“I’m not,” Tam said, holding up her phone. “I’m trying to get reception. I need to tell my editors what’s going down.”
“Now this is a proper safe room,” he replied as he made his way to an iPad console. “The walls are too thick for much cell reception, but we’ve got Wi-Fi. Password is end of the world, all one word.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And what is your name?”
“Steve Hammond.”
“And you’re from?”
“South Africa.”
“And is there any reason you would be targeted?”
“I have twenty foreigners partying at my place.”
This was what I envied about Tam: she had the presence of mind to ask questions others would consider only once their survival was guaranteed. She was already trying to deduce the target, an activity I’d engage in later, recalling memories as vivid as frescoes.
The room was crowded and hot, and we repositioned ourselves, easing out of our protective huddles. In the back, two people helped a woman who had glass in her eye.
“And this safe room is secure?” Tam asked, pausing from her typing to assess me and the few other journalists among the guests.
“Secure as it gets,” Steve replied. “There’s no access to us but through two steel gates on the ground floor and this one here. I’ve already put out a call to the police. And for those of you who are feeling queasy, there’s a bathroom behind that sliding panel.”
Tam was studying him.
“And what do you do for a living?” she asked.
“I sell safe rooms, among other things.”
A few expats actually laughed with relief, their voices unnatural, nervously hysterical as they touched each other for reassurance.
Steve unlocked a cabinet. I expected guns, but there were four bottles of Macallan 30 and one of Hendrick’s gin. He ignored the gin, cracked the whiskey, took out a stack of plastic cups, and asked who was drinking. Those who didn’t accept at first soon did, seeing others calm a little but also realizing we might not get a second chance to taste Scotch this old or this expensive.
Tam motioned me to the space on the couch next to her. Specks of glass glittered in her hair, like a party girl’s sparkles, and her eyeliner was smudged. If I were American, I would have boasted that an attacker had shot at me. He’d seen me peering over the balcony, and I’d felt the wind of a bullet at my ear.
Everyone was engrossed with the Taliban on the screen, and though I sensed the fear around me, I felt emptied of my own. It had suddenly become a pointless emotion, unable to offer me anything.
The woman who had something in her eye rinsed it out — Steve had the place stocked with water, food, and first aid kits — and her eye was fine, only a little red. She admitted that maybe it was just dust, “though it felt like glass,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it was glass.”
“Fuck!” the German shouted. On the TV, one of our attackers had taken a brick from a green backpack, the kind schoolchildren wear. He attached it to the front door, lit a fuse, and ran. Tam studied Steve, who sipped his drink, observing the screen. A few men and women held their heads, squealing until they were out of breath. The blast took out the camera near the entrance. It sounded like someone slamming a door in an old house. The floor vibrated.
Steve switched to a different feed. In the yard, the three insurgents held their Kalashnikovs at the ready and ran through the blackened doorway.
“How many doors left to go?” Tam asked.
“One on the first floor, at the bottom of the stairs,” Steve said, “and this one here.”
Something deep in my head seemed to contract, and everything in the room, the lines of the walls and ceiling, the TV and the expats, became sharp, as if a razor had cut away the dullness. Tam’s eyes, the crystalline departure at the iris’s dark blue edge, their whites slightly gray — a side effect, she believed, of nine years in Kabul’s pollution, and a source of insecurity — were now infused with light.
I’ve often returned to my memories of that evening, when death was no longer an ending but an opening into a shadowless world, and each glimpse felt like a lifetime. Among the images that haunt me are those of Alexandra, Justin, and Clay. The people in the safe room — a few ex-military types, NGO workers whose security Steve’s company handled, and independent journalists or videographers for hire who went to any party that would have them — had formed groups on the couches or the floor, holding hands, whereas Alexandra and Justin stood apart, staring at the TV, their expressions beatifically blank.
Clay also stood alone, the tallest person in the room, at once compact and long-limbed, hard-faced like a fighter but not blunt, the lines of his skull crisp, his brown hair cropped short. He appeared detached despite the feral green of his eyes.
At the time, I made only cursory note of these three. The two men and her desire for them, so uncouth as to seem illicit, had become irrelevant. I noticed Justin and Alexandra because I saw in them the purity of what I felt, and I evaluated Clay’s strength as I asked myself who would protect us if the safe room was blasted open.
I might have forgotten their love triangle altogether — its only purpose, perhaps, to underscore the foolishness that brought about my near death — had they not died two days later. Though expats would fail to find a connection with the attack on the safe room, months of my own investigation would reveal that we were all nearly killed because of that very love triangle: a convoluted story of pettiness; less a plot than a conjunction of character flaws.
“The help is here!” Steve shouted. He’d switched from the camera downstairs, where one of the insurgents was setting up a round of explosives at the next door, to the camera in the courtyard. Afghan Special Forces were coming in, stout men in uniforms and body armor. We admired the determination with which they crossed the yard under fire.
“We’re going to be fucking okay,” Steve called out. “Who needs a refill?”
TWO DAYS LATER, I was in a private taxi, on my way to an early interview at the Inter-Continental. The young driver — cleanly shaven and so doused in cologne the car smelled like a duty free — was enjoying the largely empty streets, swerving around potholes, racing into intersections, veering and braking when yellow-and-white public taxis cut into our lane, glittering calligraphy spelling the names of Allah in their windows.
Suddenly, he slowed. I’d heard a thud and thought nothing of it, but he was scanning the horizon. A white cloud rose above the rooftops and drifted toward the river, trailing a line of darker smoke.
“Let’s go take a look,” I said.
“No,” he told me. “It is dangerous for you.”
“It’s not. Let me out here. I’ll walk.”
Both of his cells were ringing. News spread quickly among Afghans when there was an attack. He pulled over, and I dropped eight dollars on the front seat.
The absence of fear I’d felt two nights before was still with me as
