Right Behind You

Chapter Thirty-Six: Babushka Boi

"I would like to dedicate to the scar on my face

All the stars of the globe, the world is yours, Scarface
I would like to dedicate to the scar on my face
All the stars of the globe, the world is yours, Scarface

Uh, fuck no this ain't no hookah
Smoking while I'm strolling down Wooster
A buck fifty, my babushka, a pistol, poppers, and prostituters
Card scammers and the Prada boosters
Low-top, yeah, the powder-blue ones
Grab a tool, huh? Power to ya
Hallelujah, better pray to God

I would like to dedicate to the scar on my face
All the stars of the globe, the world is yours, Scarface."

-A$AP Rocky (Babushka Boi)

Kae:

There were a lot of things that I thought were hard in life. Things such as getting a high score on the SATs when I was younger, getting into college, getting through medical school and residency, shit—my Muay Thai boxing lessons were brutal. But oh, those things seemed like complete relaxation days on the beach compared to the crap I got flung into. First stepping onto this foreign land via plane to an unknown location was shady enough; they had us blind-folded in the jumbo jet for God knows how long. It had to be upwards of seventeen hours or more and I was trying my best not to freak out being on a plane knowing my flight anxiety, but man was that the least of my worries.

This was a death camp.

And I don't mean in a way that people were getting bullets sunk into their brains. I meant in the basic physical training we had to go through. The orientation hosted one hundred and twenty of us—all women. The person in charge and leading this entire program was none other than Alma—excuse me...The Director. That was what we had to call her from this point forward. The women surrounding me were completely nameless...faceless even because we couldn't even look at each other. Our gazes had to remain straight and facing forward, never straining to look or glance at what was happening around us. We weren't allowed to talk to each other, know each other's names, life stories, background, absolutely nothing. How crazy it was to be around a hundred people and more and still feel completely lonely, but not in the sense of despair, more so fear.

We were giving uniforms to wear, clothing that allowed us to blend into our surroundings well, something along the lines of camo but it was a bit lighter with salmon, sand, and pink undertones. To make my point again, I had absolutely no idea where we were. All I knew was that we were in the middle of nowhere with a huge facility smacked down in the middle of it all. I had to say though, wherever we were it was absolutely gorgeous like something out of a movie. This region was in some sort of lunarlike desert landscape and it featured pink-streaked mountains, amazingly beautiful sunsets with a plethora of unique rock forms surrounding us. The area itself had various stone and sand formations that over time had been carved by the wind and water; it had a similarity of being on the moon. If I ever wondered or pictured what space and Mars would look like, this would be the closest depiction to it possible. Some areas of the dessert had dry lakes where the white minerals covered the vast majority of what appeared like man-made sculptures but were really just more formations of rock and clay.

At night when the sun fell, the sky was like something out of a vintage painting; over the rocks and mountain the sky featured beautiful colors from rose-pink to purple and then finally to a deep black. When the moon was out in its crescent view during the day it looked almost distant and barely there. At night, it sometimes reached so close it felt almost as if you could touch it. This place was unreal.

It felt like we weren't even on earth anymore if that was even possible.

But alas, that was where the good ended as beautiful as this unknown place was what we had to do in order to stay in it was something along the lines of physical torture. The first three weeks were dedicated to just "conditioning" and what I meant by that is daily running and I'm talking about miles on miles, it was so bad we had girls stopping to puke because they ran some much, I had blisters on my feet from all the running we had to do and more. I never really considered myself a runner, but after the basic course in learning how to run efficiently, I had to keep building up stamina in order to reach the weekly timed tests we took to see our improvements. Then there were the different obstacle courses we had to run through, swimming in both the enclosed pool and out in the ocean when they took us out of the desert landscape to a place that had water; we did that kind of swim with fins on. In addition to that there were ruck marches, weight training, and bench presses that we had to participate in. All of this just to train us for the first phase by the end of this conditioning segment, thirty women had already quit and dropped out of the program.