and then offered him a half-bottle of warm Coke with which to wash out his mouth. “You’ll get used to it,” said Sid, who had survived his initiation in Vietnam and told stories about what napalm and bouncing-betty landmines could do.
Sabra was such a dusty place, and hot. Like Hebron. Don’t go there. Back away. Next stop, El Salvador. Still hot, but wet, damp enough to flush the dust out of memory’s mouth. The pen moves. . .
El Salvador. Carl showed me the ropes. He drove slowly, thoughtfully, on his daily rounds, taking photos of all the new corpses that appear like weird night-blooming succulents, fresh each morning. Fresh too were the strange blisters that blossom on my skin, spreading like a pale parasitic vine across my hands, my arms, and my chest. The rash grew with the rising sun and receded each night only to begin again. The blisters didn’t bother me much during the day, when they were nothing more than a soft burning, but at night, as they germinated under my skin, they itched like something crawling beneath the flesh.
Carl laughed at me as the blisters spread across my face, making me look like a pimply adolescent. “You should have seen the stuff that’d grow on you in ‘Nam. It was like farm country in your boots,” he said.
Whatever happened to Carl? Matthew wonders, back again in his body, at his desk, in this Paris apartment. Oh yes, newscaster somewhere in the American Midwest, last anyone heard. And then, knowing he should not, he reads over what he’s written. Frustration wells up from the bottom of his gut, bubbles over his chest and down to his fingertips. He thinks he should keep a large metal garbage bin next to his desk wherein he can have regular fires. It is difficult not to tear the page to shreds with his teeth. He has become, however, a very good crumpler, and his wastebasket is more than accepting.
So, there will be no more writing today. But what then? He does not want to do what he mostly does. Mostly he sits and tries very hard not to remember things. Not Josh. Not the father. Not the daughter. Not Kate. Not his own father, brother, mother. Not Rwanda. Not Kosovo. Not Chechnya. Not so many places, not so many people. Not remembering them leaves very little room in his mind for anything else.
It is now eleven o’clock in the morning, and from the window, he watches the young man at Chez Elias¸ a tiny café on the square. He wears a white apron and uses a long-handled brush to wash the glass. Now he whistles optimistically, but Matthew has seen him sitting at a table in the window, no customers in the café, poring over maps with a look of deep dissatisfaction on his face.
Matthew realizes he is jiggling his knee, tapping his foot, and he stops himself, because he knows from experience this nervous energy is not good for him. He tells himself he is adjusting to the tick-tock passing of time outside the crisis zones. He tells himself he is fine. He tells himself he should not have had that fourth cup of coffee. He tries to read the International Herald Tribune, a story about the North Africans, the san-papiers, who have occupied the Saint Bernard church in Barbès, demanding legal residence papers. It looks bad, with the government sounding tougher and tougher. It will not end well. He puts the paper aside. Folds it in a neat square and presses it flat. Looks around for somewhere to stuff his discontent.
The sweep of the clock’s hands is agonizingly slow; the voices of the children on the street below are needles in his ears. He briefly considers calling Brent, back in New York, but it is too early, and besides, he already knows what Brent will say. How’s the book coming along? Come on, pal, get yourself together.
Deciding what to do in a tourist town when one is not technically a tourist is a wretched task. Matthew has seen the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame on previous trips; he has chased the ghosts of Joyce and Hemingway through the cafés and bookshops. He does not want to stroll up the Gap-and-Planet-Hollywood-infested Champs Élysées. He certainly does not want to go to a museum. He begins pacing, which is a bad sign.
Jack Saddler. Perhaps it is the morning’s work, the memories of Sid and Carl that make him think of Jack Saddler, but the name now springs to mind and he is surprised he has not thought of it before. Jack Saddler. Vietnam vet, ex-mercenary, sometime combat photographer. The last time he saw Jack, back in Kosovo, he had said he was heading to Paris, in need of a break. Jack Saddler, who knew a thing or two about lugging a sack of skulls.
France Telecom proves helpful and a few minutes later Matthew dials a number for a mobile phone.
“Hello?”
“Jack?” This is a lot of noise in the background.
“Who’s this?”
“Matthew Bowles.”
“Hey! You in Paris?”
“Yup.”
A moment’s silence and then, “How you holding up?”
“Fair.”
“I can imagine.” The sound of car horns. “Fuck off! Not you, Matthew. You’d think we were in Tehran the way the French drive. Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Tell you what, you free later?”
“Absolutely.”
“Meet me at this bar I know. Called the Bok-Bok.” Jack chuckles. “You’ll like the place. It never closes, and no one forces conversation if you don’t feel sociable, know what I mean?”
“Just give me an address and a time,” Matthew says.
When he gets off the phone Matthew looks at his watch, an then he takes a sleeping pill and strains toward unconsciousness until evening.
Chapter Four
Saida Ferhat wakes up as alert as a fox with the sound of hounds on the wind. It has been this way for a long time, started only weeks after her marriage to Anatole twelve years ago. It does not matter that, since Anatole is gone, she no longer has to worry about dodging an early morning boot thrown at her head. Waking this way has become a difficult habit to break. She waits for her heart to stop pounding, and then slips her legs from beneath the blankets, and pushes her wide, strong feet into the thick socks that serve as slippers. She wraps her dressing gown around her and quickly braids her hair, so that it hangs in an arm-thick rope down to the swell of her buttocks. Once, her hair had been black as the inside of an ebony box, but now there is silver in it. A strand here and there, and there another. Each one witness to a worried night, a wary day. At thirty-six, Saida suspects she will be snow-topped before she becomes craggy-faced.
She pulls the lapel of her robe up to cover the scars on her neck. It looks as though the skin is as malleable as clay there, and a sculptor with no talent for creation has pushed it and pulled it, finally given up and left it unfinished. She flexes and straightens her right hand. The skin over the veins, stretched across the knuckle bones, is unnaturally smooth, and in the morning it is stiff, itches and pulls, no matter that she rubs almond and jojoba oil and aloe in each night.
She goes to the bedroom door and puts her hand against the jam as she opens it, trying to be quiet for her son Joseph who is sixteen and sleeping on the couch in the room that serves as living room, dining room and kitchen. He did not get in until too late last night, and Saida knows she should be angry with the boy, running the streets, hanging out in Barbès, smoking and slouching around like a thug. She looks at him, and in sleep his face is sweet, beautiful almost—his soft lips open, his perfect skin flushed. He looks nothing like his stepfather Anatole, who has thick features and a low hairline. Joseph looks like his father, Habib, buried fifteen years ago in Lebanese soil in a grave beside his Uncle Khalil—his eyes are thick-lashed and his nose is long and fine. Only his lower lip is imperfect. A slight malformation there; at the bottom right it looks perpetually stung and swollen. Saida has told him since he was a toddler that Gabriel, archangel of the cleansing fire, must have kissed him there. It makes him more beautiful, she says.
It is all she can do not to reach out and brush her hand over Joseph’s head, the hair fashionably shaved as though he were a prisoner. Whatever anger there had been evaporates and she lets him sleep.
Saida uses the toilet and washes her face, brushes her teeth.