These Heroic, Happy Dead

by Luke Mogelson

  It was around this time that I lay back down in the grass. I don’t know how long I lay there. My eyes were shut. There was the tone, was all there was—the tone and, somewhere beyond the tone, the faint pop of rifles like I was underwater, I was underground. Tinnitus or tinnitus? Smite us or hit us? Years before, I’d made the mistake of doing a live piece-to-camera for CNN. While reading the cue card I’d written for myself, I’d pronounced “misled” as if it rhymed with “guy’s old.” On the progress of the war in Afghanistan, the successes of the surge, the president had myzled the public. The YouTube video had been viewed many, many times—many more times, certainly, than any story I’d ever reported. That fucking YouTube video was going to be my legacy.

  Imagine: the vanity, the inanity, of these final meditations. YouTube! Well, Sue Kwan wasn’t the only one who would die as she had lived.

  I felt a kind of thwump reverberate from the earth into my body, and a hot cushion of air lifted me off the ground. It lifted me and transported me somewhere else and set me down.

  I sat up. I opened my eyes.

  —

  It was difficult to see in all the dust and debris. It felt like nighttime. But not exactly nighttime—more like an eclipse, a total solar. Dark figures, silhouettes, flitted about. As the air began to clear I saw that they were pouring into the garden through the hole in the wall. Most of them wore uniforms—they were soldiers, police. The shooting seemed to have stopped. I got to my feet. I was a little wobbly, a little wobbly. I tried a couple of steps, then a couple more. I tripped on something and stumbled to the ground. When I looked back to see what it was, I discovered an arm. First the leg—now this, an arm. I knew there must be heads around. For once, I didn’t want to see them; just knowing they were around was enough.

  The arm looked as if it had been sprayed with buckshot. Silver was embedded in the flesh. I thought of pearls in a mollusk. (Not pearls, though, I thought.) A tactical-looking watch was still strapped around the wrist. I knew that watch. It belonged to the researcher from the United Nations Ornithological Department.

  OK, stop looking at the arm.

  I got up again. No one seemed to notice me. I scaled the rubble pile. I walked right past the soldiers and police, through the hole in the wall, and into the street.

  There were vehicles everywhere—mostly Toyota Hiluxes, but also up-armored Humvees with machine-gun turrets, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected personnel carriers, and SUVs whose tinted windows were decorated with portraits of illustrious war criminals. Commanders screamed into their radios, subordinates rushed around, limp corpses were loaded into trucks. The first TV crews had already arrived—a few local teams and the BBC. They were prepping their gear, jostling for position. One of the screaming commanders spotted them, holstered his radio, brought a comb out of his breast pocket, and headed over, combing his hair.

  I’d avoided the TV crowd ever since the whole CNN episode, and now I turned away, hoping they hadn’t seen me. There was something else, too. I was, for some reason, embarrassed. Not misled/myzled embarrassed; more naked-in-a-dream embarrassed. The source of my naked-in-a-dream embarrassment was never the nakedness. It was the fact that I alone had managed to get myself into such a situation, while everyone else on the submarine or whatever had managed to avoid it. What did it say about me, the sort of person I was?

  I had arrived at the end of the block. I stood there, unsure what to do next. Walk back to the TV crews and the commanders and the subordinates? Wander up from nowhere, tap one of them on the shoulder, and explain that I had been in the garden, I had survived the attack, I came from the other side of the wall? After a while, it struck me that my only option was to keep going.

  —

  It was starting to get dark. I passed men fanning coals at street-side kebab stands, fruit vendors, toy stores, cobblers repairing sandals on the sidewalk outside of the mosque. I experienced the drug-and-urine fragrances of the park, and the fryer fragrance of the Chief Burger. Amid the gridlocked traffic, boys swung canisters of holy smoke and older men hawked wares. One of the wares was dolls. The dollmonger carried dozens of them, a towering bouquet of dolls, each blue-eyed and blond-haired, dressed in pink and affecting an erotically ruminative expression. I followed him until he vanished into the miasma of fecal particulate hanging in the headlights like fog.

  Soon I reached the river, the bazaar. Here I felt as I often had: that I could move among the buyers and sellers, the teenagers perusing defunct American military gear, without attracting their attention. But then, you always felt you could, didn’t you, until you discovered that no, actually, you never could? A friend of mine, a local reporter, was once hired by a visiting documentarian to fix and translate. This documentarian was enchanted by Afghanistan—within a week, enchanted. One day she told my friend that she wanted to film some B-roll at the bazaar. She needed happy, normal Afghans, she explained, living happy, normal lives. My friend was busy and could not accompany her. Against his emphatic advice, the documentarian went alone. She went, she filmed, she laughed with the vendors, she ate the mangoes, and she drank the juice. Then, when her memory sticks were full, her bag laden with textiles, she returned to her guesthouse, triumphant. “See?” she said to my friend.

  It was not until about a month later, while my friend was transcribing her footage, that he came to the B-roll from that day and saw the man speaking into his cell phone. He appeared in almost every frame, following the documentarian from stall to stall. He held the cell phone to his ear, yelling over the din of the crowd. “Yes, she’s here alone,” the man yelled. “Yes, she’s American,” he yelled. “No, no one is with her, I can easily grab her, no problem. Fine, I’ll wait. Call me back when they decide.”

  By the time I reached the outskirts of the bazaar, several children were tugging on my sleeve. Although I still couldn’t hear, I knew what they were saying. They were saying, “One dollar!” and “Hey, fuck you!” I tried to shoo them. A boy in a soiled tracksuit flopped to the ground. His legs flailed; spit bubbled on his lips. I increased my pace, practically jogging into the lightless neighborhoods below the mountain.

  —

  The labyrinth of alleys sloped up the foothills, and the mud-mortar homes became denser, muddier, as the grade became steeper. I found myself at the bottom of an earthen staircase hacked into the cliffside. The stairs ascended precipitously, disappearing into more crowded dwellings. Several steps above me, a dog squatted. I knew that dog. It had the same glistening bald patches, same cantaloupe-size tumor hanging down between its haunches. Well, they all did. The tumor was so large that it bumped against the steps as the dog limped painfully up them.

  I followed. In places, the stairs more nearly resembled a ladder. The boulders and crags through which they carved were marked with paint by the de-miners. But “clear” or “not clear”? The marks were illegible—to me, in any case. Homes of IDPs stood improbably amid the sheer escarpments, and their sullage trickled down the stairs, making them slippery. At some point the air changed. I felt the difference in my lungs, which welcomed rather than cringed from each inhalation. I looked back. The dim city lay far below. So did the pollution, the particulate. I was gazing down on that foul soup, putrefying in the basin of the Hindu Kush.

  I suppose that that must have been when I saw them, the birds. They banked in unison, right at eye-level, perfectly synchronized, showing the white undersides of their wings, the dark tops. They swooped down the mountain, over the hovels, the city, the bazaar. Then they came soaring back, riding an updraft with an exquisite minimum of effort. As the flock passed overhead I realized that my hearing had returned. I detected what I thought were bells—yes, bells: a tinny music that seemed to harmonize with the flight of the birds.

  I don’t know how long I watched and listened to them. It was a while, anyway, before I spotted the elderly man standing on the roof, conducting them. There’s no other word for it: he was conducting those birds. He even had a batonlike instrument—a horsewhip or something—
with tassels hanging from its tip. He flourished the instrument, and to each movement the birds responded, banking toward him, or away. When, in a crisp, martial motion, he brought the tassels down against his thigh, the flock collapsed upon the roof, as if sucked into a drain.

  —

  The man’s house stood across the moonscape mountainside. I scrabbled over the painted boulders and the loose, eroding shale. When I arrived, I found that the house, too, was constructed of boulders and loose, eroding shale. I knocked on the door. It opened. The man held a bird in each fist. They were pigeons, I saw, and attached with wire to their ankles were miniature silver bells.

  The man possessed magnificent eyebrows, which projected straight out of his face and then curved upward, like saplings that sprout from a bluff and yearn for the sun. He spoke to me. My hearing was almost entirely restored—but of course, like the documentarian, I was deaf. I always had been.

  The old man seemed to get that I was in some sort of trouble. He stepped back into his house and gestured with one of the pigeons for me to enter. I removed my shoes and followed him into a small room paved with cushions. The sole illumination came from a vase of flowers plugged into an electrical outlet. The flowers were a lamp. At the end of each artificial stem, translucent petals enveloped a magenta light. The man opened his hands and the pigeons fluttered loose, beating their wings across the small, magenta room and out the door, returning to their coop.

  The man was staring at my chest. I looked and saw that my shirt had blood on it. Quite a lot of blood. The man’s eyebrows professed concern.

  “There was an attack,” I said. I pointed down the mountain. “Down there.” I pressed my hands together, as if in prayer, and pulled them apart in a reverse clap. “Boom,” I said.

  “Boom?” the man said.

  “Boom,” I said.

  Finally, we understood each other.

  —

  The old man invited me to lie down on one of the cushions, and as soon as I did fatigue overtook me. I don’t know how long I was out. It felt like seconds; it might have been centuries. Anway, enough time passed for everything to have changed. When I woke, I saw right away that I never should have gone to sleep; I’d made a terrible mistake in trusting the old man.

  The agents stood over me, whispering to one another. Two of them had on the black paramilitary uniforms and combat boots of the National Directorate of Security, and between them towered a third man, in slacks, a blue blazer, and a white Oxford shirt. Under the blazer, he wore a leather shoulder holster with the handgrip of a pistol sticking out.

  When they saw that I was awake they stopped talking. The two uniformed agents bent down, each grabbing me under an arm, and roughly hauled me to my feet. The plainclothes agent regarded me.

  “Passport,” he said.

  I reached into the pocket where I normally kept it. I smiled apologetically. “I’m very sorry,” I said, “I seem to have—”

  “No passport?” the agent said.

  He took a deep breath through his nose, such a breath that he seemed to increase in height by several inches. Then he grabbed a handful of my shirt, violently twisted it around his fist, and held it up before my eyes, showing me the blood. He shouted furiously into my face words I couldn’t understand but whose meaning I could guess.

  I started to explain. Before I got very far, the agent reared back and with the hand that was not wrapped in my shirt slapped me so hard that I could taste his palm, a mix of sweat and Purell, in the back of my throat.

  “If you’ll allow me to—”

  Again he slapped me. This time the tone returned, accompanied by lights. I slackened my jaw, trying to pop my ears. When my vision cleared I glimpsed, for the first time, the old man standing behind the agents. I looked at him imploringly, silently entreating him to intervene. To my horror, however, I discovered that the eyebrows did not in fact profess concern, that they had never professed concern, that that had just been a kind of wishful thinking on my part.

  —

  It turned out there was a road behind the house. A Hilux was parked on it. The two uniformed agents handcuffed me and stuffed me in the back. We headed down the mountain. The uniformed agents rode in the bed while the plainclothes agent drove. In the city, there were a lot of checkpoints, more than usual. Each time we approached one, a policeman would peer into the Hilux, recognize the plainclothes agent, stiffen, and wave us through.

  We turned onto a narrow lane hemmed in on both sides by sandbags and blast wall. Toward the end of the lane, we had to zig and zag to maneuver past staggered barriers. At a gate a policeman peered into the cab of the Hilux, recognized the plainclothes agent, stiffened, and waved us through.

  I was guided by the uniformed agents into a bleak, institutional tower, down a hall, down a flight of stairs, down another hall, and into a poorly lit room. The door slammed and a bolt clacked into place. The room was square, concrete, furnished with a metal table and two metal chairs. I knew this room. No, I’d never actually been inside it—I had never dreamed that I would!—but I knew it.

  “I’m an American,” I heard myself say. The words echoed: I’m an American, I’m an American. Later, in a feebler voice, trying to avoid the echo, I heard myself add, “I’m a journalist.”

  The door opened and the plainclothes agent strode in. He carried a bulky accordion folder under his arm. He set the folder on the table, undid the elastic band, and reached inside. He extracted a Ziploc bag pinched between his thumb and forefinger, opened it, and extracted a US passport. He slid the passport across the table, inviting me, I gathered, to have a look.

  It was mine, of course. They must have found it at the restaurant. I began to explain. The agent walked around the table and slapped me in the face.

  —

  The next thing he pulled out of the accordion folder and slid across the table was a document, too thick for staples, in Dari or Pashto, I had no idea which. Then he pulled out a fountain pen, unscrewed the top, and slid that over, too.

  I flipped to the last page of the document and signed it. The agent wasn’t satisfied. He leaned forward and tapped the bottom right corner of the top page. Then he turned to the second page and did the same. I understood that he wished me to initial each one. It took a long time. First I had trouble getting the hang of the fountain pen; then, midway through, my hand began to cramp. I had to set the pen down and try to shake out the cramp, which was awkward with the handcuffs. The agent grew impatient. When he stood up and walked over to my side of the table, I flinched and cowered, anticipating the blow. Instead of slapping me, however, the agent took my hand in both of his and gently but firmly massaged my palm with his callused thumbs. That helped a lot, and soon I was initialing again.

  How I wish I could say that it felt good to confess! I’d taken so much from these people, their country, this war. I’d taken and taken. Still, it didn’t feel good. It felt false.

  Once I’d initialed all the pages, the agent picked up the stack, shuffled it into line, and returned it to the folder. He left the room without a word, and his two colleagues entered. They escorted me down the hall, up the flight of stairs, down the other hall, and out of the building. One of them removed my handcuffs and gave me my passport. The other pointed at the gate.

  —

  I was so exhausted and demoralized that I paid little attention to where I was going. I stumbled through the park, past the Chief Burger and the toy stores. At one point, I crossed paths with a pack of orphans. I must not have looked too hot: they regarded me dubiously, uncertain whether to beg.

  When I reached the mosque, one of the cobblers sitting on the sidewalk pointed at my feet. I’d been barefoot ever since the agents had whisked me away from the pigeon conductor. With the cobbler pointing and laughing and his fellow cobblers starting to join in and pedestrians stopping to see and cars slowing down and mullahs and would-be mullahs frowning at me from the ablution area, I was visited by a familiar embarrassment.

  The cobbler held u
p a pair of sandals, offering them to me. I pulled my pockets inside-out to show him they were empty. He waved the sandals, insisting that I take them. I was choked with gratitude; I nearly wept. I struggled to summon the words while the cobbler waited to receive them.

  That’s when I saw the man talking on his cell phone.

  “No, no one is with him, I can easily grab him,” the man was saying.

  Or was he? I didn’t know. I still don’t.

  Many grateful thanks to my friends in Afghanistan who so patiently unburdened me of so much ignorance (and who still live in a country that is too perilous for me to be able to name them here).

  And to those who helped these stories along the way: Joel Lovell, Tim Duggan, Andrew Wylie, James Verini, Boris Fishman, Emily Stokes, Chad Benson, Willing Davidson, Ezra Carlsen, and Lorin Stein.

  And to my family, whom I don’t deserve: Stan, Lucia, Jake, Andrew, Tom, Therese, and Nama.

  These stories originally appeared, in different form, in the following publications: “Visitors,” The Hudson Review (Autumn 2010); “The Caretaker” (now titled “A Human Cry”), The Missouri Review (Winter 2011); “Sea Bass,” The Kenyon Review (Spring 2012); “To the Lake,” The Paris Review (Spring 2014); “Peacetime,” The New Yorker (April 27, 2015).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Liveright Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint “next to of course god america i.” Copyright 1926, 1954, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1985 by George James Firmage, from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904–1962, by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. All right reserved. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.