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By Root 380 0

they owned to raise $25,000. She’d given the cash to a corrupt official who, in turn, wrote a report claiming Ahmed’s father had been executed in the desert, closed his file, and set him free. That was back in 1981, before Ahmed was born. His father, after stopping home long enough to conceive Ahmed, had escaped to Kuwait and found work with a British oil company. When he finally made it home six years later, he’d stuck around long enough to get his wife pregnant again before vanishing back into the government’s clutches. This time his arrest was secret, and the family couldn’t track him down.

“All those twenty months we were looking for my father,” Ahmed stared down into his teacup, memories dark and jumbled. “My mother was pregnant, her abdomen was getting big. We didn’t have a place to live so we were living in rental houses, we moved seven, eight times. We asked everyone. In the end we found a way to get him out of jail.”

The family fled to Karbala, hoping to get off the Tikrit Guy’s radar. They stayed there until 1994, then moved to Najaf for a few years before finally, warily, creeping back to Baghdad.

Those were long, grinding sanctions years, when Iraq lay frozen under Saddam and Ahmed plunged blindly into his youth. On languid summer days he’d sleep until afternoon, find his friends, look for pretty girls in the market, and thrust his telephone number into their fingers in a fit of hormones and hope. Buy a sweet, cold ice-cream cone, maybe see a movie. The hours clicked out in pool halls. “I’m a professor of billiards,” he says.

At midnight he met the other runners for training, and they bounded like antelopes through the darkened streets, feet ponging off the blacktop, night hot as an oven’s breath. It was all in his voice: the boys moving like animals, the quiet intensity of the night, music slipping from parties, closed gates and silent windows and dark cars all sliding past the running boys. The possibility, and the youngness.

Ahmed ran until he was one of the best endurance runners in the country. They paid him four dollars a month on the national team, but he didn’t run for the money; he ran because he loved it, because it cut his world into a simple, Manichean place, neatly divided between good and evil. It was combat as much as a race.

“When you fight somebody you’re the good one and he’s the bad one. And if you defeat him, I can’t describe it when you live this moment. They say you’re the best.”

Since the war, he had begun to lose his taste for running. He couldn’t run anymore in open spaces. The students at the university taunted him as he bounded past: “Hey crazy, what are you doing?” Gunfire cracked his concentration.

“There is no emotion now.”

His thoughts spun in circles, swallowed their tails, and his feet pounded to earth, over and over again. The students were ignorant, he thought. Many came from the south, same as his family. “They’ve been in darkness for the 1980s and 1990s, so what can you expect?”

Why was there nowhere better for running?

First, because there was a war. And second, because he was poor.

He dreamed of being a rich man. Then he could buy himself a treadmill and train at home. He could stay inside the four walls of his house all day long; he would never have to leave. He could buy the luxury of his own prison, one he designed himself and loved.

Instead he works a poor man’s job in a pharmacy. He hates it, and the pay is thin. His perfect English, the tongue he pieced together one word at a time during long, dark hours hunched over a transistor radio, is languishing. The words are slipping away. Sometimes he strikes up a quick conversation with the American soldiers, just for the practice, but they don’t say much. Hey, they say to Ahmed, what’s up? And then they move on. If Ahmed’s father sees him approach the soldiers, he’s in for a fierce fight. His father doesn’t want him speaking English on the streets; the neighbors might suspect Ahmed of working with the Americans. That’s where the money is. Ahmed knows it—doesn’t he know it? His friend came to him and offered