Into the Sun Read online

  “Why,” I asked, “did Justin think he had to save Idris?”

  Frank’s jaw went crooked. “Everybody who comes here believes he’s got to save someone. I remember telling him, you don’t fix a country overnight. It must have been his third day. He was already assigning homework, and the girls complained to me. I told him they were too busy for homework. They all had jobs, accounting for a pharmacy or a clinic, translating and typing. ‘Think in decades,’ I said.”

  He appeared to be trying to pick up where he’d left off in his monologue, to regain the conviction to finish the polemic he’d been harboring so he could drive his verdict home. But he’d waited too long. He fumbled at his pocket and took out his wallet, as though to pay for my taxi. He pinched at a worn leather fold, removed a card, and extended it to me.

  “You know,” he said, half his face contracted as he squinted off down the muddy street, “people tell me I’ve had a good run and it’s time to head home, that I’ll be next. But that’s how you lose a war. You turn tail. You show them their barbaric tactics work. So let them target me. What was it Tennyson said of the aging Ulysses? Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. I know what I’m doing, and so did Alexandra. She told me that everyone she worked with talked women’s rights and wrote up reports, but had almost no contact with Afghan women other than a few who came through the office. She wasn’t the one visiting the prisons and seeing the abuses. Meeting the girls here changed her. She said that Afghan women aren’t as weak as people think, and she was right. The strongest women I’ve ever met have studied in this school, and if I have to die to see that they have their freedom, that’s a small price to pay.”

  At that, he blinked and lifted his gaunt palm, and I got in the taxi. As it pulled away, I inspected the card. On its back, a number was written, the pen strokes angular and uneven, like tiny cuts, but too wet, blotting. I flipped it over. Printed in a stern font were two more numbers, an email, and a name: Steve Hammond.

  All that week, Kabul was quiet — traffic jams and construction and impromptu checkpoints, but quiet nonetheless. Spring arrived in sunlit days. Afternoon showers stripped dust and smog from the air, and tamped it into the earth. The nights hovered at freezing: brittle stars, drafts at windows, and the creaking of metal as the fire took in my bukhari.

  I sat next to it, working my way through Alexandra’s scuffed journal with the help of an iPhone French-English dictionary and Google Translate, searching for what compelled her into a love triangle like a Wild West standoff between a hayseed missionary and a gun for hire. In expats’ speculation about who had died, Clay was absent, and I enjoyed his mystery as I read her entries, anticipating his arrival.

  During high school, I studied French. Its sound evokes refinement for the Japanese. My professor said the history of France and Japan is a love story between aesthetics, each finding in the other the embodiments of ideals. But I knew nothing about French Canadians.

  Je n’ai pas le choix, she wrote before leaving Montreal for Kabul. “I have no choice. I have to go. I am afraid. I have no affinity to that place or its people, but going will help me move on.” The dramatic tone surprised me. I said the first line out loud: “I have no choice.” Tyranny is a poor metaphor for internal struggle, and yet it was a feeling we shared.

  In Justin’s emails to Alexandra, he described the importance of educators in the civilian surge, whereas she was more interested in justice for women. They sounded intoxicated with their ideas, as if, in the space of writing them, they’d transformed Afghanistan.

  His emails mentioned Idris: If we’re going to create change, we need to change those in power. The men have power. We must not marginalize them … He wrote about Frank: He believes he can shape a culture by choosing its leaders; rather, its leaders must choose us. They must see in us a representation of values they can aspire to.

  Though I’d intended to pen a seminal article and expose the plot that nearly took my life, I read with a growing sense that I was onto something bigger: a tale of power and a doorway into America, where all passions seemed justified.

  Hour by hour, the reasons for my interest seemed to rise up, promising and bright on the horizon, before evanescing like mirages. When I’d come to Kabul, I’d planned to become a war correspondent. I read Ernie Pyle, and longed for World War II’s grit and simple glory, a clear enemy, two options: heroic victory or destruction, not endless games of attrition played in secret. I read Michael Herr: you couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began … might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along …

  And yet, as I learned about Justin, Alexandra, and Clay, my imagination nourished their stories with the journeys and characters in the American novels I’d grown up reading. Increasingly, I pictured myself writing in that form. I was fortunate to have a mystery, a plot, a missing person, maybe even a murderer.

  That evening, Tam came over. She’d been preparing for her Special Forces embed, doing paperwork and preliminary interviews on bases in Kabul while wrapping up edits for previous projects. Each time I saw her, she talked about Alexandra’s death. She never mentioned Clay, only Justin’s obsession with Idris, his conviction that Frank was using him. “But what disgruntled student embarks on a suicide mission?” she asked. She, too, was skeptical of the Taliban’s claim — unless Justin had been proselytizing. Converting a Muslim was one of the worst offences here.

  Kabul was a haven for conspiracies. Sooner or later expats explained away even the most random killing. If a Westerner was shot, a rumor arose that he was feeding information to an embassy or a diplomat, and someone put out a hit. If the deceased was a journalist, people said his writing had been critical of a warlord, when in truth it was hard to write anything about Afghanistan without mentioning warlords or being critical. Some days, we agreed on the incompetence of the Afghan security forces. Others, we believed they had precise information about everyone and would do anything to maintain the status quo, even kill us.

  The conspiracies gave us the sense that we were players in a vast intrigue whose chaos hid its order. In this way, they made us feel safe. If we accepted that much of what happened was random, how could we go out our front doors? We repeated stories that stripped others of their innocence so as to enshrine our own and live more fully in its protection.

  If I told Tam about my investigations, she would think I was encroaching on her territory, but just gathering this information and building it into a story diminished the uncertainty I sensed around me.

  Embers glowed inside the bukhari’s open hatch. Beyond the compound wall, an engine raced, tires spinning loudly against the ice.

  I closed my eyes. Bodies immolated, blown apart. What made everyone so sure of who was in the car? Did the police simply count the pieces? Death was too common here for them to do more than that.

  I stroked Tam’s hair until she fell asleep. I traced her throat, her collarbone. She drew closer, pressing against me, breathing softly.

  I often replayed the attack in my head, a looping reel the details of which I sorted through to determine who I’d seen before and after we’d gone into the safe room.

  Once we were locked inside, Steve Hammond told us he used the room to showcase his product: a lounge space insulated in every way, with AC and Wi-Fi, a bathroom, liquor cabinet, and iPad console, a TV to monitor the outside from wide-angle cameras, and an iron door embedded in the wall, impervious to light explosives.

  “Is this a setup?” Tam asked. “Are you staging this to make us buy one of these?”

  “I’m sold,” the young German called out. “When can I move in?”

  No one laughed. Justin and Alexandra remained entranced by the screen. They didn’t comfort each other, and they didn’t accept the Scotch. There was something private and reverential in their attention to what was happening outside.

  The Afghan Special Forces had staked positions i
n the yard, and Steve switched cameras so that one moment we were watching the soldiers shooting into a dark window and the next we saw the insurgent crouched just inside as bullets blasted grooves in its frame.

  “Shall we place bets on which one lasts the longest?” Steve asked and turned back to the room. “Aw, come on. Is this how you want to live — huddled up like rats?”

  “We have to name them first,” Tam said.

  The insurgent threw a grenade into the yard, and the soldiers leapt for cover.

  “Jesus!” someone cried out in a breathy, terrified voice.

  “Okay,” Steve told us. “That one’s clearly Jesus. They could be twins except for the body armor. What about this guy?” He switched channels.

  “Moses,” Tam replied. This was typical Kabul humor, at once proof and negation of the human spirit.

  “And number three?” Steve asked.

  “I know, I know,” the German called out, “how about —”

  “No!” we interrupted, drowning out his voice.

  “But there are no Afghans here,” he said.

  “Have some respect, you fuckin’ infidel,” Steve told him.

  “How about Elijah?” Tam suggested.

  Everyone agreed, habituated enough to the circumstances to put down twenty dollars on the insurgent of choice. I picked Elijah because he held back and let the other two take risks. As Jesus was rigging up explosives on the steel door at the bottom of the stairs, he caught a bullet in the throat and detonated them. This time we felt it: the lights flickered and there was one less camera, the others capturing only drifting smoke. Although Jesus had been a favorite, no one was thinking about the heap of twenties.

  Lana Del Rey hadn’t stopped singing, now crooning “National Anthem.” Steve went to the iPad mounted on the wall, brought up her image — that classic retro mug shot — and changed the song to “Born to Die.”

  For an hour, the last two Taliban held out as the Special Forces worked their way inside. The German, an aspiring videographer, mourned not having his gear and recorded with his phone, asking questions like, “Do you regret your decision to take a job here?” and “What are you feeling right now?” He was repeatedly told to fuck off until Steve — who paused from switching between feeds that revealed his home being systematically disfigured — simply said, “Come on, mate, quit being a cunt.”

  The terrified people were eating up the bandwidth, tweeting and IMing, making work hard for the journalists who were seeing their Afghanistan payout. A young American named Holly, who was often at social outings and worked at a shelter that rehabilitated Afghan street dogs, bawled on Skype with her mother, saying she loved her, though the line kept cutting out.

  “Tell her the connection is overloaded,” Tam said. “Each time the call drops, she probably thinks you’ve been killed.”

  “Tell your mommy the bad guys will be dead soon enough,” Steve reassured her. “Have a drink before it’s all gone and, hell, sit back and enjoy the show. You’ll never see another one like it.”

  Though the attackers were just outside the safe room, the gunfire sounded more distant than I’d expected.

  Steve’s coolness gradually waned. Maybe the show had gone on longer than he’d planned. To calm his guests, he anatomized the door: a ten-inch-thick slab, essentially an iron box filled with concrete and sliding on ball bearings in an iron frame built into the wall.

  He unlocked the metal trunk that served as a coffee table. It held four handguns and three short rifles. He gave a rifle to Clay and to another contractor, and asked who else knew how to shoot. Tam said she used to go to firing ranges with an ex in the States. The woman who’d had glass in her eye told us that as a teenager she came in second in the state fair for skeet shooting.

  “These aren’t skeet,” Steve told her, “and adrenaline is a different game.” He handed her a pistol, the people near her inching away. Tam and two men also took guns.

  We arranged the couches into a barrier. On the screen, Elijah was setting up explosives on our door. We crouched shoulder to shoulder behind those of us holding weapons. Everyone had gone pale. Someone began throwing up in the bathroom. Justin was praying, and Alexandra was looking at Clay as if she’d put her bet on him.

  Two members of the Special Forces crept in from the living room and got Elijah under crossfire. There was a resonant boom. The floor shook, reverberations clapping in the room. Our ears rang and a little smoke rose from under the door.

  “I told you we were safe,” Steve said.

  The people who had money on Moses tried to divvy up the pot, but their hands shook so badly they kept dropping the bills until they finally gave up and hugged each other.

  “Imagine,” Tam said, “they could have cleaned out twenty foreigners in one go.”

  My mind refused to consider what had just happened. I was too busy forming memories that instantly seemed like artifacts. But four days later, after talking to Frank, I studied those memories: the young German attempting his blasphemous joke and then insisting there were no Afghans, and Tam making her comment about how many foreigners would have died. Idris, who was supposed to have driven Justin to the party, definitely wasn’t there.

  When the last Taliban fell beneath a volley of bullets, we cheered.

  The whiskey was gone and Steve told someone to crack the gin. We poured it in cups and knocked it back.

  “Finish the gin! Finish the gin!” I’m not sure who started the chant, but even Holly drank. She was crying uncontrollably. On the screen, the security forces were scanning the building, carefully moving through. We clapped as Holly shook and wept and tipped the cup back, gin dribbling from her chin and spotting her shirt. Weeks later, I would hear her at L’Atmos, where she stood at the bar and described the firefight as the greatest thrill of her life.

  I think it dawned on all of us then, as we turned from Holly to the door, that we would have to open it and walk out and see the granular images from the screen become flesh, the remains of men who’d died or blown themselves to pieces.

  Steve was smiling, his hand on the lock.

  Part 2

  Kabul: January/March 2012

  }

  美智子

  Each time I left my apartment after the attack, I felt the city in a way I hadn’t before — its hunger, that primordial urge become urban panic. People charged, tromped, scurried with postures of determination, drudgery, or rage. Men full as ticks passed others so thin muscles twined bones, their loose, ragged clothes not masking the inequity, their profiles like glyphs. They were on their own trajectories and hardly noticed me. I saw that now.

  Where the asphalt ended, I followed the dirt road up through the square, earth-colored houses crowding TV Hill — one of the ridges above Kabul, its slope a suburban ziggurat and its summit loaded with the eponymous antennae and red-and-white striped communications towers.

  I was here without another expat or Afghan — friend, interpreter, or fixer — and I didn’t squint down at Taimani and find my house, measuring the time it would take to backtrack to that speck of walled safety.

  I sat on a stone with a splotch of white paint on its edge, a marker from demining years back. Wind whistled through the transmission towers, and the sun bore down out of a winter blue sky. Azan echoed over the rooftops, the muezzin shrill in the minaret speakers. At dusk, Kabul coalesced inside its geologic cauldron, headlights sparking, wide avenues cutting it into provinces, into eras, divides as clear as evening’s shadow from the mountains.

  I never intended to come to Afghanistan. It’s odd how little we learn from experiences and choices, that we can wake up in Afghanistan and go about our days, forgetting that something of consequence had driven or lured us. Our paths of longing rarely lead where we expect. I used to think I had nothing in common with my mother, but eventually I realized that I shared her frustration, her inability to belong to the
world she craved.

  She wanted to be part of respectable society. She spoke rarely, so I never knew what set her alienation into motion. Solitude, I’d learned as a child, is not a static state in a singular element, but a movement, even a journey, that can go in as many directions as we imagine.

  My mother was born in 1964, a reckless child of the economic boom that seemed to be lifting Japan toward global economic domination. I never met my grandparents. She raised me in a one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo and worked nights as a hostess. Her job seemed respectable when I read about it in magazines and discovered that a few hostesses had become celebrities of a sort. I was relieved to learn that hostesses weren’t prostitutes, though some people perceived them as such. Maybe her career explained the familial rupture, or maybe she’d found her job after a fall from grace. She did go on dates with certain clients, and on occasion she didn’t come home. I suspect she desired a few of her suitors. Their gifts piled up: fur coats, jewelry, chocolates, and perfume.

  I was raised like an envoy back to the people she’d lost. She managed my outfits and schooling, helped me with my homework. As I got older, I realized how educated she was. That was the reason wealthy men wanted to relax in her company as she poured drinks and discussed politics and history. Even as her beauty faded, her mastery of the art of listening and polite conversation retained its value.

  She never told me I was different. The Japanese are conditioned to find discordance, and it was from children at school that I learned I was haafu. I asked my mother what it meant, and she explained that, yes, my father was American. Who was he? Where was he? Could I find him? These were questions I asked for years. But she knew little. He’d grown up in California, lived in New York, and visited Tokyo. She’d been nineteen and had met him in a club. He was a wan naito sutando — a one-night stand.

  As if to console me, she said that children with mixed blood were often stars in Japan, models and actors — symbols of beauty. When we walked in the street, she pointed to posters of women advertising clothes or shampoo, and at the magazine covers on the racks.