We neared the circle and spread out on its edge. A daze had set in on the roundabout’s occupants. They walked back and forth between one another’s cars, speaking in low voices, hands pointing wildly as if to map out the strange turns that life, in peculiar moments such as this, can take.
Before entering into the light of the circle, we checked our weapons and determined likely threats. Someone shrugged. We rose out of the fringes of the dark, our forms modular and alien to the men standing there. Most of them ran off. We knew they ran for fear of us, so we didn’t follow them. Others got in their cars and peeled loudly down the street, their antique engines high and whistling, the smell of rubber adding to the odor of decomposition that permeated the air.
We searched the perimeter of the circle. The streetlights gave off a shallow hum. The abandoned cars were warm and made little ticking noises at irregular intervals. We looked for signs of Murph in the shadows, some indication of his passage. In a hidden alley, obscured by a tattered green awning, a private called out.
On his knees, he sifted through a pile of discarded fruit, rotten and blanketed by a collection of flies. We walked over to him and watched as he kneaded his hands through the soggy mass. Flies battered him lightly. He made a small clearing in the alley and a puddle showed itself blackly against the spoiled citrus. The smell of copper stagnated and mixed with the remnants of the beggar’s scavenged fruit.
“That’s blood,” someone said. A light shined down the alley. We followed the footprints, which gently reflected the light, directing us toward a maze that vanished down staircases and around unmapped corners. We checked our weapons again, quietly reasserting our confidence under the whispering noise of metallic levers shifting position, and walked down the alley.
In the dark, a swallow illustrated the turns with its call’s echo. It guided us to a hub, where the alley branched off in several directions. An old man gauzed in dusty sackcloth and smelling of rotten fruit lay prostrate in the center. Someone tapped at him with his boot. No response. The blood, not yet congealing, adhered to the boy’s boot and dripped in the moonlight. We turned the beggar over. The stench of calloused and picked-at sores, now burst from the beating he had taken, overpowered us. The gray of pallor mortis settled quickly over his wrinkled skin, becoming paler and paler as we stood there.
Sergeant Sterling chewed his bottom lip in the dark over the indrawn form of the dead man, his hands stuck casually in his pockets. His rifle hung loosely from its sling.
“What now?” we asked.
Sterling looked back and shrugged. “Shit, I ain’t got a clue.”
The dead man seemed to move for a moment as we stood there, but it was only an effect of the rigor, the slight contraction of dead muscles over his brittle bones. It seemed impossible to know which path to take. We scoured the stonework for signs of footprints. The fear began to set in that Murph had bled out on his journey and been swept up into the arms of captors, too weak to resist, as helpless as a child asleep in the wilderness. We could not avoid thinking of him sleeping in that alley, being found by men who would take him to a basement, burn him and beat him, cut off his balls and cut his throat, make him beg for death.
We followed one soldier as he walked west toward the sloping banks of the river. It was as good a guess as any other. A mosque’s towering minarets fooled the eyes and appeared to curve and hover over everything.
The sun began to rise. Colors, dull and bathed in the pale light, spread over the city in a palette of gray and gold and washed-out pastels. The morning heat began to swell our brains as we neared the river. We knew other units were searching for Murph. We heard the rattle of gunfire and the occasional reverberant slam of IEDs. But we encountered no resistance. The people we saw parted before us as quickly as they could. We walked down either side of a broad avenue that was lined by the hulks of cars set on fire in some recent past.
On the outskirts of the city we approached an open square. Two black mutts of indeterminate parentage heeled at the feet of their master. His dogs and his white shift stood out in the fallow bleakness. He affixed a three-legged mule to a cart. A wood-hewn contraption stood substitute for the mule’s stumped right foreleg. He glanced at us, twenty heavily armed soldiers, and looked back disinterestedly to his work on the cart. We sent our interpreter to see what information, if any, he could give us. Then we waited, seated lazily about the square aiming our rifles at the few open windows and down the empty side streets.
They exchanged words, and the cartwright turned toward one of the side streets and pointed out a minaret of the mosque we had passed earlier. It jutted precariously over the bank of the river, a protuberance of mottled stone. There was nothing between us and the tower but a road and barren fields.
Sergeant Sterling fiddled with his sight aperture, flipping it back and forth from night sight to day sight while trying to decide what we should do. Finally, he spit onto the dusty road and said, “They ain’t much for crop rotatin’, are they?” He paused again. “What’s he saying?” he asked the interpreter.
“He saw some men he didn’t know going into the minaret last night.”
“How many?”
“Five. Maybe six.”
“They look strange or anything?”
The interpreter looked confused. “Compared to what?”
Sterling squatted down on the backs of his calves. “All right, you guys set up a perimeter here,” he said to the rest of the platoon. “Me and Bartle are gonna check it out. It’s probably nothing.”
The cartwright offered to guide us to the tower. He led, followed by his elaborately improvised mule drawing the whole of his earthly possessions. He goaded the mule along. It consented with patient eyes and marked his path with a tripartite staccato of hoofbeats, the blunted wood of his other leg capped with wrappings of molded leather. In the back of his cart, a worn prayer mat covered a few pots of clay and stone. Items of cast iron wobbled about, shaking among a collection of woven figurines beaded in natural shades of turquoise and crimson and green.
On the side of the road a tree rose out of the otherwise sterile field, bent and swaying softly in the stale breeze. The smell of the river got stronger as we approached the minaret, a sweet coolness we had long forgotten. Past the tree and the smell of the river, the faded pink and blotchy minaret loomed at an odd angle, a dominant line through the corners of my eyes. The hermit tapped at the mule’s hindquarter with a long crook of charred cedar, communicating in this fashion a command for the mule to halt. The mule brought his momentum to a stop and as the cart rolled its last few feet, the mule hopped on its wooden contrivance, its face a picture of stillness and calm.
The hermit took off his sandals and placed them in the back of the cart. He slowly wiggled his toes, as if to stretch them for his journey. Looking from side to side several times, perhaps to assure himself of his place in the world, he walked to the front of the cart, where his hobbled mule breathed quietly. He gave it a pear, slowly stroking its muzzle as the mule chewed and addressed the man with its black eyes. He walked out into the dusty field toward the lone tree and, finding a large and appropriately angled root, reclined in the shade of its overhanging branches.
I looked at Sterling and shrugged. He shrugged back and called to the hermit from the side of the road, his voice echoing heavily over the short distance in the heat of late morning. Our shoulders hung limp against our sides.
The hermit called back, and as he did, the interpreter related what he said with a precise delay, which added to the confusion, their voices echoing in a way that gave me momentary déjà vu.
“He says that he has come through this place already and does not wish to walk the same way again.” The voice of the man slightly distant fell off before the last words of Pidgin English came. We looked quizzically at the interpreter and he said, “Check over there,” pointing to a patch of vegetation beneath the minaret.
Sterling motioned to the interpreter. “All right, get the fuck out of here. Head back
to the others.”
“I don’t know, Sarge. Something ain’t right. This seems off,” I said. “Feels like a setup.”
He looked at me with extraordinary calm. “C’mon, Private, I figured you’d know by now. ‘Ain’t right’ is exactly what we’re looking for.”
I waited.
“Ah, fuck it,” he said. “Only one way to find out.”
We had looked for him hard, this one boy, this one name and number on a list. As the man pointed, our fears had become facts, our hopes smothered and mute. We had, in a strange way, surrendered. But to what, we did not know. The sound of gunfire could still be heard periodically in the distance. The city would be covered with brass casings. Battered buildings would have new holes. Blood would be swept into the streets and washed into gutters before we were through.
We looked at the old man in the field reclining peacefully beneath the shade of the tree and saw for the first time the depth of his age and his black eyes and the mysteries housed in them. His white shift fluttered and he laughed and swatted away a few bees with his hand. We turned and walked toward the copse of trees and bushes that ringed the tower.
At the base of the tower the trees and flowers were thin and tinder-dry. The tower itself rose upward and was slung out precariously over the river. Sterling and I circled the base of the tower in the heat of the nooning sun, its mass appearing out of the dirt and dead flora like some kind of ancient exclamation. We found Murph, finally, covered in a patch of lifeless hyacinth, resting motionless in the shade of the grass and low branches.
Laid up hard and broken-boned in the patch of vegetation that was his journey’s end, his body was twisted at absurd angles beneath the pink and shimmering tower. We moved the brush that either wind or passersby had scattered over him. We uncovered his feet first. They were small and bloody. A supply sergeant could have looked at them and said size seven, but he would not need boots now. Looking to the top of the tower, it was clear that he fell from a window where two speakers had been set up to amplify the muezzin’s call.
Daniel Murphy was dead.
“Not so high up, if you really think about it,” Sterling said.
“What?”
“I think he was probably dead before he fell. It just isn’t that great a height.”
It was truly not a fall from all that great a height: broken bones were broken further, no resistance or attempt to land was made; the body had fallen, the boy already dead, the fall itself meaning nothing.
We pulled Murph free from the tangle of brush and laid him out in some shadow of respectability. We stood and looked him over. He was broken and bruised and cut and still pale except for his face and hands, and now his eyes had been gouged out, the two hollow sockets looking like red angry passages to his mind. His throat had been cut nearly through, his head hung limply and lolled from side to side, attached only by the barely intact vertebrae. We dragged him like a shot deer out of a wood line, trying but failing to keep his naked body from banging against the hard ground and bouncing in a way that would be forever burned into our memories. His ears were cut off. His nose cut off, too. He had been imprecisely castrated.
He’d been with us for ten months. He was eighteen years old. Now he was anonymous. The picture of him that would appear in the newspaper would be of him in Class A’s in basic, a few pimples on his chin. We’d never be able to see him that way again.
I took my woobie out of my pack and covered him. I couldn’t look anymore. Most of us had seen death in many forms: the slick mess after a suicide bomber, headless bodies gathered in a ditch like a collection of broken dolls on a child’s shelf, even our own boys sometimes, bleeding and crying as it became apparent that the sound of a casevac was thirty seconds too far in the distance. But none of us had seen this.
“What should we do with him?” I asked. The words themselves seemed incomprehensible. I drifted in and around the significance of the question, first reckoning with the fact that the decision would be ours. Two boys, one twenty-four, the other twenty-one, would decide what should happen to the body of a boy who had died and been butchered in the service of his country in an unknown corner of the world. We knew that if we brought him back, there would be questions. Who found him? What did he look like? What was it like?
“Fuck, little man. You didn’t have to go out like this,” Sterling said to the body at his feet. He flopped down on his butt into the dry grass and took his helmet off.
I sat next to Murph and began to tremble, rocking back and forth.
“You know what we got to do.”
“Not like this, Sarge.”
“It’s what we do. No matter what. You know that shit, Bart.”
“It’ll be worse.”
“We don’t decide. That’s way above our pay grade.”
“Sarge, you gotta trust me. We can’t let that happen.”
We both knew what that was. There are few real mysteries in life. The body would be flown to Kuwait, where it would be mended and embalmed as best it could by mortuary affairs. It would land in Germany, tucked into a stack of plain metal caskets as the plane refueled. It would land in Dover, and someone would receive it, with a flag, and the thanks of a grateful nation, and in a moment of weakness his mother would turn up the lid of the casket and see her son, Daniel Murphy, see what had been done to him, and he would be buried and forgotten by all but her, as she sat alone in her rocking chair in the Appalachians long into every evening, forgetting herself, no longer bathing, no longer sleeping, the ashes of the cigarettes she smoked becoming long and seeming always about to fall to her feet. And we’d remember too, because we would have had the chance to change it.
He stood up and started pacing. “Let’s just think this through a minute,” he said. “Let me get a smoke.”
I gave him one and lit one for myself. My hands were shaking and my lighter wouldn’t stay lit in the wind and the wind blew the woobie and uncovered what was left of Murph’s face. Sterling stared at the empty sockets. I put the blanket back. Minutes ticked into the past. A few birds darted in and out of the brush and sang. The sound of the river became clearer.
“You better not be wrong about this.”
I couldn’t think. I wanted to take it all back. “This is so fucked, Sarge.”
“Chill out, man. Just chill out, all right,” he said, and then paused reflectively. “Here’s what we do: you get on that radio and tell the terp to send over the hajji with the cart. Tell them we didn’t find him.”
I took a minute and collected myself. Sterling went on, “We’re gonna have to fix this like it never happened. You know what that means, right?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
We waited. A strange peace took shape between us. The sun muted the periphery into a mere abstraction of color and shape. Everything we did not look at directly became a blur in the corners of our eyes. We watched the hermit come, tapping lightly at the haunch of his mule. He walked slowly in the heat and all that was clear in our vision was the man and his lame mule emerging out of a hazy mirage, everything else vague or inverted or duplicate. The mule treaded lightly on its tinkered foreleg, and the man patiently guided it toward us. As he came closer we saw that the two mutts from before loped along behind him. The hermit approached and looked each of us in the eye as if we were lined up for an open-rank inspection, and finally said, “Give me a cigarette, mister.” I gave him one and he lit it, inhaled deeply and smiled.
Sterling reached for Murph’s legs and tried to lift him up. We didn’t have the chance to take it back. We had never had the chance, not really. It was as if we had already done it in another life I could only vaguely remember. The decision had been made. I moved to where Sterling was and grabbed Murph by the arms. I shuddered quickly. My heart beat recklessly. We picked Murph up and brushed the dancing flies from his skin and tried not to look into his empty sockets as we laid him in the back of the cart among the clay and stone and the
figurines of straw.
“We’ll take him to the river,” Sterling said. “We’ll leave him there. Give me your lighter, Bart.”
I did. He lit the Zippo and left it burning and dropped it into the dry brush at the base of the tower.
“Let’s go,” he said.
It was not far from the river, and we walked behind the hermit as he led the mule into some approximation of a trot. We followed behind this odd coterie of man and mule and dog for a half a klick or so, until we saw the banks of the river. Water lapped the edges and bulrushes swayed gently in the shallows at the banks.
Sterling tapped on my shoulder, pointed behind me, and I saw the minaret in flames from the dried brush burning at its base. Burn it. Burn the motherfucker down. The tower lit up like a flickering candle as the sun began to descend from its brutal apex. I thought for a moment that we might burn down the whole city for that one tower. I was briefly ashamed, but quickly forgot why.
Sterling looked at me and whispered, mostly to himself, “Fuck ’em, man. Fuck everyone on earth.”
Amen. We floated behind the cart down the broad avenue leading to the edge of the river. The street was lined with poplars and the bodies from our search; opaque shades of brown, all ages and species. We walked past many things in flames. The thin and knotty trees and flowers soaked up the fire and lined the avenue in the descending sun like ancient guideposts, all flaming and circling a little light on the scattered bodies, breaking up the dark.
We floated past the people of the city, the old and childless hovel dwellers who wailed some Eastern dirges in their warbling language, all of them sounding like punishments sung specifically for our ears. Daniel Murphy’s body in the cart reflected the orange glow, the only color on his thin and parchment skin was the flickering palette of the fire. The shadows danced on his pale form and only the listing of the broken mule and tottering cart made his body appear to move like something other than a canvas for this burning scene.