ARTESIAN SPRING
NIGHTINGALE
Hey, faggot, that means you. Anal Andy, that means you. Toe cheese means you. Salute, you aborted worm. Here’s your mother fucking a nigger, ain’t you sorry you got his brains instead of his dick.”
Could be his mother. Big assed woman with stringy, dirt matted blond hair. His mother had a big ass. One of his uncles told him she liked it up the ass. They’d crash into the trailer about two a.m., after the bars closed, and they’d fuck or mostly vomit and yell, and she’d get slapped around a little, and he didn’t remember her too well, but what he did remember looked like this dyed blond taking it up the ass from a nigger. Her ass jiggled like this bitch’s, but how’d they get the film? They could do amazing things with digital editing, and they poured this shit through his heads-up helmet, hours of it and shitty music, waiting to fire it off to him when they read his pulse and respiration and knew he was sleeping. They monitored him from a bunker 300 feet under ground, and sent out these compacted messages, a millisecond quanta that computers in his Stealth Bomber expanded to hours, no way to turn it off. He was lying down; he could roll over if he unsnapped the harness that tied him to the hull so he wouldn’t be pulped by air turbulence or remote-controlled maneuvers, but he couldn’t sit. His helmet was wireless and adjusted to his position so the screen was always right side up. He didn’t do anything in the airplane. There were no windows and no controls.
He was chosen from a civilian laundry detail at the base because he was small. He hadn’t eaten too well when he was a kid. His mom wasn’t home much; she left him money to get something from McDonald’s, and sometimes she didn’t. He liked McDonald’s. Families came there, and sometimes the parents didn’t yell at the kids or yank them around or cuff them, and everyone would be happy for a while, and the place was bright and the plastic mold seat shinny. He took the Styrofoam trays back to the trailer and saved them. He liked their round edges and how light and easy they were on his fingertips, and he scratched wavy shapes in them with his thumbnail. He liked their prefab rooms for the round-edged, prefab food, well-ordered little houses, but they pretty much got jumbled around and lost their magic back at the trailer. Anyway, he stayed thin and small and they could fit him in these planes while the real pilots whose job had been reduced to not aspirating their own vomit, were all taking steroids and couldn’t fit. Besides, their planes still had windows or a canopy and for budget reasons they were still trained to fly even though all the controls inside the plane were placebos and they didn’t do any more than he did, but they had their pride or something, and he got the job. They put a bag over his head and twirled him around on some machine, and he didn’t puke, and then they put ear muffs on him and buried him in some hole for a week and he didn’t go crazy from boredom and claustrophobia, and then he was basically ready, after that week of sitting in dirty diapers and sucking food out of a straw, skills he would need for real missions, and were just like home for him.
This might be his first real mission or it might be his tenth. Since they flew the plane from the same bunker where they monitored him and there were no controls or windows, he might have bombed somewhere the first time he went up for twenty-four hours or how ever long it was. Same drill. Shitty music, videos, wisecracks on the radio. Down in their own hole, those guys had time to waste and put things together from the inter-net. They sent him videos of torture and animals being slaughtered. Sometimes they sent these videos that started with the seal of the Department of State or the Air Force, and some one would talk at him and he wondered if one of them was his father, kind of wished it but doubted they’d want to fuck his mother, but hoped one of them had because they didn’t piss every where or throw up, but he didn’t think you could just splice one of these guys onto a parking lot with his mom and put his dick in her in the right hole and get a kid content to sit in his own shit and piss for twenty-four hours, but he wished it, for the future, that he’d get that flat life for the second part of his existence.
Inside the plane the light never changed; LCD bands kept the coffin-sized space dim as a movie theater so the superfluous images on the visor of his helmet would be clearly visible. In theory, the images on his screen could have been used to pilot the plane. He was provided with rat bottles-bottles with a metal snout for sucking-filled with the same drink given to old people to make sure they ingested enough calories to not starve.
The Stealth “pilots” were housed in a separate barracks that would have been suitable for a moth hatchery. Behind thick black curtains in breathless warmth and twilight illumination, they were fed flavored pabulums spiked with vitamins and sedatives. They were monitored by nurses in baggy outfits and crepe-soled shoes, and encouraged to sleep between trips to the commode, until under cover of darkness they were driven blindfolded to the airplanes and strapped in. Naturally, the rest of the Air Force considered them diseased, and knew them only from the read outs of the electrodes pasted on their drowsy hearts and lungs. Just to pass time, they sent those nearly flat lined graphs the porno and snuff videos that kept them awake masturbating in their own sensory deprivation wells 300 feet underground.
In his capsule he passed over Mt. Ararat its snow glowing in the starlight and began his descent to four hundred feet where electronics would let the aircraft paint the topology, doubly hidden from radar by ridges, flying along river valleys until such time as another satellite spotting the target from a hundred and fifty mile orbit sent coordinates to the onboard weapons station, when the plane would bounce up, fire its Hellfire missiles, and dive back into cover. Beneath him were olive trees and stone villages with roofs like chef’s toques, and rivers and fields, and storks and cranes on the banks, horses in paddocks, goats in the fold, babies in small hammocks wrapped in cashmere blankets, and several couples making love so quietly in the rooms where their children slept that they heard the echo of his passage. But, this run was the real deal, and though he could have done nothing to interfere with the precise prosecution of this mission, he was not supposed to ever learn of it for security reasons, not even by the slight tipping an airplane experiences when a missile drops from its wing in preparation to firing, and therefore through his earpieces the Moonlight Sonata was playing, and slowly scrolling across his visor was a tapestry made from black and white air recon photos of the bombed out cities of Europe. Block by block the roofless, empty ruins passed below, the skeleton of a cathedral, a broken-backed bridge, a row of apartments with alluvial mounds of rubble in front of them, lifeless and bewitching, what only Orpheus had seen before, the cities of the moon, and meant to pass the deliverers of nuclear payloads-the original cargo these planes were meant to haul-into the kingdom we had won. But, he slept, lying on his stomach, and dreamed what lay above him, geese, olive leaves, and silent lovers, 400 feet above where he was buried.
”You’re dead, you dumb fuck. The god dam plane’s been hit”, and he woke to see an orchard of blast shattered trees on his visor, and then passed out and the plane plowed into the loam of an oxbow river, and the stars looked down on a strange black craft fallen like a chunk of ice from the roof of night.
They found him still unconscious, the helmet over his head and the ear- phones stuffed in his ears, in a black craft that looked evil and deformed and was without windows and they thought he was a victim of torture. He was pale and it looked as if he had never seen the sun and he smelled of shit and urine, and they took off his helmet and they saw things there that shook them and they put the helmet down and wouldn’t touch it again. They unhooked him from where he had been tied down and they lifted him out of his cell. He was light as a child and he slept like a child in their arms, boneless and trusting, and they guarded his sleep as you might a child because they thought with the helmet off this might be the first sleep he had since being captured and his dreams would be of heaven. But, they carried him to the river because he stank and took off his strange suit and then his diaper, and when they washed him he woke. His eyes were completely black, like a dying person’s, like an animal’s at night, but he wasn’t startled. He let them wash him without any struggle. The waters of this river meandered and the slow, shallow current was warm. In daylight you could see mineral colors in the water, mostly the tawny color of the bare earth, along with a glitter of pyrites, and when you put your hand in it to drink, your hand looked golden, and there was no reason to doubt the bible: you were made of golden mud. Under the starlight his white skin was lunar, and the water ran off him. There was an optical illusion in it; he faded in and out of sight, as if the water both dissolved him and limned him, and he was seen more clearly from the corner of their eyes. They thought he looked ghostly and alone.
They were not the ones who had shot him down. That had been another shepherd with an Enfield rifle, and his had been the lucky shot in a string of shots aimed at the stubby, bat-like craft as it dipped down to the ludicrous and arrogant altitude of 250 feet, and the even more vain speed of eighty knots, porpoising its nose a thousand times a minute to maintain lift, flaps aflutter, flying to specifications, invisible to radar, even top imaging radar from satellites, but one great big ripe tomato-polypropylene hull that absorbed radar but shattered on impact with a stone-to a shepherd with an Enfield rifle passed along to him from his grandfather to his father-a beauty with a rosewood stock, the real McCoy, not a Pakistani imitation, but taken from a dead Brit at the Khyber Pass. The plane had whooshed down the valley panicking the river birds into screeching, honking, gyring flight. The whole valley heard their alarm, and there it was at eye level if you were on a shallow bluff, a difficult shot to make if you tried to lead it, but if you had heard the other shots semaphoring its position and had the big cartridge already levered into the chamber, and if Allah guided your hand, then just one shot that actually collided into the craft would completely jumble the computer legerdemain that kept this cardboard box airborne.
His rescuers walked single file. They moved rapidly. Their pace was geared to their animals, and on flat ground they walked with a long, seemingly leisure stride, leisure in its gaited swing, in its generous economy beginning with a swivel in their hips, but the rapid recovery of the forward leg masked the distance of the arc, and miles were sewn together from yard long splices. Uphill, they dug in like a man ascending a stairway, attacking the slope at every step, ignoring short respites that would break the momentum they had gained from will and resolution. Down hill they compounded the advantage they had gathered in the climb by high step prancing down the zigzagging goat trails, commuting velocity to an integral calculus, parsing it in such a way that at full flight with gravity at their back, they could stop on a dime, and this way they had put several miles between themselves and the downed craft when the Predator drone unleashed two Hellfire missiles that reduced it to goop.
They carried him to the mullah in their village. It would have been difficult to guess his age. Maybe, in his twenties with beard and lock of hair from under his burnoose already gray from study and responsibility, or in his forties with the unlined face of a twenty-year old, given a divine exemption from aging. Colorful rugs covered the floor and washed a few feet up the walls. There were cushions for sitting; guests were welcome at any time. Shelves were molded into the whitewashed walls, on them were books and crockery.
What were they to do with him, they asked? His nakedness had been covered with a cloth, and they set his rubber shoes beside him where they had laid him down, still in the deep sleep he had wrapped around himself in their arms. His flight suit they had tossed back into the plane; he would not want this reminder of cruelty, but the peculiar shoes they removed before his bath, shoes still chaste because they were useless for a bound man; they thought he must have brought them with him when he was captured and were a comfort to him.
The mullah passed his hands over him; it looked as though he were playing a stringed instrument. “He is a blessing. He has been violated by a beast.”
The mullah gave him a name, “Nightingale fallen from the nest”. He would not know its meaning for months, but he knew it was for him, and it was a pretty sound, and besides cock sucker, shit head, and mother fucker, it was the longest string of syllables ever given to him. There were other names the mullah could have given him, but none perhaps with a sweeter tune. It was meant for a girl, but it would absolve him of his first destiny and hide him from pursuit. The language of the region sounded melodic to the outsider. The people believed it had been given to them by the geniis of the streams, the rain, the wind, the animals, and mountain echoes. The men were said to speak from the lungs of a horse, the women from the throats of birds, and there was a distinct dimorphism between the sexes. In the military the men and women swallowed their words, rusting their throats, and they could not be told apart. When they fucked they were said to be making the two-backed beast. Here, they created a winged horse, and this chimera could fly into the realms of song where souls are created and retrieve the unborn baby. Hopefully, giving a man with a lost soul a woman’s name, after learning to speak it, he might reclaim his.
The mullah left him with his children to learn childish things and begin again. He baked bread with the women, and like a child was given the first piece to eat while it was still warm and fragrant and filled with memories. The dough was unleavened; the women twirled it on their fingertips till it was as large as a pizza, but paper thin, and then it was laid on the outside of the clay oven that was shaped like an egg, and it baked quickly and was done when bubbles and blisters popped up. The oven sat on the dirt floor of the courtyard. The courtyard was swept every day with short-handled straw brooms, and toddlers would always volunteer for this work; they were eager to join in the magic of labor, to marry tools that were animate to them. Nightingale joined them, and pushed a scrabble to the road, intent on the tumbling pebbles, dry leaves, threads, hairs, and determined bugs that made up the lowest, autonomous inch of the world.
The family ate in the courtyard and remained outside after nightfall, sitting near the charcoal-burning oven to keep warm. He would step back into the shadow, like a child, looking in at the world that had been there before him, the faces pumpkin-colored from the glow of embers, occasionally his eyes stinging from the wafting, invisible smoke, hearing their voices aloft in the dark like the smell of bread, and he could look through the voices to the nearby stars.
The people had a sacred dialect separate from the Arabic of the Koran, and much as they loved the filigree of Arabic, they wrote this language in their own script whose origins in the body they remembered without needing convincing. Although it was a blasphemy, this language was said to have created the world, and because it still did, it was necessary to speak it beautifully to spare the world from ruin. Phonemes were tied to tones, and there was no dissonant word that had lasted, still the speaker had to arrange his sentences so a melody was created. A speaker could never know at the outset what existence would be intoned by his sentence, only that the secret would reveal harmony. Nightingale listened from the shadows to the language that had descended from that original song.
The steaming lentils and yams put at the center of the dining mat were too hot for him to touch, and one of the women would have to fill his bread for him. This made the mullahs youngest children laugh, but they took him under their wing because he was too foolish to be left alone. The village was on the slopes of Mt. Ararat. The children lead him stumbling up the mountain in his rubber soled flight boots, ranging ahead of him and then coasting back like companionable dogs. One little girl held his hand. She was dressed like a miniature woman, but her thick black hair was left loose, and everything about him made her giggle, like a string of chimes falling from her throat.
It looked as if he could make the top; the air was transparent except for a scarf of clouds clinging to the summit. There was nothing to stop him; just push up from the village, ridding the wave of land that floated the houses, and like a resting seagull or a dory paddled out from harbor, be carried to the crest. Though the land had not changed in any perceptible way, within an hour of his halting climb, concentric black rings veiled the foreshortened distance; he had nearly fainted from his effort in altitude. The children pulled him down the slope and shepherded him to a canyon. A ropey waterfall dropped into the cleft and the children took him to the pool it had lathed. The little girl daubed water on his forehead and temples, and he drank from the green-gold pool. Answering an instinct, he looked up and saw an ibex studying him from the glistening crags, but he had no idea what he was looking at, its purchase on the rocks spilled him, it was the sharpness of its hooves etching it onto a bas-relief in the flat vertical. Something lifted inside his throat; or he might have been grabbed at the ankles by the ground and a lump shaken from his craw. The ibex had a lyre of horns. It was his first unicorn, the first creature to rise from a reflection in his heart.
He was eighteen. He had been plucked from a civilian laundry detachment at the air base because no pilot wanted to be the pigeon in a cruise missile, but he was eighteen if given the chance, and he was in love. She was the mullah’s sixteen-year old daughter. She may not have loved him, but Arab girls always seem to love you unless they have become wives. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were rosy. He was shy and dreamy, clumsy, with everything he was trying to learn, and mute. He had yet to smile, and such a figure might have provoked any girl, but an Arab girl is a creature of myth and mischief, and within the separation of the sexes has more commandments of femininity put on her than a Western girl. Inside her loose garments, the same loose pants the men wore, tied at the ankle, she swayed with a limber waste, and balancing well water on her head made her regal. When she sat or lazed on the pillows, she was as luxuriously comfortable as a cat. Of course, she knew he loved her; wasn’t he so intoxicated with her he had forgotten how to speak?
She baked alongside him, and her sleeves were rolled back above her elbows, and blue veins were drawn on the white skin. Her voice was a garland. When she knew he was watching, she would make shapes in the dough, kneading the dough like a goat’s teat, and he blushed. With his pale cheeks he could have lit a room. Her mother scolded her, but laughed with her. The book of magic in their own language, a book of songs derived from Genesis, was for women, and praised ripeness. Willowy and nimble, she still brushed against him, and even stumbled into him on the flat courtyard.
To the world, these people were Moslems, but Noah was more important to them than Mohammad. Eden was not far away. They believed that what was possible in Eden was still possible here. Noah had redeemed forsaken mankind, and landing on Mt. Ararat, Genesis began again. They believed they were especially chosen to protect the first covenant Allah had made with mankind when His spirit in the form of a dove offered Noah the olive branch.
Resting higher on the shoulders of the mountain than its neighbors, the village was chosen for weddings. The bride came from a village famous for making musical instruments. The two villages were historical rivals. Since all the villages were rivals the seminal reason for this particular enmity had been forgotten, leaving the field open for speculation and renewal. As good a motive as any other was the traditional separation between those who come to specialize in fabrication and those who actually employ musical instruments, with both considering themselves the purer in worship. It is a spiritual and philosophical divide worthy of slaughter to underline. On one side, the craftsmen who had earthly proof that essence resided in objects, and on the other, the musicians, afflicted with the corpus, who sought delivery into transparency, or barred from that, to be waterlogged with the viscera of light. This is probably too airy a notion to keep the blood warm, and though Nightingale had no language to be privy to gossip, and marriages between the surrounding villages were the rule, each hamlet knew by proud slander that the women down the road were insatiable: a provocation to serenade, filling the moon glazed paths, but fodder for jokes as well.
The route up the mountain was familiar to every clan, and each knew the acoustical tricks of the gullies and ravines, and the invading party had sent out sorties of tunes from a long way off. Now, they would have to answer for it. The men were dressed in cavalry clothes: tight purple vests with gold buttons and billowy-sleeved shirts, with the softest kid leather boots that turned up slightly at the toes. They ran out to meet the trespassers who were identically clad except their vests were pink. They paired off, wrapping together their right arms and clenching hands, while their left arms were bent behind them holding daggers sheathed in the small of their backs. Eye to eye they spun, kicking their heels in the air, faster and faster until they could make a turn in the air without touching down. Then they unlocked arms and walked away looking down at the ground, pondering the outcome of the battle. Suddenly the women started to ululate, and the two mullahs charged into the no-man’s-land between the armies with fierce expressions on their faces. Just before they must have slammed into each other like rams, they kicked their right legs straight over their heads and their raised boots met at the heel. Thus joined, agility and athletic prowess put in service to an awkward outcome, they turned a slow revolution. Their soldiers observing the extreme satire that preserved pride mutates into, be it beautiful in its ornate pathos and to its own lights, pride of youth, celibacy, or private revelation, clapped their hands and started to whirl and leap, pink vest grabbing purple vest, dust rising in the square, and the music began, tambourines, balilikas, drums and pipes, and Nightingale’s village self-proclaimed as “singing the birds from the trees”, but in their language as “shaming grief into dance”, surrendered to marriage. The outsider might have been excused for thinking that the wars in this country were only meant to disguise for cloudy eyes the re-entry into Eden. And the music that constituted their armories had long since been traveled and re-traveled the distances that grieved them, and all that was left in them was immediate, how ever long in a day, or however long in a lifetime, it will take for Adam and Eve to find themselves together again. The outsider might have wondered as well how long before a mullah’s rusting hips force him into retirement, or if such calisthenics might preserve him, even explain a youthful face beneath a crown streaked with gray.
The villagers joined hands and moved in a circle, men and women, everyone dressed in bight colors, and the young people eyed each other, because in the circle and in the music they were all beautiful and they could feel a whole soul just in the palm of the hand in theirs.
The groom will arrive on horseback. He will wear a loose white shirt with the collar open because his heart is so full. He will dance with each of the mullahs, and as if they are testing his knowledge of a passage from the Koran, they will compose dances that he must repeat. And then he will add to them, and the mullahs together will follow him, and then he will dance alone. The bride will soon arrive, also on horseback, accompanied by her parents. She is garlanded with flowers and wears bracelets of bells, and her eyes are drawn with kohl. In her dance her feet never leave the ground, and her eyes are not supposed to either, but she has seen the groom and raises them and everyone caught in her glance is in love. The mullah’s daughter catches the Nightingale-who-has-fallen-from-the-nest, and she is reciting passages from the Book of Voices, the Bible in her own language. He is like her shadow; without holding him he adheres to every movement in her dance, and though he can’t speak the language, with her hand flat against his, he is tailored by the verses, each one drawing calligraphy in the air with his body. The stranger might wonder what is being written by these two: “In the beginning” or as it translates in their own language, “I have always loved you.”
After their dance at the wedding they would walk to the fields together. Nightingale had a surer step since the dance, but his pallor looked destined to never leave him. A walk, then, through the deeply pleated village, where a house easily within hailing distance might still require a plunge into a shadowy chasm to reach, we see the mullah’s daughter in her baggy pants, pointy shoulders of a young girl, a rolled cloth diagonal across her chest, bread inside, a papoose not long from the oven, warm against her nipple. Hers is the long caliper stride of the region, pivoting both hips on her slim waist. A village beauty, glowing eye and cheek, nearly androgynous in her loose clothes, not just for gender but age as well, and the greater mystery because of it. A woman is by sphere and buried bone linked and likely for birthing children, for rescuing them from the flood and bringing them to earthly harbor, but this figure on the ridge ambidextrous in time, apposite and timeless, is likely to reel in sprites and geniis, those kites of the elements flying in archaic pastures. She is trusted by the mullah, wisely trusted the consensus may have been, with this, well, hatchling, trusted with his fledging. He walks with the unconscious hauteur of a two-year old, given to the mullah to name and she to engrave, whether blessing or not, who is to say, but he’s odd enough to remain forever a stranger in this world, and so directly under Allah’s eye and a test of their submission to His will, and the villagers do not say the rune against the evil eye, but instead feel a bubble of happiness inside when these figures pass, happiness for all that is still united and crowned by youth.
Down the rumpled cloak of lava threading their steps on the trail, they reach the flatlands where the river’s banks are shallow and the waters spill over each spring. The river is low now, it’s summer, and they wade through it barefoot, hand in hand, sandals or flight boots in the other, their bare feet sinking into furry bogs, rocking against each other as they slide and lurch on curried stones. The water is too placid to kick up separate voices, a murmur subsiding into a sigh, musing under its breath. The current teases at their ankles, no more than the friction of syrup, a maple color. The fields on both banks are irrigated by channels fed through sluices opened by wooden slats. The farmers wear white, and their skin looks fresh brown against the cloth, and shinning like bread crust. Some wear turbans, but many go bareheaded, their hair black and stormy. They seem settled here, but it is not in their nature to be clodhoppers; their patience seems the fruit of grace, as if they are balancing in the space between actions. Grace fits snugly inside them; whatever they do it epitomizes itself, its paragon flush with them, a peel could not have been wedged between them.
They grew wheat and buckwheat and rye. There were apricot and fig trees and pomegranates. He had never seen fruit growing and found it too much to believe. Men cast nets for fish; a sizzle when the web hit the water, but still a metronome of peace. The mullah’s daughter shook out her hair, it was too much to believe. His heart might stop. The anklet of surface tension as they skated over egg-shaped stones, the electric lift of hairs on his shins. He could look at one reed, the green strummed through it; the arriving green held him, he could barely turn away, and there were thousands and all of them were appearing. He always wanted to sleep. Why, when maybe he was forgetting to blink? Let everything in him rise to the lip and don him as theirs. The fig trees had large leaves, the trunks were white and the golden figs appended to arthritic branches like cocoons of sap. Golden figs, orange-gold apricots, black figs, black raisins, were drying on long tables, ribbons of color. The scythes advanced in a staggered line so no one would be cutting where someone else had to stand. The wheat fell in regiments. A totaling of the strokes against the dry stalks, their geometric incision, its weightless, winged orbit; the throat of the ringing holds, a fermata, the action suspended outside time. Birds would have been at the fruit and had to be startled off in flocks leaving an undertow of sound, a rush of vacuum scooped by hundreds of wings, and their breasts flashed and they wheeled.
She led him onto long spits in the middle of the river where the storks measured off begrudging steps as they gave ground. She shook out her hair. The sun and moon kissed. The circle was inscribed in him up to the brim.
The journalist’s name was Vanessa Graves. She had starred as a journalist in one of her movies. It was the death knell for her career as a romantic lead, but her talent had always exceeded those tender roles, and this part had not so much inspired her as suited her. She was tall and bony and her large eyes were deep set. She had broad, square shoulders and her voice had a husky timbre. As a journalist, a half-head taller than most people she interviewed, with fame of her own, she got the stories others might not have gone after; a handsome woman with idealized aristocratic bearing, a lush chortle and plenty of barracks humor to melt the ice.
Menopause was an imposition. She had conquered menstruation, choked it down to an allergy. A runny nose never stopped anybody, but now this snotty nose was proving to have long, gnarled roots, extending from brittle, gray hair to scalloped toenail. She took the offensive.
She dared herself into action and confrontation. No more celebrity interviews that exploited the residual of her glittery fame. She would be a foreign correspondent.
She wore a burnoose and her green eyes shown from the shadow. She had an actor’s training in appearances and poise. She abstracted the carriage of a Bedouin and walked to her full height, the perfect clothes horse for Arab garb. However, like all citizens of industrialized nations, she had invested machines with her life. Her voice clattered from the top of her throat, far distant from her heart and lungs, and meant she could not feel anything or be trusted. When she spoke no one could hear birds or children. They named her “boom”, because where she was, nothing else remained.
She rather adored them, transcendently, with divine contempt. The boys in the fields, their stormy hair, brown limbs and their rightness in the place; in her heavy boots she trampled seedlings as she crossed the fields to see them. They were singers. As shepherds they seemed to sing constantly, and she could see them singing whenever they were near water but too distant to hear. She thought they looked like Byron and hoped Allah would spare them peace so they might be killed while still beautiful and chaste.
And then she caught sight of Nightingale.
She spotted him in the kitchen, really more of an alcove opening into the courtyard. A tumble of children, plumy-eyed babies in wee hammocks sucking their toes, women with double chins and fat wrists stirring pots or cooing at the infants or shrieking generously when a toddler appeared from under a rumpled blanket, a domestic scene she steeled herself to tolerate, until the rumpled blanket purled off exposing Nightingale.
If all his senses were not busy harvesting it might have been an imposition to have children cover him with a blanket and while chortling, squirm all over him. But, there is so much savoring in the blanket den, the smells of the kitchen, spices from Persia and baking bread, and small, stout bodies, taut pot bellies and silky hair, a swarming of smooth skin, laughter, squeals and faces rubbed against yours, their occasional sudden fainting into sleep with its reckless trust and a perking steam-kettle breathing, the little body burrowed into his chest.
What idiot delight was transparent in that unlined face. Expressions of love and patience, and unearned joy showered on a mole. Vanessa would have to forget a lifetime to even imagine the horizons to this joy. It was grotesque, cruel even, this surrender of experience required to gain what this deformed creature was given. So, damn this figure now, buried in children, that he is rewarded for his simplicity with all this boundless in an eggshell.
Her interview with the mullah follows. She sits uncomfortably on the floor but her mind is elsewhere. Already, she is finished with this country. She has decided that in that idiot she has seen the heart of these people. The bare rooms, the crude tools, the mindless fertility, the endless repetition of eventless days, degeneration is the axle around which their hearts turn. Drilling deeper and deeper into complacent defeat, they have found the artesian spring and from it drink the pure water of obliteration and are filled with joy.
Nightingale and the mullah’s daughter had gone to the well; Vanessa and her cameraman found them as they left the interview. “Who are you”, Vanessa asked him, and the sound of her voice caused him to piss on himself. It had been months since he heard his native tongue.
“A mother fucker”, he obediently answered.
Vanessa never completed her documentary. She went on to document childhood prostitution or maybe it was the absurd fate of retired racehorses, but at this point her story diverges from Nightingale’s, except that her agent pedaled the unorganized footage to an American firm, a small, liberal company that figured some value attached to her name and accent. Nightingale’s brief moment of confession made it into the erratic documentary they spliced together from tailings on different cutting room floors. It was hard to make much sense out of his presence, but his colloquialism gave a contemporary frisson that couldn’t be passed up. Products of the left wing were constantly under scrutiny. This film, probably never circulated, certainly no review of it exists, fell into some agencies hands (we must not rule out its being included in a bankruptcy packaging, a liquidated asset) where a bell went off at the sight of Nightingale. It was decided he had deserted, and as his language proved, was on the way to embarrassing the military.
In the village they heard the nearly silent crackling of the air a fighter-bomber pushes ahead of it at 100 knots below Mach 1, but few were left to relay that story.
He was deaf for a week afterwards. Blood leaked out of his ears and nostrils, and he coughed it up and pissed it out. His clothes were tattered, his shoes ripped off. Rubble and the obdurate dead had moved in; the other village had been shoved into the silence.
From then on, they saw him on the slopes of Mt. Ararat. He never came down. His hair grew long and tangled, his skin remained pale and was scratched and his feet dripped blood on the stones.
He spoke to echoes. Rocks, the most unyielding of substances return the most haunting ghosts of longing. No one knew what he was saying, but because love had destroyed him they did not consider him mad. The mullahs said he might be told to build an ark, or a dove might give him an olive branch. The children watched him, waiting for the answer.
