The Abrupt Physics of Dying

by Paul E. Hardisty

  Unburied Lies

  They left the village in two vehicles, Clay and Abdulkader in the old Land Cruiser with Rania on a stretcher in the back, Hussein in the white Pajero. At the main road, Hussein peeled off towards Al Mukalla. They would meet afterwards at the farm. That was the plan. And then Clay would kill him.

  The Riyan airport terminal building, built by the British in the 1960s and degraded by the Russians over the next couple of decades, sat at the apex of a horseshoe-shaped road lined with trees. Normally, traffic flowed in on one side, passed the drop-off area in front of the terminal, and moved back out along the opposite side of the horseshoe. But now both arms of the road were clogged with vehicles: pickups trying to cut across the direction of travel, a stranded fuel carrier, an assortment of military vehicles spanning five decades, Toyota Land Cruisers and beat up old Nissans, their drivers gesticulating from rolled-down windows or standing in irate clusters next to open doors, voices raised in frustration at the complete breakdown in order, fighting to be heard over the relentless landing and take-off of heavily loaded jets.

  Clay and Abdulkader left the car at the main road and sweated their way on foot through the mire of tangled vehicles towards the terminal, Clay in back, keffiyeh wrapped around his face, only his eyes uncovered, Abdulkader in front, Rania quiet on the stretcher between them, the sample cooler at her feet.

  ‘Lean,’ said Abdulkader, as they walked towards the terminal.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are too tall. Lean.’

  Clay hunched his back, kept his face directed groundward.

  ‘There are soldiers. Say nothing.’

  They kept walking, Rania’s weight swaying in their hands. At the terminal’s main entrance, four draftees in oversized steel helmets and a middle-aged Yemeni army officer with a megaphone attempted to maintain order. A group of exasperated and hoarse expatriates stood on the pavement waving passports above their heads as if they were on a stock-exchange floor trying to dump shares in a collapsing market. The soldiers were checking documents and drip-feeding people into the terminal building in ones and twos.

  They pushed to the front of the ragged queue, drawing stares from some, concern from a few, hostility from others. They were close now, third or fourth from the doors. Sweat flowed freely from the officer’s greying temples and dripped from his chin. He had a fatherly face, until a few days ago a policeman or bank manager perhaps. The door opened again and another expat was allowed to pass, a tall overweight man in jeans and a T-shirt that said: ‘Chernobyl – take your radiation like a man’.

  A tall fair-complexioned officer in a perfectly pressed uniform with crisp boarded epaulettes and a blue shoulder lanyard emerged from the terminal building and stood blinking in the sunlight. There was a small French tricolour patch on his sleeve. He scanned the crowd, fixed on the stretcher, spoke briefly with the Yemeni officer. The two men moved forward and ushered Clay and Abdulkader towards the door. There was a collective groan from the mass. Someone yelled out from behind them: ‘What’s so special about them. I’m an American, for fuck’s sake.’ They kept moving, almost inside now.

  ‘Wait,’ called the officer in Arabic.

  They stopped, just beyond the doors.

  ‘You,’ the officer barked. ‘What is your name?’

  Clay froze, hunched. He could feel the soldier’s eyes piercing the back of his head.

  ‘I am Abdulkader Mohammed Al Gharar of Marib,’ said Abdulkader over his shoulder.

  Clay stood still, gripped the stretcher handles. He’d carried men like this before, some alive still, some not, remembered how much heavier a dead man always seemed, as if life’s regrets hardened to leaden ballast as soon as the spirit fled. In comparison, Rania seemed weightless, a six-year-old boy in his arms as he ran through the sunstruck confusion towards the helicopter. As if she wasn’t there at all.

  Clay heard the officer say: ‘Show me your identification,’ watched as Abdulkader gestured with his chin towards the breast pocket of his jacket, both hands still locked to the stretched handles.

  There was a pause. Clay looked straight ahead, didn’t move. ‘Please,’ he heard the French officer say in Arabic. ‘She looks as though she needs immediate attention. We must hurry.’

  ‘What’s the hold-up?’ he heard someone shout from outside, other voices raised in complaint, half a dozen languages.

  ‘And this man?’ said the Yemeni officer.

  Abdulkader glanced at Clay, expressionless. ‘He is my brother. He cannot speak. By the will of Allah he was born wrong.’

  Silence. Just the milling of the expats outside the doorway, the rumble of aircraft, the confusion of the traffic clogging the airport entrance. Clay dared not turn around, just stood watching his friend, looking down at Rania. ‘Mashallah,’ said the Yemeni officer finally. ‘Go.’

  They moved into the building, stopped just inside as the doors closed behind them. The French officer leaned over the stretcher and spoke into Rania’s ear. Clay watched her lips move in reply, her eyes flutter open. The French officer reached into the pocket of her jacket, pulled out her passport. He flipped through the document and found the photo page and held it next to her face; his hazel eyes flicked back and forth between her and the likeness of her, comparing the real with the image of reality. He nodded, replaced the passport, stood.

  ‘We must hurry,’ he said. ‘This way.’

  The departure hall was a churning sea of heads. They plunged in and fought towards the far end of the hall. They pivoted the stretcher around, Clay leading now. He used his height and weight to drive through the crowd, pulling her along in his wake.

  The big doors at the far end of the departure area had been rolled back, opening out onto a fringe of brown scrub grass and a line of swaying palms. Three Russian-built attack helicopters stood on the concrete apron amidst a jagged landscape of crates and boxes, airfreight containers, ammunition and spare parts. MiG-29 fighter-bombers lined the far ramp, six in all, crews swarming over them like fire ants. Just beyond the runway, set against a sparkling blue sea, a pair of SCUD missiles on mobile launchers hulked in the brown stubble. Two jet fighters in tight formation screamed low over the runway, afterburners flaring, and then turned out over the coast in steep climbing turns. The stench of burnt jet fuel wafted through the building. Across the tarmac a French Air Force Hercules stood at the edge of the apron with engines running, propellers turning, rear ramp open. The noise was deafening, the sound of war.

  The officer waved them forward towards the edge of the apron. Two khaki flight-suited airmen took the stretcher. Clay looked down at Rania. Her eyes were open. She reached up and pulled him toward her. He put his ear to her mouth.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said above the drone of the turboprops. The pilots were powering up the Herc now, checking the turbines, getting ready to go. ‘If I tell them, they will not leave you.’ Her voice was a whisper, a thread. ‘Come with me, chéri, please.’

  He pulled back and looked at her.

  ‘What happened, Rania, back in the village?’

  Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘I …’ she breathed, stopped. ‘Please, Clay. Come with me.’ She reached out for him. Her hand was cold.

  He looked away, across the runway to the sea.

  ‘You will die here,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care what you did, Rania. Tell me.’

  ‘They want Al Shams dead.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Everyone. And they will kill you, too.’ She closed her eyes.

  ‘I can’t leave, Rania.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘That story I told you. The boy in Angola.’

  She looked up at him, blinking away the tears.

  ‘I lied. It was me. I shot him.’

  Her eyes shone like the night, constellations swirling in her tears. It was too hard to look.

  ‘The squad was behind me, still in the trees. I saw movement and I fired. As soon as I’d do
ne it I knew.’ And because he had taken the boy back to the helicopter and sent Eben ahead with the squad, his best friend had been hit and would spend the rest of his life in hospital. If Clay hadn’t panicked, shot without confirming the target, if he hadn’t tried to save the boy, hadn’t succumbed to his guilt, it would have been him out there at the front of the squad. It should always have been him: him who’d taken the bullet, him lying there deaf and dumb in a fucking coma in some shit hospital for all these years.

  Clay looked down at her, this woman he barely knew and yet who seemed to know him so well, and it was like coming out of a morphine sleep of years, feeling again. And in that moment it was so clear: now is all there is. The past is gone, locked away. The future doesn’t exist. It’s what we do now, the decisions we make right now that create the present, seal the past.

  He reached into his pocket, slid the folded sheaf of papers into her hand. ‘Tell the story,’ he said.

  She nodded, tried to reach up for him but she was too weak. He bent over and kissed her. He could feel her lips trembling, the smell of her mixed with the JP4, the roar of the turboprops.

  The officer touched Clay on the shoulder. ‘We must go.’

  Rania slid something into his hand, the back of a cigarette pack. ‘Find me,’ she mouthed as the airmen started across the burning concrete. And then she was moving away from him towards the Hercules, looking back over her shoulder, carried by the French airmen, almost now to the ramp. She raised an arm and tried to wave, the airmen leaning into the blast from the propellers, her hair streaming horizontally. He waved back and then she disappeared into the dark mouth of the transport.

  The Hercules taxied to the far end of the airfield and turned and stopped short of the threshold as a massive unmarked four-engine cargo plane thudded down onto the runway with a puff of smoke. The turboprops opened up with a roar and the Hercules started to move down the runway, slowly at first, gaining speed before rotating and clawing its way into the blue Arabian sky, wings flashing in the sun, a black trail of exhaust falling away to the ground. He stood and looked up at the sky as the point that held her diminished and then was gone.

  Part IV

  Unanswered Questions

  28th May. Riyan, Indian Ocean Coast, Southern Yemen

  Clay and Abdulkader escaped the tumult of the airport and the din of aircraft engines and drove eastwards through a deserted landscape. Dust eddied back through the open windows like a fog of unanswered questions, covering the seats and Rania’s discarded burqa in a thin layer of silt. When they reached the farm, he was going to wrench some answers out of Hussein, one way or another. Why had Hussein shot Rania? And then why had he organised her evacuation, and how had he done it so quickly? He was going to get answers, and then he was going to apply Sharia law.

  Clay searched through the smoking battleground of his feelings, the strewn corpses of lost friends, the wrecks of terminally short relationships. What he felt for Rania was real, strong. He knew that now. And it was getting stronger, growing and kicking inside him, something he could not will away, could not kill. And now she was gone.

  He opened his shirt front pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper that Rania had pressed into his hand at the airport, looked at the scrawled handwriting. The words were almost illegible, jagged, smudged with her blood. Genève/Rimbaud/anges et hommes/Aden. There was a number: 022 347 38 29, or was it 022 391 38 14? He couldn’t tell the fours and nines or the sevens and ones apart. Find me, she had said.

  An hour into the journey, Clay broke the sepulchre of silence that had descended upon them. ‘Do we have enough fuel to get to the CPF and back?’ His voice sounded thin and taut in his own ears.

  ‘Mafi mushkilla.’ No problem. ‘Also five cans at the farm.’

  The farm, where Hussein was waiting for them. ‘Enough to get to Oman after that?’ he said. The Omani border was about 850 kilometres from Ash Shihir following the coast road, most of it unpaved. The alternative was to drive north to Shibam, Abdulkder’s birthplace, and follow Wadi Masila back to the coast and then to Oman, covering about 1200 kilometres through some of the roughest and most empty country on the planet. It was the edge of the world.

  ‘Enough, inshallah.’ Abdulkader trailed off into Koranic verse, eyes narrowed, body rocking forward over the steering wheel, the voice of God pulsing through him in low surging rhythms, invoking the certainty of the al-Furqan, that which distinguishes between truth and falsehood, and the other Sura that he had taught Clay: the al-Nur, the light; the al-Bayan, that which explains all things; and whoever intercedes in a good cause has a share in it, and whoever intercedes in an evil cause has a portion of it, and Allah is ever keeper over all things. And one of his signs is this: that He created mates for you from yourselves that you might find quiet of mind in them, and He put between you love and compassion. Surely there are signs in this for a people who reflect.

  They reached the farm in the rising heat of day. Abdulkader sped along the farm road between the palm groves towards the house. Ahead in the courtyard, he could see Hussein’s white Pajero parked under the big palm tree. There was another vehicle there, too, a big silver Toyota in the middle of the forecourt, doors open. Abdulkader slowed the vehicle and rolled it to a stop.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Abdulkader reached for the binoculars and passed them to Clay. ‘Look near the Toyota.’

  Clay raised the glasses to his eyes and brought the car into focus. The windscreen was opaque, crazed. He scanned down to the open door and then to the ground. At first he thought the man was sleeping, escaping the worst of the day’s heat. His legs were twisted beneath his body, his neck cocked at an angle so that the top of his skull was wedged into the ground. It wasn’t until he saw the dark stain around the head that he realised the man was dead.

  Abdulkader rolled the vehicle to the side of the road, turned off the engine and pulled out the Kalashnikov. ‘Come,’ he said.

  Clay followed Abdulkader through the trees towards the farmhouse. They stopped and crouched behind a steel water tank at the edge of the forecourt and looked over to the house and the outbuildings. The house baked in the kiln of the midday sun. The front door was ajar and the curtains fluttered through open windows. The floor of the veranda flashed and shimmered in the sunlight. They waited and watched.

  Abdulkader chambered a round and signalled him to follow. Just as they left the cover of the water tank, a dog darted out of the front door of the house and loped off into the trees. Its hindquarters were riven with mange, pink and raw. They crossed the forecourt at a run. Abdulkader stepped up onto the veranda. Something crunched under his sandals. The tile floor was covered in shattered glass. Long curved shards edged the window frames; the curtains were torn and holed.

  ‘Stop,’ whispered Abdulkader.

  Clay froze in place, one foot on each step. A low moan came from around the corner of the building. Abdulkader stepped slowly along the veranda, avoiding the broken glass, his back to the wall. He stopped just short of the corner and looked back towards Clay and signalled quiet.

  For what felt like a long time Clay stood immobile on the steps, trying to keep his breathing under control, looking up at his friend standing back to the wall with something or someone just around the corner. Sweat rolled down his sides and welled up in the backs of his knees. Another moan from around the corner, louder this time. In one movement, Abdulkader pivoted through 270 degrees and stepped forward into a crouch, swinging the AK up and around to bear down the length of the far wall. For a moment he remained frozen in position, rifle raised to his jaw. Then he lowered the weapon and signalled Clay to follow.

  The man lay slumped back against the wall of the house in a spreading slick of blood, his hands locked across his abdomen. His white shirt was splattered crimson. He was conscious and looked up as they approached. A submachine gun, a Heckler & Koch MP5, blunt with a long curved clip, lay on the tile out of reach. Spent cartridge casings littered the veranda.

  Abd
ulkader said something in Arabic. The man muttered in reply. Abdulkader picked up the man’s weapon and slung it over his shoulder. The man looked around as if searching for something, eyes half-open. He looked weary. Clay had seen that look before. Abdulkader barked at him again, weapon levelled at his face. The man peered down the gun barrel and replied in an angry wheeze, blood frothing from his mouth. Abdulkader turned away and walked back along the veranda. Clay followed, cold.

  Abdulkader signalled quiet and moved back towards the front door. He crouched and nudged the door open with the lightest touch. Hussein lay on his back in the middle of the tile floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling fan spinning lazily above him, his body resting in a pool of thick arterial blood.

  The Weight of Sin

  They buried Hussein’s body that same day under the most prolific of the pomegranate trees behind the house. The sandy ground made easy digging, and working in turns they fashioned a good, deep grave, with clean, straight sides and a flat base, the Kalashnikov and the Beretta close by. The sun burned Clay’s skin as he sweated in the grave.

  Afterwards they stood over the product of their labour and Abdulkader spoke from the Koran, entrusting this brother to Allah all merciful. Then they dug another hole, far from the house this time, and buried Hussein’s assassins together. Clay wrapped his headcloth over his mouth and nose and tried not to look at the faces or the eyes. Shifting the bodies was hard work, like manhandling sacks of grain, heavier than they appeared, the flies feasting on the corpses and the sweat of their minders. After the burial, Clay walked away into the trees and found a place where he was hidden; he sat on the ground and stared up at the sky.

  By the time he returned to the house, Abdulkader had moved his Land Cruiser behind the buildings and loaded the extra cans of diesel from one of the sheds into Hussein’s vehicle. The Pajero was newer, bigger and faster, a better bet for the difficult road to Oman. Clay drew a pail of water from the well and found some soap and a mop in the kitchen and tried to wash Hussein’s blood from the floor. Blood and water formed a slick of emulsion that spread across the tiles and settled into the grouted troughs between, the liquids only partially miscible, rejecting each other. One after the other, he dumped pails of red water down the sink. Then he washed down the veranda, the two men’s blood mixing freely in the pail.