Politically Inspired Fiction: In Shock and Awe

By Stephen Elliott, AlterNet. Posted March 17, 2003.

Politically Inspired Fiction is fiction inspired by current events, by novelist Stephen Elliott. His short stories will appear weekly on AlterNet.

"Here we go," Amy says after the air-raid sirens have been ringing for half an hour and it's become clear they aren't going to stop. It's cold in Baghdad at night and we're both wearing a blue fleece, a coincidence of what we brought from home. My home being in San Francisco, a small studio with wooden floors and a moldy shower, Amy's in upstate New York on a communal farm. She gives me that look she's been giving me since we got here, two Human Shields on the same bus from the Syrian border. Two Americans squatting in an Iraqi power plant, an obvious target in the first wave of bombing. The Iraqis certainly consider it an important target, or they wouldn't waste two Americans on it.

"Yeah," I say, rolling a cigarette on my knee. I quit smoking 10 years ago, but I've started again, out of boredom. We're sitting on a long plank of wood we've been bunking on. "Say goodnight Gracie."

Amy edges closer to me, smiling. I could see why someone would think she was pretty. She is pretty. Long, brown hair, unwashed in a while now, the thin, muscular body of an athlete. Even in the baggy clothes she wears, and without makeup, it's obvious. And I should be delighted. After all, I'm short and hairy. Nobody has ever confused me with good looking. But what she's offering, or what I think she's offering since I could certainly be wrong, is sex in the name of politics, her body in gratitude for my willingness to die for a cause, mine to hers to comfort her in our last night on earth. But I'm not into it. I'm not into anything.

"I was married," Amy offers.

"I know. You've said."

"Well, when we broke up, I couldn't keep silent anymore. You know, I couldn't let the world continue to be the way it was. I had to take my place in it. I've been protesting ever since."

"Do you think they'll arrest us? I mean, if we live, when we get back to America?"

"Yes," Amy says, brushing my leg as I stand to go outside. "I do think that."

Outside the air is crisp. All around the power plant is the faint smell of bleach. All of the lights have been shut off and there are only the black shapes of the Baghdad skyline, buildings like obelisks. The stars are enormous and I wish it could always be this peaceful, except for the sirens, which interrupt all of it with their constant screams. The sirens are loud but I am steadily getting used to them.

I didn't leave much behind to come here except a good job with the University and a dead father who died three weeks before I arrived in Amman. I boycotted his funeral. I didn't want to hear the rabbi speak of his virtues. Everyone always speaks so well of the dead. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, as the Romans would say.

I have no illusions about the conflict, though I suppose everybody feels that way. Everybody feels like they live without illusions, that they have the most accurate read on the news. I remember the papers before I left. The New York Times predicted up to 10,000 casualties on the first day of the bombing. The Village Voice placed the number at 100,000. Z-Magazine said it could be upward of half a million. Harlan Ullman, the architect of the "Shock And Awe" strategy, compared it to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima. People believe what they want to believe, then they find the news source to back it up.

But I don't think I'm right to be here. This man Saddam Hussein, who our handlers refer to affectionately as Papa, with his thick mustache, is not a good man. Even the other Human Shields don't think he is good. Rather they are anti-America, or anti-war, or just anti-Bush. But for me, I'm not here for any of that, I'm trying to exist. The world is making a decision and I want to have a seat at the table. Because for so long now I've been so sad.

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