I Have Iraq in My Shoe by Gretchen Berg

weight machines. Yes, there were weight machines. Most of them still had plastic wrap on the seats, anointed with the occasional plop of bird doody.
    The aerobics class took a pause, and everyone went running around the room in circles to some very loud, wailing Arabic music. The women were still staring at me, even as they jogged. I slowly crept over to the elliptical machine, which also was not plugged in. I had to somehow pass the time, because Chalak wasn’t due to pick us up until Adam finished his workout, which lasted for an arduous ninety minutes. Ninety minutes of my pretend exercise had to burn at least a few calories, so I climbed back on the unplugged exercise bike and pedaled away. *

    Friday is the Islamic holy day, so the Middle Eastern weekend is Friday and Saturday. Chalak didn’t work on those days, and Adam and I were left to fend for ourselves, sans car, sans driver, and sans direction. Adam had been to Erbil a few times before, and one sunny Friday he felt confident that he could find a good restaurant where we could have lunch. It was something to do.
    We started out walking around 10:30 a.m. wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirts in the ninety-degree heat. We were totally culturally aware. We walked five minutes to the entrance of the compound, crossed the threshold out into the real world, and turned left. There were no other pedestrians on our route, and we were the object of much attention from the drivers. There was a great deal of horn honking as the cars whizzed past. It could have either been because Erbil was like L.A., and the drivers were so surprised to see people walking, or just because Adam and I were so sexy in our pajamalike outfits. I started yelling, “Thank you!” after each horn honk. I told Adam, “You know, I get that we’re supposed to be covering up the sexy here, what with all the stipulations on the Cultural Awareness pamphlet and all, but the sexy really comes from the inside. You can’t cover up this sexy,” and I gestured wildly up and down my frame. That made Adam laugh pretty hard, and then another horn honked. “You can’t cover up this sexy” became my new motto.
    We passed several armed guards along the way, just guarding random cement-walled buildings, and as the guards would eye us suspiciously, Adam and I would smile and wave. Nearly all the guards would respond with genuine smiles and waves themselves. People really are the same everywhere, I thought. It was nice to see that the men with big guns still spoke Friendly Smile.
    We walked and talked about how Adam used to live with Warren down in Suli, but Warren had kicked him out of the villa for no apparent reason, and he had to stay with another teacher for a couple of months right before moving up to Erbil. Adam was one of the most mellow, unaffected guys I had ever met, and I couldn’t imagine anyone not getting along with him or having a reason to dramatically kick him out of a living arrangement. Adam said, “Yeah, I mean it was kinda weird, but he just wanted me out and I was like, ‘Okay, man’ and moved out of the villa.” That first day in Suli, when we were hanging out in his office, Warren had said to me, “Gretch, keep an eye on your food. If you let Adam into your kitchen, he’ll eat everything, seriously,” and then he went on to complain that Adam was a huge slob who never did the dishes and that he “left shit all over the place” and that their villa was always a “fucking pigsty.”
    I had been over to Adam’s villa a number of times since we had moved to Erbil, expecting a mosh pit of filth, and it was always disappointingly clean. He did his dishes regularly and picked up after himself. He definitely wasn’t a slob. On the other hand, I had stopped in to Warren’s villa in Suli during that first week, where he was living by himself after having kicked Adam out, and there were piles of dirty dishes and shit left all over the place, and it was pretty much a fucking