As I sit here looking through the bars at my little patch of sky, I keep thinking there actually is something they could be asking me about, something that they might actually want to know, something I'm not going to volunteer. Oh, no.

Her name was... Well, never mind that. Let's just call her Sunday. She was white, had a head full of gears, sweet as sugar. Only none of those things mattered. Actually, when it came do it, she was pink, which was unusual in that crowd, most of whom had ancestors from continents other than Europe.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Sunday was a flower girl. Her job in the grand scheme of things was to go out every day to the courthouse or the airport and sell flowers to passersby to raise a bit of money for the operations back at the ranch.

Not that it was a ranch, with pigs and chickens. Well, there were pigs and chickens but not the four legged kind. Or however many a chicken is supposed to have. We were all of us chicken, afraid of something, angry about something. And it was the pigs that represented what we were angry about. The ones in the cars.

Which reminds me of the time one of the guys who was into electrical gadgets and stuff; wait, it was Sunday herself; broke into a cop car and replaced the siren sound, which in those days was a tape, with barnyard sounds of pigs oinking. All the street people thought it was just the funniest thing ever when the cops lit that thing off and they heard swine a-squealing at 90 decibels in the ghetto.

So, where were we? Sunday. Looking back, I can see a grand plan in the whole thing, but it didn't make much sense to me then. Or to her. We just followed along, did what they told us, listened when they fired us up, about the injustic e in the world, the Man who was getting us down. There were more and more kids signing up, coming in off the streets, looking for something, anything, to believe in. And they gave it to us.

Sunday and I used to hang out together when she wasn't selling flowers. We'd talk about this and that. I'd admire her flame-red hair, which was unusual, as I said before, because almost everybody I'd ever been friends with before had black hair. And her green eyes were bewitching, I suppose, because I lost contact with the ground when she looked at me. But unlike all the girls with black eyes and black hair and tinted skin, she seemed to actually care what someone like me had to say, and so I said it at great length.

We figured out the world, she and I. We were wrong, turns out, but we were sure.

It was in a time when security was a pretty new thing at airports and courthouses. So she'd go through carrying various different kinds of flowers, wearing different kinds of clothes, bringing along various kinds of contraband given to her by our leaders, and stashing them inside someplace for someone else to pick up later. You see, a pretty anglo girl can get away with a lot that a man of color just can't. And sure, now and then they'd find something, but a smile and a shrug and they'd let her through, often with the article in question. She always set off the metal detectors with her voluminous stash of coins anyway, so after a while they mostly stopped looking at her.

And then things changed. The smuggling got much more serious. People started talking about death. The cause, whatever that was; every body seemed to have a different idea of why we were here, or what it would mean if we won, when we won. And casualties. The told us we were an army, strong in our numbers, and that the Man had his day coming. And we ate it up. Suddenly we were somebody. Let's just see you ignore us then, we were thinking. We'd see what they thought about bulldozing slave cemeteries in the city, when we dropped a ton of flaming jet fuel on them.

Sunday was pulled off of flower duty, and we spent time practicing something, again and again, and I never could figure out what the point was. Just this one maneuver, I suppose to pass something from her to another member of the group. Maybe they were gonna steal something important. It was all cloak and dagger, very need-to-know, very exciting.

And the discipline we'd been living with was relaxed. One of the older guys produced some beer one night in the bull area, and so we hung around and drank it. We were young, maybe not even legal, and so we got quickly more and more relaxed.

``Come the revolution, are you gonna die a virgin?'' asked Jim.

``I spoze,'' I said, not having thought about it much. ``I mean, what's the big deal?''

``Death? Or virginity?'' laughed Jim. ``I mean, is dying a virgin a big failure, or a noble choice?''

This went around for an hour or more, as the beer supply dwindled.

And then Jim, with a considerably larger smudge of a slur in his diction, changed the question. "I mean, is dyeing a virgin a harmless evening's fun over beer, or a cult abuse?''

I could hear heads turning toward where Sunday and I sat, side by side.

Beer, hair dye, and an ingenue or two are an explosive mix. When we got out of there, Sunday had big wide blue arrows dyed into the skin of her legs, pointing up under her skirt, and another one between her breasts, pointing down. She was pretty out of it, so I took her to my room and put her to bed. Oh, and all of her hair was blue.

Whether she was a virgin before that, I do not know. I was. We weren't, any longer, by the time the puking started in the morning. It felt like the Hammer of Thor between my ears.

We were chastened somewhat by the elders when they found the beer bottles. Sunday wore long jeans and a turtleneck for a while until the dye started to fade; it washes off of skin eventually.

So in hindsight, from the grand old age of fifty, which I guess entitles me to a private cell here in Guantanamo from which to ponder my sins... Um, anyway, what they were up to is trying to figure out how to mask the scent of nitrates from the dogs. The idea was that, on a certain day, Sunday would stroll in to the airport wearing her best minidress, distract the dogs, who even though they were working beasts loved to greet their clientele with a sniff to the crotch, with the smell of her blood. So that they'd forget what they were about, and ignore the nitrates in the detonator. And the human guards, of course, would respond to her female wiles, her bewitching eyes, her astonishing red (now blue) hair, and, as an afterthought, all those lewd arrows pointing the way to what they most desired about her.

Sunday was fine with all this. The problem was, she wasn't going to die a virgin. And so the smell of her blood was not there, because, um, well. I shouldn't have taken her home with me. She might still be alive if I'd let her be. Though a bunch of honkeys near the construction site would not be, how shall I say, blissful in their ignorance?

The news folks blamed it on Palestinians or terrorists or something. Certainly nothing home grown. An unfortunate bit of collateral damage, someone arguably from the IRA killed by a bomb at an American airport. Nothing to see here, move along. Or was it Basques? I can't keep them all straight. It would have worked, too.

Name? Hulver, Ed Hulver.
Rank? I am, yeah. Haven't had a bath since... I can't remember when.

OK, wrong answer. I was going to use that tooth again some day.

Rank? I was an Eagle Scout once, in another lifetime.
Serial Number? Does user id 2 count?

OK, wrong answer, again. Different reality anyway. Best keep these things compartmentalized.

Do you know anything about Al Qaeda? Hell, no. Now Sunday, I could tell you about. Blue Sunday.

But no, they don't want to hear about that.