Читать книгу Into the Sun - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 11

WINTER WAS PREMONITION. We knew something was going to happen. We saw it in the desolation and poverty, the gusting indeterminate scraps, the men pushing trash carts, their figures like engravings of the plague, heads wrapped in tattered keffiyehs; or the smog of traffic, wood fires, and diesel generators — the effluvium of four million souls desperate to heat concrete and earthen homes — mixing with dust in the thin, chill mountain air and hanging over the city in blunt journalistic metaphors: shrouds, palls, and, of course, veils. Snow fell, churned into mud that rutted and froze. Pipes burst. Handymen returned to our doors, grim and extortionate, like doctors.

Despite our predictions, the country became so inhospitable that the war itself ground to a halt, the passes closed, the Taliban waiting. As we edged into spring, storms tottered on the horizon and swept down over the rooftops without precipitation, gusts scouring up filth, lifting it in long drifting curtains the color of distant rain. At last the downpours came: hailstones as big as bullets, gutters gorged, streets flooded, a season of trash and excrement rising to the surface. Then the roses bloomed; we sighed, even sunbathed, and the fighting season began again.

On the night of the attack, spring was still more than a month away, and the taxi carrying Alexandra, Tam, and me worked its way over ice and gouged earth, its shocks creaking, the street dark until we came to the compound’s red metal gate.

Alexandra had asked us to join her, as moral support, because she was meeting a man at a party, a security contractor and former soldier. In our circle, there was no less appealing object of desire. No one I knew dated military contractors. The ratio of women to men was so in favor of the former that, for an evening’s company, they could pull from a bevy of preening journalists and aid workers.

If a lesser woman had revealed interest in a mercenary, we’d have mocked her, but Alexandra was so assured and private that her attraction seemed like parlor intrigue. She was a human rights lawyer who defended women in prisons, putting in twelve-hour days to file reports of abuse. She told us about girls incarcerated for fleeing forced marriages and how they’d repeatedly given birth during their years behind bars. At parties, she cited studies to diplomats and reporters, naming those in the government intent on rolling back protections for women and those crusading for them. She spoke so decisively that we forgot she’d only just arrived and had learned everything from books and NGO reports.

Though I doubt anyone thought of her as an impostor, we all wondered if her taste in men proved a lack of values and a true nature aligned with the occupation we criticized.

“America’s number one export to Afghanistan,” Tam once declared at a dinner, “is its rednecks.” We spoke of contractors as second-class expats. We abandoned bars when they showed up and stood drinking, staring with reptilian eyes at the women among us.

The contractor’s name, Alexandra told us, was Clay: pleasingly American, an evocation of the frontier, of a man coarse, blunt, hewn from the land. I was eager to see him so Tam and I could discuss the situation later: What did Alexandra like about this kind of man? How did it feel to be the object of her singular attention?

I’d had a taste of it earlier, at their house, while I was waiting for Tam to get home. Alone with me, though I barely knew her, Alexandra described Clay: magnetic, present, different from other men here, reserved and in control — the sorts of things one said after first impressions. She’d asked me to go with her to the party, touching my hand. She was normally so undemonstrative that the gesture seemed erotic with vulnerability, as if the story she’d become involved in wouldn’t make sense without me.

Tam arrived on her motorcycle as the taxi pulled up, and she agreed to come along. I knew we were thinking the same thing, not just about Alexandra’s fascination with rough-grained American types, but that she was already involved with one.

For the past few weeks, she’d been seeing Justin, a born-again Louisianan so bearded Tam had nicknamed him the Mullah. He was here to teach English — a teetotaler who disdained all expats other than Alexandra and almost never left his school. People thought he was boring. A weirdo. A loner. A religious fanatic in that way of Americans from the Deep South. At a dinner party, we speculated why, when all the men in Kabul were throwing themselves at her, Alexandra had picked the dullest. We confectioned theories: she could control him; she enjoyed being the interesting half of the couple; she suffered from self-loathing, like many attractive women. The only thing she seemed to have in common with Justin was an all-consuming sense of purpose and an inclination toward solitude.

We didn’t expect to see Justin that evening, not at a contractor party. Tam mumbled about slumming as we followed Alexandra like bodyguards through a living room, where people were serving themselves at a bar, to the doorway of a lounge. Alexandra pointed herself at a man — not coarse as I’d imagined, less hewn than carved — who was talking to someone just out of sight, and she smiled as he — he had the magnetism of a warrior, aesthetically, at least — smiled back, his hair dark and his eyes such a pale green they seemed to glow like the pupils of a wild animal at night. She took two steps farther, into the doorway, and froze.

The person Clay was speaking to was Justin — almost as tall, nearly as military in build — his dispassionate face now aimed at her dissolving smile. Clay and Justin had known each other in the US. They hated each other, according to Alexandra, though they’d once been friends. We’d come to the party to witness not just a desirable woman’s poor taste in men but, it seemed, the opening round of a love triangle. Our only regret was that the men weren’t more high profile — neither established journalists, nor diplomats, nor seasoned humanitarian workers, and therefore hardly fit story fodder in our circles.

I was nearest to Alexandra. Her black hair and pallor, and the severity of her expression, lent her a European air, though she was from North America. At a distance, her face was an emblem: the clearly defined jaw, just long enough to be elegant, the faint rising slant of her cheekbones. She met Justin’s gaze, her poise intact. Her bones seemed to hum beneath her skin like struck crystal. Her stillness gave the impression she was listening for this sound.

Tam turned as if on cue, and I followed her back into the living room. She wasn’t tall, only five-six, but had the carriage of a boxer — an authority that caused people in crowds to shift aside. When we were far enough away, we let our laughter go.

“If the Mullah thinks he can keep Alexandra, he’s delusional,” she told me, “but how did he end up here?” We agreed that Clay should have warned her with a text message, unless he’d invited Justin himself, staging the situation in an act of one-upmanship and using her like a weapon.

Tam slipped her scarf back, its ends brushing the floor, and let herself come in for a hug, one of her rare moments of public affection — maybe because there were no hard-hitting journos to impress here — before moving away and self-consciously touching her hair, which she wore in a tight braid.

At the bar, I poured her a vodka tonic. I wasn’t sure who the host was. Someone had put on Lana Del Rey. We weren’t bored of her yet. Talk of her invented persona, plastic surgery, and rich dad paying her way to rock-and-roll fame had yet to reach us.

As I glanced toward the lounge where we’d left Alexandra, the space my body occupied contracted. My breath was knocked out of me and my ears ached, as if someone had simultaneously shoved me and slapped them. We were all lying down, like toy figurines on a bumped table, glittering with glass.

I couldn’t breathe. I pushed myself to my knees. It should have hurt, but pain was a faraway sensation, small shards biting into my skin. Someone began wailing. I gasped, but smoke made me gag. The large windows had been blown out. People were fumbling about, shouting, their voices muted by the thud of my pulse and the ringing in my ears.

I crawled to the balcony, my head a primitive camera, a box with a hole punched in. There was no me, none of my fear, just details: an intact beer stein and tumblers on the floor, shattered glass so thick and white on the leaves of potted plants it resembled snow. I lifted my head above the concrete edge of the balcony.

At the end of the driveway, the gate was blasted open, barely connected to its twisted frame. A man stepped through it, and my body retracted and curled, my head jerking away from the sound at my ear: a hummingbird’s passing. Small puffs of atomized concrete spurted from holes in the ceiling of the room behind me. I heard gunshots.

EXPLOSIONS, SHRAPNEL, INDISCRIMINATE BULLETS — so many expats had died over the years that I couldn’t help but picture my own end: in a restaurant garden one evening, after telling a near-death story, or in a bar, a guesthouse, any of the places foreigners sipped wine, whiskey, and cocktails, smoked pot or snorted methylphenidate — knockoff Ritalin shipped in from Iran or Pakistan, and sold without a prescription.

The deaths of expats were rarely fully explained. They’d been caught in the gears of war, the overarching historic machinations, plots cooked up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, funded by Islamabad or Riyadh, or power struggles between Kabul and Kandahar, between Afghanistan and America — the circle jerk of politicians, generals, businessmen, warlords, opium kings, and transient diplomats. They were bystanders near someone important, or targeted directly, in strikes against the occupation’s colonial machine. Even journalists were threatened, for publishing propaganda — stories the Taliban hated and we loved — about brave Afghan souls risking everything to be Western: the athletes and musicians and actors, and, above all, the women.

Thinking back on the attack, I wondered which of us had drawn the Taliban. Of the twenty-one people in the house — Americans, Canadians, Australians, Brits, and so on — most were behind-the-scenes office types or neophyte reporters. Security contractors were generally killed opportunistically while guarding a target. Justin taught Afghan women, but in a school too obscure to inspire such an organized assault; someone would just shoot him in the street. And like Justin, Alexandra was new here, the women’s rights organization she worked for one of many.

Tam was perhaps the best known among us, but though she’d told stories about being targeted for her exposés, the police or government were usually her antagonists, not the Taliban. Besides, before we’d started dating, I’d heard expats debunk the plots against her, chalking them up to vanity, self-promotion, and a dash of paranoia from having lived here too long.

Later, security video footage sold to CNN would reveal that a man had run by the front gate and thrown a duffle bag loaded with explosives against it. After the blast, I lost track of Tam, not sure if she’d stayed where she’d fallen or left me there. On the floor, my body was a flare of adrenaline. Behind the ringing in my ears, Lana still crooned, but softly, as if the attack were her doing, and she was whispering to us, calling us somewhere.

I don’t know why I went to the balcony. In my shock, my brain had become less a thinking organ than a recording device. Bullets whirred past and thudded into the ceiling.

“This way,” a man shouted behind me. “The safe room is back here.”

I scrambled inside and across the living room. Downstairs, there was the clanging of a metal security door closing.

We all followed a burly man with a golden crew cut — definitely ex-military, certainly a security contractor — back to the lounge, a small room with two couches, a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, and a steel trunk for a coffee table.

“Anyone missing?” he called from the doorway, to no one in particular. The safe room remained open, and people were shouting, “Close the door! Close the fucking door!”

“There’s no rush,” he said. He wore a black button-down and jeans, and appeared a young forty. He must have been our host, his accent British or Australian. A piece of pulverized glass shone on his lapel like a diamond.

The gunfire rattled on, with enough lulls to suggest that people were moving about and the guard was returning fire. From the balcony came the sound of an occasional bullet ricocheting. Another explosion, in the courtyard this time, heaved the air and hit us with a wall of sound, resonating in the safe room like an ocean wave slamming into a cove.

The host went out and came back hauling a young man by the arm — a German I’d recently begun noticing at parties. He’d hidden in the bathroom, spots of urine on his pants.

“Check if anyone’s missing,” our host said. Alexandra, Justin, and Clay stood near the wall. Tam was fiddling with her iPhone, selling the story before it had finished happening.

“Everyone here?” he asked and then shouted into the house, “Last call!”

He reached into the door frame, slid out a slab of iron, heaved it shut, and locked it with a lever. The sounds in the room became muted, like those on an airplane. Faraway gunshots popped, quiet as pebbles tossed at a window, as if the attackers had come here to court us.

With the safe room closed, I realized the silence wasn’t that of an airplane at all, but of a bunker, far beneath the earth.

“Let’s have a look,” he said and took a remote from its holster on the TV. He changed channels, from ESPN to Al Jazeera to a replay of Friends to a grainy colorless image of the compound yard, the guard booth obliterated and a dead man lying where he’d taken cover near a Toyota 4Runner riddled with bullet holes. Then he switched to a feed showing the metal security door at the house’s entrance. Three bearded men in shalwar kameez and body armor were inspecting it.

A woman in the back of the room called out a question, her voice a fearful chirrup. It took me a moment to realize she’d asked whether the men outside were Taliban.

“They are now,” he told her and turned from the TV. “Come on, everyone, there’s no need to be scared.”

“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 I followed the road’s scant shoulder. Though my features allowed me to pass unnoticed as a Hazara — an Afghan believed to be descended from the Mongols — this was the first time I’d walked here so at ease, my mind unobstructed by visions of danger.

A crowd was forming in Abdul Haq Square, near the Dunya Wedding Hall, men skirting pieces of smoking metal. The bomb had been in a car, its doors blown open and its paint blackened. I’d anticipated the scorched bodies of bystanders, but the attacker seemed to have targeted an empty roadside or just the car’s occupants.

The interior was on fire, and the victims — much of them at least — must have been in that cloud, drifting across the river. I lifted my chin, considering sentience — memories, intentions, dreams — and this wind-pushed smoke. As far as having your ashes spread, it might not be a bad way to go, if a little unexpected.

I’d been in Afghanistan for more than a year, and only in the last week had I seen any attacks. When I moved here, my mother had put money in my bank account for body armor, but few expats used it, with the exception of paranoid diplomats or security contractors on duty. Kabul wasn’t what people saw on TV. When foreigners died, my mother would hear about it on the news, and I would reassure her that they were just unlucky.

Cars were stopping, hands holding cells out windows to snap pictures. I hadn’t been dating Tam long enough to know whether the stories were true and she really did make it to every major attack in Kabul within twenty minutes. But then I heard her motorcycle, and she pulled up, dressed for an Armageddon road movie: head wrapped in a white-and-gray keffiyeh, torn jeans over black yoga leggings, a scuffed leather biker’s jacket with a vest of yellow sheepskin from Oruzgan, its ruff warming her neck. I waved, but she drew her Nikon D4 out of a holster and began shooting. A few dumbfounded traffic police stood around in oversized suits. Green pickups started arriving with more police crammed in their beds.

Wind and a brief icy rain the previous night had purged the smog, and even distant mountains appeared close, hanging above the horizon. The parking lot and street had filled. Horns blared. More men came through the traffic. The cloud of incinerated lives was already dissolving over the frozen streets — just something else Kabul’s inhabitants would have to breathe.

As I edged out of the crowd, I came to a circle of men with their backs to me. They were gazing down, and I walked along their perimeter until one peeled away and I took his place. My stomach clenched and my knees pulsed, a feeling like when an elevator reaches a floor, an airy sensation in the joints, of being buoyed and dropped at once.

A hand lay on the asphalt, on its back, the skin pale and intact, its fingers curled slightly, as if it had been severed in the moment of receiving an offering. It was probably a woman’s, though Afghans are generally small, and a bloodless hand must decrease in volume.

I prided myself on being able to look, and then turned away. I’d seen similar things when I’d left the safe room, but in my euphoria, they hadn’t bothered me.

Tam was busy interviewing people in Dari, her camera set to video. She’d already published two pieces on the safe room: a photo-essay of the attack featuring pictures I hadn’t noticed her taking with her phone, and a witty story about how it feels when the people on TV are trying to kill you. Soon, she would have a car bomb article, a slide show, and a video report ready so that when the police announced the victims she could plug in their names.

I hailed a taxi and continued to the Inter-Continental on its hill overlooking the city. For a travel piece, I interviewed the manager about its history back to 1969, when people sipped champagne on the terrace and women lay in bikinis by the pool. I ate lunch there and fished online, but found nothing about who’d died in the bombing. I settled into a chair with a view. At a distance, Kabul bore no trace of any attack, except for maybe 9/11, which had drawn the world’s attention here and transformed a modest capital into this sooty, sprawling metropolis.

I intended to write about the car bomb, but the details I’d witnessed were generic — no different from hundreds of other events like it. I took Humboldt’s Gift from my backpack and tried to read, but the morning’s events made it impossible to concentrate. I felt both as if I’d come here to experience these attacks and as if nothing I’d lived here mattered. My persistent state of alertness was at once potent and disconcerting.

That evening, when I opened my door, Tam was reading the collected works of Gertrude Stein on my bed, near the bukhari, a cylindrical metal woodstove that, once lit, immediately radiated heat. She was alone, a crimson scarf spooled on her shoulders. In the next compound, the Afghan death metal band was rehearsing. I’d written a piece about them and gone to a few of their parties, but since the success of their album, they were no longer as friendly and I’d begun to resent the noise.

I lay on the bed next to her. This was something she liked when we saw each other — not talking, just touching. As she rested her cheek on my shoulder, I had the impression that I was with a superhero’s vulnerable alter ego.

The reverberations of the blaring music ceased, and I undressed her, kissing her skin. She was conscious of her hips since it was hard to exercise in Kabul, so I slowed for them. She had dozens of tiny poppy tattoos, one for each person she’d seen dead. They clustered on her shoulder blade, circled a biceps, framed her heart, and otherwise freckled her in random spots: an ear, a knuckle, a breast. She lay with her chin back as I kissed up along her chest. I moved my fingers over her throat’s long lines and her collarbone.

“I read a passage today that made me think of you,” I told her. As I took the book from my backpack, she kept the fingers of one hand on my waist. I’d found a stash of Saul Bellow novels in an expat’s home and become obsessed with him. His awareness and self-examination, his study of others, was addictive. The Americans I knew seemed to have emerged from a civilization that had since declined.

I leafed through for the passage that reminded me of when I’d met her during a dinner at the Wall Street Journal house. She’d been drinking gin and tonic, a ceiling light shining on her sculpted clavicle as she told me that though her father was Manhattan high society, her mother, a model from Alabama, had named her Tammy after a favorite aunt. When the dotcom bubble imploded, they moved to Burlington, Vermont. Tam, then a teenager, asked if she could change her name before enrolling in her new school. Attentive for the first time in her life, her father suggested Tammany, for New York’s Tammany Hall, but she read about its corruption and would have refused if not for the original Tammany: the Native American chief who made peace with the English settlers. She was a child of the nineties, a chic hippie educated in a Manhattan Montessori, from whose vantage the earth appeared in a golden age, and the name suited her idea of what America was meant to be.

As I searched through the novel, her cell chimed. She swung her legs down and crossed the room, her hips curving deeply, the rice-paper lamp at the bedside casting her shadow.

She read the text and was suddenly haggard. I put the book aside, and she returned to lie against me, her hand with the cell on my chest.

“Tam?” I said. The way she touched me had changed. Her tears ran along my throat.

“It’s Alexandra,” she told me. “She and Justin were in that car.”

My grief was slow in coming, my emotions stunned. I could sense the mechanical intonations of the city beyond the room — the battering of a truck motor, a motorcycle’s whine — more clearly than whatever was happening inside me.

She shifted onto her back, her gaze abstracted, as if the low smoke-dimmed ceiling was the night sky and her attention moved along the constellations.

EVENTUALLY, we went to Tam’s house, where she and her friends gathered — hugging, crying, or sitting, their heads lowered like those of people fathoming an impossible equation.

A plainclothes officer, a well-groomed man 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 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 what to tell you about Justin,” Frank said, though his demeanor called to mind a sprinter at the starting line. “When I interviewed him for the job, I played skeptic. If someone can’t convince you he should be doing something, he has no business doing it. But he was too convincing, the kind of kid who should have had his own school and been playing by his own rules. I said yes only because this place needs classes morning to night. We need to be a factory in the best sense of the word.”

Frank faltered, his hand hanging between us like a pale spider. The moment increased in focus as if a faint incandescence gathered in the room. What I’d sensed — the story — it was here. Frank wasn’t searching for words. He was trying to restrain himself. I nodded, my headscarf slipping a little more.

“‘America,’ Justin told me, ‘is asleep. We have no clue where we’re going or why we’re doing what we’re doing. Half of us say we need to reclaim what we lost, and the other half say we need to forget about it and move on, but neither of those options are any good. I can’t use a gun, so I figure I might as well educate as many kids as possible.’

“‘That’s the way to do it,’ I placated him, and he said he’d read that every insurgent we shoot inspires five more, and every one we educate will make five less. I agreed it was a plausible theory. I suspected he was a kid who’d done well but had reached the point where whatever had driven him still anchored him. He’d come to the end of his chain like a dog running across a yard. It had to hurt. I saw this in people. I’d felt it myself. Why else does a man come back from Vietnam, spend decades building businesses and selling them, marry a good woman and have four daughters, and then, when he’s supposed to retire, pick up and head back to a war zone? After that first war I’d seen so much destruction I was hungry to go home and build, and after thirty-some years I’d evened things out and there wasn’t enough destruction left in my memory to keep me building. So I came to Afghanistan. My wife remarried. She did so four years ago. It took her five to realize I wasn’t coming back. My daughters have all exceeded my expectations, and I have another decade of raising girls here.”

Frank adjusted his glasses.

“For the first few years,” he said, “I helped run the American University of Afghanistan, but the vision was buried in the details. There’s nothing wrong with grammar and math, and I know it takes time to nail all that down, but a country needs more than translators and accountants. I kept thinking about a school built on a vision. Who wouldn’t be changed just by sitting and talking to a man who’d been through war and who’d invested in society? An entrepreneur who’d played a hand in his country’s local politics? I remember one day asking myself: What’s the worst that can happen? And having the thought: some talented young people will get to learn from me.

“So I rented this place from two expats who went home. That’s when expats were beginning to leave. The golden days of the occupation were ending. Everyone was ready to drop what they were doing and run. The nice thing about being seventy-five is you get gunned down in the streets of Kabul and you die happy. I’ve had a fuller life than anyone I know.

“Since then, I’ve brought in more than two dozen volunteers, most of them just staying the three months of their visas and teaching what they could, when it suited them. But Justin was sending me syllabi and curricula before he even arrived.”

Frank chuckled — a dry, mirthless sound in his throat.

“I remember his look when he walked in here. ‘If it were an ivory tower,’ I told him, ‘we wouldn’t need you.’ He just asked where his room was and who was responsible for what, and we’ve all had headaches ever since. Until a few days ago, I guess. Well, no, the car bomb, that’s been the biggest headache of all.”

Frank hesitated, guilt obscuring his glow of pride. He no longer seemed so primed to voice his conflicts with a recently dead man.

“Would you like to see his room?” he asked.

“Yes, please.”

He led me to the door and opened it for me. I stepped in and turned.

“Can I have a moment alone?”

His small bloodshot eyes focused in on me briefly from behind his glasses.

“You knew him?”

“I did.”

“Well, I don’t see why not. I’ll just be in my office.”

I closed the door and breathed. I needed a moment after Frank’s oration. I’d felt caught in its rhythm as the story poured out of him.

I sat on the bed and placed my hand at the compressed center of the foam mattress. The closet shelf held a bottle of contact lens solution, a hand mirror, and neatly folded shirts, pants, and underwear, their colors dark. On the desk: books on pedagogy, English as a second language. A Bible lay on the sill. A notepad was empty except for a Kabul phone number that I copied. His laptop was shut. A drawer with pens also held a 32 gig zip drive.

I took the drive and paused. His room was even plainer than Alexandra’s, the line where the tile floor met the concrete wall uninterrupted but for the unadorned desk and bed. Had he lived with the minimum so he could test his loyalty to the spirit? His brief relationship with Alexandra made little sense. He’d appeared less a lover than a priestly chaperone.

Frank was waiting in his office, stick-thin legs crossed, one hand holding his glasses, his mouth chewing with a ratlike motion on the part that hooked over the ear. The plastic had been gnawed off, the metal serrated with teeth marks.

“Justin wanted to save the boy,” he told me as soon as I sat.

“The boy?”

“Idris. Most of the students here are girls, but we do have a few boys. Justin and Idris were usually together. Idris was there when that party was attacked.”

I had no memory of Idris in the safe room, though I did recall from other occasions the young Afghan man who’d driven Justin around Kabul.

“Idris was in the car,” Frank said. “At least that’s what the police told me.”

“He and Justin were friends?”

“Well, that’s not quite right. Justin thought he could be Idris’s savior, and Idris used him.” Frank was speaking more deliberately. “That’s how he met Clay.”

“Clay?”

“Clay and Justin were old friends, from Louisiana.” Frank pursed his lips, wrinkles bunching around his mouth.

“What does Clay have to do with the car bomb?”

“Clay disappeared that day as well. The company he worked for thought he’d been kidnapped. They checked the security feed outside his compound. It showed him getting into the car with Justin and Alexandra and” — Frank looked me in the eyes now, as if to say he needed to tell somebody and had no one else — “and Idris. Idris was driving. But there were only three bodies, what remained of them anyway. The security company never went to the police. They asked me not to in a, well, not very friendly way.”

“If you will permit me,” I said, “I would like to approach the security company.”

“You?” Frank stared at the ashen carpet cut to fit below his desk and chair, to damper the cold from the concrete.

This was the story I’d been looking for. Clay’s presence in the car with Justin and Alexandra reinforced my conviction that the bomb wasn’t Taliban retribution for teaching girls.

“Did you know them all well?” I asked.

“Clay not so much, but Alexandra a little more. I met her through Justin. I asked her to come and speak to the girls. We need female mentors. I’d go so far as to say . . . well, no . . .”

“Pardon me?” I eased my tone, sounding confused and in need of guidance, concealing my excitement that Tam would be doing an embed and everything I’d just learned was mine.

“If you ask me — I’d never go on record with this, but — she’s the tragedy. The others . . .” He shrugged. “Anyway, I hope you have all you need from me for your article. The bit about the security company is off the record. Don’t mention my name to them. But if you have other questions or if you find something out, just come by whenever.”

“Thank you,” I said, wondering if he would ask me to be a mentor as well.

He walked me downstairs. The school’s driveway was empty, and we went out the gate and stood in the street. I’d imagined Justin and Alexandra propelled by their missions, reeling incautiously toward a point of combustion, but the story was more complicated.

“Why,” I asked, “did Justin think he had to save Idris?”

Frank’s jaw went crooked. “Everybody who comes here believes he’s got to save someone. I remember telling him, you don’t fix a country overnight. It must have been his third day. He was already assigning homework, and the girls complained to me. I told him they were too busy for homework. They all had jobs, accounting for a pharmacy or a clinic, translating and typing. ‘Think in decades,’ I said.”

He appeared to be trying to pick up where he’d left off in his monologue, to regain the conviction to finish the polemic he’d been harboring so he could drive his verdict home. But he’d waited too long. He fumbled at his pocket and took out his wallet, as though to pay for my taxi. He pinched at a worn leather fold, removed a card, and extended it to me.

“You know,” he said, half his face contracted as he squinted off down the muddy street, “people tell me I’ve had a good run and it’s time to head home, that I’ll be next. But that’s how you lose a war. You turn tail. You show them their barbaric tactics work. So let them target me. What was it Tennyson said of the aging Ulysses? Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. I know what I’m doing, and so did Alexandra. She told me that everyone she worked with talked women’s rights and wrote up reports, but had almost no contact with Afghan women other than a few who came through the office. She wasn’t the one visiting the prisons and seeing the abuses. Meeting the girls here changed her. She said that Afghan women aren’t as weak as people think, and she was right. The strongest women I’ve ever met have studied in this school, and if I have to die to see that they have their freedom, that’s a small price to pay.”

At that, he blinked and lifted his gaunt palm, and I got in the taxi. As it pulled away, I inspected the card. On its back, a number was written, the pen strokes angular and uneven, like tiny cuts, but too wet, blotting. I flipped it over. Printed in a stern font were two more numbers, an email, and a name: Steve Hammond.

ALL THAT WEEK, Kabul was quiet — traffic jams and construction and impromptu checkpoints, but quiet nonetheless. Spring arrived in sunlit days. Afternoon showers stripped dust and smog from the air, and tamped it into the earth. The nights hovered at freezing: brittle stars, drafts at windows, and the creaking of metal as the fire took in my bukhari.

I sat next to it, working my way through Alexandra’s scuffed journal with the help of an iPhone French-English dictionary and Google Translate, searching for what compelled her into a love triangle like a Wild West standoff between a hayseed missionary and a gun for hire. In expats’ speculation about who had died, Clay was absent, and I enjoyed his mystery as I read her entries, anticipating his arrival.

During high school, I studied French. Its sound evokes refinement for the Japanese. My professor said the history of France and Japan is a love story between aesthetics, each finding in the other the embodiments of ideals. But I knew nothing about French Canadians.

Je n’ai pas le choix, she wrote before leaving Montreal for Kabul. “I have no 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 being systematically disfigured — simply said, “Come on, mate, quit being a cunt.”

The terrified people were eating up the bandwidth, tweeting and IMing, making work hard for the journalists who were seeing their Afghanistan payout. A young American named Holly, who was often at social outings and worked at a shelter that rehabilitated Afghan street dogs, bawled on Skype with her mother, saying she loved her, though the line kept cutting out.

“Tell her the connection is overloaded,” Tam said. “Each time the call drops, she probably thinks you’ve been killed.”

“Tell your mommy the bad guys will be dead soon enough,” Steve reassured her. “Have a drink before it’s all gone and, hell, sit back and enjoy the show. You’ll never see another one like it.”

Though the attackers were just outside the safe room, the gunfire sounded more distant than I’d expected.

Steve’s coolness gradually waned. Maybe the show had gone on longer than he’d planned. To calm his guests, he anatomized the door: a ten-inch-thick slab, essentially an iron box filled with concrete and sliding on ball bearings in an iron frame built into the wall.

He unlocked the metal trunk that served as a coffee table. It held four handguns and three short rifles. He gave a rifle to Clay and to another contractor, and asked who else knew how to shoot. Tam said she used to go to firing ranges with an ex in the States. The woman who’d had glass in her eye told us that as a teenager she came in second in the state fair for skeet shooting.

“These aren’t skeet,” Steve told her, “and adrenaline is a different game.” He handed her a pistol, the people near her inching away. Tam and two men also took guns.

We arranged the couches into a barrier. On the screen, Elijah was setting up explosives on our door. We crouched shoulder to shoulder behind those of us holding weapons. Everyone had gone pale. Someone began throwing up in the bathroom. Justin was praying, and Alexandra was looking at Clay as if she’d put her bet on him.

Two members of the Special Forces crept in from the living room and got Elijah under crossfire. There was a resonant boom. The floor shook, reverberations clapping in the room. Our ears rang and a little smoke rose from under the door.

“I told you we were safe,” Steve said.

The people who had money on Moses tried to divvy up the pot, but their hands shook so badly they kept dropping the bills until they finally gave up and hugged each other.

“Imagine,” Tam said, “they could have cleaned out twenty foreigners in one go.”

My mind refused to consider what had just happened. I was too busy forming memories that instantly seemed like artifacts. But four days later, after talking to Frank, I studied those memories: the young German attempting his blasphemous joke and then insisting there were no Afghans, and Tam making her comment about how many foreigners would have died. Idris, who was supposed to have driven Justin to the party, definitely wasn’t there.

When the last Taliban fell beneath a volley of bullets, we cheered.

The whiskey was gone and Steve told someone to crack the gin. We poured it in cups and knocked it back.

“Finish the gin! Finish the gin!” I’m not sure who started the chant, but even Holly drank. She was crying uncontrollably. On the screen, the security forces were scanning the building, carefully moving through. We clapped as Holly shook and wept and tipped the cup back, gin dribbling from her chin and spotting her shirt. Weeks later, I would hear her at L’Atmos, where she stood at the bar and described the firefight as the greatest thrill of her life.

I think it dawned on all of us then, as we turned from Holly to the door, that we would have to open it and walk out and see the granular images from the screen become flesh, the remains of men who’d died or blown themselves to pieces.

Steve was smiling, his hand on the lock.