Phantom

by Steve Berman

  The titles of my brother’s videos are these:

  Airplane F4-Crash

  B52_crash

  F14a_explosion (you can tell he is into flying)

  F-16 in Falluja

  F117_in_action

  Hellfire_strike

  Renegade platoon locates IED in Baquba February 2005

  Roadside IED

  Terrorist hunting-WARNING-abit-sick

  Worst Kind of Ambush

  . . . and so on.

  Worst Kind of Ambush is another humorous video. We see a row of portable toilets. Two soldiers run at one of the cubicles, fell it down, and run away. The door opens to reveal a soldier with his pants down, holding a roll of toilet paper in one hand. “Nice ass!” a voice OC says.

  IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device. It is the sort of charge Iraqi insurgents—those fighting the liberators of their country—set up by the side of the road, for instance—as, in fact, in the video labeled Roadside IED, and where the charge hits an American vehicle.

  Did Abu Karim help build these IEDs? Did he kill American soldiers? Did he contribute, unknowingly, to more videos than the one featuring his last performance?

  As a matter of fact, I suspect these videos do not exist. A Google search for “Terrorist hunting-WARNING-abit-sick” shows no results. The video, reminiscent of the screen of a computer game, shows figures running on the ground and an unnamed American pilot being directed to shoot first one, then another, and later blow up a truck with people inside it. It is unlikely such classified material would be made available on the Internet. Therefore I suspect it, too, is most likely propaganda: though I don’t know whose.

  But back to Abu Karim. Or maybe not. Maybe go back, rather, to Karim. Is he dead? If not, is he too building IEDs?

  More and more, Abu Karim invades my sleep, materializing in the black moments between sleep and awakening when I rise with a desperate need for the bathroom. He appears in the grogginess of early morning, before coffee and cigarettes banish him to the world of the dead again. He is my own private IED, improvised and explosive, with a son, a wife, a fruit-seller’s job (as fanciful as that may be)—everything, in short, but a coffin. Why is he bothering me? It is possible, I suppose, that his atoms, blasted, were carried on the wind, like sand from the Sahara, half-way across the world, bringing him to me. It is possible I inadvertently inhaled them, it is even possible that my body, in its ceaseless quest of regenerating cells, had used some of those loose atoms to construct some minute part of my own body. Is that what is it? Is Abu Karim a cancer, trying to feed off of me? I want nothing of his. I want him to remain dead. I want him gone.

  Bombattack

  Bottle_head_shot

  Die_terrorists_die

  IED attack v Stryker

  War_Footage_Iraqi_gets_LIT_UP

  More recently the voice of Abu Karim has been growing faint, replaced with a voice I have no reason to believe is dead. I call him John. He sounds white, though I am not an expert on American accents. He usually says only one word. It is said with a kind of humorous awe.

  Dude.

  Did John go to college? Or did he go straight to the army at seventeen or eighteen? Somehow, he sounds to me like a college kid. Dude. Like when you drink beer through a hose, dude. It’s called a beer bong. When you drink so much you get seriously bombed. Where did he come from? I know as much about Americans as I know about Iraqis, that is to say, very little. Can John be Karim’s age? What movies does he like? What music? Is he a rock music guy? Does he prefer the constant beat of jungle? Who was his first girlfriend? When did he lose his virginity? Has he ever been to Vegas?

  Different sets of questions, different assumptions. For all I know Abu Karim was never a fruit-seller. Perhaps he was a mechanical or chemical engineer. Perhaps he studied in America, before the war. It is possible, I suppose, that he went to the same hypothetical university John went to. Has he been to Vegas? And what did he think of it? Did he hate it? Was he indifferent? Or did he carry the memory of it like a guilty, joyful secret all those years?

  In those moments between sleep and awakening they both rise inside me. Their voices speak, but only to me. They won’t talk to each other. I beg them to be quiet. But now they are loose. Like a virus, they reproduce. They are caught in each other’s moment, in an endless digital loop, spreading from one computer to another, from one mind to another, overtly conducting a youtube war.

  But I didn’t ask for this. I turned off the television. I subscribe to no papers. I listen to music stations on the radio and turn the volume down when the news comes on. In that I am like most people. I suspect Abu Karim did not care for the news until he found that he was part of them. And John, I think, is just a regular guy, with a sweetheart back home and a mother who writes him letters every week, and hopes he drinks plenty of water in the heat. Go to them, I say. Go to your mother, your sweetheart, your high-school coach, your small-town haven. And you, Abu Karim. Go to your heaven, if you are a believer. And if not, go to the place where us atheists go, into a nowhere that is everywhere, where our atoms, our quantum, live as long as the universe itself will exist. But go. I shall erase every last copy of you. I shall destroy the software that is able to decode you. I will eradicate all knowledge of the video format that holds you. Go. Go back to your war, and leave me to mine. I do not want your ghosts.

  Eliot once said that he had seen birth and death, but had thought them different. The magi return to their kingdoms, but they are no longer at ease there. Frost said that home is where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in. Where will John and Abu Karim go? Can they return to their places, to the old dispensation? And if they did, who would let them in?

  “Do it?”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Ten seconds to impact.”

  Explosion. Black smoke. A voice says, “Dude,” and nothing more.

  Were they brought together, across half a world, for birth, or death?

  Recently I visited the Kruger Park, a place far removed, at first glance, from the world of explosives, improvised or otherwise. I saw elephants and cheetahs, antelopes and rhinos, but the animals I liked the most were small. Black, ungraceful, the dung-beetles congregated wherever there was fresh dung. They burrowed inside it. Their arms gripped the fresh, moist, earthy shit and molded it. Diligently they formed it into balls, some much larger than themselves. Diligently they rolled the balls across the tarmac and into the bushveld beyond.

  The dung beetles lay their eggs inside the balls of dung. Their young eat through the compressed excrement and, as they reach the outside at last, they open wings and fly.

  A STAIN ON THE STONE

  Nick Mamatas

  I’m not going to bother with the slow build here, or the twist ending. So here it is, right up front: back in the summer of ’84, Ricky Kasso lured Gary Lauwers out to the Aztakea Woods and spent the night torturing him in a drug-induced haze before killing him. You know the story already too; Kasso was the “Acid King” and deep into heavy metal and The Satanic Bible . . . as heavy as a seventeen year-old kid gets about anything. Kasso wasn’t very smart; he was just another overprivileged twat from Northport Long Island. And Ricky, mostly as a joke only he found funny, demanded that Gary say, “I love Satan!” while he stabbed him. Gary shouted back, “I love my mother!” and then died. Two of Ricky’s friends, Jimmy Troiano and Albert Quinones, were there, but they were all so cracked out of their minds that they probably didn’t even realize how many times Gary has been stabbed, or that Gary’s eyes weren’t working anymore after being gouged with a stick. Albert even dragged Gary back to the scene twice when Gary, a pretty big kid, broke free and tried to run.

  The scene was a large boulder, left by the retreat of the glaciers that made Long Island the peculiar cigar-shaped stretch of sand it is. That boulder is where Northport High School’s Knights of the Black Circle had their meetings. That’s where Gary died. That’s where Ricky had painted a message that proved just how ridiculous th
is whole wretched scene was: SATIN LIVES!

  Long Island in the 80s was all about the metal. Yes, there was WLIR, which played the The Smiths and The Cure for the shivering knots of gay nerds who hid in the art room during lunch, and there were even pockets of hip-hop. Strong Island represent and all that! But metal ruled. The high school talent shows were one pimply-faced guitarist after another, counting to themselves and tapping their foot while murdering Dokken on their mall-bought flying-V axes. But it wasn’t the metal so much as it was the religion that was the problem. There was a girl in my school named Felicia, who was pretty with dark curls and nice rack for a petite chick, but she was a bit of a weirdo and her mother was worse. Felicia’s mom wore a muumuu everywhere and weighed three hundred pounds. Once, at the King Kullen, she’d bought some plastic wrap and rubber gloves and mayonnaise and the total was exactly $6.66. As far as the kids in Drama Class (all dirtbags, not queers, as it counted as an English credit and didn’t involve much reading) were concerned, that was proof positive. Personally, I was much more interested in what bizarre sex thing she might be doing with plastic wrap and rubber gloves and mayonnaise, but then I always had a taste for the odd. For everyone else, six-six-six! was all they needed to hear. Felicia was exiled to the nerdy fringe of the social circle, except insofar as she gave head on the first date, which she did. A lot.

  I needed a job to pay for my car, but I wasn’t going to mow lawns for sons of bitches for five bucks an hour or shelve stock at the King Kullen, so here was my idea: I’d give kids the occult tour of the North Shore. Where they tried the witches in Port Jefferson back in the 1650s. Yeah, it never made the history books in the way Salem, Mass did, but because the local colony only fined people for witchcraft. Amityville, natch. Kings Park Psychiatric Center, which was mostly closed and had plenty of dead buildings to poke around in. I’d even found the tracks to the old rail spur that led right into the hospital and made up some story about crazies being chained to a pump trolley and forced to travel along the spur all night as punishment for fighting or masturbating. The apex of the tour was the Lauwers murder scene, and the big rock. I’d break out a Thermos full of Jagermeister, a few hits of acid—or whatever I could buy that could be passed off as acid—and I’d collect twenty-five bucks a head. Then we’d all go to the diner and eat disco fries till sunup.

  SATIN LIVES! became the bane of my fucking existence. I spent a lot of time reading up on Kasso. I knew he was the son of a football coach, a fact which always got a few hoots and guffaws from the crowd I’d lead into Aztakea. That two months before the murder he’d been arrested for disturbing a grave and that Gary Lauwers had been with him. Ricky and Gary were friends of a sort, but the only things they had in common were drugs and their Halloween fright mask version of Satanism. After Gary swiped ten baggies of angel dust from Kasso, Kasso beat him up, but not too badly. The next meeting of the Knights of the Black Circle was going to be a set-up to teach Lauwers a lesson, but Ricky just went a bit too crazy from drugs and psychosis, and the other two dipshits didn’t do anything to stop Kasso.

  That’s not the story I’d tell. I’d explain that Kasso had dug up a human skull along with Lauwers and ever since that night, things had changed between them. Kasso was wild-eyed from acid; they called him “The Acid King” at Northport and once, at a party, a girl he was making out with had a bad trip just from all the LSD in Ricky’s saliva. He’d play Priest and Ozzy backwards constantly to get messages from his dark lords. I’d copied some of the LPs onto cassette and would play them backwards as we walked through the woods, flashlights casting the tree limbs like bones. When it was just us guys on the tour, we’d inevitably play a bit of Star Wars in the fog; with girls around, everyone was a bit cooler and darker. Some of the girls even prayed, or at least said, “Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus!” almost in time with the warped tunes from my box. The swallowed syllables of the music and my little patter would really make the girls shiver and want some manly protection.

  I’d explain that a black crow came to Ricky—one time I even lucked out and a bird started cawing in the distance—and the crow demanded blood. So Ricky decided to bring Gary Lauwers out to the woods, the woods where Satan would talk to Ricky in the form of a tree and tell him black secrets of the occult. Someone would crunch through a pile of leaves noisily, and I’d gasp and shine my light on their feet.

  “There,” I said, every Saturday night. “There’s where the body was. Where Ricky would bring kids to see after bragging about his murder at school. It took two weeks before anyone told the cops. It wasn’t just Ricky who was in the grip of Satan, it was all of them. This is a sick society; we like to watch a kid die and rot, be all smelly and bloated, staring up at us with red gouges where his eyes used to be. Eye sockets squirming with little white maggots, a silent jury of our sins.” Then the light would go under my chin. “Don’t think you’re any different, any of you. You’re here now, aren’t you? Looking for a little dark magic? Hoping to find something out here? Well, don’t worry, you want the face of evil, just look in the mirror.” A bit of silence for effect, then I’d say, “Come on.”

  I’d stop at a few different places, like the stations of the cross gone Widdershins. “Here’s how far Gary got the first time he ran, but Ricky caught him and tackled him. Ricky was still the football coach’s kid, a strong kid, a fast kid. He dragged him back to where the party was. This way.” We’d walk some more. “Here was the tree Jimmy Troiano was leaning against the whole time, dusted out of his fucking mind. He thought he was watching a cartoon.” Troiano’s face was full of scars. He’d do anything to make friends, including trying to hang from a swing set by putting the swing-hook in his mouth. Jimmy Troiano had teeth like fangs. I’d shine the light and there would be a black-and-white pic of Troiano, blown up and glossy, right where I’d tacked it.

  Then, closer, to a little clearing. “Here’s where Ricky stabbed Gary a dozen times, and started screaming—” and I’d do a harsh stage whisper, “say you love Satan! Say you love Satan you little fucking bitch! Satan is your lord and master!” and Gary wouldn’t scream, he wouldn’t give in. He’d just wail, “I love my mother, I love my mother . . . ” I’d wail that lightly, like I was playing Oliver in the school play, which I did as a freshman.

  The big boulder was right behind me at this point in the tour. I knew the area like the back of my hand from my own poking around. The rock had a lot of moss on it near the bottom, and was under a thick canopy of leaves, so it was hard to see in the dark. “And then Ricky gouged out Gary’s eyes. He told him he was doing it because he loved him and he didn’t want him to see the torments of hell. ‘I love you more than your whore mother, Gary, you dirty motherfucker.’ ” I made that part up.

  “Say you love Satan!” I’d say again. Chanting. “Say you love Satan! You’re going to die, but Satan lives! You die, Satan lives! You die, Satan lives!” Then I’d swing my big cop maglite to illuminate the boulder and it would light up the night like the moon and the kids would jump right out of their skins. “SATAN LIVES!”

  After a few seconds, and if everyone was sober enough, a girl (always a girl) would say. “That says ‘Satin lives.’ ”

  There’d be a few huh?s or some laughs, depending on how sharp the crowd was.

  “Yeah, Ricky was too high to spell very well. The other guys were all drop-outs and stuff. Nobody noticed.”

  “Maybe they weren’t Satanists. Maybe they were just gay.”

  “Yeah, and Gary gave Ricky a shitty blowjob,” some guy would say.

  “What are you doing, talking about getting a blowjob from some guy,” another person would say and then the tour would degenerate into dumb animosities and it would take me twenty minutes to get everyone back to my car. This is why I collected the money after Kings Park, but before Northport.

  People liked the tour, and there was good word of mouth around the dirtbag set, and even the couple of black kids in the area expressed an interest in attending, but there was a downside too. I became �
��Satin,” for one thing. That’s a good nickname for a stripper or a pimp from the 60s, not for a longhair from Long Island.

  “Wanna go do something sometime,” I’d ask a girl. “I got a car now.”

  “Sure, Satin,” she’d say. “Should I bring my boyfriend for me, and my brother for you?”

  Sometimes I’d walk down the hall between classes and kids would sing bow-chicka-bow-bow as background music for the movie of my life. I got a couple of people shoving anti-gay Chick tracts in my locker, plus the ones about Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal, which were amusing at least. Then it started hurting the tour. I’d go through the whole two-hour spiel in Port Jeff and Kings Park, then over to Amityville before looping back around to Northport and get everyone up to the rock and then someone, and sometimes everyone, would scream, “SATIN LIVES!”

  One time, four guys I didn’t really know, from Wading River high school, broke out and started singing “YMCA,” even doing the Y, M, C, and A-shaped arm moves as they danced around. Even I had to laugh at that one, but business really dried up after that.

  The last time it was just me and Felicia. I almost cancelled the tour, but she said she’d pay double, to make it worth my while. I was tempted to tell her to think of it as a date and get a little head, but I try to be a good guy. It was weird though, with just one person. She wanted to sit in the back seat like I was a chauffeur, and she sipped the Thermos full of Jager all dainty, like it was lemonade from a crystal goblet or something. I had to say, “Everything okay back there?” a few times, because she was so quiet. I felt like her dad or something.