Screens: The War at Home
Laura Tanner
I.
All day we waited for news. Waited in winter's last hours for a war we knew was coming in a place too far away to find. Pulling out the dusty globe, we spun the world on its axes, fingers covering names of cities an eight year old can't say. Everywhere we turned were surfaces we didn't touch: the radio muted, newspaper face down in a pile, the T.V.'s shiny screen shimmering black and jumping with reflections. The boys in bed, it takes an hour for the first bombs to break through; even then they're muted, occasional and slight. In the dense dawn light the only images show what is not there: the city's unilluminated. An American reporter on his deck talks us through it, shouting to be heard. The sky's quiet now: it's the dogs he cannot silence. Set off by sounds we cannot hear, the dogs in Baghdad keep barking in our ears. From the kitchen, our setter answers their call, flies from window to window searching out a source with no location, sees things moving in the dark.
II.
The list is in the paper but I don’t know a single soldier. In this town we take kids to hockey camp or trek the hill towns in Tuscany, reluctant teenagers in tow. In the summer, news cycles slow, the little protest makes page one. We find ourselves in the picture wielding candles at awkward angles, the slow drip of wax held stiffly at arm’s length. Right before the shutter snaps a warm breeze sweeps my hair away. My oldest, not quite 13, stands just apart. The image blurs bodies and erases depth, my son’s face topping a jacket I've never seen him wear, shoulders too broad to be his straining against cloth in dim light.
III.
The boy I went to college with had half his head blown off and lived to tell about it. A handsome guy, serious and smart, he left the network anchor desk and rode the tank in Taji to find the war and make the story real. Twenty eight days of a dream job, a moon cycle, and the blood rushing out nothing compared to what the body absorbs, what the flesh takes and refuses to let go: the stone in the neck, the shrapnel in the scalp, pieces of bark buried in soft tissue that swell into spots on the MRI. Now that the words came back and the hair grew in you can hardly see the piece of skull the surgeons cut to leave room for his brain to swell. In the home movie cable broadcasts his kids laugh while he struggles to sound words they mastered long ago, tries to name things -- hammer, scissors, belt buckle – he can’t quite place from pictures. When he asked them to open the hatch and he stuck his head out to take it all in and bring it back here he couldn't know how hard they’d work to get the shrapnel out. The imaging tracks the brain’s swell but not the mind’s motion and on the screen the foreign bodies in his head glow white and eerie in the dark.
IV.
He’s known her since preschool, this chubby girl who told my son not to worry on the day they put the spacer in his mouth. Open wide, she said, admiring the metal that kept sticking to his tongue. You’re not lisping, she said, You sound good. Almost eleven now, she wears pink leggings and shirts that show her soft brown belly. Listening as his phone rings with texts we can’t hear written in codes we can’t read, we wonder nights how long a boy and girl can last as friends. We sit for dinner to the sounds of gunfire filtering from the radio below. “Serena’s family lives there,” Cole pronounces without segue, gesturing toward the sounds. “In the basement?” his older brother asks, his voice flat with apathy or sarcasm. It’s news to us, the grandmother in Sadr City, the cousins in Saulaymaniyah -- a name I’d seen on the phone for months now, a word so odd and lyrical I thought they’d made it up.
V.
They called her the “crazy woman” of al Ghazi. When her eyes met theirs instead of looking down, they thought they knew what she held close to her chest. Body, bomb, birds all burst from the deep black folds of the abaya when they blew her up in the Baghdad animal market. As she opened her arms the force sent donkeys flying, the blood of boys mixed with pigeons exploding in the air. Blocks away and hours later, a mother keens for two sons wandering the market on school holiday. The bruises on her face mark the places where her fists hit the skin over and over and her hair is laced with dirt, gritty remnants of her mourning like ashes in the air. Where I touch the picture she’s bent double, the outline of her body indistinguishable or empty beneath the covers of the robe she keeps clutching in her hands.
Working Notes
My piece traces the impact of the Iraq war in domestic terms, beginning with the explosion of the first bombs on television and ending with images of the recent suicide bombing in a Baghdad pet market. Haunted by the images I’d seen on TV the night the war began, I stayed up and wrote the first section then. As years went by and my boys continued to grow up in a world at war, I returned to the piece to add sections, most of which focused on the distance between the domestic world we live in and a world of violence accessible only through the mediation of technology and the media.
About the author
Laura E. Tanner is Professor of English at Boston College, where she teaches classes on Literature and Social Change, Contemporary American Women Writers and Twentieth-Century Fiction. She has written on a variety of social issues in literary and cultural contexts, including race, gender, violence, illness and aging. Her second book, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death, was published in 2006 by Cornell University Press.
