All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  His face flushed warm, and the images spun through him like water down a drain. He could see his dog, a springer spaniel, poised above the shallows of the lake, her tail vibrating in anticipation, her brown eyes the color of her coat open wide as she searched for minnows before plunging her head beneath the surface. The blindfold left him increasingly vulnerable to memory because he couldn’t use his vision to distract himself with objects in the room.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said. “The mundane things that rack your heart when you’re away from everything you’ve known.”

  “I—” he said. “Some of those things were right. Some weren’t. You have a very good imagination.”

  “Which weren’t right?”

  This he wouldn’t answer.

  “And yes, I do have a very good imagination.”

  “Can I ask you a question? How old are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It’s not that I would mind you knowing in other circumstances. But when and if you leave here, that’s not information I want you to have.”

  “But you told me yesterday about the love who brought you here.”

  She didn’t respond to this, and sat quietly, and it dawned on him that the more he learned about her the less likely it was that he would leave alive.

  “It’s funny in a way,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “That you would use childhood memories of your hostages as a means to get a ransom.”

  “Missing home can be more powerful than a good beating, as you put it.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, you didn’t. You’re very careful with the words you choose, I think. That would be much harder if we were to sit here for hours with you blindfolded. But for now we don’t have that much time.”

  “What do you do when you’re not here? Do you have other guests assigned to you?”

  “Guests.” She laughed. “Why do you ask? Are you jealous?”

  “Did you actually talk to my mother?”

  “Someone did. She’s older now, and a little lonely. So for her, it works the same way as it does with you. You tug at a loose string of something she remembers, and other details come pouring out. You can’t be surprised that the first things she spoke of were about you as a small boy.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the first thing any mother would say about her grown child, whether he’s a hostage or on death row. If she can make him be seen as a boy, as someone who was once innocent and sweet, then there’s a chance he’ll be set free.”

  “You sound like you know something about it.”

  She stood up then and walked over to the window. He imagined her arching her neck to look outside.

  “You were wrong about the leeches,” he said. “I was terrified of them when I was a kid.”

  “No mother would tell a story of torture on her captured son. Even if the subject was leeches.”

  “It was an interesting choice of details. You must know something about Midwestern lakes.”

  “As if that were the only place there are lakes and leeches.”

  He heard her step quietly back to the chair and sit down.

  “You asked me about what I do when I’m not here. What do you do when I’m not here?”

  It had been, he believed, over a week since his capture, but already the days had begun to run into each other, like a bleak version of a Florida vacation he’d once taken with Lynne where the sun and the ocean gave the illusion there were days and nights, but neither accumulating. Had he been more afraid, he supposed, the hours would have passed even more slowly, but with nothing to read, no conversation, no television or phone, and nowhere to move other than along the walls of the small room where either Saabir’s or Azhar’s eyes followed him as if they were watching a distant boat move along the horizon, he was consumed by tedium. At times, it was a blunt weapon that helped him fend off what he knew would be a disorienting sorrow, but other times it had become so unendurable that it would part unexpectedly, and an image of Claire riding on his shoulders (a photograph his sister had taken), or something commonplace, like Lynne setting a plate in front of him, would come slicing through.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I look forward to eating. To counting each bite of food. I think I’m even starting to look forward to your blindfold.”

  “So when you sit here for all those hours with nothing to do but think. No dreams? No erotic fantasies?”

  He laughed at this. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Those things don’t disappear just because you’re a captive.”

  “Well, they have for me.” He couldn’t help but wonder what she looked like, but he hadn’t for a moment thought about her sexually, much less anyone else in the past weeks with the possible exception of Lynne, with whom sex, infrequent as it was, had become a comfort.

  “I’d like to propose something for you to think about,” she said. “For both of us to think about, given we have little else to take up our time together. I can only spend so many minutes plying you for a ransom, and you can only hope for so long for freedom or escape.”

  “I’m not looking to escape.”

  “I can tell that about you, which is why I’d like to propose this to you.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Your daughter. Claire. It’s a pretty name. I mean that with all sincerity. A hopeful name, in its meaning.”

  The sound of it was like a hand closing over his heart.

  “How well did you know her?”

  “How well did I know her? She was my daughter, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence. Or yours. We both know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. My own father showed almost no curiosity about me once I’d left home. Or once I was caught between childhood and puberty, to be honest, and my arms and legs no longer fit his pet name for me.”

  He thought she’d want him to ask what it was, but he didn’t.

  “So if you think you knew Claire well, I have a proposal for you. I would like you to tell me the story of her life.”

  Something came hurtling at him from the inside, and he turned his head.

  “I know about her death,” she continued. “A murder. By someone looking for someone else, though she shouldn’t have been in the room with that someone else. I’m sorry about that, Marc. About this. But here, in the slums of Pakistan, that’s an undramatic way to die. I’m sorry, but it is. It’s what everyone has come to dread, but half expect. And you probably don’t want to know the story of her death, or you would have gone back home for the funeral. Except for one detail, and that’s what she was thinking at the moment she was killed. And you can never know that.”

  “I do not want to know that,” he said defiantly.

  “Why not? I would want to know. Though I think it would usually disappoint us. I read once about Einstein’s death, and how his nurse couldn’t understand his final words because they were in German. As if, you know, he’d revealed a new scientific insight or was somehow translating for God in those last minutes. It was just as likely he could have been remembering a picnic he’d had with his mother when he was a boy. More likely.”

  “What good would it do for you to know Claire’s story?”

  “Good? It would do no good for anyone. Maybe for you. It might open some kind of window for you. I don’t know what might fly through it with you trapped in this unhappy place. But as for me. As for me and you, together, waiting here, I wonder about her past so that we can learn to tell the story of her life if she had lived.”

  The thought of this under the blindfold made him feel more helpless.

  “Don’t—there’s nothing—that’s the whole point. I don’t want to—I can’t believe you’d want to do this. I’d rather you torture me, if I had a choice.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Believe me.”

  “You just said murder is commonplace in Pakistan. Suicide bombs. Drone attacks. Yesterday you spoke about how openly pe
ople grieve here. Well, would you ever ask those people to tell you about what they’re grieving? Are they grieving over the ones they’ve lost, or for the stories their loved ones won’t get the chance to live and no one will ever tell? You can’t know those stories. Claire was nineteen. If she were ninety, maybe you could know them then.”

  He was grinding his teeth between sentences, wanting to tear away the blindfold and run out the door.

  “When you were nineteen,” he said, “would you have imagined a time when you’d be sitting in this fucking building across from a bound and blindfolded man while trying to drum up a ransom for some kind of failed cause? I can’t fucking believe this. Just leave me alone.”

  He heard how much he’d raised his voice, and he waited while the sound of it echoed off the bare walls, but Saabir didn’t come through the door.

  “When I was nineteen,” she said calmly, “I was a theater major at a small college in upstate New York. One summer, we did a performance of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Do you know that play?”

  “No, I don’t know that play,” he said, shaken and exasperated.

  “There’s only one character that’s a woman. The other five are men. I was too young for that part, all of us were, but the director wanted to do Pinter. So I was Ruth. I was in love with the boy who played Teddy. That was my husband in the play. We would rehearse for hours, you know, in this theater with no air-conditioning. It was one of those summers where the world outside the theater seemed flattened by the heat. The grass dried to the point that it looked like someone had set it on fire, and in the afternoon, when the wind blew, which it always did, the trees under that sun seemed gray rather than green. You couldn’t be outside for long through this string of ninety-degree days, so after a while, it seemed like our rehearsals, and then our performances, were the lives we were living. And afterward, that boy—because he was a boy then—that boy and I would go up to his apartment, and we would make love almost till dawn on that bed, with the window fan blowing the barely cool air over our bodies. I don’t mean constantly make love. I mean the kind of lovemaking where you would finish, you know, both of you calling out in the way that it seems rare when it’s still new to you, and you’d both be almost slippery with the sweat on your skin, and the sounds of passing cars and insects out your window would lull you to sleep so that you didn’t know you were asleep, or you were simultaneously sleeping and listening to the world outside, then one of you would lay a finger on the still-damp place on the other’s neck, or in the small of his back if he’d turned away from you, and then you would be probing other places, and his breath and the sound of your own blood would rise and recede into the streets again. It was like that then. It was like waves. And after you woke up in the morning, you felt shy, a bit, at what your body revealed about who you were, so maybe the first thing you’d say were lines from the play. The last thing I want is a breath of air. Why do you want a breath of air? I just do. But it’s late. I won’t go far. I’ll come back.”

  Her words hung in the air, and forgetting how he was bound, he tried to lift his hand to reach for them. As she was speaking, he had forgotten his anger, and for the first time, really, he’d almost forgotten where he was, and the heat of the late-spring Karachi morning had become the heat of Midwestern July. Only she’d said upstate New York, hadn’t she? He sat still, waiting for her to continue.

  “So that’s where I was when I was nineteen, and I don’t know that I aspired to be anywhere else. Well, no, of course I did. But when you remember, I mean when I think back—I can’t recall any particular performance, any particular rehearsal. It’s as if they all happened at the same time. I remember the nights afterward. If Claire had lived, I wonder how she would remember age nineteen, years from now.”

  “She was not like you.”

  “You don’t know how I was.”

  “She wasn’t the way you described yourself that summer. If she’d been that. If she’d had that.” The room was returning to him, slowly. Someone’s feet shuffled outside the door. “If you had died at age nineteen, and your father knew that story, I wonder if that would have been a comfort to him. To know that you had those months.”

  “Like I’ve told you, my father was not like you, Marc.”

  “The kind of father who would travel to Pakistan for half a year not knowing where his daughter was sleeping at night?” Marc asked. “Not even knowing for certain the city she was sleeping in?” But he knew better than to berate himself. It was what had led him to Lyari.

  He said, “I couldn’t help you with the story of who she was when she died. So I can’t help you with the story of who she might have become.”

  “So there’s nothing you remember from her childhood? A time where you knew things were changing? I don’t believe for a minute you don’t know some of her story.”

  He was aware that beneath the blindfold his eyes were open, as if he were looking at her. But then he closed them.

  “She was—” He pulled at the ropes on his wrists, and the memory tumbled forward as his resistance eased away. “Maybe twelve. Fifth grade, I think. Maybe sixth. I was in her room gathering laundry. No, I wasn’t the house domestic, but I tried to pitch in, and Lynne had trained me to go through pants pockets.”

  Claire’s room appeared to him then. There were no posters of boy bands, or photos of friends, or Disney princesses. Instead, a poster of Jimi Hendrix after Claire had started playing guitar, a large, blue drawing of his head with a joint in the corner of his mouth. Harmless, Lynne had said, when he’d questioned it. Bob Dylan as a young man in the streets of New York. Janis Joplin in her wire rims, and a rapper who’d been murdered whose name he couldn’t remember. “I like your wall of dead friends,” he’d said to Claire.

  “Bob Dylan’s not dead,” she’d told him.

  “Depends on your perspective.”

  She’d smiled.

  “What did you find in her pockets?” the woman said, and he realized he’d fallen silent. “A note, I assume?”

  “A letter. A letter from an older school friend when, you know, even then kids were texting. So I was surprised. The girl’s name was Sally. It was a pretty long letter, with names of kids, only some of which I’d heard of, and the girl, Sally, was going on about how she was so sorry that she’d taken away Claire’s innocence. I had no idea what that meant. Claire was twelve years old. But at the end of the letter, the girl wrote that she wasn’t being serious when she asked Claire to cut herself to prove that she loved her, and that she couldn’t believe she’d done it and she should never do it again. I didn’t tell Lynne right away. But that night, when Claire was asleep, I walked into her room. She was a sound sleeper, and it was a hot night, and her blankets were off. She still had these thin legs and arms. She was a child. Still a small girl. But high on top of her thigh was a long slice, still scabbed over. I woke her up on the spot. She was disoriented. She told me she’d dropped a pair of scissors when she was wearing shorts, but I didn’t believe her. I stood over her, asking again and again, ‘Did you make the cut? Did you make the cut?’ As if I were asking whether she’d made the girls’ softball team.”

  “Did she tell you the truth?” the woman asked quietly.

  “Not then. Lynne bought her story. She told Lynne that she’d lied to Sally about cutting herself. Then years later, about the time she turned eighteen, when she was applying for colleges, I was sure she wouldn’t get in because of her grades. She was a smart kid, good test scores, and all. A good writer, but didn’t give a damn about her high school classes. Then she was accepted by the University of Chicago, which no one expected. She called me the day the letter came, and after reading the first paragraph, she said, ‘So, Dad. Looks like I made the cut.’ And when I said something innocuous like, ‘That’s for sure,’ she said, ‘No, Dad, get it? I made the cut. I made the cut.’”

  The woman laughed loudly at this. “That’s a good line,” she said. “She had a sense of humor.”

  He nodded. “I s
uppose I don’t find it particularly funny right now. She dropped out of high school soon after that.”

  He heard the door open, and Saabir came in and asked something in Urdu in a tone of insistence. She turned her head and explained it to him in firm, but patient, detail. He offered a curt sentence in return, and closed the door.

  “He heard me laugh,” she said. “I have to go soon.”

  “You’re not allowed to laugh?”

  “We’re not supposed to be enjoying ourselves in here.”

  “Little risk of that.”

  She let out a long breath. Beneath her garments, she seemed to cross and uncross her legs.

  “So Claire is thirty-two,” she said.

  “What?”

  “So Claire is thirty-two. Her birthday is in—?”

  “June.”

  “June. And she’s thirty-two now, and she’s living far away from you. Far away from Lynne. In a small town out west, in Montana, maybe, or eastern California. It’s a town on a highway, not an interstate, but a state road. It’s traveled more heavily in the summertime because tourists pass through going from one place to another, but they do not come to this town to sightsee. There’s a range of mountains, and on clear days you can see one that’s snowcapped, but it’s too far away once you’ve lived in that town for a few years to think about driving there to cool off in the summer heat. Claire and her husband own a small motel where mostly truckers stay, and the people passing through who don’t want to spend the money on the Best Western a few miles farther up the road. There are twelve rooms all on one level, with paneling inside, and the musty smell of bedspreads Claire smilingly describes as ‘vintage’; they bought the motel over a year ago, and they talked about making improvements, but others in that town that too slowly warmed to them told them they loved the place as it was, and anyway, shortly after they’d bought it Claire had become pregnant, wasn’t particularly happy about it, and now the baby is three months old. She uses cloth diapers to save money, washing them in the big machine along with the soiled sheets of the guests of the motel. But the diapers she hangs on a clothesline behind the building because she thinks the sun and the wind coming down off the hills scent them in ways that a drier sheet never could. The clothesline is worn, and breaks on occasion, and money’s tight enough that she’s stubborn about buying a new one, and one day, while repairing it again, she’s pulling it so taut, anchoring it under her foot so she can draw it level with the sky, that it snaps on the other end, flies at her, and whips across her thigh just under the hem of her shorts, and leaves a long welt. She curses once, and rubs it, and sees it running almost parallel to an old threadlike scar. And she remembers then this girl she loved when she was a child who asked her to put it there, the first person she’d ever loved, a girl she had kissed so as to know what kissing was like. And then she smiles, looks down at the baby sleeping in her bassinet, and goes back to fixing the clothesline.”