Sapphic Voices General Fiction

GRID

I was raised in the military life.  I can never remember wanting to be anything other than a soldier.  I liked the discipline, and I liked the Army life.  I knew what my job was every day, and I knew how each day would go.  No surprises.   I really liked that.  I suppose that's why it never occurred to me that I would ever be anything but a lifer. There was nothing that could possibly change my mind about that.  Then one day nearly twenty years ago I went to the doctor with a friend and it changed everything.

It was 1979; my third year of Army life and what I thought was a new beginning.

After two years as an MP, I had earned my third stripe and the transfer of my dreams to a top-secret MOS.  I was about to become a spy.  Life was good.  A new school, a new roommate, and possibly a best friend.   Those were all things I hadn't had yet, and I wanted them.

That new friend was also my roommate.  We shared the same quarters from the first moment we arrived on post.  We got along really well for people who met at an airport and became sudden roommates.  I'm told that this was exceptional for people who get thrown together through no choice or fault of their own.   Because we were friends, I went to the hospital with her so she wouldn't have to wait alone for her appointment.  It was nothing more than that, but it changed everything in my life.


I remember that Kate, my roommate and I speculated about the rash on her face for five weeks.  It wasn't going away on its own and Kate knew she had to do something about it.  She was familiar with it:  A stress related thing she used to get.   All she really needed was a prescription for her topical solution.  I had mentioned the doctor to her before, but being in the military, neither   one of us looked forward to seeing anyone in the medical field.  It just never seemed to end in a good way when you had to deal with them.   Maybe it was worse because we both felt that way, and maybe not.  Anyway, eventually we both knew we would end up taking that trip to the hospital.  We were simply postponing the inevitable.

A military hospital is like any civilian hospital you've ever been in times ten.  It really sucks.  The paperwork alone can put you six feet under.  God forbid you are actually sick and you go.  I had just finished the forms for Kate's visit and was content to follow the great Army maxim   "hurry up and wait."  I had my book so I was relatively happy, or as happy as anyone can be in a hospital lobby with nothing to do but think.

Since we had arrived   on this new post, we had done almost everything together.  It seems strange considering the differences between us.  I still don't understand why it worked out so well.  I was a very focused and closed in person, where Kate was a center of openness and connection.   She drew people toward her for reasons I'll never be able to understand, but I do know that wherever she was it was the center of the world.  Even today, I walk a path of aloneness, but my connection to Kate made me a part of the world in a way I never was before.   She introduced me to a world I didn't even know I was missing.  She made me feel alive in ways I didn't know were possible at the age of 21.

I remember the tap on the shoulder and looking up into the eyes of a young MP.  That didn't feel like a good   sign, but I didn't dwell on it at the time.  He asked me if I was a friend of Private McNeil's, and I said yes.  He was very polite when he asked me to accompany him to the doctor’s office.   Not thinking anything about it, I followed him across the lobby's lounge and down the hall to a pair of elevators.

I was sure the elevator said eighth floor, but if you ask anyone who works in the hospital they will tell you that there is no eighth floor.  There are six floors devoted to patient care and a floor for all the lab work.  Anyway, the MP led me into what looked like your average examination room and said "The doctor will be with you soon.   Go ahead and have a seat."  All I could think was that something was wrong with Kate, but I just couldn't imagine what it was or might be.

Could she have been mistaken about her rash, and it wasn't what she thought it was?  What if it was something worse? I mean she could really be sick, and we wouldn't have known, right?  When I finally managed to clear my negative thoughts out of my head I realized I had been waiting for some time but nobody had come in.   That seemed a little strange to me so I stood up and went to the door to open it.  Imagine my surprise when I realized it wasn't just stuck, it was locked. It was locked from the outside.  I didn't take it well at all.  Typical Private that I was, I screamed an obscenity and pounded on the door.   A voice from just outside the door yelled, "Shut up, I'm coming in."  When the door opened I tried to step out of the office, but found myself face to stomach with a huge guy in hospital whites.  "I told you I'm' coming in.  I did not tell you that you could come out, Private, so sit down and don't move until the Doc comes in.   Is that clear, Private?"

"Yes sir."  Hey, rules are rules.  Before I could even stop myself, I was following protocol.  He was a Lieutenant.  He speaks, I respond.  That's the drill.  Nothing to do but wait. And worry.  I'm not sure there's anything worse than sitting in a military hospital room waiting for a doctor, and speculating on what might be wrong.

When the doctor finally came in I was bursting with questions; lots of questions. I think I tried to ask them all in those first five seconds of conversation.  The doctor was very calm, very professional, and very military.  He just ordered me to shut up so that he could speak.   Not easy, but I managed to do it.

"I'm Dr. Justice.  Now are you Private Reilly Mansfield?"  Okay, easy enough.  Name, rank, and serial number.

"Yes sir."

"Kate McNeil is your roommate."

"Yes sir.  She's okay isn't she?"

"For the moment.  I want to keep her here to run some tests though... we just to be sure about what kind of rash she has."  Well that made sense.  "I just need to get some information from you, so at ease for the remainder of the questions, soldier."

"Okay."

How long have you and Kate known each other?"

"Six months next week."

"Why are you roommates?"

"We arrived on post at the same time so we were assigned the same room."

"You didn't know her prior to that?"

"No sir."  At this point, I think I was wondering why any of that information was important.  I guess it just threw me off.

"Are you currently sexually active?"  When he started asking me how many sexual encounters I'd had, I started to wonder where all this was going.  Then he asked for names.  He asked if Kate was one of my partners.

Okay I like rules as much as anybody here does.  But somehow, I couldn't bring myself to answer.  Sure, the Army is my life, but does it own me? If it did, then how far did ownership go? And why did he actually expect me to answer these questions?   I didn't realize that the doctor had been looking at me for some time while waiting for an answer.  I couldn't even remember what the last question was.  He didn't say anything to me but called out to the orderly who was still in the hall. They conferred in whispers for a minute and I definitely didn't like the pleased look of the orderly's face.

The doctor said that he wanted to run some tests on me and that the orderly would be glad to show me to a room.  Okay I don’t know why I did it, all I know was that alarm bells were ringing inside my head. Tests at a hospital and anything requiring more an overnight stay was not going to be good news.   Then there was that whole bizarre conversation we had just had. So I refused.  I asked about Kate and where she was now.  I argued and lost.  The orderly very politely restrained me while the doctor called my Captain, who ordered me to do whatever the doctors, told me.   When I argued he gave me a written warning. That was the first of many my file would soon have.

Having resigned myself to fate, I asked if I could see Kate. Maybe they would put us in the same room. This wouldn't be fun, but at least we could cope with it together. Maybe it was the way my mind works, or maybe it was all the questions, but I just couldn't figure out what a stress-related rash had to do with sex.   Or maybe I was just totally confused.

The hulking orderly grabbed my arm and escorted me down a long hallway.  At the end was another corridor.  When we reached it, I noticed that it was blocked off with yellow caution tape.  He lifted up the tape and pushed me underneath it.   My new room was two doors down the corridor.  I was waiting for the orderly to open the door when I heard the screams down the hall.  I knew that voice. Kate was in the middle of a huge hiss fit. Where my file had until this time been empty, hers was considerably thick.   And with fairly good reason. She doesn't always believe in chain of command and respect for authority. She also hates being alone, and in small enclosed spaces. Sometimes she can be very vocal about it too.  Even now there's no one I know who comes close to her creative use of profanity. Most people in a fit of anger simply say the first few four-letter words they can think of, Kate uses normal words and tone of voice to turn curses into an art form.   While I liked that she said to the orderly holding her down, that she hoped   he'd someday be caught beneath a camel with severe nasal drip; it wasn't her best work that did the trick. It was a much more physical act.  She threw a chair through the hospital window and it landed on one of the ambulances, scaring the shit out of the two guys inside, but we didn't hear about that until later on in our stay.

When I followed my orderly down the hall it turned out that so did several doctors and nurses who seemed to come from out of nowhere.  We were all witnesses to Kate's tantrum, but she calmed down when she saw me.  The doctors made the expeditious decision to go ahead and put us in the same room so that Kate would shut up and cooperate.   By this time I think we both had some doubts about being here, but we were stuck here and there was nothing we could do about it even if we wanted too, and speaking for me I did want to.  That's when they got scary. They started throwing words out at us like rash and contagion and virus.

When we were finally alone that first night Kate and I talked   about it all, but she didn't know any more about it than I did. They wanted to run some tests because they were not sure what was causing her rash.  That seemed plausible enough but that didn't connect to the questions that I had been ordered to answer.

We talked about the questions, and Kate had been asked something similar.  She had just refused to answer them earlier than I did, and our Captain had ordered her to stay here too.  That meant we had to decide whether we would actually answer them truthfully or not.   Or maybe we would refuse. For me it was a tough decision to make. These guys were accusing us of being a couple of lesbians; at least that's what Kate thought.  We both knew those questions were definitely going to be asked again. The only good thing that happened that night was that Kate was given her topical solution. I know now that it was a flimsy hope but we though that maybe if her rash cleared up we might be off the hook.

This was a really rough time for me.  It sounds strange, but the issue of sex or even sexuality hadn't come up much in my life.  I mean, I had a specific goal for as long as I could remember, and I did everything possible to make it happen.   The Army was my life.  I never really thought about anything beyond that.  It was my whole world.  I never wanted anything more.  But now here was this really big thing that I had to think about. Maybe I never thought about it before because I knew I wouldn't like the answer I was going to find.   I really don't know. All I can say for sure was this was the first actual moment of my life that I thought about sexuality.

I suppose I faced it much like I have everything else in my life. If I didn't understand it or know anything about it, I looked it up. It was always rare for me to ask someone else before I knew in my one mind what something meant. This time I went to Website for the word homosexual.   It said "someone who loves someone of the same sex."  The problem was that I didn't see what the big deal was.   Everyone loves someone of the same sex at some point in his or her lives.  But I guess everything hinges on the word love? Who do you love? How do you love? Why would it ever be bad to love someone?

All I could think of was that I'd had a total of four relationships in my life that didn't involve actual family members.  There were two close female friends I went through school with, my first and only boyfriend, and Kate. The boyfriend was from high school. I may have experimented with him a little, but it didn't take us long to figure out we were better off as friends than we were as lovers.

And then there was Kate. For the entire five months we'd known each other, we had done almost everything together.  We were in the same command, the same school, and the same room.  I didn't really know if that added up to anything or not. I mean I hadn't thought about sleeping with her either. There was that little problem we had that one night she had gone out with one of the guys from class.   We   actually fought about that.  I didn't like him and didn't want her to go, but she went anyway. It wasn't until later on that she told me what had happened that night; about how he’d tried to hurt her when she told him she didn’t want to sleep with him. I never did tell her that I called up a couple guys I'd gone through MP school with, and had him arrested. As a special favor to me, the guys had him strip searched by one of the most sadistic women we knew.

I suppose it was entirely possible that I was gay.  I might even have had a thing for Kate, but during those ten days, I didn't really come up with any answers beyond that.  We did talk about it between us. Kate thought that whether either of us was a lesbian or not really didn't matter.   All that mattered was that the doctors thought so. That might mean that we could get kicked out of school, lose our security clearance, or even get totally kicked out of the Army. Either way, we were probably up a shit creek without a paddle.

By our fourth day there, Kate's rash was gone, but they were still running tests on us. Some tests we took together, and some they had us do separately. During the tests, we met these guys named Pete, Mike, and Sandy who were also here on this nonexistent floor. Pete had been there as a patient for a while, and he told us that the doctors were testing for something called GRID. Gay-Related Immune-Deficiency.   We didn't have a clue what that might be but Pete explained it.  He was the expert. After all, they told him he might die from it.  He warned us about what to look for on our medical charts.  There would be a category called HIV. If it was positive we were sick, but if it read negative, we were okay.   So far, it hadn't been listed on our charts at all.


It was on one infamous Pizza Night that life got really strange.  The big bad asshole orderly was not what he appeared to be. On that Wednesday night, he came up to our floor.  That was not his usual routine because he was with us during the day shift. Terry really surprised me that night. He'd gotten hold of as extra set of medical charts on Kate and   I. This chart listed our HIV status. Neither one of us had tested positive. Kate's rash was exactly what she told them it was at the beginning: a stress-related rash that wouldn't go away with over the counter medicine.

"But why are we still here?"

I think Pete understood first.  We weren't sick but here we were in the middle of a secret testing operation.  We knew too much to just walk away.

"They can't just let you leave now. You know about us and what they've been doing."

"So what can we do?"

"You guys can't do anything but I bet Pete can." Terry grinned.  "You could go public."

"So could you."

"Not in a million years."  I listened to the two men debate as if they'd known each other forever.  "I'm not messing with my medical career, but I won't let them do this either.  I will not let them use healthy people to test their theories on.   I'll get you everything you need, but you have to release the information."

"Well, since it doesn't matter about me and I'm the one who's been here the longest I could do it."

"Well, that and the fact that you know just who to give the info to."

Pete just grinned at him.  "I have the tapes and journal I've been working on too.  We can release those."

"But what happens when you do?"

"My guess is that they'll try to blackmail you into staying here. Don't let them. Tell them they can't lock you up either. Don't let them scare you with that. They will take your security clearance from you and send you to another school.   They can do that, but they'll want to send you to some out of the way   place.  Bumfuk, Egypt or Cenop, Turkey would be my guess.  See if they'll let you get out.  That would be the best thing you could do for yourself.  If you stay, they'll dog you.   Take the out when they offer it, because they probably will."

Pete was right about everything.  When they finally offered us a chance to get out, we were both so fed up with the bullshit that we were ready to leave. Kate and I both left the Army, but took off in separate directions.  I never saw her again.   In my ten-day stay, I learned the difference between who gets respect simply because of a stripe on his shoulder, and who really deserves your respect.  It definitely wasn't what I thought it was, but then life never is.  It's still hard here in the outside world, but at least I sleep much better at night now.

The End

If you have enjoyed pj leslie's "GRID", then please be certain to e-mail her at  bbrinker1940[at]yahoo.com  and thank her for posting this Story.

Click here for a list of all of pj leslie's  Stories and Poetry at  Sapphic Voices Authoresses.

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