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Me, the Man Who Cried, and the Palestinian
By
Scott Joseph Campbell
These are the things I thought about while I lie there bleeding:
I knew I wasn’t going to die. I knew that, though at moments, I forgot. When I forgot, I panicked. But it was all in my head. When I closed my eyes, whatever chemicals that nature put there to take care of us in moments like that, worked. There was no pain. I ended up thinking of other things.
There was no pain. That was interesting.
There was pressure on my side. I didn’t know at first that it was the ground. When I understood that, it bothered me. I began to get a sensation something like discomfort. But it was something else.
Often I would close my eyes. I liked closing my eyes.
I remember a progression of thoughts and sensations that began with me remembering one time when my sister looked out the window. She had seen a bird hopping on a tree branch, and strained her eyes trying to watch him. That was there, and then a memory about a milk carton opened all the way up on top. I thought about my daughter, but not my wife. Then I felt like vomiting. That was the worst of it, the nausea. That’s when I would open my eyes.
Sometimes I would open my eyes and see things, and try to understand them. The bends and breaks of the car around me. The new geometry of my surroundings. Sometimes I saw it down there. The twist of metal that went through me. I remember once I saw that and thought of a chunk of food on the end of a fork. It was then, when the nausea got bad, in that moment after not thinking about my wife that I opened my eyes and saw the metal through me like that. I remember trying to think of the metal as a part of me. Or me as a part of the metal. Closing my eyes was comfortable. I closed my eyes.
Then I thought of Cinderella. She was walking down a dark hallway.
I heard a noise, and I opened my eyes. It wasn’t there, what I expected, but I kept them open for a few more seconds. Then I closed them again.
I felt good then, for that second. Actually good. I feel guilty about that now. But then, when I felt it, I got scared. I opened my eyes again, and the good feeling went away. I ruined it. The good feeling scared me and I messed it up. I opened my eyes in panic. I won’t tell you about that.
When I closed my eyes again, I had some kind of dream. It was desert all around. There was a fence there, and a checkpoint on a road that came down out of a steep rocky hill. I was in the Gaza strip somewhere. Probably not the real one, I have no idea what it really looks like. But I knew it was Gaza. There was a group of young men, military. Because it was written in Hebrew, I couldn’t read their names. They were standing around smoking. One man smiled. The blood popped out of his chest in a sudden red mist.
I was surprised, but he didn’t look scared. Then he was on the ground. Another man’s head twisted to the side, and he fell. There was blood on the side of his head. A third was shot in the neck. All of the rest of the men hit the ground at approximately the same time.
I counted them. I don’t know why. The one hit in the chest didn’t move. The one whose head twisted didn’t move. The one hit in the neck screamed and held himself. The others hid behind things. There were two, three in the open counting the one already shot. There was one behind the jeep by the door, and one crouched down, kneeling behind the front wheel of that jeep. Five. Five of them left. They were all looking around, trying to see the sniper. One of them pointed. They were looking in the direction of his finger, but another silent shot came down and went through the one behind the jeep. He was holding the radio in his hand. He held onto it even when he was on the ground. The two others in the open shrunk down, hiding. The one kneeling behind the jeep, next to the man who had just fallen, started shooting his rifle over the hood of the jeep without looking. Then he stopped.
Then, nothing. The three of them hid there, not moving. The one hit in the throat screamed. He was screaming. It was fear.
I wanted to tell him to relax. That he would be okay, one way or the other. I don’t know why I had this calm.
Then his head split open.
When this happened, one of the men jumped up and shot in the direction of the sniper. The rock exploded in front of him, and he dived back down. He yelled, and wiped the rock dust from his eyes.
Fuck, he said.
This was the only thing I heard in the whole dream.
I saw this man rub his hands on his rifle. His hands were sweating. One of them called to the other. They talked. I knew they wanted the radio, but neither of the men behind the rocks could move. The man near the jeep’s wheel had crawled under the jeep to try and pull the man shot in the throat to safety. Now he just stuck there, not knowing where to go. Where the bullets wouldn’t find him if he tried to leave.
There were three of them then. Two behind rocks and one under the jeep.
The sun was hotter than I have ever experienced. I could see them sweating, and feel the heat of it myself. It wasn’t warm like bathwater, like blood. It was the feeling of being trapped in a house on fire.
An hour passed. One man peeked over the top of the rock. He called to the one under the jeep to back out, to take the radio from under the jeep and try and call someone. I could tell this even without hearing him. Even without knowing his language. The one under the jeep reached the radio, but couldn’t get it to work. Slowly he crawled out. With movement so gradual, it was almost imperceptible, he leaned in and flipped a switch on the console. Then a bullet hit him too, and he went down. I don’t know how the bullet hit him in the stomach. It must’ve gone just wrong through the jeep. Now he was on the ground too. He was alive. He was screaming.
I looked up again to see where the bullets were coming from, but I saw nothing. Rocks only. I looked back at the men. One of the men behind rocks was screaming. The other was silent. The one who was silent started crying. This was also silent. The man with the wound rolled and screamed, and I could tell he was begging. Then he started praying.
And then nothing happened.
I watched them in the sun. Sweating. It went on this way. The man in the ground was in agony. The man who hadn’t cried tried to get closer to the wounded man, but a bullet hit the rocks above his head. He pulled back and didn’t move.
From time to time they tried to see from where the sniper was. They looked, and even took shots, but never hit him.
And they sat there like that, for hours.
In the sun.
It was agony, that time. Then the man who hadn’t cried stood, ran out across the open space between his rock and the jeep. He threw himself in the dust next to the wounded man, who started screaming again. The man who hadn’t cried was holding the radio, and he turned to put his hand over the wounded man’s mouth, but the sniper had heard. A bullet hit him in the shoulder. Then, before the man could hit the ground, another one hit him in the head.
The wounded man kept screaming. The man who hadn’t cried landed on him, on his shoulder, and he panicked. He started pushing at the body. He shoved it off into the dirt, and tried to pull himself away from the man’s blood, which was coming out and mixing with his own. Eventually, after the long hours, he died. Then there was just the one. The man who had cried. While I watched, Cinderella came back, and she walked down the path from up above. She walked to where the men lie dead, and looked down at them. Then she looked up at me. Her face seemed hollow. She raised her hand, and pointed. I followed her finger and squinted. There, up above, hidden behind the rocks was a man, a Palestinian. He didn’t look older than about fifteen. He was looking down his rifle patiently, waiting. I looked back down at Cinderella and then at the man who cried. He was singing. Quietly, to himself. I felt bad about the look on his face.
Cinderella moved and I looked back to her. She leaned over and reached her hand under one man’s shirt. Then she stood back up, and walked up the path without looking back.
Then it was just me, the man who cried, and the Palestinian. I watched for a long time. The man started crying again. I could feel his fear, and the heat, and I wanted to reach out, to do something. I started calling, saying Don’t Worry, and then, He’s Up There, but the man didn’t hear me. No sound came out of my mouth. But I saw how scared he was, and I kept calling. I called. I waved what I thought were my hands. I shouted. I screamed. Then he looked at me. He looked right up at me, and seemed to see me. The look on his face changed. He seemed to see something that gave him hope. It made me feel good, that look. Then he stood up.
The rock exploded behind him. Dust everywhere. It was like watching a miracle, or a movie. Like he was blessed, and nothing could hurt him. The dust at his feet did the same as the rock, and the bullet exploded a patch of the dirt beneath the man’s feet. The man looked right at me. He looked right at me and smiled. Then he took a step forward.
With him, like with the first. There was a small motion. Such a small motion for such a big thing like taking a life. The red mist came out of him and disappeared. He was smiling when he fell to the ground.
I have heard that from the shape of the blood drops on the ground, you can tell where a person was standing when he was shot.
This man was standing there.
I could say that.
***
I opened my eyes again and saw lights around me. They were coming in through the twisted metal, past everything. I saw the lines around me again, and tried to concentrate on life’s strange geometry. I remember thinking
I should remember this, meaning the lines and angles, and shapes around me.
The last thing I remember of that time, before they took me and put me in the hospital and I had the morphine dreams, was looking at the dashboard Mary across from me in the car. It was glowing in the dark, and still tacked where I had put it with double stick tape. I was looking at that and wondering why it was Cinderella. I was thinking,
It should have been Alice.
Copyright © 2006 Scott Joseph Campbell
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