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Authors: Andrew Ervin

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The battery of physical and psychological examinations, and the innumerable injections, lasted for weeks.

Back before the construction of Camp Bondsteel over in Kosovo, the American brass decided that Taszár Air Base could be another
Guantánamo. Originally built for the Red Army in the 1950s, it was conveniently located within striking distance of the Yugoslavian border. The Russians abandoned the base in 1990 and a few years later, Uncle Sam moved in. To the Hungarian government, opening Taszár to the United States gave them a jackbooted foot in the door to NATO. The Budapest media, like the American, was effectively state run and did little to feed the nation’s appetite for political scandal, even in the face of another occupation by another imperial power.

Taszár served for a short time as the operational headquarters for the theoretically multinational force charged with “keeping the peace” in the Balkans. Once things cooled down over there, though, the American government refused to decommission the base. Instead, they repurposed it for use in their War on Terror. It wasn’t like they could illegally intern civilians on American soil—they had tried that with the Japanese during World War II—so instead, they used bases like Taszár. The so-called black sites. The few Brits and Dutchmen Brutus saw around existed purely for symbolic purposes. For obvious historical reasons, there were very few Russian, or even German, soldiers on Hungarian soil.

Brutus rarely had any contact with the foreign troops or with the few Hungarian officers who, in theory, still technically ran the base. He knew the deal. His presence at Taszár represented another step in Hungary’s transition from Soviet satellite state to American satellite state. No one in the army appeared willing to question the exportation of America’s racist, imperialist tradition into yet another foreign land. Most of the other soldiers, even the rare black officer, couldn’t distinguish between Eldridge and Beaver Cleaver.

The whole base reminded Brutus of Eastern State Penitentiary back home. That was the first real prison built in the colonies, but it hadn’t housed prisoners for at least thirty years. He had taken a tour there once with his sister, before she had J. J. The administrators opened it to the
public in summertime and at Halloween turned it into a haunted house. Sometimes one of the local universities would rent it out to put on plays and shit, but the theatergoers had to wear hardhats because the place was in such dismal shape. The prison was designed so that a guard in a central tower could see into every cell. It didn’t matter if you were being watched at any given time—you had to behave because you knew you
could
be being watched.

Taszár worked in the same, panoptic way. The army created a pervasive environment of paranoia. There was one notable difference, though. Instead of just the officers and the M.P.s being able to see everything going on all the time, all of the soldiers—like the prisoners they were—could as well. Everyone knew everyone else’s intimate business. If someone stole food from the mess hall, or snuck across the motor pool to play a little grab-ass with one of the Hungarian civilians, everyone knew about it. The testosterone-powered cycle trapped everyone on the base in a feedback loop of constant surveillance. That included the foreign troops too. The M.P.s didn’t even need to keep an eye on the soldiers. They policed themselves and each other, just like Orwell had predicted. Even if Brutus
wasn’t
being watched at any given time, the police and Sparky and these other hillbillies
could be
watching him, and that was usually enough to make him think twice about doing something stupid. His letters from home were read, his e-mails intercepted, and his uppity behavior reported, all in the name of national security. But hanging out with Magda on occasion was the one bright spot in the dreary grind of army life. He heard the racist murmurings behind his back about his dating a white woman, sure, and although no one said much to his face, there existed a constant threat of reprisal from some gung-ho supremacist.

He felt the weight of his pistol bouncing against his hip with each step. Its presence unsettled him not because he didn’t want to carry it, but
because he didn’t like the fact that everyone else was carrying a weapon too. There were too many cowboys running around, anxious to lay down their own personal versions of the law. The higher-ups readily encouraged a system of justice that wasn’t based upon any consistent moral authority Brutus could identify. What, in his reading, Paul Ricoeur referred to as “the practical field” Brutus thought of as “the Man.” And at Taszár, each man had become the Man to the other men. Himself included.

When someone got caught fucking up, it was only elevated to the M.P.s if the situation—and the punishment—couldn’t be handled first within the ranks. As a message, a solider might get stuck on shithole duty for a month, or even pistol-whipped while he slept. The inmates ran the jail, which was why it was so dangerous not only letting everyone run around with a firearm but
requiring
it. West Philly had been the same back in the eighties, when everyone carried a piece because of all the crackheads. There were shoot-outs every night. Elvin got himself shot in the stomach and had a scar from his ribs all the way down his fat belly.

Apart from catching up with Magda now and then, Brutus stayed more or less in line. He sometimes voiced his more subversive political views, but still, he never expected this kind of trouble, least of all from Sullivan and the higher-ups.

Being watched and scrutinized all the time was bad enough, but the people watching him were now better armed than he was. His weapon no longer functioned properly and hadn’t for a few days, since a couple of components got lost the day he left it in his room to go see Sullivan. Huge disadvantage. And he couldn’t just go and order replacement parts either. Questions would be asked, discipline administered. Fuck all that.

He suspected that Sparky found the pieces and dumped them down the toilet. Brutus was already in a world of trouble, though, so he didn’t care if his roommate put the word out, as he invariably would, that his sidearm didn’t shoot. He carried it with him anyway. Like all things in the
army, his weapon existed for the sake of appearance. Every day, he regretted quitting college. Every single fucking day.

Brutus had attended Temple University for two years, where he studied philosophy and took computer classes, but he found he learned more on his own, reading whatever he wanted. He dropped out and took a job as a security guard at the Macy’s next to city hall, which everyone still called Wanamaker’s. Every day, on the bus ride to the store, he passed the recruiter’s office. At the Mambo’s urging he went in and, desperate to hear some good news, believed every last lie they sold him. Money for college, if he ever decided to go back. Rapid advancement. No color barrier. On-the-job training. See the world, hold your chin high, become a man. Nothing at all about the army maintaining the last vestiges of the American slave trade.

He signed on. By week three of basic training, the Seven Army Values felt like deadly sins, and he knew he had made a mistake. The limited potential for career growth afforded an inner-city brother in the U.S. Army soon became clear. They made no attempt to pretend otherwise. Now punks like Sparky dirtied their lily-white hands on ink-jet printouts while Brutus stood out in the freezing cold setting rattraps. The local rodents carried a virus that had made several soldiers sick. Brutus had personally baited over a hundred traps, but to date had caught only nine rats. The men who sucked up to Sullivan didn’t necessarily rise any quicker through the ranks, but they did get the sweetest assignments. Sparky sat in ops reading satellite images or monitoring Radio Beograd while Brutus and the other brothers and Latinos caught vermin in the snow or broke up the ice that formed every night on the runway.

Contrary to the propagandists’ advice, Brutus didn’t fear the wrath of Hungarian women and their social diseases. He had been seeing Magda for the past two months. Conjugal relations with members of the civilian
crews were expressly forbidden, but when Magda could sneak loose Brutus arranged to meet her someplace quiet. To do so, he needed to cut across the base to get to the prefab buildings where the officers ran their war. In the army, Brutus had learned, if he acted like he belonged in a certain situation, no one would question him. He could do anything he wanted to so long as he did it with a little authority. Put that glide in his stride and he could probably saunter back into Sullivan’s office and wet him on the spot. If his pistol worked.

In the absence of wind, a three-foot-tall cloud of truck exhaust lingered just off the ground. He followed it to Sullivan’s building. Odors didn’t dissipate in that weather, so the entire base smelled like oil and gunpowder, plus cooking grease and fresh paint. His sinuses were so blocked that the stink didn’t bother him as much as usual. He blew his nose, filling a tissue with soot and tar that looked like the resin coating the inside of a glass pipe. Then the oily smell hit him, only for a second, until his nose clogged up again.

Someone had used a cinder block to prop open a back door. A dozen cigarette butts lay crushed on the ground. Brutus slipped inside and, as planned, found Magda in an otherwise unoccupied meeting room.

She was maybe a decade older than him but didn’t show it, and she spoke half a dozen languages. Her father was Hungarian, and although Magda grew up in America and went to Yale, Brutus thought of her as Hungarian. She was real cool, not as materialistic as most of the women he knew back home, even though he got the impression she was pretty well-off. She worked as a translator or a consultant or something like that. It was classified. She was also gorgeous, with the kind of smile that made army life and the rest of the world disappear.

It was said that after Attila the Hun conquered all of Central and Eastern Europe he rounded up the most beautiful women in his empire and set up his personal harem in what would later become Hungary. That
was why Hungarian girls were so hot and why they differed so much in appearance. On the cleaning crews alone, Brutus saw girls with olive, Latin features, girls with Viking-blonde hair and blue eyes, and even girls with round faces and Asian-looking eyes. Magda had black curly hair and ruby lips. She was also five times smarter than anyone he had ever met.

He closed the door tight by jamming a wooden chair under the handle. She spilled all over him. Magda took off her clothes and underneath she had on her usual G-string panties, which he didn’t bother to remove. She obviously worked out, because she was strong for a woman and not at all averse to fighting back here and there. She had a nasty streak in her. They played rough. Brutus wondered if she had ever zapped an Arab with a cattle prod. She wore this expensive perfume she had had specially made in Dubai and as she rubbed against him, it rose from her skin. It smelled like fresh leather that had been treated with rose water and licorice. It drove him crazy.

After, as they got dressed, someone rapped at the door. “Halló?” a voice called out. It belonged to the head of the cleaning crew, a round old troll who, much to the amusement of the girls in her command, barked at Brutus in Hungarian whenever she saw him.

“Egy pillanat!” Magda told her.

Brutus gave the troll ten bucks to keep her quiet. That was a ton of money to some old lady making maybe two hundred dollars a month, and he didn’t have anything to spend it on anyway, except fast food and those bullshit Tom Clancy novels. Magda kissed him and went back to work. Before he left, he waited a few minutes to catch his breath and to allow any passersby to disappear.

He decided to put off rattrap duty and return to his room, Magda’s perfume still clinging to his body. Sparky was out. The image Sullivan had showed him remained burned onto his brain, like spots after staring at the sun. Brutus felt like he
had
been fucked up the ass. It was the fifth
of March. Ten days until whatever Sullivan had planned. That didn’t give Brutus a ton of time to get his shit together.

Brutus put on some Public Enemy and yanked open his closet door. He threw all his clothes onto the bed, then pulled open the drawers of his dresser and dumped the contents onto the pile. Taking a pair of nail scissors from his desk, he poked it through the heart of a brand-new shirt that the Mambo had sent him for Christmas. Cutting a crude circle through the breast, he ripped the Polo insignia out and dropped the rough swatch of cloth onto the floor. Picking up the next shirt, he did the same thing. He repeated the process with every article of clothing he owned, tearing out all the corporate symbols, insignias, and logos. They were the trademarks of the white devil, of Satan himself. One after another, he stripped the tags off the pockets of his Levi’s and cut the swooshes out of his socks, until a stack of capitalist-propaganda cotton lay at his feet like broken shackles. He would have loved nothing more than to rip the U.S. ARMY patches off his uniforms, but he couldn’t go there. Not yet.

Next, he carefully refolded his T-shirts and socks, and replaced his dress shirts and pants in the closet. He picked up the discarded patches and put them in a manila envelope, like the one on Sullivan’s desk. He addressed it to his sister and included a note on a three-by-five card: “Please use these to make me a quilt.”

He put the card in the envelope, but before sealing it pulled it out again. He erased “quilt” and wrote “flag” instead. It would take ten days to get to her.

4.

Sparky was listening to a Hungarian pop station that played terrible American eighties music interspersed with heavily orchestrated Hungarian headbanger ballads while surfing the net for porn on a signed-out laptop. He lifted his chin in hello and turned the screen to face Brutus, who
leaned over his roommate’s shoulder to see an image of two heavily tattooed men dressed up like pizza delivery boys penetrating different ends of the same surgically augmented woman. The elaborate set looked like the living room of a mansion, with a roaring fireplace and a bearskin rug. She was lying on her stomach on a glass coffee table and still had on her high heels. Two thick art books had been kicked to the floor. Brutus couldn’t make out the titles. Sparky, who had a way with words, said, “Looks like fun, doesn’t it?”

BOOK: Extraordinary Renditions
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