Then he climbed the stairs onto the plane; it was only when he stepped into the air-controlled environment inside that he realised the once-new paperback in his hand had become damp and soggy from the rain, and as he took his seat he fanned the pages open in his lap, airing them as he stared out of the window onto the tarmac, searching for her, but she wasn’t there.
— a second invasion —
Baghdad had burned before.
On February 13, 1258, the Mongol army of Hulagu Khan swept into the city, looting, burning, and killing. Baghdad’s Caliph, Al-Musta’sim Billah, was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by Mongol troops, ensuring his blood, being royal, did not touch the ground. Palaces, mosques, hospitals and homes burned to the ground. The Grand Library was destroyed, and it was said the river Tigris ran black with spilled ink.
745 years later, it was invaded again.
This time they came with tanks; attack helicopters; fighter jets; smart bombs and guided missiles, a string of communication and surveillance satellites like a pearl necklace strung across the sky, in that thin membrane between Earth and space. They came to wage a war on terror, prompted by an attack thousands of miles away.
That attack had been, like a common modern-day fork, four-tined. Once forks themselves were the subject of a holy war. ‘God in his wisdom,’ wrote an unnamed member of the Catholic Church, ‘has provided man with natural forks — his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating.’ Though this war was not about forks, the attack was carried out in the name of God. Four planes had been hijacked and made to crash, two of them into the tallest structures in the city of New York.
Almost 3000 people had died in that attack. The nineteen hijackers had also died.
Two years later, Iraq was invaded (for the second time in a decade) and its caliph, who was now called President, was taken prisoner and, later, executed. He was – terminated – in the appropriately-named Camp Justice in Kadhimiya, a north-eastern suburb of Baghdad. His last meal was chicken and rice, washed down with hot water and honey. He was killed with a rope around his neck at six o’clock in the morning.
The World Health Organization estimated that in the first three years of the invasion of Iraq, 151,000 people of the target population had been killed.
closing doors
——
He didn’t want to think about death. Outside the window, earth had given way to dark sky, sky to an impenetrable layer of cloud and, beyond that, dawn, giving way to empty night strewn with pinpricks of cold shivery star-lights, like holes in the canopy of a world. Going from London to New York was a sort of time travel, racing back into the night. The book was damp in his lap. The paper, already giving off that faint whiff of corruption from its cheap, pulpy pages. The seat was hard against his back. The cabin was in darkness, Joe’s seat light the only one still shining. Outside the Earth revolved, slowly, irrevocably, as it hurtled through space at an unimaginable speed. Inside the cabin dinner had been served and cleared, and the smell of heated-up chicken still lingered, mixing, for Joe, with the smell of the book. Like the chicken, the book seemed already dead, its text warmed up unnecessarily. He tried to imagine what lay ahead for him, and found that he couldn’t. He tried to picture the city of New York, but it seemed an absence in his mind, a place on the map that had only a hole to mark it. He realised he no longer knew what was true and what wasn’t, where fiction began and reality ended. He felt unsettled in his seat, kept turning this way and that, trying to find comfort and failing. He put the book aside and pushed his way through the adjacent seats into the aisle, and made his way to the illuminated sign that meant the bathroom. He felt the floor of the plane through his socks, his toes clutching at the surface as if it were solid, immutable: it was not planes he feared, but the approaching ground.
He closeted himself inside the toilet cubicle, shutting the door behind him. Plastic fixtures, dim yellow lights: his face in the mirror looked like the face of a ghost, staring back at him. He sat down, high above the ocean. When he stared at the wall in front of him he saw that someone had scribbled a note on the light-brown surface, five lines, the handwriting unsteady, the black ink letters spilling up and down from their rows, the thing like an obscene epitaph left by person or persons unknown who would never now, could never now, be known.
As a child I tried to step between the drops
Now I close doors softly
Like a stranger who had wandered in, lost
Into his own home
And does not want to wake its occupier.
PART FIVE
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
nothing to declare
——
New York was a silent field of lighted butterflies, too numerous to count. Lights rose up into the skies, hovered over the shoreline, swamped out the stars. The captain said, ‘Twenty minutes to landing.’ Looking out of the window Joe thought he could see other planes in the skies, circling at a distance from each other as they waited for permission to land.
Inside the immense hall of FDR, Joe lost his bearings for a moment. There was too much of everything there. Too much ceiling, too high above. Too many voices, too many people, bumping into each other like random particles in Brownian motion, thousands of individual stories that intersected for just one brief moment, touched and converged and tapered off in another direction. The floor was cold marble scuffed by too many shoes. A hidden announcement system seemed never to fall quiet, calling passengers going to or arriving from Paris, Bangkok, Tehran, Moscow, Jerusalem, Peking, Beirut, Nairobi. There was that sense in the arrivals hall of an imperial impatience, tapping its foot, saying, this is the gateway of the world, now get on with it, but in an orderly fashion please.
‘Anything to declare?’ The girl was pretty in her uniform. Joe wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to declare he was here to investigate a global conspiracy of mass murder; or say, perhaps, that he was trying to understand a war no one seemed to understand, not even those who were fighting it the hardest; or to explain about the ghosts that kept flickering at the corner of his eyes when they thought he weren’t looking. He said, ‘No, nothing,’ and gave her an apologetic smile, and she waved him through.
Luggage rolling and turning in an intricate loop… a brown leather bag; a silver carry case, the kind gangsters used to carry money in movies; a beaten-up black-and-brown suitcase with peeling stickers on its wide back that said its owners had visited the Grand Kenyon, Yellowstone Park, the Natural History Museum and Graceland. Backpacks with Cyrillic address-tags. Carton boxes with Chinese characters running down the sides. An arrivals board clicking as its slats rotated: Phnom Penh, Damascus, Reykjavik, Baghdad, Kuala Lumpur, Luzon, Cairo, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rome, Kunming: old cities and new, cities on hills and on planes, on river and seas, dots on a wide map each sending out threads of clear light that all came here, all terminated in this terminal, in this city on the edge of a continent, with threads going in all directions until a globe was filled with interlocking bands of light…
Outside the terminal he took a moment to lean against the wall and breathe, though he smelled cars more than anything else. He lit a cigarette. Above his head planes took off into the skies. The earth seemed to thrum beneath him. FDR was chrome and glass and joyful arrogance.
‘Help me,’ someone said, and Joe shuddered once and was then very still. He couldn’t tell quite when it started. He had the feeling that, even back at the airport in London, he had a sense of them. Shadows at the edge of sight, blurred silent figures, watching him, following him. Fuzzy-wuzzies. On the plane, when he came out of the toilet cubicle, in a seat that had been empty before: a young woman, only a girl really, staring up at him with mute enormous eyes – he could see the seat through her. And on the conveyor belt at the airport, amidst the luggage there were cases and bags that belonged to no one, it seemed, that kept circling indefinitely, like planes overhead which will never now be granted permission to land…