A Stranger Like You

by Elizabeth Brundage

  The city is an architectural spectacle, sky scrapers of glass and metal shooting into the heavens, refracting the sunlight. The men on the sidewalks, in their white kandouras belted with narrow black rope, their heads covered with the white cloth, ghutrah, remind you that you are somewhere in the middle of the desert, and that, for now, you must suspend your sense of logic, for it is of no use here. The approach to the hotel is dramatic, a spectacular edifice surrounded by gardens. The Emirates Palace is enormous—the sort of excessive grandeur rarely seen in your own country. Entering the lobby is like stepping into another world. The hotel is newly built. Marble floors, a dome ceiling, crystal chandeliers laced with real gold. Distantly, you think of Iraq—its once magnificent buildings gone to rubble, how strange it seems knowing the destruction continues right over there and yet here, here it is beautiful, perfect. Here there is peace.

  Maybe you are just tired after the long flight, but you feel conspicuous, profoundly aware of your middle-class American roots, drawing attention to yourself as only an American can, in your schlumpy sweat suit, your clunky bag of indispensables (vitamins, pills and medications for any possible problem, dental floss, makeup, Tampax, Nikes, your favorite Patagonia cap), and the way you move, with carbonated overflow in comparison to the serene aerodynamics of the locals. As a female, you are sensitive to the feverish curiosity of strangers. Their eyes coat your body like paint.

  Your contact from the Dubai production company is waiting for you, a slim Arab man in an expensive suit, Italian shoes. “Salaam aleikum,” he says, bowing slightly, wishing you peace.

  “Aleikum assalaam.”

  His name is Al Hassim and he is very friendly, very organized, and speaks impeccable English. “How was your flight? Are you feeling well?”

  “Yes, thank you,” you say, and return the solicitation. More than any other location you’ve shot in you feel the need to be polite, conscious of the possibility that he is judging you, adding you to the larger pool of nasty Americans who have tainted your reputation as a citizen of the world.

  “I am well, yes, thank you for asking.” Again, he bows slightly, out of courtesy. Briefly, he reviews the schedule for tomorrow. “Your facilitator and translator will be here at five a.m. Of course the weather will be splendid. It’s a two-hour drive to our location in the Rub’ al-Khali desert.”

  It is late. Most of the crew retires to their rooms to sleep. You and Tom and Bruno find the café—some of the actors join you. You are served sweet tea and dates, cognac. Tom is his usual charming self, flirting with Rosa, your gorgeous star, but instead of feeling jealous you are glad for it, hoping it will put her at ease before the difficult scenes ahead. “I’m going to turn in,” you say, finishing your tea, using the fact that you need to call Harold as a worthy excuse to be antisocial. In truth you are feeling fat and disgusting after the long flight, already dreading the early call. You want to brush your teeth, take a shower. Your room is lovely. It is like your own private Kasbah, surrounded floor to ceiling with gold fabric. French doors lead to a private terrace, inviting the warm black wind of the desert, the sounds of distant bells, horns, music from the cafe. You step outside briefly, looking down at the dark beach, the velvety water of the sea. Out there is a world you cannot begin to understand. As sophisticated as the city is, you cannot get past the cultural differences; the few women you noticed outside the hotel were clothed in abayas. And yet inside the hotel is a different world. It is as if you have traveled to a made-up land on the opposite end of the universe and as safe and peaceful as it seems you can’t ignore the fact that there are wars close by—wars that have endured for centuries and yet, in the shadow of the modern world, seem obscure and unfounded, colored by the nuances of political subterfuge. Their logic is buried somewhere, under thousands of years of sand.

  The telephone line crackles with static and you disconnect the call. You will try tomorrow, after a good night’s rest. Your body feels jittery, enervated, unpleasantly bloated, and you find your way to the shower, anxious to feel clean. Standing under the water it occurs to you that you are not as strong as you’d like to believe. Underneath your sultry arrogance you are still only a woman, physically inferior, vulnerable to the whims of men. No matter how hard you fight, no matter how deft your analysis, you are still the weaker sex. It is something you would never admit to in public, and yet you know it is the truth. Under certain circumstances—a war in your own country, for example—the prowess of your intellect would lose value. The men, with their brawny appetite for power, could easily take control.

  But then, maybe you are underestimating yourself.

  Still, it is something you think about from time to time, something you don’t discuss. And it is precisely the reason you are making this film.

  You step out of the shower and dry off, the plush terrycloth like a white stole, then pull on your boxers and T-shirt and climb into bed. Such elegance, you think. This place, this city in the middle of the desert, drenched in the kind of luxury few Americans will ever know. This is oil money, you realize. Everything it touches glitters and shines.

  Only a short distance from here, people are getting killed. On this borrowed desert, your crew will re-create the theater of war, machinating scenes of terror that may or may not be wholly accurate. And yet, the world will believe them to be. The world will assume that you have done your home-work, that you have gotten the facts. It is the business of art, you argue, to create an authentic sense of reality otherwise known as a suspension of disbelief.

  PART THREE

  POINT OF VIEW

  8

  One of his uncle’s friends worked at the airport and had arranged the job for Denny at the gatehouse. Denny guessed that his uncle was getting tired of him lying around the house all day complaining about his leg. They had told him it could take up to a year for his benefits to come through, and there wasn’t even any guarantee he’d get any. A bullet had hit his thigh and taken out a chunk of flesh the size of a baby’s fist, but he’d been lucky, he hadn’t lost his leg like some of the others, and he was still alive. There would be surgery in his future, but not without benefits. He had to wait and see and it was hard to wait and he was sick of watching TV. The world he saw on the screen was too loud, too much. He felt bad about his situation and sometimes, in a weird way, he almost missed the war, even though not a day went by that he didn’t hate it with every cell of his body. Still, you could get used to hating something. He missed his M16. His weapon was like an old girlfriend who’d walked out on him and there was just this empty space now. Being without it gave him an ache in his belly. Sometimes he couldn’t eat. Sometimes he would wake up with a start with his heart going about a million miles a minute and all he could do was cry. He was not the sort of person who cried easily, but now he cried all the time. When he’d first come home, he spent most of his time on the couch when his aunt and uncle were out at work. He would watch the shadows of the sycamores roam around on the ceiling. Sometimes he dozed off and there he was, back in Baghdad, clattering pictures, faces jeering, sounds booming. He had made up his mind that he was going to get a gun. Even back here in America, in his home state, he did not feel safe without it and he knew that, first chance he got, he’d buy himself a pistol. His aunt Marie didn’t want him there either—she had been glad to get rid of him when he’d enlisted—it was the first thing he’d ever done that she’d been proud of. She had a theory that he took after his father who had disappeared when he was a kid and got himself killed in a motorcycle accident. His mother had died a couple of years later, when he was only seven, and he’d been living with them ever since, feeling like he was taking up too much space. He knew about loss. Now he could hear his aunt wrestling with the vacuum hose, slamming it into the furniture and muttering about her no-good nephew who might have done them all a favor in getting himself killed and giving the family some honor for once instead of more heartache. She knew heartache, oh how she knew heartache! He had almost gotten killed, but almost didn�
�t count, almost wasn’t good enough for her. In a fit of anger, he had taken the framed picture of his commander in chief and shattered it on her kitchen floor and stepped all over it with his one good foot, grinding up the glass with his desert boots, and now she wasn’t speaking to him. Nobody could believe he would do something like that because it was that very photograph that had kept her going all these months when she was worrying about him night and day, clutching her rosary. “I’m not your mother, but I might as well be,” she scolded him.

  What Marie didn’t seem to get was that he’d enlisted for her. To give her some clout in the neighborhood. And people started looking at him different. Maybe he wasn’t the fuckup they thought, maybe he could make something of himself and come home and marry one of their daughters. But now, since he’d been home, people ignored him around the neighborhood. It was like they didn’t know what to say to him, almost like they felt guilty or they felt sorry for him. They put on fake smiles like either he was touched in the head or dangerous or both. It was all the same bullshit he’d been dealing with since grade school because nobody gave a fuck about him and maybe people thought he was stupid for going over there in the first place. He thought it had something to do with fear, because they knew you’d killed people and that changed the way they saw you. Nobody ever said it, but he could tell. Even his aunt Marie looked at him funny and always kind of got out of the way when he came into the kitchen for something. Uncle Hector kept scrounging around for work to keep him out of trouble because when time passed and he had nothing to do, trouble found him. “It’s in your blood,” his uncle would say. “It ain’t your fault.”

  The job was boring, but it was something to do. He didn’t mind it. He had to catch a bus at quarter to seven out to the airport, an hour or so drive from East L.A. That part wasn’t so bad. He didn’t mind the bus and he usually would try to sleep. At the airport, he bought an egg and cheese sandwich off the breakfast truck and walked three quarters of a mile over to his post in the gatehouse in long-term parking. That was his favorite time of the day, walking through the windy open space out to the lot, hearing the whining engines of the planes. Long-term parking had four gates—his post was the gatehouse all the way on the end. It was a tight space, but had a window and you could see the planes taking off. He had a computer register and the credit card machine. Close quarters was all right with him, like being inside the tank. It always brought him straight back to the first few months of his tour. Flying over to Kuwait City, his first time on a plane, his first trip overseas. He could remember the excitement, like it was some kind of vacation he was going on—not the worst fucking decision he had ever made in his life. But that was behind him now. He was out; home. And he was alive.

  There were things he noticed on his shift. People came and went. They carried bags and packages. They would park, walk to the terminal tram. Some had kids. Some went alone, in business clothes. There was once a group of nuns who’d poured out of a van. They reminded him of pigeons in their gray veils. Passengers came and went. They would stand there waiting for the tram. Some had more patience than others. Some smoked. Once he saw somebody take gum out of their mouth and stick it on the side of the shelter, right on the face of some actress in an ad like a big pimple. They didn’t know they were being watched, but he could tell a whole lot about somebody when they had to wait. You could catch people doing embarrassing things, picking their noses or butts, smacking their kids. Anyway, that was neither here nor there. It was just a job and he was just trying to keep things interesting. In the army, you learned to size someone up pretty fast. Some people would lose their tickets and make up some cockamamie story. Others didn’t have enough cash or their credit cards didn’t work. You had to come clean for him to raise the gate and he let them know it.

  Soon as he made enough money he was going to get his own place somewhere. He was going to buy himself a car so he didn’t have to ride the bus with all the cleaning ladies and gardeners. They reminded him of Hajis, and sometimes when there was one that was a little dark, with the oily greenish skin, or some kind of cloth on their head like the towel heads in Iraq, he had to stare at the floor and count, that’s what they told him to do at the crisis center, just breathe and count—anyway, they had given him some pills and sometimes they worked and sometimes he wouldn’t take them because he thought, if he did, something might happen to him, something terrible. He knew what they were trying to do. Shut him up. It was a government conspiracy. They didn’t want people knowing what it was really like over there, what it had done to his head. On the other hand, he had acquired certain skills that were useful to him now. For one thing he was a marksman. His body was toned, he was stronger than before. Problems would arise and his body would react without even thinking about it, like one of those slick intelligence operatives in the movies, nothing could really stop him—he was a fucking machine. He could read people. He could look at someone’s eyes and know things, intimate things. He could guess whether they were honorable, or whether they paid their bills or cheated on their taxes or on their wives. Like one of those police dogs, he had a nose for deception. In the long run he figured it would be useful somehow.

  His doctor at the VA told him about a priest who had a support group in a nearby church. They’d been meeting on Sunday afternoons, for two hours. Everybody had been to war, either Iraq or Afghanistan. You went around in a circle and you could say whatever you wanted and sometimes the father asked you questions. Denny didn’t mind going, but he never really said anything much. He liked being inside the church. For a period of time in high school he had considered becoming a priest, but then he’d had his first girlfriend and changed his mind. They sat on the hard metal chairs near the windows with the blue curtains. The curtains rippled and snapped sometimes, if there was a breeze. Watching them was like a kind of mystery, like the wind had a story to tell. The church was very old, no air-conditioning, and on hot days you could work up a sweat sitting there. Something about the heat and the smell, the damp linoleum floors, the dust, reminded him of the desert. Hot during the day, hot and dry, and cold at night. You were constantly in a fever state, sweating in your body armor, your Kevlar, and then, at night, shivering under your sweat, the kind of shiver you get when you’re sick. When it was his turn he said, “At night there were so many stars. I’d look up.” He shook his head, his eyes watery. “I’ve never seen a sky like that.” He didn’t tell them that it always made him cry. He didn’t tell them that the stars in Iraq were like the teeth of the dead.

  Nobody could really help you. You had to sort things out on your own. Denny tried. He carried his stories around in his pockets, in his fists, like stones. After an hour they took a break. They stood awkwardly like kids at a school dance, drinking lemonade and eating cupcakes made by some of the church ladies, with pink icing. During those interludes it came to him that he was better off than most. There was this one woman, her name was Chloe. She didn’t say much in the group. When it was her turn, she’d freeze up and stutter and then she’d start to cry. One time she took off her prosthesis and showed everybody her stump. It was weird; nobody said anything.

  They all had something in common, something you couldn’t put into words. When you’re over there, everything you’ve been taught in church goes right out the window. The more he killed the better he felt. That was the truth. You got praised for killing. You were part of a team, an exclusive brotherhood. Knowing you can die at any second changes the way you see, the way you think. He never would have believed he had the capacity to kill with his bare hands, but he’d done that too. Once. It was either succumb and die, or kill. His body went cold and rubbery, unbreakable. The killing was an intimate, terrifying dance. He was the fucking terminator. And the victory—he didn’t want to call it sexual but it was pretty close. It was primitive.

  He had this one friend from work, Javier. Javier was chunky and suave. He had a girlfriend and liked to read poetry. He carried around this huge volume of e. e. cummings and used to s
ing out poems when nobody was around. Javier was not a soldier, but he had gone to prison once for something stupid. They had an understanding. They shared something that didn’t need to be discussed. So that Thursday night Javier asked Denny would he mind taking the night shift and Denny said no problem. Denny didn’t mind doing favors for Javier because he knew they would be returned. It was something he missed about the army. He missed his buddies; they were the brothers he’d never had. That was the only thing about being over there that felt right and he would have done anything for them; he had killed for them and they had killed for him. You couldn’t mess with that bond. You didn’t find it anywhere else.

  The night shift was slower and cooler than the day shift. His aunt had sent him with tortillas and limeade and he’d just finished eating. For some reason it wasn’t very busy. Somewhere around nine o’clock, maybe a little later, a car pulled into the lot and parked under the lights. Denny happened to notice it because it was vintage, a BMW. He had always liked foreign cars, especially old ones, and it brought back good memories of the only teacher he had ever liked, Mr. Ruggeri, who taught the vo-tech classes at his high school and didn’t make him feel like shit every chance he got, like his other teachers. From where he sat in the gatehouse, he watched as the driver got out of the car, pulled on his jacket, took a small suitcase out of the backseat, and walked toward the tram. It could have been the lighting, but he looked a little bit like a Haji. But that was of no consequence anymore. He had to keep reminding himself of that. There were perfectly nice Muslims living in this country who deserved to be left alone.