let her live, I should have... I should have killed her, then myself, to cancel out the guilt of whatever role I had in creating the monster, in giving her permission to be what she was.
The city was effortlessly normal around me, not sharing in my disaster; people still walking around, smoking, eating food out of twists of newspaper, hawking things from the marketplace—shoes, electronics, fruit, nuts—under the orange sodium streetlights. No one even looked my way, parked in the empty lot in a stolen car.
If I could get to the airport, I thought, I could find someone who spoke English, get in touch with the Canadian Embassy in Iraq, get home somehow. Ask them to call in some nukes. Ask them to move the warships. Well, they would hang up on me, but maybe I could trade on that little motherfucker’s name one last time. Taste the bitterness of it in my mouth, the taste of betrayal and poison. What had they taught us Socrates drank in the end?
“Shit, yeah,” I murmured. A relief to have an actual plan, with steps in it that I could work towards. One, two, three, four. Even if they took me into custody to claim the reward, I’d still be on my way home. They wouldn’t mistreat me. And I wasn’t the one who had beat up those airport security agents back there, so even if they wanted to charge me with something, I could say that it had all been her. And it wouldn’t be a lie.
I slumped in the warm seat, feeling unburned adrenaline rush through my body till I was shaking again. Shake away, be my guest, I thought. Not doing anyone any harm here in the shadows. Let it all out, body. It’s okay. The truth set you free, and yes, it is gorgeous, it is the first time in your life that you can say it. But when the shaking was over, pain overtook me again, the t-shirt ripping loose from the bite-marks on my shoulder, fresh blood oozing. Yeah. Better go to the airport, find help. Antibiotics. Yes. Good.
The Range Rover’s owner had left, as I had suspected, some emergency or toll or snack money in his glove compartment. I sneered at the magic circle on it as I slammed the door and walked into the thicket of market stalls, ignoring the stares, my scowl apparently just enough to forestall any questions.
Three of the colourful bills and a lot of pointing got me a tall bamfoam cup of coffee, a paper bag of flatbread, and a tub of hummus, which I took back to the Rover to eat. I felt safer with the doors shut, invisible behind the tinted glass. Like a dog in its crate, I thought; and I felt hate boil up from my stomach, almost sending the coffee back up. I took another sip, defiantly. Shut up! I’m allowed to hate whoever I want to hate. Literally anyone.
On the drive to the airport, after buying a blurry, inkjet-printed map off one of the street vendors, the sky was visibly changing—not black with stars as it had been before, but boiling, charcoal clouds that could have been mistaken for rainclouds if they were not moving so fast, lit from beneath in greens and blues, sickly, weak lights, blotting out the stars. Everything racing towards the alignment, everything that had not already come through the microportals of the reactor.
I felt oddly calm and light about it, almost buoyant: evil begets evil, and now evil was being called to account for it, being taken to task, as it should be. As was right. Why should she, who was responsible for all this, beg off or outsource the responsibility for fixing it? Polluter pays. Just like she always said.
The tiny planes parked at the airport trembled as if they were about to take off, their wings rocking in unseen currents, slightly too heavy to be sucked upwards. The bigger ones weren’t moving. That was good. I wondered if I would be able to fly home from here, or if I would need to go to a bigger airport, if they would take me to somewhere more central. I was nauseated and shivery with pain, though I could feel the food settling my stomach. If only they didn’t put so much olive oil on everything; they were used to it, but for me it was just a delicious mouthful of grease that gave me heartburn. But the coffee, the