Analog Days - excerpt

This is something that happened before it all started: My Berkeley friend offered me her ex-fiancé’s old car. You try to go back to the beginning but when you do there’s still everything before the beginning, and what about that? All sorts of things keep happening, as the history books say: some of them good, some of them bad.

The ex-fiancé had wanted to learn Arabic and gone to the language institute in Monterey, he couldn’t afford to study it otherwise. Accordion player, Dylan fan. He would never have to serve. That was pre-. Now it was after and he was off to Iraq and decided to drive across the country to where he had to report for duty. After a breakdown (not automotive, mental), he left his car in Boulder, flew to Georgia. The car was mine if I wanted it.

A strange letter came in the mail, sealed with black duct tape and written in crazy-looking capital letters. It was a handwritten deed on the back of a page of Arabic language exercises.

I called the Colorado number I had and spoke to an old man who said yeah, it’s on the lawn, come’n get it. I had pictured a Toyota or Honda for some reason; it was a brown Ford Bronco, the old kind.

The whole thing started to feel too weird.

I didn’t call back or go get the truck. Someone I didn’t know had had a breakdown in it and was off to the war in Iraq and it just didn’t seem worth it.

I asked my friend every now and then about her ex-fiancé. She said she got emails saying if she knew what he was doing she would never speak to him again. Then I started seeing the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and imagined the duties of an Arabic translator, and was glad not to have his Ford Bronco. I wondered if, technically, I owned it, the deed was still in a drawer somewhere, I thought, but I’ve packed and moved across the country since and never saw it.

Someone finally went on TV, wrote editorials, about what he had done at Abu Ghraib and why and who had told him to. Finally someone said it. He became one of my heroes, pretty much all we had in that terrible year. It took a while before I made the connection and realized that it’s his car I could have owned, or maybe do own. I pictured driving around in it sometimes, in my mind, listening to Dylan. One of the dark albums, the ones about America. Blood on the Tracks, Bringing It All Back Home. I guess really they’re all dark.

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From Analog Days by Damion Searls.