The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  ‘It’s only eight numbers, not sixteen. You think of a building you know, you place each number in a room.’

  ‘Jamal and Adar might be dead. I’m not in the mood to play memory palace.’

  ‘Fine. Remember the longitude. They’ll see it’s near the road, and can start looking there. That’s the second set of numbers. Forty-one is when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Picture it. Forty-seven was the year the National Security Act was signed by Truman, creating the CIA and the air force. Picture it. Thirty-two … um. That’s tougher. Oh, ’32 is when Babe Ruth played his last season. Made that called shot against Root. Shut Chicago up for probably the first and last time. We’re talking baseball here, not cricket.’

  ‘That didn’t happen. I saw a documentary. He was pointing to the dugout. They were heckling him, and he was responding that he only had two strikes. It’s myth. Folklore.’

  ‘I saw that video with my own eyes.’

  ‘Yes, Arwood, but you don’t know what it meant. Like the shots behind the wall.’

  ‘Stay focussed. Nineteen eighty-seven. I think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was ’86, unfortunately. Did you see The Princess Bride? That was ’87.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mandy Patinkin? Robin Wright? Wallace Shawn? André the Giant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have no memory of Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya saying, “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your life is empty. What about Robocop? That was ’87, too.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dirty Dancing?’

  Benton is silent.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I might have seen it.’

  ‘Cute little Jewish girl in the Catskill Mountains seduced by the gentile help, and their beatnik ways at the summer resort?’

  ‘I hadn’t really—’

  ‘So: Pearl Harbor, air force, Babe Ruth, Dirty Dancing. All-American numbers. See? More coincidence. Makes it easier to remember.’

  ‘You used your American brain to make sense of the numbers, Arwood. That’s why they are now American numbers. I’m wondering if you’re really OK.’

  ‘We need to send those numbers.’

  Benton has had enough. There is no way of sending those numbers. No way to type them into the phone. No way to catch a signal and ride it to safety on a moonbeam.

  He steps backward to the wall, leans back against it, and eases himself to the floor. Once down, he rolls onto his side and massages his left shoulder by kneading it into the mattress, which is thin enough to be a hard surface.

  Hands would be better — a woman’s hands. Vanessa’s and Märta’s hands are different. Vanessa’s are longer, softer, gentler, but she lacks strength in them. He confuses this sometimes with a mental state, as though her fingers lack will. Märta is all purpose. She’s structured and orderly in her touch. She works it like a job. It’s less sensual, less tender, but more productive. He needs both of them right now.

  ‘Don’t quit,’ Arwood says.

  ‘I need a second.’

  ‘Does this thing have voice recognition?’ Arwood says, wiggling the phone behind his back for emphasis.

  ‘I have no idea, Arwood.’

  Arwood presses the Home button to wake it up, then presses it again and holds it down. This activates Siri, Apple’s chipper, artificially intelligent software.

  ‘Call Märta,’ Arwood says loudly, despite the phone being behind his back.

  ‘Kan du upprepa det?’

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Arwood says.

  ‘Swedish. It’s her phone.’

  ‘I don’t speak Swedish.’

  ‘The telephone does,’ Benton says. Unable to take the smell anymore, he rolls off the mattress and rubs his shoulder against the floor instead.

  Arwood mumbles something pejorative about the Stockholm syndrome before concluding, ‘You’re gonna have to use your nose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your nose. Get on your knees. You can see the Contacts icon, or address book, or whatever it is. Tap it with the end of your nose, then scroll—’

  ‘Scroll?’

  ‘Like a seal pushing a ball. You scroll to Märta’s name, and try calling it with your nose.’

  ‘I don’t think that—’

  ‘I’m not fucking around, Benton. This is what needs to be done, unless you can type with your dick.’

  Benton rises to his knees, using the same technique as before, though it requires even more effort now.

  ‘We don’t have a signal, and I’m too tired.’

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ says Arwood, who drops to the mattress and slips the phone under it as quickly as a teenage boy hides a magazine.

  Benton and Arwood hear a padlock being removed from the other side of the inner door and a deadbolt sliding into the open position. The light overhead is turned off, and the room becomes black. The door is opened slightly. A hand tosses an object into the room, and closes the door again quickly. The locks are reapplied.

  Above them is the pink of dusk spreading across the ceiling. Below, not far from the door, is a piece of cloth. It appears black — a product coughed up from the void.

  ‘Is that it, or is there something under it?’ Benton asks. ‘A grenade?’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything fall. But if I’m wrong, we’ll know in a second.’

  The fabric has collapsed onto itself and rests, its message as uncertain as its origin. To Benton, it looks organic and as natural in its free-flowing shape as an octopus. It seems to attract the light into its black folds.

  Benton is the first to say what they both see: ‘It’s wet. Toward the right.’

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘It’s blood.’

  ‘We can’t be sure.’

  ‘Of course we can be sure. We can see it, feel it, taste it, smell it. You want to confirm it’s blood and not tea, then go ahead.’

  ‘Fine, Benton. It’s blood.’

  ‘It’s the green dress.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s the girl’s green dress, Arwood. The girl’s dress is bloody. It’s Adar’s bloody dress.’

  Arwood walks over and moves it around gently with his foot. The colour is impossible to make out in this light, but the arms of the dress, and the way the sleeves flare, and the straight edge of the colour under the neck — they are the same.

  Arwood kneels down and smells it. He puts his tongue in it.

  ‘For the love of God, Arwood.’

  He spits it out. ‘It’s blood.’

  ‘So they shot her. And then they proved it.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean shit.’

  ‘Are you mad? You’re looking at the evidence right in front of you.’

  ‘I’m looking at her bloodied dress. I accept it’s hers. And I accept it’s blood. But whose blood? Who knows? Do you know? I’m staring right at it, and I don’t know. And neither do you. You just explained the same thing to me with baseball!’

  ‘This is different.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same,’ Arwood says. ‘We’re looking at something, and we don’t know what it means. Welcome to Iraq!’

  ‘You’re denying the obvious, because you can’t accept it. The kids are dead, and we’re next. Maybe you were right. There is some mystical force at work, but not to save her. We’re destined to kill this girl over and over and over again.’

  ‘No,’ Arwood says. ‘The dress tells us nothing. The answer is in the hand that put it there. Why? Think about it. I’ll tell you why. To terrorise us. Know how I know that? Because they’re fucking terrorists, Benton. Dogs bark, cats meow. These guys do this. If they wanted us to know — really know — she was dead, they’d have walked her into this room, shot her in the head right in
front of us, and dragged her body out. They didn’t. At the moment, all we know is that she’s other-than-here, there’s a bloody dress, and these fuckwits are into mind games. That last one — being into mind games — that’s a new and important piece of survival information. All of which tipped their hand, not ours. And what about Jamal? Where’s his … what was he wearing, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Clothing.’

  ‘Well … you see my point.’

  ‘This is just swell,’ Benton says.

  ‘Let’s get out of these cuffs.’

  ‘How do we do that?’ Benton says.

  ‘Well … I’m thinking we bite through them. I’m thinking you bite through mine.’

  ‘Why? Why not you bite through mine?’

  ‘Because you’re too technologically illiterate to work the damn telephone, that’s why. And if needed, there’s a tiny chance I might put up a good fight. You can’t. So my net assessment is that my hands are more useful than your hands. I’ll stand. Make it easier for you. Get comfy.’

  ‘I’ll be glad when this war is over,’ Benton says.

  ‘Haven’t you read the papers, Thomas? The war is over. This is the peace.’

  26

  Charlotte has decided to take the call with Miguel from home, as Guy has gone to see a summer blockbuster that involves superheroes and supervillains engaged in superfighting. He won’t be back for hours.

  Though it is not her routine, Charlotte showers, brushes her teeth, puts on a summer dress of yellows, reds, and oranges, and puts her hair up. When she is done, she has little choice but to ask her reflection in the bathroom mirror a candid question: ‘What are you doing? Yes, you. You think this is a date? You tell anyone about this, and so help me,’ she says, flicking off the light and leaving her hair down.

  On her way down to the computer, she puts it up again.

  Sitting on a chipped Danish chair, she launches the computer application and places the call to Miguel. She could have waited for Miguel to ring at the proper time, but then she would have been a girl waiting by the virtual phone — not even an actual one — and that wouldn’t do. But calling him, she thinks as it rings, suggests a certain eagerness, doesn’t it?

  Not when you’re calling about a lost father, you dimwit, she says to herself.

  Charlotte hasn’t really been out of Bristol — out of the lab itself, come to think of it — in ages. Aside from the odd visit to her mother in Fowey, she hasn’t even been to London in over half a year. That would have been unthinkable in her twenties — nothing she could have admitted to. And yet, now, it’s not the same. Routine has set in, and she rather likes it. She’s learned, as an adult, that it can be spiritually rejuvenating to exhale London and let it go, like freeing a trapped ghost so it might return to haunt its own terrain. One can actually feel free of London, though its gravitational force and imperial control are always present.

  Iraq, though. Can one even get there from here?

  As the computer rings, Charlotte suddenly feels exposed, and wants her neck covered. She yanks out the hair band and lets her hair fall, just as Miguel answers.

  ‘Hello? Is that Charlotte? Buenas noches!’

  ‘Good evening, Miguel.’

  ‘You let your hair down. That’s very nice.’

  ‘Ah … no. I usually wear it down. It’s … natural.’

  ‘I can see, though, how your hair gently curves toward your neck as it drops down, and then waves itself out again like a flamenco skirt, because only recently it was tied in the back. But no matter. I see you are not eating the fried tom-toms. That is good.’

  ‘Wontons.’

  Miguel’s image is a bit wobbly, and behind him there is a map of Iraq with a UN logo and the letters UNHCR, which mean nothing to her.

  It strikes her as odd that someone living in a war zone, among tens of thousands of displaced people, can be so cheerful. Before she can interrupt herself, she asks, ‘Why are you so happy?’

  ‘I think this will be a very nice walk, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. You’re away from friends and family. A girlfriend, maybe. Everyone around you is miserable. You look like you just landed a research grant.’

  ‘That is the pinnacle of happiness? A research grant?’

  Isn’t it?

  ‘One can’t really find happiness in places like this,’ he continues. ‘You need to take it with you, and hand it out to those who need it.’

  ‘That’s sweet, but by that logic, you eventually run out.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed. Maybe my analogy is wrong.’

  The screen changes as the iPad Miguel is using switches to the forward-facing camera. Miguel and Iraq are gone, and instead there is a view of a small office that reminds Charlotte of the kind she’s seen at construction sites where the workmen walk up a few wooden steps into a lorry while removing their hardhats and reaching for a cup of bad coffee. There is a round table and some plastic chairs, an orange extension cord, and more maps on the far wall. Between those maps, though, is a mirror. And as Miguel moves closer to the wall, the contraption he has built comes more clearly into view.

  She can see him from the waist up now. He is slender and earnest, and has floppy hair. There is an earnestness and boyishness to him. There is no way he is over thirty. In his right hand he holds a broom handle, and at the top of the handle is the bottom part of a dustpan on which he has rested the iPad and secured it with electrical tape. The iPad cover itself is baby blue, like the colour of the UN logo. He is smiling and waving.

  She waves back.

  She feels like an idiot waving back, and does not understand how it has come to pass that Miguel gets to set the terms of their goofiness.

  ‘Do you watch the television show Game of Thrones?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK, good. Because many people who watch that television show — and some of the donors do, unfortunately — are unnerved by what comes next,’ Miguel says, swivelling the iPad around on the handle to reveal Charlotte’s disembodied head impaled on a stick in Iraq.

  ‘In the history of the world,’ Miguel says, ‘this is the one view of yourself you never get to see. But with the benefit of modern technology, now you can! Meanwhile, introductions are necessary. Dr Charlotte,’ he says, ‘may I introduce you to Head of Charlotte. You may be in London—’

  ‘Bristol.’

  ‘OK, but Head of Charlotte is here in Iraq with me. You are now in two places at once. Time and distance have been overcome. To the people here, you are here. Isn’t that fascinating?’

  If Miguel were not Spanish and were from, say, Hull, she would classify this as serial-killer behaviour. And yet, for some reason, she doesn’t.

  ‘OK, let’s get moving,’ he says.

  Miguel has the camera facing the outside world now. Charlotte sits in her kitchen in her sundress facing a laptop, her hair smelling of chamomile, as she watches a world emerge before her as through an alien portal. That world fills her, and her lungs seem to breathe in the exotic air of a land that she has only heard about in passing, and yet that now feels immediate and populated by real people who can see her and know she is there.

  She cannot see it, but she knows that Miguel’s hand holds Head of Charlotte steady as he walks. In her kitchen, and there in Iraq, Charlotte and her doppelgänger bounce to the rhythm of the Spaniard’s gait over the uneven and ancient earth. It is dark there, darker than in Bristol, but fires burn, and streetlights shine down through hard yellow dust onto the dark-skinned children running in brightly coloured clothes, all faded by the sun and tattered from overuse.

  The land is covered with tiny stones and a thick dust that will never be washed away, because there is nowhere for it to go.

  Miguel’s voice accompanies Head of Charlotte. He explains the layout of the camp, who is there, who has come, who
is going, who is ‘at risk’, who is there to help, what might ‘build resilience’ there, and what is undermining their efforts. From habit, he speaks about what is needed and what might be yet to come if that need is not met.

  She stares at the brown and filthy tents with the faded UNHCR logos that are identical to the one she saw earlier on the map. Boys wear T-shirts with Western company logos and names of sports teams. Shoes are a mix of flip-flops and Adidas sandals and Chinese knockoffs of Crocs. Many of the children are barefoot.

  They pass some women who smile at her and Miguel. Some of their heads are covered; many are not. Some children look lower-class, peasantlike, and poor, the way Gypsy beggars on European streets seem born into the clothes they wear. Others look shiny and clean and bright-eyed and incongruous, as though they have come from middle-class lives almost like her own, only to wake up one day to find themselves living in a tent as their country tries to kill them, with their earlier everyday dreams of dolls or soccer balls or boys or video games dismissed as fantasies of former privilege that they will never experience again.

  These people have never been so close, have never been so real to her, as they are right now.

  ‘Come, I want you to meet Ayman,’ Miguel says, in a voice he might use when pointing out Barcelona’s hippest shoe stores. ‘Ayman is six, and his English is wonderful. He is the best student in the MRE class.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Mine risk education. These are the educational activities aimed at reducing the risk of injury from mines and unexploded ordnance by raising awareness and promoting behavioural change through public-information campaigns, education, and training, and liaison with communities.’

  Miguel says this in the singsong and faraway lilt of aeroplane cabin crews running through safety procedures. It is entirely possible he didn’t hear his own answer — it is that automatic.

  ‘Here, come in,’ he says, turning a corner when they arrive at a tent that, to Charlotte, is indistinguishable from any other. Miguel knocks on the pole that holds it up. A woman in a purple scarf nods to Miguel and smiles. She also smiles to Head of Charlotte, and does not seem surprised by the contraption.