It was unbearably hot and Sean stood sweating on the tarmac, a small goat dying on the ground beside him. He was wearing his finest suit, a three-piece affair with pinstripes and cufflinks, a fedora topping it off. He looked like a connoisseur of strange and exotic things, like a man partial to the wearing of sunglasses when killing people in the line of some top-secret duty. He radiated wealth, mystery and class. The tarmac merchants were taken in by his costume and they rallied round his shadow. They took aim and fired feverishly their arsenal of sales pitches, Arabic spewing forth like a hail of bullets, too fast for him to comprehend.
“I want nothing,” he whispered, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his eyes darting to and fro across the sky in search of the plane. “Can’t you see I’m suit poor?”
And then he shooed them away as if a cloud of sandflies.
It wasn’t long before he saw the plane. A tingle ran through him like a forgotten high, like a tiny taste of something long denied. Unconsciously, he reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a small makeup mirror, which he used to study his face. He looked successful with neat sideburns and a fresh shave, vibrant skin and lively eyes. He smiled and pocketed the mirror. There it was, the plane, right there on the mountainous horizon. There it was, his vindication, a faraway shape drawing nearer with each passing second, so close now that the sound of it could be heard rumbling through the oppressive heat, the smothering air that he could still not abide, not after all these years. He closed his eyes and kept them that way until the plane touched down and taxied over to the terminal. This was an exquisite moment.
Sean opened his eyes and stepped away from the goat, which lay there with its tongue hanging out. He spread his arms in welcome as the plane’s small door opened to a small and haggard cast of passengers, mostly diplomats, a string of skinny geeks swinging briefcases full of would-be conflict resolutions. Occasionally, in a delicious fit of irony, the diplomats used Sean’s services for field studies. Of course, all these men were failures in waiting. No amount of dialogue would settle the stuff of Istanistan, which was just as well as far as Sean was concerned. He kept his arms open for these men, but only in mockery.
“Come here, douche bags,” he muttered, his fingers wagging. “Come to Seany.”
Finally, his man emerged — or at least a man who Sean assumed was his. He frowned a little. Sean had never seen Avery Clip, neither in person nor photograph. Up until now, the man had only been a byline in online newspapers and magazines, a name disembodied, a small research project. That name — Avery Clip — suggested a much different man than the one who staggered down the tarmac, his head lolling around drunkenly. A name like Avery Clip conjured a man suited in the same fashion as Sean, not this denim-clad piss-tank in dishevelled sneakers and a rucksack slung over his shoulder. And yet, all the other passengers were diplomats. So this was his man.
Christ.
Now feeling overdressed, Sean sheepishly waved at Avery, who saw him and came stumbling over. He stopped about a foot from Sean and, gasping, put his hands on his knees.
“The fuck happened to your goat?” he said, sweat beading on his brow. And then he shrugged. “Man. This will look super-good in print.”
***
The next morning, they met up in a Green Zone café called The Tariff. The previous afternoon had been a write-off because of Avery’s advanced state of inebriation. With an air of borrowed freshness about him, the journalist cut a slightly better figure during breakfast hours. For his part, Sean wore the same suit; he figured Avery had been too far gone to take note of it yesterday.
The café was a bustling place. Istanistan was not your average Middle Eastern desert nation. Rather, it was a country without government, at least not of the homegrown variety. A committee of representatives from the so-called Coalition of Willing Nations administered the Green Zone, and they did so more with an eye to what happened outside of it rather than within. The CWN was waging an interminable war against insurgents in the deserts that stretched thousands of kilometres in every direction from the zone’s smattering of businesses and military facilities. Meanwhile, at any time, morning or night, the café was stuffed with aid workers, bureaucrats, diplomats, soldiers, locals and, increasingly, tourists.
“You might say this place was my first office,” Sean was saying, a cigarette burning in the ashtray between them. “This is where I had my eureka moment.”
Avery didn’t seem to be listening, not journalistically, so Sean paused to let him catch up. Avery’s eyes were scanning the café. He hadn’t yet taken out his tape recorder or notepad, though there was a digital camera, a small rectangular thing, on the table next to his hand. Sean was dismayed. He had waited years for this. Finally, he was ready to send word back home, to have himself loom large once again in the Western imagination. Here he was, reinvented and magnificent and something to behold and adore. And this man, this distracted reporter, was threatening all that with his striking indifference.
Sean slammed his fist on the table, causing the ashtray to jump. He then put on a shaky smile.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I have a condition.”
“Oh?” Avery said. He seemed not to care. He was busy fidgeting with a crucifix, rubbing his thumb up and down the representation of Jesus.
“So,” Sean began. “What’s your angle on the story? Like, former millionaire flourishes in exile? Something like that? Banished from his own country, entrepreneur goes big with daring new tour service? Something like that?”
Avery glanced at him with watery eyes. It seemed he was tearing up.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said from somewhere far away. “My editor would like a profile on you and the tour. He wants this crazy war to tower over the whole story.”
Sean thought this over. It was genius. He would come off as fearless and rugged, a man who lived life on his own terms, a man who shook off scandal and made another go of things, a righteous and redeeming go. He was about to tell this to Avery, but he paused when he saw the man wiping tears from his cheeks.
“Sweating already,” Avery said, putting the crucifix in his pocket. “It’s hell on earth here.”
“How long are you going to be here?”
“Just until I get my story,” he said quietly, his head swivelling as if in search of that very thing. “Kind of open-ended.”
“Wait until we get into the desert,” Sean said. “That’s where the story is, man. And it’s hot as fuck out there, too. They say flesh melts at high noon.” This was a lie, but Sean was hoping it would make the profile. “Anyway, I guess I should round up some tourists for the excursion.”
Avery snapped to attention.
“No,” he said urgently. “No, that won’t be necessary. My editor wants something more personal, just you and the heat and the sand and the war.”
Sean smiled.
“Sounds like a cover story,” he said. “Like my suit?”
About an hour later, the two of them were headed into the desert, a cloud of sand billowing in the wake of Sean’s SUV. Each man wore a bandana over his mouth and carried a canteen of water on his belt. They were outfitted in fishing vests — Sean with his over his suit blazer — the chest pockets stuffed full of excursion-type gadgets, compasses and such, things Sean rarely used but included for aesthetics. He kept the windows down, too, so the dashboard was covered in dust and the passenger’s experience was thus more visceral.
“You see,” Sean hollered over the din of travel, “the service I offer is unique to the world.”
He was working his way toward his spiel, and he couldn’t help but notice that Avery wasn’t taking any notes.
“Look, man,” Sean yelled, “I’m not one to tell another man how to do his job, but shouldn’t you be writing this stuff down?”
Avery jerked his head in Sean’s direction, again with watery eyes.
“I have an excellent memory,” he screamed.
Sean shrugged. “You know the biggest problem people out here have with the West? You know what really lights them up? Fucking war coverage. Fucking war coverage, man. Wolf Blitzer, you know? Editing. State censorship. Sanitization. All that shit. It looks like a fucking episode of The A-Team. You know what? They’re right. Joe the Plumber doesn’t know shit about what’s going in Istanistan, and he won’t know shit unless he comes on my tour. I got brochures in all the major hotels on three continents.”
The desert seemed to extend into eternity. Sean watched Avery survey the landscape, and he knew what the writer was thinking. He was thinking: Where the fuck am I and how will I get back? Everyone thought that. It was part of the experience.
“Don’t worry,” Sean yelled, clapping Avery on the shoulder. “We’re almost there.”
Avery removed his bandana and hooted like a frat boy.
“This is what I came to do,” he yelled. “I want to see the shit!”
“Look over there, two o’clock.” Sean pointed to a few black lumps far off in the desert haze. “There’s a piece of the shit, my man. You think you came here for this? Shit, man. This is what I came here to do.” He started laughing. “Isn’t it ironic? They all called me a liar and a cheat, and now I’m offering them the straightest truth there is.” He paused, shot Avery a sideways glance. “Remember that line, okay?”
The blobs were solidifying, taking the shapes of small buildings, possibly a headquarters. Sean knew better than to talk during this part. This is where he put on a steely vibe, where he let the reality of mortal peril take hold. Avery was rubbing his thumb on his crucifix again. He hadn’t yet put his bandana back over his mouth, and his lips were twisted into a desperate smile, his eyes locked on the approaching buildings.
Suddenly, they heard gunfire. The first time Sean heard it, way back when he was scouting his tour route, he threw up from fear. The sound was jarring and jagged; it thumped at the very air, into his ribs, angry fists on a back door to hell. And it did this in rapid and relentless succession. Most of his customers threw up too. In fact, Sean considered the tour a failure if they didn’t. Fear was an integral part of the war experience.
Avery was completely pale, his lips dry and cracked. His eyes were wide and unblinking, and he seemed to be mumbling to himself, pointing calmly in the direction of the buildings, his other hand pressed against his sternum.
“Feel that sound, man?” Sean hollered. He pounded his fist into his chest. “Right in the fucking ribs, eh? You don’t get this from CNN, you know? Flares over Baghdad is what you get from CNN. What’s that tell you? Fuck all. It tells you sweet fuck all. Even a movie, right? Something like Black Hawk Down. You watch it with surround sound in a home theatre with the lights out, and you almost feel it, you know? But it’s nothing compared to this, man. Nothing.”
Without warning, Sean hammered the brakes, sending the vehicle into a long drift, dust billowing in through the windows, sand turning to mud on the sweat of their foreheads. The guns continued to pound their chests, and Sean turned to Avery, gripping the man’s shoulders and looking him straight in the eye.
“Listen,” Sean said. “There are about fifty armed conflicts in the world. From Africa to South America, pretty much on every continent but North America. This is the educational part of my tour, okay? We will see an increase in war as climate change progresses, this because of the loss of arable land. ’Kay?” He pounded the dashboard in excitement. “This business right here? This is a perpetual growth machine. Within three years, I’ll be in every conflict market there is. I’ll have subsidiaries wherever there are soldiers.” He nodded vigorously at Avery, who was crying and shaking. “Powerful stuff, eh? You’re going to have a great story here.”
Avery wiped at his face and reached for his rucksack. He was nodding incessantly as he fished into his bag, eventually producing his notebook and tape recorder. He found some pens and absently shoved them into his breast pocket. Next, he dug out the digital camera and gave it a disappointed look.
“I should’ve bought an SLR,” he said.
“What?”
Sean was smiling. Finally, this man was moved enough to employ the tools of his trade.
“This will do,” Avery yelled. “It probably won’t even be noticed.” He shrugged. “There could be nothing left of it.”
“Here we are,” Sean yelled, the roar of gunfire now ear-splitting. “Welcome to the theatre of war.”
And it was like a theatre. At a seemingly random location in the vastness of the desert stood a small assembly of crumbling buildings. Lengths of rebar reached out of the walls, some of which were completely blown away, as if the building had been cross-sectioned for a domestic study project. The colours were dull and exhausted, here some grey and there some black.
Sean pointed to the base of one of the buildings, where a squad of soldiers hunkered against the corner. One of them fiddled with a radio. Another threw himself around the corner and fired his weapon, then ducked back behind the wall as a volley of return fire peppered the building, sending clouds of grey concrete dust billowing into the boiling air. Members of the group were making hand signals, pointing, it seemed, to a burnt-out wreck of a car about twenty yards away.
Avery leaned forward and whispered into Sean’s ear. “I have something I have to tell you.”
Sean shushed him. “Not now,” he said. People were always trying to confide in him during these moments. He had been told all manner of secrets while other men died before his eyes. “Watch. One of them is going to run for new cover behind that car. Check it out.”
A soldier left the shelter of the building and broke into a mad sprint, trying desperately for the car, which now seemed much farther away than twenty yards. Another soldier stepped beyond the corner and put out cover fire, his gun barrel sweeping back and forth. The first man made it about fifteen yards, bullets hitting the dirt by his feet and snapping past his ears, until he stepped on an IED. The explosion was deafening, causing both Sean and Avery to tremble.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” It was the soldier. “Jesus fucking Christ, help!” Both his legs had been blown off at the hips. A grotesque entanglement of flesh and veins hung out of his stumps, which were spurting thick streams of plasma into the blackened sand around him. He flapped his arms like a freakish seal.
“They’re going to use him as bait,” Sean said. “This is true brutality.”
And that’s what they did. A medic ran out to assist the soldier, and he was shot in the face. He hit the ground hard, probably dead.
“I have to tell you something!” Avery screamed. “It’s really fucking important!”
Sean adjusted his fedora. “Yeah, sure. I can get out there for a picture.” He looked at the camera. “Does that thing have a zoom?”
“No,” Avery said. He threw the camera into the sand. “I don’t work for the magazine anymore, okay? I used my severance to make it out here, okay?”
Sean’s face went completely slack.
“I’m sorry,” Avery continued. “I don’t have any money to pay you for the drive.”
With that, he leapt out of the vehicle and began a furious dash to the fallen soldier. He grunted. He gasped. His shirttails flapped behind him. Sweat poured off him in tremendous sheets. He even tripped once. But he closed in fast on the soldier, his tape recorder at the ready.
“How do you feel?” he screamed. “Excuse me, but how do you feel?”
And then Avery stepped on his own IED. He was blown completely apart, legs and arms flying in different directions, head like a cantaloupe into the side door of the car.
For its part, the war raged on undisturbed.
The next morning, Sean sat at The Tariff in a sulk. He was already into the liquor, his fourth rye and water. He scanned the crowd for potential customers, eventually giving up and settling his eyes on one of the plasma TVs.
He spat his drink onto a passing old man with a Polaroid slung around his neck.
There, on the screen, was a flattering portrait photo of Avery Clip. There was writing on the screen, and Sean could just barely make it out through the blur of the booze.
“Freelance journalist killed in Istanistan to be remembered with international book launch.”
Sean ordered another drink.
“Fucking narcissist,” he muttered.
