Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [51]
“They are really cowards,” he was saying. “If they want to face us, let them do it man by man—but they’ll never do that! Let them face me, man by man.”
He was thirty-two years old, a checkpoint policeman. “I’d like to make a living for my family. There are no jobs,” he said. He knew people loathed him as a symbol of the occupation, but he got up every morning and did the best he could. He complained about the terrorists, and the Americans too. They tell us to come pick up our weapons, he said, and then they never show up.
A relative at his bedside interrupted. Leaned over, butted in, eager to give an American a piece of his mind. I pretended he was not there. I looked at the wounded man, into his eyes. It disgusted me to look at his young, broken face, and I felt guilty. I was afraid he would see me shrink, and so I kept my eyes on him. I did not watch my pen loop across the page. He was getting off topic now, telling me about his work at the checkpoint, but I couldn’t find my tongue to stop him. I felt vertigo, as if I were falling headfirst, swan-diving down into bloodshot eyes.
“Sometimes I’m seeing so much that is banned, but I’m forgiving him and letting him go,” he was saying. “I’m treating people well.”
Somebody moaned. The flesh inside my skin was turning to air, like I might float upward, drift and bump against that scarred ceiling, a dizzy balloon. “What do you remember about the attack?” I swallowed against my stomach. “What did you hear? What did you see?”
“I was standing near the barracks as soon as the explosion happened. I flew and fell down,” he said slowly, eyes on the sheet. “I didn’t understand anything. It was very strong …”
I sucked at the air, but it was full of the smell of the man’s fresh wounds, infections fighting for his open flesh, his drying blood. I have a friend who is a doctor. She said to me once, in the singsong of a scientist tough enough to tinker with the truths of the flesh, “If you can smell it, it’s inside of you.” I have wished ever since that she had kept her mouth shut.
“I lost my sense,” the man was saying. “I could only hear the assault rifle firing …”
With the salts of a stranger’s blood in my nose, I squinted into my notebook, clenched the inner skin of my cheek between my teeth, and made myself write his words. The page looked dim and distant. Darkness started in a ring at the edges of vision and spilled inward, swallowing my sight from all sides. The world was an old movie coming to an end. I was going to faint.
“Excuse me.” I staggered through the darkness, bumped into a wall, and slid to a floor littered with crusty bandages. Words punched through the dimness. They were surprised. Raheem stopped translating, embarrassed. The family jabbered, annoyed. The world returned, piece by piece, filling itself in.
“Just a minute,” I muttered, raising my head. “I’m sorry. Just a minute.”
My eyes collided with Raheem’s, puzzled beneath white hair. “You have to be strong. We see this every day.”
“I know,” I said, staring miserably at the floor. “I’ll be fine. I don’t know why this is happening.”
“Leave her alone,” Nabil snapped. “She’s sick.”
But I knew Raheem was right. There was nothing wrong with me except that all the bombings I’d seen were running together, littering up the back of my mind. My body was shutting down in protest at the parade of broken humans. The same thing had happened a few days earlier, at another hospital. It would keep happening for months to come. I sat there on the floor, waiting for my head to clear, feeling small at Raheem’s feet. When I could peel myself off the floor I slunk back to the man’s bedside. The men in his family sneered. I asked a few more questions, feet planted on the linoleum, determined not to embarrass myself again. I wrote down the answers and we broke away. To do my job I needed only quotes and color; pieces of description and character. I had enough.
Outside, the night was cold and bright. I gulped the fresh air, grateful for the purity of open sky, the slap of cold on my face.
We spent the night in a drab hotel