The Key to the Fields

Rita came home from the war. The town was not as if she had never left. Some things had changed. The Taco Bell, for instance, was closed, but another had opened on the next street. The Church of the Passionate Blood, with its stained-glass Christ as slim and pale and sweet as a glow- worm, had partially burned, leaving a picturesque ruin in the wedge between the freeway on- and off-ramps, but the mountains that had thronged distantly around the town still thronged. In the early-morning light, they still wreathed themselves unsubtly with fog. Rita had sold her car when she signed up and hadn’t yet bought a new one. Those first few weeks, looking for work, she rode the buses around town and came across places she would otherwise have never seen. Places where one kind of concrete met another, where weeds produced flowers of startling profusion and variety, where snakes and lizards and other in- frequent forms of wildlife sunned themselves as if there were nothing odd about either them or their maker. “And lo, there was a serpent,” thought Rita, watching a black rat snake nuzzle into a Styrofoam cup. “And lo, she walked among them and was unharmed.”

One afternoon, a storm lowered over her, and Rita took a shortcut around the Pita Pit on her way to another auto-body shop where her résumé and protruding belly would be haltingly scrutinized. Behind the restaurant, she came across three windswept trees growing out of a concrete basin. They were in the middle of a parking lot whose building had been torn down, though they had remained. “The slow, still lives of trees,” Rita thought. This, at least, was not someone else’s thought. Of that she was sure even if it did not feel as if the idea originated wholly within herself. “Outer-space thought,” thought Rita. Or maybe it was from the trees, which seemed like just the sort of life-forms that might project stray bits of their consciousness outward. Willy-nilly. With no regard.

Lichen patterned the three trees’ trunks like water stains, and their leaves, which were large and silvery, tossed on the breeze in a knowing sort of frenzy. One tree had suffered a grievous injury, a gaping fissure at its base stopped by a plug of concrete. It was the sort of event that deserved a marker of explanation, though, of course, there was not one. Rita put her finger under the lip of the tree’s wound and felt the place where wood had grown around the concrete, trying to heal. “How can I bring a child into a place scraped so thin?” Rita thought. But, in her experience, all places were scraped this thin. That was the sort of century she was living in. Even thinking the thought, even standing there while the rain began to patter on her shoulders, was a kind of show. For whoever might be looking out the back window of the Pita Pit. For whoever might be disposed to see her, she and the wounded tree stooped in similar poses around their remarkable centers. God, she was tired. Of herself not least of all.

Dr. Chu called this sort of thinking False Universalism. In her last session before the army cut her well and truly loose, Rita had noted that Dr. Chu was doing something different with her hair—it was baggier, somehow, less structured. It plumed around her ears in a way that complemented the doctor’s broad face, uncomplicated cheeks, and blunt, antagonistic chin. Rita hadn’t said anything about Dr. Chu’s new hairdo at the time, though now she wished she had. False Universalism was to be avoided. False Universalism led to False Entropy, a feeling that all things were funneling toward the same bright pinpoint ending. That was what Dr. Chu said, but now Rita was here, in her hometown, and Dr. Chu was far away on the base by the coast, where outlandish spiders sometimes descended from palm trees at the ends of their shimmering threads. Rita had moved back in with her parents. She put her boots under the bed and, after a few days, shifted them into her closet. At night, she cut slices of cheese from the block with her mother’s paring knife and ate them standing barefoot in the blue light of the refrigera- tor. Inside her body, the baby tapped as if it were a miner who had lost his way in the dark.

Rita’s father, at least, was mostly as she had left him. His hair was long and white and soft, the way a well-groomed animal’s hair is soft. Like a pelt. He pulled it into a ponytail at the base of his neck with a precise, finicky turn of his wrist that displayed just how broad and square his hands were, how strong his fingers. In her absence, he had cultivated a recreational heroin habit. They sat at the kitchen table as he passed his lighter back and forth beneath a square of foil. When the smoke rose up, he chased it down with a straw from which he had trimmed the bendy top with his pocketknife. “I like all the accessories,” he said, stroking his hair back against the sides of his head. “I like the busywork.”

“What does Mom think of all this?” Rita asked. It was only very recently that the baby had become big enough for Rita to feel it move. Sometimes it wiggled like a strong, gleaming fish striking out of a school of lesser fish and then darting back in. Sometimes it didn’t stir at all for a long time, and Rita would pass her hands over her stomach, pressing here and there as if asking the baby a question. Rita’s father had left the window open in consideration of her condition. Outside, blossoms were starting to crawl up the limbs of the weeping cherry; daffodils doddered in the breeze. The sky was white. It was the early days of spring. “She’s at the church rummage sale,” Rita’s father said. “She’s in charge of the knickknack tables.”

Rita’s father had been a professor of geology at the local college. In his youth, he was involved in a radical political organization that required all its members to wear rubber animal masks to meetings. There were pigs and dogs, ducks and rabbits. Rabbits smoking cigarettes and picking at the zits on their chins. Ducks drinking red wine and sewing armbands. Rita’s father left the group when she was born, and only a few months later, some key members were involved in a guerrilla take- over of a Western Union. Their demands were unspecific; one of the ducks was shot in the leg when the SWAT team stormed the building. Rita’s father liked to tell the story as if he had been there. “Poor slobs,” he said. “They were idiots. Boobs, but they had panache.” After they married, Rita’s mother flung herself into domestic accomplishments. She made apple butter, applesauce, apple pies, potholders shaped like apples and stuffed with cinnamon sticks and cloves so that, when warmed, they exuded a misleading scent. As a little girl, Rita would bring her father rocks from the garden and ask him what they were. “Quartz,” he always said. “Quartz or schist,” and he would toss them back into the underbrush with a flick of his broad, square, efficient wrist. This was the kind of household Rita grew up in. Her mother’s kitchen was decorated with images of geese wearing blue-checked bonnets. In her father’s closet was a stack of rubber pig masks.

When she joined the army, both parents had cried. They sat at the kitchen table, each holding one of her hands, and wept. Which had been part of the point, after all, to be wept over, to feel her father’s thumb pressing into her palm as he cried and cried. Like dying and getting to go to your own funeral, Rita had thought. And there was the travel, of course. The opportunity for self-improvement. Now that she was home from the war it was as if all that crying had never happened. Rita’s father rested his chin in his hand. He gazed over her shoulder at the bonneted goose frieze that arced above the sink. “Your mother is a lifelong swaddler,” he said. “She’s always wrapping things up, tight as she can. Pinning their arms to their chests. Keeping them from squawking.”

Rita pressed her stomach as if the baby had kicked. In fact, it had been still for a long time. “Asleep,” she told her father. He nodded and lit a cigarette. Smoke hung in the air between them. A mockingbird started a high, delirious song and moved away from them, still singing.

Finally, Rita was offered a job working in the bakery department of an upscale artisanal supermarket chain. She worked with four other ladies; all day long, they slid pans of batter into the oven and pulled out cakes, dipped cookies into dark chocolate and then into white, pushed brightly colored icing through a rubber cone and swirled it onto the plump tops of cupcakes. The supermarket played flute-heavy music over its loudspeakers, and its customers were mostly elderly and frequently wore a sort of loose, beguiling sweater that made them look like frogs. Confounded frogs chug-a-rumming by the lychee berries, querulous ones rummaging around in the potato bin. Frogs with carts full of high-end olives and hair tonics and vitamin-infused fizzy drinks but paralyzed by indecision at the end of an aisle, blinking their huge eyes in the glimmering, artisanal light. It was a gentle job at which Rita excelled. The other bakery ladies soon put her on cake duty, and she spent her days twirling cakes on special pedestals as she swept white frosting across their sides.

One of the things Rita liked best about her new job was that there was now no room in her soft, flute-heavy day for the kind of invasive thoughts Dr. Chu had warned her against. “Not from your noggin,” Dr. Chu said early on in their meetings together. She took off her shoes—navy-blue heels, practical, shipshape—and folded one of her feet underneath her while the other dandled, toeing the air. “Close your inner ears to all that fabricated speculation, that unsubstantiated social mum- bling. Deactivate your Facebook account, Private French. Learn to live without Instagram.” Dr. Chu was quiet for a long time, long enough that Rita thought perhaps she had asked a question Rita hadn’t heard. Then, Dr. Chu smiled at her and stood up, waving her to her feet. That had been their first meeting. As Rita left, Dr. Chu had given her a thumbs- up at the door. Now, Rita pressed a white rose atop a white leaf within a white frame alongside a white scallop motif. “Above, beyond, into,” Rita thought. She licked the icing off the fingertips of her latex gloves, peeled them inside out, put them in the trash. She adjusted her stance so that her belly could rest on the stainless-steel table. She twirled the cake on its stand.

One night, Rita’s mother came into her bedroom—the same room she had visited at night since Rita was a lump sleeping under the sun-and- moon mobile—and pressed her hands on either side of Rita’s face. “You’re having a dream,” Rita’s mother said. “You made noises in your sleep and woke me up.”

“What kind of noises did I make?” Rita asked. She had always been a very still sleeper, the covers like the flap of an envelope folding her in. Recently, she had taken to sleeping with a pillow between her knees, to support the weight of her stomach, but even so, the landscape of her bed was flat and smooth and cool.

“You said, ‘Chunka chunka chunka,’” her mother said. “Just like that, like you were explaining the way a noise sounded to someone else who hadn’t heard it. You kept saying it over and over again. Chunka chunka chunka. Chunka chunka chunka. It sounded like your father’s lawn mower. Is that what you were doing? Your father’s lawn mower?”

Rita’s mother was a small woman with slender hands that always seemed to be wet. She had thinned and grayed over the years until she looked like a reflection of herself obscured in the mirror by some sort of decorative foliage. Rita herself was darker; muscular, not spindly. During basic training, she had watched as her body transformed from a conveyance to a machine. The point of repetition, Dr. Chu said, was to train the body to operate independently from the mind. “That way, if you are preoccupied, or taken by surprise, or experiencing some sort of cognitive disassociation, in a combat situation your body can address the need without requiring the mind’s approval. It’s empowerment, actually,” she said.

Rita thought about this. At the time, only eight weeks pregnant and seated in Dr. Chu’s functionally decorated office, her body was still something that loped along with no strain, no particular agenda. She could run a mile in under eight minutes, bench-press 180 pounds, balance a M16A2 rifle in the cradle of her shoulder as she swayed with the Humvee over the rucks and divots of the road. Her body felt tall and lean and sated, the baby only a slight thickening at the waist, as if the center of her body had drawn itself together into a lax fist, the kind one might make in sleep. There was no hunger in Rita, no particular oddity. Only dreams in which she rode the jeep up and down the streets and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. People moved out of her way. They twitched their goats to one side with long, thin switches. They pulled checkered scarves up over their mouths, noses, sometimes their eyes.

“I’d like my body to stay sympathetic to my mind,” she finally said

to Dr. Chu. “Sympathetic at the very least.”

Dr. Chu nodded. She tented her fingers and rocked her chin back and forth on top of them. Their time together was nearing its end. In the small, corridor-like waiting room just outside Dr. Chu’s door, other soldiers—some, like Rita, dressed in their on-base ACUs and some still in desert fatigues, clunky white boots laced tightly up their shins as if they were mimicking the slim, beautiful legs of camels—were sitting in a row on wall-mounted chairs, awaiting their turns. After today, Rita and Dr. Chu would only meet three more times. And then she was done. Done with the desert. Done with the gusty, humid weather of the base. Done with the army; the great animal panting of the army; the great, natural, productive, efficient heaving of the army; the great, elemental, matted, bloody, tumescent . . .

“It won’t be, though,” Dr. Chu said, interrupting her thoughts. She crossed her legs and clamped her round knees together. Her panty hose made a slight, censorious swishing noise. She never took her shoes off anymore. She never smiled. “I’m just talking to you right now, Rita. Off the record. I feel I can’t let our time together pass without mentioning to you that I think you are a young woman with very little aperture.” Dr. Chu leaned back in the chair, which creaked beneath her weight. Slowly, she uncrossed her legs and rolled back toward her desk, propel- ling herself with little nudges of her feet, looking over Rita’s shoulder at a spot on the wall above her head.

Rita had noticed that Dr. Chu had trouble with eye contact. One of the first things Rita’s unit had covered in the brief workshop on base, before the more hands-on experience commenced, was the importance of body language when dealing with the native civilian population. “The Sandbox is a state of mind,” said the drill sergeant. “Victory is a very old idea. Anyone can have it.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” said the recruits, Rita among them. She took notes with her army-issued pencil in her army-issued composition book. She wiggled her toes in her army-issued boots and scratched the back of her army-issued neck. It felt good. She felt good. Outside, in the unfamiliar weather, the orderly life of the base progressed, with the whack-whack of hedge trimmers, the chug-chug of riding mowers looping back and forth across the parade grounds, the tamp-tamp of boots left and right and left and righting between the barracks and the dining hall, the classrooms and the training fields. Flags snapped atop their flagpoles. Wedges of people trotted toward their destinations. No one strolled or talked indistinctly. The right answer was the one everyone said at the same time.

The drill sergeant continued: Eye contact was a tool in the soldier’s arsenal. Like a belt knife, Rita wrote. Like a grenade. One was supposed to look for the eyes but not look into them. Or, if a different sort of outcome was required, to look into the eyes so fiercely it was as if one were looking through the eyes for something on the other side. Something hidden that even the owner of the eyes didn’t know about. Or to bind the eyes tight with scraps of fabric, perhaps the checkered scarf, whatever came to hand. Bind them so there was no light. Not a chink. Not a glimmer. And then, with Ali Baba on his knees, all light behind him and before him only darkness, in which even the warm, stimulating scents of home; the sounds of home, pots clattering, little domestic wails; even the clay and straw and dry-dust feel of home was swallowed and replaced by the vibrating cone of the unknown, the unknowable, by the what-came-next—

Then, the drill sergeant guaranteed, the soldier had complete con- trol for as long as he needed it. Which was as long as it took. To know. To be sure.

“Chunka chunka chunka,” it sounded like somebody in the back of

the classroom said, though that could not be right.

“Intel is a demographic,” said the drill sergeant. “Justice is a demographic. Power is a demographic. But blood? That is a singularity, private. That is a worldwide common tongue.”

When Rita was six months pregnant, Zeedie was transferred from seafood to the bakery counter. Zeedie was old, scrawny. She had beautifully curved calves that presented their domes from beneath the rolled cuffs of her too-large, store-issued black pants and then receded into the reedy piping of her ankles. She had ropy forearms, dotted here and there by the scrawl of green tattoos so old they had faded back into her skin; dark eyes; and persistently foul breath. Her hair was thin, her scalp shiny and tan as the egg-brushed tops of the yeast rolls she pulled out of the ovens in the back. Otherwise, she was a mystery. She resisted the other bakery ladies’ attempts to draw her into morning chat. She made herself an efficient shadow ghosting about in the back of the store next to the industrial ovens.

Zeedie did have three shaggy black dogs in varying states of dishevelment that she brought to work with her every day and tied up outside the loading dock. The dogs were unusually quiet. They were not unfriendly but clearly preferred not to be touched, a tendency they expressed in stares of unwavering dignity and just slightly exposed canines directed at whichever non-Zeedie human was stooping down to tousle their ears. I am not a dog that will bite, the dogs said with their golden eyes and yellowing teeth, but I am a dog that will have his way.

Rita was smitten with the dogs and smitten with Zeedie. She tried to win them all over with love offerings of rawhide or biscuit treats or cigarettes or comments about the weather, but Zeedie and the dogs were stoic. No matter her efforts, Rita could never seem to find out more about them than what she could immediately observe. Zeedie kept the dogs clean but unornamented. The dogs kept Zeedie always in their sight, and when she passed away from them and into the store, they lay down at the head of the loading-dock ramp and closed their eyes as if the sight of the world without Zeedie in it were too much for them to bear.

“Zeedie. What’s that short for?” Rita said, joining Zeedie in the stock room for their midshift break. She perched on a stack of boxes and dangled her feet. Zeedie leaned out into a gentle, misting rain, smoked a cigarette, spit into a puddle. They were surrounded by gluten-free cookie mixes, unusual freeze-dried fruits, sugar scrubs, rare mineral salts. Some wag on the warehouse crew had built a little crenellated turret out of artisanal soda cartons. Some wag—perhaps the same one—had taken one of the Make-A-Face sticker pads the store sold in the checkout aisles and centered all the mouths vertically on the round, wholesome, blank spaces between waves of luxurious hair. With Make- A-Face eyebrow stickers placed on either side like furry parentheses, the mouths did look strikingly, immediately, like vaginas, but still someone had seen fit to write “Cunt Face” in blue ballpoint pen directly on the wall under the fluttering pages.

“It’s not short for nothing,” Zeedie said at last, plucking her lip as if something were stuck to it. “Just my name.”

The rain drifted in and touched Rita’s face, drifted away, drifted in. There were ridges of white buttercream in a thumbprint on both Rita’s wrists where she’d touched them as she’d stripped off her gloves. Behind her, the canned artisanal music rose in volume as someone whooshed open the storeroom’s pneumatic doors, then quieted as the doors duti- fully sealed. Off to the side, at the top of the stairs that descended from the loading dock, the three black dogs rustled and turned inside the cardboard box Zeedie had set up for them to protect them from the rain. Maybe one whimpered. One thunk thunk thunked against the thin wall of the box with its heel as it scratched a restless, migrating itch. With the turret behind her, her forearms resting lightly on cases containing bricks of chocolate infused with flowers and roots, gaseous exhalations, and chips of scintillate stone, Rita felt beneficent, serene. If she so chose, it was an easy step from feeling serene to a sort of en- throned entitlement, the royalty of place. Instead, within her the baby turned, then turned again, and she felt as if she herself were another sort of chair. It was not a bad sensation, she decided. It was as if by virtue of her engagement with whatever she found before her, she had released herself from her responsibility for whatever she found within her. Zeedie and the baby, yes. But also puddles, buckled concrete, the sparse variegated blooms that weebled their way out of industrial soil, and the thing inside her that went Chunka chunka chunka and, no matter how throttled its rhythm, did not ever seem to cease. “Take a break,” Rita thought. “Live a little.”

“Break time’s over,” Rita said, but when Zeedie didn’t turn or acknowledge her, she too sat on, legs adrift, baby turning in leisurely interiority as the afternoon slowed, then stilled, then finally held in a single point and refused entirely to pass.

In Rita’s third trimester, her father began holding Dungeons and Dragons meetings in the living room. He was the Dungeon Master and in the days before a gathering stayed up late into the night planning the quests, the pitfalls to the quests, the possible victories, the probability of unacceptable losses, the collateral damage. Rita’s father’s dungeon was spread out over her mother’s artfully faded mail-order rug, which was braided in three different shades of denim, so the dungeon looked as if it were descending through layers of sedimentary rock—speckled with fragments of shells, twists of ferns—followed by the tortured folds of the metamorphs. Shale, chert, sandstone. Gneiss, phyllite, schist. It was a deep dungeon, twelve possible levels, and filled not only with the usual monstrous dungeon denizens, but also with the remnants of an upper-world civilization—driven below by war or privation, by flu or a storm that had, thus far, lasted hundreds of years without cease. On some levels, the surface people had gone feral and cannibalistic. On others, they had learned to harvest photosensitive fungi as a food crop, were raising goats, birthing babies. In her father’s dungeon, people hung their clothes out to dry on lines stretched between stone walls, and children flirted beneath the heavy hems. In her father’s dungeon, someone caught a cricket and kept it in a wooden cage where it reeped and cheeped as the settlement, torched in the night, smoldered around it. The party of heroes descended through these levels. In the passages that branched out around them, they caught glimpses of move- ment, heard snatches of songs. Something was breathing heavily—it might have been her father’s friend, Ted, who was overweight and had asthma; something was stumbling through echoing darkness—it might have been Antoine, new to the group, who had gotten up to go to the bathroom and couldn’t find the light switch in the hall. Rita sat cross-legged in her mother’s needlepointing chair and let her belly rest on her ankles. She had a book tented on the side table so she could pretend she was reading, but really she watched as the men crouched around the dioramas her father had made, their faces tightening with every roll of the dice. In the kitchen, her mother talked on the phone, an old-fashioned model still attached to the wall. “Oh, Lynn,” her mother said as she crossed in front of the kitchen door. “Don’t say that. No, don’t say that, Lynn.”

“You pause to catch your breath,” Rita’s father said. “Your group is tired, dispirited, haunted by all that they have seen. You are crouched in a low passageway where the tunnel appears to split in four directions. Behind you, you can still see the faint orange flicker of torches and hear the distant clash of combat. In front of you, the passage appears to dip, and there is a suggestion in the darkness of roughhewn steps leading downward. The passage to your left is blocked by a recent cave-in, the rocks loose and the soil around them moist. From that direction, a faint breeze wafts around the rubble. To your right, the passage extends on in darkness and turns abruptly. You can hear the drip of water. Also, a rhythmic noise, like something very large is snoring.”

Once, outside Fallujah, Rita was stationed at a roadblock. There were concrete partitions staggered in a row three deep for her to squat behind, dirt heaped across the tarmac to slow or tip speeding vehicles, a tank behind her with the turret alertly swiveled to face down the long, empty road. Rita had her gun resting over her shoulder. Should she need it, she could drop it into her waiting palm, swivel at the waist just like the tank’s turret gun, unleash. She could do all this in less than five seconds. She had already done all these things in less than five seconds in training, and here she still was, her toes itchy in her boots, sweat on her upper lip.

Rita was nervous. It had been a bad month. The desert was blurred at its edges in a way she didn’t like, as if it couldn’t decide which was dirt and which was sky. Sometimes, as she bumped and swayed in the gun hatch on top of her unit’s Humvee on a long patrol, she would see a disconcerting strip of green where long grasses traced a seam of water running under the surface of the desert. Sometimes there were even flowers: yellow, white, red, green. The only thing that made a green flower a flower, Rita thought, was its shape. And its shape, if she remembered anything at all from high-school biology, was designed to attract wandering pollinators. To collect their accidental contributions to the genome. “I’m not having that,” she could imagine her mother saying. The wind battering against her helmet was so rackety she couldn’t hear what anyone else might be saying unless they popped their head up between her legs and screamed. Alone in the green-flower shape of her mind, Rita wanted to touch someone: brown skin tight at the elbow, curving in a wave of muscle over the forearm. She wanted to run the tip of her tongue up into the thatch of hair in someone’s underarm and taste the salt, the bitter chemical tang of deodorant. She wanted to nuzzle into the scent beneath—turned-soil smell, sour fear smell of the empty den—to live there, to reinhabit it.

But that was impossible. The only thing Rita could touch, bumping and swaying through the brown, latent, blurry, what-was-that? landscape, was her gun. She reached out to caress it. At this point, she was not yet pregnant, but her body, an empty socket, was tending that way. What was it she craved? Everything she wanted she had already gotten: food, drink, sex, death. She was twenty years old. What was left to her? She rubbed the butt of the gun, anchored it into her shoulder. Peering at the flowers through the scope, she smelled the cool, snaky smell of the gun’s metal and took aim: yellow, white, red, green.

“Go for the snoring,” Ted was shouting. “No guts, no glory.” “Oh, Lynn,” her mother practically sobbed. “Give it up to God.”

A long way down the road, a dust cloud formed, hesitated, then solidified and commenced to approach. Rita’s squad went on alert: straightening, tightening, swiveling, bringing to bear. The cloud grew closer and closer. Behind it, the desert did nothing to resolve itself into dirt or sky, nor to indicate it was paying attention. This was early in the morning. The sky had been quietly rising from behind the mountains, in lengthening shades of indigo, then lavender, then suddenly the fiery, split-lip colors of an overripe nectarine, before settling into high, clear, faded blue. At some point, the whine of a motorcycle engine could be heard. At some point, Aban, the Iraqi translator embedded with Rita’s unit, began to shout.

“But what are we doing on this mission?’ Antoine supplicated. “Snatch and grab? Search and rescue? Don’t you think it’s important that we stay on message here?”

“You’ve got the wrong idea,” said Rita’s father. “You’re explorers.

Your mission, as it were, is simply to descend.”

“At some point,” said Dr. Chu, “you can no longer pretend whatever it is you are pretending.” She opened the door for Rita and ushered her into the crowded hall. With her lips very close to Rita’s ear, Dr. Chu whispered, “This is why living an empirical life is so important, Private French. You’ve got to get out in front of it, or it will eat you up.”

Had she then clicked her teeth together? Or, it sounded like, licked her lips? There was no way for Rita to tell, standing at eyes-forward at- tention there in the corridor, which, when she came to the place where it terminated, would also effect her termination. Discharged. Honor- ably. “Private Orbison,” said Dr. Chu, and a man with a head shaped like a shovel or a leafhopper bug got up smiling and slid by Rita as if the air around her body were something he did not want to touch. A prime example of the Me-Shaped Universe, Rita thought, and wanted to turn and tell Dr. Chu, display for her the empirical application of their time together, but she had been dismissed. Dr. Chu had already retreated back into the neutral cinder-block den of her office, followed closely by Private Orbison, who, if Rita was any judge of character at all, was still grinning into the empty air.

But anyway. What was there to fear at the end of that hall that she had not already feared? On the checklist of ancestral human terrors, Rita thought, I have not yet ticked off lion or cave-in, eclipse, stampede, starvation, vengeful god. It seemed unlikely any of those was behind that door. Lion perhaps the most likely. Or eclipse. Then, she was at the door at the end of the corridor, her hand on the knob of the door at the end of the corridor, still listing what she had not ticked off that checklist. Everything inside Rita was too small to be felt by the enor- mity outside Rita. Even a relatively large organ like the liver. Even a very active organ like the heart. And yet the enormity that was Rita was very aware of the microscopity that was the baby. Though she could not feel it. Though she could not hear the sounds it made. What did this mean, empirically? Rita wondered as she opened the door at the end of the corridor and stood there for a moment, looking out onto another hallway but listening for the call that did not come from behind her, the order that would turn her back.

“Tawaquf! Tawaquf!” shouted Aban. “Tawaquf, ‘aw sawf yutaliqun ealayk alnaara.” And at that, the dust cloud slowed, sputtered, began to dissipate, or—to Rita, huffing under her helmet, bent at the knees, ready to lunge—descended, somewhat coyly, like great fans of ostrich feathers lowering for the reveal. First, the skinny front tire; then, the battered fork and handlebars of the motorcycle. Nothing gleamed, nothing shimmied. If Rita needed any more evidence that this land was different from the land in which she had been born, the ungleaming state of their motorcycles would have provided it—but there was more! Always more.

The snakes and the birds, the unfamiliar trees with their sorrowful drooping fronds, the sounds of dawn that clicked on with a static bark and then proceeded muzzily, the imprint of every single person’s pas- sage left behind in the dust, the houses and walls and wells and curtains made of poppy-patterned bedsheets in the windows, the women who bore beneath their robes whatever burden it was that was theirs to bear, the men who made behind their scarves whatever face it was that was theirs to make. Nothing could be seen in this country. Not really. Everything had to be intuited, like: This feels like evening and has the same general smell as evening; this feels like sex and makes the same general noises. But how could she tell? Evening might actually be just getting her head stuck in a humidor once used to store cakes of black rosin for the purpose of lubricating cellos. Sex might actually be a flock of talkative birds erupting from their shared roost into sudden, wheel- ing silence as they navigated the crosscurrents around a momentarily luminous minaret.

For example, while Rita dropped the gun to her palm, socked the butt in her shoulder, dropped her body to one knee, and peered through the gun’s incandescent scope, it seemed as if what she should see through her gun’s single, piercing eye was a man on a motorcycle and not much else. What she did see, what it felt like she was seeing, were the dirty hooves of a sheep draped over the motorcycle’s handlebars; the clotted wool of a sheep puffing out to either side of the frame; the sweet, dumb muzzle and wide, placid eyes of a sheep lolling thought- fully above the bike’s yoke. Was it, in fact, a motorcycle being driven by a sheep? Should she, in her service to the United States Army, shoot said sheep from the back of said motorcycle? Take it in for questioning? Rita did not know the answers to these questions or, she supposed, any others, but there was a response, a ready one, and she tightened her grip on the gun.

“La, la, la, la, la,” shouted Aban, flinging his arms up over his head. “—’Illa al souq, al souq. He’s going to market. To market,” he shouted. “He’s bringing the sheep.”

In all the ways that a machine is a machine, the body is also a machine. Its functions are regulated by other functions; its spasms, gasps, leaks, paroxysms, horripilating ripples are the function of other func- tions wearing out, running dry, in need of a good lube. “Mechanic!” call the soldiers on the battlefield. It sounds like that, right? Right? “Isn’t that right, Private French,” said Dr. Chu.

Rita pulled the trigger. Her trigger was not the first trigger, most likely; it was hard to tell. Regardless, the day filled with noise, and, as there was nothing in the desert around them to react to that noise—no birds to burst up out of sagebrush, no rabbits to leap for their holes, no wild horses arching their significant necks (or none that they could see)—there was nothing to distract Rita from the drum rolls of the rifles as the rest of the unit opened up, the heavier blats of the tank-mounted machine gun, the throttled bleating of the sheep as its chest burst and dissolved into lacework, the shout—one word; what word? She didn’t speak the language—of the hitherto-unseen man behind the sheep, the whine of the motorcycle as the engine hitched, the bike slid, the engine was punctured, sparked, doomphed in a minor fire by the side of the smoking road. “La la la la la,” Aban shouted, and then he was quiet. Everything was quiet. The fire spit and hizzled—a comforting noise, if one let it be. A forest noise, if she so chose. Rita could close her eyes and almost see behind her lids the dappled shifting forest shadows. Between them, the suggestion of a path.

Aban was on his knees on the ground with his hands over his head. Sergeant Konwiki—redheaded, freckled, squinting—stepped forward beyond the barricade and, shielding his eyes from the heat, walked back. Then they all stood as the fire burned and the stink of oil, smoke, burned wool, and burned meat rose up into the unwinking sky. A twisting, blackening pile of scrap: metal; plastic; one of the sheep’s hooves, recognizable until the very end; the man’s skull; his unseen face, black and round, withering in the very hottest heart of the fire. Where it burned blue. Where it did not waver.

After that, nothing happened. Nothing was supposed to. The fire burned out, and after radioing the base for a support unit to deal with the remains, Sergeant Konwiki tried to drag the motorcycle out of the road, but it was too hot, too enmeshed with the sticky black tar of flesh. “Gross,” he said. Rita said nothing. Aban said nothing. Maybe someone joked or sang a song. It was hot. The sun crossed the sky.

On the twelfth level, the entire party was buried in a rockslide caused by a beast, something like the Minotaur, that had risen, snort- ing, up out of an underground chasm at their very feet and accidentally gored the ceiling with its horns. “What is this bullshit?” said Ted.

“You rolled the dice,” Rita’s father said. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Maybe we’re still alive under there,” said Antoine, squinting at the rug. “Maybe we’re, like, maimed or lying nose to nose with the monster. Breathing in its foul breath.”

“No,” Rita’s father said, consulting the notebook in which he wrote out the particulars of each campaign. He rose to his feet, wincing as his knees popped, and wandered into the kitchen, where a blue wedge of refrigerator light slowly widened across the far wall. “You’re all dead,” her father said from the kitchen. “Even the beast. Heads bashed in, every one.”

At night, folded into her bed, Rita dreamed of Zeedie: Zeedie was standing at Rita’s counter and scraping white frosting up and down the sides of cakes. Cake after cake, tub after tub of frost- ing. Zeedie was so fast, so efficient. A turn of the wrist, a swipe of the spatula, and she was done. The cakes piled up beside her, lumpy and squashed but finished, and that was, after all, the point. The precise pinpoints of the frosting-roses Rita would have made, the fans and fronds and organza dots, were squished by Zeedie into an ugly but comprehensive wad. White cake, white cake. The point was white cake. “Zeedie,” Rita said, in the dream, reaching out toward Zeedie’s back, fondling the fold of Zeedie’s collar between her forefinger and thumb. “Zeedie, Zeedie, Zeedie, Zeedie.”

Zeedie was driving the Humvee up and down Rita’s street. It was a peacekeeping mission, but Rita’s neighbors did not seem to feel that way. Each was a blue balloon tied to a brick somehow still floating to- ward the Humvee, bobbing wildly in its wake, drawn-on marker faces distorted in anger. Looking down through the gun hatch, Rita could see the top of Zeedie’s scalp, her elbows and forearms, while she moved the wheel back and forth like she was rocking it to sleep. Up and down the road they went, Rita’s neighbors eeking and squeaking against each other as their numbers doubled, tripled, became less a crowd than a riot, barely contained. As the dream went on, the ambient, disgruntled, eeking noise grew louder and louder, almost unbearable. Like rats in a metal tub. Like vast, rusted turbines swinging in the wind. Like a chaw of latex packed into the cheek. But, slowly, steadily, Zeedie kept driving. Every so often she would take one hand off the wheel and nudge her sleeve back with her chin. She would consult her tattoos as if they were coordinates, then nod, then rock the wheel, then hum.

Zeedie was giving birth to Rita’s child. “Push!” Rita shouted as Zeedie hunkered down in the corner. “Push, push!” With her back to Rita, Zeedie hiked up her skirt and the long black shapeless overgarment she was wearing, and rummaged around between her legs. There was the sudden sound of a pail of water, or some other liquid, dropped from a great height and hitting the ground all at once. There was a rush of colorless fluid that soaked the canvas sides of Rita’s bakery shoes. Rita was holding a giant flag in the air. It was white and appeared to have something written on it, but she was waving it too fast to read the words and knew that if she let the flag slow, a disaster, entirely her fault, would overwhelm them. “Push!” Rita shouted. “Push push push.” Gradually, obscurely, Zeedie heaved a dark bundle out from between her legs and pulled it trailing up to her chest. She sank down and leaned her old, balding head against the wall, looking at the face of Rita’s baby. The flag was so heavy Rita thought she would soon falter. Her arms were burning with the effort of keeping it aloft, moving. There was a livid stitch in her ribs that twisted deeper every time she breathed. But for now she swooped the flag, as big as a bedsheet, as a car tarp, as a banner proclaiming a greeting or a warning in seven tongues. She was a mother, Rita thought while she swooped and yelled, curled over her stitch of pain. This sort of thing was what mothers did. “Push,” Rita yelled. “Push push,” and the baby began to cry.

When Rita woke up from these dreams, the sun was rising, yellow and tremulous as a yolk behind the screen of summer green. In all the branches of all the trees, birds burst into the same busy song they had paused the night before. On the road outside her window, the zzzz of bike tires proclaimed the early-morning exercisers returning home to their dogs, or children, or sleepy mates. Rita rose, stretched, opened her closet door for the clean bakery uniform. Most mornings, she ignored the boots sitting with their tongues curled back down their throats and their laces carefully tucked in after. Some mornings, when her back hurt, when her lungs hurt, when the baby pressed up against her stomach or back against her intestines and made her body gener- ally hurt, Rita would pull the desk chair that had been hers since the seventh grade up to her closet and consider her boots. Chin in hand, eyes half closed: boots in dawn waiting in the closet. Ready to be filled.

Later, after the rest of the campaign had begrudgingly left—shrugging into coats, promising repercussions—and her mother had gone to bed, Rita sat with her father at the kitchen table again, and again watched as he went through the elaborate preparatory rituals for smoking heroin. On the table between them sat the square of foil, the trimmed straw, a saran-wrap baggie untwisted to reveal the brown rocks. “Where do you get it?” Rita asked as her father tied his hair at the nape of his neck and felt around in his pockets for his lighter. When Rita was a child, her father used to pick her up from school with a can of beer snugged into his crotch as he idled in the car line. He smoked cigarettes, then quit smoking cigarettes, then again stood out in the backyard next to the gardenia looking up at the stars as his cigarette dipped and rose and dipped. Rita could see him from her bedroom window. She stood in her bedroom window as white and ineffectual as a moth, tapping on the glass and crying because cancer and heart disease and emphysema.

Because her father was always wandering somewhere in his mind— stroking his moustache, turning the slow car’s wheel—and where he went, he didn’t take her.

Once, when Rita was about seven, her mother set a dish towel on fire while frying bacon in the morning. Her father, who had been outside, came rushing in the back door and into the kitchen as Rita’s mother made small noises of panic and turned back and forth between the fire and the sink. Rita herself, who had been eating a bagel, sat on the kitchen stool and watched the towel blacken, the threads quiver and curl back from the edge. Like a rose petal, maybe, weighed down by Japanese beetles? Or was that a false memory inspired by the pests that were drawn into the yard by her mother’s newfound passion for Abraham Darbys, Cottage Maids, Remember Mes, and Mamie Eisenhowers? The roses were scraggly, poor producers. Rita’s father had built the beds for them, and her mother tended them anxiously, their showy tags, which proclaimed both names and blooms, still rattling around their naked shanks. “It will take them a few years,” Rita’s mother said often. “They need to get used to the soil here—and the sun.” Rita’s mother had read a lot of books about the matter and tagged the pages with color-coded Post-it notes. She buried banana peels and iron nails, coffee grounds and crushed eggshells around the bushes’ roots and squatted on her haunches in the afternoon sun, pushing her hair up from her brow with the back of one grimy wrist. She cut a tender picture in her gardening gloves, her gardening boots, her gardening bandanna with which she tied back her newly unruly gardening hair. For two years, she cut this picture. She had a lot of stamina. Heretofore unexpected resolve. Even as a child, Rita knew her mother was performing, that she meant the evidence of her fecund and unknowable inner life to be observed by both husband and daughter. It was only much later, after her time with Dr. Chu, that Rita understood that this performance was also meant for her mother herself. Being a rose gardener was the way her mother could be a woman who thought the thoughts of roses; a woman in the prickly, self-centered lush of rose-thought; and not a woman who put the ziti in the oven and pulled it out, who poured the tall glasses full of water, who picked up the phone when Lynn from her Bible study group called, who listened sympathetically to all of Lynn’s dark desires.

After two years, when the bushes had got used to nothing, Rita’s mother asked her father to dig them all out, and she had planted toma- toes instead. “Big Boy, Brandywine, Blondköpfchen,” she said, pointing to each, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it the way it had been with the roses. The tomatoes she harvested often lingered on the counter until they began to leak. Sometimes, she even left them to rot on the vine.

Still, the expectation on the day of the bacon fire was that Rita’s father, out tending the roses and emptying bags of Japanese beetles, had sensed the emergency—the smoke, the fluttering motions Rita’s mother was making with her hands—and had come to rescue, or at least reconvene. He entered with a rescuer’s suddenness, leaving the door swinging open behind him. Next, however, he slung his empty coffee cup onto the counter, walked past the fire and strode into the adjacent bathroom, from which they shortly thereafter heard the hard stream of his urine as it hit the toilet bowl, his sigh of satisfaction, his happy toot of release. After a long moment of silence during which she and her daughter looked at each other over the rising flames, Rita’s mother smashed the fire out with the back of a cast-iron pan. When her father reappeared, zipping up his worn geologist’s blue jeans, they all laughed and laughed, ate their burned bacon, laughed. It was a good memory for Rita. Whether or not it was actually an instance of False Universalism, it made her glad. The fire, the roses, the beetles in their bag. Her father, her mother, the summer all around them rising up from the ground.

“Ted sells it to me, believe it or not,” her father said now, locating his lighter in his shirt pocket and flicking it once or twice experimentally. “A guy he works with is in the reserves. That’s who he gets it from.”

“Okay,” Rita said. She watched her father tap a couple rocks onto the tinfoil square, shake them to the center. He smoothed the edges of the foil once, twice, stuck the straw between his teeth and talked around it.

“I don’t mean like that. I think the army part is incidental,” he said.

Then, “Could you help me with this, sweetie. Since you’re here.”

On base in Iraq, Rita had fucked her way through her platoon, skipping only the other members of her section. In the showers, in the rec rooms, behind the empty buffet in the mess hall, sometimes even on beds. Once, in the back of a Humvee parked in the motor pool late on a stunning, foreign night where the muzz that obscured the stars sometimes parted to reveal such strange streamers, such prismatic celestial webworks, such luminous arcing posies of cosmic dust that Rita, head thrown back to look up through the open gun hatch, came once, twice, three times and felt each time as if the eternity opening inside of her harmonized in its particulars with the eternity open above her. Not quite an exact match, not a carbon copy, but linked by the milky spray of star and seed and attendant convulsing in the otherwise nothingness of space. “Fuck,” said Private Ortega, hands on Rita’s still rolling hips. “You don’t play around, do you, girl? You like some kind of fuck machine.”

“Chunka, chunka, chunka,” Rita almost said, but she did not. She had looked away from the stars and let herself sink against his chest, face tucked into the dark space between his shoulder and his neck, feeling him breathing, feeling his cock shrinking inside of her and then slipping free, smelling the smell of his skin and his hair and the sudden wash of mint from the gum he eased out of his pocket and unwrapped behind her back. The muscles in his jaw bunched and released as he ruminatively chewed and touched the knobs of her spine, one by one, down her back to her sacrum, then up again.

“Thank you,” Rita said instead, and Private Ortega nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

Rita held the foil steady for her father and ran the flame of his lighter underneath it in slow, measured passes. The heroin bubbled and boiled into a sticky smear. The smoke rose up in wispy, twining tails, and her father chased them down with his straw. He shook his head slightly, and Rita let the flame go out. The charred pool in the center of the foil smoked for a few more seconds, then died. Her father followed the last rising feather of smoke and pulled it to him with a long, satisfied gasp. It was not much different, really, Rita thought. Pleasure is a need. The good smell of flowers, the hard fuck, the drug that fills and slows and smooths. Rita’s father sat back in his chair and lowered the plastic straw very carefully onto the table. He looked into the air past her head at the decorative baskets and cracker tins and wreaths of plastic ivy that crowded the tops of the kitchen cabinets, but he was not over there, nor right here in front of her. He was somewhere else, looking at something else. Something private. Something tender. The baby kicked inside Rita, one two three, like it was practicing a pivot or a two-step. In four more weeks, the baby would be considered full-term—bacteria in its gut; from head to toe, approximately the size of a bunch of Swiss chard. On-screen during the latest—and last if all went well—sonogram, the baby had been a series of white gestures against an intricately mottled black and gray background. In earlier scans, the images were mysterious and arcane, reminding Rita of looking through a blurry rifle scope before the focus was adjusted and the geometry of the target’s lines sprang into shape. At this stage, though, it was possible for even a layperson—Rita, say—to tell what was the baby’s head and what was belly, or bottom, or, once, the truncated bones of the femurs as the baby flexed its legs in and out of the wand’s field of vision.

“Here’s baby’s brain,” said the sonogram technician, blowing her bangs out of her eyes with a practiced huff and sliding the probe over Rita’s belly. “Here’s baby’s heart and baby’s belly, and oops, there are baby’s parts.” Rita had asked not to be told the sex—not that she wanted to “preserve the surprise” as her mother had suggested, but because it felt like an invasion of privacy to find out. She had read in a pregnancy chat room that, in utero, a penis would resemble “a shy little turtle sticking its head out of the shell,” and a uterine vagina was like “three slashes all in a row, like claws.” Rita tried to train her eyes against recognizing anything. Not turtles or tiger wounds, not pumping valves or tensile bones standing out in high relief against the otherwise undif- ferentiated her-ness of Rita’s insides. Still, when the baby raised a fist vaguely heavenward, it was impossible for Rita not to recognize it as a fist. When the baby tucked its knees up against its chest and rolled, it was impossible not to notice the tiny flutter that was its beating heart. “What are you going to name it if it’s a boy?” Rita’s mother asked as they walked back to the car, and Rita suspected this was a roundabout ploy to get her to talk about the baby’s father, whoever he might be. “Richard,” said Rita, which was her father’s name. She and her mother stood on opposite sides of the car, each waiting for the other to unlock the door. Her doctor’s office was at the farthest-flung arm of an office park; from there on out were fields more or less yellow and green with the season. If she held very still, held her breath even, Rita could hear the sound of sheep bleating to each other on the higher slopes of the farm pastures that looped in unincorporable children’s scribbles up the mountain ranges. A yellow butterfly hovered over the asphalt of the parking lot. Rita supposed it was caught in the current of heat rising from the ground, that it couldn’t muster enough strength in its gaudy, paper-thin wings to break free. Certainly there was nothing else about the parking lot to attract it. Not even an incidental planter full of pansies. Not even an ornamental cabbage frowning in its pot.

“That’s very sweet,” Rita’s mother finally said, laughing dizzily and leaning against the car frame. “Just don’t call him Richie. Your father hates that nickname.” She sneezed several times into her elbow and then rummaged around in her purse for a Kleenex. The butterfly fluttered up and down, up and down, as if it were a toy on a string. Rita resisted the urge to look up. Across the roof of the car, she watched her mother locate a wad of tissue in the pocket of her powder-blue cardigan and use it to dab at her nose. “Oh, Rita, honey. Hay-fever season again, sure as taxes. Could you go ahead and unlock the door, baby doll. You’ve got the keys, you know. Right there in your hand.”

Rita had no intention of naming the baby Richard. She had no intention of holding the lighter under her father’s heroin while he inhaled it. She had no intention of getting pregnant in a janitorial closet, probably, surrounded by the corroding fumes of bleach and Pine-Sol. She had no intention of looking through the scope of her gun at people lined up along the side of the road, men and women, some children facing the adults’ legs as if being shielded from the sight of the Humvee, the gun, the Rita on top of all of it peering down at them. Everyone was angry, shouting in a language she could not understand, waving their fists. The crowd was so full that the people in front were being pushed for- ward by the people in back, inch by stumbling inch. They dug in their toes, but still they were pushed forward. Shouting. Waving their fists. “Baby face,” Dr. Chu had said to Rita. The only windows in her office were high up, horizontal slats with frosted glass, as if Dr. Chu’s office were actually underground or needed to be protected from prying eyes. Rita had walked around the building trying to figure out from the outside which office was Dr. Chu’s, but there weren’t any windows that looked like hers. Skyline windows, she thought. Closed eyes.

Dr. Chu was writing something on a pad of paper, not looking at Rita. On their first visit, Dr. Chu had written her a prescription, held it out to her, and then, when Rita reached for the slip of paper, pulled it suddenly back to her chest and said, a note of laughter held within her voice, “But of course you’re not pregnant, are you?”

“I am,” Rita said, looking up at the closed-eye windows, looking down at her hands. “Yes. Actually. I am.”

Dr. Chu ripped the prescription up in slow measured tears and let the pieces flutter into and around the black metal trash can at the side of her desk. “That requires some rethinking,” she said, scooting over to her computer and clicking the mouse. She tapped something in at furious speed. Deleted. Tapped something else. She turned to Rita and smiled, a brief show of teeth that did nothing at all to the rest of her face. “That requires a different strategy altogether,” and Rita nodded. In a later session, Dr. Chu had said, “You put on your baby face and say: I can’t help it! You say: My hands are empty! Or: But I didn’t mean it that way! Do you think it matters what you meant, Private French? A baby, of course, does not mean to break its favorite toy, but in the end the toy is broken and perhaps its shards are dangerous. Perhaps the mother is not supervising, and the baby takes the shard and puts it, where?”

Rita shook her head. She crossed her hands over her stomach and put one boot on top of the other, then reversed them. She didn’t know where a baby would put a dangerous shard. She didn’t want to know. Once, briefly, she had helped her mother in the infant room of the Sunday school nursery and remembered it primarily as a series of acts of increasingly desperate distraction. “Turn up the music!” her mother had yelled over the Sunday school babies’ rising cries. “Turn on the glow lights! Put them in the rocking cradles! Make a whooshing noise in their ears!”

“The baby puts it in its mouth, Private French. It might even swallow.” Dr. Chu seemed distracted. She was looking around the room as if following the flight of something that had gotten in by accident, though when Rita searched for it, she could see nothing. “Regardless,” Dr. Chu finally said, putting her pen down and tenting her fingers under her nose. “Intent is not Content, Private French. Your will does not matter in the slightest in the larger equation you are a part of. Neither do your actions. You are one among many. If one did the damage, all did the damage. Do you see? You cannot point a finger, even at yourself, without making a fist.”

After the incident with the Minotaur, Rita’s father had a bad name among role-playing circles as an untrustworthy Dungeon Master. His campaigns thinned, the participants ever more disenfranchised. Only Antoine remained a constant, and one evening, even he didn’t show up. Rita’s father was left sitting alone, hunkered over the rug with his notebooks splayed out around him.

“Why do you let him be like this?” Rita asked her mother. They were standing in the kitchen, Rita’s mother stirring something that was bubbling frantically on the stove, Rita folding laundry. A layette it was called: tiny socks and shirts, tiny pants and booties, all of which had to be washed in special pink soap before the tiny person could be wedged into them. Rita held up a tiny white shirt and put her hand up through the neckhole. She made a fist and turned the hand this way and that, made the hand look up at the ceiling, across the table at her mother’s back, through the kitchen door at her father’s shape seated in darkness on the living-room floor.

“Like what?” Rita’s mother said, lifting her spoon and sidestepping until she could see through the doorway. “Oh,” she said. A dribble of steaming sauce ran over her wrist and down her forearm. She winced and rubbed it back up her arm with her finger, stuck the finger in her mouth. “He’s always had a good imagination. He used to tell you the strangest stories when you were a little girl. I worried about it sometimes—that they were too intense for you—but just look at you now.” Rita’s mother beamed and gestured expansively with the spoon. Red droplets sprayed in an arc across the linoleum, and her mother shrieked, jumped back, flung the spoon in the pot. “Did I get it on the baby’s clothes?” her mother warbled, rushing past Rita and into the pantry. “It’s tomato! It will stain.”

There was nothing on the clothes, each stack fluffy and ethereal and perfectly simple in its form. A shirt was a shirt, pants were pants. The little stack of socks were matchless, each fitting with whatever other came to it. The stack of tiny hats was austere and focused—no colors to entreat the eye, no whimsy to distract from the tiny head that would soon occupy them.

Rita’s mother came back with a box of baking soda, which she flung onto the table. “Quick,” she said, “Open it. Make a paste.” She began to pick up each article of clothing, unfolding them, turning them inside out, checking the collars, the hems, the seams.

“Mom,” Rita said. Then, “Mama.” In the living room, her father rose to his knees, to his feet. He stretched his back, spine popping audibly, then ambled over to the front door and went out. He snicked the door carefully shut behind him. A moment later, Rita heard the car start.

“Baking soda will take out any stain,” Rita’s mother said, the tip of her nose almost touching the soft nub of the sock she had stretched over her thumb. “Baking soda will erase mistakes you never even knew you made. Are you listening, Rita? This is something you’ll need to know.”

“I’m listening,” Rita said. She picked a shirt up off the pile in front of her and began to turn it over, searching for invisible stains. Together with her mother Rita stood in the kitchen, pressing her thumb into seams, prying the fabric apart along its stitches, making all the automatic gestures of restless hands, tidying up, fixing a mistake even before it was made. Night fell. The streetlights came on. Under the halo of the kitchen light, Rita sat with her mother, the baby’s raiment arrayed before them.

Rita had not intended to follow Zeedie back to her house at the end of the shift, yet here she was, standing in a parking lot behind the Palmetto Inn Extended Stay Motel, where Zeedie hoisted her dogs one by one out of a shopping cart and slowly ushered them up the stairs. The building had been a Super 8 but was modernized sometime during the years Rita was away at war. The majority of this renovation seemed to have been restricted to painting: the building a shade of undistinguished cream, the balconies railed in alternate rungs of blue and red iron. The doors to the individual units had also once been red, but, painted in an earlier stage than either building or balconies, had sun- faded into a facetious magenta. Rita watched Zeedie climb the stairs until she disappeared behind the concrete lip of the first balcony. Then the dogs’ paws and Zeedie’s feet reappeared going up the next set of stairs, visible to Rita as she squatted behind the Palmetto Inn Extended Stay Motel’s blue dumpster, as they winked between the spaces of the steps. On the third and final floor of the motel, Zeedie and the dogs reappeared and made their way down the balcony to their particular magenta door, where they disappeared from sight.

Behind the dumpster, Rita found herself breathing rapidly. There was a milky puddle of dumpster water near her foot that smelled like bleach, and underneath the bleach the rot of something long sub- merged in water. There was a rainbow puddle spreading in a slow lake across the depression behind Rita where the parking lot had buckled, sunk, and finally collapsed, abandoned to the mugwort and the pigweed and, farther down the rugged, trashy little slope, stand after stand of milkweed holding their heavy, fusty blooms up between the palms of their leaves. Rita looked for monarchs as her father had taught her, but it was a mostly cloudy day, another fall storm coming, and nothing seemed inclined to flutter. A pink piece of plastic ribbon at the end of a maroon LeBaron’s radio antenna. The corner of the Palmetto Inn Extended Stay Motel welcome banner, where one eyelet had torn loose and was pinging sporadically against the blue and red iron railing. But that was it. No butterflies. No little brown birds.

In as tight a crouch as she could muster around her awkward belly,

Rita sidled across the parking lot. When she reached the safety of the stairwell, she straightened, fisted her hands in her lower back, and stretched. Recently, there had been an election to replace the local sheriff who had had controversial crime-prevention policies before he died of a heart attack in the line of duty. The new sheriff-elect had run unop- posed and yet still campaigned. Vote Dickey! said the flyers scattered about the stairwell. Some of them bore unconcerned footprints over their script. Others had been meticulously defaced until they read, predictably, Vote Dick ! “That man needs a mandate from heaven,” Rita’s mother had said, reading the local paper and shaking her head. Rita’s father snorted and played the drumbeat from “Take It to the Limit” on the table with his coffee spoon. Now, Rita picked one flyer up, folded it, and slipped it in her pocket. Recon of all varieties was integral to the success of the mission. Nothing could be overlooked that might give one perspective on the enemy.

Rita went up the first flight of stairs, up the second set, crouched at the head of the flight, and looked down the long, still balcony. She could wait if she had to. Even this off-balance. Even wearing her bak- ery shoes, which, as her pregnancy progressed, had begun to pinch. Faintly, from behind one of the magenta doors, Rita could hear a toilet flushing, the sound of running water, the garble of a television growing suddenly louder and then receding. None of the doors in the building opened or closed. No one walked along the balconies. It was an odd hour, the midday shift. Many people were responsibly at work, and the ones who did not responsibly work were responsibly napping, or watching a game show, or out of their Extended Stay rooms prospect- ing the early-fall overgrowth with butterfly nets and ether jars and slim leather cases filled with needles and lighters and twisted coffee spoons. Outside Zeedie’s door, Rita glanced once more down into the empty parking lot, where the pink ribbon hung limp, and knocked. She turned her back on the parking lot, bellied up to Zeedie’s unremarkable door so that, from behind and below, she too would be unremarkable. Unmemorable. It was a basic precaution, she reasoned. That was how she would have explained it to Dr. Chu. Reasonably.

If there is dignity in human experience, Rita considered as she knocked again, more sharply, on the door, it is either in the way-back past when we cave dwellers peaceably plucked lice from each other’s genitals, or it has been disseminated so evenly among us all that it ex- ists within each of us as only a sand speck, a fly dot, an itty pip of the heart, too small to see. This seemed most likely to her, so likely it was almost ordained. Think of all the shit that must have piled up around a cave society’s cave, Rita thought. Think of the stench.

When Zeedie opened the door, Rita thought she might be surprised, but it was hard to tell exactly. Zeedie did gaze over Rita’s shoulder, as if expecting to see someone standing behind her. She turned to look back over her own, as if expecting the same thing. “Hi, Zeedie,” Rita said, “I just thought I’d stop by and say hello.” She inched just infinitesimally closer on her black, quiet, pinching bakery shoes. More like a shifting of weight, hardly noticeable, but enough that her stomach now bulged into the space of Zeedie’s apartment. Enough that the door couldn’t be shut.

“Hello,” Zeedie said, after a long moment’s silence. Behind her, Rita could see a coffee table and a bluish couch covered in some shiny material. There was a window with unevenly pulled venetian blinds, and a little picture on the wall that seemed vague, mottled, but well tended and personal. It was maybe a garden. Maybe a bench in a garden, all around it the flowers blotchily abloom. Zeedie might even have painted it herself. Rita knew so little about Zeedie. Had she had children, for example? Had she raised them herself or with help from a mate? A spouse? She seemed like the sort of body that had always been singular. The hard nut of the body, unpierced, but there was no way for Rita to tell. It was better to stick to tactical considerations. Points of contact. Areas in which concealment was possible, or likely, or assumed. There were questions to ask, that was for sure. Somewhere just behind the body she had now, like its overlapping shadow, Rita felt her old, tight, stripped-down body crouch and growl.

“Is that your own?” Rita asked, pointing over Zeedie’s shoulder at the picture on the wall. Confused—Rita was sure of the expression this time—Zeedie stepped back to see what she was pointing at, and just like that, Rita slid around her and into the room. Thump thump thump, down from some middling height, the three black dogs stalked around the stucco half wall that separated the kitchenette from another living space. “The bed,” Rita thought, triumphant, and imagined what would be beyond the bed. The bathroom, certainly. Perhaps a closet. There would be a bedside table with at least one deep drawer. There would be the warm space under a pillow where, close to the touch of a midnight hand, something could be concealed. Meanwhile, all three dogs had stiff-legged around the wall. They saw Rita standing there, and one growled, one sat down and wagged its shifty tail, one turned with great dignity and disappeared from sight back in the direction from which it had come. “Do you mind if I sit down?” Rita asked Zeedie, gesturing toward the couch. Zeedie, who had crossed her arms over her chest and stepped backward until her back was against the wall, said, “No.” But Rita did not sit down. She rounded the half wall and saw, as she expected, Zeedie’s bed, tightly made, and heaped with clothbound books, their gilt titles flaking off their spines. Rita flipped one open with her finger and read aloud, but the book was in another language—French, perhaps—and the sounds Rita made were halt and fumbling, honking sounds, sounds to rile the dogs. On the bed, two of the dogs had curled up on Zeedie’s pillows. On the floor the one that had growled was busily sniffing her shoes, still growling under its breath.

Dr. Chu had said, “Stop messing around, Private French. Stop equivocating. Contact is essential. Beat your palms against each other if there’s nothing else available. Make a noise.”

The drill sergeant had said, “Scan the room. Look for pressure points. Look for leverage. If you are alone, put your back against a wall. Limit the enemy’s sensory input. Limit their comprehension.”

Her father, in the kitchen, staring at the wall, had said, “Ask ques- tions, as many as you like, but don’t be surprised when you don’t get any answers. More and more, I think the point is the questions themselves. More and more, I think . . .”

“Hey,” Zeedie said. “Hey.” Then, to the dogs, something in another language that caused the growling one to sit.

There, as Rita had thought, was the bedside table. She eased the drawer open and found a clutter of tea bags, assorted travel brochures, a glasses case with a pair of cheap red reading glasses peeking out the top. Opposite the bed was the entrance to the bathroom, and through the open doorway Rita could see the mirror reflecting nothing but the four beige walls, the beige tub, the mold-speckled shower curtain. On her side of the bed was another door, this one closed.

“Hey,” Zeedie said, “you need help? Are you okay?”

What did she need, this Rita, this carrier within whom the fish-life of the baby bubbled and grew, this Rita swaying and bumping in the body that itself swayed and bumped over cratered landscapes, smok- ing with ruin—the IHOP, the Target, the Yarn and Y’all, the Dixie Republic, the Stone Ground Grill, the Firelight Tire Repair, the Flag Corral, the Life Is Good store, the God Is Great store, the Pumpkin Town Opry, the Leather Shoppe, the Kmart, the Lmart, the Ymart, the Xmart, the Superplex, the Googleplex, the General Dry Goods, the Ink Incorporated, the Golden Triangle, the Hut—What was she, this Rita, who could admit any number of entrances; who could wear any number of masks; who could breathe deeply through the loose knit of the cotton scarf and not choke on the smoke; who could over and over again pull the trigger; who pulled from herpocket nothing but her own fingers, reaching; who felt within her the great negative, the no of the universe, as it unraveled into scintillate particles of yes?

“I give you permission,” said all the voices all at once. “I absolve you. What else could you do?”

What is your name?
the interrogation might begin.
What is your number and your rank?
Your history?
Your mission?

“I’ll ask the questions here,” Rita said.

Zeedie sat down on the couch and patted her lap. All three dogs rose up on their shaky legs and came to her. They circled muskily, settled down around her, turned and regarded Rita with their wide, unblinking eyes. A cloud passed over the sun and plunged the room further into darkness. It seemed to Rita that the eyes of the three dogs whirled: one as big as a teacup, one as big as a wagon wheel, one as big as the top of the minaret tower from which, on all sides at once, came the lilting call. Rita backed toward the closet door with her hands outstretched behind her. When she found the knob, she paused for a moment, returning Zeedie’s stare, and then twisted, pulled, whirled, crouched. Behind the door was a rich darkness, a passageway leading downward, the sound of something snoring, a feel to the walls where the concrete that plugged the wound gave way to living bark and, deep down the roughhewn stairs, a pulse of light as if a fire were lit and waiting.

“Go on,” Zeedie said, “you don’t need my say-so.”

And so, belly thrust before her, Rita began her descent.

Read more from Issue 15.2.