On my second stint in Iraq, as a civilian contractor, I set up IT networks and did a lot of investigation. In the end it was mainly computer surveillance, trying to evaluate patterns of chatter to predict insurgent activity, or locate insurgents behind the anonymity of the web. I had a lot of nice equipment. It was always getting stolen, but it was insured, and I was making so much money that it didn’t matter. I worked with various private military companies, engineering firms, the Iraqi police, and the US government. I made a thousand dollars an hour for a period of about four weeks, taking vast amounts of information across multiple systems and organizing them onto a database I built for the Army. The way I estimated my fees for the Army – I worked for the Army more than anybody else – was to dream up a figure that seemed unreal and add a zero. The Army didn’t trust you if your fees weren’t preposterous. I didn’t spend anything. When I wasn’t working, I sat in my room and smoked cigarettes, and I listened to the city. The hotel was quiet during the days. In the mornings and evenings, it was manic. Everybody had their TVs on loud. Phones rang. Voices passed outside my door. Many of the people on my floor were journalists. Some were long-term residents, like me, but most were short-term. As they walked by, equipment rattled off their bodies. Sometimes they came by in groups of two or three, whispering, or not whispering. They spoke many different languages.
After I returned from my private work in Iraq, I went back to my city in the desert again, the one I kept leaving and returning to, for the last time. I had money that seemed – at least for my way of living – unlimited. I rented a four-bedroom, three-bath place on half an acre of fine, green grass near a country club, about an hour north of the city. I leased a gigantic black pickup – a Ford F-250 – with leather seats. I was all alone, and I had no furniture, just a couch and a TV, and some kitchen stuff. I drove, once a week, to the nearest grocery megastore and wheeled a shopping cart around the aisles slowly for an hour or two, examining lots of things but buying very few, and other than that I rarely left the neighbourhood. I mowed and watered the lawn a lot. I got to know a guy who lived just down the road with his big family in a six-bedroom, seven-bath house with a huge pool. Everyone in that development used a golf cart to get around – mainly this was because it allowed them to legally drink and drive – and my neighbour had a bright red one that would do thirty-one miles an hour downhill. It had silver spinning rims. A neurosurgeon down the road had a yellow cart jacked up and gold rims. It could do twenty-seven miles an hour. Mine was just white, and had no speedometer. This guy, my neighbour, worked as a distributor entirely from home, and never wore anything but shorts and T-shirts. He never had meetings. He never had to go anywhere. He drove a large black Denali with tinted windows and played old-school rap, like NWA, as loud as possible. He had a few employees who worked in an office, cold-calling, but he rarely saw them. There was a time when distributors were linked to particular industries. If you needed something specific, you needed a specific guy. If you needed steel, you needed a steel guy. But my neighbour represented a new breed – guys who could get anything in a second, from bolts for submarines to tortilla-making machines to silicon chips to garden furniture to bricks to small arms to parts for Tomahawk missiles. He put the company in the name of his wife so he could classify it as a woman-owned business, which gave him priority for government contracts. I get an order, he’d say, for 50,000 surgical coils. I go online and get a decent price from a guy I know who delivers quality stuff. Let’s say each coil costs me fifteen cents. I charge my buyer thirty-five cents. That right there is nearly a motherfucking speedboat, he’d say, and by speedboat he only meant a second-hand, small motorboat with an ice chest near the driver’s seat. I hear that, I might say. But that’s small time, he’d say. Big time is military. I mark my prices up one thousand per cent. My girl knows this. This girl he speaks of is his buyer in the Navy, who likes him because when he is on the phone with her, he turns into a right-wing hawk. This girl, he’d say, has to spend her budget, so she’s just looking for a guy who will flirt with her and be patriotic. What the fuck do I care?
These conversations between him and me took place usually while drinking vodka on the rocks at lunchtime, poolside. We’d talk, his phone would ring, he’d bullshit for five minutes, pick a number out of thin air, and when they agreed, as they always did, he’d silently pump his fist, say goodbye, send an email to one of his employees with instructions, and say, to me, Speedboat, baby. He was a millionaire, I think, but he had so many outgoings that he barely scraped by from month to month. Eventually he got the speedboat, but his wife wouldn’t let him take the kids out on it, and the neighbourhood association wouldn’t let him park it in his driveway, so he kept it in a storage facility thirty minutes away, visited it like a spouse in prison, and rarely spoke of it. He was a good guy, and he wanted to make money, have a nice life, raise his kids, have regular sex with his wife. And it seemed kind of insane to me that the very natural idea of wanting to be successful in order to create a comfortable life for your family had, here, taken such a big-hearted, unassuming, funny guy and placed him in the heart of darkness.