The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  In the eye-stinging dust, I excavate the single crate of Kris’s stuff that I put here in March, already covered by a layer of strata. I rough up Kris’s folded army uniform as I grope through the odd shapes tumbling in my hands. As soon as I arrived back in New Jersey, I also e-mailed Kris’s staff sergeant, Benja, who had told me after the funeral to be in touch. I have, in fact, been severely out of touch.

  I said, This is Maddy, Kris Urquhart’s sister, remember me? How are you? Kris left me a note about a gift—you wouldn’t happen to know what it meant?

  I feel the cardboard edging of Kris’s journal slide against my fingers. I pull it out from deep in the crate, leaving a gaping wound made of knickknacks in its wake. The word PERSONAL scrawled across the front with a Sharpie made this journal impenetrable two months ago. Today I barely wince as I sit down in the dust, force the cover open, and begin to read.

  November 2, 2003

  God, no sleep; medical check, healthy enough to die. I have great life insurance (use it to bury me under a tree full of sleeping butterflies) and the lawyer has witnessed my will (Maddy, I bequeath to you my first bug net. Just throw the rest away). I have my Culture Smart Card, which makes me feel really fucking smart. Desert camos. Individual Body Armor. Kevlar gloves. Boots. Eyepro. Elbow pads. Knee pads. Throat protector. I have my M-4, seven magazines. Grenades. Water source. Knife. Flashlight. Compression bandage. Tourniquet. Earplugs. Fucking clue. Wait. Fucking clue?

  The chaplain told me to be ready to die. The sergeant told me to be ready to kill. What do I say? Love. I don’t really know what I mean.

  I’m not finished yet. I know how to stack with my buds, kick down a door, and raid the hell out of a house. I know how to cuff, blindfold, stay polite but make them pay. I know I should shoot anyone wearing a head covering and carrying a gun. If I consult my Culture Smart Card, I can remember how to say Hello, Good-bye, and that I should keep my left hand to myself. But it doesn’t tell me how to make a guy laugh. Like on purpose. God, I haven’t even left yet and I already don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

  November 12

  The wind is blowing. It’s not a clean wind. It smells like burning plastic, raw sewage, and smoke. The wind isn’t invisible either. It’s dust wind, grit-in-the-eyes wind. A wind that steals behind your back, like the ribby dogs who cower on the street corners. The wind won’t leave me alone. It has no decency, no sense of privacy. It’s inside my mouth, inside my eyelids. The softest toilet paper feels like sand. No wonder Iraqis use their hands.

  Rage at the wind raise arms shake yell stomp feet Is this Iraq? Iraq will be in my boots ten years in the future, rubbing against my toe. Iraq will make me close my eyes.

  It’s all over them, dirt in their kisses, their food, everything. Iraqis accept the invasion.

  Maybe that’s the American problem. We accept the wrong occupying force, and then we fight the wind.

  November 18

  I was on point. An antique knight, rigid under armor. NVG’s on my face. My gun weighs a ton and a half. Act I: we bust through the gate with the Humvee, dramatic, destructive. Do we need to play Mad Max? Is this the apocalypse, or could we just ask them to open it?

  Well, we didn’t. Act II: stack against the wall by the hole where the gate was. I’m on point so I go in. Courtyard—a bush with a smell I know, night and silence. Now the door, metal grated unlocked and behind that wood. I’m so full of adrenaline I kick it and it flies open. They’re standing there waiting for us. Four men, all of them skinny, two in black robes and two in pants and collar shirts. Benja begins to talk to them in English—Everyone in the main room here—and then when they don’t move he points and gestures and says Sit, sit. The back of the house no sound but people, women and children hunkered behind tables and beds, their eyes averted as we order them to the front. A rough circle, the family, all eyes on us now. One man is afraid. The young woman pissed as hell but trying not to show it. The littlest one doesn’t get it. He starts to smile, then looks at the woman and goes blank. I can go around the room, seeing into them, and then wham I hit one pair of eyes like a car wreck. He’s in the corner and at first I think there must be a shadow cast from somewhere. But there’s not. Except from inside him, a shadow so opaque I can’t see a single thing that makes him human. When I first burst in, so full of stress hormones my head was ringing, the conquering lord, it would have been easy to hurt them. Why? Because I could. Because it would hurt. And then I saw the shadow, a black hole, all the light sucked down into antimatter. I had been in some kind of play, but the parts fell away from each other, the actor lost his voice midsentence, the scene scattered and swirled toward blackness.

  Act III (dénouement): We searched the house. We ripped open chairs and drawers and the TV and the back shed. We found an unregistered gun and a cell phone faceplate. We arrested the men, him included. The old women began to wail. The one who was afraid before turned to rage. And the shadowed one—nothing.

  We won, right? We found the enemy. But looking back as I write, I know they won. Because of the shadow. Because he didn’t let us in.

  BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005

  My hotel sits by the river in the heart of Baghdad, ringed by tall cement barricades and sandbags. On the way there I got the drive-by tour of downtown: bombed-out buildings with no roofs. Crumbled half walls, inside them the leftovers of people’s lives, the part no one wanted to take away, broken chairs or burned fabric, shattered glass. Cement crumbling like an ancient ruin, but not ancient at all. A modern ruin, ruined just yesterday.

  The hotel is full of journalists and has a pool, of all things, and simple wooden furnishings, a brown bedspread and a balcony where I can look out over the city. I was supposed to share the room with a volunteer from Citizens of Iraq in Need, the NGO that got me my visa, but she hasn’t shown up so I stand alone on the balcony listening to the distant sound of sniper fire. There is a view of other brown hotels, an unexpected abundance of palm trees, arched windows, yellow minarets, and then behind them the green river bending between cemented banks.

  Below me and past the barricades I see a woman walking with a child, a thin boy with no shoes wearing a torn pair of blue pants and a polo shirt that might have once been white. The woman walks with long, fast strides, her head down and her face obscured under her black abaya. The boy makes skipping half steps as he hurries to keep up with her. A story below me, a silent movie, the plot of which I can only guess. Where do you need to go that’s as important as your life? Maybe food trumps a suicide bomb. Maybe sickness or a lead on a lost relative is worth getting kidnapped. I wouldn’t know.

  Baghdad is a city of cafés, of rows of awnings where people sit head-to-head over a cup of strong coffee and talk politics, critique an art show, or argue about the Koran. That is the city that lies underneath the city today, a past so recent the ground almost bulges up with it. The cafés have no glass in their front windows, and who would dare to go anyway? Not the journalists who stay here. Not the locals, or even the militia.

  Later by the pool, I listen as a group of journalists on the plastic lawn chairs discuss where their security teams have told them they can or can’t be today, who needs to stay inside, who needs to get on an airplane and head home. I sit across the pool from them on the hot cement with my feet in the water. No one told me to bring a bathing suit. One of the journalists, a man about my age with dark hair, a thick British accent, and a cocktail clutched in his hand, calls out across the water, “What brings you to the Garden of Eden, darling?”

  I say, “I’m working for CIIN, an NGO, and—”

  He cuts me off. “Don’t be stupid, missy. Do you read the news? Marla Ruzbika?”

  “Well, I came because I—”

  “You should take one more chance, you should take that airport road one more time and get yourself home.” He sways a little in his chair as he continues. “Game’s up, see? No time for making nicey-nice.” He takes a gulp of his drink and turns to his friends.

  I shake my hea
d and kick the water with my feet. Listen to these men, swapping stories about their days out there, in the world beyond the barricades, voices full of drunken after-the-fact bravado. I already know I’m stupid. Stupid as them.

  The man turns toward me again. “Too much chlorine in the pool, you know. Makes your skin itch.”

  What kind of life is this? I edge forward on the cement until my body drops into the water, my clothes ballooning around me. The sun sparkles on the ripples I make, a kaleidoscope. The journalist shakes his head and draws on his drink again. He has no further comebacks.

  Chaos reigns here in Baghdad. Chaos is the leader of the city, the decision maker, the steady force that holds us together. Does that make chaos our friend? I haven’t been here long enough to decide but my hunch is that a lot of people would rather die than swear allegiance to this new dictator, this faceless brutal tyrant.

  NEW JERSEY—MAY 2005

  I brought Mrs. Bird lilies this time. I don’t know why. The purple crocuses in her driveway have turned to long leaves that could be mistaken for overgrown grass. Now I see rhododendrons, irises, and red columbines bouncing in the breeze of the car as I pull by.

  Between the circle at the end of the drive and the front door I climb five stone steps, the kind that have been set perfectly in place without any cement to bind them, and then take a walkway that is made of the same kind of rock. The rocks I walk on are smoothed by generations of footsteps. A little wall runs alongside the stairs and all the way to where it expands outward, in the shape of the big bang or maybe a mother’s arms, opening to the front lawn and the porch.

  Mrs. Bird rises from her chair on the sunny porch and in response to my armload of lilies, says, “Let me get a vase.”

  I follow her down the long hall and into the kitchen, which is opposite the parlor and study. She has a surprisingly modern kitchen with a big island, stainless appliances, and lights that are inset in little buckets, too bright to stare at. She pulls a blown-glass vase out of a cupboard, fills it with water, drops in a sprinkle of sugar, and begins to snip the ends, quickly, like she’s done this a million times before. When she drops the flowers in she jostles them until they perform.

  I carry the vase out across the hall to the study, and she directs me to put them on the coffee table as she prepares our tea. The lilies loom up between us, pink and white, their stamens stretched like butterfly tongues out of the powdery centers. They seem bigger than they need to be, beautiful but awkward. I should have just gotten some pale roses and baby’s breath. Why did I get lilies? Lilies are for funerals. I’m always looking for an alternative to now, and ignoring the beauty that exists right outside the door.

  I look across at Mrs. Bird, a little embarrassed, but she seems unfazed by this display, or by her position nearly buried behind the bouquet. As she hands me my cup, she speaks as if in response to my thoughts. “You’ve brought the fullness of summer right into my home. What’s the occasion?”

  She’s smiling. Her face stretches into its lines, the kind that don’t snap back even when she stops. There are other lines, too. I wonder how she earned them.

  “I guess I wanted to thank you for listening to me whine.”

  “For what? I’m glad you show up on my doorstep and keep me company once in a while. Anyway, you could pick some flowers from my garden. I hardly see what grows there anymore.”

  I take a sip of tea. Then, maybe to avoid the issue, I announce, “I got a job.”

  “Oh! You’re staying this time.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silence.

  It was just the other day, when I was walking down by Kris’s apartment again. I found myself drawn by the Help Wanted sign in the window of a restaurant around the corner. The sign hung by the door, the cheap plastic kind on a suction cup. Everything else was elegant. Little round tables covered with white linens. Cloth napkins. The plates had a thin band of taupe around the edge.

  It was midafternoon and there was only one customer. A beautiful man with long fingers sat by the window and looked out past me, the angle of his gaze so close I could pretend I knew him. I could almost feel his breath through the window. The sun was bright and wan, gathering strength for the year, losing it for the day. He couldn’t see me through the sunlight. There was an empty plate on his table, along with a half-drunk cup of black coffee. He’d eaten all his food. Every crumb.

  Suddenly he turned and looked straight at me. He couldn’t see clearly with the sun behind me. His face was direct, brown eyes. No, he could see, he could see me. I looked down, then stepped back until he would have had to turn his head around, maybe even his chair, to keep looking at me. I looked up. He had turned, and was smiling, not in welcome but maybe in amusement.

  My game was lost. I turned from the man and faced the sun. There’s no joy now in being noticed. Safety is in what I can see.

  “I consider waitressing a short-term commitment.” I look at the lilies again. Like teenage girls, they are a bit too much for themselves. They don’t want to thank you, they want to flatter you and then run. You know I like to make friends and then abandon them. You know I want to set fire to my family. And maybe even that I want to set fire to this, to you, to everything you pry open.

  “Your mother misses you when you’re gone, you know.” I look straight at her. She gives me that curious look, the one that makes me want to unfurl and hide at the same time. “Maybe I’ll stay. Maybe not.”

  The day before yesterday, which was three days after I saw that Help Wanted sign in the window, I rented an apartment across the street from the restaurant. I took Kris’s crate down from the attic, borrowed a set of sheets from Mom, and moved in. Mom would hardly look at me. I left the room in her house meticulous, dusted every surface, washed the windows and the mirror, vacuumed, stripped the bed. I can’t stand the thought that she’ll go in after me and clean a single speck, and curse me for it, because it’s the only revenge she knows. I’m reversing a black hole, a place where mementos, clothes, thoughts, even Kris’s death itself, have been stashed away. Against her will I will ferret out the specks of brightness that have been sucked in and pooled at the bottom.

  “When you’re running so fast, it can be hard to see the love that’s there. Love gets blurry when you run.”

  “I run because I want to be happy. Not because of love.”

  Mrs. Bird’s eyes crinkle up. “Interesting distinction.”

  Love? Distinction? I’m just a bombshell. I set fire to everything I love. I say, “I told Mom when I was nineteen that I wanted to be happy.”

  “Oh?”

  “She told me that life’s not about being happy.”

  “That’s a great way to alienate a teenager.”

  “Yeah. So I ran.” Toward all corners of the planet. Away from commitment, from the force that used its pretty face to maim what is vulnerable. I’ve run all the way to Kris’s funeral and a few steps past. “And you’re right, I guess, it’s hard to see straight at high speed.”

  “So you know what you want, but not where it is.”

  I study the paintings of flowers above us. The gold blotches, random but perfect. “I don’t really know what I want either. Something amorphous. Happiness?”

  “Is there anything concrete about it?”

  I smile unexpectedly. “When I was little. Pineapple weed growing between the ruts in the driveway. A bar of soap. The light through the leaves made shadows on the trail behind the house.”

  “I’m sure those things still exist.”

  “Staring at shadows? That wouldn’t make me happy anymore.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t. But being a grown-up doesn’t have to mean forgetting where you are on a spring day. Does that make you happy?”

  “Sometimes it does, as a matter of fact.” I stare at her now. “And what about you? Are you happy?”

  “I think I am.” Mrs. Bird closes her eyes and sits back in her chair. Then she opens them and looks back at me. “I find it’s really about my expect
ations.”

  Do we suffer because we expect pain? But while I’m searching for a comeback, my Gypsy grandma walks in and knocks me right out of my agenda. I can almost see her. She’s smaller than Mrs. Bird. She wears a black dress and pull-up nylons that show at the knees. Mrs. Bird doesn’t welcome her. I imagine she would go to the corner, to a chair by the fireplace, and stand partway behind it, as if waiting for an invitation to sit.

  “Mom said Grand-mère warned her. That Grandma would steal the china off your table if you had her for tea.”

  Mrs. Bird sniffs and turns her head. She talks to my image of Grandma, over by the mantel, still standing. “Your Grand-mère held some strong opinions.”

  Grandma has something in her hands, a little box. She lifts it against her chest and holds it there. I have the feeling that if I knew what it was, I would know what to say to Mrs. Bird right now. But I don’t, so instead I say, “If you mess up your life—if you mess up someone else’s—why would you end up with joy?”

  Mrs. Bird holds her back straight in her chair. She says, “Suffering happens. But it’s not the same thing as unhappiness.”

  “I’m not seeing your distinction.”

  “Then rearrange your definition. Happiness is a natural state of being. Everyone deserves it, even if everyone doesn’t find it.” She waves her hand dismissively at the invisible guest.

  “Okay, then what’s the magic pill? How do you translate the sabotage of your loved ones into something pretty?”

  “Consider this.” She puts down her tea, leans in, and makes sure I’m looking. “What would it mean to you to meet a truly happy person? I mean a really radiant, alive, happy person. Would you expect them to never have suffered?”

  “No. But—”

  “Would you say to yourself, Boy, I hope they’ve never taken a wrong step? Would you turn your back on them if they had? Or would you be inspired? Would you learn? Would it help you heal?”