“A baby doesn’t learn to walk from its mother’s arms,” the driver said to me, as though reading my mind. “All they did was come here and piss all over us.”
Maybe some of us pissed all over ourselves, I wanted to say, but offered, “Sure. It will take time,” instead.
I still had hope, but was no longer careless with it.
THE CAR VEERED west, away from Tal Afar, and a signpost seemed to hurtle past and right through me: SHINGAL. We were driving over the ancient stretch of desert I’d crisscrossed in the Humvees, and visions of the past came at me like flash cards: arms of the sacred mountain rising like an ark; farm buildings lazing in the spooned-out valley; a water tower in the distance; Sergeant White’s hands over mine on the baseball bat. And not long ago, Basim’s house on the far side of Khanasor—Team Spider all there, sitting shoulder to shoulder around the long floor mat, steaming plates of fragrant food filling the center: couscous, grilled lamb, cucumbers in yogurt, stacks of fresh naan. We all ate with our fingers until we sagged and had to sit way back. Migone grabbed his belly, exhaled, and called out for mercy, and still Basim’s smiling mother brought out more food.
“Is this how they all are?” whispered my brother Samir, sitting next to me, his face flushed with ale.
“Yes,” I said to him. “It is.”
HOME. THE LAST time I’d been there, I’d brought back small sacks of American candies and taught my mother how to make chicken noodle soup.
“Shaker, tell me how to greet the Americans when they come here to eat,” she’d said to me, all excited.
And the next day, as half a dozen soldiers crossed the threshold carrying bags of food from the markets, my mother rushed in from the courtyard, holding out her hands.
“Hello and welcome,” she sang out, grabbing them each by the shoulders and squeezing. “Hello and welcome, you sons of bitches!”
And minutes later, the joke revealed, the team all stood there doubled over in their fatigues, tears streaming down their faces, as Daki whipped me hard with a towel and I ran around the room in circles trying to stop myself from laughing.
“You spank your boy good and hard, Mrs. Jeffrey, until his scrawny little butt is nice and raw. Translate that, Mikey, you little shit.”
WINDOW OPEN. POTS of herbs on the sill. Smells of good food, the cupboards full—I didn’t have to go inside just yet to know it. Instead, I stood in the street looking in as though watching a dream, duffel bag and box at my feet, as my family moved about the front room. My brothers and their wives tore off bites of naan as they stared at the television sitting on a stand in the corner. Dapîra sat wrapped in her blue shawl, dozing. They were watching a show about cooking; a woman decorated delicate pastries that looked like flowers, and I heard my mother let out an ooh.
New refrigerator in the corner, the freshly painted walls as white as paper. There was a satellite dish propped to the roof, a water tank with a heater, and colorful dresses and cotton shirts flapped like bright flags from the line. A small hatchback sat in the street, and I ran my hand along the fender. Still warm and ticking. I heard Naïf say he’d taken it to buy bags of coal at market, just as I’d asked. I felt for the roll of cash tucked away in my pocket and thought of my Babo.
“What do you think of me now, I wonder?” I said to the sky.
Then I picked up my things, smiled, and stepped across the threshold and into the warm embrace of home. I’ll just begin again, I thought, and went to hug my mother, and kiss the top of Dapîra’s head.
STANDING IN THE courtyard over our patch of dirt, I fanned the red coals and tried to remember everything Migone had told me about manning the barbecue. Fat dripped from the cooking chicken skins and I basted the legs in a thick brown sauce. Kraft Hickory—I’d come back with several bottles.
Set up in the corner, the grill sent up puffs of aromatic heat like a lazy afternoon, transporting me right back to FOB Sykes, and I cracked open a cold soda. Haji watched me from one of the lawn chairs on the other side as I sliced open a pack of hot dogs and dropped one on the grill. I explained the importance of the onions, relish, mustard, and ketchup on hot dogs and burgers.
Haji was quiet, looking from me to the main door and back again. He lit up the hookah and took several long deliberate puffs. Coals hissed and tambour music thrummed from an adjacent yard. We could hear Daki moving about in the heart of the house, her voice soft and harmonious and finally freed of all her cares. She was practicing the American movie slang I’d taught her.
“Hey, you want a piece of me?” she said in slow English.
Haji got up, closed the door, and went back to the lawn chair.
“Shaker,” he said, sitting on the end, elbows on his knees. He was rubbing his hands together, a nervous habit picked up from our mother.
I crossed the dirt and handed him the dressed up hot dog on a plate. Haji bit a chunk off the end and chewed fast, a round bulge planted in his cheek; mustard pooled at the corner of his mouth. Then he swallowed and waited a moment, considering.
“Weird,” he said at last. “But good.” And then he paused, weighing his words. “I saw the pistol in your bag.”
I knew what was coming, but let him have his say. The smoldering grill kept my hands busy, and I made a show of moving around pieces of meat.
“A translator was murdered on the road to Tal Afar last night.”
“I know.”
“It’s like the tenth one this month. There have been kidnappings, beheadings all over Nineveh. Elsewhere, too. There’s a list of you guys, especially the ones who worked for the commanders. They say you worked for lieutenant colonels and met General Petraeus, the American, in Taji. Why would you do that?”
“My job was construction. In the cities.”
“It’s an execution list, brother.”
“Yup,” I said. “That’s why I have the gun.”
“I wish I had known it was going to be this bad. We are grateful, but the price is too high.”
Then I put the tongs down and looked up from the grill. For a moment, I held my brother’s face in the hard fist of my unwavering gaze. A strange sensation of rage was creeping up from my gut like thin flame and I worked a moment to tamp it down.
“It was the right thing to do for us and for the country, and I don’t regret it.”
Haji nodded and I knew he understood that the daydreaming little brother floating in the pool of well water and shepherding lambs was long gone. I told him not to worry—I knew the dangers and how to “watch my six.” My plan was to finish school and to try and get to America through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program.
Standing in the yard of our concrete house and working the barbecue was disquieting. It was as though no time at all had passed, and yet nothing was the same—starting with me.
BENEATH A MANTLE of stars, all of Shingal slept. But forty miles to the west, disgruntled Sunnis with blood on their minds continued to creep over the rat-line and into our wasteland. Bats slipped in and out of the sky as though through small tears in the sky, and I watched them, wide awake night after night, until sunrise.
Lying on a mat by the wall, I stared at the damp clothes sagging like deflated body parts on the line. The iPod sat in my lap, and I toggled through tunes, each one releasing memories of bases and friends, so far away now. Lately, I had trouble remembering small things about them that I wished to hold on to. Eye color. Middle names. The sound of a laugh. Sometimes, I think I left part of myself back in Mosul and out on the sands, and I thought of all the soldiers I’d seen who’d lost their limbs. I was missing something, but there was nowhere to go—no Walter Reed hospital for souls that would give me a new one. Maybe it was just “Michael”—the name—I was missing.
Gradually, streams of thought coalesced into a drowsy stupor, and I fell into more waking dreams as though into a well. Night after night, it was always the same.
EYES WIDE OPEN, I strained to see through the gloom—winter, 2008. We’d been working the streets for days i
n a row; my insides churned with tasteless MREs. Bowers and Faulkner had the HVT by the collar, and then the IA officers took over, pushing and kicking him along the corridor. Under a black hood, the man grunted like an animal, his hands working at the ties that clamped his fists together behind his back.
We moved into a small room with a table and chairs, and they shoved him down into a metal seat. Bowers stood back against the wall and Faulkner slid over a chair. All the sounds in the hot room seemed amplified. It felt like being inside a bunker.
Colonel Dildar was already there watching, waiting. Then he gave a signal, and at the rise and fall of his hand, an officer pulled off the black hood. The face underneath was roughed up, hard to tell how badly under the sheen of oily sweat and urban filth. A mess of blood and spit smeared one side of his swollen bug-bitten jowls. He had a belly like a barrel and belched several times; everything he did in there was passive and deliberate. They were all the same. The higher-ups in the terrorist networks always looked nonplussed and well fed.
As soon as Colonel Dildar spoke, I took my position at his side, sitting down between him and the suspect, who stared at the table in his stinking clothes. I concentrated on the words I heard, and those I uttered back and, for the moment, not much else.
“Real name?”
“Eat shit,” the suspect said to me in Arabic, and spat.
“Try again.”
“Screw you.”
And it would go on for hours.
When the others went out for a break, Faulkner, Bowers, and I were left alone. The overhead lights went out for a beat and came back on again. A fly buzzed against the ceiling and I exchanged a look with Bowers. Somewhere along the outside hallway, a door slammed shut and I flinched.
That’s when the suspect slid his eyes over to me and sniffed at the air. He brought his purple lips together like mating worms.
Faulkner shuffled through papers; Bowers was just looking straight ahead in the shadows.
“Ya sharmouta,” the man uttered under his breath. “You bitch. Working for these dogs.”
I’d been through the same routine before many times, and said nothing.
“Shingal,” he said, and clucked his tongue on the roof of his mouth.
I just sat there stock-still.
“Can smell it on you like a dog’s shit.”
Faulkner slapped down his pen and looked over. “What’s he saying, Michael?”
“Just a bunch of nonsense, sir, about the way I smell.”
And I shrugged.
A moment later, the militant sat back and chuckled at the ceiling, and then looked back at me like I was an animal he’d cornered.
“Khanasor, I’m thinking. Your English is too good.”
I knew the blood that stained his shirt like war paint was not his own; some of the leaders liked to take off the heads themselves, and that’s where all this talk was going. But by now, my own blood had stirred, and an ancient call to defend what I held most dear spread out from the very center of my body. When he spoke next, I was ready.
“You filthy devil-worshipping Yazidi pig,” he started up again. “Your women were made to be our whores. When these dogs all run home, I’ll fuck your sisters and make you watch before I slit your throat.”
The open back of my hand flew out like a catapult and clocked him hard. My third finger snapped like a wishbone.
But Faulkner and Bowers already had me in a hold, and were dragging me out kicking and panting.
And before I was all the way out the door, I watched him lean to the side and smear his bleeding nose against his shoulder. Then he offered me a raw impassive gaze in which all the dark hatreds of Mosul stirred.
“See you soon, Michael,” he said out loud and laughed.
And I could feel I’d be taking him at his word.
STILL ON THE roof and wide-eyed, I came to, mouth open and dripping. Fresh pain still shot along my finger, and I held my hand up against the full moon. Then I touched the ground all around me: the rough concrete that made up the roof of our house. The sweat-drenched sheets that were stuck to my skin. Winds had gathered and were gusting, sending the clothes flapping on the line. And I looked over to see Haji’s silhouette moving toward me. I filled my lungs. Felt my heartbeat.
“You OK, brother?” Haji said into the night. “We heard you cry out.”
“Yes,” I whispered, and grabbed the drink he held out to me in the silvered darkness. He tried to convince me that it would get better soon. I drank the water that was so cold and full of moonlight, and then I listened as Haji’s footfalls faded, until all I could hear were my own quick breaths and the wild dogs howling along the slumbering hills.
Chapter Eleven
Dil-Mir
A BOOK LAY OPEN BEFORE ME LIKE AN OFFERING ON THE DESK. The big room was bright and empty as a tank and I was all alone in it, waiting for the others to come. Years ago, this had all been a matter of routine: getting up in the morning, boiling an egg, filling my satchel with notebooks and pens, the carefree walk to school along the unswept lanes. I ran a hand over the smooth bleached paper, caressing the surface as though it were new skin, fingers tracing the many lines of black ink. Words. Pages and pages of them stacked into the tens of thousands—a whole world containing worlds, bound to a feeble spine. To me they might as well have been meaningless jumbles of letters. Anyone walking in and seeing my fingertips whispering back and forth across the text would have mistaken me for a blind man. In a way, I was.
As soon as the bell rang, an avalanche descended. The doors flung open and a torrent of warm bodies rushed in, jabbering, laughing, and filling up the vacant rows. The stench of sleep and young sweat was overpowering; I took in a gulp of air through my mouth. A few curious glances thrown in my direction, but I just sat there still as a stone. I kept my eyes tied to the open page and concentrated hard on the first sentence—
—and got no further. The other students were unloading their bags and setting up their desks. Nothing more on their minds than the next break and another tedious day ahead. Hard to believe I’d once been one of them.
When the teacher walked in in her robes, I slipped back my chair and stood among the others, returning her greeting in a monotone unison. Somewhere behind me, a boy fell into a coughing fit. The windows were open and I looked out at the sky. Clouds and electrical wires—everything in its place. A car revved and soft music poured from the adjacent streets. The teacher was calling out the attendance list, but I could barely hear her. Then the sound of her voice intoning my name wrenched me into a sudden panic. I couldn’t speak for one full minute, or escape the cyclone of thoughts that seemed to engulf me:
Michael. Mohammed. Mikey.
You look like a badass, and I need one good badass this morning.
Time had splintered into fragments, and I just stood there drowning inside an invisible maelstrom.
She said my name again, and finally I pulled up my hand and nodded.
“Here,” I breathed, heaving out the word like a boulder.
But I was not there at all.
IN MY LAST months at FOB Sykes, Iavecchia showed me how to breach time and space in mere nanoseconds.
“You heard about Facebook, Mikey?” he’d said, clacking at the keyboard.
People. Millions of them, all at my fingertips. And now that the war was over, I would need the miracle of that simple gift to sustain me. Little did I know that one day it would also come to save my life.
The first time I typed in the name “Ronald Bowers” and saw his dimpled American face fill up the screen, I felt a thrill of disbelief. Then whole albums of my smiling friend unfolded in vivid color: our time in Iraq, his family and happy-go-lucky life back in Idaho, all delivered at a mere click. Soon a whole population of military friends and schoolmates were at my fingertips. Joining Facebook was like opening a door to a hidden bridge over a chasm.
After returning to Khanasor in 2011, I would sit up late at night, alone and trolling through old faces and photos o
n my laptop, searching for echoes of the people I’d known and the person I’d been—Michael—sitting in the back of the MRAP with my tambour, manning the BBQ at the FOBs, out on patrol, playing cards. I longed to crawl inside each frame to live it all again for just a while. And then skirting yet another sleepless night of horrors, Bowers sent a message from his side of the world like a flare going up:
“Are you there?”
“Yes, brother,” I answered fast.
And my secret living hell was explained.
WHEN OUR TEAMS of warriors disbanded, back to humdrum domestic lives of garbage collections, school runs, and six o’clock dinners, a strange fever of symptoms unleashed itself into our collective blood—rage, hallucinations, full-blown panic. Some days, the future felt as hopeless as a terminal disease and the hours passed away without any meaning. Ron Bowers understood it all and told me about the service members who’d gone home and attempted suicide, were rapidly divorced, had taken to pill popping and drink. And he’d used a single word to describe the malignant sensation that seemed to bind us all like a poisoned strand of DNA—doom. The most hardened soldiers wept in their sleep, he said, hollered at their young children, accused strangers of some murderous intent. Sanity had become a flimsy thing, slipping through fingers like the sands over which so many of us had seen men and women let go of their souls.
Not long before the night Bowers reached out into the void, he’d collapsed. And maybe that’s why he called on me, on anyone. Together in that void, me on my roof in Khanasor, and him on his sofa in Idaho, it was as though no time at all had passed.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “One minute I’m in the 7-Eleven looking for a loaf of whole wheat, the next thing I know I’m somewhere else, backing into the shelves, cans of food falling all around me, not able to breathe. Might have been a smell, or a sound. But something triggered it. And then this guy, he comes in and grabs hold of me—he just grabbed hold of me, and pulled me close with both his arms. Tight. You know, any other time, I would have slugged that guy. But he was one of us, and somehow he knew—he knew how to bring me back.”
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