A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (26 page)

“I’m not Saddam Hussein,” Marshall declared. “If that’s what you think.”

He could see only the backs of their heads. Joyce made no movement or sound to acknowledge that she heard him.

“That’s what you think!” he cried. “You think it’s symbolic, don’t you? ‘Another evil person removed!’ Am I right? Tell me, am I right?”

He came around the couch and stationed himself directly in front of the television. The children scowled but Joyce only rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, as if appealing to the people in 9E for support. When he recalled this moment weeks later, however, Marshall would realize that her eyes had been wet.

“There’s no analogy here!” Marshall insisted. “I haven’t gassed any Kurds, I’m not threatening anyone with weapons of mass destruction. I’m a nice guy. In fact, I think a case can be made that I’m a
great
guy—okay? Maybe not a great husband or a great father, but I did my best, Joyce. I put more effort into
this marriage than you did. I gave up more of my basic human rights than you did.
I
was the one who was oppressed! To compare me with Saddam is totally unjust.”

“Dad,” Viola complained, “we can’t see! You’re in the way!”

THE DOG
. The kids had lost interest in the dog, and even if he hadn’t lost interest in him as well, there would have been no room for him in the studio. Marshall felt like an idiot for buying the animal in the first place. He fed him one last time and brought him in the van to a park in East New York, a desolate, virtually treeless expanse strewn with garbage. Marshall told him, “You’re going to be free, Snuff. No more having to wait for your walk, no more having to eat the same old Science Diet shit. Roll around in the dirt if you like, anytime you want.” The park was rich in dirt and dirtlike substances, poor in grass, a bit of the Empty Quarter in Brooklyn. He parked the van as far as possible from a small assembly of youths that had gathered on the sidewalk near the park. They had stopped whatever they were doing—more precisely, buying and selling drugs—and were watching the van.

Marshall let the dog out and took just two steps, not wanting to put distance between himself and the vehicle. Stooping slightly, he removed Snuffles’ leash and collar and stroked the damp fur that had been matted beneath the collar. “Hey, boy,” he began. “Have fun. Life, liberty, the pursuit…” Snuffles tensed under his hand, seeing the pack of wild dogs before Marshall did. They were at the end of the field, by a stand of scrawny trees, observing Snuffles in return. He burst from Marshall’s loose grasp so quickly that his fur scorched Marshall’s hands. The dog took full strides across the litter-spotted terrain, running leashless as he had never run before. The other dogs
yapped at his approach and once he reached them they sprinted into the woods together. Snuffles never once looked back.

That night Marshall lay down on his new single bed purchased with a fitted sheet and a light polyester quilt at Bed World, located far down Flatbush Avenue. He lay with his head on the too-pliable pillow and listened to the sounds of the building: drips, creaks, scurrying, random pings. At some point during the night he heard a series of rhythmic thumps somewhere. He wasn’t sure whether they represented lovemaking or violence or which possibility was more disturbing. He couldn’t imagine ever bringing a woman here and that was why he had purchased a single bed. That woman, no more than a potentiality, her features and contours unknown, the color of her hair and her scent and the tone of her laughter undetermined, would have to have her own apartment somewhere, preferably on the Upper East Side.

He bought a cheap portable TV and watched the remainder of the war without cable. Even through the static he could see the crowds dancing in the streets, waving Iraqi and American flags, the sane finally released from their asylums, knowing they had been sane all along. “No Saddam! No Saddam!” a young man shouted at the cameras, insistently, as if the viewers couldn’t possibly understand what that meant. No, they couldn’t. One of the broadcasts ended with a clip of a gaunt, unwashed GI striding through a narrow alleyway by himself, his helmet strapped tightly to his head, a rifle over his shoulder. His face showed the lines of fatigue and grim resolve. From unseen hands above, cut flowers rained upon his shoulders.

Marshall had been thoroughly screwed, thoroughly unexpectedly. This apartment, this bed, this crappy TV had never been foreseen when he and Joyce had embarked on the road to divorce. At the start, so long ago, once they had agreed that for the sake of the children and their own happiness—and really,
had it been so wrong for them to seek happiness, or some small measure of contentment?—they would have to live apart, they had each been optimistic, predicting a good-natured, reasonable divorce. Without even beginning to do the math, Marshall had imagined some kind of lawyerless settlement that would leave them neighbors in Brooklyn Heights, celebrating Christmas and birthdays together, recalling old family stories and laughing ruefully over drinks about the rapidly receding past. At the same time he had expected that Joyce would be totally removed from his life, that even while sharing custody of the kids he would manage never to see her again. It was unclear now how he had secured simultaneously these two mutually contradictory and individually unrealistic visions.

ONLY DAYS AFTER
Marshall had moved out, Joyce had nearly forgotten how terrible the past several years had been. The time with Marshall was only history now, to be summoned to mind at will, but oddly no longer part of her life. Her existence was defined by new, marriageless parameters. So that was that: she was no longer married.

She was no longer married
. Sometimes the thought made her weak in the knees, and on several mysterious occasions, probably coinciding with the approach of her period, she was convulsed by sobs. She fell on the bed, smearing the new bedspread with her mascara. Marshall had been part of her life for the past fourteen years, most of her adult life. In all the years of intermediate maneuvers leading up to their final separation, she had never realistically imagined living without him.

If she were asked by a (hypothetical) close friend why she and Marshall had divorced, she would have been unable to respond. An answer would have required that she revive long-dead arguments and “issues,” none of which seemed like just
cause, or at least enough cause to justify their impoverishment and the intensely complicated arrangements they would now have to devise involving the kids. She wondered if she and Marshall had made a terrible mistake.

Meanwhile the Iraq war had been won with unprecedented speed and dexterity. A light coalition presence had swiftly established order around the country. Conservative television commentators crowed over Saddam’s defeat and even more so at the rout of the antiwar liberals. The liberals had been proven wrong
again,
this time about the most elemental questions involving the nation’s security, American military capability, and the moral obligation to oppose tyranny. Joyce was gratified by the victory of American troops, especially with such minimal losses, but she watched the news glumly, as if Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter were gloating about what was wrong with
her
.

Marshall took the children to his apartment in Flatbush as infrequently as possible and he always seemed relieved to bring them back. He was forlorn and haggard these days—finally middle-aged—and she wondered if the divorce had done that to him. Of course it had. They were each now in the postmarriage phase of their lives and, though neither was even forty, indisputably middle-aged. She stared at her face in the bathroom mirror to identify the creases and swollen jowls left by her ordeal. Once, nearly by chance, she found in her hands one of their honeymoon pictures from Antigua. In the photo taken on the hotel balcony, a spotless beach behind her, her eyes were bright and she was trying to stop laughing. Marshall had just said something hilarious. What? And look how thin she had been, nearly underfed.

Saddam’s location was given up by his Tikrit cousins and he was run down by a unit of the Free Iraqi Forces in an orchard on the outskirts of the city. The Americans demanded his handover for an eventual trial, but rejoicing Iraqis who converged on the site refused. It was one of the Iraqis’ few acts of defiance
against the Velvet Occupation. In a scene broadcast globally, Saddam pleaded for his life, falling to his knees. A scaffolding was constructed in the orchard, where hundreds of men, women, and children raucously sang patriotic, pre-Saddam songs and, at one point, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Although the lyrics were mangled, the sentiment was explicit. Tears fell freely. Thousands of ordinary Iraqis arrived at the site to cheer the proceedings, and to sing and dance and embrace their fellow liberated citizens. Men and women gathered around TVs in New York and New Delhi, and in Tehran, Cairo, Beijing, and Havana. In these electrifying hours the Free Iraqis convened a revolutionary court in the orchard. A young bearded anti-Saddam fighter soberly read the verdict; his speech, promising death to terrorists and freedom for all, electrified billions. The dictator was hung from the high branches of an olive tree. The silhouetted image of the corpse, captured by an AP photographer as the sun went down, swiftly became iconic. Within a day it was screened onto millions of T-shirts that would be sold and distributed in every country of the world, in some of them by clandestine means.

MARSHALL BOUGHT
a T-shirt for himself and for each of the children. Everyone was wearing them that week. He felt foolish buying souvenir T-shirts, since he was living off his credit cards, but the dictator’s execution had made him optimistic even about his finances. The world was soaked in optimism that spring. “This is history,” he told Victor and Viola, who were restlessly lying on his bed, with the TV positioned on a chair in front of them. That morning American investigators in Iraq had uncovered a vast cache of nuclear weapons, some of them already loaded on medium-range missiles. The cameras panned slowly through the underground vault. Victor was barely paying attention. He was still taking in the new apartment’s details:
the peeling, yellow-stained wallpaper; the rumbling refrigerator; the low ceiling; this musty smell that never went away; the shirts hanging from the frame of the shower stall; the shower stall
in the kitchen;
the mousetrap set by the refrigerator, where there was a hole in the wall so black it suggested the innumerable horrors of war.

A new day. Marshall was single again, with time to himself at last, most of the week. Nearly any evening he could ask himself what he wanted to do: go to a movie, eat Chinese food out of the carton, scratch his balls? Go ahead. He could think in practical terms of dating women now. True, he was dead broke…But even that regime might be overturned in this season of change. Meanwhile he bought top-of-the-line running shoes and stylish track shorts to match his “Death to Terrorists!” T-shirt. Without having to assemble the kids for school or wait for Joyce to complete her toilet, he ran in the mornings before work, sprinting down the fractured and pitted sidewalks of Utica Avenue as if he had just knocked over an all-night liquor store. A varsity outfielder in high school, he had forgotten how well he ran: his legs were light, they kicked high, and the storefront security grilles went by in a blur.

Marshall’s new company, now called CeFKal and under new, unsullied management, which had recently adopted a logo that in no way recalled the firm’s previous corporate identity, leased part of a hulking prewar building on lower Broadway. It was attempting to revive. Marshall was attempting to revive too. He threw himself into every assignment and soon won a promotion and a pay raise (that subtracted about $50 in take-home from his $600 monthly income shortfall). Partly to avoid sleeping in Flatbush, he took every opportunity to travel on business, visiting the remote, exotic sites at which the company’s dwindled assets were hunkered behind elaborate creditor-protection devices.

Late one afternoon he flew in from a lab in the California
desert, brooding over what he had seen there. In the taxi on the way from Newark, he called to ask for an immediate appointment with Eduardo, his colleague at their former company who now headed the CeFKal division for which Marshall worked.

Eduardo was watching MSNBC when Marshall came in. Grinning, he apologized for the TV but pointed at the flat screen mounted in the wall to show Marshall what he had missed while he had been airborne: today, after weeks of peaceful demonstrations in Damascus—the police had refused to make arrests; the Army had declined to step in—Bashar al-Assad and several of his ministers had fled the country. A caretaker government swiftly assumed power that afternoon and promised freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, peace with Syria’s neighbors, and autumn elections. The public squares and mosque courtyards were thronged.

“Amazing, huh, Marshall?”

“Yes, it is,” he murmured, momentarily transfixed by the spectacle. A pert, apple-cheeked American correspondent in a flak jacket was surrounded by demonstrators waving Syrian flags at the camera. “This is history!” she shouted, and then someone produced the Stars and Stripes and she laughed. Now the crowd picked up the chant: “USA! USA!”

Eduardo said, “Bush is a Bible Belt moron who can’t put together a coherent sentence, but, wow, look…”

“I guess.” Marshall couldn’t keep his eyes off the screen. Every second person in the crowd wore a “Death to Terrorists!” T-shirt just like his, except the words were in Arabic. Just last week Assad had outlawed the shirts.

“What’s up? How was California?”

Marshall opened his briefcase and removed a sheaf of papers. “There’s a problem with the rollout.”

Eduardo turned from the TV and gave him his full, wary attention. Marshall was talking about the company’s most via
ble new product. He eyed the papers but made no motion to take them. “What kind of problem?”

“Well, the phase three tests haven’t been conclusive. But if you look at the partial sampling, you’ll see results that are more consistent with phase one. Here, let me show you something that’s suggestive of where this is going—”