Strawberry Fields Page 9

  In that country, I would write, out of the hills, the torture chambers, ghettos and far-flung villages, training camps and officer schools, a new nation of man was born, in one body terrorist and soldier. Now he walks among us, coffers filling and mothers throwing up their arms in the doorways. I see those girls, cheeks pressed to the hot slate, no doubt their skin burning, and for hours rising toward them every cry from below. For a moment the screams are my name; they cry out my name.

  Do not forgive me, but this is the thought that permits me, each day, to sit down at the desk and begin.

  Alice

  Back in a few days, I texted Modigliani. Text me if you crack the case.

  I flew north, dozing on the plane with my head tipped back—my neck, I kept thinking, exposed. In my dreams I was on an airplane, the man beside me shuffling and reshuffling a pinochle deck (not so—he too was sleeping, detective fiction in his lap), below us the Pacific Coast, green and foggy, even from this height you could see the surf, lacing around rocks, the shore a soft pastureland dotted with sheep and hikers. When I woke I could see out the window a glaciered peak emerging from cloud.

  Sergei’s parents had wanted to meet in a popular tourist spot, maybe they thought it would be easiest for me to find. I took the train downtown from the airport, gliding past small hills, urban trailer parks, long blocks of the Vietnamese neighborhood. I got off and walked downhill toward the harbor, on the horizon a blur of islands across the sound. I hadn’t been to this city in ten years but the people were all familiar. Everywhere they passed with what seemed like an air of geniality, as though they all knew each other too well to look up and say hello. The city was getting richer and richer but the business district was just a few blocks that appeared discreetly then melted back into the slope of little neighborhoods and rows of condos down toward the bay.

  Then the historic market sign was before me, and since I was early I entered the press of tourists as they moved leisurely through the stalls, easily wooed to either side by fishmongers, cheap jewelers, florists. The crabs the fishmongers pointed to were indeed immense, and the bouquets, while ordinary, were glorious in the misty air. I bought some sort of honey candy and sucked on it as I made my way to the piroshky stand, which is where Sergei’s family had wanted to meet, whether out of sincere enthusiasm or a sense of humor I didn’t know. We had only exchanged emails, and even that with much delay and confusion—the two of them shared an address and checked it infrequently; I imagined that they had acquired it solely to talk to Sergei when he was overseas.

  He sent little videos, they’d written to me. Of him and a boy he was teaching English. Rap songs, them singing together. They’d tried to embed one but the link was broken.

  The line at the piroshky stand was long, and no one in it looked like his parents as I had pictured them. These were tourists, intent on the display, where pastries shone with egg wash, the poppy seed fillings looked as rich as caviar, and the curves of the rolls were enormous, so that it would take two hands even to hold one of these creations, and an hour to eat them, if instead of biting through you unspooled the spiral as it had been formed. Piroshkies, hot in waxed paper, were handed over the counter again and again, and briefly I was transfixed by the vigor of the teenage staff, one handling dough adeptly, one hurrying to and from the back, others taking and filling orders as if the security camera above us was intended to document their professionalism.

  The stand was a few doors down from the original Starbucks, and a parade of people posed by its quaint proto-logo, their companions taking their photographs, and then switching places, continually disrupting the foot traffic. Do you mind…? two young women asked me, one of them offering her phone and gesturing toward the sign. Her friend held an oversized bouquet.

  Sorry, I said, my hands in my pockets. The women took it better than most.

  I walked a short distance from the bustle and waited. Sergei’s parents were now ten minutes late. I had given them my cell number but they had not done the same. I had described myself well enough, I thought, looking down at my jacket. The crowd made this a poor choice of places to meet, and why had I agreed to it?

  Once they were half an hour late, I got in line for a piroshky, still looking around, which made the middle-aged mother behind me nervous. I ordered the mushroom, potato, and cabbage. The filling was exceptional, the pocket firm. I walked a bit farther, to finish eating while looking at the harbor, thinking of ships’ bellies packed with immigrants, the bravery of those who had made the crossing, a courage so necessary it was almost mundane. I waited another hour, one eye on the stand and checking email on my phone too often. Perhaps they wanted to meet here so that when they stood me up I’d at least see the city, I thought, and left. I headed perpendicular from my hotel, figuring I now had the afternoon for as long a walk as I wanted, could even work in a couple of the city’s bridges, look down and see past my feet the long drop to the water.

  The sun came out and I walked for hours, ending stretched out in the grass of a small park. Two men drowsed, holding hands, a few yards from me, their stereo murmuring old-school hip-hop. When a man, good-looking, not too young, stopped to talk to me—after returning a piece of paper that he thought had blown free from my notebook—I was friendly. This city, I thought, following him to the neighborhood bar he recommended, where the beer selection was as good as he’d claimed, and we ate plates of kale and macaroni and cheese. I wasn’t surprised that he kissed me, but was surprised that it was on the street, where a woman sitting on a stoop two buildings over could catcall. When it turned out his apartment wasn’t far from my hotel I went with him. I came easily, his fingers at once in me and rubbing me, we kissed half-undressed in his room, not yet in his bed but leaning against an armoire. After that I didn’t think about anything. I didn’t stay, I had called my hotel from the bathroom, to say I would be late but still keeping my reservation. Next to the light switch in the bathroom—so that as I sat his face appeared above mine in the mirror opposite, and he’d have gazed at your chest if you stood to pee—was a framed photograph of Frantz Fanon. I didn’t comment on this when I came back to bed, though from my companion’s expression I think he was hoping I would; he could have assumed I hadn’t noticed the portrait, or didn’t know who it was.

  Robert

  I’d heard Mahatma was here, there, everywhere. Everyone said something different. I just saw him, like down MLK Boulevard.

  It’s just him, by the bridge, in front of all these cops, he’s just standing there talking and they won’t say shit back.

  I saw him standing guard over a cop car so this kid wouldn’t smash its windows, blocking him, just like talking him down.

  He’s under a tree on the north side of the park, giving a speech, you should have heard him…

  I saw him where the fire’s at, throwing tear gas right back at them.

  Everything was possible, could be nothing was true. I did what I knew how to do. Zipped a hoodie to my chin, tied a kerchief snug across my face. My press pass slapped at my gut as I passed through the crowd, men women and children peaceably assembled, signs high in the fouled air. On every T-shirt a single face appeared, a young man, eyebrows low in thought or bemusement, half his face in shadow, half in sun. In the original photo his T-shirt was red, the background red brick, here reproduced in black and white—T-shirt on a T-shirt, I thought, ha, not an infinite regression, but close enough: everywhere I turned, he gazed at me through the obstructed light of the street, inquiring, silent.

  This man, Ferdinand, had died two weeks before the protests began. Protests that were now, officially, riots. In my mother’s living room I’d perched on the arm of the couch and watched dozens of boys and men, some women, yes, some women in there, sifting rapidly in and out of a check cashing store, a horde, they said on the news, narrating fast over helicopter footage, from that height there were just dark bodies and white T-shirts, not one face. The faster the newscast
ers talked the calmer I felt. My mother walked by and smacked at my rear: That’s not how a couch works and you know it. When I packed my knapsack in the hall, still chewing toast, she handed me the kerchief and a water bottle with a squeeze top. There’s all that tear gas out there, she said. I raised my eyebrows, and she said: You kids think you’re the only ones ever been worth gassing. She brushed something invisible off my sleeve and I was out the door.

  You know Mahatma? I asked the men lined up protecting a corner store, street soldiers, tough and coughing. Yeah, man, one of them said and they conferred for a moment then told me where he was, where I was soon to learn he wasn’t. Can I get a photo? I said, of you all together, and I gestured at the kerchiefs they were wearing, half of which were red, half blue, testimony to the truce the gangs had called for the protests. I tried to get them arranged in that tight line, in the window behind them the face of the shopkeeper, but one or two were always doubled over coughing, alternately, a sort of choir. The man I talked to, blue kerchief at his throat, shouted after me as I walked away, and when I turned back toward him I saw the capillaries in his left eye give, the white flooded red. When you find Mahatma, he said, tell him we’ll do what he asked. What did he ask? I said, like a goddamn reporter. Nah, man, he said. Just tell him.

  Two weeks ago Ferdinand had died. Three weeks ago Ferdinand had seen a couple cops on the street and the cops had seen him, for a second they’d looked at each other, then Ferdinand turned and ran. Cops in hot pursuit. When they caught him they arrested him, though since they were lacking any cause this event falls in that dissonant category termed unlawful arrests. They hauled him to a police van, his leg dragging, broken, his dragging leg and cries of pain attracting the camera phone of a passerby, who shouted at the cops, while another man filmed from another angle (I went around to the back of the building when I heard the sound of the taser, he said later, they had him folded up like a crab). In the video the heels of Ferdinand’s sneakers tilt up from his shoulder blades, the two police officers’ hands pressing hard on his shoulders and shins. It was in the van that three of his vertebrae were crushed, his head nearly loose from his spine, there on the floor he lost consciousness; he was shackled to himself but loose in the van. For a week he endured, unspeaking, until one morning he died.

  The city is getting louder. The morning is warm and sirens approach and recede, a sonar that fails to locate the hot heart of the city. Mahatma? I ask, and people point, people nod. Down the street a stolen car luxuriates in slow circles before a wall of riot cops, their plastic-shielded gaze. I want at once to be deeper in and more peripheral. The emcee is my answer, the city’s best known, Mahatma, and I’ll—I’ll smoke him out, I could say, given the skies under which we both find ourselves, the air we’re barely able to breathe.

  Only once had Mahatma appeared on the news, his lawyer beside him, by chance one of his hearings had been amid the first days that the protests transformed into whatever it was they’d become. On the courthouse steps they stopped him, mikes raised, and he had already rolled up the sleeves of his button-down, his tie pendulating when he answered first one reporter, then the next. His tie matched so precisely the sky that he looked transparent, or sliced through, atmosphere itself radiating from his breastbone. His lawyer wore a tight-fitting suit, a sort of ’60s Bob Dylan tribute that looked somehow cynical, perhaps only because a phone was glowing through the front pocket. A reporter began: It seems like the nonviolent protest you called for has failed. I guess it seems like that, Mahatma said, and paused artfully, but the reporter—blonde in a kelly-green wrap dress—only went on: What message would you like to give to the looters? As though her mike were a means to address them. Well, he said, I believe in nonviolence, but—he looked off into the distance, a gaze his lawyer suddenly joined, like two deer upon hearing a crack in the woods—the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. I waited for him to go on, but when someone then asked him about his own hearing, the charges he’d been contesting for over a year, he replied formulaically and his lawyer stepped in. We may have just heard, the blonde thought aloud to the camera, one of the city’s most prominent figures, the rapper Mahatma, endorse the rioting. Let’s go to—and when the head of the usual reverend pundit appeared I hit mute. Briefly the photo of Ferdinand occupied the screen.

  Everywhere I went Mahatma had been. We need his leadership now more than ever, a woman said, and a boy, no more than thirteen, played me a recording he’d made of one of Mahatma’s impromptu performances, but any song was indistinct from the rising noise of the street. The streak of red across the boy’s shirt seemed to come from the crown of his head, he wiped a new trickle away from his lips.

  If he’s not talking to the media, my editor texted me, what makes you think you’re any different? I had paused in a barricaded street to read this when I was arrested, thrown forward into a junked-out car and handcuffed, painfully. I’m a—I said, but it seemed like nobody heard me, and although I should have gone limp I guess I helped walk myself to the van. Just then Mahatma was on the corner ahead, a crowd gathering to him, I saw him raise his hand to his face, with a knuckle rub the smoke and damp from his eyes.

  Alice

  It was not a good bar, but Modigliani seemed to like it, we had been there almost three hours. His head was tipped back against the wall, his Adam’s apple a pearl in the yellow light. In my jacket pocket was the envelope Kareem’s wife Simone had sent me, of which I said nothing to Modigliani. I planned to read it that night and was careful not to get too drunk, a restraint in which Modigliani decidedly did not share.

  I called him a cab and he walked toward it shaking his head, his only farewell a hand on my arm that could have been merely for balance. I went home—no longer the hotel but a shitty efficiency on the seventh floor of a shitty compound. From the kitchen window I could see the roof of the VA hospital, a view I had thought would help keep my head in the game.

  Rubber-banded around the contents of the envelope was a note: I thought you should have this. Not the police. I didn’t know if the sentence fragment signified afterthought or emphasis. Simone had signed it with an S and a sketch of a cat.

  When I removed the rubber band, papers fell to the bedspread and floor. Various documents, notes on pages torn from a notebook, newspaper printouts, a CD labeled backup. This seemed like Kareem’s mess, not Simone’s, as though she’d sent me the disordered contents of a drawer or the stereotypical shoebox.

  I dug in.

  The main theme so far: a prison in Afghanistan, which I’d heard of but never been anywhere near. Before Iraq Kareem had served two years in Afghanistan, if I remembered right—one of the spiral-bound pages told me this, actually, in his tidy handwriting he’d written the dates and sites of his deployments and a few select missions, with more geographical specificity than seemed strictly kosher.

  Kareem was not a man of sentences, which I respected. His notes were lists, with arrows and circles, dates and names whose relation was suggested by their situation on the page. Everywhere the initials FAM—by the name of a village, the date of what? It seems they had encountered FAM on the road. A checkpoint, where FAM had been dragged out of the taxi he drove.

  The prison was the subject of the next stack of newspaper printouts, which I had to smooth out to read, the creases in them deep and irregular, they’d been folded into small triangles, or maybe stuffed in a pocket, and although one might have called Kareem a slob, he had instead, I thought, a cynical sort of order, in which treasures were deliberately disguised as trash. The prison was in the mountains, at first just a temporary holding pen, a place to collect and interrogate while the war tried to sort out the young men of the north, their affiliations and those of the local warlords, but now, years later, it was overfull, and the articles—which were several years old—expressed the beginnings of the present concern that there was no due process of any kind at work here. The so-called worst of the worst were shipped to Gua
ntanamo; others disappeared behind these walls for years or forever.

  The death certificate was a photocopy and in English. Across the top Kareem had written: rec’d by FAM’s family 2/1. The certificate recorded the January 7, 2003, homicide of Farzad Ahmad Muhammad, coronary failure due to blunt force injury—this phrase highlighted in yellow.

  The rest was: a list of names, American military, ordered by rank, and all stationed, it seemed, in the prison, though I’d have to look into that further. I clicked through the files on the CD, which, as the label promised, were only scans of the hard copies, often blurry, marred by the documents’ creases and of little use. This was neither evidence nor argument, but inchoate, its purpose known only to Kareem. Had any one of these items been discovered among his things it would have raised no particular interest, which was no doubt his aim. And Simone, who must have understood the man’s mind, what did she think upon discovering all this? That she wanted someone else to deal with it? Although (I looked at a photo of FAM, an impromptu mug shot, his hands plastic handcuffed, expression frightened, his face young, thin, thinly bearded, robes billowing wide of his ankles, to each side of him a GI, one of whom was smiling incongruously) that wasn’t fair. She would like to honor his inquiry, or interest, whatever it was. As well as to have the weight of it off her shoulders, out of her house, which she must by now be selling. I was in Iraq, I had said to her, as a sort of persuasion so that she might tell me more, we stood in her living room, her eyes flicking toward the room where the child slept whenever I spoke or a car passed throbbing with music.