The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(28)

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written, but I did get your other messages and I’m sorry I didn’t respond sooner. It’s hard to turn my thoughts into words these days. (For once you don’t have to forgive me my poetic verbosity.) But the beauty of this place is haunting me now. The date palms bloomed and everything seems overgrown and excessively lush. No one’s been contracted to trim the palace gardens or wildflowers, so the greens by the blast walls and rivers are (beautifully) unkempt. But we hear firefights now. Firefights and sirens and tiny pops from the city. The city I’ve lived in for months but never really seen.

How’s work?

*

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Date: Aug 10, 2003 at 12:35 AM

Subject: hi!

Laura,

Again, sorry it’s been so long. My work is starting to consume me and when Haaya and I aren’t in the office, we’re usually asleep. Finding these moments alone with my laptop is getting harder.

Mostly I’ve been distracted by the news on the Sunnis. The buzz about the massacres is all over the Zone. It’s practically common knowledge that Iraqi police forces are behind the operations—but the CPA is still unwilling to acknowledge that the men they’re training are doubling as Mahdi executioners at night. I spent three evenings in a row combing newspapers, but not even the liberals are editorializing about it yet. Haaya thinks the CPA simply doesn’t give a shit. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.

Personally, that mindset disgusts me. We have the GIs patrolling, we just need to start stationing them at checkpoints so trucks full of civilians don’t get carted off and shot in the mountains. It’s not that hard!!! We’re talking about sixty people a week, Laura! This isn’t some token shooting or car bomb.

There’s this man who’s started standing outside the palace every day. An old guy, leathered and yellow eyed. He barrages the staff as we walk up the marble steps, screaming for his dead Sunni family and praying in desperate repetitions. Everyone in the office calls him the “crazy sheikh,” but no one seems to know whose department is responsible for dealing with it. We just walk by. Walk by with our bush hats and M-9’s to push paper in this damn castle.

Haaya and I have been trying to gather some information when we do our housing rounds. We figure if we can get enough legitimate sources maybe someone in the press corps will pick it up and do a story. According to a woman in the market, the Mahdis are starting to take children. Now I picture a kid’s head getting blown off every time I hear one of the tiny pops outside the walls. I didn’t come here for this, Laura. I thought I’d be making a contribution. I thought I’d be helping the world, not ignoring it.

I’m exhausted. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to write something beautiful for you. I bet New York’s a dream right now. August was always my favorite month in the city.

Hang in there. Will

*

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Date: Aug 16, 2003 at 1:06 AM

Subject: delete this when you’re done

I’m sending this to you from my childhood address—as the CPA can read our company accounts.

I have news. Haaya has a plan to curb the district targeting of Sunnis but it’s not exactly on policy (hence soccerstar73). When we worked alone last week, she met a slum man who got talking about the Mahdis. He knew about the massacres—and claimed to know about the men. When she came back around sunset, she seemed obsessed with the man; the smoothness of his voice, the green of his eyes. He told her they couldn’t talk on the street and brought her into the back room of a café on Yafa. (There’s no denying her nerve.)

She told me he knows about art, about music, about the irony of the architecture gilding the walls. A university man living in the slums was suspicious to me, but to Haaya, he was a martyr. They ate mangoes and talked every day for five days. Each day I insisted on coming and each day she forbade me to come. (She was trying to gain his confidence, his Arabic was too thick to translate, a foreigner could give “the wrong impression.”) I was suspicious, but I trust Haaya, and Haaya trusts him. Apparently, he knows which men in the Iraqi army are involved with the Mahdis. Apparently, he could make a list of them if he had to. A list, Haaya repeated to me as we stretched out beneath our fruit trees. Trust me, she said. Trust me.

I had to. Haaya knows the language and the culture better than I do and we’re talking about ten to twenty casualties per night. The deal is this: he wants In-Zone housing for his extended family—the waitlists are huge and even so, he doesn’t think they’ll pass the background check. Haaya paused when she told me this next part—making sure I was looking in her eyes. His brother used to be affiliated with Al Qaeda—but after 9/11 he pulled back to pockets of moderate Islamists, shameful, confused, and scared shitless. Ta’ib, Ta’ib, he repeated. Reform, Reform, my brother’s reformed. I imagine Haaya has sympathy for such men. (Her own father retreated from the Iraqi Ba’ath party during the First Gulf War.)

CPA policy obviously forbids Al Qaeda affiliates (reformed or not) from setting up shop inside the Green Zone Walls—let alone cutting the line of hundreds of translators, embassy workers, journalists, and doctors. Haaya talked of utilitarianism during her pitch. Talked of saving hundreds of Sunni lives, expediting withdrawal, reforming the districts and Iraqi police from within. How many names, I kept repeating. (More for myself than to hear the answer.) Fifty names. Fifty undercover Mahdi names. I counted fifty men, one by one, as they took form, lining the Helipad’s east rim. Then I counted fifty men marching to the overnight base, packed inside the inflated dome where they’d sweat through their camo and write home to their moms.