Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  He slipped away from her, air coursing over him. Quietly, he started a fire, piling tinder and gnarled chunks of wood he’d had delivered: trees far from maturity, hacked-up undergrowth, scant remainders in a country deforested from three decades of wartime winters.

  Flames rose, heat emanating from the metal cylinder. He pulled on his pants and went onto the terrace, the cold so intense now that he had to breathe powerfully.

  Sunrise climbed the far slopes of the mountains, revealing the gleaming arch of the atmosphere. He liked this time, when heaters and generators were off, and the combustion of sawdust, trash, kerosene, diesel, and gas had ended, when breezes erased the ceiling of smog and dust that the hot urban air lifted and trapped against the alpine sky. Now, the only smell was of his own bukhari’s stovepipe, the nostalgic fragrance of wood smoke.

  Something had changed. Idris was different. He had a taint of betrayal around him — another of Kabul’s odors. But there was so much betrayal here it was hard to know its target.

  He tried to conjure back how he’d felt with Alexandra. He should have told her about the killing in Iraq, explained how he’d come to this life. He saw her trying to understand.

  He went inside. She was in the kitchen in her underwear, looking at the empty counter. The air was hot now. He stood behind her, placed his hands on her arms, and breathed the fragrance of her hair.

  She turned and kissed him. She led him back to the bed, drawing him down so that his head was against her chest. He’d never been with a woman like this before.

  Is this how you’ve always lived?

  What do you mean? he asked though he knew, just wanted to hear how she saw it.

  Like … like a monk.

  He wasn’t used to being touched.

  She began to speak again, but there was a catch in her breath, and he jerked up.

  Justin stood at the window, touching it to steady himself.

  Clay was on his feet instantly, lunging for the door. He opened it, caught Justin’s collar, and swung him inside. He drove his elbow into his solar plexus and, in the same motion, kicked his legs out and slammed him against the floor.

  Alexandra was reaching toward them, lunging, fingers extended. Clay straddled Justin and punched him three times in the head. Alexandra grabbed his shoulder, pulling him back, and Clay stumbled to his feet, struggling against rage as if against an incline.

  Justin lay with one eye closed, the other knocked from the socket, upside-down on the floor.

  ALEXANDRA

  Defeated, Alexandra wrote in her journal the morning after her first visit to Clay’s house. I don’t know that I’ve met another person with so much history and so little future. He doesn’t appear aware of all that’s behind him. If I ever believed my presence here could create lasting change I would see, being with him reminded me of how many others have preceded me.

  Before I came here, the war was confusion, impersonal contradictory reports. I’d read and heard explanations from Afghans and expats, and had a sense of an immense puzzle whose pieces came together in islands that could almost be bridged. But Clay told me to give up.

  “You’d have to understand not just centuries of powers clashing and more than three decades of civil war, but millions of resilient individuals and their personal motivations, the tribal traditions and pashtunwali, and the ways the brain reacts when you’re hungry and scared and angry and traumatized. Half the country is under eighteen and sexually frustrated, and there’s not much on the horizon. They go to war the way we play paintball.”

  “So what are we doing here?” I asked, skeptical of his statements.

  He laughed. “Building résumés, making a buck, sweating out guilt. As for America” — he said it as if no other country had fought here — “Afghanistan is giving us new rules for war. Our future soldiers will be the de facto officers who lead foreign armies into battle.”

  Hearing him speak, I realized that for America, this war would matter only if it almost failed, only if the insurgency rose and challenged them, and America was changed, its soldiers becoming like frontiersmen in the Western wilds, learning the skills of natives — only then would this story deserve to be told, about an enemy worthy of America’s transformation. This was the myth that Clay had brought to the war, and without it, as he lived now, he had nothing.

  But maybe this was also true of those who weren’t soldiers.

  When Alexandra saw Clay the second time, she had no questions. There would be no answers unless she asked in the way that a journalist or lawyer led a subject. She’d never make sense of how a man so brutal could speak in such paced, thoughtful lines.

  His punches had the sound of an axe hitting wood.

  A minute before, as he stood outside, she’d gone to the window. The lines of his back had reminded her of a sculpture, the evidence of his strength excessive in the way that art could evoke an abundance of life.

  Justin’s breath rumbled when he exhaled, and she shook him. Idris was outside now. He must have watched from the stairs. Clay had spun toward the wall, clutching his face. Blood was puddling from a gash in the back of Justin’s scalp, where he’d hit the floor. She got a towel from the bathroom and wrapped his head.

  He’s unconscious, she told Idris, who was now standing in the doorway. We need to take him to the hospital.

  I have the car outside.

  Let me, Clay said. He was pale and haggard as he put on his shirt and jacket, and his boots without socks.

  She dressed, startled at how little Idris paid mind to her exposed skin. He held the door as Clay lifted Justin, and she followed them to the car. The guard tried to explain something to Clay about the downstairs neighbor letting Justin in because Justin said he was a friend.

  Alexandra sat in the back, and as Clay slid Justin inside, she took his head in her hands. Clay sat in the passenger seat. No one spoke. Idris seemed to know where he was taking them.

  Clay stared ahead, the vein on the side of his neck gorged, his body suddenly an object she couldn’t imagine touching.

  What was there for her to conclude or redeem here? Her brother’s last letter had reached her after his death. I didn’t have the courage to talk about what happened to you in person, but I wanted to … After I left, I lied to myself that it might not be necessary, but I realized that if I died, you would need it.

  Though she believed in nothing more than this inexplicable accidental life, Sam’s prescience seemed a mystical force aligned with something far greater than human knowledge.

  There is no justification, only explanations of the realities I grew up in — how boys taught each other how to see girls and how we acted upon that to prove ourselves. I didn’t know how hungry I was to belong, not to be the poor kid. Since it was like you were part of me, it only made sense that you would do what was necessary for me to have what I wanted. I would have fucked for money — would have done anything for it. It’s not until you were gone that I began to understand. I became more violent. I broke more laws. I wanted proof of something. Order maybe. Or maybe I was trying to hurt the world enough to make it show its true face.

  Idris swerved to the side of the road and shut off the ignition. Clay snapped to, seeming to wake from reverie. He didn’t look back at her and Justin, only at Idris.

  There is a problem the motor has been having. One minute. I can fix it.

  Idris glanced back as he got out. Briefly, he was familiar to her, both resolve and resignation in his eyes.

  JUSTIN

  That morning, Justin had lain in bed considering that he’d seen Sediqa wrong. Frank hadn’t saved her. She’d saved herself and used them to do it. If she was the protagonist in her story, who was he? Not evil, not even her enemy. At best, a fool.

  When he got up and went downstairs, Idris was at the pantry door, with the tired expression of a night-shift worker. Justin asked to talk, and Idris sighed.
Yes, Mr. Justin. What is it? Justin gave him some printouts and described his plan to help him apply to colleges directly for scholarships. Idris scanned the list of college websites he should read, the application essays he had to prepare.

  Thank you, he said softly, almost reverentially.

  Idris, why are you so tired?

  Because — because I am working for Mr. Clay.

  That was your decision.

  Yes. I regret it. He leaves no time to study. Mr. Clay makes me work constantly. It is not what Mr. Frank agreed with him. I have done many hours of work, but Mr. Clay will not pay me. I was just at his home. He refused.

  Just now?

  Yes. Will you please come and tell him how important my studies are?

  Justin put on his jacket, and they went to the car. It was the wrong hour for a confrontation: the air clean, the city peaceful.

  They arrived at the gate as the downstairs neighbor was leaving, the redheaded Australian Justin had met at the picnic, and he waved them in.

  After climbing the stairs, Justin stood at the window — Clay inside with his face to her chest, her fingers in his hair.

  Clay came at him. Justin woke in the car, and now her fingers were stroking his face, as if he’d gone in and lain where Clay had been.

  She smiled. Clay was in the front. Justin prayed silently for all of them, wanting Clay to turn — to look away from the sun blazing over the mountains, infusing the world with light.

  CLAY

  Clay wished life could be a series of junctions, quiet intersections where he could stop and contemplate each future to decide in which direction lay peace. Every action seemed locked to another, as indistinguishable as the currents in a river. The shifts that might have changed it all were tiny. The adjusting of his rifle to sight past the bright speck of the eye. Or a moment when he could have reached over and nudged a rifle barrel aside.

  Just before the airstrike in Iraq, someone had put on Metallica, and he’d been jolted into thinking of his days in Lake Charles, wondering if the music had made its audience more open to passions that weakened their will and blurred their goals — if it made them vulnerable to a reasoned and predatory elite. Then his squad took fire from a building off the highway and called in the airstrike. The building collapsed, and they walked to where the hole revealed a network of tunnels. Cautiously, they climbed down to search for any intelligence left by the insurgents. Though pillared and reinforced with concrete, most of the passageways had collapsed, but one ended in a low, square room. Four bottles of Jim Beam were wrapped in disintegrating plastic, their labels as thin as tissue paper. They agreed that if this place had housed an insurgency, it had been against Saddam Hussein or his predecessor a long time ago.

  Check this out, Hitch called. He swiped dust off a stack of Playboys.

  They lit up the stiff pages with their flashlights. A blonde woman knelt on a beach, her legs wide, the tuft of her pubic hair prominent beneath the taut skin of her abdomen. She had natural breasts, modest and pear-shaped, with delicate pink nipples.

  Like what fucking year is this? Hitch asked.

  They guffawed as he squinted at the cover. Holy shit. Nineteen seventy-eight.

  Daniels was pointing a gloved finger at the Playboy. Open back to that page, he said. There! He put his finger to the blonde’s pubic hair. What the fuck is wrong with her?

  Briefly, no one spoke.

  That’s au naturel, Clay told him.

  Like that? You mean —

  Yes, Hitch said, all pussies, left to their own devices, will eventually look like Don King.

  Jones sucked in his cheeks and spoke in the voice of Yoda. Young Daniels, in the age of Brazilian, born you were.

  They laughed, stomping, decades of dust rising around them.

  Daniels admitted he was just messing with them, and they reluctantly calmed long enough to change locations and set up camp. Then they cracked the whiskey, joking that it was aged, and worth thousands, maybe millions of dollars.

  Authentic hajji-aged bourbon, Hitch had called it after taking a swig and spitting it out.

  Clay tried to hold some of that pathetic joy. That’s where he’d go back to.

  He turned in his seat. Alexandra didn’t look up. She held Justin’s face, not like something she loved but the way a child might carry an heirloom across a house to deliver it into steadier hands. Justin’s eyelids twitched but didn’t open, refusing to take in any more of life.

  In the desert, Hitch reminisced about his favorite whores — he called them saints, since they often supported their extended families with what they earned, unlike the bitches back home who married for diamond rings and SUVs. He gave a soliloquy in the night, and they all agreed it was as good as Shakespeare. Eventually, they slept.

  Clay was the last to take watch and joined Daniels, who’d gone before and sat half-asleep, his rifle propped before him. At dawn, the world came into focus: plowed fields and a distant village where a narrow stream widened before a small dam.

  The wildness and joy, the way he’d lain smiling at the moonlit sky so hard it hurt, ebbed out of him. It felt like someone slowly pulling back a sheet. The sun clipped the horizon. He squinted and came to, his senses converging. A figure was nearing, almost to their camp, wavering in the onslaught of light like a flame on a wick.

  Clay felt Daniels see the stranger a second later. If he’d acted, if he’d been fully inside himself, he could have pushed the barrel of his friend’s rifle aside. Daniels’s finger pulsed. The silhouette jerked, his long hanging shirt snapping behind him the way wind catches a sail, before he fell into the furrows.

  Clay fired a few shots to confuse the landscape with bullets. Then the others were there, weapons raised as they shouted questions. The sun kept rising. People ran from the village. The light burned into his eyes, and he closed them and sat, holding the shadow of fire in his head.

  The car drifted to the roadside. Idris said there’d been a problem, a loose spark plug cable. He got out and stood, drawn and pale, briefly so motionless Clay knew that fear pinned him in place. He tried to move through his confusion to the ache in his gut.

  The sun shone with such force that the edges of buildings seemed to evaporate, everything in the city a dark nucleus with a burning outline.

  He turned, wanting to see what he had done.

  Justin’s eye was open, the other eyelid sagging. This was his real face, no hate in it, dissolving as light filled the breathless air.

  IDRIS

  The detonation dropped him to his knees. Even protected by a wall, he fell, though he didn’t know if this was because of the shock wave or his horror at what he’d done. When he and Justin had driven to Clay’s, desperation had finally taken hold of him, and he’d had no clear plan — just a thought that he could park near a car of foreigners somewhere. Instead, he had Justin, Alexandra, and Clay with him. When he pulled off the road and told them to wait, they did. He’d gotten out and put up the hood. Hidden by it, he’d walked away in a straight line, past a concrete wall. He’d pressed send on the cell. He hadn’t made up his mind. The finality — that he couldn’t return to rethink his choices — nauseated him. The blast reverberated in his bones. People were crouching in the street, running in different directions, and he ran too.

  He caught a taxi to his hotel, changed into his suit, and put on his overcoat. There was money in its lining, in his jacket, his briefcase, his suitcase. He called a private taxi and went to the airport, stayed calm through security, handed over the passport and took it back.

  On the plane, he told himself Jalal Hafiz would never have the shining eyes of a fanatic. His first enemies had been his own people. Foreigners became enemies later, and enemies wasn’t even the right word.

  His first months in Dubai, living in a modest apartment that he furnished carefully, he found himself seeing his life through violence. Walking t
he city, he considered that it was the closest thing the Middle East had to a New York — a haven where ambitious youth could aspire to stable careers and establish homes, meet with friends and go to the beach, or walk beneath the palms in the warm night air and enjoy light and water shows in the plaza fountain beneath the Burj Khalifa. And yet he envisioned the buildings being destroyed by hordes that had come out of the desert, hungry and fearful and vengeful, sustained only by faith. For hours, he lay by the small rooftop pool of his apartment complex, his face to the sun.

  He made no friends, just read books on science. Each word was a black raindrop cutting away an exposed earth, eroding his faith. If humans were less like other animals, the divine could make sense. But they hungered and shat, fought for territory, needed each other desperately for comfort and survival while carving out their empires. All this suffering had to have meaning. He took the elevator to the roof and lay in the sun and slept.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d dreamed, but he woke with an image of a jungle like the one in his book, plants unfurling from swamp, immense ferny growths, each topped with a head — a bulb with two eyes to study the sun and rain and soil that nourished it.

  Maybe human life was simply nature evolving so that it could study itself. The book said that mutations endured because they conferred an advantage. Each trait could be read into a past where it allowed an organism to survive. So why God? Why did men stare at the sky with longing?

  The question stayed with him for weeks as he read, searching for a reason to believe humans were special. But just as nature expanded relentlessly, consuming and growing, tribes and nations fought for resources and land. And if nature was greedy to fill all spaces, it must also long to move beyond the planet. It was this thought that grew in him, finally destroying his faith. Maybe humans were simply a better spore, capable of understanding their habitat and re-creating it so they could carry it with them. Maybe there had never been a God, just an impulse for expansion so powerful it imbued inaccessible territories with mystery, conjuring an image of humans as the deities they would have to be to live in unconquerable spaces.