ARABIA TERRA

The blistering anchor of Satan’s ship set down steaming and burning in the Mediterranean of his enemy, in God’s oasis, some perfect Eden or open-handed sacrifice that to his eyes seemed nothing more than Hell itself. Thin black ribbons of smoke rose above the sand, twisting and dancing against a sunbleached backdrop of rippling heat. Across a stark white horizon hiked twenty men, insignificant silhouettes backlit against the scorching desert sun of Iraq. Scattered for kilometers were the smoldering remains of destroyed tanks, charred metal. The smell of burning skin was strong.

For hours a single sound ricocheted off the distant rock walls of mountains far away: heavy black leather boots crunching on gravel. Repositioning the valley twelve inches of sand at a time. Eyes squinted into the sun, creasing baked temples beneath sweltering metal helmets. Beads of sweat down reddened foreheads lingered on eyebrows and fell to the ground, which lapped them up instantly.

Here the sand was swept away, and the ground beneath their feet became solid, hard. An enormous expanse of cracked red clay. Up ahead could be seen the semblance of houses. Amid them small obscure figures, abstracted by waves of heat, running from place to place. This was Baghdad. This was what was left of Baghdad.

A single hand rose from the company to blot out the sun, see the city, reduced to ashes, a city now of frightened children. Dust swirled in small whirlwinds, isolated in worlds of their own, scattered along the landscape, into the distance.

I believe in the sand. I believe in the sky, cloudless blue, going on forever. The shadow of the raised hand dropped away, slithering down along the contours of a man’s face, and slicing his eyes once again with harsh sunlight. A flash of white, blinding bright light, and there she was.

Mina. My heart. I will see you again. Her fingers were long and delicate, her skin deep and black. He sank into her, their lips locked, her eyes closed. They rolled as a wave in the ocean. David.

“Captain,” a voice came from the sunlight. David winced at the sharp pain, looked away, squinting at the boy. “It’s getting bad. We need water.”

“I know it,” David pulled off his scalding helmet and wiped his hand across his sweaty black brow. He looked back at his men, all clad in tan, all on the brink of heatstroke and exhaustion, and let a hollow sigh roll out of his dry throat. “We’ll try to find some in the city.”

“Captain, nobody in Baghdad is going to give us water.”

David’s eyes stung. He closed them, and saw still the pulsating flash of the sun, thick and spotty. He returned his helmet to his head, felt it burn his scalp, turned to the boy soldier in stride beside him, and opened his eyes, “Listen to me, Sam. We are not going to die here. There will be plenty of water for everyone when we complete our mission. Where we’re headed there will be fountains.”

The boy stared ahead as he walked, and David could see the redness in his eyes, the sand encrusted in the lines of his skin, behind his ears. He was filled then with a sudden sense of complete hopelessness. You are carved of stronger stuff than I.

Before the city, over a quick-and-dirty trench dug for the defense against a ground invasion, stretched a charred wooden bridge, black-blasted with splinters and scars from a providential assailant. Like one man, across the bridge the twenty men moved, all crossing the same bridge, each crossing his own. Their boots clacked and clumped on the cracking boards, dust and sand filtering down, caught momentarily in some shred of sunlight, then coming to rest five feet below, on the stacked bodies of the dead.

Before them sat a weary, frail old man, propped precariously against the last standing wall of what had once been someone’s house, now a singed, monolithic tribute to nothing. His skin was a geography of canyons, of concave contours and lines drawn in charcoal. Of the texture of rough leather were his face, his arms, his hands; his wisp-thin hair white as his pupil-less eyes.

Across that skin dropped the shadow of a soldier, and the old man erupted in a violent frenzy, trembling and panicking, shouting in his alien tongue, "La! La! Ibta'id! Kefaya!"

David removed his helmet, ran the back of his hand across his wet forehead, turned and called for Tarek, who stepped from the group and approached him. “Translate for me,” David told him, and Tarek crouched down beside the hysterical old man.

"Ihda, sahbi. Arjook, ihda."

The old man continued to scream, "La! La! Itrikni aieesh! Akhathit auooni! Itrikni aieesh!"

“What’s he saying?” asked David.

“I’m not sure. He’s talking too fast.”

"Akhatho noor ashams! La! Kefaya!"

Tarek looked up at David, whose shadow was still draped over the old man’s face. “Captain, sit down.”

David glanced at Tarek and did what he said, his shadow sliding down the man’s skin and away from his eyes, which were now again bathed in harsh light. Abruptly the old man’s shouting stopped, and he began taking in short, shallow breaths.

"Sahbi, ihna hinana insa'adik. Tiftahimni?" asked Tarek.

The old man nodded, his mouth open, blank white eyes squinting.

"Ihchelna shunu iMinar. Ibda min albidaya."

The old man answered, "Hasal ams. Chunt mashy li bait ibny, chan fee aswat alia. Surakh min fauq."

“What’s he saying?” asked David.

“He says this happened yesterday. He walked to his son’s house, and there were loud noises, screaming from above.”

"Talana bara jameean, kul al hara, kuluna, bara."

“We all go outside. The whole neighborhood, everyone, outside.”

"A'shams bidat targus fe a'sama."

“And the sun starts to dance in the sky.”

"Yameen wa yasar, fauq wa tahit, fauq ru'usna."

“Back and forth, up and down, in circles, flying over our heads.”

"A'sama inshaqat wa'shams tateeh ila alard."

“And the sky cracks open and the sun falls to the earth, and there are more things falling.”

"Nujoom tasgut min a'sama."

“Stars falling from the sky.”

"U fajeru almadeena, yidbahu kul man yilmisu…"

“They explode the city, kill everyone they touch.”

"… yuhriqu ajsamhum wahum ba'ad aysheen, yasriqu uyonhum…"

“… burn them alive, steal their eyes…”

“The M-SCUDS,” said David, shaking his head. “He’s talking about the missiles.” Tarek nodded at him.

David stood up, turned, saw a woman crying, moving in slow motion, stretching arms out to black oblivion, moving toward him. "Tifli, tifli…" her callused hands touched his face, and he could see that she too had been blinded. He pulled her away and stepped from the wall.

Across the broad impotence of an ex-erection of a building someone had set down a final hieroglyph in sprayed strokes of deep red graffiti, wet mud, fresh blood: the head of a bull on the body of a man. A Joshua Tree hinting at the Mojave yet to come.

David moved his lips but didn’t make a sound, widening the gap between the lost and found. He took a step back, black against the sky, tore his gaze away, his eyes scanning the sand. What had the desert seen? He could imagine the sound as the giant phalli screamed from the stratosphere and ignited in a flaming inferno this dark continent of a city. Such majesty. How appropriate. There was a deadly sin for each day it had taken to make the Earth.

The sunlight, abstracted by the atmosphere, shone down upon his skin. From some distant place rang the sound of an engine, and he thought he caught sight on the horizon of an argosy making its way in his direction. We are one, he considered, moving across the landscape in chariots of molded steel, as though gods in a foreign land, for in this world there is no such thing as a native. We are merely visitors here, categorized by country, separated by territory, defined by context.

A sudden cry rang out from somewhere in the city, the voice of a child. David bolted for the sound, turned a corner, caught sight of his own men tearing apart someone’s home. A woman held a screaming infant in her arms, behind her three of David’s soldiers had broken down the door to the house and were ripping open drawers, turning on faucets, beating the father still inside.

“Stop! No!” he cried, making for the soldiers. One of the men looked up, saw his captain rushing him, and quickly pressed his back to the wall of the house, shutting his eyes tight and gnashing his teeth. Every step David took was in slow motion, an eternity between he and his men, until everything seemed to freeze, and the image of the broken father on the floor of the house was like a photograph before his eyes.

A waking moment occurred then. David was suddenly eight years old, watching as the televised image of a ruined, broken, ninety year old Hussein was led up to the steel platform outside the United States Supreme Court and shot execution-style in the head. David was only a child, and yet he remembered it vividly, recalled with pristine clarity the color of the blood on the marble steps.

Now thirty years later here he was. He exploded into the house, pulled the soldier closest to him down to the ground and forced his arms to the floor. The soldier fought back instinctively before realizing his own commander had him pinned, then gave up.

The soldier against the wall shook violently, tears streaming down his face, carving tracks in the grit on his skin. David glanced up at him, saw it was the boy he had walked with earlier, and stood. “Soldier, pull yourself together.”

The boy’s eyes flicked upward, shot a panicked glare at David, then rolled back into themselves and went white. That was when the boy collapsed and began convulsing in a terrible seizure.

David slid to his side, “Sam! Sam! Wake up!” He fumbled for his canteen, upturned it in the hope of some holy water that did not come. Bone dry. He looked up at the Iraqi man crouched in the corner, and found that his only thought was to tear the house apart. There had to be water somewhere.

He turned toward the other two soldiers and ordered them to regroup with the rest of the men. As soon as they ran outside there was suddenly an enormous explosion, and the entire construction of the city seemed to split in two as a shuttered shockwave shook everyone to their knees in inarguable genuflection to some unseen thing. David flew to the doorway and covered his eyes just as a Patwa Flyer careened from over the tops of the ruins and unloaded a dozen metallic spheres upon the city. They sailed in all directions, crashing into the sides of buildings, landing on cars, burying themselves into the street, and at the moment of impact blasting apart into a million microscopic shards of blistering shrapnel, obliterating anything within three hundred feet.

David was hurled back several meters into the house and through the wall. Already he could feel the blood leaking from his ears. He’d been hit. It wouldn’t be long before the shrapnel dug itself deeper into his skin, his ears, and started to extend its spider-like legs. In less than an hour he would be dead, unless he managed to get to a United Empire Consulate, but with their own aircraft carpet-bombing the area, the chances of that were slim.

He could hear the boy soldier on the floor inside screaming, “Jesus Christ! Holy shit! What the fuck are you!?”

David pulled himself to his feet, caught a glimpse of the mother and her child misshapen and buried beneath a foot of debris. All he could see was Mina. All he could see was what could have been their son.

There was a choir of voices raised in collected horror as a population of blinded survivors raced down the street, their skin bleeding and pussing, their limbs missing. They were screaming, but the only voice David could clearly make out was Sam’s: “What sort of fucking animal are you?! Man? Bull!”

There was only one open pass left to the city center, where there had once stood a fountain sculpted in the shape of the man whose short lived liberation of these people had given way to occupancy and the subsequent birth of a new Rome. If that fountain was still standing, still holding some water… David had to get the boy there fast.

He dropped every piece of unnecessary equipment he carried, knelt down beside the soldier’s shaking body, scooped him into his arms, and, with a painful hoist, threw him over his shoulder. Against the blasted wall David nearly buckled under the weight of the boy’s body but stepped through the debris and out into the street.

Here the smell was that of scorched rubber, and the sound of the Patwa singing in the distance became a duet of ringing howls as a second plane screamed across the sky and over David’s head. He expected another dusting of the spheres, and when it didn’t come he took the chance to run heavily up the road, slowly making his way past the annihilated homes and markets.

That was when he heard the fading howl begin to grow once more. The Patwa had turned in the air and was headed back. David felt his heart in his chest, like his boots on the gravel, pounding to escape. A flailing exhaust hose from a nearby building writhed and danced as it sprayed air in all directions.

David struggled to remember the geography of the city. He saw himself a bird, or the pilot of a Patwa that, unlike his own, had not been shot down over the open desert. Through these eyes he saw himself below, running helplessly up the street, a body thrown over his shoulder, the weight and heat dragging him closer with each step to the center of the world.

But ahead he managed to catch a view of the fountain. It still stood erect! Only the head was gone, as though some mighty hand had whacked it off.

And so he forced himself forward, feeling the reeling jets of the flyer coming up behind him. He looked back, saw it appear over the top of a gigantic soda billboard. It moved fluidly through the sky, a floating isosceles pivoting spontaneously overhead and letting drop a swarm of reflective orbs, each of which shot out on its violent trajectory at the speed of sound. By the time David heard the impact, it had already happened, and he had already felt Sam’s body inflate and burst before it pulled him down on top of itself.

He whipped his head around and caught sight of the spider legs piercing through the boy’s face from inside and shredding it completely apart with an unforgiving spin. The boy had been hit by nearly a dozen pieces of shrapnel, right in his face. And his eyes, nose and mouth were now all part of the same bloody crater. David couldn’t hold back his vomit and it spilled out onto his filthy tan uniform.

But the boy was still alive, still convulsing as though conducting electricity. And so, with the last ounce of self-control he could sum up, with whatever part of himself that couldn’t allow his own man to die, David crawled to his side, drew his knife, slashed a two inch gash across the boy’s throat, and, with a deep breath, put his own lips to the hole and began blowing.

Tears bled from his eyes as he pulled his mouth away, teeth red, and punched Sam in the chest repeatedly before continuing his futile resuscitation. With each of David’s breaths the boy shivered, and with each shiver the boy grew more still, until at last David found he was blowing air into a dead body.

David fell back to the ground. Never before had he known weariness like this. Never before had he known this kind of anger.

He saw a gang of American troops wash into the city as though the white foamy teeth of the ocean reaching in to shore. They moved silently through the streets, passing over those doors marked with blood and strategically positioning themselves at the corners from which they would have the best sight of any rebel movement.

Behind David’s eyes a fury grew deep and hot, a vicious, unsatisfied hatred. His fingers wrapped themselves around the handle of the automatic rifle slung across his chest. As he stood, his index slid along the curve of the trigger and stayed there poised.

David squinted in the hot white sun, set his sights on a band of soldiers, and, with an unhinged, prehistoric scream, tore down the street straight for them. He raised his rifle and prepared to unload when he suddenly locked eyes with one of the men, and almost at the instant he realized the complete panic in the soldier’s eyes David had been shot.

There was a moment of deafening silence, and it did not take David long to realize he had in fact actually lost his hearing. He collapsed. And, for the briefest of moments, just before the silhouettes of the American soldiers emerged from the burning sun and carried him away, he thought he saw a figure standing over him. It had the head of a bull and the body of a man.