War Porn

by Roy Scranton

  “You got a motorcycle?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’d always wanted one, and when I got back from Iraq I just bought it. You have to know what you want, right, and when you figure it out, you have to grab it. What else is there?”

  She nodded at this, biting her lip, brushing his arm with hers. At a certain point, climbing down a pair of small boulders, he offered her his hand for assistance and when she came down she held on to it and deep in the canyon, stars overhead, they stood as if in another world and looked in each other’s eyes. She felt a little dizzy and he leaned in close, closer, she could feel the warmth of his body and his breath on her lips, closer, she closed her eyes and he pressed his palm on her hip, she could feel him just back teasing her, holding, then, aloft, she rose up and kissed him.

  Matt walked along the hardpack. From up here, the moon-colored blue plateau seemed nearly endless until in the distance buttes and spires erupted from the flats like exclamations breaking a sentence. His brain didn’t seem to be working. Nothing worked. Who the fuck did he think. The fuck. Them. The problem was rubbing a spot clean, clear away the crosshatching, the problem was silence and noise. Once things were silent he’d be able to see the solution, as they say, clearly, but there was too much noise. Thinking thoughts like. Impossible.

  Something startled in a bush nearby.

  I should go back, he thought. I should go back and tell Aaron he’s no longer welcome. I can tell everyone about the pictures. Tell him he has to leave. And if he hits me? Then I’ll hit him back. No I wouldn’t. I’d lie on the ground and they’d laugh and he’d leave with Dahlia and Wendy and the other two, they’d go off and have an orgy. Or what if I told everyone and they ignored me? Do they already know? Maybe they already know. How can you know what other people know?

  Everything noise and fuzz. Her you. Remember that time we went to Taos and slept in a teepee? Or the hot springs we went to naked? Maybe I should just go talk to her. Be reasonable. Just sit and talk and work it out. Explain. Decode. I know you’re upset. I know it’s my fault. Just tell me what you want, so I can fix it. I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me. Help me be good to you. Help me.

  He stumbled into a gully and sat against the side, his legs splayed before him, lying staring at the sky. Now there’s Virgo. That wasn’t Virgo earlier. That was Lyra? Hydra? It’s not Virgo now, that’s Orion, and before it was Pegasus. Really I was supposed to be an astronaut. I was meant to be the guy who zoomed into the future, the one floating in space, but I never could be an astronaut. Maybe I’ll never be anything. Maybe I’m cursed. Maybe it really is all my fault. If so, what’s the point of fighting it? What’s the point of fighting anything? Nothing. I’ve never done good things. I’ve never done bad things. What’s worth hurting for?

  Dahlia sank back onto the gray comforter and pulled him down on top. She bit his lip, dug nails in his back. He licked the salt off her neck. Rough hands up under her dress, tanned hands on white thighs, fierce hands tugging her tank top, pressing her breasts. Yes, she said yes, yes, she slid her hands down the muscles of his torso, his chest and ribs, she grabbed at his pants and fumbled with his zipper. She took him in her hand, the tense heat. He pulled off her tank top then undid her bra and was at her nipples with his teeth. She said yes, yes. She felt herself burning with life, alive like the world, fire and blood. He slid his hands under her skirt and pulled her briefs off and threw them on the floor. He sucked her tongue. Rubbing her crotch with his palm and thumb, he slid one then two knuckles deep and she said yes, oh god, yes. She pulled away and stretched, reaching for the nightstand, opening a drawer and pulling out a condom. She handed it to him. He stood up.

  “You ever been tied up?” he asked.

  She sat up and looked into his eyes, then smiled and took him in her mouth. She slid on him and sucked and licked, rubbed and pulled. Then she let go and looked up.

  “Tie me up,” she whispered. “Tie me up and fuck me.”

  He reached over to the phone and pulled out its cord, then yanked the cord from the wall. He walked around the bed and told her to lie down across it.

  “Make me,” she said.

  He smiled and shoved her back.

  She fell, looking up at him. He took her hands and tied them together over her head with the phone cord, looped the cord through the metal base-frame, tied it.

  “That’s really tight,” she said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s tight.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, then kissed her, their faces upside down to each other, and went back around the other side. He knelt on the floor in front of her and pulled up her skirt and she opened her thighs around his face. He burrowed in, spreading her wetness around, tasting deep. She moaned again, bucked her hips, wanted to reach and grab his hair but with her hands tied and beginning to tingle she couldn’t.

  “Fuck me,” she said, “oh please, please fuck me.”

  “Yeah,” he said, pulling away. He kissed the flower tattoo on her hip. “I’m gonna fuck you.”

  “I want you in me.”

  “You like to be tied up, huh?”

  “I’m so wet, god, please fuck me now.”

  “You like getting fucked all tied up, huh?”

  “Yes, please, fuck me. C’mon and fuck me.”

  “Yeah,” he said, then grabbed her by the thighs and flipped her over on her front. He pulled her toward him along the bed till the phone cord stretched taut and she was kneeling at the edge of the mattress, her knees on the ground. She looked back at him as he lifted her skirt up over her ass.

  “Put the condom on and fuck me,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing her hips, sliding a finger inside her. The same finger he pressed against her asshole, rubbing it between her buttocks, and she jerked.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Shhh.”

  “No, really, hey.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, rubbing the wetness around her sphincter, then pushing his finger in.

  “No. No. I said no.”

  “It’s good.”

  “No wait a minute,” she said, going cold inside. “Untie me.”

  “It’s good,” he said again. “Tight.”

  “No, seriously, untie me.”

  His left hand slid along the line of her jaw, his finger brushing her lips. Then he clutched her face and pressed hard in her cheek where her jaw met her skull, cracking her mouth open. He swept her briefs up off the floor and crammed them in her mouth and held them there with one hand while she bucked and tried to scream. He grabbed her top with his other hand and looped it around her mouth, cinching it tight like a bit and double-knotting it at the back of her skull.

  “Shush now. You know this is just what you wanted.”

  She felt him get up from behind her. She writhed, wailed muffled shouts, trying to get free. Over her shoulder she could see him digging in her dresser and she kicked and bounced until she was on her back facing him. He had a bunch of her tights in his hands. She tried to shout and curse through the gag—her taste—choking on spit and cotton. She tried to scream.

  “Roll back over,” he said, grinning, taking her by the ankles and flipping her smoothly. She kicked, shrieked into the gag, but his hands held her like cuffs. He pulled her legs up in the air, forcing her weight onto her neck, and she howled in pain. She tried to kick back but had no leverage; he’d pinned her legs in his armpit. He secured her ankles together with a pair of tights, then dropped her to the mattress, her knees slamming to the floor, and climbed on top of her. He used another pair of tights to reinforce the gag.

  He grabbed her hard by the back of the neck, forcing her nose into the comforter. She inhaled the gray fabric, trying to breathe, could feel him on her, his flesh dense and burning. “Shhhhh. It’s okay now. It’s okay. I saw you looking. I saw you and knew what you wanted. It’s gonna be
okay. Hush now,” he whispered, “or I’ll knock your fucking daylights out.”

  She was sobbing, trying to talk, trying to say no, don’t, stop, please no. Trying to get free but feeling her will evacuate, weakening by the moment. He slapped her in the back of the head and told her to hush, then grabbed her neck and squeezed hard.

  She went slack. Gray. Feeling herself rattle loose from herself, thinking: who’s this happening to—the room going out of focus, the gray fabric blurring. Thinking: who decides things. Thinking: where’s Matt, and what happened, and who is this. How? Who? What’s happening and who to, yes, no. Whose body? No. Who makes choices? No. It’s not me. Not mine. No. No.

  •••

  When he was done, he found a kitchen knife and cut the phone cord from the bed frame, got dressed, and walked through the house, dim and blue in the early morning, then out the back, past the fridge and blank-faced computer, past Xena watching him from the floor, into the yard where the dying embers of last night’s fire smoldered in whitened ash.

  A moment of indecision caught him there amid the party detritus, the empty beer bottles, the grease thick on the grill’s black rack, the complicated flowers on the table, then he went back out the way he came, through the gate, got on his motorcycle, and rolled past all the quiet houses rustling to wake now on Columbus Day, past the silver-black gleam of picture windows and past the yellow light shining from a kitchen or bathroom where some early-rising citizen prepared for the day. At the bottom of the lane, he turned west.

  Bleeding over the redrock, dawn spilled across the land. Monument Valley was out there somewhere, where they’d shot all those old cowboy flicks, and in the south an isolate line of mountains massed white-capped and gray. To the north, the valley narrowed to a chasm, rust-colored cliffs closing in over the Colorado, then the highway climbed out of the gorge, past the turnoff to Dead Horse Point, and up onto the plateau, opening to flat land.

  Silent where he’d left her, cut loose and curled in a wounded ball, Dahlia opened her eyes.

  babylon

  Put forth your strength: bureaucratic construction now holding the soldier and man of no tomorrow

  over black seas under nay, we used not to call upon IED attacks and suicide

  bombs youngexulted in

  documents detailing Takbir, gates of hell abide therein, torture and pass along main supply

  Allah true.

  So think of the Department of artillery, tank rounds and die, city to kill, employed to carry out the strike. The occupations fight

  special officers definitely better than we

  gulf with significant success

  more than 12 hours. “But I think massive aerial strikes that many here said before pilots aboard the USS last week ahead for Iraq’s interim also went to Baghdad University or the senior Library at Basra and Command Council issues wrote about the case of an Iraqi man who . . .”

  again the same, certain we send apostles by bench in water and urine

  dull rumbling tingling command of Allah

  lost. This statement has Iraq’s major museums and libraries retribution and that time is despite detainees, in addition, material assets oh yeah, she’s bomb. “We’re hit,” the voice and angle measurement with his eyes I left uptown, 29, of Lomira, Wisconsin. ‘Babylonian’ mathematics jump the gun, groups of insurgents took over common the wooden mountain of Placus and should be allowed in. End of fucking where they killed seven, a child—ill-starred sire of an ill-starred care many push-ups you can do from the ambush into the house when we need you to kill somebody, a sorrowing widow in your house. The ancient culture is kill them. Yet as a mere infant

  now that you are, kill

  the first days after the war. Even though he escaped the action began at 5, his life henceforth one of labor and killing two GIs and wounding mellow, spaced out from waiting, says the sheikh the police shocked the motorist down the road.

  In-depth oral history of the war based on interviews with political leaders between the sexes in Punic gulf any civic. These shall enter the garden resistance and US forces killed at least

  the light of his sky

  another in the fire, then the secret one read by Jordan, a lot of pressure to produce and other interrogation centers how is it that here in Babylon, I call you to occupy and said no title to be called to, Abdul told Al Jazeera TV

  under control

  a strategy of weakness. By late summer pointed to the breast which had suckled him. Officials expected to start drawing down Hector, my son, but occupation forces of no more than 30,000 Americans comfort from my own bosom, 130,000 troops, loosing the initiative to protect us from this man; stand not nowhere and after carrying out its increasingly managed disappearance, intelligence officers kill me as easily as though there is no parleying with him for some rock TV

  incidence of penetrating wounds. Better fight at once, gunshot wounds, shrapnel injuries or blast thus did he stand and ponder the heart, but Achilles required far more frequently than in civilian

  taking

  up, I begin to

  feel

  of holes

  Fort Sill—Berlin—New York, 2005–2015

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been a long time coming. I began writing it in 2005, while still in the Army, and finished the first draft in 2007, after having moved to New York City. Its journey to publication—and into its present form—has been circuitous and difficult, with many obstacles and hazards along the way, but also with many friends and allies who by their close reading helped make the work better, and who by their support helped keep it alive.

  My greatest thanks go to my editor at Soho Press, Mark Doten. His ambitious vision for War Porn was a refining volcano, and his insight, care, and boldness have been been fresh air and cool water to a parched and weary traveler. I can’t thank him enough. I’m also immensely grateful to Bronwen Hruska, Amara Hoshijo, Abby Koski, Rachel Kowal, Gary Stimeling, and everybody at Soho: a truly exemplary publishing team. I feel very lucky to have wound up working with people who care so deeply about books—as provocations, as contributions to a conversation, and as works of art. Thank you.

  Many thanks to early readers Helen Benedict, Peter Blackstock, E. L. Doctorow, Jim Fitzgerald, Matt Gallagher, Travis Just, Phil Klay, Kseniya Melnik, Shakir Mustafa, Nawal Nasrallah, Hilary Plum, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Jacob Siegel, J.W., and Martin Woessner. Further, I am awed and amazed by the consistently superhuman levels of patience, acumen, and brilliance my partner, Sara Marcus, has been able to access reading and rereading this book. I owe whatever is beautiful or humane in it—or in myself—to her wisdom, perspicacity, and love.

  In 2014, I had the chance to go back to Baghdad for Rolling Stone. This visit was an important experience in its own right, but it also helped me rework the middle chapters of this book with a more informed eye. Thanks to Will Dana for making the trip happen, to Alison Weinflash for arranging the logistics, and to Phoebe St. John for her painstaking fact checking. Special thanks go to everyone who helped me connect with people in Iraq and to the Iraqis and journalists there who took the time to talk with me: Isra Abdulhadi, Samr Abdul-Satar, Ghadah Abdul-Sattar, Ali Adhab, Sarem Dakhel Ahmed, Jane Arraf, Raad al-Azzur, Hassan Blasim, Matt Bradley, Hanaah Edwar, Borzou Daragahi, Haider Falih, Dexter Filkins, Alice Fordham, Haider Hashim, Naseer Hassan, Ahmed Farouk Lafta, Quil Lawrence, Christopher Merrill, Nadia Fayidh Mohammed, Soheil Najam, Ayman Oghanna, Ned Parker, Methaq Waleed, Kael Weston, the English students at Mustansiriyah University, and all the others on Mutannabi Street, in the Shorja Market, and at the polls in al-Saydiya. I am especially grateful to my interpreter on that trip, Aziz Alwan, may he rest in peace, and to my driver, Ahmed Qusay: brave, courteous, patient, and streetwise, they guided me through the labyrinth. I would have been lost without them.

  My first visit to Baghdad, from 20
03 to 2004, was a very different kind of labyrinth, and relied on a different network of support. Thanks to Lieutenant Chiarrez, Staff Sergeant Hayes, Homan, Lieutenant Juarez, Sergeant First Class Mitchell, Nick Lehman (RIP), “Smokey” Robinson, Timmy Shore, and Javier Velasco for helping me stay alive and sane out there. FTA 4evah.

  Bits of this book were published in different form in canon, CITY, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo 2013), the New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Theory and Event, and Warrior Writers. These parts are reprinted here with grateful acknowledgment.