Christopher Fletcher was a morning person.  His insomnia was getting worse.  Last night he experienced one of the most raging spells he had seen since his days in Iraq.  It was a quiet night, but his disorder amplified the darkness and summoned storms from the calmest of waters.  Waters that he, a Naval veteran, could not brave.  The absurd reality for Chris was that he never served from the bow of a ship or hull of a submarine.  He was part of the Blue-to-Green program that caught would-be sailors by their sinking legs, throwing them back on land, rifle in hand, heading straight for the quicksand.  Officially, he was an “Individual Augmentee” that was needed to fill gaps, or fulfill specialized skill requirements of the Army.  He served with Comanche Company at FOB Grizzly, but this group of “Native Americans” looked like a foolish tribe of hunter-gatherers arriving on steel horseback, roaming the plains of the Diyala eager to quench their parched lips on the head-covering of an Arab or Persian.  He was ashamed to ride alongside this band of brothers.  

raided the village of Al Khalis, polluting it’s purity.  His bed was a waiting room and slumber was the nurse that never called his name.    he needed the extra hours to get his bearings straight and get in tune with his surroundings.  He would rise out of bed, suit up and head out for his morning jog around the Texas Tech campus, precisely three laps around it’s perimeter.  He devoted his first lap to the scholars of the University.   it’s staff and .  It was one of the few times where he felt joined to the University, the cap rock and the aquifer.  The three were connected just as the scholar, the staff member and the student who collectively turned the lights on at the beginning of each day.  It was a time when he could take walks through the campus and solitarily admire the mass of a building, the scent of a garden or the legibility of a path.  On certain occasions, when he was truly the first person on campus, he would walk backwards down the very same paths that everyone would occupying as the hour approached the first classes of the day.  As a student of civil engineering, he was particularly interested in the bidirectionality of these walking paths.  During these moments he often considered the possibility that a satellite high up in the exosphere was recording his ambulatory movements along with those of the other students on campus and that some human traffic expert was compiling a heat map for scientific analysis.  The map would most likely reveal gradients of red, orange and yellow clouds spanning similar areas of interest on the campus.  He could be found in the engineering cloud.  As he made his way down Boston Ave the clouds would change in color from yellow to green to blue, the cold lifeless void of the map where no one would be found.  The hues would brighten as he grew closer to the Communications, Math and Science buildings.  The pattern would continue in this manner as he passed through the clouds of Chemistry, Agriculture, Food Technology, Landscape Architecture and Plant Sciences until arriving at English and Philosophy.  

Chris was finishing his first year at Texas Tech and was still trying to find the so-called freshness of this period in his life.  He joined the ranks of the freshman at twenty two after spending four years in the Navy, the last three of which were spent in Iraq and the last one of which was spent at FOB Grizzly as an “Individual Augmentee”, transferred from the Navy to the Army to fill a gap in a foreign unit in need of an individual with “specialized skills”.  What those skills were, he would never know.  The Blue-to-Green program caught him sleeping one day and snatched him fresh of the boat and on to a gun truck with a rifle in hand.  FOB Grizzly,  also known as Camp Spartan, Red Lion or Barbarian, was established in Ashraf City, a refugee city in the heart of MEK territory.  The People’s Mujahedin of Iran claimed this place as their capitol during the Iran-Iraq war in 1986 and named after the martyred Ashraf Rejavi.  About 20 kilometers north lies the village of Al Khalis, or the pure, a place whose geographical location seems to preside over the continuously ensuing chaos below.  Whatever unadulterated beauty existed there when the Mesopotamians dug that first well was now lost permanently and Chris would come to bear that emptiness as his own albatross.  He spent most of his days in Iraq as a lost mariner on the dunes, trying to navigate the clear quicksand of its waters with a company of fools.  

The distant sounds of shoes shuffling across the asphalt, the ring of a cell phone or the laughter from a group heading to morning class brought him back down to Earth.  It was the last day of class for the Spring semester and Christian thought it was particularly auspicious that final exams would begin on Friday along with the Cinco de Mayo celebrations.  The battle between the student and the teacher over the gilded throne of the “A”, the soft cushiony La-Z-Boy “B”, the “C” sectional, the measly bar stool of a “D” and the gutter of the “F” would be fought down to the very last line of the Blue Book.  He joined the ranks of his fellow freshman as they entered the building.  Before he could reach for the handle of the door, a Spanish study group, hopped up on energy drinks and doughnuts burst out of the double doors, their leader chanting with vigor, “the hellbent and ill-equipped Mexicans will defeat the elitist French faculty and never allow foreign invasion in the Americas again.  Then, once the smoke clears, we will celebrate and beber muchacerveza, cantar con los mariachis ybailar una polca o un Tejano.”

     Christopher Fletcher felt far removed from the so-called community of teachers scholars as he sat nervously in the chair adjacent the desk in the shadowy shared office space for English Department graduate students.  It was a space reserved for the instructors of rhetoric and composition, a core requirement for gaining upper-division status in the University.  The walls of the rectangular room were flanked with a desk for each instructor, above which could be seen the   

Chris The first desk, occupied by Zoë de Rougemont, a doctoral candidate at Texas Tech, was situated in front of the door as if guarding the rest of the space.  Other students who were visiting their instructors greeted those who entered the area with a that brooding slogan from the Brotherhood, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength." to the office so that each time one entered the space was an homage to war .    

You’re only a freshman here and barely that.   the only true clarity the calm hours before the was wandering along the West side of Boston Ave Texas Tech campus was finishing up his first year at Texas Tech and he couldn't fathom the idea of going back to Lamesa for the summer.  He decided to talk to his advisor in the Civil Engineering department and see if she could help.  

     "How are your grades?  Are you passing all your courses?"

     "Yes.  That's not the problem."

     "Oh.  Then are you registered for the fall?"

     "Yes.  Actually, I was hoping you could help me decide what to do this summer."

     "So you want to go to summer school?"

     "Yes, but not here.  I mean I plan to be here another three years and I don't want to spend my summer's here.  Does that make sense?  I love the school and all."

     "How can I help you if you don't want to be here?"

     "Well I was hoping you could recommend a school to attend?"

     "You know you don't want to be here, but aren't sure where you want to go?"

     "Yes.  That's right."

     "Are you sure you're passing all your classes?"

     "Yes," I laughed nervously.