Cathy returned to the computer, grateful that this was only one room, nothing more than a storefront, but disliked how her private life played out on public computers. She found a different image playing, the second message downloaded and running footage of a stony roadside that fell back to an endless palm grove. The jolt of the vehicle punched the image up to the sky, blinding white then blue, whipped by the feathered tops of palm trees, a rustle of green. Date palms, she knew this, not coconut. And would those be almond trees, or walnut, some kind of fruit? Olive trees broke the rhythm, pleasantly squat and pale, and locked between them the brightest sky, a thin block of air. In breaks between the groves the irrigation channels, the ditches, the dusty roads, and further back more fields and groves, an unfamiliar sight for a country she’d imagined only as stone and desert.
This world looked old by design. She put on the headphones, taken by, but not quite believing, the wearing brightness and the bare sunshine. The waters of a great river brought sparingly to the plains, passed plant to plant through channels and tubes and tight little ditches, and the transformation from flat desert to a continuous roadside oasis struck her as ingenious, hard-earned, and beautiful.
She could distinguish voices under the drone of the engine. Rem, and one, maybe two other men, laughing, discussing how the village wasn’t on the map. How wild is that? Shouldn’t be there. Across the radio, she could just about hear a voice singing and sounding like a taunt.
* * *
The next morning, stopped on Lake Shore Drive, Cathy smoothed the apron over her stomach, and thought again of this oasis: a clear image of water channels, low mud walls, a wild pampas-like grass, but mostly the palm trees, strong leaning trunks, a wild bush of fronds — home to what kinds of bird? What right did Rem have crying, homesick, in some boxy room, when he was free of this monotony?
She wasn’t eating regularly, she’d lost too much weight too quickly, enough to stop her periods. These things happened when she became stressed. Outward, she appeared to manage. Inward, everything became a mess: eating, sleeping, shitting, menstruation, every basic function thrown out of whack.
* * *
Rem could smell the camp before they came across it. A smell, from a distance, of newly turned earth, slightly foetid, not entirely unpleasant. Closer still the stink fastened to the back of his throat, turned penetrative and meaty.
Forty minutes earlier they’d come through palm groves and an ordered grid of dry irrigation channels surrounding an unmarked village, Khat. Now they sat at the head of an incline, a great plate of desert about them, falling on all sides — except to the west where a small bare hill concealed the camp. The tops of two water tanks half buried in the hill, a wire fence, and a cable-wire gate were all that could be seen from the road.
They drove slowly down the track into Camp Liberty. To their right a Quonset hut with a ribbed barrel roof and a long garage door, rosy in the late sun, with two blackened diggers pulled-up behind. To their left an uneven line of HOSCO cabins. This, Rem understood, was the camp, barely enough to justify the journey. The track continued in a wavering line toward the burn pits. Behind them, the highway struck straight, north — south. Further to the west the land lost distinction, the wind drove up a fleshy haze and the horizon faded to flat tones. He couldn’t figure why the camp was based here, nothing established its reason, no commanding feature, water, nothing, except that it lay equidistant between the Kuwaiti border, the Saudi border, and a small town called Khat.
When the vehicles stopped the men stepped out, and one by one looked about, expecting more and failing to find anything. Each one of them took shallow breaths and looked to Rem as if he was the source of the stink. Samuels sloped out last, a spanked dog, all tremors and passing terror, the only one not appalled by the stench.
Rem asked Pakosta if this was it.
‘Just about.’
‘Dead things. It smells of bad meat, animal fat.’ Santo pinched his nose, swatted the flies matting Watts’ back.
The plastic cabins were raised on wood pallets. Their fronts and sides, pitted by the sand, were so badly weathered that grit stuck in them and gave them a soft furred look. Santo gouged out the screws, and when the door opened he jumped back. ‘Something in here!’
The men gathered in a huddle and peered cautiously inside. The floor, black, appeared to move.
‘It’s ash.’ Santo thought this funny, and wafted the door and the ash stirred, disturbed as the surface of a lake.
The bed, a simple cot, at least had a mattress but the room was otherwise bare. Rem had the common sense to make sure the men brought fresh bedding and bed rolls, something more comfortable at least than their accommodation back at Amrah. He charged Samuels and Clark with checking each of the cabins. Fleas, bugs, roaches. Scorpions. Rats. Spiders. He had no idea what was out here.
* * *
Rem asked Pakosta to drive him about the camp. He wanted to see the burn pits as he didn’t yet know how to speak to the men about their work: everything was new and unfamiliar.
A home-made sign outside the Quonset pointed to ‘The Pits / The Beach’.
Pakosta turned the Humvee aggressively about. ‘I have one more property. I think you’ll like what we’ve done here. Honest to god.’
* * *
Pakosta drove first to the Beach. If Rem wanted to get a measure of this vast nothing, then the Beach was the place to start.
‘I was here in February. We had to haul a truck out of one of the pits. We should have just pushed it in.’
The Beach, a long dune, almost as high as the camp, formed a crescent-shaped gulley around an open tip of abandoned vehicles and equipment — most of it stripped of usable parts. The Beach rode up behind as a steep roll of sand.
‘This is where they dump hardware which won’t burn.’ He strode up the dune expecting Rem to follow. Once on the crest he struck a pose and swept out his arms to the north and north-west. ‘Nothing of interest until the border. Belongs to A-rabs, scorpions, camels, and desert rats. Nothing going out, and nothing coming back. If anything did happen to come at us we’d see it several days before it got here. Not so from the other direction.’ Pakosta turned to point south with two fingers, pistol-fashion.
‘Our closest neighbour is Khat. Sometimes the support and supply convoys from Camp Navistar to LSA Anaconda in Baghdad are obliged to take this road: and on occasion the good citizens of Khat choose to stone the vehicles, to slow them down and rob them, because the convoys come from Shuaiba or Camp Arifjan, and bring eggs, milk, bread, flour, you name it. Foodstuffs. Fuel. If we’re smart we’ll have nothing to do with them. Fortunately most of them believe that the pits are used to destroy chemicals and toxic material.’ Pakosta swept his hand to the east. ‘Which brings us to Camp Crapper, the largest and last burn pit in southern I-raq, which, to my knowledge, has never been permanently manned.’ Pakosta spat into the sand then levelled his arms. ‘So, what the fuck are we doing here?’
Rem gave Pakosta an honest answer. ‘Because this is the last job in town. Everywhere else doesn’t look so good right now. Why are you here?’
‘This is my career.’ Pakosta gave a laugh. ‘I’m serious. This country is my future. I’m never going back.’
* * *
Before returning to the cabins they stopped at the burn pits. Five long and shallow trenches, each as broad as a truck. Inside the pits a mess of black glue and scorched semi-recognizable detritus: a freezer unit, gypsum boards, a bicycle frame, half-burned boxes and bags melded together, yet to properly burn, but mostly an uneven field of papery black and grey ash.