Zeitoun

  Zeitoun’s family in Syria became increasingly despondent and resigned to the loss of Abdulrahman. There were so many bodies being found. Almost seven hundred in New Orleans. Their brother was surely one of them; to believe otherwise was folly. Now they just wanted the peace of mind of knowing how he had died. They wanted his body. To cleanse it, to bury him.

  SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 17

  Yuko had forbidden her to watch TV or get on the internet, but Kathy couldn’t resist. She searched for her husband’s name. She searched for their address, their company. She searched for any sign that her husband had been found.

  She found nothing about him, but found other, terrible things. All over the web she found news of the violence and evidence of its overstatement. One page would report hundreds of murders, crocodiles in the water, gangs of men rampaging. Another page would report that no babies had been raped. That there had been no murders in the Superdome, no deaths in the Convention Center. There was no end to the fear and confusion, the racist assumptions and the rumor-mongering.

  No one debated that the city was in chaos, but now there was debate over where that chaos had originated. Was it the residents or was it those sent to bring order? Kathy’s mind spun as she read about the unprecedented concentration of armed men and women in the city.

  First she read about the mercenaries. Immediately after the storm, wealthy businesses and individuals had called in private-security firms from all over the world. At least five different organizations had sent soldiers-for-hire into the city, including Israeli mercenaries from a firm called Instinctive Shooting International. Kathy took in a quick breath. Israeli commandos in New Orleans? That was it, she realized. Her husband was an Arab, and there were Israeli paramilitaries on the ground in the city. She leapt to conclusions.

  And the Blackwater soldiers. Blackwater USA, a private-security firm that employed former soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere, had sent hundreds of personnel to the region. They were there in an official capacity, hired by the Department of Homeland Security to help maintain order. They arrived in full battle dress. Some carried badges as deputies of the Louisiana State Police.

  Kathy became obsessed with all the guns. Her brother had been in the National Guard, and she knew how they were armed. She started doing the math. If all the Blackwater mercenaries were carrying at least two guns each, that would mean hundreds of 9mm Heckler and Koch sidearms, hundreds of M-16 rifles and M-4 machine guns.

  She felt as if she had stumbled upon the answer to her husband’s disappearance. Nothing else made sense. This seemed the most logical thing. One of these mercenaries, responsible to no one, had shot Zeitoun. Now they were covering it up. This is why she had heard nothing. The whole thing would be covered up.

  But there were also so many American troops. Surely they had things under control. As well as she could surmise, there were at least twenty thousand National Guard troops in New Orleans, with more arriving every day. But then she thought of the guns again. If each one of those soldiers had at least one M-16 assault rifle, there were about twenty thousand automatic rifles in the city. Too many. And if Governor Blanco was right, that these were vets coming straight from Afghanistan and Iraq, it could not bode well for her husband.

  She searched more websites, went deeper. There were 5,750 Army soldiers in the New Orleans area. Almost a thousand state police officers, many of them there with SWAT teams, armed for urban combat. Four hundred Customs and Border Protection agents and officers deputized for local law enforcement. This included more than one hundred men from Border Patrol Tactical Units—men usually armed with grenade launchers, shotguns, battering rams and assault rifles. There were four Maritime Security and Safety Teams, the new Coast Guard tactical units that Homeland Security had formed as part of the War on Terror. Each MSST carried M-16s, shotguns, and .45 caliber handguns. There were five hundred FBI special agents and a U.S. marshals special-ops team. And snipers. They were sending snipers into the city to shoot looters and gunmen. Kathy added it up. There were at least twenty-eight thousand guns in New Orleans. That would be the low number, counting rifles, handguns, shotguns.

  She couldn’t look anymore. She turned off the computer and paced. She lay in bed, staring at the wall. She got up, went to the bathroom, inspecting the new swath of white hair on her head.

  Again she returned to the computer in search of her husband. She was furious with him, with his stubbornness. If he had just gotten in the Odyssey with them! Why could he not simply surrender to the same logic hundreds of thousands of people had recognized? He had to be apart from that. He had to do more. He had to do something else.

  She found an email Ahmad had sent to one of the missing-persons agencies. The pictures he had attached were now the only ones she had of her husband—the only ones she had in Phoenix, anyway. They had been taken a year before, in Málaga. They’d gone, the whole family, and the picture was taken on the beach near Ahmad’s house. When Kathy saw that beach, she could only think of the hike, that insane hike her husband had insisted they take. If ever there was a totemic memory that encompassed the man, it was that day.

  They had been in Málaga for a few days when the older kids felt comfortable enough in Ahmad and Antonia’s house to be left for the morning. Zeitoun wanted to take Kathy and Safiya for a walk on the beach, to be alone for a bit. Zachary and Nademah and Aisha, entertained with Lutfi and Laila and the pool in the backyard, barely noticed when they left.

  Kathy and Zeitoun walked down to the beach, Zeitoun carrying Safiya. They walked for a mile or so down the shore, the water cool and calm. Kathy was as content as she had been in years. It was almost like a real holiday, and her husband actually seemed relaxed, like a regular person on an actual vacation. To have him this way, just walking on a beach for no real reason, just to feel the water between his toes—it was a side of him she rarely saw.

  But it didn’t last long. Almost as soon as she took notice of his sense of peace and leisure, his eyes focused on something in the distance.

  “See that?” he asked.

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to see what he saw.

  “That rock. See it?”

  He had taken notice of a small rock formation in the distance, jutting into the sea a few miles down the shore. Kathy held her breath, afraid of whatever notion was brewing in his mind.

  “Let’s walk there,” he said, his face bright, his eyes alive.

  Kathy did not want to walk to a particular destination. She wanted to stroll. She wanted to stroll, then sit on the beach and play with their daughter, then go back to Ahmad’s. She wanted a vacation—idleness, frivolity even.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Such a nice day. And it’s not so far.”

  They walked toward the rock, and the water was pleasant, the sun gentle. But after another thirty minutes, they had not gotten noticeably closer. And they had come upon a low promontory that separated one part of the beach from the next. It seemed a perfect place to turn around. Kathy suggested this, but Zeitoun dismissed it out of hand.

  “We’re so close!” he said.

  They were not so close, but she followed her husband as he climbed over the rock, holding Safiya with one hand, over the jagged ridge and down again to the next stretch of beach.

  “See?” he said when they landed on the wet sand. “So close.”

  They walked on, Zeitoun transferring Safiya to his shoulders. They continued another mile, and again the beach was interrupted by a ridge. They climbed over this one, too. When they were again on level ground, the rock in the distance seemed no closer than when they’d set out. Zeitoun wasn’t fazed.

  They had been walking two hours when the beach was interrupted by another, much larger promontory, this one big enough that homes and shops had been built atop it. They had to climb up a set of steps, through the roads of this small town. Kathy insisted they stop for water, for ice cream. She drank her fill, but they did not pause for long. Soon he was off again, and she had no choice but to follow. T
hey jogged down the steps on the other side to continue on the beach. Zeitoun never broke pace. He was barely sweating.

  “So close, Kathy!” he said, pointing to the rock in the distance, which looked no closer than before.

  “We should turn around,” she said. “What’s the point?”

  “No, no, Kathy!” he said. “We can’t turn around till we touch it.” And she knew that he would insist she do it, too. He always wanted his family along for his quests.

  Zeitoun showed no signs of fatigue. He switched Safiya, now sleeping, from one arm to the other, and kept going.

  They walked for four hours in all, up and over three hillside towns, across fifteen miles of beach, before they were finally close enough to the rock to touch it.

  It was nothing much to see. Just a boulder jutting out into the sea. When they were finally upon it, Kathy laughed, and Zeitoun laughed too. She rolled her eyes, and he smiled at her mischievously. He knew it was absurd.

  “C’mon, Kathy, let’s touch the rock,” he said.

  They walked out to it and quickly climbed to its peak. They sat there for a few minutes, resting, watching the waves crash against the rocks below. And as ridiculous as it had seemed en route, Kathy felt good. She had married a bullheaded man, a sometimes ridiculously stubborn man. He could be exasperating in his sense of destiny. Whatever he set his mind to, even a crackpot idea of touching some random rock miles in the distance, she knew he would not rest until he had done it. It was maddening. It was strange, even. But then again, she thought, it gave their marriage a certain epic scope. It was silly to think that way, she knew, but they were on a journey that did sometimes seem grand. She had grown up in a small Baton Rouge house with nine siblings, and now she and her husband had four thriving kids, had been to Spain, to Syria, could seemingly achieve any of the goals they conjured.

  “C’mon, touch it,” he said again.

  They were sitting on it, but she hadn’t yet officially touched it.

  Now she did. He smiled and held her hand.

  “It’s nice, right?” he asked.

  After that, it became a joke between them. Any time something seemed difficult and Kathy was ready to give up, Zeitoun would say, “Touch the rock, Kathy! Touch the rock!”

  And they would laugh, and she would find the strength to continue, partly out of a strange sort of logic: wasn’t it more absurd to give up? Wasn’t it more absurd to fail, to turn back, than to continue?

  MONDAY SEPTEMBER 19

  Kathy woke up having reached a new kind of peace. She felt strong, and was ready to start planning. She had been paralyzed for almost two weeks now, waiting for word about her husband, but this was folly. She needed to go home, to the house on Dart. She was suddenly sure that she would find her husband there. His family in Syria was right. The most dangerous thing was these roving gangs of men. That made the most sense. As the city emptied out, the looting likely grew more brazen and engulfed neighborhoods like Uptown. The thieves had come to the house on Dart, and, not expecting to find anyone there, had killed her husband.

  She needed to get back to New Orleans, hire a boat of some kind, and return to the house on Dart. She needed to see him, wherever he was. She needed to find him and bury him. She needed all of this to end.

  All morning she felt a new serenity. It was time to get serious, to stop hoping, and to start working toward whatever came next.

  * * *

  Midday, Kathy heard that another hurricane, this one called Rita, was bearing down on New Orleans. Mayor Nagin, who had planned to reopen the city, now canceled those plans. The storm, being tracked over the Gulf with winds above 150 miles per hour, was expected to hit September 21. Even if she could make it near New Orleans, the winds would again push her back.

  Nademah came in the living room.

  “Should we pray?” she asked.

  Kathy almost said no—all she did was pray—but she didn’t want to disappoint her daughter.

  “Sure. Let’s.”

  And they prayed on the living room floor. Afterward, she kissed Nademah’s forehead and held her close. I will rely on you so much, she thought. Poor Demah, she thought, you have no idea.

  And then Kathy’s cell phone rang. She picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Is this Mrs. Zeitoun?” a voice asked. The man seemed nervous. He pronounced Zeitoun wrong. Kathy’s stomach dropped. She managed to say yes.

  “I saw your husband,” the man said.

  Kathy sat down. An image of his body floating in the filth—

  “He’s okay,” the voice said. “He’s in prison. I’m a missionary. I was at Hunt, the prison up in St. Gabriel. He’s there. He gave me your number.”

  Kathy asked him a dozen questions in one breath.

  “Sorry, that’s all I know. I can’t tell you anything else.”

  She asked him how she could get hold of Zeitoun, if he was being well cared for—

  “Look, I can’t talk to you anymore. I could get in trouble. He’s okay, he’s in there. That’s it, I’ve got to go.”

  And he hung up.

  IV

  TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 6

  Zeitoun was enjoying the cool water of his first shower in over a week. The water might shut off for good at any time, he knew, so he lingered for a few seconds longer than he should have.

  But he was ready to go. The neighborhoods were emptying out, and it wouldn’t be long before there was no one else to help and little left to see. He wondered when and how he might leave. Maybe in a few days. He could head up to Napoleon and St. Charles and ask the officers and aid workers there how he could get out. He would only need to get to the airport in New Orleans or Baton Rouge, and then fly to Phoenix. There wasn’t much left to do here, he was running low on food, and he missed Kathy and the kids. It was time.

  He walked downstairs.

  “Shower’s all yours,” he told Nasser.

  Zeitoun called his brother Ahmad in Spain.

  “Do you realize the images we’re seeing on TV?” Ahmad asked.

  As they were talking, he heard Nasser’s voice from the porch. He was talking to someone outside.

  “Zeitoun!” Nasser called.

  “What?” Zeitoun said.

  “Come here,” Nasser said. “These guys want to know if we need water.”

  Zeitoun hung up the phone and walked toward the door.

  The men met Zeitoun in the foyer. They were wearing mismatched police and military uniforms. Fatigues. Bulletproof vests. Most were wearing sunglasses. All had M-16s and pistols. They quickly filled the hallway. There were at least ten guns visible.

  “Who are you?” one of them asked.

  “I’m the landlord. I own this house,” Zeitoun said.

  Now he saw that there were six of them—five white men and one African American woman. Under their vests it was hard to see their uniforms. Were they local cops? The woman, very tall, wore camouflage fatigues. She was probably National Guard. They were all looking around the house as if they were finally seeing the inside of a building they had long been watching from afar. They were tense, each of them with their fingers on their triggers. In the foyer, one officer was frisking Ronnie. Another officer had Nasser against the wall by the stairway.

  “Give me your ID,” one man said to Zeitoun.

  Zeitoun complied. The man took the ID and gave it back to Zeitoun without looking at it.

  “Get in the boat,” he said.

  “You didn’t look at it,” Zeitoun protested.

  “Move!” another man barked.