Idris bent his knees and picked up his backpack. He went downstairs slowly, looking cautious and off balance.
Justin sat at his desk, his hands on the wood laminate. The school suddenly seemed like an existence in which everything was coming undone: the cheapest Chinese-made power strips and surge protectors smoking suddenly, the plumbing leaking days after being installed, the internet repeatedly going down, electrical cords breaking, faucets dripping, toilets running, desks wobbling, pens spilling ink. The school was ruining him, but his violence could not be excused. He would pray for forgiveness.
He changed into jeans and a shirt. He’d begun to dress normally more often and attended the church where the embassy workers went, comforted to be around others like himself.
As Justin was leaving, Frank called from his office, asking where he was off to.
A party, Justin told him.
Glad to see you getting out, Frank said.
During the drive, neither Justin nor Idris spoke. They came to the address: walls with floodlights and razor wire, a red metal gate with an open door in it. Clay was standing outside, wearing only a shirt, its sleeves rolled up, showing not just muscle but poise, the way he didn’t settle into his joints but lifted out of them. As Justin walked toward him, Clay pointed to the car.
Is that Idris? Invite him in. Don’t make him sit out here like a driver.
Justin called back, and Idris got out and told Clay he was supposed to meet some friends.
Clay’s eyes narrowed, as if seeing something in the street behind Idris.
Come on. You can be late. This is going to be one hell of a party.
Idris tried to refuse again, but Clay walked into the muddy street and put his arm around him and said, Good to see you, buddy. Let me introduce you to my friends.
More than a dozen people were drinking on the second floor, in a living room with a wall of windows and a sliding glass door to a balcony where a few expats smoked.
Idris went to a table with bowls of nuts, chips, and salsa as Clay led Justin into an empty lounge with couches and a flat-screen TV.
So how are the Afghan girls in bed? Clay asked. I’ve always wondered.
Whatever you’ve heard isn’t true.
Hey, I’m not judging. I know how hard up a guy can get here.
Clay, Justin said. What are you doing with Idris?
I’m giving him a job.
There’s no future in what you’re doing. You’re distracting him from a real education.
It’s true there’s no future in security. The American money is on its way out, so this is his last chance. If he doesn’t take his opportunities now, he’s going to be scraping for the rest of his life. At least this way, he won’t have to beg. Regardless, I got Frank’s permission. He and I had a good sit-down and talked this through. I agreed to pay Idris a real wage that will cover some translating and errands for me plus whatever he does for the school.
When did you see Frank? Justin asked.
I think you were at church.
If Clay hadn’t mentioned Frank’s permission earlier, it was to humiliate Justin in person. And Frank must not have told Justin for the same reason.
As Justin turned to leave, Alexandra came into the doorway. She saw Clay first and smiled. Then she saw Justin.
You two know each other? Justin asked.
We met at the school, she said.
You were there without me?
I wanted some time with the girls, she said sternly, her pupils gleaming like gun barrels.
Clay patted his back. I invited her and her friends over. It’s a party. You invite people.
Hey, Clay! An excessively tanned man with a bald, saurian head shook his hand and, in a Jersey accent, began describing how he’d been ripped off, his tone angry and yet oddly gleeful.
So me and these guys, we decided to ship Afghan rugs to the States. We worked it out. The profit was high. Real high. We rented a shipping container, had it weighed and sealed. Then we sent it to Pakistan and from there to the US. When it arrived, the seal was in perfect condition — date, place, and weight, all correct. But inside there was just dirt. Somewhere along the way, someone replaced the rugs with dirt to the exact ounce and put an identical seal on it.
The man, whom Clay introduced as Mike, cursed and laughed, oblivious to the tension. Justin wanted to warn Alexandra that Clay was using her and Idris to get revenge.
Suddenly, Mike hunkered down, one hand on the floor, like a quarterback. Air boomed into the lounge, clapping against the walls, more palpable than the shaking of the house. Justin’s ears ached. People were rushing into the lounge from the living room, shards popping beneath their feet against the tiles. Clay told Alexandra to stay there.
Outside, rifles fired rapidly. Another detonation battered the air, and a man with a crew cut closed an iron door as thick as a wall.
In the sudden silence, the ringing didn’t let up. On the flat-screen TV’s video feed, the insurgents blew open the house’s front security door.
Justin realized this was the life he’d prayed for. All he’d braved in Kabul — desperation, manipulation, filth, cold, and now violence — was the unlit path of faith.
This was the war he had been denied.
美智子
The first time I saw Clay was through Alexandra’s words, two days after the picnic. I’d been at her house, waiting for Tam, taking a pause from reading to brainstorm an article that wouldn’t feel like a burden to write. Tam had texted me: Traffic is terrible. Make yourself at home! A moment later, Alexandra arrived. She kissed my cheeks and sat across from me.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without a book,” she told me.
Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel was on my knees, salvaged from a storage room, its moldy smell making my eyes itch if I held it too close.
“I wish,” I said, “that every person in my life were an author. I don’t know if people like these characters really exist, but I do know that some authors have so much life in them they need to create worlds to contain it.”
Alexandra was studying me. Most people’s faces opened toward others, but she normally contained herself, organizing what was within her. Her expression shifted, and I had the sense she was making a little space for me.
“You’re right. A world of authors might be fun,” she said. “Books showed me the boundaries that society creates and how to cross them.”
“And now you’re here,” I concluded.
She tilted her head, as if taking time to interpret my words.
“Yes,” she said. “But maybe it’s futile. Maybe authors create meaning because they are desperate to exist, so they keep pushing back the boundaries, like dictators trying to conquer territory.”
We spoke in this vein for a few minutes, discussing whether art was a response to being subjugated by another’s meaning, or if we simply wish to be more than we are — a private desire, not conquest but liberation.
Alexandra then asked if she could share something in confidence. She explained that she’d met Clay that afternoon. She’d gone to the school while Justin was at church, her desire to work with the girls outweighing her growing aversion to him and Frank. The guard had let her in, and from the stairs she’d heard Frank and Clay laughing, unaware that she was there. Frank had been talking about Justin, saying he lacked an understanding of men — words I could easily imagine him speaking. Alexandra described the scene to me, and, later, she detailed it in her journal.
Men know walls exist, Frank had explained as she reached the second floor, because we’ve walked into them. Girls don’t need to do that. Idris is young. He has to be tamed.
Slow grumbling laughter followed.
I’ll give him some work, the other voice — Clay’s — said. I’ll get him in line.
Frank described the situation with Sediqa. You know
, I’ve spent a decade in Afghanistan, but Idris told me I don’t understand how things work here. He actually said, Maybe her uncles are going to sell her, or maybe not. Afghans know how stupid foreigners are. If she gets the scholarship, the entire family benefits.
Why do you keep Idris around? Clay asked.
I have to work with Afghanistan the way it is. This is how Afghan men are. They were raised to be aggressive and manipulative.
Clay and Frank laughed about the nature of men, an all-knowing understanding in their words, a vague, affected compassion, though Clay’s voice sounded perfunctory.
Hello, she said.
As she came to the door, Clay glanced up.
Sitting on the couches, as we waited for Tam, Alexandra told me she couldn’t deny her immediate attraction to him.
“As for Justin, I feel protective toward him,” she said. “I worry about him and admire how much he cares. But I’m wary of his fanaticism. There’s something cold and ideological about him. If he’d succeeded in refusing his need for comfort, he’d never have called me.”
Frank stood, excitedly shook her hand, and introduced her to Clay. She said she felt like she was entering a cage, an old lion trainer displaying his beast: the big man in the folding metal chair, with his hands on his thighs.
“Why is it,” Alexandra asked me, “that we desire those who are bad for us?”
“But it doesn’t hurt you to want him.”
“It does. Because women want men like him, they exist.”
I have a proposition for you, Frank had told her. Pardon me, Clay. I haven’t lost track of our conversation, but I’ve been looking forward to speaking with this remarkable woman all day.
Clay said he had a few calls to make and would step into the backyard so she and Frank could have their meeting. Frank asked if she’d be interested in taking over the school — not right away, but gradually working in that direction, since it needed a woman’s leadership. She knew he was offering her Justin’s job, and she said she couldn’t think that far ahead but agreed to be a mentor for the girls.
While Frank and Clay resumed speaking, she met with Sediqa, who’d been sitting with four girls in the other office, all on their laptops, using Facebook. She and Sediqa went downstairs. They discussed her plans for study in the US. Only at the end of the conversation did Alexandra ask her to tell the other girls that nothing had happened with Justin.
They will never believe, Sediqa said. In our culture, the only power of women is to undercut each other. If we leave the group, if we do anything out of the ordinary, we need men to give us permission and defend our decisions.
But don’t destroy Justin in the process.
No matter what I say or do, no one will believe. The way things are now, they can accept that I got the scholarship. The injustice is acceptable, since I am no more deserving than they are.
But you’re in danger.
We are all in danger.
Sediqa just stared from across the table.
Involuntarily, Alexandra thought of Clay again and how he’d come when Justin was away. This couldn’t be a coincidence. Justin almost never left. Idris must have told Clay.
As she was saying goodbye to Sediqa, Clay came down the stairs and offered her a ride. She accepted, and Frank walked them out. He said he was counting on her. His bones suggested the man he’d once been. After the loss of such strength, he must have sought out new ways to have agency.
As Clay rode his motorcycle out the gate, she waved. In the unlit driveway, Frank’s fossilized head appeared suspended, grinning like a warning on a stick.
Alexandra tightened her headscarf and held the motorcycle with her legs, the vibrations pleasant in her muscles. Despite the jolts against the ruts, she was slow to put her hands on Clay’s back.
The street was darker than the sky, compound lights casting the road in the shadow of walls. Clay read the terrain ahead, weaving through the mud with tiny adjustments or following the gritty tracks of cars over ice. His driving was so steady she didn’t have to hold on tightly. Most men she’d ridden on motorcycles with had taken risks only to oblige her to clutch them.
She wondered how military contractors saw themselves — certainly not as members of a parasitic subculture barely welcome in the very expat circles they guarded. NGO workers and diplomats went about like the cavaliers of Kabul society, having knighted themselves by their very decision to come here. But maybe soldiers of fortune considered themselves the elect.
Arriving at her house, Alexandra loosened her headscarf. Clay was flush from the cold. He didn’t appear hurried, like many expats when they went outside.
She got off the motorcycle. The guard of a house five compounds down stood outside his gate, dressed in white, his hands behind his back in that dignified Afghan way, one hand holding the other’s wrist. He was out of earshot but no doubt noticed every detail.
In her diary later that night, she would write about her brother, Samuel, and the familiar impression she had seeing Clay. Sam had been killed by an IED in Kandahar. Why can I not help but love the vitality of violent men?
Standing outside her gate, she asked Clay what he thought of Frank, and they agreed he was typical.
Typical in type, Clay said, but extreme in nature. Most people are here to make a quick buck or to prove they’re not cowards even though they never served, or to escape a long list of fuck-ups back home, or to fight some private war in a place where it feels like it counts.
But the girls are amazing.
That’s the mystery of this place. What’s good and bad are hard for us to tell apart …
She hadn’t expected him to speak this way, his locutions clear and unselfconscious — like someone who so rarely voices his thoughts that when he does, it’s not in the register of common language. He chooses his words evenly, with a hint of resignation. He told me Frank was trying to build the Afghanistan he wanted, an Afghanistan many Afghans would hate. If Frank had his way, every man in this country would unite — even if they are as diverse as we are — and they’d take up arms against us, and we’d finally have a clear target.
Clay told her that wanting an easy solution to war made people crazy.
We have to be careful, he said. I don’t pretend to save anyone. I’ve never saved anyone.
With Justin, she felt herself walking through a winter desert. She’d been blindsided by Kabul, vulnerable and drawn to his vulnerability. But in his quiet way he was a braggart with his piety, unlike Clay, who was just here for himself, who inhabited his body as if it were the only thing he owned.
He told her about the party and said, Please come. Bring your friends.
“Come with me,” Alexandra implored me. “You and Tam.”
Sometimes Justin seemed youthful, his skin radiant, and at first Alexandra had thought of him, with all his faith, as a sort of noble savage; only later had she realized that he shone brightest in the moments when he tamed the chaos within himself. She’d once seen a TV interview with three bearded Taliban commanders. They’d glowed too. Their teeth flashed in their beards as they laughed. Their joy had been that of superiority, of righteousness — the certainty of those who organized life into one clear story and knew their heroic roles in it. They had seemed devoid of life to her, like something that ignites, blazes, and burns out quickly.
I can’t refuse Clay. Justin will be an anecdote, but Clay is code; blueprints; peeled back to the animal circuitry.
That night, Tam and I went with Alexandra. She walked into the lounge we didn’t know was a safe room, one of her rare smiles transformed from a sign of joy to — as Justin must have seen it — one of betrayal.
After the explosion, I fled to the safe room where twenty-one people sweated and cried, and the TV screen showed Afghans fighting the insurgents to save us.
Months later, as I wrote my novel in interstate motels near swa
mp forest or rocky pine, crickets sawed in weeds and the moon drifted against ebbing clouds. I traveled from Clay’s relatives toward their origins in Quebec. Maine seemed the frontier of an infinite wilderness — rocky, forested, gouged by the southward descent of two and a half million years of glaciers, long lakes like footprints.
Across the Appalachians, in Quebec, I found tamed land, straight roads between farms, villages clustered around gothic Catholic spires — a culture largely unknown to Americans. I learned new myths, about a people who crossed the ocean and copied the ways of the Aboriginals, hunting and fishing and trapping, wandering from Gaspé to Manitoba, to south of the Great Lakes, Ohio and Missouri, down the Mississippi to Louisiana. I realized what I should have in Kabul: America was not the only colonial power in love with stories of frontiers. It had simply written history as if it were the inventor of everything daring and new.
I met Alexandra’s mother in Montreal. She was gaunt: leathery skin on bones, a bulbous nose, and broken veins on her cheeks. Smoke had stained the peeling wallpaper in her apartment, the air stale and dry, smelling of marijuana and cigarettes. A man watched TV, not bothering to get up, his back to me, a seam of the recliner torn, batting hanging like entrails. The screen shone through the sparse clumps of his hair. There were sounds of trumpets and the hooves of horses pounding the earth.
Alexandra’s mother clutched her reddened, scaly hands.
That fucking country stealed my babies, she said in a heavy accent.
It made sense that Alexandra had come from her. It took me a moment to see this. She’d needed to be the savior she hadn’t had.
I drove along the Saint Lawrence afterward, further north.
On my phone, I received an email from my mother, who wrote that she was marrying a wealthy man she’d known for years from the hostess bar. She thought I was still in Kabul, and asked if I’d bought body armor yet and if I would come home soon. She’d tried to protect me, a futile gesture for one woman in a society that had the limited ambition of preventing only the most obvious forms of violence.
On a northern coast, where the May sun flashed against bits of ice in the crevices and the horizon didn’t seem to touch the gulf, I reread parts of Alexandra’s diary.
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