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heaven

Spontaneous combustion

December 4, 2014 by Pen 2 Comments

Spontaneous combustion is a myth. But something like it does happen sometimes. With the push of a button. For a variety of reasons. People who are there one moment are gone in the next.

Here’s how I imagine it, as only a person who has been close to high explosive doing its awful work can; the truck pulls up to the outer gate. The madman pushes a button. The shockwave ripples outward too quickly for slow human minds to comprehend. The madman, who is probably only a boy really, disintegrates into wet, charred bits of flesh.

Last thoughts irrationally carrying him into the black where his false belief in a paradise that does not exist will simply end. Perhaps that is in and of itself a sort of paradise. When the only world you know is so harsh, maybe stopping the world you know is a form of heaven.

The walls of the compound blow apart a millisecond after the madman’s body flings itself into an orgiastic outward spiral of exploding truck parts. Guards on the perimeter are blown apart as the hole in things expands. This is the work of men whose dreams taste only of death. This is the language of the bomb and of impotence.

Trailers rip apart. It is 4:30 AM in Kabul, a 3,500-year-old city whose residents know the smell of death and shit intimately. The winds here are always full of decay, burning, desperation. In the blackness, fanatic followers run through the new hole and begin firing their machine guns. More of the language of death.

The residents inside this poorly named place are waking up. Some are injured, the walls they felt safe inside proving too weak to keep out conflict. A few died in the initial moments of the blast. The camp, which is a place run by a company named after a character from the movie Star Wars, is what the mavens of war call a secure compound. There is no such thing. Camp North Gate also called Camp Pinnacle, no longer has a gate and does not sit on the pinnacle of anything.

I lived in this place in 2011 and 2012 but was moved away by my superiors and then injured in a moment of banality that had nothing to do with bombs. So I am not at Camp Pinnacle when the suicide bomber pushes his button and blows a deep crater into the ground, shatters the walls, creates an opportunity for mayhem. I am not close to the bomb or the men who run in after with their fury and their guns. People I know and have come to care about are though.

I can only imagine what happened. Piece it together from news reports. Live through it in my dreams. Because I spent many months expecting any given night to be my night of blood and terror I have a deeper understanding of how those moments played out after the bomb went off than you are likely to.

I know war. I have watched mortars explode close to me. Seen rockets fly a few feet over my head and then arc downwards to explode nearby. I have woken up to find bullets that have fallen down around me while I slept.

Kabul has probably not always been a city permeated with misery. I imagine it has known times of peace and plenty. I have not been there during any of those. For me, Kabul will always be a memory of armor, insecurity, fear. For me Kabul will always be complete chaos in the form of a wedding party madly videotaping their joy while a truck full of freshly slaughtered goats careens past on its way to some open air market. Life and death superimposed side by side with the backdrop being a city of tents next to a graveyard full of war martyrs.

The world inside the walls of the place I once lived that got blown up was surreal. In the little store I remember Afghan brothers selling overpriced counterfeit Beats headphones to overpaid, underproductive armed contractors like me. Every winter jacket I bought from them fell apart because the zippers were made of brittle metal. I bought two and then switched to ordering from Amazon.com. In the capital city the winters are cold.

At Camp Pinnacle, most of the imported female workers ended up pregnant and disappeared back to Kyrgyzstan. The contractors call them war wives. No alimony payments are likely to be collected by the state on behalf of those children anytime soon. Surreal. Full body massages with happy endings for the ones willing to pay. You can fuck the Russian speaking hairdresser for $100 in U.S. currency.

Inside the compound is surreal. Outside the compound is even more surreal. At least we have running water and electricity 95% of the time. The rest of Kabul, which is also called Kabol, is not so lucky. Rich people have generators in their dusty mansions. Poor people have dung fires. In this city, the higher up the mountainside you live the poorer you are.

We didn’t have to report graft or bribes by local officials until the percentage was higher than one quarter of the total budget. So, if we gave a police colonel $1 million in computers and he distributed three quarters to his underlings and sold one quarter in the local markets to line his pockets that was OK. The compound we lived in supposedly cost

The little store inside our secured compound sold third rate Chinese electronics, Afghan carpets and for some reason I never understand was well stocked with remote controlled toy helicopters. I’m sure those blew up when that bomb went off. I saw some photos of the aftermath. The building where I lived would have been shaken but my room probably didn’t sustain any major damage. Had I been there on that morning I would have been shaken awake by the bomb blast and put on my body armor while my fight or flight response went into overdrive. My years of experience in that kind of environment would have kicked in. I would have sought those I knew in order to go into what is called a protective posture while the camp guards battled the follow on attackers.

For every misled fool who wants to rush to gain entrance into an imagined heaven that does not smell like dust, shit and misery, there are always companions. These four came in shooting. Reports vary regarding how many were killed on that morning.

What’s certain is that all four of the mad truck bomber’s companions died in a hail of return gunfire from the compound guards. It’s my speculation that the Nepali guards were the most effective at returning fire. The Afghan guards tended to be mostly useless. Collecting a paycheck and praying were their two most reliable features during my sojourn inside those walls now shattered. I was reliable at the first but not the second.

One of the strange things about war is how the statisticians love to collect their data. At the end of your life, if you have been a war mercenary as I have, you might be summarized on a tally sheet as one of any number of KIA (killed in action) or, if you are not completely ended, you could become a WIA (wounded in action). There were more than 100 WIAs from the bomb and its aftermath. There were an uncertain number of KIAs of various nationalities. One of them a Romanian. It made me wonder if he was the Romanian I used to play the video game Call of Duty with. I haven’t seen him on Xbox Live for a long time now.

The people who do the important counting necessary to manage a war often guard the numbers as if they are a holy secret. Reporting in such an environment is almost never completely factual. The statisticians are often also liars with an agenda. I’ll probably never know exactly who lived, died and bled that morning. I know that one of my friends survived uninjured that day only to be blown up inside his armored vehicle another. He suffered traumatic brain injury.

War is surreal. There you are with a rifle and a pistol and body armor. Spending days driving an armored truck through the beggars, drug addicts and religious zealots of Kabul to get from one compound full of corrupt, opportunistic people to the next and then back again. Breathing in the dusty shit air.

Spending nights playing a warrior made of pixels on a projection screen while eating pizza cooked for you by an Afghan who has never known anything but the smell of dusty shit air. Who is trying to survive like you are. Who has an agenda that stays hidden behind fatalistic eyes. And you make six figures while he struggles to make enough to feed his mother, father, sisters and an untold other number of Afghans who are not lucky enough to be a pizza boy in a secure compound.

Was it one of the pizza boys who gave the attackers details on the compound so they would know the best time to do the most damage? If I had been born an Afghan pizza boy I wonder what I would have done. One of our translators, who could easily have been an Afghan pizza boy instead, was stabbed to death in the streets of Kabul with screwdrivers because of his profession. Because he needed to make a living and didn’t want to beg on the streets like so many Afghans do. In Afghanistan warlords siphon off foreign money while the denizens of neighborhoods they control starve and freeze in the harsh winters.

I sometimes wonder what it is all for. The billions of dollars poured into a place on the other side of the world which is also the world’s largest producer of opium. One of the oldest settled places. One of the most contested places. Many empires have ground their sharp teeth into dust in this place where the sound of violence is a normal part of the fabric. But for a missed moment in time I could have become part of that dust. Little bits of me scattered into the wind of a city ringed by hard mountains that always smells of shit. Shit that also provides the sustenance from which I have seen roses growing.

It occurs to me that maybe the manboy with his finger on the button of the bomb was hoping to clear a space where roses could grow out of the shit. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Filed Under: Essays, Personal Tagged With: Afghanistan, Camp Pinnacle, dreams, heaven, kabol, kabul, KIA, life, living, people, spontaneous combustion, suicide, WIA

The door

October 8, 2014 by Pen 3 Comments

Greg Smith took a deep breath and looked up the face of Old Man. The crisp granite had a wet sheen to it this morning. He glanced up the hundreds of feet that he was planning to on-sight. He’d climbed the Old Man before, but never on this side. It was going to be one hell of an adventure. Particularly because he had never done it alone.

Their fight this morning had been epic. Sheila was pissed. She didn’t want him going up the mountain alone. She didn’t understand his need to escape the rat race. Or the feeling of freedom he could only find at the top. How it took him out of his head. Out of the petty problems he was sick of dealing with. Work was dragging him down. Today, regardless of what anyone else wanted or needed from him, he was going to climb.

Greg checked his equipment and looked at the sun. He breathed again. Put the job out of his mind. Put the argument with Sheila away. I’ll make up with her tonight he thought. He began to climb. The rock called to him. The top called to him. All of it sang softly. The cool, crisp air. The warm sun on his back as he worked his way slowly upwards.

After he’d reached a distance he guessed was about 200 feet up from the bottom, he stopped for a minute to collect himself. He placed an anchor point into the face, checked his chalk, harness and carabiners, and continued upward.

After what seemed like a few minutes but was actually more than an hour Greg stopped again and took in the view. The valley below was breathtaking from this height. He saw an eagle above him and wondered what it was hunting. From this high he wouldn’t be able to spot whatever the bird was stalking. He looked down anyhow.

A vehicle’s dust trail was coming down the gravel road towards where he had parked. Greg wondered if he knew the climber or climbers inside. He wondered what Sheila was doing. If she was still fuming at him for needing this today. Those worries could wait. He begin wedge a nut into a crack in the face. And felt the first trembling. His heart skipped a beat. Had the mountain just moved?

He looked up. Then down. What the hell? This time the earth definitely shook. The mountain was unhappy. He clung to the face, desperately trying to get the nut further in. He gave it a tug and attached the rope. The mountain was shaking now. He scrabbled as dirt and small rocks came down on his helmet.  Getting his grip and settling in, he waited. More shaking came, and more showers of dirt. The rocks were bigger now. A boulder bigger than his head fell past him. And then a few more. His heart beat faster.

And then it was over. Greg looked up. No more debris. He looked down and saw two figures far below. The vehicle had pulled up next to his Xterra and he could see two small figures looking up at him.

Should I go up or down? He couldn’t believe his brain was wondering this. I need to go down. What if the Old Man shakes again? For reasons he couldn’t understand Greg found himself looking for the next handhold leading up. He began climbing again.

Then he discovered the door. The impossible door. Set a few inches into the face was a red wooden door with an ornate brass knob that looked like a human face. Stunned, Greg paused on the face. What the hell? After a minute, unable to contain his curiosity, he climbed up to the beckoning mystery and put his hand on the handle. He turned the knob.

Greg stepped into the door in the mountain wondering what was happening to him. This place couldn’t be real. It hadn’t been here the last time he climbed Old Man. He felt nervous and excited.  Inside, the room he found himself in was filled with cool air but warmly lit. He took it in, stunned. A rectangular space with rich wood paneling. Most of the wall space in the impossible place he found himself was dedicated to bookshelves. He took in the entirety of the madness and noticed more details.

He saw a fireplace. The fire crackled and glowed invitingly. Rich carpets and comfortable reading chairs were scattered about in between the shelves in the walls.

“Welcome Greg.”

He gasped as he noticed a composed, regal woman sitting in one of the chairs nearest the crackling fire. She was dressed in a white flowing garment that shimmered in the firelight. She looking at him commandingly.

“Please, have a seat. We have a discussion ahead of us.”

Greg’s knees went weak. He automatically grabbed for the harness, intending to check the rope. It wasn’t there. Astonished, he looked down and realized that he was no longer wearing his climbing gear. Rather, his outfit consisted of his favorite cargo pants and sneakers. His continued the self-inspection and realized that he was dressed for lounging around the house on a fall day.

“What the hell?” Greg turned towards the red door unsure what he should do. The door was no longer there. The place he had just stepped into the room through was now a bookshelf. He noticed one of the titles on a red spine: Abrahaim Abadi.

“Take a breath Greg.” The woman looked at him without any apparent emotion. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”

Greg shuffled towards the woman woodenly. She graciously pointed at another chair on the opposite side of the fire. Oddly, she used her entire hand to point instead of a single finger. He lurched towards the seat and flopped into it feeling weak-kneed.

“What is happening to me?”

She nodded. “That’s a perfectly natural question Greg. But let’s start with orientation. My name is Saphira. I am an agent of change. You are here because you are in the midst of a major change. You’re dead Greg. And now you have to make a choice. Take a moment to let that sink in.”

Greg thought of Sheila. “I’m not dead. I’m right here. Talking to you.” Another part of him screamed silently. He felt the truth of what she was saying in his core.

“You’re dead Greg. The first rock knocked you off the Old Man. The shell of you is down at the bottom. Those two people you saw called 911. The authorities will come clean up the scene. You were dead within seconds of impact. Welcome to what some would call Purgatory. I have this discussion often Greg. You’ve had a pretty grounded life. Now it’s over. Time to choose a new one.”

The woman sipped from a cup of something on a little wooden table next to her chair. She smiled at Greg.

“Look around. Every book contains the bones of a life. You can stay in this room as long as you wish. Until you’re ready. Until you make a choice. Choose one of these lives. This is the nature of the universe.”

Greg found himself unable to speak. He looked around at the shelves and the hundreds of books.

“Gah.” It was all he could muster.

“The Hindus sort of come closer than the rest of you to getting it right. I’ll run you through the basics. Every life starts as the bones of a book. Every soul chooses which bones to anchor itself to. The rest will be up to you. The stories you see here, the bones available to you, the anchor points – they are all an algorithm. Every choice you ever made, in your time as Greg, has led to this point and these selections.”

She looked into his face. He noticed that her eyes were an impossible purple color. That she was beautiful. In a way that was somehow completely asexual.

“But what about heaven?” Greg’s voice surprised him.

“None of those ideas come close. There is no heaven. There are only infinite pathways and endless choices. And this room. You’ve been here over and over.”

Greg thought about it. The woman looked deep into him and continued.

“You have the benefit of memory for now. Once you make your choice you’ll be born again. Into the bones you’ve chosen, into the time and place you’ve selected. You won’t remember any of this life. It will be a fresh start. But it won’t be completely sanitized. Sometimes, the echoes of past incarnations will be audible. You may get prompts. You may see little glimpses of other roads you’ve walked. This is all there is. Endless stories made up of endless choices.”

The woman pointed again in her odd way, using her entire hand to sweep the bookshelves. “I’ll be here the entire time you are reading. There is no rush. This place is timeless. Compose yourself and choose a book. We have eternity to talk about your options.”

Filed Under: Short Stories Tagged With: climbing, fiction, heaven, penfist, purpose, religion, short story, universe

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