The Last Good Man

No Moral Argument

Miles sits at a desk in the guest room of his parents’ house in Seattle, an old keyboard and tablet in front of him. He is typing swiftly, steadily. He’s been typing for most of the twenty hours since he’s been back, pouring out every memory of the past two months, first in broad strokes but then revisiting his narrative, over and over, filling in the finer details of his experiences: textures, scents, sounds; the words that were spoken—brutal, commanding, mocking, misleading—rendered as exactly as he can remember them; harsh gallows humor among the prisoners and desperate promises; the absurdities he witnessed, and the agonies; the lofty philosophies spawned out of hopelessness and terror.

Alongside the keyboard is a phone. It’s been activated with the number he’s used since he was a kid. When he turned the phone on, a call rang through. A harbinger of the myriad to come. So he turned the phone off again, letting his parents field the calls—calls from mediots, from news agencies, from publishers who never before showed an interest in his work. Calls from friends.

He answered none. He wasn’t ready to talk. Not even to the State Department officials who visited the house.

“Tell them I’m asleep.”

It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t entirely a lie either. He was hardly conscious of himself, of the room, the house, his worried parents. Instead, for most of that time, he existed within his memories—not as himself, but as a disembodied observer wandering through the hours of his captivity, reviewing it all with what felt like perfect recall.

But at last his mind is winding down, his fingers slowing, new words no longer appearing on the screen.

He is nodding in exhaustion, hardly able to hold himself up when a man’s voice speaks from out of nowhere, low, rough, regretful. “You shouldn’t have come here, Dushane.”

The voice doesn’t frighten him because he knows it’s a dream. And because it is a dream, his dream, he gets to ask a question that he didn’t know to ask when he first heard those words. “Why are you here?”

The mercenary—Jon Helm, Shaw Walker, whatever the fuck his name is—ignores the question, if he hears it at all. He moves off to supervise the execution of the Iraqi laborers who’d been heading home from the western desert and who’d given Miles a ride.

Worst mistake of their lives.

Last mistake.

No point in holding on to them. None will fetch a worthwhile ransom. No point even trying to collect. “Why the fuck don’t you just let them go?” Miles screams, but this too is a revisionary memory. He only wishes he’d said that.

The reality of that day is that Miles said nothing.

Slide it back. Play it through again, more detail.

He is on his knees. The thick fabric of his trousers fails to stop the bite of small stones against his flesh. His feet are numb, his back aches, his eyes burn with dust and the glare of the sun against the gray desert grit. His mouth is dry, throat swollen, and not just from the fear that his blood and brains are about to be redistributed in a spray pattern, a transient marker of his presence written on sand, but also because the afternoon temperature has climbed to one hundred eighteen degrees Fahrenheit and he’s been kneeling for some immeasurable period, and if it gets any hotter he fully expects the air to ignite and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe this fucking world deserves it.

By the time the mercenary stops to look at him, Miles has given up on moral argument. He recognizes that there is no moral argument that can save him when the men who were kneeling on either side of him are already dead. The best he can do is look up to meet death’s gaze, a last act of defiance.

The mercenary is tall and lean. A long face, narrow nose, light-colored eyes just visible behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses. His skin is burned dark by the sun but lightened again by dust caked in his sweat. His brown beard is frosted by dust. He wears combat fatigues, an armored vest, a helmet. The sleeves of his combat jacket are rolled up. He holds an assault rifle in his right hand. The fingers of his left hand are long and thin and contorted—half-curled—around a mass of scar tissue. There is a multicolored tattoo on his left forearm.

Miles means to look him in the eye, to look death in the eye, but the tattoo distracts him. It’s a thin black cross, wreathed in fire and wrapped in a loose, floating banner. Diego Delgado, it reads. The Last Good Man.

It’s an anomaly. So out of place it’s weirdly annoying. It distracts Miles from the imminence of his own death so that for a moment all he can think is What the fuck?

He turns to the mercenary for an explanation and Shaw Walker speaks the only words that Miles heard from him that day: “You shouldn’t have come here, Dushane.” He gestures with his crippled hand and Miles braces, expecting a bullet in his skull. A gag goes into his mouth instead. A hood goes over his head. He is barely able to breathe as rough hands shove him into an enclosed space with two other men.

A cold voice, speaking Arabic, warns that if any of them makes a sound, all will be shot.

Miles finds himself thinking, This is a fucking awful dream. He forces his eyes open. He has somehow made it from the desk into bed, though the light is still on.

With a shaking hand he turns it off, plunging the room into darkness.

Darkness is a reprieve. As long as the cell door is closed, he’s safe.

He imagines Shaw Walker, locked up at Nungsan.

What’d they do to you there? he wonders. He doesn’t know the full story but he knows how it turned out. He envisions a shock wave, generated by a soul’s cataclysmic collapse, exploding out of Nungsan in a karmic blast that is still igniting violent repercussions.

He hears Noël weeping, a distant, hopeless sound. Even farther off, gunshots in an unhurried rhythm, each one speaking the death of a man.

And it’s not over, Miles thinks.

But if he can, he’d like to finish it.