In the light, she called to mind a lean tribe on a Breton coast. She thanked him for his company and said good night.
Idris asked if they should go back and wait for Frank at the bar, but Justin was too tired. He angled the heat vents toward himself. Relaxing into his seat, he recalled how, as a doctoral student, he’d gone through a period when he would wake up in a sweat, unable to control his desire except through prayer. He was haunted by the bodies of young women who attended his classes in yoga clothes or skirts, or those on the covers of fashion and men’s magazines, or the conversations he overheard — two TAs talking about sleeping with undergraduates, how, in bed, one had referred to her implants as sweet-sixteen breasts, propping them in her hands for him to admire. Justin had visited the university chapel where the boyish pastor asked if he’d given any thought to marriage. Justin told him he preferred the greater battle: devotion and resistance to the oceanic darkness against which he could measure his faith.
TWO DAYS BEFORE Tam left for her embed, her emotions were still oscillating. She alternated between her usual boasting and wondering about the car bomb. She reminisced about Alexandra — how confident she’d seemed, like someone who’d been here before or who’d read every Kabul expat blog — and the first time we’d seen her with Justin, in L’Atmos, the place packed, people turning as she crossed the room to go to the big bearded stranger, as if he belonged to her. And then Tam cried and admitted she would find our time apart difficult, and I held her.
When she went to take a shower, I said I’d join her in a moment. The water hissed as I sat next to the bukhari in my underwear. I hadn’t told her I was going to America. I didn’t feel guilt, just an unwillingness to share. I didn’t yet know how to spell out what was driving me to investigate the lives of those who’d died in the bombing.
The knobs squeaked, and water splashed the floor rhythmically as Tam wrung out her hair. I pictured her skimming water from her body, the way she usually did, moving her hands rapidly over her skin before reaching for a towel.
“You didn’t join me.” She stood naked in the bathroom door, a cut below her knee, the watery blood glossy and thin — a dramatic flourish, like her scarves.
Wicker blinds hung in the bottom two-thirds of the windows, exposing segments of fading sky. The final call to prayer had begun, the muezzin’s reedy voice resonating in the walls.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been different.”
“I’m just tired,” I told her. “Kabul. You know how it is.”
“The winter’s hard.” She knelt and put her arms around me. In the fire’s heat, she was already dry, just a faint humidity where the top of her chest pressed into my ribs. I ran my fingers through her hair to soothe her. It felt like frayed wet rope.
Later, as she slept, I lay restless, panic rising in me each time I stopped thinking about the story. Reporters were trained to offer bright glimpses into a situation, but more often than not their pithy lines reduced it. I was no longer envisioning an article in an American magazine. Such an investigation would end where I wanted to begin. I would write a novel instead.
That night, I dreamed that I picked the hand up from the street and walked through a field of skulls knowing I would recognize Alexandra from the beauty of her bones. I dreamed that she spoke to me, fire inside her mouth, a perfect sun behind her teeth. I awoke, haunted by my memories of the car, the indiscernible mass of burning plastic and humans cremated in full consciousness.
The next morning, after Tam left, I examined the card Frank had given me. Calling would cast me into the story I’d been imagining. I would no longer be a bystander. I chose the handwritten number on the back.
I recognized Steve’s voice instantly. I’d considered various introductions. If I told him I was a journalist and knew about Clay’s disappearance, it would give me a sense of authority, but it might also carry a threat for him and danger for me.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you. I was a friend of Alexandra.” I paused to see if he’d make a sound of recognition, but he didn’t. “She was involved with Clay. I’ve tried to call him, but his phone has been off. I was wondering if you would be willing to put me in touch.”
“Where did you get my number?”
“From Frank,” I said, since there was no other plausible explanation. “I was there during the attack, at your place.”
“Well, damn,” he said. “That was quite the party. Which one were you?”
“Michiko. I don’t believe we met.”
“Yeah. I remember. You were with the pretty redhead. Why don’t you come over?”
“When would be good for you?”
“Now,” he said, and hung up.
An hour later, when the taxi let me off outside a new gate and freshly plastered walls, I asked the driver to wait. The guard opened the door to a courtyard containing a 4Runner without evidence of bullet holes. My heart sped up, my pulse throbbing in my throat.
Steve had lost the radiance of that night. His pallor and fatigued blotches — his overly white teeth, blond hair, yellow and gray stubble, and the meaty redness around his neck — gave him a motley look. He led me on a tour. Many of the rooms lacked furniture, and traces of the firefight remained only on a small area of wall where bullet holes were patterned like a star, clustered in the center, diffuse at the edges.
“Jackson Pollock couldn’t have done it better,” he said as I followed him into the safe room. We sat across from each other, on the couches where everyone had huddled, the trunk of guns between us. I’d expected a smell of sweat or at least a residue of smoke. A flat screen showed the security feeds.
“I wish I could tell you something,” he said. “Clay’s a guy I hired who didn’t come to work one day. We sent someone over to his house. There were no clues. He owned nothing. He was a true mercenary.”
“Did he ever say anything that might help explain what happened to Justin and Alexandra?”
Steve had his blue eyes on me. They were unexceptional, a little bloodshot, something faded in them, like scuffed glass. His was the gaze of a soldier exhausted from hypervigilance, scouring a landscape he could never master.
He cleared his throat. “Frank told you about the video feed, right?”
“He mentioned that you thought Clay might have died in the car bomb.”
“That old meddler,” he said and rubbed his knuckles against his chin in a simian motion, scratching his stubble. “Clay’s dead. I wish I could tell you more. He’s gone — maybe kidnapped, but I doubt it. I’d call this one dead. He was probably just in the wrong place when the Taliban went after his friends.”
Still not swayed by the Taliban story, I asked, “So what about Idris?”
“Well, there’s the mystery. Someone walked away. I’d place my bet on Idris having been radicalized.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“A little,” he said. “During the attack, Idris was here — under the bed in my room, hiding.”
