Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  “Move, animal! Open the gate!”

  They set out. David sits in back and Wali up front with his rifle. The streets feel less frenzied now. At the checkpoints Said flashes a permit of some sort and they are let through without a word. But when they reach the central boulevard, they find it clogged with traffic. Taxis and crowded minibuses, army transports, big tankers and semis whose stink of diesel fills the Peugeot. It is hard to tell whether people are simply going about their business or fleeing for their lives. They pass a stake truck laden with bulging burlap sacks watched over by half a dozen riflemen, a single phrase in English sticking out amidst the lines of Arabic that cover its panels: Road to Heaven.

  Said tries to skirt the traffic by detouring along side streets and back lanes. They go past courtyard kitchens, communal latrines, rows of battered tin lean-tos built against the backs of ruined buildings. Past areas of blight where the houses look cobbled together like children’s creations, of mud and tin and coloured plastic; where whole city blocks have been flattened to nothing as though a giant jackboot had stepped on them. Toddlers play naked amidst the ruins; a gang of boys sit perched on the shell of a burnt-out LAV. To the east David thinks he can make out the intimation of the sea, a kind of heightened glow at the horizon line like the blue nimbus of a computer screen.

  Wali keeps his eyes peeled. David has yet to see him engage the safety on his rifle.

  “I think we must join the main road again. Is dangerous here. Someone can stop us. They can take the car.”

  Said shoots a smirk back at David.

  “Take the car? What is that fucking gun for then, man? What are you doing here?”

  The flat grid of the downtown gradually gives way to the slopes of the foothills. As the land rises the streets grow harder to navigate, more and more tortuous and steep and riven with gullies or ruined by war. These were the Strangers’ Quarters, emptied out by the waves of cleansing, then reduced to rubble during the jihadist occupation. Here and there, though, lengths of street remain eerily intact, houses with curtains still billowing through their open windows, shops with their signs still hanging and their doors in place as if their owners have merely stepped out for the afternoon pause.

  When they finally rejoin the main road it is no longer the grand divided boulevard of downtown but a single stretch of pocked asphalt flanked by open sewers and by the usual string of crumbling storefronts and street stalls. There is habitation here, though the traffic is mostly bicycles and carts and the street life seems to cling to doorways as if afraid to come out in the open. There are no trees, nothing green in any direction, not so much as a weed, everything reduced to the rust colour of the barren mountains that rise up in the distance.

  They have left the government zone. It is only a matter of minutes before they come to a roadblock, an old plank laid across two oil drums. It is watched over by a handful of boys who look barely past puberty, dressed in a mishmash of hip hop and army surplus and sporting what look like Chinese M16s.

  Instead of his permit Said flashes an American ten. An older boy wearing a hood despite the heat peers into the car, smiles, shakes his head. A twitch of anger crosses Said’s face and he and Hoodie exchange a few words. A couple of the other boys shift, moving in closer, and Said finally adds a second ten to the first.

  The boy flashes an unfriendly grin in at David.

  “Thank you, G.I. Joe!” And waves them on.

  They have barely gone another half a mile before they spot a second roadblock. Said curses under his breath and makes a quick turn onto a dirt side street that climbs up over the main road. Wali is unable to hold his tongue.

  “You must use the main road! I’m telling you!”

  Said scowls.

  “Is this your city? Tell me that!”

  The street looks at first like it might let them bypass the roadblock but only ends up taking them higher up the slopes, into a neighbourhood that grows ever more haunted and desolate and ruined. They are the only traffic here, the only thing alive. Said takes a turn, then another, but each seems only to lead them farther from the main road.

  “You must go back!” Wali says. “Is the only way, you stupid man!”

  The veins in Said’s neck bulge.

  “Watch your fucking tongue, do you hear me? Watch your fucking tongue!”

  “For the love of God,” David says, “just do what he tells you and go back!”

  Without a word Said does a lurching three-point turn in the narrow street to wheel the car around. But at the first intersection they come to he stops short, seeming already unsure what direction they have come from.

  Wali cranes suddenly forward.

  “Look! Over there! In those buildings!”

  “What?” Said says. “What is it, for fuck’s sake?”

  “There! You can see! There is someone! We must go quickly! Go back!”

  David peers into the skeletal patchwork of ruined buildings but can make out only the criss-crossing of darkness and light.

  “It’s probably just some fucking beggar!” Said says.

  “Go quickly! I’m telling you!”

  Said manoeuvres them down a steep lane that ends in a square overlooked by the ruins of a small church. Several streets come off it. Said hesitates, then takes the first one.

  “You are only guessing now, isn’t it?” Wali yells. “Is not a joke, my friend! They are coming, I tell you, more than one!”

  “Who saw them? Only you! A child, seeing ghosts! A frightened woman!”

  Said brakes.

  “Fucking hell!”

  A trench has been cut into the roadway, a good four or five feet across. It might be a leftover from the jihadist occupation or something more insidious, some warlord’s attempt to make these streets impassable, to trap the unwitting in them like rats in a maze.

  Wali is shouting.

  “Why did you want to come here, in these streets? I said to you, go back! Is the only way!”

  “Don’t raise your voice at me, bushman! Don’t tell me my fucking business!”

  Said hits the gas and backs up toward the square. As he rounds the corner, one of the tires catches on something and the car swerves. There is a sickening jolt and crunch of metal and the car comes to a wrenching stop. Said puts it in forward and guns the engine but the tires merely spin and spin, spewing grit and burning rubber.

  The back end of the car has got lodged on a slab of fallen wall from the church. David and Wali push while Said guns the engine again, but the car refuses to budge. From somewhere, the smell of gasoline.

  Said gets out of the car and Wali is on him at once, shaking his rifle at him as if ready to shoot him on the spot.

  “You useless, useless man! How can you save us now? Do you want to kill us, to do this?”

  “Shut your fucking mouth, old man! I’ll kill you anytime I want, if it comes to that! I’ll snap your fucking throat!”

  “You think you can kill me? Such a useless man? When can you kill me? Try it now! Try it!”

  Somehow it all reads as slapstick to David, even as Said lunges for Wali, even as he grabs for his gun. He is no match for Wali, who is all muscle and sinew, all reflex. Except that Wali hesitates. David sees it, the flash of uncertainty, maybe just a reflex born of years of servitude or the sudden understanding that there is no way, for an outsider like him, that this matter can end in his favour.

  As soon as Said has hold of the gun his finger is on the trigger, even before he has got it properly away, so that for an instant he seems as shocked by the barrage that comes out of it as David is. But then once it has started, everything that follows has a gruesome air of inevitability.

  “Who’s killing you now, you fucking son of a whore? Who’s killing you now?”

  “For Christ’s sake, stop!”

  There will be no way afterwards to parse the next seconds with any sureness, if Said shifts the barrel in accident or with intent, if David makes a decision or simply gives in to an impulse no more conscious or
chosen than sleep. He will remember the sensation of bullets whizzing by, close enough, it feels, to scorch his skin, but not the deciding.

  At the camp they called it the Failure Drill, the one that targeted the stopping zones. Two shots to the heart, then one to the head. Like taking breaths. Click, click and click.

  It is done.

  There is a long moment like after the bomb blast when there is only undifferentiated sensation. Then time pushes forward again and everything begins to reassume its unbearable separateness. The mad echo of the shots still hangs among the ruined buildings. Slumped on the ground near the back end of the Peugeot, some object he doesn’t quite look at.

  He has the dead feeling he recognizes from dreams, of no going back.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  Somehow, he needs to clean up this wreckage. Needs to find a doctor, police, all the structures he takes for granted.

  Wali’s chest is a mess of blood.

  “I’ll get help. Just hold on.” David sits in the street holding Wali’s thin frame against his own. “Someone will come, they’ll fix you.”

  The blood pools at Wali’s belly, gets on David’s hands, his clothes, seeps into the dirt.

  “Mr. David,” he whispers, his voice already the barest rustling.

  David tries again and again to reach Yusuf on his phone until the keypad is caked with blood, but he can’t get a signal. He tries to stanch Wali’s wounds, but there are too many. Think, he thinks, as if there is something he has overlooked, some solution. Stop the bleeding. Call for help. But the blood comes from everywhere. The help is worlds away.

  “Fuck! FUCK!”

  The car keys are still in the ignition. David opens the trunk to check for some sort of tire iron or jack to try to get the car free. From somewhere a sound of movement, ghosts or the wind, then a voice in his head.

  G.I. Joe! Why have you killed those men?

  A crack and a hiss of split air, a puff of dust.

  G.I. Joe! Why can’t you kill us?

  Laughter, from the shadows. The laughter of boys. It comes to him: the boys from the checkpoint.

  Another crack, a ping of metal. The thought forms in his head like a stage direction that they are shooting at him.

  “G.I. Joe, why can’t you pay us?”

  He has to find cover. He heaves Wali up from the dirt and carries him to the church, clambering with him over the rubble of the ruined foyer trying to reach the beckoning gloom of the nave. As he moves, another shot. Pain shoots through his leg like a spike.

  “G.I. Joe, can we come to your church? Maybe the priest can pray for us!”

  He props Wali against a wall that looks like it is out of any line of fire and checks his leg. There is a livid gash just below the knee. He bandages it as best he can with a torn shred of pant leg, then sets about trying to bandage Wali, tearing strips from his blazer and from Wali’s tunic. The task feels hopeless. He can’t seem to fashion bandages long enough or tie them tight enough to stop the blood.

  Wali’s eyes have dimmed like a sleepy child’s.

  “G.I. Joe, we are coming!”

  He can hear them talking amongst themselves in lowered voices, part of his mind reverting to training mode, trying to gauge how many they are, what direction they’re coming from. There are a dozen rounds left in his Beretta, which is still at his hip, where he must have returned it with the same trained automatism with which he drew it; there are another dozen or so in Wali’s rifle out in the street, which he could make a run for. Then one by one he could pick them off. Except this is no simulation. There is no math here that can make things add up.

  The behaviour of children.

  “Are you there, G.I. Joe? We are close!”

  He needs to go. There isn’t any question of bringing Wali, who is no longer conscious, though the failure weighs on him more than any other. He moves as quickly as his leg allows him, slipping out a side door of the church and up a narrow lane that runs between the backs of houses. It brings him out to a street a block over, from where he works his way through the ruins until he has put another block behind him and the boys’ voices have receded.

  His leg is dripping blood.

  “Don’t shoot now, G.I. Joe! We will kill you, no joke!”

  They are closing in on the church. There is shouting, gunfire, the sound of smashing glass. Then a final shot, muted, as though from inside a building.

  “G.I. Joe!” The tone is so buoyant, so good-natured, it is almost heartening. “Where is your friend now? Why can’t you take him?”

  David ducks into an abandoned tenement, his leg throbbing. He manages to climb to the top floor and finds a back staircase that leads up to the roof, where he tries to get a signal on his phone. Still nothing. The roof is lined with a row of tin shanties like the garrets of Roman insulae and David huddles up in one. It is the merest oven, stripped of everything except its smell, human and stale, though through the doorway he can see out over almost the entire city, past the ruin and blight of the surrounding neighbourhoods all the way to the presidential palace and the telecommunications tower and the little cluster of high-rises along the central boulevard. Farther out, the empty warehouses and abandoned factories, the rusting freighters moored at the docks, and then the sea, which stretches to the horizon.

  He ought to tend to his wound. Ought to bind his ankle, which has started to swell from some misstep.

  The blood on his hands, on his clothes, has started to set.

  He can hear the locusts gathering at the base of his brain, reassuring almost in their quiet suasion. Somehow he has misplaced his pill pod, has left it behind in the tattered remains of his blazer or in his pants from the morning, so that there is nothing for it but to let them swarm.

  “G.I. Joe! Is useless to hide in this place, we will find you!”

  Hide and seek.

  The sun has begun to fall, precipitously, though it has hung at the midpoint for what has felt like hours, days, millennia. From his perch David tries to gauge the angle of its descent, but it is hopelessly out of kilter, off its axis perhaps or the building is, or the whole city. The city has changed somehow: he hadn’t noticed the hills before, or the tombs that line the decumanus outside the gates. How every district is colour-coded, red or purple or green, the hyper-blue of the sea an absolute border that cannot be crossed. In a glance he is able to take in the whole of the city as though it were no larger than a screen, than his own brain, every street and speck of dust and shift of afternoon light, every murder, every cup of spilled tea.

  He thinks of his phone again and then it comes to him, the one call he could make.

  He hopes he isn’t too late.

  David awakes to find a boy no older than Marcus staring down at him, with the same liquid eyes as Marcus, gleaming with life.

  “G.I. Joe!” Looking genuinely pleased to see him. “So we have found you!”

  The boy is dressed in full army gear, his uniform perfectly creased, immaculate. David knows he should be afraid and yet the situation has the air of a pleasant game.

  “How did you know where I was?”

  “How? Is too easy! The blood! Can’t you see it, my friend? Is there, every step, like you are showing the way.”

  It is true. The back of his leg is a mass of oozing blood. He can’t believe he hasn’t taken better care.

  “I think you are taking a bullet there,” the boy says. “You must be a soldier, my friend! You must be marine!”

  Somehow they make their way down to the street, though each time David glances at his leg it seems more bloated and ruined.

  “You look like my son,” he says to the boy. “Marcus.”

  The boy grins.

  “Is also my name! Marcus! Come, I can show you the way.”

  There are more boys on the street, in the same immaculate gear. Marcus leads them forward, the other boys flanking David like an honour guard. The streets are better now, surfaced with paving stones in the Roman fashion and leading up and up, into
the very clouds. The buildings are the same ruined ones, except that gradually the heaps of rubble scattered amidst the wreckage reveal themselves as encampments, the clusters of burlap and tin that cling to the upper storeys as makeshift hovels. It is like a city camouflaged in the ruins of a city. And everywhere boys, who begin to emerge in the tens, in the hundreds, an army of children ranging from toddlers to strapping teens. Boys scrubbing clothes, fixing old furniture, stirring cauldrons of food over huge firepits, though wherever he and Marcus pass they break away from whatever they are doing to follow along. Slowly a chatter builds, an energy.

  “They are happy to see you,” Marcus says. “That you are safe.”

  He leads David to a cliff face where a cave stretches back and back into shadow, jammed floor to ceiling with rows of packing crates, steel drums, pallets piled high with cartons and bulging sacks. They walk through the narrow aisles, deeper and deeper into the cave, but still David can’t make out where it ends. They pass a stack of bakers’ trays filled with the cigar-shaped rolls David’s mother used to buy when he was a boy. Marcus hands him one, still warm. The smell of it seems to hold the whole of David’s life.

  “Is very old, this place,” Marcus says. “They say my people have lived here a million years. But still we are children.”

  They climb higher. Up a great stone staircase like those of the pyramids of the Mesoamericans, the hangers-on swelled to a rabble by now, trailing alongside like the cheering crowds at a triumph. With each step David feels lighter. At the summit, a boy of five or six sits in the shade of a canopy of old lumber and tin, dressed in full military regalia.

  “Is our leader,” Marcus says.

  David wonders what he has done with the bread Marcus has given him it, if he ought to have brought it as an offering. If the David who has appeared here is one he can trust.

  “What do I say to him?”

  “Ask him your question,” Marcus says. “He has been expecting it.”

  The leader comes forward. Any second now he will emerge from the shadows with the answer David has been waiting for all his life.