1001 Nights Cast

He was a war correspondent for a provincial US news service stationed in the Tyre district. What emerged from the dust of his workplace was enlivened by the many friends at home who made fun for him by punning phonetically on the name of the city from which he reported. He was continually being bombarded with text messages such as ‘Isn’t it about time you retired?’ and ‘If you get a blow-out can you change the tire?’ All highly risible stuff. In fact, incoming missals were so frequent they were clogging up his cell phone and interfering with his livelihood. He knew his friends meant well, and appreciated the way they made light of such dangerous work, but did not wish to offend anyone. Instead, be bought himself a cheap rhyming dictionary on a flying trip to London.

This is surely the way to be a killjoy, he said, holding up the dictionary to the small group of schoolchildren to whom he taught English once a day. The school was constantly being relocated, and was currently situated in the shell of a bombed-out shoe factory. He stood up the front and talked, and when he needed to, he chalked the wall. The children sat on six long wooden stools arranged in the shape of a hexagon. He liked the children, they made his Iraq experience real for him. For all he knew they could have been the sons and daughters of insurgents, or insurgents themselves out to kill him and those like him. Not that it mattered to him. What did matter was that he could tell them anything and they would sit there and laugh and sing and cajole and joke with him.

The children called him ‘Jarhead’, because he looked somewhat like Jake Gyllenhaall, and loved his recital of ‘ire’ and were happy to chant along with him as if he were a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from a minaret: afire, backfire, barbed wire, bonfire, cease-fire, conspire, drumfire, Empire, expire, gunfire, hellfire, hot-wire, misfire, perspire, pismire, quagmire, rimfire, satire, spitfire, suspire, tightwire, umpire, vampire, wildfire. Waving the wand over each word chalked on the wall, he felt like a great conductor, these children the crowning achievement of his Iraq assignment.

And when he looked out over the heads of the chanting children he was reminded of his other great achievement there.

Over the road was a squat shed that looked like any shed in any light industrial area of any city or town. But it was here that he had unleashed all his repressed impulses. The building had been a sort of parapraxis.

He saw a truck with a tank on the back leaving the chemical factory one day and, rather than keeping the desire he had for US understanding of the Iraqi people open, he had unwittingly plugged the hole. He had transmitted a photograph of the truck leaving the factory with the caption reading ‘Weapon of mass destruction’. To his surprise, some television news agencies around the world picked up the story and claimed the truck as the lost weapons of mass destruction. He had his fifteen minutes of fame and then found himself, using the favourite word of one of his students, lammergeyer in Tyre.

He got his children composing ‘ire’ rhymes that he messaged to his friends, and instead of texting the usual news reports, he filed home reports of his students’ progress with the English language, which his friends were happy to corroborate. The war on terror was going badly and this diversion made him a minor celebrity on all the television breakfast news programs, and brought him another fifteen minutes of fame. Ernest Hemingway was a war correspondent with street credibility back home, so he filed ever wilder reports (that included pictures and writing samples), such as ‘Children learning Hemingway’s iceberg principle of writing’; ‘Children listening to Nick Adams stories’; ‘Children master paratactic style’; and ‘Children’s non-intrusive narratorial omniscience complete’. Most of this was true except for the detail, which belonged to the devil.

On the subject of this war on terror and US-Iraq relations he knew there could be no slow or fast waltz to understanding, yet he knew also that his was the more experienced desire, and in transmitting this desire he saw himself as a big two-hearted river of desire. When he read Indian Camp to the children, they saw only the chicken in the corner of history, and begged him to tell them stories about Cowboys and Indians. Instead he explained how the Indian-killers were no cultural heroes, just as the US soldiers in Iraq to some of them were not cultural heroes. His words, as he spoke them, terrified him, but he saw no other way around the pattern he took to be the truth. Other aspects of his teaching chilled him further. He would get them to write such simple and compound sentences as: ‘The two of them went out the door’; and, ‘George went back through the swinging door into the kitchen and untied Nick and the cook’; but they would write: ‘There is no God but Allah; and, The Imam Mahdi is about to appear and overthrow the enemies of Allah’. He could see through this pattern, and knew it was an article of faith for them, just as the US had its own articles of faith. He spoke to the children about patterns and faith and superstitions and, as they always did, they laughed and sang and cajoled and joked, wanting more exchange of rude dictionary words between the two languages, but he spoke his desire just the same.

When death, and his final fifteen minutes of fame came, they came in the afternoon, like a big two-hearted river of desire. He was at home in Tyre when the shell hit. They say the Islamic world tells only poetic and epic stories. The dramatic story about him was told in a flash.