War Porn

by Roy Scranton

  “We don’t want you, shit-dribble,” the one man said. “We want the men you work for.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Qasim said, his voice breaking. “I really don’t.” His mind scrambled for something, anything he could tell them.

  “Last chance, shit-dribble.”

  “My uncle . . .”

  The one man waved his hand in exasperation. The other lifted the hammer.

  “Wait!”

  “Yes?”

  “My uncle . . .”

  The one shook his head and the other swung the hammer down on Qasim’s little finger, smashing the first knuckle with a bloody crunch. Qasim blacked out. He came to a few moments later, dizzy and tingling, sweat pouring from his forehead.

  “Let me help you remember,” the one said. “We’d like information on the codes you write for Munir Muhanned.”

  “Munir . . .”

  “Oh. Now you remember.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Again.”

  “No wait! Wait! I’ll tell you!”

  “Yes?”

  “Hamadaya,” Qasim said. The man looked at him quizzically. Qasim went on: “Anouf Hamadaya, one of the students in my class. She asked me if I would write codes for her brother.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t. I’m not . . . I wouldn’t ever get involved with guys like that. I’m . . . I’m a coward . . . you see . . . her brother, Anouf’s brother, they say he works for Munir Muhanned. That’s who the codes were for. But I was too scared to do it. That’s all. That’s all.”

  The man went around the desk and picked up Qasim’s dissertation.

  “I told you, that’s all I know. There’s nothing . . .”

  The other raised his hammer again and Qasim went silent. His hands throbbed. His face throbbed.

  “We’re going now,” the one said. The other let go of Qasim, who pulled his bleeding hand into his lap. “But if you hear anything, anything that might help, you talk to your uncle. He knows who to contact.” The man turned and left, flinging the dissertation across the room as he went. His partner followed.

  Qasim watched them go, desolate and sick with pain, then curled into a ball on his bed. He didn’t respond when Mohammed and Nazahah came to check on him, or when Nazahah splinted and bandaged his crushed finger. Only when they started to pick up his dissertation did he stir, waving them away.

  The white empress hovered in the corner, her robes heaving in slow waves, her hands stretching across the space between them in the heat, head cocked, tears flowing down her cheeks and splashing her chest with tiny red blossoms.

  Qasim sat up, tugging at the sweat-damp sheets, fumbling in the tangle. As he leaned toward her, she leapt at him, her face a dog’s face. Qasim fell back and she cried, “Why?”

  Then she was gone. He sat alone, trembling. His bitten hand, aching, stank. His heart’s pounding echoed against the walls and he thought, How long? Has it begun? He imagined great whirlwinds of fire spiraling over the city. Fragments of a dream came back, running through alleys, a great coal steed at his heels, fire in its eyes, fire in its mouth. Its massive hooves pounded the air with sparks. The white empress watched from a high window, her mask impassive. Turning and turning, the streets a cyclone, all the world one ancient, winding alley. Again the dogs and something else, Anouf, a shard, her hands on his manhood, her mouth on his neck, while the horse pounded behind him. From above, the white empress watched—beneath her mask, tears.

  He heard someone walk past his room. Dawn shone in a red line. Black palms rose like minarets and the minarets rose like rockets: the sky floated black under a starry blue sea, and that’s how they’d come at him, like sharks. Had it begun yet? Were the lights in the sky the sea, or the city?

  Qasim sat up again. The call to prayer had begun. His hands, chanting dull mantras of pain, told him he was being punished for his pride. God had struck at him for his stubbornness and would kill him if he kept at it. He had no choice. He had to return to Baqubah. If he stayed, he’d be destroyed.

  Slowly, painfully, shakily he dressed, then opened his suitcase and threw in his clothes, his photo of Lateefah, his Discman, a few CDs, his dissertation—now a clutch of disordered pages—and all the books he could fit. His other things he stacked in the corner, to send for later.

  He hauled his suitcase down the stairs in the three good fingers of his less-bad hand. In the living room, he saw Othman sitting on the couch in the dark watching CNN with the sound off. Othman turned to him. Christiane Amanpour spoke on the screen. Qasim watched her smooth, pale face, her eyes bleeding tears, distant and accusing. “Why?” she asked him. “Why did you leave me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Qasim,” Othman said.

  “Please tell my uncle . . .”

  Othman stood and came around the couch.

  “Please tell my uncle I took . . .”

  “Let me help you with your suitcase.”

  “I . . . I have to . . . I have to.”

  “Yes, Qasim. Of course. Let’s have some breakfast first.”

  “No. I have to get the car before the . . . before the dogs, I mean. While it’s still black.”

  “We’ll go soon, but first come, sit. I’ll get you breakfast.” Othman led him gently around to the sofa.

  “No, now!” He waved his hand, stinking in its scummy bandage.

  “Yes, of course. We’ll go soon. Just sit. We’ll eat first, then go. Just sit. Then we’ll go.”

  “I have to go,” Qasim said, sitting and dropping his suitcase. Pain washed over him in broken pink waves.

  Othman left to put on the kettle and when he returned, Qasim had passed out. TV light dappled his wasted face.

  Mohammed came downstairs and found Othman and Qasim asleep on the couch. CNN was on, silently running a story about a hijacked Cuban plane. Something stank. Mohammed kneeled to examine Qasim’s hand: the bandage was dirty and loose, a mess of gauze, crusted pus, and filth. He took it gently up and Qasim jerked awake with a shout.

  “Let me see your hand,” Mohammed said.

  “I . . . It’s . . . I have to go to Baqubah. I need the Toyota.”

  “You’re not going anywhere with your hand like that.”

  Qasim pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. “You’re not . . . going to stop me,” he said. “You always want to stop me.”

  Qasim tried to push past him, but as Mohammed stood to hold his shoulders, he fell back on the couch. Mohammed knelt, taking Qasim’s bandaged hand on his knee and unwrapping it. He gagged on the stench of the infected flesh.

  “Help me carry him out to the car,” Mohammed said to Othman.

  On their way toward Yarmouk Teaching Hospital, which should have been a ten-minute drive, Mohammed and Othman had to go through three different checkpoints, each time arguing with the clean-faced recruits and fat reservists that they had a medical emergency and needed to be allowed to pass. Other than the Hizbis, the city seemed evacuated, estranged from itself. There was almost no traffic. Trenches had been dug in parks, berms built up in front of schools. No buses ran and all the cigarette stands stood empty.

  The hospital was quiet too. The nurse told them it might take a while: “We’re running a skeleton crew, to let our staff rest. The full shifts start at midnight.” A few others waited in the lobby: a young boy, crying, his head resting in his mother’s lap; a fat old man wheezing like faulty bellows; two or three bandaged and broken; others with less visible afflictions. Guardians of the Nation played on Iraq TV in the corner. Twice orderlies rolled stretchers through to the ER, one man bleeding from a gunshot wound to his chest, another trembling and hyperventilating, his leg broken in a Z.

  At last the nurse came for Qasim. Dr. al-Amman, quiet, short, sleek as an otter, said little to Mohammed and Othman as he dispassionately examined
Qasim’s hands. He examined the splint set on his smashed little finger. He jabbed Qasim’s rotting hand with anesthetic and, with the help of a nurse, began to cut away dead flesh. Qasim was awake but delirious, and Mohammed and Othman helped hold him down. The doctor cut away the gangrenous bits and dropped them in a bucket while the nurse soaked up blood with a sponge. It did not take long. Finished, he slathered on topical antibiotic and had the nurse wrap the hand.

  “He should be fine. There’s no indication of rabies, but we’ll run blood tests. We’ll call you—Insha’Allah—within the next few days. It appears to be a localized infection, but it may have gone further up the arm, so I’m going to prescribe some very strong antibiotics—he’s not allergic, is he? Good. He needs to take the antibiotic with every meal, three times a day. He can’t miss one single pill. Don’t cut the pills up, don’t sell them to someone else, don’t hoard them. Unless he takes every single pill, the infection will spread and kill him. Do you understand?”

  “Doctor, I’m no thief,” Mohammed said.

  “Very good. He may be delirious for a week or so while the antibiotic kills the infection. Make sure he gets plenty of water and bed rest. The hand should be unwrapped every other day and washed. Boil some salt water for five to seven minutes, then let it cool. When it’s room temperature, use it to wash his hand, gently. A proper scab must form. I’ll prescribe some topical antibiotic as well. Put that on the wound, then wrap with a new bandage. With proper care and regular cleaning, he’ll be okay. There is some deep tissue damage, so his hand will likely be permanently weakened, but functionality will return in time.”

  Driving home, Othman pointed to the horizon. Thick black clouds of smoke ribboned up from the greenbelts around the city, where the army was burning oil in big pits. Beyond them loomed a distant bruise, thickening across the sky.

  •••

  The sandstorm came later that afternoon, choking the city with oily grit, turning the world beyond the windows to a howling red void. It lasted until after well after nightfall. As soon as it had blown over, Othman went up on the roof to replace the satellite dish, but now there was no signal. Ratib thought the storm might have knocked out the local retransmitter, but Othman was sure it was Saddam and his flunkies, the stupid bastards, he muttered, blinding us in our moment of darkness.

  They attached the aerial to the TV and tuned in to the local station replaying the same programs from earlier in the day, the same state demonstrators cheering, ministers pontificating, Saddam speechifying. “Shut it off,” Othman said.

  “Nothing to do but wait,” said Ratib, slumping into an armchair.

  “I can’t believe it’s happening again.”

  “I was in the south last time.”

  “You could feel it. The air would hum and you could feel it in the back of your neck. You could feel them coming.”

  “It was fast in the south. Everything was fast. You’d be sitting there for hours, bored out of your mind, and all at once the earth would explode. There’d be a whistling, you wouldn’t hear it until later, after the explosion you’d remember—I heard whistling. But before, nothing. They hit us with jets and artillery. Those rockets they shoot.”

  “I helped dig people out of the rubble. After every raid, as soon as the explosions finished, we went down to the mosque—this was when I lived off Asmai Street, in Adhamiyah. When I worked for the Iraqi Film Commission. Anyway, after a raid, we’d meet down at the Abu Hanifa. We had boys, some of the men’s sons, and if we didn’t know where the damage was, we sent them out as runners. Then we’d go dig. It was awful.”

  “There wasn’t any rubble in the south. Just wrecked tracks and bodies. Men’s helmets burned onto their heads because of the webbing inside and the coating, the laminate on the inside of the helmet. It just melted onto their skin.”

  Othman sat on the couch. He watched the TV’s blank screen while Ratib got up and scanned the DVD rack.

  “I need a drink,” Othman said to himself. “Mohammed!”

  Mohammed shuffled in from the kitchen. “Stop yelling, pig. If I’d known you had the habits of a Jew, I’d never have brought you into my home.”

  “Where’s your bottle?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The good stuff, the Johnnie Walker, not the arak you give your clients. It’s time for a real drink. We could all be dead tomorrow.”

  “I should see my God with liquor on my breath?”

  “As if your God cared,” said Othman.

  “He cares,” said Ratib.

  Othman waved him off. “Go get your bottle.”

  “You’ll order me now, like I’m your little woman?”

  Othman leaned back and gazed soulfully into Mohammed’s eyes: “‘Your yearning shows, whether you restrain it or not, and likewise your weeping, whether or not your tears flow. How many times your composed smile deluded a companion, while between your hips—what was invisible. The heart commanded its tongue and its eyelids and they concealed it, but your body is an informer.’”

  Mohammed laughed and rubbed Othman’s shoulders. “Sad bachelor. If you want to drink so bad, why don’t you go down to the Writers Union?”

  “I want to drink with my old friend Mohammed and his son-in-law Ratib.”

  “I don’t drink,” Ratib said.

  “There is a time for your God, and there is a time for your heart,” Othman said. “You’ll have one drink.”

  “Alas, my friend,” Mohammed said, throwing up his hands. “I already drank it all.”

  Othman closed his eyes and covered them with the fingers of one hand. “‘Father of every perfume,’” he recited, “‘not of musk only, and of every cloud—I do not single out the morning clouds—every man of glory boasts of only one quality, whereas the All-Merciful has joined in you all. While other men are esteemed for their generosity, in your generosity you bestow esteem.’” His eyes opened, peering into Mohammed’s. “‘It is not much that a man should visit you on foot, and return as king of the two Iraqs. For sometimes you give the army that has come raiding to the lonely petitioner who has come begging, and you despise this world as one who has proved it all and seen everything in it—except yourself—perish.’”

  Mohammed smiled, but not Othman. There was a sadness in his voice that slowly dissolved his friend’s smile, and brought Ratib back to the stretches of silence that followed the bombs in the south, after the wounded had been trucked away and the dead buried, when they waited for more death to come. The feeling of relief at having survived lent the dread a cutting edge, laced the bitterness with painful sweetness. “Please, beloved and righteous Mohammed, name of the prophet, by the grace of God and by the mercy of God and by the infinite compassion of God, go get your bottle. This may be our last night. The last night for Iraq.”

  “There will always be Iraq.”

  “Like there will always be Akkadians or Abbasids or Ottomans. A country is a day. Come. Let’s drink like men.”

  “Ratib,” Mohammed said, “go upstairs to my office and in the filing cabinet, the tall gray one, open the bottom drawer. There, back behind some blueprints, you will find a bottle of oil to light our lamp tonight. The Johnnie Walker Black.”

  “It’s not permitted that . . .”

  “Ratib,” Mohammed snapped. “Your piety is commendable. Go get my bottle.”

  Ratib fetched it, and the two older men began to drink. Eventually, after much cajoling, Ratib did too. In the meantime, Thurayya and Warda had returned from putting the children to bed and, seeing the bottle on the coffee table, went into the kitchen. The night passed slowly, the men drank slowly, sometimes going into the kitchen for water or chai or to speak with the women, and sometimes Warda or Thurayya would come into the living room to speak with the men. It was a quiet night, a night of conversations and stories of other wars, quiet but quickened by an unheard buzz. The
radio played a low babble behind their talk, old patriotic songs and bullshit state bulletins. Just after midnight, as the men were becoming drowsy, Othman sat up with a start. Then they heard it: the distant chug of antiaircraft fire.

  It went on for a while. Othman sat back down. The shooting stopped. Started. Stopped. A distant machine turning off and on, throwing metal into the sky.

  Thurayya and Warda told the men good night and went upstairs to bed. Shortly after that, Mohammed told Othman to wake him if anything happened, then went upstairs himself. Eventually Ratib fell asleep in his chair. Only Othman was left, listening alone in the darkness. He had another drink, then another.

  He woke, later, to the walls’ dull shaking. The world shuddered once, then again and again. Antiaircraft guns flacked in the distance. There were several more explosions, far but not that far, and more guns. Mohammed came downstairs and looked at Othman. The two men looked at Ratib, still asleep, and went swiftly upstairs to the roof. To the northeast, Baghdad was in flames.

  A fireball lit the sky. Then came the boom.

  “It’s all in the Karkh.”

  “They must be going after the government buildings.”

  Tracers cut the sky in loping arcs of red.

  “I didn’t hear any planes.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. They’re too high. Or stealth jets.”

  Another fireball; they counted—one, two, three, boom. Red and yellow light flashed and shifted, the city danced with shadowed fire. They stayed and watched until the bombs then the AA guns stopped. In the east, the sky lightened to a smoky blue.

  They went back downstairs and turned on the BBC. George W. Bush’s voice filled the room.

  “My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war. These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign . . .