Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  Tell me one.

  I’m going to lower my voice.

  That’s fine. I’m not the one who’s hard of hearing.

  This was the thing about Frank: he was a man who’d grown up in the company of men and longed to please them. People who spent time with Clay said they could feel the regrets he harbored, and maybe this quality encouraged Frank to talk.

  As if telling a bar joke, he began a story from his childhood about a daft farm girl. She was one of five daughters on the neighboring property, her family too poor to pay attention to her or help her through school.

  She wasn’t an idiot, Frank said. She could speak, but did so quietly. She was pretty enough, well built. The rumor was that she had some brain problem that made reading and doing sums impossible, but she worked the farm and would make a fine wife.

  He described how local boys began paying her for sex with chocolate. If she’d understood math, she’d have realized she was giving it up for pennies. She was thirteen, Frank fifteen, the first time he’d fucked her. A boy at school had told him to tell her to come by the barn at night, that it was that simple, and it was.

  Frank admitted he’d told the story of the daft girl only once before, in the army. His buddies laughed and asked him to tell it again, and he’d promised himself he’d never breathe another word of it. The farm girl got pregnant. Frank denied responsibility to his parents, other boys denied it, and the girl disappeared, sent away to live with relatives.

  This is how it is, Frank said. By the time a man can no longer get it up, he’s done so much wrong that not even with every second of his last years can he pay the tender sex back.

  After Vietnam, he courted and married a woman with academic ambitions, and each time she struggled, he reminded her that academia was fusty and uninspired. She became careful not to complain, but what person can live without admitting to difficulty?

  You’re not really happy, he told her, until she finally gave up on her PhD, stayed home, and birthed four daughters. He’d have been evil, he admitted, if he hadn’t been so common.

  As his daughters grew, he made himself scarce, finding new ambitions, starting businesses, running for mayor. The girls chased into his absence, trying to win his pride. He watched the oldest creep into a woman’s body, like a child moving along a dark hallway, one step at a time, to see the presents below a Christmas tree. He saw his daughters transforming from slender, too-intelligent girls into women as they explored outside the home, until hurt made them stupid and maybe, finally, if they were lucky, thoughtful.

  Frank adjusted his bones in the chair as Clay reclined and sipped bourbon.

  It wasn’t easy to leave my wife, Frank told him, but Afghanistan was every man’s dream: a country razed, where, as Tennyson wrote, some work of noble note may yet be done. In a society’s beginnings, men can be giants. The first of us here were practically founding fathers. But coming here wasn’t simple. I was a soldier in Nam. I did and saw the usual terrible things. We didn’t bring our memories home. We closed them off. The world changed, and what our power could give us became wrong. I’ve read novels and seen myself in the good guys and the bad guys, and I guess I’ve come here as much to make the world a better place as because the part of me that stayed in Vietnam needed to do penance. Besides, a bored man is a dead one. Sometimes, when I wake up, before I take stock of this goddamned thing of a body and realize how old I am, I think, briefly, I’ll admit it, that I’m just beginning.

  He and Clay drank, neither speaking, Clay with his head slightly lowered, as if in deference, and Frank in thought, his fingers cupping his chin, pulling at the loose skin of his jaw.

  In the Aeneid, Frank said, breaking the silence, there’s a sibyl. Aeneas wants answers, and she writes words on oak leaves that she organizes into prophecies just as the wind blows them away. Men have always wanted a quest, a purpose in life.

  Clay nodded. For a moment, he couldn’t remember why he’d come here. His desire to establish a rapport hadn’t been innocent.

  You know, Frank said, I had a dream one time, about this girl in Nam — a prostitute one of the guys brought into camp for all of us. When I woke up, Idris was downstairs. He had the ugliest look I’d ever seen, his eyes red and swollen like he was on drugs. He said he was sick and maybe he was, but I told him to get out. I hated that the girls saw me do that. They needed Idris. More than a few of them may have had a crush. When I finally called him, I didn’t know what to say. I told him the office needed a new lightbulb.

  I can give him work, Clay said, refocusing.

  In the emails Justin wrote to Alexandra, he described how Frank frequently suspected Idris of wrongdoing, fearing that he stole from the school or lusted after the girls or would sell them all out with his insider’s knowledge. When Frank told Justin he’d picked the wrong person to save, Justin replied: But who are we to judge who deserves to be saved?

  On that last visit to the school, as I pulled up my headscarf to leave, Frank appeared unsettled, perhaps realizing I’d no longer be courting him for information.

  “You know, you’re not the only one working on this story. Steve has dropped in a few times to learn more about Idris. And Tam, she’s come by, but I haven’t told her about Steve or Clay. I’m keeping that to myself. I shouldn’t have told you. Steve wasn’t happy about that.”

  I was surprised: I’d expected Steve to have left Kabul by now.

  Frank sat a moment longer and sighed. “Strangers have been coming around. I’ve seen cars parked outside. A few of the girls, the ones who have means, they won’t attend classes anymore.”

  I asked to see the room Idris had slept in.

  We went downstairs, to the kitchen that smelled of propane and mold. He opened the pantry. As I had with Justin’s room on my first visit, I asked for a little time alone inside — “Just so I know what it feels like. For the story.”

  He shrugged and went out the hallway, onto the back porch, maybe to stand and admire the yard as it recovered from the frost, before the summer scorched it dry.

  The room held nothing. I shut the door, and a blade of diffuse kitchen light glowed beneath it. Even for me, the pantry was small. I took a step, and it sounded closed in and loud. I lay on the floor and couldn’t extend my arms above my head. Idris must have slept at an angle. Or curled on his side. I did just that, and the cold pressed from the concrete into my ribs, my knee, and the bone of my hip. I knew that anyone who’d had the determination and resilience to live here was still alive.

  The door was at my back, the light drifting past me. As my eyes adjusted, I discerned my shadow on the wall, low and blunt, like that of a stone.

  IDRIS

  In the school, at night, the silence hummed — maybe the sound of his blood or the collective rumble of the city vibrating deep within the earth. The pantry was the length of his body, corner to corner, from his head to his extended toes: a pleasure, but not as great as that of the solitude it afforded him.

  At his uncle’s house, Idris slept in a room with Farzad, his fourteen-year-old cousin. Idris gave him English lessons, but Farzad drifted off, and Uncle Osman blamed Idris for the lack of progress. The young man had difficulty focusing since the attack on the American convoy, when Idris, his uncle, and cousin had fallen, gasping in the reeking smoke of incinerated bodies. At Farzad’s knee lay the jawbone, sheared and stripped of flesh with the upward blast of the suicide vest. He picked it up. His father, his two white eyes in a sooty demonic face, struck the bone from his hand and slapped him for touching the dead in a forbidden way. Farzad had told Idris that he’d just reached for the first object he could make out. Asleep, he thrashed.

  You’re dreaming, Idris would tell him, but his cousin didn’t wake up. He calmed for a while before the flailing began again. They’d all seen horrible things. Idris had his own nightmares.

  In the pantry, his body heated the air. During the winter, he was
careful; if he touched the concrete walls, the chill invaded him like an electric current, upsetting the warmth he’d kindled inside his clothes. He sat cross-legged in blankets, hunched over his computer. The earbuds were cold when he put them in. Aisha had sent a message on Skype that she was online. I’m here now. Let there be a good connection, inshallah.

  He moved the mouse onto video call, anticipating her appearance on the screen: the way her white headscarf accentuated her freckles, the fullness of her lips, the blue in her eyes. He loved that first moment, before they began talking. Suddenly, he shut the computer, the pantry now fully dark. He lay back. With the earbuds still in, his heartbeat thudded.

  She was the only American girl he’d been able to find online. She’d converted to Islam with a friend, taken the name Aisha, and joined a chat site for young American Muslims. Not many of them wanted to help Afghan boys practice English, but her parents were professors at the University of Ohio. She’d called them bleeding-heart liberals and told him they’d educated her to defend the underdogs. At the dinner table, she’d learned how the Palestinians were being driven from their land just as the Native Americans had been. She’d grown up hearing expressions like “Western imperialism” and “American extremism.” Her parents referred to America’s right wing as little better than the Taliban in their militant views and attitudes toward women’s bodies. But her parents were hypocrites, she’d said. They worried she would compromise herself as a woman by converting. They’d asked her to see a therapist.

  They aren’t bad people, she’d told him, but they’re not as different as they think.

  In his last conversation with her, he’d described the novels he was reading to perfect his English: Tom Clancy, John le Carré, Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum — foxed paperbacks Frank brought to the school from his trips to the US. She’d asked him why he read such trash when the holy book held all the wisdom necessary for a lifetime. But the battered novels had revealed to him an existence in which individual wile and commitment to the details of a plan created change. Vision was crucial, and a certain impassivity: victory over desire, self-abnegation.

  When he’d gone onto the chat site, he’d wanted to meet someone like Holly. With her, he wouldn’t have to worry about global injustice or hear advice like that of the mullahs. He could live in that awkward joy of American TV shows, where the youth were protected and rich with faith in the kindness of life, defying the bad people and stumbling toward joy. But Idris had to give that up for now. He had to sharpen his mind, to discipline himself. He’d been childish and trusting, and it had gotten him nowhere.

  He would deny himself Aisha. He would never beg again. He would earn what he wanted. Everyone had a plan, and in each plan, others were pawns. The trick to success was making sure each pawn thought he was serving himself, when in fact he was serving you. This is what the American novels taught. It was America’s success. Idris had read the few history books in the school. America made countries believe they were pursuing their own goals when they were actually serving America. He would not reject the power that came with this knowledge. It had won the world.

  He’d begun analyzing his role as a pawn in the plans of each American he knew. With Frank, it was obvious. Frank could be friends with an Afghan man in a way he couldn’t with the girls. He needed the company of another man to feel like a man himself, and to feel he had a place among the Afghans. Frank also needed help. No foreigner could understand the workings of Kabul, and Idris brokered his existence. Tasks that were casual for him would have been almost impossible for Frank. Idris bought items at the market for the school that would have cost five times as much in one of the stores catering to foreigners.

  As for Justin, his plan was also clear, no more or less deluded than Frank’s. Americans came here to be brave, to be Americans who did something good for Afghanistan. Idris would be Justin’s messenger back to America, the perfect student whose success showcased Justin’s courage in coming here. Justin had pretended their friendship could be real, almost equal. But pawns were expendable. Justin had saved the person he wanted to be known for saving.

  And while Clay gave money and expected results, it became clear he was motivated by an underlying rivalry. Disdain came into his expression whenever he mentioned Justin, and the night the two men met in the restaurant, their conversation had been tense. Justin might have given Idris the scholarship if not for Clay.

  Now all that mattered was Idris’s own plan. The novels were right. Most people couldn’t make a plan, much less perceive another’s. Success depended on controlling desire. He could resist the urge to open the computer and chat with Aisha. It was a difficult decision but became easier when he thought of it as an exercise. He had to give up how he felt when she looked at him — as if he were the only true person who existed.

  I like you, she’d told him. You’re my street cred.

  Human desire — simple needs — ruined plans. Seen coldly, kidnapping Faisal was easy. Nearly all plans contained elements that could be construed as wrong. Most human weakness grew from fear of being judged. Plans worked when you raised them above all else.

  Clay had played him perfectly, waiting with the illusion of deference for Idris to propose the only way to get Tarzi back. Idris had done so, giving voice to, and taking responsibility for, what Clay already intended. Rashidi’s corruption had made this easier for Idris. He’d enriched himself by impoverishing people. A journalist had written an article describing how foreign aid vanished into his pockets, how projects meant to create jobs hardly materialized, if at all. The poor, unable to find work, suffered through winter after winter.

  Faisal demonstrated no signs of this corruption, but corruption made possible his almost American childlike ease. In class, when students shared writing so that Justin could critique the grammar, Faisal read an essay about how no one in Afghanistan could be trusted. He described his years in Pakistan and how much better life was there. He didn’t realize what he was saying. There was a divide between those who grew up under the Taliban and those who spent their childhoods in the safety of Iran or Pakistan or Tajikistan. Returning Afghans could not fathom the suffering of those who’d stayed. People had been forced to survive any way they could. No one likes you for who you are here, Faisal had written, but for what they can get from you. Justin had corrected him that no one was singular and they was plural. No one should be followed by he or she. Americans always taught rules that they themselves failed to follow.

  Faisal had been easy to befriend. Idris knew of a house on Kabul’s outskirts. The owner had bought a projector at the bush bazaar and transformed his living room into a cinema, showing bootleg American new releases the day they came out and charging ten afghani. Idris had invited Faisal, and they’d exchanged numbers, shoulder to shoulder, heads lowered solemnly as if Faisal were doing his duty in agreeing to take part in the Afghanistan outside his home.

  Once, at Faisal’s four-storey home downtown, Idris met Rashidi. He was a short, stern man with an angular nose like a rectangle stuck to his face. He asked Idris a few terse questions: who his family was, how he and Faisal knew each other. Rashidi seemed satisfied with the answers. Maybe he thought Idris was a tough local boy who would finally help his son integrate into this new Afghanistan. Idris told himself it was true: there were few more authentic Afghan experiences than getting kidnapped. Faisal would be able to head to America with his credentials in order.

  In his room, Faisal taught Idris to play Xbox. They sat on cushions in front of an electric heater larger than the grill of a truck. He had the newest video games from Dubai, but not even he could get bootleg movies the day of release.

  Idris took him to the makeshift cinema twice before the kidnapping. That night, swerving to avoid a rock, Idris drove the car into an icy rut and pretended to be stuck. When he and Faisal got out, the doors of the car behind them opened. One of the men caught Faisal and held a rag to his mouth. The other approached Idri
s. He had on a balaclava. His eyes weren’t Clay’s.

  Sorry, kid.

  The punch spun Idris. His knees hit the ground, burning and wet. His forehead throbbed. He heard the car trunk slam and the doors shut.

  He found the police at a checkpoint and told them what had happened. The bruise on his forehead was swelling. They took him to Rashidi’s house. A detective verified that Idris and Faisal had been to the cinema before. Idris played the part: bewildered and repentant.

  He couldn’t have learned any of this at American University. Society told people that everything beyond the obvious was impossible. When he’d begun to think about plans, he’d believed himself incapable of creating one. He walked across the city and through the market stalls, seeing how little most Afghans possessed in comparison to him, how each one made currency of their life: for some, the skills they’d learned from a father or an uncle; for others, a friendship with a successful merchant or the son of a businessman.

  In the pantry, Idris set his laptop aside. He put on his boots and the stocking cap he’d used to hide the bruises on his forehead. He’d been coming in late and hadn’t seen Justin in a few days.

  He left his room, pausing in the hallway. Faint giggling and tinny music came from the girls’ basement. As a small child, he’d watched his mother and a group of her friends dance one evening. She’d put a cassette in a black recorder, and they’d moved their hands and shoulders. The curtains were drawn, a tasseled lamp was lit, and the women’s bare feet brushed over the rug, past the cushions where he and his sister sat. A few years later, his mother and sister would be dead. What could Faisal know about those who’d stayed here and their reasons?

  Idris left the school and walked a few blocks to an empty lot. He had a vague recollection of this neighborhood from the civil war, when all that stood here were hundreds of crumbling walls, their roofs destroyed by mortars fired from the mountain. The dust of blasted stone had turned everything white under the sun. Now, marking off a future construction project, yellow ribbons fluttered on metal wires stuck into the ground. Someone would steal them soon.