Ayad’s first problem had been the dog. Yellow, the fur mud-stippled along its back, the obscene droop of teats underneath, and, high on her back haunches, a dark foam-line of hair, like an inseam. He’d first spotted her from his lookout on the roof, slinking in through the green reeds that guarded the field’s western edge, as if aware that someone was watching. It was dusk by the time he reached the well. He covered it in the way his father had, recentering the plywood board, scooping back the earth that the dog had scraped away, working by feel and memory. He saw the dog’s face for the first time, a slash of lemon behind him. He’d charged, shovel raised, only to plunge into the empty night; the third time this happened, he’d rushed immediately back to the hole, caught the dog already digging, but she bolted through the waist-high wheat.
I have a dog problem, he wrote this carefully on a sheet of his father’s stationery, and tucked it into his pocket. He left his house by the back door and walked west along a dike-top until it crumbled and descended into a dried slough, a papery, head-high grass whispering past his cheek. He crossed five canals after this, the first a swaying footbridge that he and his brother had used to joust on, the last a brand-new eighteen-inch section of aluminum culvert that had been hammered into the bank. The foot traffic on this familiar path seemed to have increased, the grass worn back in furrows, but the culvert was unfamiliar, and as he crossed it, he began to sweat—cold sweat, high up on his neck—and his insteps curved uneasily over the patterned metal and the guide wire burned his hand. He entered town through a field whose current tenants included a donkey who’d been chained to a steel drum and a long, low-rising esker of slurried trash that curved into a copse of thorn trees. A sign had been propped up against a mud wall that read Haircuts, kitchen utensils, sinks. It had hung over the awning of a shop in town for as long as Ayad could remember; its owner, he had heard, was now dead.
Raheem al-Najafi was in his repair shop as usual, talking on his cell phone in the back room, his body hidden by the door frame and one of his scrawny chicken legs stretched out across the opening, the calf bare beneath his tan house shirt.
Ayad slid the paper past the bulky parts books: Nissan, Toyota, Opel. Still talking, Raheem grabbed it, read, and nodded gravely, the solemnity that entered his brown eyes completely at odds with the salesman’s grin—tongue poked out in anticipation of a hissing laugh—which he aimed at the speaker of the cell phone, as if the person on the other end could see. Then he disappeared into the back.
There had been a time in Ayad’s early teens when he had considered becoming an auto mechanic, going into something like an apprenticeship. This had been before his father died and before his family had frozen up around that death, a situation only worsened by the news that his mother had been awarded a pension by the state, thus eliminating any immediate need to earn money. Back in the old days, then, when his greatest concern had been himself: What would he do? How would he earn money? How would he learn a trade if he could not even go to school? At that time, his father had been in Baghdad frequently at the flat that he kept there (abandoned now, since the outbreak of the war) and his mother would drive in to see him, made up, happy to be going into the city, and Ayad—his brother away in the army, his older sisters married—had stayed for weeks at the house alone, too frightened by the city, by its traffic, by the way it emphasized his disability. So he had started walking into town and squatting at Raheem’s shop—the mechanic knew him, had fixed his father’s SLE many times before—not speaking, just watching. An undeclared apprenticeship.
It had been both a provocation and a debasement: What was he worth? Or rather, a way of saying to his father: Without you, I have no worth.
Or maybe it had just been an attempt at truth.
But he was not a nothing now; after his brother had valiantly failed to survive the American invasion, Ayad had become his family’s oldest living male, and thus the steward of his mother’s land, and Raheem was something other than the man who fixed his father’s SLE. If not a criminal, then, as a Shi’ite, a man known to have connections, the possessor of a new and undefined authority. The blue sedan that the intruders had been driving when they’d arrived at Ayad’s house—it had taken him some time to place it, but Ayad was fairly sure he’d seen it before, parked in Raheem’s lot out back.
When he thought that Raheem had been on the phone long enough, he pounded on the bell that the garage owner kept hidden, out of reach, atop his desk. Raheem deliberately—Ayad was familiar with his habit—refused to even budge the sallow curve of his shin as it stuck out across the rear doorway.
Where is this problem with the dog? Raheem’s note read when it came back.
This dog wants your friends’ gift, he wrote. This night, every night. He drew a picture of a dog digging a hole under the moon, surrounded by stalks of wheat.
* * *
He slept in the living room of the main house. His only means of communication, the only way he had to confirm his continued existence, was the cell phone his mother had left for him. It was a long, skinny silver Nokia that resembled one of his father’s shoehorns. It could text in Arabic but the phone’s system of having to push a button one, two, or three times just to summon up a letter of an alphabet made his own true desires, the things he really would have liked to say to his mother—I’m afraid or How long does it take a body to decompose?—seem even more impossible to communicate. However, he discovered that if he put it on speaker, he could hold the phone in his palm and feel her voice vibrating. Who knew what the hell she was saying? He’d walk the house, sit down at her dresser, stand in his father’s closet (the clothes were all still there, his city shoes nicked at the heels), pace out front on one of the no-electricity nights, feeling that great swallowing dark coming on, while her voice buzzed away there in his palm. He could get a fair amount of information from the vibrations: the quick prickling of worry, a buzzing jagged reverb of a rant, the longer, silkier passages when she cried. (Or at least he could imagine these things, which was probably better than understanding what his mother actually had to say.) Mostly, he understood that she was claiming him. They had never gotten along well, but now, at noon and again at six, she’d call and talk to him for a good ten or fifteen minutes that were always surprisingly emotional and satisfying for him. And then he’d lift the headset up and make his own barfing donkey noise into it (this was how Faisal had described his voice after Ayad had once written, Seriously, how do I sound?), and that was the signal to hang up.
When he woke, a pale blue-gray light was swimming around the walls, over the furniture. At first Ayad thought he was doing this by himself, beaming the image in out of the past, but he realized that some of the shadow bars that spun, flickered, and recycled over the bare walls were coming from outside. And when he went to the door, he saw the cars of the—what should he call them? insurgents? takfiri?—curving around through the side yard, heading back out onto the road through the front gate, having solved his dog problem. And probably also mined the field.
That morning, the dog returned—not to the field but to the old incinerator where he’d been dumping his trash. He noticed a flash of movement just outside the back gate. He walked down through the garden, peeked over the gate, saw the dog limping and whining over the trash, then returned to the kitchen, opened a can of chickpeas (there were fifty such cans, part of his mother’s supply stash, shipped in before the roads got bad), carried them back outside, and dumped them in the dirt—a large pile just at the spot where the spacing between the gate bottom and the foot-worn path was the largest. Then little dribs and drabs leading in. At the door to his father’s workshop, he left a second can, open but untouched, then returned to the house and the TV.
* * *
His mother’s family had owned the field. When he was twelve or thirteen, Ayad had been astonished to find this out. It was also his mother’s family who’d had the money, the land, the prestige that had allowed her to maintain the (in his view) illusory sense that such a thing as stability was to be expected in the first place. This traced clear back to pre–Ba’ath Party times—or to, as his mother insisted, dangerous-to-mention original Ba’ath Party times—a time that seemed to Ayad distant and historical, though he could tell from his mother’s ferociously maintained and guarded scrapbooks it was the Polaroid-engulfed, thickly emulsed 1950s. The friendship then had been with Hassan al-Bakr; that was the man whom he’d seen pictures of, sitting in their side yard eating pickled cauliflower, surrounded by his mother’s (then his grandmother’s) roses and gardenias. And, if you wanted to look at the under-the-bed and inside-the-mattress albums, you could find a photo or two of good old Nuri al-Said.
Whomever it belonged to, the dog had no interest in going back out into the field. He’d tried to lead it out the back gate a few times—this was after he’d gotten a collar on it and manufactured a leash out of some hammock chain—and the dog kept doing this insane, maddening thing of sitting down on its rear end and ducking its head.
So, instead, he had to walk the dog down the fairly abandoned, half-paved, half-dusted-over road outside his house. A lonely line of two-strand phone poles echoed the road above their head. You want to talk about boring? Try taking this landscape seriously after you’ve spent half an hour watching a DVD of Beverly Hills Cop with your neighbor Faisal Amar. Or Independence Day. Or Sex and the City. No subtitles needed for that. In the past, Ayad had been big on backgrounds, big on the space and feel of other countries, had often walked this road without seeing it at all, head filled with nostalgia for places he’d never been. But now that same yearning pull applied to the road itself, or at least the road as he remembered it. For instance, the small grove of olive and eucalyptus trees just across from the doctor’s old place. His family had picnicked here. Horrible, boring, two-bit afternoons, as he’d seen them. A couple plastic chairs, dust-covered bowl of hummus, better replaced by Central Park, or the Vegas Strip. But now when he unfolded his imagination amid the polite churning dapple of its leaves, it was to reassemble the full complement of his family, all together, and bitching less than was strictly accurate. This particular afternoon, he’d been remembering a yellow ball he’d juggled here during a family outing, its surface the perfect combination of soft and sticky. He had caught the ball between a bare, upturned toe and his shin, and hopped on his left foot to show his father—he’d been so desperate for his father’s praise back then—and just as he made a ghost of this same turn, he saw the dog running toward him.
The thing he hated, feared, despised, loathed about his deafness was his vulnerability. But in this case, the dog’s approach gave him enough time to crouch, catch a glimpse of the oncoming convoy, and then scuttle away into thicker brush so that when the American Humvees blasted by at a hundred kilometers per hour, pushing a hot, dry wind and filling the grove with its dust, he was safely hidden. The dog lay beside him, chin upon her doubled paws, a comically flat deadpan quality to her black-brown eyes as she followed the trucks and then swiveled over to look at him—no change in expression, no movement other than the eyes—as if to say, What the fuck? And then she was gone, bolting down the road after the convoy, which was not what he’d expected, quite honestly. He half ran, half walked after her, keeping to the tree line, since, if there was one thing you could say about the Americans, they had good signage:
DANGER
STAY BACK
After about ten yards, he saw that the convoy had turned in at his front gate, and he retreated quickly back to the copse. What he wanted to do was warn them: Yes, the body is here. I don’t want it. But watch out—there might be something dangerous in the field. Against this was his awareness of how difficult, and possibly incriminating, this would be to explain, not to mention his fear of prison and arrest, the simple, unreasoning desire to remain free. After an hour, these contradictory impulses brought him to the canal on the west side of his house, at a point that, by dead reckoning, he figured was roughly perpendicular to the dry well that contained the body. He was crossing on a felled palm trunk when he felt a faint spray of wetness against his skin and he saw the yellow head of the dog swimming below, head up, very earnestly, then disappearing into the field without a look back. He bleated to it quietly. Nothing. He pounded the ground and hissed, and it came to him, tail wagging, ass down on the ground—excited. Probably barking. He saw its throat work. Urging him to come out into the field. There are strangers here! No, no, no. Quiet. Quiet, please. Then, glancing up, he saw trucks coming out the back gate. And then he was on his feet, scrambling, pushing out into the open, giving his broadest, most moronically chipper grin, the one used by American actors whose role was to be humiliated or, most preferably, ignored: Yes, hello, soldiers? I am not against you! Yes! Please stop! Please wait! There’s danger this way!