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  • The Disengagement of Airman Milton Guerreiro (Part II)*
  • Nelly Rosario (bio)

Hemochromatosis, the doctor determinates.

“Too much iron in your blood, Mr. Guerreiro.”

No, too much blood in my irons, I explain to her. The doctor, she shows me slides of ghoulish purple molecules stacked in hemogoblins.

“All this strong, ferrous blood gone to civilian waste.” She enshakes her head. “I’d consider re-enlisting, Airman Guerreiro. Iron rusts from disuse.”

Me, I shrug. “And it bends in the heat.”

When the non-issue of my heart’s dextrocardia comes up, she asks how on this good earth had I been deployed with such a rare congenitalia defect.

Me, I shrug. “My heart’s on the right side.”

“Yes, dear, too bad.”

“No, inversed is too good. Faces everybody’s.”

She puffs out her upper lip as if to say “if you say so” and goes on to document the healing progress of the scarface on my upper lip. After an X-ray, she points out the shadow of shrapnel lodged in my masculine femur. She is bragging words like “removing the enemy” and “friendly tissue” for the blue-on-blue injury caused by none other than my off-duty buddy, Pistola.

“Yes, still pals, me and Pis,” I tell her.

No, I do not want to therapy with anyone about friendlies or fires.

The rest of the tests go by in a blur of pricks and prods and a rat-tat-tat of questions.

By evening, I am very much sick of questionations. I decline the aircab back to the military Head and Quarters, preferring instead to entighten the straps on my boots. It will be a long, cacophonous walk on Zero Ground to that HQ, just as I walked in the olden days, when my muscles were not atrophied from sitting in front of Virtual War consoles of buttons and panoramic screens. In the olden days, when my eyes were mine and hers were hers, the womanfriend’s, when I had had ironless blood flowing through my veins. I had had more ears than eyes then and then. I had had imagination, my own images, my own nation, you know. A year. That is what it took me to adaptate to wearing her eyes, her wholeness of vision, and to forget my compound ones. Hers—mine, now—is a wholeness [End Page 465] where there is no deference so between what is and what is so. I do not like this straight sight. That was not the eye trade with the womanfriend for witch I bargained. My mosaic vision is gone with broken wind and fartings of vision. When I first enopened her eyes, the new world I saw through them had divided itself by itself and become a single one and only. Dwarfened and gianted, close and far. I miss and miss the compoundness of what was my vision, mosaics, unfolding from Unity as one and many. Add plus three years of virtual warring for global water powers and what it took me to adaptate to update lag whenever I enturned my head. The whole I see now is a dizzneying sight.

But and so, as I head towards the New Bifröst Bridge, my ironful think is that the dreams of olden that had taken me far, I sold to be a Rior. A warrior without the markings of war, a fekking warrior on a videoscreen—only to now end up back to the square root of one. One is one, but to throw bombs from a hidden hand and call myself Victor? Call that zero squared. I am not named Victor but Milton, though I like the letters from U to Z. Z is a very, very last letter.

I had been warned, howeverso, when I was relieved from my tour of V-war duty. Medic Ronnie Velásquez had encautioned me about veterinarian dissatisfactions in his Esperantoglish, that language art of borderless medics: “Look out for droughts and floods in the mouth, frato.” Look out too, brother, for difficulty concentrating, fullness of head, stomach awareness months of flatulence, migraines, fatigue, et, and cetera. “You’ll feel like fek, frato Milton, like fek.”

Indeed, shit...

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