American War

by Omar El Akkad

  In the early morning Joe said goodbye and left the camp. Gaines and Sarat were alone together in the office.

  “There’s nothing quite as tedious as old farts droning on about the days of their youth, is there?” said Gaines. “You were generous to indulge us.”

  “That’s all right,” said Sarat. “Every grown-up in this place talks all day about what it was like when they were young. At least your stories happened someplace far away.”

  Gaines chuckled. “Well I guess that’s some relief.” He stood and lifted the blinds and opened the window to let a little air into the room. It was still dark outside.

  “I’m glad I was able to introduce you to Joe,” he said. “I owe that man so much.”

  “He save your life or something?” Sarat asked. “Back when you were soldiers?”

  “No,” said Gaines. “I mean yes, I’m sure he must have, many times over. But that’s not all.”

  He sat beside her at the table. From his wallet he produced a small wrinkled photograph, a high-schooler’s graduation portrait. The girl in the picture had Gaines’s smile, his deep-set eyes.

  “Even back then, you could see it coming,” said Gaines. “Before the first bombs fell, before the slaughter in East Texas, everyone knew this country was getting ready to tear itself to shreds. I was worried for my family, worried about whether I could keep my wife and daughter safe. It was Joe who helped me. He found a safe place for them to live in the Bouazizi. They hated me for sending them away, but they’re safe there, and that’s the only thing that matters. That’s what Joe did for me. That’s the gift he gave me.”

  Gaines folded the picture of his daughter and placed it back in his wallet.

  “You know, I’d like to say you remind me of her, or that you two would have been good friends. But the truth is it’s been so long since we’ve spoken. Maybe if we met now she wouldn’t even recognize me. Maybe all she’d see is some old fool, some foreigner.”

  He seemed then not to be speaking to Sarat, or even to himself, but to nobody at all. He stared out the half-open window.

  They heard the faint patter of footsteps overhead: the camp’s administrators and volunteers, preparing for the morning shift.

  “Why did you side with the South when the war came?” asked Sarat. “You were born a Northerner, you fought for the Northern army when it was still one country. Why not side with the Blues?”

  “Well, after they finally brought us back from Iraq and Syria for the last time, I wandered around for a while before settling down in Montgomery,” said Gaines. “You see, we have a habit in this country of deciding the wisdom of our wars only after we’re done fighting them, and I guess we decided the war I’d been sent to fight wasn’t a very good idea after all. In the North, whenever anyone found out I’d been a part of that war, they’d want to debate it all over again, as though I was the one who ordered myself to go over there. But in the South, they don’t do that, or at least nobody ever did that to me.”

  “So that’s it?” asked Sarat. “They were good to you here, so you sided with the Red?”

  “No,” said Gaines. “I sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I’d had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.”

  “So you think we’re wrong?” Sarat asked. “You think what we’re fighting for is wrong?”

  “No,” said Gaines. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “But if you did. If you knew for a fact we were wrong, would it be enough to turn you against your people?”

  “No.”

  Gaines smiled. “Good girl,” he said.

  The sound of footsteps grew. Soon they could hear the workers upstairs delineating the day’s tasks: who was to oversee distribution of rations, who was to escort the immunization worker around the camp, who had to deal with the South Carolinians.

  Sarat stood to leave.

  “Hold on,” said Gaines. “I want you to take something with you.”

  He opened one of the desk drawers. When he turned around Sarat saw he was holding a small folding knife. He opened it; the blade was of slightly blemished steel and smooth except at its lower end, where it turned to serrated teeth. There was a monogram etched into the handle: “YBR.”

  “Do you know how to use a knife?” asked Gaines, pointing the blade toward her.

  “Everyone knows how to use a knife,” said Sarat.

  “No, everyone knows how to stab.” He flipped the knife and offered her the worn leather handle.

  Sarat turned the knife in her hand. It was light and its lightness made it seem insignificant. She pushed her finger against the edge of the blade.

  “It’s rusted,” she said.

  “It’s not rusted,” Gaines replied. “It’s dull. But that can be remedied.”

  He retrieved a sharpening stone from one of the drawers. The stone was black and rectangular. One of its sides was coarse, the other smooth.

  He set the stone on the table in front of Sarat, and then he guided her hands until they held the knife against the coarse side.

  “Resistance and stress,” he said. “All it takes is resistance and stress.”

  He moved her hands with his. The knife scraped against the stone, even and rhythmic. The sound of it filled the room.

  “How do you know when it’s ready?” asked Sarat.

  “It’s ready,” said Gaines, “when it does what you need it to do.”

  FIRST LIGHT CAME. Sarat said goodbye to her teacher and made for home. Outside, a soft morning breeze lifted swirls of dust off the ground. Sarat looked across the vast sea of tents; they looked not all that different from the ones that littered the background of the old photograph of Gaines and Joe. Maybe all tents looked the same in wartime.

  In the distance, she saw two refugees fighting. One man, drunk and stumbling, had knocked over the other one’s jug of fermenting Joyful. The two men cursed and threw feeble punches at each other but Sarat did not stick around to watch. It seemed such a petty thing to fight over, so inconsequential.

  Excerpted from:

  REMARKS BY KASEB IBN AUMRAN, PRESIDENT OF THE BOUAZIZI UNION, DELIVERED AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY (JUNE 4, 2081)

  I have tested your patience, speaking for so long on such a warm day. But I want to say this again: the government of the Bouazizi Union has no desire to impose its will on the affairs of any other nation. I believe we are all in agreement that the end of the troubles your country faces will come at the hands of the people who call this country home, nobody else. (Applause.)

  But I also believe that all reasonable people of the world—regardless of race or ethnicity or religion—yearn for the same right to liberty, democracy, and self-determination. These are truly universal human ideals, and what we do today to advance them is the most important gift we leave for our children. Wars are temporary; these principles are not.

  I remember the first time I came to America, many years ago. I was a young university student, a student at this very campus. At the time, my country was undergoing a bloody but necessary revolution, a revolution that claimed the lives of many martyrs but granted my people the freedom they had, for almost two centuries, been denied.

  I remember all the things that fascinated me about America—its vast and beautifully diverse geography, blessed with some of the most awe-inspiring natural wonders on earth; its equally diverse people, living alongside one another in peace, regardless of the superficial differences among them. I saw in the people of this country a spirit I had rarely seen elsewhere, a dedication to liberty so overpow
ering, it made of many, one. (Applause.)

  I say to you now, in closing, that I see that very same spirit here today. Whatever challenges America faces in this troubled moment, I am sure the people of this country can overcome. They have done so many times before (Applause), and they will again. And I say to you that my people, the people of the Bouazizi Union who decades ago demanded from their rulers the very same liberation your revolutionaries once demanded of theirs, stand ready as allies to assist in any way we can. We are, all of us on this earth, drawn instinctively to peace, and I believe peace will prevail.

  Thank you, and God bless America. (Applause.)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Two days before the massacre, there was a heavy storm. It lasted from dawn to dusk, the gray-muddled clouds oscillating between torrent and trickle. The hardest rain came early. By the time a convoy of Free Southerners’ trucks arrived with sandbags, many of the camp’s older tents had already washed away. The refugees sought shelter in the administrative buildings. Outside, in the stream of mud and wastewater, a doomed armada of clothes and cooking implements and irreplaceable keepsakes floated helplessly. The runoff fed into the ditches and beyond the ditches the creeks and beyond the creeks the now roaring Tennessee.

  As the Free Southerners packed the sandbags along the banks of Emerald Creek, cursing and gagging at the smell of the overflowing filth, Sarat and her girls chased after the water-swept mementos.

  Soaked to the bone, they scooped up anything of practical or sentimental value: picture frames, coils of fishing line, flags of the state and of the rebels; and keys, most important of all, keys.

  The girls worked solemnly. At Albert Gaines’s urging, Sarat had, a few weeks earlier, started a small club of sorts—her very own version of a scout troop. Already she’d wangled four young recruits—the Singleterry sisters from Alabama; Charlie from Georgia, who went by her dead younger brother’s name; and Nadine from Mississippi. Two months before she arrived at Patience, Nadine lost her lower jaw in a Bird strike on Holly Springs. In its place now was a mash of mangled skin and a metal plate that held together what was left of her jawline. Nadine didn’t speak. Of all the girls, she was Sarat’s favorite.

  When the girls’ satchels were full, they took the contents to the administrative buildings. There, Sarat unlocked the side door and led them down the stairwell to the hallway leading to Gaines’s office. In the hallway they set the salvaged items down on towels to dry, and then they returned to work.

  By sundown the rainfall started to ease; a couple of hours later it was little more than a sprinkle. Sarat ran to the northernmost tents and watched the low gray clouds fall back to the Blue country. In the north the tents were new and largely unused, but none of the refugees had sought shelter there.

  The next morning, Sarat instructed the girls to begin taking the salvaged debris out of the hallway. Her recruits laid their findings out on the ground by the side of the building. By the time the camp’s staff became aware of what the girls had done, a mass of refugees had descended on the impromptu lost-and-found. They sifted for things they thought were gone forever and when they found them they cried and hugged the girls and called them angels. By noon there was not a single item left unclaimed.

  MARTINA CHESTNUT STOOD for a long time in front of her pristine tent. She observed the corners where the fabric hugged the scaffolding. There wasn’t a single tear, not even a sign that a rainstorm had come through at all. The ground surrounding the tent was a thick stew of mud, and all her neighbors’ homes were collapsed or nearing collapse, but Martina’s home was untouched.

  For a moment she was taken with thoughts of divine providence. She began to entertain the notion that some higher power had held its cupped hand over her home. Surely it was no mere chance; surely she had suffered enough to warrant this small act of mercy. Of course others had suffered; some arrived at the camp missing limbs or sight or kin and some were nothing but hollow shells in the shape of the living, but she had suffered too. She had suffered too.

  Inside, she found Sarat and Dana on their cots, reading. Dana held a tablet; on the screen there was a Tumble magazine feature on Black Sea chic and the newly resurgent fashion scene of the far northern Bouazizi.

  Sarat sat upright on her cot, an old Southern history book in her hands, on loan from Gaines.

  “How did you two get back here so fast?” Martina asked. She breathed in deeply; the air inside the tent smelled bittersweet and acrid, a chemical scent.

  “She was out all night saving everybody’s trash,” Dana said. “I was in here.”

  “Why didn’t you come to the building?” Martina asked. “This whole tent could have been swept right out in the storm.”

  Dana chuckled. “You kidding? Simon and a couple of his friends came by a day ago and sprayed the whole thing down. They got chemicals that make the water bounce right off of anything—makes it like it never rained at all. It was a loud storm, though, I’ll tell you that. Barely got any sleep.”

  Martina observed her other daughter, who had yet to take her eyes away from the pages of her book.

  “You knew ’bout this?” she asked.

  Sarat shrugged.

  Martina fell silent. She walked past her daughters to her own room. In the last year the woman and her twin daughters had come to occupy the entirety of the tent, as Simon had taken to living outside the camp, only returning for a night or two every few months.

  On her bed Martina found another care package from her son. It was a cardboard box that had once held a kitchen mixer. Its top flaps were sealed tight with packing tape.

  Martina lifted the box. It felt heavy, perhaps twenty pounds. Without opening it she carried it past the blanket curtain to her daughters’ room. She set it beside Sarat’s bed.

  “Take this and give it out to the people who lost their tents,” she said.

  “What’s in it?” Sarat asked.

  “I don’t care. Just give it to someone who needs it.”

  “There’s lots who need it. You want me to stay in Mississippi or…”

  “Just do it, Sarat.”

  “All right.”

  Martina went back to her room and lay on her bed. The sheets were cool and the pillow felt good against the back of her neck. Soon the girls heard snoring from behind the curtain.

  Dana, lying still on her cot, cast an eye at her sister.

  “Go on then,” she said.

  “She’s gonna change her mind when she wakes up,” Sarat replied. “She’ll want it back.”

  “And she’ll get mad at you if it’s still there. Open it up—let’s take some of it and tell her we haven’t given away the rest yet. Then everybody’s happy.”

  Sarat retrieved from a sheath in her pocket the small folding knife Gaines had given her. When she first received it the blade was dull, but she had scraped it against the sharpening stone night after night. Now the blade was rough and uneven from being overworked, but Sarat mistook this for sharpness.

  She slit the tape and opened the care package. She picked the first items she saw inside—a couple of stunted, Blue-grown oranges—and tossed one to her sister. Dana pierced the skin with her fingernail and held the fruit to her nose and inhaled deeply.

  “They must have gone all the way up to Virginia for these,” she said.

  Sarat shook her head. “Simon says they’ve only been fighting around the southern end of the Smokys. Picking out those militias around there. Get any further north and the Blue soldiers proper will get you.”

  “Can’t grow these in Tennessee,” Dana said. “Too hot. Gotta be Virginia at least.”

  “They don’t go get them where they’re grown. They just pick them up at the ports in Augusta. You can get whatever you want there. Stuff you can’t even get in Atlanta.”

  Dana smirked. “What do you know about all that? You can’t even point Augusta out on a map.”

  “Yeah I can, and it’s true. Nobody keeps track of what’s on those charity ships. You can steal half t
he boat before anyone notices.”

  Sarat sifted through the rest of the package. She tossed a small can of cashews to her sister, and kept a packet of apricot gel for herself. She set aside a tube of superglue and a roll of twine and some knitting supplies to hand out to other refugees, and left the rest for her mother.

  “Hey, give me some of those,” Dana said, pointing to a small container of painkillers. “Mama doesn’t need those.”

  “Nobody needs those,” Sarat replied. “They’re for broken bones. What have you got that needs these?”

  “I got bored,” Dana said, raising her feet to the air and flicking her toes at the ceiling. “I got ten broken bones’ worth of bored.”

  Sarat observed her sister on the bed. She seemed younger somehow. For as long as she could remember, Sarat had felt that her twin had a head start on her, an innate understanding of what it means to be grown up. But in the last few months, she had come to feel the opposite. Now Dana suddenly seemed to her impossibly juvenile, and the things that held her interest girlish and trite.

  Sarat set the painkillers in the package and then slid the box under her bed. She turned back to her book. Dana picked at her orange, savoring each segment and setting a strip of the fruit’s skin atop her upper lip like a mustache. She hummed the first bars of a popular Redgrass song called “Julia’s Right,” which the summer prior had been the biggest hit in all the Mag and was universally banned anywhere north of the Tennessee line. The song was by a country star called Cherylene Cee, after whom Sarat had named her pet turtle.

  Dana turned once more to her sister. “So when are we gonna tell Mama?” she said.