They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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99 F I don’t go on dates, I can’t stand it. What do you do? Where are you from? I’ve tried but I just jiggle the drink in my hand and make people nervous. I know this because one woman put her hand over mine and said, You’re making me nervous. If you just go to bars, things can work out better. I’m better. You sit not facing each other, but facing the rows of bottles, the taps, the mirror, whatever it is. There are TVs to pretend to look at, ball games and cheering that rises up and drowns out whatever you were saying, she was saying, you can keep using that moment if you need it, start talking about something else. • I’m a lawyer, the blond next to me had said. Then: I know, I look young—this must have been in response to whatever look I’d given her. She drank from a red cocktail straw that kept 100 getting caught in the lime wedge and I couldn’t decide if I was interested. We’d been talking about torture memos. I hadn’t brought it up. Fucking unbelievable, she’d said, but swearing didn’t come naturally to her. I listened. And he’s still a judge, she said: I mean, we’re trying to impeach him. Who’s we, I wondered. She knew a lot. She knew names of laws I didn’t know, she had the series of events down precisely. You can’t have much luck with this line, I thought, looking around the bar—she had been talking for ten minutes maybe, saying: They’d put him in a box, like the size of a coffin, and leave him there. Even they had to stop doing that because there was no way it was legal. They pretended to put scorpions in, she said, but it was just to scare him, really they were caterpillars. There was a replay on the TV screen, the bar cheered. We both looked up. A player was trotting around the bases. Nice, she said. I leaned in, I kissed her. A little hard. She didn’t do anything, but she didn’t move away. I could tell she didn’t like my hand half on her leg, half on the stool, pulling her in. Well, she said, but didn’t say anything else. All that talk of interrogation techniques, I said. I’m kidding, I said. Words had been scrolling across the bottom of the TV the whole time, stock quotes, headlines. A body count from the drone that had bombed a village in the mountains earlier that day, I’d been reading about it before I came here, maybe she had too. I nodded up at the headline. Unmanned, I said, the way of the future. Soon we’ll be nostalgic for the days when people had to kill people themselves. 101 That’s not funny, she said. She had moved her head between me and the screen, a little unsteadily. I know, I said. ...