5

I had been stirred after only shreds of sleep, I was woken up by the persistent piercing chirp of a beeper. I was up and on the phone shortly, a guest at the Ghraib was about to get some quality time. They needed me to be on hand. I was out the door in 15 minutes and to the Zoo in record time. They had choppered him in.

Before the coffee had even begun to work on its consciousness, I was in the “White Room,” the tiled cold place where people are talked to at the Zoo. An arab man with a long beard growth is brought in. He is in an orange jumper, and is earing arm and leg irons. He has not been badly beaten yet, and does not look like he’s even been roughly questioned.  Read more 

4

Midnight came and went. 0100 arrived. And a minute after it departed, I stared at the clock.

It is 2 am.

This hour is one which has a mystical significance in my life. It is an hour that I never see on waking early, and seldom see on working late, except when I have some purpose. It is the hour when the old day is really and truly dying, and the new day of human activity has not yet really started. I have been on shift so many many two AMs, and waited, so many many times for the ball of the world, like a great weight, to roll again in its course.

There is a soft knock at the door.

My heart stops. Hampton would never announce his presence in that way.  Read more 

At the point where a project is well and truly headed for failure, that is the time to write the preface, because that is the point where the author is as confused, dubious and negative about the work as the people who need a preface. I’ve reached that point with In Country. It is a failure, but then so are most projects, and that is why it is easy for people to be critics, and hard for people to be writers, film makers, painters or architects. Because anyone can say “that is a failure,” while the effort involved in the failure itself is beyond most people.

In Country has been accused of being allegory. It is not. The story of Chryesie, Merc and Hampton is the story, in the end, of three little people and their problems. If anything, it is the reverse of allegory, it is not that the story is really “about” larger events played out in smaller terms, but, instead, that larger events are so overwhelming that the characters are like leaves blowing in the same autumn wind. They can’t help taking the shape of events, and they can’t help imposing their own bits of life and narrative on the events they have experienced, simply because they know no other way.  Read more 

3

The next morning I sit in my bed and sip deep black coffee that is almost the density of espresso. I am reading a copy of the Financial Times, and resting against the back of the bed. I can stare out around at my surroundings and think, for a moment, that I am in heaven.

But my body aches and I am having trouble moving. Gingerly I draw a bath and soak in it. I it is 0500 and soon I will have to put myself together and deal with the aftermath of the previous day. There will be aftermath. Not with the authorities, but within the various competing parts of what is a vast machine for stripping Iraq bare of anything of value.  Read more 

2

“John. I don’t think I can do this much longer.”

The setting could not be as different from earlier in the day as you could imagine. It is a dinning room in the Emerald City, the Green Zone. There is velvet hanging from the walls, the tables are covered with white linens that are actually white. I am not dressed in spattered camo, but in a soft white dress that hangs in folds off my soft breasts, and down just above my ankles. I am in tan silk stockings and high heels. Hampton, my husband, is in a tux. We are eating steak and fish. There is wine. We don’t usually celebrate our scores, but we have an anniversary date soon, and may not be together when it comes. It is September 2006, and we have been married almost five years.

“You’d better be able to. We aren’t going to retire on my Captain’s pay. Even if they do promote me to Major. Let’s not talk about this.”  Read more 

Book Four
The Emerald City

1

Lazy slow blades cut through the air, and the chopper seemed to float above the mosque. It was a momentary illusion as we began to fall, and every one of us roiled in the roll in the pit of our collective stomachs. The RPG from the minaret swooshed above us and exploded to the right. All eyes were transfixed left.

A burly mercenary, pockets loaded with munitions took his M-16 with a mini RPG mounted on it. He sprayed tracer bursts into the minaret, and then confident he’d found his arc pressed a second trigger that led to a flooding woosh, a cloud of brown and a spirally motion that traced a tight corkscrew in the air, lazily cutting circles toward the minaret. His shot was on target, and flower of red streaks and black streamers burst out from the openings in the minaret. There is a moment of quiet, some grins from the mercenaries.  Read more 

8

Ka-plick.

Ka-plick.

Ka-plickity plick plick.

Kap-plicity plick. Ka-plickity plick. Ka-plickity plick. Plick. Plick. Plick.  Read more 

5

It is a dream of a day in the past. I have woken on a stone cold slab. My face is caked with blood, my hair matted. My face is drawn, a day in this place won’t dent me. I’ve seen too much, too many, too long to even begin to think of playing along. I know that something terrible is happening, and they are looking for someone to pay for it. A road side shooting isn’t enough, there are a few of those a week. Blackwater mercenaries are more or less exempt from scrutiny. So too are people like me.

I’ve been here.  Read more 

4

I am stalked by the hundred, hundred, hundred. Dread that crawls behind me, with an annulus of black. I am sleeping, and dreaming, and this more real than any sight I see in America. There is only one real world, the inferno blazing fire of Iraq. The shards of stone and flesh that rain down after an explosion billows into the air.

In this dream, I am dropped again into a river, but this time the river is of fire and blood, and I see lacks of visceral and pus the gather in the eddies and people, bodies and minarets are dragged away from the shore and cast into the current. And there I far in the distance a cataract of fire, the plumes over into an abyss, and I feel my self dragged towards it.  Read more 

2

I was slammed into a stone grey cell. The bench was concrete. The door was thick steel, and there was only a small thick glass window to the outside. We were under arrest on suspicion of murder. We would be in until morning when the judge came to set bail.  Read more 

Book Three
The Plains

1

“This is what those granola gophers will never understand.”

A flick of the wrist, a short throw of his hand, a move of the stick back, his palm on the ball. I felt pressed to the back of the leather seat. The wheels were tearing at the road like that talons of a raptor. A fast eagle over land, into the broadening night of indigo, leaving the since set sun behind us. But the past only sets for a few hours, only to rise and hit you in the face again. You can run from the past, but you will only die tired.  Read more 

5

Blazing Hyperion struck his palm and enveloped the car as we burned east towards it. The light coming over the horizon and slapped me in the face as it pounded into the windshield. Long lazy miles behind us was the border into Utah from Nevada. Las Vegas, that city of lies, was fading as an object of desire in my mind. There was still a twinge back.

Maybe even now, I need.  Read more 

4

Maybe even now, I need. All, everywhere, is designed, everything. That holds events and plans. Even lost ideas are designs entering oblivion. And chosen in letters, engraved on stone.

But only under limits of meaning. Even now, everyone needs.

Hasn’t everyone made up reasons inside? And chosen an inside, outside, insane stain. A lie, gestates, enters, ends the endless kinetic ethics.

Pray on lies, lies as stars, Demanding in phases the infamous maw of useless states, praise such useless choices as sound. And in death intone: “Please rape our insides. Assassinate, plunder, slake every need.”

Have everyone rape. Onward, onward, now.

Although understanding topple our senses, defeat everything, hold endless lessons or reasons in abeyance, to each understated choice ending comes under starry scintillation in night.

Thank you Dr. Shay. I will come home now.  Read more 

2

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.

Kachugadaching.. Kachugadaching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

Click. Click. Click. Scriptk.  Read more 

Book Two
The West

1

Chariot fire was still noon bound when we hit the flat basin from which rises a city built on sin: the pseudo-country that turns electricity into unhappiness faster than any other device known to humanity. It’s stratosphere tower to nowhere isn’t even useful as a radio beacon, because the mountains that surround Las Vegas loom above it. But I can’t help it, I love Las Vegas.  Read more 

5

The dawn came knocking on the long beige horizon filled with cashes in the land which to which clung a stubble of low green. The wheels of the car turned smoothly, the passing lines flickered by with the regularity of a clock. Behind them was San Diego’s sprawl, Los Angeles’ brawl, and even the inland empire had grown sparse. It was the rains came by aqueduct that had always appalled her, she came from the broad plains that were kissed by the incline to the mountains, no such gift of man’s rain had been hers in those years. California seemed Lucifer’s Eden to her, a place that was perfect, except that it had no rain. It was unkissed by flood of fertility and moisture. It dug into the ground and found the midas touch of oil and gold, but no water. The flatness and depth of its desert made Chryssie ache for the healthy spun straw to gold of fields of wheat ready for harvest, whose white waves flowed with the wind, the land responding the sky’s caress.  Read more 

4

I am lying in this bed, and I am a blank page. My skin are the soft sheets of old vellum, waiting of the illumination to be applied. My hair is the dark cover, waiting to be caressed. His fingers turn my pages beginning from the back, turning me over and over. My mind wanders, we begin from the ending, from this, this holy now which consumes me. I want nothing more than to feel the kisses fall on my neck like a shower, each a brief raindrop in the desert of my skin, which soaks the touch and for a brief moment bears its trace, only to fade to color.

But each kiss is absorbed more slowly than the last, the redness flowers more readily with each succulent touch, and my breath rasps more and more, until there is rolling from my chest and through my throat a singing moan. It has been said a million times, because it has been true a million times a million times. The winter of my fears and wretched pain is ending, and I am spring on the surface of my skin.

I blush.

I lower my chin.

I look into his eyes.  Read more 

3

In the hallowed darkness he came to me, his lips sliding over a curve I had forgotten I had. They were roughened by fire and age, burned by magnesium sun, and ragged tipped. His hands were hard and they rode over my contours and I responded by coming to wakening desire. I was flush in so few instants, that it seemed as if I was a blaze. How quickly this peak came was shocking and striking.

His fingers pinched my nipples without ceremony, but also with a subtle softness. How could such gentle torment by both a pleasure and a pain. My breathing fell to cadences of easy rising and falling. It is the air of other planets that poured forth as tormented soot on the terrible day we met, is that air I swallowed in gulps and gasps as he pressed his arms over me. How is it that a body becomes flesh, a thing that changes from that which is I, to a wavering ripple that is a thing, under some other command, a wave that he, he, he commands. Its resonance flows up into my thoughts and sensations.  Read more 

2

There is a shadow.

It is a plane.

And it is flying far too low.

God Bless them all.

And all heads turn, because it cannot be, but we know in a sickening sense that it must be. Because nothing else could be it. The accident we’ve all feared in our sleep, when something goes horribly wrong. The pilot he must be asleep.  Read more 

I look at the sunlight of a dying day as it flows over his body, it’s finely chiseled contours, the little swoop by the sides of his abdomen that hint that there is still muscle beneath the slight layer of softness that age has provided him. I can’t bear to look for too long, but instead turn to the side of my bed, and begin brushing my hair. It is long, and still blond enough. I have had long hair for along time, so the even strokes of the brush, slowly easing out the tangles from the sweat soaked afternoon is a ritual, it calms me.

“My husband would kill me if he knew.”

I say that to the air.

“But he isn’t here.”  Read more