6

I sat in the waiting room again, after having asked for Lieutenant G___. As I sat there, feeling flustered from all the rudeness I’d experienced that morning: the woman wanting me to register as a sex offender, the rude guy on the phone - I reminded myself I’d only been on this side of the ocean eight weeks and that it was supposed to be hard.

It wasn’t as long a wait and this time I seemed to have the right person.

He looked tired. He was earlier forties with the same thick local accent as the woman wanting me to register, and seemed nice enough.
_So why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?_
It didn’t go like I had imagined, because I could feel so much anger flowing through my veins, and I felt like the lieutenant could pick up on it, so that natural, professional dynamic between two grown men seemed shot.

_So what’s going on?_ he asked me.
_I was raped nightly for ten years by my parents, and need them to be on the sexual offenders list because I see now how it wasn’t personal, and that
what they did to me had to do with their own sickness, so they could easily be doing that to a child now or in the future._

_I understand that. But why are you here, now. Today? I mean what got you here today?_

Between the anger in my veins and his suspicious attitude the next fifteen minutes wer difficult, as we each felt each other out, me asking him _Are
you at all informed on sexual abuse cases, do you have any idea how they work?_ and him asking me about any grudges I may have with my family, when was the last time I had seen them, was it friendly or not.

I was supposed to act as if I were his son. That’s how human society works, elders and youngsters. But I didn't. I don't have much respect for older
people, because of what I've seen of them. But I should've given him that respect, should have remembered the way he was seeing me. I’m just not used to being seen that way.

At some point that passed, and we both seemed to relax. I talked freely, as if I was talking to J__. I felt like I lost the right side of my brain. I
hated it. Having to come down to his level. To have to speak that freely, to entertain him, make him laugh at points. If I was being True I wouldn’t have told it all at once, I wouldn’t have told it in story form but said a sentence here and there that simply alluded to things.
I wouldn’t have degraded myself having to spell it out, having to communicate that way. I should be able to tell the story and still be myself. Just saying the words of it makes me feel less masculine.

That’s why he asked me why I wasn’t in counseling; because I wasn’t being my self; but he forced me to, having to tell a story he couldn’t understand, but had to.
Maybe it was endearing, like how W__ is endearing to me, especially when I first met him. W__ talked like that because a lot had happened to him (especially deployment wise) and he wasn’t all the way okay all the time. Maybe it’s endearing. Maybe I didn’t act like the guy in the
waiting room - upset to the point of having little manhood to even exhibit, not to mention be.

I knew what he was inflecting when he suggested counseling: that I wasn’t okay as is. Or that the only reason I was there was so I could tell someone, when that wasn’t true. If he could have seen the kids at the cookout, how
completely vulnerable they were to the slightest of manipulations ..

He asked me if I could remember anything else.
He had pages of notes written out on his legal pad. I felt my mind go blank. I told him I had written
some stuff out in case my mind were to go blank on me. I asked him if it would be alright to look over it.
He said that was fine.
I pulled out what was essentially a print out of Real, Culmination from brokenspirits.com and
looked it over, plugging in a few details for him.
Then there was just silence between us, as he rubbed his face and ran a hand through his hair.

_That’s a lot, you know,_ he said. _That’s a lot._
He described the number of cases he was working on already; all involving child sexual abuse. All the detectives had the same amount. And this was just one county.
I felt like he was trying to give me excuses, that he wasn’t taking into account how hard my end of this had been. I reminded myself that it wasn’t his job to take me into account, it was mine. It was his job to take himself into account, and the huge workload I just handed him.

He called it a confrontation. That’s what he called it. These cases take years but it would begin with him tracking down my siblings and a few other
family members and that would at some point include my parents. At that point he’d have to go to the House _For the Confrontation._

He shook my hand. In the end what had happened that morning was simply two people meeting each other. I felt like I knew him and that he knew me pretty good. It didn’t feel like the beginning of a police investigation.
As I drove away I could feel that maybe there’s no such thing as the law. W__ would argue that the law is all we got. Maybe it is civilian, man made, like a grain of sand in the beach that is Nature’s law.
The man-made law felt very small and insignificant, like something hanging by a thread in the strong wind that was my tumultuous life.

I had only been on this side of the ocean for eight weeks. This is supposed to be hard, I told myself.

I felt like I did when I was stoned a month back - colors, people, materials, everything seems so Real.
I went back to the outlet center and finished going through the stores. I bought a suede leather jacket. I didn’t know I was that guy. Someone who could own something so nice. (It was on clearance for sixty eight dollars.)
The material of it seemed so Real. Everything
around me was making me feel more and more grounded.

Meanwhile my mind went where it wanted to go, full of tangents, trying to make sense of things supposedly I had already made sense of.

You never have to tell the story again, I think to myself .. Most people are somewhere in between Her and Him. I am both perceptions. I had to know my soul in order to choose.
I find out that really I like to play: Violence is fun. Shopping is fun. Sports is fun. Police Stations (Bravery) is fun. Difficulty is fun. ..
So I don’t really like J__’s family, when it comes
right down to it. Tr__’s the one I like the most and he’s the outcast. The rest are spoiled acting, always arguing over petty things like kick ball.
I never have a real conversation with anyone but J__ and Ms J___. It’s like when you come into a new military unit, it all seems great at first, then the dirt starts to show.
I guess that’s why they call in a honeymoon. .. Maybe that’s how it works. You like everybody. You like some more than others. And
you like one all the way. Maybe that’s the social set up of single life.

I took twenty four pills. I had three days off and they’ve disappeared and I’ve exhausted myself dealing with the cop and got myself feeling like shit sometimes. It’s not right. It‘s time to be happy again.
I turn the music up loud, the large, cherry wood speakers throbbing, I drink some whiskey as it gets dark outside. I jump up and down to the blurry lights and turn and twist and swing my face left and right to the beat.

__________