Her eyes dart off to the side to the barrel of what might be water, but she doesn’t move. We go back and forth for several minutes, and she finally goes a little closer to the barrel as she watches me. She reaches for a little cup, dunks it inside, and comes back with her fingers dripping water.
“That’s it,” I whisper. “Ma…min Fadlak.”
She gives me an odd look, and I realize I’ve addressed her as a man, but I can’t remember how to say “please” to a female, and I think she has the idea anyway. My pronunciation is presumably atrocious either way.
She takes three steps towards me before a man comes around the corner, immediately begins to scream at her, and she drops the cup into the dry sand. The precious water is soaked up by the sand immediately.
I woke in a cold sweat feeling thirsty. After stumbling into the kitchen for water, I was completely unable to get back to sleep at all. The girl’s eyes as the man surprised her, picked her up, and carried her out of my sight made my heart pound in my chest.
My memories of her were clear, though I never saw the girl in the compound again. I had no idea what happened to her or what kind of trouble she might have been in for trying to help me. I’d caused so many others, at that point, to die on my watch. I never found out if I had attributed to her undoing as well.
The idea haunted my thoughts regularly. What if she was punished for doing what I asked her to do? What would her punishment have been?
Further memories – ropes, chains, fists, knees – flooded my head until I felt sick.
I tossed and turned, dozed just long enough to taste dry sand in my mouth, and got back up again. I took a piss and came out to find Odin standing there, looking up at me and wagging his tail. I took a step closer to him and reached out my hand to scratch his head.
Odin took the affection, then turned and headed back into the main room of the apartment. I followed, assuming he was going to want to go out, but he didn’t. He stopped, looked at me, then went over to his dog bed near the window. He lay down and placed his head on his paws.
“You think I ought to just sleep with you?” I asked him.
His tail answered me by thumping against the carpet. I went back into the bedroom, grabbed my pillow, and then came back to the living room again. With the pillow held to my chest, I looked down at Odin.
“This is ridiculous,” I said.
Odin’s tail thumped.
“It’s not going to work.”
More thumping.
Sighing heavily, I lowered myself to the floor and put my pillow down next to Odin’s bed. I lay down on my stomach with my arms on top of the pillow and looked over at him.
His eyes shone brightly in the nighttime city lights reflected from the window, and he panted, which always made him look like he was smiling. He reached out with his tongue and licked my arm before putting his head back down on his paws.
“That’s gross,” I told him as I closed my eyes.
Sleep came eventually. It wasn’t great, and I still had nightmares, but when I woke, Odin was there, watching me and thumping his tail.
*****
I spent the next six weeks in my apartment researching. I took Odin out for walks, but December brought winter and the weather at the edge of the lake sucked, so neither of us wanted to be out there too long. The rest of the time he would just lay across my feet until they went numb, and I would have to throw his rubber bone to get him to move.
Sleep was still something of an issue.
On a good night I would maybe get three or four hours, but it wasn’t usually consecutive. The dreams weren’t any worse – in fact, they were almost exactly the same every time – but they still woke me up and kept me from going back to sleep. Not sleeping consistently was taking its toll on my ability to think clearly, research thoroughly, and generally pissed me off.
It was the not knowing why the dreams had suddenly returned which was going to drive me crazy.
Mark’s idea that my trek to the Arizona desert reminded me of Iraq wasn’t a bad idea; I just didn’t buy into it. I didn’t have nightmares while I was there – I didn’t remember a single dream until after I had returned. Maybe there was a connection, but I didn’t think it was the climate.
Lia.
As soon as the name entered my head, I refused to think about her. I would not dwell on the woman who wandered into my sights and made me feel something for the first time in ages. There wasn’t any point; no good would ever come of it, and I simply refused to consider her.
How well was that working?
I stood up from the desk that housed my computer, stomped to the kitchen, and started pulling out frozen fruit. I added half a banana, some pineapple juice, and some flax seed to the blender before turning it on and cringing as the noise invaded my ears. I poured the smoothie into a glass, added a straw, and downed it while my fingers tapped against the counter. Odin walked up, sat down at my feet, and eyed me impatiently.