by Craig Grant
’At this point, Mick’s handwriting began to deteriorate, and became harder to read. — D. W.
Nov. 26
I read a book somewhere that said the best cookie store in the world was the American cookie store in Kandahar. Naturally the Pastry Club had to check this out. It was a disappointment. Maybe it’s a bad year for cookies. Maybe it’s a bad year for Americans.
Nobody can say Pete doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of what turns us on. This afternoon, after a street by street search for missing Merry Globesters (they weren’t in Martyr’s Square, they weren’t trying to take a peek at Mohammed’s cloak), Pete took us to see a buzkashi game. I know it was right up my alley. Football always struck me as a game for wimps, you know. Boring. This is more like it. Guys on horseback playing polo with a calf’s headless body. A great excuse to mutilate your fellow man as far as I could see. They should start up a buzkashi league in Canada and the States.
Seriously, I was a little shocked, myself. So was Charole. One of her favourite times of the year, she said, “back home in Montana,” was when the newborn calves started dotting the various pastures. Sounds idyllic. But anything to do with home, these days, sounds idyllic.
Anyway, now we’re back at the Mowafaq. (Is this a hotel chain or what?) We like this place so much that we don’t want to leave. Why don’t we stay a week, Pete? I just loved waking up this morning and finding a dead rat lying on Mick’s chest. A real eye-opener, that, better than caffeine in the morning. Still, maybe it was just what the doctor ordered. Maybe dead rats are a cure-all, here in Afghanistan. Seeing is believing. Mick is up and about all of a sudden, as limber as ever. It’s amazing how effective home remedies in these ancient civilizations can be.
from Kelly’s diary
Nov. 27
M. spent the day with D. yesterday, I spent the day with Pat. This bus is like a high school: not much changes after the
graduation. We still play the old games, the ones with the emotions as markers. You make me jealous, I’ll make you jealous & we’ll dance around the green-eyed monster that might’ve been our love. We’re off to a late start this morning. Small perfect prisms are dancing & floating all over the bus, & that should be enough to cheer me up, but M.’s sitting with D. & Pat. is sitting at the tables, all smug with himself: he thinks he’s going to get laid 1 of these nights. Just had an eventful loo-stop. S told Rob to take a picture of a chadried woman in black, hauling water from a well, & Rob did, & almost had his throat slit as a direct result. Rob thinks she did it on purpose & threatened to slice open her throat. Pete no longer makes much of an effort to hide his scowls when the loo-stop calls become too frequent.
Mick
When I woke up, Dana’s face was on the screen, saying something about a dead rat and how Pete wasn’t kidding about the hotel needing fumigators. She picked up this rat by its tail took it to the window turfed it out through one of the broken panes, real nonchalant. Kelly lying on her side in bed staring at Dana. What were you saying about the future, Dana says to Dave. Then the sides and knobs of the screen fade and melt away and she’s saying Mick? And Dave’s in my ear, saying say it won’t be fire that destroys the earth this time, as everyone is predicting. It will be water. I pass this on.
“Water?” says Dana. “You mean it’s going to rain again for forty days?”
I close my eyes, like I’m listening to something, which is exactly what I’m doing of course. Then I say, “After Turkey joins the Common Market so it becomes what they called the ten-headed dragon in the Bible, a pope’ll be shot, a president and rock star too, but the pope and president will survive and he’ll kill Gadhafi’s daughter and then the Americans will shoot down an Iranian plane and then there’ll be a few years of peace, thanks to the Russians. They’ll even dismantle a few warheads, but then Shi’ite terrorists are going to bomb a nuclear station on the San Andreas Fault and that’ll cause a quake that’ll destroy both coasts and cause a dust cloud that’ll change the weather for twenty years. There’ll be a worldwide drought and the water supply will be poisoned by radiation and pure water will be worth more than gold and after that things will get nasty. Some sex disease is going to kill a quarter of the world’s population and the Mount of Olives will be split in two. Jerusalem will get hit by a quake. There’s going to be some kind of world ruler. Everyone’s going to have a Chargex number on their hand and if they don’t they’ll starve. A few million people will suddenly disappear up into the air and down into the Bermuda Triangle and all the fish in the oceans will die and then the economic system’s going to fail and then the bombs will start falling. The only survivors will be people high in the mountains, like in the Andes and the Alps and the Himalayas and some place called Cripple Creek, Colorado.”
By this time, Kelly was sitting up in bed and she had her glasses on.
I’d said all this real fast, and in a way I think it was Dave talking. He says it was. In a way. He’d got onto my delta wave,22 he said, and rode it for a while.
Kelly said, “How long is all this going to take?”
But Dave had hung up. So I said, oh, maybe thirty years. Because I didn’t want to depress anybody so early in the morning.
Dana said to Kelly, “He can sure shoot a wonderful line of bullshit, can’t he?”
Kelly nodded her head. “He certainly can,” she said.
I let it pass. I was hungry and feeling stiff. I got up and stretched and said, “So what’s on the agenda today?”
“I’m going to go find some aspirin somewhere,” said Dana. “I’m all out.”
“Hey, I could use some of that too,” I said.
Well this is depressing. About half an hour ago the guy across the hall hacked up his lunch and died, just like that. Kind of a bummer. Really put Soon in a bad mood. She kind of snapped at me when I asked her if she knew the guy from before. I think she maybe knew the guy. Maybe they went to school together. He was about her age. Dave says she did. Didn’t know a lick of English but he seemed like a nice guy. Dave says I’ll have to mourn him later. Good old heartless Dave. Daylight’s burning, he says.
Okay. So Dana asked Kelly if she wanted to come with us but she said no thanks.
So we’re talking about great concerts we’d seen as we shuffle down Kandahar’s main street. This after Pete had taken us out to see a weird game where a bunch of Afghanis rode around on horses and played polo with this headless calf s body. But everything seemed weird to me by this time.
Dana said she’d seen the Eagles once in a small club, that was her favourite concert, and actually my favourite concert was in a bar, Bim was playing, I really like Bim. Short little guy with glasses twice as thick as Kelly’s, a harelip, and he makes this great music, twitching his legs as if he’s on strings, some kind of marionette. Dana had never heard of him. I think it’s his name that does him in. Schoolyard name. He should change it.
Anyway it didn’t take me and Dana long to find a drug pusher.
We were looking at these Afghanis making bread in a small stone oven, and this young girl was handing us both a slice when this voice behind us says, “Yeah, that’s real good bread. Best bread in town, right here.”
It was an American voice. Washington State. I’d heard the accent before.
We turn around.
It’s an American albino dwarf, in the flesh, so to speak. Maybe four feet tall with a boot-shaped face full of zits and a boil on the tip of his nose. Sorriest excuse for a human being I’d seen since Freddy Freak.
He’s wearing this serape and torn jeans and worn-out moccasins. Had a leg brace on his left leg.
I take a bite of the bread. Soft and warm. “Not bad,” I say.
Turns out he comes from a town called Wilbur, up in the Cascades. I’d been there with the old man. Weird place. There’s all these lava flows. It’s like a moonscape.
We tell him where we’re from, etc. and it was just a matter of time before he got to the point, and we say, yeah, we might be interested in some drugs.
>
“Yeah, like which ones?” he says.
“Aspirin,” I say. “292s.”
He looks disappointed. “Hey, man, heavy doper.”
Me and Dana both laugh.
“We’d also take some opium,” says Dana, “if you’ve got some.”
No problem there. He sells us a few grams. But as for the aspirin, he says, that could be a problem. “What’s it for?” he says.
“This and that,” I say. “Cracked ribs, toothache.”
“Try some chilli capsicum on the toothache,” he says. “These people might have it.”
And then he’s gone. Before I had a chance to ask him how the hell he happened to end up in a God-forsaken town like Kandahar, selling drugs to tourists. I asked Dave but Dave was too lazy to tell me. He said it was a long story.
Those breadmakers did have some chilli capsicum, though. I didn’t really think it’d work. Otherwise why wouldn’t Dave have told me about it. Huh, Dave? Dave says he doesn’t know everything. That’s for sure. He didn’t know about the Delhi dentist or my hand. Dana and me head back to the hotel, end up getting lost on the way. Came across this rock pile full of shit, an old man squatting on one of the rocks like a buzzard. There were all these crazies walking around. They don’t have a lot of insane asylums in Afghanistan. Dana said it reminded her of that scene in Catch-22 where Yossarian walks down that street in Rome and sees a guy beating his horse and a soldier getting a blow-job in a doorway and another guy getting shot. Good movie. Alan Arkin’s great. He played a great psycho in Wait Until Dark. That’s one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. I remember I saw it in a hotel room on TV with Nancy Pickles and we made love for the first time that night. One of the best nights of my life. Anyway. We eventually get back to the hotel and the bus is gone, just us in the room, and I make a water solution of the capsicum and put it in an eyedropper that Dana has and squirt it in the tooth, and I’ll be damned it does work. I let out a little whoop and do a jig around the floor and give Dana a hug that lasts just a little longer than I thought it was going to. Then she looks me in the eye and says, “Let’s have some tea.”
“A pregnant idea,” I say. And it’s out before I realized that I’d put my foot in it.
“Oops, sorry,” I say.
Dana just smiles. She’s easy to get along with.
“That’s okay.”
And so we have our tea. And she catches me up on everything I missed while I was out to lunch, back in Mashhad. That Patrick and Kelly have a little flirtation going, she said, thanks to the fact that Rockstar smashed Patrick’s glasses. And I tell her about what those Afghanis did to me back at the border. I think they were Russians, actually, in Afghan clothing. Dana said the least they could’ve done was be gentle so I could’ve got a cheap thrill out of it. I laughed. I could laugh about it, since my tooth had stopped hurting. Too bad that capsicum didn’t work on cracked ribs, I would’ve busted my gut. And then we told each other our life stories. She’d gone to this convent in high school and went through a lesbian period, she said, right up until she graduated, and then she went wild for two years with men, and that abortion she had in Istanbul wasn’t her first or even her second.
“Us Catholics have hang-ups about birth control, you see,” she says.
“I see,” I say.
“I think the thing to do is just to give up sex,” she says.
I look at her. We’re just kind of lying back on her bed, staring at this spider spinning a web in a broken window. “Yeah, really?” I say.
She laughs. “No, not really. I could never give up sex. I’m crazy about it. I’ve been masturbating since I was six. It’s this idea of forbidden fruit that they instill into us. Makes us want to reach out and take a big bite. Me it does, at least.”
Maybe it was the fact that I’d been out of commission so long. Not even able to beat off. All that jism stored up. Aching all over and I’m horny as a hoot owl. I was just in a great mood, that’s all. My tooth didn’t hurt. I had a whole package of the capsicum stuff. High as a kite with a beautiful woman.
Those chapped lips. She was wearing a loose blue shirt over a dark blue camisole with spaghetti straps, no bra beneath. She looked good enough to get stoned by more Moslem women. I guess it was a chance she was willing to take to look good. I feel good just thinking about the way she looked that day. She’d lost some weight. Her jeans were just a little loose.
“Gee,” I said. “I wonder when everybody’s going to get back.”
Turns out Pete had taken them out to look at some irrigation canals, of all things.
“I wonder too,” she said, and she reached out and took my hand, gave me a smile that turned my heart to cottage cheese. “But I always like it best at night. Especially the first time. So we’ll have to wait.”
I hadn’t even known what I was talking about.
“Besides,” said Dana, “there’s this new moon coming up.”
That brought me up short. “How’d you know about that?” I said.
She laughed. “Come on, Mick. Everybody knows everything about everyone on the bus. You’re not the only person that Kelly talks horoscopes with.”
Yeah, okay, fair enough. Still I was a little surprised. I had thought Kelly only talked to me about certain things.
“What’s happening with Suzie by the way?” I asked, just to change the subject, and Dana said you’re psychic, you should know, and I said, well, last time I checked in with the All Knowing One, Rob was pissed off at Suzie because Patrick found out he only had one testicle and he’s threatened to kill her when we get to Kathmandu.
“Either that or marry her,” said Dana. “He still hasn’t quite made up his mind.”
That was worth another laugh, and another cup of opium tea, and I remember thinking, sitting there watching a fly struggle in that web, that this might be the start of better days.
Patrick’s daybook entry
Ms. Byrnes claims she doesn’t give “one bloody damn” about the daybook any more. We can, she states emphatically, do whatever we bloody well want with it, not excluding using it for toilet paper, which is, at this point in time, a very real possibility.
Be that as it may.
On the forty-eighth day of the Haphazard Indian Trek, I arose from a foul, infested mattress, fresh from malaria nightmares concerning farm animals and polo mallets. Compared to buzkhazi,* rugby seems very much a game for sequestered octogenarians. But I digress. That was yesterday. This is today. Upon rising, I discovered that Mick was caught in the clutches of a strangled rat. When I awoke, he was discom-bobulated, as usual, and had no memory of how the dead rat came to be lying on his chest. Chalk it up as another Merry Globester mystery. Conjecture concerning that, as well as the smell of a certain Globester’s socks, drove me out into the morning streets of Kandahar, where I wandered among barely-glimpsed women in chadris and the men in their tattered khaki (there is something to be said about walking through this world half blind) till potholes prompted me to hail a horse and buggy. However, as hinted already, the streets of Kandahar are less than glorious tributes to the wonders of macadamization, all of which served to unsettle something in the pit of my bowels. I managed, with some bluster and the presentation of several ragged Afghanis, to persuade the Pathan at the reins to take me to a squatter. A literal squatter. A rock pile spattered with fecal matter of all shapes, sizes, textures and fragrance. I am beginning to look back on the Turkish Delights with some fondness, given the perspective of time and distance. However, having relieved myself, I purchased some dusky, worm-riddled apples, for our drive to Kabul, from a merchant missing four fingers (a buzkhazi veteran, no doubt) and then rode back to the hotel, where Pete was putting the bus in gear. As Kandahar’s shanty skyline disappears behind us, I sit and peel my apple, and while I peel my apple, I’m reminded of a letter I received from a friend while we were in Istanbul, lo, these many eons ago. Please don’t tell me about the bad experiences you’re having, she advised me. Because that means you’re not al
lowing the good things to come through. Tell me, she said,
* Patrick’s one misspelling, that I’ve noticed. — D.W.
301
of all the sunsets, the scenery, the friendships, the beautiful and exotic women, and remember that each day will bring to you something that most of your friends will never see.
Yes. She has an excellent point. And I can only pray that none of my friends will ever be forced to relieve themselves in the midst of an outdoor Afghani squatter. Or to watch the horror of a buzkhazi match. Or to wake up with dead rats at their throats. To name but a minimal number of experiential joys that have transpired within the last six hours.
Kelly’s daybook entry
Nov. 28
Kabul. Another Malaria Monday has come & gone, & nightmares still gallop through certain psyches. That’s still no reason not to do what tourists do best, which is see the sights. For some of us, that is. 1 or 2 people were quite conspicuous by their absence on today’s little tour of the Char Chatta Bazaar and the Mausoleum of King Nadir Shah and the animal market and the Kabul Zoo and the Kabul Museum and the Chilstoon, Rishkor and Baber’s Gardens. (Did I leave anything out?) The good news, of course, is that Tim & Mary are safe & sound & somewhere to the west of us, grooving on gigantic Buddhas, & that Kabul has loads of my favourite gem, the lapis lazuli. The bad news is that there’s still no sign of Frank. So we make do instead with Greco-Buddhist sculpture & the world’s oldest skeleton, while we ask ourselves, what are those traffic lights doing in this city? Nobody pays any attention to them. Right now I’m looking out the window & I can see a poor farm family, on ox & cart, caught in the middle of an intersection, horns blaring at them from all directions. I can hear the old gentleman with the white beard and the gunny-sack fashion statement saying, “By Allah, Martha, it’s the last time you get to the city in a camel’s age!” It’s probably their anniversary: they come into town for a decent ashak and bolani23 & this is what they get. Life is full of disappointment. But what can you do, except hang in there?