War Porn (26 page)

“That was
just
lovely,” he said.

“What do you want?” Wendy asked.

“Sorry?”

“How long were you there?”

“I'm only passing through, Chief,” he said, coming toward the fire. “I left Major Tom in orbit, and if I don't get back we might lose him in the Martian time-slip. But listen, it's totally aces, we're solving the mysteries of the universe. One thing I wanted to say: Mel, I hope we're cool and I'm sorry for calling you names and overreacting to your—how you say—interrogation. We cool?” He knelt and offered Mel his hand. Xena watched nervously.

Mel observed him, turning her head this way and that, then nodded. “Yeah, we cool,” she said, giving his hand a firm shake. “Sorry for calling you a Nazi.”

“No problem,” he said. “It's not the worst thing I've been called.” Then he offered his hand to Xena. “Cool, doggy?” Xena hugged the ground and licked the back of Aaron's hand. “Great. So we all cool.”

“We're not all cool,” Dahlia said, sitting up.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. You and me ain't cool.”

“Well, I am heartsick to hear that, sugar, and steadfastly resolved to make things right. What could I possibly do to rectify this situation?”

“What are you two talking about?” asked Wendy.

Dahlia felt her face twitch. “You bring violence into my home, you fuck up my party. You owe me.” Her eyes reflected flame. “Put your hand in the fire.”

The other women watched, waiting. Aaron smiled and took a drink of his beer, then gazed around the circle. “What are y'all up to out here besides singing campfire songs? Some witchy coven shit?”

Dahlia glared at him.

“We're just talking,” Wendy said.

“Sweet. I'll work on getting Major Tom down from orbit, and maybe then we can resume our explorations. In the meantime . . .” He leaned forward and passed his hand through the fire, slowly side to side so the orange heat licked along his hand and singed the hair on his wrist, then pressed his palm to Dahlia's cheek. They looked at each other, faces close, then he pulled away and kissed Wendy on the top of her head. “I shall return,” he said, giving a sloppy salute, and disappeared through the gate.

•••

Matt looked over at Aaron's face, washed blue in the moon's light. He was pushing a bottle at him.

“You got beer?”

“Yeah. Take one.”

“How long were you gone?”

“All your life, sweetheart. You want a beer or not?”

“I don't know what you're here for.”

“Same thing we all are: kill, fuck, and die.”

Matt took the offered beer.

“Strange trip to the backyard,” Aaron went on. “The ladies have gone native. We talked some. Everybody groks now. Why don't we take a ride in your time machine, Matthew?”

“The machine's broken.”

“Show me.”

“It's sludge. It's like a rollercoaster that won't come down.”

“So show me. Invite me in. I got something to show you in return.”

“Yeah, what?”

Aaron grinned, pulling from his pocket a silver thumb drive dangling on a gray cord. “Some real war shit. You show me the future, I'll show you the past.”

Matt thought for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. Come on.”

He stumbled up and ambled into the house, Aaron following through the dark to Matt's work zone. Through
the window, they could see the girls spread out around the
fire, talking and laughing, their hands framing forms in the air. Matt sat at his desk and jiggled his mouse, waking the machine.

Matt eyed the fire anxiously. “I think there's a burn ban on.”

“Fuck all that. Show me the future.”

The computer's fan whirred, its hard-drive light flickering red in the dark. Matt clicked an icon of the Big Dipper. “It's fairly crude, so I can only feed so many different data streams off the web before it freezes. I linked it to different sites that update their data, you know, like Dow Jones or whatever. I got a couple easy ones like US weather, so the graphic gives us a pattern like this.” He clicked on the menu and a visual popped up in the center, a slowly morphing fractal cone in greens and golds covered with bumps and indentions. It spun slow on three axes, displaying its languidly shifting planes, and as it revolved a swirl of orange and white sank into one side. “The trick is with the operator, right, because this is just a data pattern. It's no better really than raw data except in this: humans are primarily visual, so we interpret visual patterns much more quickly than we do numerical, syntactical, narrative, or even linguistic ones. But the new operator doesn't see much in one pattern, like this one here, until they've seen dozens of them and compared them against each other. As well, the algorithm doesn't measure data but rather the rate of change. So with this, I can tell you that the weather patterns for the US are generally changing slowly now, but that there's some serious turbulence here”—he pointed to the swirl of white and orange—“that represents a relatively intense but locally manifest change in weather conditions. Not very helpful, I realize, for meteorology, but that's not the point. Let's do stocks.” He clicked a menu button and the first graphic disappeared, replaced by a new cone, green and gold, this one wider, shallower, and bumpier, red and strangely sparkling on the edges and growing darker and darker, toward a fierce purple, at the point. “This is all the world's major stock exchanges, along with some other transnational data like trade deficit numbers, wheat production, the price of oil, stuff like that. This seems about normal, actually, generally calm with local fluctuations. Sometimes you get a wave sweeping across, either in concentric circles or as a shifting convergence. See, like this point here, this bulge—if it got any bigger, I'd say that's probably gonna start a wave that will likely spread and affect other markets. I'd say watch out for turbulence in the global economy.”

“But it doesn't tell you where.”

“It can.” He hit Control-M and markers came up: Tokyo Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Crude Oil DPB. “But remember, what it's measuring isn't the change but the rate of change. I don't care what the level of the Dow is, or even how much it went up or down, but how much it went up or down relative to, a, the overall size or value of the data set and, b, its previous movement. A steady increase, as long as it continues to change at the same rate, won't show up at all. But if the increase slows, right, even if the change is now zero, the change in the rate of change will be what we see. You got it?”

“Like it measures acceleration and deceleration, not speed.”

“Exactly. I mean, it doesn't so much tell the future as show turbulence in complex systems, which I think might offer a key to understanding the systems themselves. Part
of the problem is that so far the systems are user-defined. I mean, if I had enough computing power, I could feed thousands and thousands of real-time data streams into the thing and you'd get a global picture. Another problem is real-time data—most good data is private or secret. What you're seeing now is very narrow. It's like taking a poll of five hundred people; it just doesn't tell you much. Whereas if you polled five hundred thousand, you'd have some real numbers.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. So there it is.”

“Trippy.” Aaron pulled out his thumb drive. “My turn.”

“Okay.” Matt closed down the program and plugged in Aaron's drive.

“Iraq Pix,” Aaron said. “Camp Crawford.”

The fire crackled between them.

“What was that with you and Aaron?” Wendy asked, turning to Dahlia.

“Just messing with him,” Dahlia said.

“Dolly working her mojo,” Mel said.

“I ain't got no mojo.”

“Dirty Dahlia,” Wendy laughed. “I'd be jealous if I didn't know you were so stuck on Matt.”

“Sure,” Dahlia said. “Like a tar baby.”

The first picture was of a dusty, tan-colored building looming against a bruised sky. Barbed wire coiled on the wall tops.

“We did a bunch of stuff in Iraq,” Aaron said, “including working at several different internment camps. This is Camp Crawford. We called it the Pit. It was north of Baghdad, not far from Taji, and it was specifically for insurgents and intel targets. It's not like Cropper, on BIAP, which was high-value, or Abu G, which had a bunch of different shit. We were supposed to get hard cases from other assets in the north and northwest, a lot of hadjis from Fallujah and Tikrit and Baqubah, a lot of Sunni triangle shit.”

“Hadjis?”

“Iraqis. You get real racist over there.”

“Do you?”

“Anyway, Camp Crawford. Click forward.”

He did and the next pic was a bunch of soldiers, some in brown t-shirts and some in black, all wearing desert boots and brown camouflage pants, making gang symbols or flipping the bird, men and women both. Aaron was in there, leaner, more muscular, squatting with a rifle.

“These are the dudes I worked with. There's Sergeant Dickersen, and that's Grimes and Woolsley and Peanut and Garber. That's Staff Sergeant Cortázar and Lieutenant Viers. The guys in black t-shirts—see, brown t-shirts, that's the Army standard. The Air Force wear black t-shirts, but these guys aren't Air Force. They're OGA. Bill and Pete and Dick and Gary.”

“OGA?”

“Other governmental agencies. That dude there, the hadji-looking one, he's our terp, Wathiq.”

•••

“The thing with Aaron,” Wendy said, “I think he had a hard time in Iraq.”

“What do you mean a hard time?”

“I don't know. He won't talk about it. He says he just wants to put it behind him. But he's really tense now, and I think
. . . 
I think something happened.”

“You think he has PTSD?” Rachel asked.

“I don't know how you know. He says he doesn't.”

“Has he gone for counseling?”

“I don't know. He just got back. He just showed up.”

“What's the deal with you two?” Dahlia asked.

“I don't really know,” Wendy said. “We started dating in Tucson, like, almost two years ago. I was finishing my MFA then, and he was still working on his bachelor's, but he's only a year younger than me
. . . 
and we'd been dating for like six months but hadn't discussed it as anything serious when he got called up, and then we started having these really super intense discussions about the future. I just couldn't make the promises I think he wanted me to. I think he had this romantic idea I'd wait for him, pining away with a yellow ribbon, but I can't live my life like that. And I didn't even know if we were right for each other anyway. It'd just been a thing. So we basically made a tentative agreement that we'd keep writing and then check back when he got home. He thought the war would be over quick and he'd be sitting in the desert twiddling his thumbs the whole time like in that book
Jarhead
. So we wrote each other letters while he was in training, but then once he got to Iraq, it stopped. A couple emails, then nothing
. . . 
until he called me from the airport in Atlanta, a year later. I couldn't believe it. I thought I'd let it go. I thought I'd moved on. When I heard his voice on the phone, though, I sort of fell apart.”

“What did you think when he quit writing?” Rachel asked.

“Honestly? I thought he was dead. I mean, I read the lists for a few months and didn't see his name, but how could I know? It was the not knowing that made it so bad. Finally I just closed off the part of myself that cared.”

“Jesus.”

“Didn't you call his parents or somebody?”

“He's always been a loner. He never really talked about his parents much. I know his dad used to live somewhere near Tucson, and I'm not even sure where his mom's at. He had some friends in college, the guys in his band and his stoner buddies, but they didn't know any more than I did.”

The next picture showed a young Iraqi woman smiling uneasily at the camera, looking at something outside the picture's frame. She wore loose orange prisoner pants and a
Pantera
shirt and her hair was streaked with blonde, dark roots growing out over platinum stripes. She couldn't have been older than nineteen or twenty.

“That's Connie,” Aaron said. “We called her Connie. She was in for theft, I think, but she was nice and spoke some English, so she got a lot of freedom. Click forward.”

The next picture was of Connie pulling her shirt up over her breasts, tugging the waist of her orange pants down to the top of her pubic hair.

“Two dolla. Some dudes paid five for the whole nude, but I dig how this one's flirty, like she's not showing you everything yet. She did other stuff, too, on the DL, but I wouldn't touch that cooze with a ten-foot pole.”