Chapter 18

The television reporter was in need of a bath. But so was everyone else in that forsaken country so the smells did not matter, merely part of the background. In the foreground, the local warlord had agreed to give an interview and tell the world how carnage had become as normal as the dust storms. It was dry morning in the village, before the blistering heat would overtake all but the warriors. With a sweeping gesture, the warlord - drooping robes over his thin arm, for no one was fat - pointed out the trajectory of his men. From this temporary base, the warriors - with no formal education, no employment prospects in the modern world, no understanding of the international order - would ride out and rid the land of its rot: the former inhabitants, all of whom had been terrorized into taking flight with only the clothes on their frail black forms, dragging their elderly and carrying their children and breadbaskets: refugees all whose lives were every day sapped by the scorching rocks of that sun-baked wasteland. Each day, the warlord's men on horseback drew ever closer with their spears and machetes until the scorching rocks cooled with the blood of nameless, faceless, numberless beings whose story would never be told in the evening news. The warlord grinned at the camera: a near-toothless grin, a smile beyond good and evil, like an earthquake or a tidal wave.

About 6,500 miles to the west, across an entire ocean, I was crossing the street and heard:

"Oh God! What in the world happened to your nose?"

My field of vision temporarily expanded, in a sort of spasm, and I took her in: an old woman - fat, dressed in layers of old coats - clearly homeless and mentally ill, shuffled past. Her two small, black eyeballs were lost in the clumps of flesh that collected on her blistered, wasted face. Those tiny orbs registered my nose splint for a moment, then moved on to the other senseless objects of her senseless world. Only her frozen, open-mouthed grin - nearly toothless - bore witness that she had once spoken.