“Where did you end up going?”
“Community college. Turned out that I didn’t have the money for much more at that point, and my dad knew that, so he’d applied for me. I was probably the most resentful kid on that campus my first semester. I took a journalism class on a whim, and I’ve never looked back.”
“How did your parents feel about your career choice?” I am always careful with the tenses, not wanting to sting anyone with an assumption that loved ones are living.
“They were just happy I’d stopped complaining about being stuck in our town. But the thing is, I wasn’t all that angry at our town. It just didn’t give me a way to see how I was going to fit into the world.”
“And of all the ways to be a journalist, you chose war reporting.”
“Did I mention I come from a sleepy little town?” he asks with his voice lowered.
“And how does it feel when you go back to your sleepy little town?” I ask.
Clay’s smile fades. He runs his thumb along the edge of his foldout tray.
“The first time I went back,” he begins, without looking my way, “I felt like I was walking onto a movie set. Everything looked so perfectly arranged. There was the grocery store with thirty different kinds of cereal, the boxes lined up perfectly on the shelves. A big yellow school bus stopped in front of our home at twenty minutes past seven in the morning, five days a week. People stopped at red lights and let moms with strollers cross the street. Sure, unexpected things happened here and there, but they were the kinds of unexpected things you expected to see. Someone died of pneumonia. A foreclosure sign went up on a house. And people . . . people just went bowling on Saturday nights and talked about the weather and walked their dogs.”
I watch his hands as he talks, glad that we’re sitting shoulder to shoulder instead of face to face.
“I’d seen too much while I was over there,” he continues. “Home felt plastic, like a toy fresh out of its box.”
“You’re not the only one drawn to the thing that keeps you up at night,” I say.
Clay chews his lower lip.
“But it can’t go on like this. There’s got to be a reset button,” he says.
“If you found one, would you push it?” I ask.
Sitting next to Clay, I pick up a faint scent—a warm blend of teak, nutmeg, and apple. I become self-conscious that I’ve noticed and shift in my seat, trying to add an inch to the space between us. The scent is subtle, though, and doesn’t cause my head to squeeze the way Adam’s cologne often did. Clay’s too busy digging for an answer to my question to notice my fidgeting.
“I don’t know. But I am sure if my mom found that button, she’d be the first to push it. She thought I would end up writing for the Kansas City Star.”
Mom groans, turning her head to the other side without opening her eyes. “People are always complaining about moms pushing their buttons,” she says.
I stifle a laugh.
Clay looks impressed at Mom’s ability to slide into a conversation half-asleep.
During my surgical residency, I’d scrubbed in for a difficult case. An eighty-nine-year-old man had suffered complication after complication in the treatment of his colon cancer. His physical deterioration seemed to accelerate his dementia, leaving his children to make decisions on his behalf. When he came into the hospital writhing in pain from yet another bowel obstruction, his children insisted that something—anything, everything—be done to save him.
But the man’s cancer had robbed his blood of the elements it needed to form clots. He bled profusely. Bright red blood splattered onto my mask, my glasses, and my sterile gown. I cauterized and irrigated and cauterized some more, finally getting the bleeding under control.
At the close of the case, I left the recovery area and walked down a hospital corridor, heavy-footed in my clogs, to see an ailing patient in the intensive care unit. I noticed people looking at me askance. A woman’s hand flitted to her mouth.
I looked down and cursed under my breath.
Blood had soaked through the sterile gown, painting scarlet splatters across my scrub top. I took a few papers out of my pocket, unfolded them, and used them to cover the stains.
The woman I passed probably thought I’d done my patient more harm than good. I didn’t blame her for looking away. To wrest a body—or a country—from the grips of demise is a bloody affair.
Chapter 51
Even without the turbulence in the skies, my stomach would have been doing somersaults. I press my face to the glass and trace the jagged lines of the mountains.
“No city in the world makes a grander entrance,” Mom whispers.
I hear the lift of pride in her voice too and remember that Kabul was much more than just another post for her.
This leg of the flight, from Dubai to Kabul, is just under three hours. There are only a handful of Westerners on the flight. Some toy with spreadsheets on their laptops, while others sleep with arms folded and heads tilted back. The rest are my countrymen, some dressed in loose-fitting tunics and pantaloons, some in suits, and a few in acid-washed jeans and slim-cut dress shirts. They are men with features as rugged as the mountains, with skin the color of the earth. They look as if they were bits of homeland shaped into people.
I have kept to my seat and avoided eye contact with them for the duration of the flight.
The cabin air is stale, and my limbs are stiff. I’ve only picked at the trays of food that have been placed before me, my appetite as thin as the atmosphere at this altitude. I reach over and touch Mom’s hand.
“I’m really glad you’re here with me.”
“Me too,” she says, a light rasp in her voice. She clears her throat and exhales slowly and for a second I wonder if this trip might be too much for her. The years are starting to show on Mom.
When the pilot announces that we’ll be landing within twenty minutes, I squeeze the armrest. My mind is flooded with my parents’ faces, with echoes of Faheem’s giggles, with the feeling of sitting in green grass with Neelab and Rostam. As the plane descends, I plunge deeper into a sea of memories. Images I thought had faded bubble to the surface. By the time the plane touches down and rolls along the narrow tarmac, I can barely swallow.
I concentrate on the muscles of my throat, trying to reverse this feeling.
As a first-year medical student, I spent a lot of time in the anatomy lab, two large rooms in the basement of the school. The thick steel door did little to contain the smell of formaldehyde. We were doing head and neck dissections when I stayed back one day to ask our anatomy professor a question I hadn’t wanted to ask in front of my classmates. We stood over my group’s cadaver, an elderly woman with one replaced hip and a hint of mauve nail varnish on her fingers. My classmates kept her hands tucked under the drape so we wouldn’t see them during dissections but I would lift the edge and let her fingers show when it was my turn to expose a new muscle or nerve. I thought she deserved to be known as a whole, not just the sum of her parts.
When people feel sad, they get a lump in their throats, I said. But what does that mean anatomically? What’s happening?
My anatomy instructor, Dr. Sinks, was a wizened woman who looked to be in her late seventies. She had stark white hair cut in a severe bob and was nearly a foot shorter than me. She presided over the dissections in a rubber apron with her gloved hands clasped behind her back. When something noteworthy was discovered on any one cadaver, she would climb atop a stool and whistle between her teeth to capture our attention. She was surprisingly cheerful for someone who spent much of her day away from daylight and in a room with the deconstructed bodies of her contemporaries.
Ah, the physiology of globus hystericus, she’d said. She plucked a scalpel and a probe from a set of tools on a nearby table. With a touch that was at once delicate and determined, she peeled back the layers of the neck.
Not long ago, anything from fever to depression was attributed to the so-called roaming uterus, she explained. Surgeons perf
ormed “hysterectomies” to remove the offending organ. But the globus sensation is caused by the autonomic nervous system activating a fight-or-flight response to stress. The glottis expands to take in more air while the muscles of swallowing press against it. It’s almost as if the body were choking itself.
I could have hugged Dr. Sinks, rubber apron and all. Once I knew the muscles, I could fight for control over them. It has been no small feat, but I have learned how to breathe through the feeling, to wrest the little fingers off my airway.
Passengers rise to their feet and pull bags and jackets from the overhead compartments. Bits of Dari and Pashto conversations swirl around me, filling my ears faster than I can process any of it. Mom and I arrange our headscarves, letting the ends fall over our shoulders and pulling the fabric down to our foreheads. A crush of bodies move toward the exit, down the stairs, and onto the tarmac. We’re greeted by a bright but brisk day.
We find our luggage on the conveyor belt and pass through checkpoints. Clay hails a yellow taxi, and for a second it feels like we are back in New York. We ask the driver to take us to the Intercontinental Hotel. He is not the least bit flummoxed by his English-speaking passengers.
“Intercontinental. Yes, sir. Yes, madam. Very nice hotel,” he says approvingly.
Mom and I slide into the backseat of the cab. Clay sits in the passenger seat up front with the driver. He sets his bag between his feet and looks back over his shoulder to ask us if we have a preferred route.
“Do you want to go through Wazir Akbar Khan?”
The driver glances in his rearview mirror, from which dangles a tasbeh, amber beads and a burgundy tassel. He looks back at Clay and smiles.
“You are many times in Kabul?” he asks.
“Many times, friend,” Clay replies.
We head west, down the long road that leads out of the airport and into the city. My sleep-deprived eyes move slowly across the landscape, as if I’m submerged underwater. Billboards. A shopping center with sale signs in the windows. A braying donkey. The ding of a bicycle bell. Cars pressed bumper to bumper.
“You are businessman?” the driver asks Clay. I am grateful Clay is here to absorb the driver’s attention, to distract him with conversation until I can collect myself. Clay tells the driver he’s a journalist in a way that implies we’re all journalists.
“Just look at this,” Mom says softly. Kabul is a jungle of juxtapositions. An internet café practically shares a wall with a mosque. Men with mobile phones pressed to their ears buy vegetables from the back of a wooden wagon.
The Intercontinental Hotel comes into view, a vintage postcard come to life. The hotel, only five stories tall but wide, sits atop a high hill and boasts incredible views of the city. I have walked through the front doors in glossy Mary Janes for a family wedding and circled the pool in the back, my small hand fitting snugly in my father’s, as men swam laps and women wearing round-rimmed sunglasses lounged in the sun.
We pass through multiple security checkpoints, pat-downs, and metal detectors to enter the hotel lobby, a grand room constructed of marble, boasting wide columns with gilded bases. Elaborate chandeliers brighten the long marble-tiled hallway, a regal floor designed with medallions and intricate borders to mark off sitting areas with tufted sofas and armchairs.
Men and women in dark blazers and brochure-worthy smiles greet us from behind the reception desk. Sparks of light dance at the far edges of my vision. I sense a migraine coming on, fueled by the recycled cabin air, the lack of sleep, the empty stomach, and more.
We turn our passports over to the woman behind the front desk counter. She has thick, perfectly shaped brows and is a decade younger than me, and still I surreptitiously search her face for any familiar features. Could she be a cousin? Maybe the sister of someone I knew? When she notices my stare, I turn my attention to my phone.
“I hope you will enjoy your rooms. They are on the second floor with a view of the pool, as you requested Ms. . . . Aryana,” she says as she hands my passport back to me. Afghanistan was once named Ariana. I wonder if she can see through my documents and clothes to know that I am made of this earth too.
She points us in the direction of the elevators and assures us that the bellhop will bring our luggage to us shortly. Clay’s room is down the hall from ours. We all need to rest and agree to meet in the hotel lobby in two hours for dinner, adjusting ourselves to local time. Our room is simple but thoughtfully decorated, the pattern on the blue carpet reminiscent of the patterns on the walls of the Alhambra in Spain. The plush bedspread and cushioned headboard are the same regal shade of blue. Our bathroom has steel fixtures against white marble, spotless top to bottom. Two bottles of water sit atop the wooden dresser.
I look out the window while Mom thanks the bellhop for setting our bags inside the room. When she closes the door, she joins me to check out the view.
“I swam in that pool a handful of times. Had plenty of dinners in the restaurant downstairs. It’s strange to see it again, on the other side of a war,” she says.
“This hotel is a five-star experience compared to some places we’ve stayed in, isn’t it?” I add.
“It certainly is. Remember the stray cat that wandered in through the window in Turkey?” Mom laughs at the memory as she plops down on the bed, propping a pillow under her swollen feet.
Mom and I, in our travels, never sought out luxury. We were comfortable with the thrum of people and traffic outside the windows of our sparse rooms, which kept us exploring the world outside.
We have chosen this luxurious hotel for its security. The Taliban were ousted but not eradicated. Extremists continue to wreak havoc on the country by planting car bombs, suiting up in suicide vests, and exploding hand grenades at hotels, embassies, and the offices of nongovernmental organizations.
“I wish we could have stayed at the old apartment on Chicken Street,” Mom says wistfully. Her eyes close almost against her will, and she drifts into a light sleep. I do not wake her. It would break her heart to see my rituals—my careful study of the hotel floor map on the back of the door, my testing of the windows to be sure they open, and my evaluation of the space beneath the beds to see how many people it will accommodate. I do not put my feet up until I have memorized the paths to the roof and to the stairwell and confirmed that a leap from this floor might allow us to escape with only broken bones.
Chapter 52
Since I last logged in, a half-dozen new imaging results have come in as well as a flurry of labs. I respond to messages left by oncologists and primary care doctors and answer a bullet-point list of questions from my office manager. I scroll through my inbox one more time and see a new message from Adam.
Aryana, please give me a call. I’ve been thinking about you.
I look up from the computer. Mom, her cheeks still pink with her yoga flush, stands over me with a towel wrapped around her. Her hair is wet from her shower and for a split second I see Tilly. I close my laptop without responding to Adam’s email.
I have been thinking about him too, imagining what he might say if I told him I was in Kabul right now.
“Any fires?” Mom asks.
“All under control,” I say. She knows how hard it is for me to unplug from my work because she’s wired the same way.
We find Clay in the hotel café reading a local newspaper printed in English. Since today is Saturday, the embassy and the government offices won’t be open until tomorrow. Clay has already called an old contact, a linguist named Waleed, and arranged for him to drive us around Kabul.
“Good morning, ladies,” Clay says as he sets down his coffee cup. There is a basket of bread on the table, along with jam and a plate of cheeses.
Over breakfast, we make an ambitious list of places we want to see, pushpins on my personal map of Kabul. Clay takes notes, his gray eyes gauging and designing. We head to the lobby, where the hotel doorman signals us over and leads us out the doors to meet our escort. Leaving the hotel is easy. There are no X-rays or
pat-downs for those headed into the city.
Waleed has arrived ahead of schedule, a sign that he’s been working with foreigners. He is polite, articulate. In a Kabul full of Western contractors, aid workers, journalists, and military personnel, he has found his niche.
He could be anywhere between twenty-five and forty years old. Age is hard to guess since clocks and hearts seem to tick faster here, where lives are lived in urgency. He wears jeans and a pressed shirt, bowing forward as he shakes our hands. He has a fully charged mobile phone and a solid enough command of English that he can even crack some jokes.
“Good morning, friends. Mrs. Shephard and Dr. Shephard. Mr. Porter says this is not your first visit, so I will not say welcome. I will say welcome back to Kabul.”
“We’re happy to meet you,” Mom says graciously. I can see the woman she was in her younger years, marching into unknown territory armed with diplomacy, an earnestness in her interactions with people, and a rooted belief that there is good in others. Were it not for me, Mom probably would have stayed in Afghanistan until the embassy shut its doors and called every last person home.
Waleed’s eyes linger on my Eastern features, my Western dress. He looks at the three of us, and I can guess at the assumptions he is making about our relationships.
“Sir,” Waleed says, turning to Clay, “where would you like to take these ladies today?”
I instinctively take a step forward, as if I’m coming out from behind a curtain to claim my spot on the stage.
“Waleed-jan, I was born in Kabul, but I’ve not been back here since before the Russians invaded. Let’s start with a drive past Polytechnic University. It’s closer than anything else.”
He blinks back his surprise.
“Yes, Doctor,” Waleed says, turning on his heel and extending his arm to invite us to follow. He pauses for a beat before he continues. “Doctor-sahib, you remind me of my dear sister. She is also a doctor, in the very busy maternity hospital. She would be very happy to meet you.”
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