When I get back to her apartment I tell my friend about what I saw, about the plane that exploded in mid-air. She doesn’t seem particularly interested, instead wants to continue our conversation about what I’m about to do. We argue more, but unlike before, now when we argue we also laugh. I think, while I was on my walk, she decided that if I was going to die we should at least have some good times together before I go.

  That night she took me to a secret, illegal art party. I was surprised that she was unsurprised by the warplane I had seen explode. She told me it happens regularly and no one knew what to make of it. I felt there was something exciting about the phenomenon, that it presented possibilities, or at least promising questions, but my friend wasn’t so sure.

  To get to the party, we drove to a suburb of a suburb. Several times, as we drove, we heard planes overhead, and each time we heard that sound we drove just a little bit faster. We parked by a fence, climbed over it (I ripped my pants as we did so), then walked for a long time, I would guess almost an hour. There was a door with a password, another door with a different password, and then stairs going down and down and down. After such a long journey I was thinking that no party could possibly be good enough to make it worth this endless travel but I was wrong. I had no idea what I was talking about.

  On our walk I asked again about the exploding planes. She told me the rumour she had heard was that about one plane was exploding every other day. And strangely, it seemed it was democratic, not only planes from any particular government or army or faction. Planes from all countries appeared to be exploding more or less equally. We talked about whether it could be a computer virus, perhaps a computer virus that had gotten out of hand, spread beyond its original target, or another form of sabotage. My friend didn’t discount these possibilities—in fact, she didn’t discount any possibilities, any explanation might be possible—but I couldn’t help but feel she wasn’t particularly interested in the explanation. For her it was happening and that was all, another mad thing in this endless series of madnesses called war and colonization.

  “But don’t you think it’s actually great,” I asked her, unable to understand her patient lack of excitement.

  “It might be great,” she replied, “I don’t know. The longer I live here, the more suspicious I become. I don’t want to get my hopes up if they’ll only be dashed a few days later. And also, the pilots…they might be enemy pilots, they’re definitely killing us much more, a lot more indiscriminately, than we’re killing them. But I don’t know why, I find myself not wanting to rejoice in the deaths of those enemy pilots. I’m afraid of becoming obsessed with revenge. I mean, the longer I live here, the more I’m becoming obsessed with revenge, and therefore the more I try to counterbalance it by not rejoicing in these pilots’ deaths.”

  “I’m not talking about revenge,” I say. “I’m talking about curiosity, about wanting to know why.”

  “The planes are exploding. Whether or not we know why, they’re exploding.”

  I say nothing. I still didn’t understand.

  Stepping into that party, into the first room, I felt something opening up. A sense of possibility I don’t think I’d felt in a very long time. Then I immediately started feeling guilty, as if I was here to experience a meaning I was unable to experience at home but that I was getting without the daily pain that made it possible (though perhaps the pain would come later). I walked into the middle of that first room and froze. Things were happening all around me, I could also hear other things happening in the further rooms, and I still hadn’t gotten my bearings. Frozen in the middle of that room, it was as if I split into two, as if one part of me had broken off and floated toward the ceiling with the intention of giving the other part a lecture. The lecture was as follows: Now is not the time to feel guilty or beat yourself up. There will be plenty of time for that later. When you stepped into this room, you had an experience of opening. When was the last time you had an experience of opening? Don’t throw that away for a wallow in cheap guilt. Your friend brought you to this party, you don’t have a lot of friends, take it in and enjoy it. You might be dead tomorrow and never have another chance. It was a good lecture, good self-advice, and I did my best to listen, though I don’t think I entirely succeeded.

  On the large walls on either side of me were 35 mm projections. One was a montage of randomly exploding planes, the other footage of wildlife in the bombed-out ruins of the city: a few rabbits, a stray deer, two camels that followed each other like a couple, and another animal I didn’t recognize. If I had seen these films at home, I might have thought they were good, more art that I was free to take or leave, but here they were life as it was happening all around us and disappearing. I knew I was being romantic but told myself that perhaps being romantic was part of the opening. Being romantic was the flip side of my stupid guilt. In the next room a choir of young people were reading out an endless list of names in unison. I knew these were the names of people who had died, had been killed, but also I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to have what I knew confirmed. At home I wouldn’t have found this performance good, would have found it too literal and heavy-handed, but here it became something else, a kind of simple necessity to have these names spoken out loud and witnessed. It was performance like I had seen a million times before. Why did I suddenly care about it now? I imagined that I was killed tomorrow, my name being added to the list. But, of course, my name would not be added. They were all local names.

  My friend finds me and I tell her I think the names are all people who have been killed and she laughs. They’re all names of contemporary artists, filmmakers, and writers, most of whom are still alive. She pauses, listens to about a dozen names, then looks at me, saying that at least those dozen we just heard are all, to the best of her knowledge, still alive, then laughs at me again, how I made the most simplistic and literal assumption. She tells me that for her it feels good to hear these names celebrated, to hear art from her home and from the surrounding countries celebrated. That it’s a nice change from the endless names of war. All through the party—and we stayed all night—it was as if I was being reminded what art was for. Or not even reminded: as if I was learning what art was for, learning again what art could be, as if for the first time. Or at least learning one thing it could be for.

  We walked through to the next room together. I couldn’t tell how many, but there were doors leading in all directions, and I found myself unsure what this place used to be, some sort of underground labyrinth or bunker. My friend actually didn’t know; so far she had known the answer to almost every question I’d asked, but it was the first time she’d been here as well. What she did know was that these parties had been happening every year since the war began, which meant this was the ninth or tenth one. Every time the party happened in a different location and each time it was a bit more elaborate than the last. Everyone wanted to participate and everyone wanted to attend. She knew a few of the organizers, but there were many more she didn’t know. She told me that part of her good reputation here derived from the fact that her work had been shown at the very first one, the very first party that almost no one attended, making it borderline legendary, a legend she was happy to have benefited from over the years. She wasn’t sure she wanted acclaim, but if acclaim were to accrue from something that was pure luck, purely accidental, being in the right place at the right time, she didn’t see any particular harm in it. She said that perhaps she preferred success that came from rumour as opposed to more official success. I wondered if she thought of me as someone who preferred it the other way round, but I didn’t ask. She was talking about herself, not about me, and I knew it was better to keep the conversation about her and her work. I have a tendency to talk too much about myself, and even though I wasn’t sharing these thoughts, I was thinking too much about myself now and that was almost as bad. I told myself it was almost as bad, but I knew, in fact, it was worse.

  We slowly walk toward the next room as I ask her about it, what she showed at that very first party nine or ten years ago. As we walk, it seems that she’s thinking, I assume she’s thinking how best to describe it, a work she made so long ago. She has already told me that since she came back here, time has changed for her, moving back, and the war has done all sorts of strange things to her sense of time. So has the death of her parents. We come to a room full of large paintings. My first thought is that these are the most apolitical paintings I have ever seen. Which is insane, because like anyone who has seen a large number of paintings in their life, I must have seen thousands of paintings that have absolutely no interest in politics. And why must I view all works of art through my political desires? These were large, nineteenth-century domestic scenes—dinners, walks in the park, hunting, marriages—painted with certain flourishes of abstraction, mainly in dark browns and bright reds. I felt they were apolitical, but as I stared at them longer I could also feel anger in their approach. My friend tells me she recognizes the figures, they are the first generation of colonizers, people her grandparents or great-grandparents might recognize because some of their pictures were on the money. They imposed their values and sent the wealth back home. It was never officially a colony, but it might as well have been. Then socialism in its infancy, then socialism crushed by dictatorships, dictatorships covertly funded by my government, then the dictatorships wanted the wealth for themselves, and now bombs to reopen the markets and whatever national resources come along with such openings. This could be one of so many places, the slightly abstracted figures in these paintings like so many aggressive historical foreigners happy to call such places their own.

  “At that first party I played a recording of my parents. On repeat.” As we stared at the paintings I listened to my friend. “I was just realizing they were going to die, I had never actually thought about my parents dying before they wrote to me and asked me to take care of them, and as part of this realization I wanted to record them. It was a time when I wasn’t sure if I still thought of myself as an artist, if I was still thinking of myself as an artist. I was doing more community projects, wondering how to make use of my life, if there was a way I could use it more directly to help people. Those were the kinds of things we used to talk about at school.” I said I remembered, that I still remembered those conversations, they’ve stayed with me. “When I recorded my parents, I wasn’t thinking it was going to become art. I just wanted to record them. But then I was asked if I had anything to show at the party, and I hadn’t actually made art in a long time, all I had was the recordings. My parents weren’t talking about anything so interesting, just their lives before the war, how they tried to have a good life, not get arrested, go to work, love each other and their friends, stay out of trouble. I was surprised how many people who came to that first party knew my parents, or had met them, they were still alive then. They were actually more social than I thought, friendly with everyone. And my parents were so happy to be part of my art, even though I barely even thought of myself as an artist anymore. They really took it in the best possible way. They came from a generation with such respect for art and culture. Mainly they preferred more traditional works: paintings and films and novels. But if my work was more modern, more contemporary, they loved me so they were going to love that too. Before they gave their approval, I was worried I might be exploiting them, using their words for my own ends and it might be wrong to do so. But when they died, it was the strangest thing. I knew that one of the last things I had done, one of the last things they saw me do, actually made them happy. Many of the choices I’ve made in life, they didn’t like them so much, they didn’t always approve, though they did their best to be supportive. But they were so happy I had used their voices in my art.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so we walked in silence. I thought back to when I used to know her, tried to remember if she had ever said anything about her parents, but nothing like that had stuck in my mind. We walked though several rooms, barely even looking at the art or each other. I said: “That’s a really beautiful story.” Some others came over to say hello and she introduced me. We got talking and, I’m not sure how it came up, but I told them how I had seen a plane explode and was once again perplexed by how deeply unimpressed they all seemed. It apparently happened all the time, with such frequency it was barely worth mentioning. They were all sure there was some devious and logical explanation for the phenomenon, even if no one yet knew exactly what it was. We continued walking as a now-larger group, it felt like there must have been hundreds of rooms spanning in all directions, and I considered again why I had come here. So often in my life I had done so little and now I was taking this insane trip, of which my current location was probably the most sane part. But I was surrounded by art, and meeting new people, their perspectives so different from my own I could often barely follow the conversation as they switched in and out of my language and we wandered through the rooms and through the art. For that long moment I felt strangely happy. But I also knew the moment would pass.

  I had to leave in the middle of the night. I told myself I have to leave in the middle of the night because, if I leave during the day, my friend might try again to convince me not to go and this time she might succeed. I had written her a goodbye note I was going to leave on the kitchen table. It read:

  The purpose of this note is to thank you for all your friendship, kindness, and hospitality. For picking me up at the airport and letting me stay in your home. And for all the really beautiful conversations about art and life we’ve had over the years. I know you don’t approve of what I’m about to do, and I’m also grateful that you don’t approve, that you continue to be a voice of sanity in my life. I ask myself if those have always been our respective roles: you the voice of sanity, me not. So I just want to thank you again and ask you not to worry. Whatever happens, it is what I’ve come here to do. I think of you as my favourite friend.

  However, when I get to the kitchen, there is already a note waiting for me, in an envelope with my name on it. I put the envelope in my pocket and replace it with my handwritten missive. Then I gather my carefully packed belongings and quietly close the front door behind me.

  There is a certain joy in being wrong. This is one of the many thoughts I have walking along dark streets toward the outskirts of the city, then past many buildings and houses that back home we would call suburbs, though I don’t think they call them that here. In the landscape I would be traversing, along with constant bombings, there were many different groups of various sizes and from various places, all fighting each other, sometimes in coalitions, sometimes alone. There were many checkpoints on the roads, checkpoints for cars and vehicles, but, I had read, if you were travelling alone, by foot, it wasn’t especially difficult to avoid them. What I didn’t expect was how long I would walk without anything happening. As I walk through the darkness, and keep walking as it bleeds into dawn, in the farthest distance there is a dot, a splotch. I wonder if it’s a village or checkpoint, and continue wondering for what seems like many hours, many lifetimes, until finally I reach it, the dot, the splotch, which does, in fact, turn out to be a village—from what I can tell, completely deserted. Most of the houses have been bombed within an inch of their lives. There is almost nothing left. It is still a village, albeit now painfully in ruins. As I walk through, I look down at my feet. There are bloodstains on the ground at irregular intervals. Also burn marks, ash, and rubble. It is remarkable the degree to which the ground appears scorched. I wonder if I should sleep here for the night, but nothing about the idea feels right. I don’t know why exactly, but I have a distinct feeling that the people who live here intend to return. As I pass, I consider snooping into a few of the houses, see what’s there, if anything, but again feel it would be wrong. They didn’t abandon their homes just so I could later explore a museum of bomb-destroyed dwellings. On the way out is a well from which I fill my water bottles, then worry that it might be poisoned, revenge on any scavenger who tries to loot what is left behind. But the water tastes clean. (Of course, I have absolutely no idea what poisoned water tastes like, but I drink it and later feel fine.)

  I continue to walk. Soon the village is once again a distant dot, now on the horizon behind me, but as I turn back to glance at it one last time, I might already hear the plane. I stop to be sure, and moments later the first bomb hits. A single plane bombing a deserted, already-destroyed village. The plane comes back around for a second then third load. Why is this plane bombing this emptiness? Does the pilot think there are soldiers hiding there? Does he want to destroy it to such a degree that no one will ever think to return? Before I manage to arrive at anything resembling an explanation, the pilot has already lost interest in the village, is now flying toward me. There’s no cover anywhere in sight, so I just stand there, not knowing if the plane will spot me or pass over on its way to a more promising target. My heart is beating faster than I ever remember it doing, and if I’m not killed by a bomb, perhaps a heart attack will finish me off. I wonder if I should run, but there’s nowhere to go as the plane speeds past, then circles back around, coming down lower as it circles back for a third time. On the fourth pass I feel it happening, this plane is about to drop a bomb and I look straight up, almost sure it will be the last movement I ever make, when the plane explodes mid-air, whatever is left spiralling downward and crashing maybe fifty feet away. A moment ago I was sure I was dead, and now, here I am, once again alive, in shock.

 

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