“Jay, let’s go to the university and check on my brother. Maybe he came back, or maybe somebody knows something.”
“Let me rest five more minutes.”
“Why can’t you sleep at night?”
“I don’t know.”
A knock. Who else?
“I have two lamps and no light bulbs, Jay. I’m in the dark.”
“Is this literal or metaphorical?”
“It will be literal in a few hours. Now it’s just unpleasant.”
“At least there’s still plumbing.”
“Not for long.”
“Give me five minutes, guys.”
“C’mon, Alija, let’s go look for my doorknob.”
I hear their voices fade down the hall. I turn toward the wall. Painted beige cinder block. I trace the cracks. We need water, supplies, an extra car battery, blankets, socks, and cartons of cigarettes for the guerrillas or the MUP or whoever won’t let us pass where we need to pass. The y key on my laptop is loose. The 2’s not so good either, but numbers don’t matter so long as there are letters. The sat phone needs a new cable, but if the war’s not too long, we’ll be okay. I should visit Vijay’s grave, but there’s no time. The dirt is probably not settled yet, a hump brushed with snow in a field of marble. It’s a poor cemetery; there will be more wood than marble, split pine and oak markers laminated and lettered. I like it when the faces of the dead are chiseled on stones. Everyone is so handsome and pretty. The chisel men are paid extra; they are God. I cannot draw, but I wish I could take a line, bend it and turn it, make it go thin, make it go wide, let it curl and lift into something. I have words, and if I lose my y, I’ll have twenty-five letters. I do hear stories, though. They shape me the way copper is shaped when it’s hammered. The thoughts run. My stories are the memories of others. They fade over time. Parts of some get twisted into parts of others, dead faces scrambled and reassigned to different geographies, different wars. I say each time I will not let this happen. But it does. Sometimes when I read a story I have written years ago, it seems to have come from another voice. I can notice similarities in cadence and style, but I can’t remember being there exactly at that time. The words, even the images, seem like someone else’s. But I gathered them. I sifted them, put them on a screen. Only to — what? — have them lost to me? I used to keep clips of my stories. I don’t anymore. They don’t belong to me. They are just things out there, stuff I collected and sent through space, ramblings and facts taken from the lives of others. I am not a thief. For the most part, they were given freely.
It is dusk. Alija’s brother is not at the university. No one has seen Ardian for months. We check some of his coffee shop haunts and Alija sees one of his old girlfriends. Nothing. He is traceless. Papers blow over the streets. We walk through the main square and pass the statue of the warrior on his horse. He looks like an Asian Viking, an oxidized bronze mix of Leif Ericson and Charlie Chan, Nordic or Slavic mingling with Far East. A king from some old world, or maybe the archetype for a new one. Who knows in this dark cold? His facial features, against this geography and population, seem like a painting hung in the wrong room of a house. He’s a Rembrandt on a Picasso wall or vice versa, or maybe he’s David amid the Cubists. But that’s what you get when you’re conquered, someone else’s identity sitting high in the saddle. Alija points to what appears to be a gash of gold at the horseman’s neck.
“My father used to say he bleeds sunlight. Some guys I knew from a village way out near the mountains drove here one night and tried to cut his head off. They sawed. They had power tools. We all watched. Sparks flew. They worked for a while, but that head wouldn’t budge. The police came and all of us ran. One of the guys got shot in the leg, but he kept running. Two days later, in a creek, police found the big, carved head of someone who looked more like us. They covered it in a tarp and buried it somewhere.”
I make a note: a nice metaphor, I suppose, for one of my stories. It’s nice to be walking in a city again, even if it is this one. People moving like cutouts in windows, creeping behind shades, fuzzy, lights flicking on, little kids running down halls, clattering in stairwells and into the night, looking for Dad, whirling around him like dust, leading him home to dinner, yanking his hands and laughing that Mom is going to kill him. Kill him again for being late. We stop at a black-market CD shop. A guy with a shaved head rises and hugs Alija. They talk. I flick through titles, a hodgepodge of genres, Prince, Creedence Clearwater, Sting, Dire Straits, the typical classical selections, obvious jazz, two or three New Age albums, a Hank Williams and a vintage Black Sabbath, long before the days when Ozzy went nuts with rings and mascara. I wore my Paranoid album out as a kid. Ozzy was a screech and howl from another world. “I Am Iron Man” with that wah-wah guitar and the guys in the band standing in that field on the cover like drugged wheat with clunky belt buckles and boots. Rolled my first joint on that album cover. Me and Nut Johnson. Sprigs and seeds mostly. We barely got high, but we pretended we were as stoned as Ozzy himself, jumping on our spider bikes and riding to the cul-de-sac to hunt lost balls in the storm drains. Alija taps me and we go. There is no moon and no snow.
“That guy any help?”
“No. I’m still pissed at you, Jay. You never told me about the camp until it was too late.”
“What could we have done? Gone up and knocked? The Leopard was trying to find out.”
“But you didn’t tell me. What if I didn’t tell you, Jay? What if I left out a line of description? What if I left you with a big bubble of silence? Nothing to feed your notebooks. None of those details you like so much. What if I gave you only sounds, Jay, sounds you couldn’t twist into words?”
“What now?”
“I don’t know. No one has seen him.”
“Would he have gone to your parents?”
“In that refugee place? No way. He would have come here.”
Gunshots burst from a few blocks away. Nothing major. A guy’s probably oiling his AK and waiting for war to come down his alley Alija keeps moving. I follow. Her hair is nearly invisible in the night. We stop at a pizza place owned by a fugitive Bulgarian who sells guns out of the back. The guy shrugs. We walk to the mosque and wait outside the courtyard wall. A man with a cane and a milky blue eye comes out. Alija collars him. The man has heard about boys coming down from the mountains, but he hasn’t seen any. He says there are many rumors and you can take your pick, but there is only truth and that is Allah. Alija asks whom she might talk to about the boys. The man says the world is big and boys can hide. Alija presses him, and the man says talk to Allah. Alija says she needs to talk to someone in town about the boys. The man says Allah is in town, and that Alija, although she is a woman, might find him if she is quiet and careful not to let the MUP follow her. The MUP are everywhere, but they don’t see like Allah sees. They miss things, but Allah misses nothing. Allah’s gaze, says the man, is like water in a room; it goes everywhere, fills everything. The man says you cannot look at Allah; you have to speak with downcast eyes. The man looks around. He says he has spoken too brazenly. He walks away, his cane clicking along the wall.
“I’m guessing he meant Allah, as in ‘The Allah, peace be upon him.’”
“He did.”
“If he’s in town, maybe he’s at the Grand.”
“In a room with no doorknob.”
The bar is full, and Brian and his two Russian journalist buddies are building a toothpick city between beer bottles.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t worry, Alija, he’ll turn up. Meet Boris and Anton.”
“Wodka?”
“Why not.”
Boris is sleepy-eyed and Anton is wired; both are stained by cigarette smoke, yellowed dolls with unruly hair. Russians are cool that way. They can go and go and go with no sleep. They are the last ones to go home unless there’s a woman involved, but I suppose that’s true of just about anyone once a woman crosses the threshold. They are talking about fishing and why Brian uses flies, a flickin
g wrist, and a whole lot of effort when all he needs to do is hurl a stick of dynamite into the river and watch fish float to the top. Boris and Anton laugh, and Boris stands up and does a lousy fly-fishing imitation. Brian looks like he wants to punch the Russians for such sacrilege; he says a fish needs to be caught with skill, says there’s honor involved. Boris says it is a skill to keep a fuse lit till the very last moment before the dynamite sizzles in the water. Brian knocks down Boris’s toothpick building. Boris knocks down Brian’s. Anton orders another round.
“How you doing, Anton?”
“Have flu. Feel like dick in cold water.”
“That bad.”
“Worse, really, I tell you, worse. This flu on my head like two pieces metal pushing on brain.”
“Too bad.”
“What can do?”
The bar is a murmur. It’s crowded, shoulder to shoulder, but words are moving beneath currents, whispers in a chorus before the conductor arrives. The happy anticipation of war is gone. The gunrunners, the pimps, the drug dealers, the profiteers, they’re all worried now, plotting about how and when to get out with their fortunes before the bombs drop. They sit and hunch, draped toward one another, but not quite trusting one another, money hidden deep, pencils scratching paper, numbers traded, maps drawn. These guys are like blackbirds. They’ll be in the air, vanished at the crack of the first shot. They’re drinking heavily, and their women are wondering who’s making the trip out and who’s getting left behind. There’s mud on the floor, and the waiters, their trays tarnished and sticky, don’t seem to care about the broken vases on the tables and the flowers scattered near the door. The beer is cold, but there’s no Beck’s anymore. There’s a squeeze at the border, that jagged line of barbed wire and gray light one hundred kilometers away. Alija sits next to Brian and the Russians, a fairy-tale damsel, I suppose, and I want to hold her and dance with her, I want to do that even though there’s mud on the floor and I can’t dance and the place is too gruff for tenderness, but I want to dance to something slow with this girl I sleep with but do not know, this spirit with things hidden deeper than a gunrunner’s money.
I take her hand, and we dance. Brian and the Russians clap, and then that fades and the gangsters looking turn away. We dance, our boots sliding in slow circles, our hips pressed, Alija’s head on my chest, like it is when we sleep, but we are standing and dancing and her hair is brushed and cool and it smells, I think, of apricots and rain, yes, that’s it, apricots and cold rain blowing through a field. I can barely hear the music, the song I do not know, but it whispers and the bar murmur arcs over it and it seems at once intimate and lost, as if we are dancing in the living room of a house of strangers. I pull Alija close. I feel her grip around me, and for a moment we move in effortless symmetry, the way an unexpected breeze lifts the colors of a flag. She reaches for my hand, and we go to our room. We undress and slip into bed. I feel the cold bottoms of her feet, her hair dusting my shoulders and chest, and then quiet on the border of skin and bone. There will be no story tonight, no peeling back, no visit to the horse in the field or the men in her kitchen; we listen to nothing, and for a long time there is no sound, no rustle from the world, and then, snow, a dry snow tapping the window. Alija sleeps, her arm across me, over the blanket and cool. I get up and walk to the window and see my reflection, a gauzy presence drawn with an unsharpened pencil. I know the features. They are me, but they are the unfinished me. I step closer and come into a bit more focus, but I seem insubstantial, a blur hovering over streetlights. I should click on my computer and write. My notebooks are pleading for release. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll write long. File a big Sunday piece for the desk. They’ll be happy, get some art, nice graphics, roll my words into a grid. Then everyone can go home and we’ll do it again the next day, and the editors will say how about some more analysis here, a speck more color there, did he really say that? what’s an RPG? we’re opening up pages, we want to do this big, this is history, man, history, it’s epochal. No, it’s not. It’s just another disturbance on the page.
I lie back down. I close my eyes, breathe with Alija’s rhythm, and feel as if I might float into sleep, but sleep is a rim beyond. I dream awake. Where has the dateman gone? Over the mountains, vanished, folded into a fanatic’s poem. Morning is out there, a distant slow swirl in the sky coming toward me. I know more of the sky than most. I watch it like TV, the plots and the subtleties; stars pull away and comets flare and the moon shimmers incandescent but elusive, a coin from God’s pocket. A missionary in Africa told me once that the planets and the moons were God’s spare change. It’s kind of a weird image, but it works in the jungle. Not here, though; the sky here is shrunken and less ancient, unable to conjure the mystery between the mortal world and the cosmic. God’s pocket is a step too far, too purple for the paper, but I could get the rest in, hide it in a graph between troop movements and mass graves, slip it into the copy so no one would see. Who would notice an inlaid astronomical observation? Little victories against readers and editors are essential.
Morning arrives, raw but sunny, a bit of ice melt on the hills. Alija wakes and smiles. The sleep wrinkles on her face will fade before she slips into the shower. Youth. She’s quickly in and out of the bathroom, naked and dripping, toothpaste on her lip, a comb sliding through her hair. She turns, and I see the raised letters on her back; they are whiter, harder than the rest of her. Another stroke of the comb, and they disappear.
“No hot water.”
“Surprised?”
“You never have knots.”
“Knots?”
“Your hair. It’s always smooth.”
She jumps back into bed and covers me. Her brother is not found, so she is not happy, but there is acceptance, as if somehow in the night she had looked upon the bruises and graves of this land and reconciled things. Not to the point of forgetting, or calling off her search, but to contemplate possibilities she had kept closed before. Like an animal, she knows she needs her energy for the coming war. Brothers, after all, have been known to reappear. They’ve been plucked from earthquakes, pulled from the sea. What else does she have except hope? She kisses me, a wet snap of a kiss, and I can taste the water and minerals from her hair, feel the clean, cold squeak of her skin. She hops back out of bed and dresses. She is so young; sometimes I see how young she is, pressing against another morning, her words and her voice my only certainties. I do the shower spin, pull on my jeans and shirt, and follow her into the hall, where Brian is kneeling in front of his door with a screwdriver and two Russians.
“We found my doorknob. Anton passed out on the floor, and when he woke up he spotted it under the bed.”
“You look a little pasty, Brian.”
“Too much booze. I’m officially on the wagon. Hey, Jay, come here.”
Brian and I walk down the hall, and Alija heads to breakfast with Anton and Boris.
“Tonight, Jay, eight o’clock.”
“What, dinner?”
“War. There was a British spook drinking way too much last night at the bar.”
“Who?”
“You remember that guy from Sarajevo years ago? The funny looking one with the bent nose? Him. He was whispering to some Brit hack. They were both wasted, Jay, but you know this guy; he’s usually right. I called my office. They’re hearing similar shit. People seem to be moving faster and quieter in Washington.”
“How are you on money?”
“Not good,” says Brian.
“We’ve only got two flak jackets. Alija’s going to need one. We’ll stop at the black market after breakfast. We’re going to need gas, a lot of gas, and we’re going to have to hide it somewhere. Food too. I thought we’d have more time. The y key on my computer’s not going to make it.”
“Where do you want to be? The MUP are going to seal the place.”
“We’re going to have to hide the sat phone too. That’s the first thing the MUP will go for.”
“Think they’ll arrest us as spies?”
>
“They’ll probably kill us,” I say.
“They won’t kill us. They’re going to need stories coming outta this place. Otherwise it’s a black hole and NATO can do anything they please. Nah, the MUP are going to want this chronicled. They’ll corral all the hacks. Maybe we should go back to the Leopard.”
“I don’t know. What do we get there? Guerrillas fighting MUP? The real show’s going to be at the borders. I think you were right; it’ll be an air war we can’t see and hundreds of thousands of refugees we can. If we only have one choice, which we do, I say we go with the refugees and burning villages.”
“You sound like Jeopardy, man. ‘Alex, I’ll take refugees and burning villages for two hundred.’ Maybe we can backtrack to the guerrillas. There’s going to be a lot of nasty shit between them and the MUP.”
“I need socks.”
“We’re going to have to stockpile water.”
Promised Virgins Page 19
