by Mark Powell
The lights were off inside and the only sound was the quiver of breeze through the treetops. He held his hands out from his body. Here I am. Here’s your chance. The tire iron there for the taking, his life there for the taking, and they should take it, they should come for him now if they knew what was good for them. He hadn’t brought the Walther for this very purpose: to allow them to come for him.
But they didn’t. So instead of dying he took out his phone and streamed it all to Jimmy Stone: the car, the house, the quiet street.
Let him see.
Let him know.
A moment later he stood outside the window where they slept, his feet sinking into the soft earth of the flower bed. Shrubs. Dead azaleas. The heater came on, the heat pump, whatever it was, sitting on its concrete hurricane pad, and when it went quiet it was like a stillness had descended, cosmic in its depths, some dispensation of suburban silence. Eventually, he heard them within. The clutch of their breathing. The window was cracked and through the slash he could hear them in bed, sleeping, waiting. They were no more than a few feet from him, less probably, separated by the double-paned glass and then, beneath that, separated by nothing at all. The human smell of bed sheets and quilts and some incense they must have burned.
Someone moved. He thought the man moved, turned over, adjusted the blanket.
The orange wires of a space heater pulsed and faded.
When the man was still, Reed moved out from beneath the azaleas, staying close to the house, staying in the darker pocket of shade past the spigot and past the coiled hose as he made his way back around to the porch. He went quietly up the three steps. The swing. The rocking chairs and a small table. The house was a Craftsman bungalow, assembled back beneath the live oaks, giant slouching trees deepening the night.
He felt around for a way in.
The door was deadbolted, but the window was unlocked. It was leaded glass, older than those along the bedroom, and he slid it up far enough to get his fingers in, slid it higher, and then moved through it—leg, arm, body—pulling himself behind himself as if this were his idea and not simply some surprising thing that was happening to him, something to which he was witness.
He was in the front room then. Couch, TV, end tables—all of it poorly articulated. He slid the window down when he felt the draft, moved along the bead-board walls until he stood between the front room and the kitchen. Boxes of cereal. A pot of coffee going cold on the dead burner. The tire iron was still in his hand, his fingers still wrapped around the shaft. He’d forgotten about it, its coldness, but knew, too, that he hadn’t. He’d known all along it was there. That was the point, after all. It was what he was doing: entering a house to do violence.
He waited and gradually moved forward, listened. Moved again, waited, listened.
He was in the hall when the man yelled, when John Maynard yelled, and Reed felt his body constrict, his fingers a fist around the iron.
He called out again. But he was asleep, he was crying in his sleep.
The woman said something Reed couldn’t understand.
The man was muttering and then speaking, his voice thick and frightened.
“What did I say?” he wanted to know.
And the softer voice of the woman: “You were just yelling.”
“I didn’t say a name or anything?”
“Drink some water.”
They were just voices to Reed, sounds in another room.
“I didn’t say a name?”
“Drink this. You were just yelling.”
They were just voices. You couldn’t exactly ascribe life. But then, without his intending it, he felt them change. He felt his fingers loosen around the shaft of the iron. His scalp was sweating, he felt the beads gather into an ill-worn halo, and standing there a small part of himself was afraid of the larger part, the part that was actually him. But something else, something deeper, believed what he was experiencing was the end of a long migration, that he was returning to himself, to both the person he had been and the person he might yet be. He had been a frightened child, an angry child, this was true. But he had also been kind.
He thought of what Stone had said just before Reed beat the shit out of him. The worst thing you could do would be to forgive me. The world needs confirmation: you’re a monster. They couldn’t bear your forgiveness. He wasn’t sure that he could bear it either. Just the same, he backed out, climbed through the window, and left.
He used the pay phone outside the Dunkin’ Donuts to call Hadawi.
I’m on my own now. I want you to know that.
But Reed—
You won’t be hearing from me again.
Reed—
He hung up and drove north back to Jimmy Stone’s lake house, stopping only once to buy two five-gallon containers he filled with gas to go with the container he’d found in the shed. There was so much he could have said, but also there was nothing really. Fuck you, he might have said. Except that wasn’t exactly it, either. You couldn’t tell them though, not in a way they would understand. But he intended to show them. He had in mind a gift for them, a play of sorts. One last thing for them all to watch.
37.
John’s mistake was going.
But it wasn’t that first trip to Poland that undid everything.
It was when he went back. It was that second trip to Site Nine.
John thought of that in Erin’s bed, not that it was a new thought. But then again everything seemed new lately, or if not new, unexamined in a way he had never thought possible. It was talking to the boy, to Reed Sharma, as much as it was his sleeping with Erin. The woman beside him, Karla’s old best friend. The skin he had touched. The lies he had told.
Out by the sidewalk the streetlight shone, hazy and opalescent.
The heat was off and the windows were cracked so that cool air moved through the gaps, just enough to make you want to bury yourself down beneath the comforter and the quilt. Which was exactly where Erin was, asleep on her side, withered arm cradled against her stomach, only the top of her head showing.
John was on top of the covers, sweating, and it was because of Poland.
It was because of that second trip.
He was married to Tess by then. She was happy and John was happy with her, happy so long as he could operate in the narrow constraints of justification, happy so long as he could imagine what he and Jimmy Stone and Ray Bageant had done not just as necessary, but as morally right.
Then they picked him up in Milan, a cleric. Hassan Natashe. Brown skinned and American-born, but traveling on a Canadian passport and the question was how?
The question was why?
The question was what’s this jihadi shit doing on his phone?
Videos. Links to blogs and forums.
Numbers in Karachi and Jalalabad. Not the numbers of known terrorists but metadata indicated a sprawling web of implication. He was calling the numbers of folks who were calling the wrong fucking numbers, the ones keyed to, the ones being recorded.
So they plucked him off the street—what was John doing at the time? Probably having sex on the couch with his new wife—they plucked him off the street and put him in a Fiat van, drove him to the naval air station at Aviano and put him on a Gulfstream V to Katowice. The hood and hand restraints. The promethazine suppository.
Another van took him through the Polish night, past the chainlink and barking dogs and then he was in the room and John—summoned from Florida—was in the room with him. There was no separation this time, no watching through the distance of a screen: they sat face-to-face. John asked questions, made notes, and then prescribed the absence of sleep, or the standing, or the lifting by the same thin wrists the cleric one day tried to chew his way through. To chew his way to Allah. To chew his way out of the room in a zippered body bag.
It went on for weeks.
It amazed him.
John sat there through all of it, eighteen hours a day, wanting to know what it was the man knew. He didn’t mean in a
ny objective sense. The questions John posed were about networks and numbers. But what he wanted was internal. He wanted the locked secret of the man’s being, for it was evident that he had one. It was evident that the man had discovered some inner resource, some truth only accessible to those who suffer. It was exactly what John had written about, exactly what he had pretended to know: that somewhere out past the torment was order. That past the storm of loss was a perfect calm of being.
One morning they hoisted him by his hands, allowing him to dangle for hours like a piece of meat, which was exactly what he became. It wasn’t possible to survive it, yet that was what it reduced to: the inevitability of his survival. Later, they would beat him or scald him, but hanging there, his life no more than the roped pain in his wrists, John knew Hassan Natashe would live, and he would do it very precisely in his hands and arms and shoulders. And that was part of it; that, perhaps, was all of it. When they cut him down, life would come rushing back in. The questions. The soft-soled slippers, the bottled water. But in that moment it was suspended. What reigned was what was.
The next day John drowned him. Secured his wrists, the hood, poured the water over his mouth and nose and what followed was an awful wrenching of coughing and gagging and then, most frighteningly, what seemed a calm acceptance. John drowned him for hours. John drowned him for an entire day, and after that, he felt wedded to him. He needed what Hassan Natashe had.
Still, he wouldn’t talk, or wouldn’t talk right, because in some respects he never shut up. He confessed to everything, except everything was wrong. The man was a river of disinformation.
So John drowned him again.
And he spoke wrongly, falsely.
And John drowned him, and in between the gagging and vomiting he wept softly, stoically, and John drowned him as if these two men had been put on this earth for no greater purpose than to hurt, and to witness that hurt. He was breaking open, light—as much as intestinal fluid—was on the verge of spilling forth. Not intelligence but the secret he was after, the secret he had to have. So John became Dr. Mengele. He drowned him. He strung him up and cut him down, scalded him and froze him, blasted him with noise and light and then took away all noise and light. Day after day, hour after hour, it went on without fail because John was close, John was so close to knowing. It was what Peter Keyes had promised him after all. We’re going to open up souls, John. That was exactly what was happening, what was about to happen, then—
When word came that they had snatched the wrong man it was more the ruination of sound than sound itself, the abrupt dragging of the tune arm across the record.
How could this be?
But then again, more accurately, how could it not be?
It simply was. They had followed the right guy into the train station or the subway or whatever the hell it was, and then followed the wrong guy out. Brown guy, but the wrong brown. This from the directorate of operations, this colossal shoulder shrug.
What can we say? Mistakes were made. That kind of shit happens in the world.
As for the Canadian passport, he turned out to be a Canadian citizen. Born and raised in Toronto. An actual fucking Blue Jays fan.
The numbers in his phone, the videos?
Wasn’t his phone, asshole. It got mixed up when the Evidence Team went to barcode it. This guy’s phone came back clean. This guy’s phone is loaded with pics of his kids, cute kids.
What can they do?
Well, first, they can drug him, they can fly him to Ljubljana and put him in another van. Stuff his pockets with travel papers and 500 euros in small bills, drive him south to just this side of the Italian border where they tell him to get out and walk, seriously. That way, motherfucker. Beat it.
A week later he’s back home telling his tale of misery and grief to every major news outlet in the Western world. There’s no proof, of course, but it’s compelling shit, laced with details about stress positions and jargon that all checks out, right down to the nerve damage in his hands.
So when he files suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan against Global Solutions, an otherwise unknown consulting firm, the ACLU offers representation and within twenty-four hours he’s on both Dateline and Charlie Rose.
And then there are no more interviews and no trial because there is no more Hassan Natashe.
One starry night three weeks after his release he puts the kids to bed, kisses his wife goodnight, locks himself in the bathroom, and makes some serious progress on chewing through his wrists. Except this time the instrument of choice is not his teeth but a pink Bic Lady Shaver.
It’s tragic, and the night John hears the news he stands outside his and Tess’s condo and lets her see him. The idea is to go on as before, but as soon as she starts talking he realizes nothing is the same and never will be again.
“You’ve changed.”
“Everybody changes.”
“You’ve turned cruel.”
“That was inevitable.”
“Oh no, John, it doesn’t have to be.”
But actually, yeah, it does. He’s cruel and she tells him as much, and he’s glad for it, even if it isn’t exactly true. The truth is, he’s always been cruel. The truth is, he’s wanted to hurt someone since Karla died. He’s needed it. He’s wanted some goddamn payback and now that he’s got it he’s happy, happy old Hassan is dead and his family’s life is every bit as wrecked as John’s.
And it’s that happiness that breaks him.
It’s that happiness that almost kills him.
It’s—
*
“John?” Her hand on his shoulder. “Wake up, John.”
“What?”
“It’s all right. Wake up.”
And then he was awake and still atop the covers and still sweating and Erin was telling him that he was crying out in his sleep, yelling.
“What did I say?”
“You were just yelling.”
“I didn’t say a name or anything?”
“Drink some water.”
“I didn’t say a name?”
“Drink this. You were just yelling.”
He drank it while she stroked his hair, suddenly cold, suddenly shivering.
“I want you to go away with me,” he said. “Next week. They’ll all be in Florida. Go with me, all right?”
“Drink some water.”
“Somewhere in the mountains,” he said. “You’ll go?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ll go.”
And he believed her, and then he was beneath the covers.
And then, finally, he was asleep.
38.
Tess thought she was done with it, with seeing them, or at least with being bothered by it. Even the crying had stopped. Then she took the children Christmas shopping at the city center mall in Dunwoody north of Atlanta and there they were. A Middle Eastern man, brown skin, loose white shirt—a blouse?—sitting at the food court and talking on his cell. Another outside the Limited, bored. Three women in chadors—the word just came to her, this entire new language she was learning—three women in chadors eating Auntie Ann’s pretzels.
They walked through the shops, in and out of doors, Laurie strapped to her chest, Daniel holding her hand, Wally wandering somewhere behind, oblivious so that every few steps Tess had to stop and remind him to keep up. She felt so out of place. The shops were crowded with well-dressed people, women wandering in clouds of perfume and wearing either three-inch heels or sneakers from 1982. The leggings, the skin-tight jeans. You passed them and their scent was like a sonic boom, a delay, four, five steps before it hit you, a half second after you thought it wasn’t coming. The men held bags or children, stopping to let them look at the window displays, the reindeer and sleigh.
“Come on, Wally. Keep up, honey.”
They walked around the corner past the endless cafés with their craft beers and bamboo chairs, their heat lamps glowing like alien craft caught in the act of descent. She didn’t know what exactly she was doing here. Shopping,
yes, but for whom? For what? John had refused to come, or not exactly refused because she hadn’t actually asked him because she was getting this vibe off him that was all how many seconds till you and the children are out the door? It was a frequent thing, this bad energy, and she was glad he hadn’t come, even if she could use the help.
“Come on, Wally.” Stopping again. “One more place and we’ll get some lunch, okay, honey?”
What would John have said had he come? He would have made fun of them, all of them, himself included. Happiness seemed to invite his wrath. Happiness seemed to signal some moral failing. Just look at them, Tess. All the good Americans with their bathroom tiles and drone strikes. Driving too fast down highways lined with junk food and Chinese manufacturing. The entire world—could you say that he hated the world? That didn’t seem exactly right. Maybe he was only sick of it. The abductions of African girls and the hashtag campaigns to get them back. Pull down the statue, chant outside the dictator’s villa. Watch the revolution on YouTube, the refugees on the evening news, the life vests and drowned toddlers, the border fences in Hungary.
Maybe he was only sick of it and maybe that was fair, maybe that was a reasonable response.
But you know what, she thought, you know what, dear, guess what? Being sick of it is a luxury. You think you’re the only one paying attention? The upcharge for sweet potato fries, the good heels and Coach bag. Everyone’s profound sense of contented decency while meanwhile in Syria or meanwhile in the Democratic Republic of Goddamn Congo tickles like the sneeze that never quite arrives.
He had infected her, John had.
Those nights on St. Simons when he was failing to die with the same withering conviction with which he was failing to live. He had infected her, weakened her. She’d been strong and he had weakened her.
“Come on, Wally. Pay attention, honey.”
She felt a swell of anger against her husband but also very much against the people around her. The pigtailed men in canvas sneakers, the women wandering in and out of Kohl’s. Then ahead of her—thank, God—like some resplendent promised land thick with bourbon chicken and gluten-free wraps she saw the doors to the food court.