ALPHA
I box in the park. He boxes in the park. We box in the park and when we hit, our first faces crack and shatter. Underneath, now, I see his second face. Narrow and deep. Now he eyeballs me and past the blur of our hands attacking there is this second face, ancient and fierce, no bone, no muscle, just light and time. No, I say, no. I can’t hit this.
ROMEO
He shot a deer with the AR-15 I had just learned to shoot at the range. He’d learned in Bosnia. I’m going out for a while, he’d said. Postcards from Sarajevo - never sent.
He came back a few hours later, the deer bleeding down his back, standing in a pool of blood. It’s like you when you’re on the rag, he says.
For a moment I wonder if he’s drunk or high before remembering that it’s an irrelevant diagnostic. He’s in treatment. I am the support. It’s time for dinner, for training, for barbeque. I get our boxing wrap tape from the drawer in the bedroom and two beers. He gets the repeller rope from the shed.
He throws the deer to the ground, trusses its forefeet together, and hoists it into the tree. He comes back, and we watch it swing. We wrap our hands. We drink those beers, and eight more.
Ready? He asks.
It’s dark by now, a few fireflies, the stars twist in the spill of the Milky Way, and we sway together to Patsy Kline playing from inside. His skin is warm and cracked with blood but still soft. Chiricahua Apache. Hairless. Russet. Flesh of stone. I am yellow, golden, cold.
And we hit that deer as hard as we can. Left hook. Right hook. Left hook. Right hook.
It leaves the wire hair of its coat in our cracks. Knuckles. Both hairless. Blood. We roast it in an oil barrel.
This deer is not a war criminal.
Months later, I am stripping in the Garden District. He comes to see me, in all ways. They all come to see me, and come, to see me, and I don’t respond. It’s tense - ejaculate. I don’t know why. Perhaps the possession of a muscle that gets soft and hard and soft and hard and perhaps there is some alchemy in that which leads to a need for external control, or perhaps cocaine gives anxiety to performance or performance to anxiety, or perhaps it’s because of the leopard print thong and a primal amygdala urge to hunt or fuck - something has lodged inside me that observes and idly hypothesizes but no longer analyses or concludes. I remove more layers of clothing and then he jumps the stage. His pussy. His. Not mine. This is my payday, and he already used his on cocaine. I used mine on field research. On the removal of nothing for nobody. On the privilege to look into their eyes and say, you won’t hit this, not afterward, not this. He’ll take me home.
And he takes me home, and I’m lying on the bed and he mounts me in an effort to say I love you, even though I’m angry that you were naked and they wanted you.
And I say, baby, I want you.
And he says, baby, I want you too.
And with his right fist, he hits me in the left eye socket, hard enough for that one soft pop and crack. It’s unmistakable when you hear it from the inside.
Next to the bed is a mirror, decorative perhaps, it’s hard to say why New Orleans has mirrors in its bedrooms. Does anyone truly want to see? And I watch us in the mirror, poised, his right hook suspended, and he says, I’m going to kill you. I need to beat you to death.
And I say, are you? And I hold the mirror against my face. And he sees his reflection and I say, which of us do you want. I don’t remember caring about his answer, I just want to watch the decision unfold against his face.
And he says, I don’t care which one of us. But I’m going to do it. Let’s just say it’s me.
I leave the mirror on the pillow and he pounds it until his blood spurts all over the wall. This is something I can hear, but not see - I know the splatter pattern of a split vein against a white wall as it spurts. I wait. I’m on hold with the police. He pounds the mirror with his well-trained fists while I call the police who do not respond to strippers in New Orleans at three in the morning after a Saturday night, or any night. He pounds it like it’s a Serbian, like it’s a Bosnian, like it’s a deer, like it’s me, like it’s his Irish father who didn’t want a half-Apache son, like it’s his Black mother who didn’t make it past the hail of dad’s bullets, like it’s himself reflected from a fake imperial gold frame suggesting that the colony of France will show you where you stand whenever you are prone. My eye is menstruating through the toilet paper and gesture of a washcloth. From the bathroom on my cell phone, I hear him sobbing, asking for my help with the blood and the pillowcase and his grief and the injustice and my pussy and his dick and the cocaine and the glass that has shattered into his eyes when all he wanted, all he ever wanted, was control.
I am not a war criminal.
MODEL MUGGING
It’s a sign on the wall at the VA - Model Mugging. A man, in body armor, who students will be trained to attack and disable from attempted sexual assault. Women only, says the ad. It’s a good place to look for a girlfriend. As if I hadn’t tried both, tried it all. All the same, I sign up and it’s there I meet my first girlfriend. When the model mugger has her pinned to the mat, all three hundred pounds of him, she is a whirl of blonde, Dallas hair scratching off his balls and jamming her fuchsia manicure into what would be his eyes if he weren’t wearing goggles. She’s crying. And that is how it will be our last time together - the party she has a year later when her guy friends get too drunk and don’t calculate on my training, and I drive away with a head injury, and newly single. But for now, she is who she is. Impervious. Imperious. Triumphant.
There is the wife and two daughters of an arms dealer in Austin who has been threatened by a deal gone wrong. Their leggings match, and their athletic shoes are new - bought together, for this ritual of preventing a retaliative attack. Each time I see their shoes, I see them at the checkout counter at the outlet mall with the girls, impatient, and their mother deciding which credit card has the lowest balance and the best rewards.
At each meeting, we go around the room to discuss in our three minutes what act of violence has brought us, all women, to this room in North Dallas where four former GIs in body armor wait on the bench to attack us, looking sad. They don’t want to be doing this. I wonder what debt they are repaying, and which woman will never know. They’re not GIs. They’re SOF. They’re on permanent holiday from Fort Bragg, because nobody has that sadness in their eyes except for those guys.
It is the fourth week of being pinned in a sexual assault position: on my knees, on my back, against the wall, or slammed to the mat in whatever way my imbalance has left me prone. Each week, I learn. Where to kick. How to leverage. It is hand to hand. The program is run by special forces, retired, pretending to be boy wonder enlisted grunts on the GI bill. I can smell Somalia on them. I wonder what soul debt they are repaying, and which person will never know they tried.
It is the fourth week and I say to the group from behind my eyeliner and wicked lips that five weeks ago I was kidnapped, assaulted, raped, whatever word you want to use, for whatever phenomenon, and I include a glancing mention of domestic terrorism both because that was what it was, and because the reduced tuition criteria included a geopolitical angle and was included in the course recruitment materials. I never qualify for anything. I may as well make the best of my truth. I make eye contact with the mother of the consul to Kabul. She looks a bit offended - her terrorism is by proxy, by brown men, via her lawfully married man, and from half a world away, and he’s not Christian, this man who she fears will cross the Mexican border into her gated community to ravage her like only a Muslim can and here I’m accusing a nice Mormon boy from the suburbs and I wrap it up by saying, and I don’t plan on it happening again - and it won’t, though many will try. I don’t know that yet. I am hedging for the future. A silence falls.
Did you read the contract, the facilitator asks.
No, I reply.
You have to wait six months.
For what, I ask.
To recover. The time limit in the training contract is six months past inciting incident.
This time limit. As though it will be enough. Who is able to count the days. They stretch and shrink, and shrink and stretch, an unwanted erection. The benched men in body armor are from Fort Bragg. I know who trained them in SERE. I know the trainer, I know how it goes. Getting used to enduring torture. To administer it. They’re not being paid. They’re volunteers in this program. For what have they volunteered - the rapes by priests, by Boy Scout guides, by their fathers who beat them, what made them decide to undergo formal training to withstand and administer torture. Who are they prepared to kill. Why do they want to train me. Why did I agree to this, and why did I not fight back harder or, why did I not get this training earlier to detach a man from his testicles.
Oh, I say.
Have one last go, they say. Then you can’t come back to the program until your time passed has…passed.
He lands on me with a look in his eyes of compulsion and regret. He topples the ninety five pounds of me to the floor. I remember to keep one leg sharp, out to the right, my strongest leg. I remember to flip him from sheer force of will and the laws of physics that are, if I stay aware, on my side. I’m wearing the tank top I will later wear when I am institutionalized by the police for PTSD. The tank top that the attendants on the locked unit will confiscate for being too revealing. It’s a boxing tank. It has a built-in bra. In it, I can move. And so while I still have it, I remember to climb, fast, wriggling my pelvis nearer to his trachea. I remember to crush it with my elbows, I remember to go for his eyes with my left hand, and to twist his testicles with my free knee and then my right hand. I remember how long to wait before returning to the trachea with my shoulder, and another ratchet to his right eyeball. He’s wearing armor. I’m not. He doesn’t feel a thing. In his eyes, the chemistry of his body response betrays him. This is familiar to him, and I will never know why. And this is familiar to me, the assault, and he knows why. The relationship is uneven and this makes me angry. My future girlfriend watches from the ring, cheering me on.
Girl, you got this. Girl, kill it, kill it.
Later we will eat each other out as though that is some kind of victory.
There is a silence inside me, the wind before the wind and after the wind. The grinding of testicles protected by a cup. The erasure of eyes, protected by goggles. The dull rasp of the trachea, collapsed were it not for the shield. My elbow in his throat. Sharp. I’ve got nothing on besides a tank top and a pair of jeans. Like I did at the time. Like I won’t in the future. He stares at me while looking away. I cannot ascertain why there is no eye contact, yet this intimacy. It is the opposite of what I know.
Later I am making love to my future girlfriend and she says I was brave.
Thank you, I say. I know her story. I know why she signed up. And in her blue eyes and skin of mother England I see the rise of broken cheekbones and I don’t know whether I am still alive enough to kiss them.
I remember the desire to hear something crack, something that cannot be repaired. But there is armor for that, and behind that, eyes that both know this reparation is rupture, is rapture, is not enough.
Quintan Ana Wikswo’s transdisciplinary works surround the intimacy of cruelty and defiance in crimes against humanity over spacetime. Wikswo is the author of the several books of text and photographs, including The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, the novel A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be, and multiple anthologies. Her work appears regularly in Guernica, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Conjunctions, LitHub, Warscapes, Kenyon Review, and others. She holds multiple fellowships from Creative Capital, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Visit her website. Twitter: @QuintanWilswo IG: QuintanWikswo
Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels