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 nightlight’s glow strayed along the wall. I made my way to the bathroom, where I examined the journal, its cover worn dark and scuffed. The entries — some only a line, others pages long — were in French, the dates going back eight years. The printed letters were squarish, tight and determined. I put it on the highest shelf, behind a row of towels. I dropped the wipe in the toilet, flushed it, and turned on the faucet. I was still wearing the blocky ruby-colored ring. I hid it as well and washed my hands. I studied myself in the mirror.
A young Afghan woman once told me, at a party, that even with oppression, sexuality found paths, not because of individual will but because of the laws of nature, like the insistent flow of water or seeds sprouting beneath stones. These were her metaphors. The last few years of my life, negated passions had been rising within me. Until now, I’d never attempted an investigation this big. Though my actions felt urgent — all that stood between me and an imminent, unknown violence — they were also a release from stasis, from waiting for my life to have an objective that mattered.
Tam fit against me as soon as I was back in bed. As with an infidelity, in a few decisions, I’d locked a part of myself away.
THE SCHOOL WAS two stories of rain-streaked concrete. The other buildings on the street hid behind walls, but the school’s upper windows were exposed, close enough to throw a stone through, or a grenade. It had been built during the hopeful years I’d heard about, just after the American invasion, and not amended for the hard reality that followed. Despite its modesty, there was arrogance in those two panes of glass — righteous provocation.
Frank looked well past seventy, not just rawboned but meatless, his liver-spotted skin like parchment on an angular skull that might have been handsome encased in flesh. And yet he had the glow and gravity of a man facing terrible odds, the authority of one who has been the target of America’s enemies. He smiled as I came in the door, his hand wrapping mine, transmitting by touch an anatomical sense of bone and tendon.
When I’d called and told him I was doing a feature on the personal missions of expats who’d lost their lives, I’d expected him to be wary, but he’d appeared eager to talk, less about Justin and Alexandra than about his school — to make it sound worthy of their deaths.
He walked, gesturing into rooms, tapping his steel-frame glasses into place with the knuckle of his index finger as he told me about the free classes offered and how he was creating a future for Afghanistan. His violet shirt betrayed few suggestions of the body beneath and, if not for the belt cinching his slacks, might have flapped like a sail. His gaze was direct, appraising, unapologetic; he had the smile of one accustomed to sales and elections.
“This is the office. Just a sec.”
Seven teenage girls sat, glancing from beneath headscarves to determine whether I was Hazara. Frank checked his laptop, on a desk right in the middle of theirs, and I tried to make sense of this aging American man surrounded by Afghan girls. From speaking with Alexandra, I knew the place was a prep school of sorts, where Frank handpicked high school– and college-age girls and the occasional boy for his program. He led me next door to another office and motioned to a folding metal chair.
From the way he looked at me, I could tell he was seeing a demure Japanese, not a bijin — I am far from that — but maybe a hint of the ojoosama, the naiveté of the hakoiri musume, and above all the patient ryosai kenbo, the part of our tradition that, in step and posture, evokes the values of service, embodied, as we believed for centuries and still largely believe, in a woman. I let my headscarf slip. The skin around my eyes relaxed. I didn’t employ this skill often, but I’d seen it used daily in Tokyo.
“I don’t know