Byron's Lane

  Byron's Lane

  A Novel

  Wallace Rogers

  Copyright © 2013 by Wallace Rogers

  Langdon Street Press

  212 3rd Ave North, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401

  612.455.2293

  www.langdonstreetpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

  ISBN: 978-1-62652-133-9

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Lord Byron was nothing if not the prototype of the conflicted Romantic hero. His persona has influenced artists possibly more than his art itself. His work was a synthesis of medieval and classical inspiration with a modern sensibility.

  When he read his poetry, people listened.”

  Meg Wise-Lawrence, The Germ

  PROLOGUE

  Part of him died in Iraq. The experience shrunk him. It killed his aura of innocence. It sapped his exuberance. It ended his quest to make the world a better place than it was when he became part of it.

  I knew we had lost the best of Adams when he coldly described to me what happened in Samarra—two weeks before he left Iraq, six weeks after his friends were assassinated in Mosul.

  Mosul and Samarra channeled his slide into the Waters of Lethe. Because both events occurred months after the national news media had packed up and left Iraq, and weeks before America’s military presence there evaporated, we heard nothing about them. Our fickle attention had turned to other places in the world and more pressing matters back in the States.

  *

  Jonathan Adams spent eight months in Iraq, working as a civilian contractor on an American foreign aid project. The day trip to Samarra was his last scheduled field assignment. He was riding in a four-vehicle military convoy when it stopped alongside a dusty traffic circle next to Samarra’s Malwiya Minaret, a mile from the municipal building he had just toured. A TV reporter recently arrived from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to cover its Army Reserve civil affairs battalion’s last two weeks on the job and their trip back to Scranton, wanted to use the landmark as a backdrop for an interview with the battalion’s ranking officer—a bookish, bespectacled forty-year-old lieutenant colonel. Everybody except two turret gunners and one of the drivers had left their vehicles. They were gathered around the Humvees, snacking on candy bars and sunflower seeds, smoking cigarettes, talking about going home. The reporter and his cameraman were busy setting up for the interview.

  A teenage boy emerged from a group of Iraqi men huddled around a card table full of bootleg videos. The video stand was a football field’s length away from where the convoy had stopped. The boy joined three women in burkas with two small children in hand as they walked along the shoulder of the traffic circle. The women and children turned down a side street; the boy continued to walk toward the Americans.

  He was less than ten yards away when he shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” He clenched his teeth and pushed a button on a small black plastic garage door opener concealed in the palm of his right hand.

  The boy looked bewildered when nothing happened. His forehead furrowed. His mouth dropped open. A second lieutenant pulled his handgun out of his shoulder holster and shot him in the head. The boy’s knees buckled, and he crumpled like a collapsing house of cards. Blood pulsing from the hole in his forehead formed an expanding sticky purple circle on the hot black asphalt. Silence followed the sharp, crisp sound of the single gun shot.

  The stillness shattered when someone in uniform—Adams didn’t notice who—shouted: “Let’s go, gentlemen! Return to your vehicles! Mount up now!”

  Everybody scrambled back into the Humvees. Four turret gunners cocked their .50-caliber machine guns. Everyone was quickly accounted for by the drivers, who spoke to each other on their headsets loud enough for Adams to hear from the backseat. The whole process hardly took a minute.

  The convoy lurched through the roundabout and drove quickly out of town. In a controlled rush, they speeded toward a small, abandoned, fortified outpost, just off the Mosul-to-Baghdad highway that skirted Samarra on its west side.

  Forty minutes later, beside the sand-scarred concrete blast walls that partially surrounded the place, and guarded by a platoon of infantry just arrived by helicopter, the Channel 6 news team from Scranton, Pennsylvania, nervously set up its camera again. The lieutenant colonel asked the reporter to make no mention in his broadcast about what had happened on the traffic circle. The colonel did his interview, and the detachment’s majors, lieutenants, sergeants, and E-4s taped Thanksgiving Day greetings to friends and relatives back home. Some were shown on the six o’clock news that night. The partially rebuilt dome of Samarra’s Askariya Shrine was the backdrop now, ten kilometers off in the distance.

  The second lieutenant who shot the boy didn’t do an interview. He sat alone on the ground, leaning against a T-wall, staring off into the desert, smoking cigarettes one after another.

  The profound impression the incident made on Jonathan Adams was consummate awe. He marveled at how the movement from the shadows of the Malwiya Minaret to the FOB safe place had been executed, how their extraction from the situation on the traffic circle unfolded exactly according to the “In Case Something Happens” plan the major and first sergeant in charge of the mission described in the 0-900 briefing, before Adams was given his seat assignment and the convoy left division headquarters.

  When he called me from Minnesota and told me all this on the telephone, less than two weeks after it happened, Adams made no mention of what it feels like to be a millisecond away from being blown up, or seeing someone ten feet away from you get shot in the head.

  Six weeks before the Samarra incident, in Mosul, all the warm and soft parts of Jonathan Adams ossified and grew stone cold. By the time Samarra happened, he’d become numb and indifferent.

  *

  When I was young, my father gave me some advice: “Watch and learn,” he’d said. Before I explain what happened in Mosul, know that I am a trained observer.

  It’s hardly a rare talent. My generation has sprouted so many like me that this description could be written on our collective tombstone in thirty or forty years, when the last of us are finally dead and buried. But I have a natural aptitude for it.

  Mine is the first generation that’s learned life’s lessons by watching thousands of hours of television. In the process, most of us have evolved finely-tuned voyeuristic tendencies, an enhanced, detached curiosity, and a self-absorbed interest in the misfortunes of others. These are reinforced in people like me who’ve read hundreds of books and watched a multitude of movies. As much as I want it to be otherwise, television, books, and movies provide the lens through which I interpret almost everything I see and experience.

  Jonathan Adams is the only one I know of our generation who spent most of his time feeling, doing, and thinking instead of watching. Fueled by hope and faith, he was constantly chasing possibilities. In the meantime, while I occasionally stopped to watch the world go by and draw some judgment about it, cynicism and doubt caught up to me.

  Iraq made Adams like the rest of us.
>
  *

  Movies, books, and television taught me that when your telephone rings in the middle of the night, what happens after you pick up is almost always disturbing.

  I vividly recall his frantic first words. They were draped in anxiety and knocked me awake.

  “I met with them for our morning briefing in the conference room an hour ago. Hind gave her camera to Hassan. He took a picture of the four of us. I’m looking at it now. She e-mailed the picture to me just before they left. All three of them are dead, Tom.”

  His sentences tumbled over each other and crashed against my ears, like surging waves against a harbor break wall.

  “It happened because I’m here in Iraq. I have no business being in Iraq. I’m the one who should be dead. I’m the only one alive in this picture.”

  It was unlike any exchange we’ve had before or since. I could hear his sobs five thousand miles away. He took a deep breath.

  “If they didn’t work for me, Tom, they’d be home tonight with their families. I asked them to go to a fucking senseless meeting for me—so that what I’m doing here would have an Iraqi face to it. What did these kids die for?”

  His voice grew halting. His latest words, more softly spoken, were barely able to penetrate his grief and his guilt—so fresh, so stifling—apparent to me half the world away.

  “I sent them off to do things I was sure should be done—to make this mess we’ve made of Iraq have a happy Hollywood ending. I convinced them that what we were trying to do was empowering. I told them that democracy is life-changing.” He paused. “I got part of it right, didn’t I, Tom? Their families’ lives were surely changed today, weren’t they?”

  His words came fast, falling over one another. “I was so damn sure that everybody everywhere wanted freedom to hope, freedom to dream, freedom from fear—the same freedoms we enjoy.” He paused. “That’s bullshit, Tom. It took the slaughter of three extraordinary people to make me realize that. How could I have been so stupid and arrogant?”

  He breathed heavily. Then his words burst into the telephone. “I was so sure the Iraqis wanted this, in spite of a hundred things a blind man could have seen going on all around me. I was so sure that I risked the lives of three beautiful people to try to make it the way I thought it ought to be. What have I done? What do I say to their families?”

  I was sharply awake now. Adams’s sobs faded in and out of his cell phone. The transmission of his words from so far away and the unchecked emotion that attended them dispersed in my ear, went dead for half seconds, and then gathered and gushed, sharply audible again. My free hand scrambled over the nightstand and found a switch beneath the lampshade. As I turned on the light, I kicked back the blanket that covered me and swung my feet to the floor. What I wanted to say was catching up to what he was telling me.

  “Adams, are you okay? Are you safe? Tell me what happened.”

  The pause that followed was long enough to make me ask Adams if he was still there. I heard him swallow.

  “They were in my car. It happened right after they drove out of the compound, three blocks from here. The car was hit by an RPG. They died an awful, horrible way, Tom.”

  There was silence in my bedroom, punctured by faint, soft sobs that dripped through my handset’s earpiece. “I killed them—as sure as the son-of-a-bitch who fired the thing.”

  Another pause. I had nothing to say to fill the intermittent silence. I should have said something comforting—something to challenge his damning assertion that he was the reason his friends had died. But Adams’s words and the bone-chilling emotion that accompanied them left me speechless.

  Killed, he told me, were his translator, his office manager, and his project coordinator. They were seated in the back of the car, the part penetrated by the rocket-propelled grenade; three Iraqi women, all in their late twenties, two of them young wives and mothers, on their way to an insignificant lunchtime meeting.

  “When I heard the explosion, I ran outside,” he said.

  He saw a plume of smoke—a silver-changing-to-gray-changing-to-black billowing column of smoke. Tiny black specks rained down on his head and shoulders as he stood a few feet beyond the threshold of his building’s front door. Adams knew what had happened. The few guards still standing at the compound’s checkpoint when he burst through the gate were unable to stop him. He ran down the street, toward awful silence that turned into plaintive whimpers that grew into screams and long, mournful wails.

  “When I got there, I helped pull my bodyguard out of the car’s front seat. The front half of the car was detached from the back half. The driver had opened his door and was wandering around the wreckage, holding his ears. There was blood leaking from the places where his hands were pressed. I heard short bursts of gunfire.”

  He told me he would never forget the sight of the smoldering carnage. He couldn’t bear to glance inside the burning hulk that had been his white Toyota. He’d never forget the smell.

  I was helpless, eight time zones away.

  “Please hang on, Tom. My security chief is standing in the doorway. He wants to tell me something. I’ll be back in a minute or two.” Sobs strangely accompanied his explanation for the interruption and punctuated his request. He likely really needed time to pull himself together. I reached over to the nightstand and pushed a button on the answering machine to activate the speakerphone. I rose from the bed and walked a few feet to my desk—in front of the bedroom window. I turned on my laptop computer and opened the last e-mail I had received from Adams. Attached to it was a picture.

  The picture was of Adams and his staff. They were posed in the walled courtyard outside his office. They had arranged themselves in two rows—eight of them standing, five of them kneeling. It was easy to pick out Adams’s women. He was in the middle of the back row, and they stood on either side of him. Two of the three had their arms folded in front of them, just like he did. A lump rose in my throat. As I stared at the picture, my mind tumbled back to the week before he left for Iraq, four lifetimes ago.

  Adams had signed a contract with the State Department. He was going to Iraq to help them organize local governments so they could provide the basic services that cities provide people in the United States. In the process of showing them how to efficiently collect and get rid of their garbage, he would teach democracy to a new crop of community leaders and politicians who were only theoretically aware of its components. Jonathan Adams was qualified to spread the democracy gospel; he fervently believed in its principles and the benefits of good governance.

  Adams had hastily arranged a leave of absence from the University of Minnesota; he temporarily abandoned his seat in the Minnesota State Senate, its spring session having just concluded. He managed his escape from Minnesota so quickly that the local media wasn’t aware of his plans until after he had left the country.

  When he passed through New York, my friend confided to me over lunch that one of the reasons he needed to go to Iraq was because he was ashamed he had kept his hand down the last time his country involved itself in a war he couldn’t support. His easy avoidance of our generation’s war was owed to a college deferment and a high draft lottery number. His place in Vietnam was unfairly filled, he said, by some poor bastard who had neither.

  Born in his pre-teenage Kennedy years, Adams’s civic commitment was unbridled. He single-mindedly began his preparation for a life in the public sector in junior high. He improved and refined his capabilities as his career in politics played out.

  I stared at the picture. I ran my finger down Adams’s image and shook my head. The sense of hope he sprinkled on anyone who’d listen to him and the dreams he pursued were always too fragile a foundation on which to build a body of work and a lifetime of achievement. There’s a good reason we measure success in America these days by what we accumulate rather than how many lives we’ve influenced. Changing someone’s life in a positive way is an accomplishment impossible to quantify. Such achievement fits nowhere inside a contemporary port
rait of an America framed by measurable outcomes.

  For the first time in fifty years—as long as I had known him—it was apparent that Adams was without a bearing, a heading, a plan, a compass. He was far from home, in an unfamiliar place, drowning in a culture he didn’t understand and couldn’t accommodate, or tolerate, anymore. He had wandered, uninvited, into the middle of a civilization that seemed to be driven by political and spiritual leaders who wanted to burn the place down so it might rise from the ashes and flourish as it had during Muslim’s glory years, more than a millennium ago.

  Adams’s voice on the speakerphone pierced the bedroom and snapped my attention away from the picture. I shut down the computer, returned to my bedside, and picked up the telephone.

  “If all this weren’t so fucking bloody and horrific, so utterly, contemptibly wasteful and backward, all it would be is absurd. We could ignore it—if we could find a better way to fuel our cars and make things out of plastic. Goddamn oil! We should build a wall around this wasteland and let them simmer and stew in their hate for modernity, their fifteen-hundred-year religious feuds, and their prejudice against women—out of sight and out of mind.”

  I had never heard Jonathan Adams talk like this. He scared me. He disappointed me. But I understood what drove his words. I instantly forgave him.

  “I need to come home, Tom, before my fractured beliefs get someone else killed.”

  I asked if there was anything I could do to help facilitate his departure. I could travel from New York to Minneapolis on a day’s notice, meet him at the airport when he returned, and spend his first week at home with him.