the scenes.”
“You’re still a hero.”
“Oh, please,” she laughed, “do you really think a line like that will get me into bed?”
She was in my bed on the third date, like the rules dictate. She liked it vigorous and rough, the way I suspected a soldier would.
“Hold me until I sleep,” she said.
She didn’t sleep well. She tossed, turned, and hit me in the face, and screamed out a set of numbers that didn’t make sense.
“I’m sorry,” she told me.
“It’s okay.”
“I lied when I said I didn’t see any action,” she said. “I was in some pretty hairy battles and lost some close friends in my unit. I was taken hostage for three days by insurgents and a Delta Team rescued us.”
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“I can see it in your eyes.”
“My eyes?”
“You’re writing a pilot for a TV show.”
She had me.
“That’s all right,” she said. “It might make an interesting program.”
I kept seeing her. I enjoyed the rough sex, bruises and scratches and bitten lips. Each time we got together, she opened up more, felt comfortable enough to tell me about seeing her friends killed when they drove over improvised explosive devices or their HumVees were hit with RPGs. She told me how many enemy combatants she had shot and killed, and how they had roughed her up while she was a prisoner, and came close to being gang-raped if the Deltas had not burst in.
“I’m thinking of enlisting for a third tour,” she said. “My sister will freak out, but I’m serious.”
“Why? After all that happened.…”
“Because it’s real over there,” she said seriously. “Is it ‘real’ here in Los Angeles? Hollywood? It’s all make-believe; it’s all bullshit illusion, people living fantasies and virtual lives. I don’t want that. I grew up here, I know that life, and it’s not for me. I don’t know what I want, but I never felt more alive in war than I ever have. Here, it is all ‘reel’—spelled like the spool is moving pictures.”
Yet three weeks later, she informed me that she was now having second thoughts about reenlisting because she was officially in love with my sorry dreamer’s ass. I didn’t know how to respond to that; you never do when someone says, “I love you,” and you do not love them back. “No need to answer, TV boy,” she said, fingers on my lower lip, “what I feel has nothing to do with what you feel, and I can wait.” Wait for what? I was fond of her, she was great to talk to and have sex with, but I had only known her for seven weeks and I was more occupied with getting a staff writer’s job on a new hit science-fiction show than getting involved; if I landed the job, I wouldn’t have the free time to see her as I did as an unemployed writer.
Then we had our first big fight. It was about a camping trip she and her sister had planned, a week in Big Bear; her sister was bringing her fiancé and Allison wanted to know if I would join them.
“A week?” I said. “A weekend, maybe, but Allison, I’m sorry, I can’t do a whole week out of the city.”
She wasn’t pleased with my response. “Why not?”
“I can be called into a meeting last minute,” I told her. “I have pitches out there, I’m up for this staff position. I have to be in the city.”
“Company town,” she said with distaste.
“You know how it is. Look, I’ll go two days, Saturday and Sunday.…”
“And leave me alone with my sister and her future husband?”
“The best I can do.”
“Is it because of what I said?” she asked. “Confessing I love you?”
“What? No.”
“I can see it in your eyes.”
“See what?”
“I don’t expect you to love me back yet, but I expect you not to lie to me and pull bullshit!”
“Allison,” I said, and then I got it: her flattened palm into my nose. I felt the blood flow. I don’t know what happened; it was in her eyes: she was not the same person, she was a mad woman, or a soldier, and she had a serious intent to hurt me. She used whatever hand-to-hand combat training she had been given and did some serious damage to my body, hiding her hands and feet, kicking and punching and chopping and screaming, calling me every name in the book. “Kidnap and torture me?!?” she yelled, and I felt a rib crack as I went to the ground. She was not here in Los Angeles; she was somewhere back in the Middle East, reliving a moment of violence, and I was not the guy she was dating, but an insurgent who had to be taken down.
And down I went.
II.
I woke up in my bed and every inch of my body hurt, like Godzilla had stepped on me a few times, treating me like Little Tokyo. She must have put me in bed after she knocked me out. I could hear her in the living room, pacing about, talking to herself.
I reached under the bed, where I kept a .38 snub nose in a shoebox for intruders. There are a lot of criminals in Los Angeles. I checked the chamber and made sure the six rounds were there. I had been on the firing range, and my Dad had taught me how to shoot.
I limped to the living room, wondering if she had broken my foot. Determination and self-preservation kept me moving.
She stopped pacing when she saw me. “Oh, God, Brad,” she said. “I’m so sorry what I did. I don’t know what happened—I snapped, and.…”
She saw the gun I was pointing at her.
“Brad?”
“Get out of my apartment,” I said as calmly as I could.
“I don’t understand.”
“Get out of my home, and get the hell out of my life, you psychopathic bitch.”
Her eyes became hard. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I don’t know what happened to you,” I said, “but you’re nuts, and I want nothing of it. Look what you did to me.”
She stepped forward. “I can explain.”
I didn’t give her a chance. I fired three times, all in her chest.
III.
I poured myself three shots of vodka. I wasn’t aware of the pain in my body now that I had a dead body to contend with.
I considered what to do. Call the cops? Would they believe me? Soldier goes crazy, uses the karate chops, I had to shoot her. Or would I get fifteen
