The Last Magazine: A Novel (12 page)

He inhaled the smells, absorbed them in his pores along with everyone else in the city, and it didn’t seem to matter that the toast was still burning and the city was on fire; hysteria made all of it irrelevant. And, as is true for a small percentage of manic cases, some Iraqis and American soldiers and Western mercenaries turned to violence: rioting, looting, checkpoint killings, criminal acts, rape, and it didn’t matter what you were stealing or killing—throwing a ripped mattress on the back of a truck was as good as smashing a priceless vase, ripping off a flat tire the equal of a brick of gold, a book to a crate of milk and cheese, a schoolteacher in a car to a terrorist with a rocket-propelled grenade, an ugly woman to a beautiful teenage starlet—no it didn’t matter, as mental illness can give everything perceived the same exaggerated value, worth and worthless indistinguishable. It wasn’t about value: it was about letting the mania take hold, allowing the mania to equalize all things considered, with the only solution for the hysteria to wind itself down, exhaustion the only cure.

Following the mania there was a depressive crash. With it came deep and profound questions that had no answers, or answers that could never satisfy. After two months of insomnia, months of only blackout sleep, and not wanting to get out of bed—just a rest, just a timeout from life is what everyone seemed to need. No timeout was coming. Such difficult questions in the morning, in the afternoon, at night. What is going on in life? What’s the meaning of all this? Is there someone who can tell me?

And Peoria bopped around the city streets, windows of the car
rolled down, no traffic laws still, asking these questions—asking these questions, he thought, on behalf of the Iraqi people and the American people. And the answers he was getting—what were the answers? Uncle Fadil says the answer is that freedom is here, thank you George Bush, goddamn Saddam. Another, when Peoria ran into a funeral procession, answers: What have you done to my family, my life—is this what freedom means, does freedom mean the death of my family? And the Americans, most of the Americans, they had answers, the least satisfying of them all—answers that hinted at such a lack of answers that the only possible response was to hope they were right. They could give you answers, yes, very good at providing answers—the answer is, everything is going great, democracy is going to be established, the rule of law and the new Iraqi government shall be here. Yes, the Americans were sure confident they had the right diagnosis, the right meds, the right brand of therapy and treatment—this is a traumatized country! Thirty years of brutal repression—how do you expect them to behave? Of course there is anger and violence, this is normal, this is expected, but within six months, they’ll be on their feet, and we’ll all be home by Christmas.

“Do you think,” Ahmed says to Peoria, “your country will be home by your Christmas, as your general says?”

“I’m going to be home by Christmas,” says Peoria. “Thanksgiving too.”

“I’ve seen movies of your Christmas and Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah, there are some good movies about them.”

Yes, the American general in charge of American Forces in Iraq said this: we should have the bulk of Americans home by Christmas, and this was reported, and Peoria knew this wasn’t an unusual comment for a general to make. Home by Christmas had been promised before. Pope Gregory VIII, setting off the Third Crusade in the twelfth century, issued a papal bull exhorting his allies to war. The
bull promised that after a journey to retake Jerusalem, your men will be able to return in two years’ time to celebrate the birth of Christ on our land, which will be made so much sweeter, so much sweeter knowing that we have retaken the holy city of Jerusalem and restored its rightful place. Longer travel times, in those days, of course, but getting everyone home for the holidays was a major concern—a concern that Napoleon ignored to his everlasting historical shame when he decided to invade Russia, and when one of his sultry little French advisers said, “Emperor, we might get stuck in the Russian winter, the mud, the cold—why don’t we bring clothes for the winter?” And Napoleon didn’t believe him. When winter comes, Napoleon wrote, our soldiers will be celebrating Noel in Paris—
Joyeux Noël pour toute la France!
—or the anterooms of Saint Petersburg. In World War I, the Brits promised the war would be done soon enough. Hitler expected a comfortable O Tannenbaum as well. In Korea, after MacArthur turned the tide, just to push the Chinese back over the Yalu River, word was that we’d be out of there by the New Year. In Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, on tape, after making a massive bowel movement, grunted that he wanted to make sure Robert McNamara understood that no tour of duty should span two Christmases—we can’t have them missing two holiday seasons, bad for morale.

The promise of Christmas was given, and it was a promise that the Americans believed, at least temporarily, that they could keep.

Peoria gets up, grabs a chair and drags it along the patio.

“Sit, Ahmed, sit,” he says.

Ahmed sits.

“What do you think of this spray paint? Look at this, the stars, the tiki torch, the hummus—you and me? What is it? What do you think it is?”

“Peoria, I remember the day your country was attacked on the September the eleventh. I cheered.”

Ahmed laughs, Peoria laughs.

“But I would not have cheered if I knew you would come here. You don’t understand these people, these Shiites,” Ahmed says. “They are no good, they are Muppets of Iran.”

“Puppets?”

“Yes, Muppets of Iran. Saddam knew this. They are worse than the Kurds. We Sunnis, we are better well educated, you see,” Ahmed says. “We respected the Shiites, we understood them, we knew they were not well educated. The engineers, the doctors, the lawyers, they are Sunni, not Shiite. But these Shiites, these Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Abdul Aziz and all of them, are not well educated. That is why we did not let them rule Iraq.”

“Right, right,” Peoria says.

“You see this now, in the government—sixty-five percent of the seats to the Shia? This is another Iranian lie—you Americans say Sunnis are thirty percent?”

“Twenty-four percent.”

“Lies, this is not true. Sunnis are the majority and have always been here—how else do you think we have led Iraq?”

“Right, right.”

“This is very dangerous, you see,” Ahmed says. “Think of the niggers.”

“You can’t say that word, dude. You have to say ‘blacks.’”

“Really? Why not? I have seen it in the
Police Academic
movie.”

“Yeah, they can say it in
Police Academy
, but you and I can’t say it, you know?”

“Okay. Think of the blacks slaves when your Lincoln let them out of their caves. He did not make them president! He did not make them secretary of defense! He did not put slaves to run your army! Because they still did not have the education. This is like the Shiite.”

“I don’t know, dude. That sounds like a bit of a stretch.”

“You want another example? South Africa! Before the war, I worked with a white man from South Africa, a journalist, and he agreed with me. He said, ‘When our government changed, we did not just give all the jobs to the blacks—they needed time, they were not educated, they were not ready.’ And he says to me, ‘If there is democracy here, if the Americans do come, I agree, you can’t just give all of the country to the Shiite. They are not the engineers!’”

The Iraqis, Peoria knew, held engineers in very high esteem. Engineer, a sign of great respect and prestige. He’d never met a people who were so keen on engineering degrees. More engineers per capita than anywhere else, if the Iraqis were to be believed, and really, there wasn’t much to show for it—shit still looked like it was falling apart, everywhere, and he didn’t think the bombs changed all that much.

Click, click, click,
Peoria is shaking the spray paint can with one hand, drinking a beer with the other.

“I need another drink,” he says, and leaves Ahmed in his patio chair, and heads over to the bar, three wine buckets filled with ice, half-empty cans of Diet Coke, Arabic lettering and with the European openers—which don’t just click and pop, like the American cans do, but peel back, leaving what Peoria thinks is a dangerous metal edge. You could easily cut your lip on the foreign Diet Coke. There are two shot glasses and a bottle of tequila.

“Is this Turkish tequila?”

“Fuck yeah,” somebody shouts.

Peoria pours two shots for himself, takes the two shots, gulps them, down, done, finished, refreshing. He keeps shaking the spray paint can, turning it upside down and right side up, the noise like a sprinkler system, upper torso rotating, falling a bit back on his heels.

He sees Christine, a girl he would classify as top tier. Christine works for Sky News and has a British accent. She is blonde and
large-breasted and she’s right now stripping off her polo shirt to put on a T-shirt that another enterprising soul has made, a T-shirt that says BAGHDAD HOT.

Peoria walks up to Christine.

“Baghdad Hot.”

“Peooorrrrriiiiaaaaa, my hero,” she says, and tosses him her polo shirt. “Do you think this fits?”

Peoria takes a step back, his foot resting on the filter for the pool, and grabs the silver tube railing on the pool steps for balance.

Christine’s breasts, as Peoria has already noticed, are large. The cotton T-shirt stretches around them.

“Headlights,” Peoria says.

“Headlights?”

She looks down.

“You mean my nipples,” she says.

“Who made that T-shirt?”

“Crazy Dave the German,” she says. Crazy Dave, a German, had driven an RV from Germany to Iraq, crossing at the border point in northern Iraq, and set up his RV like a trailer at a parking lot across the street from the U.S. embassy. He had a line of T-shirts—“Stay Classy Iraq,” “I’ve Been Fucked in Baghdad,” “Stuck Between Iraq and a Hard Cock,” “Major League Infidel,” “I
Sunnis,” and other sexually suggestive and culturally charged lines—creating his own little logo of a female by the name of Baghdad Betty. The term “Baghdad Hot” became popular about month four, when the first significant group of female contractors, soldiers, and NGO workers started to show up. If the normal scale for attractiveness in the real world was, say, one to ten, the term “Baghdad hot” meant an additional two or three or four bonus points were added, thanks to the sheer dilemma of the male-to-female ratio. A girl who was, say, a four or a five or maybe a six in Kansas or New York or wherever would
become a seven or an eight or a nine in Baghdad. “Do you think I’m Baghdad hot?” Christine says.

“Yeah, I think you’re top tier wherever. Didn’t you go to fucking Yale?”

Instead of answering, Christine dives into the pool. The shallow end.

She skims the top and pops up.

The splash draws the attention of the other partygoers, thirty or so of them now, all watching Christine break the surface and pull back her hair.

Peoria, with his years of being trained in the art of American safety—always wear a helmet, always wash your hands, always look both ways before crossing the street, always wear a mouthpiece, even in soccer—realizes it is very dangerous, the pool.

The shallow end is five feet deep, the deep end, ten feet deep, but the way the lights bounce off the pool, in the darkness of the tiki torches and the heavy shades of booze, presents an optical illusion of the same depth.

He cringes.

The signs around the pond in New Hampshire that he visited as a kid, the stick figure with a slash through the chest, the long list of rules at the country club. (1) No running. (2) No diving. The statistics he had memorized after reading the story of a local boy in the eerie dive-accident-prone summer of 1986, a total of 757 diving incidents in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, two or three fatal, the others causing lifelong spinal cord injuries.

These warnings, he knows, are part of his culture, and that culture grabs hold of him.

Holding the spray paint, he steps up to where the water laps against the filter, and he stares at the concrete, water from the pool gathering in small rivulets.

He thinks of two words

NO DIVING.

There is no “No Diving” sign, no warning!

Christine swimming, the crowd getting noisier, louder.

Peoria bends over, arm outstretched, the spray paint can good and shaken.

He starts spraying, in large, yellow, sloppy letters: NO DIVING.

The next few hours: black, image, black, black, image—a face.

The face of Brennan Toddly.

A conversation—no, an altercation.

“I think,” says Brennan Toddly, sitting next to Christine, Peoria sitting next to her poolside, “that what you did was disrespectful.”

“Christine jumping in?” Peoria says.

“No, you. Your spray-painting. That was a sign of disrespect.”

Peoria, yelling, now five months or seven months of what—of anger, of disillusionment, and thinking about the dead Americans and Chipotle without a dick and how cold he was that night in the desert and thinking of those slaughtered goats and donkeys and Iraqis he’d seen on the side of the road on the way into Baghdad, the piles of man shit in the terminals at the newly liberated international airport—is screaming: “Aren’t we a little late for that, Brennan, disrespect? You’re the motherfucker who said this was going to be a great idea, you’re the motherfucker who advocated bombing a city and occupying a country and killing all sorts of fucking people, and you think I’m the one who is being disrespectful? I read your shit, man!”