The Story

In Bataween's rubble, junk dealer Hadi al-Attag begins pulling stray body parts from bomb sites and the morgue's overflow, grief-driven since his partner Nahem Abdaki died in a blast so thorough that no one could sort his remains from the wreckage of strangers.

So Hadi assembles the scavenged limbs and organs into one whole body, meaning only to give it the dignified burial Nahem never received, laying it out in his junkyard workshop while he decides how and where to bury a man made of many men.

Before he can bury it, a hotel bombing kills a guard whose own body is destroyed beyond recovery. Unable to find its corpse, the guard's wandering soul settles instead into Hadi's stitched creation, which is why the thing on the workshop floor suddenly opens its eyes.

The composite corpse rises and walks out into Baghdad's night before Hadi can stop it. Neighbors who glimpse it have no word for what they've seen, so it becomes known simply as Whatsitsname — a nameless made-thing loose in a city already full of the unburied.

Elderly widow Elishva, who has waited quietly for twenty years for her son Daniel to come home from the Iran-Iraq war, sees Whatsitsname wandering the street and is certain her boy has finally returned to her, taking him gently into her house and calling him Daniel once more.

When Elishva's daughters, Hilda and Matilda, call from Melbourne begging her to admit Daniel is dead and come live with them, she refuses and cuts off their calls instead, choosing the son she can touch over the daughters who tell her the truth.

Whatsitsname slowly discovers why he was made: each part of his body once belonged to a bombing victim, and until he avenges that person's death, the part stays whole — so he sets out hunting down the men responsible for the deaths that built him.

One by one he tracks down the men guilty of the deaths that made him, and each time a debt is settled, that piece of his body decays and falls away, which is why he must keep killing just to keep his own body from rotting apart.

Hadi, unable to stay silent, tells his café friend Aziz the whole story, who passes it to Mahmud al-Sawadi, a young journalist exiled to Baghdad after an earlier article got a man killed — and Mahmud sees in Whatsitsname the story that could redeem him.

Mahmud writes up the story of a walking, avenging corpse built from bomb victims, and his editor al-Saidi runs it in the magazine under a splashy headline, and the account spreads through Baghdad fast enough that it reaches men who ask far more dangerous questions than curious readers ever would.

Brigadier Majid, a state security officer already hunting a string of unsolved killings across the city, reads the article and suspects it points straight at his real culprit, so he hauls Mahmud in for hours of questioning until the frightened journalist finally gives up Hadi's home address.

Majid's men descend on Hadi's junkyard and beat him savagely for insisting that Whatsitsname is only a corpse and nothing more, leaving him broken and unconscious among his own scrap — but his neighbors find him before dawn and nurse him slowly back from the edge of death.

By now three men want three different things: Majid wants a culprit to parade before Baghdad, Mahmud wants a story that clears his name, and Hadi wants only to protect the creature he never meant to make dangerous — and none of them yet see how it ends.

With the guilty men used up and his own parts still decaying one by one, Whatsitsname starts killing whoever is simply nearest to keep himself from falling apart, and the line between the men who deserve death and the men who don't begins to blur badly in his hands.

Slowly he begins to doubt the very mission that made him, realizing there are no innocents who are only innocent and no criminals who are only criminals — a hard truth that corrupts him even as it clarifies exactly what kind of monster Baghdad itself has made.

Elishva's grandson flies in from Melbourne, and his face so closely echoes the young Daniel she remembers that the resemblance finally breaks her twenty-year belief, letting her see for the first time that the man in her house was never her son.

So Elishva finally agrees to leave Baghdad behind, packing up the house and the small icon of Saint George she has trusted to protect her for decades, and departs for Melbourne to live at last with the daughters she had shut out for so long.

Meanwhile editor al-Saidi is accused of embezzling something like thirteen million dollars from the magazine's accounts, and rather than face the charge in court he flees the country outright, leaving Mahmud alone to answer for a paper that is already collapsing underneath him.

Security forces arrest and interrogate Mahmud over the fallout from al-Saidi's disappearance, and when the magazine finally shuts its doors for good, Mahmud sells off his own furniture and belongings just to pay the remaining staff their last overdue wages before walking away broke, jobless, and disillusioned.

Brigadier Majid finally traces Whatsitsname back to the Bataween streets where Hadi first built him, and moves in himself to close the hunt — unaware that one of his own subordinates has separately planted a bomb in the neighborhood meant to finish the creature off outright.

The bomb goes off without warning and tears through Hadi's house and the surrounding block, gravely wounding Hadi where he stands and flattening the very workshop where the whole story began, but Whatsitsname walks out of the wreckage still moving, the blast having failed once again to end him.

Hadi wakes days later in a hospital bed to find his own face burned and torn past recognition, so disfigured by the blast that he now looks exactly like the composite thing he once stitched together, and it is this new ruined face that seals what happens to him next.

Authorities seize on the resemblance and arrest Hadi as Criminal X, the serial killer the whole city has been hunting for months, and no one in power stops to ask whether the true Whatsitsname is still out there somewhere, wearing a stolen face that used to be someone else's.

Mahmud, who knows in his gut that Hadi cannot be the true killer, has no power left to prove it or save him, so he packs up and returns home to Amarah, no longer believing in any of the three justices he once wrote about — only in anarchy now.

What it means

Frankenstein in Baghdad argues that violence stitched from violence never stays clean — Hadi's mercy becomes a monster, Elishva's grief becomes delusion, and a city hunting a killer settles for an innocent man's ruined face, because in a war with no innocents left, justice always finds the nearest body instead of the right one.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.