Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  He did not have to turn around. He hadn’t stopped watching her walk away. “Me? Dopey? Hah!”

  “Hah,” she said back at him. They looked for a moment, smiling. “What I said to you on Bloor Street—you haven’t even asked me what it was.”

  Danny went blank. “I remember what you said.”

  “Oh yeah?” He knew that she knew she had him. “What?”

  “Um . . . I forgot.”

  “You remember but you forgot?” She started laughing. “You weren’t even listening to me. I knew you weren’t.”

  “I was too listening.”

  “Oh right.”

  “You were telling me . . .”

  “Telling you what?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  She shook her head slowly with an eye-rolling motion he was to remember long after he last saw her. Her lips pursed in a little smile. “My mother wants to thank you for saving Omar. And so does my grandmother. She’s here visiting. They both said you should come over for tea.”

  “Okay.”

  “No. It’s not okay. They can’t invite you. Only my father can do that. Even my grandmother would be afraid. She’s a tough, funny old lady. But she knows she can only do what my father wants. And my father would never allow it.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “Away,” she said looking down.

  “Away?”

  She still wouldn’t look at him. “Afghanistan. In some camp.”

  “A camp in Afghanistan?”

  With a little nod of her head she turned and walked into the darkening eastern skies, passing through the lights of Queen Street. Danny watched her. When she was a block away she took a large scarf out of her pocket and quickly wrapped it around her head.

  It was the same scarf she was wearing in the days that followed, whenever he saw her on the streets, slowly walking with her stooped and ancient grandmother. The scarf protruded so far in front of either side of her face that it seemed to Danny to be almost a shroud.

  9

  Maybe it was that both Danny and I were careening through battles looking for ways to find the women we’d lost. Maybe we understood that about each other before either of us had said a word. Maybe that was what did it.

  In the mountains, we used to lie under the stars some nights wondering about this psychic. She had to be able to help. And then we got wondering what her place was like. We’d be out there breathing in that thin air that somehow seemed purer and colder than anything I’d ever inhaled, staring up at those stars that were so bright they shot spikey little shards of light into your eyeballs. I mean, you’ve never seen stars till you see them in those goat-stripped wilds of Afghanistan, those denuded, rocky hills without another light source around for about a caliphate or two away. There’s zillions of them up there looking like they’re about to fall on your head, twinkling away malevolently like some eerie celestial light show that can seriously creep you out if you can’t hang onto the beauty of it all. And even creepier are those jagged towers of utter blackness, the mountains that loom over you in all that roiling night. They make you feel like a speck. Actually, a lot of things there make you feel that way.

  Maybe that’s why someone got online and found a psychic, some woman named Constance who lived in America and who tells your future. If you have one. A lot of our guys had their fortunes told online or by sat phone by this woman, and some of them aren’t living anymore. The minute I heard about this woman, I wanted to know what she told them before that bloody operation in the mountains near Khost. I see a rough patch coming up . . . IEDs. RPGs. Ambushes. Oh never mind.

  On those nights when we were out in the mountains we’d lie there wrapped up like mummies with weapons, debating what this psychic looked liked and what kind of place she lived in. The general consensus was that she was old, she probably cackled, and she lived in some Gothic place that looked Transylvanian, with vines and cobwebs all over. With black cats hissing everywhere.

  No one knew exactly how we’d gotten involved with this psychic. The urban legend was that one of our guys, a gunnery sergeant, had somehow found her online and she did a cyber-reading for him. She told him that he would get back alive but she couldn’t see anything about a home to return to. Two days later he was called out by the company commander and told that word from Pendleton was that his house had just burned to the ground. His wife got out alive, but his dog didn’t.

  Before the sun went down that night, half our base camp was trying to e-mail this psychic. Remember, this is in the early days, somewhere around a year or so after 9/11 when things hadn’t been bolted down with a military pipe wrench the way they were later. Pretty soon guys were firing online questions like Katyushas, volleys of them, wanting to know if their wives were fucking the local football coach or if they were going to get home alive or if it was possible that God could intervene and give a certain major the clap.

  The result was one big, fat cyber-silence. Nada until about a month later when one of the platoon sergeants suddenly got an e-mail message from her asking for his birth date and where he was born. A week after he replied, he got an e-mail telling him that she saw his left foot in a vision. The platoon sergeant laughed and went around doing some goofy My Left Foot routine like it was all a big joke until a week later, when he stepped on an old Soviet land mine and blew his foot off. His left foot.

  After that, it was practically anarchy in the ranks. The whole company was coming unhinged. No one would ever admit to it, but whenever any of us got next to a laptop, we were all firing off birth dates, place of birth, height, weight, mother’s maiden name, name, rank, serial number, shoe size, you name it. On the surface everything seemed cool. After all, we’re Rakkasans—the legendary 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne. But if you looked closer you’d figure out that on one of the operations in the mountains where we were supposed to be like bloodhounds, chasing the Taliban across the border toward Miram Shah over in Pakistan, we were all thinking about what that psychic would say. It got so whacked that some of the drivers were even asking for readings from the psychic so they’d know where the IEDs were hidden, the ones that could blow up under their vehicles.

  It became so obvious that Lieutenant Colonel Lukovich, our brigade commander, heard about it. We all thought Lukovich ate nails for breakfast so it didn’t take a psychic to figure out what his reaction would be. Grunt-type laptops vanished like they were lepers at a fashion show.

  But by this time I had discovered a secret weapon: the Canadians. A month or so earlier, one of the CENTCOM geniuses, the Gods of Tampa, sitting back there running the war from Florida, decided that we should be welded together with the Canadians like the Second Coming of D-day.

  So that’s how I got to Danny. And to his outfit, which was called—of all things—the Princess Patricia Regiment. So right off the bat you just knew you had an outfit primed for some American to make a smart-ass remark about Patsies or little princesses or whatever. Or at least, that’s what we expected. But it was more in our minds than theirs.

  They were the same but different from us. Tough, rugged soldiers who lacked our jagged edges and technology, but made up for it in a whole bunch of key ways. For instance, we’d shell something just a hair quicker than they would, but when they did it, all that was left was a sea of glass. Or when they dealt with the Afghan tribesmen they always started off way more polite than we did. But the end result was pretty much the same. A lot of them had been peacekeepers in countries where there was no peace—Bosnia, Haiti, and other assorted hellholes—places they went to do all that moral-high-ground stuff that makes politicians all warm and fuzzy.

  Finding Danny was like finding a direct line to the psychic. Unlike Lukovich, none of the Canadian commanders seemed to care, or even know, about psychics, so when I got OpConned to the Princess Pats, what we both really cared about was Danny’s access to the Internet. Or better yet, one of their sat phones. Which all came down to one necessity: access to this Constance. By this time I was real
ly buying into it all. I was definitely becoming a believer.

  Because how else was I ever going to connect with Annie Boo?

  Danny’d already heard about Constance so he didn’t have to be convinced. But after I told him about the My Left Foot episode, he was . . . determined’s not really the right word. Obsessed would be better. “She’ll know where Ariana has been taken. Where Zadran’s keeping her.” He kept saying things like this over and over again.

  Danny didn’t merely want to talk to Constance. He had to talk to her. And not simply on whatever satellite phone he could borrow from one of the reporters. He was, he announced, going to find out where she lived and he was going there to meet her.

  “Oh man. Can you believe this?” he whispered later that night. “She lives in Hollywood.”

  • • •

  That night, Danny’s major tactical concern was cell phone reception. I thought he was going to bust something inside him, stalking all over the side of that mountain, dialing the satellite phone, staring at it, and then muttering curses at the cellular gods before storming off to a different part of the mountain to repeat it all over again. I lay back on my rucksack and watched. He was the mountain’s very own pinball.

  But then suddenly he stopped. Even from about two hundred meters I could see his eyes. They were burning holes in the twilight. He beckoned to me, yelling from the plateau he was on, “It’s working!”

  When I got there he was dialing the number for Constance. You could see him preparing himself, taking the safety off his mouth and putting it on automatic, ready for the word burst that would get all he wanted to say onto her voice mail before it cut him off. His face was coiled to spring into action.

  “Constance?” He looked around, whispering. “It’s her! She actually answered the phone!”

  He listened, like all those spring-loaded words had drained right out of him, down into the mountain. “Constance, Constance,” I heard him almost pleading, “I can’t make an appointment, okay? Not right now at least. But I will.” A pause. “I only need a couple of minutes, okay? I’ll pay for your time when I see you, I swear.” Another pause. Then: “Constance, Constance. You’re confusing me with someone else. I’m not the guy from Paramount. I’m in Afghanistan. Fighting.” Another pause.

  “Not that kind of fighting. It’s a human rights thing. Fighting so that people can keep telling fortunes and . . .”

  It went on like this for another few strangled exchanges, until finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. So when he started into another Constance, Constance routine, I walked over and grabbed the phone out of his hand, holding him at arm’s length.

  “Hello, Constance? I’m a friend of Danny’s, the guy you were just talking to, and let me put all this in context, okay? I’m part of the 101st Airborne and we’re actually at war over here—”

  “Tell him that she is alive,” the silky voice on the cell phone interrupted.

  “She?”

  “Whoever he is seeking.”

  “Ariana?”

  “Whoever he is seeking.”

  “She says she’s alive,” I yelled to Danny, not knowing that that was an issue.

  “But she’s being held by Luciferians.”

  “By who?”

  “The Luciferians. Followers of Lucifer. She misses him. A lot. How old are you?” she asked, changing the topic before I could even grapple with the Luciferian thing. “You can only change at eighteen, thirty-five, or fifty. Those are the only three ages at which you can change, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m—”

  “I’ll be happy to see you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I must go now.” There was a pause. Then: “You are also coping with Luciferians. Aren’t you?”

  “Is Lucifer the devil?”

  “When I see you, I’ll do a reading.” Then the line went dead. I wondered about Annie Boo being with a bunch of the devil’s people. It was definitely a possibility.

  And that was the moment when I first thought that maybe I needed to go and see this Constance too.

  Toronto

  10

  In the months after what Danny came to call their “piano day,” he and Ariana were together only twice, each time for no more than an hour, walking along the streets near High Park. But they would talk often on the phone, the calls only happening when she phoned him from an old pay phone on Queen Street. She never specifically told him not to call her; it was one of those things that was just understood. He didn’t push for an explanation the way he did with almost everything else in his life, knowing that she wouldn’t talk about whatever it was that sometimes worried her. He understood that she would simply expect him to know, in the same way he knew so much about her—and she about him. All without really ever having put this knowing into words. It was some transmission of psyches to be completed wordlessly.

  There was a week when Danny knew something had changed. Although the days were getting longer, Omar was never around in the evenings, not even on Fridays when they usually met and went to Sherway Gardens or one of the other malls. And Ariana looked startled whenever he saw her in the halls of Humberside Collegiate, quickly looking away and hurrying past. Once, she looked back at him, shrugged, and then vanished into her history class. And the calls from the phone booth on Queen Street suddenly ceased.

  Only Ahmed seemed unchanged. The few times that Danny saw him on the streets, Ahmed refused to say hello, just walking past him with that same deliberate stride, his long, severe face framed by the beginning of the beard he was longing to grow.

  After several weeks, he waited for Ariana on Bloor Street. She saw him as she crossed through the traffic. She stopped, with cars rushing past her in both directions, and looked around quickly as if she was trying to see if anyone was watching. Danny wondered why she had almost a pleading look. Later, he decided that this was the moment when he first refused to see things as they really were.

  “Please.”

  “Hey. C’mon, what’s wrong?”

  She didn’t answer. She just kept walking. And when he followed, she whispered, looking straight ahead, “Find some place my brother won’t see us. Please.”

  They ended up in a nearby funeral parlor, sitting at the back in one of the pew-like seats, staring straight ahead into the open coffin of an old man with long strands of white hair combed over his baldness in a way that did not hold. The long white strands succumbed to gravity, falling in sheaves onto his yellow, silken pillow as if a mop was growing out of the side of his head. A few friends and relatives came and departed without disturbing the hushed atmosphere. Twice, old ladies stopped beside them, patting Danny’s arm, and murmuring what a good man his grandfather was. And then they were alone, whispering to one another.

  “Are you scared of me?”

  “Danny, no.” Said with troubled eyes.

  “Then why all this?”

  At first she couldn’t answer. “My father came back.”

  “So?”

  “He’s been away for six months. Things are different now.”

  “Hey. My father was away too. He came back after five months. And everything was different. I barely knew who he was. My mother hated him more but couldn’t live a day without him.”

  “My father is not like anyone you know.”

  He waited for her to say something else. She just stared ahead.

  “When I get my licence I’m going to rent a car. I want us to go somewhere,” he said, mainly because he couldn’t think of anything to say. She hesitated, reached over, and then put her hand on his. It was the first time they had ever touched. And he hoped he didn’t look stupid or anything because of the smile that he couldn’t control. Whoever heard of an out-of-control smile? And in a funeral home too. But with it came her quick, worried glances, looking around her.

  “What? You afraid that old dead guy is going to wake up or something?”

  “My father has just come from the mountains. Between Pakistan and Afghani
stan. He lives there most of the time. He is very strong. Not like my mother. She is strong but in a different way. Even Omar is scared of my father.”

  Before Danny could respond, a man in a gray suit appeared beside him and said in a low voice, “Will there be anything else? Would you like the coffin to remain open, or would you like us to close it now?”

  “Close the coffin. But do me a favor? Comb his hair properly.”

  “Of course, sir,” said the man in the gray suit.

  Outside, Ariana walked along the street several feet away from him as if there was an invisible person between them. “My father will invite you over to our place. He doesn’t want to but he will. He will have Omar do it for him.”

  “Some invitation.”

  “He has to. My mother told him you saved Omar. So he has to.”

  “Why does he have to?”

  “It’s part of how we are. My parents are from a different way of life. In their heads, they still live in Miram Shah.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “North Waziristan. It’s all tribes. Everyone, all the men, wear turbans and belts with bullets. I remember as a little girl wondering if the bullets were good luck charms. But then I found out how much killing those bullets did.”

  They walked in silence, stopping at a red light. “You saved their son. So they have to invite you. It is their duty.”

  “Do you want me there?”

  “No.”

  Danny looked at her, expecting her to laugh as if all this was some kind of joke. “And please, please don’t say anything about seeing me play the piano.”

  “Why? Won’t they be proud that you’re playing the piano?”

  She tried to maintain a kind of smile as if it were part of a juggling act that suddenly crashed, brought down by the weight of a single tear. She turned and ran.

  • • •

  A week later, Omar silently pressed a piece of paper into Danny’s hands. The address on it led him to the eighth floor in one of the teeming apartment buildings, warehouses of multiculturalism on Jameson Avenue. There was something about the starkness of their apartment that made Danny uncomfortable. The walls were painted light blue with no paintings or posters on them, only what looked like green signs with wiggly white writing. And the lights—there were no lamps like he was used to at home. Instead there was the bare ceiling bulb in the living room that made him squint as he sat on the rugs scattered across the floor where Ahmed and Omar sat next to their father, a short, powerfully built man with an unruly beard and a wide, stern face under a flat, sort of pancake hat.