by Roy Scranton
Matt eyed the fire anxiously. “I think there’s a burn ban on.”
“Fuck all that. Show me the future.”
The computer’s fan whirred, its hard-drive light flickering red in the dark. Matt clicked an icon of the Big Dipper. “It’s fairly crude, so I can only feed so many different data streams off the web before it freezes. I linked it to different sites that update their data, you know, like Dow Jones or whatever. I got a couple easy ones like US weather, so the graphic gives us a pattern like this.” He clicked on the menu and a visual popped up in the center, a slowly morphing fractal cone in greens and golds covered with bumps and indentions. It spun slow on three axes, displaying its languidly shifting planes, and as it revolved a swirl of orange and white sank into one side. “The trick is with the operator, right, because this is just a data pattern. It’s no better really than raw data except in this: humans are primarily visual, so we interpret visual patterns much more quickly than we do numerical, syntactical, narrative, or even linguistic ones. But the new operator doesn’t see much in one pattern, like this one here, until they’ve seen dozens of them and compared them against each other. As well, the algorithm doesn’t measure data but rather the rate of change. So with this, I can tell you that the weather patterns for the US are generally changing slowly now, but that there’s some serious turbulence here”—he pointed to the swirl of white and orange—“that represents a relatively intense but locally manifest change in weather conditions. Not very helpful, I realize, for meteorology, but that’s not the point. Let’s do stocks.” He clicked a menu button and the first graphic disappeared, replaced by a new cone, green and gold, this one wider, shallower, and bumpier, red and strangely sparkling on the edges and growing darker and darker, toward a fierce purple, at the point. “This is all the world’s major stock exchanges, along with some other transnational data like trade deficit numbers, wheat production, the price of oil, stuff like that. This seems about normal, actually, generally calm with local fluctuations. Sometimes you get a wave sweeping across, either in concentric circles or as a shifting convergence. See, like this point here, this bulge—if it got any bigger, I’d say that’s probably gonna start a wave that will likely spread and affect other markets. I’d say watch out for turbulence in the global economy.”
“But it doesn’t tell you where.”
“It can.” He hit Control-M and markers came up: Tokyo Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Crude Oil DPB. “But remember, what it’s measuring isn’t the change but the rate of change. I don’t care what the level of the Dow is, or even how much it went up or down, but how much it went up or down relative to, a, the overall size or value of the data set and, b, its previous movement. A steady increase, as long as it continues to change at the same rate, won’t show up at all. But if the increase slows, right, even if the change is now zero, the change in the rate of change will be what we see. You got it?”
“Like it measures acceleration and deceleration, not speed.”
“Exactly. I mean, it doesn’t so much tell the future as show turbulence in complex systems, which I think might offer a key to understanding the systems themselves. Part of the problem is that so far the systems are user-defined. I mean, if I had enough computing power, I could feed thousands and thousands of real-time data streams into the thing and you’d get a global picture. Another problem is real-time data—most good data is private or secret. What you’re seeing now is very narrow. It’s like taking a poll of five hundred people; it just doesn’t tell you much. Whereas if you polled five hundred thousand, you’d have some real numbers.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. So there it is.”
“Trippy.” Aaron pulled out his thumb drive. “My turn.”
“Okay.” Matt closed down the program and plugged in Aaron’s drive.
“Iraq Pix,” Aaron said. “Camp Crawford.”
The fire crackled between them.
“What was that with you and Aaron?” Wendy asked, turning to Dahlia.
“Just messing with him,” Dahlia said.
“Dolly working her mojo,” Mel said.
“I ain’t got no mojo.”
“Dirty Dahlia,” Wendy laughed. “I’d be jealous if I didn’t know you were so stuck on Matt.”
“Sure,” Dahlia said. “Like a tar baby.”
The first picture was of a dusty, tan-colored building looming against a bruised sky. Barbed wire coiled on the wall tops.
“We did a bunch of stuff in Iraq,” Aaron said, “including working at several different internment camps. This is Camp Crawford. We called it the Pit. It was north of Baghdad, not far from Taji, and it was specifically for insurgents and intel targets. It’s not like Cropper, on BIAP, which was high-value, or Abu G, which had a bunch of different shit. We were supposed to get hard cases from other assets in the north and northwest, a lot of hadjis from Fallujah and Tikrit and Baqubah, a lot of Sunni triangle shit.”
“Hadjis?”
“Iraqis. You get real racist over there.”
“Do you?”
“Anyway, Camp Crawford. Click forward.”
He did and the next pic was a bunch of soldiers, some in brown t-shirts and some in black, all wearing desert boots and brown camouflage pants, making gang symbols or flipping the bird, men and women both. Aaron was in there, leaner, more muscular, squatting with a rifle.
“These are the dudes I worked with. There’s Sergeant Dickersen, and that’s Grimes and Woolsley and Peanut and Garber. That’s Staff Sergeant Cortázar and Lieutenant Viers. The guys in black t-shirts—see, brown t-shirts, that’s the Army standard. The Air Force wear black t-shirts, but these guys aren’t Air Force. They’re OGA. Bill and Pete and Dick and Gary.”
“OGA?”
“Other governmental agencies. That dude there, the hadji-looking one, he’s our terp, Wathiq.”
•••
“The thing with Aaron,” Wendy said, “I think he had a hard time in Iraq.”
“What do you mean a hard time?”
“I don’t know. He won’t talk about it. He says he just wants to put it behind him. But he’s really tense now, and I think . . . I think something happened.”
“You think he has PTSD?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know how you know. He says he doesn’t.”
“Has he gone for counseling?”
“I don’t know. He just got back. He just showed up.”
“What’s the deal with you two?” Dahlia asked.
“I don’t really know,” Wendy said. “We started dating in Tucson, like, almost two years ago. I was finishing my MFA then, and he was still working on his bachelor’s, but he’s only a year younger than me . . . and we’d been dating for like six months but hadn’t discussed it as anything serious when he got called up, and then we started having these really super intense discussions about the future. I just couldn’t make the promises I think he wanted me to. I think he had this romantic idea I’d wait for him, pining away with a yellow ribbon, but I can’t live my life like that. And I didn’t even know if we were right for each other anyway. It’d just been a thing. So we basically made a tentative agreement that we’d keep writing and then check back when he got home. He thought the war would be over quick and he’d be sitting in the desert twiddling his thumbs the whole time like in that book Jarhead. So we wrote each other letters while he was in training, but then once he got to Iraq, it stopped. A couple emails, then nothing . . . until he called me from the airport in Atlanta, a year later. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d let it go. I thought I’d moved on. When I heard his voice on the phone, though, I sort of fell apart.”
“What did you think when he quit writing?” Rachel asked.
“Honestly? I thought he was dead. I mean, I read the lists for a few months and didn’t see his name, but how could I know? It was the not knowing that made it so bad. Finally I just clos
ed off the part of myself that cared.”
“Jesus.”
“Didn’t you call his parents or somebody?”
“He’s always been a loner. He never really talked about his parents much. I know his dad used to live somewhere near Tucson, and I’m not even sure where his mom’s at. He had some friends in college, the guys in his band and his stoner buddies, but they didn’t know any more than I did.”
The next picture showed a young Iraqi woman smiling uneasily at the camera, looking at something outside the picture’s frame. She wore loose orange prisoner pants and a Pantera shirt and her hair was streaked with blonde, dark roots growing out over platinum stripes. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty.
“That’s Connie,” Aaron said. “We called her Connie. She was in for theft, I think, but she was nice and spoke some English, so she got a lot of freedom. Click forward.”
The next picture was of Connie pulling her shirt up over her breasts, tugging the waist of her orange pants down to the top of her pubic hair.
“Two dolla. Some dudes paid five for the whole nude, but I dig how this one’s flirty, like she’s not showing you everything yet. She did other stuff, too, on the DL, but I wouldn’t touch that cooze with a ten-foot pole.”
“Other stuff?”
“Yeah. Command looked the other way as long as we kept it quiet.”
“What . . . what did she do with the money?”
“She hid it, saving it for when she got out. She had her own cell, for privacy. We took care of her, you know, treated her pretty good, gave her extra MREs, cigarettes, shit from Any Soldier packages back home. Connie was alright. Some of the Army bitches complained about the guys, you know, pimping her, but nothing ever really happened. It never went official.”
“That’s awful.”
“Oh, shit. You’re totally right. I’ll put it away, then.” Aaron reached for his thumb drive.
“No, wait,” Matt said. “It’s awful, but I think I should see it. So I know what it’s like. I should know what it’s like.”
“Your call, Chief. You wanna click forward?”
“Yeah,” Matt said, then regretted it.
A young, mustached Iraqi man lay naked on the floor of a cell, his face ruptured and bleeding, his hands secured behind his back with zip-ties. A soldier stood with one boot on the back of his neck, grinning at the camera.
“That’s Woolsley. We . . . he was stressing the prisoner, you know, in preparation for an information session, and the guy got a little crazy, so we . . . we kept running him into the bars until he fell over. Fucked him up pretty bad. He lost a bunch of teeth,” Aaron said, sliding his finger along the right side of his upper lip.
“Are these torture pictures?”
“I worked in detention.”
“Did you . . . torture . . . people?”
“Legally?”
“Were you actually involved in doing this?”
“I told you,” Aaron said. “I took pictures. Nobody’s making you look. All you gotta do is pull out. Listen. You think about it while I get another beer. You want one?”
“Uh . . . sure.”
Aaron got up and rummaged in the fridge while Matt stared at the man standing with his boot on the naked man’s neck, the naked man’s split lip and gashed face, his blood shiny on the concrete floor.
Aaron brought back two beers and handed one to Matt.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What?”
“In his butt. What is that?
“Oh, we made him stick a chemlight in his ass.”
“A what?”
“A chemlight. It’s a little plastic, you know, a glowstick. They’re about as big around as your thumb. You bend it and it breaks this glass capsule inside so it glows. It’s a chemical thing. It doesn’t really hurt, it’s just invasive, and the hadjis don’t know how the chemicals work so they freak the fuck out. But like I said, they’re not that big, so as long as you don’t tense up, it’s not painful.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ve had bigger shits. I mean, you get your prostate checked, right? It’s not any bigger than that. It’s just uncomfortable.”
“And humiliating.”
“Yeah, but so’s a fucking prostate exam.”
“I don’t think they’re the same.”
“It was standard operating procedure. Not a big deal.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“It gets better. Click forward.”
“Wait. I just . . . So . . . you tortured people?”
“Enhanced interrogation, technically. Whatever you want to call it, I told you, I fucking held the camera. How many times I gotta say that? Click forward.”
“I didn’t know what to think. All I could do was imagine the worst.”
“Oh, Wendy,” Rachel said, rubbing her shoulder.
“It’s just all so intense. After he called, after everything, after I thought he was dead, he’s alive again and we keep talking on the phone and I can’t stop thinking about him and I can’t sleep and I start thinking about moving back to Tucson or him moving here and basically I’m in this crazy emotional spiral for like a week and that’s part of why—I mean, I won’t say I went to Grand Junction Thursday explicitly planning to fuck David T. Greene, but I needed something, some kind of counterweight, some blockage to put between Aaron and me. Something to keep me from falling.”
Mel grunted.
“But when he showed up, I knew. I knew. I knew instantly that we’d have a good time but that was it. Because I just can’t. I’ve done this kind of thing and I can’t anymore. There’s something self-destructive in him, you know, that bad-boy thing, and the chaos energy’s thrilling, but there are limits.” Wendy looked into the fire. She picked up a stick and poked at the coals. “I don’t know. Sometimes I get the feeling he just doesn’t care what happens anymore. He didn’t used to be like that.”
“Like with Xena,” Mel said.
“That wasn’t his fault,” Rachel told her.
The next picture showed a naked Iraqi man wearing panties on his face, handcuffed to a metal grating on the wall, passed out and dangling by his hands. A tall Hispanic soldier stood next to him.
“I can’t remember this puck’s name. It was like Z something. Zabar . . . Zartan . . . Zazar . . . Anyway, that’s a stress position. You keep them handcuffed like that for hours. You don’t give them water, because if you do, they have to piss and then you have to unhook them and everything and it’s a huge hassle. You don’t feed them, either, because if you do that, then they have to shit. Click forward.”
“Can’t you go to the media or something?”
“Sure. You see this guy?” he pointed to the soldier in the photo.
“Yeah.”
“That’s Staff Sergeant Cortázar. He took us all aside after Abu G broke and—this conversation never officially happened, realize—and told us that because of one stupid shit, because of that blue falcon Joe Darby who turned in the photos, a whole bunch of good soldiers who did their jobs, who were doing what they were told, were now getting totally fucked by the system. It wasn’t their commanders getting punished, it wasn’t Dirty Sanchez or Rummy or Dubya, it was the men and women doing their jobs. And not only that, but this fuck Joe Darby was jeopardizing the whole intel-collection apparatus in Iraq, which put the lives of our fellow soldiers at risk. Those pictures fucked up the whole occupation. Fucking Joe Darby got American soldiers killed.”
“But . . .”
“We didn’t decide to do this shit. We didn’t ask for the torture detail. Staff Sergeant Cortázar told us to do this shit because Lieutenant Viers told him to do this shit, and Captain Weems, the company commander, told him to do this shit and so on up the fucking chain of command. Plus, our guidance with the OGA fucks was full cooperati
on. They say jump, we don’t ask how high, we don’t ask shit. We jump. Now these orders were put never in writing, realize. Everything was verbal. The OGA guys go straight back to Langley or whatever cesspool they ooze out of, and we’re their tools. We did what we were told to, just like those kids in Abu G. So Sergeant Cortázar is all like, here’s the deal. Think about this fact: if we decide to talk to somebody, show somebody pictures, we better damn well think about who exactly is going to be getting it in the ass. Bush? Rumsfeld? The general? The CO? Or your battle buddy?”
Aaron took a drink of beer. “The fact of the matter is, fucked up as it may be, most of these fucking hadjis didn’t know shit. I’d say the majority of them were locked up by mistake, or at best they were grunts who didn’t know their ass from al-Qaeda. It’s a little depressing when you think about it. But if I had a problem with what was going on—which I did, of course, I’m a red-blooded American, right?—then the time for me to address that was before I fucking did it, before it got done, or at the very least while it was happening. Not afterwards. Not later. Not now. Something else Sergeant Cortázar said that stuck with me is that once you make a decision, once you do something, you can’t take it back. And he’s right. You don’t get to say ‘Oh, wait, what I did was wrong, so now I want to get someone else in trouble so I can feel better.’ If it was wrong, it was wrong. But I did it. Nothing can change that. Click forward.”
Dahlia lay back in the grass, staring into a sky so black it was purple, watching Perseus and Cassiopeia chase each other across the galaxy. “Hey—you guys want to fire another bowl? Maybe do some shots?”
“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Let’s party like it’s 1999.”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said.
“Girl, you got to live a little,” Dahlia said. “It’s a gorgeous night, we’ve got plenty of stuff to keep us going, and when was the last time you partied till dawn? C’mon. Sunrise. I want to feel like I did something epic for once.”
“Let’s do it, man,” Mel said.
“Yeah,” said Wendy. “C’mon.”