Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “I must work before the MUP come and trash me again,” he says.

  “We’ll see you soon.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Chapter 8

  Perhaps.

  So much unknown. We drift out there with instincts and a faint map. What is true? What is not? Can you find it anyway? Write one true sentence. Somebody said that once. But does it exist? Can syllables and sounds make truth? Is language capable of such precision? I think not. The best we get is a composite. We don’t even know the truth about ourselves. How do we find it beyond? Look at me. Bleeding bank accounts, laughable portfolios, apartments, fires, domestic messes, too much drink, too little rest, plane tickets, hotels, customs guards with crookedly sewn patches, lost computers, missed interviews, bulletproof vests, endless fights with editors, but in the end all I need is twelve to fifteen hundred words and I can compress the world for you. I can move characters like God. Admittedly its a tiny stage. A few columns of newsprint wedged between ads for underwear and jewelry. That grid of black type is my best stab at the truth. It is the place I am most honest. My confessional. It’s not as hallowed as it sounds. Twining threads, making rope. Facts, details, color twisted together. Describe a face, the lift of a cup, a gesture of motivation. Documents. I love documents. They add gravity to the human element. Collecting, collecting. Twisting, twisting, twisting. The story comes. A languid lede, or one with the power of a sucker punch? Keep it moving. Character, color, creating place. Hit the nut hard. The nut graph is what it’s all about. Why are you telling this story? What’s it mean? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Then let it ride, but never use all your notes. If you use everything in the notebook, you’re a shitty reporter. You have to leave half out. That’s the deal. That means you got the details. You got it right. But is it true? That’s the annoying rub. There is a man in the mountains. This we know But why? For what purpose? Even if you meet this willowy, bearded character with dates, will you get the truth? Willowy? Where did willowy come from? He wasn’t willowy before. Why now? See, layers added and you didn’t know. That’s the thing. A story widens. It gathers like a storm. Things appear invisibly. Who added willowy? Vijay? Alija? Brian? Me? Now willowy will be out there. It will become part of the lexicon of this man no one has seen. He may be short and fat, but for now he is somehow willowy And he is bringing war. No, scratch that. He is the thread in a larger war. Maybe not a decisive thread, but still a thread. He needs to be twisted into the narrative. He needs to be defined. God must plunk him on the stage and introduce him to the world.

  “Let’s eat,” says Brian.

  “Mixed grill?”

  “What else.”

  “Chewy brown stuff on a stick.”

  “We should be covering Wall Street, Jay.”

  “Nice clothes. Good lunches.”

  “Knicks tickets.”

  “Chinatown in the rain.”

  “Yes, Jay, we blew it. Got in the wrong line when they were picking teams.”

  “Cut it out,” says Alija.

  “Why? We were just imagining.”

  “I can’t imagine. It’s all make-believe to me.”

  “No context.”

  “Only videos. You have basketball games. I have sheep shit and dust.”

  “Poetic.”

  “She’s been watching British films.”

  “La-di-dah,” says Brian.

  “Better dialogue,” says Alija.

  “You know what British movie I did like? Chariots of Fire. Remember those guys running on the beach in their white shorts?”

  “I loved that,” says Alija.

  “You can get Chariots of Fire here?”

  “We get all kinds of movies. Smuggled in from Macedonia. You can get anything, Brian,” says Alija. “You can get a Russian whore if you want.”

  “They’re too intimidating. I like Romanian whores. Black-market. Jay, that’s — “

  Boom. Mortar rounds are profound conversation stoppers. I swerve, and we slide into a ditch on the hillside out-skirts of the city. Boom. Another lands in a field in a spray of dirt and stone. Smoke. Whoosh, boom. Another. The sound, so pure and pristine, permeates beyond tissue to bone, traveling up the spine in a knot and across the shoulders. Other cars skid into the ditch. We climb out of the Jeep. No one is hit, only a few shrapnel nicks in the back door. Broken watermelons scatter the road, and a donkey attached to its cart is lying with a torn leg. It wails and struggles to rise in spastic kicks. Blood trickles from its nose. The people are okay, but the donkey stepped onto a precise place at a wrong time and caught whirling metal. Its matted coat is singed; strands of white smoke rise from its body. It’s so random it makes you believe in fate. The animal’s owner ambles muddy from the ditch. He looks around: green rind, seeds, and red pulp at his feet. Someone hands him a gun. He looks down. Two pops. The donkey shudders, and there is a wire of air like when a window closes, and then the cart and the hooves and all motion ceases. Eleven men unharness the animal and drag it to the roadside. Children skip and laugh through the split melons. The cart is turned upright and trotted away by two boys. Cars are pulled from the ditch, mortar-round marks are studied, heads shake, and life, temporarily frozen in fear, subsides to its rhythms, and soon the jumble moves on, the kaleidoscope turns, and the scene is as it was moments before the first explosion, except for the paintbrush stroke of blood that will remain until the evening rain.

  A few guys help us push our Jeep out of the ditch. We give them a little cash, and they walk whistling down the road and toward a city streaked by fog. Brian, Alija, and I say nothing. The Jeep smells of fresh dirt, a tinge of gunpowder. We don’t know who fired the mortars. It could have been the MUP. It could have been the guerrillas attempting to blame the MUP for a few civilian casualties. Or it could have been some kids with an old tube and a few shells. We drive away.

  Megan sits at the bar. It’s been a while. Maybe five years ago in some Bosnian shit hole with a crunch of consonants for a name. She is a sight, lifting her beer in the chatter and smoke at the end of the day. There are more journalists and NGO types here than a few weeks ago. The scent is out. The waiters in their clip-on bow ties and snug black vests are happy. The gangsters and the money changers are jolly too. Alija is right. You can get it all. The anticipation of bloodshed does magical things. Opportunists of all denominations have suddenly appeared. Money belts will fatten and prices will rise. Translators — shrewd sensors of changing economic indicators — will bump themselves from one hundred to two hundred dollars a day. Gas spirals. Hotels get ridiculous. Cologne masks the scent of sheep, and everyone’s a businessman in a bad suit with a leering eye. It’s like Bogart in that bar in Casablanca, only not as suave or seamless. No one’s ordering champagne, either. This is strictly beer and whiskey. Two Russian hacks are sitting in the corner, wearing cutoff shorts and getting drunk. Brian thinks he recognizes them from Chechnya and goes to say hello. An Italian I know from somewhere is sitting with a British spook I know from somewhere else. Whisper, whisper. Local pols are looking grave and sanguine in the corner. UN monitors sit neatly in their sweaters, downcast eyes and plastic smiles. And who is this? Ahhh, the let’s-drive-down-the-dirt-road freelancer with the porcelain nose and the patrician grin. Ellen’s still alive, I see. She’s washed her T-shirt and traded bandana colors. Her sidekick, Ted, is hovering with a highball glass and a cigarette; the guy’s too nervous, looks perpetually cold. He’s eavesdropping on a couple of old hacks who made their careers in other wars and are now writing books that will glimmer for a moment and then tumble forever into the bargain box. I read their stuff years ago, and they were good, awfully good, but you can never be too good for too long, and by the time the cult of recognition rises the best you’ll ever do is gone. The door keeps opening, and people keep arriving. The stew is thickening. The bartender is running out of glasses and sweating. Another case of something is delivered. The beer tap hisses, and foam splatters the worn marble counter, and everyone seems hallucinatory in a grim
y mirror. A clutch of thugs — all wearing the same black shoes with off-center gold buckles — are doing shots of raki and hugging one another, red-faced and weeping at being out with friends with a good seat by the window, watching the traffic and thinking they own a part of something. Then one of them will say something about someone’s sister, and the brotherhood will dissolve into badly thrown punches before a gun is pulled and some semitoothless cousin gets shot in the knee or the abdomen. I can see the future with this crowd, my dysfunctional family on the road to war.

  “Buy me a drink?”

  “You buy me a drink.”

  “We’re both on expense accounts.”

  “How romantic.”

  “How are you?”

  “Same as before.”

  “You look great.”

  “Jay, if I don’t look great in this crowd it’s time to join a nunnery.”

  “Can you still do that? I thought all the nunneries closed.”

  “I saw your byline and figured I’d run into you.”

  “How’s Doctors Without Borders?”

  “Ready to heal,” says Megan.

  “I heard you were in Africa.”

  “Rwanda for a while. I took a long time off after that. Had a friend with a house on the Maldives.”

  “I could use that about now,” I say.

  “It’s coming, huh?”

  “I think. Where are you setting up?”

  “Still mapping it out,” says Megan. “Probably somewhere toward the mountains.”

  “Look around. How many faces do you know?”

  “A few.”

  “We travel in a small world,” I say.

  “Is that Brian over there with those Russians?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He looks thinner.”

  “Runs on nerves.”

  “He suffers from sat-phone anxiety, as I recall.”

  Megan laughs. The daughter of a man with a lot of silos, she is from the Midwest and a graduate of NYU medical school. She worked in a city hospital for a year and then joined DWB and has been trundling through war and famine ever since. There’s a tribe of people like her, disappearing into the raw world, leaving former identities in a box or a basement and sending short notes home every now and then to families who tell neighbors that their daughter is altruistic, if a bit odd. I don’t remember where it was that I first slept with Megan. She was a kind soul even in bed, and when she came she would weep and almost melt through my skin. She approached everyone with an aura of sympathy, as if we all — from a hacked-up African to a horny journalist — had lost our way and needed a hand to guide us back to the intended road. I’ll bet as a child she wandered the Midwest dusks looking for Daddy’s lost cattle. This is not to suggest she isn’t selfish, because she is. Everyone here is selfish, and Megan is selfish in her goodness. The complexities of that are too tedious to ponder at the moment. I just want a few whiskies and quiet patter with my old but new again girlfriend. I want to give a waiter a big tip so he’ll remember me and I’ll be set until the war is over. I feel rich. I have somebody else’s money in my pockets. I have a new computer and a fully charged sat-phone battery. The green light is on. The connection to the big world is static free. I can send words and words and words; I am a limitless dispenser of information. But I don’t want to file tonight. I want to sleep with a girl I can enter. Alija is fine, and I can hold her and feel her and in some ways I am more intimate with her than with anyone before, but I need to be inside and she won’t give me that, not yet, and I understand why, but still, I have needs, I am selfish for things. A beer bottle drops. A pop and a pause, and then the bar swirls on, and the mortars and the dead donkey fade, and the rain comes as promised and the blood is washed away in the night and Brian is drunk as he and the Russians build a toothpick castle on their table in the corner.

  Morning. Light beautiful and cruel. Megan sleeps in a room I suppose is in a hotel. I don’t remember much of last night. Megan’s suitcase — bursting with clothes like a stuffed doll ripped — sits on a chair. She rolls over and finds me. I am on my back looking at the cracks in the ceiling, pretending it’s a big map, looking for a brittle edge to take me someplace. Someplace new. I think of the wall of maps in the Vatican. Painted in gold and blues, the sketches depict the evolving world as man understood it through the centuries. In each succeeding map, the lines are more precise, the contours of the coastlines more accurate, the mountains rising, the blush of deserts, the world coming into focus in a slow, almost sensual way. Megan is warm. That is what I love most — the naked morning warmth of another, the breath and half-smile of a new day, the let’s-get-coffee chatter, the splashing in the bathroom, when the makeup and the gloss of the night before are peeled away and we see things as they are, and, if we are lucky, those things will be the best.

  Alija disappeared last night with friends to search for her brother and spend time on the town before we go to the mountains. I’ll have to extricate Brian from the Russians. They could be anywhere. Megan sits up and walks toward the window, her body a silhouette in the sherbet orange curtain light. I have a theory. All terrible hues in the world end up in places like this, as if color-blind decorators with macabre tendencies were set loose in a contest to see who could be the most creative with the shards and nubs at the bottom of a crayon box. Megan is pretty even in this. Bodies. Alija’s is tight, an iris on a stem. The corners of her eyes, her breasts, her hips are as a young God intended when he pulled a rib from Adam and shaped clay in the garden. In Alija’s body I see my own age, the lines and curves I once was, the diminishment of what I have become. Alija is a girl of instinct, and when she lies with me on those nights of her choosing she is light upon me and quickly sets herself to the rhythm of my breathing. She seems able to disperse and then regather along my side, her warmth creeping over me, her head high on my chest, strands of her hair catching the stubble of my chin. Some men want to possess such a body, but you cannot. It’s a prayer of pleasure you will never own. Megan’s body tempts in different ways. It is an achievement of wisdom. Her skin is softer, pliable, the slight puff of belly, the aureole a whorl of tenderness. I prefer Megan’s body. Its wants are more, its desires harder to please, but it is understanding and forgiving, and like mine, its muscle and tone are deeper, its imperfections are the very things that make it alluring. It is a body that has survived youth and has found things on the curious road toward mortality.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Eggs and cheese and half-ripe tomatoes.”

  “Why are tomatoes never fully ripe here?”

  “I don’t know, but I know a place that serves a decent espresso.”

  “It’s all in the machine.”

  “The grind.”

  “No, Jay, the machine. It’s all about steam and compression. Ask any Italian.”

  The science and mathematics of espresso making are, I suppose, interesting, but not today. Megan leaves the window and lies beside me. We make love in the tacky light. When she comes her body shudders like a light breeze riffling an awning. She’s on top and she holds my face in her hands, squeezing slightly, kissing. She pushes back my hair. She doesn’t cry. She seems happy, and I think that maybe she has retreated, maybe she has realized that only a little of the world can be healed. We leave the room and head for food. Brian sits with three espresso cups in front of him.

  “Goddamn Russians.”

  “Why do you even try to hang with them?”

  “Pride, Jay. C’mon, we grew up in the Cold War. Remember the Olympics? We duked it out with the Russians medal for medal.”

  “Gymnastics is one thing, but vodka and Russians — you’re a dead man. You’re wiped.”

  “They did me in. The worst part, Jay, they got up hours ago laughing like two kids. Goddamn Russians. They only have one computer between them, so they were fighting all night about who gets to use it today.”

  “You remember me?”

  “Yes, I do, Megan. How are you?”

&nb
sp; “I’m well.”

  “Africa?”

  “Rwanda.”

  “That’s as ugly as the human soul gets.”

  “So far.”

  “Let’s eat.”

  We sit. Eggs on silver plates, a strange jelly and bread toasted on one side.

  “Hey, look, in the corner, it’s Tobias Brookstone III.”

  “Not him.”

  “In the flesh.”

  “Who’s Tobias Brookstone?”

  “A fiction writer pretending to be a journalist.”

  “He makes stuff up?” says Megan.

  “Let’s call it healthy embellishment. Once, I forget where, he wrote this overheated lede that said war was ‘only days if not hours away’ There was a problem. The war came six months later.”

  “Tobias is going to be looking for the dateman, Jay.”

  “He’ll interview him even if he doesn’t find him.”

  “It’ll read like this: ‘U.S. and Western intelligence officials are concerned that a new, troubling dynamic has injected itself into the civil war in ... yada, yada, yada.’”

  “Tobias does order the best wine, though.”

  “This is true.”

  “He always picks up the tab.”

  “True again.”

  “He’s kind of, in a slightly perverse way, charming.”

  “Affected.”

  “You mean the accent?”

  “The William Buckley School of Affected Speech.”

  “Good espresso,” says Megan.

  “Told you.”

  “Hey, Brian, what makes a good espresso?”