Not Boring

I awoke this morning to a phone call from Baghdad.

“Hello?”

“Hi, McBickle. This is _______, I’m a colleague of One Man in Baghdad’s.”

Pause. She says nothing.

He’s dead, I think. This is it. This is the phone call.

If he is not dead, he has been wounded. There has been another blast, this one too close, closer than the one last week 50 yards from his colleague’s car. Please, let him be okay. Let him not be dead.

My sleepy brain imagines it out, steels my breath; waits for words.

“I’m calling to ask for…”
…Something related to my work. She is calling about work.

“Holy crap,” I tell her. “I thought you were calling to tell me something had happened to OMiB. Christ.”

“No,” she laughs. “He’s right here. He says hi.”

“Christ,” I say. “Tell him hi back.”

Christing hell.

I take down information, tell her what I know, hang up the phone, close my eyes, breathe shallowly, marvel at the oddity of being awakened by a call from a war zone and thoughts of death. I think about how the faceless voice of a woman I’ve never met just raked me across the world from my slept-in bed in Brooklyn to a room I’ve never seen but envision as white-walled and sparsely furnished containing a man I care about deeply who drives me utterly batshit bananas because of incidents like this.