Ordinary Obsessions

by Tom Corbett

  “Just a concern. I still love both of you, though you can be trying at times.”

  “I know you do,” she said in a serious tone. “And you are right that I am…quite trying at times that is. By the way, I have come to love her as well…Jules that is. You, not so much. But she is amazing…now that I know her. In the old days, she struck me as just another pretty face with a great body. Now I can see what lies underneath - amazing. Guess I am repeating myself.”

  “Same with her brother, Ricky?”

  “No, he is just a gorgeous hunk with a great body.” When Kat paused, Chris thought to himself that she had arrived at a conclusion. “Okay, here it is. What is the chance you can come back home?”

  “For a visit, no problem.”

  “Yes and no,” Kat said slowly. “I do want you back this summer, so we can talk more at length. But I am thinking of getting you back here on a more permanent basis, with the whole family. Maybe not forever but what we are talking about could be a long struggle. Chris, it is the future of the country, the world. The right today controls the Republican party and they are, how should I put it…?”

  “Bat-shit crazy?” As Chris finished her thought, he wondered for a moment if he had heard her correctly. When her bottom line had come, it had still surprised him even as he realized that was exactly where her narrative had been heading from the start. “Kat, I have been here in England forever, I am becoming a British citizen. I have set down roots, finally.”

  “I know all that, Chris. I stared at the phone for half an hour before calling. Hell, I started and stopped more than once. I damn well know what I’m asking. I wouldn’t have if I did not think it was so important. I need you, Jules needs you. For Christ’s sake, the damn country needs you. Whatever you are doing for the world will be negated if these people get total control. Just think of the damage the far right could do to the economy, the international order, the environment, global warming, the safety net, inequality and opportunity - the list of potential disasters is endless. Have you ever heard Trump on protectionism? He could plunge the world into another depression that would make the Great Depression look like a mild dip into economic insanity.”

  “I know,” Chris breathed weakly.

  “Do you?” Kate barked. “Make no mistake, the nativists see where we are going if they don’t seize total control: white America will lose control in a generation or so and they just cannot permit that to happen. They are going all in. Their venality knows no bounds. Their paranoia is palpable. This is not politics as usual, this could be a fascist takeover and an end to the world as we know it. If you think I exaggerate, listen to some of Trump’s speeches, straight out of the early 1930s Nazi playbook.”

  “Kat, you are beginning to sound like me back in college, even the foul language.”

  “Goddamn it, don’t patronize me. I am fucking serious here.” Then, as if she had heard herself. “Maybe you’re right on the language thing.”

  Chris toyed just for a moment about another comment on her use of colorful language before deciding that would not be wise. “Kat, I am not going to say no out of hand. I have worried about these very things myself. But it will take some time for me to think things through. Things are getting so settled for me. This…this will require time. Besides, it involves more than just me. No promises but I am listening, I am hearing you.”

  “Thank you. That is all I can ask for now. Chris, I know what I’m asking. You once told me that the best thing about doing what you did, or your people did, is that they provided helpless people with everything. There is no better feeling than that, you told me. I am not sure I can take them, Father and his allies that is, on by myself. There are other business types who share this apocalyptic vision, but we need someone to keep the oppositional glue together, not a known political operative but someone like…you. I hate to say this, but you have credibility. Many of them know you, have given you money. Best of all, you make them laugh as well. You are just so…disarming. I hate admitting this, but I need you, we need you. I suppose I am asking for at least as much as you provide to others, I am begging you for everything.”

  Chris winced at her subtle cut. “I get it, Kat. I do. Let me noodle all this, whatever can be worked out, if anything, will take a while.”

  “That I understand. And Chris?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep this close for a while, alright, just family? Well, I better get some sleep. I reenter the corporate war in the morning.”

  “Kat, before you go…I do love when you beg.”

  “You are such a shit.” But he could hear a small chuckle.

  “Goodbye.”

  “Wait!” he cried out.

  “Yeah?”

  Chris took a big breath. “You never cease to amaze me.”

  “Ah.” Now he clearly heard a tiny chuckle from his sister. “Be still my beating heart, my life is now complete.”

  He smiled momentarily as the connection was lost but that did not last long. He flipped on his email, and there indeed was a message from Kat with an attachment, likely written by Jules but unsigned. He glanced through the material just to get a general feel for it before settling back in his chair. He would read it more carefully later but the sense of it had already moved him.

  “Shit!” he said to no one in particular.

  Standing, he looked out over the quadrangle below. He was just high enough to glimpse the far countryside. He loved this place, the university and the town and even the country. From his mother, he had learned that he was not supposed to like the British. Since the days of Cromwell, if not before, they had done unspeakable things to his Irish ancestors. The English overlords had done everything they could to root out and destroy Catholicism and what they saw as the evil residue of the Celtic culture. Even amid the Great Famine of the late 1840s, the absentee landlords shipped off food stuffs to foreign markets for profit as three to four million natives died or emigrated. They offered soup and bread to those that would convert to the Church of England. Few did, the faithful embraced their religion and their culture with ever greater fervor. The Irish were driven even deeper into their cultural obsession.

  Apparently, he had forgiven the English for all their ancient sins. He loved the life that he had discovered here, his family, his eclectic but rewarding career that included academic, literary, and consulting components. He was comfortable yet stimulated. It was a perfect world. Then a scene from a movie crowded in on him, from the Godfather trilogy. Was it Pacino or De Niro? Why couldn’t he keep those two actors straight? In any case, by the third film the protagonist thought he had finally escaped his gangster legacy and gone legit when he was dragged back into the family business of murder and mayhem. Chris had escaped Chicago, his culture, his family, all the hate and now…they would drag him back in.

  Then it hit him: that was why Kat started with where Azita might do her internship and residency. His sister was no fool. She knew that Chris would resist coming back if his adopted daughter were staying in England. She knew how attached he had become, how much of a protector of her he remained. That was true. Memories flooded back to him, landing for the first time in the Panjshir Valley medical and refugee site where Kay had, without permission, moved to join Amar Singh, who then was only a fine doctor who worked in his program but whom he had never met in person. He did not think that his sister could put herself in a more dangerous spot than a Chicago public hospital ER. But she somehow managed it. Was she trying to find a way out of the pain, like their older sibling had? He could still recall how furious and frightened he had been as he and Karen Fisher, his assistant, had travelled to the site. You just never knew when your life was about to take a different trajectory.

  Chris leaned back in his chair and forgot about the writing he intended to do that morning. Rather, he saw and smelled that day in 2001 when the helicopter landed, blowing up dust from the desolate and scorched land. Normally agreeable, he was bright with anger when no one greeted him, when he and Karen were p
ointed to a non-descript building. Upon entering, all that greeted him was a fetching young Afghan girl whose wide, expressive eyes melted his hostility a bit and whose excellent English, though accented, rendered him momentarily mute. The girl told him that his sister was off treating wounded children from a shelling in a nearby village with this very girl’s father. Amar, likewise, was busy dealing with victims of the same shelling at their facility. So, the girl took him on a tour. Her innocent charm and enthusiasm reached him. He could feel his resolve ebbing away. The need was so great here, the people so brave and thankful. For the first time, in truth, he knew with intimate understanding what his work was all about.

  A while later, he was directed to Amar Singh, the woman he put in charge of directing the medical team but whom had, to this moment, merely been an image on his computer screen. Walking out the back of a temporary medical facility, there she stood holding a dying baby, providing comfort in the last moments of its life. He froze in place, first not wanting to trammel upon such a personal scene, then immobilized by his own feelings. He could not take his eyes off her, the one tear that coursed slowly down her cheek. What was that hollow ache suddenly inside him? He had never felt anything so intense before. Now, with time and distance, it all made so much sense. He had experienced two fundamental epiphanies in one day. He first had fallen in love with his work and then, inexplicably, he had fallen in love with a woman.

  He was still sitting back in his chair, smiling, when his phone rang. He didn’t answer. He did not want to give up his reverie. After some time, he did not know how long, he finally checked the number and recognized it immediately. It was his adopted daughter, the very same wide-eyed Afghan girl who greeted him that day during the height of the last frontier holding out against the Taliban. He kicked himself for his selfishness. He always answered for her, no matter what. After all, she had led him to a deeper love of his work and to the woman who would become his wife. He listened to her voice mail and quickly exited his office.

  CHAPTER 2

  RADCLIFFE SQUARE

  Azita Masoud was troubled. It was odd that she should feel so discomforted, one might say out of sorts. She had just finished another successful semester of medical school, once again ranking among the very best students in her class at Oxford University. It was now spring in the smallish, quaint city she had come to adore, a lovely time of year in a place that typically offered such a dreary winter climate. Moreover, she lived with her adopted family, Christopher Crawford and Amar Singh, whom she had fully embraced with great affection. More than affection, she concluded, but with as much love as she had for Pamir and Madeena, her biological parents who had been murdered by the Taliban. Even the nightmares that had visited her since her remarkable escape from war-ravaged Afghanistan had become less frequent, diminishing from nightly intrusions to periodic harassments.

  Her traditional nocturnal visitations had been largely the same. She would rush through the narrow streets of a prototypical Afghan village searching for something unnamed and unnamable. The identity of the terror she simultaneously sought and yet feared could not be denied for long.

  It was her parents, Pamir and Madeena, whom she had adored with a kind of unreasoned desperation. Still, her connection to her father was endless and unique. A physician, he was her role model, her deity in human form, the source of her obsession to follow in his footsteps. Like him, she would be a healer. Nothing would stop her.

  But dear Pamir now was lost to her forever. She drifted back to the ancestral village in the Panjshir Valley, mourning the death of her older brother Majeeb, who had been lost in a battle with the Taliban while fighting for the Northern Alliance. As she and Deena, her sister, were out before daybreak collecting eggs for breakfast, her known world had ended abruptly. The family had escaped the Taliban and were working with total devotion against all the oppression these fanatics labored so hard to impose. Thus, the family members were targets of their rage in the days after Osama bin Laden had struck America on September 11, 2001. Being a target of these fanatics was never a good thing but became particularly dangerous after the Western powers were stirred to drive them from power for harboring bin Laden. As the Taliban’s control was threatened, the religious extremists came after the family for revenge one day. They harbored a special animosity against the Pamir clan after they had escaped their control. Important people had been humiliated.

  Those moments crowded into Azita’s mind as she walked down High Street toward Radcliffe Square. She was no longer the Muslim girl who had entered Britain, an emigre from Afghanistan, at the end of 2001. Then, every sound and sight were both a delight to, and an assault on, her senses. She desperately sought the blessings of a world-class education, which was possible through Chris and Amar, and which her biological father Pamir had desperately, if wistfully, hoped to somehow provide. Yet she feared the sudden changes and wondered if she could succeed in this strange land. For a moment, her mind’s eye returned to the room at Heathrow where the immigration bureaucracy had challenged her right to enter the country. How could they think of her as a threat? But, of course, she looked exactly like any one of so many girls who had dressed as innocent children before blowing themselves up, and others, in the name of Allah. Besides, she had not possessed the proper papers.

  She no longer looked like that young girl. She was a woman now, stylishly dressed in form-revealing jeans and a loose blouse that hung down below her waist and yet still managed to suggest a desirable female form underneath. Her only sartorial concession to her roots was a head covering, usually draped around her neck when in private and often, but not always, covering her head in public. Funny, she never could decide what to do. For years she would loop it over her head in public, even after she had converted mostly to Western dress to fit in. At some point, almost unconsciously, she would fail to cover herself if it were especially warm, which did not occur all that often in Britain. Now, she felt a decided tug to return to traditional costume as an expression of Islamic modesty. She thought hard, but she could not recall the rules she had used for determining which culture to embrace: the old or the new. She thought harder but could not understand this tug toward the old ways. Today, that confusion bothered her greatly. She emphatically draped the cloth over her head in the traditional manner.

  Passing by St. Mary the Virgin’s chapel, she entered one of the many enclosed green areas that marked the university landscape. She particularly loved this one. It was like many others. However, in the middle of this green space was a circular structure of ancient origin, though not so old by British standards. She loved staring at this building, thinking back to the people who, so long ago, had erected such monuments in the pursuit of knowledge, or perhaps to honor long-forgotten institutional affinities. This structure embodied that encrusted ambiance of solidity and tradition. She could never forget that great minds had wandered over these grounds for centuries and now she was one of them. Then, she silently chided herself for such arrogance. She belonged, but did she? Doubt yet nipped at the corners of her confidence even after years of academic success.

  Where was the man she needed most, her adored biological father Pamir? He had raised her during her years as a young girl. He had planted in her the dream of being a healer. He had nourished her desire for learning and her curiosity about the wider world. He had broadened her perspective beyond the narrow strictures that surrounded her, gently nurturing an appreciation of all people and the wisdom in most philosophies. He had even introduced her to Shakespeare and planted the possibility of studying at the same university where he had been trained as a physician. And now she was here. And he was not. How cruel is God! Immediately, she recoiled at her blasphemous thought, but her regret did not stay long. Larger doubts about her world view, the foundations of her culture, were more common these days

  Her world as a young girl was in that house at the end of her frantic nightmare, the abode from where the screams emerged as she approached. She knew it but hated confirming that knowl
edge. She would never quite make it to the inside of that humble home in her fantastical journey. Fear and guilt kept her away in those tortured dreams. Still, she had to accept what awaited inside the structure. The Taliban had, in truth, crept toward the house that early morning when Deena, her sister, went about her normal morning chores. The family had prayed over the loss of Majeed the day before with members of Pamir’s extended family. This morning, Azita could not sleep from grief and memory. Restless, she joined her sister just as only the most astute observer might catch the initial retreat of the night’s blackness. She had never accompanied her sister before, rising early most mornings only to study her books. For some reason, one she never could quite recover later, she went with her sibling that morning. It proved an unscripted decision that saved her life. As Deena and she made a desperate escape into the predawn darkness, they heard the door of their home being battered down and the screams of Madeena, their mother.

  If Azita ever made it to her horror-filled destination in her nightmare, what would she have found? Would she have witnessed her parents being tortured? If Allah were merciful, their demise would have been swift. Her guilt, though, remained palpable. These fanatics were after her as well. Perhaps she was the prime target of their wrath as the girl who presumed to act like a man, who helped her father heal the wounded, who defied the new cultural and religious mandates by embracing the world of the mind. She could touch the source of both her anxiety and her crushing guilt. What if her parents had endured a slow, painful death as they were repeatedly asked about the whereabouts of their daughters? That was not likely the case. The assassins probably wanted to carry out their murderous intent and disappear before the village awoke. But she could not have known that in the moment. Deena and she had no idea of their numbers or their plan, other than to slaughter the entire Masoud family.

  Azita could never have known the truth. Later, after her rescue, the villagers said that their parents had passed to the other world quickly, absent suffering. But she could never shake the sense that they had lied to her and her sister from kindness. Perhaps her parents had died quickly, no questions asked, their ultimate thoughts embracing the horror that their children were also being slaughtered. If true, their final moments were agony beyond physical pain. On the other hand, if their end were prolonged, with questions about where their children could be found, they might have realized that their offspring had escaped. Then, they would have paid an agonizing physical price for their silence but received much spiritual comfort. Neither possibility had ever brought the young woman anything but nauseating guilt. Thinking on those moments never brought her peace. She knew they would have wanted her and Deena to flee and save themselves. In her heart, though, she never forgave herself for not doing something, anything, to try to save them. Reason, what she did best, eluded her in this instance. Her superb logic proved utterly useless.