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 in 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
