Читать книгу The Distance Between Us - Masha Hamilton - Страница 7

THE WHOLE OF HEAVEN IS OFF-BALANCE as they rumble out of the city: clouds one moment, darting sunlight the next. A dust shroud swirling around the Land Rover prevents Caddie from seeing where they are going or where they’ve been. Far behind them, a mosque wails its hellfire summons to those who believe. It’s noon, then, and men of conviction are submitting their foreheads to the ground in a graceful wave, while she barrels forward into the formless, blind middle of a day.

The Land Rover rattles like a crate of scrap metal. Her shoulders ache, she’s inhaling cupfuls of powdered dirt and they have at least another ninety minutes to go. But those are only irritants. Her real worry is the driver, a complete unknown. Rob and the hotel concierge rounded him up when the regular chauffeur, the one Rob assured her was “the best in Beirut,” didn’t show. A driver is their lifeline in dusty, uncharted territory. This guy, well—she catches her breath as he swerves sharply and clips a roadside bush, aiming directly for half a dozen desert larks. The birds scatter and arc overhead, their fury sharp enough to be heard above the thrash of the engine.

“Christ,” Caddie mumbles. In the rearview mirror, the driver gives her a squinty glare. Cobwebs form at the outer corners of his eyes, and dried grime thick enough to scrape off with a fingernail is caked behind his right ear. “Who the hell is he?” Caddie mutters to Marcus, next to her in the backseat. “Should we really be—?”

“Cautious Caddie,” Marcus says. “He’s okay. Rob wouldn’t use him otherwise.” He leans over Caddie to address Rob, who’s on her left. “Right-o, Rob?”

“He’s fine. Told you. Checked him out.” Rob is focused on adjusting his tape recorder’s input level. With his scruffy hair and taut energy, he looks like a street tough instead of a network radio reporter. Here, that aura serves him well.

“See?” Marcus says to Caddie. “Anyway, what’s our choice? Sit on our bums all day?”

She smiles at him saying “bums” in his refined British accent. Something in him—his inflection maybe, or his humor, or his experience in the field—unknots her, and relieves her of the responsibility of having to control everything. Anyway, he’s right. This story is too hot to pass: a Q-and-A with Musaf Yaladi, fiery-eyed, Princeton-educated thug-darling of the West, in his south Lebanon lair. The elusive Yaladi is a Lebanese crime king, dabbler in terrorism and chief distributor for weapons, bogus American one-hundred-dollar bills and the raw materials for heroin produced in the Bekaa Valley. With a couple punchy quotes from him, the piece will write itself. She’ll be the only print reporter to have it. Page one for sure.

They’ll be fine, just fine. Caddie would prefer fewer variables, but she’s done her usual checking, narrowed the risks to a pinpoint. She’s confirmed that they aren’t traveling through disputed territory, that Yaladi knows they are coming, that he wants to do the interview. The only drawback is that she doesn’t know this particular minefield very well. With Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, it would be different. She’s worked that territory for more than four years now, she and Marcus, and those back roads are carved in her mind.

Marcus fingers the leather band on his left wrist, a gift from an Arab mother he once photographed and managed to connect with, he would say. Caddie would say charm. He stretches his arms, the muscled forearms tapering to delicate wrists, then widening to broad hands, and smiles sideways at her in a way that excludes Rob, the driver, all of Lebanon. She imagines licking lemonade from his lips, its bitter taste undercut with tangy sweetness. She rotates her shoulders to loosen them.

In the front passenger seat, Sven pats the video camera on his lap and chats to the driver in sunny, Swedish-accented Arabic. Long-limbed, he seems as comfortable as he would in his own living room. He’s the most easygoing and polite of journalists, with an uncommon ability to nap anywhere on short notice. Caddie often runs into Rob and Sven on the same story. Privately she’s nicknamed them Yin and Yang.

They pull up short before a barrier of razor wire and man-sized chunks of concrete spray-painted black with Arabic graffiti. A Yaladi roadblock. She didn’t expect it this soon. The driver cuts the engine and the air grows defiantly still. The dust finally gives up and sinks.

A slouching man with a knife tucked into his belt separates himself from a concrete slab, sticks out a hand to collect their press cards, and then, self-important on squat legs, strides into a hut. A second roadside militiaman, baby face and pear belly, plants himself next to their Land Rover, machine gun cradled in his arms.

Caddie brushes the dust from her hair. She wishes again that she were more familiar with this route from Beirut to the south. They are probably twenty miles from the border with Israel, twenty miles from the Mediterranean Sea. The land is scraped and stingy, abandoned even by animals and insects, left to these imprudent men with their weapons.

“One-two-’twas brillig and the slithy toves . . .” Rob intones into his microphone.

“You’re going to drain the battery before we get there,” Sven says.

“Something’s wrong with the goddamned pinch roller,” Rob says. “If I don’t get the interview on tape, I might as well have slept in, saved myself this cowboy ride.”

Incessant worrying over the equipment, Caddie knows, is part of his routine. She has habits of her own. During interviews, she often makes up a ridiculous question or two that she would never actually ask, then imagines her subject’s response. It’s oddly soothing.

“You worry too much,” Marcus says. “If the pitch is off, it’s so slight no one will notice.”

“Hey, bud, I don’t worry enough,” Rob says. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be in the middle of fucking East Jesus letting some monkey point his gun at me.”

Their guard has begun shifting gently from foot to foot, swinging his weapon as if in time to music. Watching him, Caddie almost hears her ballet teacher’s shrill military voice: “One, two, on your toes, lift your head.” She’d been, what? Eight, maybe nine years old, and remarkably clumsy, all clashing elbows and difficult knees. “Again, from the top. Let’s plié . . .” She pictures this bulky militiaman, with his unexpected Santa Claus face, wearing a pink tutu. As he sways next to the hunks of ruined concrete, she is struck by a single, distinct wave she can identify only as elation.

How could she ever explain to someone back home what it is to cover a conflict? At least one like this that crisscrosses through the region, its front line changing daily, so that she can find herself unexpectedly in it at a moment’s notice. Everyone with a television set observes the violence and horror. But, sitting on their couches, can they imagine the delight of unexpected absurdities? The rush of ecstasy, even, when the exotic intersects with the familiar? Or the way that seeing all this, up close, elevates a common life?

“I have an idea for dinner tonight,” Marcus says near her ear.

“I’m filing tonight,” Caddie says. “And you’d better be sending a couple pictures.”

“That’ll take half an hour. As for you, what? A couple quotes from the drug lord, a little local color from his hideout. You could almost write it now.” Marcus shifts in his seat and pulls a crumpled receipt from his back pocket. “Here.”

“I’ve got paper, thanks.”

“How about your phone number, then?” he jokes, pseudo-husky, leaning in again to smell her cheek. She laughs, shoving him off. He winks, and the color of his eyes makes her think of olives resting in martinis.

Okay, so she’s partial to his blond good looks, his humor, and his consummate skill with a camera. She likes that he’s drawn to her face without makeup and her constantly disheveled short hair. But they aren’t a couple; spare her that conventionality. They are colleagues. Plus lovers, when the mood strikes. Both of them journalists who find the story irresistible and plan to live in it a long time. Discussions about relationships soon bore her. Too much dependency invariably backfires, in her experience.

Usually she thinks Marcus agrees. There are, of course, those other times. Like in the hotel bar last night. She’d been talking about how she didn’t want to sign another year-long lease on her apartment, and he’d said she’d become afraid to commit to anything, too hooked on the ephemeral news story to ever be satisfied with the solidity of real life. His tone was surprisingly wistful. She refused, though, to give him a serious response. They were in a bar, after all, with colleagues. Screw you, she’d countered, laughing. News stories are real life. And they were—a form of it, anyway, the way bottled perfume was a form of odor. Besides, I’m just talking about a lease. She could tell he wanted to say more, but he took another slug of beer, letting it drop.

The mustachioed militiaman who collected their cards strides out of the hut, shaking his head as though he’s uncovered a plot. He motions. Their driver—what’s his name? Hussein? Mohammed?—glances back without meeting anyone’s eyes. Grains of sweat darken his temples and bead above his lips. He slides from the jeep, taking the keys with him, as if these journalists were inmates, plotting to drive off and leave him behind in the vacuous Lebanese landscape. Christ.

The gunman speaks to the driver in a dull slur that Caddie can’t make out. Their guard is still swaying, his AK-47 balanced delicately in his arms and pointed in their direction. The crickets grow loud, unusual for midday.

The driver shuffles back and passes out press cards. Three.

“Excuse me,” Marcus says. “Where’s mine?”

The driver shrugs.

“Brilliant.” Marcus swings out of the jeep, the two Nikons around his neck bouncing.

Their pear-belly guard stiffens, aiming his gun at Marcus’s chest. Caddie reaches from the Land Rover to try to grab Marcus’s arm, but he’s too far away.

“Okay, okay.” Marcus raises his hands. “I need my card back. Card. Back. Comprenez?”

The guard holds his gun steady.

“Tell him, Catherine.” He’s still grinning, still outwardly confident that this adventure is manageable, no more threatening than a Ferris wheel ride. But Caddie knows he drops her nickname only at serious moments,

“My colleague, please, must have his press identification,” Caddie says in Arabic, addressing both militiamen, trying for a there-must-be-a-small-mistake smile. “Then we will depart, thank you.”

The mustachioed militiaman speaks shotgun-fast to the driver—to Caddie it sounds like “these beans should be fried again in Syria”—and the driver listens without expression. Caddie’s Arabic isn’t bad, but now she wishes, deeply, for a better grasp of local colloquialisms.

Another man emerges from the hut. Shirtless, skinny and muscular, he appears younger than the others. His face is creased in irritation. His hair sticks up in tufts as though he’s been unwillingly roused from bed. Carrying no weapon, he walks with shoulders high, hands alert, fingers slightly extended. Caddie’s tongue suddenly tastes metallic.

“You still here?” The shirtless man speaks in English.

“I need my identification card.” Marcus enunciates as if to a child. “What a fashla,” he says to Caddie in an aside, using the Arabic for “mess-up.”

The young tough squints. “What you want?” he asks in English, in a tone that convinces Caddie the best answer would be “nothing.”

Marcus chuckles. “This guy speaks pretty good caveman.”

Caddie speaks sharply, quietly. “Shit, Marcus. Shut. Up.”

Yes, this sleepy-eyed militiaman is a fool, made silly by the handful of power he holds over a hut and two armed men. But Marcus, it’s clear, has a case of Superman Disorder, the disease that worms its way into journalists, fooling them into believing they’re so seasoned, their instincts so developed, that every risk is manageable. That even the clouds and the dirt will back off in their presence. That a little cockiness will simply give them Godspeed. She’s avoided that pit of overconfidence. So has Marcus, until now. She shoots him a pointed look. He seems to need reminding that this is not a disciplined army. These are thugs led by a man who smuggles and kidnaps and kills. They let mood swings, and a very personal interpretation of Allah’s will, dictate when and where they fire their guns.

“C’mon, Marcus. Let’s get out of here,” she says.

“I don’t go without my card.” Marcus takes a step forward and speaks in one long breath. “We’re more than happy to scoot, you bloody bloke, but first, it would be brilliant if you could go peek under your pillow and see if you can find a little card, one with my face on it.” He finishes with an ersatz smile.

The shirtless boy fighter surely can’t understand much of Marcus’s racetrack sentences or clipped accent. But he leans forward attentively as if examining vermin, then pushes closer to their Land Rover, bringing with him the scent of barbecued onions. He glances in Caddie’s direction, then grips Sven’s arm. “Go,” he says in English, shoving Sven and motioning at their driver. “Go!” The word comes out guttural.

“Bit testy, aren’t you?” Marcus remains jaunty, but he’s finally edging back toward the jeep.

“Still, I think it’s a good suggestion,” Sven says, sounding strained.

The baby-faced guard, gratingly calm, lets off a shot into the dirt that produces a pregnant swell of dust. He levels his gun and jerks it to motion their driver forward. The driver shifts into gear. Caddie grabs Marcus’s arm and tugs him back into the vehicle as the driver punches the gas pedal.

“My card,” cries Marcus mock-meekly, raising his arms in an empty-handed gesture. Having lost, he’s clearly decided to treat this as good fun. “Why my card?”

“Why my wife?” Rob speaks over the engine noise. “Life is arbitrary.”

“Why do we always end up talking about your divorce?” Sven asks over his shoulder.

“Right,” Rob says. “Who cares? Let’s just get the interview. We’ve got to be almost there. When we get back, Marcus, you can tell the press office your card went through the wash.”

“What wash?” says Marcus. “Who’s holding out on me? Is anybody using anything besides the sink?”

He’s too jovial, considering this nonsense could have caused them to be detained for hours—or worse. Caddie jabs him. “You won’t even need the damn card in a couple days.”

“Right you are. A whole month in New York.” Marcus, oblivious to the edge in her tone, is annoyingly cheerful. “I’m overdue. So cheers-ciao-salaam,” he says, running the words together.

She twists slightly away from him, reminded now however irritating she finds his reckless behavior, it doesn’t bother her nearly as much as the fact that he has more or less spontaneously booked this flight to the U.S. He insisted he needed a break, had to get out, even yesterday was too late. She argued for days to get him to postpone it long enough to make this foray into Lebanon. Once they are done here, he’s taking off. She only hopes that he doesn’t miss any huge stories—major flare-ups of violence or government collapses. Nobody based in the Middle East takes photos as good as Marcus’s.

Caddie glances behind them and her chest finally loosens: the roadblock is out of sight; surely the worst of the day is history. They pass a couple buildings still showing the kiss of battles—gapes and scars where walls should be. Then a patch of trees with leaves implausibly green against the fresh sky. Mt. Hermon rises in the distance, a landmark she knows, and the region becomes rocky again.

Their driver slows as they pass a woman in a long, loose dress and a headscarf who totes a toddler straddled on one shoulder, a basket on her head. She looks middle-aged, though she’s probably in her twenties, eroded by having borne a child each year since age sixteen. Caddie has interviewed women like her. She lives in a one-room hut with a husband who shows more fondness for his gun than his family. Every day she scorches her fingertips making pita, and every night she rubs sore calves with callused hands. When she speaks, the wind carries away her words. When she needs help, she leans against a tree. She rarely knows surprise.

Their driver has courtesy enough, at least, to spare the woman the discomfort of being covered in dust. As they crawl past, she acknowledges them with the smallest of nods. Her toddler, frightened by the noisy vehicle and its load of strangers, lunges forward, blocking his mother’s sight. She wipes his fingers from her eyes with her free hand in a gesture that seems to rebuke and soothe at once, and the intimacy of that movement sets off a longing within Caddie, irritating but not unfamiliar.

“Stop,” Caddie calls out in Arabic. “Back up. Please.”

The driver slows, shifting his face toward Sven for direction. He’s been paid to cart them where they want to go and, inshallah, he’ll do it. But Caddie knows what he’s thinking: taking orders from a woman, no one told him about that. It appeals as much as walking barefoot on glass shards.

Caddie stares hard and Sven remains silent. The driver blows frustration out his mouth, then brakes and shifts to reverse, halting his vehicle alongside the mother.

“Caddie,” Rob says. “What the—?”

Caddie turns her head away; she knows what he’s going to say and doesn’t want to hear it: that the criminal they will interview is as mercurial as he is dangerous and makes enemies with the ease that most people drink water. That there are warrants on his head in Syria, Israel and the United States and he’s always on the move to avoid detection. That if they are late, even a little, he will not wait.

This won’t cost them but a minute. Sven could move to the back and squeeze in next to them, leaving the front seat for the woman. Caddie herself will hold the child on her lap. A lift of a few miles might save this woman hours of walking.

She rises to make the offer.

But the mother’s chin is raised in sharp rebuff, and Caddie recognizes—a moment too late—what she already knew. The woman would never climb into this car. She would be called a whore, and possibly beaten, if a brother or husband or even a neighbor saw her in a car loaded with foreign men, and with Caddie, who is not an ally, who is only an outsider, a stranger and transient. Who has no place pretending otherwise.

Even worse, she’s just shed her journalistic detachment. The moment reeks of sentimentality, no greater sin among reporters.

With the Land Rover out of gear, the driver revs the engine. She feels Rob’s stare.

The mother moves past, eyes averted. The toddler stares over his mother’s shoulder, then ducks to hide himself. No one in the vehicle moves. No one speaks. Finally their driver turns to Caddie, his expression empty, his contempt strong enough to emit a sour scent.

She tightens her left hand into a fist, searching for a question she might ask this driver, one that could allow her to smirk. What would you put on a vanity plate for this bullet-dodger? 2-TUF-2-SPIT, she imagines him answering. That brings a smile that she hopes looks mysteriously smug to the driver, and to Rob.

Then she nods, a gesture intended to display confidence. She sits as the driver faces forward to lean into the gas pedal. The Land Rover jumps, leaving the woman in the trail of dust he had avoided the first time.

Rob speaks first. “Where the hell did that come from, Caddie?”

“This damned pressure-cooker,” Marcus says. “Woman, you need a break too.”

“As if we all don’t,” Sven says.

“Sunday brunch in the Village,” Marcus goes on. “Mimosas and Eggs Benedict and a stack of frivolous glossy magazines. We’ll go windsurfing off Long Island. You can browse all the bookshops on the Upper West Side. And buy fresh bagels every day.”

For a moment, she does miss New York. She misses blending in, not having to concentrate on the language. And street signs—God, how she misses street signs right now on this dusty, no-name road.

Marcus smiles. “I see it in your eyes. Come out with me, away from this madness.”

“The paper wants me here,” she says.

“Tell them how dead it is; then they won’t. Point out that everyone in your country is preoccupied by the election right now. About the Middle East, no one gives.”

Caddie shakes her head. “It’s never dead here, Marcus. And didn’t you see all those farm-fed American boys in the Inter-con bar last night? They didn’t make the trip to get laid. Spooks, for sure.”

“She’s got a point,” says Rob.

“CIA—so what?” Marcus grimaces in mock despair. “All that means is no photo ops for sure. C’mon, Caddie.”

Caddie shakes her head. “If I need a break, I’ll take a couple days off in Jerusalem.”

“Why?” he says. “Why do you have to stay?” When she doesn’t answer, he exhales in loud frustration. “Okay, then,” he says. “But not me. That’s the joy of being a freelancer.” He puts his hands behind his head as though leaning back in an easy chair. “Poof. I’m gone.”

The driver slows again to about five miles an hour. Except for scrawny gray bushes hugging the roadside, the area seems forsaken. “Enough delays,” Rob calls, bouncing his right leg. “Let’s get the show rolling.”

“Don’t worry.” Sven half-turns in his seat. “We must be almost there. Isn’t that right?” he asks the driver in loud Arabic. “We are there?”

Their driver doesn’t answer—in fact, Caddie realizes she’s never heard him speak. She has no idea what his voice sounds like, and that suddenly registers as odd.

Before she can ask another question and wait him out until he’s forced to reply, she catches sight of a bush up ahead to the right, jerking in a way it shouldn’t. The air hisses and loses pressure like a deflating balloon. “Hold it,” Caddie says, but she doubts anyone hears because right then a passing shrub rises and makes an inexplicable ping. “Hey—” Marcus exclaims, and he half-stands, faces her and raises his hands as though to block her from the bush. Then he leans on her, shoving her down, and Caddie is dimly aware of a crack and grayish smoke as she hears Sven in the front yelling, “Gas, hit the gas you idiot, go, go, go for Christ’s sake!” It occurs to her that their situation must be serious for cordial Sven to call someone an idiot, and Rob sinks to his knees on the floor of the jeep, pulling her toward him, saying, “Oh Jesus oh fuck oh Jesus,” so she’s sandwiched between the two of them, Rob and Marcus, and she’s aware of a peppery scent, and then, at last, she feels the jeep plunge forward and she tastes the dust that has settled on the leather seats but she sees nothing since her head is near her knees and Marcus is slumped over, protecting her, and the air becomes too dense to breathe, as though she’s underwater, and they seem to be turning because she falls to her left in slow motion and she realizes she should definitely be afraid right now, very afraid, yet she feels separate from it, in it but apart, like she’s that dirt caked behind the driver’s ear, and they spin to their right and Marcus, who is still covering her body with his own—God, he’s heavy—half falls off and at that same moment she feels something sticky like tree sap on her cheek and she touches it and it’s blood. “I guess I’ve been hit,” she says, shifting her body toward Marcus, keeping her voice light because she’s already been flighty today about the woman and her toddler so hysteria now is impermissible, and then she knows, she knows right away and without any doubt. The blood is his and he’s gone.

SHE’S HEARD IT SAID that everyone’s blood is the same color. An insistent moral position: we are all as one underneath. But it’s not true—or perhaps it’s that once spilled, the hue varies widely based on whether the day is humid, balmy, overcast. On whether the blood splatters on concrete, dirt, gravel, or grass.

She makes lists in her mind. Pastel rose and watery. Vivid as a police warning light. Eggplant-purple.

The blood that comes from Marcus’s head is the color of raspberries, and sticky.

“I HAVE TO FILE,” Caddie pleads. “It’s a story. Even if anybody’s . . . hurt. Especially then.”

No, no, dear. The voice comes from a great distance as a lady with pewter hair and creamy uniform reaches for Caddie’s arm, mops it with a cotton ball.

Caddie feels a sting. “What’s in that syringe?” She puts her head back against the pillow, overcome by a desire to close her eyes. Then she tries to sit up, realizing at last that this is a nurse, and a nurse should know something. Caddie has to interview her. “Can you tell me the precise nature of the wounds—”

The nurse’s head wobbles. You can’t get up yet. Please.

“How—” Caddie breaks off for a second. “How exactly are you listing their conditions?”

Lie still, dear. Try to relax. The doctor will be here soon. The pewter-and-cream lady, still out of focus, removes the needle and swabs Caddie’s arm again.

“I don’t want to relax. I want to file.”

She feels her arm being patted. It’s all over.

The nurse’s words echo. Overoveroverover.

. . .

THERE’S GRANDMA Jos, sleeves rolled above the bulbs of her elbows, chopping onions for chicken soup, her eyes oozing and her face rigid with loss.

Grandma Jos, kneeling to pray in the dusky church—one slow knee, then the other—her expression now flaccid with a resignation Caddie hates.

Grandma Jos, counting and recounting the cookie-jar money for that yellow dress with the lacy collar that Caddie can wear to the school dance, because Grandma Jos says she must look presentable now that she’s “nearly of age.” And though Caddie is embarrassed by the old-fashioned concept, and even more by frilly dresses, she loves this one because it’s starchy in that new-clothes way that the church hand-me-downs never are, and without even the tiniest of stains.

Grandma Jos, coming down the street in time to see Caddie, already bandaged on one elbow, jumping her rusted bicycle over a makeshift wooden ramp. A growl—Girl!—softened quickly to her public voice. Why does it always have to be dangerous to be fun?

No. Grandma Jos is not here. Caddie is not a child. She has to pull herself from this fog.

SHE WAKES UP ALONE in a room devoid of color. Why do they do that in hospitals, as if bland and passionless were comforting? Her left upper arm is sore and taped up; she’s tethered to an IV. She remembers a flight from Lebanon, vaguely. She gets up, pulling the contraption along with her, her hand rigid on the cold metal. Someone has left a newspaper on a table. The Cyprus Mail. So she’s in Nicosia. She flips rapidly through the pages until she finds it: Award-winning British freelance photo-journalist, 41, killed in a . . . She skims to the bottom, where she sees her own name: Catherine Blair, 32 . . . In between her name and his, the words blur.

What makes her think, then, of that Walt Whitman poem she had to memorize and recite during a sixth grade assembly? But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red. What remote melodrama; no one would publish it today, and still school-children have to learn it. “Whitman,” Caddie says aloud. She grips the newspaper and snickers.

Somehow, through none of her own doing, the laughter shifts into something else, something loud and unruly that makes her chest vibrate unnaturally. The nurse with the needle returns.

HOW DID SHE LET THIS HAPPEN? She’s usually so careful, her caution more valuable than a flak jacket. So how could she let him down like this?

Kill those bastards.

“AND YOU’RE SURE that Sven and Rob, that my colleagues . . . ?”

They’re fine. No injuries at all.

So where are they, then? Where the hell . . . because she needs to ask them why.

Isn’t there anyone you want us to contact?

It was all set up. Yaladi wanted to be interviewed, damnit. There was no crossfire to get caught in, no shelling. A simple interview with a famous criminal.

Some relative somewhere? The nurse, insistent, squeezes Caddie’s hand.

Relative? Not anyone living. Grandma Jos, the last to die, would be useless anyway. She’d show up straight from the airport with the Lazarus Department Store shopping bag she always carried, and she’d pull out a Bible and suggest they pray together. That would be the extent of it.

Caddie smooths the thin, bone-colored blanket that covers her legs. She makes her voice absolute. “No one.”

The nurse disapproves. She stands motionless for a moment as though weighing her options. Eventually she sighs. Maybe you’ll think of someone later. For now, sleep. She reaches to the cart and closes in.

THE DEEP PULSE OF NIGHT, its shadows a retreat, its tiny noises companions to breath. Night is a woman’s hand spread wide to shield her, to protect her from shame. At night, it’s all right if she finds herself musing without purpose, careening through memories, dallying longer among the dead than the living. It doesn’t matter that pieces of herself have been scattered, that everything she does takes place some long distance away, that her emotions, once so tethered and well behaved, now threaten to cripple her.

The permissive night: she’s begun to crave it.

Still, she won’t give in to a dread of dawn; she won’t be sunk by this sunlit heaviness. A flying leap, perfect form with arms outstretched and toes pointed, is what she’ll try for.

They bury Marcus with a camera and one of those little boxes of raisins he always carried in his pocket. Does someone tell her that, or does she dream it? She isn’t sure. She imagines, against her will, his hands draped over his stomach. Square hands, almost clumsy looking, with squat nails pressed to the ends of his fingers. But when he used them in a rush to insert film or change a lens or focus a shot, they were precise enough to mesmerize her. They became, then, the hands of a creator. When they touched her, she sometimes imagined herself to be one of his cameras. Though she and Marcus always avoided talking of the future, she knew that if she let herself, she could get addicted to those moments.

As a photographer, he was a master of angle and light and, most of all, passion. His photos of faces revealed secrets and captured essence, raw and unrelieved. He was known for the single shot that exposed a person’s history. “Penetrating,” one award committee said. “Too powerful to ignore.”

She remembers being with him once in his converted darkroom. They were studying some photos he’d developed, full of expression and gesture, and suddenly he switched off the lights and slipped out, leaving her fumbling first for the wall, then the door.

Whatja do that for?

It’s a life skill, Caddie. Always know how to find your way out of a darkroom. Or did he say dark room?

On the fourth morning, clear of drugs, she writes a letter to Marcus’s parents in London. “A fine photographer and cheerful companion. He loved the story that he died for. Was committed to his work.” A bit beside the point, but she can’t say what she really means. That he was irreverent, and lemon-tasting, and intense and lighthearted at once, so often exactly what she needed. That already she misses the nights. That miss is not a strong enough verb. And that maybe she should have told him that.

“CATHERINE BLAIR?”

She raises her hand, palm out as though blocking light, and sees him through her fingers. A doctor this time. Milky white suit with shit-warmed-over grin. She shifts her body away. “Caddie,” she says. “I go by Caddie.”

“Well, Caddie. Good to see you sitting up and reading. You must be feeling well today.”

Christ. This phony cheerfulness is more painful to witness than a child’s tears.

“You were lucky with the arm. Everything checks out fine. Someone from your newspaper comes tomorrow, I’m told. We’ll probably release you the next day.”

“Right-o.” One of Marcus’s expressions.

“In the meantime—” He pulls up a chair as though someone had invited him to sit. “I’m here. We can discuss anything.”

He emphasizes the last word. He thinks she’ll find comfort, does he, in asking her questions aloud? As though to pronounce them one by one would remove the weight? Okay, doc, tell me. Why, right after a shower, did he smell like citrus and taste like salt? How did he learn to cook spaghetti with such a flourish? Where did he get those lips, far more beautiful than mine, heart-lips, lips that, in truth, belonged on a girl’s face? And that way he had of looking at me sideways and making it feel more intimate than anyone else’s straight-on stare and yet still full of freedom—how did he do that?

The milk suit pats her arm, murmuring gently, urging her to speak her thoughts. “Go ahead.” The painstakingly modulated voice shakes her free of reverie. “It’s important to pay attention to your feelings.”

Maybe, doc, but I don’t need to share. Real journalists write in third person for a reason. Don’t you know that, doc, don’t you know anything? They disguise their opinions and never spill their guts, ever. Except maybe sometimes, maybe during the dense hours while children sleep, to a half-stranger in some poorly lit airport terminal in a Third World country after witnessing acts of unspeakable violence in towns with unpronounceable names. But not to neighbors or even lovers and certainly not to doctors. You can check my passport to see the countries I’ve visited, doc, but you’ll never know where my head has been.

“Do you know how many people have been killed in this region in the last decade?” she says. “Have you heard of the slimeball we were going to interview? I knew the risks—we all did.”

“Still—”

“We wanted to cover it. We were dying to.” She meets his gaze straight on, silencing him for a beat.

“Yes, and that’s—”

She holds up a hand to stop his words. She wishes she could ask him a question. She thinks while he waits, appalling eagerness in his eyes. If your home were burning, which would you take first? Your pet, or your cash, or your photo albums? She doesn’t ask it aloud, of course. His answer, she imagines, would be to finally turn away. Who, after all, likes being dissected?

“I’m fine,” she says, forcing out the word. “Fine.”

His shoulders sag slightly at her dismissal. “Well. Let us know if you want to talk later.”

THE FOREIGN EDITOR, Mike, paces in the waiting room. He no longer looks like the Mike she used to know, the one who transferred out of the posting in Jerusalem that Caddie filled. “Live tight and write loose” was his parting advice when he headed for Ben Gurion and a job in management with a couple days’ worth of scratchiness on his cheeks and a rip in the right shoulder of his T-shirt. Now, straight off a flight from New York, his suit is starched enough to support his weight, and his hair seems polished. She crosses her legs, sits up straighter and pretends she’s wearing boots, jeans and dangly earrings instead of a dingy hospital shift. Two others are in the room: a bent-nosed man and a coiffured woman with a run in her stocking. They’re in street clothes, too.

“Living in an airport terminal, that’s what this is,” Caddie says, gesturing to take in the room. “One damned delay after another. And now you want more.”

“It’s a promotion, for God’s sake.” Mike leans on the windowsill. “You like New York.”

New York. Where Marcus is supposed to be. Visiting photo galleries, eating late overpriced meals in closet-sized cafés. She cranes her neck to look out the window behind Mike. A leaf supported by an indiscernible breeze spins in circles. And they’re way up on the third floor. What are the odds of something like that?

“I’m fine,” she says at last to the window, sick of that word fine, but addicted to it, too. “I don’t want to be transferred to New York. Least, not now.”

“Caddie.” Mike moves to a cushioned chair across from her, gives her a get-real look. “First of all, you’re not okay. Who would be? But leave that for a second. This is about a career move. A job that’ll be perfect for you. Roving correspondent based in New York. You don’t have to get stuck behind a desk all the time like I have.”

She shakes her head. “I’ll have to wear smart clothes, get my hair styled. It’s not me.”

“It is you. Plenty of independence. And no one cares what you wear.”

She gives him a comical glance. “Shit, Mike, look at you. They gave you a title and you’re a whole different person. Now maybe that’s for the best, in your case.” She grins, glad she can still tease.

Mike hesitates a beat. “Think it over for a couple weeks. And in the meantime, go to Vienna; cover a round of peace talks. They start next Wednesday.”

So this is his counteroffer. It doesn’t sway her. “Me writing peace talks? Get real, Mike. All analysis, no action? My copy will stink.” She leans forward in her seat. “I want to go home.”

“Jerusalem’s not home, Caddie. It’s an assignment.I used to cover it. Jon is covering it right now.”

“Okay, an assignment. But it’s where my stuff is. My books. My CDs. My underwear, for God’s sake. Look, maybe I’ll take your job, but not right now. I’m not going to run away just because I got shot at. You understand?”

He squeezes the arms of his chair with both hands. “I’m trying to work with you here, Caddie.” He massages his forehead like it’s bread dough. “If I talk them into letting you go back, there has to be no reporting.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says.

“Your instincts are off; they’ve got to be. Besides, we already promised Jon at least six weeks.”

“Six weeks?”

“Caddie.”

“Okay. Sure.” That can be negotiated later.

“And soon, very soon, we discuss this New York transfer again,” Mike says. “But seriously.”

“Right-o.”

“In the meantime, you can listen to your music or snorkel in the Red Sea or explore the holy sites. They owe you nine weeks’ vacation anyway. Until Jon leaves, until we talk, stay off the job.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it, Caddie. No fooling around. This isn’t only from me. It’s orders from on high.”

“On High,” she repeats, liking the weight the editor gives the phrase. Liking that she will be defying On High, the very thing that betrayed her.