Samir caught the remake several years later, at a midnight showing on the BU campus. He didn’t care for it. By then he was struggling with his own alien invasion—physical and emotional impulses that he’d long been aware of, but could no longer deny. The movie’s theme cut too close to home, and the downbeat ending upset him as much as it had the clerics.
He still loved the old black-and-white version, though.
Abdullah came in the break room in search of coffee just as Omar Sharif was preparing his final assault on the invaders’ warehouse stronghold. “Hard at work, I see.”
Samir held up his cell phone. “I’m waiting on a call from an informant.”
“Uh-huh.” On screen, Sharif finished wiring up the explosives in the back of the truck and got behind the wheel. “Wow,” Abdullah said. “Talk about a movie that plays differently now.”
“Nah, Sharif’s a good guy,” Samir said. “And he’s no suicide bomber.”
“Are you sure? I thought he sacrificed himself to kill the aliens.”
“No, he jumps out of the truck at the last second. Here, watch . . .”
The truck crashed through a barricade and accelerated along a pier towards the warehouse. Then the film hit a splice and they were looking at a long shot of the warehouse blowing up.
“Wait a minute,” Samir said.
Abdullah laughed. “Edited for television.”
“No, that’s not right. It must be a defective copy or something. Just wait—he’s in the water, and he comes out of the surf and Faten Hamama is waiting for him . . .”
It didn’t happen. The destruction of the warehouse went on and on, the same explosions looping several times while martial music played, and then the words THE END appeared.
“That’s not right,” Samir said. “Omar Sharif survives. He gets the girl!”
“Yeah, well.” Abdullah shrugged. “It’s just a movie, dude.”
“But that isn’t how it ends!”
His cell phone rang.
Abdullah, in no hurry to get back to whatever task was keeping him here after dark, followed Samir to the elevators. “So you’re going to meet with the guy?”
“What guy?” Samir said.
“Your informant.”
“Ah. No. Turns out it was a waste of time. He just called to say he couldn’t find out what I needed.”
“Well if you’re not busy then, you want to go grab some dinner? Or maybe”—Abdullah looked hopeful—“hit a club? I’m supposed to be babysitting a wiretap, but now that Farouk’s gone home I was thinking I’d put the machines on automatic for a few hours.”
“You know I’d love to,” said Samir. “But I’m actually not feeling too well. I’m going to go home and get to bed early for once.”
Samir’s “informant” was actually Isaac, his former colleague from Halal Enforcement. Isaac was still at Halal; these days he headed a task force that was conducting a probe of the Baghdad PD’s vice division. Between his monitoring of the vice squad’s activities and his knowledge of Halal’s own operations, Isaac was able to predict with near-perfect accuracy which of Baghdad’s rat cellars, brothels, and other illegal establishments were liable to be raided on any given night. Earlier today Samir had forwarded his old friend an email joke—their prearranged signal that he was planning to go out. Once Isaac had the night’s vice raid schedule, he went to a pay phone, called Samir’s cell, and, without identifying himself, recited a list of target neighborhoods to avoid. Isaac did not ask, and Samir did not tell, what sort of illicit entertainment he’d be seeking. But Samir was pretty sure Abdullah wouldn’t be into it.
He drove home to the Kadhimiyah district apartment where he’d been living ever since his divorce. He showered and changed clothes, then pulled all of the ID out of his wallet, lingering for a moment over a snapshot of his twin sons, Malik and Jibril. The boys, ten years old now, lived with their mother in Basra.
Samir left the snapshot with the pile of his ID and grabbed a driver’s license with a fake name. The phony license was primarily a good luck charm—if he got into trouble tonight, the thing most likely to get him out was cash. He made sure he had plenty of that, too.
He slipped out of the apartment building through the back door, walked to a Baghdad Transit stop several blocks away, and caught a bus across the river. At Antar Square in Adhamiyah he switched to the subway. Descending into the station he glimpsed a funhouse reflection of himself in a security mirror. Past the turnstile, the darkened glass of a smoke shop presented him with another reflection; though less distorted than the first, the image still seemed like that of a stranger. It was the way he was carrying himself, he knew: Along with his identification, Samir had left behind his usual swagger.
He boarded a southeast-bound number 6 train, choosing a car whose only other occupant was a long-haired BU student reading a biology textbook. Samir sat across from him and waited, smiling, to see if he’d make eye contact. But the boy only burrowed deeper into his book.
The door at the far end of the subway car slid open and a transit cop entered. As he came down the car, rapping his nightstick against the empty seats, Samir straightened up and put on his day-face for a moment. The cop gave him a look but walked past without saying anything.
At the Muadham Gate station three men boarded the train together, all wearing the black uniform of the Mahdi Army’s Guardian Angel street patrol. The transit cop, making another pass through the car, pulled up short and raised his nightstick; but when all three Angels turned towards him, he reconsidered his options and stepped off onto the platform just as the train doors were closing. Samir, not quick enough to disembark, instead stood up and moved to the next car. Looking back, he saw the Angels approach the long-haired student, one of them reaching out to flick the locks brushing his collar.
Two stops later, the conductor announced the transfer point for the Sadr City El. When the subway got underway again, Samir took another look back into the adjoining car. The Angels and the student were gone, but the textbook lay on the floor, broken-spined. Samir watched it shuddering with the motion of the train.
He might have become a sailor if he weren’t so afraid of drowning.
Samir’s Uncle Zuhair—actually a cousin of his father’s—had been in the merchant navy. No one ever called him Sinbad, but like David Cohen he was a handsome man, so it was something of a curiosity that he never married. Whenever he was asked about this, Uncle Zuhair would say that he was married—to the sea. If the questioner was male, he might add a ribald joke about the hundreds of “ports” he had visited in his career.
Even now, knowing firsthand how far a man will go to hide his true nature, Samir had a hard time believing that his uncle was anything but an itinerant heterosexual who happened to love the smell of salt air. It would have been a fantastic cover. But Samir’s sole experience with deepwater travel, during a high school field trip to Kuwait City, had been a nightmare: The tour boat that was taking the class out to Failaka Island had gotten caught in a storm, and with the waters too rough for safe docking, they’d been forced to ride it out. Samir had thought for sure they would capsize, and when they finally made it back to port he swore he would never go through that again.
If he couldn’t share Uncle Zuhair’s profession, he could still adopt other aspects of his lifestyle. For most of his youth, Samir had been overweight, but towards the end of high school he began to work out, and his new physique, along with the rough sense of humor he had developed as a defense mechanism, proved attractive to a certain kind of girl. At BU, Samir cultivated a reputation as a ladies’ man. It wasn’t a complete charade, but he routinely exaggerated his exploits, at times recklessly endangering the reputations of the women involved. He felt bad about that, but he was terrified and desperate to hide what he was—at first from himself, and then later, when self-denial became impossible, from his friends and his family.