from THE GETTYSBURG REVIEW
In The Seventy-Third Virgin, Colonel Ali Al-Khan played an American woman. He stood naked in a garden in the movie’s most famous moment. He faced a warrior also played by himself, and this warrior was also naked. He was lost. He had lost count. He, like the viewer, had been through virgin after virgin, the variety in flesh slowly lost in the sameness of the sceneiy, the same lock of legs, the same leopard curling through the floral thickets, the same bluebird always on the shoulder of the postcoital corpse, for in the colonel’s interpretation of heaven, the virgins must die. There must be a moment where the warrior, discharged of his nacreous nectar, can walk empty and alone into the arms of the one everlasting creator, also played by the colonel.
Bill Caesar used to blow leaves for a living. When the war began he was a detailer, a cleaner of cars and a part-time thief. He was a scavenger, a hoarder of parts. He was addicted to pornography and ciystal meth. Bill Caesar had given up on Christianity and America, just as he felt America and Christ had given up on him. Bill still went to church with his grandmother every Sunday, but he often fell asleep during service.
“America wants you dumb,” Bill told me. “They’re happiest when you just get fat and tired and don’t ask any questions. It’s good for business.”
One day he pulled back a cracked mirror in his bathroom, revealed
a medicine cabinet that was full of vials containing antidepiessants, amphetamines, barbiturates, erectile dysfunction medication, and several different prescriptions for stomach and heart problems.
“Before you guys, I was on more pills than my grandmother. I was sick. America was sick.”
But things have changed. Bill Caesar has lost sixty pounds, and so can you.
*
There’s been an awakening. Kovach, West Virginia, was once the site of the most serious fighting in the war. Here is where you found the privately armed militias, the fundamentalists with the underground bunkers. They called themselves “rednecks,” a term used to describe an unfashionable tan line. There are minors that many of the people in this region are inbred and addicted to dmgs, just as Bill was. Yet the prevalence of violence and drug abuse did not create a dissonance in the “hearts and minds” of these believers. Around the necks of the countless corpses from the first battles were crucifixes.
“We would talk about peace, but look at history,” Bill said.
He opened an encyclopedia that once belonged to his grandfather. Bill doesn’t watch much TV anymore. He’s now an avid reader. He shows me a painting from antiquity, a picture of women burning alive. “Witches.”
“We executed more people than anybody else in the world. Right up there with Pakistan and Iran. Whether it’s women, poor people, retarded people—I don’t know. You’ll hear people talk about the sermon on the mount and compassion, but that’s just not the way Christianity played out in America.”
Bill told me the stoiy of a friend who lived in another country, one of the millions of refugees. His name was Russ. He was molested by a Catholic priest. He committed suicide last month.
“Before you guys, it was gay this and gay that,” Bill said. “You turn on the TV and we’re either watching some gay guy trying to convert a straight guy or watching a girl cheat on her husband, making everybody just hate women. I mean it makes sense if you think about it.”
Bill looked away for a moment. The room went silent. Bill is thrice divorced. His last wife left him for the minister of a megachurch, the infamous Reverend Todd Hostetler. For Bill, this was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
The control tower at Dulles Airport resembles a minaret. We arrived on the tarmac to greet Colonel Ali Al-Khan. It was an exciting time. There was intelligence of a forthcoming attack on Washington, one that could possibly change the course of the war. Before the plane touched down, there was a period of quiet conversation.
“Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA,” Bill told me. “I’m not sure if it s him or his brother they named the airport after, but they were both veiy secretive men, responsible for countless acts of ten or. They assassinated leaders left and right, overthrew countless governments that were trying to establish democracies in both Africa and South America, not to mention the Middle East. We had good dudes for awhile, like Eisenhower—guys who knew that we were on the verge of turning tyrannical, but nobody could do anything. Guys like the Dulles brothers held all the cards, these men behind the scenes. The military-industrial complex. Corporate terrorism. Which is landa what terrorism is all about, right—corporate? If it’s national, government sponsored, then it’s not terror, right? That’s why the CIA was so dangerous. They hid our armies in corporations until the corporations became indistinguishable from the armies.”
Colonel Khan’s plane touched down at midnight. Khan had been in Kashmir, finishing a film. There were minors he wanted to do a movie about the war, the first wave of American suicide bombers, but I was told by his agent that his visit was purely patriotic. Apparently he’d received countless letters from the troops. His work as a soldier, thespian, and Muslim businessman had earned him an international reputation.
“I just want to see the war for myself,” he told me, as we drove through Virginia, the oldest colony in the countiy.
We passed the ashes of the ambiguous American companies. We saw horses in fields, fires on the mountain. We passed by an old drive-in theater where Colonel Khan wanted to stop. He wanted to walk around in the weeds and the gravel, take pictures of the blank screens, the old, rusty microphones posted on their poles, the meny-go-rounds and the slides, the old popcorn booth.
Bill and I stood back. We watched as the movie star danced in the moonlight. This is the country where movies began. The drive-in theater was where people parked their cars and engaged in acts of premarital sex while watching movies in the country’s “heyday.”
“I have hope for this country,” Colonel Khan said, as we returned to the road.
He told me that he believed people were starting to “come out of the closet,” a phrase often used in America to describe the announcement of homosexuality. The soldiers chuckled at this phrase, but Colonel Khan was serious.
“Christianity is dead,” he said. “I have listened to Reverend Todd. I have seen the ATMs in the sanctuaries, hhave seen the churches converted to gymnasiums and discotheques and police stations and museums. You cannot have a faith that can be so easily converted to so many things. This is the essence of Christianity. It is like capitalism. It is like the chameleon, and, therefore, the American was like a chameleon. Whatever shape or color he needed for a given situation he assumed. This is why so many great actors and actresses come from here—this tendency. One must be experienced in his craft in order to juggle the identity of the chameleon with the true identity of the believer.”
Perhaps Colonel Khan was that “rare bird,” as Americans say. We stopped at a checkpoint. Colonel Khan signed the bicep of a soldier with his knife. We took pictures in front of a bumed-out Mustang.
Colonel Khan struck his famous pose: a drunken face coupled with slouched shoulders and a distended stomach. His ability to impersonate, to actually embody the American, was uncanny. The stomach muscles required to maintain such an appearance over the course of an entire film are beyond comprehension, perhaps the result of intense military training. According to insiders, Colonel Khan never uses a stunt double and always refuses the moulage of the makeup artist. He does everything himself. When we returned to the base, there was a fire to greet him.
Suicide was the issue for Bill Caesar. I watched him strip the flanks of a buck deer with a horn-handled knife his grandfather gave him. I watched him give a speech on leadership and patience, his hands steady as he circled the fire.
People listen to him now. They respect his skills. But it wasn’t always like this for Bill. Before the war, West Virginia was like much of America. Drug abuse was on the rise. Divorce rates had doubled. The rate of clinical depression had tripled over two generations. The percentage of children bom to unmarried parents had gone up sevenfold. Suicide
lates among the young people in the state had quadrupled. And this is to say nothing of the rates for adults and soldiers.
“Colonel Khan saved my life,” Bill told his men. “Y’all remember channel six-seventy-six?”
It was now late. The men had finished their meal. They were sitting “Indian style,” sipping chai tea. Bill was the only one standing. The embers of the fire were glowing.
“I was watching Mr. Khan at two in the morning,” Bill said. “It used to be that I’d just watch that channel when I was stoned. There was something weird about seeing the Terrorists’ praying, but I don’t know. That night it was like God commanded me to stop. Just something in my gut. Maybe some of y’all saw the same program.”
This was a month after Bill’s third wife left him. Bill described an infomercial, a promotion for a new online interactive translation of the Koran. He described Khan talking about the wisdom of Allah, his cautions about hasty decision making, a short dramatization of the world’s creation.
“The word was deliberation,” Bill said. “Colonel Khan told me to wait three days before I made a big decision. He told me God didn’t just make the earth like that. He said God needed six days. Even though that’s not a lot of time, it shows the wisdom of deliberation. So I didn’t kill myself just then. I waited and I watched more of the programs on that channel and I realized: people in this country kill themselves for themselves, which if you play it out like a math equation—like the colonel did—the whole thing equals nothing. When you don’t kill yourself for something bigger than yourself, you just cancel yourself out, and maybe worse. Maybe you even destroy the people you leave behind. My grandmother is still alive. I remember on the second day thinking about her and how much pain she’d feel, how she wouldn’t have anybody to walk her across her bridge in the winter, nobody to eat her cookies or watch Jeopardy with—and then it really dawned on me. She wouldn’t have anybody to talk to. She’d be alone. All by herself.”
Bill’s oldest brother was executed by the American government. His youngest brother killed a Chinese woman “just so he could play video games all day in the pen,” Bill told me. Although his mother was still alive, living somewhere in California, Bill hadn’t heard from her in years.
“Colonel Khan taught me about love,” he said to his men. “He taught me that dying for something is better than dying for nothing.”
Bill snapped the elastic waistband on his pants. He hugged Colonel
Khan as his men applauded and fired their guns into the night, causing leaves to fall, birds to fly. When the fire finally died. Bill helped Colonel Khan to his feet. He led him through the network of bunkers. I kept a respectful distance, allowing Bill some time to ask questions. Aftei awhile, I noticed something you never would ve seen in America five years ago: two soldiers holding hands.
>
Bill Caesar wore a mullet, a hairstyle often mocked in America. Distinct from the long hair of those who were once called “hippies,” the mullet is in some ways the “negative” of the “hippy hairdo. Just as the conservatives of America saw the longhaired hippies as the sign of sentimental idealism, many of the liberals I’ve spoken to see the mullet as the sign of inveterate ignorance. They associate it with the indentured servants from Mexico. One form of long hair as a sign of wealthy nostalgic rebellion, another as a sign of poverty and machismo.
I watched Caesar from a distance with the leader of the Iraqi special forces, a lieutenant whose identity must remain secret. We watched Caesar’s mullet flap in the wind as he fired through targets and dug trenches. We stood back as he looked under the hood of one of the white trucks our military had donated. He raised his arms in a sign of victory after successfully replacing a spark plug.
“Good,” said the lieutenant. “Now let’s go find some bad guys.”
Bill started the truck. Despite the pleas of the lieutenant, Colonel Khan insisted on riding “shotgun,” a term Bill explained to us as we drove down the road.
“One man drives, other man shoots. Can’t shoot if you’re driving.”
When Bill was growing up, the man riding shotgun shot deer and stop signs, random acts of destruction. We approached the town of Kovach. We passed a baseball stadium and a diner. We waved to a family of Negroes sitting on a porch; their son Horace was on Caesar’s SWAT team. He always drove the lead vehicle in the convoy. Prior to the war, Horace worked at a call center selling information to international corporations. His wife bought popular words from search engines before being downsized into a mechanical turk.
“He had an ‘Amazing Grace’ moment,” Caesar told Colonel Khan. “Horace thought he was living the good life. Then he lost his home and his wife. She went off with a soldier. Same old story.”
We passed through a classic American neighborhood: Empty, identical, oversized homes with white plastic siding; meticulous gardens now
wild with weeds; the face of a middle-aged woman in a red silk dickey posted on the real-estate signs that stood in eveiy yard.
How bout the seventy-third real-estate agent?” Horace remarked over the CB.
“Everybody wants to live in the big city,” Caesar said. “Most people have forgotten there’s a war out here—judging by the news.”
“Why have you not killed your wife?” Colonel Khan said.
The truck went silent. Colonel Khan’s question seemed full of compassion, a genuine empathy with the suffering of Bill Caesar. Yet I wondered, even then, if it was all part of a character study, if Colonel Khan would one day wear a mullet and drive a truck through a simulated American landscape, the love of a faithless woman still tearing at his heart.
“Americans are a little different than Arabs,” Bill said.
“Is that right?” Colonel Khan said.
“I sent the reverend a pipe bomb, but it didn’t go off,” Bill said.
“That was cowardly.”
“I know.”
“This is the sign of America’s sickness,” Colonel Khan said. “You have forgotten the original source of evil.”
“I know,” Bill said. “You’re right.”
“If I’m right, why is she alive?”
Bill looked like he wanted to respond to the supercilious tone in the colonel’s voice. His eyes “bugged” with intensity. But then he took a deep breath, as if suddenly reminded of the virtues, the program on deliberation that had started it all.
Moments later, the colonel grew unsettled, perhaps unsatisfied with the exchange. I listened to him speak in Arabic. I understood his command. We changed course. I could see Bill stiffen in his seat as we drove across a tall bridge where lower-middle-class Americans used to simulate suicide. They would harness a large rubbery hand to the beams of the bridge and then dive toward the river.
I looked down at the eutrophic waters, suddenly aware that this was not just another “celebrity embed.” We took a left a kilometer after the bridge, wound our way down a loose gravel road, passing crosses in the ditches, the river getting bigger and bigger.
I could smell fire and fermentation, the loamy breath of the river mingled with the smoking of meat and the cool leaves of sycamore trees and blackberries. We slowed down on a flat muddy road that ran parallel to the water. There were trailers and cabins, discarded machines in
the yards, naked children blowing bubbles. I saw a little girl swing from a tire tied to a vine. She disappeared into the summer water and then reappeared with her hair slicked back, now looking like a boy.
The convoy stopped in front of a metal mailbox shaped like a fish. This was the home of Bill’s third wife, Polly Colfelt-Whitacre-Hostetler. The house rested on wheels. There was a pink truck in the driveway, a bridge made of compressed grocery bags in the front yard, a bridge over nothing, leading from one plot of fallow dirt to another. There was a red-white-and-blue sign that read Vote Yes for Kids.
Bill led us up the front steps. Horace and his men stayed with the vehicles. Bill knocked on the door. We heard the sound of wild steps, a fluttering in the floorboards.
The door opened. Polly appeared before us. She was wearing a white rubber sun dress. When she first stepped into Bill’s arms, I expected the garment to immediately redden. I thought he had stabbed her with his grandfather’s knife. I looked at the colonel. His eyes were wide and blank, like a bird of prey. It took me a moment to see that Polly was “overcome with emotion,” and so was Bill.
He made a show of releasing his hands from her waist, but this did not change the fact that they instinctively went there in the first place. Polly had hair like hay. She checked her purse, sniffed her armpits. She directed us into the house with her forefinger to her lips.
She led us to a bathroom door. Bill made a signal with his finger. The colonel sent close to a hundred rounds through the door, and there, on the ground, behind the shattered particle board, was the Reverend Todd Hostetler, one of the most radical clerics in the countiy and thus one of our high-value targets, breathing his last wheezy breath.
Polly immediately called for the children. They came spilling out of two rooms in the back. There were at least a dozen of them along with three dogs and five cats, and on the shoulder of the oldest boy, perhaps fifteen years old, was a red-tailed boa constrictor, the design down its spine like the injected lips of a starlet.
I watched the colonel finger the snake and assess the situation in the living room. I admired his deliberation. He saw what I saw: the children were fascinated. They ran skipping circles around the soldiers. Khan told all of them except for the youngest girl to go outside, where I could hear them imploring Horace to let them toy with his gun.
“Kilby sure has grown up,” Bill said to his ex-wife, as the door closed.
Kilby, who wore a red mullet and freckles, was Bill’s son, the only of the children who belonged to him.
Have a seat, young lady, the colonel said, directing Polly’s daughter to his knee.
The colonel was sitting in a white Naugahyde recliner, which seemed an accessory to Polly’s sundress. The child, a brunette of about ten, did as she was told. She even smiled, ran her hands down the colonel’s legs, reverse cowgirl.
Bill and Polly were commanded to sit on the matching couch. One of the dogs took a seat at Bill s feet, began to clutch and thrust at his leg. The colonel smiled.
“Here we go,” he said, bouncing the child on his knee. “Everybody having fun now, just like dogs, no?”
Bill released an uncomfortable laugh, a sound like he’d been punched in the stomach.
“She would make a fine actress, would she not?” the colonel said to me.
The colonel moved his hands up her ribs and blew on her neck, making her giggle. I must admit, I was a bit taken aback. I was uncomfortable with the way he bounced the child on his knee. It felt inappropriate in the moment. I wanted Bill to stand up and do something. I remember how he looked me in the eye at one point, as if he expected me to do something.
But it is precisely in moments like these where the colonel teaches us most poignantly. What we see as a sin in the moment is a mere stone removed from the road of the final path, the ever unfolding path of the truth.
“Marriage, Bill, is a sacred institution, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, Bill. No. Not anymore. This is old hat. This is my first video.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Yes, you are. What does sharia mean, William? Show me that you have paid attention to the basics. What does the word mean?”
Bill sat up straight for a moment, then fell into a crouch, his fingers laced in his lap. He shrugged his trapezius muscles. The colonel removed the shirt of the young girl. He threw it atop Bill’s head, quickening his memory with anger.
“The path to the watering hole,” Bill shouted.
“Yes,” the colonel said. “Yes. This is the meaning, the path to the watering hole. Just as the law of Christ is living water, so is the law of Muhammad the path to the water. Water, Bill. Water. Constancy, change. Always there, always changing. There is nothing sacred, yet
everything is sacred. So hard to discern the sky from the sea after awhile. Everything is the same, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, you fucking idiot. Look at this girl, Bill. Do you want her to be the seventy-fourth virgin?”
“No, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s just a child. She’s too ypung, sir.”
“Too young to be split like a piece of fruit? Like a fresh peach?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why, if the most sacred vow between two people means nothing, should she mean something? She, who you have made no vow to?”
“Because she’s a child.”
“Bill, have I not taught you how to think? What did I discuss in volume twenty-three?”
“The sacred.”
“And what makes something sacred?”
“God’s word.”
“Yes. God’s word. You know what it is, yet you ignore it. You treat it like water. You let it pass, and just like water and the salt it bears, you don’t miss it until it’s gone. Abuse, abuse, abuse, until the salt and the water become nothing more than a field of hollow stones. In America I have witnessed wondrous things, William. I have held the saxifrage, the flower that bursts through the rocks. Yet I know there is no water in rock, William. I know, just as you know, where the water is and where it isn’t. Yet smell the underwear of this child, William! Tell me if it wouldn’t be easy to get lost in this world.”
The colonel tossed the child’s panties at Bill. I noticed Polly’s fingernails buried in the canvas thighs of Bill’s pants. We were all tense, all one. The cameras were always rolling, but still! What was he doing sniffing the underwear of a child? Nobody could gauge his sincerity from one moment to the next. Bill, like the rest of us, was confused, afraid, perhaps more than a bit faithless, drifting back and forth like a pendulum.
“Wait,” he said.
“Yes, Bill?”
Bill’s head returned to his hands, a gesture of prayer. The child was completely naked on the colonel’s thigh, and not entirely unhappy. Like most fools of the earth, like eveiyone in that room, she was oblivious to
design, to Gods will. Or perhaps her smile indicated the very opposite, that American notion of the child’s wisdom.
Polly,” Bill said. “The colonel’s right. I know what the law requires. Colonel, you yourself argue that we must adapt God’s law to our land, that the stoning of a faithless woman is, to some degree, figurative, yes?”
“To some small degree, Bill, yes.”
“A hail of bullets is a form of stoning, yes?”
“Yes, Bill. Yes.”
Okay. Children don’t need to do or see certain things, yes?”
“Yes, Bill. Yes.”
“Okay. Can we do this my way, without the girl?”
The colonel’s smile was more demonstrative than it had been all day. There was a feeling of great relief among the men, myself included. The colonel had taken us to the brink, and, as is always the case, the mind tastes God in this place. What is necessary becomes clear.
We followed Bill outside. He called his son down from the turret of the truck, said he wanted to teach the child a lesson. But he told the other boys to stay. He had his rifle poised behind Polly’s head. One could tell, walking behind her, that she was wearing a Saran Wrap thong. She kept flashing the other soldiers.
We walked along the river road, cut a path into the woods, walked past chimneys of broken stone, the riparian landscape dense with foliage, bloated roots like nerves in the earth, the American landscape more alive than anything I’ve ever witnessed.
“It’s easy to get lost in this country,” Bill said, the two men walking side by side in front of the other soldiers.
“Yes, Bill,” the colonel said. “I know this has been a tough year for you. But I’m glad you have found strength. I must admit, I was a bit worried, as they say.”
“Its all of this,” Bill said, sweeping his hand across the canopy of leaves. I followed his hand. It was hard to see the sky, hard to see anything but what was right in front of us.
“It’s like you say in volume eighteen,” Bill said. “Our strength is our weakness. I mean, I’ll grant you: You’re a smart guy, but think about this country and how easy it is to be dumb when you’re walled in by so many trees, so much mystery around eveiy corner. This isn’t the desert where you can always see things so far and clear, where you can make sense out of miles. In America, it’s the opposite, Colonel. Everything’s covered. You really have to know things to see things clear. It kinda
struck me when you were talking about saxifrage. Just that word. The way it reminded me of my granddaddy and all the things he used to teach me, what berries to eat, what berries not to eat, what flowers did what. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, Bill. I do.”
“Colonel, this is me, this is my country, but I’ve been afraid of it, like everybody else. We all want to see things clearly. We don t want a desert, but we do. It’s out here she’ll feel the\fear, the tenor. Not in there.”
The colonel said nothing. He merely shook his head, clapped Bill on the back. We arrived at a small clearing at the top of a rise, the river perhaps a full kilometer behind us.
“Face against the tree, bitch!” Bill screamed.
The colonel turned toward Bill’s men, spoke into the camera.
“Do you see what he’s doing? There are a million faces of Zina. We need not indulge her sentimental incarnations. For Zina, as the woman of a million faces, is the woman without any true face. Bill, may your bullets bore into the back of her skull as permanent empty eyes for all to see.”
For those Americans unfamiliar with our teachings, Zina is our name for adultery, and also the name of a recurrent woman in the colonel’s films. Polly Colfelt-Whitacre-Hostetler responded to the colonel’s words with yet another flip of her white rubber sundress, showing us all her backside and the transparent thong, what appeared to be a tattoo of a middle finger on her left buttock.
The colonel smiled, took a brief bow for the boys. Bill Caesar pushed the muzzle of his gun into Polly’s head, said a few choice words. He stepped back into the center of the clearing—his son, his men, myself, and the colonel but a few steps behind him in a crescent formation.
“Kilby,” he said.
With his left hand steadily holding the rifle, he motioned his son forward with his right. It seemed to me that he wanted his son to learn, to see what was happening. Of all the children, there was but this one that was his, and when Bill fired his gun, his son ran toward his mother’s body, but Polly, instead of sliding down the trunk, seemed to stagger. As Bill and the boy reached her body, she fell in alongside them, and they ran down the rise, into the trees.
The men ran left and right and into the middle of the clearing, firing up a mist. The colonel raised his hand, stilling the soldiers who were so eager to give chase. He turned to me with a patient smile, swept his hand across the land.
‘Bill lost his will,” he said. “But he was right, was he not?”
“How do you mean, sir?” I said.
This. All of this. This land is different. But it will not always be. Write this down, my friend: The desert is coming as a sea. The sooner we tear down their forests, the better off they’ll be.”
I followed the colonel back to the village, to the trailer by the river. I stood on the edge of the living room with the lieutenant and the cameramen and the other soldiers, the child once again on the colonel’s knee. Within seconds of completion we sent the movie out to the entire world. This, I believed, would be the final movie, the last of his cautionary tales, the stoiy of how the American retreated to his cave, the woman who led him astray, the child that brought him home.
But here’s the thing, as they say in America.
Bill Caesar did not come home.
And perhaps I became impatient. Perhaps I lost my faith. Or maybe, in between takes, standing by the river with the colonel, I was merely letting my mind wander as we sometimes do when we think we’re not working.
“Think he’ll come back?” I asked.
I heard the horn of a train in the distance, the bark of a dog. The colonel shrugged his shoulders. We watched the huts along the river light up, the silhouettes of Americans eating dinner and watching television, playing with their children. I remember seeing cars pass over the bridge, the sound of crickets like bells, an old woman sweeping off her porch. It was then that I turned to the colonel and offered what, at the time, was truly nothing more than idle chatter. I was not suggesting an idea for another movie. I was merely asking a question, part of my ongoing curiosity about Bill Caesar, a man whose stoiy now seemed on the verge of ending—if only he would’ve faced the consequences of his actions!
“Is his grandmother still alive?” I asked.