This sort of intimacy between the occupier and the occupied is at the heart of all the other visions within The Fever Chart. In “Retreating World,” an older piece from Wallace repackaged in the triptych, an Iraqi man delivers a monologue that weaves his love of books, his hobby of raising pigeons, and the devastation that war and sanctions—the play is set in 2000—have left behind in his nation. Thus, early on, his advice on raising pigeons dovetails into the state of Iraq after nearly a decade of sanctions: “Never name a pigeon after a member of your family or a dear friend. (Beat) For two reasons: pigeons have short lives—and when a pigeon named after an uncle dies, this can be disconcerting. And second: these times are dangerous for pigeons—they can be caught and eaten.”²⁴ This style of mixing the intimacy of books and birds from his personal life, with the violence unleashed on an entire nation continues throughout the play, such as when Ali begins to speak of the Gulf War, saying,

We hid in bunkers for most of those weeks. Cursing Saddam when our captain was out. Cursing the Brits and the Yanks the rest of the time. And I missed my birds. But birds were prohibited in the bunkers. Prohibited. Prohibited by the laws of nations as were the fuel-air explosive bombs, the napalm—Shhh!—the cluster and antipersonnel weapons. Prohibited, as were the BLU-82 bombs, a fifteen-thousand-pound device—Shut up!—capable of incinerating every living thing, flying or grounded, within hundreds of yards . . . And me, I missed my birds. The way they looked at me, their eyes little pieces of peace sailing my way.²⁵

Similarly, after Ali eats part of one of his books, he declares,

Books can also, in extreme times, be used as sustenance. But such eating makes for a parched throat. Many mornings I wake and I am thirsty. I turn on the taps but there is no running water. A once-modern city of three million people, with no running water for years now. The toilets are dry because we have no sanitation. Sewage pools in the street. When we wish to relieve ourselves, we squat beside the dogs. At night, we turn on the lights to read the books we have forgotten we have sold, but there is no electricity.²⁶

What these passages reveal is how deep into the intimate corners of individual lives political and economic devastation can reach. The last section particularly underscores this idea, as Baghdad had once been one of the major centers of Middle Eastern arts and culture, with a remarkably high literacy rate, before the wars with the United States began.²⁷ And though the sanctions regime and wars have weakened the Iraqi educational system, UNICEF still estimated total adult literacy between 2003 and 2008 at 74 percent.²⁸ Thus, being forced to eat a book in a culture that values literature so much, and for a man who loves books so profoundly, becomes a stark marker of the degree to which Iraqi society, down to the most personal levels, had been undercut by the sanctions during the nineties. For Ali, the violence and devastation, and not the artifacts of a life he had once known, have become the normative structures. Perhaps this makes sense, as he continues to explain that when his unit of soldiers tried to surrender to the Americans in 1991, the U.S. unit fired an anti-tank missile at a single man, a friend of the narrator: “Out of hundreds, thousands in that week, a handful of us survived. I lived. Funny. That I am still here. The dead are dead. The living, we are the ghosts. We no longer say good-bye to one another. With the pencils we do not have we write our names so the future will know we were here. So that the past will know we are coming.”²⁹ As Ali moves into the heart of his trauma, even the memories of the books and birds from better days disappear from his monologue, replaced only by violence and loss, by the devastation that has steadily pushed all other beauties out of his life, by the death of the man he had earlier described by saying, “If love is in pieces, then he was a piece of love.”³⁰ A piece of love, turned to pieces of human devastation by the violence of war.

Too often, discussions of war violence are separated from a direct understanding of what that violence entails. The number of bodies are given in an abstract frame, one that does not see the inability to feed or educate one’s children any longer, the inability to bring a glass of water to an ailing parent, the inability to walk down the road beside one’s lover, the inability to love. In “The Retreating World,” Wallace brings such personal details painfully close to her audience, staging the destruction brought by large weapons on the smallest, most private level. And the play also ends in a moment of intimacy, when Ali picks up a bucket and holds it up for the audience, declaring, “These are the bones of those who have died, from the avenue of palms, from the land of dates. I have come here to give them to you for safekeeping. (Beat) Catch them. If you can.”³¹ As he lifts the bucket out over the audience, they are not met with bones of dead Iraqis, but “hundreds of white feathers.”³² Thus, instead of fully horrifying an audience that helped construct Iraqi suffering, he, like Mourid, provides a gift of beauty, a moment to breathe and hope together, to know that the space between the lives of the oppressor and the oppressed is thinner than the space between feathers falling from the sky.