Sleep (26 page)

David negotiates the use of Wali for the morning as part of his price so he can get more video footage of the downtown, giving in to the beginning-of-the-day optimism that still dogs
him, that still makes him feel there might be a point. They go on foot, making their way to the central boulevard and continuing north to the presidential palace, where the provisional government sits. All that is visible from the street is the high stucco wall that rings its compound, studded with watchtowers and topped with a double row of razor wire. David stares up into one of the towers to get footage of it and a soldier turns his rifle on him with what looks like real intent. David can feel the Beretta pressing against his hip beneath the cover of his shirt.

“No worries, Mr. David,” Wali says. “The only one they will shoot is the one with a gun.”

They keep walking. Farther along the wall a service gate swings open suddenly and three cars come shooting out of it in quick succession, not the usual armoured government sedans but the sort of rattletrap Asian imports the streets here are filled with. Almost at once they disappear around a corner.

Wali looks ready to spit.

“Is the government,” he says. “Always the same. Every morning they go like this to the town to drink tea, to show that the city is theirs. No fear! But then why every time they are using different cars, different gate?”

“Where do they go?”

“Downtown. Different places. I can show you. Like children, I tell you, playing their games.”

David takes the risk of hailing a street taxi to try to track them down, thinking it might make a good clip if he got some of them on camera touting their fearlessness, then edited in Wali’s scathing commentary. Wali directs the driver to what looks like the bohemian quarter, every second shop a tea house or eatery or internet café. The streets are the usual mess of torn pavement and blockages, the taxi moving at a snail’s pace. They pass children touting Marlboros and Coke, begging
lepers, a cluster of hut-like tents of bent branches and rain sheeting that spills into the roadway from an empty lot like a misplaced village.

It is Wali who spots the cars, parked at the bottom of a short side street that gives onto some sort of hotel. The street is blocked at their end by a small street market.

“Is one of their places,” Wali says. “Come, we can walk, is faster.”

They have to thread their way through the market. David nearly trips over a boy with stumps for legs who has been plopped down on a mat like a sack of goods. Behind them a taxi has turned into the street and is trying to force its way through the crowd, people shouting and pounding on the hood though still the car keeps inching forward. David gets a glimpse of the driver’s face as he goes by, impassive as if the crowd were just weather he needed to get through.

It is only when the car is free of the market and has begun to accelerate that the strangeness of it begins to come clear. By then it is too late. The explosion is over in such a flash that David registers it only as a kind of blankness, a hole in the centre of things that there is no way to think about or know. For a moment, in the blankness, he isn’t sure that he is still alive, that whatever it is that is him is still somehow attached to his flesh and bone. Then the noise and the dust come at him like a wall and the world reasserts itself, a barrrage of indiscriminate sensation.

He is on the ground, breathing dirt, and some ghost is pulling at him.

Mr. David!

Shouts and wails, car alarms, points of pain, the chemical smell of spent explosives and burning fuel. Everywhere smoke and dust and rubble, twisted metal, uncertain lumps of things
his mind can’t take in. Where the hotel stood, there is only fog and flame.

“Mr. David! We must go!”

People run screaming in every direction, jostling him, falling and not getting up. A big man in flowing robes looms up out of the murk clutching a bloodied sack that turns out to be a boy.

From somewhere, utterly distinct, the wail of a child.

A soldier is shouting at him.

“Why have you come to this place, you stupid man! Get back!”

The ghost is still at his elbow: Wali, entirely grey with dust.

“Mr. David, we must go! Someone can hurt you! Someone can take you!”

They hurry back through the market, in chaos now. The wail of the child follows them up the street, then goes silent.

They have to fight their way back to the hotel on foot, through streets grown frenetic. Sporadic checkpoints have sprung up but they seem only to heighten the tension, the soldiers manning them paranoid and green and on edge. Wali has called the hotel on David’s pay-and-go to get Said to come fetch them, but they see no sign of him.

“I think he is sleeping,” Wali says with disgust. “For khat he can leave his own mother to die.”

As they near the hotel the streets grow quieter, until there are no soldiers or crowds and they have reached a kind of eerie normalcy again. Only now does David realize how filthy he is, how his whole body aches like a single bruise. He touches a hand to his head: his video glasses are gone. He waits for the disappointment to set in at the footage he has lost, at what he might have done with it, but feels only a dim relief.

Yusuf comes hurrying out of the hotel gate to greet them.

“Such a terrible thing, terrible! Thank God you are safe! It’s
very bad, what has happened, maybe six or seven ministers, dead! I sent the car for you, of course, but the checkpoints turned it back.”

In his room David showers at once, trying to wash away the grit and the smell, though they cling to him like a second skin. He isn’t sure if the dullness he feels is indifference or shock or something else. He keeps expecting some upsurge of emotion or understanding, something to make him feel he is on the inside of what has happened instead of at this strange remove.

He sits at his desk to clean the Beretta. Grit has entered every crevice again. He wipes down the guide and the spring, the receiver, the slide, scrubs the barrel again. The work seems to calm him, to bring him back to himself, to his body, as if all this time he has not quite dared to make a commitment to it again. Now the images begin to come back to him, though it strikes him as odd that what he most remembers are the things he most turned from, the glistening bits in the street, gut or limb or severed head, the fallen heaps like shattered mannequins. All of it familiar from the news yet utterly foreign, with none of the quickening that catastrophe brought at a distance, only the turning away and the guilty blood rush—irrepressible, obscene—of having survived.

David checks the time: not yet noon. It is hard to believe that less than half the day has passed. That the rest of his life still stretches in front of him.

In the fevered light of afternoon he wanders Ostia Antica. The handsome guide is there, walking ahead of David with the patrician air of someone who knows he will be followed. Past the tombs outside the gates, past the warehouses and the baths and the forum, to a construction site where he is building an
apartment block amidst the ruins. In one smooth motion he edges a brick with mortar and sets it in place. The precision of it, the artistry, leaves David breathless.

Someone is pounding at the door.

“They are expecting you, Mr. Pace! You must come! On account of the curfew!”

Yusuf.

“Just a minute, for Christ’s sake.”

Somehow the interview is still on. David has to fight to make sense of this.

“What about the roads?” he says. “The checkpoints?”

“It is not a problem, sir. Only there is the curfew now, you must return before dark.”

He ought to be gone, like the journalists. Ought to pack his bags and head home instead of risking his life for an interview he doesn’t need for a book he will never finish.

“Give me a few minutes.”

His clothes of the morning are ruined and he has to pick from the few clean ones he still has on hand. An aging pair of chinos, a light blazer; a dress shirt he’ll have to wear untucked, to cover the Beretta. He tests the gun for concealment and snags, then chambers a round and sets the safety and tucks it into his holster.

His mind keeps returning to the blast. To that sense of being there at ground zero at the crucial instant yet somehow unable to take it in. There seems some lesson in that, if only he could make sense of it.

Wali is squatting in the shade of the guardhouse eating some kind of stew from a battered tin bowl. At the sight of David, his grin, like manna falling.

“Mr. David! We are still alive, isn’t it?”

A boy darts out from the kitchen courtyard and sets a cup of milky tea at Wali’s feet. David recognizes him as the one Said delivered a backhand to some days earlier.

“Is my son,” Wali says. The boy is five or six, dressed in a dirty white thawb that is a miniature of his father’s. “Name is Wali. Same like mine.”

David remembers the hard set of the boy’s shoulders when Said struck him, the glisten of tears held back. That he himself said nothing.

“Wali is a good name.” He hands the boy a coin as if he were merely the good-hearted foreigner Wali seems to see him as. “Your father is a good man.”

Wali beams.

“Ah, Mr. David! I think you are joking! I think you want to kill me!”

There is a sound of raised voices from the lobby and Said and Yusuf emerge in the midst of some heated argument. Said slumps into his chair beneath the palm and Yusuf picks up a stone and flings it at him, hard.

“Why are you sitting, fool? The customer is waiting, can’t you see that? Didn’t you sleep enough in the morning?”

Said rises like a sulking schoolboy and makes his way to the car. He kicks out at Wali as he passes him and knocks over his teacup.

“Move, animal! Open the gate!”

They set out. David sits in back and Wali up front with his rifle. The streets feel less frenzied now. At the checkpoints Said flashes a permit of some sort and they are let through without a word. But when they reach the central boulevard, they find it clogged with traffic. Taxis and crowded minibuses, army transports, big tankers and semis whose stink of diesel fills the Peugeot. It is hard to tell whether people are simply going about
their business or fleeing for their lives. They pass a stake truck laden with bulging burlap sacks watched over by half a dozen riflemen, a single phrase in English sticking out amidst the lines of Arabic that cover its panels:
Road to Heaven
.

Said tries to skirt the traffic by detouring along side streets and back lanes. They go past courtyard kitchens, communal latrines, rows of battered tin lean-tos built against the backs of ruined buildings. Past areas of blight where the houses look cobbled together like children’s creations, of mud and tin and coloured plastic; where whole city blocks have been flattened to nothing as though a giant jackboot had stepped on them. Toddlers play naked amidst the ruins; a gang of boys sit perched on the shell of a burnt-out LAV. To the east David thinks he can make out the intimation of the sea, a kind of heightened glow at the horizon line like the blue nimbus of a computer screen.

Wali keeps his eyes peeled. David has yet to see him engage the safety on his rifle.

“I think we must join the main road again. Is dangerous here. Someone can stop us. They can take the car.”

Said shoots a smirk back at David.

“Take the car? What is that fucking gun for then, man? What are you doing here?”

The flat grid of the downtown gradually gives way to the slopes of the foothills. As the land rises the streets grow harder to navigate, more and more tortuous and steep and riven with gullies or ruined by war. These were the Strangers’ Quarters, emptied out by the waves of cleansing, then reduced to rubble during the jihadist occupation. Here and there, though, lengths of street remain eerily intact, houses with curtains still billowing through their open windows, shops with their signs still hanging and their doors in place as if their owners have merely stepped out for the afternoon pause.

When they finally rejoin the main road it is no longer the grand divided boulevard of downtown but a single stretch of pocked asphalt flanked by open sewers and by the usual string of crumbling storefronts and street stalls. There is habitation here, though the traffic is mostly bicycles and carts and the street life seems to cling to doorways as if afraid to come out in the open. There are no trees, nothing green in any direction, not so much as a weed, everything reduced to the rust colour of the barren mountains that rise up in the distance.

They have left the government zone. It is only a matter of minutes before they come to a roadblock, an old plank laid across two oil drums. It is watched over by a handful of boys who look barely past puberty, dressed in a mishmash of hip hop and army surplus and sporting what look like Chinese M16s.

Instead of his permit Said flashes an American ten. An older boy wearing a hood despite the heat peers into the car, smiles, shakes his head. A twitch of anger crosses Said’s face and he and Hoodie exchange a few words. A couple of the other boys shift, moving in closer, and Said finally adds a second ten to the first.

The boy flashes an unfriendly grin in at David.

“Thank you, G.I. Joe!” And waves them on.

They have barely gone another half a mile before they spot a second roadblock. Said curses under his breath and makes a quick turn onto a dirt side street that climbs up over the main road. Wali is unable to hold his tongue.

“You must use the main road! I’m telling you!”

Said scowls.

“Is this your city? Tell me that!”

The street looks at first like it might let them bypass the roadblock but only ends up taking them higher up the slopes, into a neighbourhood that grows ever more haunted and
desolate and ruined. They are the only traffic here, the only thing alive. Said takes a turn, then another, but each seems only to lead them farther from the main road.

“You must go back!” Wali says. “Is the only way, you stupid man!”

The veins in Said’s neck bulge.

“Watch your fucking tongue, do you hear me? Watch your fucking tongue!”