I checked into the Palestine, which is a horrible place but has decent electricity, after walking a mile down the road to get there. No vehicles are allowed near the Sheraton and the Palestine unless they have special clearance, so we carried our gear through the checkpoints, run first by Iraqis and at the last stop to the hotel, by U.S. soldiers. No one asked for I.D.; there was a quick search by young men who joked that they were mujahedin, and while this is a typically Iraqi joke, it could easily be true. Sadoun Street is blocked off and closed to people and vehicles. Small groups of kids milled around the checkpoints, along with translators. But after trying several routes away from the hotel, I found only barbed wire and concrete barriers. It was hard to find way out into the normal part of the city. The only way out of the sealed area was to walk a mile along the river, then cut across Sadoun just before long stretch of razor wire that stopped all traffic on the road.

Baghdad is a city of talkers, and I knew this neighborhood as a place where even strangers used to greet one another. Now, though, this convention has become obsolete. As I walked down the street, the city's new personality came through, and it was bitter and sullen. It didn't want to talk. Eventually, a worker from Sudan fell in beside me. He was wearing a janitor's uniform. "Where are you going?" he asked. I told him what I was doing. He didn't understand. For some reason, he was faking a leg injury and every few steps would cry out in agony, perhaps because he wanted me to know that only a fifth of whisky would set things straight. We crossed Sadoun so he could get his liquor, and at the end of a recently created dead-end street, where the controlled area ended, two American soldiers waited in an armored personnel carrier. They said they had just arrived from another position. People were staring at us in an unfriendly way.

"Grenades just come out of nowhere," one of the soldiers said. "You don't know where they're coming from." The young man manning the APC's gun was mystified by the grenade-throwing technique. "We never know who's doing it," he added. Both the soldiers were expecting bad things to happen that night, but they would stay there and guard that edge of the zone. The next morning, I left the Palestine to get away from the barbed wire and the blast walls. It was extremely depressing inside the compound because true security requires emptiness. Around the Palestine, the military engineers had tried to achieve their goal and had come very close. The man at the desk wanted to know why I was leaving, but it would have taken too long to explain. On Sunday, the emptiness was everywhere. I found a new place to stay.

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