I wasn't sure weather to list this as a "comedy" or a "tragedy". I mean it does have some comic elements to if, but its also obviously a tragedy because of the torture element. Eh, what ever.
I did a little research on government torture. You probably won't be able to tell, but...you know...at least I tried.
Chapter 2
Charlene had been divorced for years, and it hadn't been easy finding a new man. Not that it was her fault, she had had a young daughter, and nothing is a bigger turn off than "Oh yea, and by the way, I've got a kid." However, Vanessa was older now, and going off to live at college.
Charlene had made of habit of disguising her daughter's room as "a guest room" when ever one of her potential lovers came to visit, replacing the dolls on the shelf with decorative plates, and the posters on the wall with paintings of fruit. The room still had a suspiciously gothic quality to it, but that suited Charlene's purposes just fine.
Once Vanessa had shown up for a surprise visit while Charlene was with one of her boyfriends. Charlene had told him that Vanessa was the maid, which had annoyed Vanessa a great deal, especially since she had just walked in on her mother having sex with some strange dude in her (Vanessa's) own bed. Then said strange dude, had suggested Vanessa join in a threesome, and Vanessa had screamed and fled from the room.
"Sorry about, Lupe," Charlene had said in explanation. "She doesn't speak very good English."
Perhaps "Lupe's" English was too good, in any case that became the general pattern of things. Charlene kept seeing different boyfriends, who would inevitably find out about her daughter, and when they did Charlene would tell them that Vanessa was not her daughter. No, she was Lupe, the Spanish maid. She didn't speak English, and she was in no way related to Charlene in anyway what so ever.
Vanessa was "Lupe" to the mailman, and "Lupe" to the Pizza-delivery guy, and "Lupe" to the the stock clerk at Walgreen's. She was "Lupe" to the gardener, and "Lupe" to the homeless guy who lived under the bridge. She was just "Lupe!"
OK, so maybe it wasn't the kind of scenario that should be referenced in a mother's day hallmark card, but it worked. So whatever. Charlene enjoyed her sex life very much, and she didn't feel as though she aught to give it up just because she was also a mother. Vanessa was an adult now, and Charlene needed her own life.
But Charlene's "sleeping around" days where coming to an end. She had a steady boyfriend now. His name was Howard, and he worked for the military, apparently. What precisely he did for the military was never exactly discussed, but that was fine by Charlene. If he could believe that her 18-year-old daughter was really a Spanish maid named Lupe and wasn't actually related to her in anyway what so ever, then she could believe that he didn't break the U.S. constitution every day by torturing political prisoners for information. Relationships are built on lies.
Howard's career wasn't exactly a closely guarded secret, Charlene just chose to ignore it. It was much better that way. For both of them. Well, at least, that's the way she felt about the situation. Howard seemed to feel a bit differently. He was always trying to "bring his work home with him" (so to speak) in their discussions.
"Have you ever heard of medical torture?" he had asked her once.
"No, and I don't want to. So don't say another word," said Charlene.
"No it's really interesting. Really," insisted Howard and he continued as though there had been no interruption. "They employ the use of medical professionals to make interrogation procedures safer, and there by keeping the subjects alive longer, and under more violent conditions."
"Ugh. That sounds perfectly dreadful," said Charlene.
"It's not," insisted Howard. "It's more practical and more humane. Terrorists don't die, and are more likely to offer us information under pain of torture. For example, water boarding. Terrorists used to die when they where water boarded, but then they had some medical staff do experiments on the victims to find out what was killing them, and it turned out-"
"Stop it Hein-I mean-Howard," said Charlene. "I don't want to hear about this."
"-It turned out that the massive amounts of fresh water being ingested into their bodies was giving them low saline blood levels. So the doctors just switched the fresh water with a saline solution," explained Howard. "Less deaths. More torture. Everybody wins. Personally, I think that medical torture is a really good idea...What do you think Charlene?"
"Uh...," began Charlene. She wasn't exactly sure how she felt about this. "I suppose it's an OK idea, but not a great dinner conversation. And um...Lupe won't want to hear about it. She's a bit sensitive about the issue."
At the time Howard and Charlene where sharing what was supposed to have been a romantic dinner, while Vanessa ate her dinner in the adjoining room. She had been flipping through her Spanish-English dictionary, picking up new phrases to make her act more convincing. But during the course of Howard's little rant about water torture, she had stopped. The the sound of the dictionary's pages being turned faded to silence. Her posture became ridged.
"But I thought you said that Lupe doesn't speak English," said Howard.
"Oh that's right!" replied Charlene quickly. "She doesn't! Carry on then."
"OK," continued Howard. "So there's a lot of research being done about the ways in which we can make torture more effective, more specifically adaptable to the individual, if you will. We've even gone so far as to interview the families of captives, in order to identify the weaknesses of individual captives and more easily exploit them."
Charlene liked to believe that Howard was a decent person, and she usually managed to convince herself that he was...but tonight there was something in Howard's expression that was positively...horrific.
"I don't like where you going with this," said Charlene, and suddenly she didn't feel very much like eating.
