“Too bad,” Raul says. “I like getting photos of you with your little helmet and flak jacket. It makes you look like Mrs. Potato Head.”
I let out a long breath and a look of concern comes across Raul’s face.
“You doing okay, Liz?” he says. “You gonna get the PTSD on me?”
“No, I’m fine.”
He stares into my eyes. Raul’s my dearest friend because underneath layers of cynicism is a remarkably sweet and loyal man, but I get nervous whenever that Raul comes to the surface.
“I’m tired of covering a failing war,” I say, looking away.
“So find another war,” he says. “One we’re winning. There’s probably some nice little war in Africa or someplace.”
“Africa?”
“Don’t they have pirates in Africa? That’d be cool.”
“We don’t have a pirates-specific beat.”
“That’s too bad,” he says. “Afghanistan is played out. But everybody always loves hearing about pirates.”
“You know,” I say, “you haven’t asked me, not even once in all the years I’ve been going overseas, how the war is going.”
“Let me guess,” he says. “It’s going bad.” He plucks a piece of cheese off the grass tray. “Did I get it right?”
I sigh. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
Raul smiles indulgently. “I read your stuff,” he says. “Some of it. You inspire me.”
“How?”
“Well . . . I started donating to the International Rescue Committee.”
“That’s nice.”
“I’m not completely worthless. Oh . . .” he says, pulling on the collar of his shirt, “and I’ve made a real lifestyle change. Can you tell what it is?”
He leans back in his chair with his arms wide, displaying himself to me.
“I changed my wardrobe,” he says. “Now I only wear clothing that saves lives.” And once more, he tugs at the collar of his shirt.
I lean forward. The shirt is light blue, with shiny white buttons. The last time I went shopping with Raul he bought a shirt that cost more than your average villager in Paktika makes in a year. I’m sure this one is no different.
“Impressive,” I say. “How does it do that?”
“Italian-made shirt, the components cut individually, with hand-sewn Australian mother-of-pearl buttons, and”—he grins widely—“a percentage of the profits goes to mosquito nets.”
“Mosquito nets.”
“Mosquito nets.” He smiles. “Did you know that the most efficient way to save a life is to donate money for mosquito nets to help stop malaria? Every thirty-five hundred dollars to send mosquito nets to Africa or wherever saves a life.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve heard that.”
“Ethical capitalism. Buy our fancy crap, save a life. If every company did this, we could solve all the world’s problems.”
“There’s issues with that,” I say.
“Oh, I know,” he says, “charity’s a Band-Aid, right?”
This is something I’ve told him. That charity’s nice but real problems require political solutions. And political solutions don’t happen without a free press bringing real problems to the public’s attention.
“And they probably use child labor or something,” Raul is saying.
“No,” I interrupt, “I know about this. I’ve read about this.”
“About my shirt?”
“About mosquito nets,” I say. “Mostly they’re great but in the Great Lakes region of Africa, they’ve been taking those nets and fishing with them. The chemicals on the nets pollute the water, and the holes in the nets are so small they don’t just catch fish, they catch fish eggs as well. So the lakes are all getting depopulated of fish. Which means, yeah, you’re going to have less people dying of malaria, but it’s fucking up their economy and all those people are going to be very hungry very soon.”
Raul stares at me.
“I read about it in the Journal,” I say.
He starts cracking up.
“The fucking fish!” he says. “Oh, that is why I shouldn’t even try. Oh man, that is a short history of humans trying to do good in the world.”
It takes him a moment to calm himself down, and then he says, “I’m sorry, but you are such a bummer.”
• • •
The next day I meet with Farah Al-Ani, a former interpreter I’d met years ago when I was covering her army unit in Basra. At the time I hadn’t paid her much mind, but then later I interviewed her over Skype so I could write a piece about her at the behest of her old platoon commander. She was trying to get a visa, there were proven threats to her life, and a cousin of hers had been murdered, possibly something to do with her work for the Americans, though nobody really knows. The platoon commander was also, it’s worth saying, completely in love with her. She hit every standard of American beauty—she was tall, thin, with curly but not too curly hair, and long eyelashes. Soon after the story went through, her visa application moved forward as well, and I like to tell myself that the piece I did played a role. Proof, I think, that stories matter.
I meet her at an Israeli coffee shop in Murray Hill, and it’s a little disturbing to see her in New York, dressed like a New Yorker. Skinny black jeans and combat boots, of all things. She’s still pretty, though in a way that seems so much more ordinary than it did in Basra, among the army.
We have coffee and she tells me about her life in New York, why she stays away from Little Iraq in Queens, how she likes the job an army contact had helped her get, and how she’s handling the schooling she’s trying to do on the side.
“I’m still very grateful to you,” she tells me in an almost shy way, and I want to hug her but don’t.
On a whim, I ask her if she’d ever let me do a follow-up article. Tell her story of coming to New York, settling in. Maybe react a bit to the rhetoric in the presidential campaign. She physically recoils.
“I’d . . . like to put that behind me.”
“Oh. Of course,” I say.
“I feel bad, though,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
“Sometimes . . .
