We get my bags and soon we are driving through the streets outside the Green Zone, passing beneath the 14th of July Bridge bathed in neon lights. He grumbles to himself as we pass through another checkpoint: “I hate it,” is one of his favorite phrases, along with “You’re high,” and “I’m not your girlfriend, man.”

We talk about why he lives here, in Baghdad, where it’s still dangerous, and what things cost and how expensive it is to live in the United States. “All people think foreigners have much money,” I say. “Not me,” he says. “I’m different.”

We pull over for dinner. We talk briefly about how a man must appear in Iraq, how officials care that he has two nice phones. They judge the shoes he wears, the car he drives, the phones he uses. We eat kabob at a second-floor restaurant in the darkness of a cool winter night, everyone dressed in hoodies.

A fixer is an indispensable lifeline to a foreign journalist working abroad. They provide everything from sources to housing to security. They offer cigarettes and companionship, risking their lives to help tell stories that are oftentimes close to home for them personally. That dynamic, so intimate a relationship in small bursts, can be difficult to navigate. I tell him I am nervous.

“No one has ever said that to me before,” he says. What I meant to say was that I was scared about the assignment, not of him. He puts down his kebob. He sits straighter in his chair, avoids eye contact. He has misunderstood me. He thinks I don’t trust him, is insulted, and now we have disconnected. We fall silent. I reach for my Chapstick and pop the cap on and off and on again, dawdling as I try to pull the conversation out of a stall.

I feel vulnerable. I scan the exits and realize I have no idea where I am in relation to the compound where I am supposed to stay. I had read and heard about fixers, or those who disguised themselves as fixers, selling other journalists to militias. I had read and heard about wrong turns taken down wrong roads controlled by bad people.

He toys with his phone, checking the time. Or maybe sharing our location with someone, or a group of people. The men behind me get up to leave. I’m twitchy. Since our first WhatsApp conversation he had demanded money, he was nasty when I was late to reply, and he had me buy him cologne to bring him as a gift. I had been traveling for 36 hours, at this point though. Maybe I was tweaked and needed to sleep, a refuge I can turn to almost anywhere with the help of a pill.

If he is going to sell me out, my PPE isn’t going to help me. We leave the restaurant and drive away toward the compound where I’m staying. I hope. I check our location on my phone, making sure we are heading in the right direction. Why’d he turn there? Is this the right street? “Let me ask you a question,” he says as he stops the car outside the compound and pulls the emergency brake.

I believe he is going to ask why I said I was nervous. He drapes himself over the steering wheel, looks at me and says, “Can I have money?” I ask him how much and he says, “$200.” I tell him, “No, absolutely not.” I had sent him more than $500 before the trip and would pay him more after the trip was finished. Money, another protective layer we can wrap around ourselves, felt like good insurance. I understood that to keep it until the end of the assignment meant that, at least until I finished my work, I held some power over him. He says, “Thank you.” And, thinking he did not understand, I say, “No. I said no.” He says it again, sarcastically, staring into the dark alleyway: “Thank you.”