by John Shirley
“What’s the matter, Zainab?” Ali asked, almost laughing at her expression.
She turned back, her heart thudding. She heard the man’s voice again, soft and low pitched. “He comes from the Jordanian side of the family, and he has been in Pakistan until recently. He came here with a Pakistani company to work. And why?” She looked in the backseat again and saw the old man’s eyes, floating against the rear window, then they were gone. “Why?” asked the voice again. She turned sharply to the front of the car. She’d been ill with a fever a few days before. She must still have something, giving her delirium, she decided.
Her heart jumped like a frightened animal as the strange tinny song came again from Sabbah’s coat.
Sabbah chewed his lip, and looked at his watch, and reached for the cellphone.
~
As Private Paul Gatewood walked up, Lance Corporal Binsdale and Specialist Vintara were standing together on the overpass, their assault rifles in hand, watching as the driver of the supplies truck, an Arab guy subcontracted by Halliburton, tinkered with the engine. Gatewood stood with them, looking at the Arab. The man wore glasses and a turban; he tugged at his clipped white beard as he puzzled over the engine.
“Now I wish I spoke that fucking language,” said Corporal Binsdale, a young black man sweating in khakis and a Kevlar vest. The others were sunburnt white men in fatigues. “What the hell’s his name again?” Binsdale’s own first name was Kaytel, something about a TV commercial on when he was conceived.
“I don’t know, Kaytel,” Vintara said. “Abdul or something.”
“Man, you think they’re all named Abdul.”
Gatewood hesitated about speaking up. He’d had a hard time getting these guys to accept him already. When he’d transferred in from South Korea, they’d found out he had a B.A. in English. “Fuck,” Vintara had said. “A fucking English major. That’ll help.” And Binsdale called him “Major English,” even though he was an enlisted man like the rest of them.
Finally Gatewood said, “His name’s Fahad. I think.”
“You think, Major English, or you know?” Binsdale asked.
“I’m pretty sure.”
Binsdale glanced along back at the troop truck behind them, where seven soldiers were sweltering in the rear. He could see cigarette smoke drifting out of the back, a violation of regs. Gatewood had the same thought: the corporal was going to have to get them out of the truck soon, what with the heat, but that would constitute unnecessary exposure of troops in a high-target area, namely on this overpass, and that was bad ju-ju, as Vintara liked to say. They could back up, go by another route, but there was a lot of traffic waiting behind them—stopped four car lengths behind them, not wanting to be close to potential targets—and it’d be hard to get past them.
Binsdale muttered, “Fuck!” and, putting on his sunglasses against the glare at the front of the small convoy, walked to the materiel truck blocking their way off the overpass. After a moment, Gatewood followed, thinking that he might be of help, but he only knew a few words of Arabic, so he hung back a pace. While standing there, he thought he saw someone out of the corners of his eyes. He turned and just glimpsed an American soldier he didn’t know. Army. He was a young guy, skinny, with thatchy brown hair and a sad smile, and he didn’t have his rifle; he had his hands in his pockets. He was walking by, looking at Gatewood, nodding to him, and Gatewood was going to ask who the hell he was—he sure hadn’t come with them—and where was his weapon, but the guy slipped between the vehicles and was gone, almost like he blinked out. All this in a second, as Binsdale called, “Hey—uh—Fahad?”
“Yes, soldier officer?” the man said, not looking up from the engine.
“I’m not an officer, blood. Listen, if you can’t get this thing started we’re going to have to push it out of the way. Maybe with the truck behind.”
“You are making to leave me behind here?” The man looked at him in alarm.
“No, man. The truck’s almost empty, nothing much in it, it’s going to pick shit up, so we can leave it. We’ll send some guys around.”
“Looters will take it, soldier.”
“Well maybe, I’ll call in for someone to watch it. Maybe get the local cops here.”
“Local cops are looters, too, soldier.”
“Mostly not, blood. Don’t trip, we got it covered. You start it or not?”
“Maybe it is start.” Fahad looked at his watch. Glanced over his shoulder. “I will try . . .”
“You do that.”
Binsdale walked back to Gatewood and Vintara. “Well he—”
“The fucker’s running off, Kaytel!”
“What the fuck?” Binsdale ran toward the truck, aslant across the road and blocking their way out of Saddam City. He stopped, staring after Fahad—then looked at the truck engine.
Gatewood stepped to the other side of the truck, and saw Fahad sprinting down the farther side of the narrow overpass, toward the road paralleling the Tigris.
“Holy shit,” Binsdale said. “He cut the distributor wires. I think that fucker was planning this all along . . .”
~
“Why did you stop?” Ali asked, as Sabbah pulled up at the curb, half a block from the overpass. “Have we not enough petrol?”
“Yes, yes, we have enough, we—it’s just too soon,” Sabbah snapped looking at his watch.
He looked pale, to Zainab. She remembered her Jaddah speaking of Sabbah with a mixture of pity and contempt. “He has nothing. Look at him, no woman, no job, everything he tries has failed. Always bad luck. Now he is with those fanatics . . .”
“He is one of them,” said the man in the backseat. Zainab didn’t turn to look, but she knew he was there. “And he has vowed to give his life. You must try to get out of the car. You must survive, so that you can find a way.”
Zainab squeezed her eyes shut, opened them, and looked—
“What?” Ali said.
She shook her head. No one there. Except she thought she felt the man looking at her still.
Her breath whistling loudly between her teeth, Zainab looked at the American soldiers, who seemed stuck somehow on the overpass, waving their arms and pointing at the engine of their truck. One of them was setting up orange cones a little distance in front of the stalled vehicle. That meant keep back or else, she knew. People who approached a stalled American vehicle without permission were often shot, whether they intended harm or not.
She looked at Sabbah. She thought about the car that he had never had before and the cellphone he had never had before, and she could feel the fear rolling off him with the sweat. He began to murmur prayers then, traditional prayers. They seemed to be pressed out of him like the fear and sweat.
“Oh,” she said. The man in the backseat was right.
Sabbah looked at her.
Zainab turned to Ali. “Come, we’ll get out and wait in the shade.”
“No,” Sabbah grated. “You will stay in the car.”
“I am too hot, Sabbah.” She unlocked her car door, started to press the handle to open it.
Sabbah grabbed her by the upper left arm and squeezed, and she whimpered in pain. “I said no! You will wait—we’re going—”
The cellphone chimed from his pocket again. He let go of her arm and clawed at his coat, his motions frantic, till at last he got the insistent cellphone out. “Yes, yes . . . yes we—yes. Now. Yes.”
She turned to look at her brother and mouthed, Run. Run!
Ali stared at her, blinking, not comprehending.
~
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” Binsdale was saying.
Vintara was staring at a car driving up toward them, a dusty blue sedan. Three people in it. “That fucking car—coming out of park there—it’s coming up here, and they can see those cones, man. They see we’re fucking blocking the way!”
He unslung his rifle from his shoulder.
Gatewood put a hand on Vintara’s shoulder. “Wait, Vintara, Jesus—there’s
kids in that car. Two kids—”
“I don’t fucking care, that scraper is not coming up here.”
“Vintara, we have orders; you don’t light up a family car with kids in it, unless you see a weapon.”
“And Lieutenant Mayfield said fuck that, he said if they won’t stop you light them up—they’re Ali Baba, man. And fuck, here they come—!”
Time seemed to slow then, becoming like a dead leaf drifting slowly down, and Gatewood felt as if someone was calling him.
He turned from Vintara, and saw the young soldier again—the guy just appeared at his elbow. “Hey bro, huh-ah. Listen, Vintara’s going to hit you—move! And get the kids out of the car . . .”
Then time sped up to normal, the same time as the car coming at them sped up; Gatewood moved, and the blow hit him only glancingly. But he fell to his knees . . .
~
“Sabbah, don’t!” Zainab shouted.
“Shut up!” Sabbah shouted, tears rolling down his cheeks.
She knew what he was doing. The soldiers had sometimes shot at cars approaching a checkpoint too quickly. Families had been killed, and now they’d been ordered not to shoot at cars containing women and children. But Sabbah and those who had sent him were using her and her brother as camouflage, to get them near the trucks. The car was a bomb.
“You are martyrs, we are martyrs, Allah Ahkbar!”
“No, Sabbah, my brother is so little—no!”
“This is all I have, this I will have!” Sabbah shouted, stepping hard on the gas pedal.
Zainab reached over and grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard to the right so the car swerved, turning broadside to the soldiers just twenty-five feet from the cones.
Sabbah slapped her so hard that her eyes were filled with blue sparks and she lost her grip on the steering wheel. He shouted a prayer and opened the glove compartment and as her vision cleared she saw wires attached to the sort of switch used to turn on a light, the whole fixture sitting crookedly on a sheaf of dusty papers.
Ali was screaming and trying to open his door. Sabbah was pawing at the switch, trying to set off the bomb. The car spun to a stop . . .
~
Gatewood was sitting on the ground, holding the side of his head, hearing gunfire just above. It came to him that he’d been trying to stop Vintara from shooting up the car, and Vintara had hit him with the butt of his gun. Now the gun was firing; brass was clinking on the asphalt.
“Oh fuck, Vintara, don’t shoot that car, not this time . . .”
He felt strong hands lifting him up by the armpits. Binsdale. “That’s a bomb car, you know that, man.”
Vintara stopped shooting, and, a bit unsteady, Gatewood ran to the car, looking for the kids—the driver was shot to pieces but he was alive, still fumbling with something on the dashboard. “This is a sucker move,” Gatewood told himself, as he helped the little boy drag the girl free. He dragged them both skiddingly away from the car—then the blast came, spinning him around like he was on a turntable. He felt the scorching heat of it; he heard shrapnel singing past his head. He heard Binsdale shouting with pain—but everything he heard was through a blanket of ringing. He fell, lay there stunned a few seconds.
Shaky, he got to his feet and looked down at himself—no blood, no torn clothing. Binsdale was clutching his side, but it looked superficial from here. A piece of metal from the wrecked car; the stink of gasoline and blood from the twisting pillar of smoky flame. He could make out oozing pieces of the driver, smoking to one side of the wreck.
There were two small, slender figures lying near the overturned orange cones nearby. The smaller one, a boy, stirred—and suddenly sat up, holding his head and wailing. The other, his sister maybe, lay still, blood pooling around her neck, her shoulders.
“Vintara,” Gatewood said loudly, not even looking toward him, “did you fucking light up those kids?”
Vintara was sitting against the bumper of the truck, staring at the bomb wreck. He nodded. Then he shook his head. “I was shooting at the driver . . . I think I hit one maybe; I don’t fucking know . . .”
Gatewood wobbled over to them, his head aching in distinct throbs that went with each step, and saw that the girl’s eyes were fluttering.
Gatewood sat down next to her and took her pulse. It seemed more or less regular. The wound was just under her collarbone. He found a compress in his belt pack and pressed it to the wound; she twitched at the touch. The little boy, close beside him, had stopped crying. He was staring with his mouth open at Gatewood.
Hearing ambulance sirens approaching, Gatewood felt the girl’s pulse. He smiled at the boy. “She’ll live, kid.”
He glanced up, and saw two men standing together nearby. An Arabic man with a white beard and the young soldier. He knew they were there and not there, at the same time. He could feel it. The others never glanced at them.
Both men nodded to him. Gatewood heard the young soldier’s voice in his head. “You must survive, so that you can find a way.” Then the old man and the soldier vanished into the smoke from the burning car.
~
They vanished for Gatewood; they were fully aware of one another as they rode the smoke upward, letting it carry their subtle bodies into the air, up and up into the sky over Baghdad.
They were aware of the people below, trying to get on with their lives. Children studying the Qu’ran, parents selling coffee and sweets from little booths, young men agonizing over whether they should risk taking a job as an Iraqi policeman—a death sentence to a sizable percentage of police trainees—and people simply trying to get home to their families.
A car bomb went off south of the city at the opening ceremony for a new hospital. Sixty-seven souls were broken free of their physical moorings and went spiraling up toward the River of Nepenthe—the River of Forgetfulness—wailing with disorientation and loss.
The ghost of the old man and the young soldier were aware of all this as they, too, ascended. Both of them felt a longing to join the drifting procession to the river; to let it carry them into the shining Sea of Mind.
But they could not go with the other souls drifting through the sky. They had both taken vows, on dying, the young soldier and the old man, to ease the suffering they had seen in life; the suffering that both of them had helped bring about. They had taken a renewed vow to avert the great black spiritual cloud that hovered over the horizon of this plane of Being. But it might be too late. It was difficult to tell. The future was balanced on a razor blade . . . It might fall either way—or slide out of control, falling to be slashed in two.
“Where to?” the ghost of the young soldier asked.
“East. Afghanistan,” the ghost of the old sheikh said.
“Did they find someone?”
“I found him, gentlemen,” came a third voice, echoing to them etherically, in English. The speaker, invisible to them just now, was somewhere far away. But a spirit can be distant and nearby at once. They knew just who he was; neither was surprised at the telepathic contact. “I haven’t a great deal of confidence in him. He may abandon us at any moment, eh? Indeed he might.”
“Who is it, Colonel?” the white-bearded ghost asked.
“A man named John Constantine. I’m afraid he’ll have to do. There’s no time to find another.”
“Did you say John Constantine?” the white-bearded ghost asked, his heart sinking.
“I did.”
“And—he’s an Englishman? Neither old nor young? A mocking tongue about him? Hair the color of dried straw?”
“His hair looks like it bloody is dried straw. A mocking tongue? Bleeding smart-mouthed little prat, more like. That’s him, all right. Best we can do. You know him?”
“I know of him. And if he’s the one we have to work with . . .” The white-bearded ghost then used an expression in Arabic that roughly translates as follows:
“We’re totally fucked.”
3
I THOUGHT I WAS SOMEONE ELSE, SOMEONE GOOD
> The Elburz Mountains, Iran
“Not sure I can eat now without spewing up, Bakky,” Constantine muttered, as old Bahktiar pressed the bowl of soup in his hands.
“You eat, the Abi Sheikh, he says you eat. Good goat’s meat, fresh,” the old servant Bahktiar insisted. He was a small, gnarled, nearly toothless man in a dirty yellow robe and turban. He had never approved of Constantine and disliked being called “Bakky,” so of course Constantine called him that pretty much always.
All too firmly back in his body, sitting on the edge of his cot in the chilly old mountain monastery, the robe itching him as usual, Constantine looked at the soup and thought of the cover of an old Rolling Stones album and almost threw up. But he took the wooden bowl in shaking hands, closed his eyes, and made himself sip some broth. It went down surprisingly well. He had slept on returning to his body, and it was now just dawn. Most of the monks had been up an hour and a half already, meditating.
“Salam Aleikom,” said the Abi Sheikh in Farsi, stepping through the doorway of the little cell. Bahktiar instantly fell to his knees before the monastery’s master. The sheikh was a tall gangling man with a thin, silver-streaked black beard, a beaklike nose, deep brown eyes filmed with age, a frayed blue robe and a faded blue hat like a truncated cone. Known only as “the Blue Sheikh”—or simply Xodavand, Farsi for “Lord”—the old magus had once revealed to Constantine that he was in fact not natively Persian; he had been born in Egypt, but after two hundred years in Iran, the locals thought of him as one of their own. Constantine knew him for an expert on both Persian and Egyptian magic, and the teachings of both Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegestus: teachings that merged into one, if you went far enough back.
The Abi Sheikh patted Bahktiar on the shoulder and waved him away. A Zoroastrian monk himself, the old servant stood up but lingered, glaring at Constantine because, as usual, this Brit interloper had failed to fall to his knees in the presence of the master of this monastery. Bahktiar made a “get down, kneel” gesture with his hand, which Constantine ignored.