From Baghdad with Love by Jay Kopelman (a court of thorns and roses ebook free .TXT) 📕

comparison to now when I’m afraid of everything including the voice on my computer announcing new mail.

I think the pacing is what’s getting to me. The back-and-forth unearths all kinds of radioactive crap I don’t want hanging around. Like a lot of faces. Weird, dreamy faces. Faces of stray dogs I fed at the Syrian border. Faces of embedded journalists in Fallujah with terror dripping down them like sweat. Faces of Iraqis smashed into the street like ripe banana meat under your boot and the question of whether a face is really a face if there’s no one home behind it.

Mostly, though, faces of people who risked their lives to try to save Lava. They bother me the most. I think we all let the mangy little flea-bitten refugee get to us—as if love were some sinister germ intent on infection—and now that we’ve all been bitten by the contagion, now that it comes down to the end, now that all other roads of escape are closed for good, I feel I owe it to them to make sure Lava gets out alive.

Maybe the little shit is dead already. Or maybe they didn’t make it through and he’s now lost on the streets of Baghdad wondering where everybody went. I pray that if Lava doesn’t make it through, he’ll find a body somewhere in Baghdad to keep him alive for just one more day.

Which brings me to the last part of my confession: I want Lava to stay alive. No matter how bad things get, it’s still better to be alive. I want to know he’s breathing and leaping after dust balls and chasing imaginary enemies in his sleep. I want him to be alive, because then there’s still hope that he’ll make it here to California and get to be an American dog who runs on the beach and chases the mailman instead of strangers with guns. I want him to be alive almost more than anything I can think of, which feels like a confession, because before Lava, I was a Marine who wasn’t required to cross any lines with alive on one side and dead on the other. I carried a rucksack full of coupons redeemable towards absolution. Now, after meeting Lava and letting fear in, I feel distantly related to a serial killer.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

April 2005

So this is fear. This is what it all comes down to: waiting for an ­e-mail.

Fear’s got nothing to do with pain or eternal damnation or existence that’s been canceled. There are no improvised explosive devices in this arena. No trip wires or vulnerable porta-shitters or sandstorms that take your chopper down.

Your own death has nothing much to do with it in the end. Ask anyone who’s been there—the beheaded, the burned, the blown to bits—I bet they’d give you an earful. Death, buddy, is death. Slit, boom, bang. One minute you’re alive; the next minute you’re dead, and once that happens, once you finally experience what you’ve worried about all your life, that’s it. There’s nothing else to worry about.

It’s just all the in-between stuff. All the waiting.

At the NPR compound, Ben Gilbert puts Lava in a vehicle with the ABC cameraman. They hide Lava (in ways that can’t be detailed), because no animals are allowed to pass from the Red Zone into the Green.

Security around the Green Zone is cinched tighter than usual after a United Nations report indicated “irregularities” with the election, demonstrations raged, and insurgents fired mortar rounds into the Green Zone’s concrete barrier. If they get to the checkpoint, and the driver doesn’t look right, the vehicle is the wrong color, if Lava so much as farts, it’s all over.

The vehicle takes off. Sam waves good-bye.

Meanwhile, across the city, a roadside bomb kills three Iraqi policemen and wounds five, a car bomb kills seven people and wounds nine, and more mortar rounds are launched into the Green Zone.

And I’ve gotten to wondering, as I sit here and wait for the e-mail to arrive, if that’s what the suicide bombers tell themselves—that their lack of control over death makes everything but death a waste of energy. I mean, to blow yourself up has got to hurt, right? Even if it’s only for a fraction of a second, there is still that fraction of a second to look forward to when your skin tears away from your bones and your brain goes one way and your toes go another and every form of torture devised by man comes together in one single fraction of a second that you’ve been hardwired to avoid since sperm met egg. But they do it anyway. They disconnect their own internal wiring and pull the detonator anyway.

And, I mean, you gotta ask: Why?

I figure they just get tired of waiting.

The vehicle speeds through the streets of the Red Zone without stopping as a videotape is posted on the Internet showing three Iraqis being executed for working for the US military and as a memo is released to the press indicating that a top US commander in Iraq authorized illegal interrogation tactics that included using military guard dogs to “exploit Arab fear of dogs.”

The rest of us, we just pace back and forth, check our e-mail, stare at the computer, and worry about what’s being arranged for us in some other galaxy. We wait. We worry. We wait.

The vehicle inches forward through the checkpoint line. Exhaust and heat vapors marbleize the air. The driver stares forward. The cameraman counts rolls in the concertina wire outside his window.

Over on the other side of town, dozens of insurgents attack the Abu Ghraib prison with car bombs and rocket-propelled grenades just as the US National Guard announces back home that it is easing restrictions on recruitment and now accepts anyone with at least a ninth-grade education.

Wait.

David Mack stands at the drop-off point in the Green Zone under