by Greg Baxter
But that isn’t right. It’s not what happened. I push the sheets off me. I’ve set the heat too high. My mouth is dry. I’ve had six weeks of uninterrupted sleep, and now I am awake and I’m not even tired. Each thought I have gets up on its own legs, grows arms, grips me, lifts me higher and higher into an awakened state, and marches me toward the morning, which is still hours away. I sit up, finally, turn the light on, and see the glass of water I set on the nightstand. I reach for it and drink it. It’s lukewarm. I get up and go to the thermostat, which is in the hallway. I turn on the light, and by the door are my boots, still wet, salt-stained, and dripping water on the floor. Above my boots my new coat hangs on a hook, and on the hook beside it I have hung my new scarf. I turn the light off, go into the kitchen, flick on a small lamp, pour myself another glass of water, boil the kettle, wait while it boils, standing in my T-shirt, pyjama bottoms and bare feet, drinking my glass of water and refilling it and drinking it and refilling it and drinking it. When the kettle is boiled I make some green tea. I let it sit while I go to the bathroom. I wash my hands and face and go back to the kitchen, crack the front window open to let cold air in, and smoke a cigarette at the kitchen table. And there, alone, in the subdued and satiny lamplight, I think, again, That did not happen. It had not happened. The man with the moustache had not thrown the cue ball. After Saskia potted her shot, and I shook hands with Manuela, the man simply quit without paying his debt, placed his stick against the wall, and drifted away, and the rest of the evening – at least the hour or so longer that Saskia and I spent there – passed strangely but without incident. How, I ask myself, had I remembered it as though it were real? How had my mind, even briefly, believed in it? I sit back down at the kitchen table and light another cigarette and let the false memory play out. It is corrupted now, but it still contains sensation: Manuela, hit between the shoulder blades, drops. She bunches her back up. Saskia bends down to help her. Janos and Zaid throw themselves on top of the man with the moustache, then more friends come along. They really give it to the guy. Saskia shouts at them to stop, not because she cares about the guy with the moustache, but because nobody is paying attention to Manuela, and she is badly hurt. She has gone pale. A group of people come inside from the smoking area, having heard the commotion, and more people from the front area, and I realize then that there is going to be a great and unfortunate misunderstanding that is going to get a lot of people injured. Nobody who has arrived late knows why the guy on the ground is being pummelled, so they begin to pull people off him, who resist, and the fight spreads backward. I kneel down over Manuela, with Saskia. Saskia says, What do we do? Just hold on to her, I say. I’ll go get the manager. When I stand, I see that Hard Core is back, trying to calm everybody down. I try to pass but he steps in front of me. I say, Please get out of my way. He doesn’t move. He is frightened by all this violence, but it has thickened in him. His blood has stopped flowing. I say, Well, go ahead, Brian, and he swings at me. He is four or five inches shorter than me, and he does not know how to punch. He misses and I push him down to the ground, not angrily, without heat; I simply place him there, and he realizes he shouldn’t get up. And that is where the story ends. But that is insufficient. I pour myself another cup of green tea and watch the steam rise out of the cup. I blow on it. And the scene rewinds. It goes back again. There he is again, Hard Core, in front of me, just before he is about to throw his punch, and I grab his open mouth with my hands, pull it open, and I break his jaw by physically unhinging it from his skull, just pulling – I have his head in my chest, and pull his face open until it pops. I leave him on the floor.
I stand up, feeling an uneasiness that goes everywhere in me, down to my toes and fingertips, into my lungs and eyes, and makes me dizzy. I need to walk around. I open the cupboards. I find a mostly full bag of flour. There are also some jars of spices. I open a few and smell them. Cumin. Paprika. Caraway. I open the refrigerator. Nothing is there, except some lard. The lard has been opened – one of those grease paper wrappers that butter comes in. I take it out and set it on the counter. I see a bite mark on it, or maybe it’s a fork mark. I lean in. It looks like teeth to me. I go back to my room. It’s about four in the morning. I still don’t feel tired. I have a few books. I could turn on the radio. I don’t have a TV. What I really want to do is go to sleep. I’d like to sleep until the sun comes up. I open the door to the living room and, even with the curtains closed, I see that the room is bright. I walk to the windows and pull the curtains back, and I see something unexpected and wondrous. The clouds have come way down, and the streetlamps are glowing violet. The violet light smashes upward, then reflects off the heavy, low clouds upon the snowy graveyard, and rises up pink. It is a wild, breathtaking sight. It makes me think of the way I imagine the outer boundary of the universe to be, not black, not vast, not raging, not full of electric storms or combusting debris, but cloudy, bright, and snowing little pink particles of dust. There is nobody walking around, obviously, though it would be nice and mysterious to see a man or woman standing on the sidewalk, or wandering around the headstones. I stand at the window for a little while. It might be five minutes or it might be ten minutes. I remember that I have not hung the painting Saskia gave me. It’s leaning beside the couch. I look around the room at the various paintings and prints that came with the apartment, all bland, and decide to remove one that features a snowy landscape. I take it off and place it on the floor. I take the painting Saskia and I bought and hang it there. I step away from it. It seems level. Then I go back to the kitchen and close the window, because the apartment is finally getting cool again, and I grab the little radio in the kitchen, take it to the living room, plug it into a socket and raise the antenna. I scroll through the bandwidth. It’s an old radio, so it has a dial. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I start at the bottom, at 88. There is a lot of odd music in this city. I go very slowly. The squelch between the stations is nice, that sizzling and scratching you ride right into the sweet spot – I did some work for Peace 106 in Baghdad, and I remember lots of afternoons when I sat in my hotel, holding a little silver Sony single-speaker FM radio, which ran on batteries, rolling the dial from 106 to 105 and back to 106 and on to 107, and back again, very slowly. Here, in my apartment, I go all the way up, and find what sounds like a weather report. It is, so far as I can tell, just names and numbers, cities and temperatures, delivered without inflection. I sit down on the couch and imagine the man who is reading these. I picture him in a bright room under long fluorescent bulbs, wearing a white shirt and a navy blue tie, undone. Every few minutes he pauses. I presume this is when he flips a page or has a drink of water. Or he might be on a loop, and this is a bulletin he recorded an hour ago, which will play every hour until six a.m., and in that case I am thinking of him driving home, wearing a huge puffy brown jacket with a furry hood, and large square spectacles, and he drives as languidly as he speaks. If somebody cuts him off, he brakes, checks his rear-view mirror for oncoming danger, and speeds up again when it is clear. He drives so slowly that people overtake him on dangerous stretches of road, simply because they believe his car is malfunctioning. Curiously, he has never, not even once, turned the dial on his radio to himself, to hear himself speaking. He is in his late forties. He is the kind of guy who takes apart his remote control, draws a schematic, then rebuilds a remote that is ten times the size, full of huge buttons, which only he can use. He drinks milk that is five or six days past its use-by date, because he believes the whole idea of use-by dates is an industry conspiracy. He reads fantasy books that are written for children. He washes the leaves on his plants with a damp cloth. He does not like other people, yet he lurks in their radios at night, a voice from beyond, outside geography and time and temperature, as if he might, by the power of his own disintegrated life, save them.
During my second stint in Baghdad, about two weeks after I’d had that cryptic conversation with the inspector at the police station, and about two weeks before I left for good, I was getting
a lift from Forward Operating Base Rustamiyah back to the Green Zone, rolling down Route Pluto at about fifteen miles an hour in a convoy of Humvees, when we stopped abruptly because somebody at the front of the convoy had become concerned about a water buffalo standing by the side of the road. This was in eastern Baghdad, in the spring of 2007, and IED attacks were on the rise. Insurgents placed them in trash, in dirt, and in – or sometimes under or behind – dead animals. This one was, however, alive – bleating, stomping, and swatting flies off itself with its tail. I would be told, later that day, that the man who raised the alarm, a PFC named Schaefer, did so because he saw the animal chained to the fence, but by the time the story had got passed down, vehicle by vehicle, along the convoy, the story was that somebody had spotted a wire coming out of the animal’s ass. I was, that day, shitting it, since I knew I’d be leaving soon. When your days in a dangerous place are numbered, as mine were, your response to danger changes. My mind had already begun its departure. I spent a great deal of time in those last few weeks in daydreams, corkscrewing out of Baghdad International, rising up over that vast brown swamp of smoke and trash, higher and higher, until the moment we were free, out of rocket range, and the sky was beautiful because it was so dry and blue, and the desert was beautiful because it was so old, so important, and endless. We waited there a long time. We watched for movement all around us. On one side of the road there were empty fields, dotted with trees, and on the other were clusters of habitable, grey, boxlike structures – though they were a good distance away, perhaps a thousand yards. Another PFC named Gomez slowly made his way to the water buffalo. Gomez had received a morals waiver. The Army had loosened its recruitment standards, which meant people could join up despite a criminal history – mainly serious misdemeanours but also felonies like aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide. The only things that seemed to absolutely rule you out, as far as your criminal history went, were multiple felonies or heinous sexual crimes. But the reason I remember Gomez was because, as we waited for him to reach the animal and confirm the sight of wires coming out of it – or whatever it was that he was ordered to do – I had a sudden desire to take his place. The weather was weirdly cool and cloudy, and there was an orange-pink light coming from a gap between the horizon and a stack of clouds that filled the rest of the sky. Gomez jumped the fence and walked around the animal, very carefully. He moved slowly. He knelt down. He stood on his tiptoes. He cleared bits of brush all around the animal with his rifle. When he seemed to be satisfied that it was not a threat, or, I suppose, that it was not being used to conceal a threat, the tension in his body evaporated. His shoulders loosened up, his stride got casual, and he started to jog back toward us. Somebody shouted a question at him as he was running, and he shook his head and twirled a forefinger in the air, and everyone started jumping back into their Humvees and our engines started up again, and we were off, again, at about fifteen miles an hour, heading back to the Green Zone. As we passed the animal and cleared what, I suspected, would have been the blast zone, I felt great relief that nothing had happened, that Gomez had not been killed, that there was no IED, no ambush, and so on, and the man sitting beside me said, All good? and I gave him a very sincere thumbs up, but very soon after that, and before we returned to the Green Zone, I realized that everything contemptible in me was contained in that sense of relief, or, maybe, in the gesture that expressed that relief.
Saskia and I left Chambinsky before one, to catch the last trains. The place stayed open until six a.m., but I wasn’t drinking any more, and I began to sense that everybody thought of me as a bit of tedium. When it was proposed that I play pool, I was evasive and said I was no good. I said goodbye to Manuela. I said goodbye to Janos and Zaid and then broadly to everyone. They were just settling in. Saskia said she didn’t want to stay with them. She was tired, and she wanted to have the breakfast we had planned, and we could not have that breakfast hung over. We needed appetites. We needed to be rested. I agreed. We walked down a long avenue of closed shops and empty benches. The temperature had dipped sharply, and my hands were starting to freeze inside my gloves; maybe I was just getting too tired to feel warm. She was chatting about types of cheese that go well with breakfast. She mentioned smoked salmon. Do you like hot chocolate? she asked. Not really, I said, but let’s have some anyway. There were large red globes strung high above the avenue, which descended toward a large, brightly lit square, where we would separate. How many courses are we up to? I asked. Saskia started to count, on her fingers, the number of courses she’d planned in her head. I stopped at a crowded late-night stand to buy a bottle of water for myself and an orange fizzy drink for Saskia. There was a long wait, because the people in front of us couldn’t make up their minds. It was a couple in their sixties – a man with silver hair and a thin black coat, who wore neither gloves nor hat, and a woman in a thick fur coat, wearing very high heels. The woman couldn’t decide whether to get a slice of pizza with pepperoni on it, or one with spinach. You know, said Saskia, there really is no limit to the kinds of food you can eat for breakfast.
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First published 2012
Copyright © Greg Baxter, 2012
The mora
l right of the author has been asserted
