by Greg Baxter
The streetcar stops and we get on. It’s crowded, and this disappoints Saskia, who had wanted to sit and rest. She holds onto a pole and I grab a dangling loop. At the top of this street, there’s a palace in two parts, the upper and the lower, and a garden in between. In the upper palace, one of the most famous paintings in the world hangs. It costs a lot of money to get in, and all they have is that painting and five or six rooms of old artefacts. People go straight to the painting and leave. They walk right up to it, take video cameras out, and film it, and on the way out, they complain. I heard an English couple complain that it was not very good. An American man said he thought it would be bigger. Nobody pays any attention to the other stuff. One room has nothing but Mesopotamian artefacts – it claims to be one of the largest exhibitions of Mesopotamian art in Europe – and, on the two occasions I visited, I spent most of my time there. When I was in Iraq, with the Navy, Mesopotamian art and artefacts were being looted. And when I went back, as a civilian contractor, I met, and worked with, people who were trying to locate and rescue the pieces. One guy sat in my hotel room and sobbed. He’d been the curator of a museum, and everything had been taken. He came in smiling. We shook hands and he told me a joke. We had some tea. I never understood how Iraqis drank hot tea when it was 120 degrees, but I did it anyway. He’d gone to Cambridge, which meant he spoke better English than I did. He was discussing various pieces matter-of-factly, handing me folders. He showed me a database on his computer that listed each artefact, and the progress of the investigation into its whereabouts. Then he came upon one piece that was in no way different from the others, not at all special, not more valuable, not larger, and he started sobbing. He sobbed and sobbed, in that tiny room, with the curtains drawn, in the middle of summer. Being here, and having no job to do, seemed about as far away as I could ever get from that moment. But then I walked into that room in the palace and found myself surrounded by Mesopotamian art, so I stayed a while.
Do you mind me talking about that stuff? asks Saskia. Not at all, I say. Are your parents alive? she asks. Yes, I say. Were you ever married? No, I say. She seems satisfied, and she leans down to look out the windows and check where we are. The streetcar stops, and more people board, about six or seven, and push us closer together. They shake the cold out of themselves by hopping and clapping and rubbing their hands together. The road suddenly becomes steep, but the streetcar stays smooth and quiet. In the spring and summer, she says, we should have a picnic in the palace garden. Good idea, I say. I’ve walked through the garden a few times. I’m drawn to parks in winter. I sit on benches and watch the snow, or I enjoy the cold sunshine or the grey wind. I don’t do anything. I just observe, and stay very still, until it’s too cold to stay still. The parks and gardens are usually attached to a palace or an imperial office that makes me think of power and of glory and how these things, here, have passed into history like an artefact. In Qatar I sat in a room the size of a hangar, and on the walls were five hundred large screens flipping through live satellite and ground surveillance of every inch of soil in the various theatres of war that stretched from the Horn of Africa to eastern Pakistan. We had something smaller in Baghdad, in Camp Victory. I used to sit and watch and make notes and disseminate bits of intelligence, and then I’d go have a coffee with Italian commandos and intelligence officers. I met a bunch of French officers in Qatar, and found out the French military was taking part in small-scale but extremely violent combat with Iranian forces near the border. It was not official combat, but engagements took place. The Syrians and Iranians were fighting Americans. Israeli commandos were fighting Iranians. It was all happening. I led a four-man Forward Dissemination Element. Our job was providing surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting intelligence to coalition air assets and ground forces. We worked with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the 42nd Infantry Division. My days on rotation, which were long and busy, went like this: after a couple hours’ sleep, I’d wake very early in the morning, grab a coffee, and head in to check SIPR for tasking. SIPR is the classified intranet system that, some months before I arrived in this city, a young kid named PFC Manning used to download hundreds of thousands of military documents and diplomatic cables, which he gave to WikiLeaks. Then I’d check ATO – air tasking orders. ATO is the flight schedule for war, published by the Combined Air Operations Center. It’s a document that includes all scheduled flights and missions for all squadrons. After that, I’d check Air Mobility Command for theatre transportation – C-130s shuttling between Qatar, Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I’d check email. These checks determined the battle rhythm for the day and night. Outside the regimented nature of my FDE work, Camp Victory was a place of incongruity and a stupefying lack of drama. In bright blue pools, Army guys played water volleyball with the ugly hot Polish girls who worked at the post exchange. Behind the palace, pacing around alone and in a cloud of fathomless confusion, General Ricardo Sanchez smoked cigars and scratched his cheeks. Paul Bremer walked around with this practised gaze of victory on his face, but in closed-link video meetings he did nothing but scream and excoriate and blame at the top of his lungs, or so I heard from people who knew. From the bottom to the very top, the one thing all American leaders had in common was an unpreparedness for the very thing they’d wake up to face the next day. We drove around in SUVs, ate Pizza Hut and Subway, drank Budweiser. We sunbathed. We surfed the internet. VIPs with entourages took tours around the camp. Bremer was trying to create a free-market epicentre at the heart of the Islamic world, and Camp Victory was like the epicentre of the epicentre. There was always the sound of faraway firefights and detonations, and from time to time we’d come under mortar attack. There was a lady from Oklahoma working for KBR as a room-assignment queen – a sixty-something grandmotherly dyed blonde. She probably made more money than half-decent basketball players in the NBA. She was responsible for all the hooches on our compound. One day my boss came in to get a room ten minutes before she was closing. He had travelled by C-130 from Qatar and was hot and tired. She was closing up early and wanted to go home. Come back tomorrow, she said. We said no, give us a room, but she did not. There were very nice Filipinos working for pennies doing our laundry. There was a guy working for a Dutch multinational that had the sewage and waste contract. He and I drank together often. I’d sometimes think of how absolutely perfect it seemed, to have picked this place, where the first cities appeared – Uruk, Nippur, Nineveh, and Babylon – where man invented civilization, to carry out a war, secretly fought by all the nations of the world, that would be the beginning of the final war, which would be waged for two hundred years, or five hundred, and fought all over the earth, and which would probably end with the total disappearance of one or two or three of the great cities on earth – London, Paris, New York – or perhaps all of them.
On my second stint in Iraq, as a civilian contractor, I set up IT networks and did a lot of investigation. In the end it was mainly computer surveillance, trying to evaluate patterns of chatter to predict insurgent activity, or locate insurgents behind the anonymity of the web. I had a lot of nice equipment. It was always getting stolen, but it was insured, and I was making so much money that it didn’t matter. I worked with various private military companies, engineering firms, the Iraqi police, and the US government. I made a thousand dollars an hour for a period of about four weeks, taking vast amounts of information across multiple systems and organizing them onto a database I built for the Army. The way I estimated my fees for the Army – I worked for the Army more than anybody else – was to dream up a figure that seemed unreal and add a zero. The Army didn’t trust you if your fees weren’t preposterous. I didn’t spend anything. When I wasn’t working, I sat in my room and smoked cigarettes, and I listened to the city. The hotel was quiet during the days. In the mornings and evenings, it was manic. Everybody had their TVs on loud. Phones rang. Voices passed outside my door. Many of the people on my floor were journalists. Some were long-term residents, like me, but m
ost were short-term. As they walked by, equipment rattled off their bodies. Sometimes they came by in groups of two or three, whispering, or not whispering. They spoke many different languages.
After I returned from my private work in Iraq, I went back to my city in the desert again, the one I kept leaving and returning to, for the last time. I had money that seemed – at least for my way of living – unlimited. I rented a four-bedroom, three-bath place on half an acre of fine, green grass near a country club, about an hour north of the city. I leased a gigantic black pickup – a Ford F-250 – with leather seats. I was all alone, and I had no furniture, just a couch and a TV, and some kitchen stuff. I drove, once a week, to the nearest grocery megastore and wheeled a shopping cart around the aisles slowly for an hour or two, examining lots of things but buying very few, and other than that I rarely left the neighbourhood. I mowed and watered the lawn a lot. I got to know a guy who lived just down the road with his big family in a six-bedroom, seven-bath house with a huge pool. Everyone in that development used a golf cart to get around – mainly this was because it allowed them to legally drink and drive – and my neighbour had a bright red one that would do thirty-one miles an hour downhill. It had silver spinning rims. A neurosurgeon down the road had a yellow cart jacked up and gold rims. It could do twenty-seven miles an hour. Mine was just white, and had no speedometer. This guy, my neighbour, worked as a distributor entirely from home, and never wore anything but shorts and T-shirts. He never had meetings. He never had to go anywhere. He drove a large black Denali with tinted windows and played old-school rap, like NWA, as loud as possible. He had a few employees who worked in an office, cold-calling, but he rarely saw them. There was a time when distributors were linked to particular industries. If you needed something specific, you needed a specific guy. If you needed steel, you needed a steel guy. But my neighbour represented a new breed – guys who could get anything in a second, from bolts for submarines to tortilla-making machines to silicon chips to garden furniture to bricks to small arms to parts for Tomahawk missiles. He put the company in the name of his wife so he could classify it as a woman-owned business, which gave him priority for government contracts. I get an order, he’d say, for 50,000 surgical coils. I go online and get a decent price from a guy I know who delivers quality stuff. Let’s say each coil costs me fifteen cents. I charge my buyer thirty-five cents. That right there is nearly a motherfucking speedboat, he’d say, and by speedboat he only meant a second-hand, small motorboat with an ice chest near the driver’s seat. I hear that, I might say. But that’s small time, he’d say. Big time is military. I mark my prices up one thousand per cent. My girl knows this. This girl he speaks of is his buyer in the Navy, who likes him because when he is on the phone with her, he turns into a right-wing hawk. This girl, he’d say, has to spend her budget, so she’s just looking for a guy who will flirt with her and be patriotic. What the fuck do I care?
These conversations between him and me took place usually while drinking vodka on the rocks at lunchtime, poolside. We’d talk, his phone would ring, he’d bullshit for five minutes, pick a number out of thin air, and when they agreed, as they always did, he’d silently pump his fist, say goodbye, send an email to one of his employees with instructions, and say, to me, Speedboat, baby. He was a millionaire, I think, but he had so many outgoings that he barely scraped by from month to month. Eventually he got the speedboat, but his wife wouldn’t let him take the kids out on it, and the neighbourhood association wouldn’t let him park it in his driveway, so he kept it in a storage facility thirty minutes away, visited it like a spouse in prison, and rarely spoke of it. He was a good guy, and he wanted to make money, have a nice life, raise his kids, have regular sex with his wife. And it seemed kind of insane to me that the very natural idea of wanting to be successful in order to create a comfortable life for your family had, here, taken such a big-hearted, unassuming, funny guy and placed him in the heart of darkness.
The last time I saw him we were up late in his back yard. He’d been drinking vodka tonics through the afternoon and evening. I came over after dark, because I heard loud music playing on his outdoor speakers. The police came by a few times to tell him neighbours were complaining, and he turned the music down for a little while, but then a song he liked would come on, and he’d turn it back up. After midnight, his wife started coming out every ten minutes to tell him the kids could not sleep. I was wearing a jacket, and he was in swimming shorts, bare feet, and a T-shirt. At around half past one, he started bouncing on his trampoline. He kept saying, Watch this, as though he was about to backflip, but all he did was bounce. Intermittently he delivered his philosophy on life as well as his philosophy on women. Finally his wife asked me to go home, so I left him there, bouncing on his trampoline, in the middle of the night, which was cool and starry. It was a few days later that I packed some things into a suitcase and got a taxi to the airport. I didn’t say goodbye. I suspected that he knew me as the kind of man who came by and had drinks, not the kind of man who said goodbye.
I say to Saskia, What were we talking about? Picnics, she says. I was saying we should have a picnic in the spring. Sounds good, I say. My favourite thing to do in spring, she says, is to go to a park with a friend on Sunday morning with all the newspapers and spend five or six hours there and not say a word to each other, except to comment on the nice weather. And then we go for lunch somewhere outdoors and drink white-wine spritzers for a long time. Then we go back to the grass and look at the blue in the sky until we fall asleep. Good Lord, I say, that sounds nice. Do you do that often? She pauses and watches the road for a few moments. No, she says. I don’t think I’ve ever done it, not like that. Everybody I know wants to talk. They read over your shoulder, and then they want to talk. Well, I say, I’m your man. She holds my elbow as though to thank me for saying something nice. If you get your apartment today, she says, tomorrow morning I’ll come over with food and we’ll have a breakfast that takes two hours to eat. I’ll bring bread and jam, and lots of butter. We’ll have an egg each – every course is small, and we eat them slowly. We’ll have mushrooms and sausages. We need buttermilk, meat and cheese. We’ll get very smelly cheese. We need fruit. And some newspapers. And lots of coffee. During breakfast, we’ll smoke lots of cigarettes, and when we’re done we’ll open the windows and air the kitchen out. After that, we’ll play some music and look at the city guide. God, I say, I hope I get the apartment. We could do it at my place, she says, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same. She has a flatmate. He’s from Montenegro, and he works and plays video games and spends a lot of time on the phone to his mother. She looks up at me and her mood has sunk a bit, because she is thinking that this is her life, to share a small flat with an adult who plays video games, so she thinks of something comforting. At least he pays his rent on time, she says.
The road levels out, and the streetcar accelerates. We pass the palace and enter a large white square. All around us is massive white imperial space. It really takes your breath away – still, even though I’ve seen it many times now. The inner ring is at the other end of the square, four or five lanes in both directions, always swamped with traffic. Two large avenues, one leading into the centre and one leading away, have curved in along either side of the streetcar tracks. Cars are backed up on the avenue leading into the city, as far back as I can see. The avenue out of the centre is nearly empty, and the odd car flies by. Today, because it has snowed so heavily, there is almost nothing that is not white, except the red lights of cars that are ahead of us, and the black, gritted streets, and various flags flapping over hotel lobbies and on the tops of buildings. The lights in the hotel lobbies are red and gold. They look empty and extremely peaceful. We pass the first stop that is on the ring road, between a school for actors and a school for musicians, and Saskia tells me a little bit about them, that it is very difficult to get into these schools, and that the drama school is for teenagers but the music school is for children as young as six. If you are six, she says, and you h
ave not been identified as a musical genius, it is probably too late for you.
Just before the next stop, as we are waiting at a traffic light, she leans down and sees someone, and starts knocking loudly on the glass. Manuela! she shouts. A girl in a big fur coat and big pink combat boots turns around. She’s got dark red hair. Saskia waves. Manuela smiles and waves back. The streetcar starts to move again and they both point up the road – presumably to the next stop, where we will rendezvous. What a coincidence, I say. You’d think so, says Saskia, but I always run into people I know. You’ll like Manuela. She’s very pretty. I look back, and Manuela shrinks into the scrolling scenery. We stop and get off, and have to readjust to the cold – I put my hat on and she puts her gloves on, and we zip and button up again. Shall we wait or go to meet her? I ask. She’s going in our direction, says Saskia, so we should wait. Yes, I say, but it feels odd to just wait here. Let’s walk very slowly. Okay, says Saskia. We begin to walk back toward Manuela as slowly as possible. And she – I can see her now a long way off – is hurrying in our direction. I see that she is tall and thin. Saskia has mentioned Manuela to me before, and I have, I suppose, expected that she would be cool and stern, but I can already see that she is sort of goofy. She takes short, quick steps, with crossed arms. She holds her head down and looks up only when she nearly bumps into somebody. I know that Manuela used to work with Saskia and now works for the central bank. She’s more interested in her work than Saskia is. She is always working late, writing papers for conferences, having power lunches. Saskia is happy to stay in research, working hard in rare bouts to write reports only five or six people will read in their entirety, and is always dreaming of new things to do outside of work. Saskia says that Manuela sometimes irritates her, because she has no interest in books or art or history, but then admits that without Manuela she’d have an uninteresting social life. There’s a small park beside us, in which there is a statue of a huge seated figure – a poet. On the other side of the ring road is another figure – Saskia tells me this is a philosopher. They are real historical men, friends and rivals, who lived at the same time, about three hundred years ago – aesthesis versus theoria, Saskia says. Manuela is close enough now to wave. Then she looks down again. Saskia stops, so I stop. There is no reason to keep walking. Manuela gets to us and is out of breath. She and Saskia talk for a bit, and I don’t understand anything but hello and how are you, and the cold. Then Saskia says, We have to speak English. So Manuela switches to English. We’re going to buy him a new coat, says Saskia. And then we’re going to look at an apartment for him. An apartment! says Manuela. How exciting. Where? Saskia says the name of a street, or an area, I suppose. You must be rich, says Manuela, but not in the way Janos said it. You were in the Navy? she says. I nod. Saskia says, I’ve just learned he was on submarines. You don’t look American, Manuela says. Sorry, I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with looking American.
