Stop infectionHe who conquers a city is as nothing compared to he who conquers his own nature.
—David Mamet
It was pointless trying to sleep. I slip out of the hooch into the sprawling mess of Camp Fallujah. I walk in uncertain flip-flop steps over fields of smooth rocks meant to bury the powdery sand, which always found its way up with the faintest encouragement. I pick my way along the catwalk flanking the Cummins generator that churns an end-of-the-world grinding noise, using a small xenon flashlight to avoid waist-high coils of concertina wire. Was there ever a real threat of infiltration?
“Camp used to house some real tough mudders,” the marines said. “Saddam kept ’em on the outskirts of Fallujah to intimidate the city, keep it in line.”
Now it houses American marines, there to do the same. In clusters of brutalist one-story structures with blacked-out windows operate intelligence fusion centers and logistics teams and endless other functions of HQ. What little rain spatters onto their slopeless roofs steams off. On I wander, over fields of gravel, past an egg-shaped pond with water so dark that three feet looks like a dozen. A single swan glides ghostly across its oil-slick surface. The generator is far behind now; all I can hear is the ship-ship of my sandals. I pass through the camp’s checkpoint and trudge past the boneyard and its acres of broken-down and half-exploded cars and trucks. The sun is peeking up over the dead fields as I approach the city.
The city wakes, and I hide behind the gnarled remains of a detonated sedan on Route Ethan, weaponless and American. A bowel-shuddering dread seeps in as I watch the darkened blood of a butchered lamb trickling along a nearby sidewalk, dusted with Anbari sand. I want to crawl into the car to hide, but it has been mangled beyond any degree of car-ness: there are no doors, no roof, no tires, only a thornbush of splintered and blackened steel and melted upholstery. I want to crawl under the car, but it grows from the pavement—there is no under. Nearby, a black blossom of char blooms in the middle of the road where the car exploded. The sun is climbing, an executioner’s blade overhead, dropping hours of light before I can try to escape under cover of night back to Camp Fallujah.
An errant soccer ball rolls up, stopping at my feet. A Falluji kid races over, his laugh turning into a gasp as he spots me, and then an excited yell. Shoulders and heads appear, forming an ever-tightening clutch around me, their talk turning to shouts and hands grabbing for me. Fuck. No. No!
The No! lurches me awake into West Chicago. The nightmare waits for me just on the other side of sleep, waiting to replay when I can no longer keep my body awake. There is a wretched pain emanating somewhere from my face, so eclipsing in its fullness that it takes some time to identify the source: I have thrashed my fiberglassed arms against the mob of my nightmare, clocking my broken jaw and severed lips in the process. More blood flows into my mouth and onto my tongue, and I am now irreversibly awake, as another night of potential sleep and recovery slinks from the room. I have wounds to tend, drugs to take. Once back in bed, I turn on the television and stare at infomercials until sunrise and the stirring of my parents downstairs.
In the beginning, despite it all, there was hope. I wanted to go back to Fallujah. I wasn’t supposed to be home yet and did not call my friends to let them know I was back. There was no point getting comfortable: I would heal up in a few weeks, I figured, and be back in Iraq to finish my work.
But I was a wreck. My legs, the last piece of me to hit concrete, were somehow spared, although several of my toes had split open at the tips like small lobster claws. I had to hoist my feet high to ensure I’d clear each step on the stairs, since my big toes were wrapped comically in a tennis-ball-sized mass of gauze. With my casted arms and railroad tracks of stitches across my face, I lurched through the house like a medicated Frankenstein.
It hurt to move. At the slightest movement, an ache would scramble through my arteries up to my head and pause in a menacing stance. If I kept going, it would twist and squeeze different parts of my brain without hesitation. I learned my place, that I could not best it, that I would listen to it, which meant that I did everything with great deliberation and delay. I wondered if this was what I had to look forward to if I ever grew old, which seemed unlikely considering my condition, when a good morning meant I hadn’t sleepwalked out of bed.
During the first morning, I ambled down to the basement computer and wrote two emails. The first was to the First Marine Expeditionary Force to tell them that I would be unable to make it to the briefing in Camp Pendleton. Using my index fingers, I typed slowly and did not use any more words than absolutely necessary.
I wrote the second email to management at USAID in Baghdad. I didn’t go into much detail about the accident, because I didn’t know much. I said I’d need approximately eight weeks before I could get my casts cut off and return to my projects, and apologized for any complications that might be caused by my absence.
I wanted to write a checklist of the things that would need to happen before I could return to Iraq, but I couldn’t hold a pen: the distance between my thumb, index finger, and middle finger had been set in fiberglass. No amount of contortions could make them touch, much less grip a pen.
In the basement, I found a roll of duct tape and climbed the twenty-two steps back up to my room like a mountain path, stopping to gather my breath and relieve the pressure in my brain.
I sat down at my desk and placed the duct tape next to a pen. I leaned over and scooped up a sock from the floor, and wrapped it clumsily around the shaft of the pen. It took ten agonizing minutes to free a corner of the tape without the use of opposable thumbs. Sweat beaded and trickled with a sting into my wounds, and I barked, “Goddamn it, does it have to be so hot in here?!” After great effort, I managed to tear off a foot-long piece of tape. Bit by bit, I crudely taped the sock to the pen, its point emerging from the now-thick grip. I lowered my right hand over the sock-pen, wedged it into the space between my thumb and index fingers, and lifted the pen in my hand with a faint smile. I looked at the clock. Thirty minutes had elapsed. My head was thumping, but I had regained the capacity to write.
I called for my mom, who hurried up the stairs, and explained that I needed a sock taped around a knife, fork, and spoon.
Later that afternoon, I wandered to the kitchen with my modified silverware and a faint appetite. I knocked a tinfoil-sealed container of Mott’s applesauce from the fridge onto the floor and sat down with my legs crossed before it. The act of peeling off the foil was impossible, so I fitted the sock-knife into my cast, hovered it over the applesauce, and slammed it down, hoping to puncture the foil enough to snake a straw through. But the foil was too strong, and the knife popped out of my cast and onto the floor. Shadow, my cat, walked by and stared for a moment before sauntering over to the open can of tuna my mom had left out for her.
I refitted the sock-knife and tried again. Again. Again. The sweat stung. I figured out how to use my feet to hold the applesauce in place, rested the knife’s point directly on the foil with my right hand, and this time bashed the blade through the foil using the cast on my left arm. A quarter of the applesauce slopped onto my feet and the floor. I gingerly pursed my torn lips around a straw and guided it past the foil to feed myself. A couple weeks earlier, I was coordinating tens of millions of dollars of aid. People called me sir.
Stop infection
Casts off
Unwire jaw
Root canals
Stitches out
Braces
Insurance reimbursement
Beneath it all, I wrote “Medical clearance,” knowing that I would need a new clearance before being permitted back into Iraq. In every conversation with my doctors, I pressured them to give me best-case scenarios and the most aggressive course of treatment, hoping to be back on a plane to Fallujah in less than two months.
In my childhood bedroom on a dead-end street in West Chicago, I created a war room. I locked myself in and mapped out my return. The floor was soon littered with checklists, timelines, alternative timelines, secondary to-do lists, all with boxes to be checked, printouts of articles, pill bottles, briefing materials for the canceled marines lecture. CNN looped endlessly on mute.
The first week passed, and my bosses hadn’t responded to my email. Surely it had been sequestered as spam. I emptied my backpack onto the bed and found the matchbox-sized device that periodically received a several-digit code from a satellite, allowing me to log into USAID’s email system to resend the message through my government account.
I woke each morning with a gnawing need to check in on the news, to log into email, in search of some connection with Iraq. I called my colleagues who had returned before me to rant about the lack or quality of media coverage and to trade news about who was being investigated for corruption, which projects were unraveling, who was going to Afghanistan next, who got what plum posting where, who was resigning from the agency in frustration over Iraq. I wrote to the few Iraqis in Fallujah whose email addresses I still had and apologized for my delay in returning.
Early on, friends relayed hurtful gossip pushed by marines and others in USAID and the State Department who barely knew me: the most widely spread version had me drunk and partying out a window. One marine general announced in a staff meeting that I had decided to simply quit so I could stay in the United States, which angered me more than the other explanations for my absence.
Friends who found out about my accident asked me just what, exactly, had happened in the Dominican Republic. I pecked out the number of a neuropsychiatrist friend who worked with veterans at the VA hospital in New York. He listened to my account of what had happened and interrupted: “Kirk, you had a dissociative fugue state.” I perked up, remembering the months I’d spent as a fourteen-year-old learning Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the organ. The act of pedaling a bass line while playing on two tiers of keys was such a leap for my adolescent mind that I had to master the hands so that I could play without looking, focusing my eyes instead on the pedals below my feet and dangling tie. I stared at my casts while he continued.
Over the phone, he read from the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association: “Travel may range from brief trips over relatively short periods of time (i.e., hours or days) to complex, usually unobtrusive wandering over long time periods (e.g., weeks or months), with some individuals reportedly crossing numerous national borders and traveling thousands of miles.” A fugue state is characterized by autopilot behavior, which is only sometimes tame. People have emerged from a fugue state to find themselves behind the wheel of their car or in a mall with shopping bags under their arms, with no recollection of how they got there. Incidence of the disorder increases during periods of war.
I hung up, shuffled over to the computer, and typed “fugue” into an online dictionary, and the page blinked back two resulting words. I wedged the sock-pen into position over a notebook and wrote in nervous, oversized letters that filled the page, “Fugue: Flight, Departure.”
I had never heard of the disorder before, but each example I found online came as a revelation. I felt as though my accident had trapped me within a kind of John Grisham novel, only a much more pathetic version. There was no pelican brief, no assassinated justices; just some kid who sleepwalked out a window while on vacation from Fallujah. But each sentence seemed as though it were written for my eyes only, as though I had just deciphered some conspiracy in plain sight, the plot to pilot me to my death while I slept.
The essential feature of dissociative fugue is sudden, unexpected travel . . . with inability to recall some or all of one’s past. . . . Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode, and upon recovery there may be amnesia for the original stressor. . . . Once the individual returns to the prefugue state, there may be no memory for the events that occurred during the fugue. . . .
Sometimes dissociative fugue cannot be diagnosed until people abruptly return to their prefugue identity and are distressed to find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances.
I took the words, symptoms, examples, and spread them like plaster over the rupture that had torn open on December 29.
At the end of the second week, I still hadn’t heard anything from my bosses. I was growing angry. Didn’t the near-death of a senior staff member warrant at least a brief phone call? I didn’t know what was happening with my position and wanted to report on my progress, lest they think of giving the Fallujah job to someone else.
I wasn’t making much progress, though. The yellow pus of infection colonized healthy flesh as it wept drowsily from the sutures on my chin and forehead. A beard was emerging, and I had the terror-filled realization that I’d need to shave to effectively fight the infection. Once I could no longer push it off, I duct-taped a sock around my razor blade. Each downward stroke tugged at the stitches, and a sickly stream emerged in response. I spent an hour shaving what felt like one whisker at a time until the tear and infection site were mostly cleared. My legs, exhausted, carried me back into bed, where I stared at the silent television screen and tried to sleep.
As I tried to avoid fixating on my bosses’ silence, I began to doubt my eight-week estimate. The successful completion of once quotidian demands—feeding, washing, shaving—triggered a wave of euphoria that quickly broke apart into a frightful awareness of how battered I was. I turned my full attention to the maintenance of my body: teeth, bones, face, antibodies, stomach. I was in the cockpit of a heavily strafed bomber, my engine sputtering and coughing, lines leaking, windshield cracked and whistling. My only priority was to hold altitude. In the quiet of my room, I would whimper, and then curse myself for the self-pity: Oh, you big baby. Least you can walk. Lot of people never wake up. So you have a little dark spell here. Tough shit. But my high-minded attempts at paying respect to the dead and worse off sputtered quickly. The churn of self-pity grew stronger by the day, threatening to overpower my hope for a speedy return to Fallujah.
My parents, in the thirty-seventh year of their marriage, were struggling with each other like any couple approaching four decades and the imminence and uncertainty of retirement. They had masked any sign of this whenever I’d call from Iraq, but now I was home, and it was unavoidable. And while a trauma in a family brings everyone closer, it also rubs the plates in the tectonic history against one another, resurrecting old tensions and unwanted recollections. I bickered with my dad like an adolescent. That I relied on them to shuttle me to and from surgeries didn’t help. I felt guilty for being back in their space at a time when they could have used privacy, and embarrassed that I was home when I was needed elsewhere. I pushed them away, going to great lengths to take care of myself, ruffling my casts into garbage bags so that I could stand under the shower, contorting myself elaborately into my clothes, bashing knifes through tinfoil to eat.
We called the crude web of stitches binding together my upper lip the Cockroach. Whenever my mouth was closed, it looked as though I were chewing on a large dark-brown insect, with partially unraveled stitches for antennae.
I hadn’t smiled for weeks. Late one evening, flipping through channels, I discovered The Colbert Report, which had aired its first episode while I was still in Fallujah. Two minutes into Stephen Colbert’s deadpan dismantling of White House spin about Iraq, wrapped in neoconservative chest-beating pomp, I broke into a grin. The pain flooded in at once. When my lip tightened into a smile, the Cockroach slithered up toward my gums and snagged itself on the wire bracket holding my jaw together. Fresh blood trickled into my mouth, and I raced to the bathroom mirror. I unhooked the mess with my index fingers, returned to my room in a sullen mood, and turned off Colbert. No more laughing until the Cockroach was gone.
The next morning, I pulled on a pair of sweatpants, writhed my casts through an oversized T-shirt and flip-flops, worked my way down the staircase, and slipped out the front door into the numbing winter. The cold felt good on my cuts. I pried open the door to my dad’s Buick, lowered myself in, and took off before anyone could stop me.
It had snowed most of the previous night. I hadn’t driven in a year, and since both arms were in casts, I had only my fingertips to steer. I kept the radio off, rolled down all the windows, and suppressed a smile. I reached the first intersection, having no clue where I was headed, and again the urge to smile returned. I decided to make only right turns until I was comfortable enough to turn left across a lane.
I imagined piles of snow dumping upon Fallujah. The war would probably come to a halt. I drove up Roosevelt Road, past the grocery store, and turned right onto Joliet Street at my childhood bank, where seven dollars in savings from grade school still accrued interest, a penny a year. Snowplows scraped along ahead of me, spraying a shower of salt in their wake. Snowblowers blasted white arcs from every other driveway. My high school loomed on the left, and I sped past it anxiously. At the next red light, a beat-up Chevy Cavalier pulled up to my right, and a heavy woman stared at me, my casts, and then back at me in alarm.
I pulled into a slippery parking lot and walked into a bookstore to find stacked high in the main display Paul Bremer’s book about his year as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. I used my casts like chopsticks and carried a copy to the register.
“Ohmigosh, what happened to you?” a teenage girl with the pasty complexion of Midwestern winters cooed warmly. I watched her eyes settle upon the Cockroach stitching between my lips and dart away.
I grunted, dumping some bills onto the counter. My first interaction with someone outside of a hospital or my home, and I realized quickly that I wasn’t up for it.
“ ’Kay, here’s your change. Hope ya feel better soon! ’Njoy the book!”
I trudged through the snow in my flip-flops. When I got back to the car, I realized I couldn’t hold Bremer’s book and open the door at the same time, so I dumped him into the parking lot snow. The book was for reading, not for displaying. There he was on the back cover of My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, dismounting a Blackhawk in his idiotic costume of a prep blazer, khakis, and combat boots.
The Buick was in motion. I drove on, past strip malls, gas stations, and hibernating golf courses, following the train tracks until I reached desolate stretches of heavily tilled frozen farmland. I pulled off onto the shoulder just before a railroad crossing. The heater was the only thing audible, save for a periodic rubbery scrape of the wipers. I opened Bremer’s book and started to read.
Two weeks later, I blasted out of the driveway and aimed the car at Chicago. Bremer was giving a speech in late January 2006 before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (now the Chicago Council on Global Affairs), at the same Hilton hotel where Mayor Daley had unleashed his cops on antiwar protesters during the 1968 Democratic Convention.
I gave my keys to a shocked valet and made my way into the hotel ballroom, passing a constellation of Burberry jackets and mink stoles wrapped around what I supposed was the foreign policy establishment of Chicago—an incongruous concept. I didn’t know anyone and didn’t bother trying to make small talk, sailing past and positioning myself in the first row in front of the podium. The Chicago cognoscenti stared at me as they wriggled out of their coats and into the seats around me. They did a poor job concealing their whispers. “What do you suppose happened to him?”
My arms were swelling in their prisons, and my jaw was throbbing. I hadn’t taken any painkillers all day, because I didn’t want a Vicodin haze to roll in while Bremer was talking. I wanted all my senses at the ready.
Bremer emerged to sturdy applause. My glare was surely intensified by the row of stitches between my brows. He spun fantasies from the podium, taking care to blame Iraq’s current problems on Iraqis, and to blame future problems on Iraqis, too. A few nights earlier on TV, I had seen him contradict his own account of the decision to disband the Iraqi military in his first days in Baghdad, so I was in the mood for confrontation. When the Q&A session began, I shot up a black-casted arm and held it firm. He looked at me, furrowed his bushy brow, and turned his head to take a question from someone else.
For thirty minutes, I alternated arms when one grew tired, and as time wore thin, raised both at once. “Why doesn’t he call on him?” a woman behind me whispered to her husband in a tone of support. As he wrapped up each answer, he looked at me and then called someone else. The Q&A ended, and a hundred-strong line formed to get books signed. I was exhausted, sore, and wary of the hourlong drive through the snow ahead of me. I got into the car, feeling at once foolish and angry, and headed back in darkness to West Chicago, where the punishing roulette wheel of sleep spun over my bed.
As the cold of January hardened into February, it became apparent to me that my injuries were more severe than I wanted to admit. Nobody in USAID management responded to me.
The winter sun set early, not long past four. I drove to the theater to watch movies in darkness with other West Chicagoans and usually fell asleep before the opening credits finished rolling.
My acidic side began to appear at the slightest of provocations and corroded the most unsuspecting and innocent. I watched It’s a Wonderful Life, still in the DVD player from Christmastime, and laughed contemptuously at Jimmy Stewart’s doe-eyed George Bailey, whose dip in the river renews him, opens his eyes to the miracle of life, focuses that which is blurred, straightens that which is skewed. Everything was very tidy for George. I lumbered to the bathroom, knocked a Vicodin bottle on its side, and pinched a pill between my ring finger and pinkie. The pill began to dissolve on my tongue into a bitter metallic strain of saliva.
“Kirkie, there’s someone here to see you. Are you decent?”
My mom entered cautiously with a pastor friend of hers “who knows all about you, who is one of your biggest fans, and wanted to come by just to see you.” She seemed nice enough, but I was having difficulty separating her words from Jimmy Stewart’s. Sensing that I wasn’t giving my full attention, Mom muted the TV.
The Vicodin receded for a moment, and her words became clear—“. . . Because the Lord has a Plan for you, you have been Spared for a Reason . . .”—before they were tugged away in a hydrocodone riptide.
Somewhere around the phrase “to not take for granted each day we have,” I catapulted a “Ha!” from my lungs and blurted, “Okay! Well, thanks for coming!” I decided it was better to vacate the minister from my room, however rudely, than to subject her to what was roaring through my mind. What did she know of not taking days for granted? I was twenty-five years old and didn’t exactly feel that I was wasting my life. What did she know of being spared?
I had grown up on stories in church about the transformative power of a near-death or rock-bottom experience, the turn to Jesus after a drunk-driving accident, after a near-fatal drug overdose: these people realized only after the brink moment that life is short. But I was lying there because I had spent a year in a war zone, and my sleeping mind decided for me that it had had just about enough. I was alive because the mortars that Iraqi kids my age had launched in my direction were duds, poorly aimed, or nudged away by an indifferent gust of Iraqi wind. I was still on earth because I had marines who protected me. I was alive because my wrists had been strong enough to break a headfirst fall to concrete. I was there because I lucked out. I wasn’t arrogant enough to find a plan just for me in the tornado of chaos and probabilities that had spat me back into West Chicago.
The minister left with an understanding smile. I apologized to my mom a couple days later.
My grip on Fallujah was slipping. For a year, I had studied thousands of pages of USAID reports, Bechtel power and water plant assessments, aid absorption rate studies, classified marine situation reports, inspector general audits, embassy electricity forecasts that sagged under the weight of their own stats, endless iterations of data projected onto maps of Iraq’s provinces. In my early days back, I tried to imagine that I was home for a short period to report in from the field, but the only people I could brief were my increasingly worried parents, brothers, and friends, who had no idea what I was talking about.
As March approached, the possibility that I would not return increased with each week that passed without word from my bosses. I sketched out a briefing book for whomever USAID would inevitably send to replace me, and broke it into sections: Canal Clearing. Agriculture. Health Services. Wat/San. Power. Employment Generation. Audit of Past Projects. Key Persons on Fallujah City Council. Key Counterparts within Second Marine Expeditionary Force. Unsorted Notes on Anbar.
I looked at the checklist I’d made on my first morning back home. All I had managed to do was prevail against the infection and tug the stitches from my eyebrow.
A family friend who was a surgeon at the nearby hospital offered to sink a screw into the broken bone of my right wrist. The liberation of one hand would dramatically increase my ability to take care of myself. Friends counseled me to let the wrists heal naturally, but I had convinced myself that I could return to Iraq with a cast on one arm. Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a marine medic to saw it off, but I stood no chance of getting a new medical clearance with both arms in casts, so I leaped at the surgeon’s offer to operate.
Nobody could get to the veins on my arms because of the casts. Linda, the medical assistant, shook a WD-40-sized can and sprayed a cold aerosol over the delta of veins and arteries running upon the top of my foot, temporarily freezing the area. A jolting piercing, followed by a sigh. Another piercing. Another sigh, coarsened with exasperation. “Come on . . .” She shot me an impatient glance. She hadn’t yet sunk the IV and was looking at me as though I were to blame. Within thirty seconds of meeting her, she had become an enemy.
But then it was in, and Linda was standing next to me with the supreme sleep, blissful and blank, in little glass bottles on her tray. She injected the anesthesia into the tiny veins of my foot, and I loved her without condition for it.
When I realized I was waking, I moaned in groggy protest. Why couldn’t they just put me under for a month or so? My eyes rolled around aimlessly until they settled on my mom, who was crying. She wiped her cheeks when she noticed that I had come to.
It took another few moments before I thought to ask, “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I’ll let the doctor tell you.” She looked anxiously at the door. I was waking up fast now.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Honey, I can’t explain it like he can. Let’s wait for him.”
“Mom, c’mon, just tell me. He can tell me more later.”
She dropped her head and wiped away fresh tears.
“The doctor made a mistake. He got in there, and—” She looked angrily back at the door. “Oh, this is ridiculous. He should be the one telling you!”
“Mom. Please. Don’t worry, I won’t be upset. Just tell me.”
“He got in there, and I guess he had the screw halfway in, and the bone started cracking apart more. Something about the angle of the screw being ‘tricky,’ he said. He had to unscrew it. Oh honey, I’m so sorry!”
I looked down and noticed a new cast on my right arm. The cuts on my face started to sting, and I gathered that I was crying. “What does this mean in terms of recovery time?”
“He said you can get the cast off in another eight weeks. I know you wanted a different result, dear. I’m sorry.”
I imagined holding the surgeon’s incompetent hands on the bed stand and bashing them with my casts. For the first time since the ER in Bournigal, I had regressed: my wrist was worse, not better. The botched surgery blew apart the only flimsy bridge I’d been able to construct since my fall, the idea that I was speeding toward a return to the most important job I’d ever had.
The surgeon slid into the room upon a stream of nonsense, suggesting that I shouldn’t feel upset. “If anything,” he chirped, “the surgery might have stimulated the tissue with positive results.” The bill arrived ten days later, topping $6,000. The screw alone was $800, and it wasn’t even in my goddamned wrist.
Dead flies and a blue wasp with a broken wing lay in the window casement, entombed by the storm windows my dad put up when I was still in Fallujah.
My descent was rapid after the failed surgery. I lost my grip on the fire hose of information about Iraq, the reports, trend lines, atmospherics, and situation reports, but the need to assess still rumbled within. I could do little to restrain myself. I printed out Google Earth maps of my hometown and began to study its infrastructure. I circled water and wastewater treatment plants, power step-down stations and transfer lines, the hospital, police, and fire stations.
I imagined that I was an insurgent and studied which areas of the city were the farthest from the police and fire stations. I looked up the number of cop cars and fire trucks. I circled gas stations, propane tank lots, and the most vulnerable points in the power, water, and gas lines.
Distracted from my infirmity, I went deeper. I grabbed a couple maps and headed into town, studying them coldly. I looked at population density. I highlighted the tallest buildings and perches in town, among them the windows looking out from the English Department on the third story of my high school. I pulled into the parking lot behind the Burger King and left the engine running as I surveyed the rail yard, through which graffitied coal hoppers and boxcars trundled toward Chicago. Where were the quickest access points and escape routes? How often did commuter rails run?
I figured my hometown could be brought to its knees in a few hours. The basic infrastructure was embarrassingly exposed: in many cases, there wasn’t even a chain-link fence around a soft spot. Two simple attacks in opposite corners of town would cripple security. Alarmed and depressed by the thought experiment, I backed away from the rail yard and turned myself into the military occupier of West Chicago.
I imagined my dad’s Buick as a brigade commander’s Humvee and rolled out of the Burger King parking lot onto Route 59. I dissected the city into manageable quadrants and determined which streets would serve as main and alternate supply routes. I allocated ten tanks and forty Humvees and began to position entry and exit checkpoints at the main arteries into town. On Main Street, in the parking lot shared by True Value hardware, Taco Bell, and McDonald’s, I positioned an M1 Abrams tank as a show of force. I placed countersniper teams in the English Department, in the Bible Church steeple, and on the catwalk below the W E S T C H I C A G O letters stenciled in black over the faded blue paint of the water tower. I snarled concertina wire through miles of backyards and bulldozed berm walls to seal off the more vacant stretches in the western third of the city.
The high school would be the seat of my administration, my civil military operations center, providing ample space for condolence payments and meetings between our occupying forces and disgruntled West Chicagoans. In the cafeteria, where I had posed for my yearbook picture, I’d line them up to scan their eyeballs and fingerprints. The town jail wouldn’t be able to hold more than eighty if packed, so I designated my middle school as the primary detention facility and suffocated it with blast walls, razor wire, floodlights, and gravel-filled chest-high Hesco barriers. Curfew would begin at eight across the city.
The Jel-Sert factory, which turned corn syrup into Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles, would serve as the morgue. If I applied the Iraqi civilian casualty rate to our population base, the bodies of a few hundred West Chicagoans could be expected each month.
I needed to know the greatest employers, the local powerbrokers, the city’s most pressing needs. I printed a year’s worth of city council minutes and began to pore through them. I bookmarked the police blotter page on the West Chicago Press website. I drove through occupied West Chicago and sensed the coil of hypervigilance tighten, just slightly, when I imagined what an IED would do to the soft-skinned Buick. My mood darkened.
“Whatcha up to, sweetie?” my mom asked when I pulled back into the driveway.
“Nothin’ much, just drivin’ around.”
The Vicodin didn’t work anymore. Instead of increasing the dosage, I stopped taking it altogether. I shivered in a cold sweat on the bed, passively watching a CNN report on Fallujah. An itch gnawed from deep within the new cast, and I knew that there was nothing I could do to scratch it. I tried to focus on something else, and the crawler at the bottom of the TV screen announced that Sheikh Kamal, the head of the Fallujah City Council, had been assassinated the previous night.
I raced to the computer in search of more news and found a message from a friend in USAID still in Baghdad. “Thought you’d get a kick out of this,” he wrote above a forwarded message from somebody in USAID management who had just arrived: “Who is Kirk Johnson, where did he work, and when did he leave?” Someone from IT realized that I still had my Iraqi cell phones and the satellite device for checking email and was urgently demanding their return, lest any inventory be missing. My first letter from management since the accident, and all they wanted were my phones.
The itch was tormenting. I bashed my casts together, hoping to somehow stop it, but it persisted, unfazed. I crawled into bed and turned off the news.
I had resisted it as long as I could but finally submitted to the conclusion that I had failed in Iraq. I had not been good enough or strong enough to keep a grip on things, my brain had tumbled, and now I was obsessing over Google Earth images of my hometown infrastructure.
A sympathetic lieutenant colonel gathered my clothing, toiletries, and the Christmas stocking my mom had mailed to Fallujah and shipped them back in two large gorilla lockers. When they arrived, I pried them open and searched eagerly for my green government-issue notebooks, containing months’ worth of notes and contacts, but they had likely been tossed into the burn pit before the Second Marine Expeditionary Force cycled home. The agency never sent a replacement to Fallujah. The canal-clearing initiative unraveled, and its funds were diverted back to rubble removal. Despite all of my efforts, not a single thing remained. It was as if I had never even been there.
I mailed the worthless cell phones back to USAID, threw out my notes for the briefing book, and stopped following the war.
Insurgent maps of West Chicago gave way to cover letters and résumés. I was unemployed, after all, and a huge portion of my savings from a year abroad had been distilled into IV bags, dispensed into orange scrip bottles, and transferred into the bank account of the doctor who mangled my wrist. I was staring at tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of bills.
The medical center in Bournigal had prepared a thorough discharge folder for my American insurance provider, Clements International, including doctors’ notes, typewritten lists of procedures, X-rays, drugs, and medical supplies. I was comforted by the thoroughness of its records, the thickness of the folder, and was relieved to know that I had insurance from a company that specialized in covering expats and aid workers.
Except: I had neglected to call Clements from the emergency room in Bournigal and therefore failed to obtain a preauthorization number. The customer service representative clucked as he informed me that the insurer would not reimburse me. In an appeal, I FedExed my entire discharge folder to the company, which then indicated that it would not honor any claims because the hospital paperwork was in Spanish. When I called to receive preauthorization for a series of upcoming root canals and a procedure to remove the wiring from my jaw, I was told that my policy covered only medical costs incurred abroad, not domestically. I pulled out the surgical to-do list, estimated the cost of the remaining procedures, and figured I would be penniless in two months.
The horizon of depression is stripped of contour and color. For months, I trudged across its baked fields in search of relief, past occasional mirages of minor achievement (stitches removed, infection subdued), and through a fog of stomach-eroding painkillers and antibiotics and more surgical complications.
While sitting in the endodontist’s waiting room, I found a quote of mine in a dated issue of Time magazine, uttered months earlier on Election Day in Fallujah, in which I spoke about the fledgling reconstruction efforts in the city. The doctor asked me, “What was it like over there?” as he slid a black rubber bit between my jaw and prepared a series of root canals. After several shots of Novocaine, though, he removed the bit from my mouth and told me there was a problem: the scar tissue around the roots of my teeth prevented him from fully anesthetizing the area. If I didn’t want to feel a lot of pain, he said, I could reschedule for a general anesthesia session in a month. Sick of waiting for procedures, I told him to just get it over with. He drilled away into my four front teeth while “Love Potion No. 9” warbled through a small speaker overhead and tears streamed down.
After the oral surgeon missed one of the steel wires wrapped around my front tooth as he removed the bracket holding my jaw together, I decided I was done making new appointments and filling out more insurance forms, so I drove up to the hardware store, bought a wire cutter and a pair of needle-nose pliers, and yanked it from my gums.
When my arms were finally exhumed from their fiberglass caskets, they looked as though they belonged to someone else, slender and frail and jaundiced. One wrist made a popping sound whenever I turned a doorknob.
I would need braces once again. The chairs in the orthodontist’s waiting room were designed to resemble huge white molars. Surrounded by anxious and acne-besieged thirteen-year-olds, I stared up at the “Before and After” wall and its neat Polaroid rows of patients’ smiles, and found my scarred face glowering from within the adolescent jungle. When the orthodontist asked if I wanted any special-colored rubber bands—maybe red and white for the Bulls?—I grimaced my no, and he began to hoist my dead teeth back into place and ensure the postponement of any dating life.
A half year after the fall, my checklist was finished, but I had given up on returning to Iraq. I no longer wanted anything to do with that part of my life, and my cynicism about international development work clouded out the desire to work anywhere else. Why bother?
I decided to disappear into law school for a few years and make a nice salary when I got out. I drove to the library of the community college where I had first studied Arabic and waded through LSAT prep books and practice tests. I was done with Iraq.