Chris Abani - Song for Night

To counter these ambushes, the rebel leaders came up with the funnel. The name reminds me of the white cone my dog wore after he was neutered, and I can hardly make the sign for it without cracking up in soundless mirth. At the tapered end of the funnel, which is the front, are the scouts and mine diffusers. The scouts are split into two groups: the rekies who are strictly there for reconnaissance, and who report directly to the leader and are the only ones with radios or satellite phones; the other group of scouts are called kamikazes. Their job is to draw enemy fire while we mine diffusers get to work clearing the road for the body of the troop, which is spread out in a fan, the two sides ready to flank the enemy if necessary.

My platoon and I are often at the front of every encounter. This has pros and cons. Pros and cons — the language of the invisible manual of John Wayne; invisible or lost. I like lost better — the lost manual of John Wayne. It should probably have a subtitle like my French textbook did: French Afrique Book One: French Even Africans Can Speak . Anyway, pros and cons would be a chapter in that manual. John Wayne swore by them.

“Weigh the pros and cons of every situation!” he would shout at us. “It is best to proceed when there are more pros than cons, but not every con is a bad thing. In war we have acceptable losses; provided of course that it is in the service of the greater good … It’s all in the manual,” he would add to forestall Ijeoma’s questions.

Thinking about it now, I will pay good money to see that manual. I slap myself. So many digressions — no wonder I have lost my platoon. Pros and cons of being at the front of every battle:

Pros—

• Prime pillaging opportunities.

• The battle is over quicker.

• If you die, it is quick (unless you fall victim to a mine, which can be a slow death sometimes).

• The kamikaze dies first.

• Choice pick of weapons.

The cons?

• Death.

• Death.

• Death.

But regardless of the risks, I will not trade places with the clean-up crew, the platoon of vultures that bring up the rear, whose job is to clean up the dead and ensure the counts are accurate. Some of us have dog tags and some don’t, so their job is at best a good guess. I am sure that when the war is over, many of the reported dead will stream back to their families only to be rejected as ghosts or zombies. For us at the front, death is quick, ours and our comrades. For the clean-up crew, death is a lingering disease. Do they get tired of it? Counting the dead is not easy. It is rare to die intact in a war. Bullets and shrapnel from mines and mortars and shells can tear a body to pieces. An arm here, a leg over there in the foliage — all of which have to be retrieved and assembled into the semblance of a complete body before there can be a count. The worst thing about this job may be the irreconcilable math of it: Many of the parts don’t add up. This is the enemy’s cruelty — that much of the generation who survive this war will not be able to rebuild their communities. Even now it is not uncommon to run across groups of these half-people holding onto life in distant parts of the forest. Even the enemy soldiers spare these pitiful creatures when they come across them.

I remember a group I saw once. Children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breasts — all of them holding onto life and hope with a fire that burned feverishly in their eyes. If any light comes from this war, it will come from eyes such as those.

Someone had found a radio and it was tuned to a BBC World Service broadcast of Congolese highlife. There were a bunch of disabled children dancing in a circle. A young girl with one leg standing off to the side leaning on a stick made fun of the dancers. Challenged to do better, she laughed, threw the stick away, and jumped into the circle. She stood still for a moment as though she was getting her bearings, and then she began to move. Still balanced on one leg, her waist began a fierce gyration and her upper body moved the opposite way. Then like a crazy heron, she began to hop around, her waist and torso still shaking. She was an elemental force of nature. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I have never seen anything like it before or since — a small fire sprite shaking the world and reducing grown war-hardened onlookers to tears.

I think of her and the fire I saw burning in the others and I realize the fire burning in me is shame; shame and fear, and it drives me to get up and proceed. I must find my platoon.

Time is standing still — literally. My watch, an old Timex that belonged to my father, is fucked. Already broken when he died, it was the only thing of his that my uncle let me inherit. The watch has one of those expanding bracelets made of a metal that was painted gold once, and its face is a mottled brown. Since I’ve had it, the second and hour hands have fallen off, both nestling like tired armatures in the bottom of the cracked glass case. My life it turns out is a series of minutes. I glance and guess it’s about noon now. I have been walking for too long and I am dying of thirst. The river to my right is poisonous with the dead. It would be wise to get off the river road and make my way through the shade of the forest until I can find some water, but the road is faster and I decide to continue on it for now. I look at my broken watch and think, One more hour. Rustling the broken arms like pods in a shaker, I head off again.

I have other watches. Nicer watches. Rolex, Patek Philippe, Raymond Weil, Movado — name it. All of them liberated from houses we ransacked or from soldiers who had ransacked other houses before us. And not just watches. I have electronics, cameras, money, jewelry, weapons, shoes, designer clothes, even gold teeth and glasses. Looting is something we all do, rebel and federal troops, officers and enlisted men alike. John Wayne even took a car once, a Lexus that blew up shortly after. That made him angry for a week. We take what we can when we can. Since we have no means of transporting too much for too long, especially as we must keep our weight down for the mines, we made several secret stashes along the way. We figured others might stumble on a cache or two, but with the number we have, we will be well off after the war.

Through it all, my father’s watch remains my most treasured possession. That and the medallion of St. Christopher that Ijeoma gave me after she stepped on that mine. She would have taken it off her own neck, except that she no longer had any arms or legs and wasn’t much more than a bloody torso, lacerated by shrapnel, body parts scattered in a way that cannot be explained or described. Instead I read her mind, or her eyes, or something, and understood everything — what she wanted, what stood she regretted — all of it, filling my head like a bad virus. I reach under my shirt and rub the cool metal of the medallion. She said it would protect me for sure now, especially as it had already claimed one victim.

“I am proper sacrifice,” she said, and smiled.

I remember it all — every minute of it — vividly. Or at least I remember my memories of it. She lay dying in my arms, and I wiped a tear from her face.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not expecting her to answer.

“You disobeyed the rule book,” she said.

She was right. I was in the middle of a live minefield assisting a dying comrade, in direct contravention of John Wayne’s rules, abandoning my post to help her, endangering myself and the rest of my platoon. But I loved her.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t die.”

“It’s not so bad,” she said. “Dying, I mean. It’s not so bad.”