Actually I wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway since I was going with Louie and a new Iraqi acquaintance of Louie’s to tour a famous historical site outside the city. Big ruins. Famous for being old. And ruined.
I was wearing Louie as a sort of fleece vest again under my suit jacket. The Iraqi who was acting as my guide was named Khalid, and he spoke a lot better English than me. We’d managed to throw off the two guys who’d begun following us that morning, so were alone in a pretty deserted place with nothing much around us except three zillion grains of sand.
We had our big meeting in the men’s room of the little museum that was part of the ancient site. Present on this historic occasion besides me and Khalid, were Louie and two other FFs named Abe and Oops. Oops got his name from his tendency to knock things over and say as he rolled happily away, “Oops.” He’d spent a lot of time in the States, but the last three months had been here in Iraq. What he’d been doing in Iraq I was never told.
Abe was not named for our great president, but for Abraham, the grand old man of the Old Testament. Abe knew more about the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam than any creature in our world’s history. He could quote word for word the Old Testament backwards or forwards at the drop of a hat. In Hebrew. Same with the Koran in Arabic. Fortunately, none of us were wearing hats, so couldn’t drop one even if we’d wanted to, and were thus spared a recital.
The three FFs were all in their fighting trim—round—while I was in my non-fighting trim, sitting on a toilet—the only seat available. I missed my rocker.
“Excuse us, Billy and Khalid,” says Louie, and for the next four or five minutes no one speaks a word in any human language. The three FFs move around the bathroom a bit, seemingly at random. Nothing in their shape or their hairs indicates that anything in the least is going on. But presumably they’re exchanging an amount of info that would take three humans a century to communicate.
“Wow,” says Oops after about ten minutes. “It’s really easy, isn’t it?”
Nice of him to speak in English when he didn’t have to.
“The wrath of the Lord shall fall upon them,” says Abe. Not sure what he was talking about, but I have that reaction to most preachers.
But then they all went again into conference in their own computer language, and Khalid and I were left to our own devices. Which, this being a two-seater, two-urinal, two-sink bathroom, were not much. Khalid had been standing near the door all this time smoking cigarettes. He was about fifty years old and looked a bit on the morose side. I decided maybe it was my moral duty to try to improve US–Iraqi relations by talking to him. ’Course, it’s not easy to improve relations with natives of a country that you’ve been bombing for more than twenty-five years, but at least I could be polite.
“So, Khalid,” I says. “What do you do when you’re not helping the FFs?”
“Who are the FFs?” he asks.
“The Protean terrorists,” says I.
“Ah, yes, the Jibawli.”
“Jibawli?” says I.
“It is an Iraqi slang word meaning something like ‘the funny ones.’”
“Funny ones, huh,” says I. “Not much fun in Iraq the last thirty years.”
“No. Not much fun.”
“So how’d they get that name?”
“Because in the middle of suffering and death, they still manage to be funny and have fun.”
I thought about that. Yeah, Louie, Molière, and Gibberish were like that. Never saw either of them stop being… light. And Louie-Twoie, Jesus, he’d probably invent a new dance to perform on his dad’s grave.
“Whose side are you on in all these wars going on around here?”
“I am on the Jibawli’s side,” he says. “They try to stop the killing by all sides.” He pauses. “They will not succeed.”
The FFs were miracle workers, but I had to agree that bringing peace to this place was beyond anyone’s capacity.
“Are you a Sunni or a Shiite?” I ask.
Again he pauses, lets smoke drift up past his face toward the ceiling.
“I am nothing,” he says.
“Safest thing to be in Iraq these days,” says I.
“Yes,” he says.
Not for a single moment had he smiled or looked anything but gloomy.
The conference seemed to be at an end when the three FFs began bouncing around the bathroom like kids at recess. Off walls, off toilets, off me and Khalid, off each other—it was a dance of a sort, but a comic dance, a frolic. No sounds, just enthusiastic bouncing. And I was surprised to see that Louie was on the slow side compared to the other two. More of an intellectual than an athlete I guess. Or maybe having bits of his body carved away really had affected him.
Finally they stopped.
“Good meeting, guys,” says Oops.
“We shall smite them until the very timbers of their buildings shake with fear,” says Abe. Not a small talk sort of guy.
THIRTY-FIVE
(From LUKE’S TRUE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT OF THE INVASION OF THE FFS, pp. 165–170. Being an excerpt from an unpublished memoir by Carlita Morton.)
It took me only a few days with my husband away in Iraq to realize that when he got back our new lives were not going to be what we’d hoped for. First of all, I missed working at the Protean Defense League. The two weeks I’d worked there had been wonderful. For one thing the PDL bosses weren’t all white males. We like to think that women have made tremendous strides in achieving job equality, but I can remember only two years ago Billy and I walked into an insurance company office in Riverhead to look into getting a new policy, and there, prominently displayed on the wall, was a photo of the bosses of the company: nine white men and one woman. After seeing this photo, I turned and looked into the open office area: about a dozen women and two men. Incredible. At the PDL the human bosses included an equal number of men and women.
I felt our job at the PDL was important. We were monitoring what was happening to FFs throughout the world and were trying to free them whenever one was dragged into the legal system. I had been surprised to find that in the “civilized,” “advanced” nations, the authorities often seemed more disturbed by the Forthehelluvit actions that the FFs inspired than the cyberattacks on their banks and government agencies. Any FF seen at some sing-in, dance-in, drink-in, etc., was considered guilty of having fomented the event and, if captured, charged with conspiracy to incite riotous behavior. They should actually call it “conspiracy to incite people to have fun.”
Our problem was that the established “justice” systems were rigged to enable the authorities to dictate what was considered justice. Whenever an FF was captured and jailed, they would argue that no bail should be granted since an FF was a clear threat to flee and, once free, almost impossible to re-apprehend. Judges usually accepted this argument. Then the government authorities would begin the process of drawing out all proceedings as long as possible, since their goal, the incarceration of the FF, had already been achieved.
However, governments have one major problem: there are no measurable differences that humans can detect among various FFs, no “fingerprints” so to speak. It means that the only FFs getting jailed are those who are actually caught in the act of committing something defined as a crime. Louie is the most wanted “man” in the world, but how can they find him when almost every FF in the world looks just like him? Identifying FFs isn’t made easier by FFs loving to assume different shapes.
The authorities have developed a special X-ray machine which shows that the internal images of FFs vary considerably and can be used to identify an FF. The X-ray becomes in effect a fingerprint or DNA ID. The Department of Health and Human Services has issued an edict that every FF come to a hospital and be X-rayed, but turnout has been low. Currently this method of identification seems pretty useless. If an agent sees an FF committing a crime, bouncing high in the air for example, but fails to capture him right then and there, he has no way of knowing which FF was the culprit. Un
less, of course, he’s carrying an X-ray machine at the time and the FF stays still long enough to be X-rayed. But Baloney told me recently that in monitoring the NSA, FFs have learned that the government is working on a handheld X-ray machine that will solve that very problem.
Not only was I having to give up a job that I loved, but our whole family was having to give up the house and area we loved. In three days I looked at almost a dozen condos. They were all modern, immaculate, filled with the latest gadgets that would monitor everything from your toast to your coffee to the temperature in your closet. I couldn’t see our family being happy in a single one of them.
Billy and the boys are messy. They rarely wipe their feet when entering our house and seem always to neatly place their clothing on the floor. Over the years I’d adjusted and no longer noticed rugs that needed to be vacuumed or floors that needed to be mopped. I’ve become as happy with messiness as my men folk. I don’t know which thing depressed me more: that in any immaculate apartment the messiness would look messy, or that living in the city, Billy and the boys would no longer be traipsing in with sand, mud, leaves, or grass cuttings on their shoes. The nearest sand, mud, leaves, or grass cuttings to any of the condos was usually many blocks away.
And what would Billy do in our new life? He’d still read, of course, but lost forever would be having a couple of drinks with his old buddies, spending several days out on the water, walking through the woods down to the sound.
Every family and each individual has their own needs, and I couldn’t see any of our basic needs being fulfilled in the rich new life Louie thought he was setting up for us. I’m depressed. And I see no way out.
THIRTY-SIX
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 263–266)
That night we partied. In Baghdad in those days that meant you went someplace where you weren’t going to be shot at or blown up.
We went to the nightclub in the basement of the US Embassy. It was a big place built to entertain seven or eight hundred people, but there were only about a hundred there the night we went, only twenty or so soldiers. It was Abe, Molière, Karen, LT, Khalid, and me. Louie was there wound around my chest, making me sweat even more than the desert heat, despite the air con.
Two other young women were also there that either Karen or Molière had found to join us, whether as female company for me and Khalid I didn’t know. Felt sorry for the two gals though: neither Khalid nor I paid them much attention. I was being faithful to Lita. Khalid was being morose. Of the hundred other people in the nightclub, I figured only half of them were agents, although I may have erred on the low side. Probably the two gals at our table were agents too.
In any case we partied.
Kind of boring actually. The entertainment was a rock band that might have been big back in the last century, but was kind of small now. We drank of course, me having to pour stuff down under my sweatshirt to let my Louie vest join in. Molière was, as I’ve said, a teetotaler and only poured water over himself. Perrier actually. The American Embassy didn’t serve straight water. Twenty-three bottles of Perrier.
Karen drank mostly wine with a few sips of champagne. Khalid drank vodka. I sipped at a couple of bourbons.
Louie-Twoie, you’ll be surprised to know, was a big drinker. Like any young kid trying his wings, he sampled every drink on the menu. His favorite seemed to be Scotch and prune juice. Kid’s got a bit to learn.
There was dancing too. Although there was only one woman for every four men, the gals that got out on the dance floor were worth watching. Might have been nice except for the music. Neither Karen nor Molière felt like dancing, LT was too small, I was too old, and Khalid too morose, so all but Abe stayed put. Abe did ask one of the two gals with us to dance and he managed to grow two legs and two arms but forgot a head so looked a little strange.
It didn’t work out too well. The gal came back and told us Abe had called her a whore. Abe had abandoned her and was lecturing a group of GIs at a table not far from ours on the virtue of turning the other cheek. I figured it wouldn’t take more than five or six minutes for them to shoot him.
Things only got interesting when Jake Manningham, First Secretary at the Embassy, joined us. He was a good-looking guy in his late forties who I’d noticed earlier at a table nearby with two gals almost as nice looking as Karen. They all seemed to be putting drinks away at a good clip, but none of them seemed very cheery. Finally, he’d stood up, said something to the gals, and sauntered over. He asked if we’d mind if he joined us for a bit. We all said “fine”—except Khalid, of course, who just looked morose.
When he introduced himself he casually said that although his title was First Secretary, he was of course primarily an intelligence agent working for the CIA. He’d worked in Iraq from 2008 until 2010 and had returned a year ago.
“So, you having a good time?” says I, when he paused.
“No one has a good time in Iraq,” he says, not morosely like Khalid would say it, but soberly, factually.
“Spying not that much fun?” says I.
“More fun than pretending to train Iraqi soldiers or policemen, or pretending to try to get their electric grid together,” he says. “I get to meet more interesting people.”
“Met any Proteans?” asks Molière.
“Until tonight, just one,” he says quietly.
“What was he like?” Molière asks.
Jake takes a small sip of his Scotch.
“Dead,” he says.
Awkward silence.
“Tough to get intelligence from a corpse,” says Karen.
“That was my position,” says Jake.
“You didn’t get to question the Protean?” asks Molière.
“I was there for one of the interrogations,” he says. “Strangest thing I’ve ever been at.”
“How so?” says I.
“All the guy did—the Protean—was make jokes.”
“Jokes…” says I.
“No matter what someone asked, he’d find a way to give an answer that, if we didn’t feel we were there on serious national security business, would have been funny. Usually he was in the normal spherical shape but every time he made a jokey answer he’d change his shape to that of a two-foot-wide smiling mouth. Even when we began… forceful means, he still found things to joke about.”
“Yeah, we Proteans can be pretty annoying that way,” says Molière.
“I think that’s why they put him in solitary and cut off his supply of water and light,” says Jake quietly. “Took almost three weeks, but they managed to kill him. Didn’t get a single piece of useful information.”
I wondered how Louie and Molière and LT would take this. For a moment all of us were quiet.
“How many of us have you killed?” asks Molière.
“That’s the only one I know of that died at our hands,” says Jake. “I think our A-15s have killed a few with missiles.”
“Why were they shooting at them?”
“We think the Proteans are behind our drones being reprogrammed to miss their targets. Officially every Protean in Iraq is an enemy. I actually don’t know how you guys are here.”
“You think all Proteans are terrorists?” asks Molière.
“Whichever one of you two is Molière,” says Jake looking from Molière to Abe, “is a visiting VIP. So is the small one here named Louie-Twoie. Whichever one of you isn’t Molière is not a visiting VIP and therefore is clearly an alien terrorist.”
“I am the Voice of Truth that speaks from the heart of the universe,” says Abe.
Jake stares at him a long moment.
“Whatever,” he says.
I couldn’t figure out what this guy was up to. He was saying things to us that no self-respecting intelligence agent would say to a party that included his agency’s enemies.
“When are you resigning?” asks Molière out of the blue.
For the first time, Jake looks a little startled.
“What makes you think I’m resi
gning?” he asks.
“Because you obviously have no interest in holding on to your job,” says Molière.
Jake looks from one FF to another, then picks up his glass and finishes his drink.
“No one in his right mind would want to hold on to my job,” he says quietly.
Since no one else asks the obvious, I do.
“Why not?” says I.
“All we do is turn shit into bigger shit,” he says. “Everything we do to try to stop radical Muslim terrorists just makes them stronger, makes it easier for them to recruit even more terrorists. We’ve spent two trillion dollars fighting the war on terror. What have we achieved? On nine-eleven two-thousand-one there were maybe a thousand anti-American radical Muslim terrorists around the world. After fighting three or four wars against them and spending trillions, there are now millions of terrorists wanting to kill Americans. Every time we drop a bomb and kill twenty Arabs, some of them usually women or kids, two hundred become radicalized and want to join up. It’s madness.”
“Sorry to hear that,” says Molière.
“You know, there’s a solution, Jake,” says Louie from my chest, but imitating my voice.
“And what’s that? Drop a dozen nukes throughout the Middle East and eliminate half the Muslims?”
“Games, Jake, games,” Molière answers. “If you humans would just see all your struggles as games and your opponents as your fellow humans—as your brothers, as your friends—you’d eliminate two-thirds of the misery you’re creating for yourselves and the world.”
“Yeah,” says I, from deep in my chest. “Imagine if your bosses suddenly began thinking of those resisting you as ‘rebels’ or ‘resisters’ or ‘freedom-fighters’ rather than terrorists. Or those resisting the dictators our government props up around the world as ‘rebels’ or ‘resisters’ or ‘freedom-fighters.’ That would change everything. As soon as we call anyone a ‘terrorist’ he ceases to be a human being and he and his family and anyone standing anywhere near him can be tortured or bombed or killed. That’s pretty sick.”