Thomas E. Howard
At the End of the World
Many foreigners hate Americans for the exact reasons most Americans have said they loathe me. Think about it.
—Tim McVeigh. Letter from prison, May 16, 2001.
There was a Basque saying: izena duen guzia omen da, or, that which has a name exists. For the longest time though, I didn't know Rosethorn's name.
Her father was born in the Basque Country of Spain, southern Euskal Herria, and studied industrial engineering at Sarriko, the school of economics in Bilbao. As a Basque student in Franco's Spain in the 1960s, Rosethorn's father became a fervent Basque nationalist and anti-fascist. Police arrested him for flying the banned Basque flag, the ikurriña, and he spent a month in jail. When he got out, he took part in a student strike that ended in violence during one of the several "states of siege" Franco declared against the Basque Country, and fled Spain with the Guardia Civil at his heels.
Her father settled in Argentina where he met her mother. The two married, and Rosethorn was born soon after. When Rosethorn was only two years old, her family left Argentina to come to the United States, once again fleeing dictatorship.
How I knew these things I couldn't say.
Rosethorn's mother was also born in Spain, in the old Galician city of Muros. Each year during the Feast of the Virgen del Carmen in July, the people watched a statue of the Virgin Mary, la Protectora, lifted onto a boat at the docks, rowed out to sea and back as a blessing for the year ahead. At night beneath eucalyptus trees they drank wine and watched dancers perform the muiñeira con gaitas. As a child, Rosethorn's mother sang to her in Galego about a woman who sat along the coastline of la Finisterra on the northwestern tip of Spain looking out to sea, waiting for her shipwrecked husband to return. Rosethorn's father died of stomach cancer in 1983, and her mother never remarried.
There was a certain power wrapped up in language, in the names that others gave us and in the names we took ourselves. Within a name was an identity, a spirit that animated us and brought to life our past and our lineage, or cloaked it. Without a name, without a context, a thing did not exist. Our true names, the names we lived by, were sacred. Our choice of language held more potential than we realized.
Nunca Mais, Never Again—two powerful words lapping the northern coastline of Spain in an oil-slicked tide after the Prestige tanker spill destroyed the environment, choking seabirds and fish and with them, along with the livelihoods of everyone who depends on the ocean. In Galicia, young people left in search of jobs, as family fishing ships came back half empty, grounding their nets, while industrial trawlers reached deep beneath the waves, dredging everything in their wake. The astilleros, the shipyards of Galicia and the Basque Country, were cutting jobs or shutting down. As they went, workers of whole towns and cities entered the global race to the bottom. There was a joke that a Galego flag was on the moon before an American flag; so many young people left in search of a future, you might find Galego spoken anywhere.
Galego was closer to Portuguese as a language than to Spanish. When Rosethorn did speak in Spanish, it was in the Castellano of her mother, but to be half Galego, half Basque, born in Argentina and raised in the United States, made Rosethorn a woman who searched until she was breathless, quick to share her passion with others, but private and close by nature.
I knew these things, as I knew everything, only in disjointed pieces at first.
Then it all came back in a flood.
I forced myself awake. It was maybe half past two and the steady rumble of traffic on the highway near my apartment reminded me of police helicopters beating their blades overhead.
With post-traumatic stress disorder, your dreams weren't dreams anymore.
The difference between long-term integrated memories and the dissociated cramped muscle of thought from the past few years was a matter of perception. The past existed on shuffle replay, the present at a point that disappeared in an instant, and the future not at all. When a thing died, it left a deep mark; while a thing lived, it existed in one breath, but what was forgotten lasted forever.
Experiences altered the connectivity between brain areas. Synaptic flow and efficiency changed from exposure to certain things. Thought only existed as a looped neural pathway that cycled through very quickly.
There was no abstraction, no theory that did not have as its base a foundation in existence, no thought that didn't have a brain to think it, no cause that didn't have an effect or motivation, no decision that was ever altruistic, no struggle without sides.
I knew certain things only because, as I said, I never forget anything.
When the mind clicked in on a threat, it initiated a series of physical responses to amp flesh and bone, ready to throw down or cut and bolt in a second. Nerves relayed sensory information, blood cells carried hormones coursing through veins, arteries and capillaries. Catecholamine and thyroxin levels increased. The heart started in with a chest-jumping rhythm, while muscles tensed and coiled, Sonny Chiba style. Cortisol decreased initially, allowing the body to burn more calories by accessing stored fat. Lungs got hip-hop beat boxing as eyes darted speed metal riffs and all brakes failed. Constantly amped post-trauma, the level of neurotransmitters and number of receptors on the brain's nerve endings changed. The purpose of nerve cells was fundamentally altered.
Make me forget.
All structure was composed of various elements and their interaction.
Society was nothing more than a composition of various people and the manner of their interaction. All intentional human events had as their cause the actions of individuals, groups of individuals or the political, economic or social institutions constructed by either individuals or groups. Depending how it was looked at it, this could be impossibly simple or impossibly complex.
Really, no one ever forgot anything.
All human emotions were processed through the limbic system. The part of the brain called the amygdala processed emotional memory, sending fractured, incomplete or irrational memories to the hippocampus. The hippocampus integrated and associated memories, linking them with each other in space and time. Broca's area in the left frontal cortex provided a logical, narrative coherence and verbal integration, giving memories a name and context. This allowed us to store experience in long-term memory.
Lobotomize me. Give me meds, give me drugs. Help me drool away existence.
Dissociated traumatic memories couldn't be integrated. Triggered by minor, subsequent stressors, this dissociated material intruded on consciousness. Located in the brain stem near the limbic system, the locus ceruleus responded to stressful situations by sending messages to other portions of the brain, changing the flow of neurotransmitters. In a sensitized state, the locus ceruleus responded as it would to the original trauma, stuck in overdrive on the brink of stalling out. With recurrent trauma, Broca's area shut down. The hippocampus atrophied and malfunctioned. The amygdala kicked in full time and traumatic memories became the skipping tracks of a CD, fragmented rough and jagged with bruised, hangnail edges.
Reformat my mind with serotonergic antidepressants, tricyclics like imiprimine and amitriptyline, give me lithium, give me sodium valproate, diazepam, alprazolam.
Make it so that I no longer am.
All that was necessary to change the structure of any system was to change the relationship of elements within that system, to each other and to the whole. Any structure based on intentional cause in its relationships could be altered by intentional acts. A structure based on greed, competition and sadism tended to make people greedy, sadistic and competitive; one based on fear, intimidation and ignorance tended to make people fearful, intimidated and ignorant.
Change the nature of the relationships and you changed the structure of that system. Change the structure of the system and you altered the intrinsic nature of the elements. The only thing necessary was the intentional act, the consequences of which were never certain. Like a butterfly flapping its wings, with everything came risks.
It was four-thirty a.m.
I stood outside, my cigarette sucked down to my fingertips, burning me.
That which had a name, existed.
When I saw her last, the images were arranged in plates with these captions written beneath, the photo essay of an Iraqi journalist Rosethorn managed to book at a gallery in the city. Graphic pictures in full color: bright and thick dark reds, tangled browns and ashen yellows, searing pinks and powdery fine grays, sickly pale whites and brittle, cracked tans and khakis.
-- This Iraqi woman is struggling to care for her children. Her husband was killed.
-- Nada Adnan, fourteen year old school girl, suffers multiple fractures from cruise missile shrapnel that nearly sliced her leg off above the knee.
-- Four year old girl wounded by US artillery. Her father was handcuffed by US troops as he begged to comfort his young daughter.
-- Seventy-six year old Malh Mrzwk Albdre. Killed in an air strike.
-- Aseel Hassan Aabood, a twenty-three year old woman, died in a missile strike.
-- Iraqi father and daughter in better times.
Each photo paired to a brief text heading, putting a context to what the conscience could not comfortably comprehend. Bruised, broken limbs and faces, figures maimed and bloodied, mutilated in ways that seemed physically impossible-deflated. Clumps of flesh swaddled in cloth stained crimson, beyond recognition as human. Images of civilian casualties in Iraq, brushed aside by military spokesmen as collateral damage.
-- Children's ward at Al Kindi hospital, Baghdad, Iraq.
-- This little boy suffers from shrapnel wounds in his abdomen. Without anesthesia such wounds are very hard to treat.
-- Twenty-six year old Iyad Jassim Ibrahim, killed by a cluster bomb, Basra.
-- Dead Iraqis piled in mass grave after bombing, children on top of adults.
-- Bombing survivors with severe burns and shrapnel wounds. Children's Ward, Al Kindi Hospital. Baghdad, Iraq.
-- Iraqi civilians dig graves outside of hospital.
Images that will never be shown on the nightly news sandwiched between Sports and the Five-Day Forecast. Images that will never merit a Congressional investigation. Images that will never be the subject of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Images that will never hit the newsstand. Images that will never be looked at by the majority of Americans with anything but denial and disbelief. Images that are unpatriotic. Images that will never be in a high school history textbook or almanac. Images that will never be used as evidence in a court of law. Images that will not rest. Images that have names.
-- Nine year old boy, Falah Hasun, killed by shrapnel in Najaf.
-- Thirteen year old Abbas lost his entire family in the 2003 US lead bombing of Iraq. Abbas lost his arms at the shoulder and suffers third degree burns.
-- Eighty year old woman, Fadeela Zeeg Abdullah, killed by shrapnel.
-- Ten year old girl, Zahraa Husien Khzaieer, dead from chest wounds, Baghdad.
-- The family of Sajid Kadhum Bouri al-Bawi, who was shot during an interrogation by US troops on a night time raid, Baghdad, Iraq. Soldiers hid his body behind a refrigerator in an attempted cover up.
-- Iraqi baby exposed to depleted uranium.
Depleted uranium from spent armor piercing bomb and ammunition fragments used by the United States military and scattered across Iraq causes birth defects, among other health problems. Many babies whose mothers were exposed to dust or fragments are born without eyes, brains, organs, arms or legs, with two heads, no head or with no skin, only a thin transparent membrane. Iraqi doctors educated in London or Stockholm deal each day with cases they have only seen described in textbooks. Seven year olds developing breast cancer, multiple cancers appearing in the same person, in the same family. Things that never existed beyond the hypothetical study group questions of medical students.
Rosethorn said that according to a study by the Veterans' Administration of 251 veterans' families from the First Iraq War in Mississippi, 67 percent of children conceived and born after the war had similar birth defects. Four hundred tons of depleted uranium dust and fragments are in Iraq and the amount increases daily. The half-life of depleted uranium is 4.5 billion years.
Scientists estimate the Earth to be 6 billion years old.
My throat was dry. At her apartment, candlelit and subdued in contrast to the horrible array of war images in the portfolio binder on her kitchen table, I asked Rosethorn for a glass of water. "So you're determined then?" Rosethorn said she wanted to see me, that she had something important to say.
She nodded. "I've got everything all worked out."
"You've thought it through, all of it?"
"Everything," she said. "Travel is all worked out. I'll be going with other independent journalists to Amman first to link up with a reporter from a Baghdad newspaper, Al Muhajaha, through my Indymedia contacts." Rosethorn moved to the cabinet to pull a glass down and glanced back over her shoulder. "Maybe I'll get to rub shoulders with some hot shots, huh?"
I didn't return her enthusiasm.
"I really want to meet up with people who worked with Deep Dish on Shocking and Awful."
The last page of the portfolio was a list compiled of names, dates, locations and manner of death from March 2003 to the present, from Iraq Body Count. Bullet in head. Shrapnel. Missile. Burns. Tank attack. Air strike. Full body burn. Aerial bombardment. American soldiers. Car hit by tank fire. Bullet cut arteries. Bullet in heart. B-52 dropping cluster bombs.
"It's what I want to do, what I have to do," she said. "It's got to be documented."
Bomb. Cluster bomb. Roadside bomb. Tank bomb. Car bomb. Family car in head-on collision with US armored personnel carrier fleeing ambush. Double suicide attack on offices of political parties. Throat cut. Rape. Sniper's gunfire. Killed by other Iraqis. Kidnap victim. Shot. Suicide car bomb. Helicopter launched rocket. US air strike.
"This is the chance I've been looking for to do what I've always wanted. So many of the Iraqis I've talked to, despite everything, they seem so filled with hope. They realize opportunity in even the worst of situations. It's strange to find that. Almost a contradiction, but not quite."
I bowed my head and couldn't make eye contact.
"One woman I met, she opened a battered women's shelter in Baghdad. It was amazing to hear her speak. She was with one of the communist parties there. But you know, here's this woman getting death threats from fundamentalist militias because of her secular, feminist views and standing her ground. In the past, women like her would have been tortured or raped and then executed by Saddam's regime. She doesn't have military protection, just her comrades and her courage. I want to document women like her, ordinary people doing their best despite the war and the occupation, all the violence around them. This could be what I've always waited for."
"Yeah."
She asked, "Did you hear what I said? This really could be it."
"I just don't understand why you have to go."
"I don't have to go," she said. "But I want to. It's a chance to show what's going on."
"Yeah, okay."
Rosethorn took a seat next to me. "Listen, if you're not going to be supportive of the decisions I make then maybe we shouldn't even talk about it." Her tone changed, now curt and dismissive.
I didn't say anything.
"What? What is it?"
"It's just that..."
"What? I don't get it. I don't think it's asking too much, you know, to be supportive of me. You know filmmaking is what I really want to do with my life."
"Yes, all right, fine. Filmmaking. Yes. But this isn't like trekking through some rainforest somewhere. This is going to a war zone where people are being shot and kidnapped and killed."
"All the more reason to show how ordinary people are affected." She stood from her chair and began pacing the kitchen. "Wait, your friend, what's his name? He went to Palestine, right?"
"Aaron."
"Yeah, Aaron. That was a war zone. He came back fine."
"He got arrested and deported by the Israeli army."
"So?"
"If you get detained by US troops, even as an independent journalist, you think they'll just deport you? How do you know they won't call you an enemy combatant and ship you off to a prison camp who knows where? And if you're grabbed by some militia..."
"I can't believe I'm hearing this from you."
"Do you even know what you're doing here? I swear to God, it's like you've got fucking tunnel vision or something. There's plenty of shit that needs doing here, right here."
"Don't raise your voice," Rosethorn said.
"Look, sorry. I don't understand why you need to go running away all the fucking time. The world is going to stay the way it is, there will always be suffering, people will always be dying and there's nothing any of us can do to stop it. Nothing. People die and they're gone. That's it. No second chances."
Rosethorn stood near her sink and composed herself.
"And yes, everything in the rest of the world, I get it. But what about right here, huh? Don't we live in the belly of the beast, right? Shouldn't we be doing more here, isn't that what you always said?"
She turned her head to gaze out the kitchen window.
In the brief silence I noticed my right hand shaking uncontrollably as it rested on the open portfolio. I put it in my lap and held it still there. I cast my attention at the ground.
"You really have changed," she finally said.
"There's just more to me now." I crossed my arms.
"You know, I don't get it. I thought you of all people could be supportive about this."
"Supportive? Oh, you want me to be supportive?" I looked at her. "Because you don't seem to care if you end up as a footnote on iraqbodycount.org? Yes, I have changed. Maybe when it comes to watching people I care about, people I love, put themselves in potentially horrendous danger, I can't be as supportive as you'd like me to be."
"What happened there was bad, okay, but it doesn't mean everything stops."
"You weren't there," I said to her. "You want to call it bad, like it was a bad hair day, fine. I don't give a shit how you describe it, because it isn't just about what I saw, or any other time like it. We've been through a lot together, you and I. We've seen worse, maybe. But what I've learned is that people don't exist in a vacuum. One person gets kicked and ten get the wind knocked out of them. I don't know what you've learned. So I'm sorry you took the time inviting me here to be supportive of you because I just don't have the energy. I'm spent."
Her eyes filled with tears.
I rubbed my left eye with the heel of my palm. "Look, you do what you're going to do. Nothing I could possibly say would stop you anyhow. I give up." I stood.
"You're just going to leave?" Rosethorn's voice broke into angry sobs.
"I really don't need this." My right hand drummed out a frenetic tempo against my thigh and I made no attempt to stop it or hide it from her anymore. "I can't watch this."
"I don't need this either, okay? Not from you," Rosethorn said. "I can't do this."
After a little, I went, "I don't think we can figure this out right now."
She shook her head. "Just go," she said. "That's what you want to do. Just go."
I collected my coat and knapsack from near the door. When I looked back, Rosethorn stood with her arms held close across her chest, hand up by her mouth, biting on her thumb.
She didn't look at me, and that was the last time we spoke before she left months ago.
In another dream, I'm halfway to the corner of some street when I hear an unmistakable inflection to my name from behind me. "Peter?"
Her hair is shorter, but otherwise she's the same.
We walk to face each other and I go, "Hi."
"Hi," she says.
"I guess I should tell you that I haven't kept in touch because there were some things that I had to deal with," I say. "I can't promise you that things won't come up, so I can't be around anymore."
"You showed up again after not talking to me for this long to tell me you're leaving?"
"I wanted to explain, so you'd understand."
"I don't want you to explain. I don't want you to make anything up."
I shake my head. "Listen..."
"No, really. I don't want you to say a word." She looks at me and puts her hand to my stubbled cheek, then withdraws it. "Mostly, it's good to see that you're okay."
"Mostly?"
"The way you left, you're lucky it's mostly."
"You're right."
"Don't apologize." She looks down. "You're still my favorite person."
"I suppose this is when I ask you how things are."
"Same as always." Rosethorn smiles. "But as expected. What's done is done, right? You can't do what other people expect of you."
"No, you can't."
"Forget it. Hey, I don't want you to fight my battles for me. I never have. You had your reasons. You have to trust that I have mine."
"My reasons..."
"Which I don't need to hear. We don't have to explain ourselves to each other, right?" Rosethorn pivots on her heels to face me. "You don't owe me an explanation and I don't owe you one."
"No. You don't. And I don't."
"Right." We stand and look at each other, then with arms crossed, she goes, "So I guess this is where we say goodbye for a while again?"
"Maybe. I don't want to."
"But we will," she says. "This is where we hug and you walk away and I walk away and we both go back to whatever it was we were doing before."
I nod, reach out, and tuck her hair behind her left ear with my fingers.
Rosethorn wipes at her eyes with a wrist. "Look, it doesn't have to be this way."
I take a step forward. "This wasn't my intention."
She stands there, arms at her side, and shakes her head.
"Look, I..."
Rosethorn leans forward with her hands on my arms, kisses me on the cheek and walks away.
©2005 by Thomas E. Howard
