Cassiopeia
Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku. They meet on Anne’s third day at the Fallon Naval Air Station, a pancake of corrugated metal buildings and asphalt airstrips sizzling in the Nevada desert an hour north of Reno. Anne first sees the woman outside the base’s health clinic, standing alone and abrupt like a juniper in scrubland, slender and tanned, a menthol cigarette tipping between two fingers like a stage prop. Smoke winds above her in the afternoon heat, her only motion the languid wiping of a palm over shorts cut off an inch higher than they should be.
Anne can’t help but stare as she approaches the clinic; the woman seems to operate in slow motion, an eddy in the stream of hurried soldiers, military doctors, and private contractors with security badges dangling from lanyards. The woman appears oblivious to the movement around her, including Anne as she enters the double doors close enough to breathe in the sagey scent of the cigarette. When Anne leaves the clinic nearly an hour later she is surprised to find the woman still lingering near the doorway, still exhaling smoke—as if she has merely been dragging on the same cigarette the entire time.
“Everything OK in there?” the woman says abruptly as Anne passes. “At least tell me the doctor had warm hands.”
Anne stops, the vulgarity of the comment just starting to register. The woman’s dry lips thin around her cigarette into an ambiguous smile.
Anne shields her eyes with a handful of pamphlets the Navy doctor had given her on the way out of the examination room. This is the only other civilian to speak to Anne since she’d moved into the married housing barracks with Eddie on Tuesday evening. The only person who isn’t wearing a shirt with their last name emblazoned across their left breast, who hasn’t ended a sentence with the word “ma’am.” She’s taken off guard by the woman’s informality, by the inappropriate intimacy of the question.
“New, yeah?” the woman says. Anne nods, and the woman lets out a guffaw, scratching the ass of her shorts before slapping Anne on the shoulder. She drops the last of the menthol onto the blacktop, snubbing it out with a battered athletic shoe. “Let’s go, girl. Unauthorized tour.”
Her name is Cassie, Anne learns as she follows the woman through a labyrinth of aluminum hangars and chain-link fencing. Her father had a passing interest in astronomy, the woman explains—or perhaps Greek mythology—and so they’d named her “Cassiopeia.”
“It’s a constellation,” the woman says, pointing up into the midday sun. “But nobody calls me that. Not anymore, anyway.”
They climb a three-story watch tower next to an empty field, look out over a grid of buildings. Overhead, slate-colored Harrier jets scrape against the desert sky, dipping low to strafe target ranges built out over the dried beds of Lake Lahontan, the great inland sea of North America that vanished at the end of the Pleistocene.
“See that town out there?” Cassie says, pointing out across the playa to a stand of dark buildings. “It’s a fake.”
“A fake?”
“I went out once, on a date. It’s just empty buildings, supposed to look like some place in the Middle East. Just walls. Nothing inside.”
She grew up as a Navy brat herself, Cassie tells her. Had sworn off military men until she’d been knocked up by a Petty Officer Third Class during her senior year of high school.
When Cassie tells her this, the two women are standing
