The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  “I’m not a journalist,” Brian said.

  “I didn’t have to tell them,” Jodee said. “They recognized you. I already informed them that you would not leave. They did not seem overly concerned.”

  Olivia had been in and out of Aleppo for years. She had many contacts, and was probably known by more people than she knew herself. For a journalist, that was both a good and a bad thing.

  Jodee cleared his throat. “It isn’t far to the madrassa. If we are still going.”

  “We’re going.” Olivia started walking toward the gate. If Assad was orchestrating the torture of former enemies of the state—men like Jodee—and doing it right under the noses of Western occupiers, she had to tell the story. Of course, the torturers could be acting on their own . . . probably were acting on their own. But best to let the official investigators figure that one out. In Olivia’s experience, it was rare that officials investigated anything before being embarrassed into doing so by the press.

  As she passed the taller of the bearded men, he spared Olivia a measuring glance. A thick aroma of Turkish tobacco clung to him.

  On the other side of the gate, a Syrian flag hung limply above the great medieval citadel. Many of the surrounding structures had been beaten into rubble. The streets were mostly empty, except for a few young men. Olivia’s eyes widened when she saw one of them, armed with a machine gun, scurry around a corner.

  “Not good,” she said, and her heart beat faster.

  “Do we need to get out of here?” Brian said.

  Olivia turned to their guide. “Jodee?”

  “This way.” Jodee waved them into a cobblestone alley. He walked quickly, almost running. Olivia had to jog to keep up. They followed a crooked path, squeezing between walls thousands of years old, until they came out a couple of streets over. Three French soldiers, members of the peacekeeping force, walked by on patrol, their rifles shoulder-slung, soft berets instead of helmets covering their heads.

  “This is your madrassa.” Jodee pointed.

  A single-story structure with a domed roof. Bullet holes pocked the sand-colored façade. Arabic letters, like contortionist stick figures, made a chain above the archway. Below the archway, a door wrapped in green copper stood open. At the sight of the madrassa Olivia stopped dead.

  Brian, frowning, said in a whisper, “What is it?”

  Olivia stared at the building, a strange sense of recognition resonating through her. “I feel like I know this place.”

  “Liv, are you all right?”

  On the next block, gunfire erupted. Someone shouted in English, but the shout was cut off.

  It was starting.

  Instinctively, Olivia looked for cover. The French soldiers reacted to the gunfire, going for their weapons. But they weren’t fast enough. Two men, their faces covered to the eyes by scarves, came out of nowhere and ran at them—or was one chasing the other? The second man did not have his weapon raised, and his empty hand reached out as if to catch the first man and pull him back.

  The first gunman looked like a teenager. During the war she’d seen dozens just like him. Kids in flip-flops, armed with machine guns and righteous anger. This one shouted something about God and triggered his Kalashnikov. Heavy rounds racketed from the muzzle. The French soldiers danced briefly like marionettes and went down. A few yards from them, Jodee lay sprawled and bloody, unmoving.

  The shooter swung his gun toward Olivia. The second man pushed the barrel down. “Antazar.” He sounded angry.  The shooter clearly wanted to kill Olivia, not to mention anything else that might be alive in the immediate vicinity. But for the moment at least, he didn’t. Olivia’s legs were shaking.

  The man who had pushed the barrel down approached her. He was older, maybe thirty—same age as Olivia. A white scar cut through his left eyebrow and climbed his forehead like a jagged trend line. Olivia thought she knew him. Years ago there had been a man among a group of disorganized insurgent fighters. Olivia had embedded herself with them. Getting the story. She never knew his real name, but this man had been kind to her, intervening when some of the others had crowded her. In this place, kindness made an impression.

  “Don’t go back the way you came,” he said. “Find shelter and stay low.”

  “I know you.”

  “Look to your friend now, and go.”

  He couldn’t mean Jodee, who lay face-down in a pool of blood. Brian’s hat rested a few yards from Jodee’s body, and Brian himself stood near the madrassa, facing the wall, his head down and hands out of sight in front of him.

  “Bri?”

  He looked over his shoulder, his face curd-white above the sunburn line made by his missing hat.

  “Brian.”

  He half turned toward her, his arm braced against the wall. The left leg of his khakis was soaked dark, and drops of blood shone like glossy red enamel on his boot. Olivia started toward him. Behind her, a gunshot went off. She jerked around. One of the French soldiers lying on the ground held a 9 mm pistol extended. The man with the scar was still falling, a bleeding hole in his face. The kid in flip-flops unloaded into the soldier, the Kalashnikov rounds ripping across the soldier’s chest. Then the barrel came up and pointed at Olivia and Brian.

  This time there was no one to stop him.

  Two

  The weapon clicked—empty.

  The gunman reached for the replacement magazine holstered on his belt. Down the street an intense firefight broke out. The kid in flip-flops ran for cover. Bullets flew in every direction, or seemed to. Was any of it directed at them?  Was it the coalition, a new uprising, Islamic State infiltrators? None of the above?

  Olivia caught Brian as he staggered away from the wall. She pulled his arm across her shoulders, the weight of him almost dragging her over. Blood sopped his pants, so much blood. Olivia struggled to hold him up. Oh, God, Brian. She lugged him toward the door of the madrassa—the nearest place they could take shelter. A heavy explosion went off, so close the ground shook.

  She and Brian staggered inside.

  Hazy pillars of sunlight pierced the damaged roof and stood among the disarranged school desks. The air was hot and stifling. Outside, men shouted in Arabic. A crude door frame opened on a staircase plunging steeply down. She walked Brian toward it, struggling to keep him upright.

  “What are we doing?” Brian sounded confused, weak.

  “Hang on, Bri. We have to get out of sight.”

  She maneuvered him into the stairwell. Brian slumped against her. Awkwardly, they descended a dozen steps, then halted. It was too dark, but there was no going back. Gunfire rang out, so close it had to be coming from inside the schoolroom above them.

  Good guys or bad guys? There was no way to tell.

  Olivia pulled out her phone. It fit her hand like a carbon fiber playing card. The Gates-7 was the Swiss Army knife of phones, loaded with old-school apps like the LED flashlight she now tapped on. A dim circle of illumination appeared at their feet. Too dim. The battery no longer held a decent charge.

  They continued down stone steps so worn over the centuries that they appeared to sag in the middle.

  The sounds of fighting became muted, absorbed by the earth and by thick stones quarried around the collapse of the Mongol Empire. Underground it was cooler, but a fetid smell rose around them. Urine, feces, and the briny stink of terror. Olivia stifled her gag reflex, missed the next step, and fell to the ground with Brian. Her phone went skittering away, and she landed hard, striking the back of her head on the stone floor. For a few moments, the pain eclipsed everything. She squeezed her eyes closed and gritted her teeth, seeing stars. Next to her, Brian groaned.

  “Oh, Jesus. Brian, Bri—”

  Groping in the dark, she found him. Her fingertips came away oiled with blood.

  “Hold on, Bri.”

  He made a sound then like a clogged drain. Emotion threatened to overwhelm her. Olivia tried to cut through it, find a detached place where she could think. Her emergency medical training
came back, for all the good it would do her in the dark. She looked around but couldn’t see the phone; the battery must have quit.

  She felt for Brian’s wounded leg. Blood pumped over her hands, hot and slippery, which meant a damaged artery. Panic lifted into her chest like a swarm of hornets. For a few seconds, she couldn’t move. Then, using the heel of her hand, she pressed hard against his femur near the groin. Or tried to. Every time her hand slipped, more blood bubbled between her fingers.

  She tore the scarf from her neck and tied it around his upper thigh, cinching it as tight as she could. Brian whimpered, too weak to scream. She doubted the tourniquet would work, but after a few moments the blood stopped spurting. Maybe it was helping, or maybe Brian was simply running out of blood.

  He was trying to speak. “Tell my parents.” His words were barely audible.

  “Shut up. We’re getting out of here.”

  He went quiet. She felt for his face, took it in her hands. “Brian, can you hear me? Brian?”

  She put her ear to his chest, heard a faint, bubbling gasp—then nothing. Olivia picked up his wrist, tried to locate a pulse. There wasn’t one. Next she found the carotid artery in his neck. No pulse there, either. She started CPR, keeping up the chest compressions and breathing until she couldn’t keep it going any longer, until her arms and shoulders ached and her back cramped.

  Above her, faintly, came the sounds of gunfire.

  With every rescue breath, she knew he was gone. His lips, so sweet and yielding that morning, now were cold and rubbery.

  She stopped CPR, panting now to get her own breath back. Across the room, so dim that at first Olivia wasn’t sure she was seeing it, a pale ghost light became visible, like a tiny window in the floor—her phone, the screen grayed out to almost nothing.

  Olivia rolled onto her knees and began to crawl. Her hand skidded in a warm puddle. She whimpered and kept going, reached the phone, and picked it up. The flashlight was still on, revealing a floor littered with a plastic bag, candy bar wrappers, a wrinkled sheet of newspaper featuring a grainy picture of Bashar al-Assad in his wheelchair, and a scattering of matchsticks and cigarette butts. Lots of cigarette butts.

  Gathering herself, she got one foot under her and started to stand. Her head bumped something that yielded stiffly. She ducked away and turned the failing light on it. A human foot stuck out over the end of a table. “Shit.”  The foot twitched, and someone groaned—a sound called up from hell.

  She got on her feet and held her phone over the table. An old man, his shirt open, lay stretched out, his beard and hair biblically wild. Leather straps immobilized him. Cigarette burns made random constellations across his chest and neck, like eruptions of pox. A dark purple bruise spread upward from his groin. Someone had poked at his abdomen with a knife, leaving a dozen red dashes. Alligator clips attached to his earlobes trailed wires to a power box with a big-dial rheostat, like something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

  Olivia’s gut clenched as if someone had slugged her. The old man’s lips parted like one more wound. She leaned close. His breath smelled like rotten meat. The old man spoke, and the words were unintelligible, at least to Olivia. They sounded Arabic but without the modern intonations. There was also an English word, but it made no more sense to her than the Arabic. It sounded like “supers-potion.”

  Delirium and gibberish.

  Olivia reached for her water bottle, but it wasn’t there; she’d given it to the little girl. “Help’s on the way,” she said, not even trying to sound like she believed it. Even if help did arrive, it was already too late for Brian—and probably for this old man, too. Olivia’s flashlight dimmed further, the battery nearly exhausted. The next sound out of the old man’s mouth wasn’t a word but a death rattle. Olivia pulled back, shook her head. “Fuck this place.” She meant the torture cell, the city, the country—the world in its entirety.  The whole disaster.

  Something squirmed in the old man’s hair. The wiry gray tangle twitched, and a thing like a beetle emerged. No bigger than a bean, its carapace cobalt-shiny where it wasn’t smeared with blood. The bug emitted a minute clicking sound—

  And flew straight at her face.

  Swatting at it, Olivia stumbled back. Where did it go? She checked the front of her shirt. No bug.

  She returned to Brian and flopped on the floor next to his body.  The back of her head stung where it had hit the floor earlier. She carefully fingered the bump. It was tender and bleeding. What a mess, and it was her fault. Olivia fought the guilt that was trying to crush her, but there seemed to be no stopping it. “Brian, I’m so sorry.”

  Something twitched in her hair, tickled the back of her neck.

  Click click click.

  Pain like a hot needle jabbed into the base of her skull. Olivia clawed wildly at it, raking up a fresh wave of pain when her nails scraped the bump.

  “Fuck this place.”

  She found Brian’s hand and held it. For years Olivia had chased one crisis after another, freelancing between war zones and famines, tsunamis and violent protests. She had begun to witness the world as a single ongoing disaster event. In the places where the event was particularly savage, particularly chaotic, she added a capital D. Reporting allowed her to stand aside, insulated her. Now she remembered something she’d once understood very well but had deliberately turned away from as a matter of survival: All disasters are personal.

  She sat, knees drawn up, and bowed her head. Be alive, don’t be gone, be alive, Brian. I can’t be the one who did this to you. One foot in the door, but it was enough to let through a cyclone of pain. Her fault Brian was gone. Jodee Abadi, too. Why hadn’t she done things differently? In her mind she saw Brian outside the madrassa, before he was wounded, saw him clearly in a suspended moment before he was shot.

  A surge of dizziness rocked her. A wheeling light appeared, like a migraine aura, and she fell into it. For a while she lost herself. Then the world . . . shifted. Like an elevator that had stopped short and suddenly dropped the last six inches. Olivia grunted, as if the shift had been real and physical. She felt nauseated, confused. White stars briefly swirled in her vision, like when she had struck her head. Had she fainted? When she tried to let go of Brian’s hand, his hand clamped down tighter.

  Olivia gasped and tore free, as if she had been gripping a hot wire. Even as the rationalization sped forward—surely it was an involuntary muscle spasm—Brian said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Brian!”

  “Whoa, take it easy.  You sounded like you were going to be sick.”

  She threw herself at him.

  “Hey, watch the leg. Christ, that hurts.”

  She held her fading flashlight over him. Brian blinked, his glasses missing; they’d fallen off when she shoved him toward the madrassa, after the shooting started but before he took the hit. Blood soaked through Olivia’s scarf tied around his thigh. She clearly remembered doing that, yanking the scarf away from her head and making it into a bandage, applying pressure to the gunshot wound—a wound that appeared much less severe than the spurting arterial rupture that she also remembered.

  She tried to concentrate through a murderous headache. Like a secondary memory laid over the primary, she saw the scene in the street. This time the teenager in flip-flops was alone. He fired his Kalashnikov, wounding Jodee and two of the French soldiers before the third took him down. Jodee sat up, hurt but alive, yelling at them to get off the street. Then more gunfire, coming from multiple directions. Brian taking a hit. Yelling, staggering, clutching his leg, blood leaking between his fingers. A frantic retreat into the madrassa, down the stairs and into the stinking dark . . .

  Olivia couldn’t process it. Couldn’t think clearly.

  Outside, the shooting had ceased.

  “What is it?” Brian said.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening. You aren’t dead. I tried to save you, but I couldn’t.” She was babbling, and stopped herself. Brian looked confused.

&
nbsp; “Liv? You’re scaring me.”

  She controlled her breathing, but she couldn’t slow down her heart or do anything about the throbbing headache, the nausea. “This is not possible.”

  “What’s not possible?” Brian said.

  “It didn’t happen this way. I wanted you to be alive. But it didn’t happen this way.”

  Boots came clomping down the stairs. She turned toward the sound. Bright lights attached to the barrels of assault rifles swept the torture cell.

  The lights pinned Olivia and Brian.

  “United States Marines! Show me your hands!” an American voice shouted.

  They showed their hands. Olivia squinted, turned her head aside. The Marines were faceless behind the lights.

  Three

  Olivia climbed the stairs, followed by a young-sounding Marine who, when she stumbled, told her to take it easy. Others had already carried Brian away. Behind her, in the sewer-smelling chamber, someone said, “We’ve got another live one here.” Olivia looked back. Shadows swooped and ducked away from the bright weapon-mounted lights.

  Outside the madrassa, the heat struck her like a furnace blast. Across the square, two men helped Jodee into the back of an old bullet-riddled Peugeot—her friend resurrected, just like Brian, both wounded but alive in the second memory. In the real memory, she thought, reluctantly. Olivia had never before doubted her grasp of reality. But she had hit her head pretty hard on the floor of the madrassa, and right then she couldn’t quite reconcile the competing versions of events.

  “Jodee!”  Yelling sent a hot needle into her temple, but at least the nausea had begun to subside.

  He waved, grimacing in pain. The driver threw the door shut, got in, and drove them away.

  “Where are they taking him?” Olivia asked one of the Marines.

  He shrugged. “Whatever passes for a civilian hospital around here.”

  Marines lifted Brian into the back of a lightly armored transport. Olivia pulled herself into the vehicle and sat on the bench beside his stretcher. She looked at her hands. Bloodstained, yes, but not washed in gore to her elbows, as she had expected. She could still feel the blood—Brian’s blood—bubbling and spurting between her fingers, but she must have gotten that wrong. Brian had lost a lot of blood, but nothing like what she had imagined in the dark.