Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

  139

  Trauma to the back of the skull. Contusions on the front of her head. A weak pulse, a fluttering of the eyelids, no lucidity.

  The doctors huddled. They had seen this sort of injury before, but seldom in a child so young. Most likely an epidural hematoma, the blood slowly collecting in the space between the skull and the outer lining of the brain.

  What was needed was a skull decompression, but that would require a CT scanner. Their only scanner had been inoperative the past month. But perhaps they should drill anyway. They had done it before in emergencies. Make an incision into the skull. Relieve the tension. Drain the blood.

  The shouts ricocheted along the corridor. We need permission. Where are the parents? Do you hear me? We should wait. Monitor her pulse. Have we called the parents? Check her heart rate. We need permission from the parents. Watch for bradycardia and respiratory collapse.

  140

  Bassam was ushered into the operating room. Salwa didn’t want to go. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. The air was so dense he felt as if he was fighting through water. He pushed it aside but it collapsed over him, wave upon wave. Abir was laid out, tubes in her arms, a breathing apparatus at her mouth, her head bandaged, a small wave of dark hair at the nape of her neck. He walked across and kissed her eyelids. He had told her that morning that she could not stay over at a friend’s house. He had been sharp with her. Wake now, he thought. Just wake and you can go wherever you want. Open your eyelids and I will never say another stern word, I promise, all you have to do is open your eyes.

  Bassam turned to the doctor behind him: We have to get her to Hadassah. They have all the proper equipment there.

  —You can’t, said the doctor. Everything is closed off.

  —I have friends in Jerusalem. I can call them. They can help. They can get an ambulance here.

  —It’s all locked down.

  Bassam was already moving out into the corridor to look for Salwa. She was by the benches, surrounded by other women, but entirely alone. The dark of her eyes glistened. The left side of her lip twitched slightly. The women surrounding her bowed their heads, let him through. He took her elbow, guided her to the operating room. The door swung. He held it open with his good foot.

  Salwa stood there frozen until her hand went to her mouth. She could see the rise and fall of Abir’s chest.

  —We’re going to switch her to Hadassah, he said.

  141

  The Israeli hospital. At Ein Kerem. An ancient Palestinian village, once.

  142

  Where Smadar was born.

  143

  At first it seemed as if it would be just a small delay. Protocol. Security. The army needed to accompany the vehicle to the hospital. The route had to be prepared. There was trouble outside. A calm was called for. The ambulance could move soon. An hour passed. The situation was under control, they said. Remain alert. They would be moving again soon. They were in touch with the authorities. Repeat. It was for the safety of everyone. A route was being established. Stay calm. Instructions would be on their way. Repeat. They would be moving soon. Helicopters had been deployed. There was still rioting near the checkpoint. Repeat. Moving soon.

  Bassam sat in the back of the ambulance with Abir. She was laid out on the gurney in her hospital gown, hooked up to the drip bags. The monitor machines beeped softly. Two paramedics sat in the front of the ambulance, another one behind with Bassam. They whispered softly, glancing at each other as the instructions came over the radio. A route has been established. We will be going soon.

  Bassam’s mobile phone died after an hour and fifteen minutes. He could see no rioting out the back window. There were, he knew, other routes the ambulance could take. In the front seat the paramedics were shouting into the radio: they wanted to loop around. The answer came back. Negative. Stay where you are.

  A small plastic bag lay at the foot of the gurney. Abir’s school socks, her shoes, her school tunic. Beside it, her leather schoolbag. He reached down and opened the clasp. In it, her schoolbooks. Mathematics. Religious Studies. A copybook. Her lunchbox, untouched.

  In the bottom of the schoolbag, he found the bracelet of candy. For a moment he thought about slipping it on her wrist. He tucked it back in the bag, kissed her forehead.

  He reached for a clean linen sheet in the rear of the ambulance, opened the doors and stepped outside. A jeep sat idling not five meters away. A voice came over the loudspeaker telling Bassam to step back into the ambulance, that everything was under lockdown.

  —Step back, sir. Step back now.

  He didn’t turn. He carried the bedsheet over to a concrete bollard at the side of the road. He glanced up at the sun, established due east, unfolded the sheet into a rectangle on the ground, knelt down. He was surprised that nobody tried to stop him. He could hear, in the distance, the sound of helicopters.

  A soldier came towards him, a gun strapped across his shoulder. His eyes were brown and tender. He said nothing until Bassam finished praying.

  —You have to get back in the ambulance now.

  Bassam felt a surge of hatred for the apology in the soldier’s voice.

  The soldier’s hand touched his elbow. Bassam swung his arm away and walked across to the ambulance. The door closed behind him. He bent over Abir. He could still see the soft fog of her breath on the oxygen mask.

  The ambulance lurched in increments. One hundred yards, two hundred, fifty, ten, one hundred again. It reversed, stopped once more, turned around. Static on the radio. Another half hour passed.

  A call came to return to the first hospital. Strike that. Remain in position. You will be moving again soon. Repeat. You will be moving soon.

  When he opened the doors once more, Bassam realized that they were still near the checkpoint. Some soldiers were arguing behind an orange barrel. There were three empty deck chairs set up alongside the barrel. Far away, a dog barked. All else was quiet.

  After two hours and eighteen minutes the ambulance was given the okay to drive to West Jerusalem.

  144

  In the hospital Abir was kept alive for another two and a half days.

  145

  The waiting room was filled with activists. Bassam had come to know them well over the previous fifteen years. From the courthouses. From mosques. From synagogues. From churches. From prison. From peace conferences, meetings, rallies.

  Theirs was a small world: cliques, factions, splinter factions. Nothing of that mattered now. They crowded together, waiting, drinking coffee, waiting, holding hands, waiting, slipping outside to smoke, waiting, whispering into phones, waiting.

  A silence fell over the crowd when Bassam walked in. He knew every face: Suleiman, Dina, Rami, Alon, Muhammad, Robi, Chen, Elik, Yitzak, Zohar, Yehuda, Avichay.

  He stood quietly with his head bowed. He did not want to address any single person. The ceiling pulsed down upon him. Only the ticking of the wall clock could be heard.

  —Ma feesh khabar baed, he said in Arabic, then repeated it in Hebrew, and then in English: No news yet.

  146

  The newspaper reports said that a ten-year-old child had died in the hospital after an incident in the West Bank. It was said in some reports that her father was a prominent member of Combatants for Peace. It was said in others that he had spent seven years in jail for terrorist activities in Hebron. Some reports mentioned both. Haaretz. Al Quds. The Jerusalem Post. Felestin. Yedioth Ahronoth. Israel-Nachrichten. Al-Hayat al-Jadida. The Palestine Telegraph. The Army released an official statement denying any involvement. A TV segment said that rumors of an incursion were spurious. Later there were reports of rioting in protest against the Separation Barrier being built through the school playground. Another report said the girl had been seen at the school gates holding a stone. She was killed by a rock to the back of her head from nearby rioters. She was s
hot by Palestinian Authority forces. She was epileptic, she smashed her head when she fell. She implicated herself by running away from the jeep. She was found to have stones in her pocket. She picked up a shock grenade which had exploded in her hands. She was buying candy. She threw her arms in the air in surrender. She was walking defiantly away. She had been mistreated in a Palestinian hospital. They had dropped her from a gurney and she had hit her head. She was air-lifted immediately to the Hadassah where she had been given priority care. The Muslim parents had refused to get help from a Jewish doctor. She had no I.D. Reports of an illegal incursion were categorically untrue. The girls had been throwing stones, it was caught on closed-circuit television from the school gates. Her father was an active ranking member of Fatah. The teacher in her school was a known Hamas activist. No such Border Police operations were logged that morning. The delay in the ambulance absolutely did not hasten her death and was directly linked to riots on the ground.

  147

  In civil court, four years later, the judge questioned the assertion that Abir’s head injury was the result of Palestinian boys slinging rocks from a nearby graveyard. She pointed out that the nearest graveyard was located behind a four-story building, a hundred meters away from where the jeep would have been located. The rioters would have had to be able to sling their stones up over the building to clear the water towers and arc precisely downwards to land anywhere near the tin-roofed grocery store.

  It was an entirely impossible feat, the judge added, even in the most vivid imagination.

  Not to mention, the judge said, the autopsy commissioned by the Aramin family, or the discovery of the rubber bullet yards from where Abir fell, or the evidence from eyewitnesses that at least two rounds of rubber bullets had been fired.

  148

  The newspaper reports said that a fourteen-year-old girl had been murdered in a suicide bombing in West Jerusalem. Some said that four people had died in the attack. Others said five. There were two bombers in some reports, three in others. Fifty-eight were injured, seventy-seven, one hundred and twenty. The bombers had been dressed as Orthodox men. It was a Hamas splinter group. They had come from East Jerusalem. They had escaped from prison in the West Bank. They were on a Wanted list that was ignored by the Palestinian Authority. They had passed through Qalandia checkpoint. They had been living undercover as merchants in the Old City for many months. They had hidden in West Bank caves. They had targeted a group of teenage girls for maximum shock. They had originally planned to attack the Mahane Yehuda market. A secondary plan was to take out a music school. It was a direct reference to the bombings which had taken place on the same street in 1948, led by British deserters who had joined the Jewish underground. It was a bombing funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran, masterminded by Yasser Arafat. It was a brand-new splinter group belonging to a radical underground network. The bombers were heard to yell Allahu akbar seconds before they pulled the tabs on their belts. It was a direct attack on the family of Matti Peled, Smadar’s grandfather, a former Israeli general. It was a sophisticated operation planned out amongst the most senior members of Hamas. Another nearby car bomb failed to go off. The shrapnel was laced with rat poison which was rumored to maximize bleed-out. It was a new type of explosive stolen from the Israeli Defense Forces. The bombers had spread themselves out evenly on the street for full impact. The girls were shopping for schoolbooks. They were going to sign up for jazz dancing classes. They were last seen walking along, passing a small silver Walkman between them, two of the girls leaning together to share a single pair of earphones.

  149

  The smashed Walkman was found and entered into evidence. Later, Uri Esterhuzy, a forensic scientist from Tel Aviv, examined the machine and determined from the scorched cassette that they had been listening to the Sinéad O’Connor album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.

  The plastic tape rollers were melted and jammed on the song Nothing Compares 2 U.

  150

  Smadar danced to the song in her baggy shorts and her red sleeveless T-shirt, her late grandfather’s watch on her wrist.

  In the living room, she was always bumping into the oak coffee table so that there was a little ring of bruises on her knee. The bruises became apparent when she stood on the table to dance, a darkening tattoo.

  She listened to the album with her white headphones on, so that Rami was forever wondering what part of the song she was inhabiting as she mimed along to the music.

  151

  The bombs were so loud that they shattered windows at a distance of thirty yards.

  152

  When she was a baby, Smadar became the poster child for the peace movement. The poster appeared in union halls and student centers and kibbutzim all over the country. It could be found posted in left-wing offices and school hallways and bakeries and bars and falafel stores.

  Rami had taken the job, but it was just that: a job.

  He snapped the photo and designed the poster himself: its size, the font, the weight of the paper. Smadar’s hair was fair and bobby-pinned. Her eyes were large. Her face was cherubic. Her little finger was hooked up near her top lip.

  Already, at one year of age, there was something intense and concerned about her. Like she might have known something in advance.

  153

  154

  The poster asked: What will life in Israel be like when Smadar reaches fifteen?

  155

  She was two weeks away from fourteen.

  156

  The three suicide bombers had an accumulated age of sixty-eight. They went up in a pink mist.

  157

  The weight of each bomber’s vest was forty to fifty pounds. The Semtex was packed with ball bearings, screws, nails, glass and shards of sharp porcelain. Forensic tests concluded that, despite reports, the shrapnel had not, in fact, been laced with rat poison to make the victims bleed out quicker.

  158

  Semtex was invented by two Czech chemists who named it after an abbreviation of its parent company, Explosia, and Semtín, a suburb of the city of Pardubice. The explosive was mass-produced first in the 1960s in response to a request from the North Vietnamese government of Ho Chi Minh.

  It was malleable and putty-like, so it could fit just about anywhere. A tiny handful could bring a plane down.

  For years, representatives of the Czech government gave out Semtex in neatly ribboned gift boxes to visiting heads of state, most notably to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who eventually bought seven hundred metric tons of it and distributed it to the PLO, Black September, the IRA and the Red Brigades.

  The original compound was almost impossible to detect by airport scanner until a taggant was added in 1991 so that it would emit a distinctive vapor.

  The removal of the taggant from the Semtex emulsion was not an easy task for even the most experienced chemists, and the process usually rendered the explosive useless.

  159

  In manufacturing a rubber bullet, the rubber is coated around a rounded steel core. Wax from the carnauba palm is used as a lubricant, and molybdenum disulfide, known also as moly, helps the rubber stick to the metal on contact.

  160

  Bassam and Rami gradually came to understand that they would use the force of their grief as a weapon.

  161

  Seven hundred and fifty years ago al-Rammah, the Syrian chemist, postulated the idea of rocket-propelled torpedoes in his book Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices.

  His handwritten treatise was lost for many years until it was discovered in a battered leather traveling trunk in a small Ottoman village market.

  The manuscript changed hands several times until it found its way into the Topkapi Palace library in Istanbul, known to scholars—with its domed ceilings and decorated Iznik tiles—as one of the most beautiful libraries in the world.

  162

  Perdix drones
are named after the mythological partridge. The flying machines are small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. They are released from pods mounted on the wings of fighter jets, a cloud of them all at once—like a flock of starlings seeding themselves into the sky.

  They are sturdy enough to be released at Mach 0.6, almost five hundred miles per hour.

  After the initial orders are programmed in remotely by human operators, the drones are designed to act autonomously.

  They are sprayed out in a flock of twenty or more, sending signals to one another, creating their own intelligence as they go along. Theirs is the ultimate in digital communication, a perfect specimen of math and computational intuition, able to tell itself what to do and when to do it. Turn left, turn right, realign coordinates, hit moving car, engage now, rifle! rifle! rifle! weapon away, reconnoiter, abandon mission, retreat, retreat, retreat.

  They can make a decision to carry an explosive right through the window of your home.

  163

  Flying so fast that it would be a miracle of precision if a slingman could hit one with a stone.

  164

  When Rami found out that a drone could be built remotely on a 3-D printer, the plastic casing created from the bottom up, slice by slice, embedding the microchips, cooling until fully formed—so that anyone, anywhere, in possession of the right chips, could feasibly create a flock of drones—he stood up from his desk in his home office and went into the living room to mention it to Nurit.