Elegy on Kinderklavier Read Free Page B

on the back porch, with the implied hope that he will keep coming back—is lost on his brother’s wife, who tacitly allows it. He doesn’t blame her. Wild Turkey knows she was friends with a man in a Bible study group in her old hometown who’d gone on an outreach mission early on in the supposedly safer Kurdish north and been kidnapped and was now missing, presumably beheaded. He knows she has, at some level of consciousness, transferred her anger and grief onto Wild Turkey himself, whom she is convinced committed his own atrocities in Iraq.
    â€œI am the least of you,” Wild Turkey’s brother says now, in a kind of bored wonderment, and Wild Turkey isn’t sure if he’s quoting scripture or paraphrasing scripture or if he has hit, in his unintentional summary of several of Jesus’ sentiments, an ambiguous middleground in which he can just say something and mean it, or want very much to mean it. Neither speaks. The motion sensor light trips back off, and they are thrown again into darkness.
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    Wild Turkey wakes up in the desert. He’s in a slight, body-shaped depression at the base of a mud wall, over the edge of which sits the fake village. This is a training exercise, the last preparation for the grab team before they go over to the Shit. They are in Arizona. Wild Turkey lies still, listening to the grumbling of the other guys on the team, and watches the mud ruins (fake? real?) seep with the grays and blue of the thin winter sunset.
    Sometime before zero dark, Wild Turkey stands paused in his position in the team’s tactical column, lined up against the exterior wall of one of the village houses. Inside he can hear the muted noise of a radio. In a minute, at the first man’s signal (two consecutive blips of static on the radio earpiece) the men will go into their suite of motion, so practiced and efficient and many-parted as to seem almost balletic. Wild Turkey, who is the Defense Intelligence Agency officer attached to the team (which really just means he is responsible for the confirmed identification of team extraction targets), breathes in the quiet, in the dark. He closes his eyes and thinks through what is about to happen, the steps so familiar, mechanical, though less in the way of machines than of soul-hollowing boredom. This is why these men were chosen for the grab team, Wild Turkey has often reflected in these moments: because they will do this with perfect disinterest, not keyed-up, not even eager in the way of the adrenalized Army kids.
    But what Wild Turkey thinks of now in the eternal moments before the twin blips throw the night into action is where he is standing, is the fake village, meant to be a simulation but really more of a simulacrum, a psychological agent at play in the men’s imaginations. It’s all an effort, really, at making their imagination of what they will soon face in Iraq “more real,” if such a thing makes sense, Wild Turkey thinks. As if anything could be more or less real than anything else, as if all reality isn’t contained in every instance of it, thisdesert being very apropos of all this in that it really is indistinguishable from the Iraqi desert (though Wild Turkey will only confirm this later) and so contains that other reality, or is contiguous to that other reality. The real desert and the village and the specific house that this one is meant to represent are actually just a double, a repetition. He’s had a lot of time to think about it.
    Wild Turkey has often been overcome by this sense during their operations in the fake village—this feeling that the real Iraqi village/desert/target house is actually very close by, maybe over the next ridge, and that it is or will be the exact twin of this village. The feeling has spread until Wild Turkey hears two sounds in every one fake mortar explosion or real explosion of blank assault rifle rounds: the exercise’s sound and, somewhere behind it,