The Apartment A Novel(46)

During my second stint in Baghdad, about two weeks after I’d had that cryptic conversation with the inspector at the police station, and about two weeks before I left for good, I was getting a lift from Forward Operating Base Rustamiyah back to the Green Zone, rolling down Route Pluto at about fifteen miles an hour in a convoy of Humvees, when we stopped abruptly because somebody at the front of the convoy had become concerned about a water buffalo standing by the side of the road. This was in eastern Baghdad, in the spring of 2007, and IED attacks were on the rise. Insurgents placed them in trash, in dirt, and in – or sometimes under or behind – dead animals. This one was, however, alive – bleating, stomping, and swatting flies off itself with its tail. I would be told, later that day, that the man who raised the alarm, a PFC named Schaefer, did so because he saw the animal chained to the fence, but by the time the story had got passed down, vehicle by vehicle, along the convoy, the story was that somebody had spotted a wire coming out of the animal’s ass. I was, that day, shitting it, since I knew I’d be leaving soon. When your days in a dangerous place are numbered, as mine were, your response to danger changes. My mind had already begun its departure. I spent a great deal of time in those last few weeks in daydreams, corkscrewing out of Baghdad International, rising up over that vast brown swamp of smoke and trash, higher and higher, until the moment we were free, out of rocket range, and the sky was beautiful because it was so dry and blue, and the desert was beautiful because it was so old, so important, and endless. We waited there a long time. We watched for movement all around us. On one side of the road there were empty fields, dotted with trees, and on the other were clusters of habitable, grey, boxlike structures – though they were a good distance away, perhaps a thousand yards. Another PFC named Gomez slowly made his way to the water buffalo. Gomez had received a morals waiver. The Army had loosened its recruitment standards, which meant people could join up despite a criminal history – mainly serious misdemeanours but also felonies like aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide. The only things that seemed to absolutely rule you out, as far as your criminal history went, were multiple felonies or heinous sexual crimes. But the reason I remember Gomez was because, as we waited for him to reach the animal and confirm the sight of wires coming out of it – or whatever it was that he was ordered to do – I had a sudden desire to take his place. The weather was weirdly cool and cloudy, and there was an orange-pink light coming from a gap between the horizon and a stack of clouds that filled the rest of the sky. Gomez jumped the fence and walked around the animal, very carefully. He moved slowly. He knelt down. He stood on his tiptoes. He cleared bits of brush all around the animal with his rifle. When he seemed to be satisfied that it was not a threat, or, I suppose, that it was not being used to conceal a threat, the tension in his body evaporated. His shoulders loosened up, his stride got casual, and he started to jog back toward us. Somebody shouted a question at him as he was running, and he shook his head and twirled a forefinger in the air, and everyone started jumping back into their Humvees and our engines started up again, and we were off, again, at about fifteen miles an hour, heading back to the Green Zone. As we passed the animal and cleared what, I suspected, would have been the blast zone, I felt great relief that nothing had happened, that Gomez had not been killed, that there was no IED, no ambush, and so on, and the man sitting beside me said, All good? and I gave him a very sincere thumbs up, but very soon after that, and before we returned to the Green Zone, I realized that everything contemptible in me was contained in that sense of relief, or, maybe, in the gesture that expressed that relief.

Saskia and I left Chambinsky before one, to catch the last trains. The place stayed open until six a.m., but I wasn’t drinking any more, and I began to sense that everybody thought of me as a bit of tedium. When it was proposed that I play pool, I was evasive and said I was no good. I said goodbye to Manuela. I said goodbye to Janos and Zaid and then broadly to everyone. They were just settling in. Saskia said she didn’t want to stay with them. She was tired, and she wanted to have the breakfast we had planned, and we could not have that breakfast hung over. We needed appetites. We needed to be rested. I agreed. We walked down a long avenue of closed shops and empty benches. The temperature had dipped sharply, and my hands were starting to freeze inside my gloves; maybe I was just getting too tired to feel warm. She was chatting about types of cheese that go well with breakfast. She mentioned smoked salmon. Do you like hot chocolate? she asked. Not really, I said, but let’s have some anyway. There were large red globes strung high above the avenue, which descended toward a large, brightly lit square, where we would separate. How many courses are we up to? I asked. Saskia started to count, on her fingers, the number of courses she’d planned in her head. I stopped at a crowded late-night stand to buy a bottle of water for myself and an orange fizzy drink for Saskia. There was a long wait, because the people in front of us couldn’t make up their minds. It was a couple in their sixties – a man with silver hair and a thin black coat, who wore neither gloves nor hat, and a woman in a thick fur coat, wearing very high heels. The woman couldn’t decide whether to get a slice of pizza with pepperoni on it, or one with spinach. You know, said Saskia, there really is no limit to the kinds of food you can eat for breakfast.