Paradime Page 2

  ‘There’s a long bit about . . . termination of contract, stipulations, regulatory something, pursuant to . . . I don’t know, it’s all legalese, I’d need to read it closely. But Jesus, can they really do this?’

  I swallow hard, the ground beneath my feet beginning to melt, the avenue itself beginning to spin. I lean back against the window.

  ‘Look,’ I say, almost in a whisper – and conscious that I’m speaking to a person who believes in the legal system, who actually wants to some day be a lawyer – ‘the truth is, these people can do whatever the fuck they want.’

  *

  Once she’s established that I don’t have any other ‘appointments’ set up for the rest of the day, Kate insists that I come back to the apartment.

  I get an F train to 14th Street, an L over to Third Avenue, and walk the remaining few blocks to our building, slowing down the closer I get.

  I’ve never been good at looking for work, but in a weird way that’s never mattered because work has always found me. After the old man died, and the place closed, plenty of other kitchen opportunities opened up for me in Asheville – which was maybe why it took me three more years to get the fuck out of there, and why my route out was the recruiting station.

  After Iraq – two fifteen-month tours with six months in between – I spent a whole year doing nothing, living in a cousin’s house, smoking weed, going through a box of old paperbacks that I found in the basement, and trying to figure out who or what I was. Then one day a guy from my old company called up and said, if memory served, I was a kitchen guy, right, and did I want a job in New York, that he and his brother were opening a place and needed to build a crew. So I figured that’s what I was, a kitchen guy, and why fight it? Anyway, that particular venture didn’t work out, but it did lead, in turn, to the Mouzon gig and two years of steady employment. The money was lousy, though, so when I saw an ad for the position with Gideon, I jumped at it.

  I get to the entrance of our building on 10th Street and suddenly feel sick, like I’m going to puke right there on the sidewalk. I haven’t eaten, so there’s nothing to puke, but the feeling persists. I go inside, along the narrow hallway, and up the stairs, hoping I don’t run into anybody. I don’t like this place, and although it made sense for me to move in, which I did about a year ago, I half suspect that one of the attractions of shipping out to Afghanistan was to get away from here – not away from Kate, away from this damp and cluttered little apartment of hers. I don’t have nightmares about Iraq, go figure, but I do have nightmares about this place, about still having to trudge up these stairs when I’m forty, or about being trapped here, say, with a baby.

  Which is something we’ve discussed.

  With my key out, I get to our door and open it. Kate looks up from the table, a smile on her face. It quickly fades. She’s out of the chair in an instant, but in the next I’m in the bathroom, retching into the toilet bowl. Not long after this, we’re both at the table, poring over the letter, dissecting it, parsing the language – one minute convinced it’s nothing more than a stalling tactic, the next that Gideon don’t just intend to withhold my last pay cheque but might actually be threatening me with some form of legal action as well.

  After a while I stand up and walk over to the refrigerator. I take out a bottle of water and knock a third of it back in one go. Screwing the cap on again, I look at Kate. She’s small and slim, with bright blue eyes and shoulder-length red hair. At times, in her black-rimmed glasses and plain black T-shirt, she can seem fairly intense, but she’s also thoughtful and circumspect, good qualities, I’m sure, for a lawyer – at least the kind she wants to be. Speaking of which, there’s a conversation we haven’t had since I got back, an interrogation she hasn’t conducted, and I have to say I admire her restraint in not initiating it. What really happened over there? That’s all she’d have to say to get the ball rolling. And I’d tell her. I wouldn’t lie. But she hasn’t asked. When I spoke to her on the phone a couple of days before I shipped back, I tried to explain how these staff cuts were the result of a massive lawsuit Gideon was involved in and that, because of an early release clause in my contract, there was nothing I could do about it. Besides – I was at pains to add – maybe my timing hadn’t been so great. The war was winding down, after all, and troops were coming home.

  This was greeted with the kind of silence that told me she knew I was full of shit.

  Since there were more important things to focus on when I got back, such as what to do next, there didn’t seem to be much point in conducting a post-mortem, in trying to pick apart a decision that couldn’t be reversed, so it became the official line, and nothing more was said about it.

  But with this letter now and its veiled threat of litigation, I won’t have any choice but to talk about it. There’s pride in the mix too. Kate never liked the idea of me going to Afghanistan, never approved of Gideon Logistics, and I sort of ended up defending them, being all hard-nosed and pragmatic about it. I don’t usually have a problem admitting that I’m wrong, but when it’s this spectacularly wrong? You need a little lead time.

  It’s been three weeks, though. How much longer do I need?

  Kate holds up the letter, and shakes her head. ‘I just . . . I don’t understand this, Danny.’

  I put the water back in the fridge. I close the door and lean against it. ‘That’s because there’s something I haven’t told you.’

  She stares at me, her eyes widening.

  If the fridge behind me didn’t have such a loud hum, she’d probably be able to hear my heart beating from the other side of the table.

  ‘There was an incident at the base,’ I say, ‘something pretty horrible, something that I witnessed, and I wasn’t the only one, but for some reason they’re trying to implicate me in it, with this letter, and . . . the thing is, I don’t understand it either.’

  Any lawyerly composure Kate has falls away and for a brief moment the look on her face displays a nervousness, a reluctance to hear what I have to say that almost equals my own reluctance to say it.

  But then her composure returns.

  ‘What is it, Danny?’ she says in a whisper, leaning back in the chair. ‘What happened?’

  2

  This might be the most Kate has ever heard me speak at any one time since the day we met.

  The Forward Operating Base at Sharista, I tell her, was huge – a maze of shipping containers, Humvees and B huts. It was an insanely elaborate ecosystem teeming within a heavily fortified perimeter of Hesco barriers and wire-mesh fencing. My job as an assistant kitchen coordinator at the main DFAC was to oversee a turnover of between five hundred to a thousand covers on any given day. This meant working twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, sometimes seven. It meant rotating crews in a mechanised system that was less about real cooking and more about defrosting, heating, and reheating, about moving shit along a conveyor belt and making sure that the ex-flow of meals and the in-flow of diners aligned, like some sort of celestial eclipse.

  There were a few other guys, nearly all ex-servicemen, doing the same thing I was, which was basically shift supervision, but since we were also on rotation there wasn’t much time for hanging out or getting to know each other. The vast majority of the kitchen staff – the preppers, line cooks, servers, cleaners – these were all TCNs, i.e. Filipinos, Nepalese, Bangladeshis, Kenyans, Nigerians, most of them with no English, most of them trafficked in by small recruiting agencies that wouldn’t know a basic wage or welfare regulation if it came up and bit them in the ass.

  Now, I was exhausted most of the time, so it took me a while to start paying attention to this stuff and to realise that these people working under me were being treated like shit. Their living conditions were awful, they weren’t paid anything like what they’d been promised, and some of the women (if I understood correctly what I was hearing) had routinely been victims of sexual harassment, if not outright assault. And something else: there often wasn’t enough food to go around their compound at de
signated mealtimes.

  I look at Kate directly now. She’s staring back at me with a shocked expression in her eyes, one that tells me I need to explain this, I need to make it make sense, and fast.

  But I can’t.

  Because apart from anything else, I haven’t told her what happened yet.

  *

  During my time in Afghanistan, Kate and I kept our communications to one quick phone call a week. It was easier that way. Long emails or Facebook posts aren’t my thing, and in a five-minute call I could keep it breezy. Even if conditions at the FOB had been ideal, hearing about my routine there still would have been depressing, or at the very least boring, so I tended to let Kate do most of the talking.

  What she’s hearing now, therefore, is definitely new to her, and if she’s wondering why I’ve kept it to myself for the past three weeks, she doesn’t let on.

  ‘There was this one guy,’ I tell her, ‘from Nepal, Sajit something. He was skinny, like a stick insect. He worked one of the walk-in freezer units, loaded it, unloaded it, twelve hours a day. He spoke English, enough anyway to hold a decent conversation, and he was funny too – I liked him. It was Sajit who told me what was going on in the compound, Gideon security guys showing up at night, picking out girls, then stories about a trade in fake documents, about intimidation, about people getting cheated out of whatever small amounts of cash they’d managed to save. I brought this up one day with a Gideon manager. I asked him if he knew what conditions were like for the TCNs, but he laughed in my face, told me to shut the fuck up and get back to work. An hour later, as if he’d been thinking about it, he showed up again, walked right over to me and said I needed to mind my own business if I knew what was good for me. Then, like a good cop, bad cop rolled into one, he tried to confide in me, said, “Look, what do you want, these people are animals, you know, you should see how they live, how they choose to live, it’s disgusting.” Before I could come up with an answer, he’d moved on, but I don’t know if there’d’ve been much point in speaking up anyway. I don’t think Sajit would have thanked me, or any of the others. Conditions were bad enough without dragging my stupid shit into the equation. But let me tell you, with two months down, and nearly twenty-two to go, I was sick to my stomach of the whole fucking place.’

  ‘Jesus, Danny . . .’

  I say nothing for a moment. Funny how two little words can be so loaded, so nuanced, so ambiguous – there is sympathy in them, of course, but also confusion, and not a little dread. Kate isn’t going to judge me for not speaking up, not yet. She knows how to hold her own counsel. It’s in her head, though. I can see it in her eyes.

  ‘It went on the same way for a while,’ I say, ‘weeks and weeks. Sajit would talk to me, or I’d hear stuff from some of the others, a couple of the line cooks, Kenyan guys I’d bullshit around with when there was a break in service. Technically, it was none of my business, and there wasn’t much I could do about it anyway, but it bugged me. I suppose it’s naive to think of war as anything other than a form of business, but this particular war seemed to be run exclusively by pricks at head office with boxes to tick and targets to meet – like how many people you can fit into a fucking shipping container at night, for instance, or what’s the least amount of rice you can distribute to the maximum number of mouths.’ I pause at this point, and glance down at my shoes. I guess I’m stalling. ‘So about a month ago,’ I go on, looking up again, ‘there was . . . well, there was a riot at the base.’

  ‘A riot?’

  ‘Yeah, more or less. No other word for it. Three hundred people were lined up for dinner in this compound at the rear of the base, and about halfway through they just ran out of food – that was it, there was nothing left, and it was apparently the second or third time it had happened in the space of a few weeks, so . . . empty plates, empty bellies, no prize for guessing what comes next.’

  Kate leans forward, eyebrows furrowed. ‘Let me get this straight, this wasn’t the main dining place, right, where you worked, this was their—’

  ‘Yeah, it was a separate facility, a separate arrangement, but that’s what it’s like there, the whole base, it’s a fucking patchwork of subcontracts and outsourcing. What probably happened is that someone at a computer terminal somewhere three thousand miles away basically made a mistake filling out an order form for supplies. Now we had plenty of food in our stores, it’s just that—’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’

  ‘—Gideon weren’t about to simply hand their shit out like they were a relief agency or something. So about eight or ten of the TCNs – to start with, anyway – stormed into the manager’s office and demanded more rice, or bread, or whatever the fuck was available. The manager flipped, said they had no right to demand anything. He started screaming, soon they were screaming, it went back and forth, then someone got pushed, and it just erupted. In less than a minute, half a dozen young guys were smashing the place up, furniture, desks, filing cabinets, windows, computers. More joined in, and it spilled outside, where there were now at least a hundred others lined up waiting. Then it spread throughout the camp, all of these hungry fucking people rampaging around, throwing rocks and swinging lead pipes they’d found. A bunch of them, including Sajit, broke into the main DFAC storerooms and started taking stuff and passing it along a chain to the outside. Then Sajit, with two others, managed to get one of the big walk-in freezers open, which didn’t make any sense, because all the stuff in there was frozen, obviously, by definition, so what use was that going to be, but I guess by this stage it was more frustration and rage running the show than actual hunger.’

  ‘Where were you during this? Did you see everything?’

  ‘At the start of it I was half asleep in my little B hut listening to music. Then I heard noises outside, screams, glass breaking. I got up, headed out and made straight for the kitchens, and just as I was getting there, to the storerooms, to the walk-in freezer, several heavily armed guards, Gideon security guys, were also showing up. At first, it was chaotic and confusing, but with Sajit and the other two now more or less cornered, backed all the way into this freezer, the situation very quickly got very fucking tense.’

  Standing now in our small apartment on 10th Street, looking directly into Kate’s eyes, I feel something pulse through my body – a mild electric current, like a push notification on vibrate.

  Am I really going to do this?

  ‘Sajit . . .’ I say, and hesitate, but there’s no turning back. ‘Sajit was the freezer guy, okay, and because it was, I don’t know, his domain, he stood out a little from the other two, like he was a ringleader or something. He definitely wasn’t, though, and in fact at the end there, I’m not sure, he may even have been trying to protect the place.’

  But suddenly this seems implausible to me, like a self-serving rationalisation, and I hope Kate doesn’t pick up on it. ‘Anyway, I was standing there at the entrance to the freezer, all these security guys in front of me, in pairs, three deep, with M4s and body armour on, full battle rattle, and there was this thick odour, as well, Kevlar and refrigerator coolant . . . it was awful.’ I exhale loudly at this point, and shake my head. ‘I couldn’t catch Sajit’s eye from where I was standing, and when I eventually called out his name, one of the Gideon security guys turned to look at me like I was insane. And after that, with a terrible inevitability to it, there was this lightning-quick sequence of movements that just played out in front of everyone’s eyes . . .’

  Avoiding Kate’s gaze now, I stare at the floor, my voice barely above a whisper.

  ‘One of the two guys with Sajit lifted a box of frozen burger patties from a pallet next to him and raised it above his head. There was a lot of shouting. Sajit turned as if he was going to pick up another of the frozen boxes, at which point two of the security guys rushed him. There was more pushing and shoving, and it was hard to make out what was going on, to make out who had the frozen box in their hands at any given moment, but then suddenly I had this clear view for a few seconds of the first Gi
deon guy bringing the box down right onto Sajit’s head, knocking him to the floor, raising the box and hitting him with it again and again.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’ Kate covers her face with her hands.

  I swallow hard, my throat dry and raspy. ‘When the two Gideon guys stood up and moved back, you could see it, everything, Sajit and the second guy on the floor, both dead, skulls cracked, Sajit’s totally smashed in on one side . . . and his face . . .’

  ‘STOP.’

  I do, but only for a moment. ‘The third guy was against the back wall of the freezer unit, cowering between two pallets. The guards quickly cleared everyone out of the storerooms, herding us out with their rifle butts, and then they sealed the whole place off. When word of what happened spread throughout the camp, instead of inflaming the situation, as it might have done, it knocked the riot stone cold dead. A lot of damage had been inflicted, mainly to property, and in a very short space of time, but no one had been hurt, not physically.’ I hear myself saying this, and then add, ‘Well, no one else, that is . . . apart from . . .’

  But this time I really can’t go on.

  *

  What I do instead is pick the letter up from the table and reread it, study it line by line, not because I didn’t understand it the first time but as a way of avoiding eye contact with Kate.

  There wasn’t anything I could have done to prevent what happened, so maybe the guilt I’m feeling over it is irrational, like a form of survivor guilt, but it’s certainly real, and it’s all I’ve been able to think about since I got back. It’s also very clear to me that even though there really wasn’t anything I could have done, it’d be hard for someone who wasn’t there to see it that way.

  So I guess I’m surprised at how Kate eventually reacts. No indictment is handed down, nor does she say ‘I told you so’. She reaches across the table, puts her hand on mine, and squeezes gently.