One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (26 page)

A jack-in-the-box!

I walked across the street with it wrapped in a brown paper bag. I walked with it away from the toy store down the length of Zawra Park along Al-Kindi Street. As Bashar’s note had said, vendors no longer lined Sharia al-Kindi, selling hot kebabs and
shawarma.
No musicians played in the park. I heard across the expanse of the silent street the shopkeeper roll down his overhead security door, protecting the store window. The sound of the rolling door, grating and harsh, flew through the park, across the Tigris, bouncing back from the far shore. A group of birds rose from the bank, circled, and landed again on stilted legs. They gathered around and bent over a carcass in the river mud, picking at it. The
muezzin
call from the Sheikh Ma’aruf minaret began. I set my package with the jack-in-the-box on the grass beside me, knelt facing Mecca to the south and a little to the west, and prayed for the duration of the
salaam.

When the
muezzin
ceased wailing, with the air seeming clearer and cleaner between all the towers of the city, I stood, brushed the knees of my pants clean, and walked toward Tigris Bridge. As I summited the bridge, the view of Umm al-Khanzeer spread before me: Saddam’s white-stucco ministerial houses nestled amid green-shaded streets, sprinklers whisking back and forth in the jeweled evening, a paradise.

I looked at the paradise for a long while, not thinking of my brother at all. I forgot about the disagreement he and I had, the blow I gave him. I just looked and looked across the city. Calmness penetrated my mind. I thought clearly for a moment, and the thought that occurred to me was this: it had been a mistake, my mistake, to return so soon to Iraq. It had been a mistake to return at all.

I crossed the bridge and the cloud of foreboding finally lifted from me. I decided that I would admit that I was wrong. I’d tell her that we would soon be leaving. I’d apologize to her for bringing her to Iraq. I’d apologize for staying in Baghdad even after Bashar and all his children, all her friends, had left. I’d give her the jack-in-the-box and I’d hear her laughter again and everything would be good. Everything would be fine.

Father Truth!

Maybe I’d even call Annie to share the news that we would soon return to America and would soon get to be together as a family again, if only through the prison visitation window.

My step lightened.

By habit, I took my identification card from my pocket as I approached the gate on the island side of the bridge, holding my wallet in one hand, the card in the other.

“Late this evening, Doctor?” asked the guard.

“Yes,” I said.

I handed him my identification, a formality. We knew each other well after so many comings and goings. The guard opened the pedestrian entrance. Imbued with the sense that everything, everything in the world, would be better once I left Baghdad, I felt lighthearted. I tarried at the guard post for a moment, making small talk.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Late tonight. I stopped at a toy shop…”

It was then, in mentioning the toy shop, that I realized I had forgotten the jack on the other side of the river, in the grass of Zawra Park, where I had knelt to pray.

I took my identification card from the guard and returned across the bridge. As I approached the jack-in-the-box—still wrapped in its brown bag—a terrible vibrating thump shattered the stillness of the evening, shattered the air behind me. The sound was all too familiar, occurring all too often those days. I did not jump. I did not startle. But I turned and looked across the bridge. In the distance the slums of ath-Thawra, Sadr City, glowered, a haze of heat and smog rising from dull brown rooftops. But the thump came from a place closer to me than the slum. In the distance sirens blared, moving toward the sound of the bomb. Smoke curled over Umm al-Khanzeer itself. Smoke on the protected island. Smoke near my home.

Uncertain, panicking, I turned again toward the jack-in-the-box. Then I turned toward the island. Then I turned toward the jack-in-the-box, spinning, the world spinning. At last I chose my direction, toward the south, toward Mecca, away from Umm al-Khanzeer. I knelt again, knelt in the direction indicated by the
Qibla,
but I could not pray. I could not pray! I could do nothing other than look at the jack-in-the-box, my jack-in-the-box.

It had sprung.

31

Wednesday Night

FATHER TRUTH!

At one point, I’m not sure when—sometime after I open another whiskey bottle and drink a good deal of it—I crawl to the spot where my spit dried into a dull shellac on the wall. I crawl across the glass pieces on the kitchen floor, hearing them break and screech as they catch in my skin and drag across the tile floor, but I feel no pain in the flesh of my body. I crawl to the wall beneath my spittle and I turn myself around, propping myself upright with my back against the wall so that I stare at the empty space on the shelf behind my kitchen table, where my jack-in-the-box had so long been preserved.

I sit that way for a long while.

At some point that night, while I sit there, I vomit. When I wake the next morning, chunks of food and mucus float in my half-full whiskey bottle. A rancid, sticky coating covers my left hand, clings to my unshaven cheek and my bare chest, soils my pants. Blood from my knees, hands, and shins has also dried on the floor, a smeared brown trail that begins, faintly at first, where the farthest piece of the broken glass glitters in the morning sun. The trail of blood ends where I sit. When I pick the biggest pieces of glass from my legs and hands, the wounds open anew and fresh red blood oozes from me, coating the duller brown.

There is no aspirin in the house. No orange juice. No raw-egg-and-Tabasco-sauce hangover cure. No way for me to easily pull myself together. I look at my whiskey bottle for a long time, with my own acids and greases coagulated on the surface of the sweet brown liquid.

Thirteen years of emptiness, void, and denial.

Father Truth.

I raise the whiskey to my lips and drink, pulling from the bottle like a suckling calf. The taste of it is horrible.
Father Truth.
I drink again.
Thirteen years.
I drink until I cannot sit upright and then, at last, I sleep.

I do not dream, not when I sleep. I am thankful for the absence of dream. The void is imploding. I do not want to look at it any closer than I must, but when I am awake, neither can I bear reality. As a refuge, then, in my waking hours, I dream. I drink and I dream and I sleep when I can, day or night.

Father Truth.

I talk to her, too, as I dream. I talk to her as I walk about and do the real-world things I must do. I talk to Layla, or at least to the image of Layla that haunts my dreams. I am aware of the strangeness of this. Maybe it is like a mark of henna on me, painting me as a bride would be painted, a celebration and a bereavement both, a setting aside of myself, making myself
haraam
from the world. When I talk to Layla I see the questioning looks on those who pass me in the streets, those who pass my store. During such times, as often as I can, I send Abd al-Rahim away from me. I send him on errand after errand, pointless errands, now not so much because he annoys me but because I do not want him to interrupt my conversations with Layla. He has caught me speaking to her, little words, whispers and hushes and laughs and gestures.

I know, now, that she’s not there. I know she is just a figment of my imagination, Layla popping up at such inopportune moments. My dreams cling to me as I witness the most real realities, as I endure the most mundane moments. Keeping her with me in my dreams like this provides a little respite for me, a breath in a bubble as I drown, a charmed muon burning her spiral on the CRT screen of my life.

Abd al-Rahim catches me talking to her. Others notice that I talk to her. I don’t care.

When Mahmoud leaves with Michele’s family to bury Michele’s body in one of the cemeteries of the holy city of Kufa, my drunkenness imposes a layer of dream over the reality. I see Michele’s family depart with Michele’s plain wooden coffin lashed to the roof of their car. But I see, too, an apparition of Layla lying on top of the coffin. She crosses her hands over her chest and has fastened black-painted cutout cardboard
X
s over her tightly shut eyes. She plays at death in order to make me laugh.

Likewise, after I go to the tailor to be fitted for a suit of clothes respectable enough for my wedding, my drunkenness converts reality into dream. I take the clothes home and hang them from a bare nail on the wall opposite my kitchen table. Nothing too odd there. But the suit broods, on the wall, dark and formal, and I think that I will not get along well with it until it says, at last, “Drink! Drink! Don’t let my silence disturb you.”

We share the rest of that night’s bottle of whiskey together, sip for sip, shot glass slammed down against shot glass. We sing merry songs. Layla plays the banjo. We clasp arms and totter down alleyways—my new suit of clothes, Layla, and me—as though the alleyways are a yellow brick road. Layla and the suit will ask Oz for new bodies. I will ask him for a soul.

And when the Kuwaiti interpreter and his lieutenant return to my store, they find me drunk and befuddled by a dream in which Abd al-Rahim, Layla, and I swim together, with Seyyed Abdullah occasionally jumping in for a skinny-dip. Whenever Abd al-Rahim fins too near to Layla, she morphs into a school of goldfish, several hundred goldfish, and they slide apart, around, over Abd al-Rahim in the same way that a shimmering school of sardines first envelops and then scatters away from the onrushing shadow of a shark. Layla falls apart and then re-forms nearer to me, as if I can in some way protect her. She is wrong, though. I have no special powers. I am no superhero. I am only distantly related to goldfish.

I gurgle and the words I form float from my mouth in hieroglyphics, shiny-bubble, jackal-headed, demon words. From somewhere far away, beyond the veil of my drunken dreams, I hear the Kuwaiti interpreter as he says: “A funny noise, that gurgle.”

The waters of my dream shatter around him as he steps through parting waves. He wipes his shoes on the curb of the Safwan street to keep them from getting muddy.

“I am drowning,” I tell him. “A pleasant feeling, really, once you stop struggling.”

“Sa-Bah Al-Chair,” says the lieutenant, trying out a little phrase-book Arabic.

“You move like a robot,” Layla tells the lieutenant, teasingly, though the lieutenant can’t understand the hieroglyphics used by us goldfish as we speak.

Abd al-Rahim does the backstroke several meters away from me, out in the middle of the market road, floating in the image of the dream as though he were a genie or a hovercraft or a hot-air balloon, his body superimposed about three meters above the surface of the road.

“He’ll turn around and come for you again,” I whisper to Layla. “He looks like he is gone but he is, in truth, afraid of the really deep water. He still needs to stay close. He relies on you.”

“My opinion of him exactly,” says the interpreter, pointing covertly to the lieutenant at his side. I am surprised for a second. He understands what I am saying! He is a friend, a companion, a goldfish whisperer! He doesn’t know that I really speak to Layla. He doesn’t know that we talk about Abd al-Rahim. The Kuwaiti thinks I refer to his boss, but what does it matter? I’m happy to have his company, happy to talk to him, happy to have him as a pal. I take his hand in my hand and begin to shake it.

“He’s young,” I say.

“Yes,” says the Kuwaiti.

“But really not robotic.”

I’m surprised to find myself defending Abd al-Rahim. Layla looks at me as if I am a traitor, as if I am confused, hopelessly undertrained, and never truly able to be taught the mystic understanding of robots.

“Does he have the papers?” asks the lieutenant.

The lieutenant’s face is clean and pink. His hands are scrubbed and hairless. His nails are trimmed and without oil or dirt beneath their white and pearl-like cuticles. He smells like milk and talcum powder and I have to choke down the bile rising in my throat as I remember the curdled taste of the first drink of my defiled whiskey.

“You know that one of our convoys found a jack-in-the-box in the middle of the road near Az Zubayr, don’t you?” asks the interpreter, saying nothing about the papers that the lieutenant wants and needs. I still hold his hand.

I think about getting the adoption papers down from the shelf behind me, but I can’t do anything with them until the Kuwaiti makes his first reference to them. The lieutenant can say all he wants in English, but I can’t let the Kuwaiti know I understand that language. He would surely, then, suspect me despite our shared appreciation of hieroglyphics. So the interrogation continues until the Kuwaiti can no longer resist his master’s insistence. He is free to ask me anything he wants.

He is free.

But I am, too.

I have a defense now. I am crazy and I am drunk and I am ruthless and I am beautiful. As I realize this newfound freedom, I itch to demonstrate its powers.

In the middle of the interpreter’s next rabid bit of questioning I say, apropos of nothing: “Indeed it is a dangerously powerful thing, this appearance and disappearance of goldfish, the school of them dissolving when the shark comes. And—
ya Allah!
—such gossamer wings.”

This makes the interpreter pause. He doesn’t know that I am crazy. I see his lips move. He repeats the words for
fish
and for
gold
in high Arabic:
samak,
thahab.
He says “gossamer.” He recites the word
shark,
which is
qirsh.
This word has meaning for him. He looks over his shoulder at the Humvees stationed along the sides of the road, arrayed like huge finning fish.

I continue, still drawing power and code-meaning from my dream: “When she moves she dissolves and reconstitutes herself. She is near me now, then far from me the next moment, then nearer again before I am even aware.”

“She? The network?” asks the Kuwaiti. “Are they recruiting you? Jaish al-Mahdi? Hezbollah? Al-Qaeda?”

“I could help you,” I say. “But I can’t seem to make her hold still long enough. She’s a million pieces of glass shattered on a kitchen floor. She’s here, there, everywhere. She’s gone again now. No…no …there she is!”

Layla appears with an umbrella and a raincoat. She splashes in puddles of ocean and makes mud cakes that she holds up for my inspection. The street would be gray from reflected storm clouds except for the bleeding of her bright raincoat into the puddles, the bleeding of blue-sky colors breaking through cloud. I point to her. The lieutenant and the interpreter both look up and behind them. In the middle distance a low, flat warehouse on the edge of town seems to be exactly in line with the azimuth my finger indicates. The lieutenant motions to one of his Humvees. The turret gunner swivels toward the warehouse and hunkers lower behind his sawtoothed weapon.

“Ask him about the papers,” says the lieutenant, more forcefully now. “We need to go. Ask him if he will sign them or not.”

“Papers,” says the Kuwaiti.

I reach for the papers. The Kuwaiti takes them from me. He sees that I haven’t signed them yet. He points to the places where my signature must appear.

Then, as I scribble the fake and crazy name al-​Mulawwah on the documents, the Kuwaiti says, “If you want to talk, if you want to tell us about ‘her,’ as you say, we can arrange for the information to be kept secret. We can reward you for your cooperation. We can maybe make ‘her’ stand still long enough to capture ‘her.’ Goldfishes and sharks and puddles of raincoat-color—however you want to talk about it, I will find a way to understand.”

“Don’t tell them about me,” says Layla. “They won’t believe you.”

“I will tell you,” I say to the interpreter. “I will tell you everything I know. Come back with a tape recorder in three days’ time. I will tell you everything.”

Layla frowns and closes her eyes.

My offer excites the interpreter very greatly. He doesn’t translate any of this for his boss. Maybe he will later. I don’t know. I see the gleam in his eyes, and I know the idea excites him.

When I finish with the papers, the lieutenant shakes my hand.

“It will be a few months,” he says. “I finish here in a week or two. Just trying to get home safe now. I will return for her then. My wife will be so pleased. We can’t have children…”

The Kuwaiti doesn’t even bother to interpret this flow of enthusiasm. He says an elaborate good-bye to me, long enough so that the lieutenant thinks his words have been relayed. I smile. The lieutenant smiles. We all shake hands again. Stars of glory spangle the Kuwaiti’s eyes.

They leave, mounting their Humvees, and I take from its secret spot behind my shack the bottle of whiskey I have stored there. I drink from it, turning my back guiltily away from the street. They’ve taken her, my girl, my Layla. They’ve wafted her away from me and I want her back, I want her back, I want her swimming around me. I want her back at least for these last few hours and days and minutes. The burning liquid, the whiskey, works as an anchor for her. I slip away from my concerns with reality and with the scene at my store into more dreams, more dreams, dreams overlaying the images of the market in various filmy veils, until the floating images seem more real than the reality. My consciousness vacillates that way, drink by drink, from moment to moment, though I cling to the dreams and force the drink on myself in order to keep Layla near and enlivened. I want dream, not dust. I want story, not truth. I want magic, not politics. I want Layla.