The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  Following the mania there was a depressive crash. With it came deep and profound questions that had no answers, or answers that could never satisfy. After two months of insomnia, months of only blackout sleep, and not wanting to get out of bed—just a rest, just a timeout from life is what everyone seemed to need. No timeout was coming. Such difficult questions in the morning, in the afternoon, at night. What is going on in life? What’s the meaning of all this? Is there someone who can tell me?

  And Peoria bopped around the city streets, windows of the car rolled down, no traffic laws still, asking these questions—asking these questions, he thought, on behalf of the Iraqi people and the American people. And the answers he was getting—what were the answers? Uncle Fadil says the answer is that freedom is here, thank you George Bush, goddamn Saddam. Another, when Peoria ran into a funeral procession, answers: What have you done to my family, my life—is this what freedom means, does freedom mean the death of my family? And the Americans, most of the Americans, they had answers, the least satisfying of them all—answers that hinted at such a lack of answers that the only possible response was to hope they were right. They could give you answers, yes, very good at providing answers—the answer is, everything is going great, democracy is going to be established, the rule of law and the new Iraqi government shall be here. Yes, the Americans were sure confident they had the right diagnosis, the right meds, the right brand of therapy and treatment—this is a traumatized country! Thirty years of brutal repression—how do you expect them to behave? Of course there is anger and violence, this is normal, this is expected, but within six months, they’ll be on their feet, and we’ll all be home by Christmas.

  “Do you think,” Ahmed says to Peoria, “your country will be home by your Christmas, as your general says?”

  “I’m going to be home by Christmas,” says Peoria. “Thanksgiving too.”

  “I’ve seen movies of your Christmas and Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah, there are some good movies about them.”

  Yes, the American general in charge of American Forces in Iraq said this: we should have the bulk of Americans home by Christmas, and this was reported, and Peoria knew this wasn’t an unusual comment for a general to make. Home by Christmas had been promised before. Pope Gregory VIII, setting off the Third Crusade in the twelfth century, issued a papal bull exhorting his allies to war. The bull promised that after a journey to retake Jerusalem, your men will be able to return in two years’ time to celebrate the birth of Christ on our land, which will be made so much sweeter, so much sweeter knowing that we have retaken the holy city of Jerusalem and restored its rightful place. Longer travel times, in those days, of course, but getting everyone home for the holidays was a major concern—a concern that Napoleon ignored to his everlasting historical shame when he decided to invade Russia, and when one of his sultry little French advisers said, “Emperor, we might get stuck in the Russian winter, the mud, the cold—why don’t we bring clothes for the winter?” And Napoleon didn’t believe him. When winter comes, Napoleon wrote, our soldiers will be celebrating Noel in Paris—Joyeux Noël pour toute la France!—or the anterooms of Saint Petersburg. In World War I, the Brits promised the war would be done soon enough. Hitler expected a comfortable O Tannenbaum as well. In Korea, after MacArthur turned the tide, just to push the Chinese back over the Yalu River, word was that we’d be out of there by the New Year. In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, on tape, after making a massive bowel movement, grunted that he wanted to make sure Robert McNamara understood that no tour of duty should span two Christmases—we can’t have them missing two holiday seasons, bad for morale.

  The promise of Christmas was given, and it was a promise that the Americans believed, at least temporarily, that they could keep.

  Peoria gets up, grabs a chair and drags it along the patio.

  “Sit, Ahmed, sit,” he says.

  Ahmed sits.

  “What do you think of this spray paint? Look at this, the stars, the tiki torch, the hummus—you and me? What is it? What do you think it is?”

  “Peoria, I remember the day your country was attacked on the September the eleventh. I cheered.”

  Ahmed laughs, Peoria laughs.

  “But I would not have cheered if I knew you would come here. You don’t understand these people, these Shiites,” Ahmed says. “They are no good, they are Muppets of Iran.”

  “Puppets?”

  “Yes, Muppets of Iran. Saddam knew this. They are worse than the Kurds. We Sunnis, we are better well educated, you see,” Ahmed says. “We respected the Shiites, we understood them, we knew they were not well educated. The engineers, the doctors, the lawyers, they are Sunni, not Shiite. But these Shiites, these Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Abdul Aziz and all of them, are not well educated. That is why we did not let them rule Iraq.”

  “Right, right,” Peoria says.

  “You see this now, in the government—sixty-five percent of the seats to the Shia? This is another Iranian lie—you Americans say Sunnis are thirty percent?”

  “Twenty-four percent.”

  “Lies, this is not true. Sunnis are the majority and have always been here—how else do you think we have led Iraq?”

  “Right, right.”

  “This is very dangerous, you see,” Ahmed says. “Think of the niggers.”

  “You can’t say that word, dude. You have to say ‘blacks.’”

  “Really? Why not? I have seen it in the Police Academic movie.”

  “Yeah, they can say it in Police Academy, but you and I can’t say it, you know?”

  “Okay. Think of the blacks slaves when your Lincoln let them out of their caves. He did not make them president! He did not make them secretary of defense! He did not put slaves to run your army! Because they still did not have the education. This is like the Shiite.”

  “I don’t know, dude. That sounds like a bit of a stretch.”

  “You want another example? South Africa! Before the war, I worked with a white man from South Africa, a journalist, and he agreed with me. He said, ‘When our government changed, we did not just give all the jobs to the blacks—they needed time, they were not educated, they were not ready.’ And he says to me, ‘If there is democracy here, if the Americans do come, I agree, you can’t just give all of the country to the Shiite. They are not the engineers!’”

  The Iraqis, Peoria knew, held engineers in very high esteem. Engineer, a sign of great respect and prestige. He’d never met a people who were so keen on engineering degrees. More engineers per capita than anywhere else, if the Iraqis were to be believed, and really, there wasn’t much to show for it—shit still looked like it was falling apart, everywhere, and he didn’t think the bombs changed all that much.

  Click, click, click, Peoria is shaking the spray paint can with one hand, drinking a beer with the other.

  “I need another drink,” he says, and leaves Ahmed in his patio chair, and heads over to the bar, three wine buckets filled with ice, half-empty cans of Diet Coke, Arabic lettering and with the European openers—which don’t just click and pop, like the American cans do, but peel back, leaving what Peoria thinks is a dangerous metal edge. You could easily cut your lip on the foreign Diet Coke. There are two shot glasses and a bottle of tequila.

  “Is this Turkish tequila?”

  “Fuck yeah,” somebody shouts.

  Peoria pours two shots for himself, takes the two shots, gulps them, down, done, finished, refreshing. He keeps shaking the spray paint can, turning it upside down and right side up, the noise like a sprinkler system, upper torso rotating, falling a bit back on his heels.

  He sees Christine, a girl he would classify as top tier. Christine works for Sky News and has a British accent. She is blonde and large-breasted and she’s right now stripping off her polo shirt to put on a T-shirt that another enterprising soul has made, a T-shirt that says BAGHDAD HOT.

  Peor
ia walks up to Christine.

  “Baghdad Hot.”

  “Peooorrrrriiiiaaaaa, my hero,” she says, and tosses him her polo shirt. “Do you think this fits?”

  Peoria takes a step back, his foot resting on the filter for the pool, and grabs the silver tube railing on the pool steps for balance.

  Christine’s breasts, as Peoria has already noticed, are large. The cotton T-shirt stretches around them.

  “Headlights,” Peoria says.

  “Headlights?”

  She looks down.

  “You mean my nipples,” she says.

  “Who made that T-shirt?”

  “Crazy Dave the German,” she says. Crazy Dave, a German, had driven an RV from Germany to Iraq, crossing at the border point in northern Iraq, and set up his RV like a trailer at a parking lot across the street from the U.S. embassy. He had a line of T-shirts—“Stay Classy Iraq,” “I’ve Been Fucked in Baghdad,” “Stuck Between Iraq and a Hard Cock,” “Major League Infidel,” “I Sunnis,” and other sexually suggestive and culturally charged lines—creating his own little logo of a female by the name of Baghdad Betty. The term “Baghdad Hot” became popular about month four, when the first significant group of female contractors, soldiers, and NGO workers started to show up. If the normal scale for attractiveness in the real world was, say, one to ten, the term “Baghdad hot” meant an additional two or three or four bonus points were added, thanks to the sheer dilemma of the male-to-female ratio. A girl who was, say, a four or a five or maybe a six in Kansas or New York or wherever would become a seven or an eight or a nine in Baghdad. “Do you think I’m Baghdad hot?” Christine says.

  “Yeah, I think you’re top tier wherever. Didn’t you go to fucking Yale?”

  Instead of answering, Christine dives into the pool. The shallow end.

  She skims the top and pops up.

  The splash draws the attention of the other partygoers, thirty or so of them now, all watching Christine break the surface and pull back her hair.

  Peoria, with his years of being trained in the art of American safety—always wear a helmet, always wash your hands, always look both ways before crossing the street, always wear a mouthpiece, even in soccer—realizes it is very dangerous, the pool.

  The shallow end is five feet deep, the deep end, ten feet deep, but the way the lights bounce off the pool, in the darkness of the tiki torches and the heavy shades of booze, presents an optical illusion of the same depth.

  He cringes.

  The signs around the pond in New Hampshire that he visited as a kid, the stick figure with a slash through the chest, the long list of rules at the country club. (1) No running. (2) No diving. The statistics he had memorized after reading the story of a local boy in the eerie dive-accident-prone summer of 1986, a total of 757 diving incidents in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, two or three fatal, the others causing lifelong spinal cord injuries.

  These warnings, he knows, are part of his culture, and that culture grabs hold of him.

  Holding the spray paint, he steps up to where the water laps against the filter, and he stares at the concrete, water from the pool gathering in small rivulets.

  He thinks of two words

  NO DIVING.

  There is no “No Diving” sign, no warning!

  Christine swimming, the crowd getting noisier, louder.

  Peoria bends over, arm outstretched, the spray paint can good and shaken.

  He starts spraying, in large, yellow, sloppy letters: NO DIVING.

  The next few hours: black, image, black, black, image—a face.

  The face of Brennan Toddly.

  A conversation—no, an altercation.

  “I think,” says Brennan Toddly, sitting next to Christine, Peoria sitting next to her poolside, “that what you did was disrespectful.”

  “Christine jumping in?” Peoria says.

  “No, you. Your spray-painting. That was a sign of disrespect.”

  Peoria, yelling, now five months or seven months of what—of anger, of disillusionment, and thinking about the dead Americans and Chipotle without a dick and how cold he was that night in the desert and thinking of those slaughtered goats and donkeys and Iraqis he’d seen on the side of the road on the way into Baghdad, the piles of man shit in the terminals at the newly liberated international airport—is screaming: “Aren’t we a little late for that, Brennan, disrespect? You’re the motherfucker who said this was going to be a great idea, you’re the motherfucker who advocated bombing a city and occupying a country and killing all sorts of fucking people, and you think I’m the one who is being disrespectful? I read your shit, man!”

  A salsa bowl spills, a table gets turned over, crashing drinks.

  “And why are you talking to her, aren’t you married?”

  Black, black.

  In the bed. Christine without her shirt. Peoria apologizing for some reason.

  The next morning.

  Peoria dragging a duffel bag into the tight elevator, inhaling a sick breath of Turkish tequila, green and gilled-up and unshaven—ding, the elevator door opens—and through the glass doors to the pool.

  There are beer bottles and plastic cups filled with cigarettes and spray paint everywhere: no running by the pool, no smoking by the pool, no minors not accompanied by an adult. A whole list of rules now spray-painted around the Hamra pool: no invasions by the pool, no English by the pool, no naked tits by the pool, no pornography by the pool, no Christians by the pool, no Muslims by the pool, the Jews run the pool, no pools by the pool, no journalists by the pool without adult supervision.

  How many rules had he written? Was it even him? Fuck! There were some rules in Arabic too, written by Ahmed—yes, he remembers handing Ahmed the spray paint at some point.

  What a mistake.

  Peoria’s fear breaks through the tequila sweat, one fear undiluted, and coming through with clarity: I need to flee. I need to get out of here.

  I need to get out of here right now.

  Two SUVs are waiting for him in front of the hotel.

  He throws the duffel bag in the back of one of the SUVs, a drive out in the early morning, echoes of minaret calls heard through the tinted windows, before the sun comes up and the depression sets in again.

  The trip to the border will take about eight hours, and he knows he’ll fall asleep by the time they reach Fallujah.

  INTERLUDE

  THE PLOT MUST ADVANCE AT A QUICKER PACE

  That’s fun. That’s what it was like. I’ll tell you how I know later.

  I leave you with Peoria on his way to Bangkok.

  The plot needs to advance back in New York.

  Time capsule: George W. Bush lands on an aircraft carrier. “Mission Accomplished.”

  No one ever accuses America of being a nation of historians. Our impressions over the long run are formed by a few vivid pictures and a tagline.

  Nixon and Watergate: “I’m Not a Crook.” Bill Clinton: “I Did Not Have Sex with That Woman.” Gerald Ford: Tripping. Jimmy Carter: Malaise, though he never actually said that word. Reagan: Tear Down That Wall. Morning in America. Kennedy in black-and-white: Ask not what. Kennedy in color: Back and to the left.

  War happens and life goes back to normal for the headquarters staff.

  Michael M. Hastings, me, now one year employed at The Magazine. My attention strays from the war after the first summer of the invasion.

  Anyway, mission accomplished.

  You might forget that at the time, people took that seriously.

  18.

  September to December 2003

  We’ve won the war, Hastings,” Nishant tells me. “Now, how do we win the peace?”

  I take notes.

  “Post-conflict situations. The Balkans, Japan, Germany—those three should do for now. How long did
the occupation last? How much money was spent? How did we enable the local government? How did we get them up on their feet?”

  I do my research and get the answers for Nishant. We had 465,000 Americans in Japan in 1945 for the occupation, which lasted till 1952. Germany, well, we had only half of that country to take care of—luckily, it turned out, the good half.

  The Balkans are a different story—we didn’t fight those wars; we just came in on the end to broker a peace agreement and use some tactical airstrikes. De-arming programs, weapons for bread.

  I dig up all this information and write it up in about ten pages, single-spaced.

  My point, and I try to stress this to Nishant, is that these historical examples don’t really apply to Iraq. That Iraq, in a lot of ways, seems sort of unique, at least in American history. The closest example is Vietnam, or the Philippines, and that isn’t an example anyone wants to bring up.

  Nishant uses lots of the numbers in the final piece and takes a quote or two from the experts I’d interviewed, but doesn’t seem to appreciate my analysis.

  At the time, though, it is popular to say that we did it for the Germans and the Japanese, we can do it for Iraq too.

  The story runs in September, and I stop paying attention to the war.

  The U.S. presidential election is under way, and I start to write stories for the magazine’s website. It’s the only place I can get my political stories published. To work for the printed domestic magazine, you have to be a political correspondent, and I’m not that—technically, my title is still part-time temporary researcher.

  In October, I write a story about a candidate for president named Howard Dean. He has basically been ignored by the media, and so when his camp finds out that the magazine is going to do a story on him (even for the website), they jump. My angle is his celebrity connections: a bunch of left-wingers in Hollywood want to support him, and because they are more famous than the actual candidate, the website takes the story. I get to interview Rob Reiner, Alec Baldwin, Ed Norton, and Ben from Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream maker.