The Angel of History

by Rabih Alameddine

  Jacob’s Stories

  The Drone

  If you looked at Mohammad’s village from a bird’s-eye view, as I usually did, you wouldn’t have been impressed with the boy’s crumbling house, or with the village architecture either. Heck, you would probably have mocked it with no little disdain, just as my guys back in Florida did on a daily basis. (“I can bring this house down with four slingshots, George.” “Well, Dick, I can bring this house down with one Hellfire missile.” “Bring this house down, George.”) The houses had a kind of style, but it wasn’t ours. They fit in their surroundings architecturally, but we weren’t that fond of the surroundings to begin with, were we? I mean, how could you be, it was arid and poor, all browns and beiges and creams and off-whites. (“Diarrhea colors are all I see, George, all I see, and it’s worse in night vision.”) Not a sprig of real green. Which was why our boy had to go quite a distance from his house to fetch firewood, and that is where our story begins, that was how he and I met that fateful day, a day that would live on in Rooseveltian infamy or glory, depending on which side of the fence you preferred to dangle your legs from.

  Up high I was flying that day, above the incomprehensible land beneath—beneath me both literally and figuratively—poking my upturned nose into everyone’s business as usual: who was walking home, who was making lunch, who was making bombs, who was pissing in the outhouse, who in the wind, who was having sex. (“They’re fucking doggie-style, Dick. It’s not missionary. Look at ‘em go at it!”) Above the Tappi area, about ten miles from Miramshah, a group of girls stopped playing and hid behind outlying rocks upon hearing my approach. Can you blame them? I’d killed two of their friends only two months ago, and it seemed I’d sprayed three of the girls below with shrapnel. It was unintentional, I didn’t intend to kill the girls, Nabeela and Naeema, both blue-eyed and under ten. I’d aimed for the sorry shack where their militant father slept, and it was unfortunate that the girls shared the same address. My Hellfire sucked the air out of their home, whoosh. (“You brought the house down, George!”) That was me, not the other prowler of these skies, my partner Kurt Z. Full disclosure.

  And since I’m disclosing here, let me add that I enjoyed watching my Hellfire hit its target; the sensation electrified my circuits. The colors—reds, oranges, yellows, blues, browns, ochers, purples, every imaginable color burst before your eyes with each explosion. The smell of napalm in the morning did not compare; it was overpowering, like garlic in a meal, you smelled only napalm. With my hits, I smelled fire and cordite and nuanced residues of human roasts. The feeling of firing a rifle? A machine gun? Pshaw. All other sensations were as the tinkling of a doorbell to the throbbing of Big Ben, which, incidentally, was how Lord Wolseley described shooting and killing Negroes in Africa. Can you imagine what it would have been like had the British had us at the turn of the twentieth century? Wowza!

  The landscape stretched before me like an interminable tumbling sea of sand and rock. The light was expansive, the sun hammered down relentlessly, its beams cut like sabers, stabbed at your eyes like rapiers. The air against my face was like thin ice crackling, except it was nowhere near cold enough for ice even at the heights where I was cruising. I missed the feel of fresh rain, missed its fragrance, missed the soughing of leafy treetops. A tree, a tree, my kingdom for a tree. In the offing, the white sky and white earth were welded together without a joint. Suddenly, as if someone had slapped me and jolted me into a deep sense of recognition, I felt a frisson of something ominous in the atmosphere, a smell of some sort, a different air density, a thickness, a spark, something I couldn’t identify. I warned Dick and George, but neither could decipher the feeling, or what I was saying, for that matter.

  “George, Dick, something weird is going down,” I said into my telecom.

  “What’s that damn hum?” George asked.

  “I see dead people,” Dick said.

  “Where?” George asked.

  “Target six seven three just entered his demesne.”

  “Dead in two minutes and thirteen seconds,” George said.

  I put all my senses and missiles on full alert. I assure you that never before had this land, this sand, these rocks, the very arch of this blazing sky, appeared to me so hopeless, so stark, so impenetrable, so pitiless, so invulnerable, so foreign. I saw a haze in the distance, a bright mist, and then my nose turned downward. My right wing had lost its way, my mind heard a voice, George, “I’m losing him, Dick. What the hell is happening? Did a terrorist shoot him? Damn, damn, damn. They can’t blame me for this. If they dock my pay this time, I’m going to sue.”

  The desert loomed as a frightening declivity that I was bound to visit, its floor rushed to greet me. I was lucky enough to crash-land in a valley with few rocks, my bottom sliding on dry sand for only a few feet. The excessive friction saved my life, but it erased the paint off my underbelly. For years while flying above this godforsaken land I’d been exposed to the powerful forces of erosion, suffocating sun and wind, bubbling heat, and I’d still remained presentable. My first encounter with the actual culture on the ground and it was a Kelly Moore holocaust.

  Need I tell you that I was terrified? I tried talking courage into my senses. I could barely move and I certainly could not take off.

  What could I do?

  I had no idea.

  I surveyed my surroundings, but every grain of sand looked like every other grain of sand, they all looked alike in this country. I knew where I was. I’d scouted this valley before, there wasn’t an inch of earth for hundreds of miles that I hadn’t spied on. I knew the lay of the land better than anyone else. I sprawled broken-winged and helpless two hills away from the village, in a valley rarely visited.

  I gauged my situation and realized that I was done for. With Herculean effort I could move a few inches at a time, I could maybe shuffle a wheel here and there. My right wing had betrayed me. Since the air held little or no moisture, I would not rust to death, but I couldn’t tell you which of the two possible fates awaiting me was worse: that I would spend the rest of eternity by my lonesome, undiscovered, sand blanketing me inch by inch until I was buried alive, or that I would be discovered by the villagers, who would slow-kill me with their shepherds’ staffs and rakes and hoes and rocks, but not before I Cheneyed a couple of their faces. The rest of my life wasn’t going to be pretty and neither was I.

  Then Mohammad appeared, and what a vision he was. A vague shape rose behind the hill, transformed into a silhouette haloed by the sun’s mucous disk, a paper puppet like Karagöz, their infamous passionate fool of the Ramadan shadow theaters. I was taken aback by the sight at first, but once he took one step down the mountain and the sun no longer obscured as many details, I saw him for what he was, a possible terrorist. His swarthy complexion gave him away, as did the ascetic aspect of his billowy clothing: no color, no denim, no Gap Kids, no Diesel.

  I tried to contact Dick and George, to no avail. I was on my own. I cocked my missiles. I scanned him for weapons and found nothing other than a bundle of five emaciated branches cradled in his arms like a newborn babe. I calculated that a branch could sting but not kill me. He’d have to come close enough to swing the flimsy weapon, which I wouldn’t allow because I’d shock and awe him into oblivion, or at least the Middle Ages. Still, I didn’t appreciate that look of maleficent curiosity upon his face. Mohammad descended the mountain with no fear. These people, without exception, couldn’t wait to ascend to their imaginary heaven with seventy-two pom-pom-wielding houris with whom they could perform delightfully imagined debaucheries—imagine, a Heaven with virgins instead of the Virgin. This approaching boy showed a surprising lack of awareness of his approaching death. I wished to show him a Schwartzkopfian graph detailing what one of my Hellfires would do to his body. I was just about to blast him to kingdom come, not his nymphet-infested one, when he fell on his butt and slid down the rest of the hill giggling like a schoolgirl. Mohammad spanked his behind to rid it of sand and dust, and without bothering to
pick up the branches, his weapons of mass destruction, came at me still laughing.

  “Doobly goobly gook McCain?” he asked. His teeth coruscated in the dazzling sunlight, such white teeth in a dark face.

  It is said that General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who in 1898 saved Sudan by killing tens of thousands of Sudanese, once had a Negro boy flogged to death with a whip made out of hippo hide (ancestor of the chicote of Congo, the sjambok of South Africa, and many others) for not being able to communicate in English. You might erroneously think this was a harsh sentence since the boy had never met a white man before Kitchener’s army stomped his village, nor had he heard of, let alone heard, the English language, but you see, the death was accidental. Kitchener, beloved of the British and Queen Victoria, wished only to teach and civilize, to educate the boy and his people.

  As enchanting as Mohammad was at that moment, I too wanted to teach and civilize the damn boy. He should know better than to talk to me, obviously not from his village, in his local language.

  Once more I cocked my missiles, when he suddenly said, in the queen’s tongue if heavily accented, “Hello. My name is Mohammad. What’s yours?”

  “Ezekiel,” I said, still a bit leery, until the boy reached over and hugged my nose. The disarming Mohammad and his discreet charm persuaded me to uncock my missiles. You had to give these people credit, their innocent nature allowed them to be genuine and loving. As an example, I’ll bring up another flogging story, not that I’m obsessed with the subject, but it’s not easy to find stories of these people that don’t include a good whupping. A Swede working for a Belgian company in the Congo, Lieutenant Gleerup, related how his bearers’ bad behavior would force him to flog them until one time he whipped one Negro so hard that Gleerup, not the Negro, fainted. The Swede (and it’s important to emphasize his nationality—think Stockholm and its delightful syndrome, think Nobel Peace Prize) wrote of how tenderly the flogged man treated him, covering him in his own white cloth to keep away the sun, caring for him, laying his head on his lap while another Negro ran down to the river to fetch water for him, so that soon Gleerup recovered and was able to wield the chicote once more. Nice people. I tell you, black people back in Florida have lost that earthy genuineness, their simple nature. Our noble savages have misplaced their nobility.

  The boy spoke once more. “Hello. My name is Mohammad. What’s yours? Would you like some tea and crumpets?”

  That was confusing, and I began to wonder whether I was misunderstanding his heavily accented tongue.

  “I like marmalade on my toast in the morning,” he said, “and in the evening, I like brussels sprouts. How about you?”

  “Is this some form of code?” I asked. “I’m not sure what you mean by brussels sprouts. Is marmalade a metaphor?”

  “English, yes.” The boy clapped his hands once in joy. “It always rains in London, but we make cotton in Yorkshire, and these kippers were swimming in the Channel yesterday.”

  I understood then that open communication wasn’t going to be an integral part of our relationship, but he hugged me again and released all my inhibitions.

  The first time he circled me, I felt like a cow at the market being examined, the second time, when he whistled appreciatively with every step, I felt I was the only girl at a fraternity party, which elicited discomforting and confusing feelings, enough so that without my even realizing it my missiles cocked on their own accord. But then the boy rattled off a few gook phrases, pointed at the five dry branches, and with waving arms gesticulating to indicate an explosion, he added, “Whoosh,” which I figured meant that he had to return home and build a fire. I thought that was terribly sweet until I realized that he was leaving me for the night.

  As I watched him climb back up the hill, maneuvering through the slippery scree, his feet finding an ideal landing every time, I knew it was going to be a difficult night. At the top of the hill, he turned and waved at me before disappearing. For the first time in my life, I was alone. Without Dick and George, without NPR or Sirius, here at the quiet limit of the world, abandoned to the indifferent stars above, near no accustomed hand, I felt lonely, so lonely.

  I felt sorry for myself, spent the first few hours thinking about my fall. Adam and Eve had nothing on me. I was once king of these skies, a silver shadow like a dream roaming the air and high spaces of this middling east. I surveyed all and knew everything and more. That evening I was lonelier than Bonaparte strutting on the volcanic beach of Elba, reviewing his triumphs while desperately trying to contain any incidental eruption of thoughts about Waterloo. I was bereft until I noticed that Mohammad had picked up only three of the branches. It might have been unintentional but it certainly was propitious; the remaining two bits of wood formed a cross on the desert floor.

  A cross of firewood before my eyes, a sign for me to see.

  Blessed be divine interventions.

  My mood soared again, my wings might not have been able to fly, but I was uplifted. My fall was divinely ordained, obviously. This was my burden, I, the best of my breed, was placed here to veil the threat of terror, to continue this war of peace. I would lift these people, teach and enlighten them. I had a mission and I finally knew what it was. I would open this village to the civilizing influences of commercial enterprise—oh, and democracy, of course.

  The rising sun woke me up to a glorious cloudless morning; its rays fell on the ground like white ashes and warmed my face. This severe land was warthog ugly, but I could hardly bear the stark beauty of my American intention. My heroism almost embarrassed me. I wanted to thank myself, slap my own back. If only I could see a bald eagle floating in the sky above, I would be complete. My heart brimmed with joy and the morning peaked and Mohammad came down the mountain once more. Oh, what a meeting it was. He was happy, I was happy. He could spend the whole day with me. Oh, what a time we were going to have.

  Even though I couldn’t move around much, we were still able to play. We began with hide-and-seek, though I always had to be the seeker since I couldn’t hide. I might be slim and sleek in the air, but I stick out at ground level. Mohammad hid behind rocks, and each time I’d shoot a round or two at the rock behind which I thought he was hiding and we’d laugh and laugh. He tried to teach me a song in his phlegmy language, but that didn’t work since the villagers’ primitive tongue meant nothing to me. I taught him a number of songs—well, just the hooks. We spent one delightful hour on “Bootylicious.”

  Such fun.

  He warned me, though. He told me that if the villagers found out about me, they would come out in force to kill me. To make his point, since his language skills were so incredibly primitive—why anyone would choose to speak that fricative language instead of the elegantly simple English is beyond the understanding of my firmware—his dramatic gestures included an exaggerated drop of a guillotine. Like Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, and John the Baptist, I would be beheaded—roll, roll, my pilotless cockpit.

  It almost happened. The next day, when Mohammad came back to play, we were discovered by his father. He was looking for his son, who had ignored his chores for two days running. Once he crested the hill, I heard his shrill gasp all the way across the valley, as did Mohammad. We separated instantly. I should have been more frightened, or more courageous. I could have shot the man right there and then and saved myself a lot of trouble, but I wasn’t thinking. We were having such a good time. Even when he called for his son and I looked up at him circled in sunlight, all I thought was why couldn’t these people add a touch of color to their wardrobe? What’s wrong with denim? Back to Bonaparte for a moment, the little corporal whose reputation has been unfairly maligned; shouldn’t it be time for a Napoleon Revival? You know, when he invaded Egypt—well, when he befriended Egypt, delivering its people from their despotic masters—he made it mandatory for all Egyptians to wear the tricolor cockade, the knotted ribbon preferred by French Republicans. He tried. Who wouldn’t want to pin a cockade on these villagers? The English attempted to civilize,
but Gandhi kept all the Asians in diapers. Hopeless.

  I didn’t worry much about Mohammad’s father seeing me because I believed in the righteousness of my cause. I assumed he understood that I was there to save him and his cohort from a life of terrorism and dogma. When Mohammad rushed up the hill, I realized that I got ever so lonely when he left me. I had never felt like this toward anyone before. I had never felt this, never experienced anything like these inchoate feelings, sweet and frightening. If my face could have moved or shown any expression whatsoever, I’d probably have blushed.

  The joy morphed into fear when the entire village came at me, roaring menacingly, men with shepherd staffs, women with spatulas, children with sticks. I screeched, “Terrorists, terrorists. You’re all damned for eternity if you don’t stop this campaign of terror against your betters. Stop being jealous of my freedom. Stop or I’ll shoot.”

  They didn’t stop. I pondered the fact, if ever so briefly, that after all these years, these villagers, not just Mohammad, couldn’t understand the tongue of enlightened people everywhere. There must be someone who did, but I wasn’t about to let them squash me before I found out. I released the safety on all weaponry. Mohammad walked backward, desperately trying to stop the indecent mob, and forcing me to hesitate for a moment. I couldn’t see his pleasing face but I heard the pleading of his voice. He kept repeating, “Doobly goobly gook McCain.”

  Could I risk hurting my beloved?

  Yes, of course. Collateral damage. We were trained to deal with that.

  The ratio of innocent per terrorist varies from one primitive nation to another—innocent Iraqis were worth more than Afghanis who were worth more than Pakistanis (there are so many of them) who were worth more than Yemenis who were basically worthless because we had to kill them a few times. As an example, a colleague killed the leader of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. It was the third time the former Guantánamo detainee Said al-Shihri had been reported dead in a drone strike, so whatever collateral damage had to be incurred to rekill him was acceptable, of course. Every strike killed an al-Qaeda leader, and sometimes we killed them over and over, and since no civilized person could possibly tell the difference between one Muslim name and another, everything worked out.