Fobbit

by David Abrams

  Chance Gooding Jr. was sitting on the edge of his bed reading Don Quixote when he felt the urge to start clearing his throat. Then he noticed it was getting harder to breathe, as if the air was thickening. He got up and opened his door. He was met with a wall of orange-brown air. It was a dust blizzard.

  He couldn’t see his neighbor’s trailer fifteen feet away. At some point while he had been deep in Cervantes, the wind had kicked up, stirring all the talcum-powder dirt around Baghdad. Now it was filtering through the vents in Gooding’s air-conditioning and laying a fine grit over everything in the room, starting with his respiratory system. He turned off his air conditioner and tried to go to sleep. But he woke two hours later, burning with the heavy air; each particle of dust was an ember, each breath was a suck of stifle. In the morning, his throat was raspy and there were mucus flakes in the hollows of his eyes.

  He wasn’t the only one to suffer through the simoom. Plenty of other Fobbits spent the day choking, complaining, and walking with an exaggerated forward hunch. By lunchtime, the air was hot and thick with turmoiled dust. The sky turned orange as cream of tomato soup.

  Major Flip Filipovich had been in the fitness center when the simoom hit, the wind howling and scraping across the Quonset hut’s metal curve. The guy who ran the fitness center —a real prick who hardly ever spoke to Filipovich—dashed around the room, stuffing towels into the gaps between walls and floor, saying in a contrived British accent, “Oh, bloody hell, bloody hell!”

  When Flip emerged from the moist, stenchy interior, his skin slicked from fifty minutes of intense carb burning on the treadmill, he had a nasty surprise. He was instantly coated with the airborne dust, his chocolate skin turning orange in a matter of a minute. He wasn’t wearing goggles so he was forced to put an arm in front of his face as he made his way back to his hooch, looking for all the world like goddamn Laura Ingalls Wilder in goddamn Little House on the Fucking Prairie during a blizzard. He was not happy, not in the least fucking little bit. Now he’d have to shower all over again before reporting for his shift at Headquarters. And no guarantee he wouldn’t get caked with orange again during the short walk between his hooch and the palace.

  Two days after the start of the simoom, Chance Gooding’s sand-wracked throat and serial sneezes had turned to the flu and then one day he woke up with a cramped stomach and waves of nausea whirling through his body. He simultaneously gritted his teeth to keep the rising bile down and clenched his buttocks to keep the descending liquidity of his shit sucked up.

  He knew exactly what had happened. The previous day, he’d come back from a morning run around Z Lake and, gasping strings of saliva, had headed straight for the water distribution point where the Twees handed out bottles of water from the depths of their chilled trailer, which was crusted with thick frost.

  “You wanting water, yes?” asked the young brown man (Filipino? Pakistani?) standing in the frozen doorway.

  “Yes,” Gooding panted.

  “You wait. I get.”

  Seconds later, the Twee came back out, holding a bottle by its screw cap between his begrimed fingers. Gooding was too winded and drained from the run and the flu to care about this lack of hygiene. As he grabbed the bottle and unscrewed the cap for a series of throat-pounding gulps, he was also too endorphin-delirious to realize the cap had not been sealed and was most likely a reused bottle that the pecan-colored Twee—another ambitious young entrepreneur forced to take cost-cutting measures where he could—had refilled with water from a garden hose.

  Gooding hobbled back to his trailer, wrote a few lines in his diary concerning the mists rising off the lake “which dissipated like Saddam’s regime itself,” then showered and headed for the palace, where he faced another thirteen hours of keyboard banging and answering Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad’s beck and call.

  He didn’t make it through the entire thirteen hours, however. His bowels had been clenched by hot, scaly fingers shortly after the morning Battlefield Update Briefing. Gasping and groaning, he rushed down the hallway to the latrine, barely getting his drawers around his ankles and settling his ass on the seat before he released a tooth-grinding torrent of shit into the toilet bowl. For a few seconds, his head went dark and stars prickled his vision. He sat there moaning on the toilet seat for fifteen minutes before he thought it was safe to stand up and leave.

  And so it had gone for the rest of the day until he’d been certain there was nothing left inside—but no, wait . . . here it came again!—and he’d walked back down the hall as fast as he could with a clenched asshole, which by now was thoroughly abraded and exhausted by the repeated wiping it had endured throughout the day.

  Major Filipovich had been his usual cheery, concerned self: “Fucking A, Sergeant Gooding, you’re about the greenest white guy I’ve ever seen. What’s gotten into you? Or, should I say, what’s gotten out of you?”

  “Har, har, sir.” Chance swallowed to suppress the bile rising in his throat like a hot thermometer. “Bad water is my guess.”

  “I told you to stay away from the Twees and their tap water, didn’t I?”

  “You did, sir.”

  “Well now you’re finding out the hard way.” Filipovich grinned and held up his lunch in the Styrofoam container he’d just brought back from the dining facility. “Hey, want a bite to eat?” The sausage link and boiled cabbage were still steaming and entered fully into Chance’s nostrils as Filipovich held it out to him.

  That’s when Gooding completely lost it, grabbing for the garbage can and hurking a stringy yellow stream of bile onto a sheaf of discarded press releases and Sig Acts.

  Harkleroad sent him home, saying they’d “get by somehow” until Specialist Carnicle came on shift in five hours, and insisted he go on sick call in the morning if he wasn’t feeling better.

  Fifteen hours later, he was not feeling better, no, not at all. His body brought him back awake at 4:30, a full two hours before the medics opened for sick-call patients.

  Later, he would type these words into his diary:

  To write about one’s bowels is an embarrassing thing. But in this case it is necessary, in order to understand how I came to shed blood for the first—and hopefully the last—time here in Iraq. I woke up at 4:30, my body weakened from having continuously emptied itself for the last twenty-one hours. At any minute, I expected to start crapping out my stomach lining since there wasn’t so much as a crumb of food left inside me. Because the medical aid station didn’t open for another two hours, all I could do was lay there, moaning and writhing. There might have even been some gnashing of teeth. There was certainly much cursing of Twees who fill water bottles from garden hoses. Finally, when it was time, I got dressed and walked down to the aid station, which was in a trailer nine rows away. The wind was howling—okay, maybe not quite howling, but certainly letting out a mournful moan or two—and visibility was down to fifteen feet. We were smack dab in the midst of the season of dust storms that transform our little American enclave into a foreign landscape. There was so much dust (and particles of whatever crap—literally—had been stirred up and carried here from the city) that the morning sun burned everything a bright salmon-orange. Baghdad was in full-on Mars mode. I was forced to walk hunched over (which was okay by my already sore abdomen) and hold my arm in front of my face. I felt like an actor in an old MGM movie wandering the desert in search of the Lost Platoon, or maybe he’s chasing some Arab marauders who have made off with a distressed damsel, and for every two staggering steps forward he is forced to take one back, and all the time the actor is thinking to himself that if he can just make it through this scene, then C. B. DeMille will yell “Cut!” and the studio grips will turn off those giant fans and the back lot will return to normal and they can all go to the studio commissary and have midmorning martinis. I struggled through the storm and finally made it to the aid station, worried I might have contracted emphysema en route.

  Gooding, coughing simoom dust, mounted the wooden steps and opened the trail
er door to an empty waiting room. This was his first time at the aid station—he prided himself on being the kind of Fobbit who worked so hard he didn’t have time to worry about sniffles or coughs—and he was surprised by how cramped and threadbare the doctor’s office seemed to be at first glance. A row of plastic orange chairs lined one wall, facing a small table with a computer and a vomit spill of papers and files. On the wall above, there was a dry-erase board that charted patient intake and time of release (blank at this point); in one corner, someone had drawn a daisy with a smiley face and written SHIQUANDA WAS HERE. The place smelled like dried blood on week-old bandages. Also, a little minty. A fluorescent light flickered and buzzed overhead. But that was it, nothing else in this room. Not even a pile of year-old magazines.

  “What the hell kind of rinky-dink operation are they running here?” Gooding muttered. Then, overcome by a fresh wave of nausea, he slumped into a nearby seat. His M16 thumped to the ground and he held his head in his hands, waiting for the sickness to pass.

  He heard someone come out of a room at the rear of the trailer and walk across the creaking floor.

  “Help you, Sar’nt?”

  Gooding looked up through the lace of his fingers. It was Specialist Blodgett, a guy he recognized from the support platoon, a medic who also happened to be one of the laziest, fattest slobs in the company. Gooding remembered seeing Blodgett on the monthly “esprit de corps” runs back at Fort Stewart (which he liked to call “spirit of the corpse” runs due to the lack of any real camaraderie generated by jogging six miles in the Georgia heat). Blodgett was always at the back of the pack, barely moving his feet above an Airborne shuffle as the other two hundred members of the company outpaced him down the road. It wasn’t until they were back at the field outside company headquarters and the commander was wrapping up his falsely cheerful motivational speech that Blodgett would finally come into view, by this time walking across the field, blowing hard and shaking his thick, reddened head from side to side. He was a medic, for fuck’s sake! He should have been one of the healthiest soldiers in the company. Physician, heal thyself!

  “Help you?” he repeated, his sausage-y fingers poised with a pen over a clipboard.

  “I’m sick,” Gooding said.

  “Yeah, no shit, Sar’nt. You and every other person who walks through that door.”

  “But I’m really sick.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Blodgett admitted. “Your gills do look a little green. Here—” he held out the clipboard “—need you to fill out some basic information then we’ll get you triaged, ’kay?”

  Gooding nodded and took the clipboard. As he was filling out the intake form, the door banged open with a howl of wind and another soldier stumbled inside, crying out, “Fucking A! Goddamned wind nearly ripped off my fucking face out there.” He slammed the door shut behind him and unwrapped the scarf from around his mouth, then announced to the room, “I’m sick!”

  Blodgett called over his shoulder to someone in the back room, “Hey, it looks like we got us an epidemic on our hands—now there’s two people out here who say they’re sick. Oh, me, oh, my! Whatever will we do?”

  A voice sounding thick and sore from swallowing too much windborne dust came from the back room: “Cut the comedy, Blodgett. Just get them triaged and bring them back here.”

  “Roger, sir.” Blodgett rolled his eyes and stage-whispered to Gooding and the other soldier, “Doc’s in a bad mood today. I’d watch out if I were you.”

  Gooding returned the clipboard. “Here. This all you need?”

  Blodgett glanced over the intake form. “Looks good enough to me. We’ll make up the rest as we go along.” He turned to the other soldier. “Have a seat and fill this out. We’ll get to you when we get to you, after we get through with Sarge here.”

  “Fine by me,” the soldier said. “I got nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in.” He sat and started humming to himself, tapping his fingers against the barrel of his M16, which he still wore in a sling around his neck. His gills did not look green and he seemed almost happy to be here at the aid station. Fucking malingerer, Gooding thought, swallowing another gob of bile.

  “C’mon back, Sar’nt,” Blodgett said, leading him to a larger room at the back of the trailer. “Step into my laboratory—mwuhahaha,” the medic said in a lame attempt at a mad-scientist imitation. His jowls quivered with laughter.

  Blodgett sat at a computer and started copying the information off the clipboard, punctuating it every so often with hmm or mm-hmmm. Gooding took a seat next to the desk because his knees had turned to jelly. Blodgett told him to remove his DCU shirt, then wheeled over a blood-pressure machine on a long silver pole. A cuff went on Gooding’s biceps and a thermometer was jabbed into his mouth. Blodgett watched the digital numbers on the machine, listening to the accelerating short blips, then frowned when they eventually settled and gave a long beep. “Hmmm. Okay, now I want you to stand up and we’ll take your vitals from that position, too.”

  “Why?”

  “We like to see how your blood migrates through your system. Systolic and asystolic, and so on, so forth.”

  It sounded like bullshit to Gooding but he stood anyway, trying his best to hide the tremble in his knees.

  When the machine beeped again, Blodgett was still frowning. “Hmm. Okay, wait here and I’ll go get Doc Claspill.”

  Apparently, Gooding’s blood wasn’t doing so well on its migration.

  Blodgett returned, followed by Captain Claspill, a sleepy-looking man with a shock of tousled black hair sticking up off his head—as if the follicles themselves were still upset and angry at being pulled off the pillow an hour ago. When he spoke, there was sand in his voice. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.” He took the clipboard from Blodgett, read what was on the computer screen, then went back and forth from clipboard to monitor for nearly a minute before he looked at Gooding sitting there with his drained face and throbbing stomach.

  “All right,” he croaked. “What I’m gonna need you to do now, Staff Sergeant Gooding, is remove your boots, loosen your belt, then hike yourself up onto this bed over here.” He patted a cot—dust puffing up from beneath his fingers—and gave Gooding a wan smile. “You do that while I take a short break, then we’ll see what’s going on inside you, hmm?”

  He left the room and Blodgett smirked at Gooding, holding two fingers to his lips then blowing out a puff of invisible cigarette smoke. “Doc’s got his bad habits.”

  “I see.”

  “Says it opens up his blood vessels, helps him focus and concentrate.”

  “I’m not about to stop him.” Gooding started unlacing his boots.

  “Anyway,” Blodgett said. “Just do what doc says and I’ll be back after I go see what’s ailing this other dude.”

  Gooding unbuckled his belt, then looked at the cot. It was covered with a stained wool blanket—Army-issue green—and sagged in the middle. At one end was a large, embroidered pillow with the silhouette of a grizzly walking across it—probably hand stitched by somebody’s mother and sent over here to Iraq. Before he lowered himself into the sinkhole of the cot, Gooding wondered how many other unwashed heads had touched this grizzly pillow in the past week. Sterility appeared to be an afterthought here in the aid station.

  He lay there for several minutes, eyes closed and hands folded across his chest like he was in a coffin, while the doctor sucked his way through a cigarette out back in the Iraqi wind and Blodgett interrogated the other sick-call patient in the outer room. Gooding closed his eyes, letting the rise and fall of voices match the rhythm of his lungs. First, he thought of his ex-wife, Yolanda, and wondered who might be screwing her even as he lay here dying in Baghdad. Then he thought about his desk in the palace and pictured a snowstorm of paperwork—Sig Acts and drafts of press releases—falling around his computer and burying it in deep white drifts. Then he thought about the disgraced captain Shrinkle and wondered what had happened to him. No doubt shipped home to a desk job bac
k at Fort Stewart. Then, thinking about Shrinkle’s hand grenade blowing up the truck drifted his thoughts to a suicide-bomb attack that had ripped through a bus terminal near the Green Zone last week. Gooding hadn’t heard the blast from where he worked at his desk in the palace, but he’d read about it online like it was a dispatch from a war he was watching through opera glasses. One line in that news story, however, had brought it rushing close enough to punch him in the heart: Ahmed Mahjoud returned to the blast site to search for his brother’s head after identifying his headless body at a hospital morgue by the belt he was wearing.

  Gooding’s bowels shifted and he clamped down. At the same time, a fresh wave of sour bile rolled through his stomach and threatened to blurp up his esophagus. He swallowed and pushed away the suicide bomber’s head with its singed, bulging eyes.

  The stink of cigarettes was sharp in his nostrils. Gooding opened his eyes to find Captain Claspill leaning over him, staring at him through those heavy-lidded eyes with what looked like boredom.

  “You back with us now?”

  “Yes, sir. Just closed my eyes for a second and I guess I drifted away.”

  “Hey, don’t make me jealous. You don’t want to know how long it’ll be till I feel a pillow again. Damn double shifts.” He blew out through his nose and the ghost of smoke was just as strong and sharp. He stood quickly, clapping his hands on his knees. “Well, okay. Let’s see what’s going on inside you.”

  Claspill pulled a stethoscope from his pocket, blew tar and nicotine on the metal disk for nearly a minute, and said, “Just one of the complimentary services we offer here at the aid station—no cold metal on skin.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Now just relax and give me three deep breaths and hold it on the third one.” He lifted Gooding’s T-shirt and placed the stethoscope in the center of his belly. Gooding breathed, breathed, breathed, held . . . and Claspill gasped as he listened to what was migrating through Gooding’s innards. “Whoa!”