by Nino Ricci
“Shit, that was back in the dark ages. But totally Darwinian, you know, like in that movie, what the fuck was it? About social media. Kill or be killed.”
“Like here,” he says.
“No, this is civilized. At least here they use guns.”
The air conditioning is still out. From the service courtyard comes a burst of laughter and the tinny whine of a ghetto blaster playing Eminem.
“So. Failed states. I guess you’ve come to the right place. I’ve been to armpits but this is the asshole. The fucking colon.”
From the gin they move on to lines of Ritalin and from there to a few grams of sodium oxybate that David cuts with the last of the tonic. By the time their clothes come off, they are lost in a haze of not-quite-presence. It is clear by then that the smell coming off Petra is the acetone stink of the committed alcoholic. David has to fight to stay hard, trying to use his disgust as a way of rising above it.
Petra is already dressed and settled into the lone armchair with a cigarette before he has had time to so much as wipe the jism from him.
“Jesus fucking Christ, it felt like you were drilling for oil down there.”
He resists the impulse to say something cruel. She has fucked him for the sake of a bottle of gin without the least hint of apology or shame. There seems something almost admirable in this.
“You never said who that professor was. At Harvard.”
From the grin on her he knows at once he should have held his tongue.
“You’re shitting me, right? I thought you were on to me. Can you really see me at Harvard? Doing Roman history like some fucking princess?”
“I’m not following.” But he is beginning to.
“I was having you on, for Christ’s sake. That phone call?” She keys a few numbers on her phone and it rings. “It’s programmed, you idiot. For when I want a quick exit. Very handy. It gave me a chance to search you.”
He knows he ought to laugh the matter off.
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
“To tell you the truth I wanted to get at that pretentious fuckface Eric. The fact that it got me to your gin was a bonus.”
He just wants her gone now.
“I figured it was the liquor you were after from the fumes coming off you. But I’m the one who got the bonus. I’d have settled for a blow job.”
She shoots him a smile that drips malice.
“Fuck you too, Professor Pah-cheh. Or no, maybe not professor after all—looks like you lost your job. Oh, and here’s news, something about date rape. That wouldn’t have to do with that drug you were dosing me with, would it? Amazing what you can learn on the internet. If it’s any consolation, I knew all that and still let you fuck me.”
The only bearable part of this whole encounter for him now is that it will soon be over. Petra, though, takes her time with her cigarette as if this is what passes as connection for her.
“What are you, anyway? Forty-five? Fifty?”
“Are you going to sell me insurance?”
“It’s just, what the fuck are you doing here? I mean, seriously. I just hope you still have a real job somewhere. I hope you have a family or something, in which case, my advice? Get the next plane back to it. People die here.”
By the time she is gone he feels ready to peel off a layer of skin just to be free of her. It had taken her a matter of minutes to piece together all the sordid half-truths that dog him these days across encyclopedia sites and blog comments and academic forums, bits of innuendo and implication and lie that join up like a puzzle into a portrait of depravity. Greg’s handiwork: that has grown clear from the frequent allusions to plagiarism, which are all the more damning because they are always couched in a vagueness that makes them irrefutable. For a while David was spending hours of every day trying to put out every fire, though usually he only ended up feeding them. Bit by bit he had had to cut himself off, eventually even shutting down his web site.
Exhaustion takes him over and he stretches out on his bed. His stay feels poisoned now. By evening, when Petra joins the others at the bar to regale them with more war stories, he will be a laughingstock. People die here. He ought to get on a plane like she suggested and go home. Then he thinks of the cubicle that passes for home now, of his life, of the man he has become.
For days he holes himself up in his room, getting the kitchen boys to bring him his meals and seeing no one. He goes through his video footage and tries to get a start on some of the articles he has pitched; he goes through his book files, the palimpsest of notes and outlines and drafts inscribed into his hard drive going back more than a decade now. The numberless sections he has written up, then excised, then reinserted; the introductory chapter he has reworked a hundred times, polishing and repolishing, then losing faith and restarting from scratch. A million words or more, enough for a dozen books, for a project on the scale of Decline and Fall; as ambitious as that, as vast in its reach. His last hope.
He starts writing, in longhand, beginning at the beginning. It has been years since he has worked this way and the process feels incredibly primitive at first, the ink stains, the cramping, the snaking lines. But slowly he finds a rhythm. It is a relief to be forced to commit to a thought and move on. Then there is the pleasure of watching the pages begin to accumulate, these tangible objects with his tangible mark.
He cuts back on his meds to keep from burning himself out and tries to manage his sleep by napping for twenty minutes in every two-hour stretch. That, he has learned, is the rhythm of his disorder, corresponding roughly to the rhythm of lab rats in whom the neurotransmitters that govern waking and sleep have been knocked out of service. In their absence, mechanisms precisely tuned to calibrate darkness and light, to modulate metabolism, to pump the body with the stimulants that make possible the nine-to-five day humans take for granted cease to function. Instead, from the first moment of wakefulness the craving for sleep begins to build.
The routine breeds its own peculiar brand of altered consciousness, until he starts to lose track of the days. He has the sense he is devolving, regressing to what creatures might have been back when there was only sleep in the world, only the protozoal heave and stir of sensation and reflex. Then one afternoon he goes down to the lobby in search of paper and finds the hotel strangely deserted, as though he has slept through some apocalypse. He wanders into the courtyard and sees that no one is manning the gate, which sits ajar.
The light from the street beckons him. He steps through the gate and follows the street in a direction he hasn’t taken before, away from the downtown. With each step the neighbourhood grows more desolate, the houses more tottering and ruined, though he feels no sense of danger. An old man who sits smoking a pipe on his front step offers it out to him and laughs and David acknowledges the gesture with a wave and walks on.
He comes to a cross street. In the distance an arched gateway like the portal of a walled city looks out to a vista of such unearthly blue it looks like a painted backdrop. It takes David a second to make sense of it: the sea. He passes through the gate and the sea lies stretched out in front of him to the horizon, edged by a ribbon of white beach. After the days of being holed up in his room he feels dazzled. Some children are playing in the surf, running back and forth as the waves break, holding their sarongs up to keep them dry, and it is all David can do not to join them.
Back at the hotel, Yusuf accosts him in the lobby.
“It is all arranged for tomorrow, Mr. Pace! After afternoon prayers. My driver will take you.”
David has almost forgotten by now: the Malana.
“Fine, fine.” He still sees the children at the beach, their black, black skin, their coloured sarongs. It seems almost impossible now that he hasn’t merely imagined them. “Will any of the others come?”
“No, no, Mr. Pace, there is only you! The talks have finished by now.”
David can’t quite take this in.
“I’ll have to see.”
“No worries, of course, o
f course. In the morning everything can be settled.”
He is already back in his room before he realizes he has forgotten to get paper. On his desk, his finished pages sit waiting for him. He slips them into a drawer.
At breakfast the dining room is nearly deserted. Yusuf is on David at once, making arrangements.
“You can take two of the guards, I think. It’s better.”
“Just one. Just Wali.”
“Of course, Mr. Pace, of course, you are right.”
David negotiates the use of Wali for the morning as part of his price so he can get more video footage of the downtown, giving in to the beginning-of-the-day optimism that still dogs him, that still makes him feel there might be a point. They go on foot, making their way to the central boulevard and continuing north to the presidential palace, where the provisional government sits. All that is visible from the street is the high stucco wall that rings its compound, studded with watchtowers and topped with a double row of razor wire. David stares up into one of the towers to get footage of it and a soldier turns his rifle on him with what looks like real intent. David can feel the Beretta pressing against his hip beneath the cover of his shirt.
“No worries, Mr. David,” Wali says. “The only one they will shoot is the one with a gun.”
They keep walking. Farther along the wall a service gate swings open suddenly and three cars come shooting out of it in quick succession, not the usual armoured government sedans but the sort of rattletrap Asian imports the streets here are filled with. Almost at once they disappear around a corner.
Wali looks ready to spit.
“Is the government,” he says. “Always the same. Every morning they go like this to the town to drink tea, to show that the city is theirs. No fear! But then why every time they are using different cars, different gate?”
“Where do they go?”
“Downtown. Different places. I can show you. Like children, I tell you, playing their games.”
David takes the risk of hailing a street taxi to try to track them down, thinking it might make a good clip if he got some of them on camera touting their fearlessness, then edited in Wali’s scathing commentary. Wali directs the driver to what looks like the bohemian quarter, every second shop a tea house or eatery or internet café. The streets are the usual mess of torn pavement and blockages, the taxi moving at a snail’s pace. They pass children touting Marlboros and Coke, begging lepers, a cluster of hut-like tents of bent branches and rain sheeting that spills into the roadway from an empty lot like a misplaced village.
It is Wali who spots the cars, parked at the bottom of a short side street that gives onto some sort of hotel. The street is blocked at their end by a small street market.
“Is one of their places,” Wali says. “Come, we can walk, is faster.”
They have to thread their way through the market. David nearly trips over a boy with stumps for legs who has been plopped down on a mat like a sack of goods. Behind them a taxi has turned into the street and is trying to force its way through the crowd, people shouting and pounding on the hood though still the car keeps inching forward. David gets a glimpse of the driver’s face as he goes by, impassive as if the crowd were just weather he needed to get through.
It is only when the car is free of the market and has begun to accelerate that the strangeness of it begins to come clear. By then it is too late. The explosion is over in such a flash that David registers it only as a kind of blankness, a hole in the centre of things that there is no way to think about or know. For a moment, in the blankness, he isn’t sure that he is still alive, that whatever it is that is him is still somehow attached to his flesh and bone. Then the noise and the dust come at him like a wall and the world reasserts itself, a barrrage of indiscriminate sensation.
He is on the ground, breathing dirt, and some ghost is pulling at him.
Mr. David!
Shouts and wails, car alarms, points of pain, the chemical smell of spent explosives and burning fuel. Everywhere smoke and dust and rubble, twisted metal, uncertain lumps of things his mind can’t take in. Where the hotel stood, there is only fog and flame.
“Mr. David! We must go!”
People run screaming in every direction, jostling him, falling and not getting up. A big man in flowing robes looms up out of the murk clutching a bloodied sack that turns out to be a boy.
From somewhere, utterly distinct, the wail of a child.
A soldier is shouting at him.
“Why have you come to this place, you stupid man! Get back!”
The ghost is still at his elbow: Wali, entirely grey with dust.
“Mr. David, we must go! Someone can hurt you! Someone can take you!”
They hurry back through the market, in chaos now. The wail of the child follows them up the street, then goes silent.
They have to fight their way back to the hotel on foot, through streets grown frenetic. Sporadic checkpoints have sprung up but they seem only to heighten the tension, the soldiers manning them paranoid and green and on edge. Wali has called the hotel on David’s pay-and-go to get Said to come fetch them, but they see no sign of him.
“I think he is sleeping,” Wali says with disgust. “For khat he can leave his own mother to die.”
As they near the hotel the streets grow quieter, until there are no soldiers or crowds and they have reached a kind of eerie normalcy again. Only now does David realize how filthy he is, how his whole body aches like a single bruise. He touches a hand to his head: his video glasses are gone. He waits for the disappointment to set in at the footage he has lost, at what he might have done with it, but feels only a dim relief.
Yusuf comes hurrying out of the hotel gate to greet them.
“Such a terrible thing, terrible! Thank God you are safe! It’s very bad, what has happened, maybe six or seven ministers, dead! I sent the car for you, of course, but the checkpoints turned it back.”
In his room David showers at once, trying to wash away the grit and the smell, though they cling to him like a second skin. He isn’t sure if the dullness he feels is indifference or shock or something else. He keeps expecting some upsurge of emotion or understanding, something to make him feel he is on the inside of what has happened instead of at this strange remove.
He sits at his desk to clean the Beretta. Grit has entered every crevice again. He wipes down the guide and the spring, the receiver, the slide, scrubs the barrel again. The work seems to calm him, to bring him back to himself, to his body, as if all this time he has not quite dared to make a commitment to it again. Now the images begin to come back to him, though it strikes him as odd that what he most remembers are the things he most turned from, the glistening bits in the street, gut or limb or severed head, the fallen heaps like shattered mannequins. All of it familiar from the news yet utterly foreign, with none of the quickening that catastrophe brought at a distance, only the turning away and the guilty blood rush—irrepressible, obscene—of having survived.
David checks the time: not yet noon. It is hard to believe that less than half the day has passed. That the rest of his life still stretches in front of him.
In the fevered light of afternoon he wanders Ostia Antica. The handsome guide is there, walking ahead of David with the patrician air of someone who knows he will be followed. Past the tombs outside the gates, past the warehouses and the baths and the forum, to a construction site where he is building an apartment block amidst the ruins. In one smooth motion he edges a brick with mortar and sets it in place. The precision of it, the artistry, leaves David breathless.
Someone is pounding at the door.
“They are expecting you, Mr. Pace! You must come! On account of the curfew!”
Yusuf.
“Just a minute, for Christ’s sake.”
Somehow the interview is still on. David has to fight to make sense of this.
“What about the roads?” he says. “The checkpoints?”
“It is not a problem, sir. Only there is the curfew
now, you must return before dark.”
He ought to be gone, like the journalists. Ought to pack his bags and head home instead of risking his life for an interview he doesn’t need for a book he will never finish.
“Give me a few minutes.”
His clothes of the morning are ruined and he has to pick from the few clean ones he still has on hand. An aging pair of chinos, a light blazer; a dress shirt he’ll have to wear untucked, to cover the Beretta. He tests the gun for concealment and snags, then chambers a round and sets the safety and tucks it into his holster.
His mind keeps returning to the blast. To that sense of being there at ground zero at the crucial instant yet somehow unable to take it in. There seems some lesson in that, if only he could make sense of it.
Wali is squatting in the shade of the guardhouse eating some kind of stew from a battered tin bowl. At the sight of David, his grin, like manna falling.
“Mr. David! We are still alive, isn’t it?”
A boy darts out from the kitchen courtyard and sets a cup of milky tea at Wali’s feet. David recognizes him as the one Said delivered a backhand to some days earlier.
“Is my son,” Wali says. The boy is five or six, dressed in a dirty white thawb that is a miniature of his father’s. “Name is Wali. Same like mine.”
David remembers the hard set of the boy’s shoulders when Said struck him, the glisten of tears held back. That he himself said nothing.
“Wali is a good name.” He hands the boy a coin as if he were merely the good-hearted foreigner Wali seems to see him as. “Your father is a good man.”
Wali beams.
“Ah, Mr. David! I think you are joking! I think you want to kill me!”
There is a sound of raised voices from the lobby and Said and Yusuf emerge in the midst of some heated argument. Said slumps into his chair beneath the palm and Yusuf picks up a stone and flings it at him, hard.
“Why are you sitting, fool? The customer is waiting, can’t you see that? Didn’t you sleep enough in the morning?”
Said rises like a sulking schoolboy and makes his way to the car. He kicks out at Wali as he passes him and knocks over his teacup.
