That Savage Water

by Matthew R. Loney

  A girl – Jesus said.

  Miles watched Cassie lift the bottom of her foot and examine it. She cradled the blow-up bed beneath her arm and limped up the beach towards the pool, the toes of her foot curled as talons as she walked.

  I’ve never told her – Miles confessed – She admires me so much for making it through a disaster. How does someone not become what they survived?

  It’s much too late for that, señor – Jesus answered calmly – A disaster is exactly that, because of what it takes from you. Once it’s happened, it’s mandatory you lack a feeling of wholeness afterward. And don’t expect to forget it. Like I said, it wasn’t the ocean that scared me. Your girlfriend is coming this way. But I think it would be good for us to talk again. My heart tells me you need someone who understands catastrophe.

  Cassie stood on the far side of the pool by their empty lounge chairs squeezing the water from her ponytail. She squinted against the brightness, scanning for Miles in the pool and then on the chairs around the deck. For a moment, Miles hoped she wouldn’t see him. He lowered his gaze at the deck, as he watched the water darken the concrete where the drops of sweat had gathered since he’d arrived at Jesus’ chair. The tan line from his flip-flops made a deep Y shape on the top of his foot. To the right, a similar puddle had grown around Jesus’ toes, small and almost feminine, but with wisps of black hair growing from the tops of each.

  Catastrophe… – Miles repeated.

  Your girlfriend – Jesus lowered his sunglasses – She really has an exceptional body.

  Miles watched the puddle around his foot expand across the desert of textured surface until finally it made one single pool with the water around Jesus’ feet. Miles suddenly felt better, as though the empty feeling had drained from him leaving him full and strangely satisfied – Yes, she does.

  Miles? – Cassie said from behind him.

  He looked up at her shape silhouetted against the sun and blue sky. For some reason he thought of boat travel and jet skis and seashells being pulverized into perfect white sand.

  I cut my foot – Cassie said – Look.

  She held it out, giving Jesus a cursory glance – I must have stepped on some glass… – The bottom of her sole was indented with the texture of the decking; sand had dried into the horseshoe crevices of her toenails.

  Maybe it was a piece of shell? – Jesus offered.

  No – Cassie looked at Jesus coldly – It was glass. I’m going inside to find a bandage. I’m starving too. I feel like I haven’t eaten for days.

  It was nice to meet you – Miles said, standing – Congratulations on surviving your disaster.

  The pleasure was mine. It gets better, as they say.

  What did that mean? – Cassie asked, as they stepped into the air-conditioned lobby. After the pool decking, the burgundy carpet felt noticeably softer, more organic, like moss or the trimmed grass of a putting green. Years ago they must have permitted smoking inside; there was a faint odour of tobacco mixed with carpet shampoo.

  What did what mean?

  Congratulations on surviving your disaster. Who was that guy? And a Speedo? Really?

  He’s Mexican.

  I don’t think that’s any excuse. God, I could eat a horse.

  Cassie found a resort worker in a trim black uniform and showed him her injured foot. The man brought her arm around his neck and led her into a hidden corridor of supply and personnel offices. From inside the lobby, Miles watched Jesus run his fingers beneath the elastic of his bathing suit, smoothing the hair around his navel with the oil. He stood and looked out at the ocean, then lifted his foot to examine something on its sole. Behind him, a gull began to devour an empty Styrofoam plate, a ravenous clump of feathers. Hunger would lead a person to do anything, Miles thought. You could never know what horrible things you were capable of until you’d done them and then there was no taking them back. How many fish would it take to feed all five thousand? Miles wondered as he stood watching Jesus. How many humans to satisfy one giant fish?

  THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM GOES THROUGH KARBALA

  A female bomber pretending to be pregnant detonated the first one… – Harim struggles to keep up with the pace of translation. He picks out bits the crowd of men shout at him – …A male bomber also blew himself up as the ambulances arrived…

  Clusters of deflated balloons hang from a tower of amplifiers, motionless in the boiling afternoon. Black char sprays up an adjoining cinderblock wall, its dark umbra fanning outward as though painted on with a blowtorch – some arsonist’s quick graffiti. Shredded, the remains of party streamers, once the same crisp white as the bride’s dress, have long since been trampled. Concrete rubble and chunks of broken stone lay scattered across the scorched ground nearly to the road. Plastic chairs coated with skins of dust lay strewn around the car-sized crater. Where three men crouch staring into it, the hole gets deeper and the water turns from black to red. Behind them, the burnt-out wedding car, scorched and skeletal, a bouquet of plastic flowers melted off the rear bumper. A sudden breeze that smells like cardamom drafts a balloon out from under a chair and settles it behind the rim of the car.

  An old woman draped in black appears in the doorway of the adjacent building. She wails in Arabic and carries a goldframed portrait of the young bride. Her burka skims the pools of blood at her feet before she collapses, disconsolate, into the arms of her nephew or son or stranger. The crowd begins to push towards us, incensed into a suffocating nearness like an agitated herd preparing to stampede. As they push in around me, I lift the camera again to my eye and snap at their lamenting faces. This is for my protection. People will give a camera distance; they wil give a woman with a camera al the distance she needs.

  One man grabs my wrist and pulls me towards the edge of the crater. He points down into the water. Hovering just beneath the surface, the bride’s slender hand with painted fingernails severed at the wrist. I aim through the viewfinder, pivoting my lens so the reflection of the man’s grief-stricken face is reflected in the hand’s open palm: a harrowing portrait framed in the crosshairs.

  I release the shutter. Gorgeous.

  Paul and I are at the opening of a Magnum exhibition of combat photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario in downtown Toronto. The whole CBC set crew is invited, though it was I, not Paul, who’d made arrangements for us to attend. Shot in Vietnam, Biafra, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, the images are a curated conglomeration of catastrophe, neatly framed, matted and aligned on the imperfect red brick walls. If you squint and stand at a distance, they take on the appearance of textured abstract prints, like neutral pastels crushed on concrete. It’s a trick I play when I shoot so I can frame the geometry right, though Paul had once confessed that shapes and body parts weren’t at all similar. For a camera technician, he’s oddly oblivious to the basic principles of photography.

  Standing in a towel at the bathroom sink after I’d blow-dried my hair, I told Paul that combat journalists like myself brought their respect to an exhibition like this one. With his crew from CBC, an open bar would seem like some fraternity challenge meant to be surmounted.

  Why do pictures require good behavior? – Paul combed his moustache – We’re not at work, Les. For Chrissakes, loosen up.

  I’m only asking you to take it easy. I know the people there.

  Know was intoned in a way that meant don’t embarrass me, but Paul is as defiant as he is skilled at telling jokes. With a rocks glass in his hand, he stands in the corner of the gallery, his fellow camera technicians cracking up around him at regular intervals in loud rifts of laughter. Behind him and to his left is a large colour photograph of a group of Palestinian refugees freshly executed on the streets of Beirut. To his right, in black and white, a mother and her four children huddle by the bank of a muddy river in South Vietnam as overhead a gunman in a chopper lines them up.

  What’s the definition of confusion? – Paul baits the group that begins to gather with each
passing volley. The grin on his face tells me he’s feeling pretty damn good about himself – Blind lesbians in a fish market.

  The crowd of men is an eruption of molars and clanking glasses under arches of high-fives. His timing is impeccable, which makes it easier to despise him because he’s so damned good at being lewd.

  Really, Les? – My best friend Greta feigns disgust and pulls me away.

  I asked him to behave – I apologize – You can’t expect me to control a grown man.

  But her eyes stay glued to him in that way I’ve seen a dozen women lock their gaze. The way I did when I was an enthusiastic intern studying him from the news desk as he adjusted the giant TV cameras.

  Our reporting headquarters are stationed in the reception room of the old Emperor Hotel. Across the street, the Tigris meanders down the centre of Baghdad, a cool ribbon spanned by wide stone bridges that absorb the heat of the encroaching desert and then release it outward in ripples of shimmering air.

  …The female bomber blew herself up as people were dancing and clapping, while the passing wedding party played music… – Harim is on the telephone, switching between English and Arabic, with a local tip-off about a suicide attack in Karbala, a city seventy miles to the southwest – …the male bomber attacked soon after as police and ambulances arrived at the scene.

  Deaths? – I ask.

  At least thirty-five…sixty-five wounded, including the bride and groom.

  Harim is one of three Iraqi translators the CBC hired for the duration of the war to assist us in covering our stories. He’s the only one of them who misses the irony that for him, war is a benefit. Or maybe he’s the only one who just hasn’t admitted it. He’s solid as a tree with thick muscular forearms and a broad black moustache that offsets almost feminine eyes rimmed by enviable lashes. Even on days over forty degrees, he’s still in long sleeves and pants, not a sheen of sweat grazing his forehead. Although it’s a gross comparison, he’s always appeared to me like a well-groomed, tidy Saddam.

  Why a woman, do you think? – I ask Carter, my assignment manager.

  Explosives are easier to conceal under a woman’s clothing – Carter says – You aren’t treated with the same suspicion as men.

  We should be – I say – We’re lethal and devious and stop at nothing to get what we want. You’ve worked with me before, you should know that. I’m deranged.

  You’re a sniper, Les. It’s why we love you. I need you to go to Karbala today and scan your images to Toronto by this evening. Take Harim. He’s got the best sense and knows the area.

  I used to think photography was as close to the truth as one could get. It seemed impossible to lie to a camera, even more so when an arm’s been blown off and its blood transforms into this perfect refractor of light that ultimately, in cruel and almost unjustifiable ways, renders the photograph a beautiful one. It’s a tough paradox to swallow: beautiful blood. But atrocity releases some sort of lunatic aesthetic impulse inside me. It’s why so many combat photographers are certifiable because we’re confused by our attraction to death. Greta once told me I’d make the worst beauty pageant judge – my criteria are so skewed I’d get the winner entirely wrong.

  An hour outside Baghdad, I ask Harim to pull over somewhere I can use the toilet. He turns into an oil truck weigh-station just off the highway on a patch of cleared desert. From behind a dusty pyramid of oranges at her market stand, a woman with deeply etched lines in her face directs me around the back.

  When I open the wooden door to the toilet a hunched figure at the window turns: A black trapezoid catches the edges of the dim light source, rustling under the fabric of her burka. The air is thick as an attic’s, that musk of nomadic women edged with spice caravan, algae and animal hide. At first, when she brings out her fingertips covered with blood I think she’s been shot. A scrap of old fabric crumpled on the windowsill is mottled with red. From beneath her burka I am being scanned, analyzed and ignored.

  The four toilets are shallow ruts fenced off by knee-high wooden doors. As I step into the stall, drop my pants and squat over the hole, I watch her continue to clean herself and wonder how they managed to cope with everything I would find so difficult. They hauled massive piles of wood strapped to their backs and sweated it out on foot mile after mile inside those body bags. Pregnant, they curled up in some deserted hut and pushed out their baby in silence like a bitch delivering pups beneath a table. They seem of stronger stock than their men who keep them like mules for their endurance.

  Two condoms walk past a gay bar – Paul rallies again – One says to the other, “Hey, fancy dropping in there and getting shit-faced?”

  Obscene – I hear Greta mumble. She stands a few feet away studying a photograph of a mass grave, an incomprehensible tetris of joints and limbs askew, piled like discarded chicken bones – I don’t know how people get away with it.

  What do you call a gay man’s scrotum?

  Jesus, Paul…

  Mud flaps.

  Les, is this even real? – Greta’s face searches for some sinew of explanation.

  I wad a folded napkin from my bag and dab my crotch. The trapezoid is at the rusted rain barrel rinsing her hands when I exit the stall. Water sloshes from her palm and splashes dust onto the hem of her burka and the mint green wall where a colony of spiders have abandoned their webs. Shafting down onto the crumbling paint, the light is a frenzy of molecules, each one a rebel. Through the grid in the woman’s eye screen, I just barely catch a fractal of skin: cheek, eyebrow, lip. Some creature is alive beneath that portcullis, some stalwart inhabitant of either a prison or a citadel. She turns and drifts across the floor, disappearing. From the woman outside, I buy four oranges and two bottles of water. She uses one hand to place them into a bag, her other a stump truncated at the elbow.

  Nothing is how it should be – I think.

  The truck’s form shimmers through the heat of the scorched gravel as though from inside a furnace. Inside, the cab is air-conditioned. Harim lifts my camera bag off the seat, placing it between us as I get in. He shifts into drive and pulls back onto the road.

  I say – I thought a woman had been shot.

  In there? Did it frighten you?

  I look at him, at his black whiskers, at his patient hands gripping the wheel, at his glances up to the rear-view mirror like a dog diligently aware of a hundred scents at once. I want to hold my camera to his face and say – Me? Do you think I take pictures of blown-up weddings because I’m easily frightened? Because the body scares me? Do I look like a woman who can’t handle blood? but instead I say – She had her period. I only thought she’d been shot.

  Harim and I drive in silence. Outside is a moonscape of desert whizzing past in clouds of tire dust. We overtake mule carts and bands of women on foot carrying firewood.

  The truth is that when I saw the blood, deep down I’d wished she’d been shot. The light had angled onto her surfaces in a way that when she lifted her arm to take the piece of cloth, she’d been illuminated like some otherworldly priestess exalting her pagan divinity, her pose a surreal Pieta. Instinctively, I’d reached down for my camera.

  Blood must be our scaffolding, not our bones. Without, it we’re empty tubes, limp puppets, so I don’t believe it’s wrong to want to capture that essence on film. So what if I go looking for it, expecting it, craving it? Is it possible to ask if any war photographer is happy in their work? Are we uniquely forbidden from loving what we do? I believe we have the right to inject with aesthetics any cruel reality we want, to frame the truth of human suffering for the distracted world to flip past in magazines on their way to the perfume ads. It’s my belief that if you compose a gruesome image with the same intention as a jewelry campaign, people wil be more likely to stop and take a long hard look at it.

  Your guy’s a riot – a junior cameraman named Remi leans over to me.

  I’ve got another one – Paul quiets the crowd like a minister – What do lesbian
s think tampon string is for?

  I don’t know, man – Remi is in stitches – What?

  Flossing after eating.

  I don’t envy you, Leslie – Greta fails to repress a smirk – Keep your eyes wide open.

  You’re not married to him yet.

  What? Don’t you think that was funny?

  It was a hoot, Paul. You’re a douche.

  He squints a grin, all teeth and moustache and brown-tinted sunglasses – An anal douche?

  Paul’s charm has never been his crudity but his ability to get away with it and for people to become more endeared to him because of it. I want to say to Greta, now he’s funny, now’s the act that hooks you and makes you want to cling to him forever.

  But instead I walk over to the photograph of a Cambodian man being shot point-blank in the side of the head, his eyes grimaced, his black hair blown outward by the blast, and feel worse that it oddly comforts me.

  The moon has already descended behind the mountains but its aurora still illuminates the sky behind them, giving the appearance of a cautious, stormy dawn. Distant peaks rise in jagged layers behind the concrete edifices, the streets of the city dark except for the front gate of the mosque where a fluorescent bulb buzzes over the figure of a soldier who has momentarily leaned his head back against the khaki wall. In the distance, a dog barks in sharp falsetto and from the balcony of our room I see the soldier lift his head before resting it back against the wall.

  Do you always smoke? – Harim says from the bed.

  Only after a suicide. I can’t think of another occasion it justifies.

  Pleasure?

  Huh… – I inhale – Tell me about what that is. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt it.

  Harim’s body is the texture of felt. It is firm and tanned and covered with hair.

  I didn’t mean that. I apologize.