Strawberry Fields by Hilary Plum

Author:Hilary Plum [Plum, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fake News, Fiction, Journalism, Politics, War & Military
ISBN: 9781944380038
Google: tg8zswEACAAJ
Amazon: 1944380035
Publisher: Fence Books
Published: 2018-04-02T23:00:00+00:00

Alice

It was not a good bar, but Modigliani seemed to like it, we had been there almost three hours. His head was tipped back against the wall, his Adam’s apple a pearl in the yellow light. In my jacket pocket was the envelope Kareem’s wife Simone had sent me, of which I said nothing to Modigliani. I planned to read it that night and was careful not to get too drunk, a restraint in which Modigliani decidedly did not share.

I called him a cab and he walked toward it shaking his head, his only farewell a hand on my arm that could have been merely for balance. I went home—no longer the hotel but a shitty efficiency on the seventh floor of a shitty compound. From the kitchen window I could see the roof of the VA hospital, a view I had thought would help keep my head in the game.

Rubber-banded around the contents of the envelope was a note: I thought you should have this. Not the police. I didn’t know if the sentence fragment signified afterthought or emphasis. Simone had signed it with an S and a sketch of a cat.

When I removed the rubber band, papers fell to the bedspread and floor. Various documents, notes on pages torn from a notebook, newspaper printouts, a CD labeled backup. This seemed like Kareem’s mess, not Simone’s, as though she’d sent me the disordered contents of a drawer or the stereotypical shoebox.

I dug in.

The main theme so far: a prison in Afghanistan, which I’d heard of but never been anywhere near. Before Iraq Kareem had served two years in Afghanistan, if I remembered right—one of the spiral-bound pages told me this, actually, in his tidy handwriting he’d written the dates and sites of his deployments and a few select missions, with more geographical specificity than seemed strictly kosher.

Kareem was not a man of sentences, which I respected. His notes were lists, with arrows and circles, dates and names whose relation was suggested by their situation on the page. Everywhere the initials FAM—by the name of a village, the date of what? It seems they had encountered FAM on the road. A checkpoint, where FAM had been dragged out of the taxi he drove.

The prison was the subject of the next stack of newspaper printouts, which I had to smooth out to read, the creases in them deep and irregular, they’d been folded into small triangles, or maybe stuffed in a pocket, and although one might have called Kareem a slob, he had instead, I thought, a cynical sort of order, in which treasures were deliberately disguised as trash. The prison was in the mountains, at first just a temporary holding pen, a place to collect and interrogate while the war tried to sort out the young men of the north, their affiliations and those of the local warlords, but now, years later, it was overfull, and the articles—which were several years old—expressed the beginnings of the present concern that there was no due process of any kind at work here.

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