Into the Sun Page 5

  When I was nine, I realized that haafu was the Japanese pronunciation of half. I had made English my passion and felt a sense of ownership over the language. I was drawn to it before it was offered in school. I watched English TV, read magazines and eventually novels. I was soon better at speaking English than my teachers. But science, my mother told me, over and over, was life’s highest calling, and languages would not earn me the respect I deserved.

  When I got a little older, I sensed another difference within me. There was a misalignment of desire that I couldn’t verbalize but felt in the way I gravitated toward girls, how talk of boys didn’t interest me. The girls ignored me, sensing they weren’t entering into an alliance for a mutual goal but were the goal themselves. Just as my mother wasn’t part of the society she craved — though she could evoke it to the satisfaction of powerful men in hostess bars — I saw my people in American novels and TV shows, and counted my days.

  To please my mother, I excelled in science, through university and into a respectable job, synthesizing lab reports on DNA studies. One day I learned that she’d been writing letters to her parents for years, and one had finally been answered. They wanted to meet. We had a long tense dinner at which a gray-haired man with pouches below his eyes asked me about my work. My mother had two siblings whose photos were on the walls, and I learned about them and my successful cousins. Hearing my mother and grandparents speak, I realized what I should have long before — that I was her fall from grace, that the family’s last shared memories dated to her pregnancy.

  After dinner, at her home, she wept, thanking me, and then I went back to the apartment I’d recently moved into. The next day I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t go to work. All my life I’d lived under the weight of something I was unable to name, an array of fears — of difference and failure — and now I saw that my life was invalid in my culture. My story — if it were to be told — was that of a mistake attempting redemption.

  After a week, I accepted that I could no longer pretend. I slept and spoke to no one, and in the times when my mind cleared, I read American stories — of defiance and adventure for the sake of self-invention. Until then, my fate had been to fashion myself in an image established by a society under the domination of toad-like old men with teenage mistresses and three-thousand-dollar suits. I craved leaving behind the hypocrisy and setting out for a frontier where I could prove that my confused beginnings were the prologue to something great.

  Of course, when I did cross the Pacific, to San Francisco, the place I found was no frontier. The America I’d composed in my brain was a country of the past: the memories or inventions of dead authors. I was frightened by the uncertainty before me and realized how much fear I’d been harboring, how much it had locked me into my previous life. Every decision now was laden with expectation and consequence, and yet I gradually realized that when I was making the decisions, selecting my challenges, the apprehension that had overshadowed my life became manageable.

  Though I floated through my travels, my choices at each juncture encouraged me. Exploring the West Coast, I wrote travel pieces, mapping the area by its tourist venues, trendy hotspots, and gentrified streets.

  As my writing found an audience in Japan, I was offered assignments abroad. I composed testimonies to the luxury of a new generation of Gulf State hotels, or the splendor of parks in Africa and Asia. When an editor asked if I would go to Afghanistan, my dread seemed to erase me, and this compelled me to confront it — to let it purge me of myself.

  I was hired to write about Bamiyan, one of Afghanistan’s safest provinces and the historic home of the Hazara people I resembled. When I arrived there, at an altitude of eight thousand feet, the spring air was cold and the trees barely budding. I visited cathedral-high niches in the cliffs, where the Taliban had dynamited the ancient towering Buddha statues, and I climbed to the crumbling mountaintop turrets of Shahr-e-Zohak, the red fort at the entrance to the Bamiyan valley. I visited Afghanistan’s first national park, Band-e-Amir, a chasm holding six sapphire lakes separated by natural travertine dams.

  In the guesthouse, listening to journalists and NGO workers on R&R from Kabul tell stories, I felt a twinge of recognition, as if the characters from the novels I’d grown up reading had appeared in the flesh. What I found familiar wasn’t just their love of adventure — that is universal enough — but an obsession with testing boundaries and reinvention. They sounded excited by their own words — the experiences they described not finished but still having effect on them, like a catalyzed chemical process or an initiated life cycle.

  A few days later, in Kabul, as I met more expats in cafés, bars, and hotels, my impression grew, a sense that they had stepped out of history’s shadow and knew it — that their thoughts and actions actually mattered. They seemed aware of their fears, capable of describing them, and yet able to survive here. I delayed my flight, found a room among expats, then a studio apartment, and my articles began edging away from the subject of travel.

  For a year, as I navigated unease in my new environment, the dangers of daily life illuminated parts of my old self that I hated. The attack on the safe room forced me beyond a fear so old it was a current — a river I had always swam against, moving closer to its source. I found myself in a quiet, powerless space, where what was was: material, unmoved by my mind, unclouded by emotions and ideas. In the weeks after, tiny pieces of glass emerged from my body, from my knees, from my palms, from healing cuts I’d barely noticed.

  In the dusk, as Kabul’s lights came on, I decided that I’d sufficiently tested my courage. I made my way down rainwater gullies or in the dirty patches of snow to keep from slipping, moving aside for a taxi struggling home, its mismatched yellow and white panels rattling.

  I called my chowkidar, the guard who cared for the apartments in my compound, and asked him to light my bukhari. By the time I arrived, the studio was warm, and I sat at my desk.

  When my job had been to read reports of genetic studies, I’d seen so much of what makes us human broken down to code: the impulse to love or hurt, the lust for dominance and conquest. As I read imagined lives crossing the American continent, I recognized the workings of our heritage, the ticking of destiny in hungers and needs, our insatiable quest to claim more territory and dominate others in every way possible, even if under the banner of civilization, or salvation.

  Though I understood that we create fictions to transform the perpetual rising of animal desire into human stories of fulfillment, I struggled to give myself the authority to invent. And yet I’d reached the limits of journalism. Reading about Alexandra, Justin, and Clay, I had the sense that I’d come to a forgotten temple in a dusty, ruined America and, while trying to decipher the civilization portrayed there, had seen the same figures repeatedly etched upon a wall: characters like those I’d read about since I was a child, the bearers of a language, as if, in a myth, they’d met me at a river and taken me across, illuminating the dark country beyond with their bodies.

  Among the copious Word files on Justin’s zip drive — most of them syllabi and curricula — was one entitled “Notes,” a record of his life in the form of — I didn’t see this right away — sermons. He revealed glimpses of his life behind biblical lessons: boarding a plane in Dubai, excited by the brightness of the sky. It seemed that he harbored ambitions as a preacher and thought his life might be a source of inspiration. The prose was so overwrought that reading it felt like spying on him through a dense jungle.

  The story I found there was a personal fiction of omissions — guilt and obligation whose origins were not mentioned — and as I sat at my laptop, I hunted these blank spots in my mind. Though he had no impact on what happened in the safe room — made none of the memorable remarks — he was the least incidental of those who might have been in the car. Without him, Clay and Alexandra wouldn’t have met, nor Idris and Clay.

  He remains clear to me from the safe room, handsomely indif
ferent despite the judgments on him or from him — he disapproved of almost everyone and was considered a pedant and zealot. He had short auburn hair, sun-bleached to red in places, and a beard as abundant as those of the men outside to kill us. Though the beard and square cut of his hair drew attention to his nose, making it appear long and vaguely prophetic, it wasn’t an unusual nose in itself, and faint rosy spots on his cheeks suggested that, shaved, he’d look like a boy.

  He echoed this perception in his notes, wishing to see his reflection in the plane window as he neared Kabul, afraid he lacked poise, and at once knowing that his readiness depended only on his faith. This is how he comes back to me, peering into the window to see my evocation of a face shining as if lit in a niche, staring in thrall, craving what he saw.

  JUSTIN

  In countless cycles, a dream sequence that refused to finish, the plane turned, the horizon’s curve glowing the saturated blue of an LCD screen. Justin leaned close to the window. It must be time. He had a sense of floating, motionless above the gray field.

  Over the intercom, the pilot explained they were circling high above Kabul, waiting for the cloud ceiling to lift. Every few minutes, the airliner tilted as it turned, windows on one side going dark as those across the aisle brightened, silhouetting turbaned heads and beards.

  The discharge from Justin’s sinuses worsened. He blew his nose. The two men who’d begun the flight next to him had found seats farther up. Across the aisle, a bulky man with a mop of beard glared.

  The blue vanished, dense clouds battered past the small passenger jet, and altitude losses jolted the wings. The landing gear dropped, the wind shear palpable as Justin’s seatbelt tightened against his hips. The plane vibrated through rough air like a car going over a rumble strip.

  He checked his mind for fear. His arrival was only a waypoint. Death would be meaningless. If he trusted the knowledge that came to him in the seconds between waking and full consciousness, or in that confluence of daydream and vision, he would have the years he needed for everything he’d lived to have meaning.

  At the front of the cabin, a cell bleeped: the text message alert of an early Nokia no longer used in America, a repeated double pinging that had become of another era within a decade. One by one, throughout the plane, other cells echoed — two, four, almost a dozen — so that, though clouds gusted and muscled at the window, he knew the ground was just below.

  Brown lines of wet roads appeared in glimpses, framed by dirty snow. A white hill emerged then dissolved in mist. The city’s sprawl came into focus, two-dimensional at first, thousands of square rooftops in a maze of streets. The wheels thudded, the wing flaps went up, the plane rocked and then pushed hard against the tarmac.

  Buckles clicked and men crowded the aisle to open overhead bins as the plane slowed, as if they were on a bus. They pulled out their bags, their beards angled upward. Some shouted into cells.

  The edges of his nostrils burned. As the others were rushing out, he touched the drink napkin to his nose and stood. In the aisle, a black cloth lay in a heap. He stooped and lifted it, a headscarf maybe. The material felt smooth and synthetic between his fingers.

  Just inside the airport, a woman stopped as the men hurried past, a few of them looking her over. Her back was to Justin, her brown hair cut below her shoulders. His sinuses ached, and he blew his nose.

  He passed her and turned. He’d been told not to speak to Afghan women in public. She stared slightly up and beyond the ceiling, her black eyes unfocused. It took him a moment to realize that they seemed so dark only because her pupils were dilated. The thin rings of her irises were actually amber. One of her hands lingered at her shoulder, her fingers in her hair.

  Did you drop this?

  She focused on him, her pupils contracting. She was breathing fast.

  Oui! Merci. Thank you. It is mine.

  You’re French?

  She took the scarf carefully, appearing at odds to control her fingers, and looped it over her head.

  Québécoise. Thank you for finding this. I just realized.

  As they walked together, Justin’s apprehension faded. He made himself confident to reassure her. Only his cold undermined his arrival.

  What brought you to Afghanistan? she asked.

  I’m volunteering at a school. A prep school, basically.

  Side by side, like a couple, they approached the officer checking passports. They had their fingerprints scanned, headshots taken, and passports stamped. Her passport was Canadian. Why hadn’t she said that?

  Outside the open doors of the baggage claim, the wet parking lot was threaded with melting snow. Men stood packed together at the inert conveyor belt. Justin asked what she did.

  I’m a lawyer. I have a contract with an organization that defends women in prisons.

  The conveyor began to chug and creak. His headache had worsened, and his back ached.

  I’m finishing my doctorate in education, he told her. At the University of Houston. I was offered an academic director position here.

  He didn’t want her to think he was just a volunteer, but he disliked how his words came out. He hadn’t meant to cut her off to state his superior credentials. The sense of the journey he’d lived through his prayers grew distant. He should be able to follow the truth without needing to tell another.

  When they’d retrieved their bags, they walked out together, following the Afghans who pulled their suitcases across a road and through a gate into a parking lot where groups of people waited: families, women in headscarves, and taxi drivers, many of them in Western dress. Those in shalwar kameez had chosen tan or brown, a few blue. No one was in black, and none of the foreigners — except Justin — were dressed like locals.

  Is it okay for us to be talking in public? she asked.

  I don’t see why not.

  Is this your first time?

  As he said yes, she glanced down at his black Afghan tunic. With a few steps, she put space between herself and him, as if realizing he was not only new here, but possibly dangerous.

  The sudden shifts in her carriage — the lengthening of her stride, the redressing of her shoulders and neck — gave her the air of someone on a routine visit. Lifted, her forehead was clear. There were faint determined lines on either side of her mouth, like those of a woman who didn’t want to be disturbed.

  A man wearing a casual suit and trim goatee approached her and extended his hand. His accent was faintly British.

  Ms. Alexandra Desjardins, welcome. I am Hamid. Please let me take your bag.

  She thanked him and then observed Justin warily. Hamid was poised, appearing ready to lunge between them.

  It was a pleasure meeting you, Justin told her.

  Yes. Good luck. She smiled with only her mouth — her pupils suddenly tiny, her irises thin golden bands — before walking away.

  A few taxi drivers called to Justin. Through a growing buzz of adrenaline, he realized how cold he felt, his jacket much too light.

  In the days before his flight, Justin had perfected his appearance: a fist of beard, close-cropped hair, and the black shalwar kameez. Ahmad, the Dari teacher he’d found on Craigslist, a grocery bagger at Whole Foods, had stood next to him before the mirror at the tailor’s.

  You will do very well, Ahmad had said.

  Justin was still confusing the shalwar and the kameez, one part of the outfit loose pants with narrow ankles, the other a tunic that hung to his knees. As he studied himself in the mirror, he envisioned his arrival in Kabul: his calm blue eyes contrasting with the auburn beard.

  During his layover in Frankfurt, he began to sniffle. By Dubai, his nose was stuffed. On the flight to Kabul, his back muscles ached. When he took his window seat, the young Afghan next to him smiled. He wore black jeans, an ornate leather jacket, and had gel in his hair — clearly the son of an affluent family. Justin pictured himself having dinn
ers with them, discussing politics and the parallels between Islam and Christianity. He tried out his Dari — Chettor hasten?

  Khub hastam, the young man replied and then switched to English. Do you lift weights?

  Yes, but only to stay in shape.

  Then you must know Hamidullah Shirzai? He is one of Afghanistan’s great bodybuilders. There is a film about him. I believe he must also be famous in America now.

  Justin’s sinuses throbbed with the drumbeat of his heart. Discharge stung the edges of his nostrils, gumming up his mustache. He put a drink napkin to his nose and blew.

  The young man went rigid. He stood, walked up the aisle, and leaned to speak with other passengers. Afghans glanced back at Justin. By the time the plane landed, he was alone in his row.

  He’d imagined his arrival as a new beginning, but now, feverish, he could see only risks: that he wouldn’t be able to communicate, that he’d be harassed for being an American, or even kidnapped — or that the Taliban would shoot down the airliner. How could it be safe to land in the capital around which America’s longest war had been spiraling for years?

  As Justin waited in the parking lot, he thought how reassuringly familiar Alexandra had been — even if she was French and from Canada, a country that called to mind only his father’s stories about Vietnam and the men who escaped north to flee the draft.

  He began to shiver, his muscles like icepacks.

  Mr. Justin?

  The young man wore jeans, and a belted jacket hung on his frame like a bathrobe. He had the starved look common to people who hadn’t recovered from being underfed as children.

  Yes. That’s me.

  I am Idris. Mr. Frank sent me.

  If not so thin, Idris would be striking with his black hair, his cleft chin with a few sparse hairs, his unwavering dark eyes set against milk-pale skin.