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I should be. If not with the world, then with the serious business of getting over Reese, but… I’m taking the evening off. From both, it seems.
Me: Where’s RTC?
My navigational prowess is limited to the West Coast, and the Eastern Seaboard still befuddles me occasionally.
Reese:Sorry, RTC is the Rowley Training Center. Laurel, Maryland. I’m sixteen miles northeast of you.
I look to my left, as if I can peer around the White House and all of DC, gaze to the northeast, and somehow spot Reese out there.
Me: What’s the Secret Service training center like? I’m imagining something impressively high-tech.
He sends a picture in response: a stark, plain room, cinderblock walls painted white. A single bed, nightstand, lamp. The only sign of human presence is an unzipped duffel on a luggage rack.
Reese: Grim
Me: Looks like some of the camps I stayed in when I first went overseas.
Reese: Yeah?
I share more with him in one text than I have with most people who ask me about my time working abroad.
Me: When I first went to the Balkans, we were staying in a dilapidated warehouse. There were probably thirty of us altogether. Forensic anthropologists, technicians, lawyers, legal attachés, human rights advisors, and gravediggers. It rained so much that the mud slipped beneath the warehouse walls and started piling up inside. It unmoored the foundations, and by the time we left, the warehouse was ninety degrees off from where it had started. We called it the spinning top.
Silence. Reese’s dots dance, and then stop. Dance and stop.
Reese: What was it like? Doing what you did?
Me:Harrowing.
With the first mass grave I helped excavate, we recovered thirteen bodies, all piled on top of one another like they’d been heaved in a pit. They’d been there for years. They were skeletonized.
Plastic and nylon decay far slower than flesh, and the ties and blindfolds their executioners had used were still there, as if they’d just been knotted on. Fabric over empty eye sockets, plastic twine around brittle arm and leg bones.
It rained the whole time, mud slipping into and around each skeleton, as if the earth didn’t want to give up the dead.
One thought echoed through me after: this should not happen in this world. Not ever again, to anyone.
Me: It was enlightening in a cruel way. I saw how far people can go into their own hatred, and what happens when they throw their humanity away.
I never talk about these parts of my past. They are public, of course, in the way that my resume is public. But the things I saw, the horrors I dug up with my own hands… those belong to me.
Another long pause, and then Reese changes the subject.
Reese: What’s a night off look like for you?
It looks like I’m trying to get over you.Of course, I don’t type that. I snap a picture of the sunset off the Truman Balcony, capturing the end of my chaise lounge, my leggings-wrapped calves, my bare feet. The sky is peach and periwinkle and streaked with wisps of clouds. Cherry blossom buds hover on the trees, and the lawns are brilliant once again. The roses around the South Fountain are in their first scarlet bloom.
Reese:Wow. I’m jealous. I only had traffic for a view on my drive up tonight.
Me:I thought you were going yesterday.
Reese:I was, but we had a threat come across the squeal sheets, and I wanted to go check it out personally. That ate up my Saturday. I missed check-in and the physical fitness test. I’ll do them tomorrow morning, before the first weapons re-qual.
Me: A threat?
Reese:Turned out just to be a ranter. Someone running their mouth and getting too hot under the collar. He was very contrite after we showed up at his house at five a.m. and hauled him downtown. We let him off with a warning, but I’ll be keeping an eye on him.
This is not the first time someone has raged against my policies or against me personally. It is the first time since I’ve had Reese as my protector, though, and that’s doing strange things to me.
