Love Show (26 page)

After the first day, I didn’t think anything could shock me.
It all blended together. We worked in groups of two or four, depending on what
needed to be done.  Increasingly, Chip and I were on our own.

Chip had no Arabic, but Erin and
Dell had enough to get by together. It made sense, even if it left us without a
more senior reporter.

I filed my first story on the
second day. It would be buried in the international section when it was
printed, a brief write-up on medical shortages in rebel-controlled regions.

On my third day, I just started
sending briefs to the New York office, un-copyedited, unspectacular. Just
information. They were folded into larger stories by practiced reporters based
in New York and London.

I couldn’t remember when my first
week ended and the second one began. I certainly did not know what day of the
week it was most of the time.

So, I don’t know when we saw the
girl die.

Chip was swearing as darkness fell.
Our Jeep was nowhere to be found. We had both begun to fear it had been stolen.
We were in the outskirts of a dangerous part of the city, the sky was fading to
gray, and the gunfire sounded close, maybe just a few blocks away.

We’d gone to chase down another
story of carnage, and we’d found carnage, but too much gunfire for Chip to safely
photograph it, so we turned back for the Jeep.

And it had fucking vanished.

“Didn’t we park it here?” I
demanded.

“I don’t know!” he screamed.  He
breathed. “Sorry.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We’ve got to move, though.
We can’t just stand here.”

“Where?”

“Just walk. I’ll call Dell.”

He dialed and we walked north, past
broken windows and crumbled houses, the loud roar of the world in our ears.

“Dell, it’s Chip. Our car was
stolen and we’re walking north along the city border…yeah, I fucking know.” He
sighed. “We’re not far. Alright, we’ll try to get there.”

“We’ve got to move,” he said,
breaking into a jog.

“What did he say?”

“To
move
,” Chip snapped. I
heard the urgency in his voice and I started to run with him. “We’re meeting
him at the edge of the ruins by the mosque, alright?” He shook his head. “The
whole city has gone to fucking hell.” He pulled me left down a familiar street.
“Listen, if we get split up or if I get hurt, just run to the ruins and get
Dell.”

“Did he say to do that?” I asked,
thinking it couldn’t possibly come to that.

“Yeah,” he said.

We started to hear shelling. It was
close, really close. It was so loud that it obscured the gunfire.

My ears rang.

“Shit, shit,” Chip yelled. “Let’s
cut through here.” He nodded at an alleyway.

“No, no, no,” I shouted, grabbing
at his wrist. It was a narrow alley that went between two buildings and we
could so easily be shot by a sniper from the rooftop windows.

“It’s faster.”

“No, let’s go the way we know.”

A man pushed two young children in
front of him, hustling them down the same alleyway. I heard him urging them to
run home as he unholstered a weapon.

I saw the blood blooming from the
girl’s forehead at the same time as I heard the gunshot. She fell to the ground. 
She was dead. I knew immediately.

The father cried out and scooped up
her tiny, broken body, howling even as he urged his son home, carrying her with
him.

“Oh my god,” I said, in a strangled
whisper.

We heard another shot and Chip
ducked. “Run!”

We sprinted along the path that we
knew. I ignored the gunfire, shaking, seeing the that little girl die again and
again as I ran.

How old had she been? Five? Maybe
six.

How much more fair would it have
been if I were shot instead of her?

When we reached the rubble at the
square, we saw Dell’s Jeep. Chip doubled over and threw up.

“Christ,” he said.

Dell didn’t say anything when we
got into the car. Chip climbed into the back and swore incoherently as we sped
down the bumpy road.

When we reached the main highway,
he spoke. “You guys okay?”

Chip didn’t say anything.

“Clark, I need to hear your fucking
voice.”

“Fine,” he said hollowly.

“Hadley?”

“I’m good. I’m fine.”

Dell swore again and punched the
steering wheel and sped all the way back to Damascus.

I ate with Chip. If you could call
it eating. Neither of us touched our food. We sat on the floor of his room,
which was messier than mine and covered in his jaw-dropping photographs.

“You two are off-duty tomorrow,”
Dell advised us. “I don’t care what they report.”

He left us to go to Erin and work
on their write-ups.

“How old do you think she was?” I
asked Chip.

He shook his head.

“Like six, right?” I asked.

“Shut up,” Chip said. “It’s not
going to do any good talking about it.”

“I mean, like, nobody—there’s not
anything—that should be an atrocious thing, and it’s not. Like, there’s so much
bad shit going on, nobody will even care about—”

“Shut up or get out,” Chip said.
“I’m serious. I can’t think about this shit.”

I got out. I didn’t like being
yelled at for trying to have a conversation I badly needed to have.

Knowing I could sleep in the next
day made everything worse. I chose to stay up, reading through pages and pages
of information on Twitter. The Arabic script blurred into one continuous
stream.

140 characters and all anyone had
was bad news.

They were right
, I thought,
as I fell asleep at sunrise.
I had no fucking idea what I was getting into
.

The day off was worse. Because I had to reckon with what
we’d experienced. I didn’t want to see Chip, but I didn’t want to be alone.

I wrote back to David’s emails.

He’d sent me eight and the latest
was cheery, but concerned:

Hadley girl,

A
re you ignoring me? It’s foggy
here and wonderful and Justin is trying to change a light bulb and failing, but
it’s twenty feet in the air, so I can’t blame him! Hope you are safe.

Love, David

I started the email four or five
times.

It would’ve been selfish to
complain to him. I couldn’t tell him a child had been shot and nobody had
called the police or done anything because that was just one of the things that
happened all the time here.

I wrote a short piece on it, trying
to fit the cruel and personal tragedy into an article that could run in a
newspaper.

I finished it and sent it to Dale,
knowing he’d say that it wasn’t something they could run in a national
newspaper—it was just an anecdote, not a news story, but I told myself at least
I would know that I had tried, that at least I had bothered to write something
down, at least I would have a record of her death, those few seconds, something
that gave one of so many victims a public record of death. Even if I didn’t
know her name.

Chip couldn’t stand being alone in the
hotel any more than I could. He knocked on my door, muttered a gruff apology
for snapping, and offered food.

I let him come in.

“I think they might evacuate us,”
he said. “I mean, this is getting fucking crazy.”

I nodded in agreement.

There wasn’t much else to say. When
I was twenty-two, I saw a five-year-old girl get shot. Maybe she was six. I’ll
never know her name. And I knew nobody got to decide how their life went. Not
really.

I never thought about anybody in Syria, because I was
focused on what was happening. Transcribing the story, keeping an eye on the
door, looking out for Chip, knowing that we might need to move at any second,
any second at all.

You can’t think about your mother
and father when you’re screaming over the sound of shelling in a language you
learned in quiet classrooms halfway around the world.

I saw things worse than that
five-year-old little girl dying.

Bloodier things. Sadder things.

Eventually you stop putting things
on the scale. It’s all horrible, you can’t tell the difference, so you turn
each horrible thing into a fact. A girl shot. A man executed. A teenager bound
and beaten and killed because someone repeated a story he told in his history
class.

Another journalist missing.

Rumors of chemical attacks again.

One long night, as we drove silently away from a horrific
scene—same old story in a brand new place—I pressed my head to the window of
the truck, squinting out into the darkness at the cities from which everyone
vanished.

Erin was cold, Dell rough, Chip
brittle. None of them invited closeness. Neither did I. But I felt like I was
vanishing, too. The things that had grounded me in place, the people I spoke
to, the routines I had, my family, David, they’d all disappeared.

Chip had told me if anything
happened to him, I should tell his parents how much he loved them. I told him I
would. I was sure they already knew that.

I realized that if anything
happened to me, I would want someone to tell Jack Diamond that I had loved him.
I had never told that to anyone. He would never know if I died here.

I watched the unlit buildings and
land and I thought of Jack, like he was just out there, beyond reach. I
remembered his warmth. I remembered that he comforted me, somehow, when I
didn’t even know I needed comfort, someone to hold onto at night when I wondered
what the hell the point of anything was.

I wanted him.

I missed him.

I would trade this for him.

I would trade this for nothing.

But I wanted to trade it for him.

Chip grabbed me before dawn, on maybe two hours of sleep,
and he said we had to go, pushing a can of Red Bull into my hand.

“Pierre says they’ve got real
evidence now. Massive casualties.”

“Evidence of what?”

“Chemical weapons,” Chip shouted.

We’d been chasing proof of chemical
weapons attacks for weeks now. Having interviewed dozens of rebels across the
country, we knew it was unlikely for such uniform stories to come out without
attacks having occurred.

Some doctors had told us that they had
treated patients whose symptoms lined up with exposure to neurotoxins, but we’d
found no other evidence to corroborate that and we couldn’t print stories other
than ones that said Syrian rebels claimed to be attacked by chemical arms.

I pulled my boots on, and a jacket,
and grabbed my flip camera and recorder and phone.

We were on the road before 3 AM. Chip
tossed me one of the gas masks from the glove compartment.

“Seriously?”

“Pierre says it’s hot,” he said.
“Take it.”

Pierre was a French journalist who
had reported on patients admitted to the emergency room with symptoms of
gaseous poisoning a few months back.

We trusted him, but he hadn’t been
able to confirm anything other than the doctors’ accounts. Rebels were hard to
track down, young men in danger of dying, and if you could find them, they
might not want to talk. They never knew who they were putting in danger.

“Where?” I asked.

“In Ghouta,” Chip said. He shook
his head. The last alleged attack had been in Adra.

“The patients are coming in now,”
Chip said. He looked at me. “It’s going to be grim if Pierre’s right. He said a
couple thousand could die.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah.”

We parked in the dark near the
hospital, and we could see there was a lot of activity already.

We jogged towards the entrance to
the emergency room, and then we saw it all.

The vomiting women and children coughing
blood, tiny bodies slumped against walls, medics shouting over screaming
patients, doctors restraining wild-eyed boys.

Pierre had abandoned his camera and
was talking rapidly to a doctor in French.

“What the hell?” Chip said. “What
the fuck is going on?”

“We’re almost out of atropine,” the
doctor said. “We’re going to need to divert patients to facilities where they
can be treated.”

“What’s atropine?” I asked Pierre.

“It’s the antidote to Sarin,” he
muttered in English.

“Holy fuck,” Chip muttered.

He lifted his camera and began to
take pictures.

I looked around bewildered for
someone who wasn’t too sick to talk, but it seemed impossible. I closed my eyes
and took a short breath.

It was hard for me to breathe too.
I panicked fleetingly, wondering if the attack was ongoing, if I was in danger
of dying. It felt that way—the way my heart was pounding.

I found a boy, sitting alone, maybe
thirteen. He was a child by my standards, but an adult by the standard of this
room. He was crying softly, in between huffing air from an oxygen mask.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” I
asked softly in Arabic.

He nodded.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“We were sleeping,” he began. “And
I woke up, my mother screaming that the baby wasn’t breathing.” He went on. He
had five sisters. His father, a rebel, was dead, and his two older brothers had
joined the fight against Assad.

The baby died, he told me.

He started crying again, softly.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jabbar.”

“Did they get out? Are they here?”

He shook his head. “I ran for help,
but everyone needed help. They brought me here instead.”

I bit my lip. Tears slid down his
cheeks.

“Do your brothers know where you
are?”

He shook his head. A doctor came
and shooed me away and I watched him, wishing I had the time to be heartbroken
for him, wishing I had the resources to find his brothers. Jabbar. Jabbar’s
baby sister died.

Chip found me in a hallway, trying
to catch my breath. He pulled me by the arm. “They want us out of here. We’re
going to the mosque.”

“What? Why?”

“They want us out. Say we might get
exposed and they’re running out of resources to treat people.”

We followed Pierre out of the
hospital and deeper into the city.

It was still and silent in the
square as the sun rose. We got out of the Jeep and closed the car doors, and
realized why. There were announcements being read over the loudspeakers: a list
of names.

And across the square, in neat
lines, wrapped in white sheets were hundreds of bodies. Normal adults ones,
child ones, toddlers, and tiny, little infant bundles.

My heart dropped.

I couldn’t do this.

It thudded against my chest. I
thought I could do this but I knew then that I couldn’t. I couldn’t do this.

At the end of the long nightmare of that day, we got the
call we’d been expecting. The call I’d been waiting for.

“We’re pulling you out. Chip and
Erin will go to Lebanon. Arrington, we’re pulling back to New York. Dell,
you’ve got authority to continue reporting, but we’re moving you to Turkey,”
Dale told us. We heard the heaviness in his voice over the speaker phone. “You
did good work. But we’re bringing you home.”