The Bone Clocks

A lithe roller-blader glides past the church. He looks so free.

“Hokey-dokey,” says the photographer, “on the count of three I’d like a big cheesey ‘Cheeeeeeeeese!’ Yes? A-one, a-two, and …”

THROUGH A HOLE blasted in a dry block wall, Aziz snapped a family hurrying across the wasteland north of the doctors’ compound. An Arabic Grapes of Wrath, on foot. I told him it could be a cover shot, if it came out well. “I bring to your hotel tomorrow, after I develop. If on cover,” Aziz rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers in the universal symbol, “Miss Olive, she pay more?”

“ Ifit’s used, yeah,” I said. “But you ought to—”

A helicopter hammered by very low, blasting up sand and grit, and Aziz and I both ducked. A Cobra gunship? Kids appeared in the road from the next-door compound, shouting and pointing in the ballooning clouds, and watched it disappear. One boy threw a symbolic stone after it. A woman in hijab anxiously called the children in, shot us a hostile glance, and shut the gate. We were about as close as it was possible to get to Fallujah, a golf shot shy of the “Cloverleaf” intersection, where the Abu Ghraib highway knots into Highway 10. South, through the baked and wavery air, was the bad-tempered holding pen of vehicles, pooling at the verges of the outer checkpoint. Large numbers of marines and a couple of Bradleys—mini-tanks, basically—blocked the road. The second checkpoint was just beyond the Cloverleaf, flanked by a bulldozed-up berm, a ridge of dirt and rubble topped with razor wire. Nobody was allowed into Fallujah today, and only women and children were allowed out.

The rumors about this makeshift clinic for refugees set up by a couple of Iraqi doctors turned out to be true. Nasser was inside recording interviews, thanks to his Al Jazeera press accreditation, which was every bit as authentic as my Bosnian passport. Aziz and I had joined him for a while; at least a hundred patients were being attended to by two doctors and two nurses with little more in the way of equipment than donated first aid boxes. “Beds” were blankets on the floor of what had been a spacious living room, and the main operating table had until recently been a pool table. There was no anesthetic. Most patients were in various degrees of pain, a few in agony, and some dying. The mortuary was an inner room, where six unclaimed bodies lay. The flies and the smell were intolerable; some guys were digging graves in the garden. The nurses promised to distribute the infant formula, but the doctors asked us for painkillers and bandages.

Aziz took a few photographs while Nasser conducted interviews. I’d been introduced as Nasser’s Bosnian cousin, also working for Al Jazeera, but anti-foreign sentiment was acute so Aziz and I soon left to wait by the car and let Nasser work unimpeded. We sat on a broken curb and each drank a bottle of water. Even in spring Mesopotamia is so hot you can drink all day and never need to piss. From Fallujah, just a kilometer to the west, we heard gunfire and, every few minutes, big explosions. The air tasted of burning tires.

Aziz stowed his camera in the car. He returned with cigarettes and offered me one, but I was still on the wagon. “Bush, I understand,” said Aziz, as he lit his. “Bush father, he hate Saddam, then Twin Towers, so Bush want revenge. America need many oil, Iraq has oil, so Bush get oil. Friends of Bush get money also, Halliburton, supply, guns, much money. Bad reason, but I understand. But why your country, Ed? What Britain want here? Britain spend many many dollars here, Britain lose hundreds men here—for why, Ed? I not understand. Long ago people say, ‘Britain good, Britain gentleman.’ Now people say, ‘Britain is whore of America.’ Why? I want understand.”

I sifted through possible answers for Aziz. Did Tony Blair really believe that Saddam Hussein possessed missiles capable of destroying London in forty-five minutes? Did he really believe in the Neocon fantasia about planting a liberal democracy in the Middle East and watching it spread? I could only shrug. “Who knows?”

“Allah know,” said Aziz. “Blair know. Blair wife know.”

I’d give a year of my life to see inside the prime minister’s head. Three, maybe. He’s an intelligent man. You can tell by his gymnastic evasions in interviews. Does he not think, when he’s looking at himself in the mirror, Oh, fuck, Tony, Iraq has gone well and truly tits-up—why oh why ohwhy did you ever listen to George?

A drone circled above us. It would be armed. I thought of its operator, picturing a crewcut nineteen-year-old called Ryan at a base in Dallas, sucking an ice-cold Frappuccino through a straw. He could open fire on the clinic, kill everyone in and near it, and never smell the cooked meat. To Ryan, we’d be pixellated thermal images on a screen, writhing about a bit, turning from yellow to red to blue.