Читать книгу Enemy Combatant - David Winner - Страница 4

He had suffered neither stroke nor seizure, but those happenings in the Caucasus still afflicted him. His synapses were off, his reflexes. If you hammered his knee, his arm might spring out.

When he learned of children being separated at the border, he could only think about how Bush, thepresident before the last president, had landed in a small plane on an aircraft carrier, handsome in his bomberjacket, and declared the mission accomplished in Iraq in those clipped Texas tones when the war had only justbegun, Iraq about to devolve.

When Trump pulled out of the Paris Treaty, he thought not of rising oceans and burning forests, but thatAmerican female soldier, just a little bit pretty, holding an Iraqi prisoner on a dog leash at Abu Ghraib, the prison in Bagdad where his countrymen had been depositing the prisoners that he suspected that they picked up atrandom.

He’d stuck his head so far inside his laptop during the Bush years that his wife and his work began to slip away from him.

Then an inept doctor in Arizona performed emergency A-fib surgery on his mother’s heart.

And failed to stitch her atrium back right, so her organs started failing three days later.

Different kinds of evil twisted all up into each other like they were mangled in the same car crash.

He wasn’t crazy, he’d insisted to Sarah, when she’d suggested a psychiatrist.

And he had medication of his own.

He could inhale wine until it was no longer good enough and vodka was required.

And suction marijuana like oxygen.

But that was long ago, and Peter should be able ignore what came across his newsfeed. Hardly anyonehad newspapers on the subway. No headlines flashed in his face.

But his fingers kept searching for new horrors on his phone as his brain bounced backwards to old ones.

When he saw pictures of children in cages, he couldn’t not think of those other damaged creatures, barelyhuman, that he’d captured with his phone in the Republic of Georgia. And when the girl died in Charlottesville and so many people got murdered in so many shootings, he could only think of his mother like she’d been the victim of something darker than incompetence.

When they okayed the killing of Kurdish allies, he could only fume that the president before the lastpresident looked reasonable in comparison.

That he might be forgiven for his empire of wrongdoing, remote corners of which Peter had witnessed himself