Savages

and busted his way into SEAL school. Sixty miles south of here, on Silver Strand, they used the ocean to torture him. Made him lie faceup in a winter sea as freezing waves pounded him (waterboarding was just part of the drill, my friends, SOP). Put heavy logs on his shoulder and made him run up sand dunes and thigh-deep in the ocean. Had him dive underwater and hold his breath until he thought his lungs would blow his insides out. Did everything they could think of to make him ring the bell and quit—what they didn’t get was that Chon
liked
the pain. When they finally woke up to that twisted fact, they taught him to do everything that a seriously crazy, crazily athletic man could do in H 2 O.
    Then they sent him to Stanland.
    Afghanistan.
    Where . . .
    You got sand, you got snow, you ain’t got no ocean.
    The Taliban don’t surf.
    Neither does Chon, he hates that faux-cool shit, he always liked being the one straight guy in Laguna who
didn’t
surf, he just found it funny that they spent six figures training him to be Aquaman and then shipped him to a place where there’s no water.
    Oh well, you take your wars where you can find them.
    Chon stayed in for two enlistments and then checked out. Came back to Laguna to . . .
    To . . .
    Uhnnn . . .
    To . . .
    Nothing.
    There was nothing for Chon
to
do. Nothing he wanted, anyway. He could have gone the lifeguard route, but he didn’t feel like sitting on a high chair watching tourists work on their melanoma. A retired navy captain gave him a gig selling yachts but Chon couldn’t sell and hated boats, so that didn’t work out. So when the corporate recruiter looked him up, Chon was available.
    To go to I-Rock-and-Roll.
    Nasty
nasty
shit in those pre-Surge days, what with kidnappings, beheadings, IEDs severing sticks and blowing off melons. It was Chon’s job to keep any of that shit from happening to the paying customers, and if the best defense is a good offense, well . . .
    It was what it was.
    And with the right blend of hydro, speed, Vike, and Oxy it was actually a pretty cool video game—IraqBox—and you could rack up some serious points in the middle of the Shia/Sunni/AQ-in-Mesopotamia cluster-fuck if you weren’t too particular about the particulars.
    O has diagnosed Chon with PTLOSD.
    Post-Traumatic Lack Of Stress Disorder. He says he has no nightmares, nerves, flashbacks, hallucinations, or guilt.
    “I wasn’t stressed,” Chon insisted, “and there was no trauma.”
    “Must have been the dope,” O opined.
    Dope is good, Chon agreed.
    Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a
bad world
it’s
good
, if youcatch the reverse moral polarity of it. Chon refers to drugs as a “rational response to insanity,” and his chronic use of the chronic is a chronic response to
chronic
insanity.
    It creates balance, Chon believes. In a fucked-up world, you have to be fucked up, or you’ll fall . . .
off . . .
the . . .
end—

5
     
    O pulls her jeans up, walks over to the table, and looks at the gun, still in pieces on the beach towel. The metal parts are pretty in their engineered precision.
    As previously noted, O likes power tools.
    Except when Chon is cleaning one with professional concentration even though he’s looking at a computer screen.
    She looks over his shoulder to see what’s so good.
    Expects to see someone giving head, someone getting it, because there is no give without the get, no get without the give when it comes to head.
    Not so fast.
    Because what she sees is this clip:
    A camera slowly pans across what looks like the interior of a warehouse at a line of nine severed heads set on the floor. The faces—all male, all with unkempt black hair—bear expressions of shock, sorrow, grief, and even resignation. Then the camera tilts up to the wall, where the trunks of the decapitated bodies hangneatly from hooks, as if the heads had placed them in a locker room before going to work.
    There is no sound on the clip, no narration, just the faint sound of the camera and whoever is wielding it.
    For some reason, the silence is as brutal as the images.
    O fights back the vomit she feels bubbling up in her belly. Again, as previously noted, this is not a girl who likes to yank. When she gets some air back, she looks at the gun, looks at the screen, and asks, “Are you going back to Iraq?”
    Chon shakes his head.
    No, he tells her, not Iraq.
    San Diego.

6
     
    OMG.
    RU Reddy 4—
    Decapitation
porn?
    Check that.
    Gay
decapitation porn?!
    O knows that