10

There weren t many people who believed I could graduate Basic. Oddly, A___ and H___ were exceptions.
When each reached young-adulthood, they seemed a bit helpless. They both could hold down jobs, and were known as hard workers, but there was always great Drama in their lives, so that their real lives seemed haphazard, and I incidentally functioned in the role of big brother.
A___ needed regular, short-noticed, randomly-timed protection from guys who saw her as easy pickings even though she did not. She was attracted to these guys because of our Dad, R___, she just didn t know it yet, and kept claiming to want guys with stronger character.
Just before leaving for Basic I had to quit one of my jobs, after confronting my own boss, who happened to be her neighbor, about him trying to rape A___ in her apartment.
He had held her against a wall despite her telling him to let her go and get off her. It worked, and I handled myself well, and he handled himself unwell, and was justly confronted.
This is one reason why, during this time, I had such compassion for my sisters despite their previous roles in the House, because they were so obviously hurt by guys like R___, and women like Mom, to the point that they would sit in my apartment and choke back tears as they told their stories.
Fortunately they were both beautiful. Physically they had mostly taken after Mom, inheriting her easy, athletic, feminine form.
I once pushed H___'s car a quarter-mile, up a hill, in flood waters already rising above my knees. When we got the car to her apartment, and amazingly the car started, she told her neighbor of how 'we' had just pushed it all this way, despite her having been in the drivers seat the whole time.
She had a strong, strong, strong relationship with Christianity and because of this simply assumed she was okay, despite the House and the inevitable reaping of what it had unfairly sown for her.
In those first years when she was eighteen and I was nineteen, she wanted a relationship with me that displayed the same easy chemistry A___ and I had.
But she was younger than us.
Maybe because of what happened in the Mustang, maybe not, and maybe because A__ always took the lead when dealing with R___, and maybe not, H___ missed out on the most obviously sexual aspects of the Abuse in the House and God s Country.
I would write letters to each of them, throughout Basic and AI training, and they would write often, religiously. I always felt a surprisingly deep, tight-chested, almost-cringing comfort in their lives and stories being so civilian, and physically safe.
There were plenty of troubling signs and hints all through those early years, when the three of us were all freshly out of the House. But we were all so young. I purposefully didn t put much thought on these warning signs, despite having the already-growing feeling that inevitably, we would be estranged from one another.
They both regularly expressed an assumption about me. It was that at some point, inevitably, I would cross some line and start doing well in life. It was just underlying, all the time, showing up in jokes, in comforting comments, but mostly in a kind of lack of compassion for me, and a kind of narcissism on their part. When we were younger they expressed this assumption with hateful and conniving jealousy, but as I shipped off to Basic, they expressed it with a seemingly-deep-seated hopefulness.
As I watched my relatives in those early years of American freedom, and sensed them, I slowly allowed my self to see the truth of how they were acting.
Their movements’ dependence on my having no memory before the age of twelve was assumed, even to the point of trusted.
It was as if my remembering or even trying to was some unforgivable break in trust. With each dealing them, it was as if they were moving more and more slowly, their lips mouthing words I took in more and more slowly, until I finally could see what had always been behind every movement, word, expression kind as it may have seemed, like a layer of civility hiding something else -- Violence.
It was required but felt inhuman for me to continually break away from that natural sense of connection with relatives. I’d been learning how since the day I was born, but for some reason only began to do it consciously when I was first out of that House.
To live like a CIA agent, terrified of being suspected, threatened at all times by a natural, invisible connection with the enemy. It was as if the enemy could read my mind if they wanted to. I learned to allow to assume they could.
As a boy I tried to be connected to the ground instead, a grave the House had made me unafraid of.