Song for Night

by Chris Abani

  John Wayne stopped us with a casual wave, and we spread out wordlessly into the formation we had been trained to. The people in the church tableau froze as we approached: the man holding Jesus, the women washing the Virgin, and the priest in the truck whom I assume meant to carry the statues to another church or parish where they would be safe. As we moved forward in a loose fan that tapered into a point, with John Wayne leading, only the child moved. Smiling, she ran toward us. John Wayne bent down, arms spread, a father home from work, except he didn’t look like a father, more like a bird of prey. He picked up the seven-year-old girl and held her to his side. Something about him in that moment must have terrified her though because she began to cry.

  “What is your name?” he asked her.

  “Faith,” she said, still crying.

  John Wayne touched her face tenderly, and then when she smiled tentatively through her tears, he threw his head back and laughed.

  “This one is ripe. I will enjoy her,” he said, looking right at me, as though he expected me to challenge him, like I did the first time he had forced me at gunpoint to rape someone, but whatever he saw in my eyes made him laugh even louder. Without thinking, I lifted my AK-47 and opened fire. He moved, instinctively I think, the way an animal will, to escape the shot, and the bullet went through the seven-year-old and found John Wayne’s heart. They both looked at me, faces wide with shock for a long moment, then John Wayne fell, taking the girl with him. Everyone scattered for cover, the women, the man carrying Jesus, still carrying Jesus, and the rest of the platoon; everyone except Ijeoma, who stood behind me, and the priest, who leapt out of his car and ran toward John Wayne and the girl.

  Without a word the priest bent down, said a prayer over the child, kissed her forehead, and drew a cross in the air above her with two fingers. He pried her from John Wayne’s arms and held her to his chest, her blood staining his white soutane. He seemed confused, unsure what to do next, and his eyes locked on mine were filled with tears and an expression I have seen too many times. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. I was numb to John Wayne’s death. Gladness would come later. For now, all I could think was that the only real casualty was Faith.

  I became aware that Ijeoma was rubbing my back gently. Without a word I turned and put my head on her shoulder. When I looked up, the rest of the platoon was gathered in a circle around us. Nebu had unpinned John Wayne’s rank insignia and was holding it in his hand like a burning coal. He approached me silently and pinned it to my shirt, saluted, and turned around. The rest of the platoon came to full attention and saluted. I was now the leader, months into the war; our war.

  I turned to Ijeoma. She looked at me with a mocking smile, then we all set off. In the weeks to come, we would see the old women eat the baby and Ijeoma would die.

  Perhaps I should change my name to Unlucky.

  Perhaps this is karma.

  Perhaps this is how we learn love.

  I wonder what Grandfather would have made of it.

  Imagination Is a Forefinger

  between the Eyes

  Hiding is all I seem to do: from myself, from the enemy. But doubt never leaves, not even here in this tree. Like a spider busy spinning a web, my mind weaves the night into terror.

  What does it mean to hide in a ceiling, in that narrow hot crawl space crouched like an animal smelling my own scent, full of it and grateful for it, while my mother stays below, in what seems like the brightest sunlight although it is only the light of a sixty-watt bulb, waiting to deflect the anger of people intent on murder, my murder, waiting so that I may live, and I watch what happens below and I am grateful that I can smell my smell, smell my smell and live while below me it happens, it happens that night bright as day, but I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it, and I hide and am grateful for my smell crouched like an animal in that dark hot space.

  I shake my head. Imagine good things, I say to myself, forefinger pressed firmly between my eyes, block out the horror and imagine good things, I say, but all I can think is that it would be nice to have a hot meal.

  I sigh, turn over, and close my eyes, dropping the cigarette into the wet black.

  Dawn Is Two Hands Parting

  before the Face

  Morning arrives in a shout, parting the protective cover of leaves as surely as a hand. I blink and wipe at my eyes furiously. Time is like that here. No gradual change, no softening of the light or gentle graying of night. Instead everything happens rudely, at once: like this war. I stretch carefully so as not to fall out of my perch. My trained eyes scan the terrain, ascertaining very quickly that it is safe. I scramble down. It is a quiet morning, no sound of gunfire, only birdsong and the landscape, the grass flowing like a green mossy carpet from where I stand at the edge of the forest down to the river. But then the war intrudes again: floating past in the river like a macabre regatta is a cluster of corpses. Riding them like barges, and breakfasting at the same time, are a bunch of vultures. I light a cigarette and scratch my belly. Time to move on, maybe catch breakfast on the way. I know to go against the flow of the bodies. They are washing downstream from the killing zone—a town, judging from the number of bodies in the water. I set off.

  Life and death are like this river, Grandfather said. You can go anywhere on its spread as long as you don’t try to stop or alter the river’s course. But he was wrong. I have cheated death’s course many times and I am still here, like an undercurrent, full of a hate dark as any undertow.

  A Funnel Is Fingertips

  Steepled, Palms Apart

  I scan the road ahead and try to figure out what the enemy might have in store for me, if this is their territory now. Ambush is a standard procedure—for both sides. This is how the enemy set their traps: they plant mines in the road verge, in the brush, then they ambush an oncoming troop. The initial volley of fire from them is aimed a little too high so that it kills only a few oncoming soldiers. Naturally, and in spite of the three weeks of boot-camp training and the formations we have been taught to assume, we scatter for cover, stumbling onto the mines, blowing up ourselves and our friends. It is a particularly cruel way to take out an enemy, but since land mines are banned in civilized warfare, the West practically gives them away at cost and in this way they are cheaper than bullets and other arms. If they could, the enemy would have jerry-rigged the mines so they could throw them like grenades, but the firing mechanism of a mine is too sensitive to take such risks. Instead they lay them like a metal undercarpet. When a mine explodes, anyone directly on top will usually be killed. They are lucky. For the rest, shrapnel tears off arms and legs and parts of faces. Mines are like little jumping jacks. You step on one, they arm, you step off, and they jump up about mid-torso high and then explode, ripping you apart. For us, the rebels, mines are as valuable as bullets. We have no generous superpower sugar-daddies and we reuse every mine that we successfully defuse. Waste not want not.

  To counter these ambushes, the rebel leaders came up with the funnel. The name reminds me of the white cone my dog wore after he was neutered, and I can hardly make the sign for it without cracking up in soundless mirth. At the tapered end of the funnel, which is the front, are the scouts and mine diffusers. The scouts are split into two groups: the rekies who are strictly there for reconnaissance, and who report directly to the leader and are the only ones with radios or satellite phones; the other group of scouts are called kamikazes. Their job is to draw enemy fire while we mine diffusers get to work clearing the road for the body of the troop, which is spread out in a fan, the two sides ready to flank the enemy if necessary.

  My platoon and I are often at the front of every encounter. This has pros and cons. Pros and cons—the language of the invisible manual of John Wayne; invisible or lost. I like lost better—the lost manual of John Wayne. It should probably have a subtitle like my French textbook did: French A
frique Book One: French Even Africans Can Speak. Anyway, pros and cons would be a chapter in that manual. John Wayne swore by them.

  “Weigh the pros and cons of every situation!” he would shout at us. “It is best to proceed when there are more pros than cons, but not every con is a bad thing. In war we have acceptable losses; provided of course that it is in the service of the greater good … It’s all in the manual,” he would add to forestall Ijeoma’s questions.

  Thinking about it now, I will pay good money to see that manual. I slap myself. So many digressions—no wonder I have lost my platoon. Pros and cons of being at the front of every battle:

  Pros—

  • Prime pillaging opportunities.

  • The battle is over quicker.

  • If you die, it is quick (unless you fall victim to a mine, which can be a slow death sometimes).

  • The kamikaze dies first.

  • Choice pick of weapons.

  The cons?

  • Death.

  • Death.

  • Death.

  But regardless of the risks, I will not trade places with the clean-up crew, the platoon of vultures that bring up the rear, whose job is to clean up the dead and ensure the counts are accurate. Some of us have dog tags and some don’t, so their job is at best a good guess. I am sure that when the war is over, many of the reported dead will stream back to their families only to be rejected as ghosts or zombies. For us at the front, death is quick, ours and our comrades. For the clean-up crew, death is a lingering disease. Do they get tired of it? Counting the dead is not easy. It is rare to die intact in a war. Bullets and shrapnel from mines and mortars and shells can tear a body to pieces. An arm here, a leg over there in the foliage—all of which have to be retrieved and assembled into the semblance of a complete body before there can be a count. The worst thing about this job may be the irreconcilable math of it: Many of the parts don’t add up. This is the enemy’s cruelty—that much of the generation who survive this war will not be able to rebuild their communities. Even now it is not uncommon to run across groups of these half-people holding onto life in distant parts of the forest. Even the enemy soldiers spare these pitiful creatures when they come across them.

  I remember a group I saw once. Children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breasts—all of them holding onto life and hope with a fire that burned feverishly in their eyes. If any light comes from this war, it will come from eyes such as those.

  Someone had found a radio and it was tuned to a BBC World Service broadcast of Congolese highlife. There were a bunch of disabled children dancing in a circle. A young girl with one leg standing off to the side leaning on a stick made fun of the dancers. Challenged to do better, she laughed, threw the stick away, and jumped into the circle. She stood still for a moment as though she was getting her bearings, and then she began to move. Still balanced on one leg, her waist began a fierce gyration and her upper body moved the opposite way. Then like a crazy heron, she began to hop around, her waist and torso still shaking. She was an elemental force of nature. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I have never seen anything like it before or since—a small fire sprite shaking the world and reducing grown war-hardened onlookers to tears.

  I think of her and the fire I saw burning in the others and I realize the fire burning in me is shame; shame and fear, and it drives me to get up and proceed. I must find my platoon.

  Danger Is a Deeper Silence

  Time is standing still—literally. My watch, an old Timex that belonged to my father, is fucked. Already broken when he died, it was the only thing of his that my uncle let me inherit. The watch has one of those expanding bracelets made of a metal that was painted gold once, and its face is a mottled brown. Since I’ve had it, the second and hour hands have fallen off, both nestling like tired armatures in the bottom of the cracked glass case. My life it turns out is a series of minutes. I glance and guess it’s about noon now. I have been walking for too long and I am dying of thirst. The river to my right is poisonous with the dead. It would be wise to get off the river road and make my way through the shade of the forest until I can find some water, but the road is faster and I decide to continue on it for now. I look at my broken watch and think, One more hour. Rustling the broken arms like pods in a shaker, I head off again.

  I have other watches. Nicer watches. Rolex, Patek Philippe, Raymond Weil, Movado—name it. All of them liberated from houses we ransacked or from soldiers who had ransacked other houses before us. And not just watches. I have electronics, cameras, money, jewelry, weapons, shoes, designer clothes, even gold teeth and glasses. Looting is something we all do, rebel and federal troops, officers and enlisted men alike. John Wayne even took a car once, a Lexus that blew up shortly after. That made him angry for a week. We take what we can when we can. Since we have no means of transporting too much for too long, especially as we must keep our weight down for the mines, we made several secret stashes along the way. We figured others might stumble on a cache or two, but with the number we have, we will be well off after the war.

  Through it all, my father’s watch remains my most treasured possession. That and the medallion of St. Christopher that Ijeoma gave me after she stepped on that mine. She would have taken it off her own neck, except that she no longer had any arms or legs and wasn’t much more than a bloody torso, lacerated by shrapnel, body parts scattered in a way that cannot be explained or described. Instead I read her mind, or her eyes, or something, and understood everything—what she wanted, what stood she regretted—all of it, filling my head like a bad virus. I reach under my shirt and rub the cool metal of the medallion. She said it would protect me for sure now, especially as it had already claimed one victim.

  “I am proper sacrifice,” she said, and smiled.

  I remember it all—every minute of it—vividly. Or at least I remember my memories of it. She lay dying in my arms, and I wiped a tear from her face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not expecting her to answer.

  “You disobeyed the rule book,” she said.

  She was right. I was in the middle of a live minefield assisting a dying comrade, in direct contravention of John Wayne’s rules, abandoning my post to help her, endangering myself and the rest of my platoon. But I loved her.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t die.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she said. “Dying, I mean. It’s not so bad.”

  “Shush,” I said.

  “Leaving …” she began, and then she died. I like to think she was going to say, “Leaving you is hard.”

  I’ve often replayed that scene, wishing that I could change some detail. That I had held her back for a quick kiss, thus keeping her from that mine, but being the leader meant having to act a little indifferent toward her in front of the others. If she resented the change, she said nothing. I squeeze my eyes tightly closed, but her mocking smile can’t be shut out.

  Voices, and not imaginary ones, are coming down the road from a hidden bend. I don’t hesitate, loping across the short grass between me and the forest, gaining cover quickly. There is no point in waiting around to find out if they are friend or foe. I need to get to a town and get some food and drink, so I plunge deeper into the forest, moving fast if not silently through the undergrowth. At this point, silence doesn’t matter anymore. Even if they hear me, they will imagine it is some animal. I press on until I break through the cover into a circular natural clearing in the forest. It has been widened and I can tell from the cut shrubbery where nature stopped and machetes moved forward. There are a couple of open and empty metal shipping containers, a few bombed-out vehicles, including an ambulance and a ruined armored car. Something about the ambulance fills me with a nostalgia that makes my eyes water from the sweetness of it. I stop and scan the clearing. Apart from a few crows, the place is abandoned. Something about it is very familiar though and I realize I have been here before. The entire platoon has been here. Just before Ijeom
a got blown up, after the church incident, after I shot John Wayne. There is no mistaking the statues the guys liberated from the church—the wooden Jesus in a peeling red tunic with one leg missing where Nebu had chopped it off the day we killed a monkey and needed firewood to cook; Jesus’ leg was the only dry wood anywhere on that rainy day, the rain had made it possible to catch the monkey as it slipped on a wet branch. I couldn’t eat it because it reminded me too much of the dead child in my dreams, and of that night we stumbled on that gory feast, those gorgons, and I left the campsite as the others cooked and ate it. Later, Ijeoma brought me an open tin of Spam from a box we’d liberated from some rich man’s house.

  I look around, eyes meeting those of the sad-looking Virgin whose white-painted concrete body has turned green from rain. She is mottled from the bullet holes we inflicted with target practice. I approach slowly. I am on the right track, this much is sure. It seems I am retracing my steps through places we passed. Something is off about it though, and yet as much as it is nagging at me, I cannot pinpoint what it is exactly, but I know it has something to do with the chronology of my memories. The time between them is shrinking, I think. If I didn’t still have this damn concussion I might be able to figure it out.