During a drive through Chicago, I imagined the majority Latino West Side fighting against the mostly African American South Side. I imagined fighters setting up mortar positions along the Dan Ryan Expressway. Snipers taking shots at rival gunmen from the top of Soldier Field, its facade crumbling from rocket fire.
In Tehran, a Dutch colleague spoke to me in English as we walked down the street and I turned on him. "Shhhh!" I demanded. Be quiet.
"Dude!" he said. "We can speak English here! We're not in Iraq."
I was moody, despondent and distracted. I surfed the Web, checking for news updates from Baghdad. I saw a group of kids playing soccer, laughing in the streets of Tehran, and I just wanted to cry.
Delphine and I argued, always about the same thing: Even when I was not in Iraq, I was in Iraq.
"Why do you bother even coming home?" she said.
At a dinner party once, I accidentally told the story of one of my close calls. Delphine was outraged. "You didn't tell me about that," she reprimanded me.
"I didn't want you to worry," I said meekly.
Months later, I became enraged when I found out she hadn't told me about a frightening encounter she'd had with authorities in Tehran. We hadn't seen each other in two months, and here we were fighting. I was indignant. "I knew something was wrong. You lied to me."
She was having none of it. "Well, you do the same thing to me," she said.
We were becoming two loners, deceiving each other in pursuit of our addictions.
*
I trembled each time the trucks rumbled past on the road to Najaf. I had seconds to make a decision. Left with little recourse, I decided to tell the man at the checkpoint the truth: I was an American journalist traveling in disguise. He asked for my American passport. I told him I didn't bring it. "Would you bring an American passport on this road?" I asked defensively.
His assistant nodded in understanding, but the older man looked at me and shook his head, his frown hardening.
With my fear came a strange calm, a sense of resignation.
Then the guy's frown melted and he smirked, shaking his head. He believed my story. I was no spy or terrorist. If anything, he thought I was a total moron for driving down this road, just a few months after the bombing of the Samarra shrine. The civil war was raging and every Iraqi who could flee the country was long gone. And here I was playing undercover agent.
