Free Emails from the Edge by Ken Haley

like cards to the front of the deck. The fear—or thought—struck me that maybe the arrangement for Westerners to assemble at the airport was an Iraqi ploy, disinformation, and that the planned airlift (surely sea evacuation? My mind was a blur) presaged a massacre.
Sane or mad, the mind controls the body. As I neared my apartment, my breathing was laboured and I could hear my heart pounding furiously. Others have since explained that I would have been hyperventilating; all I knew was that everything in my field of vision was swaying and swimming in and out of view. It was as if the physical laws of the universe had been suspended, gravity first.
For several minutes, it must have been, I paced the pavement in front of the tower block where my apartment was, in quest of a balance that had deserted me. I have a hazy recollection of taking the lift to my floor, fumbling for the right key, going into the living room and scrawling a hasty farewell note to my parents (while struggling to believe it would ever reach them in the event of an invasion, which now seemed to me a much greater certainty than tomorrow’s sunrise). Whatever else I did is lost to memory.
It must have been mid-evening now, but time becomes fluid, neither measurable nor of the slightest importance, when the world appears to be breaking up. To unbuckle my watch and fling it away, heedless of where it landed, seemed the most sensible thing in the world to do. This was the end time, whether the Iraqis were poised to invade or the Second Coming was in the wings. End time .
It must have been the mixture of religious and military signals that suggested it. The word ‘Armageddon’ blitzed my mind and the burden that had borne down on my struggling sanity for the seventeen days since the outer world had lost its stability now crushed it utterly, breaking through my last reserves of self-control. I ran down the road, hands outstretched in front of me, screaming, ‘The world is ending! This is the end of the world!’
As tends to be the case with such declarations, I was wrong, or maybe just premature. But no one told me that at the time. If anyone had been in the vicinity, no doubt they would have shrunk from the crazy apparition hurtling down the boulevard. But, after what must have been a few hundred metres, I did attract someone’s attention: behind me, from out of nowhere, I heard the wailing of a police siren.
The van stopped, officers got out, a couple of them came over, pinned my arms behind my back and dragged me inside, forcing me to lie face down on the flatbed behind the sealed-off cabin. The driver, after furtively looking around and grinning, or grimacing (I was in no position to tell which), gunned the engine and sped away.
In the back of the van, my police escort—between trying to keep me prone, with wrists pinned over the small of my back—were discussing me in Arabic. How easy it is to make sense of a conversation by tone alone, it occurred to me, even when spoken by people whose language you don’t know. These tones spoke to me of hostility and uncertainty combined. Yet at no time did I feel threatened by them. ‘Fatalism’ is too weak a word for what I felt; it was not so much ‘what will be will be’ as ‘what must be has begun’. The unknown held no fears for me, perhaps because it was infinitely preferable to the terror of waiting for what my fevered imagination, fed by other people’s fears and speculations, could apprehend.
I was passive and powerless, unable to see where we were going. I couldn’t be sure which police station the van delivered me to, while sensing it must be on the edge of the built-up area. But, for once in my life, curiosity had outrun its course. They could do what they wanted with me; careless was I now, in the grasp of Fate.
Once inside the police station—a shabby block of concrete with mustard-coloured walls—my passivity reached the end of