First and foremost, this is not a story about your home, wherever that is. Secondly, America and Iraq are the same place. Now that you've taken in the preliminaries, the story can begin, but like a bad dream, one of those that seem to run on an eternal loop. That way you'll know the story like your left hand. Familiar terrain, you'll think. And that's a good thing. That's the nature of stories and bad dreams. A great deal of redundancy ensures an effective act of communication. Once it's in your memory, any amount of wandering will lead you back.
Wherever you are, remember that you're in Iraq, where one doesn't find work; but where one can always find bodies. You whisper an impromptu Salat al-Janazah, and each time it is a little more distant from tradition. Memory, you remind yourself—past tense. So you walked about, dazed by the darkly prescient quiet, or by the report of bullets and the deafening blast of car bombs. Then, one day, you discovered there are jobs. The work you found was overshadowed by Baghdad University. It required you to collect information. You took the job despite much uncertainty and ugliness surrounding it, a clarion call of "education!" rising beneath the klaxons.
Nobody knew what it really meant. You never could tell who was running what. Just by the very nature of the work, sometimes a person was held captive by one side or another for a few days, it didn't matter which; one answers what is hoped to be an adequate response, and simply being able to leave afterward is thanks enough.
When you were not being questioned yourself, almost everyone you spoke to was mistrustful and angry. Do you remember? There was an inveterate lack of resources everywhere you went, and you were lucky; you managed to get rations when you'd required them. You felt guilty about the ones you saw who had lost everything and had little or no chance of getting by.
While one is in such a landscape, one's mind travels beyond the rubble, or perhaps deeper into it. You began to think you were trapped in one of Scheherazade's stories. You thought about your missing brother, his dead wife, your nephews and nieces who were scattered. Your brother had been the one who should have lived, and maybe he did. It's impossible to tell if he's alive, but, as in most cases...Well. And you still remember each taste, each smile at the celebration when he'd graduated from university. Those had been happier times. They had been troubling too, but not so bad for your family, at least.
You wandered and went inside the rubble of homes, taking what you could. Lives went out in the desert like the Adhan. Whoever had once lived where you went, in each case, no longer did. Sometimes one would find a body still in the building (but not living there), flesh calmly frozen in final terror or despair. Worse still: on the edge of going, like the young woman whom you discovered and couldn't help but think of as one of Scheherazade's unlucky precursors.
Eventually you quit and left.
Forgive yourself; nobody is responsible for dreams or stories, both of which are just motivated lies.
As unreal as it seemed, the story seemed to change. You were facing the qiblah of sorts. There it was: Muhammad's voice coming out, snarled in static and pauses.
"How did you find me," you'd asked with shock.
Muhammad, your cousin, said that it hadn't been easy. He'd called friends, acquaintances, family, looking for someone that may have been left. A friend of a friend of a family member had handed you the cell phone while in the kitchen, his eyes watching for signs of unrest out the window as his wife cooked. "I wasn't looking for just you," Muhammad said. His voice was distant, broken or buried under the interference of more miles than you could guess. "I was looking for everyone. But it sounds like everyone's gone or missing. Don't get me wrong, Ahmed. I'm very glad I found you."
You had been very close as children, but he had been lost to his family on foreign soil for a very long time. He'd been thinking of the past, he said, and after seeing the bad news for months, had decided that he couldn't merely ignore his roots any longer. For several years, he'd been living in New York City. Everyone in the world knows New York, but he'd decided to leave that place. "In New York, there's no opportunity," Muhammad said. He was living in the Midwest now. He said that here there would be a chance for you to live as well.
"My English is very poor," you explained.
"You'll learn, Ahmed."
After a great deal of paperwork and struggle, you moved from the Middle East to the American Midwest. There was not as much gunfire, and no car bombs. The winters were very cold.
Your cousin helped you to secure a position and a place to live. You found work, and then were laid-off. "Laid-off from cleaning fucking toilets," you bemoaned.
Muhammad told you not to lose heart; that everybody in the country was struggling. You would be fine, Allah willing. So you began to wander again. Looking for work, yes, but largely just wandering; you were a Bedouin wandering in a strange place.
Every morning you watched the light of the sun turn the sky into a firestorm. One morning, from the front steps of the apartment complex where you lived, you sat and watched the miracle of the sun shift through the sky...One morning. It's always "one" something or other. One morning, meaning every morning from now until the end of the world, the air was cool, galvanizing your senses. On the street, some children headed to school chattered and stared at you for a moment as you lit a cigarette. A lawn crew was arriving at the opposite building, and you thought for a moment about asking whether they might need another employee. One by one, the men began removing the equipment, all of it fringed with old grass clippings. The smell of gasoline wafted by as the morning exploded with the sound of their motors. In the distance, a dog began to bark. How hard could the job be, you wondered. You knew they'd turn you down. Your English, your history, either reason or both, you thought. Better to go to the employment agency again than to waste the moments of one's life with those who will look upon you with contempt. Besides, with what money you had left, you needed to buy a money order for your rent. You crushed out your cigarette. You walked across the grass, dew from the lawn wetting your shoes. Going to the market now would give you enough time to check with the employment agency later.
It was still cool and the streets were empty now that the school day had started. The neighborhood had been built on the rise and fall of gentle hillocks, the streets curving and rolling, and you enjoyed walking to the market. It allowed one's mind to travel freely. Never mind the houses with boarded-up windows, the graffiti, and the scattered drug dens. At least getting shot was less likely than in Iraq.
There had been little rain throughout the summer. The leaves of the trees in the neighborhood were a burnished gray, sapped partially by the sun and also coated in a fine layer of dust. A few vehicles were parked before the houses, some rusted, others newer and better maintained, much like the houses themselves. One of the house's patios was collapsing, the browned grass and weeds overtaking the cement stairs. The windows had been lined with aluminum foil from the inside. It's counterpart across the street had flowerpots along the front, and hanging from a hook just before the door. The mood of the house was inviting, in stark contrast to its neighbor. Vivid orange and purple flowers grew from the pots.
As you rounded a corner, thinking again about your prospects, you noticed a house with a broken window, the front door ajar. You'd passed it many times. It was a squat one-storey building. Out of past habit, you suppose, you stopped on the sidewalk and looked. A bird sang in a nearby tree. Inside the threshold, there was an odd formation of shadow parallel with the door. You stared, standing still for a time, and glanced around the calm street. Your brow began to sweat.
You began walking to the door and knocked. The door swung open and then stopped on the obstruction, the shadows. You spoke, saying one of the few English words with which you felt confident. "Hello? Hello?"
The television was on; the door was gouged and smeared with old grease.
She was not quite dead. The woman in the half-collapsed home in Baghdad was not fully gone. She whispered, "Help," and there was nothing you could do. You had fled, not so much for help, but because there had been nothing you could do. You heard guns not far away. Blood had pooled on the tile floor. "Forgive me," you said. You fled from your helplessness.
This woman was quite dead, lying on the carpeting. The television was tuned to an American talk show. The coffee table was overturned, an ashtray spilled beside her long, streaming, brown hair. She was face down, and you went to her knowing that there would be nothing you could do for her, but perhaps you could at least make things not so wrong this time.
"Hello, hello, hello!" You burst from the door screaming into the calm September morning. The houses remained silent. Across the street, then, you thought. You began banging and clawing at a neighbor's door. "Hello! Hello!" While you were banging at the door, a car stopped in the street. The door swung open. "What's the matter, Guy?"
"Hello!"
The man approached, and you began waving and pointing. He looked to the house where the woman lay. "What?" You grabbed him by the arm and he tried to break away; you dragged him along, across the street, through a row of shrubs, and as the two of you came to the door, light now streaming inside the house, you noticed his face collapse like a roof. He looked at you. "Shit—shit, man, what did you do?" He broke free and ran, removing a cell phone from his jeans pocket.
You waited quietly for the police. "Women is gone," you said.
"You kill her? You do that?"
"No." You paused, searching for what was not quite right. "I help her."
You spent three days in jail. They told you that you could make a call, but you did not understand. The rabble stared at you with incredible spleen, spitting on the floor, pacing like the cats in the zoo. Your very presence seemed to cause them anguish, as though they were starving and you held food. You thought of Mandor, the Siberian tiger, and the lions the U.S. troops killed. Sometime later you made a connection between the prisoners' routines, when they seemed indifferent, and the phone on the wall. You reached Muhammad. Finally, they told you you were innocent, but you did not understand. You did not understand anything they said, but their anger, their disgust transcended words. They released you with disgust. There was no reason for them to feel so. But is there a reason for anything?
"Look, Ahmed," said Muhammad. You were at his house for tea. "Here's the story on the woman you found. It says..."
And you did not listen. You tore the article from the paper after he finished translating, and placed it in your wallet. The paper is getting worn and faded, it has been so long, and still you do not understand anything that has happened to you. The story makes no sense. Where is the meaning? You do not think that there is a reason for anything in the loop, wherever you are. Forgive yourself.
John Kuligowski currently lives and writes in the Midwest with his wife and two children. His work has appeared in a number of places, most recently Prick of the Spindle and Crash. He has a weird fixation with semiotics.
Comments (closed)
Don Bagley
2010-04-21 13:57:09
John, you made second person work. Good story. I liked the ending, as it had just the right amount of darkness.
Jared Bates
2010-07-28 19:26:40
john... fuck yes... you are an amazing writer... glad you told me about this. I'll probably be stopping by soon...peace Jrad