American War

by Omar El Akkad

  “What’s in it?” he asked.

  Sarat picked up one of the metal disks stacked inside the crate. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she’d seen it before. It was heavy and circular, like a thick dinner plate, colored the same shade of brown as the land on which they stood. Its edge was lined with equidistant markers and in its center there was something that looked like a fat black button.

  “I don’t know,” Sarat said.

  “Maybe there’s something inside,” Marcus replied. “Can you open it?”

  Suddenly Sarat remembered watching the hopeless Red grunts with their metal detectors, clearing the earth near the camp’s northern fence.

  “It’s a bomb,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a bomb. They bury them under the ground and when someone steps on them they blow up.”

  She could feel Marcus freeze behind her. “Walk away,” she said. “Go on down that path over there. I’ll be there in a second.”

  “I’m not just gonna leave you with a bomb in your hand,” Marcus said.

  “Just go, for God’s sake. What’s the point in both of us getting killed?”

  “Better that than you getting killed and me having to explain what happened. I ain’t leaving.”

  With Marcus peering from around her shoulder and her heart pounding, she carefully set the land mine back in the crate. A few inches from the bottom of the crate, it slipped out of her hand and dropped. Sarat watched it, waiting for the inevitable explosion, and then in an instant she turned around, grabbed her friend by the hand and sprinted toward the island’s interior.

  They ran blind and mute through the thicket for five minutes without pause, until their exhaustion and the dawning realization that there had been no explosion brought them to rest.

  “What…” said Marcus, gasping. But he couldn’t form an end to the question, and finally he just said, “What the hell? What the hell?”

  Sarat couldn’t help but laugh, and quickly they were both in hysterics over their brush with death. Since their arrival they’d been careful not to make too much noise, but now they cackled.

  They found themselves near the middle of the island, where the tree cover was thickest and the ground cool under the shade of the branches. About twenty feet up one of the tallest trees, Sarat saw a wooden observation platform, a lookout of sorts. Without a second thought she started to climb the thick hemp rope that dangled from the tower.

  “What’s up there?” Marcus asked.

  “Don’t know, but I bet you can see the whole camp,” Sarat replied. “Bet you can even see the Blues.”

  She climbed to the platform and Marcus followed. Their view was obstructed a little by some of the nearby trees, but otherwise they were above most of the canopy. The world, Blue to the north, Red to the south, spread out before them.

  They unzipped the backpack and ate their sandwiches and watched the vast horizon. In the distance to the north Sarat saw more acreage of browning forestland and a few dilapidated marinas and even the skeleton of a creek-side condominium near where the Tennessee River flowed.

  From Albert Gaines’s many maps she had learned that there were natural borders and political borders. To the north the land looked the same but she knew there existed some invisible fissure in the earth where her people’s country ended and the enemy’s began.

  They sat silent for a while, letting the sugar from the apricot gel slowly revive them.

  “You mad at me?” Marcus asked.

  “Why would you think that?” Sarat replied.

  “Haven’t seen you lately. Came by your tent a few times, but you weren’t there.”

  “Been busy, I guess.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Learning. Got a new teacher, comes by a few times a week.”

  “I thought you said they don’t teach you anything worth knowing in Patience.”

  “They don’t,” Sarat said. “But he ain’t one of them useless teachers the Red Crescent folks bring in. He’s teaching me all kinds of stuff they won’t. Stuff they’re too scared to teach.”

  “Like what?” Marcus asked.

  Sarat pointed northward. “Like about them. About all the things they’ve done to us over the years. All the times they’ve put what’s good for them ahead of what’s good for us. You can go to school a million years down here and they won’t have the guts to tell you a single thing about Northerners. But now I’m learning what they’re really like.”

  Marcus observed the land to the north with indifference. “My dad told me the other day that my grandfather was a Northerner,” he said.

  “Like, he fought for them?” asked Sarat.

  Marcus shook his head. “Nah, just worked up there, on the oil trains up in some place called Williston. Died in that big explosion in ’69. My dad said the North didn’t care about prohibition too much before that, said if the same thing had happened in Texas they wouldn’t have done anything about it, even if it had killed a thousand. He said the thing about Northerners is, when it’s good it’s their good alone, but when it’s bad it’s everybody’s bad to share.”

  “If your dad hates them so much, how come he’s always talking about sneaking out of here and going up to join them?” Sarat asked.

  “Just because he wants to go there don’t mean he likes them,” Marcus said. “Just means it’s safe. If you had a chance to go where it’s safe, wouldn’t you?”

  Sarat thought about the question. It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester—perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  The sun began to set over the far side of Camp Patience. Sarat and Marcus descended from the lookout and walked back along the path to the edge of the island. Their underwear had dried on their bodies but it felt good to slip into the water once again. With nothing inside the bag, there was no point in holding it above the water; Sarat slipped it on her back. Her hands free, she swam with ease, gliding.

  She’d learned recently that solid land was not the natural skin of the world, only a kind of parasitic condition that surfaced and receded in million-year cycles. The natural skin of the world was water, and all water on earth was connected. In this way she was able to make believe she was swimming not in some offshoot of the Tennessee River, but in that muddy place by the banks of the Mississippi. For a brief moment she was home.

  AFTER NIGHT FELL she ate dinner alone in her tent and then she went to see Gaines. They’d settled into a thrice-weekly ritual: every night he visited the camp she would come to see him in his office. Sometimes he’d give her errands to run, envelopes stuffed with cash to hand out in the South Carolina slice. Eventually the Carolinians got used to the sight of the tall, bald-headed girl crossing into their neighborhood. In time the boys in South Carolina gave her the nickname Payday. But although anytime she walked through the hermit sector she had on her person more money than most of Camp Patience’s refugees would see in a lifetime, not once did she worry about theft or harassment. They all knew who she worked for.

  After she ran the errands she would return to Gaines’s office and listen to him teach. Every night was different: sometimes they discussed the natural world, a textbook spread open on the table before them full of pictures of all the plants and animals that didn’t survive the planet’s warming. Most often, they talked about the way things used to be.

  He fed her the old mythology of her people—the South of Spanish moss and palmetto fronds; of magnolia trees dressed up in leaves of History and History’s step-sister Apocrypha; of unmatched generosity and jubilant excess; of whole pigs smoked whole days and of peaches and pecans and key lime pie. She gorged on it all, delighted not only that such a world existed bu
t that she held to it some ancestral claim. How much of it was real and how much pleasant fantasy didn’t matter. She believed every word.

  He said that her country once occupied the most fertile land in all of the world; mother of sugar and mother of cotton and mother of corn. He taught her about the first time the North had torn her country to shreds. He said people think of that war now the way they think about most wars: just a bunch of young men killing young men on the orders of old men. But he said it was women who were left to clean it all up in the end, women who rebuilt the scorched Southern country and nursed what was left of those young men. He said there were even some women who fought and killed, disguised themselves in the clothing of men if they had to. Women who defied.

  Sometimes he gave her what he called lyrics—a script of sorts, relating to something they’d discussed that day. Then she’d go home and read it over, until she learned her part of the conversation. And the next time he returned to the camp, they’d talk through it, as naturally as though they’d had the same conversation a thousand times.

  What is the first anesthetic?

  Wealth.

  And if I take your wealth?

  Necessities.

  And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?

  Acknowledgment.

  And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight?

  Family.

  And if I kill your family?

  God.

  And God…

  …Hasn’t said a word in two thousand years.

  Good girl.

  Sometimes the meaning of the lyrics escaped her. But she committed them to memory anyway. She was certain one day they would suddenly reveal their meaning; one day there might come reason to sing, and sing she would.

  SARAT STOOD by the side of the administrative building, waiting for Gaines to arrive.

  He was the only man she had ever known who could enter and leave Patience whenever he pleased. No refugee was ever afforded such privilege, and even the camp’s administrators and guards were forced to sign in and out every time they ventured into the Red. But Gaines floated past the gates at any hour of the day or night, carefree and without hassle, as though the gates marked not some severe wartime perimeter but the entrance to his own summer home.

  Once she had been passing near Patience’s front gate when Gaines arrived. She watched the young soldiers at the gate smile and shake his hand, inquiring about his health and the health of his family. He in turn asked them about their families, about their wives and parents and children, and whether they were comfortable in their apartments in Atlanta. Then the soldiers, in a sheepish way, made it clear that times were hard for them and their families, that the Free Southern State was late again in paying their wages, but that, anyway, what was the use in complaining?

  She watched as Gaines discreetly passed each of the soldiers a small envelope. The soldiers, even as they protested that they couldn’t possibly accept such kindness, quickly snapped the envelopes from his hand. In that moment Sarat saw the only sincere expressions of gratitude she had ever witnessed on the soldiers’ faces. Watching the interaction, she needed no one to explain to her that, between the flag sewn on their uniforms and the money in Gaines’s envelopes, there was no question where the young soldiers’ loyalty lay. It seemed perfectly reasonable then that Gaines should come and go through Patience whenever he pleased.

  A little after eleven o’clock, she saw him walking up the path from the southern gate. Every time they met he had come alone but on this night he was joined by another man, a man she had never seen before.

  “Sarat, I want to introduce you to a close friend of mine,” said Gaines. “I’ve known him for a long time, since we were both not much older than you are now.”

  The man standing next to Gaines extended his hand. Sarat shook it. He appeared about the same age as Gaines, but his skin, the same caramel shade as Sarat’s father’s, was smooth and almost entirely free of wrinkles.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sarat,” the man said. “Albert has told me a lot of very nice things about you. My name is Joe.”

  There was an exotic quality to his accent, the phonemes leaden, birthed a little lower down in the throat. She recognized quickly that he was a foreigner.

  Gaines led Sarat and Joe into the administrative building and down the stairs to his office. Like Gaines, Joe appeared out of place in his neatly tailored suit and green silk tie. And like Gaines he seemed to take pleasure in the rigidity of his posture, his shoulders level and proud, his spine a ruler.

  Inside, Sarat and Joe sat at the table while Gaines made coffee. He turned on the stereo and played the old classical song he liked, the one he called the song of the weary pilgrim. For Sarat he slathered honey on warm toast. She felt self-conscious in front of her unfamiliar companion, and ate slower than usual. But he simply smiled and observed her as though he’d known her since birth.

  “Albert tells me you are originally from Louisiana,” Joe said. “Is that correct?”

  “Yeah,” Sarat said, “that’s right.”

  “It’s a very beautiful part of the world. I went there, some years ago. Very proud people there, very proud.”

  “And how about you?” Sarat said. “Where you from?”

  Joe seemed taken aback by the question, but quickly he regained his calm demeanor. He smiled at Gaines, then he pointed at one of the maps on the wall. “I am from the Bouazizi Empire. Do you know very much about the Bouazizi Empire?”

  Sarat shook her head. “Just what Albert said, that it used to be a bunch of different countries and now it’s one.”

  “That’s correct,” said Joe. “It used to be that all those different countries were ruled by kings and generals who treated a few people very well and a lot of people very badly. So we had a revolution, and finally we forced out the kings and forced out the generals and formed a republic, a democracy.”

  Even more so than Gaines, Joe projected an air of serenity when he spoke. He was bald but for silver wings above the ears, clean-shaved but for a thick mustache that perfectly described his upper lip. Sarat tried to pinpoint what it was about him that imbued him with such calmness and finally she decided it must be because he was a visitor, an interloper, removed from the immediate consequences of the war raging all around him.

  “So what you doing all the way out here,” she asked, “if you’re from over there?”

  Joe nodded. “That’s a very good question. I am here because my country supports those who fight for freedom, wherever they are in the world. And that’s what your people are doing, isn’t it, Sarat, fighting for freedom?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Gaines rose from the table and walked to the bookshelves. He retrieved a book, one volume in a hardbound, green-covered collection. The writing on the spine and the cover was intricate and indecipherable to Sarat, the letters all conjoined, their peaks and loops like the road map of a hallucinated city. But Joe seemed to recognize the book.

  “My God!” Joe said. “You kept them, all these years?”

  “Of course,” Gaines replied. “It’s one hell of a gift.” He turned to Sarat. “When we were young men, Joe gave me a present, a collection of old Arabic poetry called the Book of Songs. It’s a very old, very rare gift, probably the only one of its kind in the Red or the Blue.”

  He opened the book on the table and flipped through it until he came to a photograph slipped between the pages. He handed it first to Joe, who whistled in disbelief at the sight of it. Then he showed it to Sarat.

  “Be kind,” he said, “and tell us you still see some resemblance.”

  Sarat looked at the old photograph. It was of two lanky young men, one shirtless, the other wearing a uniform of brown camouflage, standing in a desert encampment. A little nameplate was stitched to the uniform’s shirt; it read: Joe. The two men looked to be in their late teens, about the same age as Sarat’s brother. They were smiling and had their arms around each other’s shoulders. The shirtless one w
as leaning on the butt of his rifle, the other one carried no weapon.

  “How long ago was this?” she asked.

  “Must have been ’21 or ’22,” said Gaines. “Around the time they sent us over there for the third time, right before the Fifth Spring.”

  Joe leaned close to Sarat; he looked at the photograph again. “That’s right,” he said. “I remember, I remember when it was still your guns and our blood.”

  For a moment Sarat thought she saw Gaines wince. He took the photograph from her and placed it back between the pages of his book and put the book back on the shelf. Then he sat beside Sarat.

  “A few weeks ago we spoke about what you think you might want to do one day, when you’re older, when you leave this place,” he said. “Remember?”

  “Sure,” Sarat replied.

  “Well, that’s why I wanted to introduce you to my friend Joe. Because when you settle on what you want to do for yourself, what you want to do for your people, Joe might be able to help you. I know you said you might want to go to Atlanta one day and work for the Free Southern State, but you might change your mind. And then you might find that you need things, things that are hard to obtain, things even I can’t procure for you. But Joe might be able to help you. So I want you and him to be friends, and I want you to keep your friendship a secret, because there are lots of people who would want to hurt him if they found out he was helping Southerners. Do you understand?”

  “All right,” Sarat said, even as she wondered what kind of help Joe might provide. “I won’t tell.”

  “I’m happy to have met you, Sarat,” said Joe. “I hope we’ll be able to assist each other one day.”

  She stayed with the two men until it was almost dawn, listening to them reminisce about the old war during which they first met. Much of the world they talked about was long gone, the old dynamics of power now inverted, but she enjoyed listening to it.

  They talked about the years they spent in the part of the Bouazizi Empire once called the Arabian Peninsula, a place whose desert heart, once home to glittering oil-funded kingdoms, was now too hot for human habitation. Sarat knew from her geography and politics textbooks that these parched sandscapes were now lined with wave after wave of solar panels—blinding amber nets that caught the energy needed to feed and finance the empire. But the old men swore there had been cities—entire countries even—in these places. Millions once lived here, they said, before the temperature soared and the oil ran out.