News From the Red Desert (33 page)

That night was another movie night at Green Beans. At seven thirty it was growing dark and the crowd was restless. The turnout was even larger than for
Fight Club.
Rami Issay had grown anxious that Sara Miller was not coming, and had been deliberating how much longer to give her when the door opened and she walked in.

“Sorry I'm late,” Miller said.

“You aren't at all,” Rami Issay replied. “We have plenty of time.” Then he stepped outside and gave a thumbs-up to Rashid, at the projector. Sara Miller and Major Horner followed him. Chayse Simpson was already there, and had videotaped the arrival of the crowd.

“Is that Rashid, running the projector? Oh, this is perfect,” Miller enthused.

They sat down in the chairs that had been reserved for them. Amr brought Miller a cup of coffee—with almond milk, just as she liked it. Rami Issay tapped his foot nervously. He was aware that
Sin City
was not the sort of film normally shown on military bases. Several of the more pious soldiers would probably leave partway through the screening. Rami Issay wondered what they could possibly have made of the title when they opted to come. That there was a retribution theme? Well, there was, actually, but not in an Old Testament sense. It didn't matter.
In a few minutes the crowd would be rapt. This was a movie, not a DVD watched alone in a bunk with headphones plugged in and the rest of the world plugged out. They had gathered as a crowd to eat popcorn together. The object of their shared attention was less important than the fact of it. Rami Issay, cinephile since he was six years old, understood this.

He looked at Simpson, who was pointing her camera at him, and smiled. “It is lovely, is it not?” he whispered. “So many lonely people, just wishing to sit among friends and watch a show. I know exactly what they seek.”

And then the sinning began: comic-book gore and bilious greens flowed into sulphurous yellows and Bruce Willis, full of taciturn rage, would endure anything to spare his daughter the suffering his enemies would subject her to if they could. Old Town was run by machine-gun-packing hookers full of lethal carnality. Crime kingpins and crooked cops were cartoonish in the darkest overinked sense, and the corrupt politician protected his monstrous son.

Most of the soldiers took it all in blank-facedly. There was some stirring in the back when the violence was interspersed with lurid graphic-novel sexuality. Some stood and left, but only a few. Rashid paid particular attention at the non-Americans in the audience: there were a couple of Jordanians, a few dozen Romanians, lots of Brits and Canadians, a smattering of Gurkhas—and the interpreter pool. As the film proceeded, the lurid comic-book carnality caught their attention. An animated, even a quasi-animated, film is allowed to be vastly filthier than live action movies, without drawing the attention of the censors, Rashid thought. Though this was certainly drawing the attention of everyone here. Poor little Mohammed's eyes were the size of chicken eggs.

Rami Issay was in his element: happy and validated. The host of a successful party, three hundred new close friends, sitting in metal chairs and eating popcorn with butter flavouring and too much salt and laying down a carpet of empty plastic water bottles. Every one of them, man and woman, rapt at the sight of Jessica Alba in chaps, twirling her lariat. Simpson zoomed in on him again, as he merrily, obliviously, chewed on his own popcorn.

Ninety minutes later, when the evildoers had been mostly punished and the muted and qualified victory of the righteous was obtained, Rashid finally looked up and around and was surprised to realize how engrossed he had become in this odd cartoon. It had felt so purifying to loathe a despicable scumbag villain and cheer his comeuppance. He looked over at Mohammed and saw an expression on the boy's face he had not seen before: a heavy-lidded blankness that could have been sleepiness, except that in his limbs was an agitated restlessness that he could not suppress. Rashid glanced next at Fazil and Amr. They looked as they always did. He looked back at Mohammed. Someone should have told him not to watch this. Too confusing for him. He did not need to see that scene with Brittany Murphy. Even in Boston they would have called that nasty.

“Mr. Issay, that was fantastic. I loved every second of it. Chayse, did you get some good footage?”

She nodded.

“Great. Clearly we can do something more interesting here than episode four of
Stars Earn Stripes.
I want to shoot the whole event the next time you put on a film. Can you do another one soon?”

Issay nodded. “Of course.”

Miller put an arm around his shoulder and led him inside, where they sat down at a table. “I've already spoken to my contacts at NBC and Sony. They need to see some HD footage in order to commit, but your movie night will fit in nicely with the chess tournament footage. We might have most of a pilot right there.”

“A pilot? You mean for the
Stars Earn Stripes
?”

“Well, I'm just thinking aloud here. But like I said, I'm seriously considering doing something altogether more interesting. A docu-dramedy about you and your café.”

“Good heavens.”

“You will have to get yourself an agent, Mr. Issay.”

“Really? But I would be willing to work for free. I require no additional compensation.”

“You'll want to think about that, I think. You'd need to come to Los Angeles. There will be test shoots and the writers would need to meet you.”

“I'll need a visa.”

“We'll take care of everything. What I am trying to work out now is how to tell your story in a way that the American public will connect to you.”

“Am I so opaque?”

“We are all opaque to one another, Mr. Issay. The only redeeming feature of television is that it can break that down sometimes.”

“Muslims from this part of the world are not well understood in America.”

“I think you mean two things by that,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I think you mean that they are not liked and I think you mean that they are not understood. For our purposes, these are very different problems. The dislike can be used to our advantage. The not understanding part is trickier. Americans don't like feeling stupid. The more they realize how little they understand about this place, this situation, the less engaged they will be as an audience. So our job is to familiarize them without them realizing it. We can't puncture the confidence of our viewer. On no account should we force on them an insight they do not feel they have come to mostly on their own.”

“This is human nature. My staff, they are the same.”

“Precisely. We want the viewer to come to understand the perspective of someone like you because they figured it out on their own, they're so smart. They know what you or someone like you thinks.”

“Madam, I am at your disposal. I do not really understand how or what you are going to do. But I will help anyway I can.”

Chayse Simpson and Sara Miller and Rami Issay sat at the café until long after everyone else had left. Simpson made notes. What this would be, they proposed, was a marriage of drama and reality television. Issay's character would be unveiled one episode at a time, with successive
revelations alternately alarming and reassuring the audience. The thing would be to keep the audience fond of him, even as they feared him.

“Maybe make him torn himself, about his feelings about the unfaithful,” Miller said.

“Ladies, if our purpose is to educate our audience I feel I should point out that the dominant tradition in Islam is one of tolerance,” Rami Issay said. “Look around you, after all—you are surrounded by Muslims who are not angered by you.”

Miller paused, then said, “We have to be conscious of the audience's expectations about you, though. And there has to be tension to sustain their interest. A whole lot of tolerant kumbaya will not be interesting to watch.”

“I do not understand the kumbaya.”

“Neither do I, Mr. Issay, except when I've been drinking.”

Climbing a hill fast now, the men kept the distance between them constant nevertheless. Deirdre followed Lattice closely and tried to pay attention to what he was saying. Clearly he was not minding being in command. He sounded as if he was not in the slightest tired. He was thirty years older than her. Where do they find these guys? And he kept talking.

“The movies get war wrong so constantly yet that version of combat is what prevails as normal, even among soldiers, even among ones who have seen a lot of fighting. You should see them coming back from particularly intense patrols. They have so much cognitive dissonance the first thing they do is run for their game consoles and immerse themselves in Call of Duty. The first few times I saw that I just stared. These guys are the original first-person shooters—why do they need the games?

“Because the games present violence as ordered and controlled and understandable, the same way movies do. The narrative arc is completed, there is a kind of choreography and beauty to a firefight shot by Michael Bay, or a bar fight even, in any sort of film. And we love
that narrative. We apply it to situations where it doesn't apply in the least. Which is always.

“We've all seen bar fights. Stupid, fat, drunk men blowing saliva and blood and roaring at each other. No narrative about it. Nothing beautiful. Movie bar fights bear the same relationship to real bar fights that movie war does to real war.

“In movies and Greek poems, violence is a corrective, a settling of scores, a meting out of justice. It is necessary and useful.” He paused and glanced behind him. Deirdre was right there. “Did I just hear your tape run out?”

Deirdre caught her breath. “No, I have…twenty more minutes,” she said, checking her recorder. “We could do this when we stop, if you like.”

“No, I think this is good, the sound of gear rattling, and you puffing for wind, puts it all in context.”

“Okay.”

“In the real world, chaos lies at the heart of violence. The men who shout and punch walls back home do it because they feel more comfortable, more powerful in a chaotic environment. Same thing here. This is the central reason war doesn't proceed logically and predictably. Phobos and Deimos, fear and dread, are the moons of Mars. But Chaos is her core.”