Station Zed
Page 5
FOR ALL THE VIOLENCE GOING ON IN IRAQ, in my little white box of a CHU, my container housing unit, it was eerily calm. And no wonder: the entire complex of CHUs was covered by a huge steel roof and surrounded by twenty-foot high, reinforced concrete blast walls—”to keep bombs and missiles from falling right on your head” was how the fellow who gave me the key to my CHU put it. This kept the whole compound perpetually in shadow, but it added to the feeling of isolation and quiet.
There’s a poem by Tomas Tranströmer in which he’s in a motel room so anonymous that faces of his old patients begin to push through the walls. The CHU was something like that, a refuge from the violence, a deprivation chamber I was grateful to retreat to, but also a little theater of the mind in which what happened during the day came back to haunt me in the ammonia smell of disinfectant mixed with drying mud that exuded from my CHU. Mariam’s face came back many times, and the face of her brother, though I could never quite make out his face because it was always too close to hers. I could see the shape of his head as he bent down to her ear, but his body was lost in shadow. His gentleness and the violence of his final act resisted my attempts to explain or understand. Of course, I was imposing on his entire past the moment when he’d pressed Send, making that moment more significant than a thousand other moments which, as he lived them, would have had their own weight and value. A back-page newspaper photo of smoke pouring up, a vague ghost-face pushing forward into the white walls of my CHU—except for the glimpse Mariam had given me, that was all I could see.
Meanwhile, inside my CHU, I led a radically simplified life: no decorations, purely functional furniture, and not much of it—and a gas mask against Sarin and other forms of nerve gas, packed neatly in a small cardboard box with a convenient black plastic handle. The warning read DO NOT REMOVE.
But after a while, staring up at the white ceiling, letting my thoughts drift, I’d remember the daily body count—the bodies, which had seemed so abstract back in the US, began to take on solidity and form. From the very first night in my CHU, I’d established a routine (maybe more of an obsession) of going online to check on that day’s violence. During the night and day it took me to reach Iraq, twelve liquor stores, run mainly by Yazidi Kurds, had been shot up in drive-bys from SUVs: nine customers and owners had been killed. Although no official group stepped forward, conservative Shia, whose version of Islam decrees death for drinking booze, were probably the gunmen. Then on Sunday, forty-six more people were killed, this time by Sunnis terrorizing mainly Shia neighborhoods: the places they hit were crowded shopping areas, markets, and auto-repair shops. If the bombs had gone off in corresponding borough neighborhoods, they would have been the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, Hunts Point Market in Queens, and the lower reaches of Fourth Avenue’s garages in Gowanus.
LATE ONE NIGHT WHEN I COULDN’T SLEEP, I went onto Donald Rumsfeld’s website, and clicked onto a secret, now declassified, memo that he had written in 2002, a year before the war began, when he was still Secretary of Defense. It was entitled, appropriately enough, “The Parade of Horribles.” The term derives from the nineteenth-century custom of mummers parades, in which one’s fellow townsfolk would dress up like monsters and grotesques, and lurch down Main Street on the 4th of July. I clicked on the memo, and watched as twenty-nine Horribles marched down my screen—including number 13, in which no weapons of mass destruction are discovered. (Rumsfeld himself placed three check marks after this Horrible). Other Horribles include sectarian battles between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds (one check mark); US postwar involvement lasting ten years, not two to four (one check mark); the cost of the war becoming ruinously high (no check mark, though the cost to the United States and Iraq is $200 billion and climbing); and world opinion turning against the US because Iraq would “best us in public relations and persuade the world the war is against Muslims” (five check marks).
DEPOSITION
after the “Supplemental Report on September 11 Detainees’ Allegations of Abuse at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York”
According to Lieutenant 1, he confronted
another lieutenant who was responsible
for escorting detainees (hereinafter “Lieutenant 2”)
after seeing Lieutenant 2 slamming detainees against
the wall. Lieutenant 2 also supervised many of the other officers
whom Lieutenant 1 witnessed slam detainees against the wall.
Lieutenant 1 stated that Lieutenant 2
told him that slamming, bouncing, pressing against the wall
were all part of being in jail and not to worry about it. To confront
such things when nations everywhere are responsible
for “Admax”—administrative maximum security—against
terrorist cells puts security staff, particularly frontline officers,
under seismic pressures that make officers confront
not only the many hidden drives that are responsible
for terrorism, but the subtle way the wall,
if detainees breathe or move at all, calls out: whoever is against
terrorism haunts the detainees’ minds with the specter of Lieutenant 2,
who becomes in the detainees’ self-hatred of their own inner officers
a general hatred that rears up into a wall
walling detainees in, nobody now “against”
but all submitting to a kind of law that makes detainees confront
what they would like to see as an officer’s pathology, an officer’s
need to feel the “Admax” of being responsible—
a predictable pathology for detainees who hate Lieutenant 2,
the more dangerous, the more unconscious, as if the wall
shoved itself against the faces of detainees responsible
for their welcome to America in this way, faces slammed against
a T-shirt THESE COLORS DON’T RUN that the officers
have taped to the sally port, and that Lieutenant 2
videotapes to make sure that the detainees confront
what it means to have their hands “goosenecked,” to make a wall
“waltz” with a stripped-searched detainee responsible
for making us act the way we do, you, me, Lieutenant 1 and 2
forced by these detainees to throw off our mental chains and confront
star-crossed perplexities amongst our officers:
so welcome to my castle, you fucking terrorist: up against
the wall, don’t think I don’t know how to make you responsible
for the ways we Lieutenants, both 1 and 2, train our officers
to confront the walls you terrorists love, and love to shove your faces against.
THE CHOPPER’S SIDES WERE OPEN TO THE NIGHT AIR, and I instinctively shoved myself back on the bench as far as I could get—not very far, it turned out, certainly not far enough to quell my unease about hurtling through the air with no door in front of me.
The contractor gave me thumbs up, and I at least knew enough to give thumbs up back, and then the chopper blades accelerated faster and louder. He slid the lenses of his night-vision goggles past the lip of his helmet and down over his eyes to keep watch for snipers on the ground, and then we slowly ascended, the nose of the chopper dipping slightly as the tail lifted up, and we soared straight up until the pilot adjusted the pitch of the rotors and we shot ahead, eventually climbing to about a hundred feet over the city.
Everything was dark down below for the first quarter mile, and then we were crossing over Baghdad, the lights of the cars on the road flickering softly, houselights shining in the windows. The pilot occasionally flicked a switch on the instrument panel, and then, as we rose higher, and the night air got very cold, the contractor slid the Lexan-glass doors closed on the passenger part of the tiny cabin. The chopper shimmied back and forth in the light wind, soft buffets, almost the way a child might pet a cat on the head. Just above the pilot’s helmet silhouetted against the curved
glass of the windshield shimmered another little galaxy. Switches glowing in the darkness, an overhead instrument panel lit up the pilot’s hand as he leisurely lifted his left arm from time to time to switch something off or on.
For a moment, I felt immensely happy: I had the reverie of myself as a child, looking up at dayglow stars stuck to the ceiling over my bed—a memory I knew to be false, since I’m way too old for such things to have existed when I was a kid, nor were my parents the type to indulge me with dayglow stars. I knew, even as I took pleasure in it, that my fantasy was out of sync with the reality on the ground, not to mention the contractor hunching forward, his gun in his lap, intently scanning the darkness below. At least the contractor had his orders and his night-vision goggles. What I had to go on was the drone of helicopter noise, its surgical detachment from the neighborhood alleys and streets, and the way my own hypervigilant senses magnified and crystallized the light and dark flow of the city beneath me. One of Saddam’s former palaces, encircled by a moat that testified to the dead dictator’s love of water, glowed dimly below us, looking like an Arabian Nights fantasy in bad taste, and reputed to have a torture chamber in the basement. Aloft in the chopper and looking down, I found and continue to find it hard to know what tone to take when the truth is both atrocious and banal.
And if you were on the ground looking up? In an oral history of the Iraq War, I’d come across this account of a pregnant woman, Rana Abdul Mahdi, who lives in Sadr City:
“… I saw a helicopter floating very high in the air away from me, and I watched as it fired a rocket toward me and my little sister, Zahra. She was eight. I felt heat all over my body, and then I was on the ground as the street filled with smoke. There were bodies all around me, and I saw my sister with all her insides spilling out her front. She was reaching for me, motioning with her hand for me to come and help. … I saw my left foot was gone. It was sitting there in the street a little ways from me.”
UH-1N
The light lift “Huey” rose from the floor of night
into the darkness of the brain
where it felt the sullen winds pushing it this way and that,
following the current of a thought
into a blankness and far-seeingness
that, as I rose in the actual chopper, released me
to confront the scabbard of Orion’s belt.
Behind him the scorpion menaced his exposed heel.
But then the rotor roar filled up the space between night sky
and ground-dark.
The imagination slipped down over my eyes
like a pair of night-vision goggles: what they showed me
was myself strapped in, staring down at Baghdad
at one of Saddam’s kitsch palaces
that looked like something out of The Thousand and One Nights
in which only Scheherazade’s unending flight of words
to keep the sultan from murdering her
can preserve her from his scimitar.
How picturesque the imagination
envisions the storied world lit up by infrared.
How the helicopter’s retracted doors letting in the cold night air
refreshed and restored the sultan in me
while putting under threat of death
the insurgent imagination that thinks it can talk its way
out of the void it hovers in, its blades rendered
an invisible blur as it holds its position
in the darkness, intent on the levitating heaviness
that allows it to convince itself, suspended
in the air,
that it’s really weightless.
ON OUR WAY BACK FROM ONE MISSION IN BAGHDAD, I learned that a suicide bomber had gotten inside the Green Zone, or what since the US troop withdrawal in 2011 had been rechristened the International Zone—the IZ, as the locals put it. That meant the rest of the city qualified as the Red Zone. But the Red Zone, the IZ, no matter—sure enough, a day later, the bomber blew himself up not too far away from where we’d just conducted a workshop.
But such incidents, after the workshop with Mariam, now took on a subtly different quality. I had begun to feel such rage about the relentlessness of the killing, the zealotry that could inspire it, the religious mania that seemed to brutalize people into killing other ordinary Iraqis who most likely weren’t particularly religious, except as a formal, societal, or familial instinct, and who had no doctrinal grudge against anyone. Their only sin was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But since Mariam’s story, written and read with such understated feeling, my rage, and the comfort it gave me because of my certainty that it was justified, could never take hold of me without also seeing the image of her brother, gently, very gently, bending down to kiss his sister, to ask her if she needed anything at the market, and whispering, again with the utmost gentleness, that this would be the last time he would ever see her.
4
Homage to Vallejo
1/ INTENSITY AND HEIGHT
I want to write, but only foam comes out,
I want to say so much but it’s all crap—
there aren’t any numbers left that can’t be added up,
nobody writes down pyramids without meaning it.
I want to write, but I’ve got a puma’s brains;
I want to crown myself with laurel, but it stinks of onions.
There’s no word spoken that doesn’t dissolve in mist,
there’s no god and no son of god, only progress.
So come on, to hell with it, let’s go eat weeds,
eat the flesh and fruit of our stupid
tears and moans, of our pickled melancholy souls.
Come on! Let’s go! So what if I’m wounded—let’s go
drink what’s already been drunk,
let’s go, crow, and find another crow to fuck.
2/ HAT, COAT, GLOVES
Right in front of the Comédie-Française
is the Regency Café; and right inside it, there’s this room, hidden,
with a table and an easy chair. When I go in,
house dust, already on its feet, stands motionless.
Between my lips made of rubber, a cigarette butt
smoulders, and in the smoke you can see two intensive
smokes, the café’s thorax, and in that
thorax an oxide of elemental grief.
It matters that autumn grafts itself into other autumns,
it matters that autumn merges into young shoots,
the cloud into half-years, cheekbones into a wrinkle.
It’s crucial to smell like a madman who spouts
theories about how hot snow is, how fugitive the turtle,
the “how” how easy, how deadly the “when.”
3/ BEST CASE
Look, at the very best, I’m someone other—
some guy who walks around marble statues, who enters
his adult clay into indexes of blood, and feels
the rage and fear of the fox chased to its hole—
and if someone anoints my shoulders
with indigoes of mercy, I’ll declare
to my absent soul that there’s no hellishly
paradisal elsewhere for me to go.
And if they try to choke me on the sea’s wafer,
telling me it tastes like His flesh, more acid
than sweet, like Kant’s notions of truth, I’ll cough
it all up: No, never! I’m other as a germ, a satanic
tubercle, a moral ache in a plesiosaur’s molar:
in my posthumous suspicions, all bets are off!
4/ ANOTHER DAY OF LIFE
I’ll die in my apartment on a cold bright day,
with nobody around, the apartment next door gone
dead still while wind shushes through the balcony,
though the branches somehow aren’t moving, just as the sun
doesn’t move, everything’s so quiet, so frozen.
Parked c
ars, plastic bags bleached in the bare trees,
a couple of those Mylar balloons tied to a chair on
the balcony next door, celebrating something, maybe?
… now sagging listless on the floor,
as if every last molecule had been pierced by a needle—
Tom Sleigh is dead, he stared up into the air,
the sky was pale blue as usual and he couldn’t feel
the cold coming through the window, and there wasn’t
much to say or not say—and nobody, anyway, to say or not say it.
5/ MY JAILER WON’T WEEP TO BE MY LIBERATOR
My cell’s four walls, whitening in the sun,
keep counting one another—but their number
never changes, despite my jailer’s
innumerable keys to chains
wrenching the nerves to their extremities.
The two longer walls hurt me more—who knows why—
their salt-stained cracks like two mothers who die
after labor, but give birth to twin boys
whose hands they still hold. And here I am,