All of the following events happened rapidly and successively, the way a small child falls down stairs: I found Simon on the coast, beached beneath a rock. We fell in love. We played out roles. Our secrets turned to stones and weighted us down. We stopped speaking and we drowned. We had been asked to give that which we needed most: our blood, our tongues, our limbs, our lungs. I don't know how else to describe it, the pressures which began to distort us, to pull apart our lives. Simon and I are like two tangled skeins of twine unwinding, one attached to an anchor, the other a kite.

I want you to see the world the way I saw it: from a utility closet on the second floor of Hangar Two, four, dank water-stained walls at the end of the road, nine miles in from the main base gate, thirty miles north of the coast of Detroit. Here, on the damp, concrete-colored tiles, I, Captain Meredith Delmar, served my country by obliterating meaning and demonstrated my worth by constructing piles.

Meanwhile, the campaign overseas played on around me as if I were the eye in a game of tag. I watched people chasing each other in circles, screaming at walls and flapping their hands. My troops flew away and later, changed and leaner, blindly wandered home or floated down from clouds. They materialized in doorways, in closets, alongside lamps. Or they didn't. Sometimes they came back limping, flinging themselves to the floor when a loose window slammed, tensing at laughter, wincing when you tapped them on the shoulder or touched the backs of their hands.

When I joined the service, I did not intend to harbor words as if they were a strange and precious breed of life suddenly going extinct. But I was assigned to a utility closet and given pages and pages of documents to read: instructional pamphlets, decorations, nominations, classified reports, essays and exposes, manuals and files, and I found myself saving, pocketing words, collecting them, one at a time. My job was to knife each sentence into single word blocks because words, like events, derive meaning from what precedes them. I was ordered to unhinge them, to cleave, with a blade, each word from the next. I was explicitly directed to deprive the language of its order. I was ordered to take context and render it into mess.

I like to say I discovered Simon one morning in the pre-dawn mist. He was nearly drowned and naked, sprawled out on a deserted stretch of coast with a slate boulder the length of a coffee table resting on his downy chest.

Simon had a body built for saving lives. He could have lifted a grown man in his brawny arms, draped an unconscious body around his muscled neck, carried a wounded toddler in each of his enormous hands. The dog tags around his neck said Lieutenant Simon Chatterbox. The words United States Navy were written underneath.

So I dragged the boulder away. I took off my coat and covered his legs. I took off my wool hat and pulled it down over his head. My hair, in long tendrils, brushed over his cheeks. But still he did not move.

I like to believe I rescued Simon from a case of severe hypothermia, covering him with my body to bring him back to life: the sun breaks over the sound, and its rays are like spokes. I have my thumbs on Simon's wrists and the tendons there are like rigging. Beneath my hips, Simon's cock is rising slowly like a mast. The water from his chest is seeping through my sweater and leaving dark circles around my breasts. My cheek rests against Simon's cheek and a pair of gulls floats above us. They are shrill and buoyant, there in the clouds.

Then I get on my knees and I unearth him with a pointed stick. I tear away the crimson algae entwined around his limbs. And Simon stands up and follows me along the lapping waves to a narrow spit of shale and slate which juts into an imaginary bay, and there we live in a cobblestone and baleen-roofed cabin which does not really exist.

Sill, I can describe this place exactly as it actually appeared to me that day, the face of the bay so viscous you could touch the surface, then pull your finger back, and the surface would not break but would stretch up towards you. And to the south and west, the steep slopes of overlapping mountains, which completely ringed the bay, their peaks glaring white against the cinderblock sky, and to the east a soccer field sized lake of packed, blue ice imperceptibly sliding down the mountain's face.

When I met Simon, I was twenty-five years old, sleeping little and working late. I was living by myself in the single room of my cobblestone cabin with a dirt floor and a baleen roof I could touch with the palms of my hands while standing. There was no door but I could enter and leave by climbing through a round portal four feet above the floor. Twice a day, when the tide was out, I could leave my spit and walk half a mile out over silt and wander by myself in the empty bay.

This was February of 2005, and I was still commissioned at the time, stationed in Detroit and working directly for WATCH, the Word And Text Control Headquarters. For two years, I participated in the Word Annihilation/Recycling program, which was established under WATCH as part of the Campaign for Small Change, a movement dedicated to the development and liberation of everyone in the world. My job required me, on behalf of the government, to sort the everyday words people use into two categories: words which would be eliminated and words which would remain. I personally was not given the authority to choose. Rather, I was issued two tomes, each of which was so wide we'd had to remove all the doors from their hinges just to bring them inside.

So I followed the guidelines set out in print: there were words I could recycle and words I had to discontinue, words I could not save and words to be re-used, words I had to discard and words I could revive. Occasionally, my department also conducted raids and collected fines, but mostly, I sorted. It was my official responsibility, my civic obligation, to carry out the fate of every written line.

At first, Simon didn't believe me.

“That's crazy. We don't do that,” he said softly, drying off his feet. “Sort words.”

“Yes,” I said, with authority. “We do.”

“How?” he asked.

Simon had a voice gentle enough to coax a gull down from the sky.

“Haven't you found there are things you cannot say?” I asked him.

We were sitting side by side on the spit. Simon looked at me suspiciously then took the towel and folded it in his lap.

“So,” he said as he folded, measuring the perimeter of the towel with his transparent eyes. “Where do these dying words go?”

“We keep them on base,” I said. “In a warehouse there.”

I had been inside the warehouse, a converted dorm consisting of three stories of dusty, square rooms, each of which had a single, bare bulb glaring overhead. The iron frame bunk beds no longer belonged to bodies. During the late nineties, they had been converted into shelving for dismembered texts. My troops and I used to bring the words over in olive-colored, canvas bags identical to the ones used for real world deployments. Sometimes, stray words escaped us and scampered across the floor like ants until someone stepped on them and stopped them. Or we found them occasionally on the sidewalk, emaciated and sallow, as lifeless as the dried skin on chapped lips. Once, I found the word forgive stuck to the bottom of my boot, the word share stepped on and curled at the base of the stairs.

“But that's classified information,” I added.

“Is it?” Simon said, and he took the folded towel and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Yes,” I said. “The entire front and rear door are stamped all over with the word SECRET in red.”

Simon looked at me in disbelief.

“Wait,” I said suddenly. “I have something to show you.”

As I rummaged in my pocket, Simon looked both ways as if we were crossing some imaginary street. Then I felt them, the tiny slips of paper the size of movie ticket stubs, each as insubstantial as the pink copy of an ordinary receipt.

Terror, peace, victory, truth. I laid out these words on the palm of my hand. The word truth was upside down and peace and terror were overlapping. I separated them with a finger. “The government currently owns these words,” I said.

Simon leaned over to examine the words in my hand.

“Can I touch them?” he asked quietly, as if they had fallen asleep. I shrugged. Victory began to jump. Quickly, Simon cupped his hand over mine.

“I should put them away,” I said, and I whisked them back into my pocket. “I'm supposed to keep them confined.”

“Poor little guys,” Simon sighed.

“Sometimes I think about setting them free,” I said, searching his face to see if he would agree with me.

But Simon looked concerned. “You wouldn't.”

“No,” I assured him. But secretly, I was not so certain.

Still, back then, I could justify keeping words locked up. I used to tell myself that choices, like words, exist only in the context of their times. My participation, I used to believe, was comparable to banking a treacherous curve on a municipal street or dumping fluoride into reservoirs to fortify the public's teeth. It's true: as part of the Campaign for Small Change, I helped put certain words into textbooks and aired others on TV. I supervised words being packaged into animation and I coordinated their distribution to children in the form of little flag-shaped, chocolate flavored sweets.

For the good of the state, I recycled words like rights and families, proper nouns like God and America, and titles, like Ensign, like President, Lieutenant, Pastor, and Chief. Also, conjunctions, like but, and, because, and for, which are used to create causational links. And articles like a, an, and the, which have little particular meaning but serve to increase the duration and thus the quantity of speech. There are pronouns, like we, which inspire community and unity, and words like integrity which increase individual responsibility and personal pride. And there are other words I save on the public's behalf, terms like compassionate and familyvalues, adjectives like best and greatest, and categories like democrat and republican, which are nouns of a chunkier, more ambiguous shape.

Sometimes I'm afraid I've exaggerated my own role in this contemporary campaign for small change. But other times, I feel like I did not do enough to stand up for the tiny creatures who scampered and played all around me each day. Still, there were simply too many of them to save. So I just grew accustomed to locking words away. Particularly the adverbs. Bravely, sadly. It was my job to call production and make sure they had been discontinued. Peacefully, thoughtfully, truly discontinued.

We locked words away until early that spring, when we began to run out of room in the warehouse, after which we took to burning any words which could not be locked away, and we packed these excess words into jet engines along with sentimental clichés and fuel sources such as JP8. As for the salvaged words, I was then ordered to divide them once again, and a portion of the salvaged words, mostly the sturdy verbs, were loaded onto planes. These were words like fight, vanquish, conquer, destroy and hopeful verbs of inspiration like save and build, protect and create. We sent these words to our soldiers overseas where they were used to fortify tanks, to arm the natives, to suppress bleeding and supplement pay.

It was only after we began burning words that I began trying to save just a few of them each day. I'd sneak them into my pockets and smuggle them outside. Then I'd take them home and hide them anywhere I could find, in an old honey jar, in a ceramic vase, in my sock drawer, inside an embroidered sachet. I hid words everywhere. Even behind my commissioning certificate, I kept a paper bag of words taped to the frame.

But I never told Simon about the words I saved because I suspected he would have taken them from me in the name of national security.

Hiding my words from Simon was easy. During the week, he worked across the bay. I saw him only on weekends, when he would walk to me when the tide was out and then I'd pull him through the portal of my cabin and we'd make love and lie awake together in the dark listening to the gulls warbling on the roof. I would tell Simon about the words I had burned, and he would tell me about the contortions of the floor of the sea.

Then, one weekend, we had heavy rains and Simon called to tell me he couldn't come to see me. And then, in the middle of that same week, while searching for something else, I put my hand into the back cargo pocket of my battle dress pants and burst into tears.

“Meredith?” Simon kept saying when I called him. “What? Stop crying. I can't understand what you're trying to say.”

“Intimacy is gone!”

“What?” said Simon urgently. “Are you talking about a word?”

“I only took her out accidentally,” I lied, still crying. “But now she's gone.”

“Is she lost? I'll come across the bay and help you find her.”

“She's not lost. Besides, you can't.”

“Why not?”

“How would you get here?” I managed. “It's high tide. You don't understand. She's not lost. She's right here. But I've sent her through the wash at least twenty times.”

An hour later, I heard gulls warbling on my roof and then a rapping on the portal. When I opened it, Simon was staring back at me, his head soaking wet. Behind him, the night was starless and black.

“How did you get here?” I asked him suspiciously through the portal.

“Aren't you going to pull me in?” Simon asked softly, and he blinked.

“But how did you get here?”

“I walked across the floor of the sea,” Simon said, and he sounded breathless.

I looked through his eyes and saw a synapse snap.

“How did you really get here,” I asked him one last time.

“I walked,” Simon said uneasily, water running down his face. He took the back of his hand and wiped it across his cheeks. “I thought I could help you bring intimacy back to life.”

But I didn't pull him through. Instead, I shut the portal and paced around my room, from the wood box to the stove, from the fireplace to the unmade bed. Then I opened the portal and looked out. Simon was sitting on the spit with his back to the cabin. He was shivering.

“Meredith?” he said quietly without turning around.

“What?” I said.

“Can you bring me a towel? And a dry set of clothes?”

I closed the portal and put on a sweater and a pair of boots and wrapped a set of Simon's spare clothes up in a towel and pushed everything out the portal. Then I climbed through after it.

“Hey,” he said as I sat down beside him. He nudged my side.

“Hey,” I said back, staring across the bay.

“I was going to surprise you,” he said quietly. “That's all.”

I sat beside him with my hands in my lap.

“Sometimes,” Simon continued, and he began to loosen the soaking laces of his shoes. “I fill my pockets up with stones.”

A sea gull landed beside him and Simon stretched out his hand and absently stroked her throat.

“I like to go for walks by myself at the bottom of the sea,” he said.

Then, suddenly, Simon flinched and touched his side. He coughed. It seemed, for a brief snap of time, like he was struggling to breathe. And then, just as suddenly, he was fine.

“I just wanted to surprise you,” he said, squinting.

I said nothing.

Instead, as we sat there, I pictured Simon sinking. I imagined him underwater with his ankles crossed, his arms like the arms of a corkscrew, rising in strokes as he tunneled feet first deep down into the sea. I pictured the water darkening, the pressure building behind his eyes, the way they must have looked, bulging, surprised. I imagined what he must have seen down there, electric eels pulsing like the stars of distant galaxies, his face passing within inches of the contoured rims of canyons and craters, his toes pointed, the puff of silt his feet must have made as they slid into the floor of the sea.

“I just wanted,” he began.

But I looked away and he stopped. I put my hands into my pockets looking for words, but my pockets were empty. So I shook my head.

Simon had secrets. Everyone has secrets.

Simon, this is my secret. Simon and Meredith are me and you. And I have other secrets too, which maybe you already knew, the secrets I keep hidden between my fingers, along my inner thighs, under the arches of my feet. Now I am feeding them to you on the floor of the sea because you cannot hear me and I cannot speak.

And now I want you to know why I have waited this long to reveal us, our identities, though perhaps you have guessed, why I have deliberately stripped this story of any pretense of realism, why I have buried facts in the surreal, built our lives into grotesques, chosen impossible places to stage actual events, why some scenes take place underwater, why I will reference an accident in outer space. I've done all this intentionally. Because I want you to understand right now as you consider a lifetime of service to your country what it's like to see your own mind tied up in contradictions, in a fantasy to which you may not always subscribe, so you can begin to imagine what it's like to hear yourself reciting words you don't believe in, swearing to phrases which do not feel right. I want you to start to decipher, as I have, the implications of your life, the truths from the myths, a system of values from a rhetorical device, a supernatural sign from an intentional choice. I want you to feel as overwhelmed now as I was once as disoriented as if you had just walked directly to me in the deepest of sleeps, across the marbled waters of an unreal sea, waking only as I touch you, as I brush my lips across your silt stained cheeks.

And since you have been robbed of every sense but taste, I have also chosen to enhance the flavor of everything that really happened, placing only the sweetest, sharpest bites between your teeth. If I were not feeding you this story at the bottom of the sea, if you were, let's say, to read it, I would ask you, after, to knife it apart. I'd ask you to destroy it, this story, to keep us disguised.

“Can we go inside?” Simon asked me. “It's cold out here.”

I shrugged and stood up.

Simon followed me back to the portal. He put his hands around my waist and lifted me up and then, once I was inside, I grabbed him by his shoulders and pulled him through. He tumbled onto the dirt floor and stood up. The cabin was dim. A candelabrum was burning on the mantelpiece to my right. In the low light, Simon's shadow stretched across the cabin's wall like a black river of ice. Then he came towards me, moving as if I were a victim he was hurrying to save.

“When I'm not with you, I imagine us together, meeting somewhere,” he whispered, cupping my elbows in his hands. “Do you imagine us too?”

“Yes,” I whispered and I tilted back my head to look into his transparent eyes.

“Tell me you want me,” he whispered.

“I do,” I whispered back. “I want you. All of you.”

But it was only after he had lifted me into his arms and carried me to the bed, pulling my pants down over my knees, that he found the raw patch of veins on the inside of my thigh. He blinked, quickly, anxiously. It must have looked like some kind of chemical burn, like an abrasion.

“An asteroid,” I whispered, and I put my palms on his cheeks so he would look away. “It came by me too quickly. I didn't have time to get out of the way.”

I didn't know what else to tell him. I didn't know how else to explain. I was selling myself in swatches. I was peeling off my skin and giving it away.

Simon, this is what I have been trying to say. When I joined the service, I thought I understood. They say they break you down to build you up. This is exactly what they say. I have repeatedly seen and dismembered that phrase. But I believe now that they break you down so they can possess you. I believe that they dissect you, so they can sell you, incrementally. Or in bulk, at the discretion of Congress, or part by part, limb by limb, an organ traded for an organ, on the domestic markets here, in the open markets of foreign streets. I believe the body, in this process, becomes as worthless as a worn out word; we're, all of us, like a warehouse of discarded lines, like piles of dismembered texts, you and me, our bodies disappearing.

I won't lie to you. If you stay in the service, there are so many privileges we'd enjoy, you as an officer, me as your wife. Also, it's most probable you'll survive. But you may be asked to donate, to participate in part; you may be asked for your corneas, your toes, your nails or your teeth. You may be asked to give in pieces: your calm demeanor, your will, your opinions, your beliefs. Only I want those pieces. There isn't any part of you I'd be willing to give.

Also, remember, after you commit yourself again, if at any point in time you change your mind, like, for example, while you're boarding a Centcom-bound plane, you will find officers, like me, armed and standing guard before locked doors of the terminal from which we deploy you. And people just like me will force you to go, against your will, and you cannot refuse and you cannot escape.

II

But there's more to what happened than what I've already said: it's true my job began to change right after I met you. But something else happened too; the funding began to run out that spring and we were asked to take special measures by pledging donations of blood and skin. It's difficult, I know, for you to swallow. But I need you to absorb what happened to me.

In the beginning I was only asked to lead a voluntary arm of the campaign. This I did in the evenings. I worked efficiently and effectively, dividing my troops into various squads. We were seeking small change. It's remarkable, the quantity of coins people throw away, the free money you can hunt and find. We combed wishing wells for silver dollars. We waded into public fountains after nickels and dimes. In a matter of weeks, the searching failed to turn up enough to meet our quotas, and I'm now going to describe the consequences of those times.

I'm not so special. I wanted small change, too. I wanted to fill my pockets with triumphs and successes, significance and ideals. But I often felt like you must have felt, trapped under that slate, buried in silt, walking underwater with your pockets filled.

Then the money ran out completely, and once again, the guidelines changed. I was suddenly tasked with stringing words together. I went through my piles and made vintage expressions and stamped them in the corner with the name of my operation and a current date. Then we sold them: rhymes and expressions, slogans and captions, tautologies, analogies, and simple sayings just for fun. We sold exclamations and retorts, platitudes and puns. And people bought them and kept them in their pockets, like tiny pets, or chewed on them for hours, like they were caramels or wads of gum.

So, you see, I was much more involved than I told you at the time.

Once, knee-deep in a fountain, I was accused of stealing dreams. But I stole nothing. I took only what I could find. Besides, we can't change the world by throwing coins at a dream. People need to think before they purchase words and toss away change. We vote with what we fund; we shape our world through what we say and what we buy.

Then came June, and then June became July. The campaign dragged on and we were dragged on with it as if it were a current we were forced to ride. It's true we had volunteered. We were not drafted. We were never coerced or cornered, never threatened, though often bribed.

We had strange weather that July, hot and dry, the air as desiccated and rough as if it had been mixed with ground up stone. I kept working. The air in my utility closet and the hall beyond grew so gritty we tied swatches of fabric across our mouths and noses. Still, my troops had nosebleeds so severe they sometimes turned their heads in surprise and slung blood accidentally along the corridor walls.

Simon, I remember you disappeared for several weeks to work on your ship, and when you returned, you walked across the bay to me in your sleep.

The tide was out and I was wandering in the silt when I saw you coming towards me. Your eyes were closed and you were marching in your polished boots.

“Simon,” I whispered. “Wake up. You're here.”

Then you shuddered and you opened your eyes.

“Sorry,” you said, and you asked me for a glass of water, asked me to stroke your face with my open palm, to scratch behind your ears, to kiss you, touch you, sit closer, be more near.

The campaign for small change seemed to encounter more challenges than our government had planned. And suddenly, the same quantities of time began to move much more quickly than they had before. It was as if our lives had been pre-recorded and were now being replayed to us with certain details edited out, deleted or skipped. The quantity of work became tremendous. My troops gathered up crates of paper so dense we had to pack them onto palates then charter C-130s to fly them up the stairs. One palate broke apart in the process and a Staff Sergeant I knew was buried alive.

We were asked to give further and most of us did. I gave from all the places I could safely hide. I gave away the parts of me that no one asks about and no one sees. I took my knife and shaved away at the arches of my feet. I shaved away skin from the inside of my cheeks.

But how did I fail to notice that what happened to me also happened to you?

When we made love on the dawn of the day you left me, I moved languidly and quietly upon you, and you whispered, lying on your back, your transparent eyes twitching, ponderous, searching out irregularities in the cobblestone walls, “Tell me you want me.”

“I do,” I whispered, and I touched the shorn sides of your scalp, where the hair had once bristled right above your ears. You flinched.

“Tell me,” you whispered. “Again.”

“I want you,” I whispered. “All of you. All of you.”

There are moments when time stands so still it seems to open up. Sometimes, right after you left, the sea seemed so smooth I thought I could sail into its core, look over the edge of my craft and see you waiving to me from the ocean floor. There are moments when two people can talk to each other openly and honestly about the contradictions of their minds and the directions of their lives. Simon, if you and I shared moments of tranquility and truth, they disappeared quickly and silently the way a dry leaf burns up or a distant star fades from view.

“Give me everything,” I whispered. “All this.” And I ran my finger across your dry, upper lip, down through the slight cleft in your chin, over your adam's apple, between your nipples, down to your ribs, where I felt the slightest pucker of skin.

I frowned. And then, just for a moment, I looked through your eyes and I could see there the gray furrows of your brain, ridged, like mountains, like waves, and images bobbing among them, holographs, memories, possibilities, everything playing out in the back of your mind, an inversion of me, naked, straddled over you, the cobblestone walls of the room, concave and billowing, as flimsy as sails.

Against the back of your mind, bathed in red light, I saw a cluster of cells, the little one, which did not happen, the extension of us which would have formed had we allowed our bodies to meet, unguarded. She was floating there, right behind your eyes, like a bubble of air, a flickering of light. I started to cry.

Behind your eyes, your mind filled up with a light rain, a slight mist, like the morning when I found you. Through this mist, I could see the palm of your hand receding as you reached up to pull me towards you.

There are words we can recycle and words we cannot recycle, words which repulse us and words which possess us, words which stay with us and words which escape us. After you left, I sat in the utility closet on the second floor of Hangar Two and I knifed time away. I made piles of words like trust, lust, you, and me, and I stuffed them into the pipes above my head to keep myself dry by stanching the leaks.

Then, later that summer, leadership came to tell us we had not done enough, so I continued to peel myself apart in long, lean strips, which I left alongside two femurs in the hospital's bucket of ice for body part donations, which is chained to the bike rack outside the community gym.

At staff meetings, we began to pass around knives, slicing off pieces of our tongues according to the diagrams presented to us on Powerpoint slides. Soon, the ability to hear was deemed an unnecessary luxury for those in a community in which no one can speak, and so, back in the office and after hours, we helped each other carve out our cochlea, our tympanic membranes, our Eustachian tubes and inner ears. Then we tallied the number of parts procured and calculated these figures as percentages of dollars saved and we graphed these numbers in the three colors of a stoplight and it made the whole situation seem much less dire than everyone had feared. And finally, later, when we ran out of organs and tissues to give, we sharpened plastic straws and drained the interstitial fluid from between our knees.

Just yesterday, in fact, I was lying on my back on the starch scented sheets of the cots we had set up in the gym between a maze of olive colored scrims and as I watched my own blood draining into three different tubes, I wondered about you, Simon. I wondered where you were and what had become of you. I wondered, as I drained, as I imagined the sounds I couldn't hear all around me, a shuffling of papers, rubber-soled feet carrying out the campaign, which was, we were once told, to maintain freedom and keep us all safe. Then I realized, suddenly and certainly, that you were waiting for me, below me, on the bottom of the sea, in the silent depths where no one can see, and I squeezed the rubber ball I had been given and the blood drained from me faster and the rubber ball became a stone and I began to sink down towards you.

I did not make up this story. I did not imagine the burns and amputations, the infections and reactions, even if they did not happen specifically to me.

So this is my own campaign for small change. I believe words alone can change the way we think. And while there are causes I would fund with my blood, ideals I would pay for with ribbons of my skin, I believe no one has the right to contract out the body, to lease the limbs and organs of other people's kids. The human form, like the words which define it, cannot be irrevocably pledged or owned, for any quantity of time, regardless of the values we espouse or the documents we sign. I have worked enough with words to recognize the ones which come in bulk, the ancient survivors, buzzing in the air around us like mosquitoes, full of blood and sucking at our eyes,

Simon, I believe above all else in the integrity of the human body. And I don't believe in an afterlife of souls. I hold my own truths to be self-evident. We live briefly. We live abruptly. We are born lovers. We are born whole.

Once, you asked me to tell you the stories which changed my life. But now you can't hear me and I can't speak and all I can do is feed you, set these salvaged words in order, lay each one between your lips, words as wet as my desire, words as rich and dense as seeds.