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By Root 411 0

down on the street. It is easier to blame a nemesis than to accept chaos as an everyday condition. I saw the car coming too fast. The Iraqis always said that. I don’t remember what it sounded like, I didn’t hear anything, some said, and then I knew they were very close, and lucky to be alive. It knocked me off my feet. I went flying through the air. They describe their return to consciousness, limbs and blood and people dying around them. I saw a man, he was dead. I saw a woman, she had no arms. At this point, everywhere in the world, survivors inevitably say:

It was like something on TV.

Or:

It was like a movie.

Fact: The contemporary human imagination cannot confront a suicide bomb without comparing it to pop culture.

There is a collective response to suicide bombings, the way a society toughens itself and rears up like a snake, and that is particular. Israel invades the West Bank or Gaza. Iraqi Shiites, after the walls of Iraq were smeared with their blood for a few years, organized militias and started kidnapping, torturing, and murdering Iraqi Sunnis. But in the moment, the smoky, bloody moment after the bomb has exploded in a fit of shrapnel and fire and force, there are only victims, their lives burned and their bodies broken to make a point. A suicide bomb is a political statement; it is intended that way. But it’s hard to find politics in the particular. The particular is a great, dumb wash of blood. Israelis and Iraqis, two peoples with no common political ground or shared grievance, act the same roles, say the same words, stumble through the same grasping emotions.

We nosed into Mosul and roared along darkened streets that twisted and sprawled over the banks of the Tigris. Hours had passed since the bomber had targeted the Iraqi police. We would go straight to the hospital and look for survivors.

Picture them: Men standing in line on streets stained by age and blighted by blast barricades. They are working class, their clothes and shoes are scuffed. It is payday, and as they wait for their salaries, they pass cigarettes hand to hand. Nobody would work as a police officer in Iraq if he could help it. They are marked men, working for the occupation. But they have lived through everything so far and they are ready to keep going. Tomorrow is the holiday. They will spend their salary on a sheep or, if they can afford it, a straggly cow. Their families will gather and cheer as the men cut the animals’ throats, offer the blood up to God, and pray for blessings in the months to come. These pleasant prospects hang in the cold, dusty air. And then the bomber’s car barrels down out of the day because that is how death comes in Iraq—doubtless and too fast to duck.

The light in the hospital was frail, glistening on things like margarine. The air smelled sour, like medicine and rotten plums and fresh blood. Somebody screamed, the voice bouncing like a ball through the corridors. The ward was one long room, the cots next to each other. In each cot lay a bloody man, and each bedside was hung with faces. There were women in long black robes, and men with rumpled shirt-tails hanging over work pants. Some families leave the women at home. If the women were there, so were the sacks stuffed with spare clothes, crumbling cookies, hasty plastic things.

The chill of night had been banished by gas heaters. Hot, damp air pressed at the bodies, thinned toward the ceiling, swirled with the perfume of shitty bedsheets and puke-soaked mattresses and antiseptics. Needles jutted incongruously from veins. Men stumbled over IV drips, the old wheels of cots tripped their way over a gritty floor, the ward arranging itself. Sweat pushed through my skin, dampening the wool of my sweater, pooling at the waist of my corduroys.

We stood at a bedside and I forced myself to look at the wounded policeman. His face was cracked, and blood had seeped into the cracks and dried there. It didn’t look like a face anymore; it looked like a broken plate that had been plastered back together with blood for glue. There were only his eyes, glittering with