victimscompass

America, your truck stop coffee tastes like it came out of a Marine's ass. I should know. I joined the Marines with Trevor two years ago. We'd been shooting bad guys since my Barbie days. After Basic, they sent us to Albany, where things went very deeply south indeed. In no time flat, Trevor landed, in combat gear, in Afghanistan, in the deepest shit this side of Herat. I went home. Trevor carried a sniper rifle almost as tall as me. All the Afghanis just had to touch it; so did Trevor. He used to write me just to tell me how cool it was to kill people for a living.

I can imagine; I live in Detroit.

It happened in September. His spotter, Norm, picked out the victim--a middle-aged man in the striped coat they wear on top of Levis and moon boots. He was shoving his way through a crowd with a sneer and a saber. The Secretary of State was in town for a meeting with Karzai. It was supposed to be a secret. Word spread, I guess. Lunghee turbans flowed like water through the streets. Trevor lined up the man in his sights as the secretary's motorcade rounded a corner. It was hot at street level but the cool breeze meandered up through the shaft of their minaret.

The man stopped. He tugged at the sheath. Trevor sucked in a breath and held it, willing himself to still. Norm gave a wind speed. The saber came out. The man pointed it at the motorcade. That was enough for Trevor. He fired.

Norm said the man died instantly. I guess Trevor disagreed.

Trevor's next words came out in a dusty accent. "Home," he said, as they climbed down the tower. He looked at Norm like a stranger. When they rejoined his unit, Trevor forgot everyone's name. He freaked out. Norm tried to do something, but Trevor put Norm in a hold until he broke his arm.

They put him on the next flight back.

"I became the person who killed me," Trevor said to me when I met him on his mother's porch. I hate metaphysical bullshit when I've barely had a chance to say hello. I looked him over. He was black and blue where they'd beaten him, an old tradition for the dishonorably discharged. He sat sipping green tea with one hand in his dog's mangy fur. Trevor was allergic, but he hardly noticed the welts on his hand. "Private."

"Trev," I said, looking down at the hem of my skirt and willing him to call me by my nickname, Ash. I hated the sound of my warbling voice. "You made it." It even looks cheap on paper.

"Did I?" He toasted me and drank, meeting my eyes through the green haze of his drink. That stare creeped me out. His eyes drilled through me. "I know you, yes?"

I nodded. How much PTSD do you need to forget you made and lost a baby together?

He waved me off with his tea. "Perhaps. It is so easy to know a woman in your country. Here, you are lazy and fat, except the pop stars. I think I shall be one."

He was right. This wasn't Trevor, unless his dick grew big enough to eat him alive. I turned away, changed my mind and kneed him in the groin as hard as I could. His expression hardly changed. His upper lip dotted with sweat.

He leaned forward, grabbing my neck and pulling me into his face to whisper in a voice of onions and hummus, "I think it is time for you to go." And something else, raspy and ancient that came from something I didn't understand then and don't now. The real Trevor.

He let me go and walked inside. The dog harrumphed and went back to licking itself.

I got up, but my feet on the steps felt wrong. I turned around and banged on the door. "Trevor! I'm sorry! You're not a body snatcher! I can prove it!"

Like smoke, his face coalesced out of the nothing of the darkened house interior. "The only way to do that," he said, licking his lips, inches away from mine, "is to kill me. Would you like to try?"

His mom's old .38 special poked through the hole I'd kicked in the screen when I was fifteen. I stared as he shook it, like a doggy treat, until I grabbed it by the barrel. And he smiled and held my eyes with the endless pits of his. Finally, he vanished.

The irony hit me then: we'd both been kicked out of the military for the thing inside of us. I hated him, it, them, then. It got worse.

Trevor started hanging around a rough crowd, particularly this guy, Ustad, who declared himself his manager. I saw them up at Dooley's, and it shook me. Trevor played a set on a sitar while people tried to dance to it. I didn't even recognize him until I got close enough to see his old busted nose underneath the beard. Then Ustad brushed past me to order a drink at the bar off Trevor's card. Trevor just smiled. Trevor, who had picked pennies off the sidewalk, had joined the marines to pay off his mom's house. Ustad bought lots of shit, new iPods, motel rooms off Gratiot Avenue, caviar. Eventually, they cut up Trevor's cards. So, inevitably, Ustad cut up Trevor.

They found his body in a snow bank in Malden Park, in Windsor. Trevor's throat was cut and the edges of the wound had frozen solid. His family held a closed casket funeral. I went, played Taps, left and cried.

Ustad popped up in Cleveland, in the Flats, at a bar called the Powerhouse. Cops busted him after he tried to run one of Trevor's canceled cards on three Mai Tais and an order of potato skins. They said he went quietly. Local media unearthed Ustad's nasty habit of leeching off of celebrity wannabes. The singer they found, half-dissolved in battery acid in her bathtub in the eighties? A dancer found strangled with piano wire? Ustad denied everything, and could answer for nothing.

"No matter what they say," he said on camera, in a voice that reminded me of Trevor's recently acquired accent, "I am the victim here." And then he gave that stare. Watching it on TV made me want to punch the set.

I started to suspect the new Trevor was right. He was possessed by the man he'd killed. And that--what? Spirit? Soul? Identity?--had possessed the man who had killed Trevor.

It wouldn't take too long to prove me right or wrong. They sent Ustad to Youngstown, Ohio, where he cooled his heels and waited for extradition to whichever state wanted to kill him first.

About the same time, that Haley girl from American Idol started touring again. Do you call it a comeback if you never made it in the first place? Her van rolled into Youngstown on a Saturday to play a special concert for the inmates. She was too young to even know who Johnny Cash was. Nobody wants to talk about how Ustad got free, or how many died in the riot, or even why Haley packed heat, but when local news showed her emerging from the hospital a few days later she had it, too.

The stare was back.

Nightmares kept me awake the next six months. I was a mess, stress eating, gaining weight. I saw images of this... thing... that possessed what killed it. It could pop up anywhere or be anyone, Trevor, you, me. Then it got worse:

Haley came out with an album.

It should have tanked. A girl whose best credits were American Idol and singing the national anthem at the opening of the 2007 Western Conference semifinals should not make music that wraps all of the pain of two thousand years' warfare into a seventy minute thrumming, polyphonic pop symphony following the form of the Indian tala. Until she did. Alone.

Critics loved it, hailed it as a breakthrough. Doubters said they saw her lip sync in her live concert, but it only drove ticket sales higher. Besides, she didn't. Every instrument she played, she played well, and sang, too, with a raspy voice that sometimes overreached her register but never disappointed. I caught her on PBS yesterday. She wore a loose, striped coat and a kind of pop star turban, and stared at the lights the whole time. She sold out every concert she played in the south. I knew she made it big when Nashville started playing around with sitars. Still...

The nightmares came back last night.

I wish I could talk to someone. Guess you're it, America. I can't prove anything if I won't put my life on the line.

Tonight, Haley kicks off her northern tour in Charleston, West Virginia. It was six hours' drive, after work and in the dark, but close enough, and one of her bodyguards went through Basic with me and Trev. He swears he can get me a half hour alone with her. I'm counting on it.

So, I'm on my third coffee and the waitress is looking at me like I'm crazy for writing on this napkin and the tip had better be big to pay for all of the free refills. Or maybe she's seen what I'm oiling under the table. It will be an awkward fit, but all those calories missed my boobs, and the extra padding just looks proportional. It does tip me off balance, the .38 special, but it's nothing I can't get used to, and I might be able to use the extra wadding as a crude silencer. Do I even care if I'm caught? If Haley is just very talented, I'll be murdering a young singer in her prime. Well, cry me a river. Britney should have been so lucky.

I have to be ready, just in case. Before the main event, I'm taking a double handful of Advil and half a bottle of Southern Comfort. Hope I shoot straight. If he or she or, fuck, "it" takes me over, we're on the express train to hell. If not, I'm all for calling 911 and getting my stomach pumped. Poison's not a nice way to die. I've got a baggy. I'm using the next cup of coffee to swallow this note so my family doesn't have to wonder what kind of moral compass guided me into this travesty. The new Haley would understand it. It's tribal. It's all about revenge.

It's time, America.