Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

Or so I thought.

Speedies or no, I'm still blessed and cursed with a soldier's body. In the soldierboy I was exercised constantly, to keep from cramping up; at the university I worked out every day, alternating an hour of running with an hour on the gym machines. So I could get along without sleep, but not without exercise. Every morning at dawn I'd excuse myself from the proceedings and go off to run.

I was systematically exploring downtown Washington during my morning jogs, taking the Metro down and going in a different direction each day. I'd seen most of the monuments (which might be more moving to someone who'd actually chosen to be a soldier) and ranged as far afield as the Washington Zoo and Alexandria, when I felt like doing a few extra miles.

Peter accepted the fact that I had to have the exercise to keep from cramping up. I also contended that it cleared my head, but he pointed out that his head was clear enough, and the only exercise he got was wrestling with cosmology.

That was not entirely true. On the fifth day I got almost all the way to the Metro station and realized I'd left my card behind. I jogged on back to the apartment and let myself in.

My street clothes were in the living room, by the fold-out bed that Amelia and I shared. I took the card out of my wallet and started back to the front door, but then heard a noise from the study. The door was partly open; I looked in.

Amelia was sitting on the edge of the table, naked from the waist down, her legs scissored around Peter's bald head. She was gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles were bone-white, her face to the ceiling in a rictus of orgasm.

I closed the door with a quiet click and ran out.

I ran as hard as I could for several hours, stopping a few times to buy water and choke it down. When I got to the border gate between D.C. and Maryland, I couldn't get through because I didn't have my interstate pass. So I stopped running and slid into a dive called the Border Bar, icy air sharp with tobacco smoke, legal in D.C. I drank down a liter of beer and then sipped another liter with a shot of whiskey.

The combination of speedies and alcohol is not entirely pleasant. Your mind goes off in all directions.

When we first started going together, we talked about fidelity and jealousy. There's a kind of generation problem: When I was in my teens and early twenties, there was a lot of sexual experimentation and swapping around, with the defendable basis that sex is biology and love is something else, and a couple could negotiate the two issues independently. Fifteen years earlier, when Amelia had been that age, attitudes were more conservative-no sex without love, and then monogamy afterward.

She agreed at the time to go along with my principles-or lack of same, her contemporaries might say – even though we both thought it was unlikely we would exercise our freedom.

So now she had, and for some reason it was devastating. Less than a year ago, I would have jumped at the opportunity of having sex with Sara, jacked or not. So what right did I have to feel injured because she had done exactly the same thing? She'd been living with Peter more closely than most married couples live, for quite a while, and she respected him enormously, and if he asked for sex, why not say yes?

I had a feeling it was she who had asked, though. She certainly had been enjoying it.

I finished the drinks and switched to iced coffee, which tasted like cold battery acid, even with three sugars.

Did she know that I'd seen? I had closed the door automatically, but they might not remember having left it slightly open. Sometimes the current from the airco cycling on and off would ease a door shut.

"You look lonely, soldier." I did my running in fatigue uniform, in case I wanted an unrationed beer. "You look sad." She was pretty, blond, maybe twenty.

"Thanks," I said, "but I'm all right."

She sat down on the stool next to me and showed me her ID, professional name Zoe, medical inspection only one day old. Only one customer had signed the book. "I'm not just a whore. I'm also a professional expert on men, and you're not 'all right.' You look like you're about to jump off a bridge."

"So let me."

"Huh-uh. Not enough men around to waste one." She lifted up the back of her wig. "Not enough jacked men, anyhow."

Her off-white shift was raw silk, hanging loosely on her graceful athletic body, revealing nothing and everything: This merchandise is so good I don't have to advertise.

"I've used up most of my entertainment points," I said. "Can't afford you."

"Hey, I'm not doing any business. Give you one for free. Got a dime for the jack?"

I did have ten dollars. "Yeah, but look. I've had too much to drink."

"No such thing, with me." She smiled, perfect hungry teeth. "Money-back guarantee. I'll refund your dime."

"You just want to do it jacked."

"And I like soldiers. Was one."

"Come on. You're not old enough."

"I'm older than I look. And I wasn't in for long."

"What happened?"

She tilted toward me so that I could see her breasts. "One way to find out," she whispered.

There was a jack joint two doors down. In a few minutes I was in the dark humid cube with this intimate stranger, memories and feelings crashing together and mingling. I felt our finger slide easily into our vagina, tasted the salt sweat and musk of our penis, sucking it rigid. Breasts radiating. We shifted around so we were two mouths working together. There was a slight distracting ache from two of her molars that needed work. She was terrified of dentists and all of her beautiful front teeth were plastic.

She had thought about suicide but never attempted it, and our sexual rhythm faltered while she relived my memory-but she understood! She had spent one day as a mechanic, assigned to a hunter-killer platoon by a clerical error. She watched two people die and had a nervous breakdown, her soldierboy paralyzed.

She knew nothing of science or mathematics, physical education major, and although she felt my end-of-the-world anxiety, she just linked it with the suicide attempt. For several minutes, we stopped the sex and just held on to each other, sharing sorrows at a level that's hard to describe, independent of actual memory, I suppose body chemistry talking to body chemistry.

There was a two-minute warning chime and we re-coupled, hardly moving, slight internal contractions bringing us to a slow-flowing orgasm.

And then we were standing in the lemon heat of the afternoon sun, trying to figure out what to say.

She squeezed my hand. "You aren't going to do it again-kill yourself?"

"I don't think so."

"I know what you think. But you're still 'way too upset about him and her."

"You helped with that. Having you, being you."

"Oh." She handed me her card and I signed on the back.

"Even when you don't charge?" I said.

"Except for husbands," she said. "Your own, that is." Her brow furrowed. "I got a little ghost of something."

I felt a sudden new sweat break out. "Of what?"

"You jacked with her. Only once? Once and a... another time that, that wasn't really the real thing?"

"Yeah. She had a jack put in, but it didn't take."

"Oh. I'm sorry." She came close and plucked at my shirt. She looked up at me and whispered, "The stuff I was thinking about you being black, you know I'm not a racist or anything."

"I know." She was, in a way, but not malicious and not in a way she could control.

"The other two..."

"Don't worry about it." She'd had only two other black customers, jacked, full of anger and passion. "We come in all flavors."

"You're so cool, so thoughtful. Not cold. She ought to hang on to you."

"Can I give her your phone number? For a reference?"

She giggled. "Let her bring it up. Let her talk first."