Back at the hospital, the room may have been surrounded by the Others, but it was small and tightly controlled and closed away to outsiders so that she felt safe enough from the world there. And so far Dr. Peter had kept his promise about not hurting her. At least, there was some comfort when Dr. Peter was around, making the hospital more appealing for that reason, too.
Now she found herself trapped inside of the home of smiling strangers who seemed eager to be kind to her, but who spoke with such foreign accents and lived such American lives that they barely seemed real to her.
Suddenly the long course of treatments stretching in front of her reached into infinity. She realized that she couldn’t do it. Despite all of the strength she had been able to summon in order to survive long enough to reach this place, she now found herself empty of the power to endure another year of this strangeness. The “is, but is not” world of her hosts was a clear example of the kind of hospitality that is coin of the realm among the Afghan people. It should have warmed her heart. But the family’s environment was overwhelming, and the intended comforts were no more nourishing to her than lumps of wax that have been molded to look like pieces of fruit.
She was able to move her arms again, but she couldn’t do anything with them. She could walk, but there was nowhere to go without supervision. She could talk, but not to anyone she knew or to anyone her own age who spoke her language. She could eat, if they chose to bring her food, she could sleep, if they chose to allow her to sleep, but there was practically nothing that she could do herself.
The wide mood swings started in again, the way that they did during the first weeks after the fire. She found herself feeling all right while she was occupied with some little thing, but then a moment of the smallest frustration would make all the poison come blasting out of her, the same way that her blackened flesh had once forced screams of pain from her throat. Now the pain came in the form of frustration at her state of utter helplessness and the sense of isolation, mixed with a sick dread of suspicion that this chain of events would not be done with her until her entire life was cut up into tiny bits and scattered to the wind.
The only way to exert her will upon the world was with shrieking outbursts of temper. She learned that the sudden emotion outbursts struck most people so hard that they frequently did whatever it was that she wanted at the moment, just to make her stop. The power was similar to that of an infant lying in a crib, trying to get attention, and her will to live had already proven itself ready to grasp at anything that might help her.
While the slow summer days drifted by, whether she was in her isolation in the host family’s home or in their structured outings among the Others, Zubaida found that even this humble form of infantile power was better than having none and submitting to being an invisible pawn among these strangers.
Once again, it was good to make them see her.
And so it was a familiar thing to Zubaida when the host parents began to step away into a corner and discuss her in whispers. She sometimes managed to catch enough that she felt like she had a pretty clear idea of what was going on. She recognized it from the whispered conversations of desperation that she had often heard from her mother and father back when all she could do was to lie in her burn bed, trying to hold still, trying not to cry out and to keep silent, and not being able to do any of it.
It was clear to her; they were asking themselves how badly the accident had damaged her—and whether it might even have affected her mind.
They were wondering if she was crazy.
* * *
By July 3rd of 2002, Zubaida had completed three weeks of recovery following her first two sets of operations. So early that morning, she was prepped for her third round of surgery, then placed under anesthesia while Peter Grossman and his team prepared to take her the next step.
At the same time, over on Zubaida’s home side of the planet, the Afghanistan countryside which has played unwilling host to centuries of marauding hordes and a number of modern day armies, was embroiled in a subtler war of hard-fought propaganda. The day’s leading story was that some forty innocent civilians had been killed in central Afghanistan by U.S. military forces. Army representatives reported that Special Forces observers who were out scouting for Taliban resistance had been fired on from a nearby residence, so in accordance with their rules of conduct they called in powerful flying gun ships onto the source of the fire, resulting in the local casualties.
Representatives of the families claimed that the people who were attacked were only gathered there the occasion of a wedding—and that the victims were merely firing random celebratory gunfire into the air in accordance with accepted local customs. The complaints offered up the event to the world as a clear case of deliberate mass murder by the U.S. Army.
However, the American commander pointed out that the gunfire that the Special Forces soldiers originally responded to was not “random” at all, but it was directed straight at the soldiers and was focused for accuracy. He also pointed out that the night before, the American gun ships had already been in the area to fire on several gun posts that were presenting a continued threat.
Everybody involved insisted that everybody else was lying.
* * *
When Peter Grossman entered the operating room that day, his confidence in Zubaida’s case was really beginning to rise. So far, all of her grafts were healing well, and her pain had been kept to a minimum. He felt especially thankful for that; these early stages of the entire procedure would not be an acceptable time for his credibility with her to falter. He knew that of all of the many people now involved in Zubaida’s case and in her story, he was the literal point man of the mission. The hopes of Zubaida and everyone in her family, as well as her growing roster of supporters, Non-Government Organizations, and government sponsors, lay with the military personnel who dared to endanger themselves by trusting her father and allowing them into the unprotected and vulnerable interiors of the American bases and medical facilities. Their hopes would come to a focal point as fine as the scalpel’s edge that carved and shaped her.
Today’s procedures were to prepare her for a series of much more subtle operations designed to smooth out her re-carved features. The first thing to do was perform a complete change of all of her dressings, under anesthesia. Then the cleaned wounds would be sealed for healing using homografts (donor skin) taken from cadavers and processed so that a victim’s body won’t reject it. Their vital function was to keep her wounds protected from infection but allow them to “breathe” naturally through the porous structure of the donor grafts. They were a temporary part of the overall process, but their role in protecting her was vital in helping her to remain strong enough to complete the entire long list of surgeries. The less energy that her body had to expend in fighting infection, the more it could retain for the long uphill journey.
Dr. Peter worked on his sedated little patient like a custom tailor slowly building a full-body suit out of living fabric. Now when the procedures went on to become much more focused and delicate in their nature, the permanent grafts could then be taken from her own body and blended into the surrounding skin. The living pieces of the suit would have to do much more than fit and function; they would have to move through every day and night together, stretching, pulling, flexing as much like the old born-on suit as possible. As time moved on, they would have to grow with the rest of her and not betray her by going out of control like her own scar tissue had done.
Once again, Peter Grossman spent the morning occupying the fourth dimension, while every slice and stitch that he made took place with one eye on the present moment and the other on the possible repercussions to every one of his medical choices and surgical actions as they were going to spread out over time.
Zubaida awoke after the third session feeling much stronger than she had after the first two. There was a big difference in the size of the areas being worked on this time, and the assault on her body was of a much lesser degr
ee. Now was the time when her past experiences of un-medicated agony helped to make her strong in the present moment. The level of discomfort was so pale compared to how she had spent many endless days and nights that she might have felt positively cheerful about the whole thing, now—except for the fact that Dr. Peter or somebody had apparently wrapped her up in padding and bandages to the point that she could barely move.
It didn’t matter that she had nowhere to go or that she was too connected to tubes to leave her bed. The intolerable problem was that she couldn’t move at all, even though the lack of pain from the operations and the low level of physical shock left her feeling so cheerful that little bits of her old music actually floated through her. They went at her like breezes across the hairs on the back of her neck. They flitted through her head in little fragments, teasing her by appearing and disappearing.
Now Zubaida didn’t simply want to move to the music, she needed to feel its energy moving through her, allowing her to have something of herself back. She knew from experience that every move she made with her arms, her legs, her body, had always confirmed her identity to herself and the rest of the world. In the days before the Taliban sent the flaming orange teeth to devour her, dancing had always left her feeling stronger. So she was certain that even the smallest musical movement could push more energy through her and help to speed her healing, but at the moment she was so tightly bound that all she could do was wiggle her muscles beneath them. It was barely more than clenching and unclenching, in time to the beat. It brought her close to what she craved, but her abilities just weren’t up to her desire; the tiny muscle-clenching movements would never be enough to free her, or to pump healing energy through her.
Now the nightmares that had been steadily increasing since she boarded the plane to America leaped ahead in strength. She lay drifting in and out of sleep from a world no more real to her than the imagined scenarios. Faces of people who had once jeered at her reeled again in front of her mind’s eye; they stared down at her melted countenance as if she were something under a rock. She tried to run from them, tried to strike out at them, but her legs melted out from under her and her arms stuck to her body.
When her recovery progressed enough for her to move around the halls, she visited one teenaged boy whose legs were badly burned. Using gestures, she encouraged him, saying “look at me,” knowing that by simply standing next to him and smiling, she was letting him know that he could cope with all of this, too. That he would get past it. After all, she gestured to again, look at her.
The problem was that she couldn’t hold onto the good feelings. Once her dressings were lightened, she was able to make up little dances while sitting up in her bed, causing the nurses to watch her and laugh, and although the attention felt good, some little thing always seemed to go wrong. It never mattered what it was, exactly, all that mattered was that whatever went wrong was strong enough to kill the good feelings and to instantly turn her world back into a thing of pain and frustration.
The result was that her rages got people’s attention even better than her attempts to dance. It made her feel embarrassed and angry for the same nurses who had looked at her with admiration to blink at her in surprise and concern. But the thought that she had let them down made her feel even worse, as if poison were running in her veins and spilling into her thoughts.
She heard them conversing just outside her door in the bleating nasal tones of the American language, and it seemed plain that what they were doing was asking one another the same question. It was a question that Zubaida had already heard spoken about her, in other places—has this girl lost her mind?
She wanted very badly to know the answer herself.
Chapter Five
Rebecca Grossman found that her few visits with Zubaida had touched her in a way that no other patient at the burn center ever had. The language barrier was frustrating, but she found that it actually served to facilitate the awareness of all the other non-verbal aspects of communication. Zubaida’s body language, as well as her own, delivered meaning when words could not. Non-verbal sounds, voice tone, facial expression and most of all eye contact were the primary tools that she and the girl had available. Even within those limitations, Rebecca found that she got a palpable sense of Zubaida’s iron will as well as her playful spirit, but that the moments of insight into the girl were fleeting. It seemed clear to her that there was a firestorm of activity inside the girl’s brain which had surely been given few opportunities for expression.
After Zubaida had a couple of weeks to recover from the July surgeries, Rebecca called the host family and arranged for Zubaida to come for a visit over the weekend. Zubaida was initially tentative, but she quickly warmed up and began exploring around the property. She was unsure about the swimming pool, coming from a place where there was no such thing and where few people ever learned to swim. She allowed Rebecca to coax her into the water and splash around for a little while, but she was not at all sure how people could relax when they were up to their necks in water.
The Grossman’s menagerie of animals didn’t seem to charm her much. In her country, animals were beasts of burden or walking items of food. Any value in the idea of keeping them for pleasure and feeding them with resources that could keep another human being alive seemed lost on her. The two horses in the barn behind the house lived in quarters the size of her family’s home, and there was another entire house back there that was explained to her as a place for relatives and visitors to stay. That idea fit into her background, with her culture’s emphasis upon family and hospitality, but back at home only the local warlords had the resources to keep up desirable, empty houses on their land.
One of the strangest new things about this American-style castle, to her, was that instead of using the beautiful kitchen inside of the house, her host explained that in this country the people cook often outdoors over open flames for amusement. They do this even when they have kitchens outfitted with a host of devices which Zubaida had witnessed for herself as they performed amazing tricks in preparing food with hardly any work at all.
She didn’t understand some of the kitchen appliances yet, but at her host family’s house she saw how fast and easy that such things made the preparing of a meal. And yet out there behind Peter and Rebecca’s house, right next to the pool and the horse barn, there was a whole area dedicated to cooking and eating outdoors—right next to all the animals—instead of indoors where it was cool and clean and quiet.
And the dogs, four of them, huge animals. How much would four dogs that size eat, without doing any work in return? They seemed too friendly to be guard dogs, too big to go inside of the house. Everybody was always telling them to go away. So what were they for?
Strangest of all, while much of an Afghan’s time is spent trying to avoid the desert’s summer sun and staying out of the worst of the heat; here in this place called California, people seemed to spend a lot of time outdoors lying around in the blazing sun voluntarily. She saw that Peter and Rebecca had special chairs for that very purpose, even though they looked so perfectly new that it seemed as if nobody used them.
Since Zubaida had only learned a handful of English words, her reverie was unbroken while she toured around the home with Rebecca and her host mother. From time to time, she could tell that the two women were talking about her, but since she had been the focal point of adult attention for the past year, she had long since learned to tune it out. The women’s animated conversation receded in Zubaida’s awareness and dissolved into a blur made up of the flat vowels and strange consonants that Zubaida now knew to be typical of the American language.
Rebecca listened with surprise and concern to the stories she was hearing from the host mother. Peter was still at the hospital for the day, but she knew that he would also want to know the things she was being told. The host family expressed the pride they felt in taking care of this Afghan girl and had the admiration and support of a number of their friends, many of whom could
also speak Zubaida’s Dari or the closely related Farsi language. The family’s sense of personal and ethnic pride weighed heavily on them in this task, as well as their social standing among the Afghan community who was now largely aware that the family was hosting Zubaida. They seemed to have some degree of personal warmth for Zubaida as an individual, too—all the characteristics that the charitable NGO had looked for in a host family. But the good news ended there.
Rebecca listened with mounting discomfort to a series of events that were supposed to have taken place with Zubaida in the brief time that she had been with the family. As Zubaida grew stronger after the hospitalization, her personality apparently grew stronger, as well. Much of the time, that seemed to mean that she was in a state of conflict with one or the other family members—sometimes with the household in general.
At night, Zubaida seemed terrified of being alone in the dark and suffered from such horrific nightmares that she woke up the entire family by crying out. Even a simple afternoon nap on the sofa was likely to end with Zubaida making some huge jerking movement that was so powerful, it woke her with a loud gasp.
She was described as having mood swings so rapid and so severe that nobody ever knew which version of Zubaida they were going to be dealing with from one moment to the next. Her behavior was described as flipping from gentle teasing to confrontational torment to black moods of isolation that left her unreachable. Any discussion about her family back home sent her into such a strong funk that she seemed, to the hosts, to be capable of violence. They admitted that they hadn’t actually seen that from her, but insisted that they felt more concern than they had expected regarding the safety of their own child in Zubaida’s presence.
After all, the mother explained, she and her husband had only taken on the task of hosting Zubaida because they were moved by the story of her plight. They felt proud to step forward to help someone from a civilization they had long since left behind. Now, with the first rosy blush faded from the situation, the colder realities of attempting to make a severely damaged child feel at home in an utterly foreign situation were revealing themselves to be far more strenuous than they anticipated.
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