The Last Magazine: A Novel (11 page)

T
o get the can of yellow spray paint, A.E. Peoria steps over the sleeping bodies of the bellhop and two other waiters passed out on the thin foam mats and wrapped in threaded blankets on the concrete floor in the Hamra Hotel’s supply closet. Spray paint is a red-hot commodity in Baghdad, sales off the charts. The owner of the Hamra, Mr. Al Mansour, had been bragging that he’d bought ten cans just this morning and stashed them away for potential resale.

The collapse of Saddam’s regime has brought a flood of new products to Iraq that people couldn’t get before: satellite television dishes, air conditioners, extra-large flavored condoms, gumballs, new Toyotas, genetically modified nectarines from the European Union, premium whiskey, Turkish beer, and yes, spray paint—there had never been cans of spray paint in Iraq before, something to do with United Nations sanctions. All the paint in Saddam’s regime had been in tin aluminum buckets that required a brush. But a shipment of spray paint had come in at the market, a few truckloads driven up from Dubai, and the stocks cleared out within hours, more truckloads ordered up.

Spray paint, A.E. Peoria has observed, was catching on like mobile phones in East Africa, the push-button aerosol technology a new blessing on the land.

The Iraqis were trying out these cans of wonder with gusto. An Aladdin’s lamp of a free society: shake it, push, puff, and forty wishes of free expression granted before the hiss of an empty bottle.

In Iran, after the fall of the shah in 1979, there was an old man who made his living walking around the streets pulling down statues of the shah, with a simple noose and rope pulley device, reimbursed by the new fundamentalist government per statue. In Iraq there had been some highly publicized toppling of statues, some nice TV moments, but the real symbolism of the new era had been found in the cans of spray paint that had infiltrated Baghdad. Slogans spray-painted everywhere, showing the world that Iraq was still a literate cradle of civilization, the premier spot for poets and artists and lovesick songstresses in the Arab world, the first signs of a new age of legal vandalism and graffiti and contemporary writings. Messages, taunts, haikus, circles, squares, penises, threats, cubes spray-painted across the city in all colors—yellow, black, purple, green, blue, red—a rainbow of spray paint on the sagging corners of wounded buildings, on the stone exteriors of government offices stripped bare of copper wiring and paper products and Apple IIe computers, on the strikingly white pillars of Saddam’s now abandoned ninety-seven palaces, on road signs crossing out the name Saddam with the Arabic word for “free,”
ahrar
, and on the newest feature of the city, the concrete blast walls, two tons of concrete each, eight feet by ten feet, a perfect canvas for the country’s new identity.

The ten cans of spray paint, as bragged about by Mr. Mansour, are there, and Peoria grabs one, jumps back over the sleeping bodies, and heads back out to the pool.

Over the past five months, the pool at the Hamra Hotel has become
the central meeting place for American and British journalists, and the home of
The Magazine
’s bureau. A.E. Peoria helped set up the bureau on the third floor, a deluxe suite, converted into a place of business, with a kitchen, desks, phone lines, running water, rent of three grand a week, and bad room service. Mr. Al Mansour was making up for lost profits after thirteen years of those same sanctions that kept the country spray paint–free.

It is A.E. Peoria’s last night in Baghdad. A drive across the desert to Amman the next morning, then a flight to Bangkok, and he is letting loose. What a five months it has been. A real learning experience.

He barrels out onto the patio, poolside. He starts shaking the can. The party is in full swing.

There is a tray of kebabs, a feast of hummus and chopped cucumbers and eggplants and tomatoes, there is a platter of grilled fish,
masgouf
, the Iraqi delicacy. He sees his translator, Ahmed, grabbing a plate.

“Ahmed, my haji, come here, man, I’m leaving tomorrow, we need to talk before I go.”

He grabs Ahmed by the shoulder and guides him over to a white suntanning chair under the glow of a tiki torch. Ahmed sits down, and so does Peoria.

“Have you tried the
masgouf
,” Ahmed says.

“You know, I have to say, Ahmed, there’s a fucking reason you don’t see Iraqi restaurants anywhere, you know what I mean? Thai restaurants, Lebanese, even fucking Tibetan, Indian, Nepalese, every kind of cuisine in the world is in almost every big city, there’s all these kinds of restaurants, you know? But there’s not any Iraqi restaurants anywhere. I think that says something, man. You can’t blame that shit on the sanctions. How many times can you have fucking boiled and grilled chicken and fucking cubes of cucumbers and tomatoes before it’s like, shit, enough, let’s get some flavor. . . .”

“The
masgouf
is our national dish,” Ahmed says. “Saddam’s favorite . . .”

“Would you think I would eat a fish caught in that fucking river? A fish from the Euphrates?”

“The Tigris.”

“It is the Tigris, man. I have to thank you for correcting me, because without you I wouldn’t know shit about this country. There’s a new regulation that Americans aren’t even allowed to swim in that river.”

“It is not a problem.”

“No, it is a problem. Don’t give me that ‘It’s not a problem’ shit. I’m leaving tomorrow, Ahmed, I’m leaving tomorrow and I need to know what you really think. We can drop the ‘I’m your boss, thing,’ you know we’re friends. You’ve told me everything, bro, every fucking thing. Can you believe it, I didn’t even know what a Sunni or Shia was—or I guess I did know it because, you know, I’d done the reading—but not what it really meant, you know? Like a fucking Catholic versus a Protestant a few hundred years ago, or maybe ten years ago if you’re talking Northern Ireland.”

“I don’t even think your president knew the difference,” says Ahmed.

“Isn’t that the problem,” says Peoria. “Look what’s happening. You can’t feel good about it, can you?”

“Feel good?”

Peoria knows that Ahmed doesn’t feel good about it, because Peoria doesn’t feel good about it, and Peoria is partially relying on Ahmed to get that feeling. Ahmed’s unease is understandable: he was a translator in Saddam’s Ministry of Information. He is a Sunni, from a prominent Sunni tribe, the Dulaimi. One of the other correspondents at
The Magazine
first met Ahmed while he was an official minder on the journalist’s visit during Saddam’s regime. He’d been
assigned, up until the bombing, to keep watch on the journalists, and translate. After the bombs started, the journalist told Ahmed he could have a job working for
The Magazine
, now that his old job had been wiped out by the war.

Peoria doesn’t feel good about the war because he feels fear all the time now. After he’d spent the night in the desert, darkness started to creep into his mind. A real darkness, because for the first time in his life, he’d actually experienced a trauma. A bona fide trauma. A life-or-death trauma, not the garden-variety American trauma of parents getting divorced, or deciding what graduate program to apply to, or as in his case, the more unique but still peculiarly American trauma of having two gay parents coming out.

Over the past five months, when self-assessing his own life and how that life shaped the person he was, those two events—what happened in the desert and his parents’ homosexual revelations and divorce—were the two events that explained how he felt about the world, how he saw the world, what the world meant to him. Things weren’t permanent, things could always fall apart, never get too comfortable, and even those you trust, those you trust as authority figures and role models, are liable to show themselves as illusions.

Yes, those two traumas were the first stories, right off the bat, he’d be sure to tell a shrink or a therapist or a psychologist when he got home. He had much experience with mental health professionals—a long list of them, his parents believed in therapy—and he’d always started with the divorce and the coming out to explain how, exactly, he had become the gnomish ambitious person sitting on the chair beside the expert and talking as the hour passed.

Now he had another trauma to add.

The desert, in his personal narrative, had radically altered his life. And though normally, as his compulsive disclosure disorder would dictate, he would spend the time talking about the trauma, ad
nauseam, to whoever happened to be in his vicinity, he realized that this was a peculiar trauma in that he was very scared to talk about it. That was what was so unusual: the fear to bring it up. Unprecedented.

He had started to feel a great shame, an introspective sort of shame that he thought he’d dealt with. How long did it take him to get over the shame of, as he once heard a less than politically correct guidance counselor put it, “having two homos” as mom and dad? At least until he was twenty-three or twenty-two maybe twenty-four. But he still would talk about it! And what solid ground or semisolid emotional ground he felt he was on after talking about it. In his narrative, he was sure the gay divorce would always be the pantheon of trauma, the starting point of his life—if I survived that, I can survive anything, he would tell himself.

And then he actually—literally, with the reality of dirt—survived a night in the desert, an attack, an ambush. Seven Americans killed, he escaped. But how he processed this—how he processed this had made him pick away at the other scabs in his mind. So he felt shame (like the divorce), and he felt, on some profound level, that it was all his fault, like the divorce.

His CDD, usually, would handle this by just talking about what had happened—but he’d never felt so afraid of talking about anything else, so he didn’t want to say a word about it anymore, but in every conversation, he found himself talking about it, again and again, getting more afraid each time he told his story, and he couldn’t stop.

The desert—that’s how he thought about what happened, as “the desert”—became the new prism upon which he reevaluated everything else that had happened in his life, and more specifically, everything that had happened since he had set foot in Baghdad. It had colored his views, it had made everything dark, and it had started to really frustrate him that not everyone could see just how dark things were, no matter how much he talked.

Peoria then did what he had always done: he threw himself into his work. He focused on the work.

Peoria had arrived in Baghdad with the convoy that rescued him and immediately disembedded from the unit and made his way to the Hamra. His story had made quite a splash—which brought attention to Peoria, an attention that he had once thought he craved but now wondered if it was such a good thing after all. He would be introduced, and the journalist would likely say, “Oh, you are the one who saved that soldier.” Peoria would then have to explain that it was an editorial mistake. That no, he hadn’t saved anyone, that he didn’t have approval over the headline, that he was lucky to be alive and that he in fact was saved, not the other way around, that he had almost given up that night. But this didn’t ease any of the suspicions. Journalists, Peoria knew, as a whole, were first and foremost suspicious of each other—especially if it was another’s perceived successes, and especially if they had been writing about themselves; it was seen as cheating. Never write about your own problems, write only about the problems of others.

But Peoria started working, setting up the bureau, going out on the streets every day, looking for stories with Ahmed at his side.

Peoria had never experienced a city that had no rule of law. Rule of law had been a vague concept to him, something he didn’t think too much about: parking tickets, speeding tickets, open-container laws. Even in Third World countries, where rule of law didn’t necessarily live up to legal ideals, there at least were some laws at work, even if they weren’t enshrined in a document that the brown-faced citizenry probably couldn’t even read, or the white-faced citizenry didn’t bother to read and just took for granted.

You could make sense out of corruption to the point where corruption started to make more sense than following the rules of the non-corrupt—why not take a bribe, after all? Playing by the rules
means not playing by the rules. But you expected people to stop at traffic signs, or not to, or to drive on the correct side of the road, or not to, or to not just shoot you in the face because you’re there, or to shoot you in the face because you’re there. Other places had at least been predictably chaotic.

No consistency, though, was the problem in Baghdad, no way to guess the right patterns.

Over the past five months, he could actually feel the rule of law erode, the society’s protective membrane disintegrating under the onslaught of a series of complex diseases. The attack on the immune system had sounds and smells to go with it. Symptoms.

In the first week, there was a light ringing in the ears, as if the whole city were on the verge of a stroke. As if the people of Baghdad woke up each day and tried to shake off a blood clot forming in the brain. All around the city, his inner ear would ring with too much blood and his nostrils would pick up an unidentifiable smell that might as well have been burnt toast, the telltale sign of a stroke. (Though not toast in Baghdad: What was the smell? Oil? Gunpowder? Trash? Flaming sewage?) And even walking in a straight line he would feel dizzy, as if he’d been turning around in circles, head spazzing to the right and left, trying to figure out exactly what was happening.

And like a stroke victim who tried to put his condition into words, he felt tongue-tied and slack-jawed and mildly retarded trying to explain what was happening, groans and grunts, indecipherable—“Fucked-up, this is fucked-up”—and this inability to string words together was reflected in his reporting among the general population, quotes from Iraqis that didn’t get past three or four words, strung together, and jotted down with his handwriting that resembled a palsy case.

By week two, the medical condition shifted from signs of a stroke
to a hypomanic episode. The ringing was still there, but now everyone had too much to say—the Iraqis couldn’t tell him everything fast enough, especially those who spoke English, and notebooks filled up, three a day, filled with long passages and monologues. The smells floated in the air, but a man in the throes of mania finds joy even in the scent of wafting dog shit and bitter unchlorinated feces.