Cockroach
We called the crude web of stitches binding together my upper lip the Cockroach. Whenever my mouth was closed, it looked as though I were chewing on a large dark-brown insect, with partially unraveled stitches for antennae.
I hadn’t smiled for weeks. Late one evening, flipping through channels, I discovered The Colbert Report, which had aired its first episode while I was still in Fallujah. Two minutes into Stephen Colbert’s deadpan dismantling of White House spin about Iraq, wrapped in neoconservative chest-beating pomp, I broke into a grin. The pain flooded in at once. When my lip tightened into a smile, the Cockroach slithered up toward my gums and snagged itself on the wire bracket holding my jaw together. Fresh blood trickled into my mouth, and I raced to the bathroom mirror. I unhooked the mess with my index fingers, returned to my room in a sullen mood, and turned off Colbert. No more laughing until the Cockroach was gone.
The next morning, I pulled on a pair of sweatpants, writhed my casts through an oversized T-shirt and flip-flops, worked my way down the staircase, and slipped out the front door into the numbing winter. The cold felt good on my cuts. I pried open the door to my dad’s Buick, lowered myself in, and took off before anyone could stop me.
It had snowed most of the previous night. I hadn’t driven in a year, and since both arms were in casts, I had only my fingertips to steer. I kept the radio off, rolled down all the windows, and suppressed a smile. I reached the first intersection, having no clue where I was headed, and again the urge to smile returned. I decided to make only right turns until I was comfortable enough to turn left across a lane.
I imagined piles of snow dumping upon Fallujah. The war would probably come to a halt. I drove up Roosevelt Road, past the grocery store, and turned right onto Joliet Street at my childhood bank, where seven dollars in savings from grade school still accrued interest, a penny a year. Snowplows scraped along ahead of me, spraying a shower of salt in their wake. Snowblowers blasted white arcs from every other driveway. My high school loomed on the left, and I sped past it anxiously. At the next red light, a beat-up Chevy Cavalier pulled up to my right, and a heavy woman stared at me, my casts, and then back at me in alarm.
I pulled into a slippery parking lot and walked into a bookstore to find stacked high in the main display Paul Bremer’s book about his year as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. I used my casts like chopsticks and carried a copy to the register.
“Ohmigosh, what happened to you?” a teenage girl with the pasty complexion of Midwestern winters cooed warmly. I watched her eyes settle upon the Cockroach stitching between my lips and dart away.
I grunted, dumping some bills onto the counter. My first interaction with someone outside of a hospital or my home, and I realized quickly that I wasn’t up for it.
“ ’Kay, here’s your change. Hope ya feel better soon! ’Njoy the book!”
I trudged through the snow in my flip-flops. When I got back to the car, I realized I couldn’t hold Bremer’s book and open the door at the same time, so I dumped him into the parking lot snow. The book was for reading, not for displaying. There he was on the back cover of My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, dismounting a Blackhawk in his idiotic costume of a prep blazer, khakis, and combat boots.
The Buick was in motion. I drove on, past strip malls, gas stations, and hibernating golf courses, following the train tracks until I reached desolate stretches of heavily tilled frozen farmland. I pulled off onto the shoulder just before a railroad crossing. The heater was the only thing audible, save for a periodic rubbery scrape of the wipers. I opened Bremer’s book and started to read.
* * *
Two weeks later, I blasted out of the driveway and aimed the car at Chicago. Bremer was giving a speech in late January 2006 before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (now the Chicago Council on Global Affairs), at the same Hilton hotel where Mayor Daley had unleashed his cops on antiwar protesters during the 1968 Democratic Convention.
I gave my keys to a shocked valet and made my way into the hotel ballroom, passing a constellation of Burberry jackets and mink stoles wrapped around what I supposed was the foreign policy establishment of Chicago—an incongruous concept. I didn’t know anyone and didn’t bother trying to make small talk, sailing past and positioning myself in the first row in front of the podium. The Chicago cognoscenti stared at me as they wriggled out of their coats and into the seats around me. They did a poor job concealing their whispers. “What do you suppose happened to him?”
My arms were swelling in their prisons, and my jaw was throbbing. I hadn’t taken any painkillers all day, because I didn’t want a Vicodin haze to roll in while Bremer was talking. I wanted all my senses at the ready.
Bremer emerged to sturdy applause. My glare was surely intensified by the row of stitches between my brows. He spun fantasies from the podium, taking care to blame Iraq’s current problems on Iraqis, and to blame future problems on Iraqis, too. A few nights earlier on TV, I had seen him contradict his own account of the decision to disband the Iraqi military in his first days in Baghdad, so I was in the mood for confrontation. When the Q&A session began, I shot up a black-casted arm and held it firm. He looked at me, furrowed his bushy brow, and turned his head to take a question from someone else.
For thirty minutes, I alternated arms when one grew tired, and as time wore thin, raised both at once. “Why doesn’t he call on him?” a woman behind me whispered to her husband in a tone of support. As he wrapped up each answer, he looked at me and then called someone else. The Q&A ended, and a hundred-strong line formed to get books signed. I was exhausted, sore, and wary of the hourlong drive through the snow ahead of me. I got into the car, feeling at once foolish and angry, and headed back in darkness to West Chicago, where the punishing roulette wheel of sleep spun over my bed.
* * *
As the cold of January hardened into February, it became apparent to me that my injuries were more severe than I wanted to admit. Nobody in USAID management responded to me.
The winter sun set early, not long past four. I drove to the theater to watch movies in darkness with other West Chicagoans and usually fell asleep before the opening credits finished rolling.
My acidic side began to appear at the slightest of provocations and corroded the most unsuspecting and innocent. I watched It’s a Wonderful Life, still in the DVD player from Christmastime, and laughed contemptuously at Jimmy Stewart’s doe-eyed George Bailey, whose dip in the river renews him, opens his eyes to the miracle of life, focuses that which is blurred, straightens that which is skewed. Everything was very tidy for George. I lumbered to the bathroom, knocked a Vicodin bottle on its side, and pinched a pill between my ring finger and pinkie. The pill began to dissolve on my tongue into a bitter metallic strain of saliva.
“Kirkie, there’s someone here to see you. Are you decent?”
My mom entered cautiously with a pastor friend of hers “who knows all about you, who is one of your biggest fans, and wanted to come by just to see you.” She seemed nice enough, but I was having difficulty separating her words from Jimmy Stewart’s. Sensing that I wasn’t giving my full attention, Mom muted the TV.
The Vicodin receded for a moment, and her words became clear—“. . . Because the Lord has a Plan for you, you have been Spared for a Reason . . .”—before they were tugged away in a hydrocodone riptide.
Somewhere around the phrase “to not take for granted each day we have,” I catapulted a “Ha!” from my lungs and blurted, “Okay! Well, thanks for coming!” I decided it was better to vacate the minister from my room, however rudely, than to subject her to what was roaring through my mind. What did she know of not taking days for granted? I was twenty-five years old and didn’t exactly feel that I was wasting my life. What did she know of being spared?
I had grown up on stories in church about the transformative power of a near-death or rock-bottom experience, the turn to Jesus after a drunk-driving accident, after a near-fatal d
rug overdose: these people realized only after the brink moment that life is short. But I was lying there because I had spent a year in a war zone, and my sleeping mind decided for me that it had had just about enough. I was alive because the mortars that Iraqi kids my age had launched in my direction were duds, poorly aimed, or nudged away by an indifferent gust of Iraqi wind. I was still on earth because I had marines who protected me. I was alive because my wrists had been strong enough to break a headfirst fall to concrete. I was there because I lucked out. I wasn’t arrogant enough to find a plan just for me in the tornado of chaos and probabilities that had spat me back into West Chicago.
The minister left with an understanding smile. I apologized to my mom a couple days later.
* * *
My grip on Fallujah was slipping. For a year, I had studied thousands of pages of USAID reports, Bechtel power and water plant assessments, aid absorption rate studies, classified marine situation reports, inspector general audits, embassy electricity forecasts that sagged under the weight of their own stats, endless iterations of data projected onto maps of Iraq’s provinces. In my early days back, I tried to imagine that I was home for a short period to report in from the field, but the only people I could brief were my increasingly worried parents, brothers, and friends, who had no idea what I was talking about.
As March approached, the possibility that I would not return increased with each week that passed without word from my bosses. I sketched out a briefing book for whomever USAID would inevitably send to replace me, and broke it into sections: Canal Clearing. Agriculture. Health Services. Wat/San. Power. Employment Generation. Audit of Past Projects. Key Persons on Fallujah City Council. Key Counterparts within Second Marine Expeditionary Force. Unsorted Notes on Anbar.
I looked at the checklist I’d made on my first morning back home. All I had managed to do was prevail against the infection and tug the stitches from my eyebrow.
A family friend who was a surgeon at the nearby hospital offered to sink a screw into the broken bone of my right wrist. The liberation of one hand would dramatically increase my ability to take care of myself. Friends counseled me to let the wrists heal naturally, but I had convinced myself that I could return to Iraq with a cast on one arm. Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a marine medic to saw it off, but I stood no chance of getting a new medical clearance with both arms in casts, so I leaped at the surgeon’s offer to operate.
Nobody could get to the veins on my arms because of the casts. Linda, the medical assistant, shook a WD-40-sized can and sprayed a cold aerosol over the delta of veins and arteries running upon the top of my foot, temporarily freezing the area. A jolting piercing, followed by a sigh. Another piercing. Another sigh, coarsened with exasperation. “Come on . . .” She shot me an impatient glance. She hadn’t yet sunk the IV and was looking at me as though I were to blame. Within thirty seconds of meeting her, she had become an enemy.
But then it was in, and Linda was standing next to me with the supreme sleep, blissful and blank, in little glass bottles on her tray. She injected the anesthesia into the tiny veins of my foot, and I loved her without condition for it.
When I realized I was waking, I moaned in groggy protest. Why couldn’t they just put me under for a month or so? My eyes rolled around aimlessly until they settled on my mom, who was crying. She wiped her cheeks when she noticed that I had come to.
It took another few moments before I thought to ask, “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I’ll let the doctor tell you.” She looked anxiously at the door. I was waking up fast now.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Honey, I can’t explain it like he can. Let’s wait for him.”
“Mom, c’mon, just tell me. He can tell me more later.”
She dropped her head and wiped away fresh tears.
“The doctor made a mistake. He got in there, and—” She looked angrily back at the door. “Oh, this is ridiculous. He should be the one telling you!”
“Mom. Please. Don’t worry, I won’t be upset. Just tell me.”
“He got in there, and I guess he had the screw halfway in, and the bone started cracking apart more. Something about the angle of the screw being ‘tricky,’ he said. He had to unscrew it. Oh honey, I’m so sorry!”
I looked down and noticed a new cast on my right arm. The cuts on my face started to sting, and I gathered that I was crying. “What does this mean in terms of recovery time?”
“He said you can get the cast off in another eight weeks. I know you wanted a different result, dear. I’m sorry.”
I imagined holding the surgeon’s incompetent hands on the bed stand and bashing them with my casts. For the first time since the ER in Bournigal, I had regressed: my wrist was worse, not better. The botched surgery blew apart the only flimsy bridge I’d been able to construct since my fall, the idea that I was speeding toward a return to the most important job I’d ever had.
The surgeon slid into the room upon a stream of nonsense, suggesting that I shouldn’t feel upset. “If anything,” he chirped, “the surgery might have stimulated the tissue with positive results.” The bill arrived ten days later, topping $6,000. The screw alone was $800, and it wasn’t even in my goddamned wrist.
Insurgency
Dead flies and a blue wasp with a broken wing lay in the window casement, entombed by the storm windows my dad put up when I was still in Fallujah.
My descent was rapid after the failed surgery. I lost my grip on the fire hose of information about Iraq, the reports, trend lines, atmospherics, and situation reports, but the need to assess still rumbled within. I could do little to restrain myself. I printed out Google Earth maps of my hometown and began to study its infrastructure. I circled water and wastewater treatment plants, power step-down stations and transfer lines, the hospital, police, and fire stations.
I imagined that I was an insurgent and studied which areas of the city were the farthest from the police and fire stations. I looked up the number of cop cars and fire trucks. I circled gas stations, propane tank lots, and the most vulnerable points in the power, water, and gas lines.
Distracted from my infirmity, I went deeper. I grabbed a couple maps and headed into town, studying them coldly. I looked at population density. I highlighted the tallest buildings and perches in town, among them the windows looking out from the English Department on the third story of my high school. I pulled into the parking lot behind the Burger King and left the engine running as I surveyed the rail yard, through which graffitied coal hoppers and boxcars trundled toward Chicago. Where were the quickest access points and escape routes? How often did commuter rails run?
I figured my hometown could be brought to its knees in a few hours. The basic infrastructure was embarrassingly exposed: in many cases, there wasn’t even a chain-link fence around a soft spot. Two simple attacks in opposite corners of town would cripple security. Alarmed and depressed by the thought experiment, I backed away from the rail yard and turned myself into the military occupier of West Chicago.
I imagined my dad’s Buick as a brigade commander’s Humvee and rolled out of the Burger King parking lot onto Route 59. I dissected the city into manageable quadrants and determined which streets would serve as main and alternate supply routes. I allocated ten tanks and forty Humvees and began to position entry and exit checkpoints at the main arteries into town. On Main Street, in the parking lot shared by True Value hardware, Taco Bell, and McDonald’s, I positioned an M1 Abrams tank as a show of force. I placed countersniper teams in the English Department, in the Bible Church steeple, and on the catwalk below the W E S T C H I C A G O letters stenciled in black over the faded blue paint of the water tower. I snarled concertina wire through miles of backyards and bulldozed berm walls to seal off the more vacant stretches in the western third of the city.
The high school would be the seat of my administration, my civil military operations center, providing ample space for condolence payments and meetings b
etween our occupying forces and disgruntled West Chicagoans. In the cafeteria, where I had posed for my yearbook picture, I’d line them up to scan their eyeballs and fingerprints. The town jail wouldn’t be able to hold more than eighty if packed, so I designated my middle school as the primary detention facility and suffocated it with blast walls, razor wire, floodlights, and gravel-filled chest-high Hesco barriers. Curfew would begin at eight across the city.
The Jel-Sert factory, which turned corn syrup into Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles, would serve as the morgue. If I applied the Iraqi civilian casualty rate to our population base, the bodies of a few hundred West Chicagoans could be expected each month.
I needed to know the greatest employers, the local powerbrokers, the city’s most pressing needs. I printed a year’s worth of city council minutes and began to pore through them. I bookmarked the police blotter page on the West Chicago Press website. I drove through occupied West Chicago and sensed the coil of hypervigilance tighten, just slightly, when I imagined what an IED would do to the soft-skinned Buick. My mood darkened.
“Whatcha up to, sweetie?” my mom asked when I pulled back into the driveway.
“Nothin’ much, just drivin’ around.”
Surrender
The Vicodin didn’t work anymore. Instead of increasing the dosage, I stopped taking it altogether. I shivered in a cold sweat on the bed, passively watching a CNN report on Fallujah. An itch gnawed from deep within the new cast, and I knew that there was nothing I could do to scratch it. I tried to focus on something else, and the crawler at the bottom of the TV screen announced that Sheikh Kamal, the head of the Fallujah City Council, had been assassinated the previous night.
To Be a Friend Is Fatal Page 13