Baghdad Journal

Goodbye to Zeke and the Guns

In room 201 above us Zeke and Eli were smoking hash. Our last night in Baghdad, I went up to take Zeke [see The Devil's Palace part I] the empty coke bottles he wanted for The Barn, the small café he was building within Camp Victory which made him smile thinking, calculating about a dollar a day for each of the 7000 troops living within the compound. The Pakistani, Sangi, and the Kurd, his name I never knew, were sitting with them. But they hadn't smoked. They are Muslims. Eli mixed tobacco and hash in the ashtray in front him, and pulled the filter off the emptied cigarette and rolled everything in the "strongest and thinnest rolling papers in the world" or so he said. Zeke ate from a plastic tray of pumpkin seeds and peanuts. He offered. The Kurd with green eyes the color of Caribbean coral reefs and not the azure blue of the Dead Sea, and Sangi stood up and went to the couch behind us, pushing aside a 9mm and sitting in its place. The guns at night were usually all over the apartment. They brought out the Uzi, the 9mm, the 357 Magnum, the MP5 machine gun, some of them loaded, some of them old without a safety. They played with them like toys and pretended to be spies, CIA. They cradled their guns and imagined espionage.

Zeke was talking about perspective, though I wasn't sure how he got onto the topic, talking about how everything is relative, how a broad landscape fills the eyes the same way a woman's body lying next to you in a bed can fill the eyes and be just like a landscape, saying the whole world, depending who's perceiving it, could be beneath his fingernail--that philosophy.

I tell them I'm going downstairs to get Brandon. Actually you're not going anywhere, Zeke told me. He wasn't going to let me go. He would drug me and cut out some of my organs, he said, to sale on the organ black market.

I pretended to really believe him, like I believed he was not the man I knew him to be before, and reacted to the mask he was trying to put on though not really succeding at getting it to fit his face (he said when he was in Los Angeles he had people telling him he should be an actor but he didn't care a fuck about acting) because his other face kept coming through and I could see he was who he was, the halfhappy heartbreaking nihilist Argentinian adventurer, the kind of good guy that would give a kidney to his brother maybe if he was in the right mood.

When I tell him about the police we saw shooting, he said, "You loved it. You love the adreniline rush, because otherwise why would you come here unless you were crazy. Maybe we're all crazy. Maybe that's why we come here." His eyes were red and closing, but one more than the other, so it looked like he was winking. His hair was mussed like a justwaking boy, but not like some one crazy, more like a philanthropic opportunist, he and they were here working for the Saudi millionaire because of contracts with the U.S. government, because of $3000 leases for Ford Explorers and Toyota Landcruisers for the military, more than 120 of them leased in two months, you add it up, you figure, and that's the number, the reason why they were here. And they had other contracts with the U.S. and were looking to grab more, money the main reason, nothing to do with being crazy.

The power shut out. And we were in the dark smoking hash. Eli had the joint, the orange cherry on the end of it illuminated his face, the only thing we could see in the dark. With his slicked-back gelled hair he looked the devil's son. The Kurd laughed his devil laugh. Zeke began to tell more ghost stories, a story about Saudi Royalty kidnapping people in Turkey or Peru or some other country when one of their family members needed an organ transplant. They cut their organs out and sewed the person back up and let them go. If it wasn't a vital organ they live, if it was then it was their bad luck, he explained. Then the Saudis shipped the organs on ice in coolers back to Saudi Arabia. He says there's great money in it. He was bullshitting, said he wanted to go into the business, had a connection through his Saudi employer. For a second i bought the story, he'd talked about lots of business ideas. With my encouragement he was thinking about salvaging buying collecting scrap metal. I even called my brother in Little Rock who works for a scrap dealer there and told him that a man who knew nothing about scrap metal but had other kinds of contracts with the U.S. government wanted to got into business with him. When the lights came back on I could see in Zeke's face that he was lying about the organ business.

Brandon knocked and was welcomed in. He sat at the table with us, looking tired and not ready to leave in the morning. We had started a lot here and finished less than half of it. I tried to convince him to stay, maybe because I wanted to stay myself. Zeke, Eli and Sangi were moving into a house soon. They offered us a rentfree room if we wanted to stay longer, but we were set on leaving, getting back to Berkeley, to school which was starting in three days, which we were all the more indifferent about after three weeks well-introduced to Baghdad.

"You think there's any hope for this country?" Zeke asked, then answered his own question, "No." I told him I think there's lots of potential but Iraqis have a long way to go, a simple answer to avoid too much talk which I wasn't in the mood for. The Kurd and Sangi were speaking in Arabic, almost whispering behind us, their voices like a forgotten radio beneath our conversation. "You know what they are talking about," Eli said. "They're talking about religion." They smiled when they heard Eli talking about them, then they dove back into their whispering.

Just before Brandon and I left the room, Zeke mimiced the muzzein call to prayer. He succeded in pissing off the Muslims in the room. They smiled, but I could tell they were offended, but they loved this man so they were trying to let it go, that he profaned what they so wholeheartedly believed, or maybe their belief wavered enough that they allowed it. Still Sangi castigated him. "Come on Zeke, man! You fucking guy," he said. "What? What? Brandon just wanted to know if I could replicate the sound of the muzzein because I've been living in the Middle East for seven years." He was telling one of his fictions. Sangi didn't buy it. "Do you even know what it means, what you're saying?" he asked Zeke. Zeke said it was the public call for all Muslims to come to pray. Sangi was standing, happy his friend knew what he was mocking. It was a good time to say good-bye.

Posted by Adam Shemper at August 24, 2003 08:26 PM | TrackBack