Fundamentally

1

Five Months Earlier

It's not like I was expecting Stalingrad, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps up-lit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down palm trees beside the Tigris River. Why was it so . . . nice? What happened to the rolling blackouts? The electrical transmission network supposedly ravaged by war? Hadn't I donated to help Iraqi women giving birth in cowsheds lit by the flame of a single candle?

Car after car parked along the river's banks; sparkling Audis and BMWs among older Toyotas and Hyundais. I'd thought I was a high roller, leaving London halfway through a monthly Travelcard. Young men unloaded foldout chairs, shisha pipes, and portable barbecues, setting up by the water's edge. I could almost smell the marinated baby chickens, the flattened carp smoldering over charcoal, but the driver stopped me from rolling the window down.

"Security," he said, tilting his head toward rooftops empty of snipers.

I spotted a huddle of teenagers watching TikTok, trying to imitate a dance, before pushing each other over, their laughter subsumed by the honking traffic. Rosy and I used to dance like that.

A convoy of cars started beeping frantically, and my back tensed up, anticipating a critical incident ahead. Then I saw white ribbon stretched over the hood of a Mercedes, a bride stepping out, her lace dress draped over marble steps as she entered a five-star hotel. Was this fucking Midnight in Paris? I'd signed up for cluster munitions, not glitter bombs. I spluttered with the indignity of it.

"Everything OK, ma'am?" The African driver looked over his shoulder. What had brought him here? A carefully weighed decision, no doubt. Not juvenile heartbreak, like me.

"I'm fine, thanks. You can call me Nadia." I deserved to be called a lot of things, but ma'am wasn't one of them.

"Ah, it's like Nadia Buari, big actress in Ghana." He nodded at me with approval. "And why you came to Baghdad, Nadia?"

"Oh, I'm here for a job. I'm creating a deradicalization program for ISIS brides. Yeah . . . don't ask."

The driver raised his eyebrows but stayed silent. I checked my phone, hoping for a message from Rosy conveying immense pain at having me ripped from her life. But my SIM card, flabbergasted at having been brought to Iraq, had malfunctioned.

Returning to the window, I strained my eyes, searching for burned-out cars and bullet holes, something to undermine this tableau of festivity, anything to force Rosy into irrelevance. But in the falling darkness, the jollity glowed only brighter.

We entered the Green Zone, a fortified district where international organizations and government agencies hid from the population they claimed to serve. My new home.

My driver deposited me in the car park of the UN compound. He stepped out of the car and lit a cigarette, staring hard at my chest while I heaved my suitcase out of the trunk. Shouldn't misogyny have an equal and opposite chivalric force?

"Over there." He pointed toward a security cabin, his burning red tobacco dancing against the darkness.

I dragged my suitcase over the ground, the evening breeze a warm relief after the intense air-conditioning in the car. A generator rumbled on the far side of the car park, the smell of diesel repelling insects through the air, the stars obscured by a thin gray smog that hung between the city lights and the night sky.

I entered the security cabin, caught my foot on the lip of the doorway, and fell inside. It usually took more than ten seconds to humiliate myself at a new job, but here I was, already achieving a personal best.

A lean Iraqi man in a blue uniform stepped away from his prayer mat and crouched beside me. "You OK, Doctor?"

I was comforted by his use of my title; status gives you scope to absorb minor failures. I hoisted myself up.

"I'm Farris," he said, his Iraqi accent strongly Americanized. He picked up my suitcase and put it on a trestle table that bisected the room. "You must be Dr. Nadia. You're very welcome here."

I watched in horror as he snapped on latex gloves and unzipped my suitcase.

"Real sorry I have to do this," he said, shaking his head. "It's just protocol."

He used his hand condoms to remove every item in turn. A copy of Cosmopolitan, the headline screaming: "Everything You NEED to Know about Rimming!" Scores of enormous black underpants interspersed with a few sexy transparent ones. A lilac bullet vibrator, which he unscrewed until a AAA battery shot out. A backup pack of AAA batteries. I pulled out my nonfunctioning phone and pretended to text, my ears throbbing with shame.

My ears were familiar with the feeling. When I was a teenager, my mum found a Just Seventeen magazine hidden in a Quranic exegesis textbook in my bedroom. She lay in wait as I returned from school.

"This is disgusting, Nadia." She waved the naked torso of Pacey from Dawson's Creek in my face. "How can you read such filth?"

I don't read it; I look at it while holding an electric toothbrush to my clit.

"It's the other girls at school," I said, inching back toward the door. "I'm only trying to fit in. I don't enjoy it." Evoking the mysterious dangers of peer pressure normally worked on Mum.

"If they jumped off a cliff, would you follow?" she said. It was her favorite retort, but also the most idiotic. I obviously did a risk analysis before deciding which of my friends' behaviors to imitate. Mum was trying to tear up the magazine, but she kept getting the glossy pages tangled in the staples.

"Muslim friends only from now on," she said.

Mum had been a born-again Muslim ever since my father died when I was a toddler. After the magazine incident, she invested heavily in my indoctrination, until I became deeply religious. A total dork, I loved nothing more than planning my revision timetables, and being religious was like having a revision timetable for life, the day of judgment being the final exam. I lived as a paragon of Islamic virtue until I went to university, where relentless intellectual challenges and social seductions thawed my devotion to naught.

"Good to go, Doctor," said Farris, zipping my suitcase back up. "Look forward to hanging sometime."

His prayer mat lay in the corner, an image of the Ka'ba woven into the fabric, but when I looked at his face, it was warm and free of judgment.

He handed me over to a staffer whose white headscarf and blouse produced the combined effect of a shroud-albeit a shroud destined for paradise. It felt strange being around Muslims again, after my godless life in London, and I wondered if they could smell the apostasy on me.

Shroud led me through a grassy outdoor quad, the air fresh against my matted hair, and into a two-story building, where she tapped a key card against a bedroom door. I stepped inside. The room was tiny, which made the furniture look huge. A single bed pushed against the wall, an incongruously ornate wardrobe, a desk covered in blue pen marks, and a flimsy foldout chair.

Shroud held the door open, one foot in, one foot out, and handed me a bundle of items, including a lanyard, a map, and a schedule for tomorrow.

"You have question?" she said.

Dozens of questions collided in my brain, canceling one another out.

"No." She was gone before my mouth completed the "oh."

I stood in the middle of the room, suitcase next to me, its metal handle standing high, ready to be reversed out of this world. What cunty-bollocking madness had possessed me to come here?

I remembered the taste of Peroni on Rosy's tongue, the sweaty jasmine smell she'd leave on my sheets.

I'd thought I could evade my pain, dump it at Heathrow like lost baggage and fly away. Yet here I was, the exact same person who'd left London twelve hours before, my breathing shallow, the oxygen laced with loss.

I persuaded myself to unpack, told myself it'd make the place feel more homey, but ten minutes later, my suitcase was empty and the room remained indifferent to my presence. For the third time in my adult life, I was trying to create a home on hostile terrain. Your mother doesn't want you, the love of your life doesn't want you, well . . . how about a random failed state? Is it possible you belong here?

In the ensuite, I sat on the toilet tracing the cracks in the tiled floor with my toes, my body too tense to wee. It took a concentrated visualization of Niagara Falls to summon a trickle. I undressed and got into bed. Feeling the rough polyester sheet against my back, I realized it had been a decade since I'd slept in anything other than Egyptian cotton.

"Princess Nadia," Rosy would have said, "can you feel a pea beneath your hundred soft mattresses?"

Easy for her to say, Bubble Wrapped by her doting parents, taped in the protective seal of a country to which she unequivocally belonged. For years, I'd only had her.

Now I was three thousand miles away, lying in a single bed in Baghdad, clinging to the bedspread despite the heat. My fingers held so lightly to life, I could have shut my eyes and let go, my body evaporating, the world unmoved by such a tiny shift.

2

I stepped outside into the bright morning sun, freshly showered, inhaling the scent of my strawberry-infused shampoo. Standing in the middle of the quad, clutching my map, I could see the grass being watered by thin black tubes, the ground beyond parched and dusty. I squinted up at the buildings, turning the map around and pointing it in different directions. If that's there, then I must be . . .

"Are you lost?" said a deep Geordie voice behind me.

Only physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I turned around and was confronted by massive pectoral muscles pressing through a khaki green T-shirt. I looked up. He must have been six foot four, his blond hair lit with streaks of gold, his jaw large and angular, his shoulders enormous. Holy mother. Imagine coming back to London with this specimen on my arm. His leg was bigger than an average man's torso.

"It's science that women haven't got space awareness," he said.

So, I'll have to gaffer tape his mouth shut. He'll still be impressive.

"You mean spatial . . . anyway, hey." I fluttered my eyelashes. "I'm Nadia, it's my first day. Can you help me?" And then fuck me blind?

"Tom." He stepped toward me, his gorilla-like stature blocking out the sun. He plucked the map from my weak feminine fingers. "Where you trying to get to?"

"The cafeteria." I sucked in my tummy so I looked like the type of girl who rarely ate. In fairness, I'd eaten nothing since a piece of Gouda and some oat crackers on the plane. Maybe I'd return to London svelte as well as worldly.

"If the camels die, we die," he said.

I looked at him, perplexed.

"Sherif Ali, in Lawrence of Arabia," he said. "It's my favorite film."

"Do you identify with Lawrence, as a fellow blond savior in the Middle East?" I winked.

"Yes," he said, without a trace of humor.

We walked together between two buildings that cast large, overlapping rectangles of shade. Every step we took summoned little dust explosions, coating the bottoms of my trousers in rust-colored dirt. "Can't you even stay clean until breakfast?" Rosy would have said.

We reached a squat sandstone building with wonky flagged steps and small windows armed with metal bars. After the UN's first base was bombed in 2003, the new compound had crouched in a defensive posture. The UN mission, meant to be temporary, was now sixteen years old and larger than ever. Instead of becoming a beacon of democracy, Iraq had lunged from one civil war to another, and the UN had twisted around the carcass like knotweed. And I thought I could make a difference? A heartbroken, foreign academic, showing up after nearly two decades of international failure. The hubris of it.

The cafeteria was smaller than I'd imagined, like a basic greasy spoon. Wipe-clean tables with wooden caddies in the middle, stacked with cutlery, condiments, and napkins. Swirls of moisture glistened from the recent swipes of a wet dishcloth, and the smell of incinerated toast was so strong I half expected to see a cloud of charcoal hanging in the air. I picked up a sticky brown plastic tray and joined a queue of people perusing platters of eggs, fruit, and cheese. One of those conveyor belt toasters was at the end, next to a basket of bread. I picked up a boiled egg, but Tom took it out of my hand and shook it gently by his ear. He placed it on his own tray, picked up another egg, shook it, and handed it to me.

"Childish!" he said to two men giggling at a table that faced the buffet.

"Fun spoiler," said one man in a French accent.

"It's spoilsport," said an African man sitting next to him.

"Spoilsport," repeated the Frenchman.

"Charles and Pierre"-Tom tilted his head toward them-"think it's hilarious to hide raw eggs in with the boiled ones. It's no bother to me, I chug raw eggs before training."

A gray-haired man sitting on the far side of the room tapped an egg on the table edge, and a membranous slime exploded over his suit. He screamed and stood up, a yolky puddle sliding to the floor as gulps of laughter escaped from the vertical brown trays that Charles and Pierre had hidden behind.

I stifled a smile. "Gosh, thanks for saving me from that, Tom, I'd have been so embarrassed."

"You're welcome, doll," said Tom, the lilt of his Geordie accent a perfect complement to his physique.

We sat opposite each other, and I buttered a piece of toast that was burned on one side and completely uncooked on the other. Tom cracked three raw eggs into a tumbler and downed them while I repressed a gag.

"You'd never guess it," he said, "but Pierre's proper fancy like. His dad's French ambassador to America, and his granddad was before. Pierre just pisses about, though, spends all his time hosting parties for journalists. He chats a lot of shit but, if you ever need info, sometimes he gets decent gossip about what the Iraqis are up to."

Charles had returned to the buffet for seconds, and I watched Pierre throw an open sachet of mayonnaise at his back before ducking under a table. Charles spun around, leaped over a chair, and dove toward him, crushing a hash brown into his face as they wrestled on the floor.