"Thank you" I told the man who sold coffee on the street corner. Here the McCafe' was labelled as 'American'. In America we call it Arabica. Elsewhere, things are always better.

"Alaimtnan, kayf latifa" He said to me. He wanted a tip. I gave him one.

I walked out past the Security Convoy. I worried that my constant need to move erratically was going to get me in trouble, but I had become helpless to make myself stop it.

Another flashback. They would think I had dreamed all of this up anyway. Who cares? I wondered that the sights had gotten to me. Hell, I'd be worried if they hadn't gotten to me.

"Surgy?" The captain was calling to me. "Surgy where the heck are you going? We are over here? Forget how to cross the street?"

I had.

You had to take a left turn three times to make a right in Arua. 

Who can cross the street in such a place?

I was in the swirling sands again. I couldn't leave this place. My body was still in Uganda, but my spirit had crossed the border.

The man with stars for a face stood there with me. I stared into the blackness under his cowl, under skies without any stars and I beheld the unknown constellations there. 

"Neat trick" I told the specter. The evil-thing pointed for me to look at something and I shook my head 'no' and I said to him: "I am not falling for that again. You are going to show me a scorched mass grave full of the bodies of torched children. Then when I can't look away it is gonna play backwards in some kind of rewind and show me they were still alive when they put them in there and burnt them up. No thanks. I am good, totally caught on to your tricks." I sassed the monster.

It kept pointing and I realized my head was turning anyway, you cannot change what has already happened. Not ever.

Then I was back in Arua and I had crushed my coffee in my hand, the hot black liquid had burned my hand. I had dropped it. I was standing there screaming. Then someone grabbed me and dragged me back to the vehicles.

Later that day I had to talk to my boss's boss. 

It was very quiet in that office. He sat looking at me.

The clock ticked quietly. Pictures of smiling people adorned his office. There were sports trophies for t-ball. Every kid gets one at the end of the season. In a place like this, your kid's t-ball trophy is magically made of real gold.

"I am alright." I told him. He smiled sadly at me.

"No you are not." He dropped the pencil and sat back. "It is always something." He said absently. "It is this place. It is evil."

"The people...where would I go?"

"Go home, Surgy. Don't you have kids and stuff?"

"I did. I have nothing for me back there."

"Jesus Christ, Surgy! You have only been here for a few weeks. You talk like Ericson." My boss shook his head at me.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"Yeah but Ericson...uh...He went into that ebola situation." I smiled weakly. I wasn't convincing him.

"The only way you are going back out there is if I need you to fill a body bag. You are a liability now, you have lost it. Paid leave. Go home, see your kids. Attend a community college. Do something else with the rest of your life. You have done your part. Go home." He insisted.

"Where would I go?" I wondered. "While everyone is still here?"

"What do you mean? You owe these people nothing. They just see another American. You think you are some kind of hero, but really you are just sick." He had a way with words. 

"I am here to help. If I leave then who will take my place?" I asked.

"What are you talking about? Do you even hear yourself anymore? Do I need you to see Whitehead? Seriously. Whatever goes on out there always has you kids coming back here like you have seen..."

"Seen what?" I asked.

"Nothing. Like you have seen nothing." He narrowed his brow, aware of everything I had seen 'out there' as he called it.

"Do you know what they do to the girls?" I asked suddenly. "Sometimes they keep some of the girls, instead of putting them with the others..." I didn't hear the rest of my own words. I was somewhere else while my mouth told some kind of story that gradually made that man across the desk fall silent, in his gaze at me.

"I see." He said after a very long time. "Do you know what did it for me?"

"What?" I asked.

"When I first got here. This kid gave me my gunshot wound. He was a little boy. Child soldiers, I know you have shot back at a few."

"Killed 'em" I interrupted. He paused for a second, acknowledging that I made a distinction.

"He had a AK-47. He was just a little guy. Looks just like Jimmy, my boy. For a second I actually thought it was Jimmy. Worried it might have been him until I got to Skype with him later on, after I had calmed down." He spoke slowly, honestly and absently. I had probably just talked the exact same way but hadn't even heard myself. Part of my mind was ignorant of what the insurgents did with the selected female children. He went on and on. I just heard parts of the story. "With his little Cookie Monster T-shirt...bloodstains on it...not even his blood...They make them kill, usually their own mothers after making them watch them....And then they make the kid pull the trigger, by then the mother is saying 'do it' and they do...I sat back up because I didn't know he had shot me. I waved to him and he kinda smiled weirdly and raised the rifle...had pieces of his head on me after that. It was like a bad special effect...except real..."

"Ever wonder why?" I asked. I had a crazy person's grin on my face, I didn't mean to wear it. It just appeared there.

"You are going home, Surgy. Go home and make it up like it never happened. Never come back to Africa. Never speak Arabic again. Don't even drink coffee. Just go be quiet. Act like none of this happened and that will become who you are. You are broken."

"I am broken."

"Go home and let baseball games and girlfriends and top ramen bring you back to reality."

"Eighties music? I like eighties music." I told him.

"Sure. Get some of that also. Just leave everything else here, with me. I will take care of it for you. You have done enough. You should never have been here anyway. These people don't want your help. Okay?"

"Okay." I sighed. I had been crying. I guess that meant I was healing. I wasn't though.

I was on the plane home remembering something. A rhythm. A word.

A face.

I wasn't sure what. I was remembering something. Had I ever been there? Nope, of course not. I was home.

I was home. I examined my journal and my calendar. How had I hidden those weeks? I had never gone. I recalled telling my boss at the Security Company that I wasn't going to go. He went without me. I had quit and gone back to school. People would have noticed I had left.

"Not as a rifleman, as a translator. We need someone who speaks Arabic."

I don't speak Arabic. Not one word of it. I know words in every language except Arabic. When would I have studied it? Never had the time.

My dad asked me once: "Where have you been these past few weeks?"

I'd disappeared. "At my girlfriend's house. You know, hanging out."

He looked skeptical of that. The ex-girlfriend I hadn't spoke to for months. That is who I claimed I was with. My own mind struggled to believe it. 

Where had I been? 

I again tried to remember something that had come a full circle in my mind, in my personality. A face? A word? A song?

A name.

"Hey Surgy." A guy I saw at the gas station near the Agency said to me. I knew he meant me because he was looking at me. My name isn't Surgy. I said so.

I left and I did not look back.