Standing on the tarmac, far from the shade of the hangar, Sean mopped his brow for the fifth time, a small goat dead on the ground beside him. He wore his finest suit, a navy three-piece with gold cufflinks and a beige snap-brim fedora. Unlike back home, where all the boys smoked Treasurer Golds and gulped Alka-Seltzer before the morning market bell, no one made fun of the hat here. It was chic, and tarmac merchants rallied around his shadow, enchanted by his magnificence and trying hard to sell him socks or ballpoint pens in horrible English that made him laugh openly.
“Can’t you see I’m suit poor?” he muttered, stuffing the hanky in his pocket and scanning the horizon for the plane. “Take the goat if you’re hungry.”
He absently swatted at them, never taking his eyes from the sky, and eventually they fell back, sloping into the shade and jabbering in what was probably Arabic, though three years wasn’t long enough to know for sure.
It wasn’t long before he saw the plane, a tiny speck in the brilliant blue sky. A nervous chill washed over him, and he took a cocaine mirror out of his pocket and studied his face. He was beautiful: neat sideburns and a fresh shave, vibrant skin and lively eyes. He smiled and put away the mirror.
Yes, there it was: the plane, descending against the mountains, vindication, a faraway shape approaching steadily, now so close it could be heard rumbling through the smothering air he still couldn’t abide. He closed his eyes and kept them shut until the aircraft touched down and taxied across the tarmac.
This was an exquisite moment.
Sean opened his eyes and stepped away from the goat, which had its tongue out and was drawing flies. He spread his arms in welcome as the plane’s small door opened on a haggard assembly of passengers, mostly diplomats: a string of type-one diabetics swinging briefcases full of endlessly amended conflict resolutions. Sean occasionally drank with these reluctant nihilists, and most of them were too emptied to aspire for anything more than armed abduction and free drinks and sandwiches on a subsequent book tour.
“Billy,” Sean called. “How’s the wife?”
“Got a premium membership at Ashley Madison,” Billy said, his eyes moist and unblinking. “Saw it on our browser history.”
One by one, they shuffled past, each more downtrodden and hopeless than the last, until there were none. Sean gaped at the door. He took off his hat and ran fingers through his thin and frizzy hair. His Adam’s apple dunked as he swallowed. And then, when it seemed like all the passengers had deplaned, and Sean, sweating copiously, fumbled anew for his hanky, another man appeared in the doorway, and relief washed over Sean despite this man’s awful appearance.
Sean had never seen Avery Clip before. Up to now, the man had just been a name attached to online newspaper and magazine articles. He had been a syllabic entity, three distinct sounds always in the back of his mind. Still, he’d been expecting something different — someone different. The name just didn’t conjure this scrawny, denim-clad mess with a thick red beard and completely shaved head, his shoes held together by duct tape, a patchy rucksack slung over his shoulder.
“Mr. Clip,” Sean called out, feeling overdressed. “Mr. Avery Clip?”
He waved and Avery wobbled toward him, stopping about a foot away and doubling over with his hands on his knees.
“Are you all right, Mr. Clip? Can I get you some socks? Or maybe you’d like a new pen?”
“Jesus,” Avery wheezed, pointing at the fly-benighted goat, no less a corpse than any other in the environs. “Jesus Christ. I think I found my nut graph.”
*
The next morning, they met up in a Green Zone pub called The Tariff. The previous afternoon had been a writeoff on account of Avery’s advanced stage of inebriation. But, with an air of borrowed freshness about him, the journalist cut a slightly better figure during breakfast hours. As for Sean, he wore the same suit, just in case Avery had been too far gone to notice it the day before.
The Tariff was always busy. At midnight, the place throbbed with middle-aged and divorced aid workers gyrating on tables to Kelly Clarkson; they left for their bunkers with moribund marines too young to grow beards. In the wee hours, the place became quiet and tense as embittered officers gambled away their salaries and children’s college funds. Throughout the day and into the early evening, it was a hive of bureaucrats, diplomats, off-duty soldiers, privileged locals, and, increasingly, tourists. Everyone’s shoes stuck to the floor and no one complained when the toilets didn’t flush. It was a great place to ignore the explosions on the other side of the wire.
“You might say this place was my first office,” Sean said, a cigarette burning in the ashtray between them. “This is where I had my revelation.”
Avery wasn’t listening, not journalistically. His eyes drifted aimlessly around the bar. He hadn’t taken out his tape recorder or notepad, though there was a small digital camera on the table, a pink one covered with flower stickers.
Sean was dismayed. The last time America heard of him, he had crashed his Porsche into a California palm tree the morning after Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He left a paper trail (along with trace amounts of cocaine, a case of empty beer cans, and an unpaid and underage prostitute) from the accident scene all the way to the border of Mexico, where it was assumed he had escaped to an afterlife of villas and margaritas. The media vilified him: a selfish, grandiose executive, fat with bonuses earned pumping waste through the elaborate dreamscape of America’s financial system.
But now? Now he was ready to bounce back, to loom large once again in the American imagination, this time as an ingenious entrepreneur who had journeyed to the end of a long, dark night and found himself reborn in the warm glow of dawn. And this man, this distracted reporter, was threatening all that with his striking indifference.
Sean slammed his hand on the table, causing the ashtray to jump and Avery to snap to attention.
“Sorry,” Sean said. “I have this twitch. I think it’s stress.”
“Oh?”
Avery didn’t seem to care. He was busy fidgeting with a crucifix, frantically rubbing his thumb up and down the representation of Jesus.
“So, what’s your angle on this story, Clip? Like, beastly scion of Reagan reborn in desert? Junk-stock man returns with darling tour service? Something like that?”
Avery glanced at him with distant, watery eyes.
“Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. My editor would like a profile on you and the tour. He wants this crazy war to tower over the whole story.”
It was brilliant. Sean would come off as fearless and rugged, a rogue who lived by his own rules, whose moral compass had been scrambled, but once again found true north amid a backdrop of violence and poverty and flies on children. You couldn’t buy that kind of press, and he was about to tell Avery, when he noticed the man wiping tears from his cheeks.
“Sweating again already,” Avery whispered. “War really is hell.”
“Wait until we get into the desert,” Sean said. “That’s where the real war is, man. And the real heat, too. They say flesh melts at three o’clock.” This was, of course, a lie, but he wanted the line to make the profile. “Anyway, I’ll go round up some tourists for the excursion. It’s an easy sell. Might chuck in a freebie. Won’t take long.”
Avery leapt to his feet.
“No, no, no. That’s not necessary. My editor wants something more personal, just you and the heat and the war.”
Sean smiled.
“You like my suit?”
*
An hour later and the two of them were in the desert, a cloud of sand billowing behind Sean’s SUV. Each man wore a bandana over his mouth and carried a canteen of water on his belt. They wore fishing vests — Sean’s over his suit blazer — the chest pockets stuffed with excursion-type gadgets, like compasses and other things Sean didn’t understand but included for aesthetics. He kept the windows down, so the dashboard was covered in dust and the passenger’s war experience was thus more visceral.
“You see,” Sean hollered over the din, “the service I offer is unique to the world.”
He was working up to his big spiel, and he couldn’t help notice Avery wasn’t taking any notes.
“Look, man. 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.
“You know the biggest problem we have in the West? War coverage. It’s war coverage, Clip! Wolf Blitzer and CNN! Sanitization! TV dinners! Shrinking foreign bureaus! It all looks like an episode of The A-Team. And that’s a problem, Clip. How can aspiring university students or responsible Americans know anything about what’s really happening in the Middle East if they don’t come on one of my tours? Why watch Gadhafi stumble to his death on grainy cellphone footage when you can pull up beside his tormentors in a bulletproof Hummer with O Fortuna on the stereo?”
The desert seemed to extend into eternity. Sean watched Avery survey the landscape, and he knew what the writer was thinking: Where am I, and how will I ever get home? Everyone thought that. It was part of the experience.
“Don’t worry.” Sean clapped him on the shoulder. “We’re almost there.”
The wind was roaring through the windows and Avery removed his bandana, hooting like a frat boy.
“I want to see the shit!”
“Look over there, two o’clock. There’s a big piece of the shit, my man.”
They were approaching a smattering of small buildings, possibly a terrorist headquarters. Sean knew better than to talk during this part. This was where the reality of moral peril began to take hold. Avery was rubbing his crucifix again. He hadn’t yet put his bandana back over his mouth, and his lips were twisted in a vulture’s delighted rictus, eyes locked on the approaching buildings.
The sudden sound of gunfire slammed them in the ribs, thumped at the air all around them, deafening and surreal. Sean remembered his first time hearing that sound: he’d puked. In fact, most of his customers did. Otherwise, the tour was considered a failure, because fear was an integral part of the war experience.
Avery was pale-faced and mumbling to himself, his lips dry and cracked and his beard like a fire on his face. He pointed calmly in the direction of the buildings, and his other hand was pressed against his sternum.
“Feel that sound, Clip?” Sean hollered. He smacked himself in the chest. “Right in the ribs, eh? You don’t get this from the news, do you? Oh, sure, maybe Black Hawk Down with surround sound, but you never know when your labradoodle is going to walk across the room. And besides, even with the lights out, it’s nothing compared to this, man. Nothing.”
Sean pumped the breaks and sent the vehicle into a long drift, dust storming through the windows, sand turning to mud against the sweat of their foreheads. The guns continued to pound their chests and Sean turned to Avery, looked him straight in the eye as they drifted into the breach.
“This is the educational part of the tour, Clip. There are about fifty armed conflicts in the world, from Africa to South America, pretty much every continent but North America. We’ll see an increase in war as climate change progresses because of the loss of arable land and the scarcity of other resources. This business right here? It’s a perpetual growth machine. Within three years, I’ll be in every conflict market there is. I’ll have subsidiaries wherever there are soldiers. I mean, it’s really something, Clip.”
They lurched to a stop, and Avery was crying and shaking, rummaging through his bag and finally, finally producing a notebook and tape recorder.
“I know!” Sean smiled approvingly. “I know! It’s so moving!”
“I should’ve bought an SLR,” Avery screamed, holding the camera between them.
“Here we are, Clip. 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 crumbled buildings. Lengths of rebar reach out of the walls, many of which were completely blown away. All the colours were dull and exhausted, all grey and brown and black.
Sean pointed to the base of one of the buildings, where a squad of marines hunkered against the corner. One of them fiddled with a radio. Another threw himself around the corner and fired his weapon, then ducked back as a volley of return fire smashed into the wall, sending clouds of grey concrete twisting through the boiling air. The soldiers were making hand signals, pointing, it seemed, to the burnt-out wreck of a car about twenty yards away.
Avery leaned forward and whispered into Sean’s ear: “I have something to tell you.”
“Not now.” People were always trying to confide in him during these moments. He had been told all kinds of secrets while other men were dying. “Watch. One of them is going to run for 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 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 and snapping by his ears, until he stepped on an IED. There was a deafening explosion. The marine flew straight up in the air, and then, less intact, fell straight down.
Both his legs had been blown off at the hips, and he began screaming the names of his favourite TV shows. 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.
“They’re going to use him as bait,” Sean said joyfully. “This is true brutality.”
A medic ran out to assist the soldier. He was shot in the head and collapsed, probably dead.
“I have to tell you something!” Avery shrieked.
Sean adjusted his fedora. “Sure, no problem. I can get out there for a picture.”
“No! Listen! I don’t work for the magazine anymore! I’ve been accused of fabrication! I need to save my reputation!”
“Clip! What’re you saying?”
“I’m sorry! I don’t have any money to pay for the ride!”
Avery leapt out of the vehicle and began a furious dash to the fallen soldiers. His shirttails flapped behind him, and sweat poured off him in tremendous sheets.
“How do you feel?” he kept screaming. “Excuse me, but how do you feel?”
But then Avery himself stepped on an IED. He was blown completely apart, legs and arms flying in dozens of directions, and his head, like porcelain filled with tuna salad, smashed into the side door of the car.
The war did not take note, and Sean, sullen and dejected, drove back to the bar. It was clear that Avery Clip was a scene-stealing narcissist stricken by ineffable self-loathing. But there was a promotional angle to his death, so Sean spent the rest of the day working out the details.
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