in his forties, came by with an escort of two green Ford Rangers. He sat with us, holding the tea Tam had served as he explained that there had been three people in the car. The scant remains offered few clues, but the car belonged to the school where Justin taught. Justin and Alexandra were missing, as was one of his students, a young man named Idris, who was Justin’s driver. The Taliban had tweeted that the victims were killed for immoral contact with the Afghan girls they were subjecting to Western educations. Justin must have been the target, since many mullahs forbade men from teaching girls after puberty, but Alexandra had recently become involved at the school as a mentor, so her death wasn’t incidental.
After the officer left, we discussed why the Taliban would bomb a car when they could have stormed the school and killed its teachers and founder, a septuagenarian named Frank Alaric who’d been in Kabul since the American invasion. Tam phoned Frank, offered her condolences, and then mostly listened.
“I would love to do that,” she said finally, “but I’m starting a documentary on the US Special Forces. It’s a long one . . . Yeah, a month of embeds at different bases . . . I leave this week, but I’ll come see you as soon as I’m back. I’ll do a feature. I promise.”
Even when grieving, Tam existed to create stories. She hung up and said Frank sounded almost proud to have been targeted. He vowed he’d never shut down his school.
By 2 a.m., the last of our friends had gone, leaving Tam and me alone in the house she’d shared with Alexandra. We decided to get some rest, and in bed she pulled close.
When I’d moved to Kabul, I’d tried to shift from travel writing to journalism, selling pieces to a Tokyo online zine that distributed to cell subscribers. The editors liked having a correspondent in Afghanistan, and I liked the idea of being one. The title served me well, and I sent in short articles about culture and social life, even about conversations overheard in bars.
The people I met in the expat scene — journalists and aid workers who’d spent decades abroad and had personas big enough to contain their restless lives — fascinated me. At parties, we laughed about those who’d become unhinged in their quest for purpose while we quietly worried about our own. I’d been drawn to Tam because I wanted to understand where she found her courage. She was both ruthlessly ambitious and emotionally fragile, and I learned more than I expected from her. After the safe room, I realized what kept her here. I’d seen the attack I’d lived through anatomized in the online news and repeatedly played on CNN. I’d experienced the connection to something bigger that came with living in a war zone.
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
