Time Hack

By J.G.P. MacAdam

Sometimes the stoplight took forever to change. This guy in front of her—his muffler was fuming like a goddamned smoke pit. Look at the exhaust. See the way the air wiggles right before it changes into smoke? Heat ripples. Yeah, that was how it looked. Right before the flames licked up over the walls of the qalat.
“Mom.”
“Yeah, what?”
“What time are you picking me up?”
“Time?”
Time. Sometimes time went fast and smooth, like a fresh stretch of highway. Sometimes time went slow, excruciating, every pothole in creation conspiring to pop your tire. Sometimes the distance between then and now just disappeared entirely.
A glance in the rearview. He’s not there. No one’s there. A glance at the clock. Lu was gonna be late. She didn’t mean for her daughter to be late. Mornings just happened that way, sometimes. The list of things to do, boxes to check, items to remember, lengthening on and on, into eternity.
Eternity?
Eternity was a deployment with no end.
Her unit wasn’t supposed to have been over there more than twelve months, but twelve turned into thirteen, then fourteen, then sixteen. Extensions can drive guys a little cuckoo, sometimes. She’d never so much as cast a second glance at Sergeant Carmichael. Not once. Never did anything suggestive. Right? Though, he never did do anything. Nothing physical. Never laid a hand on her. But, doing nothing was still something. Wasn’t it?
Another glance in the rearview. A red sedan pulling up behind her. It’s not him. Can’t be. It’s been—what?—almost twenty years. Her fingers flexed at the ten and two of her steering wheel.
“Mom.”
“Hmm, what?”
“Green means go.”
“Ah, shit.”
At least Lu was paying attention. She was a good kid. Noticed things. Kept her eyes open. Wasn’t gonna end up a scatterbrained dolt like her mom.
Why, wasn’t it just last night she’d been cleaning up dinner and thinking of something. Something to do with goats and bullets and Carmichael’s fucking smirk and that Pashtu woman who wasn’t wearing her burqa. And she left to go take out the garbage. That Pashtu woman was probably only in her twenties. Thirties, tops. Then she came back in. Looked like she could’ve been in her fifties though. And she opened the cabinet to grab a fresh garbage bag, peeled it open, stopped.
“Ah, shit.”
She’d grabbed a Ziploc by mistake.
Tom hadn’t noticed; sucked into fantasy football or something. But Lu, ever since she was a toddler with those big brown eyes of hers, she’d seen.
“You’re always zoning out, Mom.” Lu laughed and looked out the car window.
“Am not.”
The hell did Eli say the other day?
“I don’t go anywhere. I’m right here.”
Marcy hadn’t been combat arms, but that didn’t mean she was spared the combat. Christ, was it really almost twenty years ago already? She felt old. Even if magazine covers in the checkout line were saying forty was the new thirty, still, she felt it.
Marcy had been sitting in her corner in the conference room, waiting for the bigwigs to show up and the meeting to start. Eli and Rick were down at their end of the table, chatting. The two engineers and Marcy were the only ones in the room. Until another engineer showed up.
“Well, look who it is,” said Rick. “Fashionably late, as usual.”
“I needed a coffee refill,” said Joe. “Somebody took the last cup and didn’t refill the pot.”  
“Just like a woman,” said Eli. “So full of excuses.” And they went on with their jokes and jabs and their blueprints, like Marcy wasn’t even there. Like she was invisible.
Maybe if she were twenty years younger, or if she bothered with makeup, people would notice her. No one noticed her, not anymore, not unless they came asking where the hell their purchase request was. Order these parts. Sign this invoice. Secure the contract the depot needs to support the new vehicle, trailer, missile launcher, whatever the US Army needed repaired, refurbished, replaced to support the warfighter. Nothing pissed those engineers and production guys off more than government contracting. Buncha nonsense paperwork. That’s where Marcy fit in. Doing the job no one else wanted to do, staying low behind her cubicle walls and stacks of red tape, counting the years until her time in service added up to a federal retirement.
“Maybe ten more years…”
“Huh?” said Lu.
“Ah, nuthin. Talking to myself.”
Another stoplight. Exhaust. Heat ripple. Did it start before the mission with the goats and the beds and the woman not wearing her burqa, or after?
It was before.
She’d been an intel analyst, tasked out from S-2 to spend some time on the line with the infantry. Choppered out to some lonely outpost squeezed up against a mountainside. She was the only woman on base. The only woman and a hundred guys. But, sitting inside that bunker with yet another rocket whizzing overhead and impacting somewhere not far enough outside of the base’s walls, everyone’s asshole relaxing only a few millimeters until the next incoming came screaming in, everyone’s faces shaved—baby smooth, just as her own—and with all of their mitches and weapons and vests and wearing of uniforms and dirt in equal measure, it was almost if she really was, just one of the guys. Until what’s-his-name opened his mouth.
“You have to do better.”
“Huh?”
“You have to do the best you can in school. You have to get straight A’s.”
“I get straight A’s, Mom.”
“You have to be top of your class, like what’s-her-name, the one who won valedictorian last year.”
“You mean Trance?”
“What kind of hippie name is Trance?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to beat her; you can beat her. A hundred on every test. Promise me.”
“Mom, you’re giving me a complex.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. But you gotta get up outta here. Go to a good school—a great school, maybe. Don’t be like me. A little community college, then marriage, then stuck in a job you hate for the next thirty years.”
“Maybe I should go work at the depot.”
“Over my dead body.”
“If the depot’s so bad then why’ve you and Dad worked there for, like, ever?”
Good question, Marcy thought. Why had she never asked herself that one?
“Maybe I should join the military.”
Marcy winced.
“I—”
She never had figured out what to say to Luanne, how to say it.
“Not until after college.”
“Why?”
Why. Because some things didn’t happen to people with educations, with rank, with money, with authority, or if they did they at least were able to do something about it. Talk to another officer, afford therapy, hire a lawyer, that sort of thing.
“It’s not a competition, Mom.”
“What isn’t?”
“Life.”
Red means stop.
“How would you know.”
Tailpipes. Exhaust. The smell of someone’s flicked cigarette smoldering on the asphalt. Butts littering the dirt under everyone’s boots. Thirty sleep-deprived guys and little ol’ her crammed into a bunker together. Had he really said it? “Maybe someone should show us her tits.” What the hell was his name? “You know, help kill the time,” he added, smirking at her, not at her.
The fuck was she supposed to say to that?
It was tricky. Half these guys were the type to send a girl a dick pic at the drop of a hat. She only wanted to be treated like an equal, even if she wasn’t infantry she was still out there ducking from incoming the same as them. But these infantry guys—all they knew were lines. Phase lines, battle lines, gridlines, gender lines. If she didn’t draw the line somewhere, herself, then they were gonna draw it for her.
“Well,” she said, every ear in the bunker bending to her next words. “You must really miss your mother’s tits, they’re probably the only ones you’ve ever seen.”
A few oooo’s, a couple snickers.
“Keep talkin’ about my mother, bitch.”
“Kuntz!” That was his name. “Kuntz!” said a sergeant at the end of the bunker. “Shut the fuck up!”
It was another awkward hour in the bunker, counting the minutes, seconds, until the all-clear was given. That’s when she noticed Carmichael for the first time. She was walking back to her own single room next to the operations hut, which she kept padlocked, even when she was inside of it, just in case, and rarely ventured out of but for chowtime, the odd mission or two, and the “female shower hour” which she, of course, took advantage of alone and quickly. The hairs pricked up on the back of her neck. Someone was looking at her. She turned, and there he was.
Sergeant Carmichael.
Standing outside of his platoon’s corrugated hootches. Carmichael was in second platoon. A well-respected sergeant. Squad leader. Silent type. His dark-lens eye protection masked his eyes. Was he looking at her? Had to be. He said nothing. She just turned and kept walking.
A glance in the rearview. A flexing of her fingers at the ten and two.
“Mom.”
Green means go.
“Yeah, honey.”
“What time are you picking me up?”
“Um, three-thirty. No, four. Four-thirty. I’ve got a nine-hour day today.”
“You sure? Last time you forgot and I was left waiting an hour.”
“I won’t forget.”
“I’m putting an alarm on your phone. Four-thirty, right?”
“Right.”
Another stoplight. Not much further to go. A glance at the clock. Maybe she’ll be on time.
They were late leaving the base, she remembered. The day of the mission. It was only eight clicks into the hills but it took them two hours to travel those stony mountain roads. Cliffs staring you down. Using their height to intimidate you. The past did that sometimes, too. Ambushed you. Sometimes it was just a pop, like Lu, when she was five, popping bubble wrap, or sometimes it was Tom banging away at the treadmill downstairs—thump, thump, thump—for an hour straight, until the thumps became inbound rotary blades.
She’d met Tom at the depot. A test equipment tech. About as slim and nerdy as they came. A real nice, thoughtful man. Someone she could talk to. Though, it would be nice to be wanted, sometimes. Tom, unfortunately, had the libido of a three-toed sloth. It was a miracle she ever conceived Luanne at all. But, maybe, that was one of the reasons why she had married him.
A glance in the rearview. He’s not there. No one’s following her. Still, she glanced again, and again. She couldn’t help herself.
“Are you drinking again?”
“What?”
Tom stood under the archway to the kitchen.
“Did you go through that whole six-pack by yourself?”
“Uh—”
Oh, she’d been royally toasted, and on a school night.
“Not quite yet.” She chugged her beer, dropped it in the recycle bin, opened the fridge, popped the cap on the next. “That’s six.”
“Why do you do this?”
She groaned. Just let me be, Tom.
“You keep doing this, and I’ll leave you.” Wasn’t his first time saying it. Probably wouldn’t be the last. “I only stay with you because of Lu.”
A real nice, thoughtful man.
It would be nice to be wanted, sometimes. She and Tom hadn’t so much as gone out on a date in… she couldn’t remember how long. Though, there was that one night—was it last year?—when, out-of-the-blue, she’d come home from work, taken a shower, then tried on a little makeup, done up her hair, slid on a dress. The zipper was tough, but no matter. She stood in the mirror, and for the first time in a long time, she liked what she saw. She went out to the kitchen. Sat at the table. Popped the cap on a Heineken. Waited. Popped another. Tom came home after picking up Lu from swim practice; Lu bolted upstairs to her room and her phone. Tom came into the kitchen, dropped his keys on the table, stopped. He said nothing, at first. Then, “Where you off to?”
“Nowhere.”
“Huh.”
“Wasn’t sure I was gonna fit in this dress.” She turned towards him. “What d’ya think?”
“Looks like it still fits.”
“Mm.”
He stood there another moment, as clueless as a toddler, until—“Game’s on, I’m gonna go watch.” His sneakers down the stairs. The treadmill turning on, then the game, and thump, thump, thump until chowtime, showertime, bedtime.
“Green means go.”
“Ah, shit.”
Lu laughed again.
“Don’t smirk at me!” said Marcy.
“What else am I supposed to do?”
Oh yeah, the mission. That’s what she’d really been trying to think about. It was her intel that had said a bunch of Taliban fighters were likely utilizing one of two qalats out in this no-name village on the Pak-border. The village was no more than a huddle of qalats up the steep side of a wadi. One qalat stood alone, however, overlooking the village from the top of a cliff. She, with the rest of second platoon, drove up to check it out. The infantry did what the infantry do. They kicked in the door and searched the place. They brought out a man, a woman and three kids, one of which would not stop crying. A little girl. Her hair a dirty mess. No headscarf; not old enough yet. Poor thing. Didn’t know what the hell was going on.
It was female shower hour. Marcy was drying off, wiping her towel down her leg. When there he was. Watching her. Like he’d just let himself in.
Panic shot through her guts. “The fuck you looking at?” she said, trying to sound tough, like she wasn’t afraid.
“Nuthin,” said Carmichael.
He smirked, once, and walked out.
It was all she could do to run in her towel and flip-flops back to her hootch and padlock the door. Who could she tell? Who should she turn to? Who would believe her? He’d just say he made a mistake, forgot the time.
They’d been at that qalat for an hour and the little girl was still howling her eyes out. That’s when Marcy felt the same feeling again. Eyes crawling down her. She turned and there he was. As though he didn’t have anything better to do but sneak up behind her and just stand there, and look. Dark-lens eyepro a mask over his eyes.
She remembered trying to swallow, to say something, to tell him to fuck off, but nothing would come out.
Someone called her name. Carmichael drifted off, like nothing ever happened. Sounds returned. An Apache overhead, Humvee engines clanking, sergeants calling orders. The little girl in the background, still crying.
“Marcy!” called the CO. “Hey, come take a look at this.”
No one used her real name. She wasn’t PFC Johnson, here, with all these guys who called each other by their proper names. Hecklemeyer, Sanchez, Li, Reteor, Schneider, Sergeant Jones. Even the CO, Captain Dicks, called her Marcy.
He took her past the man and woman and their crying kid and into the qalat. It was your average mud-walled compound found anywhere in Afghanistan. One soldier was making his way up a rickety ladder to look in a second story storeroom. “Fuckin’ stinks in here!” On the ground floor, the CO showed her the beds.
“See these?”
“Why’re there so many?”
“Precisely.”
Out around back, he pointed at the herd of goats.
“See those?”
“That’s a big herd of goats.”
“My point again. Why do a few families out in the middle of nowhere need so many goats? Now, I want you to take a look around, see what ya see, then take my terp and question the woman.”
“Yes, sir.”
Inside what must’ve been the main bedroom—only a square of quilts on the floor for a bed, a bit of a raised area with plastic pots and cooking gear and tubs on it—Marcy spotted something curious.
A burqa.
“Why are there so many beds?” she asked the woman.
The woman looked through the cedar boughs at her husband and kids, who had been taken a distance away. Captain Dicks was over there trying to calm the crying girl down with a lollipop. Truck engines going. Apaches hovering. Soldiers everywhere, in and out of the qalat, their arms loaded with blankets and cooking gear and all of the other crap no one wanted to touch without their gloves on, dumping it all in a big pile outside.
The woman would not speak, kept looking over at her crying kid. The terp raised his voice and she looked at him, at Marcy. Her face said so many things.
“What’s this for?” Marcy held up the burqa.
“Sometimes my husband makes me wear it.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes, other men come.”
“What other men?”
She wouldn’t say; she didn’t know.
“Just some men.”
Down in the village, third platoon was coming up empty in their search. They’d come across only women and kids.
“Why is your husband the only military-age male around?”
The woman shrugged. A faint, almost nonexistent movement.
“Why does your husband make you wear a burqa? The Taliban aren’t in control here anymore.”
“Aren’t they?”
Her face said so many things.
Some things came back with a resonance. The sound of the CO’s voice when he said, “Torch it.” The bleating of the goats when the two-forty opened up on them. The smell of diesel fuel being poured across the inside of the qalat. The pop of Carmichael’s incendiary grenade. The heat on her face, even at a distance, as the black smoke plumed and the air wiggled and the orange flames crept over the walls of the qalat.
Higher, higher.
The little girl never did stop crying.
“Mom!”
“What?”
“You’re going like twenty miles an hour, I’m gonna be late.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay. See? Last stoplight. Almost there.”
Almost there. Six months to go and she was free. Out of the Army. The deployment was over, everyone was back stateside. She’d been heading to the PX on Fort Drum when she got that feeling again. Someone was watching her. There. Sitting at an outside table by the Burger King. It was him. Carmichael. That fucking smirk under his dark-lens eyepro. She hurried into the PX, bought her cigarettes, left the same way she had come in, the only way out, and she tried not to look up, but couldn’t help it. She glanced. No one there. Had she really seen him? Of course she had. She must’ve.
She got in her car and drove back towards her barracks. Stopping at the stoplight. It was nighttime. Pitch dark. She thought she heard someone pulling up behind her, the telltale throttle of an engine. Their headlights flicked on in her rearview. Blinding her. Was it the cops? No. They revved their engine, the light turned green, and they sped around her and down the road. A red sports car, she thought it was. Must’ve been.
She couldn’t remember how long she waited at the stoplight. One more round of changes? Two?
Green means go.
Four months until her final out. Almost there. Sergeant Carmichael standing just out of range behind her barracks. Was it him? Had to be. Three months. Carmichael outside of the Walmart, watching her as she pushed her cart. Two months. A red sports car following her out of the gate. The fuck did he want? Pulling up beside her at the stoplight. That fucking smirk on his face. Then throttling away before the light even turned green.
One month to go.
One month until it was back home to Pennsylvania and she could forget all about Carmichael, goats and burqas. One month, every day glancing over her shoulder, in the rearview. A red sports car idling in the parking lot of her barracks as it got dark. He never did do anything—yet he did, didn’t he? One month, one week, one day, until it was finally over.
It was all a long time ago, Marcy said to herself. Almost twenty years. It wasn’t just Carmichael following her around and stalking her. It was the bullet-perforated goats, the flames licking up the wall of the qalat, the little girl’s cries, the smirk on his face. All of it piled one on top of another. Layered traumas, mashed together, compressed, eroding, unresolvable, just left to decay over the years, like all those vehicles and oil drums and expired munitions at the depot left to rot in a field. Who knew how much time, and money, it’d take to clean up the mess. Just bottle it up behind fencing and razor wire and gate guards and nobody has to see it, like it never happened.
A glance in the rearview. That’s not him back there. Is it?
“Mom?”
Is it?
Whoever it was beeped and sped around her and she jumped in her seat. “Oh!” It was only a farm truck of some sort.
“Mom, what is going on?”
“Nuthin, honey.” Marcy wiped the tears out from under her eyelids, tried to catch her breath. Move forward, move forward. Green means go. It’s your little girl’s future you gotta think about now, not the past. Her future.
“I promise, it’s nuthin. See? We’re here now. Made it on time.”

****

J.G.P. MacAdam is a disabled combat vet and the first in his family to earn a college degree. His publications can be found in Passengers Journal, Military Experience & The Arts, and upcoming in Proud To Be: Volume 10, among others. You can find him hunting for wildflowers with his wife and son, or otherwise at jgpmacadam.com