Authors: Audrey Bell
Dale shook my hand gruffly, while he was on the phone.
"Well, whatever the fuck happens, we're not going to get scooped by Larry
Dawes."
I smiled and caught the eye of a
much-younger reporter grinning in the corner. I couldn’t believe I was here—at
the
New York Times
as a new hire.
Dale waved at the younger reporter
to get his attention and made an indecipherable series of hand gestures.
The younger reporter grinned. He
nodded. He was tall and lanky with dark hair and square-framed glasses.
"Hadley, I'm Kip Styles."
"Nice to meet you."
"You'll have to forgive Dale.
He woke up in a good mood and he's been trying very hard not to show it."
"I heard that," Dale growled.
Kip laughed. "Come on. Let's
get you set up."
I followed him to an elevator bank
and up to the eighteenth floor. "You’ll be overseas mostly, right?"
I nodded. “Yeah.”
"So, you'll have a neat
desk." He smiled. "You're young to be doing this."
"What?"
"Going to a conflict
zone." He smiled. "You speak Arabic or something?"
I nodded again. “Um, yeah. I do.”
"I thought so." He logged
me into a computer and set up my email account. “They usually don't take anyone
out of college without good reason. Arabic is a good reason."
I nodded.
"What do you do?"
"Metro," he said. "And
I cover sports a little. Baseball and hockey.”
“Cool.”
He nodded. “It’s fun. Not nearly as
prestigious as international news, of course, but they also never send me
further than Yankee Stadium.”
I smiled.
“Dale said he’d come up to brief
you and then you'll probably be free to go after that.” He grinned. "Don't
let him freak you out."
I nodded. "Yeah. Sure. I
won't."
Kip left me for coffee and I looked
around the newsroom in awe. I couldn't believe I was actually, really here.
"Hey." Dale said,
pocketing his Blackberry and coming back towards me. "Let's chat."
I nodded and followed him into his
office. He closed the door. "You're done with classes?"
I nodded.
"When's graduation?"
"Saturday."
"Congratulations. So, Syria.
What do you know?"
I looked at him warily. "Where
should I start?"
"With the basics."
"It's bordered by Lebanon,
Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan."
He nodded.
"Official language is Arabic.
The ruling party is the Ba'ath Party. They’ve been in power since 1963. The
current conflict started in 2011, with the rest of the Arab Spring uprisings.
Protests began relatively peacefully. However, the government tried to crush
the demonstrations using military force. The protests developed into a violent
uprising against the ruling party. In the past few months, it’s become a
full-scale Civil War. Bashar al-Assad, the current President, has refused to
resign under international pressure.” I took a breath. “The conflict’s been
going on for two years now. And it’s been complicated by religion and by the
involvement of other countries. Assad is an Alawite, which means he's part of a
minority branch of Islam, as opposed to the Sunni branch." I took a
breath. "Large parts of the conflict can be found in the religious
differences, as well as political ones."
He nodded. "Good. Current
death toll?"
I lifted my shoulders. "I
don't know. I haven't seen a specific number."
"As of now, it's safe to say
40 to 50,000."
I bit my lip. Christ.
"Meaning it could be many,
many more. And millions of people have been displaced," Dale handed me a
folder. "Here's our timeline of major events. It's helpful, but it's not the
most important thing you should know. What you should know is that where we are
sending you is extremely unstable. It's safe enough. We feel comfortable with
the risk, but it is ultimately unstable. No matter how many facts you memorize,
a clear head will be your most important asset."
I nodded.
"So, let's run through
this."
We ran through the grim facts. He
talked. I listened and made notes. When we finished the most recent updates, he
cleared his throat.
"Right. You're fluent in
Arabic. You won't be doing that much reporting at first. You'll contribute, but
Erin and Kevin will do most of the writing. Chip does photos. The four of you
will be a team." He nodded. "Think of yourself as a highly valuable
assistant." He smiled. "The young man over there now is leaving us
for law school. He burnt out quickly—six months—but a lot of people don’t even
last that long.”
I nodded.
"So, rest up. You know? Let
your friends have your fun. Tell them you need to sleep," he said.
"As a precaution, we have hostage training sessions for anyone going over
there. How much longer are you in town for?"
"Friday."
"We can schedule it for
Thursday. I think it's better to do this a few weeks before, so you're not
panicked when you go."
I nodded. "Yeah, sure."
I wanted to say the training had been reassuring. But it
hadn't. I ended up with a notebook of things not to do and a foreboding sense
that the training was a desperate attempt to assure workers they had some
modicum of control.
Dale had told me to delete my
personal Facebook and Twitter accounts and to open new ones just for work.
"Everyone uses social media
now." He explained. "Even Syrians in the middle of a civil war."
Deleting my Facebook seemed like
especially good advice when I logged in and saw a picture of Jack with some
delicate-looking Asian girl named Grace on my newsfeed. It could have just been
a friendly photo. Jack was wearing his fraternity’s senior week t-shirt and
Grace was wearing one from her sorority. But they were both beaming at the
camera. And for some reason I hated that.
Delete
. Gladly.
During hostage training, I had
thought of Jack only sparingly, which surprised me. I'd thought more of his
father, who I felt I had actually come to know by reporting on him for Riley’s
class. I'd found video clips of him online. Alex resembled their father much more
closely than Jack, but there was one short clip I found of Scott Diamond
interviewing a man outside of the New York Stock Exchange. It was a boring
interview about exchange rates. But it was just like watching Jack. They had
all the same mannerisms.
I wondered if Scott Diamond had
known to not beg. Begging, they told us, made you easier to kill. Personal
details, however, were helpful. The things your father said when you went
fishing, the cake your mother cooked for your twelfth birthday, the bedtime story
your sister told her kids. Those things humanized you. Those things, they told
us, could save your life.
I wondered if they taught Scott
Diamond to be compliant and calm. I wondered if he tried to tell the men who
killed him about Jack and Alex and Julie. I wondered if any of it mattered at
all.
My mother came to town in a blue dress and with Solomon,
intent on not speaking to my father, in keeping with tradition.
My parents turned out to be easier
to ignore than they'd been before. David chattered at my mother and plied her
with champagne until she remembered the only thing she loved more than not
speaking to my father was being the center of attention.
Justin's parents came, too. They were
lovely.
My mother rolled her eyes when Justin's
mother explained she worked as a neurosurgeon. I understood for the first time
in my life that my mother looked down on women who worked so that she would not
have to look down on herself. When Justin’s mother asked what she did for a
living, she spoke haughtily: "I'm a mother," she said, turning her
attention towards Sol.
My father's eyebrows took off
towards his hairline.
My parents, Solomon, and Justin’s parents left us after
dinner so we could be wild for one last night. We found Andrew and Nigel and
Juliet and we drank underneath a big white tent, laughing with each other,
telling each other we couldn’t believe it was over, wondering what we’d missed,
wondering when we would see each other again.
I laughed a lot. We were far enough
away from the music that I could talk to Andrew who was moving to D.C. to work
for the weather bureau and to Juliet, who had been named the next Editor-in-Chief,
without yelling. Juliet and Justin commiserated about how much they would miss
us next year. We all promised to come back and see them.
I saw Jack from afar, or at least I
thought I did. I saw plaid and dark hair and that familiar walk.
I sipped my beer and bit my lip. I
wanted to talk to him. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, finished my drink for
courage, and followed him.
I found him with Xander and
thankfully without a girl. Xander saw me first and nudged Jack with his
shoulder.
Jack turned. He hadn’t shaved in a
few days. He looked scruffy. It was a good look on him.
“Hey, there,” he said.
Xander got to his feet, nodded at
me—“Hey, Hadley”—and turned towards a crowd of boys in their fraternity so that
Jack and I were alone.
Jack stood up to his full height
and looked at me. He smiled. “So, Hadley Arrington.”
“So, Jack Diamond.” I wavered,
thinking about what my dad had said about selfishness. I’d been selfish. And
Jack had been selfish. We chose ourselves instead of the other person.
“You’re something else, you know
that?”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” I
said.
He nodded. He sipped his beer. “You
leave tomorrow?”
“After the ceremony, yep.”
He smiled.
“What about you? Where you headed?”
“New York,” he nodded. “My mom’s
house in the suburbs, though. Not the city. I need to figure some things out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, that’s
good.”
He nodded. “It’ll be nice. A lot of
people will be nearby.”
I snuck a look across the tent. The
metal poles were wrapped in Christmas lights, the van Morrison song playing sounded
a little sadder than it usually did, and Jack looked damn good.
“Thank you,” Jack said, with a
smile.
I flushed. “What?”
“You said I looked damn good. Thank
you.”
I closed my eyes. “Jesus. I’m
sorry.” I could feel my face flaming.
He laughed. “It’s fine. You always
look damn good.” He licked his lips and stared at me nakedly.
“So, maybe we’ll see each other,” I
ventured. I tried to think of him in New York—the both of us growing up a
little bit—and then maybe in a few years….
“God, I really hope not, Hadley,”
he said.
Right. I swallowed. “Yeah. Sorry.
Sorry, I just…the music and ceremony and all that…it’s making me sentimental.
Congratulations, though. On graduating.”
He smiled sadly and I smiled sadly
back. “You too.”
“I’ll…well, maybe I’ll see you at
the ceremony,” I said, with a shaky smile.
He laughed bitterly.
“I’ll go though. Sorry.”
I turned. He reached for my wrist
and pulled me close to him. He ran his thumb over the veins on my wrist near
the base of my palm. His hands were warm and gentle, calloused. They felt so
good. I exhaled heavily. It felt like so long since I’d been touched.
“Hadley Arrington,” he murmured.
I swallowed. He looked me in the
eyes, pulled me close, and kissed me gently—his lips like a flutter of
butterfly wings against mine. “Goddamn, I miss you.” He said.
“I—I wish…” I didn’t know what to
say. “Me too.”
He raked his fingers through my
hair, loosening the ponytail, cupping my chin in his hands. “Hey, be safe,
okay?”
“Yeah. I will.”
He nodded at me, our eyes were
locked, and I thought briefly that maybe we could salvage it. Maybe we could
fix it. Maybe we could be whole.
“Goodbye, Hadley.”
I cried over Jack Diamond when I got home. Instead of crying
at graduation, I cried over Jack.
He was right to say goodbye then.
I searched for his face, briefly,
when we threw our caps into the air, when we turned out to meet our families, when
people were crying from joy and sadness and possibly from colossal hangovers. I
couldn’t find him.
I clung to David, who couldn’t stop
laughing.
“We’re done, done, done, done,” he
chanted.
But later David clung to Justin,
and they reaffirmed that they’d be able to make a long-distance relationship
work, and my mother and Solomon went to the airport and my father came back
over to help me with the last of my belongings.
David’s flight to San Francisco was
the following day.
My dad waited in the hallway while
I hugged David tightly and he started crying again.
“No, no, no,” I said. “We’ve got to
be happy. We’ll see each other. We will.”
“It won’t be the same.”
I kissed him on the cheek. “You’ll
always be my best friend.”
I gave him the cappuccino machine
and tried not to burst into tears when he said: “Four years and it’s finally
all mine!”
We drove to the airport. We had
separate flights—my dad’s to Beijing and mine to New York and he hugged me at
the gate. In a few days, I’d be in Syria and he’d move onto Tokyo before
looping back to London.
“I’m proud of you, kid,” he said
gruffly, pushing a wrapped box into my hand, and disappearing towards the
international terminal.
I opened it waiting for my flight,
thinking it would be a delicate piece of jewelry selected by his assistant.
But it was a satellite phone. The
perfect present.
I took a breath and exhaled. I told
myself I’d be okay.
“They’re sending us fucking babies now,” Kevin Dell said at baggage
claim at the airport in Damascus.
Judging from the airport, you
wouldn’t know the country was at war. It was clean, and while there were armed
soldiers, it didn’t seem much different from JFK.
I knew it was Kevin Dell because
I’d spent the last week memorizing the résumés of the three journalists I’d be
working with. Kevin Dell was the most senior. 42, grizzled, Pulitzer
Prize-winner, a leg full of shrapnel, a bad divorce in 2003, and more accolades
than you could count.
“Fucking babies,” Dell repeated.
He was speaking to Chip Clark, the
handsome Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer with a million dollar smile. “You
Hadley?” Chip asked.
“Yeah.”
Kevin Dell extended a hand. I shook
it.
“I’m Dell. This is Chip Clark,” Dell
said, knocking Chip in the stomach. Chip was thirty, somewhat of a prodigy. I’d
seen his photographs before. They tended to be heart-stopping.
We were just missing Erin, an
experienced broadcast journalist who had grown up in Australia and broken
several major stories about international corruption.
“Let me grab your bag,” Chip
offered.
“No, carry your own bag,” Dell
said. He looked at Chip. “It’s not the fucking Ritz Carlton. Let’s not give her
any ideas.”
Chip smiled at that, and we walked
through a series of metal detectors out into the bright, shining morning.
I saw her sitting in the
passenger’s side of the Jeep; Erin Phipps, in olive green pants, with a
headscarf falling back from her blond hair onto her fine shoulders. She had a
cigarette clenched between her teeth. She looked sort of like a movie star.
I tossed my bag into the back of
the jeep as Dell jumped into the front.
“Christ, how old are you?” Erin
asked in a raspy voice. She sounded kind of like a movie star too.
“I told you. She’s a baby,” Dell
said.
“I’m twenty-two.”
Erin nodded and exhaled a thin stream
of smoke through her teeth. “Welcome to hell, kid.”
Chip climbed into the back with me.
“It’s not that bad.”
“Don’t sugarcoat things,” Dell
said. “We’re staying in Damascus, which is safe. We go out into the
rebel-controlled cities every few days. Things have gotten a bit hairy the last
few weeks. You don’t want to be caught outside of Damascus after dark.”
I nodded. “Right.”
Chip looked out at the highway. We
could’ve been anywhere. There were billboards, cars, no signs of unrest. I
shifted uneasily.
“Weird, huh?” Chip said, looking at
me.
“Sorry?”
“It’s weird—how calm it seems,” he
explained. “And like twenty miles away everything’s gone to hell.”
I nodded. “Yeah. It is.”
They didn’t give me much time to settle in before we went
out to talk to a rebel commander. I left my stuff at the hotel, grabbed a tape
recorder, a bottle of water, and a notebook and followed them back out for the
day’s assignment.
We drove out to Daraa. A military
stronghold that was vulnerable to rebel takeover.
It was an hour’s drive to Daraa.
The world changed in an hour.
You could hear firefights once you
started heading south towards the strongholds.
Erin and Dell were joking about the
bombastic general we were going to interview and Chip occasionally snapped
photos.
“Take one of Hadley,” Dell suggested,
watching in the rearview mirror. “Before and after she’s seen this fucking
mess.”
He grinned and snapped a photo. I
was sure I looked uneasy.
“We’re coming up to a checkpoint,”
Dell told me. “Time to shine.”
I was grateful to have something to
do.
“Put on a headscarf,” Chip said
seriously.
I pulled one on awkwardly. Chip
snorted and adjusted it quickly. His touch was utilitarian, like I was a camera,
something that he was handling for work.
Erin yawned. “Misogynist bullshit,
Arrington. Get used to it.”
Dell rolled down his window.
“Salaam,” he said.
The Syrian guard barked quickly for
ID and I handed him our passports and press credentials, speaking as
deferentially as I could.
The guard gave me a hard look but
waved us through. I settled back against the seat, feeling relieved.
We drove to the rebel commander’s
offices. We were ushered in wordlessly. Dell had interviewed him before. I was
the only one who was new.
The commander spoke in English.
“She’s new.” He nodded at me. “What happened to the boy?”
“Law school,” Dell said, glaring at
me so I knew not to talk.
He studied at me suspiciously, but
said nothing else. I turned on my tape recorder and waited for him to lapse
into Arabic. He didn’t.
Chip fiddled with his phone. Having
been told not to take pictures, he had nothing to do with his hands.
“What’s up?” Dell asked, turning to
him.
“Bathroom?” Chip said. He waved his
phone at Dell and Dell nodded.
He was escorted from the room, and
a few seconds, having asked nothing more than softball questions, Erin thanked
the commander for taking the time to meet with us and we started to go.
I didn’t understand what was going
on until Chip was in the car. “What’s going down?” Dell demanded.
“Two suicide bombers attacked a rebel
stronghold.”
“What?”
“Unconfirmed.”
“Where?” Dell asked.
“Northwest corner of the city.”
“Anyone taking responsibility?”
Erin demanded, tapping out a text or email on her Blackberry.
“No, no, not that I can see. People
are saying ISIS or the military.”
“It can’t be the military.”
“Unconfirmed, unconfirmed,” Chip
shouted as we sped off.
We reached a smoking pile of rubble
a short while later. I shivered while I heard the gunfire. I’d never heard it
so close. A screaming child ran past a crumbling wall in the direction we had
driven from.
“Focus,” Chip said quietly to me.
“Seriously, heads up now.”
I nodded, trying to worry where
someone that small would have to go for help in a place like this.
Dell gestured to a distraught man
who was motioning wildly at the destruction.
I closed my mind and just began to
translate for them.