by James Meek
For three weeks, Kellas was busy filing reports for The Citizen, as the UN arrived in Kabul, western ambassadors returned and fighting moved first to the north, then the mountains in the south. Four journalists were murdered on the road from Pakistan. Kellas asked after Astrid, and worried about her.
Was she right? Was there really no good reason why the Bagram killings should trouble him more than, for instance, the deaths of two Taliban fighters in Kabul? He marched with the Alliance, and thus, with the Americans; he took their hospitality. He was not a guerrilla for peace, sneaking out at night and sabotaging weaponry. He’d never tried to persuade an Afghan that killing was wrong. He observed, he reported, he did not intervene, and as far as that, he was culpable in the project. Without his words and Astrid’s actions, it was true, those men would not have died that day; yet neither he nor Astrid had intended harm. It was not even that he was tormented by the memory of tiny stick figures burning to death in silence. No post-traumatic stress, he didn’t dream about it; the only times he had dreamed about Afghanistan since the fall of Kabul it had been a twee, foppish, comfortable alternative Afghanistan of cake stands and Shaker furniture. And yet, as more Citizen correspondents arrived in Kabul, and he had more time on his hands, he found it gnawing at him.
There was a distance, a modern distance of things, a terrible modern distance where the warriors and their camp followers were neither close enough for the intimate killing of blades and teeth, when you would see the enemy’s face, smell his sweat and hear him panting, nor as far away as the home fires used to be from the front lines. Close enough to see, but not close enough to know. The cleverer wars and the world became, the more bitter the struggle to preserve ignorance. The fuller and the closer the world, the more desperate the struggle to keep the distance. Now that the world could be spanned in a day, now that anyone could learn any language and speak to anyone anywhere at any time, the battle for distance, on which war depended, had taken on a shameless, frantic character. There was a cult of seeing without knowing and watching without touching. The generic foreign faces on television: you knew them, because you could see them, you could hear the foreign sounds they made. But you had to avoid knowing enough about them to prevent your imagination making them out to be what you wanted them to be. You had to turn away from the knowledge that you could reach them on the phone. That they had phones. That they could call you. The horror of the labour required if these truths were accepted drove people to celebrate the distance and nurture it, to turn their wills towards preserving the difference between a here and a there, in a world where there was no there any more, where everyone was already here. Citizens conspired with rulers to give the far-off Other qualities of evil or innocence they did not know they had been given, and could not own. It made no difference whether the fantasy was that the far-off Other was quite unlike us, or that the far-off Other was just the same as us; the dearly cherished fantasy was that the Other was far off. The certainty of members of all the world’s overlapping Ummahs was that they would never have to justify, in person, without an intermediary, in language each could understand, that which was being done in their name to those who lived out the consequences.
Ever since the day at Bagram, Mohamed had been less sincere with him. The smile had been contrived and Mohamed had been more wary, not, Kellas suspected, because he had been troubled by the deed in itself, but because he was sick of war, had seen Kellas as a minor harbinger of its end, and now saw him as part of its perpetuation. He was tainted. Mohamed had been happy on the day he returned to Kabul but after that it became harder and harder to find him. He was busy seeing old friends and fixing up jobs against the day Kellas would leave. When Kellas did track him down one day and asked him to look for the families of the truck drivers who had been killed, Mohamed was reluctant. He didn’t ask why; he wasn’t interested. He explained how difficult it would be to find them, how they could be anywhere, not only in Afghanistan or Pakistan but in Saudi Arabia, Algeria. Where would you start? Kellas dragged him down to the old state truck depot and to the places on the edge of town where the truckers congregated and made him ask. They got nowhere. In the end, on the promise of double pay, Mohamed spent two days with him, trying to find the remains of the burned out truck. Towards the end of the second day they found it, or what they decided must be it, on a gently undulating field of dust, speckled with small stones. A soupy grey sky hung low above their heads. It looked as if it was about to snow. In the distance, at Bagram, they could see the commander’s tower, and cranes moving where the Americans were building a new base. Tubby American transport planes, painted a grey which matched the snowclouds, trundled along the taxiways. The howl of their engines was borne on the cold wind.
Mohamed kicked the rusty, blackened chassis of the truck. There was no sign of what it might have been carrying. If there had been number plates, they had been taken away. Kellas looked around to see if there was any trace of the victims’ remains but there was nothing, not a bone. There wasn’t a habitation for miles. Perhaps the Taliban came out and took them for burial. There were jackals; there were buzzards. Kellas caught Mohamed’s eye and felt foolish.
‘I’m sorry to have brought you all this way,’ he said.
‘Why sorry?’ said Mohamed. ‘For you, I would go to the ends of the earth.’ Kellas knew that they wouldn’t work together again.
‘Don’t think about the men who were in this truck,’ said Mohamed. The wind tugged at his shalwar kameez, pressing it against his ankles. ‘They were bad men, foreigners. Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens. They were the enemies of America and Britain. They deserved to die. Anyway, men are killed here often. What if you found their wives and children? What would you say to them? Would you give them money?’
‘No. I don’t know what I would say to them. Tell them what happened, perhaps, and listen to what they told me.’
‘It wouldn’t help them,’ said Mohamed. He shifted his feet and with his right hand fingered the edge of the fawn blanket slung over his shoulder. His eyes flicked away, then returned to Kellas. ‘And, if they lived here, they would know you, and they would know me. But you would leave, and I would stay. It would be trouble.’
‘Did you find them?’ asked Kellas.
‘You must believe me. The families of the men who died here only want money or revenge. They do not want to shake your hand or to see your tears. It is not enough.’
‘Did you find them?’
‘Adam,’ said Mohamed. ‘Adam Kellas. When you were a boy, were you beaten?’
‘By the teachers.’
‘Was it always justice, that they beat you?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to see the teachers again, to talk about it with them?’
‘It’s not the same!’
‘Take it like a beating, Adam Kellas. Sorrys are not always of use. Not all things can be closed and put away. If everything could be forgiven and made right, what would stop men doing more and more terrible things? When you’re in London, you’ll remember that we’re here.’
‘It’s cold,’ said Kellas. ‘You found them, didn’t you?’
In the car on the way back Kellas told Mohamed that he was leaving. Mohamed said that he should come back and visit him, that he would always be glad to see him.
‘What will you do in London?’ asked Mohamed.
‘I’m writing a book.’
9
Soon after ten o’clock the bus, with Kellas aboard, crossed the Hudson and entered New Jersey. For a short while the lights of Manhattan blazed to starboard before an embankment gulped them down. At Newark, a score of passengers pressed around the door of the bus, waiting to be let in. They looked cold. Several other buses arrived at the same time and passengers ran backwards and forwards trying to find the right one. Their overfilled suitcases on wheels would twist like reluctantly led beasts on the end of their thin handles, tip and roll over, and in their hurry the passengers wouldn’t heed and would scrape them upside down along the
ground. A man in a plastic Stetson who spoke in Spanish heaved a cardboard box longer than he was into the luggage compartment, climbed on board, found a seat, got up, got off, dragged the box out again and loped away for another bus. They set out once more. Kellas tried to sleep, but he was thirsty, and hot air was pouring from a vent under the window by his seat. He took off his jacket. He began to sweat. The veins around his head pulsed and what moisture was left in his mouth felt sticky, stringy. The man next to him had a small, half-full bottle of water in his hands. Kellas said: ‘May I have some of your water?’
The man turned to him, smiled, and said: ‘It’s OK.’
Kellas said again: ‘May I have some of your water?’
The man said: ‘It’s OK.’
Kellas leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. The heat and thirst writhed in him like a second body coterminous with his own, making him shiver awake every time his thoughts wandered to the edge of sleep. Each time he opened his eyes he would see similar fast-food joints and gas stations at similar crossroads, identical traffic lights hanging from the same cables, yet all the time, they were moving south. Little changed except for the illuminated slogans outside the churches. They passed a sign reading ‘A Friend Of God Is A Stranger To The World’.
Some time after midnight they reached Wilmington. There was a smaller crowd waiting to board. Among them, hanging back, eyes glittering with hope, were the homeless. The bus terminal had been chained shut. Kellas could see there was a Pepsi machine in there. He got off the bus and banged on the chained door. One of the homeless men said there was a door on the other side. Kellas and another passenger, a man with a conical head and sideburns and an enormous torso, with a T-shirt that read ‘Little Italy’ on the front and ‘Home of The Sopranos’ on the back, marched to this other door. It was sealed from the inside. It didn’t have a handle. Kellas tapped on the window and attracted the attention of a man in a khaki raincoat, who let them in. Kellas fed a fivedollar bill into the machine and it laid a cold plastic bottle of Pepsi in the groove, and no change. While Kellas wrenched off the cap and emptied the bottle into himself, the bus station attendant began yelling at their saviour. ‘Why’d you let them in?’ she shouted.
‘I was wondering, sirs, if you could possibly help me out,’ said the homeless man, inclining his cup towards the Little Italy patriot. ‘Here’s my ID. I was in Vietnam.’
‘I had to let them in! You can’t have people standing around in the cold.’
‘A little spare change, sirs, would go a long way towards putting one former Marine back on the right course. Semper fidelis.’
‘I want to get home tonight. You don’t have any business opening that fucking door.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ said the man in the raincoat. ‘I don’t care who you are, I deserve respect.’
The Little Italy patriot dropped coins into the ex-Marine’s cup, his large, meaty fingers showing delicacy. ‘You made your choice when you joined the Marines, my friend. Nobody forced you.’
‘Are you kidding? You never heard of conscription?’
‘You’ve got no right to speak to me that way,’ said the man in the raincoat.
They boarded a few minutes before the bus set off again. Kellas dozed until they reached Dover. The immigrant with the water had gone. Kellas’s neighbour now was a man of about his age, portlier, with a black woollen jacket buttoned up to his throat and an expression – eyes staring ahead, a little too wide, braced – of waiting for the next bad thing to happen. As the bus moved off again, Kellas saw dark tyre-stripes drawn through a lacy layer of white on the blacktop. Snow grains swarmed around the lamps.
Kellas asked his neighbour if he knew how far it was to Oak Hall. The man said he’d never heard of it. He was going to Raleigh. His name was Lloyd, and he worked as a medical biller. They shook hands.
‘I’ve never met a medical biller before,’ said Kellas. ‘We have a different system.’
‘You done the right thing,’ said Lloyd. ‘What we have is a mess. We’d be better off with socialised medicine. I always said that. Where you from? Yeah? How come you’re travelling on the bus?’
‘It’s cheap.’
Lloyd laughed. ‘Yeah. It’s cheap.’
‘What happens in America if you get cancer and you don’t have insurance?’
‘You die.’
‘Come on, that’s not true.’
‘You want to know what’s true? I’ll tell you what’s true. I’m going down to see my sister in Raleigh, OK? She’s got no insurance, and she needs thirty thousand dollars’ worth of drugs every year just to stay alive. She’s got a shitty part-time job in a grocery store, and as long as she hardly earns enough to feed her kid, the state of North Carolina pays for her medication. She could get a better job. She’s had offers. But the moment she earns anything more than a poverty wage, the state stops paying for the drugs. Either way they make sure the poor die quicker.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘It’s personal. D’you mind if I ask what your profession is?’
‘I’m unemployed.’
Lloyd laughed sceptically. ‘Come to America to look for a job? You should have stayed at home. I hope you’ve got insurance.’
‘No. In fact, I’ve got this arm, this injury on my arm. I don’t suppose you’d take a look?’ He pulled back his jacket sleeve and held the bandaged wrist out towards Lloyd.
‘Whoa! I said I was a medical biller. I’m not qualified to treat injuries. I don’t even know first aid.’
‘I know you can’t treat it. I thought you might be able to tell me how much it would cost for a doctor to do it.’
‘Oh, the cost?’ Lloyd raised his eyebrows, held the wrist between thumb and forefinger and moved it warily up and down. ‘I don’t know, probably an 881 oh two code, or an 881 twelve. Can’t imagine it would cost more than five hundred bucks, as long as they didn’t have to do any tests.’
‘Five hundred?’
Lloyd laughed. ‘You’ll have to get your British health service to send you a plane to pick you up and fly you to England.’ He shook his head. ‘How’d you get here, anyway? You get such good social security over there you can afford to fly here from Europe?’
‘I thought they were going to publish my book. I thought they were going to give me lots of money. It was a mistake.’
‘What you write?’
‘Novels. Do you read?’
Lloyd breathed in, tucked his chin into his chest, turned, held his two forefingers up to Kellas and said gravely, as if repeating a rehearsed confession: ‘I have to tell you that I am not a great reader. I will try to read Time magazine once a week. If I go into the coffee shop and there’s a newspaper there, I’ll pick it up. I like the sports section, sometimes the Op-Ed. My wife reads a lot, and my kids…they’re into Harry Potter. I dipped into that. That was fun. I love that magic shit. The last proper grown-up novel I read was…what was it called…? The Killing of…To Kill A Mockingbird. We read that at school. I loved that book, but…it’s time, you with me? There’s no time. Sometimes when I’m on the road and I’m staying in a hotel I’ll take the Bible out of the drawer and start to read that. I’ll go through the TV channels first, and when there’s nothing on…No, you know what? It’s when there’s really great shit on several channels, and I watch it all, I watch maybe like a whole movie, and then some chat shows, and then a couple of cartoons, with all the commercials, and I start to feel strange, know what I mean? Like I’ve drunk too much soda. That’s when I get to opening the drawer. A couple of months ago I read the whole of the Book of Genesis before I turned off the light. Now that, for me, is a story. A lot of people I know are always talking about Revelation, and the Rapture, and Jesus is coming, you’d better be ready, but Genesis, that’s the one I prefer. I prefer the beginning to the end, know what I’m saying? So what’s your book about?’
‘It’s a thriller. It’s about a war between Europe and America.’
�
��Europe and America?’ Lloyd laughed. ‘Right, you’re going to take us on.’
‘It’s not about how there will be a war between Europe and America, or how there should be a war between Europe and America. It’s about how there could be.’
‘No way. That’ll never happen. America’s too strong and you Europeans, you’re a bunch of pussies. Look at what’s happening with Iraq. We saved your asses in World War Two and the French and the Germans are too yellow to help us out now when we ask. Not that we need the help, but it’d be nice.’ Lloyd had stopped smiling. His forehead was twisted and he stared at the seat in front of him. ‘Anyway, you’re British, right? You’re on our side. What you talking about?’
‘It’s a book about an imaginary future,’ said Kellas. ‘It’s a thriller. It’s fiction. It’s entertainment.’
‘My sister’s best friend is in Kuwait right now with the Marines. That ain’t much of an entertainment.’
Lloyd and Kellas were silent for a little while, although Lloyd had acquired some indignation; he sat in the seat with his arms folded, looking straight ahead or down the aisle. He was ticking over. A couple of times he made a ‘hm!’ sound. Eventually he turned to Kellas and said: ‘What I want to know is, where do you get off imagining that kind of future?’
