HE STEPS FROM THE tempered air of the hotel lobby and at once is in another country. Heat hits him like a bomb blast; the smell of kerosene and cooking fires and dust. The hotel courtyard is crammed with vehicles, the white minivan the journalists use, an armoured Jeep, the black Peugeot that Yusuf, the hotel’s owner, keeps on standby. The young driver, Said, some sort of nephew or cousin Yusuf has got saddled with, sits smoking listlessly beneath the lone scraggly palm that rises up against the security wall, his eyes sharpening an instant at the sight of David, then going dull again when David heads toward the gate. The couple of times David has been out with the boy he has been thin-skinned and surly, every smallest inconvenience an affront. By mid-afternoon he will be pumped up on khat: David has seen him chewing wad after wad of the stuff with the kitchen help in the service courtyard beneath his room. It is the same in the markets and tea houses throughout the city, a whole generation of men who sit for hours of every day using the drug to feed their violence or to tame it, David isn’t sure which.
Wali stands guard at the gate with his rifle, part of the troupe of thawb-clad cattlemen Yusuf imports from the provinces to serve as his private militia.
“Ah, Mr. David!” Flashing a grin. “Where are you going? I can come with you, is better.”
“I think I’m going to try on my own today.”
Wali’s grin goes wider.
“You are a brave man, Mr. David, very brave!” As if sending him off to joyful death.
It is David’s first outing alone. Mostly he has tagged along in the journalists’ van, with two or three of Yusuf’s cattlemen riding shotgun. Outside the government zone the city is still a jigsaw of clashing factions, each with its own militiamen and checkpoints and tolls. In the neighbourhoods to the north, where the city rises up toward the coastal mountains and every switchback and corner window and cul-de-sac offers some stronghold or point of ambush, new gangs still form almost weekly, only the sections held by the Malana, a Western-style do-gooder David has been researching with whom Yusuf has promised to get him an interview, offering anything like safe passage.
The street beyond the hotel is deserted, a barren stretch of beaten earth flanked by a jumble of half-built buildings and half-ruined ones. For the first time since he arrived here David feels truly exposed. He has brought sunglasses equipped with a built-in video camera in the hope of putting together some saleable news items or digital extras for his book, though they only make everything he looks at seem more menacing and veiled.
He turns at the first cross street, following the instructions he got from one of the journalists, Eric, from France. Only now does he begin to see signs of life, men in doorways, cars, open shops. Already the sun is like a hammer blow. He stops at a hole in the wall displaying a motley assortment of hats and picks out a baseball cap that reads Security.
“How much?”
The trader sits smoking in the darkness of the shop.
“Twenty dollars.”
“I’ll give you seven.”
The man looks at him so distantly that David thinks he hasn’t understood.
“Is twenty dollars. Last price.”
He can’t read the man’s tone. He picks up a fez done in the local pin-hole-style embroidery, in gold and black.
“And this one?”
“Five dollars.”
He peels a five from his wallet.
By the time he reaches the main boulevard the crowds have thickened. David has seen pictures of the street from the halcyon days of Soviet backing, the flowered planters and royal palms along the centre island, the office buildings in gleaming glass and gleaming white. Now, the planters and palms have given way to rubble and weeds and rows of crude market stalls obscure the buildings. Textbook reversion—David has seen it in other former satellites as well, modern cities that regressed to primitive villages the minute the empire packed its bags.
David buys a Fanta, piss warm, from a boy hawking them from a water-filled bucket and stands drinking it while the boy waits for the empty. On the roadway, a motorcade bearing the logo of the international delegation in town for peace talks cuts through the traffic flanked by a military escort, a stillness hanging in its wake for a few seconds before the traffic folds back into place.
The Fanta boy is staring up at him.
“America? CIA?”
Anywhere else the question might be a joke. Here, half the guests at David’s hotel seem to be agents of one sort or other, selling arms or buying them, gathering intel, playing factions one against the other or paying off the warlords they have failed to depose to kill off the jihadists they once supported.
“Not CIA. A journalist.” He drains the bottle and hands it back.
He is headed for the arms market. It is one of the ideas he has pitched for write-ups to various outlets to help offset the cost of the trip and maybe serve as teasers for his book. After years of work he has had to rethink his original concept: it was getting too bloodless, too invested in his own theorizing. What he needs is something more visceral, exactly what served him so well back in Masculine History. That is what has brought him here, the hope that this place’s reversion, its constant tottering toward anarchy, might give him a paradigm for the failure of states; the suspicion that what is happening here is not some bizarre aberration but the human default, a microcosm of the brutality and blood lust that have spurred human history ever since Homo sapiens pushed Neanderthal off an evolutionary cliff.
He looks around to see that the traffic has changed, that the Fanta boy has vanished. This is the other function of his videocam, to act as his brain’s backup for everything he misses or forgets, for the blackouts when whole seconds or minutes fail to register. Such lapses happen daily now, no matter how much he loads himself up with his meds. He’ll be driving down a highway or standing on a street corner or waiting in line at an airport check-in and suddenly he’ll have no idea what he is doing or where he is going or why, as if the thread of time itself, whatever it is that makes a life a continuous whole and not these vanishings his own has become, has been snapped.
If only he can hold out a while longer. If only he can push through to the end. Every morning he tries to convince himself, tells himself the same lies, which by noon have worn thin.
At the back of his mind, always with him now, the locusts of sleep, waiting to swarm.
It had been possible in the end, even easy, to lose even his son. By mere inadvertence, really, as if he had turned his head for a minute and the boy had slipped from him, irrevocably.
In his mind there had always been a time in the offing when he would make the effort, when he would break through. When there was no book to finish, no issue with money; when Marcus was old enough to understand. Then, not long after his return from the States, Julia announced she had taken a job as dean at their old university in Montreal. There was no question of fighting her: he had neither the resources nor the grounds. He had had to sell his condo by then to cover his living expenses and his debt, still in the same limbo with the university as when he’d gone. His new accommodations, a tiny rented condo with flimsy rice-paper sliders to give the illusion of rooms, had no space for Marcus to sleep and so had ended up limiting their time together to awkward weekend outings that stank of obligation. They never spoke again of their visit to David’s club. David always meant to bring it up with him, to look into shooting courses, to find a way to broach the issue with Julia, yet at the back of his mind he suspected he would just be laying the ground for some new way to fail him.
It was only when Julia had sold the house that it began to sink in what had happened. The opportunity he had always imagined, the chance to be the good father, to make things up, had passed. Julia moved into the sprawling manse her father still lived in and enrolled Marcus in the same old-boy private school her father had attended two generations earlier, so that visiting him now was like travelling into enemy territory.
David had stopped in to see him on his way over here, taking him out to a restaurant in the old city that had once been a favourite haunt of his. It was the first time he had seen him since Christmas and he had grown half a foot since then, looking more like David and yet also, in some way, in some new bearing he had, more separate from him.
“School all right?”
“You’d have to ask Mom about that.” In a tone of complicity. “She seems to have her own grading system.”
This was the boy who used to squirm at every question as if it were an awkward piece of clothing he had to squeeze himself into. Almost overnight, he’d turned adult.
“Do you like that place? All that pretension?”
“It’s not that bad, really. For a school, I mean.”
The boy was managing him. Old enough to understand. This was the day David had been waiting for, when they might sit as equals.
“You never told me where you were going exactly,” Marcus said.
“Research trip. For my book.”
“Ah, yes.” Aping a plummy Oxford accent. “The book.”
It took David an effort to realize the boy had meant no insult. If anything there had been almost a deference in him, an underhanded pride.
Every moment there had ever been between them seemed suddenly to flash in front of David, every failure.
“We should go away together this summer. To Europe, maybe. Or a beach.”
Marcus’s adultness fell away and he was the squirmer again.
“I dunno. I usually have camps and stuff. You’d have to ask Mom.”
You’re still his father. Already this seemed less some right he had, some last vestige of hope, than a debt he would never repay.
There had been only a single time since the divorce that Julia had truly turned to him as a father. A boy Marcus had known since kindergarten had begun to bully him, and though Julia had confronted the boy directly, then had spoken to his teacher, then to the principal, matters had only worsened with each intervention. She had finally called the boy’s parents, who had accused her of being on a witch hunt and threatened legal action if she called again. All of this she had kept from David until it came out in a barrage one afternoon when he went by to pick up Marcus for the weekend.
“I just want it to end, David, I can’t tell you how this eats at me. I just want it to stop. All I can think of now is ways to hurt this kid. I think of burning his house down. Of running him down in my car.”
David spent the whole weekend in a fury, imagining how he would ream out Marcus’s teacher, ream out the principal, how he would go to the school board and show them what a mockery all their rhetoric was, how they hadn’t a clue. It was still the same as it had been in his own day, the same cruelty, the same insidiousness, the same idiotic adults who imagined children innocents. There was nothing more brutal than a child. David would show the kid brutal. He would hire some older kid to give him a beating. He would turn up at his house with the Beretta and give him and his asshole parents a taste of what real fear was like.
He tried to discuss the matter with Marcus.
“Was there something you did to this boy? Was there a reason he stopped being friends like that?”
“I don’t know why.” Already close to tears. “I didn’t do anything. Do we have to talk about it? I already talked to Mom.”
He had taken exactly the wrong tack. That was the worst of it, what made it impossible to see the thing clearly, that beneath his rage was his own sense of shame. He was back in the schoolyard again watching Danny get picked on, feeling stigmatized along with him, feeling marked. Wanting to say to him, For fuck’s sake stand up for yourself.
David kept running through every possible option, what could be done that would work, that would make the kid pay. Yet the more he thought, the more he felt stymied. The truth was that Julia, too, had taken the wrong tack. She had branded Marcus as weak by fighting his fight for him. Meanwhile the other kid, in being singled out, had gained status. There was no way to defend against that kind of primal algebra.
“We have to keep at this,” Julia said when he dropped Marcus home. “We have to fix this.”
David drove by the kid’s house. The front curtains were open and he could make out the father reading in an armchair in the living room, half turning from time to time as though calling out passages to someone in a further room. Something in the look on his face, a certain maleness, vaguely repellent, reminded David of himself. Then, as if on cue, the boy came into the room, not whining or sneering but only holding out a notebook that his father took from him and scanned the pages of before handing it back with a curt nod of approval.
David had already seen too much by then. He had wanted monsters, something to feed his anger. Instead he might have been looking into his own house back when he had one, at his own family. Whatever violence was being bred here was likely not much different from what had made David imagine taking a Beretta to a child and Julia running him down in her car.
In the short run it was Julia who solved the problem, insisting the boy be suspended for a few days after he was caught defacing one of Marcus’s notebooks. It was the first real punishment anyone had thought to administer to him and afterwards he left Marcus alone. Who knew what it was that had first set him off, maybe just brute animal impulse, something he could no more be blamed for than for the colour of his eyes.
David, though, knew even then that the only solution that would have made any real difference for Marcus was the one he had never quite had the patience for: that he be a better father. The kind who passed on inner resources. Who taught his son to be strong. The father he had vowed to be, again and again, until every chance had passed.
The gun market runs for several blocks, a string of tin-roofed stalls and patched-over shops selling M16s, Kalashnikovs, Uzis, RPGs. There is a hair-trigger feel of danger but something muted as well, a sense of lethargy, of boredom almost. On the walk from the hotel David passed hardly a doorway that wasn’t watched over by some young clansman with a rifle, but here half the stalls appear abandoned, rows and rows of lethal weapons spread out on their crude display racks without so much as a child to keep watch over them. Meanwhile men in robes sit smoking Marlboros and drinking tea under the shade netting of the tea houses that flank the street as if all this has nothing to do with them.
The gun laws here are even more draconian than back home but in practice are a farce, used only for shakedowns and bribes. In the face of recent abductions even some of the journalists have taken to carrying guns, despite the taboo against them, buying them outright if they have ways to get them home or using buyback schemes that amount to a sort of rental system. One of the Americans showed David a full-auto Glock he’d picked up, with a magazine the size of an assault rifle’s.
“Twelve hundred rounds a minute, if you could manage to feed them in fast enough. The only other people in the world with this thing are the Austrian anti-terror cops.”
The gun was overkill, the kick on it probably enough to break the man’s wrists. David had done self-defence courses at a camp outside Buffalo before coming out here and has some notion by now of the difference between the fantasy of lethal force and what happens in real time. In real time, the one round you can control is better than the thirty you can’t. In real time, in that first second of blind panic when your life hangs in the balance, the gun you’d thought you’d mastered, landing round after round in the kill zone at twenty-five yards, becomes the bucking animal it had been the first time you’d held it.
His first morning at the camp he was given an eighteen-round Glock and put in front of a huge rubberized screen designed to reseal itself from a bullet’s friction when it was shot. As he watched, a shooting rampage unfolded in front of him that was like one of Marcus’s shooter games blown up to life size, so realistic he could make out the colour of people’s eyes, the sprays of blood on the walls. People running screaming in every direction; others lying bleeding or dead on the floor. The setting, a classroom building in a university, was custom chosen, every detail hauntingly familiar. The scene moved him down hallways, around corners, through open foyers where he stood fully exposed, with each step the sickening pop, pop of the shooter and the grating howls and pleas getting louder. The whole time, people running at him wild-eyed, the fear in them so bald and real he could hardly bear to look at it.
From a doorway, a man ranting at him, a girl in a chokehold, the flash of what might have been a gun. David’s heart was pounding; he was drenched in sweat. At the back of his neck, the first time it had ever happened to him with a gun in his hands, a premonitory shiver.
The screen went black.
His instructor stepped out from a monitoring booth at the back of the room.
“Sorry, man, you’re dead.”
David had signed on for regular courses after that, for a while going down almost weekly, sometimes for two- or three-day sessions. The place offered training for every setting and every scenario, from back-alley muggings and home invasions to hostage takings and guerrilla-style ambushes. In the course of a day he might fire a thousand rounds, doing the same drills over and over, building his muscle memory, training his animal self to make decisions his thinking one was too oafishly lumbering for. After a while he started getting flashes of the simulations he’d done as though he had truly lived them, had been through rampages and war, was a seasoned killer. At the back of his mind, the constant obsession with raising the odds. The actual stopping zones on a human body were infinitesimally small: there was the brain stem’s medulla, about the size of an egg, which could shut the body down like a light switch; there was the heart, the size of a fist. The prospect of making these shots on a moving target in a state of agitation without having hardwired them into your very being was next to nil.
From up the street, the rat-a-tat of a Kalashnikov being tested and right away the smell of powder, sharp as ammonia. All along the market the AKs predominate, all with the weathered, indestructible look of having been through it, wars and guerrilla uprisings and coups, jihads, terrorist massacres. Some of them might have come off the lines right back in the first days of the Cold War, might have made the rounds since then of Cambodia and Vietnam, Angola and Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, to end up in this backwater failed state still ready for service. David had had a few goes on an AK at his gun camp. Even in full auto, when it could slice off an arm in a matter of seconds, it had the simplicity of a Nerf gun, and about as much kick.
He pans the street with his video glasses, but when he tries to engage any of the traders they shake their heads, either not understanding him or not wanting to. David can feel the street watching him, the barefoot boys, the alhajis in the tea houses, the young men who sit chewing khat in the shade of tamarinds. He has already seen how easily matters can turn here. The journalists’ driver had tried to force their van through a throng of pedestrians once and people had begun to shout insults and pound at the windows with what felt like real violence.
“Mr. Man!” One of the traders is holding out a beat-up AKM whose folding metal stock has the look of a crude prosthetic limb. “This way, come, you can shoot this one! One bullet, one dollar!”
The man is thick-necked and hulking, with none of the desert leanness that is the norm here. He wears a bright yellow T-shirt that reads Pirate.
“Who do you want to shoot today, Mr. Man? Who do you want to kill?”
A dozen rifles dangle like sides of meat from the front of his stall. A couple of M16 knock-offs; a hodgepodge of Kalashnikovs with markings in Cyrillic, in Roman, in Arabic, in Chinese. David, playing along, takes the AKM the trader holds out.
“How much?”
The man grins.
“For you, my friend, only your life.”
“The price is too high, I think.”
“You are smart, my friend. You don’t want to die in this place.”
The trader goes by the name of Madman. David tries to draw him out, not sure if he is con man or sage but glad to be getting some footage.
“You are journalist, yes? New York Times. You can put my name there.”
He goes through his guns, reeling off prices. David tries to get him to talk more generally, about sources, about his bosses, about the city’s factions, but he grows cagey. David asks about the Malana, whom the Western press touts as someone trying to rise above the sectarianism and violence, but Madman acts like he has never heard of him.
“People from your country, they come here, they say factions, they say clan, is a way to say we are not civilized. But we are civilized, my friend, many thousands of years. Before the Romans, before the Greeks. They say guns, they say killing, but where are there more guns, more killing? In your own country.”
David doesn’t quibble. For all he knows the man has committed atrocities, nearly everyone has in this place who has survived, but he seems to have understood the lesson of history, that in the long run such delinquencies hardly matter.
David has spied a crate at the back of the stall that holds a collection of handguns, piled in a heap like discarded auto parts.
“What about those? Are they for sale?”
Madman’s eyes brighten.
“Aha! So I have found you out! You like to have pistol, not so?”
He dumps the crate unceremoniously onto the counter of his stall. A Jericho, a Taurus Millennium, a couple of Glocks. The others are mostly cheap knock-offs or types David has never seen.
“Which one, my friend? I give you best price, to sell and also buy back.”
David eyes the guns, hardly daring to take one in hand. At his camp, once his reflexes in the simulations had sharpened to the point where more times than not he was making the kill, fear had given way to something else: anticipation. The slow burn in his blood, better than any drug; the incredible focus.
“Is that all you’ve got?”
Madman smiles.
“You are right.” As if they are no longer playing at things. “You are a man of knowledge. Those are only for boys.”
He brings out a basket with what is clearly his premium line. A Heckler and Koch. A Springfield. A Walther. It is the last one, though, that holds David’s eye: a Beretta. It looks like an idealized version of his own, the same red dot by the safety, the same hatching on the slide, the same monogrammed grip, but sleeker and darker and more substantial somehow, with the flawless finish of something engineered to standards slightly beyond the human. He picks it up. It sits more squarely in his hand than his own does, feels more perfectly balanced. He checks the markings: US M9. American military issue.
He drops the magazine and inspects it, pulls the slide back to check the chamber and barrel. Clear.
Madman looks pleased.
“I think you know this one.”
David points the gun skyward and slowly squeezes the trigger to test its resistance. This is the instant he loves, the one just before the hammer strikes, when the gun is still all potential, poised at the balancing point between intent and loss of control.
Click.
“How much?”
The question of buying or not feels already moot. Even Madman, taking his time, playing David out, seems to know this.
“This one is special, my friend, is only one in all of the market. You can see for yourself. Is from your own soldiers, when they came.”
The gun has clearly seen service but doesn’t look old enough to go back to the American presence. More likely some recent clandestine has been parted from it, though under what circumstances David doesn’t like to guess.
“I’ll give you three hundred.”
In the end he agrees to five, probably more than the gun would cost new, and to a buyback of a mere hundred and fifty. He hasn’t dared to come out with that much money on him and will have to return to his hotel for it. Now that business is being transacted Madman has turned no-nonsense, his eye perpetually scanning the street.
“I will come with you. Is better.”
Madman wraps the gun in burlap and twine together with a box of the same 9×19 Parabellum soft points David uses in his Beretta back home, making a parcel that resembles those of the local bootleggers. He calls a boy over to watch his stall and pops a banana clip into a Kalashnikov.
“We are safe now, no worries.”
Madman waits behind at the cross street when they reach the hotel, to avoid problems with the guards. In the hotel courtyard, Said is berating one of the kitchen boys.
“Animal!” he says, reaching out theatrically to smack the boy on the back of the head when he sees David passing.
The hotel is bustling today because of some sort of peace forum sponsored by the international delegation. David manages to get in and out without interference, glad he has squirrelled away some of his cash in his room and spared himself the awkwardness of needing to get into Yusuf’s safe. Only when he is back in the street does he realize how reckless he has been, rushing out unaccompanied and unarmed with his fistful of cash like the merest rube.
Madman stands waiting for him with his parcel in the shadow of a ruined building.
“All there.”
He draws into a doorway to count the cash.
“Is good.” Already elsewhere, already gone. “Go with God, my friend.”
This time Yusuf spots him as he enters the hotel, his eye going straight to the burlap package.
“Mr. Pace! Where have you been? Is very foolish to go out alone!”
He is decked out in all his finery today like some oil sheik.
“As you can see, I’ve managed to survive.”
David heads for his room. In the hall he passes the flinty Reuters woman he met the night before at the hotel bar, a new arrival, dressed in a low-cut top that in a country like this might be enough to earn her a stoning. Tasha or Tara, something fashionable like that. At the bar—a snakepit of gonzo journalists and black marketeers that Yusuf opens up only well after supper, presumably to keep it from corrupting the locals—she had barely given him the time of day, matching the men drink for drink and holding court the whole night with her war-zone tales.
She raises an exaggerated eyebrow at his parcel, clearly taking it for the bottle it has been made up to resemble.
“Any to share?”
Fuck you, David thinks, though something in him responds to her despite himself, as though the insect swarm that has been massing at the back of his head is starting to clear.
David gets one of the boys in the service courtyard to bring a jar of kerosene up to his room and sets about cleaning the Beretta, stripping it down on his flimsy desk. Fine desert sand has worked its way into the gun’s every cranny. The slide shows a good deal of wear, though the barrel, which he scrubs by pulling a strip of kerosene-soaked hand towel through it with a shoelace, is fairly clean. All this suggests the gun has come straight out of the military, which uses only fully jacketed rounds, not much given to fouling. In the delicious logic of war, jacketed rounds are considered more humanitarian than the soft points favoured by civilians because they pass through flesh more cleanly.
Partway into the cleaning, someone comes knocking. The air conditioning has died again and the smell of the kerosene has filled the room.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Pace?”
It is Yusuf. David doesn’t get up.
“Fine. Everything’s fine.”
The barest pause.
“I’m told you have something to clean.” It seems everyone here is Yusuf’s spy. “If I can help you, Mr. Pace. On account of the smell. For the other guests.”
“Be done in a minute. Just an old clock I picked up.”
The evasion is so flimsy that Yusuf doesn’t even bother to acknowledge it.
“You mustn’t go out on your own again, Mr. Pace, I beg you. It’s very dangerous. You must let the hotel look after your security.”
When he has gone David reassembles the gun and goes through his drills. He has brought a holster with him that fits inside his waistband and he practises drawing and holstering, watching for snags and checking the drape of his shirt. He tests the alignment on the sights; he works the trigger. The trigger pull is heavier on the first shot if the gun is uncocked because of the added resistance of having to pull back the hammer. David dry-fires again and again with the hammer both forward and back so he doesn’t get caught botching a shot because he has miscalculated the weight of the pull.
His room looks out over the razor wire of the hotel’s security wall toward the distant slopes of the northern neighbourhoods. A lone low-rise in concrete and silvered glass a couple of blocks over breaks the view. David can’t tell at this distance if it is occupied or abandoned. Someone could be standing at one of its windows that very minute angling to get a bead on him. In the city’s worst days gangs of boys had made a game of such sport, targeting random strangers for casual killings.
David takes aim at one of the upper windows and in his mind’s eye sees a shadow move behind its mirrored surface. He pulls the trigger and a black throb goes through him.
Click.
At the camp it had come to seem that threat was no longer something he prepared for but what he needed to conjure. Now, in this place of threat, the scenarios keep playing out in his head until it is becoming hard to distinguish what he craves from what he fears.
In the hotel dining room Eric, the Frenchman, calls out to him from a table the journalists have colonized at the back. The Reuters woman is there, scrolling through her phone.
“Petra, have you met David yet?” For some reason Eric has made a point of taking David under his wing. “He’s working on a book about failed states. You must know his work.”
“We met at the bar, I think.” Barely looking up from her phone. “Sorry, I never caught the last name.”
“Pah-cheh.” Eric rolls the name out like an aria. “As in ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’ Though maybe you know him as Pace.”
“David Pace? You’ve got to be kidding.”
As if on cue her phone rings.
“Sorry, guys, I have to take this.”
David hates the hard turd of ego in him that still clings to the least sign of recognition. That gives in to Eric’s blandishments, though for all David knows he comes here to diddle young boys. That itches now for Petra’s return.
“It looks like the prospects are good,” Eric says. “I am talking about the truce, of course.”
“Don’t tease me with false promise.”
“Ah, yes. If there is a drug here even more dangerous than khat it is that one. Hope.”
When she returns her whole manner has changed.
“So. Professor David Pace. Masculine History, right? Julius Caesar?”
“Excellent,” Eric says. “So you know it, then?”
Petra laughs.
“Oh, I didn’t say I’d read it. But I had this history prof at Harvard who used to go on about it, if you can believe it. Small world.”
David resists the urge to ask the professor’s name.
“So this is the sort of work Harvard gets you these days?”
“Oh, I didn’t say I’d graduated.”
This time David laughs as well, too loudly.
The others have begun to drift off. Eric asks about David’s trip to the gun market.
“I picked up some LAVs and a truckload of M16s. I’m taking the city tonight after supper, if anyone’s up for it.”
“If it means I’d be able to get a drink in this place before midnight,” Petra says, “then I’m in.”
It comes to David that this is his cue. Any to share? He is glad of the mickey of gin he scrounged in his first days here on a booze run with some of the journalists.
“I’ve got a bottle back in my room you’re both welcome to.”
Petra lets the offer hang a few beats.
“Can’t say I’d mind. Eric, you in?”
Eric holds up his hands in a show of Gallic helplessness.
“Sadly, some of us have to work for a living.”
Petra draws a cigarette from her pack and David leans in to light it. She takes a long drag.
“I guess that leaves me and Mr. Pah-cheh, then.”
David pours a couple of generous shots of gin into the room’s plastic bar glasses and tops them with a splash of nearly flat tonic from an open can in his fridge. There is an ice machine down the hall but David has yet to see any evidence that it works.
“You need the fucking secret service to keep track of the supply line here these days,” Petra says. “I had some duty-free coming in and the bastards actually confiscated it.”
“I’m sure Eric can set you up. Or Yusuf.”
“Not Yusuf, the snake, he draws the line there. The whole not profiting from sin thing. By which he means what a sin it would be to cut into his profits from his price-gouging bar.”
David doesn’t let himself think how long it has been since he has had sex. More than once he has had to pay for it; more than once he has failed to finish. The last sex he had that actually mattered was with Sophie, also something he doesn’t let himself think about.
He has hardly set the bottle down before Petra is reaching for it to refill her glass. He catches a whiff of something as she leans in that seems too chemical, too deep, to be just the lingering alcohol breath of her previous night’s bender.
“So Harvard,” he says. “How was that?”
For a second she doesn’t seem sure what he is referring to.
“Shit, that was back in the dark ages. But totally Darwinian, you know, like in that movie, what the fuck was it? About social media. Kill or be killed.”
“Like here,” he says.
“No, this is civilized. At least here they use guns.”
The air conditioning is still out. From the service courtyard comes a burst of laughter and the tinny whine of a ghetto blaster playing Eminem.
“So. Failed states. I guess you’ve come to the right place. I’ve been to armpits but this is the asshole. The fucking colon.”
From the gin they move on to lines of Ritalin and from there to a few grams of sodium oxybate that David cuts with the last of the tonic. By the time their clothes come off, they are lost in a haze of not-quite-presence. It is clear by then that the smell coming off Petra is the acetone stink of the committed alcoholic. David has to fight to stay hard, trying to use his disgust as a way of rising above it.
Petra is already dressed and settled into the lone armchair with a cigarette before he has had time to so much as wipe the jism from him.
“Jesus fucking Christ, it felt like you were drilling for oil down there.”
He resists the impulse to say something cruel. She has fucked him for the sake of a bottle of gin without the least hint of apology or shame. There seems something almost admirable in this.
“You never said who that professor was. At Harvard.”
From the grin on her he knows at once he should have held his tongue.
“You’re shitting me, right? I thought you were on to me. Can you really see me at Harvard? Doing Roman history like some fucking princess?”
“I’m not following.” But he is beginning to.
“I was having you on, for Christ’s sake. That phone call?” She keys a few numbers on her phone and it rings. “It’s programmed, you idiot. For when I want a quick exit. Very handy. It gave me a chance to search you.”
He knows he ought to laugh the matter off.
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
“To tell you the truth I wanted to get at that pretentious fuckface Eric. The fact that it got me to your gin was a bonus.”
He just wants her gone now.
“I figured it was the liquor you were after from the fumes coming off you. But I’m the one who got the bonus. I’d have settled for a blow job.”
She shoots him a smile that drips malice.
“Fuck you too, Professor Pah-cheh. Or no, maybe not professor after all—looks like you lost your job. Oh, and here’s news, something about date rape. That wouldn’t have to do with that drug you were dosing me with, would it? Amazing what you can learn on the internet. If it’s any consolation, I knew all that and still let you fuck me.”
The only bearable part of this whole encounter for him now is that it will soon be over. Petra, though, takes her time with her cigarette as if this is what passes as connection for her.
“What are you, anyway? Forty-five? Fifty?”
“Are you going to sell me insurance?”
“It’s just, what the fuck are you doing here? I mean, seriously. I just hope you still have a real job somewhere. I hope you have a family or something, in which case, my advice? Get the next plane back to it. People die here.”
By the time she is gone he feels ready to peel off a layer of skin just to be free of her. It had taken her a matter of minutes to piece together all the sordid half-truths that dog him these days across encyclopedia sites and blog comments and academic forums, bits of innuendo and implication and lie that join up like a puzzle into a portrait of depravity. Greg’s handiwork: that has grown clear from the frequent allusions to plagiarism, which are all the more damning because they are always couched in a vagueness that makes them irrefutable. For a while David was spending hours of every day trying to put out every fire, though usually he only ended up feeding them. Bit by bit he had had to cut himself off, eventually even shutting down his web site.
Exhaustion takes him over and he stretches out on his bed. His stay feels poisoned now. By evening, when Petra joins the others at the bar to regale them with more war stories, he will be a laughingstock. People die here. He ought to get on a plane like she suggested and go home. Then he thinks of the cubicle that passes for home now, of his life, of the man he has become.
For days he holes himself up in his room, getting the kitchen boys to bring him his meals and seeing no one. He goes through his video footage and tries to get a start on some of the articles he has pitched; he goes through his book files, the palimpsest of notes and outlines and drafts inscribed into his hard drive going back more than a decade now. The numberless sections he has written up, then excised, then reinserted; the introductory chapter he has reworked a hundred times, polishing and repolishing, then losing faith and restarting from scratch. A million words or more, enough for a dozen books, for a project on the scale of Decline and Fall; as ambitious as that, as vast in its reach. His last hope.
He starts writing, in longhand, beginning at the beginning. It has been years since he has worked this way and the process feels incredibly primitive at first, the ink stains, the cramping, the snaking lines. But slowly he finds a rhythm. It is a relief to be forced to commit to a thought and move on. Then there is the pleasure of watching the pages begin to accumulate, these tangible objects with his tangible mark.
He cuts back on his meds to keep from burning himself out and tries to manage his sleep by napping for twenty minutes in every two-hour stretch. That, he has learned, is the rhythm of his disorder, corresponding roughly to the rhythm of lab rats in whom the neurotransmitters that govern waking and sleep have been knocked out of service. In their absence, mechanisms precisely tuned to calibrate darkness and light, to modulate metabolism, to pump the body with the stimulants that make possible the nine-to-five day humans take for granted cease to function. Instead, from the first moment of wakefulness the craving for sleep begins to build.
The routine breeds its own peculiar brand of altered consciousness, until he starts to lose track of the days. He has the sense he is devolving, regressing to what creatures might have been back when there was only sleep in the world, only the protozoal heave and stir of sensation and reflex. Then one afternoon he goes down to the lobby in search of paper and finds the hotel strangely deserted, as though he has slept through some apocalypse. He wanders into the courtyard and sees that no one is manning the gate, which sits ajar.
The light from the street beckons him. He steps through the gate and follows the street in a direction he hasn’t taken before, away from the downtown. With each step the neighbourhood grows more desolate, the houses more tottering and ruined, though he feels no sense of danger. An old man who sits smoking a pipe on his front step offers it out to him and laughs and David acknowledges the gesture with a wave and walks on.
He comes to a cross street. In the distance an arched gateway like the portal of a walled city looks out to a vista of such unearthly blue it looks like a painted backdrop. It takes David a second to make sense of it: the sea. He passes through the gate and the sea lies stretched out in front of him to the horizon, edged by a ribbon of white beach. After the days of being holed up in his room he feels dazzled. Some children are playing in the surf, running back and forth as the waves break, holding their sarongs up to keep them dry, and it is all David can do not to join them.
Back at the hotel, Yusuf accosts him in the lobby.
“It is all arranged for tomorrow, Mr. Pace! After afternoon prayers. My driver will take you.”
David has almost forgotten by now: the Malana.
“Fine, fine.” He still sees the children at the beach, their black, black skin, their coloured sarongs. It seems almost impossible now that he hasn’t merely imagined them. “Will any of the others come?”
“No, no, Mr. Pace, there is only you! The talks have finished by now.”
David can’t quite take this in.
“I’ll have to see.”
“No worries, of course, of course. In the morning everything can be settled.”
He is already back in his room before he realizes he has forgotten to get paper. On his desk, his finished pages sit waiting for him. He slips them into a drawer.
At breakfast the dining room is nearly deserted. Yusuf is on David at once, making arrangements.
“You can take two of the guards, I think. It’s better.”
“Just one. Just Wali.”
“Of course, Mr. Pace, of course, you are right.”
David negotiates the use of Wali for the morning as part of his price so he can get more video footage of the downtown, giving in to the beginning-of-the-day optimism that still dogs him, that still makes him feel there might be a point. They go on foot, making their way to the central boulevard and continuing north to the presidential palace, where the provisional government sits. All that is visible from the street is the high stucco wall that rings its compound, studded with watchtowers and topped with a double row of razor wire. David stares up into one of the towers to get footage of it and a soldier turns his rifle on him with what looks like real intent. David can feel the Beretta pressing against his hip beneath the cover of his shirt.
“No worries, Mr. David,” Wali says. “The only one they will shoot is the one with a gun.”
They keep walking. Farther along the wall a service gate swings open suddenly and three cars come shooting out of it in quick succession, not the usual armoured government sedans but the sort of rattletrap Asian imports the streets here are filled with. Almost at once they disappear around a corner.
Wali looks ready to spit.
“Is the government,” he says. “Always the same. Every morning they go like this to the town to drink tea, to show that the city is theirs. No fear! But then why every time they are using different cars, different gate?”
“Where do they go?”
“Downtown. Different places. I can show you. Like children, I tell you, playing their games.”
David takes the risk of hailing a street taxi to try to track them down, thinking it might make a good clip if he got some of them on camera touting their fearlessness, then edited in Wali’s scathing commentary. Wali directs the driver to what looks like the bohemian quarter, every second shop a tea house or eatery or internet café. The streets are the usual mess of torn pavement and blockages, the taxi moving at a snail’s pace. They pass children touting Marlboros and Coke, begging lepers, a cluster of hut-like tents of bent branches and rain sheeting that spills into the roadway from an empty lot like a misplaced village.
It is Wali who spots the cars, parked at the bottom of a short side street that gives onto some sort of hotel. The street is blocked at their end by a small street market.
“Is one of their places,” Wali says. “Come, we can walk, is faster.”
They have to thread their way through the market. David nearly trips over a boy with stumps for legs who has been plopped down on a mat like a sack of goods. Behind them a taxi has turned into the street and is trying to force its way through the crowd, people shouting and pounding on the hood though still the car keeps inching forward. David gets a glimpse of the driver’s face as he goes by, impassive as if the crowd were just weather he needed to get through.
It is only when the car is free of the market and has begun to accelerate that the strangeness of it begins to come clear. By then it is too late. The explosion is over in such a flash that David registers it only as a kind of blankness, a hole in the centre of things that there is no way to think about or know. For a moment, in the blankness, he isn’t sure that he is still alive, that whatever it is that is him is still somehow attached to his flesh and bone. Then the noise and the dust come at him like a wall and the world reasserts itself, a barrrage of indiscriminate sensation.
He is on the ground, breathing dirt, and some ghost is pulling at him.
Mr. David!
Shouts and wails, car alarms, points of pain, the chemical smell of spent explosives and burning fuel. Everywhere smoke and dust and rubble, twisted metal, uncertain lumps of things his mind can’t take in. Where the hotel stood, there is only fog and flame.
“Mr. David! We must go!”
People run screaming in every direction, jostling him, falling and not getting up. A big man in flowing robes looms up out of the murk clutching a bloodied sack that turns out to be a boy.
From somewhere, utterly distinct, the wail of a child.
A soldier is shouting at him.
“Why have you come to this place, you stupid man! Get back!”
The ghost is still at his elbow: Wali, entirely grey with dust.
“Mr. David, we must go! Someone can hurt you! Someone can take you!”
They hurry back through the market, in chaos now. The wail of the child follows them up the street, then goes silent.
They have to fight their way back to the hotel on foot, through streets grown frenetic. Sporadic checkpoints have sprung up but they seem only to heighten the tension, the soldiers manning them paranoid and green and on edge. Wali has called the hotel on David’s pay-and-go to get Said to come fetch them, but they see no sign of him.
“I think he is sleeping,” Wali says with disgust. “For khat he can leave his own mother to die.”
As they near the hotel the streets grow quieter, until there are no soldiers or crowds and they have reached a kind of eerie normalcy again. Only now does David realize how filthy he is, how his whole body aches like a single bruise. He touches a hand to his head: his video glasses are gone. He waits for the disappointment to set in at the footage he has lost, at what he might have done with it, but feels only a dim relief.
Yusuf comes hurrying out of the hotel gate to greet them.
“Such a terrible thing, terrible! Thank God you are safe! It’s very bad, what has happened, maybe six or seven ministers, dead! I sent the car for you, of course, but the checkpoints turned it back.”
In his room David showers at once, trying to wash away the grit and the smell, though they cling to him like a second skin. He isn’t sure if the dullness he feels is indifference or shock or something else. He keeps expecting some upsurge of emotion or understanding, something to make him feel he is on the inside of what has happened instead of at this strange remove.
He sits at his desk to clean the Beretta. Grit has entered every crevice again. He wipes down the guide and the spring, the receiver, the slide, scrubs the barrel again. The work seems to calm him, to bring him back to himself, to his body, as if all this time he has not quite dared to make a commitment to it again. Now the images begin to come back to him, though it strikes him as odd that what he most remembers are the things he most turned from, the glistening bits in the street, gut or limb or severed head, the fallen heaps like shattered mannequins. All of it familiar from the news yet utterly foreign, with none of the quickening that catastrophe brought at a distance, only the turning away and the guilty blood rush—irrepressible, obscene—of having survived.
David checks the time: not yet noon. It is hard to believe that less than half the day has passed. That the rest of his life still stretches in front of him.
In the fevered light of afternoon he wanders Ostia Antica. The handsome guide is there, walking ahead of David with the patrician air of someone who knows he will be followed. Past the tombs outside the gates, past the warehouses and the baths and the forum, to a construction site where he is building an apartment block amidst the ruins. In one smooth motion he edges a brick with mortar and sets it in place. The precision of it, the artistry, leaves David breathless.
Someone is pounding at the door.
“They are expecting you, Mr. Pace! You must come! On account of the curfew!”
Yusuf.
“Just a minute, for Christ’s sake.”
Somehow the interview is still on. David has to fight to make sense of this.
“What about the roads?” he says. “The checkpoints?”
“It is not a problem, sir. Only there is the curfew now, you must return before dark.”
He ought to be gone, like the journalists. Ought to pack his bags and head home instead of risking his life for an interview he doesn’t need for a book he will never finish.
“Give me a few minutes.”
His clothes of the morning are ruined and he has to pick from the few clean ones he still has on hand. An aging pair of chinos, a light blazer; a dress shirt he’ll have to wear untucked, to cover the Beretta. He tests the gun for concealment and snags, then chambers a round and sets the safety and tucks it into his holster.
His mind keeps returning to the blast. To that sense of being there at ground zero at the crucial instant yet somehow unable to take it in. There seems some lesson in that, if only he could make sense of it.
Wali is squatting in the shade of the guardhouse eating some kind of stew from a battered tin bowl. At the sight of David, his grin, like manna falling.
“Mr. David! We are still alive, isn’t it?”
A boy darts out from the kitchen courtyard and sets a cup of milky tea at Wali’s feet. David recognizes him as the one Said delivered a backhand to some days earlier.
“Is my son,” Wali says. The boy is five or six, dressed in a dirty white thawb that is a miniature of his father’s. “Name is Wali. Same like mine.”
David remembers the hard set of the boy’s shoulders when Said struck him, the glisten of tears held back. That he himself said nothing.
“Wali is a good name.” He hands the boy a coin as if he were merely the good-hearted foreigner Wali seems to see him as. “Your father is a good man.”
Wali beams.
“Ah, Mr. David! I think you are joking! I think you want to kill me!”
There is a sound of raised voices from the lobby and Said and Yusuf emerge in the midst of some heated argument. Said slumps into his chair beneath the palm and Yusuf picks up a stone and flings it at him, hard.
“Why are you sitting, fool? The customer is waiting, can’t you see that? Didn’t you sleep enough in the morning?”
Said rises like a sulking schoolboy and makes his way to the car. He kicks out at Wali as he passes him and knocks over his teacup.
“Move, animal! Open the gate!”
They set out. David sits in back and Wali up front with his rifle. The streets feel less frenzied now. At the checkpoints Said flashes a permit of some sort and they are let through without a word. But when they reach the central boulevard, they find it clogged with traffic. Taxis and crowded minibuses, army transports, big tankers and semis whose stink of diesel fills the Peugeot. It is hard to tell whether people are simply going about their business or fleeing for their lives. They pass a stake truck laden with bulging burlap sacks watched over by half a dozen riflemen, a single phrase in English sticking out amidst the lines of Arabic that cover its panels: Road to Heaven.
Said tries to skirt the traffic by detouring along side streets and back lanes. They go past courtyard kitchens, communal latrines, rows of battered tin lean-tos built against the backs of ruined buildings. Past areas of blight where the houses look cobbled together like children’s creations, of mud and tin and coloured plastic; where whole city blocks have been flattened to nothing as though a giant jackboot had stepped on them. Toddlers play naked amidst the ruins; a gang of boys sit perched on the shell of a burnt-out LAV. To the east David thinks he can make out the intimation of the sea, a kind of heightened glow at the horizon line like the blue nimbus of a computer screen.
Wali keeps his eyes peeled. David has yet to see him engage the safety on his rifle.
“I think we must join the main road again. Is dangerous here. Someone can stop us. They can take the car.”
Said shoots a smirk back at David.
“Take the car? What is that fucking gun for then, man? What are you doing here?”
The flat grid of the downtown gradually gives way to the slopes of the foothills. As the land rises the streets grow harder to navigate, more and more tortuous and steep and riven with gullies or ruined by war. These were the Strangers’ Quarters, emptied out by the waves of cleansing, then reduced to rubble during the jihadist occupation. Here and there, though, lengths of street remain eerily intact, houses with curtains still billowing through their open windows, shops with their signs still hanging and their doors in place as if their owners have merely stepped out for the afternoon pause.
When they finally rejoin the main road it is no longer the grand divided boulevard of downtown but a single stretch of pocked asphalt flanked by open sewers and by the usual string of crumbling storefronts and street stalls. There is habitation here, though the traffic is mostly bicycles and carts and the street life seems to cling to doorways as if afraid to come out in the open. There are no trees, nothing green in any direction, not so much as a weed, everything reduced to the rust colour of the barren mountains that rise up in the distance.
They have left the government zone. It is only a matter of minutes before they come to a roadblock, an old plank laid across two oil drums. It is watched over by a handful of boys who look barely past puberty, dressed in a mishmash of hip hop and army surplus and sporting what look like Chinese M16s.
Instead of his permit Said flashes an American ten. An older boy wearing a hood despite the heat peers into the car, smiles, shakes his head. A twitch of anger crosses Said’s face and he and Hoodie exchange a few words. A couple of the other boys shift, moving in closer, and Said finally adds a second ten to the first.
The boy flashes an unfriendly grin in at David.
“Thank you, G.I. Joe!” And waves them on.
They have barely gone another half a mile before they spot a second roadblock. Said curses under his breath and makes a quick turn onto a dirt side street that climbs up over the main road. Wali is unable to hold his tongue.
“You must use the main road! I’m telling you!”
Said scowls.
“Is this your city? Tell me that!”
The street looks at first like it might let them bypass the roadblock but only ends up taking them higher up the slopes, into a neighbourhood that grows ever more haunted and desolate and ruined. They are the only traffic here, the only thing alive. Said takes a turn, then another, but each seems only to lead them farther from the main road.
“You must go back!” Wali says. “Is the only way, you stupid man!”
The veins in Said’s neck bulge.
“Watch your fucking tongue, do you hear me? Watch your fucking tongue!”
“For the love of God,” David says, “just do what he tells you and go back!”
Without a word Said does a lurching three-point turn in the narrow street to wheel the car around. But at the first intersection they come to he stops short, seeming already unsure what direction they have come from.
Wali cranes suddenly forward.
“Look! Over there! In those buildings!”
“What?” Said says. “What is it, for fuck’s sake?”
“There! You can see! There is someone! We must go quickly! Go back!”
David peers into the skeletal patchwork of ruined buildings but can make out only the criss-crossing of darkness and light.
“It’s probably just some fucking beggar!” Said says.
“Go quickly! I’m telling you!”
Said manoeuvres them down a steep lane that ends in a square overlooked by the ruins of a small church. Several streets come off it. Said hesitates, then takes the first one.
“You are only guessing now, isn’t it?” Wali yells. “Is not a joke, my friend! They are coming, I tell you, more than one!”
“Who saw them? Only you! A child, seeing ghosts! A frightened woman!”
Said brakes.
“Fucking hell!”
A trench has been cut into the roadway, a good four or five feet across. It might be a leftover from the jihadist occupation or something more insidious, some warlord’s attempt to make these streets impassable, to trap the unwitting in them like rats in a maze.
Wali is shouting.
“Why did you want to come here, in these streets? I said to you, go back! Is the only way!”
“Don’t raise your voice at me, bushman! Don’t tell me my fucking business!”
Said hits the gas and backs up toward the square. As he rounds the corner, one of the tires catches on something and the car swerves. There is a sickening jolt and crunch of metal and the car comes to a wrenching stop. Said puts it in forward and guns the engine but the tires merely spin and spin, spewing grit and burning rubber.
The back end of the car has got lodged on a slab of fallen wall from the church. David and Wali push while Said guns the engine again, but the car refuses to budge. From somewhere, the smell of gasoline.
Said gets out of the car and Wali is on him at once, shaking his rifle at him as if ready to shoot him on the spot.
“You useless, useless man! How can you save us now? Do you want to kill us, to do this?”
“Shut your fucking mouth, old man! I’ll kill you anytime I want, if it comes to that! I’ll snap your fucking throat!”
“You think you can kill me? Such a useless man? When can you kill me? Try it now! Try it!”
Somehow it all reads as slapstick to David, even as Said lunges for Wali, even as he grabs for his gun. He is no match for Wali, who is all muscle and sinew, all reflex. Except that Wali hesitates. David sees it, the flash of uncertainty, maybe just a reflex born of years of servitude or the sudden understanding that there is no way, for an outsider like him, that this matter can end in his favour.
As soon as Said has hold of the gun his finger is on the trigger, even before he has got it properly away, so that for an instant he seems as shocked by the barrage that comes out of it as David is. But then once it has started, everything that follows has a gruesome air of inevitability.
“Who’s killing you now, you fucking son of a whore? Who’s killing you now?”
“For Christ’s sake, stop!”
There will be no way afterwards to parse the next seconds with any sureness, if Said shifts the barrel in accident or with intent, if David makes a decision or simply gives in to an impulse no more conscious or chosen than sleep. He will remember the sensation of bullets whizzing by, close enough, it feels, to scorch his skin, but not the deciding.
At the camp they called it the Failure Drill, the one that targeted the stopping zones. Two shots to the heart, then one to the head. Like taking breaths. Click, click and click.
It is done.
There is a long moment like after the bomb blast when there is only undifferentiated sensation. Then time pushes forward again and everything begins to reassume its unbearable separateness. The mad echo of the shots still hangs among the ruined buildings. Slumped on the ground near the back end of the Peugeot, some object he doesn’t quite look at.
He has the dead feeling he recognizes from dreams, of no going back.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Somehow, he needs to clean up this wreckage. Needs to find a doctor, police, all the structures he takes for granted.
Wali’s chest is a mess of blood.
“I’ll get help. Just hold on.” David sits in the street holding Wali’s thin frame against his own. “Someone will come, they’ll fix you.”
The blood pools at Wali’s belly, gets on David’s hands, his clothes, seeps into the dirt.
“Mr. David,” he whispers, his voice already the barest rustling.
David tries again and again to reach Yusuf on his phone until the keypad is caked with blood, but he can’t get a signal. He tries to stanch Wali’s wounds, but there are too many. Think, he thinks, as if there is something he has overlooked, some solution. Stop the bleeding. Call for help. But the blood comes from everywhere. The help is worlds away.
“Fuck! FUCK!”
The car keys are still in the ignition. David opens the trunk to check for some sort of tire iron or jack to try to get the car free. From somewhere a sound of movement, ghosts or the wind, then a voice in his head.
G.I. Joe! Why have you killed those men?
A crack and a hiss of split air, a puff of dust.
G.I. Joe! Why can’t you kill us?
Laughter, from the shadows. The laughter of boys. It comes to him: the boys from the checkpoint.
Another crack, a ping of metal. The thought forms in his head like a stage direction that they are shooting at him.
“G.I. Joe, why can’t you pay us?”
He has to find cover. He heaves Wali up from the dirt and carries him to the church, clambering with him over the rubble of the ruined foyer trying to reach the beckoning gloom of the nave. As he moves, another shot. Pain shoots through his leg like a spike.
“G.I. Joe, can we come to your church? Maybe the priest can pray for us!”
He props Wali against a wall that looks like it is out of any line of fire and checks his leg. There is a livid gash just below the knee. He bandages it as best he can with a torn shred of pant leg, then sets about trying to bandage Wali, tearing strips from his blazer and from Wali’s tunic. The task feels hopeless. He can’t seem to fashion bandages long enough or tie them tight enough to stop the blood.
Wali’s eyes have dimmed like a sleepy child’s.
“G.I. Joe, we are coming!”
He can hear them talking amongst themselves in lowered voices, part of his mind reverting to training mode, trying to gauge how many they are, what direction they’re coming from. There are a dozen rounds left in his Beretta, which is still at his hip, where he must have returned it with the same trained automatism with which he drew it; there are another dozen or so in Wali’s rifle out in the street, which he could make a run for. Then one by one he could pick them off. Except this is no simulation. There is no math here that can make things add up.
The behaviour of children.
“Are you there, G.I. Joe? We are close!”
He needs to go. There isn’t any question of bringing Wali, who is no longer conscious, though the failure weighs on him more than any other. He moves as quickly as his leg allows him, slipping out a side door of the church and up a narrow lane that runs between the backs of houses. It brings him out to a street a block over, from where he works his way through the ruins until he has put another block behind him and the boys’ voices have receded.
His leg is dripping blood.
“Don’t shoot now, G.I. Joe! We will kill you, no joke!”
They are closing in on the church. There is shouting, gunfire, the sound of smashing glass. Then a final shot, muted, as though from inside a building.
“G.I. Joe!” The tone is so buoyant, so good-natured, it is almost heartening. “Where is your friend now? Why can’t you take him?”
David ducks into an abandoned tenement, his leg throbbing. He manages to climb to the top floor and finds a back staircase that leads up to the roof, where he tries to get a signal on his phone. Still nothing. The roof is lined with a row of tin shanties like the garrets of Roman insulae and David huddles up in one. It is the merest oven, stripped of everything except its smell, human and stale, though through the doorway he can see out over almost the entire city, past the ruin and blight of the surrounding neighbourhoods all the way to the presidential palace and the telecommunications tower and the little cluster of high-rises along the central boulevard. Farther out, the empty warehouses and abandoned factories, the rusting freighters moored at the docks, and then the sea, which stretches to the horizon.
He ought to tend to his wound. Ought to bind his ankle, which has started to swell from some misstep.
The blood on his hands, on his clothes, has started to set.
He can hear the locusts gathering at the base of his brain, reassuring almost in their quiet suasion. Somehow he has misplaced his pill pod, has left it behind in the tattered remains of his blazer or in his pants from the morning, so that there is nothing for it but to let them swarm.
“G.I. Joe! Is useless to hide in this place, we will find you!”
Hide and seek.
The sun has begun to fall, precipitously, though it has hung at the midpoint for what has felt like hours, days, millennia. From his perch David tries to gauge the angle of its descent, but it is hopelessly out of kilter, off its axis perhaps or the building is, or the whole city. The city has changed somehow: he hadn’t noticed the hills before, or the tombs that line the decumanus outside the gates. How every district is colour-coded, red or purple or green, the hyper-blue of the sea an absolute border that cannot be crossed. In a glance he is able to take in the whole of the city as though it were no larger than a screen, than his own brain, every street and speck of dust and shift of afternoon light, every murder, every cup of spilled tea.
He thinks of his phone again and then it comes to him, the one call he could make.
He hopes he isn’t too late.
David awakes to find a boy no older than Marcus staring down at him, with the same liquid eyes as Marcus, gleaming with life.
“G.I. Joe!” Looking genuinely pleased to see him. “So we have found you!”
The boy is dressed in full army gear, his uniform perfectly creased, immaculate. David knows he should be afraid and yet the situation has the air of a pleasant game.
“How did you know where I was?”
“How? Is too easy! The blood! Can’t you see it, my friend? Is there, every step, like you are showing the way.”
It is true. The back of his leg is a mass of oozing blood. He can’t believe he hasn’t taken better care.
“I think you are taking a bullet there,” the boy says. “You must be a soldier, my friend! You must be marine!”
Somehow they make their way down to the street, though each time David glances at his leg it seems more bloated and ruined.
“You look like my son,” he says to the boy. “Marcus.”
The boy grins.
“Is also my name! Marcus! Come, I can show you the way.”
There are more boys on the street, in the same immaculate gear. Marcus leads them forward, the other boys flanking David like an honour guard. The streets are better now, surfaced with paving stones in the Roman fashion and leading up and up, into the very clouds. The buildings are the same ruined ones, except that gradually the heaps of rubble scattered amidst the wreckage reveal themselves as encampments, the clusters of burlap and tin that cling to the upper storeys as makeshift hovels. It is like a city camouflaged in the ruins of a city. And everywhere boys, who begin to emerge in the tens, in the hundreds, an army of children ranging from toddlers to strapping teens. Boys scrubbing clothes, fixing old furniture, stirring cauldrons of food over huge firepits, though wherever he and Marcus pass they break away from whatever they are doing to follow along. Slowly a chatter builds, an energy.
“They are happy to see you,” Marcus says. “That you are safe.”
He leads David to a cliff face where a cave stretches back and back into shadow, jammed floor to ceiling with rows of packing crates, steel drums, pallets piled high with cartons and bulging sacks. They walk through the narrow aisles, deeper and deeper into the cave, but still David can’t make out where it ends. They pass a stack of bakers’ trays filled with the cigar-shaped rolls David’s mother used to buy when he was a boy. Marcus hands him one, still warm. The smell of it seems to hold the whole of David’s life.
“Is very old, this place,” Marcus says. “They say my people have lived here a million years. But still we are children.”
They climb higher. Up a great stone staircase like those of the pyramids of the Mesoamericans, the hangers-on swelled to a rabble by now, trailing alongside like the cheering crowds at a triumph. With each step David feels lighter. At the summit, a boy of five or six sits in the shade of a canopy of old lumber and tin, dressed in full military regalia.
“Is our leader,” Marcus says.
David wonders what he has done with the bread Marcus has given him it, if he ought to have brought it as an offering. If the David who has appeared here is one he can trust.
“What do I say to him?”
“Ask him your question,” Marcus says. “He has been expecting it.”
The leader comes forward. Any second now he will emerge from the shadows with the answer David has been waiting for all his life.
Shouting, frantic, and a boy in a dirty wife-beater, no more than eight or nine, is jabbing him hard with the point of a rifle.
“Stay there! Stay there! I will shoot!” Wild-eyed, so that no response seems the right one.
An older boy stands laughing behind him.
“Is not a goat, to poke him like that!” He is dressed in a torn Public Enemy T-shirt that shows a swath of bony ribs. “Is not a chicken!”
But he pokes David in turn to make him rise.
“You see, we have found you, G.I. Joe!” Up close like this there is nothing buoyant in his tone, nothing heartening. “Now we can kill you!”
They force David down to the street at gunpoint, paying no attention to his leg. Three more boys are waiting there, just as ragtag, all with rifles. None looks any older than David’s own son. One has a second rifle slung over his back: Wali’s.
Public Enemy pulls David’s Beretta from his own waistband. David hadn’t even noticed it was missing.
“Is nice gun, G.I. Joe, how much in America? Two hundred? Two-fifty?”
“I bought it here,” David says.
The boy ignores him. He aims the Beretta at his young sidekick’s head and the whole group seems to ready itself for whatever antic is about to follow.
“Boom!” Public Enemy says. Then he raises the gun ever so slightly and pulls the trigger.
The air explodes and a look a terror crosses the boy’s face before he erupts in fury, pounding his fists at Public Enemy and trying to wrest the Beretta from him. The other boys are doubled over.
“Boom!” they say, again and again, reliving the moment.
Public Enemy leads the way, up streets that rise higher and higher yet only keep repeating the same landscape of ruin. Two of the other boys flank him at a distance. David’s leg has purpled and swelled from his ankle to his knee, but they offer no help.
“G.I. Joe!” Public Enemy says. “Why are you walking so bad? Come now, we are almost there!”
From a distance come urgent shouts and imprecations. They pass what look like the remains of a school and come to a dusty playing field: a group of boys are playing soccer.
“I think you know this game, G.I. Joe. Can you play it?”
The boys crowd around them at the edge of the field as if David were some prize game animal Public Enemy had bagged. Public Enemy spins out his story until he has everyone in stitches.
“ ‘Stay there, stay there, I will shoot you!’ ”
Some of the boys are as young as four or five, all with the same anemic look of having been out too long in the open. It jars David how close it all is to his dream, the company of boys, the laughter and jokes. Public Enemy has got to the part about the Beretta.
“Boom!” he says, and the sidekick pounds at him again, and everyone laughs.
There is a sudden hush, and the boys part to let someone through. It is the older boy from the checkpoint, still in his hood but looking larger now, more the leader, no longer just a kid extorting petty cash at the side of the road. He ignores David and goes straight to Public Enemy, meeting his expectant grin with a backhand that nearly knocks him over.
“Is this how you bring in a prisoner? Did you think to tie him? What if he runs? What if he grabs for your gun?”
Before he has finished saying it he has pulled the Beretta from Public Enemy’s waist. Public Enemy looks close to tears.
“Sorry, sir.”
“And then you go bragging! How long did it take you to find him? Why did you let him kill that man? What of the car they were driving, what has become of it? We are not playing here, you fool! This is no game!”
Only now does he turn to David. His cheeks are gouged with tribal markings David hadn’t noticed before, just healed-over gashes, really, so crude they look self-inflicted.
“So you don’t want to pay the tolls, G.I. Joe. But now you will pay.”
There is barely enough time for David to think of the pettiness of this before the boy cracks the butt of the Beretta against his skull and his mind goes blank.
In the old stories it is only in hell that the hero learns what will set him free. The trick is remembering. The trick is making it back.
These are the things that David can no longer remember: What it felt like the first time he made love to Julia. The first time he held Marcus. When he learned his father was dead. The images are there, the memories of the events, but not the important thing, what mattered most. As with history. Only to show how it actually was. A joke.
Even now, after so many years, he still has his dreams of returning to his father’s hometown. The dream is always the same and yet never quite; there is always the train that pulls into a station, made up of luxurious sleepers or the filthy cattle cars of concentration camp transports, or there is no train at all, just an arrival, a sense of walking through streets at once familiar and utterly foreign. People greet him and smile, then stare after him from behind closed curtains. Tell him nothing. Tell him everything. Tell him he is lost, has made a mistake, has taken a wrong turn, or wonder how someone who claims such an interest in history has not even bothered to understand his own.
He is the man of history who wants to stand outside it. Who wants to think he is born out of nothing. Who doesn’t want to pay.
He must remember to save a coin for the ferryman for the trip back.
David opens his eyes, to the taste of blood.
He is on his knees at the edge of the playing field, under the slanting afternoon sun. He tries to move but feels strangely encumbered, realizes his hands are bound, his ankles are. That the sun is like daggers.
He tries to remember what dream this is. If only there were a clock, or a mirror, or a book.
“G.I. Joe, you have come back from the dead!” The boy in the hood stands over him, haloed in the sun but somehow not blocking it. “You are welcome, G.I. Joe, you are welcome!”
Laughter and jeers. The whole troupe surrounds him now with their rifles and rags, dozens of them, a republic of boys, their leader’s joke rippling through them. G.I. Joe! You are welcome!
“Do you think is a game, G.I. Joe? Do you think you have come here to play? You can join us for football. You can show us American style.”
More laughter. David knows he has to make the effort to think more clearly, to understand, yet the more he understands the more his leg throbs, the more his wrists and ankles burn, the more the sun pokes its daggers.
The boy still has the Beretta. He makes a show of inspecting it, flicks the safety on, then off again.
“US M9,” he says. “Very fine, very fine. How much, this gun, in your country?”
The question feels more freighted this time.
“I bought it here,” he says, as before.
“Here? I think you are lying, my friend! Is not possible here, this gun. Only American soldiers and CIA.”
“Maybe some soldier left it behind. Maybe only his body went home.”
He regrets his tone at once. There are some titters among the boys and then screaming pain as Hoodie cracks his skull again.
“You think we are joking here, with your lies, but is no joke! Tell me why you have come here, G.I. Joe. Who has sent you?”
He needs to tell them about the Malana, about his book. About Wali’s son waiting for his father’s return in the kitchen courtyard; about his own. At bottom, though, he knows the boy is right. Knows he is steeped in lies, that there would be no end to the unravelling of them.
He can’t shake the dream he had of these boys before they took him, the feeling that he is the one who has chosen which version is dream and which is real.
“I’m a journalist,” is all he gets out, and then another hammer blow.
“Lies, my friend! Where is your press card? Where is your recorder? Where is your pen? The truth is you are a killer, isn’t it? The truth is you are a spy, CIA!”
There it is, finally, the ludicrous charge, almost heartbreaking in its insufficiency.
The mountains that rise up at the end of the playing field seem to hold them here as on a stage. David imagines all his separate selves massing in the wings like a chorus, readying for the final turn.
The boy presses the gun to his head.
“Last chance, G.I. Joe. Only the truth!”
The sun beats down.
In his last years of high school David had developed a small trade in pot and hashish in his neighbourhood so he wouldn’t have to go begging for cash to his father. Once he crossed a dealer in the Jungle by underselling him and the dealer showed up at David’s school in his beat-up Olds.
“No funny business. Just to talk. Man to man.”
David got in the car. That was how green he was then, how arrogant.
They drove out to an empty parking lot and smoked a joint. The dealer had such an easy manner it was hard not to like him.
“Back home we fix this kind of problem very quickly,” he said, as if setting up a punch line.
“And how’s that?”
“It’s very easy.”
He reached in his glove box and pulled out a small silver-plated pistol. David knew nothing of handguns in those days and thought at first it was some kind of toy.
He put the gun to David’s head.
“You see how easy? Before you can close your eyes, the problem is solved.”
Click.
David felt wetness beneath him.
“No worries, man. Stay out of the Jungle and your secret is safe.”
The fear before the hammer had fallen had been like black poison going through him, like a blinding flash in the darkest corner of himself. Yet even then there was that part of him that had thrilled, awaiting the bullet as if there were already a phantom space in his brain set to receive it.
The accusations move through the boys like a wind or a fire, killer, liar, spy. Then the refrain. Make him pay.
With the gun to his head David sees things more clearly. The stark contours of the mountains at one end of the field, the vivid blue of the sea at the other. That he can take so much in, that his brain can hold it, is a wonder to him.
If he walked far enough through the desert that stretches out beyond the city he would reach the outposts of ancient Rome, the still-standing custom houses and theatres and city walls, and then beyond them the pyramid tombs of the pharaohs, the ziggurats and ruined temples, the valleys that were the very birthplace of the human race. All of this he has wanted to give a shape to, right back to the animal past that was still almost all of what humans were, back to the shifting continents and striking meteors and drifting orbits that made every notion of virtue and blame, of progress, of hope, an irrelevance. Thinking it his job to breach every protocol and wake every sleeper. As though, if he cast wide enough, if he took in enough of the muck and the gore, the animal stench, the cold mineral sheen of indifference, even the likes of himself could be accounted for.
The sun has begun to drop behind the mountains, giving them the unworldly look of a planet in its end times, a place where no one has yet spoken the words and yet day by day, the certainty grows.
Hoodie’s finger is on the trigger.
“What can we do with this liar, this killer? Why should we save him?”
Make him pay.
Any minute now, David is sure of it, he can feel the urge growing in him like the howl of all his disparate selves, he will do the thing that will land a bullet in his brain. He has never felt more awake.