by Daniel Lowe
He handed the piece of cloth back to Saabir, who folded it neatly and slipped it back into his pocket. This kindness led him to take a risk.
“Josephine,” he said.
Saabir laughed once, and shook his head.
“Well, then, whatever her name is. What does she look like?” He passed his hand over his face, and through his hair matted with sweat.
Saabir shook his head again, this time with a slight smile, and said, “No.” Then he hoisted his gun higher on his shoulder, and said, “She is man. Man.”
“She’s strong like a man?”
“No. Eyes. Eyes of man. See?” Saabir belatedly recognized the irony of the word, smiled, and then pointed at Marc very deliberately, and with the same finger slid it across his throat.
“Josephine,” Saabir approximated, and smiled again, while Marc involuntarily brought his fingers to his Adam’s apple.
“Eat,” Saabir said, and rose to go to the door to fetch food from wherever it was prepared for him, probably in one of the low houses near this one, but someone knocked before he got there, and Saabir slipped outside where he overheard what sounded like an urgent conversation between Saabir and who he guessed was Azhar.
Then Saabir burst through the door and walked over to where Marc was still sitting on the mat, and reached down and grabbed him under each armpit and pulled him to his feet.
“Hey-hey,” Marc said. “Just tell me what you want me to do.” But Saabir was already standing behind him, slipping the blindfold over his eyes and yanking it hard, and tying the rope around his wrists so there would be no risk of the knots loosening. Saabir then pushed him toward the door, and outside; mingling with the bright, damp smell of the morning was the exhaust of a car, throttling low in what he knew was the narrow road that ran a few feet away from the house, and Saabir was pushing down on his head like a television cop—despite a rising sense of fear Marc laughed at the thought—and then he was inside and Saabir slammed hard into the driver’s seat and the tires slipped for a half second before they went speeding away.
Marc clenched his teeth as they drove. He reasoned they were not taking him away to execute him, since clearly they had been taken by surprise. Still, this kind of flight was cold comfort, and he could feel his pulse in his bound hands. He guessed someone had learned where he was being held hostage, whether that was a Pakistani agency contacted by the American embassy, or some other terrorist organization, or, as the woman suggested, an angry family who had lost someone to a drone missile. They were banging over rough patches of road, and he hadn’t eaten anything, and he’d read somewhere that you couldn’t get carsick unless your eyes were open, but within fifteen minutes his stomach was turning over, and he groaned, and lay across the seat to try to steady the impact of the rocking car, which was almost impossible with his hands tied behind him. Saabir said something to him in Urdu, likely that it was better for him to lie down, anyway, in terms of them being observed, but if Saabir had been ordering him to sit up he wouldn’t have found the strength.
He wished he could fall back to sleep, which had been the elixir for this kind of nausea when he was a boy, facilitated by the pale yellow tablet of Dramamine that was actually intended to knock him out, he learned, when Claire as a small girl suffered from the same kind of carsickness, and, on particularly long drives, Lynne would sometimes have her take half a pill just to curb her restlessness. When she was a baby, she’d hated the car seat, hated it, had howled in protest to the point of exhaustion during long drives, and once when he’d yelled at Lynne, who had given up, “Can’t you shut that kid the fuck up?” she’d said, “How would you like to be strapped into a big blue box on wheels with no way to understand why you’re not allowed to move, or play, or sit in your mother’s lap? She’s pissed off because it doesn’t make any sense,” which had never occurred to him before, but now, lying on his side with the smell of exhaust seeping through the floorboards, he fully understood.
* * *
His father slammed the brakes hard while pulling to the side of the road, threw open the van door, and led him out into the woods. He stood next to Marc, his arms crossed, and hissed, “Well, goddamn it, throw up. C’mon, throw up, for Christ’s sake. We’re two miles away from camp, and you couldn’t wait. So throw up.”
Under the blindfold, he opened his eyes. For a moment, he thought his father was behind the wheel, or that he himself was driving, and Claire was in the backseat, and he was hissing at her. He must have fallen asleep, gratefully, and his stomach had settled and the road was smoother. He started to sit up, but Saabir said, “No.” The pit in his belly was drilled deeper by hunger, but at least there was no nausea.
They drove for what seemed like another hour, leaving what must have been the main road, and then over another route that was rough with sudden drops, but his carsickness didn’t return. At last, Saabir pulled over and turned off the car. He sat without speaking for a full minute, likely surveying the landscape, and then pushed open the car door, and Marc heard the passenger-side door pushed open, too; he’d been unaware that another person, likely Azhar, was there for the entire ride, but it made sense that Saabir wouldn’t be driving alone. The air smelled dry and warm, leaning toward hot, and in the absence of the car engine there was virtually no sound. Marc was afraid to leave the car.
Saabir opened his door then and said, “Up,” and Marc slowly flexed his knees and rose to his feet. He felt Saabir’s hand in the small of his back as Saabir led him along a path where Marc had to lift his feet so as not to stumble. He could hear the wind in what sounded like low trees or shrubs, and something skittered away in front of them. If he were to be executed, this would seem the perfect place; his body would never be found.
They reached a spot on the path where, under the blindfold, he could tell the light was dimmed, and then Saabir stopped. He unknotted the blindfold first, and when it fell away Saabir was standing directly in front of him, his hand on the trigger of the gun, and a rock wall was rising behind him. Above, the sky was pale blue with no sun; they seemed to be in a mountain range, and, if they had been keeping him on the outskirts of Karachi, it was likely the Kirthar Mountains, one of the few places he’d thought he might visit when he’d committed to the corporate office in Pakistan because of a supposedly beautiful national park.
“Marc, Saabir is going to untie your hands. But if you turn around to look at me, he will kill you. Do you understand that?”
Marc nodded. He was surprised that she’d been in the car and he hadn’t sensed her presence, and felt his skin prickle at the sound of her voice, and then a brief sense of relief. Saabir moved behind him and unknotted the rope, and Marc folded his shoulders in like wings and felt the blood return to his forearms and fingers. It was good to breathe the fresh air of this place, and he filled his lungs with the dry, slightly sweet fragrance. He took a closer look at the rock wall in front of him, and on it was a scrawled image of what looked like an antelope with long, curved horns. Next to it was a dim handprint.
“Petroglyphs,” he said. “Is that what you called them?”
She didn’t answer him then. It was difficult to gain a perspective on where they were when he couldn’t turn away from the wall. It seemed ridiculous, without the blindfold, to not simply shift his stance and look at her. Saabir took a few steps to one side and sat down on a small, flat boulder, his gun resting on his lap. From his pocket, he took a pack of cigarettes, withdrew one, and lit it with a lighter. The smoke smelled good, and distantly familiar. Marc heard her footsteps on the stones behind him.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “This one looks like an ibex.”
“So you knew this was here?”
“Well, we didn’t stumble on it, no.”
Saabir lifted the cigarette to his mouth. He was watching the woman closely.
“Why do you suppose so many of them come with handprints?” Marc asked.
“The obvious reason. A signature in the time before written language.”
/> “A handprint is more intimate, I think.” He realized he was more curious about her appearance away from the room.
“I’m coming around to your right, so I want you to slowly turn to your left, away from the wall.”
He heard her moving in a half circle, and he mirrored her, glimpsing, he thought, a length of dark-blue garment before he came around and saw the valley below their perch on an overhang. There were a few dry grasses, almost gold in the sunlight that reached them there, and farther on a grove of low, green trees around a source of water that was hidden from him, and beyond these, in the distance, dry, slightly pink mountains with deep, dark grooves he knew were likely expanses of low evergreens or shrubs that were shielded from the sun and wind.
“This is … It’s an incredibly beautiful place,” he said, and he was surprised that his eyes filled. “So desolate.”
“Sometimes, from here, you can see herds of wild goats. I don’t see any today, though. It’s been a long time since I’ve come here.”
Saabir was looking off into the horizon, and then glanced back to where they stood. He put his cigarette out on the rock and stood up, stretching his back. A large bird darted out from a crevice in the rock, and reflexively Saabir’s hand went to his gun, but then he relaxed it, and when the bird flew into the light its shadow briefly flitted across Saabir’s face. He smiled faintly. The bird soared high above the valley.
“I don’t imagine this was an organized field trip,” Marc said to the woman.
“No. There was word that someone was coming for you. We don’t know who. Azhar stayed back and made sure there was no sign of your presence. When they find nothing there, we’ll be able to take you back. They won’t search there again soon.”
“Someone might say something.”
“I know; that’s always a risk. But it comes with a price, so it’s unlikely.”
“Sometimes, I wonder if it’s only three of you. You, Saabir, and Azhar. The four of us now.”
She didn’t say anything to this.
“Why here?” he asked.
“If you have to run, and you know you haven’t been followed, then why not here? It’s a place Saabir has known since he was a boy. And I’d told you about the petroglyphs.”
“How do I know that Saabir didn’t make those himself?”
Every time they said his name, Saabir, who had sat back down on the stone, glanced over at them.
“We need to stop mentioning him,” she said. “Why would you want to believe that, anyway? We could have hidden in a Lyari slum. Instead, we took you to this beautiful place with this ancient art. Maybe it should mean something to you.”
“Pardon me if I’m not grateful.”
“You may never see anything like this again.”
On the distant hills, clouds cast shadows that mottled the land, and seemed to slide into and emerge from the stony valleys.
“It’s hot.”
“A cool day for this time of year. We’ll need to leave before midafternoon. Claire would have loved it here,” she said.
He shook his head. “Claire lived her entire life in the city. We sent her away to an expensive sleepaway camp when she was a kid, and she had a counselor call us within a day because she was terrified of the bugs.”
“I’m not talking about Claire, the child. I mean Claire, the woman. She would have stood here like her father, with her eyes wet.”
“You can’t see my eyes because I can’t see you.”
“But you can see Claire now. And this place is closer to the one she imagined when she first dreamed of opening the hotel. With Jack.”
“This exercise—” He looked out again over the hills. “Inside that tiny room, it almost makes sense. There’s nothing else to see, to think of. But out here, it seems ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that I don’t turn around and look at the person I’m talking to. It’s what anyone would do.”
“Tell me a story about Claire.”
“What if I lie to you? What if I make one up?”
“That’s fine, too.”
Marc laughed at this. He wished he could ask Saabir for a cigarette, who had lit another, and was watching him thoughtfully, as if he, too, were waiting for Marc’s story.
“Do you mind if I sit down?”
“No,” she said. She said something to Saabir, who nodded. “I’m leaning against the wall behind you.”
He imagined the figure of a woman with the petroglyph near her head, as if posed for a photograph. He knelt and folded his knees. Nearer the ground, the air was slightly cooler and smelled of some kind of exotic herb. He breathed the scent in.
“I told you a lie already,” he said. “At least partly. It’s true that Claire was terrified of the bugs at that camp. But later—it’s not that she changed her mind, exactly. Around the time she turned sixteen, well, that was when she started getting into trouble. She began stealing things. Things of no worth, you know? A plastic gold bracelet. A pair of canvas loafers that she wore out of the shoe store. Nothing that would have cost her more than five or ten bucks, and she had a job working at an ice cream shop. And we’d have given her money for anything she’d asked for. When she was caught, she told us that stealing these things was symbolic. She said she never stole anything of value because that might hurt people, and someone might lose their job. She told that to the judge, too, and said, when she took things, she imagined the hands of a poor kid in Vietnam running a scarf through a sewing machine in some dimly lit warehouse where he could never hope for better. And she stole the scarf so Americans couldn’t profit from that poor kid’s work. A girl after your own heart, I guess.”
“Ha. You think you know my heart?”
“Would it matter if I did?”
“Would it matter if you knew Claire’s?”
He wanted to say, At one time I did, but instead he shook his head and waved the thought away.
“Anyway, it was petty theft, and the judge sentenced her to this kind of weekend excursion for wayward kids. She had to go on a three-day canoe trip down a river up north, you know, buildings fires, pitching tents with others, steering the canoe through some pretty substantial rapids, making meals at night. No cell phones. No technology. It was autumn, I remember, and the leaves had turned. It was a cold weekend, but it was supposed to be brilliantly clear. She hardly spoke to us in the two-hour trip to the campground, and when she got out of the car she walked away without saying good-bye. We had to register her without her help, and the camp counselor patted Lynne’s shoulder and told her that it wasn’t all that unusual for the kids who had no choice.”
He stopped for a moment, and looked down at the base of the hills. “I’m guessing streams run through these mountains in the rainy season. There, along the deepest valley.” But the woman didn’t respond to this, and it seemed as if he were speaking only to Saabir.
“When we picked her up on Sunday afternoon, a perfect day, really, a sky deeper and bluer than this one, the red maples the color of apples the way they get up north, she literally bounded to the car. Skipping almost, like she hadn’t since she was a little girl. She jumped into the backseat, and the first thing she said was, ‘Mom and Dad, it snowed! Last night at the campfire. We were sitting around, and the counselor was trying to tell this pretty lame ghost story, and then these snowflakes started to fall from the sky! Not like a lot of them, or anything. But for a few minutes. We all put our faces up, and let the snow fall on them. They melted right away because we were warm from the fire. One kid, Jesse, grabbed the bag of marshmallows and made a little snowman out of them. He used M&Ms for eyes. It was amazing, because you could see the underside of the leaves in the light from the fire and these dark flakes falling down.’”
He stopped there. His chest had tightened when he’d approximated her words and voice, and the tone of both was for a moment suspended in the air.
“Her cheeks were flushed,” he continued. “I mean, like in a kid’s book, apple-red like the leaves. She smelled—a little like this place
. Like dry leaves and a campfire. And for the first half hour of the ride back, she sat up on the backseat and told us about the trip down the river, told us how one kid had fallen in and she was the one to extend the paddle and help pull him back into the canoe. How afterward, all the kids were brave and funny. One boy had stood up in the back of the canoe after riding the rapids, ripped his shirt off, and did a hula dance. One of the girls had stepped out of the canoe and rock-hopped to where a blue plastic bag was snagged on a fallen limb, and stuffed the bag into her pocket, and said, ‘Too pretty for that here.’ And then Claire told us, ‘We sang songs. We sang songs, and actually meant it. I mean we wanted to. A counselor had a guitar, and, like, we sang hippie songs like one by Joni Mitchell called “Circle Game.”’”
Now, a lyric of it spun through his head. He could barely remember the tune.
“For a minute, I thought she’d actually sing it. But of course she didn’t. And of course, Lynne and I were silently delighted, and I was already composing in my head the grateful letter I would write to the judge. After a while, Claire settled back into the seat. I thought she might fall asleep like she had when she was little, but she kept her eyes on the passing landscape.”
Near his knee was a small stone, and he picked it up and gave it a short toss. Saabir watched it slide under a shrub.
“And then, closer to home, when it was almost sunset, we were still outside of town, and we were passing a farm where a line of cows was headed back to the barn. It was idyllic, really. A Norman Rockwell painting of goodness. I looked into the backseat, and I could see Claire’s face. And she was staring at the cows, and then when they were gone, she stared into a dried cornfield that hadn’t yet been harvested. And her eyes were narrowed, and I was astonished to see her crying. And then she said, ‘But that was bullshit. None of it was real. None of it. I can’t believe the things a beautiful place can make you believe.’”