Justin was flushed, staring at the floor like a little boy. Idris said nothing, picked up his backpack, and went downstairs.
Inside the pantry, Idris began to cry, sobbing so hard his throat ached. He found some tissue and cleared his nose. He reached into the backpack and felt the thick paper of the banded one-hundred-dollar bills. The bundles were small and would be easy to hide separately. He stashed the money in a bag of clothes, locked the pantry door, and walked back over to the lot. He called Clay and said that Rashidi had the money. Then he called the mullah and told him to ready his men near the expat neighborhoods, either Taimani or Wazir Akbar Khan.
As Idris walked back through the school’s door, he heard Frank asking where Justin was going. Had Frank been there all along? Had he heard what had happened, or did he even care?
A party, Justin said.
Glad to see you getting out more.
The drive was silent. Idris steered effortlessly. He’d spent years navigating this traffic. Even now, surrendered to his plan, he negotiated the melee of cars. But the images hardly reached his brain. He was counting down to the text message he would send. He parked outside the compound and observed it: its lights and security cameras and concertina wire, and the large metal gate with an inset door.
Clay came out in a shirt, his sleeves rolled with the modest authority of a general who removes his jacket and turns up his cuffs. He called to Idris as if he hadn’t seen him in days.
Some of my friends are expecting me, Idris said.
Come on. You can be late. This is going to be one hell of a party.
When Idris refused again, Clay crossed the mud and put an arm around him.
Good to see you, buddy. Let me introduce you to my friends.
Idris realized his lie had rung false, especially now with the ransom. Clay likely didn’t suspect anything, but he was a keen observer. Idris commanded himself to relax.
They moved through the party toward the bar. Next to them, a young German man was talking to two women about his ropes.
Ya, you see, I have five-fifty paracord. A thin strand holds five hundred and fifty pounds. I keep a hundred feet in my jacket and two carabiners. I can escape from any place.
As he manically described knots and his tiny titanium grappling hooks, the women laughed.
Ropes can’t save you from every situation, one said.
Yes, they can. This is a city of walls and flat roofs. As long as I can get on a roof and get off the next wall, and do it fast, I will survive.
Clay and Justin were talking, and Idris stepped away, pretending to make for the food. He listened to the foreigners’ chatter, edging past each group so he could hear them over the music.
A woman ranted about a Rolling Stone journalist who’d mocked her on Twitter. A boyish man bragged that during an embed he’d joined a few marines for their morning run and kept up effortlessly. A woman with pouched eyes said she hated Kabul and was counting the days on her contract until she could live someplace where the air was clean and the food didn’t liquefy her intestines.
Idris wandered until he found the bathroom. He sent a text, describing the location and that there was a single armed guard. He deleted it and any questionable numbers from the log, removed the SIM, and flushed it.
Back in the living room, Holly’s blonde corkscrews bounced as she laughed. Regret spooled inside him. No, fuck her and the dogs she sent to America. Her friends had laughed at his jokes and stories, and then shouldered him aside.
He went down the hall and found the bedroom. He shut himself in but left the door unlocked. The closet was empty, with nothing to give him cover. Under the bed there was just enough space. The box spring pressed on his chest. At last he’d discovered a benefit to years of hunger. The tender spot on the back of his head stung as he rested it against the tile floor.
The explosion came as fast as he’d expected. A man began shouting for people to follow him, and a second explosion thudded through the building. Kalashnikovs rattled. The door creaked open, and someone said, If anyone’s hiding, come out. We have a safe room.
The man’s voice belonged to the kidnapper who’d punched Idris in the street.
Idris commanded his heart to slow, but it was beating too hard and he couldn’t breathe deeply enough to calm it.
Another detonation shook the floor. Then the firing started up again, louder and more constant. Had security forces arrived already? Idris hadn’t expected the house to be so fortified. If the insurgents failed, he would be held accountable.
There was yet another explosion, and the firing got closer but more intermittent. Then it intensified — the high notes of bullets ricocheting along the halls, the violent telegraphic sound of the guns like a conversation across the distance — until there was a final burst.
Sweat soaked him. He wanted to push the box spring off. Footsteps moved through the house. Afghans were speaking, clearing the rooms. When someone came into the bedroom, he called for help. Two soldiers lifted the bed. He could hardly stand, and they held him under his arms and walked him out, their boots grinding against broken glass and bullet casings. Holes pocked the walls in uneven lines and clusters, and two insurgents lay dead, their blood congealing.
The foreigners were coming out of the safe room, most of them covering their faces. Justin and Alexandra passed, their eyes bright, staring at the dead. The assailants had known this was a suicide mission — almost all attacks in Kabul were — but they’d expected something in exchange for their lives. One had been partially dismembered by his own explosives.
Outside, vehicles packed the street, foreign and Afghan cameramen pressing in.
Clay arrived and put an arm around Idris. He’s with us, he told the security forces. The night washed over them, blue lights eddying along walls, headlamps shining on mud. There was an etheric quality to the air — the fumes of a city ready to burst into flame.
An NDS agent in a suit approached Idris.
You are the Afghan who hid under the bed?
Yes.
Please give me your phone.
Idris handed it over.
Clay vouched for him, and the agent checked Idris’s call record and shrugged.
Okay. Maybe he is sheep. Maybe he is wolf. Go, you take him.
Then the agent walked away.
It’ll be okay, Clay said, a hand on Idris’s shoulder, but he was looking around, the muscles of his neck taut.
Idris crossed his arms. His sweat had gone cold. Rashidi, the mullah, Noorudin — what would they do? He hugged his jacket against himself, his wet shirt making him shiver.
Private taxis and NGO drivers began pulling up, and among the foreigners he heard weeping and a strange hysterical laughter, an animal sound, like dogs yipping far away.
People hurried through the churned mud in no semblance of order, to and from points he couldn’t perceive, and all of them, Afghan or foreigner, searched his face as if they knew.
美智子
As my taxi pulled away from the school, I called Steve. I was fantasizing about my success while imagining how people might speak of me if all this went wrong: expats concocting conspiracies in which I was a threat to those in power, and old classmates in Tokyo calling each other to say, Did you hear about Michiko Kimura? — Yes, on the news, dead in Afghanistan.
“Michiko,” Steve said, “how’s your investigation coming along?” He must have programmed my name into his phone.
“My investigation?”
“I wish you’d told me that you’re a journalist. There’s a lot more I would have shared.”
I asked what that would be, and he said, “Why don’t you come over? I’m here now. It won’t take long.”
I directed the taxi driver to Steve’s house and told him to wait for me. I rang the buzzer and the guard let me into the familiar courtyard.
The musc
les in Steve’s arms and shoulders were larger than I remembered, and a stress rash covered the side of his neck to his hairline.
“Come on in.” He shook my hand, a little hard.
The house remained empty, as if he’d planned to leave, but it now had monitors in each room, with images sectioned into four feeds, showing the street, the inside of the gate, the front yard, and the side walkway. We went upstairs, to the safe room, which had since been converted to his bedroom and office. A laptop was on an otherwise bare desk.
From the street came the bleating tune of an ice cream cart passing, an irritating electronic rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and Steve muttered, “That fucking ice cream man’s been hanging around all day.” Then he took a breath and turned his attention on me. “I know you’ve been investigating the deaths last winter. It’s been what, three months?”
“Yes, but I’m not really interested in answers.”
“Go again?” The hostility in his voice couldn’t have been clearer.
“I’ve been researching their lives, who they were, what brought them here. It’s more of a human interest story.”
“Uh huh. So you haven’t found anything?”
“In what way?”
“Regarding Clay or Idris … or anything else?”
“No. It’s all a dead end.”
He just stared, the veins in his eyes forking out from his irises like lightning.
A buzzer sounded.
“Goddamn it,” he said. In one square of the monitor, two police trucks had stopped and a man who was almost certainly a plainclothes agent in a leather jacket — they were usually the ones to speak to foreigners — had reached up to the buzzer.
“Come with me.” Steve hurried me downstairs, but at the door, he appeared uncertain.
“Wait here. I’ll just be a minute.”
He went out, paused to look back while crossing the yard and then again at the gate before saying something to the guard. The hall monitor showed him enter the street and speak to the agent, gesturing to the house, most likely to say he couldn’t invite them in. The agent reluctantly led Steve to the truck. He opened a briefcase on the hood and took out some papers. The police leaned against the fenders, Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders.
I walked through the first floor. The rooms were empty. In one, a bookshelf had been slid back. There was an iron door behind it, with a key in the lock. Having heard so many rumors of contractor conspiracies, I wasn’t surprised he’d have a secret passage, only that he’d leave it exposed. I pushed, and the door opened soundlessly onto a narrow staircase.
I glanced back at the monitors. Steve was still examining the papers, photographs now, and shaking his head.
The stairs led into a different climate, coolness emanating from the walls. I descended into a hallway whose only light was yet another monitor. Steve examined the documents, listening to the agent, who looked often at the compound gate and street camera, as if right at me. Maybe he’d been here before and had been invited inside, and was now dragging this meeting out, suspicious of Steve’s reluctance to let him in. Though Steve had been the victim of an attack, security contractors were often in trouble with the government for taxes or permits, as well as with the police, who viewed them as competition for work they could be paid for themselves.
The unlit corridor led to an open door with two locks on it. A windowless concrete chamber held a small table on wheels with a TV and DVD player, and a metal folding chair with a box of Kleenex next to it on the floor. I turned on the TV and played the DVD. Two people were having sex against a wall, the woman with her elbows over the man’s shoulders, her breasts in his face. It wasn’t commercial porn but rather a poorly lit video feed. I moved closer. It was Alexandra, her fingers in Clay’s short hair.
Steve must not have trusted Clay. I shut off the TV, ran into the hall, and checked the monitor. Steve was still outside. The agent was gesturing toward the house. Evenings, when I rode in taxis with other foreigners — on those occasions when I dressed as a woman — the police often checked my passport, since they thought I was Hazara and suspected me of being a prostitute. But Steve could easily explain that I was a foreigner.
There was another door at the end of the corridor, also open, and I ran to check it quickly. The thin mattress of a cot lay next to a bucket, a loaf of bread in a plastic bag, and a jar of water. Had the cell been prepared to contain someone else, or did Steve think I had knowledge that could hurt him? In the middle of the ceiling was a small metal plate with a circle of glass. A camera. I rushed back into the room with the folding chair. The same fixture was there.
On the monitor, Steve was putting the documents and photos back in the briefcase.
I tried to breathe, my heart working so fast and hard that my ears buzzed, and then I was back in the clarity I’d experienced in the safe room — my entire life a prelude to this moment.
I ran upstairs. I had only minutes to guarantee my safety, but once I left, I wouldn’t be able to find out what Steve was up to. I sprinted to the safe room, took his laptop, and shoved it into my backpack. On the screen, Steve closed the briefcase, pushed it away on the hood, and threw up his hands. I raced downstairs. He argued with the police, edging closer to the door.
October sunlight raked my eyes as I hurried to the gate. The guard scrambled out and held up his palm. He was a small man in stonewashed jeans and a leather jacket, his hair cut in a mullet and a gold hoop in his ear. He said something in Dari I couldn’t make out.
“What?” I asked. “I am not Hazara.”
“Ah. I did not know. Mr. Steve said no matter what, you stay inside. It is not safe for you to go out.”
I was suddenly convinced the small room in the basement had been prepared for me. My hands shook as I fumbled in my bag. I pushed close to him and took out a hundred dollars.
“The cameras can’t see this,” I told him. “I’m too close to you. Take it. Tell Steve I lied to you. Tell him I threatened to call the police.”
The money was quickly in his hand and hidden from the camera. The police were just across the wall, and if he refused, I would scream. He must have seen this in my eyes. He went into the guard house. I pulled the latch on the door and let myself out. The police leaning on the truck fenders began to laugh.
“So this is why you do not want us inside,” the agent told Steve, who’d flushed, his rash visibly larger along his neck. “But we do not mind. She is a pretty one.”
I walked off. They’d never remember me as anything other than a Hazara prostitute. If I spoke, I would have an insurance policy against Steve, but I would also be on their radar if he reported the theft of the laptop.
My taxi was gone. Steve must have had the guard pay the driver and tell him to leave. I walked, conscious of the laptop’s weight in my backpack. I pulled my headscarf close, and at the cross street, I turned. Two blocks farther down, the security guards at the Finest Supermarket let me inside. I went up several floors to the section selling household items. I sat in a chair wrapped in plastic and called a taxi in case Steve was searching the streets.
I’d heard that the Afghan government not only was trying to rein in the expats’ sense of entitlement but was becoming more protective of its image. The NDS was increasingly investigating claims published in the foreign media. It must have suspected something. Steve had to be in trouble. What other reason could there be for the mattress, the bucket, the jar of water, and the loaf of bread at the end of that basement hallway?
The tiny cell suddenly seemed the destination for this journey, as if everything I’d done was to confront a fear of being closed away and made powerless, or at least to write it into a story bigger than my life.
Before I ever read of America, I knew the novels and history of my nation, its exceptionalism and colonial spirit, the way it forged a single identity — inflicted upon us — before it was forced on
others. Then Japan was finally dominated, colonized by America, until it assimilated even that re-education into its pride, rebuilding the pieces into the unflinching image of empire’s rising sun.
In school, the girls sensed how I admired them, and their groups refused to let me join in even though I attempted to ingratiate myself. When I told my mother about the meanness, she said they were trying to teach me to fit in. The boys observed my orbiting and smirked, but I saw how others aligned themselves, and I believed that dressing and speaking and laughing the right way would help me overcome my difference.
On a day that I stayed late, working in the lab to finish an assignment, four boys were talking in the hallway and watched me pass with drifting eyes. They followed in a row, their stride arrogant and symmetric, so much like something from a music video it seemed harmless. They were suddenly behind me and one had his hand over my mouth. I didn’t notice the janitor’s closet until I was inside it. They held me to the floor. One stood with his back to the door.
There is nothing special in these details. I have lived with them for too long. Their rotation in the hurried silent satisfaction of needs. They’d done this before and didn’t have to speak to direct the routine, or had simply been synchronized by the precision of their culture.
At the end, a punch, unnecessary, anticlimactic: not hard, though it did flash stars in my vision. It seemed more an assertion of agency than a desire to inflict pain.
Or maybe sourceless anger needed release, that anger that doesn’t begin in our lives but somewhere millions of years ago in the gap between desire and reality, the awareness of — and rage at — what isn’t.
Or it could have simply been a correction, punishment for what I was not.
They hurried out, and I spent the night on the concrete, in that small room. Briefly, after hours of lying there, I experienced a state that resembled lucid sleep. I went outside before dawn, when I was least likely to be caught. I pushed through the school’s door that locked behind me.
Into the Sun Page 30