According to a clerk at Baghdad's Al Fanar Hotel, on the east bank of the Tigris River, Berg checked in on March 22, left for Mosul the next day, returned to the hotel on April 6 and checked out on April 10.Berg said he was going home, the clerk said, and walked down Saddoun Street, a major artery, because the road was closed to vehicular traffic. He left behind in his room a yellowed and folded page from a book by Jon Burmeister, a South African writer of thrillers who died in 2001.
The page carries a short prose poem titled "The War That Wasn't." It describes a man named Jericho, who is awakened by machine-gun fire, "his heart hammering thunderously against the ribcage as though trying to escape."
The poem ends: "What the hell was happening? God knows, he thought. But it seemed clear that the war had arrived -- the war that wasn't coming here . . ."
The bit about the yellowed, folded page just about made my hair stand up on end, for some reason. Trying to find the entire "prose poem" now...
Nick spent entirely too much time reading obscure material and writing e-mails with bizarre references to fall within the range of normal guy in his 20s. It looks like code to me.