Reprieve by Alex Poppe

“Al, I think I fucked up,” Luke announced.

Seeing Luke was agitated, I shut my computer. Usually, nothing much fazed him. When our apartment block caught fire, and we evacuated to a questionable hotel, and when our apartment block was rocked by a 6.7 Richter scale earthquake, Luke’s reaction was to organize a party. He made luxury out of a moment. 

“What happened?” I asked, unsure I wanted to know. Even though Luke often referred to me as a sister, we were very different. I was a disciplined, by-the-book, future-dweller whereas Luke lived as if life were the last tube of toothpaste. He squeezed every possible bit of joy and pleasure from it, rules be damned. Years ago, we had been dancing at a club on a UN compound, pretentious with its door policy that favored females. Luke, wearing a fedora, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, moved like he was born from music. He was trying to teach me how to move my hips, saying I didn’t know how to let go. By the time I traded the dance floor for a bar stool, he had gotten three phone numbers. Later, he hooked up with an NGO worker and arrived home, escorted by sunrise as birds tweeted jazz.

Luke paced back and forth across the hand-me-down red Persian rug covering my living room floor. Through the windows behind him, the Iraqi sun sizzled the phallic blue skyscraper towering above Sulaimaniyah’s stunted cityscape. He was days away from leaving the Kurdish region of Iraq for good. I was sad to see him go, but everything fresh has a shelf life. He was no longer the committed teacher I had met eight years prior on the plane to Erbil, where we both had teaching jobs at an elite international high school. Now, we both worked for a prestigious private university in Erbil’s rival city of Sulaimaniyah. The year prior, he had devised a scheme to dismiss his classes an hour or so early several times a week for most of the term, cheating students out of countless instruction hours, until he got caught. Luke knew it was time for him to move on. He had zeroed out his student loans, made bank, and was burnt crisp by teaching.

Luke stopped pacing. “You know how I went to that woman’s house last night?”

A few nights prior, I had taken Luke out for a farewell dinner. We stopped at a local café on the way back to our apartment block, where we were next door neighbors. I left as Luke, his Asian cheeks flushed a telltale alcohol red, bummed a cigarette from a dark-haired woman sitting alone at the bar. I assumed he would hit on her and didn’t want to be a third wheel. Turned out the woman was married, and she had invited Luke over to her house to do drugs with her and her husband a few days later. Because Kurdistan has a zero-tolerance drug policy, I thought Luke should steer clear, but I’d kept my thoughts to myself. It wasn’t my place to tell him how to live.

“Man, that woman was wearing her pajama bottoms at the bar,” Luke said in the same tone he used when he’d poke my belly and tell me to suck it in.

“I thought they were yoga pants.” I hadn’t really looked at her because I was a practiced wingman. Back in Erbil, I had run interference for Luke when he dated a friend of mine under our supervisor’s nose. Our supervisor happened to be his ex, and the supervisor, Luke and I lived on the same floor on the same wing in a different compound in a different city in a different life. Those were the before days: before the Syrian refugee crisis and ISIS and the economic collapse which had brought Kurdistan to its knees. Now, it was 2019. The world had moved on from Iraq.

“And she and her husband are loaded. Like, when I went to their house, I dressed UP.” 

I pictured Luke in his cornflower blue dress shirt with the white collar and his aviators hanging in the V of his black four-button vest. “So, how’d you fuck up?”

Luke finally sat down on my sofa, which was the twin of the one in his apartment. “I think the husband might have taken photos of me.” His lips duckbilled as his eyebrows raised. “Cutting lines of coke.”

I kept my face very still even though I had little patience for his destructive behavior. I knew he was anxious about moving back to the States, about setting up a new life in an old place that didn’t quite fit anymore, so I kept my finger off his sore. I neither condoned his drug use nor berated him for it because our friendship had been built on a “You do you” attitude. As a result, we didn’t hang out much together. I was a repository for Luke’s secrets while he urged me to color outside my self-imposed lines. “What do you mean think? Do you know for certain?”

“No.”

“Then maybe he didn’t.” 

“The husband was asking a lot of questions, like where I work and when I leave.” 

“He could have just been making conversation.”

“Or he could want to blackmail me, and Al, I let my guard down.”

“No one’s going to blackmail you.” I laughed at the ridiculousness of the thought. “Let’s say he was. When do you leave?”

“Next Tuesday or Wednesday. After Eid.”

“You don’t even know, so how can they know?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Luke relaxed into the sofa back.

“What did you cut the lines with?”

“My faculty ID and my residency card.”

I shook my head. “If the edges of the cards are frayed, there might be residue. Wash them with the pants you were wearing, pockets out.” I read a lot. “Do you have any drugs in your apartment?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No!”

I wanted to believe him. “If you do, get rid of them. And if you’re really worried, why don’t you talk to Olivia?” Olivia was the director of our program and Luke’s close friend. She hadn’t fired him when he’d skipped all those instruction hours.

“No, Poppe. Promise me you won’t tell her. Don’t say a word.”

*

The next day, Luke spiraled farther down the rabbit hole. He panicked that the cocaine couple were going to blackmail him, which struck me as preposterous. He thought they had someone watching him, ready to pounce when he stepped on campus to return his work computer. He worried that someone would hit him at the bank when he went to get his final payout or at the airport just as he was about to board. I reassured him it would cost too much to have someone watch him 24/7. I teased that he wasn’t rich enough to watch. I joked he was being paranoid. I lied, saying everything would be okay.

*

The following day there was a lost food delivery boy roaming our apartment floor. I went to Luke’s, thinking he might be in the inflatable kiddie pool he kept on his balcony, where we’d sometimes lazy along the pool’s cushioned edge, cooling our feet in the dandelion afternoons. When he answered his front door, he opened it just far enough to fit his head through. His eyes darted the length of the hallway behind me. 

“Did you order food?”

“Nah.” When he spoke, it was more susurration than sound.

His head and face were freshly shaved, and he looked clammy. “Are we’re still on for tonight?” I was to pick him up for his going-away party at our friend, Miran’s house.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

But when I returned a few hours later, he told me he couldn’t go and urged me to make his apologies. I agreed on the condition that he give me his extra set of keys so that I could check on him afterwards. When I returned a few hours later, the windows were shut and the aircon was off, the apartment hot and stuffy with June’s heat. Luke sat cross-legged on his couch, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the TV. Later, my mind would thumb back and forth over that moment, realizing too late what I had not seen then.

I tried to keep it light. “I told everyone you were pale and not feeling great, and let them fill in the blanks for themselves A lot of people came up with food poisoning.” Olivia had been at the party. Since I was an unpracticed liar and the only single person in a party full of couples, I had spent most of the evening playing with Miran’s eight-year-old daughter and avoiding my boss. “Your friends think you’re shitting your brains out,” I sing-songed.

“Shh. They’ve bugged my apartment—”

For a moment I thought he was putting me on. “What they?”

“I’ve been hearing voices.”

“When? Tonight? Before the party? That was me, listening to DemocracyNow! while I was getting ready.” I could have an entire conversation with Luke through our shared bathroom wall.

“Other voices.”

“People are back from Eid break to start the summer term. Tre and her son are back.” Tre and her son lived above me, but she often complained about Luke’s loud music.

Luke’s eyes bugged. “Poppe, are you sure? Oh man, oh man, oh man. Last night, in the middle of the night,” Luke pressed his lips together and shook his head, “I think I took a kitchen knife upstairs. You need to go upstairs and check on them.”

I got that skin-crawl feeling. “You think or you know?”

“I don’t know.”

Logic fought panic and won. “Wait. I saw Tre today, coming back from Carrefour.” 

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I helped her with her bags.”

I didn’t know how to understand Luke’s behavior because I’d never seen him unhinged. Before I had gone to the party, I’d leveled with Miran about what was going on, but Miran didn’t use drugs either and naively thought the cocaine Luke had snorted on Tuesday needed to work through his system. Today was Friday. 

Luke and I sat in silence, with me watching Luke watch the TV. I thought about how I hadn’t liked him when we first met. How he had plopped down into the empty airplane seat next to me, drunk, and talked at me, revealing how he had been in jail in Korea for growing marijuana plants in his apartment, how Kurdistan was a fresh start. How I had realized we were employed at the same school, but I still sent him back to his seat, not caring what he told our new colleagues. How he had sidled up to me as we deplaned in Istanbul for the long layover, put his arm around waist, and said, “Let’s see about finding you a shower,” and my curt, clear, impolite response. We had become friends slowly, carefully, Luke teaching me how to unworry and me teaching him I don’t know what. I sat in his moist living room, the walls the color of milk cartoon insides, quietly resenting him. I didn’t consider him one of my closest friends, wasn’t sure how much we’d stay in contact once he left, and suspected I was dealing with him by default because most of his party posse had left for summer break. I was sweaty and impatient and frustrated that I didn’t understand what was happening to him and that I couldn’t help him.

“I want to go to the US consulate tomorrow.” Luke said, not looking at me.

“That is such a bad idea. What are you going to say? ‘I did drugs with this couple and now they’re after me.’? You’ll be the one who gets in trouble.” I doubted the university would risk its reputation to bail a using teacher out. “Why don’t you sleep in my apartment if you feel unsafe here?” 

“I don’t want to put you in danger.” He kept his eyes glued to the TV.

His paranoia was suffocating.

*

The next morning, I heard something in the hallway outside my front door. It was Luke, darkening my doorway. 

“I knocked. Why didn’t you answer?” He had his suitcase and a backpack.

It was too early for crazy. The long, bony fingers of Luke’s behavior had poked my conscience all night. When I awoke, I called a mutual friend who used to work for the university and had a lot of experience with drugs. He said he would call Luke later but never did. “I didn’t hear you. I was peeing.” 

Luke came in and paced the length of my entry way. Rubbing the top of his head, he rattled off his regrets: the half-truths and infidelities and downright betrayals. I wanted to plug my ears because there are some things you can’t un-hear, and I didn’t want to lower my opinion of him. Tamping down judgment, I reminded myself of my own shortcomings and simply listened. Luke said he was on his way to a hotel to call his friends in the States. 

“Why do you have to go to a hotel to phone them? Phone from your apartment.”

“I think they bugged my apartment.”

Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. “There is no they.” My patience was short-lived. “Fine. Phone them from here.”

Luke’s eyes narrowed. “They might have gotten to you too.” 

I spoke in a carefully measured tone. “No one has gotten to me.” I nodded my head until Luke was nodding too. “You can have the living room, and I’ll go into my bedroom.” 

He side-eyed me. “Have you left your apartment?”

“No. I’ve been here all week.”

Luke slid his backpack from his shoulder.

“Except for the gym.”

His backpack dangled. “That’s enough time.”

For what, I wanted to scream, ready for him to leave. “No one has been here.” I spoke deliberately, as if beading each word on a string.

He reached into his backpack and handed me a book. “Give this to Olivia.” 

It was his recipe book. Luke used to cook in his parents’ restaurant before they closed up shop and traded America for Korea. My mind flashed to the family dinner we had had the month prior: Luke, cooking; all of us sprinkled around the kitchen, holding greedy plates. “Give the book to Olivia yourself. You’re not leaving for a few days.” My skin pricked. “Why are you going to a hotel? You’re not thinking of, of killing yourself?”

“No,…no! But Al, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Luke, you’re scaring me. Tell me you won’t do anything stupid.” 

We get so desperate for what we want to hear. 

*

The text message was from Luke. I had talked him out of going to a hotel but failed to convince him to stay in my apartment. He had gone back to his, and I was prepping for the start of the new term. Reading his message, I got that needle-belly feeling. What if he was telling the truth? Psyching myself up, I rushed into the hallway, but no one was there.

I berated myself for getting sucked into his vortex of paranoia. Needing to feel in control, I ran some errands. When I returned, there was another message.

I was relieved he had said no. The semester was to start the next day, and I couldn’t wait to turn my brain off and lay out in the sun.

As I was leaving, I thought about knocking on Luke’s door, but I didn’t want to waste thirty minutes of sun time listening to go-nowhere psycho-mumbo. While I was watching the elevator numbers light up in descending order, Luke was wrapping a garden hose around his waist before he rappelled off his seventh floor balcony. As I left the front entrance, he hit a small patch of grass on the back side of the building.

*

Severe head injury. Severe chest injury. Holocranial fracture. Spinal cord injury. Two broken legs. One fractured arm. Respiratory failure. On a stabilization table in a chaotic room in a Kurdish hospital, Luke flatlined twice before he died.

*

Because I had invited my ex-roommate to the pool, our friends knew where to find me. Three pairs of feet carried three worried faces over a patch of manicured fake grass to where I lazed in a lounge chair. In the nightmare unreal of day, I threw some money under my beer glass, threw my dress over my bathing suit, threw myself into Miran’s car and tried not to throw up on the way to the hospital. When we got to there, I glimpsed Luke on a gurney, his track-suited legs oddly bent, his slight frame attached to machines. He looked smaller, less like a thirty-six-year-old man and more like a broken, wooden boy-doll. I remembered a fireman’s description of his buddy after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11: “His wife wanted to know if he had suffered. How do I tell her the only thing holding his body together was his [fireman’s] suit?” We get so desperate for what we want to hear.

This is my last image of Luke, for I was ushered away from his body and not allowed near him again “for my own good” but without my say. I wanted him to know I was nearby, that I hadn’t abandoned him. In the short, long hours that followed, there were many questions to which I alone had answers, except for one: Why hadn’t I told university authorities what was going on? 

*

Everybody: Why didn’t you tell the university what was going one?

Me: I promised Luke I wouldn’t.

Everybody: You should have told us. We would have been able to do something.

Me: I promised Luke I wouldn’t. 

Everybody: If you had told us, we could have saved him.

I open and close my mouth, a caught fish.

*

 I didn’t say that I had told two people, who work or used to work for the university, and it hadn’t saved Luke. Miran had asked me to keep his name out of the story. As a local, he could not afford to have his family’s name linked to a scandal. 

The following is a series of irreversible events, rewound: A security guard for our compound called the building manager after seeing a body fall and hit the grass below. Luke scaled the outside of the building using a garden hose. Luke placed his backpack containing his passport, wallet with several thousand dollars, and phone, but no apartment keys, near his balcony railing. Luke locked his apartment door from the inside. Luke called the university’s head of security claiming someone was trying to kill him. Luke gave me the extra set of keys to his apartment. 

Fast forward. Luke died. Because I had his extra set of keys, which should have been turned it when his roommate left, and no keys were found on his body, and he had claimed someone was trying to kill him, I was taken to the Asayish, Kurdistan’s secret police, for questioning. 

*

I heard he was pushed.

I heard he jumped.

I heard he was nervous about leaving.

I can’t believe he’s gone.

I heard the university asked for blood donations.

I heard the hospital didn’t have enough of his blood type, and that’s why he died.

I miss him.

I heard the university isn’t going to pay to ship the body back.

I heard his brother had to start a GoFundMe.

I heard the university is paying, and the brother is hustling the university for money.

It’s so quiet without him.

I heard the brother wants the body shipped to him in the States.

I heard the parents want the body shipped to Korea.

I heard the university can’t ship the body back until the police say so.

The State Department isn’t saying much.

I heard he was trying to climb down from his balcony.

I heard he was trying to climb up from the sixth floor.

I heard the Asayish are involved.

*

Even though the Asayish had taken my written statement on two separate occasions, I was again pulled out of my class to talk to them. The woman who had given Luke the drugs had made them; the Asayish had found a lab in her home. She and her husband were from Pakistan, a country whose illegal drug trade generates billions of dollars as opiates, cannabis, ecstasy, and cocaine seep through Pakistan’s long, porous border with Iran and into Kurdistan. The Asayish wanted me to identify the woman who’d given Luke the drugs even though I’d told them I couldn’t; I hadn’t taken a good enough look at her face. All I remembered were those yoga pants. 

The sun was high as the university’s head of security, a translator, and I were escorted through a maze of low cement buildings in a police compound. We were brought into a building bordering a courtyard and led through a suffocating hallway to an important somebody’s office. The room was large and air-conditioned, with two sofas and some chairs forming a U along its perimeter. At the top of the U sat a man in a suit behind a large desk. Beside him was a mini fridge. Many men, soldiers in military uniforms and civilians in pressed, collared-shirts, sat or stood as space dictated. Their colognes mingled in the recycled air. The men in the room were carefully not looking at me as they spoke about me to the translator, who occasionally clarified a point about my written statement with me in English and then reported back to the men in Kurdish. Because I could not follow their conversation, I wondered who believed my statement, believed that I didn’t use drugs, believed that I had done everything I could to prevent Luke’s death. When the translator was directed to move from the sofa we were sharing to the sofa on the opposite side of the room, my stomach plummeted. 

The office door opened, ushering in a blast of sand-roasted heat and a middle-aged woman. She looked vaguely familiar; for a moment I thought she was the actress who had played an FBI agent on The Blacklist. The woman sat down next to me on the sofa, and we observed each other in the static quiet. A uniformed soldier spoke, and the woman next to me moved across the room to sit next to the translator. Everyone watched the woman and I look at each other from opposite sides of the room before she was dismissed. I shot my translator a “What was that?” look and received a shoulder shrug response. After another flurry of Kurdish, the university’s head of security, the translator, and I were led outside and made to wait in the courtyard. I was told that the woman who had come into the room was the Pakistani woman who had given Luke the drugs, and that she had confirmed I had been sitting at the bar with Luke when he bummed a cigarette. Without my prior knowledge or consent, I had just participated in an eyewitness identification process called a show-up, with no effort made to protect my identity. 

Inside me, anger, fear, and guilt slugged it out, with no victor. I wanted to know how big the Pakistanis’ home lab was, did they work alone or were they part of something bigger? Did I have a target on my back? Was I safe? Did I deserve to be safe after what had happened to Luke?

I wanted to yell at the head of security for disrespecting my agency; I had already told him I couldn’t positively identify the woman whom Luke had met, nor had I been there when she had given him the drugs, but I didn’t. Not only was the head of security one of the most powerful people at the university, let alone the Sulaimaniyah region because his brother had been martyred saving the president of Iraq’s life, but the head of security blamed me for Luke’s death and wanted me fired. He said I should have told them.

Should haves. 

There’s a line in Lanford Wilson’s play, Burn This, where the character Pale, furious and gnawed with grief after the death of his brother, says the world is going down the toilet on “I’m sorrys.” The world excuses itself with “should haves.” Shifts blame with reproach. Grants mea cupla reprieves. 

A man in a tan shirt with three small children in tow stared at me as they walked past us and into the building we had just exited.

Time slowed.

The tan-shirted man and two of the three children exited the building, lingering just outside its entrance. The Pakistani woman stood in the doorway, holding their smallest in her arms, the sun beating against her face. There were new half-moons of shadow under her eyes. Over the toddler’s shoulder, she looked at me with anger and fear; dread and regret. I wondered about her take-backs: first high, first deal, first batch. Going to that bar that night. Giving Luke a cigarette. Issuing the invitation. I imagined the scene in her plush house; Luke sitting with her in a pastel-colored living room scented with rose water, she offering him coke on a silver tray, he cutting it with his ID cards. Luke lowers his head to the tray. Freeze frame. The impossible do-over. 

Swaying gently, the Pakistani woman clung to the toddler in her arms, cooing into his ear, peppering fervent kisses on his cheek, inhaling his cucumber smell. Time stretched. The tan-shirted man pulled the toddler from his mother’s arms as a security officer led the Pakistani woman from her patch of sunlight into the building’s dark.

“Justice” is swift in Kurdistan. Within days, I was told the woman had been imprisoned, the woman and her husband had been imprisoned, the woman and her husband had been disappeared, they had been deported, she had been imprisoned and he had been deported. No one mentioned the home lab. No one mentioned a forensic toxicology report. No one mentioned if the cocaine Luke had snorted had been cut with something else. No one mentioned if the husband and wife worked alone or were part of something bigger. No one mentioned the children. I thought about Luke, left on his own before he was old enough to drive, and I added motherless children to the collateral damage ledger.

A lot of people wished I had told Olivia about the drugs. Many people wished Luke had gotten on a plane the moment his term ended instead of waiting until after the Eid holiday. Some people wished the university’s head of security had immediately responded when Luke called him, saying people were after him. A few people wished Luke hadn’t snuck into the apartment below to drink the owner’s alcohol, which exasperated his drug-induced paranoia. Those who knew wished Luke had told those who didn’t that he had had a drug-induced, psychotic break in high school. One person wished she had sacrificed some sun time and knocked on Luke’s door once more.

 I wish for all of the above. 

Alex Poppe is the author of four works of fiction: Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017), Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019), Jinwar and Other Tales from The Levant by Cune Press (2022), and Duende by Regal House Publishing (2022). She is currently a staff writer for www.preemptivelove.org. 

16 November 2021