The Iraq Universe
An alternate dimension
A fractal desert broken up by bongo trucks and the occasional donkey. Early morning. The sun lifts. Oppressive. What it is like.
schism.
Tears in the fabric where third-world poverty spills out like plasma. Paved roads surrounded by webs of dirt roads that meander into wet gullies. Lemongrass and currant tea, the sound of gilded porcelain teacups on saucers. Rank smell. Acrid carbon. The stench of burnt shit and old oil. Phosphorus.
a tree and garden with snakes and the naked man walking to it, across the map, it stretches, is not yet there. pulling. taut with gates open. a maze of truth encircling but leaving open. rushing currents, river of life,
I enter it slowly — stage left from the west — a place called Al-Anbar. I have been (almost) here before in a different existential plane of time and place called Jordan, on its eastern front where the signs read: 5 kilometers to Iraq. A long highway entrance into the western desert of Iraq, far from Baghdad’s principal politics.
Pockets of sulfur-dioxide. Eddying. I sweat heavily. The heat is couched beneath my body armor, immersed in salty fluid. Pores yield secretions. Also: the sound of rotors. Burning trash and the scent of combusted explosives shock my nostrils. ISR flies overhead — glinting shards…
