Watchlist

by Bryan Hurt

  “What’s the usual?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know. Nigger lover, spic lover, faggot lover, badabadonk, badabadink.” His do-rag had a Finding Nemo motif. Charlie’s daughter was a pediatric nurse in Iowa City and every week she drove out to Edna to sponge down his countertops and bring him a box of old scrubs he could scavenge for kerchiefs. She was a blond, jolly girl, strong round arms; she friended me after we met and filled her page with pictures of her and her girlfriends hoisting martinis and affecting gang signs.

  “Still?” I asked.

  “Every day.”

  “Every day?”

  A boy of twelve appeared from the kitchen with a broom and long-handled dustpan. He started sweeping in brisk strokes, as if he were raking leaves.

  “I’d say about every day. You would be amazed what people can say from the veil of anonymity. You would be amazed.”

  Guillermo Esquivel, the owner, a man with a comically alarmed mien, brought a plate of flautas we hadn’t ordered.

  “Now look at that,” Charlie Burt said. “How much do I owe you, Guillermo?”

  Guillermo wagged a finger at him.

  “You are too good to us,” the mayor said. “Now this right here is the upside to being mayor.”

  Charlie’s daughter told me when the Mexicans began to appear—first by carload, to be housed in trailers off State Road 24, then by van and bus—Charlie did more than welcome them. “He totally went native.” She had a raucous laugh; she seemed to inherit all of Charlie’s equanimity and was uncursed by his powers of reflection. “That’s the reason my mom left,” she said. “Two years of a lockout? Hey, no problem. Black union janitors from Chicago sleeping on the living room floor? That’s cool. But once he jacked the pickup on hydraulics she hauled outta there.”

  I said to Charlie, “That’s what fucked up Jean Seberg. Anonymity. The rumors about her getting pregnant by a Black Panther. She got so upset, her baby died a few hours after birth.”

  “Oh, well, sure. But that was the FBI.” Charlie threw one arm across the back of the banquette and rubbed his belly with the other hand. “That was a sophisticated operation.” One thing I liked about Charlie was that I never had to explain to him about Jean Seberg. He knew all about her, as he knew about all the famous people from this part of Iowa—an astronaut, an opera singer, a gay novelist from the fifties. A mass murderer, too.

  “The net result is the same, isn’t it,” I said darkly.

  “Neutralizing? Well, only if you allow it to be. Of course I don’t attract the interest of the FBI. Not anymore. No, I just attract a bunch of cowards with too much time on their hands. Now that poor girl there, she never had a chance.”

  The sweeping boy came to our booth and gestured impatiently at my feet. I lifted them and he swept beneath me, knocking my soles with his broom handle. The front window admitted the milky haze of the Iowa afternoon. The streets were damp and empty; hard to believe we once crowded them, shoulder to shoulder, meatpackers with their wives and kids, hollering for an end to the lockout.

  “I wonder what happened to all those strikers,” I said.

  Charlie stared where I was staring. “Oh, they’re still around. They just all went indoors.”

  AFTER I HAD Googled Barack Obama a couple times I started getting pop-up ads for chocolate singles. Every morning at the same time I craved a macchiato, went to the supermarket Starbucks, and ran into Megan McKibbee, who was now concerned that the Iowa Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage. “I’m concerned,” she said, photographing her beverage. “I am not a homophobe. But I do believe in freedom of religion.” The oftener I saw Megan the more I remembered her from high school, sitting in the front of English class, waving her hand, declaiming that Jane Austen was so relatable.

  I drew deeply on my iced macchiato, trying to induce brain freeze.

  Jean Seberg’s baby, Nina Gary, was buried in Marshalltown, not far from the rest of the Seberg family (except for Nina’s parents, both suicides, both laid to rest in Paris). The Riverside Cemetery was inclusive, but segregated: the Catholics lay across the footpath from the Lutherans, the Germans cordoned from the Swedes, with a small but special spot for the blacks; the veterans mingled in death as in life. It was a gorgeous old graveyard, shaded by sycamores. There was Jean’s father, Ed the pharmacist; her mother Dorothy; her brother David, who celebrated his high school graduation gunning the dusty road to Edna and was killed when his car skidded and ignited a dry patch of grass; Jean’s beloved grandmother, a frontierswoman with a creative streak, the only member of Jean’s family who adored meeting the likes of Bobby Short and Burl Ives. The graveyard was tended but not manicured, bouquets here and there in various stages of desiccation, one freshly dug grave awaiting its coffin, the black Iowa clay piled alongside it. The tombstones straight or leaning. I considered buying a little bunch of forget-me-nots at the cemetery shop to place on Nina’s grave, but what was the point, really? Who would see? Instead, I took a picture.

  I ordered a black cocktail dress that was supposed to be straight out of Mad Men. I had no idea where I would wear it, and by the time it arrived I’d gotten too fat.

  Charlie Burt asked me to ride with him outside of town. There was something he wanted me to see. I fiddled with the door release of his pickup and listened to him go on, something about the family farm. During the strike the farmers surrounding Edna crawled into town on their tractors and threshers, parading in support, blocking the access of the Iowa Guard. They had their own troubles, deep in debt, looking down the barrel of foreclosure.

  “Oh, they kept their farms all right,” Charlie explained. He talked so slow I wanted to stuff my hand down his throat to unthrottle his words. “If you can call it that. But they gotta buy everything from Monsanto and they gotta sell everything to Monsanto. The family farmer is no better off than a sharecropper.” I began to think Charlie Burt might be insane. How would I know? He was the only person I regularly talked to; I had no frame of reference.

  As we drove by the slaughterhouse Charlie fell silent—from nostalgia or rage, maybe both. I thought about the packages of madeleines they had at Starbucks, whether I’d want that or a biscotto when we got back to town. Charlie had a Mexican station on the radio, a cheery accordion.

  “See, look there,” he said. We had just crossed the Edna limits. I strained to see what he was pointing out, a filament on the horizon. Then another, then another, taller than telephone poles, white and slender. I hoped whatever Charlie wanted to show me we could see from the pickup; laziness drained me.

  Windmills, they were. Three blades apiece, at any moment two blades lifted 120 degrees, like raised arms in a glyph of despair. The more I looked, the more of them emerged, scare quotes on the horizon, ahead of us and behind us, blotting out Edna, and the hogs and crops.

  “It’s a wind farm, Odile!” Charlie Burt had to shout so I could hear him over the hum. He pulled to the side and hopped out. Luckily the shoulder was banked so I had only to roll out of my side of the cab. The noise was everywhere but, like the polyphonic buzz of an air conditioner, so constant as to be hardly perceptible. This was a good spot, all right—the wind, which we hadn’t noticed in the middle of Edna, was wild here: Charlie had to tighten the knot on his Little Mermaid bandana. “What do you think?”

  “It’s nice,” I yelled, unconvincingly.

  “It’s the future!” His left eye watered; condensation collected on his cheeks. “Green energy.” His voice rose and fell with the turning of rotors. “Don’t matter if Obama wins or Hillary, they’re both committed. And Iowa is going to be right here at the heart of it.”

  And then Charlie Burt, the mayor of Edna, released a cowboy whoop, as if the energy carried through the cables beneath us thrummed through the soles of his boots.

  “You can’t outsource energy,” he said. And he took off running, toward the windmills, which seemed too far away to touch. I think he clicked his heels. As he trotted away he looked back a
t me, like a dog, and the farther he ran the more I wanted to lie down on the moist ground, the dead May grass on my cheek, the soil enriched by ancient glaciers, acid wind, and waves of newcomers, the flat earth absorbing every desecration of our ancestors. Here was the blood of the shoats born for slaughter, here were the severed tongues of our grandmothers, here were the amnia they buried, here lay the stillborn imagination, here are the intestines and the shit, here are seeds of corn. And the snakes slithering from the creek beds, the farms and towns that rose and subsided, the punishment for the girl who transgressed, the atrophy for the rest of us. Here grew a girl who wanted to leave a mark in the dirt, and for that she was eviscerated, in body or in spirit, whichever put up the least resistance.

  Testimony of Malik, Israeli Agent,

  Prisoner #287690

  by Randa Jarrar

  I’m waiting for the Turks to x-ray me. They placed me under arrest two nights ago, after the bloody fight in Karaköy. I am flightless, stuck in a small metal cage. They assigned a guard to me. The guard is very alert. Whenever I stretch out or move my neck, he turns to observe me. They think I’m a spy. Me. A kestrel. A very small falcon.

  I would never be a spy. As a child, I saw the bodies of collaborators hung from the lines my kin and I used to hunt from. Their bodies swayed. The punishment for spying was always death. And death never appealed to me.

  My name is Malik Hassan Kareem El-Hajj Aamer Ahmed Kan’oun. Yes; my great-grandfather Aamer performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. He flew there from our village of Aqraba, over Jerusalem, past the Dead Sea and the ruins of Petra, along the Red Sea, and over Umluj and Jeddah, eating grasshoppers and moths, which he hunted on the wing, all along the way. Once he arrived in Mecca, he performed the seven rounds around the holy rock, drank from the water of Zamzam, and flew between Safa and Marwa. When he came home, my father and his father were relieved to see him—he had been missing for weeks and they worried hunters had captured and killed him—but they were suspicious of his story, and asked if he could prove that he had truly gone on the pilgrimage. My great-grandfather, expecting his children and their children to be unbelievers, brought out a rock from his mouth, a pebble the likes of which his caste had never seen. This was one of the pebbles he had gathered to throw at the walls of the devil. From then on, all the falcons called him El-Hajj Aamer.

  I was born eight years ago, and my father would take me on flights to the Mediterranean, flights that he said were dangerous because the people living to the west of our village, Israelis, carried large guns and monitored their airspace vigilantly. I never questioned why this was, but followed closely behind my father’s tail. We are small birds of prey, which sometimes works to our advantage: we can go on long-distance flights without arousing too much suspicion. At the Mediterranean, I saw humans without feathers swimming in the sea, and humans in large black feathers playing in the sand. My father explained that the featherless ones were in Tel Aviv, and the feathered ones were in Gaza.

  The best prey was in Gaza. My favorite meal is cicadas—followed by voles, butterflies, and grasshoppers. I’ll eat a mouse if I have to. But I prefer songbirds and shrews. Gaza had plenty of my favorites. After Father passed, I would go on solo trips to the coast for the cicadas.

  One day, while I was en route to the sea, I saw the bigger birds, the warplanes, hovering far above me. I knew trouble was coming, and it did. The white phosphorous that the plane urinated clouded the air I flew in, and soon, I was in the sea. A group of children found me and nursed me to health on the balcony of their apartment. Father always said to stay away from humans; they had roasted and eaten some of my sisters and brothers. But the children were kind, and bored, since they were under curfew. They released me when I was healed.

  On my flight back to Aqraba, I was captured by university students in Tel Aviv. They took me into their white labs, recorded information about my feathers, beak, feet, and clipped a metal bracelet on my leg. They wanted to study my and my family’s migration patterns. No matter what I did in the months afterward, I could not remove the metal bracelet, which had etchings on it in their language.

  IN AQRABA, EVERYONE was angry with me for being captured by the Israelis. My wife at the time shat all over our nest, a common message to prey, husbands, and humans to stay away. I respected her wishes, even though I missed my children. My mother was elderly and would allow me visits in the early mornings. I asked her if she was afraid of death, and she said she wasn’t. She told me that she had heard that at death, no one suffers, because each of us has a pleasant, short hallucination before we let go forever. This brought me comfort, as I’m sure it did for her. I hunted voles to nourish her, finding them at night by tracking their urine lines, which I can find in the pitch dark because I am able to see ultraviolet light.

  Mother died in winter. We all buried her, my kin making peace with me for the day. The children pecked at my bracelet, trying to break me free of it. After Mother’s death, I left to the sea in Gaza. There was nothing left for me in Aqraba anymore.

  It had been almost two years since my injury there. And again, as soon as I arrived, I knew I had come at the wrong time. The large bird warplanes dropped bombs on balconies, bridges, and beaches. I could not recognize the building of the children who had nursed me. It was rubble. I could not find the children. I could not find cicadas. There were no fishermen to accompany at the sea.

  So I flew east. I didn’t know where I was going, only wanted to leave everything I had known. I flew past Aqraba on my way east and it was difficult for me not to land as I always had. I kept flying; lucky for me, I can fly even in stationary, fixed air. I flew north, toward Cyprus. When I arrived there, I found a quarry and had my fill of toads, shrews, and snakes. I kept traveling north, arriving in the Aegean Sea. There, I stayed on islands and hunted from clotheslines and high telephone wires. The local birds paid me no mind, neither welcoming nor shunning me. Every morning on the island I liked best, a round, elderly widow sat outside her white rock house and watched me through binoculars. She believed I belonged to her, and I enjoyed her sense of ownership over me—it was the closest thing to love.

  Come winter, the woman left, and the island’s white houses became covered in snow. I wanted to fly homeward, but decided to go west to Athens until it got warmer. In Athens, I lived in Exarchia, with anarchist birds who accepted me so long as I helped them find and share prey. About my metal bracelet they said nothing, only that they respected me for escaping the confines of whatever hell the Israelis had made me live in. They smelled awful, refusing to groom themselves, and had long, tedious conversations about the 1800s, when anarchism was alive and well in the region. I flew with them to the Acropolis at sunset, and they shat against the Parthenon’s walls. In the evenings we watched hippies dance in Syntagma Square, and we ate the kebabs they left in their wake.

  At the first sign of spring, the anarchist birds got feisty. One in particular cautiously declared that she was unsure about anarchism as a functional social system. The other birds laughed and told her that that was the point. Becoming braver, she said she had observed a group of bees that afternoon who had voted on which place to settle and live in. She described their dance, the way the rest of the bees grew convinced by their bodies’ votes. The birds viciously attacked her when she said this, pecking at her feathers until she relented. I flew northeast in the morning.

  IN WESTERN TURKEY I survived by remembering a story about my cousins: they had become famous one spring and summer by hanging on poles under the floodlights of a soccer stadium, hunting moths and other insects. They’d been recorded doing this and the footage had aired around the world. So, from the air, I looked for stadiums. And I found them; in their floodlights I hunted and ate to my heart’s content, watching teenage boys chase soccer balls into nets. I kept flying west.

  That’s when I found Istanbul, and the seagulls of Istanbul. Over the Bosphorus, chasing ferries and being fed by humans, I became a cliché: I fell in love. She w
asn’t anything special, and to the human eye, there was no difference between her and any of the other gulls. But I flew near her every early evening, the sunset athaan being garbled by the Turkish muatthin, his Arabic awful and funny. I told her so, made her laugh. She said we could never breed, because I was not one of them. I said that was part of my attraction. We were friends through the summer. In early fall, she moved to the island of Burgazada, and I asked if I could join.

  Her pack did not allow me to. In Karaköy, by the fish market, they zoomed at me from all angles, which reminded me of the anti-anarchist bird in Athens, her blood, her stand. They taunted me for my bracelet. They asked where my pack was; said I had been left behind on purpose. She did not come to my defense.

  I lay bleeding on the rocks near the river. A policeman found me, and, reading my bracelet, instantly called his commander. The commander and a special terrorism unit came and collected me in a cage, ran tests on me all day. Tomorrow, as I said, they will x-ray me.

  IT IS NOW morning and I am sedated. They place me in the belly of a machine. They capture an image of my insides. They shout. They whisper. There is nothing inside me—no microphones, no chips. The room empties. I am placed back in the cage. Three men in uniform take down notes. An important man enters the room. He stands in front of me, looks into my eyes.

  We are not afraid of you, he says. I think he is talking to me, but then realize he is speaking in case I really am a spy, in case I am recording. Then, he takes me out into the sun, and releases me.

  I am too elderly to fly home now. I want to return to Aqraba, to say good-bye, not to those who have shunned me but to my land; to the olive trees, the earth, and the cicadas. Instead, I live out the rest of my days on the grounds of a garden in Topkapi, a beautiful once-palace.