by Salar Abdoh
“I try to get you out of this country.”
“I don’t even have a passport. They won’t issue me one. Believe it or not, I am still considered a danger to the Islamic Republic.”
“It can be arranged.”
“And that man who came in here?”
“Fani? I have no choice but to work with him.”
“Why not just refuse?”
“I have already put my signature on documents. And men like that, you don’t back out on them. It’s not done. Also, he’s not working alone anymore. There are others involved. Others I’ll never get to see. But they’re there. They smell money and they are born.”
“All this is because of your friend’s family, their confiscated estates?”
Malek nodded. He remembered years back when he’d taken Sina to Fresno to see his father. By then the old man was already pretty sick. And yet he had gotten on his knees and kissed Sina’s—his ex-boss’s son’s—hands. It was the most excited that Malek had ever seen his own father, dropping down like that and putting Sina’s hands to his lips. Maybe he’d thought by doing that he would somehow rewind time and they’d all be back in Tehran again—before the revolution, when everything was fine and in its rightful place, the world ticking away handsomely without the troublesome Islamic Republic, without the killings and executions, without the war and everything that followed it.
He told Soaad about that episode now.
She was silent a moment, then murmured, “It is my fault. I got you into this. You should have never come to Tehran. Forgive me.”
“Listen, this business that I have with Fani and Sina, it started long before you.”
“No. It started thirty-five years ago when I began informing on my friends. That is why you are having to do what you are doing now.”
“You never informed on anyone. Don’t forget that. And when we’re finished here, your case will be closed forever. Do you understand?”
But she had already turned back to her kitchen stove and would not look at him.
* * *
Fani said to him, “Mr. Malek, do you ever watch these videos they have on the Internet?”
“I have to be at the airport in four hours. Just tell me what I want to know.”
“In return for what?”
“We’re either working together or we aren’t. I’m signing on behalf of Sina Vafa. I need to know what kind of a man I’m signing for.”
“And once you find out?”
Malek shrugged. “You have my mother’s dossier. So I’m not walking away from you. I can’t walk away from Sina Vafa, either. He’s—”
“Your brother? At least you love him like one.”
“I stick to my people.”
“Who are your people, Mr. Malek? America or us?”
Malek was silent. Fani wasn’t playing with him. What Fani wanted was to be sure the bird wouldn’t fly the coop. He wanted assurance.
The place was in the same affluent neighborhood where Soaad had taught her yoga class. It was on a street with some European embassy at the end of the block with young Iranian soldiers posted in front. Malek was surprised that Fani had brought him here. Surely this wasn’t his house. It didn’t look lived in. More like a setup, a façade for a house. Books neatly stacked in a library shelf next to a window with a gorgeous view of the mountains. A spotless glass dinner table and leather chairs. Throw rugs. A few ordinary paintings and calligraphy on the walls.
And a computer.
Fani had turned it on. He went online through a proxy portal to bypass the government censors.
For the next hour Malek sat there watching one video after another on Fani’s screen. They were mostly clips of contract workers in Iraq, with inflated titles like Sniper Kills 50 Insurgents, or more bland ones like PSDs in Action. After a while it resembled a video game. American private military contractors recording footage of themselves in fast-moving cars while popping off gun rounds. Some of the videos were compilations glorifying the military life, with heavy-metal music playing in the background. Malek was hooked. It put him back in a place he hadn’t been to for a while. He felt the adrenaline. And soon he forgot why he was even sitting there watching all this.
At last he slowly reached over and pressed pause. His mind blank. It was like someone had hammered him on the head or suffocated him under a pillow. It took him a moment to find his voice. Fani was standing by the window gazing at the mountains.
“So?” Malek murmured.
“It may not look like it right now, but that war next door, it’s winding down.”
“Why did I just sit here watching this stuff?”
“It was the kind of videos found on your friend’s computer.”
“Why show them to me?”
“You figure it out, Malek. You wanted to know; I showed you. I have nothing to gain by deceiving you. We work together. Like I used to do with Sina. And what you and I do is, according to the laws of this land, completely legitimate. However, it would no longer be legitimate if your friend gets himself killed. Because then that piece of paper you’ve been carrying around with you would be worthless. As would all our efforts.”
“You want to keep Sina Vafa alive.”
“So do you, I assume. Though each of us has his own reasons. Talk to him. Tell him to get off Satan’s donkey, as the saying goes, and stop doing the things he does across the border.”
“I very much doubt that my friend is a mastermind who targets American private contractors in Iraq.”
“Why? Because he’s too nice to do that kind of thing?”
Malek had no answer to that.
“As I said,” Fani went on, “that war is slowly, very slowly, drawing to a close. In the end, the men who will be left to fight are fools like the ones you saw on those videos, and people like your friend who want to do something about those fools.”
“Maybe he just has a thing for violent Internet videos.”
“Sure, Malek. Sure! And now I take you to the airport. It’s time.”
JAMES
It was brotherly love, he thought without much irony. And it was the kind of protection you wanted to give a younger sibling, even though James McGreivy, a hardened Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, was not exactly the sort of man who needed anyone’s protection.
Malek hung in the back of the auditorium watching as the panel discussion turned from tensely polite to pointedly hostile. James was up there on stage taking the hits. To each side of him there were other men who had also written books about their experiences of the war. They weren’t necessarily gung-ho types. But they had a special bone to pick with James. And the mixed audience could have gone either way.
The auditorium went quiet all of a sudden, panelists and the audience waiting for James McGreivy to answer a question about the Second Battle of Fallujah, of which he’d been a part. James searched the audience until his eyes locked onto Malek’s. Help me out here, he seemed to say.
Just a week earlier, driving two hours into Long Island to visit James’s mother and sick father, there had been a similar moment at the dining table. James’s mother, a woman with frail milky skin and tired blue eyes that followed the movements of her eldest son around the house like she was still looking after her four-year-old, had made pot roast and some unlikely spicy cabbage that she claimed she’d learned how to cook when James Senior, a career Army officer, had been stationed in Korea. The awkwardness between the visitors and James Senior lay thick and none of the fluttering back and forth from the kitchen on James’s mother’s part eased the strangeness. James’s father simply refused to say one word. He would not talk, period. It was bad enough that his one child who had followed his military path had written an antiwar book while the battle was still on. It was another for him to bring Malek to their house and announce, “Mom, this is my Iranian colleague that I told you about.”
Malek had sat there with the pot roast stuck in his throat feeling like a bona fide alien. McGreivy Senior—looking disused, a retir
ed colonel and former helicopter pilot with his own tours of duty from ’Nam long behind him, and with no uncertainty about who was friend and who was foe, and that if not Communists, then softness and liberal mumbo jumbo had turned his stout America to mush—was a man who had seen two of his three kids fall into every crack that this failing world proposed. His younger son, after several brushes with the law for drug possession and a felony charge, had finally put as much distance as he could between himself and the old warrior, living in some godforsaken town in Nevada where he rode his pride and joy, a Harley, and intermittently bagged groceries for a living. While the little sister had relegated herself to trailer-park America somewhere in the Midwest where she wasted away alongside a skeletal husband with a ferocious methamphetamine habit.
In the three months since the start of the academic year, these were the sorts of details Malek had learned about McGreivy’s life from McGreivy himself. And now, in this house in Long Island where America seemed set to clobber itself, father and son had sat staring at each other as if one was an unreconstructed gook killer and the other a lover of every hajji that ever strapped a bomb to himself and tried to kill a few Americans. What had gone wrong? Captain McGreivy, who had seemingly done everything right, who had passed the brutal Marine Officer Candidates School, and not only done well but was on the road to surpassing his father’s military distinctions in every way imaginable, had suddenly upped one day and called it quits. Not only quits, but then this book he had written. This fucking book that called everything into question. Including the heroic Battles of Fallujah. What was the colonel to do with this? This son who had been the apple of his eye, his point of pride, the one bright shining kid that had kept him ticking while the two others went to hell and disappeared from his life altogether. The colonel sat home and got sick and received calls from salty old buddies in places like San Diego and Fort Bragg who asked him point-blank, What does your son mean? Why is he writing this stuff? I thought you said it would be an excellent book about the war.
The silence at that table. It stunk of betrayal. And sitting there, Malek had a vision of Sina Vafa in Iraq at that very moment . . . doing what? And to whom? And for what? McGreivy Senior was right; he had a point. Malek shouldn’t have been in that house. His presence threw every arrangement the old man had with himself into question. Why do this to any man? Malek resented having been brought there. Even if it was brotherly love. Even if it was some bullshit piece of fiction about how we are all people of one planet and should learn to get along. McGreivy Senior didn’t want to get along. And he had earned the right not to.
And so, back in the auditorium with James McGreivy on stage, Malek wanted to shout across that audience to him, My friend, you’ve taken a piss on your own people and I don’t know how to tell you to fix it.
Immediately to James’s right sat a former Army Ranger who had done quite well for himself with those think tanks in Washington. Mr. Security! No doubt he could give a four-hour lecture on how to deal with terrorists and low-level wars and insurgencies, and in a few years go on to set himself up for public office. To James’s left there was another former Marine who had also been at Fallujah. He had posed the question to McGreivy, bluntly, “What do you mean that Fallujah was hardly Iwo Jima? What’s the point of that statement? That’s an insult to every Marine who gave his life for this country.”
Malek saw a cloud finally pass over James McGreivy’s eyes. He could feel it coming; James was going to throw every caution to the wind. He’d had enough of this. Enough of his book and the war and these panels which he’d been sitting on for the past year to supposedly promote his book. Two words came out of his mouth, and he said it just low enough that a lot of people weren’t sure they’d heard right: “Fuck it!”
Someone in the front row asked him to repeat himself.
“I said FUCK IT. No, Fallujah wasn’t Iwo Jima for us, and it wasn’t Normandy for them,” he emphasized, pointing to the Ranger. “Fallujah was bullshit. We took a town of a few thousand half-starved Iraqis and squashed them with everything in our arsenal. It was like taking a baseball bat to a cornered lab mouse, to a mosquito. And then . . .”
This was horrible to watch. McGreivy had lost it, and because he had lost it he was exaggerating. Malek watched James as he spat with anger, his eyes meeting no one now. There were already murmurs in the crowd. And then James just bolted up and blitzed past that redline he had already crossed: “And afterward, what did we do? We patted ourselves on the back and gave ourselves medals and called it one heck of a fight. Medals? It was those poor surrounded bastards in that two-cent town who deserved the medals. They weren’t the ones with the Abrams tanks on their side, were they? Bravery? Honor?”
James’s voice finally got drowned out in a sea of jeers, then a loud, clear voice from the audience called out what was probably on everyone’s tongue just then: “You’re a disgrace to every soldier that ever served under you.”
Unable to watch anymore, Malek backed out of the auditorium to wait for McGreivy outside. Even if a fraction of what James threw at these people was true, there were still things that simply couldn’t be said the way he had just said them. Least of all by Captain James McGreivy of the United States Marines. There was something untenable about this.
So Malek stood in the parking lot on a chilly mid-November evening in Arlington, Virginia, and waited. That morning he had received a call from Sina’s mother, begging him to come back to Tehran even if only for two days. She and her husband needed him. He had promised them he’d come as soon as the fall semester was over.
* * *
Malek gave it another week before he asked James about Fallujah. “You don’t really believe what you said down there in Arlington, do you?”
“The Corps fought a good fight in that shithole town in Iraq. No one could have done it better than us. No one ever does.”
“So why did you say what you said?”
“I was tired, Rez.”
James avoided Malek’s eyes. They were sitting in James’s office, which was still mostly bare. The college had given him a room on the other end of the building from Malek’s. Piles of books sat in neat rows on the ground. Unlike most of the other offices, there were no posters on the walls. They’d also promised James a new paint job and carpeting. After two months of waiting, he had bought paint, brushes, carpet, and glue, and did the whole room in two days on his own. Malek had seen how James’s relationship with the college had turned sour from day one. Everywhere he turned, the former Marine officer saw inefficiency and waste. The cloaked indolence of a run-of-the-mill public university, which Malek was used to from years of having been a graduate student, just plain maddened James. In a way, James McGreivy may as well have come from another planet. A place where only skill and ability bumped you up. He was a fish out of water here. Didn’t know how to play with words, and didn’t want to. He just wanted to get the job done. When he fumed, he would tell Malek, A man’s either good to go, or he’s not. And as early as the second faculty meeting of the semester he had blurted to their colleagues, “Is no one responsible for nothing? The way things are run here, it’s like you’re sending soldiers to war without guns and ammo.”
Malek realized that his own job was safe. James would not be rehired next year. The roomful of tired old professors had gone silent, the way the auditorium in Arlington would go silent a month later. But then the head of the department, who had hired James in the first place, answered, “That’s a double negative you just used, James. No one responsible for nothing. I thought you had better command of English, being a part of an English department, after all.”
“It was said for emphasis.”
“But the English language does not work that way. And by the way, up here we’re not at war, in case you imagined we were. We don’t train soldiers here or give them guns and ammunition.”
They’d laughed at him then, a cold, academic laughter that only knew the world through the New York Times. Yet James McGreivy had ta
ken that derision with a lot more composure than he would the jeers in Arlington. His healthy, boyish good looks, with those intense, narrow warrior’s eyes, stood in stark contrast to the pallid bearings of the professors. He didn’t worry about the next book he was going to write. He wasn’t after a promotion. If he was, Malek knew, he would have simply stayed in the service. He was just an idealist jarhead, almost a decade Malek’s junior, who—even after Iraq, or maybe especially after Iraq—was still seeking the damned truth. And he wouldn’t shut up. Couldn’t. Keeping quiet was not why he had accepted the offer of this job. It was not why he had written his book.
Which was why his students loved him. Worshipped him, more like it. James McGreivy, the idealist, had taken on the job in this inner-city college in Harlem to change the world. In the Marines he had seen for himself how you could turn just about anybody around and give them new life. He was convinced that this place was shortchanging his kids. He talked about the students like they were a part of his own brigade, company, platoon. He felt protective of them, told them they could do anything, and then went ahead and showed them they could do anything. One month into his teaching gig, a female student had confided to him that she’d nearly been raped. Within days, James McGreivy had gone down to the school gym and applied for a time slot to teach basic self-defense to anyone who was interested. Word had gotten around—Professor McGreivy was teaching you twenty-two moves that would save your life in any given situation. All you needed were these twenty-two moves and you wouldn’t have to be afraid of anyone ever again. The self-defense class was exploding, especially with female students who flocked to him like some kind of savior.
But that was still not enough for James. Soon he was arguing with the administrators. He demanded to know why the class sizes were so large. And why was the college gorging itself on the sweat of taxpayers, holding parties at expensive restaurants for its higher staff all the time?
In other words, James McGreivy was on many shit-lists. But why should he care about that? Publishing the book had released a flood. Now he was out to fix his whole country. And if his own father thought he was crazy, or a traitor, then so be it. He’d lost a brother and a sister to the sickness that had become America. The sickness of greed, he told Malek. Greed and selfishness. “Do you know the first thing you learn as a Marine? It’s to not be selfish. Because selfishness will get you and your buddies killed. You won’t even survive boot camp without learning to work with others.”