The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  Amanda interrupts, “They’re obsessives who have projected their fears of emotional and physical penetration onto medical technology.” She flings herself down on the patio. Her cotton skirt is carelessly stretched above her knees. “In plain language—the walking wounded.”

  The wounded. Sam thinks of Romey’s scar, of the gunshot that killed Chloe. Sam supposes Amanda would have a neat category for them as well: depressives. But a category isn’t the same thing as an explanation. Knowing Chloe was unhappy isn’t knowing why or how she died. The revelation of Omar and Romey’s fling is fiypostered over Sam’s attempts to find out about her sister’s death, yet someone sent Sam an anonymous card, leading her to Montreal and now Detroit. She is reaching for answers, but they arc away from her like an exploding star she can’t break open, that she can only watch as it shatters against the earth.

  The next morning, which is a Saturday, Amanda asks Sam to drive her to Dearborn. Dearborn is a suburb of Detroit, except the suburbs of Detroit are considered separate cities. Ray explains the purpose of these artificial divisions is to divide municipal tax bases in order to prevent upscale neighbourhoods from having to foot the bill for the poor. Downtown is a wreck due to a Darwinian economic policy.

  Dearborn, or Little Arabia, turns out to have the biggest population of Iraqi citizens outside of Iraq along with the emigrants of many other Middle Eastern countries. Sam drives past dollar stores, bakeries, dry cleaners, and fruit markets, all of which have signs in English and Arabic. On one street men clad in cotton robes and woven caps hasten through the front doors of a domed mosque. This evening Sam will be going to a meeting of Gulf War veterans. For both of these communities of people to share the same geography is, she thinks, a painful irony.

  Sam glances at Amanda. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “What exactly are militia organizations? I know they’re into gun ownership but so is most of America.”

  Amanda, who is sorting out her Canadian and American money, dumps it back into her satchel. “Funny you should ask. I’ve just been doing some research on them.”

  “Francis mentioned that.”

  “Right. Well, militia organizations are paramilitary groups who believe the American people need armed force to defend themselves against the federal government, which they view as the puppet of a global socialist conspiracy. The United Nations, international bankers, and corporations are considered part of the so-called New World Order, whose agenda is the erasure of national and economic borders. People in the militia are horrified by what they fear will be the dilution of white American identity, and the target of their hatred is an ‘other’—-Jews, Muslims, or the Arab world in general.”

  Sam backs the car into a small space. “Why are they so afraid?” What made some people join militia groups while other people took ecstasy and preached peace, love, unity, and respect?

  Amanda undoes her seat belt. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  Sam shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “I think people hate a particular group as a way to avoid hating themselves.” A glint of metal from Amanda’s eyebrow piercing blinds Sam like a camera flash.

  Sam blinks. “What are we doing here in Dearborn?”

  “I’m buying an outfit of Muslim women’s clothing.”

  “Why?”

  “I like disguises.”

  Sam regards the black vintage slip Amanda is wearing as a dress. The flimsy material is slack across her A-cup chest and pulled taut across her wide hips. A pair of chunky leather sandals from the ‘60s complete her retrophile look. Is she an artsy chick who listens to emo, or is her whole presentation a charade? Sam continues her scrutiny of Amanda: pleasant features, pink cheeks, high forehead, and hair like stretched taffy. A Gerber baby all grown up, except Sam senses Amanda has another skin. Francis is equally enigmatic, but Sam isn’t as interested because it is always women who seize her attention. Wagging her finger, Sam says, “I think Francis’s right. You’re an agent.”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for black Ford Explorers.”

  Getting out of the air-conditioned car is almost intolerable, even though Sam broke down just before she left Montreal and cut her black jeans into shorts. Michigan feels much worse than Montreal; the air is more humid, wet, and gummy. Beneath her knapsack, sweat sprouts across Sam’s back. Within minutes, her throat is parched. She goes into a convenience store to buy bottled water. Inside the store a Middle Eastern teenager wearing cargo pants is working behind the counter. When Eminem comes on the radio, the clerk raises the volume on his boom box. As he counts out Sam’s change, he swings his body to the beat, and an older woman stocking the shelves glares at him. Her head and mouth are covered by cloth, but there is no mistaking the censure in her eyes. Their interaction turns out to be a microcosm of the whole area. On the streets Middle Eastern pop competes with hip hop, burger joints vie with falafel stands, while clothing stores carry both head scarves and designer jeans. The melting pot is boiling over, hot liquid scalding everything.

  When they reach a strip mall, Amanda pulls Sam into an air-conditioned Arabic emporium. Sam wanders along the aisles of merchandise, browsing her way through displays of frankincense and incense burners, brass Aladdin lamps, and tapes of belly dancing music. She fingers the hip scarves belly dancers wear, wondering how Romey would look in one. Sam picks up a crimson sash made of chiffon and dangling gold coins and brings it to the counter. If their relationship isn’t over, Sam hopes Romey will like it. Just ahead of Sam, Amanda is buying a black dress, or abaya, as she informs Sam, along with a hijab Muslim women use to cover the head, and a niqab to cover the face. When they get outside, Amanda suggests they go next door to smoke a hookah pipe. Sam has never done that before but, as long as the place is air-conditioned, she is willing to try it.

  They enter a small, dark restaurant with blue walls and wine-coloured carpets. Bronze busts of Nefertiti are propped up here and there, and a wide-screen television is showing Arabic music videos featuring beautiful women sinuously wriggling their bellies. The place is almost empty, and what few customers there are, are all men. After seating Sam and Amanda in a booth, a middle-aged man hands them paper menus, which, along with food and beverages, lists different flavours of hookah tobacco.

  “What kind do you want to try?” Amanda asks.

  Sam shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t even smoke cigarettes.”

  Amanda leans over the table to read Sam’s menu. “We don’t want to get rose water because that’s gross.” She puts a finger on the first item on the list. “Let’s get strawberry, it’s a classic. Do you want anything to eat?”

  Sam shrugs again.

  “I’ll decide,” says Amanda. When the waiter returns, she places her order in Arabic, so Sam has no idea what to expect. What does arrive, before long, is the hookah pipe. It looks like a combination of a lamp and a teapot. The bottom, or base, is made of blue glass, and connected by a metal tube to a triangular cup. Springing from the tube is a thin, coiled-metal hose. The waiter fills the cup at the top with tobacco.

  “He’s packing the hookah,” Amanda explains. She points to the tobacco, which the waiter is covering with tinfoil. “That’s the shisha.”

  He pricks the tinfoil with a toothpick and sets tiny grey cakes of charcoal on top of the foil. An older woman arrives holding a tray containing two coffees and a plate of baklava, which the waiter takes and sets in front of them along with the coffees. He says something else to Amanda in Arabic, but she responds with a wave of her hand, sending him off.

  Sam hears a gurgling sound and realizes the bottom of the hookah pipe is filled with bubbling water. Amanda takes some matches out of her satchel and lights the charcoal. After a minute, she takes the metal hose, puts her mouth on the plastic clip on the end, and breathes in for a moment, then releases a curling wisp of sweetly scented smoke.

  Sam asks Amanda how she learned to spea
k Arabic.

  “I just know a bit. I used to have a Lebanese boyfriend.”

  “The first girl I kissed was born in Greece, but I don’t speak Greek.”

  Amanda explains, “I pick up people’s accents, speech patterns, and languages. If you surround me with people speaking an unfamiliar language, I’ll start to speak it within a few months.” She picks the pipe up from the table, offering it to Sam. “Do you want to try?”

  As Sam sucks in smoke, she tries to prepare herself for the harsh burn of something in her lungs. But—surprise— the smoke is smooth and cool in her chest. She inhales again, more deeply, exhales a candied vapour.

  “What was your Greek girlfriend like?” Amanda asks. She stares at Sam with eyes Sam decides are grey, although the colour grey doesn’t encompass their intensity.

  “She wasn’t gay, and she wasn’t really my girlfriend. She was sexually abused by her father.” Sam stops, tips her eyes down. Why is she even talking about Dyna? The smoke must be making her light-headed. Sam doesn’t want to do some girlie inventory of her relationships with Amanda. For one thing, that would mean thinking about how many relationships Sam’s screwed up, which means thinking about Romey. Sam hands the hose to Amanda. “How come you’re asking?”

  “Just making conversation. If you would prefer, I’ll tell you about my ex-boyfriend.”

  Sam shrugs, which she’s been doing a lot lately.

  “Okay, boys don’t interest you—I see that.” Amanda corrals Sam with another stare. “Francis tells me we’re in Detroit to find out about your sister, who may have killed herself or been killed.”

  Sam sips her coffee. “Yeah.”

  “What was your sister like?”

  That is the question Sam is trying to answer, or more precisely, what was her sister capable of—suicide or getting herself killed? When Sam puts it that way, she realizes there isn’t too much of a difference. She picks up the pipe and inhales more of the strawberry smoke into her lungs. Wasn’t there something in Alice in Wonderland about smoking a hookah? Ah, yes, there was a caterpillar who smoked a hookah and kept asking Alice, who are you? Their conversation went around in circles like the smoke, which is now also swirling between Sam and Amanda. How would Sam describe Chloe? Smart, fierce, and protective, but also thoughtless and annoying. A woman who never tried to charm anyone but whom some people couldn’t help but like. To the caterpillar, Alice was unable to say who she was because her body kept changing size and she couldn’t see herself; that was Chloe.

  Sam says, “Remember how you said you liked disguises?”

  Through a mouthful of baklava, Amanda nods.

  “Well, my sister lived her life like it was a series of disguises. I don’t think she knew who she was.”

  The group of Gulf War veterans meets in the early evening in a computer repair store not far from Dearborn. The store is a mess. It is crammed with broken computers, some of which are so clunky and old Sam can’t understand why they haven’t been thrown away. Flavescent computer monitors line one wall, stacked on top of each other and pitching in all directions. Lying across a series of tables are open hard drives with coloured wires springing out. Sam is about to hear from men who have also been taken apart, whose experience of the Gulf War caused them to short-circuit.

  A dozen or so people sit on canvas chairs in a semi-circle at the front of the store, where an attempt has been made to clear an area of the carpet Most of the people are single men, but there are also a few straight couples. Parked in a wheelchair is a husky man who exudes an aura of authority. He is smooth-shaven with light hair nearly buzzed off. He has a plump, pink face but wary, cynical eyes. Sam can’t judge his age—he reminds her of the way babies can simultaneously resemble old men. Behind the man is a white projector screen.

  She sits in one of the canvas chairs and tries to remember what she knows about the Gulf War. In theory, the United States declared war on Iraq because of the injustice of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, but myriad dictators have committed genocide and invaded countries without being sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. Why did Iraq face repercussions from the United States? Oil.

  Sam hears one man say to another: “I heard my company First Sergeant is sick now. I’m telling you, this guy could battle a football team and win.” She should mingle, but what can she say to these guys? She has nothing in common with them. Suburbanites who brag about the size of their satellite dishes. Assassins who killed for oil so they could have SUVs.

  The man in the wheelchair introduces himself to everyone as Jason Weaver, a former US Marine.

  “Hi Jason,” everyone says, as though they were at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting—but the similarity immediately ends.

  Jason, despite being sick and disabled, speaks confidently. “America’s assault on Iraq resulted in victory; one hundred thousand Iraqis died compared to less than two hundred allied forces. But a decade later, twenty-five thousand vets from the war have filed disability claims. Many of us say we have Gulf War syndrome. We won’t all use the word but the memory loss, the aching joints, the fatigue, the insomnia, the headaches, they’re real. They’re real, but the media says we’re fakers, that any scientific study we can come up with to prove we’re sick doesn’t have a large enough control group.”

  Almost as if on cue, a man at the back interrupts. “The media is just plain arrogant, people debating just for the sake of debating. When you wake up in the morning and your body has shut down, that’s when you figure out something’s wrong.”

  Jason nods. “That’s exactly right. We don’t know why we’re sick; we’re not scientists, but we know something’s wrong. We know the theories: chemical and biological weapons, stress, vaccines, and oil fires. I believe my illness was caused by chemical weapons.”

  The guy at the back speaks up again. “I was a radio operator in the Gulf, and I remember this Iraqi Scud missile attack. As soon as the warhead landed, every chemical-agent monitoring device in the area went off. We got put onto the highest alert for twenty minutes, and then got told it was a false alarm.”

  “That’s the military for you,” Jason says. “Everything’s on a need-to-know basis.” He pauses to wheel himself away from the screen, then calls for volunteers to turn off the lights and to operate the slide projector.

  Sam switches off the lights. This meeting doesn’t seem like a support group. She expected each veteran would get a chance to talk briefly about themselves and their experiences, but clearly Jason has something else in mind. His talk seems rehearsed, as if he has given it many times before. No one is asking any questions, so she must be the only one who is out of the loop.

  Slides display the flash-bang spectacle of war: convoys of tanks, oil wellheads spewing smoke, and the oil fires— toxic cascades of light in the night sky. There are also slides of guys on board the ship playing cards, waiting in line for chow, and on “liberty” in Hawaii bars. One slide shows a picture of a corpse in the sand, an Iraqi soldier dowsed in blood, flaps of his skin hanging from his body. Up until then, the slides didn’t look like war so much as men training for war, playing at war. The dead soldier is the only picture of the enemy Jason has taken, and he doesn’t say whether he killed the man. He does say the ground war was so “successful” it stopped one hundred hours after it began, and Sam gradually realizes that while Jason spent months in the Persian Gulf, he only did a total of a few hours of actual combat time. The Gulf War was no Vietnam; it was an accelerated music video. Jason saw action for the first time only after the ceasefire— shooting hadn’t ended in all sectors. His company was checking out a series of bunkers in a forest close to the oil fields when they began receiving small arms and automatic weapons fire from enemy soldiers. They returned fire and called in air support. “We finally got to do what we were supposed to do,” Jason says, sounding relieved. Despite the Gulf War having made him sick, he is glad he had the opportunity to fight in it. Sam can’t understand him. How can anyone aspire to being a killer?
How can these men justify the invasion of a country far less powerful than the one in which they live? It’s shooting goldfish in a bowl.

  A slide appears of a dead dog lying on its side, its legs like bent sticks. Jason wheels himself in front of the screen, and the illuminated dust from the projector jets onto his chest. He says, “It was during that operation I saw what the government won’t admit, evidence of chemical weapons.” Near the oil fields, his company found enemy tanks and supply trucks destroyed by helicopters. They also discovered hundreds of dead animals: not just one kind, but cows, goats, dogs, chickens, birds, and cats. The animals had no bullet wounds, and insects lay dead around them as well. “That made us stop and think; was there some chemical warfare agent in the air? Should we be putting on gas masks? The head of our command called someone and, while we were waiting, I took pictures. The higher-ups insisted the area wasn’t toxic, so we kept going. But a day before my ship arrived in the United States, a team of customs agents was flown on board by a Navy helicopter. Our company was told to take all our stuff and go on deck, where each Marine had his bags checked. They told us it was for weapons, but then they took everyone’s rolls of film. But they missed this one—it was in my jacket pocket, and they didn’t search us.”

  After Sam puts the lights back on, Jason reveals the purpose of his slide show: he wants to start a class action suit against the military and the government. The slide of a dead dog is his evidence he and others were harmed by chemicals. So far, over a hundred people have joined the suit. Who else wants to sign up? For the remainder of the meeting, the men discuss legal strategy, what it is Jason wants to accomplish, whether it is possible this action can be heard outside of a military court, and how much money the suit will cost.