Into the Sun Read online

  Tam’s bedroom felt hot and closed in, and I had the impulse to get up and shut the bukhari’s flue, but the air was cold on my damp skin. I became aware of the house’s silence, my heart banging with the desperation of a trapped animal. My thoughts no longer moved in an orderly progression. The vacuum I’d existed in since the attack was gone. The room seemed to contract, the dark thick and smothering.

  What I was feeling took its time rising and then did all at once, with a pulse as long and transfixing as a seizure — a sense that something else had to happen, that none of this made sense if it all ended here. The Taliban habitually claimed responsibility for foreign casualties, but the targets of the car bomb and the school itself were inconsequential — trivial in the scope of the war. Justin and Alexandra had also been in the safe room, so the two attacks must be linked. The first had been so substantial and calculated that far more than the lives of two unknown expats had to be at stake. I felt certain there would be another attack.

  I was sweating hard. I tried to lie calmly and not wake Tam. The suddenness of my panic terrified me. All along, behind my tranquility, a hidden part of my mind — the autonomous, atavistic kernel of my cognitive organ — had been at work. The incompleteness of the violence felt like jagged edges in my brain.

  And then an image came to me — of me setting to work, investigating the event that almost killed me — and my heart began to relax. I was almost back in that awakened, accepting space that I’d briefly thought would be mine forever. The siege during the party and the car bomb had to be pieces of a larger plan that was still in the works. More people could die.

  Though I was conscious of the manic energy behind my thoughts, I didn’t care: I would uncover the plot behind the attacks and write it into a major story — my first in English, for a big American magazine like Rolling Stone or GQ. I’d prove the Taliban claim untrue and solve the murders. I’d say something more meaningful than the articles that were instantly published on the heels of carnage, their conclusions interchangeable, their perfunctory insights borrowed from the previous week’s news. I would make my readers experience what I had — the way chaos could suddenly engulf a life and the desire for agency that arose from that. Justin’s and Alexandra’s faces returned to me: the look of mastered stillness that they’d shared was common in Japan.

  Tam’s breathing slowed. She worked so hard, fueling herself on caffeine, that her sleep was sudden and deep. I slipped my leg from beneath hers, took her wrist, lifted her arm, and placed it on the warm bed. I pulled on my pants and shirt, and let myself out. A USB wall charger gave her forehead a blue, mortuary glow. I carefully closed the door.

  I listened, reassuring myself of the silence. My heart had steadied. I wasn’t passively awaiting the next attack. This investigation was the only thing I could imagine doing, and my restored equanimity seemed proof that it was the right choice. I crossed the hallway to Alexandra’s room.

  There seemed to be two kinds of expat dwellings: those that were overdecorated, the concrete walls covered with personal photos, artwork, and movie posters, the bookshelves crammed with novels and DVDs; and those as stark as jail cells, as if being here were doing time, an obligation to society or necessary duty for some future career. Alexandra’s was unadorned — plastic on the windows, old rattan blinds lowered, a desk with a laptop, a bed with a blanket and small pillow.

  I wanted to touch everything, to slide under the covers. I smelled the clothes hanging in the closet. They held a faint fragrance of lavender, a remnant of fabric softener.

  No one had known her well, except as an expert on a subject she’d schooled herself in from a distance. That was part of her allure. But the hint of defensiveness in her suggested she’d fought to prove she was more than her appearance and that accepting admiration would be surrender.

  Alexandra’s laptop, a very old HP, was open on her desk, and when I touched the mouse, the screen lit up. It had been asleep, not password protected. Maybe she never stopped working and saw no reason to impede her efforts. I began forwarding emails to myself. Years of her typing had worn the letters off the keys, smoothing or hollowing them ever so slightly. I pictured her working with a straight back, too pragmatic to worry about getting a new fashionable computer as long as this one functioned.

  I permanently deleted the messages I’d sent to my account, logged out of her email, closed her browser, and shut the computer off, but left it open. Makeup removal wipes were on the dresser, and I ran one over the keyboard. From the bottom desk drawer, I took out a large leather book — a journal. There was also a heavy plastic ring, the kind from gumball machines, and I slid it on my finger. I suddenly felt nauseous. I pulled the chair out too loudly and sat. I held my face, cooling it with the skin of my fingers.

  The hand. Where was it? In a bag in a police refrigerator? In the trash? On its way to Montreal? It had to be Alexandra’s. I’d barely known her, but I wished I could go back to the circle of men at the site of the car bomb and see the severed hand as more than a sign of the random brutality of war.

  A growing awareness of time muted my thoughts, and though I wanted to inspect every pen, every scrap of paper, to discover more about her and find something that justified my presence here, the risk had become too great.

  A nightlight’s glow strayed along the wall. I made my way to the bathroom, where I examined the journal, its cover worn dark and scuffed. The entries — some only a line, others pages long — were in French, the dates going back eight years. The printed letters were squarish, tight and determined. I put it on the highest shelf, behind a row of towels. I dropped the wipe in the toilet, flushed it, and turned on the faucet. I was still wearing the blocky ruby-colored ring. I hid it as well and washed my hands. I studied myself in the mirror.

  A young Afghan woman once told me, at a party, that even with oppression, sexuality found paths, not because of individual will but because of the laws of nature, like the insistent flow of water or seeds sprouting beneath stones. These were her metaphors. The last few years of my life, negated passions had been rising within me. Until now, I’d never attempted an investigation this big. Though my actions felt urgent — all that stood between me and an imminent, unknown violence — they were also a release from stasis, from waiting for my life to have an objective that mattered.

  Tam fit against me as soon as I was back in bed. As with an infidelity, in a few decisions, I’d locked a part of myself away.

  The school was two stories of rain-streaked concrete. The other buildings on the street hid behind walls, but the school’s upper windows were exposed, close enough to throw a stone through, or a grenade. It had been built during the hopeful years I’d heard about, just after the American invasion, and not amended for the hard reality that followed. Despite its modesty, there was arrogance in those two panes of glass — righteous provocation.

  Frank looked well past seventy, not just rawboned but meatless, his liver-spotted skin like parchment on an angular skull that might have been handsome encased in flesh. And yet he had the glow and gravity of a man facing terrible odds, the authority of one who has been the target of America’s enemies. He smiled as I came in the door, his hand wrapping mine, transmitting by touch an anatomical sense of bone and tendon.

  When I’d called and told him I was doing a feature on the personal missions of expats who’d lost their lives, I’d expected him to be wary, but he’d appeared eager to talk, less about Justin and Alexandra than about his school — to make it sound worthy of their deaths.

  He walked, gesturing into rooms, tapping his steel-frame glasses into place with the knuckle of his index finger as he told me about the free classes offered and how he was creating a future for Afghanistan. His violet shirt betrayed few suggestions of the body beneath and, if not for the belt cinching his slacks, might have flapped like a sail. His gaze was direct, appraising, unapologetic; he had the smile of one accustomed to sales and elections.

/>   “This is the office. Just a sec.”

  Seven teenage girls sat, glancing from beneath headscarves to determine whether I was Hazara. Frank checked his laptop, on a desk right in the middle of theirs, and I tried to make sense of this aging American man surrounded by Afghan girls. From speaking with Alexandra, I knew the place was a prep school of sorts, where Frank handpicked high school– and college-age girls and the occasional boy for his program. He led me next door to another office and motioned to a folding metal chair.

  From the way he looked at me, I could tell he was seeing a demure Japanese, not a bijin — I am far from that — but maybe a hint of the ojoosama, the naiveté of the hakoiri musume, and above all the patient ryosai kenbo, the part of our tradition that, in step and posture, evokes the values of service, embodied, as we believed for centuries and still largely believe, in a woman. I let my headscarf slip. The skin around my eyes relaxed. I didn’t employ this skill often, but I’d seen it used daily in Tokyo.

  “I don’t know what to tell you about Justin,” Frank said, though his demeanor called to mind a sprinter at the starting line. “When I interviewed him for the job, I played skeptic. If someone can’t convince you he should be doing something, he has no business doing it. But he was too convincing, the kind of kid who should have had his own school and been playing by his own rules. I said yes only because this place needs classes morning to night. We need to be a factory in the best sense of the word.”

  Frank faltered, his hand hanging between us like a pale spider. The moment increased in focus as if a faint incandescence gathered in the room. What I’d sensed — the story — it was here. Frank wasn’t searching for words. He was trying to restrain himself. I nodded, my headscarf slipping a little more.

  “‘America,’ Justin told me, ‘is asleep. We have no clue where we’re going or why we’re doing what we’re doing. Half of us say we need to reclaim what we lost, and the other half say we need to forget about it and move on, but neither of those options are any good. I can’t use a gun, so I figure I might as well educate as many kids as possible.’

  “‘That’s the way to do it,’ I placated him, and he said he’d read that every insurgent we shoot inspires five more, and every one we educate will make five less. I agreed it was a plausible theory. I suspected he was a kid who’d done well but had reached the point where whatever had driven him still anchored him. He’d come to the end of his chain like a dog running across a yard. It had to hurt. I saw this in people. I’d felt it myself. Why else does a man come back from Vietnam, spend decades building businesses and selling them, marry a good woman and have four daughters, and then, when he’s supposed to retire, pick up and head back to a war zone? After that first war I’d seen so much destruction I was hungry to go home and build, and after thirty-some years I’d evened things out and there wasn’t enough destruction left in my memory to keep me building. So I came to Afghanistan. My wife remarried. She did so four years ago. It took her five to realize I wasn’t coming back. My daughters have all exceeded my expectations, and I have another decade of raising girls here.”

  Frank adjusted his glasses.

  “For the first few years,” he said, “I helped run the American University of Afghanistan, but the vision was buried in the details. There’s nothing wrong with grammar and math, and I know it takes time to nail all that down, but a country needs more than translators and accountants. I kept thinking about a school built on a vision. Who wouldn’t be changed just by sitting and talking to a man who’d been through war and who’d invested in society? An entrepreneur who’d played a hand in his country’s local politics? I remember one day asking myself: What’s the worst that can happen? And having the thought: some talented young people will get to learn from me.

  “So I rented this place from two expats who went home. That’s when expats were beginning to leave. The golden days of the occupation were ending. Everyone was ready to drop what they were doing and run. The nice thing about being seventy-five is you get gunned down in the streets of Kabul and you die happy. I’ve had a fuller life than anyone I know.

  “Since then, I’ve brought in more than two dozen volunteers, most of them just staying the three months of their visas and teaching what they could, when it suited them. But Justin was sending me syllabi and curricula before he even arrived.”

  Frank chuckled — a dry, mirthless sound in his throat.

  “I remember his look when he walked in here. ‘If it were an ivory tower,’ I told him, ‘we wouldn’t need you.’ He just asked where his room was and who was responsible for what, and we’ve all had headaches ever since. Until a few days ago, I guess. Well, no, the car bomb, that’s been the biggest headache of all.”

  Frank hesitated, guilt obscuring his glow of pride. He no longer seemed so primed to voice his conflicts with a recently dead man.

  “Would you like to see his room?” he asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  He led me to the door and opened it for me. I stepped in and turned.

  “Can I have a moment alone?”

  His small bloodshot eyes focused in on me briefly from behind his glasses.

  “You knew him?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, I don’t see why not. I’ll just be in my office.”

  I closed the door and breathed. I needed a moment after Frank’s oration. I’d felt caught in its rhythm as the story poured out of him.

  I sat on the bed and placed my hand at the compressed center of the foam mattress. The closet shelf held a bottle of contact lens solution, a hand mirror, and neatly folded shirts, pants, and underwear, their colors dark. On the desk: books on pedagogy, English as a second language. A Bible lay on the sill. A notepad was empty except for a Kabul phone number that I copied. His laptop was shut. A drawer with pens also held a 32 gig zip drive.

  I took the drive and paused. His room was even plainer than Alexandra’s, the line where the tile floor met the concrete wall uninterrupted but for the unadorned desk and bed. Had he lived with the minimum so he could test his loyalty to the spirit? His brief relationship with Alexandra made little sense. He’d appeared less a lover than a priestly chaperone.

  Frank was waiting in his office, stick-thin legs crossed, one hand holding his glasses, his mouth chewing with a ratlike motion on the part that hooked over the ear. The plastic had been gnawed off, the metal serrated with teeth marks.

  “Justin wanted to save the boy,” he told me as soon as I sat.

  “The boy?”

  “Idris. Most of the students here are girls, but we do have a few boys. Justin and Idris were usually together. Idris was there when that party was attacked.”

  I had no memory of Idris in the safe room, though I did recall from other occasions the young Afghan man who’d driven Justin around Kabul.

  “Idris was in the car,” Frank said. “At least that’s what the police told me.”

  “He and Justin were friends?”

  “Well, that’s not quite right. Justin thought he could be Idris’s savior, and Idris used him.” Frank was speaking more deliberately. “That’s how he met Clay.”

  “Clay?”

  “Clay and Justin were old friends, from Louisiana.” Frank pursed his lips, wrinkles bunching around his mouth.

  “What does Clay have to do with the car bomb?”

  “Clay disappeared that day as well. The company he worked for thought he’d been kidnapped. They checked the security feed outside his compound. It showed him getting into the car with Justin and Alexandra and” — Frank looked me in the eyes now, as if to say he needed to tell somebody and had no one else — “and Idris. Idris was driving. But there were only three bodies, what remained of them anyway. The security company never went to the police. They asked me not to in a, well, not very friendly way.”

  “If you will permit me,” I said, “I would like to approach the
security company.”

  “You?” Frank stared at the ashen carpet cut to fit below his desk and chair, to damper the cold from the concrete.

  This was the story I’d been looking for. Clay’s presence in the car with Justin and Alexandra reinforced my conviction that the bomb wasn’t Taliban retribution for teaching girls.

  “Did you know them all well?” I asked.

  “Clay not so much, but Alexandra a little more. I met her through Justin. I asked her to come and speak to the girls. We need female mentors. I’d go so far as to say … well, no …”

  “Pardon me?” I eased my tone, sounding confused and in need of guidance, concealing my excitement that Tam would be doing an embed and everything I’d just learned was mine.

  “If you ask me — I’d never go on record with this, but — she’s the tragedy. The others …” He shrugged. “Anyway, I hope you have all you need from me for your article. The bit about the security company is off the record. Don’t mention my name to them. But if you have other questions or if you find something out, just come by whenever.”

  “Thank you,” I said, wondering if he would ask me to be a mentor as well.

  He walked me downstairs. The school’s driveway was empty, and we went out the gate and stood in the street. I’d imagined Justin and Alexandra propelled by their missions, reeling incautiously toward a point of combustion, but the story was more complicated.