Afgantsi

“You want to put a bullet or two into him in the first ten seconds – if you don’t, you might fall in love with him and then you won’t do it at all.”  (The Bullet)

A vast planet-wide incomprehensible fucking machine

every terminal wears her face.

Re-entry

We are pulling out of the alien dimension – pass through a thin layer of cold mud and spurting blood and jagged sawing steel – “oh yeah, there’s this as well” – but it is only a surprisingly thin layer of the many worlds…

Desultory deathdance

Toy plastic skeleton hanging in the window, swaying and spinning in the breeze. Hazard lights on the street-sweeping truck outside cast a strobing jerkily dancing shadow-puppet on the wall.

Gripped by deja vu

Almost vertiginous, a momentary dizziness.

I was desperately trying to remember where I had had this moment before.

But of course I couldn’t remember, it hadn’t happened yet.

“There was method to her madness.”
“Entirely. It was the presence of method that made her mad.”

The fog of war

Castro was in the bathroom, hiding from his wife and doing a line of heroin. I was on the phone to Nippon TV.

“Do you speak English?”

“Hai,” said a female voice.

That was what they all said. She was the third tier of secretary-receptionist and I had already been on the phone for twenty minutes. They all knew how to speak English, but then didn’t. “Well, ah… Could I speak to Mr Kurosawa, please? The international news editor?”

Some rapid-fire Japanese. Then: “Kurosawa-san? You like to speak to Mr Kurosawa-san?” The incredulity in her tone of voice conveyed the idea that Mr Kurosawa-san was an incredibly important man and one quite simply couldn’t call up like this out of the blue and expect to speak to him.

She put me through to a lady called Yui instead, and I started on the same story I had already told ABC, NBC, Sky, BBC, ABC (Australia), TVE, TV France, Doordarshan and God knows who else. Castro and I had been working the phone in shifts from his kitchen without stopping for 24 hours.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the overall military commander of the Talibn was killed yesterday. We have a video interview, the first one he gave specifically directed at a Western audience. It was recorded 24 hours before he died. Might you be interested?”

The Japanese bought it, too.

A week earlier, I had dropped in on Castro because he had called me up, asking for a favour. I was sick, sick, sick. I hadn’t taken any heroin for two months, and I had been steadily reducing doses of buprenorphine every three days, down from 20mg to 0.8, 0.4, 0.2, 0. The withdrawals didn’t hit me until the very last days, but then the doctor put me onto lofexidine. Good stuff. Doesn’t get you high, but combats the physical symptoms and makes things bearable. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any at the pharmacy and had to order it in.

So I had gone to see Castro covered in a stinging, clinging, toxic sweat, to discover he needed to borrow money. Our man in Pakistan had come up with something really cool, super exclusive, but we needed to front him a couple thousand dollars. So I went to the bank to empty my account, cursing and sweating and shivering as I waited to get to the teller.

It was a couple nights later and the video hadn’t come through yet when Castro called me in the middle of the night to say “He’s dead”. Dead? Yep, special forces op. Dead dead. No tape. Sorry about your money, I’ll try and pay it back somehow.

He called me again early in the morning. “We got the video!”

It was too much to be coincidence. The whole might of the US and NATO military machines had been hunting our one-legged mullah for five years, and now they had finally got him.

“They followed Kabir back, isn’t it? It has to be… But… that means we killed him!”

“And you paid for it!” We collapsed into hysterical lunatic laughter.

There was no question about it, we decided later on over breakfast. They had followed the trail of the tape back and found  him. Castro had already scored and went into the cafe toilet to do his medicine and I washed down another few valium blues and pink lofexidines with coffee. We waited for the translator to get back to us with a transcript and followed the story developing on the wires and the internet. Mullah killed. British SBS. Helicopter-borne forces had surrounded him on the road from Quetta to Kandahar and taken him out. No, it was Americans, a Predator. No, a rival faction had sold him out. No, he wasn’t dead at all, he was in Iran, it was his cousin who was dead. As the story spread among those watching and interested, like ripples on a pond, at first rumour and then deliberate disinformation were introduced into the story. Within hours, a dozen-odd equally plausible equally internally consistent theories had taken form and begun to fight each other viciously.

Normally interviews with these jihadi types are never as interesting as they sound, but this was pretty good stuff. Our proxy Kabir, furnished with a list of questions we had passed him, was actually shaking with fear at points in the interview – we could tell from his voice. Our one-legged mullah was a vicious torturing killer with a reputation for beheading accused “spies” on the slightest provocation.

“Are you involved in the poppy or heroin trade? Do you finance your activities using the poppy trade?”

“This is a question you will have to address to the farmers. We know nothing of growing poppy. If the farmers wish to provide us with zakat from their profits from poppy, this is nothing to do with us.”

“But in the West it is said that you finance jihad using the proceeds from the heroin business, which causes much suffering to the people? Can you say whether there is any truth in this or not?”

“This is not something I can speak about. The West has nuclear bombs – and this thing, poppy and heroin, it is like nuclear weapons for us. So it is not a thing I can speak about.”

“Are you planning attacks in the West? And do you have Western recruits in your ranks?”

“With the grace of God, we will execute attacks in the West. We will make their women and children weep like our women and children have wept, we will make them feel fear like we have felt fear. And indeed, thanks be to God, we have some mujahideen in our ranks who have come from the West.”

There were a few good clips in there for the buttefly minds in the media and their 10-second attention spans, so we got on the phone and started calling people up. On a rolling schedule – Castro, despite being a junkie, was a family man and kept regular hours, whereas I was in the throes of the nightmarish insomnia of the recently ex-junkie and stayed up all night. Besided this, I was effectively homeless and staying, mostly, with my ex-wife, a less than ideal arrangement. After he retired to bed, I stayed on the phone to time zones on the other side of the world, smoking joints, until finally tiredness overcame me and I collapsed onto the sofa in the living room.

Up again at 6am, coffee and valium for me, and off in search of his dealer before it was time to take the kids to school. 48 hours later, we had covered every time zone in the world, sorted out the sub-titles and the file-transfer problems, provided background interviews, ironed out the little details, closed all the deals, and Castro’s wife was fed up of finding me in my ever-so-elegant but stinking clothes sleeping on the sofa every morning with an ashtray perched precariously on my chest and an empty wine bottle on the floor. And so we closed the operation.

And that’s how we killed the man. He was a real cunt and he deserved it.

I will never understand

Ice cubes clink in my glass of scotch and cigarette smoke rises. There is a hazy moon far above the sparkling lights of the modern highrises that loom around us. Across the plastic table on the dark roof terrace most of the girl’s face is shadowed by dark hair, but light falls on her lips. She licks them and I feel her watching me. To the left, the blond Swede pours himself more vodka, leans back in his chair, and launches on another inconsequential story about some ex-girlfriend.

I hadn’t expected to end up here tonight. It was meant to be just a quick beer with Fernanda, the lady from the office who wanted to practise her English. Suddenly there was a crowd of her friends around, and more drinks being unloaded from trays onto tables, and then it was one o’clock and we were all queueing to pay our bills. The girl, some friend of a friend of a friend, had come up to us and demanded “Well how about oral sex then?” Fernanda had smiled and looked away, her friend the Swede had given a nervous laugh, and I had shrugged and said “Ok, let’s go.” We were all without a ride, so she offered to drive us. We dropped Fernanda off at home. The Swede wanted to go home as well, but being new here wasn’t sure exactly how, so the three of us had gone back to her place for a few more drinks.

With a start I realise I am thinking about war again, tanks roaring over broken ruins and helicopters spitting rocket-fire and endless miserable refugee camps in the desert, while my empty stare has been resting on her breasts and her bare foot is resting in my lap. The Swede is looking at me, but I haven’t been listening to the conversation and don’t know what has been said. I make a non-commital sound of agreement and reach for another cigarette.

We are onto some sort of life-philosophy, now, all of us cursed with the privilege of freedom and not knowing what to do with it. The Swede launches on another story, and I lapse back into autistic reverie.

“…and he’s 62 years old, you understand? He’s had a successful career as a diplomat, lived in London for most of his life, owns places in Stockholm and in Rio and in England… So he got back from his walk, but he was still sighing heavily and looking worried and shaking his head and muttering to himself. So I finally asked him, dad, I said, what’s wrong? You’re obviously worried about something. And he sat down and he said to me, son, I have no idea what I want to do with my life.”

“I will be 30 in two weeks,” the girl says. “And I will know then what it is to do.”

There is silence as we all contemplate this, a silence that stretches and no one seems inclined to fill. I know what I should have done, I should have gone to the goddamn wars… Everything, but goddamn everything, seems so inconsequential and banal when you’re not playing for ultimate stakes.

Suddenly the girl lurches to her feet, announces it is time to go in, and starts weaving towards the roof-terrace door. The Swede gets up to follow her.

I finish my cigarette, collect the bottles and glasses from the table and head downstairs after them. I find her sprawled on the sofa, music plays on the stereo, and the Swede, obviously drunk, leans uncertainly against the dining room table. I flop down onto the sofa next to her, put a hand on her leg, stroke her inner thigh. The Swede seems to feel uncomfortable, finally comes to a decision, declares he is leaving to find a taxi. We nod good bye, she pours more wine, I pour more whiskey, we sprawl on the sofa against each other. She snuggles her head into my shoulder and appears to fall asleep.

I sip my drink, listen to the music, drift. But still, the tanks are roaring through my head and air-raid sirens are howling.

She lifts her head from my shoulder and, almost by reflex, I lean to kiss her lips. She turns her face away. “What’s my name?” she demands.

I have to think a moment. “Jessica” I say, almost triumphantly.

“Very good!” she says and holds her hand up to high-five. I squeeze her hand and she brings my fingers to her lips. I touch her lips, push my fingers in her mouth, deep. Then I am pulling her shirt open and her bra down to expose God help me but what perfect breasts. I have my hand between her legs, stroking her pussy through her jeans, can feel her heat and moisture seeping through.

And still, somewhere just under the surface, the fucking tanks. I struggle and flail in my mind and somewhere a little voice is laughing at me. I try to banish them and stir myself with memories of sexually submissive Nina belt tight around her neck moaning “Hurt me” and wriggling her ass as – but no goddamn it. Now, here!

Kiss, lick, suck, bite her tits, grip her neck, kiss her open mouth her lips. This displeases her, that’s not what she wants – she turns her face away again and grabs my hand, pushes it into her mouth, deep, my fingers are in her throat. She opens her mouth wider, bares her teeth, watches me eyes glittering, inviting me to fuck her mouth and drench her face in come. Gropes for my jeans, finds my cock still resolutely soft. It has not stirred in all this time.

We fumble listlessly for a little longer and she gets up to stagger to the toilet. Sound of flushing, and she calls from behind the corner: “I’m going to sleep”. Bedroom door clicks shut.

I light a cigarette and drink more whiskey and stretch out on the sofa and swear to myself that I will never goddamn understand. Where did the fucking tanks come from?

Here we are now

I always check a blog’s first-ever post first, too…