Afrika

Anubis Ali had a large camel that enjoyed to spit in my eyes every time I looked at it or was near it in any proximity. This wasn't because the thing hated me or something, it was just very ornery and quite old, probably around ten or eleven years of age. Well, that was what our guide had assured me in confidence while we sat in the back of a dingy, crusty, musky, raunchy cigarette smoke filled cafe in a scortching hot shithole by the name of El Zawya El Hamra. Apparently he always had the ability to talk to his camel, along with many other animals- in Egyptian- and could learn of its various opinions about the men they were guiding. I had once come up into a random conversation they were having in the stable, and the animal confessed that she greatly fancied me but still threw saliva in my eyes because I had a 'tendency to accidentally stand in her way'. To plainly state it, I thought that this talking with animals buisness was far from ludicrous due to my own science born talents and I took what I heard as something which had a possibility of being truthful....But I naturally remained slightly irritated by the thought of continuing to receive large globs of thick spit in my face throughout the rest of my service in Africa, which at that point was about three and a half months. Although that may sound like a short amount of time, constant travel, longterm boredom, being spat on, being shot at and watching my men choke down canned dog food (literally) in the mess hall every day made a week seem like a whole year. Single days seeming like a whole year were inevitablly causing a few months to feel like a slowly rotting eternity.

My vocal reaction to all of it, of course, did not express that factor. Everything instead came with all terms of kindness, "I guess you will have to send Naunet my deepest apologies for being in her way so much. I had no realization before this that I had an irking habit, but I understand where she is coming from." That was a harmless white lie, in general- I did not have the capability to socially bond with animals, mind you. I enjoyed being around them but I never had the opportunity to mentally connect with anyone's dog or cat or bird or chinchilla, because my body doesn't have all of the bells and whistles inside its deeply embedded circuits to do such a thing. What I can do successfully, though, is gain the fullest communication with the dead without a Oiji board. Call it a magical power, if you will, possibly even an outlandish quirk of the Occult. To me it is neither a power or a quirk of all oddities; I do not consider myself to be a circus freak nor do I see myself as a gypsy. Those titles do not (will never) fit the description of my well deserved case in any stretch of the finely tuned imagination belonging to every clear minded individual which may cross my beaten path. What I do consider myself to be is a person who is receiving an eternal punishment for the wretched, vain and selfish actions he carried out many years before. A person who needs to get shaken upside down, then flipped inside out, in order for him to come to terms with how disgusting he truly was being. The type of man who is so dumb that the only way to anyone can get through to the guy is by forcing the bastard to take multiple bitter pills, along with stinging spankings all of the time, sometimes even for no reason at all. The person you had to give whippings to on his bare back, over and over and over again, practically rub his nose in wet shit for a while, just to make him somewhat think about what he just did. That sad man hiding his face in the corner who, for a long while, was treated with no respect at all because he rarely ever dished it out to the people around him in the past. That is my identity at its completion. A worthless piece of dumbass garbage.

Don't try to tell me I'm not.

Ali nodded his head, smiling brightly. "I shall send your apologies to her when we get back to your camp site." Was his answer. "She will appreciate getting a good dinner while hearing your acknowledgements." My acknowledgements? It was a strange way to word the thought, but that was nothing new. Ali worded many things oddly all of the time and I always had to decipher each sentence he let out, like a code expert. His German was not up to our par. Not terrible, just imperfect. You see, he was still in the middle of learning the language, and that caused him to sometimes have trouble placing the right words into a sentence and filling in for the ones he didn't quite know yet. It was cute, in a weird way. We all knew he meant well even though the man's sentence structure, along with contents, could get spotty. He reminded us of a tiny child below Kindergarten age who couldn't string words together correctly but was intelligent in all absolute nature; a future straight A student who at his current state was not taught enough to be coming to his destined acceptially high intellectual level yet. The man was pretty humble, too, and I believe heavily that this helped all of us forgive his many grammatical mistakes.

"It's too bad that the camels eat better than we do." I said. All of us laughed as our drinks came to the table. Gerald, my assistant, rose from his seat and helped the waiter pass around the many glasses, then gave him a small brown sack of gold coins. He was always being extraordinarily kind, generous, helpful, the works, to everyone around him. I think that is why I, along with the rest of the division, enjoyed working with the Captain so much. The officer was one of the few British motherfuckers in the entire desert who cared about a human that wasn't himself and he wasn't focused on mainly waiting for some stupid 'tea time'. To be absolutely clear, he wasn't the kind of person who drove you mad with his persistent incompetent moral laziness. Gerald instead drove you mad with a potent feeling of flaming camaraderie which radiated magnificent shades of gallant blue in front of you in the form of an aura. Said colors gave you this warm, calming sensation in your chest that could make anyone want to just stick with him until the end of time. Like conjoined twins or something to that effect. It was an amazing thing to endure.

"Look," Ali suddenly said when my assistant sat back down, placing a hand upon my arm. Those hands were the size of my head, I swear to god. "Look at who has come in! We are all....Uh... blessed? Is that the word I need...? Prince Abasi Muhammad arrived! Colonel, you may go meet with the prince- he might take fancy of you!" I watched as the prince and his four Fez-hat-wearing guests began to talk with each other in native tongue as everyone began to get settled in at their table, which sat diagonal from us. Two of the men glanced at me about three times, pointing subtly, laughing. I wondered if they were criticizing me for my rather sickly appearance- most of them were around twenty times the size as I was then. Honestly, the only skinny one sitting at that VIP table was the young prince, and insulting a person of that position ends in sudden death for the one handing out the burns. At that point I was reminded about a certain factor: the same damn thing happened to me a lot during the time I spent four years serving in the worst parts of Arabia (that occurred way before my son Ashby had been born). The higher class is filled to the brim with judging tubs of lard over in the middle east as well.

"Mmmhhh, I don't think I would want to go over there." I said. "I mean, I don't think I would enjoy it-"

"Why not? You would be blessed."

"Blessed? More like harrassed."

Ali cocked his head to the side then, saying carefully, "What is this...harrassment that you speak of?"

Grimes, the lone Scott in our division, explained to Ali what I meant by 'harrassment'. This created a giggle fest which lasted a few long seconds and I knew he now got the guist of what I was so worried about. My mood then changed from happiness to pure, hot embarrassment. "It's really not funny," I said, squirming in my seat. I didn't do that because of my emotions. I got squirmy because the wooden seat I sat in was so hard that it made my ass fall asleep to the point where it was in a state of Novocain's version of numb. We were sitting at that table for around an hour discussing what routes leading to Kenya were the best to take. "My size is nothing to laugh about- there are many men who swim in a men's small, alright? It's normal, ok?"

"N-no, sir, it isn't normal. You have a condition called A-Anorexia...." Dingley said shyly, his Newkirk stutter giving me many flash backs that I tended to get at night while sleeping. He was modeled after the guy, after all, so naturally this unfortunate implement had been prebuilt into his speech patterns.

"In their culture, it is common. I'm sure of it." Gerald said in a low voice, his face displaying a look of solemnity. "But in ours.. Sir, I do not understand why you starve yourself like that.....It's so unhealthy and unnecessary." He was only half right. Starving myself was, undoubtedly, unhealthy. But it wasn't unnecessary. I mean, I deserved to suffer while everyone else had the absolute privilege to be well nourished in all aspects.....My assistant and many others for some reason just did not realize or comprehend the intentions involved with my important life decisions, especially the ones about how I took care of myself. It must have been a corroding side effect of their blind, naive respect for me. That's why he followed everything up with a childish, "May I ask why you think you need to do such a thing to yourself?" A pause in the conversation slipped into the moment, making it more uncomfortable than ever before. I am willing to say that I was the guilty party which stood up in front as the creator of the halt. What else was I to do? I desired some time to think of a response bereft of crude words.

"Gerald, I just don't want to eat that very much- think of all of the people, soldiers, I am allowing to get fed! I believe it was General Model who said, 'a man who leads troops has no right to think of himself'-"

"You cannot quote Model in this type of situation, sir!" Geral snapped back. "He didn't mean you had to starve yourself for no goddamn ruddy reason and constantly view yourself as the salt of the earth to be a good leader! You're just too dumb to understand that, too self-absorbed, too single minded... My God!" By the 'My God' I was already headed out the door, trying to hold in a depressive teary anger fit. The still night air felt pleasantly cooler than the inside of the cafe but I wasn't really in the correct mindset to appreciate it right then. I kind of wanted to walk around by myself for a while, just to get a chance to cool off without anyone there to watch me. So I did that and, unsurprisingly, the walk didn't even make me feel a tad bit better. I kept on hearing my assistant speaking up to call me out for my attitude repeatedly in my head, feeling the thought that he never spoke to me like that before starting to eat away at my innards while knowing I deserved what I got told fully nevertheless. At one point I stopped at a bench and sat upon it, taking out a letter I had received three days before from Werner. Under the rich moonlight I read it again to take my mind off of being shoved into the mud in front of a price. One part of it actually caused me to let out the emotions I hastily bottled up earlier. I started bawling after reading only these few sentences: Yesterday Hans tried to commit suicide for the third time this month....He's getting more frequent in his spells of depression, but I do not know what to do because I'm not a trained psychiatrist. I am just a soldier.....This time he attempted to jump off of our roof- you know how high that is; as tall as the Eiffel Tower or Mount Everest. The poor man stood up there all day long, staring down at the ground, flip flopping between wanting to come down and wanting to jump, becoming increasingly more morally split.' I sobbed for a few dragging hours with my head buried in my hands, feeling trapped in a cruel world filled with a sludgy mass of undecided-ness. General Stekelgruber's attempts to take his life made me unsure if the environment of the human race was adequate for living in or if it became tainted with green poisonous toxins without me actually knowing it. I sat there toying with the idea of which one it was, and then I left the bench five minutes after midnight, frustrated because couldn't figure it out. As I was making my way past an old brothel, all of the hookers who were standing outside fled when they saw me coming near them. If prostitutes, of all types of women, do not want to be around you, you're better off calling yourself dirt. Well, I was better off calling myself that, and you might be a whole different story. Maybe you're not as repulsive as I am, maybe you're not as old. Maybe you're more than ninety pounds. Maybe you're not six foot four. Maybe you're not a walking skeleton of a man who doesn't really have a brain left in his head or a soul in his chest. Maybe you have the confidence of a lion and a heart of solid gold. Maybe you're not a soldier who hates everything about himself. Maybe you're a pretty female or a handsome male..... Maybe you're dead. I envy you if you are. Jesus, I wish I was fucking dead, laying in a wooden casket down underground, maggots gorging on my eyeballs and exploded stomach, my arms falling off the bone like a smoked baby-back rib slathered in thick barbecue sauce. I wish, I wish. That's all I can coo out at society.

By one o'clock I reached the camp site, eyeing the men who were on guard duty. They saluted at me like robotic idiots, bringing a hand up to their caps and clicking their heels in a pathetic unison. I didn't do the same back at them. I simply waved a weak hand at all of the men and then went into my tent to get some rest, stripping down to just my boxers the moment I walked over to my cot, not bothering to turn on the light. I began to remember the first encounter- you know what I mean- with a woman that I had left behind to serve in the tank core. I smelled her cheap perfume in my nostrils and the sensation of her firm embrace wrapped itself around my body so strongly that I entered an aroused hypnotic daze. I felt as though I was loosing consciousness while only being capable of seeing some sort of mirage in front of me, my surroundings becoming the space underneath her barrack. The mattress morphed into the cold dirt which my body had rested on as I surrendered to her, and I could feel the pressure of Rose's body now on top of mine, parts sliding into parts. I could see her face hovering over mine, smiling down at me as she began to rock to an fro, things appearing realistic in an ultamit form as I actually began to feel an overwhelming sexual pleasure. My hands rested upon her ample thighs, for some odd reason, and I could feel her skin and the goosebumps which had poked up upon its surface. Next thing I knew we were rolling around and the whole thing became more fun as the pressure gradually increased even though I wasn't heavy enough to apply any of it. What an exciting dream.... I woke up around four o'clock, naked, lying on the floor and covered in a large amount of cum, a foreign masculine arm draped around my neck. Exhaustion caused me to then doze off once again. I opened my eyes about two hours later and sat up, now wide awake, wiping dirt and crust off of myself, looking over at the man who was in my tent. I found that I had 'enjoyed' half-asleep sex with Sergeant Andrew Finch. He must have sucked my cock for a while and then just did me in the ass, or I did him in the ass after a while or both happened. I still have no clue about what exactly occurred. I don't want to know, though, since I'm not the biggest fan of having homosexual relations with men. I'm straight as a board.

"Finch!" I said sharply, pulling on my boxer shorts. He woke up and rubbed his face, moaning sleepily. I pulled him up off the ground. "You bastard! You flitty fucking cuck of a bastard! I should beat your sorry ass for what you did to me when I came back here this morning! I really should! What the hell is wrong with you, man?" I didn't let his face get very close to mine- I was afraid the Sergeant would kiss me or try to pull other gay tricks.

Finch ripped my hands off of him and said in a groggy voice,"Whadduya mean? Why ya callin' me a bastard all of a sudd'n? I jus' woke up, sir, and I don'-"

"YOU FUCKED ME!" I yelled. "YOU BASICALLY RAPED ME!"

"Yea, I did." Finch confessed calmly. "But that don' mean ya gotta get all sore about it or anythin'. Ya don' have to call me a flit or a cuck or a bastard or whatever 'cause I gave ya a good time." I hate Americans sometimes. I really do.

"What part of, 'you basically RAPED me' do you not get? You can't be that fucking brain dead."

"I get it, I really do. But ya jus' went all limp, alrigh', and I couldn' help myself. I was drinkin'. I swear I don' have a fetish for skinny male widows over forty-five."

"Get your clothes and leave." I said. "Please, leave now before I kill you right here, right now." Finch put on his uniform without saying anything else, then left me alone in my tent. I went over to the mirror I used for shaving and took a glance at myself to check for cuts or major wounds. My fingers brushed up against the undeniable bruises which were upon my neck, along with the rest of me, lightly in a mass of disappointment, and the dried blood on my upper lip was crumbly to the touch. My left eye was painfully blackened to high hell. A nice, thin cut ran across the bridge of my nose, luckily not deep enough to leave a scar. I truly did appear to be raped. I looked molested and beaten and taken advantage of, just like how I came out when Lacey had done the same to me umpteen years ago. I started to cry again as I gazed upon myself, unable to continue to bottle up my emotions. The bawling I had gone through during the night broke the seal of my heart and now I could no longer stay internally carbonated. I went flat and warm. I was the open soda in the fridge that noone wanted to drink up. Now, you might think to yourself, "wow-ie, that whole soda analogy shebang sure does sound sad, sorry, miserable, etcetera!" That's because it's real and fresh and unplanned. You know, the way life is for most regular people, a tale with no exact stone script behind its words. Events just kind of pop out at you here and there, some great, some evil, some exciting, some overly exuberant, others mind numbingly boring, but nothing really fits in together to create one big huge consistent story line, even if you try to make it seem as such. Things happen, then things end on a cliffhanger, and nothing is ever finished.

I came away from the mirror, jerked for a while, and afterwards took a sponge bath to get all of the crusted cum off of me. My body felt as though it had been forced through a washing machine; sore, backwards, upside-down, inside-out. Every hole in my body was tender and raw feeling, sort of stretched out in a way, how a person normally is when they get brutally used and abused. My legs kept on wobbling around as I tried to remain standing still, causing me to have to sit down on the ground while I hosed off, heated sand creeping into my underwear. Sitting down made me feel like a weak child but I did it anyway, just to prevent myself from falling on my face in the famous Three Stooges style, because I honestly went through enough trouble already. Shattering my face would have been the annoying icing made of acetone getting layered on a four tier cake which called itself life- I didn't particularly fancy the idea of personally adding it on with a rusty butter knife. Not during that drilling fuck-cluster of a Sunday morning. Nope. Nadda. Zippo. No thank you, sir. What I did want to do, though, was strangle somebody- it's obvious who I wanted to take victim. I'd strangle him to alleviate a portion of my bundled up emotional turmoil, possibly even burn the heartless jackass's body when the job came to a solid finish. Ironically, would have never committed a crime like this, in the long run, because I mainly always wanted to hurt another human and stewed about what they did to me but I didn't ever come around to physically laying a hand on them. Weird, the way my actions would lay out; on paper they sounded cowardly while sounding censored at the same time. I guess they showed that I could be a decent person, or that I had a nagging conscious mind breathing down my neck which prohibited me from doing whatever I damn well pleased. Probably both.

When I was done taking a sponge bath, I got off of the ground, then slowly, carefully, went over to my cot to get dressed. My ribs screamed out a squealing song of pain as I put my undershirt on. To make matters worse, my fingers refused to efficiently button it up. They were too busy being fumbly, clumsy, shaky, unsure, to do a simple- along with repeated- task, forcing me to feel disabled. Helpless sensations ripped off the original dissatisfied mask I wore on my homely face each day because disability deteriorates the manhood of a soldier. This deterioration is inevitable even if the paralyzed state is only a malign illusion caused by a horrid experience. Laws of equal opportunity, in an entirety, hold naval ships in the bays belonging to a lack of human mobility. Why? Noone but lady karma knows, since she is the keeper of answers to self-esteem questions men have been asking for thousands of years. She is the one placing together two variables to make a crippling pair, and in the situation of fifty-fifty outcomes, only the creator understands the logic being put forth into their world.

Someone gingerly walked in as I started shaving, and in the corner of my eye, Gerald came into sight. I put down the razor for a moment to stop myself from accidentally nicking my skin. Suddenly, through gritted teeth, this amazingly got grumbled out, "What the fuck do you want?"

"Nothing.... I just came to see how you are doing and I.... Owe you an apology. I am sorry," My assistant said in full remorse as he cleared his throat. "I disrespected you with statements that I didn't mean- they weren't even truthful or close to your personality. Sir... Sir, do you have a black eye?" I picked the razor back up and began to shave again, not turning to let Gerald fully see my face. Ignoring someone like that is childish. I know. I do admit that I felt pretty juvenile as I pretended not to hear him....But I wasn't in the mood for conversing about the condition of my body.

"Never mind my goddamn eye." I said. "And let me alone for five seconds so I can finish grooming. "

"You sound angry. "

"I am angry! You are totally correct! Congratulations!" Was my sarcastic, bitter toned response, an ill fitting attitude on my end.

Gerald at first did not say another word to me. He made the expression he was prone to make when in the middle of hard thought, his brows furrowing slightly, lips persing. He inspected the inside of my tent wearing said face for quite some time, and the Captain sat down on the edge of my bed for a moment, crossing his legs like a sissy, thumbing through the photographs I left on my nightstand. Each one of them came with the letter from Werner as sort of an odd type of bonus content thrown together to spark memories of happiness I couldn't possibly regain. Memories of times where Stekelgruber wanted to live, memories where my sons were nine and ten, memories where my wife Evy was still alive, memories where Wiedemann displayed Sergeant's stripes on his arm instead of sporting Major's insignia scattered about on his uniform. Times of laughter, love, friendship, beginnings. A place I wished I could crawl back to because my life then let me feel newly free. Now I just felt trapped within a pushing blitzkrieg-ish travel, within the constant order of aggressive superiors asking us for more when no more existed in our stamina reserves. Stress bent us forward to give a good bone day in, day out. I mainly failed to express my sickness of the war, of combat, to anyone I spoke with, thus allowing our case to remain heartbreakingly static. If only, if only. "Why do you keep a straight face in all your pictures?" Gerald asked me after a while. I wiped my face with a towel, turning to look at him as he rummaged through the stack of old photographs with the curiosity of a bumbling moron, the way I used to be. A person would have to keep everything out of my line of sight when I was original because I willingly snooped around to find bits of secret revealing personal possessions. No registry of the idea behind privacy, that was one of the worst of my many chronic problems. That and being absolutely brain dead. "I've seen you smile before, many times before, during meetings with other officers, especially the gatherings we attended in Lochbacher. It's really not as bad as you might think...."

"Flattery will get you nowhere with me, Captain." I said. I completely faced him now, not caring about his utter shock towards my battered appearance, trying to control my temper in an adult manner. "Not now, not ever again, no matter if you believe I can get buttered up easily or whatever else you have been told. I'm not willing to sit here and be falsely spoiled by elaborate treatments meant to be handed to a man of perfection, someone I am clearly the opposite of-" Gerald sprung off of the bed, placing his canteen against my blackened eye, bringing my hand up to it so he didn't have to hold onto the bottle throughout the whole conversation. The ice cold water inside relieved some of the pain as it rested there on my bruise, and I knew it soon would make the swelling go dramatically down. His care squished some grumpy snark out of me but I addressed none of the factor out loud. I lost the ability to speak outside of my head. My throat wouldn't let me say anything- my brain ordered it to be mute so I could be mentally scolded for being an asshole to a person I was so emotionally attached to. I deserved a mental spanking and I notably encountered the harshest of them as the cold sunk deep into my skin.

"You do have a black eye! How did you get a bruise like that last night, sir? Please.... Tell me." He insisted, grabbing my shoulders, acting like a mother instead of an assistant. "You have to tell me, or you won't feel any better." I then told Gerald about all of the things that had happened to me, in the best detail I could muster up, in a shaky voice I normally never let out into the air. Letting it all go was just as refreshing as taking a long piss on a cold morning.