Gods Without Men (39 page)

Listen. We repeat, listen. This is the voice of the Ashtar Galactic Command. We speak in the names of all sentient beings in the thirty-three sectors of the Universe, in the name of the Ascended Masters and the Conclave of Interdimensional Unity. We bring this music to you, the Star People, so that you may understand more fully your place in the cosmos. The AGC is an ensemble composed of humans and higher-density beings. As Children of Light, we employ electronic instrumentation and processing modules that allow us to tune our output to the harmonic vibrations of the Universal Field. Know that attempts have been made by powers on Earth to persuade you that your reality as Star People is false. These powers, strongly magnetized to the Darkness, must be resisted at all costs. They seek to destroy you, and plunge you into the brute negativity of matter. This message goes out to whosoever will listen and understand. In the name of the Great Master Jesus-Sananda and of Ashtar, Commander of the Brotherhood of Light, Adonai!

Uncle Hafiz drove, singing along to the
Beverly Hills Cop
soundtrack. The heat is on, he sang, pounding the steering wheel. He’d drunk a lot of tea before they left. He was excited about the new rotation. “I promise you,” he’d said, more than once. “You gonna have the greatest time.” In some ways Uncle was sweet, but he was also an insane person. Packed in the trunk with his other props was a complete faux-leather Franklin Mint edition of “The Timeless Novels of Charles Dickens,” which he was going to use to decorate his office. There was also a sword and a Perspex award she’d found for him at the thrift store. It was actually for something called Excellence in Network Marketing, but it was shaped like a pair of wings and he was very pleased with it. An excellent gift, he pronounced it. A thoughtful gift.

Laila doubted she was going to have the greatest time, but she needed the money. If she didn’t make it to college next year, she would definitely slit her wrists. Or walk out into the middle of the I-5. One of the two. Sure, it was kind of Uncle Hafiz to get the job for her; she just wished he worked somewhere else. They wouldn’t be at the base for another few minutes, but she was already feeling nervous.

The clearest symptom of Uncle Hafiz’s insanity was his cheerfulness. Laila could see little to laugh about in this life; he seemed to find everything hilarious. He’d been in San Diego twenty-some years, since before Desert Storm, and maybe that was part of it. In a lot of ways he and Auntie Sara lived in a dream world; some things you never brought up in front of them. Leaving Iraq was the best decision of his life, Uncle always said. “I weep for your parents, because they never listen to me when I beg them to get out.” He’d been a happy young man in Baghdad, playing soccer for a college team, hanging around in cafés with his friends. The family had money, but then came the fighting with Iran and air raids and shortages. In those days Saddam was America’s ally, so it was possible to get a green card. He had a speech that started with “California is like a beautiful woman,” and rarely got any further because it scandalized Auntie Sara. When Laila finally heard it in full, she was disappointed to discover it was just a series of cheesy anatomical comparisons featuring L.A. and San Francisco as the breasts.

Uncle Hafiz loved California. He loved its rivers and forests and freeways and red carpets and smog. He was the proudest American she knew. If anyone expressed doubts in front of him about the wisdom of the Bush family or the beauty of capitalism or even the superiority of a McDonald’s hamburger over any other food item one could buy for a dollar ninety-nine, he would simply wave his hand at the Happy Gold Cash and Carry, if it was in waving range, or if not would produce the laminated picture he kept in his wallet, thus (as far as he was concerned) winning the argument at a stroke. To Uncle Hafiz the Happy Gold Cash and Carry was a sort of cross between Mount Rushmore, Arlington National Cemetery and the Alamo. It represented all that was
profound and noble about his adopted country—opportunity, struggle, never paying retail. The name had been given to the business by its previous owner, a Chinese guy who’d gone back to China to buy a shoe factory. Hafiz had thought of changing it to something more truthful and self-evident, perhaps in honor of his favorite president, Ronald Reagan, whose strange nickname he always used (it sounded like “the jeeper”; Laila had never seen it written down), as if the two of them were old friends who read the newspaper together and played backgammon. But
The Jeeper
, all agreed, was a weird name for a Cash and Carry, whereas Happy Gold made some kind of sense, so Happy Gold it remained, though it now had a red, white and blue paint job to help it carry its load of patriotic significance. He’d left his son Sayid in charge. I have my duty, he told the family when he announced the move. We are at war. Every evening he phoned for a report on the takings.

Sayid, who regularly shook his fist at CNN, but knew better than to mention the war in front of his father, was happy to be left to run the business without daily homilies on the righteousness of the American cause in Iraq. His wife, Jamila, would often roll her eyes and mutter at her father-in-law, even though Sayid had ordered her expressly not to contradict the old man. “It only causes
us
pain,” he told her once, while Laila was in the kitchen, trying to make herself invisible. “Him? He hears nothing. Water off a duck’s back.” They had a lot of arguments like this. Sayid would tell her not to waste her breath. Jamila would cry. She’d had family in Fallujah. Three cousins, all gone. When Hafiz was talking about the war, she’d try to carry on quietly with her work. Laila, stirring while Jamila chopped, would sometimes see her freeze for a moment, the knife quivering in her white-knuckled hand.

They drove up the long straight road that led to the base, which was much larger than the little town next to it. At night it lit up the valley, a parallel world that Laila could see from her bedroom window, with traffic and fast-food signs and a grid of streets. The main gate was like a checkpoint at home, a slalom of concrete crash barriers and bored Marines bending down to peer into the car. Involuntarily she began to
fidget as they came closer, her eyes flicking to the speedometer. Uncle was approaching too fast. He didn’t seem to know how dangerous it was to spook these people, how quick they would be to fire.

A Marine crouched down beside the window. Uncle Hafiz greeted him like a long-lost relative. The Marine scowled and took their IDs. After a few minutes he came back out of the office and instructed them to drive through to a shed, where the car was searched. Laila was allowed to get out; she walked around, scuffing her sneakers across the concrete. There wasn’t much to see. It was just a shed. Hafiz kept up a steady stream of chatter, mostly about the presidential election and the heroism of the Republican candidate, who’d been a POW in some past war. Laila wished he would be quiet. He was trying too hard, making a fool of himself. No one wanted to talk to him. She needed to go pee, but was told she’d have to wait until they got to the reception center. One of the young Marines doing the search kept trying to catch her eye.

At last they could drive on. They passed barracks and hangars and basketball courts and a big box store with
SNEAKER SALE NOW ON
written in the window. Then they parked in front of another office and went inside. There was a whole crowd of Iraqis waiting in the hallway. Uncle Hafiz seemed to know them all, and started hugging and kissing cheeks. When she came back from the bathroom, he showed her off, putting his hand on her shoulder and saying how proud he was that she was doing her duty for her country. She didn’t bother pointing out that it wasn’t her country until the immigration case was settled. Everyone was introduced as her auntie or uncle; they were all going to look after her. This was what she’d been afraid of—a whole new crowd of busy-bodies reporting on what she did, who she spoke to, offering opinions on how she dressed, like they knew the first thing about fashion. They were a motley crew, dressed in American clothes, except for one very old man who Uncle referred to as Abu Omar, in yashmagh and dishdasha, clicking his prayer beads and blithely ignoring the
NO SMOKING
sign on the wall.

She grimaced through the introductions and put her earbuds back in. Eventually someone nudged her and told her they were calling her name.

A woman dressed as a soldier registered her and made her sign an indemnity form. From now on, anything that happened was basically her problem. Then the woman took her photo and made her a pass. Laila wondered what it was like for her, working with so many men. Did they behave themselves? Or did they pester her, opening the door when she was in the bathroom, making stupid remarks?

She was told to get her stuff and wait with everyone else in the parking lot. They stood in a long line, holding their passes, until they’d all been checked off by a Marine with a list. There were more people than she thought there would be. Easily over a hundred. Batch by batch they were loaded onto trucks and driven out into the desert.

The sergeant who rode with them shouted instructions and handed out bottled water. The name of their village was Wadi al-Hamam. It was located “fifty clicks” away. No one was to move from their seats while the vehicle was in motion, due to considerations of health and safety. They drove across a flat plain, dust kicking out behind the back wheels of the truck and masking the vehicle behind. The passengers sat facing one another, bouncing and sliding from side to side on the benches, their luggage piled between them like the worldly goods of refugees. The afternoon light made everyone’s faces glow golden yellow. The thin-faced man with the bad teeth, the two women trying to read a celebrity magazine. It was a freak show. This was going to be her world for two months?

Wadi al-Hamam was weird. The village looked exactly like one of the little towns where her mother had family. Walls of cinder block and concrete and mud brick, a whitewashed minaret. Poking up over the roofs were wooden telegraph poles carrying a tangle of wires. The desert stretched away in all directions. They’d parked beside a row of shuttered stores with one-room apartments over them. Signs hand-painted in Arabic:
TAILOR. AUTO SPARES
. The sky was peach and lilac; it looked hand-painted too.

“See,” said Uncle Hafiz. “This is for me.” He was pointing to a building with an English sign fixed to it:
MAYOR’S OFFICE
. She looked around more carefully. All the buildings were actually shipping containers, with false fronts to make them look like houses. As they walked toward the
hall for their induction, she realized that the telephone wires didn’t go anywhere. The bricks and cement were sheets of molded plastic, tacked to wooden frames. It looked like what it was, a stage set for an elaborate play.

Know that attempts have been made by powers on Earth to persuade you that your reality as Star People is false

That night everyone sat up late and sang songs. It was like a wedding back home; the women congregated on one side of the room, the men on the other. They ate snacks and sipped glasses of sweet tea. It was good to be surrounded by a crowd gossiping in Arabic. It felt as if a weight had been removed from her shoulders. At first she enjoyed herself, laughing and making jokes with the rest. Then, like a tower collapsing inside her chest, all her pleasant feelings crumbled. It was no use. The singing, the hands clapping—everything led back home, to her old life, to the good things and the bad and eventually the worst thing of all, the corpse lying on the garbage heap by the airport. She slipped out and hid in the dormitory, pulling the sleeping bag over her head so she didn’t have to hear the music.

She knew it would feel strange to be surrounded by soldiers, but since Uncle had moved them to the desert, she’d seen enough of them—hard-faced young men driving about in trucks, buying cases of beer at the supermarket—to be prepared. So she was ready for that part, but not for this, not to feel as if she were actually back in Iraq. She tried to make the picture cute, to add a soundtrack of passionate guitars and surround it with pretty bleeding hearts and flowers and color the scene in romantic black and white, but still Baba lay there, broken and dead. He’d been all alone. He must have been so frightened. It was worse, somehow, because they’d never let her see him. That only made his ghost more powerful.

There were a few memories that came back time and again. An evening at some uncle’s house. How old was she? Nine, ten? Everyone was sitting outside because of the heat and she was playing with Samir, a chasing game that was making them both giggle and scream. Her father
was talking around the brazier with the other men, smoking, wearing a dishdasha instead of his ordinary suit. He was relaxed, enjoying himself, playing at being back in the village. She had a flash of herself at that age, her feet tucked underneath her as she read a book on the swing chair.

They used a drill on him. She overheard Sayid say it, only a few months ago. No one had ever told her that part.

There were nights just after the war started, when there was bombing and everyone had to sleep in the main room, laying their bedding down on the tiled floor. It was a large room, but they all ended up close together, because it wasn’t safe to be near the windows. Who could sleep on such a night? The children went crazy. Even the adults would act hysterical, her mother and the other women bickering about stupid things, raising their voices, bursting into tears. Sometimes the men would go up on the roof and look over the river toward the ministries, smoking and watching the shock-and-awe. She always begged to be allowed to go up too, but she never was. It was one of those nights, when everyone was staying over and the electricity was cut so the whole apartment was like an oven and the family was tense because someone had gone out and not come back. She was dancing with Samir in the candlelight, making up the songs and music herself, from fragments of the pop videos they showed on state TV:

Sexy sexy!

Sexy sexy!