H: How?

Me: He meets his match in a woman sniper near Hawija. He stalks her for days and finally has her in his sights as she is drawing water from a spring. He does not pull the trigger. She is . . .

H: Beautiful?

Me: Majestic. O Channel will have to find a suitable woman for the part.

H: They won’t go for it.

Me: The writers, Ajooj and Majooj, will have to deal with the Censorship Department. That’s not my concern.

H: Ajooj and Majooj?

Me: The cowriters. It’s my name for them. You’ll know who they are.

We lost connection for a minute. I looked around. In the time I’d been typing messages back and forth to H, a man had gotten blown to pieces. There was a lone tree and he’d gone there to take a piss and stepped in the wrong place. I closed my heart to that and did not go near to take a peek. There had been an explosion and I’d certainly heard it. But you get inured to it. Hard men were shouting hard words in Arabic. That broken tree was going to have pieces of the dead man hanging and dripping from it for a long, long time. It would be near impossible to get it all off. I already knew all this and forced myself to not be curious.

H: Any news from the enemy scholar?

I was confused for a moment and wrote, Enemy scholar?

H: You know, the OTHER enemy. Not those prehistoric fools in Iraq and Syria.

Me: YOU told me not to write to her.

There was silence. And silence from H meant this: Don’t you ever use capital letters like that with me, boy!

I wrote meekly, knowing full well that he already had the information and was just testing me: The answer is yes. This other enemy—she asks that since I will not answer her, perhaps I can recommend someone else who will do the research she needs in Tehran.

H: Tell the scholar to meet you in Erbil.

Me: What?

H: Do it. Erbil is a taxi ride away from you!

Me: What, take a cab through enemy lines?

H: Don’t play stupid. You know what to do. Do it!

Haji Yusuf came up to me looking glum. “I keep telling the young men not to just walk around as if this is their father’s backyard. To God we return!”

“To God we return, ya Haji Yusuf!”

And then we both turned and saw our world. Maysam and the bomb-disposal guy in the middle of no-man’s-land. The disposal man digs his hand with its two missing fingers into the ground and slowly picks around a diameter. This is nothing like the movies. Rather, it’s as if he’s a child—and he is a child, twenty at most—looking for treasures of the Median armies who passed this way before time. Soon he has a barrel next to his feet and is explicating on it quietly to Maysam. He walks not nearly carefully enough some paces, digs again, and comes up with another barrel. Then another. And another. It’s a mine highway. It’s a painting. It’s midfield in a football stadium. It’s many things and giant Maysam and the bomb-disposal boy stand there and look toward the horizon, while Cleric J talks into the phone telling other commanders other things they should know about the location. From all of these barrels they’ll extract incendiary material and reuse it for rockets. This war may be stupid but it possesses genius. Meanwhile, Cleric J’s faded and muddy blue tunic flaps magnificently in the wind. The awkwardly built armored vehicles, looking like mud-caked lozenges, rattle their way back down the road to their own shitholes, oblivious to the miseries they have set in motion.