Nevertheless, by being as dogged as they were, they stole the show. We wanted them to just go die somewhere. But they had other ideas. And when my left eye started to really go bad, as bad as some of the gassed vets I’d seen with their permanently damaged corneas, I decided to go home for a respite. I had done nothing for Tehran and their expectations. Losing the cell phone had been a master stroke—it absolved me of having to look for the Proust guy. Though this meant that H would be waiting. And so would the O Channel thugs.

Peace, ultimately, was a problematic condition.

War, putting everything on hold, was sometimes more desirable.

I went back to Baghdad to fly to Tehran. But I did not go to Sadr City to fetch Zahra the Beheader that first night. Instead I took a hotel in the Karada District and went to my usual corner liquor joint off Abu Nuwas for a bottle. It was obviously bootleg Scotch and tasted dubious but it did the job. Next day, wracked with both a hangover and guilt, I called my friend Jasim who immediately began to berate me.

“Do you know how many calls I got from Tehran from people looking for you?”

“I can guess.”

“What is this number you are calling from?”

“I lost my phone. I’m in a hotel.” I gave him the place’s name.

“Don’t move from there!”

I did.

Jasim worked for a TV network in Baghdad loosely connected to the Hashd forces. He was the kind of man of whom you think: if there were another ten thousand more of him, this country would not be in such a state of putrefaction. Instead, he did fixing and producing jobs for next to nothing for inept people who had dollars, people who’d never know Jasim was saving their lives at least five times a day in the Baghdad of now, just as he had done in the Baghdad of ten years earlier. He was the quintessential guy behind the scenes, quietly smoothing the way, loved by even the worst of men because he stayed honest to his own disadvantage. I always had the feeling that if Jasim too one day went up in smoke in a suicide bombing, then I wouldn’t want to live anymore. It wasn’t because I loved him, which I did, but because there comes a place where you have to draw the line with God. Not everyone should have to die. Somebody should stay around, somebody without bloody hands.

But I couldn’t face Jasim just now. He was too responsible a citizen for me to face with a hangover. I’d left Zahra the Beheader in Baghdad to live temporarily at Jasim’s house with his wife and two children. But Sadr City was a sprawling meganeighborhood of love and dashed hopes, where extended families put on slippers and shuffled from house to house to visit next of kin, and next of next of kin, for hours on end every night when the weather cooled down. How would Zahra the Beheader, who had lost everything and had been on the verge of being put on display like a circus freak, get by in Sadr? I didn’t know.