Read Online News From the Red Desert by Kevin Patterson - Free Book Online
Authors: Kevin Patterson
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the oldest, too, perhaps forty years, maybe forty-five. I have never learned whether or not he has a family or children. I did know that he had terrible insomnia, and that when he lifted his patch, his left eye looked like it was filled with cotton. Sometimes, in the sleeping area at night, one caught sight of him lifting the patch as he lay on his back, staring at the ceiling and waiting for morning.
Mohammed was scarcely eighteen, and by scarcely, I mean thirteen at the outside. He must have claimed to be older in order to be hired, and while he attempted to sustain the fiction, he shaved once a week and then only for the ritual of it. If he possessed any hair but the shock of blackness rising straight up from his scalp, none of us had ever seen it. Fazil would not allow him off the coffee shop premises after dark. I dismissed the boy as an ignorant villager. Everything about him suggested dullness: his accent, his relentless piety, his inability to look anyone in the eye or say the first thing about politics, or anything else.
My first night there, they told me they had been waiting for me for months, as if it were somehow my fault I had not been hired earlier orhad my papers processed more quickly. They gave me to understand that I would be starting with a debt owed to them, which would require paying off. My detested predecessor, a Bangladeshi named Hamid, had developed tuberculosis four months earlier, and was immediately loaded into a truck headed for the border. Since then, the population of the camp and the workload had increased steadily. Rami Issay had told them I was supposed to have arrived every day for the last three months. And now there were the Gurkhas and the Australians and the American Marines landing here and the English Marines too. Some days the queue wound out around the coffee shop all the way to the massage parlour. I was pleased to be here, I said. I would change my mind soon enough, Fazil said, though without much conviction. We all laughed harshly.
Fazil was the one who taught me how to use the espresso machine. Mohammed swept out the place, as he would twenty more times that day. Amr carried more bags of coffee beans from the back. Rami Issay returned to the café and sat in a chair and read a copy of the
Harvard Business Review
he had found somewhere. The pilots began coming in about then, looking for their cappuccinos. Rami watched to see if any of them would notice what he was reading. None of them did. He did not betray any disappointment. The pilots, headshorn and enormous in their green flight suits, stood around the entrance together and laughed like great braying camels and enjoyed being themselves, so muscular and so erect. Rami Issay just sat there, out of the pilots’ way, and looked out a window toward Ghar Killay, the mountains silver peaked and jagged in the distance. The air above them shimmered in the midafternoon heat. Then someone else walked in and he rose, grinning, to greet them.
Master Sergeant Demetrios Anakopoulus
Five years on this base and the one place I’m still not used to is this coffee shop. First year here, we were on hard rations most of the time—foil bags of ravioli and omelets and beef stew, and coffee that came out ofgreen metal urns and no one would even have admitted knowing how to spell cappuccino, let alone drink one three times a day. Now my guys run over here after every meal and bring back trays of foamy cups. At first I never came here. It seemed too fancy for an operational base in a combat zone. Then I did and it turned out that it’s the one place on the base where people give one another a bit of space. So I spend quite a bit of time here. The only place I can be alone. Which is sort of the point to my being here, as far as I can tell.
I do find it a treat. Today, more than a treat.
Select all.
How could I have been so stupid?
First thing, I guess, is to act normal. Hope the site doesn’t post anything. Resist the temptation to write
Mohammed was scarcely eighteen, and by scarcely, I mean thirteen at the outside. He must have claimed to be older in order to be hired, and while he attempted to sustain the fiction, he shaved once a week and then only for the ritual of it. If he possessed any hair but the shock of blackness rising straight up from his scalp, none of us had ever seen it. Fazil would not allow him off the coffee shop premises after dark. I dismissed the boy as an ignorant villager. Everything about him suggested dullness: his accent, his relentless piety, his inability to look anyone in the eye or say the first thing about politics, or anything else.
My first night there, they told me they had been waiting for me for months, as if it were somehow my fault I had not been hired earlier orhad my papers processed more quickly. They gave me to understand that I would be starting with a debt owed to them, which would require paying off. My detested predecessor, a Bangladeshi named Hamid, had developed tuberculosis four months earlier, and was immediately loaded into a truck headed for the border. Since then, the population of the camp and the workload had increased steadily. Rami Issay had told them I was supposed to have arrived every day for the last three months. And now there were the Gurkhas and the Australians and the American Marines landing here and the English Marines too. Some days the queue wound out around the coffee shop all the way to the massage parlour. I was pleased to be here, I said. I would change my mind soon enough, Fazil said, though without much conviction. We all laughed harshly.
Fazil was the one who taught me how to use the espresso machine. Mohammed swept out the place, as he would twenty more times that day. Amr carried more bags of coffee beans from the back. Rami Issay returned to the café and sat in a chair and read a copy of the
Harvard Business Review
he had found somewhere. The pilots began coming in about then, looking for their cappuccinos. Rami watched to see if any of them would notice what he was reading. None of them did. He did not betray any disappointment. The pilots, headshorn and enormous in their green flight suits, stood around the entrance together and laughed like great braying camels and enjoyed being themselves, so muscular and so erect. Rami Issay just sat there, out of the pilots’ way, and looked out a window toward Ghar Killay, the mountains silver peaked and jagged in the distance. The air above them shimmered in the midafternoon heat. Then someone else walked in and he rose, grinning, to greet them.
Master Sergeant Demetrios Anakopoulus
Five years on this base and the one place I’m still not used to is this coffee shop. First year here, we were on hard rations most of the time—foil bags of ravioli and omelets and beef stew, and coffee that came out ofgreen metal urns and no one would even have admitted knowing how to spell cappuccino, let alone drink one three times a day. Now my guys run over here after every meal and bring back trays of foamy cups. At first I never came here. It seemed too fancy for an operational base in a combat zone. Then I did and it turned out that it’s the one place on the base where people give one another a bit of space. So I spend quite a bit of time here. The only place I can be alone. Which is sort of the point to my being here, as far as I can tell.
I do find it a treat. Today, more than a treat.
Select all.
How could I have been so stupid?
First thing, I guess, is to act normal. Hope the site doesn’t post anything. Resist the temptation to write