Revisiting The Place Of A Story’s Beginnings
Walking past this park bench in the early hours (as I do many mornings) it was very much like the first time I saw it sixteen years ago— a rising sun in a clearing sky. Like watching the Good Lord recreate the world right before my eyes. I instantly imagined this was the place where a broken angel named Andrew would sit and read through the lost diary of a dead man.
And all those years ago I sat on that very bench and took a notebook from my jacket. I wrote these words —
Cully, Switzerland. Many years after the war.
I met Robert Price in Baghdad on February 2, 2003. Nine weeks later I watched him disappear in the desert. It was late afternoon, the air was thick with dust and smoke — we were surrounded by slaughter and destruction. Robert handed me his backpack. Inside was his journal with a Mont Blanc fountain pen clipped to the spiral. It was all he had left in the world.
“Hang onto this for me, Andrew,” he said.
I took it because I didn’t know what else to do. He staggered toward an Orange and White GMC. The doors were scarred with shrapnel and the windows were shattered. Arabic scribble along its side marked it as an Iraqi taxi. Robert opened the door and the driver tumbled out to the ground. Half the poor man’s face was blown off. Robert stepped over him and climbed in. He started the motor, he looked at me.
“It’s not your fault, Andrew. This is a hard world, especially for guardian angels.”
He drove in a wide circle, looking for the tracks that marked the smuggler’s trail. Finding them he drove to the edge of the plateau and down to the desert. He was going after the woman carrying his unborn child. The woman’s name was Noor.
— that’s all I wrote that day. I had no idea I was setting out on a story that would follow me (haunt me?) for nearly two decades. With the characters sometimes whispering in my consciousness, begging me to guide them to this place where they could rest.
Today was one of those days. Time for wine.
