Phantom by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: short story, short stories, horror, anthology
ISBN: 9781607013396
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2012-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

SET DOWN THIS

Lavie Tidhar

On my brother’s computer, a video file shows an American fighter plane pinpointing a group of men in Iraq.

“Do it?” the pilot says.

“Confirmed.”

“Ten seconds to impact.”

Where the men have been there is a huge explosion, and black smoke covers the grainy grey streets. “Dude,” the pilot says.

I have no faces and no names to put to the men. The black smoke must have contained the atoms of their flesh, their bones (though bones are hardy), vaporized sweat, burnt eyebrows and pubic hair and nose hair (unless they used a trimmer, as I do), in short, the atoms of their being. Later, I think, one could find, lying in the street, a tooth or two, the end of a finger that had somehow survived, fragments of bone, a legless shoe. These men are nothing to me. They are pixels on a screen, a peer-shared digital file uploaded from sources unknown, provenance suspect, whose only note of authenticity is that young pilot’s voice when the smoke rises and he says, quietly— “Dude.”

Let us pick a man at random from the video. His name is, let’s say, Abu Karim. It means the father of Karim. He had given his son the name, perhaps, in honor of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, because even men who die in targeted bombings might like basketball. He is five feet ten inches tall. You could say he is short, but he had never felt it. His son is taller than him, and he is proud of it. “My big son,” he says. In Arabic the word is jabar. There is an Iraqi footballer, Haidar Abdul-Jabar Khadim, who plays for Jordan’s Al-Wihdat club. He could have been named for the American basketball player, too.

We don’t know what Abu Karim was doing on that street, with those others, at that time and at that place. Undoubtedly, the military minds behind the strike know, or at least suspect. Perhaps he is a terrorist, fighting the Americans who are trying to liberate Iraq. Perhaps he is a religious zealot, coming out of a radical madrassa with the other students. Perhaps he is a secular socialist, a former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. It is impossible to tell from the video, and in any case his death does not concern us. It is, by its very existence, no longer in the bounds of right or wrong. It merely is.

Did the man have hobbies? Did he like to collect stamps, as pedestrian as that may seem? Did he covet the Cape Triangular, did he receive catalogs in the post from Stanley Gibbons, was his happiest secret moment his receipt of a mint Penny Black?

Poor countries produce stamps for collectors in more wealthy countries. Following the death of Saddam Hussein the Iraqi bank notes and stamps bearing his image were already selling at premium on London’s Cecil Court.

I don’t want to make him into a saint, though stamp-collectors are hardly that. Let’s say Abu Karim is not a nice man. Whatever he was before—before the circumstances of his life changed—he is no longer that.

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