7.8/The Lived Worlds/The Body in the City

The Foreign Correspondent's Body: Re-Entry

The War-Zone Rider

What the premium schedule did not describe was what came back. A man home three days from three weeks in that besieged city undressed in a New York bathroom and found two colors of skin on one body, with a line between them. The face, the neck in a V where the collar had stood open, the forearms below a rolled sleeve, the backs of the hands — all of it darkened and roughened to a dry, leathery finish. Everything the clothing had covered stayed the pale it had been at the airport three weeks earlier. The border ran along the collar line and the cuff line and nowhere else, because the field wardrobe never changed and the sun found the same edges of him every day he was there.

The returning body was a record, and it was more exact than the dispatch the same man had filed. The dispatch had been shaped in transit — argued down a metered satellite line, cut to a page count, ranked against the month’s other news. The body had been shaped only by where it had been. On olive skin the sun did not redden; it darkened and coarsened, and where the man had gone short of water it took on a grey ashiness that no amount of washing lifted. The lips were cracked down the center, often with a healing split, and the corners of the mouth showed the small angular cracks that come with dehydration and a diet run down to cigarettes and coffee.² Pinched at the back of the hand, the skin was slow to fall back. The hands themselves were the most-used part of him and showed it — dry, nicked, the knuckles chapped, a burn or a scrape somewhere on them healing at its own pace. The beard had come in untended, irregular and patchy, days past a clean shave and nowhere near a grown one. None of this was injury. It was residue, left by the place and not by any wound.

The Clothes That No Longer Fit

The face went gaunt before the body looked thin. The cheeks hollowed, the jaw came forward, and a collar that had closed easily three weeks earlier now stood off the neck with a finger’s slack. A belt had been taken in a notch, gathering the trouser waist into folds under it. Three weeks on the diet of a working correspondent — few hot meals, broken sleep, and the steady cortisol of a place where the body stays ready to move — stripped several pounds off a fit man in his thirties, sometimes more than several, and it came off the face and the waist first, so that the change read in how the clothes hung before it read anywhere else.

The clothes told the rest. In 1989 there was no synthetic quick-dry field cloth; a correspondent’s shirts and trousers were cotton, and cotton washed by hand in a basin or a stream loses its crispness for good. It hung slack, rumpled in a way that no longer pressed out, and it carried the marks of where it had been: salt lines from dried sweat, a general grey cast of embedded dust that survived laundering, colors that had faded unevenly so the shoulders and chest of a jacket were lighter than the seams. The elbows wore through first, from leaning and lying prone; the pocket edges frayed from hands going in and out of them. The wardrobe itself was cloth and nothing else. Through the start of the decade the press wore no armor — the flak jacket and helmet became standard for correspondents only across the siege of Sarajevo, in the middle 1990s, and even then a magazine at the lower end of the access ladder often outfitted its people ad hoc or not at all.³ A man came back from a war in a safari jacket and a pair of desert boots, and the jacket was the only protection he had worn.

He also came back dressed for the wrong climate. The body that walked the thirty-six to forty-eight hours out of a warm-weather assignment — out over a mountain road, through one European airport and then another, into a customs line at Kennedy — arrived in November New York still wearing what it had needed a hemisphere away, layered inadequately for the cold, conspicuous in a terminal full of winter coats. The luggage carried the same evidence: a canvas shoulder bag gone soft and grey with use, a strap mended in duct tape, a reporter’s notebooks dog-eared and swollen from damp, the whole load carried on one side so the body leaned to it out of habit. One good object usually rode somewhere against the general wear: a decent pen, a school detail, or the watch — a cheap, tough digital thing bought to survive field conditions rather than to say anything about money, worn scratched and a little loose, the one piece of equipment that never failed.

The Nervous System

The clearest marks were around the eyes, and they were the marks of sleep taken in pieces. A correspondent back from a war slept in short cycles and woke at low sounds — a refrigerator compressor, a building settling — still alert at a level no one had told it to lower. The face carried the standard record of that: hanging eyelids most of all, then hollows and swelling beneath the eyes, reddened whites, fine lines the skin had not held a month before, and a downward set at the corners of the mouth.⁴ The eyes themselves had a glaze that was not sleepiness but its opposite — the wired, un-quiet alertness that Michael Herr, writing of an earlier war, described as a nervous system that would not go quiet, that kept running inside the skin as though something were still after it.⁵ It was exhaustion and vigilance at once, and it did not switch off at customs.

The body kept the habits of the place it had left. A dropped pan or a car’s backfire moved the hand before the face had time to compose, and then the face composed. In a room the man took the seat with his back to the wall and his eyes to the door, and did it without deciding to. He walked flat-footed and deliberate, the gait of someone used to watching where a foot came down among rubble, and in a clean Midtown office that careful walk was the thing that looked most wrong. The eyes moved even when the rest of him was still, taking a room’s exits and its other occupants in a low continuous sweep, an economy of attention that spent little and registered everything and did not switch off because the room was safe. His hand shook, faintly, lighting a cigarette or lifting a glass — the fine tremor of a nervous system that weeks of unbroken alertness had left unable to settle. A correspondent back from a war fought with heavy munitions carried a ring in the ears that never fully quit, and it made a loud restaurant or a crowded party its own kind of ordeal, more sound at once than the hearing could sort into parts.

Against all of it the body developed its own small management, and the most reliable instrument was the drink — not a slide into anything, but a measured, predictable dose timed to the onset of sleep, two and not a third, taken the same way each night. What broke the composure was scale. The first days back, an ordinary supermarket aisle read as an obscenity — choice stacked and lit past any conceivable need, for a body that had spent three weeks where a liter of clean water was a negotiation — and a man could set down a basket and leave without buying anything, unable to say to the person beside him what the trouble had been.

For this there was no name available. The clinical category existed — it had entered the psychiatric manual in 1980 and carried into the revision of 1994 — but correspondents were not yet counted among the people it was understood to describe, and so the return was managed in the folk vocabulary of the trade: jumpy, not sleeping, needed a drink.⁶ The re-entry ran to a rough clock. The first days were disorientation, ordinary problems failing to register as problems. Then, somewhere around the fourth or fifth day, the body came back into the room it was actually in. And then, not long after, it grew restless, and began to want the next assignment, which was its own kind of symptom, and went unremarked as such.⁷

The surface healed on its own schedule, and the schedule was slower than the paperwork. The tan faded over weeks; the weight came back more slowly than it had gone. For a month after the assignment had been filed and closed and forgotten by everyone who had edited it, the body was still visibly wearing it — gaunt at the cheek, dark along the collar line, quick at a sudden sound.