Deserts of Fire Page 13

  Amelia

  We did not name Megumi’s mother after a cartoon character. We named her after Amelia Earhart, the aviator, because we thought she would soar, but whenever the subject came up, she acted like she literally could not believe it—you named me after someone who crashed and burned or drowned or otherwise just disappeared? You’d like it if I just disappeared, too, wouldn’t you? And it was true, just then, I would have been happy if she’d just wandered off to the mall or something, but I couldn’t very well say that, and I didn’t have anyone to talk the problem over with after Karen died leaving me with Amelia who had been thirteen and who would be in and out of rehab for years. Even so, I would never have guessed she’d go on to get herself gunned down so stupidly.

  I blame the authorities. Yes, they probably had to kick down the door and go in with guns drawn, but no one was armed in the house. Okay, they didn’t know that. But they should have been able to tell an assault rifle from a soup ladle even in the dim light. At least they minimized the collateral damage when it came to Megumi who is so quiet now. And trembling, she is all the time trembling just below the surface. You can’t really see it, but if you pull her into your arms where she stands stiff and silent, you can feel her trembling.

  The authorities had been prepared for a fight when they kicked down the wrong door and shot Amelia and David. Imagine you were on that team rooting out terrorists. Some of those young cops must have been frightened. They must have thought they were in terrible danger. They must have thought they would find weapons. The higher-ups might not have looked too closely at the information they had, but they would never in a million years have thought that they would find nothing. I’m convinced that’s why the DEA took over afterwards.

  What they finally found became the grounds for calling Amelia and David major drug dealers. They needed to cover their asses. They got lucky. They changed their story.

  The fact that Amelia and David turned out to actually be major drug dealers is beside the point. I just wish Amelia had dropped her soup ladle, put up her hands, and cried, “Don’t shoot!”

  I look at the pictures in my head of Amelia in her black bandana and bandolier of bullets and Amelia in her red and white high school band uniform, her clarinet, her silly hat, and I see that small strange unsettling smile that is the same in both pictures, one Amelia looking back and the other looking ahead in time. I don’t really think she had a black bandana and bullets. I do think the clarinet was real.

  I still mostly refuse to think of Megumi’s father David as anything but “that man who married my Amelia” and led her into a life of dope, poverty and death, but the truth is, Amelia played her own part. It’s like when she was a teen in rehab, and it hit me one day I could stop worrying about her getting in with the wrong kind of friends. She was the bad influence herself that other parents should worry about. But then for just a moment, she seemed to pull it all together. She met David, got married, gave birth to Megumi, relapsed a couple of times, came back, and then died in a botched homeland security raid.

  Clavichord

  I run into people all the time who think “clavichord” is another word for collarbone. I once mentioned that to Megumi hoping she would smile, but she didn’t get it. This is another sad example of a fifty-four year old man trying to amuse a superhero. I don’t think her rat spider sidekick who might also be a cat or maybe a possum got it either.

  Generally speaking, a clavichord is a rectangular wooden box. It usually has a lid. The keyboard is usually on the left. Inside there is a soundboard and a number of strings. The mechanism for making music is the most simple of all the keyboard instruments. You press a key on one end of a lever and the other end rises up and a metal blade called a tangent strikes a string or pair of strings.

  Unlike a piano player, for example, the clavichord player is in direct contact with the string. The art is in what to do with that contact. Your touch controls the dynamics of the note. You can do a kind of vibrato. You do not just push a key and a consistent sound is produced. It all depends on what you do with that finger on the key.

  The instrument is not loud. Everyone needs to be paying attention—the player, the listeners. Clavichord music is not something that can happen accidentally or in the background. If your neighbor is a clavichord player, chances are you’ll never hear the music through the common wall even if you put your ear right up against it hoping to figure out what’s going on in there.

  Some clavichords are as big as the tops of conference tables. Some are quite small. There is a tiny model called the “King of Sweden” that you can pick up and carry around under your arm. Most are somewhere in between.

  We like to claim that the clavichord was Bach’s favorite instrument.

  In other words, the clavichord is the very essence of the keyboard. It is what Plato would have called an “ideal” keyboard instrument if it had been invented in time for him to call it anything at all.

  It was Abu Yusef who pointed out how much a clavichord looks like a crate of rifles.

  He had a lot of trouble getting his instrument into Iraq when he came home from Italy after the Invasion.

  Our anime supergirls, Megumi and Layla the ghost, never have that kind of trouble. That’s a very good thing, since their clavichords sometimes really are filled with high tech weapons and alien technology!

  Abu Yusef

  Earlier, Abu Yusef amused us all with his story about how Layla came to be his only student, the way the women of the town were all atwitter over it. Most of the children had been very curious about the Mayor’s keyboard which apparently made no sounds. No, that was not true. The sounds it made were very small. You had to be close and listening carefully. What was the point in that?

  He had caught her listening at the door to his music room, and she had run away frightened that he would tell on her, but he had said nothing. He finally took on several other children as students and was able to include Layla in the group. By the end of the week, only she remained.

  Why in the world would you want to teach the child to make those noises?

  She is the one who wants to learn, he told them, and she is the one who actually can learn.

  Abu Yusef’s description of this experience led to a lively discussion of teaching keyboard to very young students and the uses of the clavichord in such teaching and J. S. Bach’s The Little Clavier Book for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. The trouble with little fingers. And all the stuff you need to know. Should we talk about bebung or leave that for later?

  I love my mental picture of Layla’s lessons. She takes her place on the bench in front of the clavichord. The wind that blows through the windows is always very hot in my imagination. Is there glass in the windows? Layla’s little fingers. Will she be able to do it? He stands beside her. Her grandmother sits in a corner with her hands folded in her lap. She is as huge and still and present as an Easter Island statue, impossible to ignore. She is keeping a close eye on the proceedings. Layla and Abu Yusef are working on a snippet of Couperin he especially likes and believes is fundamental to technique. Layla looks up at him. She is so serious and determined.

  Yes, Sensei, I can do this.

  No, that would be Megumi.

  No, not her either.

  Amelia with her clarinet?

  Do you hear the way she is getting it? Abu Yusef asks Layla’s grandmother. Do you hear?

  Abu Yusef is also an Etruscan archaeologist. He spent many years in Italy before coming home after the Invasion. His Italian is perfect. He is widely read. When it comes to the clavichord, he is an expert on the instrument built from the intarsia of Urbino in Italy. This is a wood carving of an old clavichord. It is so detailed that builders have been able to duplicate the instrument. Abu Yusef has made four such copies. One is in France, one is in New York, one is still in Italy, and the other is in London. He wishes he had kept one of them for himself. Well, someday when things are quieter, he will make another. In the meantime he has a wonderful double fretted instrum
ent (that looks like a crate of rifles when closed). It is the sound of that instrument which captured Layla’s imagination and transported her to a world where everything was possible.

  The Twangsters

  You can’t be a supergirl with huge eyes unless you’ve got a profile. I’ve figured that much out poking around online trying to figure out what Amelia might have been thinking when she named Megumi.

  So, here we go.

  Name: Megumi

  Alias: Pumpkin, snuggle bunny.

  Race: Human

  Gender: Female

  Age: six

  Hair: light brown (blinding pink these days)

  Eyes: blue (dazzling and always a little sad)

  Height: 44 inches (111.760 cm)

  Weight: 42 pounds (19.051 kg)

  Blood: Type A

  Status: Demon hunter, rocket scientist, first grade student (in the fall).

  Quote: “Everything is so quiet.”

  Name: Layla

  Alias: Lallie, Princess of the Night.

  Race: Human

  Gender: Female

  Age: six

  Hair: brown (ghostly blue these days—you might even say purple)

  Eyes: brown (sparkling, dancing, laughing)

  Height: We must guess that she might be just a little taller than Megumi.

  Weight: And maybe just a little lighter.

  Blood: Type B (I’m making this up. I don’t want to think about the blood. Why do we always need to know the blood type of our superheroes?)

  Status: Crime fighter, ghost.

  Quote: “Where will we put them all?”

  Storyline: Megumi is sad sitting under her tree. Her whole world has been shattered. She has come to live with her grandfather in his clavichord dojo. There are no children her age in the neighborhood. Instead there are a few good jazz clubs, a gay bar, and a couple of top-notch restaurants (one Vietnamese and the other French). She doesn’t really want to learn how to play the clavichord. But what else can her grandfather teach her?

  Meanwhile in southern Iraq, Layla who really does want to learn to play the clavichord is run down by a truck. She becomes a ghost. She somehow picks up on the clavichord connection between Megumi’s grandfather and Abu Yusef, and she materializes and makes friends with Megumi. Megumi’s finger work is much improved by her interaction with the talented ghost.

  Megumi will cut her hair short and dye it pink, scandalizing her grandfather, and Layla will do hers in a bright but ghostly blue. They will wear cool costumes. Look at them! Zooming around righting wrongs and singing songs (but not too loudly because no one can hear the clavichord if you’re belting out the words with too much enthusiasm). Layla and Megumi will be black belts in Megumi’s grandfather’s dojo of martial clavichord playing. Everyone will be forced to stop shouting and shooting and listen carefully to hear them playing.

  Some of the cool stuff in future episodes will include gender confusion, evil aliens, talking animals, and giant robots. We get the idea that after all is said and done and the adventures are over, Layla will move on to wherever little girls go when they die in vehicular mishaps in Iraq, but Megumi who will be the president of Mars or something will never forget her. There is the hint that Megumi’s mother Amelia will help Layla find her way by pointing at the light with her soup ladle. We suspect Layla might pop back in from time to time for even wilder adventures or to give Megumi sisterly advice about life.

  Little Stars

  I move away from the window and sit down at the clavichord and get lost in some tricky parts but not so lost I don’t hear Megumi come back in. She comes quietly up to my side. She pulls at my sleeve. She gives me a small pinecone. I pat the bench. She crawls up beside me. I put the pinecone down on the music stand in front of us.

  Megumi plays a little tune.

  Clunk clank clunk clank clink clink clink.

  “Very nice,” I tell her, thinking that what she’s played might be Bach or it might be “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

  Both are good.

  * Note from Ray Vukcevich: I wrote this story for a project called “The Dust Girl” by Benjamin Buchholz. When I asked him to say a few words about it, he sent me this:

  The second day of my military service in Iraq I responded to a traffic incident no more than a few hundred meters from the border crossing point for US supplies between Kuwait City and Baghdad. There I found that one of our semis had run over an Iraqi girl of about six years of age, a girl who had been begging for food or water. She had run out into the road to get a water bottle thrown to her from one of the semis. When I arrived her blanketed body lay still in the roadway, with a southbound convoy stalled on one side of her, the soldiers anxious to return to the safety of their base in Kuwait, and a convoy stalled in the northbound lane. Between the two perhaps a hundred Iraqis had gathered, wailing women, relatives, other children, along with British troops, our young American troops, members of the town council, dogs, and even a few goats. The scene troubled me for many months, haunting me. As catharsis, I asked a number of writers to tell the story, to invent it anew from nothing more than details such as those I’ve provided in this very paragraph. They immersed themselves in the characters and told the tale of this ‘Dust Girl’ from the perspective of one of those bystanders. While no story can truly capture a death such as this in its randomness, its chaos, its futility, perhaps the fiction preserves bits and pieces of her. It is all we can do.

  Pedro Iniguez’s fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Space and Time Magazine, Crossed Genres, Outposts of Beyond, and From the Corner of Your Eye. His story “Shaytan, The Whisperer” was originally published in the anthology Those Who Live Long Forgotten.

  In Islam, the devil is called Shaytan or Shaitan.

  “shaytan, the whisperer”

  PEDRO INIGUEZ

  algol, the Demon Star, adorned the night sky and watched as Baghdad burned. The flames licked skyward casting webs of light and shadow upon the crosshatching of streets. Homes, offices, palaces: the fire knew no prejudice.

  In early April, 2003, Baghdad became a city of light.

  Inaya watched from the roof of her house. Every few minutes the bombs burst in the distance and the gunshots popped sporadically.

  Her uncle, Arif, stood with one arm on her shoulder and the other clasping the Koran. He whispered prayer to the wind but Inaya didn’t care.

  The most she could offer was hope that Hakeem had not come into contact with American forces.

  “Shaytan was created from fire,” Uncle Arif said now looking at her. “And he is born again wherever it may kindle.”

  “Uncle, please, don’t start with that.”

  “Allah created the Angels, the Djinn, and Man. The Angels were the only ones not to have free will; they obeyed him and worshipped him. One day came, when Allah created Adam, the first man, and Allah told all to bow down to his new creation. One by one they all kneeled until it came time for Shaytan to do so. He was the only one standing, and proclaimed to Allah, ‘I will not bow down to Adam, I am superior to him; I was born of fire and he of clay.’ For this Allah cast him down to Earth and relegated judgment until the end of times. Shaytan would then declare his intent to lead the followers of Allah astray and prove that faith could be broken.”

  Arif sighed. “Shaytan is the Whisperer of Men; but he has no power over us, child, only the power to suggest. But he is a great deceiver; he can appear as any form, man or beast. And it is said that wherever Shaytan goes, the Ghouls are not far behind.”

  “Uncle, please—”

  “The Ghouls are Djinn of myth, the wanderers of the desert sands. The scavengers of men, they feed on the carrion of the departed. Where Shaytan steps, the Ghouls feast. Shaytan drifts with the wind … and he is here.” He swept his hand over the city.

  Inaya had no more words for her uncle. Her face was like stone and turned to look on the burning city in quiet concern.

  Uncle Arif put his hand on her shoulder
again and looked on. “I hope your brother is safe.” He paused to survey the glow. “But there is so much fire.”

  The light of the fire gave way to the light of the sun; the light of the sun gave way to the light of the television.

  The news broadcaster announced Coalition Forces had formally declared the capture of Baghdad.

  Inaya saw women on the television with wallet-size photographs of their loved ones. They were going around the city looking for missing family members; perhaps soldiers, perhaps boys that never came home during the bombing. The women checked the prisons, the hospitals, the mass graves the military dug up.

  She rummaged through drawers and rifled cabinets. She found an old service picture of Hakeem in full army uniform; he was a handsome man and a caring brother. It was not like him to not have called.

  It had been three days since she heard from him.

  Uncle Arif went to work at the market and she hoped it was still intact. She scribbled a quick note of intent and stated she didn’t know when she would return, but promised that she would. Inaya didn’t know where to start, but figured she’d try getting out on the street first.

  She hit the city in her worn Nikes and faded blue jeans. She was an unconventional young woman in an unconventional time.

  The Karrada district was one of the most diverse in Iraq and for that she had been fortunate. The ordeals other women or Christians faced in other parts of the city were usually spared on her.

  The air was tinged burning rubber and wood. She didn’t know what burning flesh smelled like and hoped she didn’t smell it now.

  The crowds were out in numbers as hundreds of feet pounded the cracked sidewalks. Inaya stopped to ask a man what this was all about.

  “We are heading to the Main Square to celebrate the American Victory,” the man said.

  As she walked the crowded dusty streets, she swayed to the Al-Jadirya Private Hospital.

  She was hit with a sting of nerves and feared walking in. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know anything anymore. But, she braved the feeling and walked in.