcame a reluctance to kill for duty and patriotism. Despite knowing that career soldiers existed, it never occurred to me that combat could exhilarate.

We lionize historical warriors like Patton and Lee, although both admitted to loving war, but it’s not acceptable for contemporary soldiers to speak unashamedly about their passion for combat. While I didn’t support the war Wulf fought in, I believe we are all responsible for the roots of conflict. And we set up young soldiers for isolation. After we train them to kill and they have achieved their purpose, their experience makes them social pariahs. I decided to deal with my discomfort at Wulf’s disclosures.

“It’s rare to talk like this,” I’d said, uneasy and fascinated. “Our values are so different and you must think I’m naïve but neither of us gets angry. I get to understand you because I’m not busy defending myself.”

I drove away from prison that day past desiccated creosote and wrinkled cholla, still green but wearied by drought. Mesquites thirsted for a rain that wouldn’t come, their canopies strung on branches like limp dishrags.

At the coffee shop, I sat beside my friend, Jim. “Now I know Wulf was going to hurt a child, I’m surprised my affection hasn’t disappeared. I feel like a bad person by association.”

Jim was detective-handsome with epaulet shoulders. Wavy grey hair added gravitas but it was an infectious, good-natured smile that made my women friends swoon. Now retired, he’d once specialized in sex-crimes but today worked as a private investigator. Although he loved crime novels focused on the dark milieu of world-weary gumshoes, his own demeanor was up-beat and compassionate. In my mind, viewing others with compassion after twenty-five years on the force made him due for a medal.

We never scheduled our meetings but had hung out on a nearly daily basis at Starbucks for a decade. We hugged only on birthdays but felt comfortable enough to lapse into silence or ignore the other while we typed or texted at our shared table. We were lonely. Jim was single and looking for a partner. I shared a marriage bed with a man whose brain injury made him forget how to love me.

“What you do in prison is a good thing,” Jim said. “You won’t stop seeing Wulf?

“No. I signed up to support men who’ve done terrible things because no one is beyond redemption, no matter how long it takes. No one deserves decades behind bars without a soul to visit. I won’t stop going but it’s hard.” I shot my hands in the air. “I don’t know what Wulf was planning to do to that kid. The title of his crime rocked me but now I’ve had time to think, he could have run away with an underage girl he loved. Wrongly! Stupidly! Illegally! That would be the best scenario. But I can’t help imagining others that are lots worse. I have to find his case somehow.”

“What if you find something that changes how you see him?”

“I know. But I’m already upset. I have to know the details and then I’ll settle it in my mind.” I sighed. “It’s stupid, really. I knew about this possibility from day one.”

“You’ll be all right.”

But I wasn’t. I couldn’t sleep. I’d cracked Pandora’s Box and burned to peer inside. Disgusted, I told myself that my job was to support Wulf while he endured prison, not to satisfy voyeuristic curiosity. But for peace of mind, I wanted to know the worst.

On my next visit, Wulf walked toward me with an easy grace born of fitness, holding his sculpted, bald head at a proud tilt, allowing his indigoed arms to swing loosely.

Before he even sat down, I blurted, “I can’t stop thinking about your crime. It’s messing with me. What happened?”

“I was back from Iraq doing this woman. She was fucking with her kid.”

“Abusing? Sex?”

Wulf nodded, pressing his lips together until they whitened.

“Why would you want a relationship with someone who did that?”

          “I was fucked up. I knew I wasn’t coping and had signed up for another tour. I didn’t belong here anymore. War was the only thing I understood.” He looked away. “I knew the woman was doing it. Their interactions were off. But it was none of my business.”

My stomach plummeted.

The skin on his face stretched tight over chiseled bones, as taut as I felt he was stretching our friendship. “Anyway, she didn’t have a car and asked for a ride. I dropped her and the kid off someplace.”

“Across state lines?”

“I lived five minutes from the border.”

“She made the trip to hurt her boy?”

“I didn’t know. Didn’t care, either.”

My mind went round and round. He’s a dad. How could he ignore an abused kid? I ached for that trapped child. It hurt to imagine a woman so damaged that she would inflict such pain. And I thought war had loosened Wulf’s grip on his soul.

As soon as I got home, I turned on my computer. The online documents I found said Wulf urged the woman to have intercourse and oral sex with her ten-year-old son while Wulf took photos. I slammed my computer shut and cried.

The tears dried but left behind an ache in my chest that made me want to run. I didn’t want to know more but I couldn’t not know, either. With my hand still over my mouth, I re-opened my laptop. I wanted to read the case transcript but could only find a decision denying Wulf’s appeal: a brief summary of the case. But I did learn that soldiers returning from combat in Iraq commit more violent and sexual crimes than their civilian counterparts. After the slaughter of war, I could imagine a heightened tendency to explode, to slash, and to screw. I could understand attempts to replicate combat’s adrenaline high when life at home seemed pedestrian and trivial. But the quiet perversion required to photograph a mother opening her legs for her boy’s virginity was something else entirely.

I dreaded my next prison visit. But when I got there, Wulf talked about his boys and I was able to cope.

“I call every night but they haven’t answered for six months.” Relaxing, he stretched his feet forward. He’d been issued a torn Croc shoe. “It used to amaze me how much Cliff remembered. He was only six when I fell. But if I was home, he was with me.” He smiled. “If I worked on the car, he was beside me. If I hung out with my guys, he was there.”

Tenderness washed his face. “When I came home injured from Iraq, I still had the bloody field splint on. I was helicoptered to the Green Zone and then to Germany but decided to come Stateside for surgery. I came through the airport doors leaning on crutches, and his little face fell. I threw my crutches down and called him over. I picked him up and he pressed his face in my shoulder.” Wulf’s arms moved to cradle the memory of his son and he laughed. “It hurt so bad! I was biting my lip so he couldn’t hear me crying. My dad came over and I had to lean on him. But I kept saying to Cliff, ‘It’s okay.’”

For six years, Wulf wore a beard that kinked its way to his chest, looking like it had been steeped in blood. But one day, he entered the visiting room with a neatly trimmed goatee. There was stubble on his head, too. He’d ditched that menacing prison style: bald and bearded.

“I like it.”

          “It’s a very pretty red,” he ran his hands over his hair.

The color was beautiful but I stared, checking my laughter, searching for a hint of self-ridicule. Surprisingly, there was none and I chuckled. “Even if you say so yourself!”

The room was full and noisy. Groups of loud visitors sat on either side of us and I jerked the row of connected seats forward. Two seconds later, an officer leaned over me. “Move it back!”

Wulf caught my eyes, twisting his lips together, as if saying, Welcome to my world. Then his handsome freckled face abruptly lost its vigor and his chest heaved. “I don’t feel like I’ve got much to offer. Life doesn’t change in here. I was listening to this guy tell his story; I’ve heard it at least six times before and I started thinking, ‘Do I bore her?’”

“No! We talk about so many things. Those conversations we always come back to are contentious and fascinating. You’ve helped me learn things that are important to me.” I shrugged, embarrassed. “I only knew it in theory before but friendship can flourish even when values don’t coincide. I’ve learned to suspend judgment in favor of curiosity and wonder.” I shrugged, embarrassed again.

But he nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t feel like I’m an asset anymore.”

“You are to me. You’re a window to worlds I don’t know. War, the military, prison, your peccadilloes. I don’t know anyone else who can disagree so adamantly without getting angry.”

He raised his eyes and sat straighter. “It’s true, contention is interesting. I like hearing different views in case there’s something I haven’t considered.”

He held my gaze for a long time. Then he whispered, “I just paid fifteen hundred dollars to a lawyer to review my case.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t do it.”

Connected by his silent stare, I regarded him closely. Strung about his neck, in place of a crucifix, hung a miniature axe. He was the most fascinating man I visited but he challenged me constantly. His laughter, his tenderness and his roving intelligence had not lulled and blinded me to the cut of his blade.

“Why didn’t you ever say?”

“Ambiguity matters. Character shows.”

I liked that he’d never tried to persuade me, that instead, he thought I’d work it out.

 “You took a plea bargain. You pled guilty.”

“I did transport the kid. But no one took photos. If there were photos, they would have charged me with that. They charged me with conspiracy because there was no evidence. His mother made it up to get me involved and to bargain for a lower sentence for herself.”

“Did you witness the acts?”

“No. But I knew something was up.”

I put both hands on my forehead. “My head’s reeling. I can’t process it, yet. You’re innocent! God, to go from the intensity of war to a cell, you must have been climbing the walls.”

“No. I was in shock. It was so far out in left field, I was stunned.”

I believe him. Oh, you’re so naïve. Why would you believe a felon? All you have is his word.

Almost as soon as those thoughts arrived, I didn’t believe them. In all our time together Wulf had displayed startling honesty and the courage to show himself even when he knew I might not approve. My decision to accept his innocence wasn’t necessary to avoid internal discomfort. When I thought him guilty, I learned to accept it and feel comfortable that I cared for him, still.

Eighteen months later, his lawyer said that Wulf had been imprisoned illegally and that he would fight for Wulf’s release. But such legal battles take time and Wulf and I will continue our conversations in prison for many years.

Conversations forge a path to those in-between places, like marshes that are neither sea nor land. Oozing, slimy places where missteps are fraught. Those fragile landscapes are disappearing because we want to drain them and fill them with rubble. But marshes are rich with tasseled reeds and the dense Belgian lace of interwoven roots. Wulf was not my guide when we explored there, nor I his, but you can’t go there alone.

Gillian Haines lives in Tucson’s desert where she loves hummingbirds and saguaros. For the past eight years, she has volunteered to visit four men in maximum-security prison because they only know the desert’s thirst. Her work has been published or accepted for upcoming publication in The Ilanot Review, Gravel Literary Magazine, Rain Shadow Review, Stories from the Other Side 6^th edition, and an as yet untitled Punctum anthology. She is writing a memoir about her prison experiences.

Violations

by Jenn Gilgan

     When atrocities of ISIS destroying priceless ruins became news last March, I felt incensed. On the heels of brutal murders, the terrorist group obliterated their culture’s past. Their excuse: destroying idols that were false gods. They justified their actions through their faith—Mohammed is the only prophet to the only God, Allah. They manipulated the beautiful words of their prophet into ugly acts of brutality and greed. The antiquities were pre-Islam, and so, in their view, unholy.

    Each video clip of a sledge hammer smashing carved stone to dust felt like a blow to my head, shaking loose memories of a trip my parents and I took to Iraq in Spring 1978, our second year of living in Beirut, Lebanon. Truthfully, I do not remember much from that trip; I was only twelve. My brain repressed what should have been the interesting parts: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, mosques with golden domes. I vaguely recall these sites; photographs and the awful scenes on the news help to pry loose my memories.

          One detail of that fated trip I vividly recall is my dad’s severe case of Montezuma’s Revenge. Not because he was so sick, but because of events I could not escape as he commandeered the back of the taxi, our primary mode of transportation. Iraq was not the hubbub of tourism, even pre-Gulf War, so bus tours were nonexistent. Mom sat in the back with Dad, attempting to provide some comfort from the heat, the nausea, the bumpy roads, a nasty combination for my ailing dad.

Even more vividly, in my visceral memory, I recall sitting up front with the Iraqi taxi driver and a Lebanese gentleman, Sami, an important client of my father’s employer, an international bank. He had volunteered to accompany us as a translator since we did not speak Arabic beyond the basic pleasantries. This man had wealth and prestige. He had a handsome face, light brown hair and bright blue eyes. He was tall and athletic, a descendent of the fair Phoenicians. He also had, as I was to discover, an eye and a roaming hand for young girls.

I was not raped, but over our week-long trip, I was violated multiple times in the front of the taxi. He found ways to grope the training-bra sized bumps on my chest or to massage between my upper thighs. He deftly hid these acts by unfolding the over-sized paper map across our legs. Not knowing how else to behave, I sat still, frozen like an ancient statue. Internally, though, a chaotic battle raged: my mind screamed NO, STOP, but my hormones were curious, tempting me to let go and enjoy the scary, strange, thrilling sensations. At night I promised myself I would refuse his next attempt; each day I fell mute, cowering to his position of power—both over me and over my dad’s career. My unconscious must have understood the adult dynamics and politics.

Over three decades later, I have wondered why I couldn’t get past these memories. Why have they haunted me? Why must I remember that my first sexual contact was uninvited and confusing? While I felt ashamed that my twelve-year old body craved learning more of the strange internal warmth that flooded my body, my adult brain could intelligently articulate that he was at fault. That he was the creep. That underneath his handsome visage, he must have had a serious flaw in his psyche to prey on a twelve-year old who had hardly begun to blossom.

After years of journaling, counseling, and eventually confessing to my mom about Sami’s pedophilia, I thought I had moved past the rage and disgust of those memories. Until recently. Watching the antiquities long associated with the vacation of violation smash to the ground in plumes of dust released an unexpected rage in me.

Many of the antiquities that ISIS has destroyed are those that my twelve-year-old self visited. I was hardly impressed by history or ruins when I was a kid. The trip was my parents’ idea. I had wanted to see the pyramids in Egypt, but since that was the time of Camp David, Egypt would not have been a safe destination for

American tourists. Instead, we went to Iraq, not yet a danger zone for Americans. As a typical twelve-year-old, I rolled my eyes at yet another tour of crumbling ruins (in my mind the Sphinx or pyramids or the land of Cleopatra were not crumbling, and so much cooler to explore). My parents had a history of taking my brother and me on educational trips: the Parthenon, Athena’s Temple, a Grecian Olympic stadium. We had visited Byblos or Baalbeck or both in the mountains and fertile valleys of Lebanon. Before living overseas, my parents took us to what counted as American ruins: Mystic Seaport, Washington Irving’s home in Sleepy Hollow, the Newport mansions, and the Hudson River Valley robber baron castles. In 1978, I considered this trip just another educational tour my parents imposed on me.

So, if I didn’t care then about the immensity of the history before me, why suddenly did I want to rip out the throats of those thoughtless, careless scalawags on the news? Because I had more than just seen the ruins. My cellular memory had never let go of the sights, the sounds, the sands of Iraq. The ruins were me, and I the ruins. Now, via the sights and sounds of technology, I saw the terrorist attacks against their own history as akin to the personal affront I experienced.

On the surface, the antiquities are ruined beyond repair. No master archeologist will be able to repair the pieces to their previous state. On a deeper, longer-lasting level, I’m reminded of the classroom lesson about bullying: have students take a clean sheet of paper and then crumple it into a ball. No matter how they try, students cannot “fix” the paper back to its original pristine smoothness. Harsh words and actions make the same lasting impression on people as the creases in the paper. I had been bullied in one of the worst ways, and so were the impressive statues of Tikrit and Mosul. No amount of counseling, confessions, or apologies could smooth the scars inflicted on me or the stone statues.  My scars were emotional. The statues’ scars historical.

More universally, those statues and my childhood innocence represent a higher state of understanding than either my personal terrorist or the ISIS terrorists can appreciate. Terrorism on any level is not an act of intelligence. That is not to say that the perpetrator in my story or the ISIS men are not intelligent. I know for a fact that my molester was incredibly intelligent. But, his actions were selfish and uncaring and lacked wisdom. The same holds true for the recent actions of ISIS: There is no sense, no caring, no wisdom in destroying priceless artifacts.

The author and her mother, 1978

I have a photograph of my mother and me in front of one of the statues that guarded a town. It towered over us, its face kind and gentle. The face and beard of a man, the body of a horse, wings of an eagle, and cloven feet of a goat. In Tikrit maybe. I don’t remember. That is what I have repressed. That is the knowledge I have lost forever because something frightening and unexplainable took precedence in my memory. I hate that man for all that he robbed from me: my innocence, a chance not to fear intimacy, and my chance to remember extraordinary history on an extraordinary trip. I hate the terrorists for what they are robbing from the world: the foundation of great civilizations and creativity and genius and tolerance. So few have had the opportunity to visit those sacred lands because of the constant upheaval in the Middle East, and now, many of the reasons to visit any of the historic sites—Babylon, Bybolos, Jerusalem, Petra, Palmyra, Cairo—have either been smashed beyond recognition or have become too perilous to visit. The world should not allow anyone or anything terrifying to obliterate our collective memory of our beginnings. Whether you connect to the Middle East through genetics, religion—this includes Christianity and Judaism—or not at all, those ruins once governed fertile and prosperous lands. Trade routes from east and west crossed the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Your genealogical tree likely has someone who once walked that fertile valley. This is not a land to fear. It is a land to rejoice and celebrate.

Today, Iraq may seem like a wasteland to many. Desert sands. Bombed out. Citizens turned refugees. At its heart, though, is a vibrant, caring, god-fearing culture, whether that god be God or Allah, or even Yahweh, Buddha, or Vishnu. Yet, hate and prejudice prevail despite each religion’s teaching to love and tolerate our brothers and sisters of every land. We are all human. Shakespeare’s Shylock cries out, “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” We all bleed. We all laugh. We all cry. We all need safety and protection and love. If we do not unite to protect that which needs protecting—our heritage, our children, our future—then we risk a chasm in the web of humanity.

The terrorism occurring across the Middle East parallels my personal turmoil. My story is one of many, and the religious terrorists are only one story of mass hatred. The ISIS terrorists hide under the beauty of Islam’s Koran. The words meant to inspire the beauty of compassion, faith, loyalty, and love have been misused to justify hate crimes and murder. They are a larger, scarier rendition of the handsome man who abused the trust of a young girl.

Jenn Gilgan aspires to inspire. She lives in Tampa, FL where she teaches high school English. Her writing draws on her experiences from when she lived in Beirut, Lebanon as a child and London, England as an adult. When not inundated with teaching and grading, she enjoys exploring the world through her cameras and researching ideas for both lesson plans and novels. “Violations” is her first published piece; she is currently drafting and re-drafting a YA novel influenced equally by her love of Celtic mythology and her life in Lebanon.

Handguns and Healing:

After twelve years and one bullet to the heart, a friendship attempts renewal

by Jona Jacobson

         As there are guns for making war, guns for keeping peace, and guns for unleashing havoc, there are friends with whom you are frequently at war, friends with whom life is peaceful, and friends who join you for a drive to a reservoir in the dark predawn hours of a high school day, sunroof open and cigarettes blazing.

         For a long while I knew little of such distinctions and complexities.  I had few friends. I was gloomy, put myself down often, and glared my way through whole days to keep others at bay.  Through my Junior and Senior High school years, I practiced that glare in the mirror. Few had heard of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) in the 1980s, so the only explanation I could come up with for why I was so terrified of people was that I was a misfit and unworthy of friendship. So I decided, as the teen mind is so uniquely qualified to do, that it would be easier if I scared people away proactively.

         But in high school, one person saw through my glare and befriended me. We met our sophomore year. Quickly we became close friends: I was fat, she was slightly plump and we bonded over talks on the front steps of Poky High. Discussions of our fat oozing out to fill cracks in the cement created unification as only two thick girls can achieve. She meant the world to me—which in later years I realized was an unfair position to put someone in—and I happily embraced her as a sister. Neither of us knew I had SAD. I only knew I needed her. She only knew I clung to her like a drunk grasps a bottle.

         Over the next few years she lost weight and gained a social life while I clung desperately to a friendship I could feel slipping away. She’d have unsafe sex with someone I disapproved of and my anger resulted in months of not talking. Possessive? A bit. Then we’d start talking again, slipping smoothly back into our routine: me at her house with her family, or in her bedroom, sitting in the open window even in the freezing winter months, smoking. We’d talk.  We’d laugh.

         We’d go to parties. But my social anxiety would rear up and I’d prop in a corner, glaring, while she laughed and mingled. I hated myself for going. I hated her for being able to do what I could not. I suspect she hated me. Friendship with me cost too much.

         At Idaho State University this pattern of hanging out and not talking would continue for a few years. Then, years later, over one summer break, the month of our ten-year high school reunion, she headed off for vacation with her husband. The day before she left she told me, “I’ll call when we get back.” This may have been her way of communicating the Hollywood-esque blow-off: “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

         In the meantime, I went to Seattle for my own mini-vacation. A terrible thing happened there that left me bruised and broken. I wanted nothing more than to cry on the shoulder of the friend I had counted on for so long. When we were both back in Pocatello, however, instead of a friendly shoulder, I had the door to her house closed in my face by her husband with a gruff, “She’s not home.” A cold shoulder reception if ever there was one.

         Silence reigned. I am not proud to admit I called repeatedly and I stopped by repeatedly and I left copious numbers of notes. I was desperate and I stopped just shy of stalking her. Or not, I suppose. Over the next few years of not knowing what had happened, I did what came naturally: I blamed myself. And what blame is complete without punishment? So I cut myself with scalpels and knives and bits of broken mirror. I burned myself with curling irons and sugar caramelized on the stove top.

         The more I tried to cling to remnants of our friendship, I suppose the more she may have backed into her home and into the corners of her life, hoping I would go away. Physically, I am intimidating to many, though I never thought I was to her. Perhaps I was wrong. Clearly, I’ve been mistaken about a number of things. Perhaps with each letter she received, she felt a chill of foreboding.

         What could drive a friend to hound another friend so? Desperation. But why? Days before I stood in her entryway and had the door and the friendship shut on me, I was bent over a car on a dark quiet street near Volunteer park in Seattle and raped. And when I came home, I needed my friend.

         I survived. Both the rape and the loss of friendship. But the two events became entwined. No longer can I think of one without thinking of the other. And the blame I heaped on myself for both situations was nearly intolerable.

         Eventually I stopped. Stopped the stalking, stopped the self-blame and the punishment. I went so far as to major in anything but English (writing having been my chosen path as a teen), because she was first a student then a lecturer in the English Department. I wandered from Occupational Therapy to Sociology to Art to Accounting. And the years passed on.

         More years passed, some twelve years since that day I knocked on the door looking for support. And then I was shot.

         My 17-year-old nephew stood beside me in my mother’s home on what would have been my parents’ 50th Anniversary had my father not died four months earlier. He was eager to look at his grandfather’s handguns. I began checking the weapons for ammunition; something I ought to have done already. But with dinner to be cooked and a symphony to attend after, I was rushed and didn’t feel I had a few minutes to spare.

         He watched me clear a gun, and picked one up in imitation. When he removed the magazine, I said, “Better be careful, in case Gramps left a round chambered.”

         He remembers silence. It’s possible speech formed in my mind, but the two puffs of air that hit me prevented it from passing my lips. Instead, I fell back and my world became a thing of fuzzy cold and distant words. Words like, “You’ve been shot!” and “Does she have a Living will?” And cold like you can not believe unless you have been “in extremis”—near death.

         Then silence. Just as I had not heard the gunshot that rang out in a small room, I stopped hearing the doctors and nurses and family members present in the Critical Care Unit. Silence replaced the disjointed words as shadows moved in the periphery. Silence that reminded me of the silent streets I walked after I was raped. When I pushed myself off the hood of the car I’d been bent over and I walked back to where I’d been staying, not a single dog barked. No tires crunched stones on pavement. No birds tweeted. No cats in romantic interlude yowled. Not even the wind whispered through the myriad drooping rhododendrons and bloom-less magnolias lining the sidewalks I walked without my booted feet making any sound. Silence and cold in Seattle. Silence and cold in the hospital. And a few ghosts wandering about in the shadows.

         The first words to come from the silent darkness were two days later, “I’m going to remove this tube now.”

         And I was alive again.

         Seven days after my fortieth birthday, a .38 hollow point entered my body and split, passing through my left lung. A fragment stayed there, one in my liver, two in my myocardium and the largest plowed in to settle in my interatrial septum. A gun misfiring led to miraculous events: the cross-top hollow point didn’t mushroom out as it should have; the bullet fragmented prior to entering my heart (which wouldn’t have survived a whole or exploding missile); and a one-time friend returned to my life.

         Out of the depths of darkness that was two days of drug induced amnesia, I awoke to the beeps and bright lights of a Critical Care Unit. I was browsing Facebook in a slight morphine and freshly-infused blood fog, surprised to read a message from my former friend, who wrote, “Good god, woman--I'm astonished by the grit that allows you to (1) survive a bullet wound) and (2) take a self portrait IN THE ICU and post it on FB—you're an Internet superhero.”

         She added, “Scary rumors were flying Friday night--I'm glad, very glad, you're still among the living.” She asked if she could visit.

         Could she come visit? I was in shock, not just from the five bullet fragments lodged in three of my major organs, but from the message and its apparent import. Three fragments in my heart, and there I was in a hospital bed, getting what felt like another shot to the heart. I couldn’t tell if this one was good or bad.  A cardiologist tells me, “The heart doesn’t feel pain.” But if you believe you’ve lost a friend, the hurt is real enough.

         Aside from a few passing greetings at the local coffee shop (“Jona,” from her; “Morning,” from me) since I returned to Idaho in January 2009, we haven’t spoken much for a dozen years.

         My shooting made top spot on TV news and front page headlines, but perhaps a mutual friend told her.  Despite my years of thinking about this potential reunion with prepared responses such as, “Why don’t you continue to do what you do best and leave me alone,” I typed, “Yes” and hit send.

The next day she stood beside my bed with latte in hand and a mutual friend in tow (could she not face me alone?), saying, “We’ve only just started talking again and you nearly die on me.” We spoke only a few minutes because, well, I was recovering from a gunshot wound and hadn’t even sat up on my own yet. We hugged awkwardly when I was too tired to visit longer.

When she left I knew we’d be on shaky ground—and indeed since then our conversations have been stiff and cumbersome—but I was thankful for surviving the bullet that entered my heart, giving me another chance at friendship. One not tainted by clinging neediness.

         A few days more passed and I received another Facebook message, this one accompanied by a friend request. In the message she basically said friending me would be fair, because then I’d have as much access to information about her as she had to me (presumably through mutual acquaintances) but if I didn’t want to friend her, that was okay too. She wouldn’t be hurt. She’s a tough cookie, this one. That, or she just didn’t care. But then, why initiate contact after all these years?

         Although the pain of the loss of her friendship had faded, it was like a deep bruise that, if I moved just so, would flare up and hurt again. Hoping this would mend the hurt, hoping this would make the rape not have happened, and despite my fear that it would only make things worse, I hit “friend.”

         That was in April of 2009. We got together once in September of the same year. Other than that, our interactions have been limited to Facebook comments and occasional in-passing greetings at the coffee shop. I invited her to a few functions—not too many, I didn’t want her to feel suffocated by me or my friendship. Friendship should not be something one feels is a burden or feels obligated to attend to. So I didn’t press.

         Over the last several months, however, I admitted to myself that with every status update or comment she made on a mutual friend’s wall, but not on my own, I hurt. Each icon and “like” eroded my self worth just a teensy bit and pained me slightly more than the last. Finally the realization came that Facebook would not be the place our friendship might have a chance.

         Why did I react in such a hurt manner to this common Facebook activity? With each Facebook post the self-blame returned: My fault I was raped. My fault I lost my friend. My fault. Is it fair to be angry with her because I was raped? No.

         Is it fair to be cut off from a friendship without even a “Go Away!”? No. The rapist’s parting words  were cruel. My friend’s lack of parting words, though, somehow cut more deeply. In a moment of determination, I did what in real life is so hard to do, but on Facebook, so easy. I defriended her.

         Then she started a knitting group. She sent me a message wondering if I’d defreinded her because she’d noticed she couldn’t include me directly on the invite list, and if I didn’t mind her prying, “Why?” She wondered if she’d done something to hurt me—unintentional as it may be—because she often felt she was hurting me. She commented that our conversations, short and infrequent as they were, always seemed off kilter.

         Through Facebook messaging I explained that I felt I was walking on eggshells whenever I saw her, not knowing if it was okay to engage her in conversation or if the standard greeting was the maximum I should employ. As gently and unobtrusively as I am capable of doing, I intimated that perhaps knowing what I’d done—or what she thought I’d done, years ago would help our interactions now.

         I had defriended with hope. Within the social, spatial, and temporal confines (boundaries set by her, for her comfort) of a knitting group, we spent one evening together.  Other attendees were shocked to discover we’d known one another well over thirty years. She sat facing forward, I sat slightly twisted away from her—partly to protect myself, partly as an attempt to keep from crowding her. I’d done enough crowding over the years. But I’ve also done enough evasion.

         Within days of this knitting group meeting came a message in response to my delicate probing into what had happened fourteen years ago, my inquiry about what may have brought an end to our friendship. She was not ready, she wrote, to delve into the past. In fact, and in no uncertain terms, I was told that day would probably not come. Ever. Furthermore, Facebook, she wrote, was not the place to discuss such issues. Not that she could think of a place or time such things should or could be discussed. But, she wrote, the relative safe parameters of the knitting group, surrounded by several intelligent women knitting, would be the best I could hope for, as far as interacting with her might go.

         Intentionally or not, she hurt my feelings; I’d known it would happen. Heartache had prepared me.  But I am not a girl practicing my glare in the mirror anymore.  Friendship is more complicated than Facebook allows and defriending isn’t as easy as it sounds.  Perhaps if we can get past this awkwardness, a knitting group filled with ‘neutral’ knitters will indeed be a better place to (re)start.

A substitute teacher in Blackfoot, Idaho, Jona is known at one school as "Avatar" and at another as "The Teacher Formerly Known to Have Tattoos." Due to one parental protest ("She'll recruit our children into tattooed legions!") she has to cover up from head to toe and now teaches in "WhiteFace." When she isn't dealing with cosmetics or children, Jona lives with her NonHusband of fifteen years, their two cats, and hordes of tree-eating elk and deer.