News From the Red Desert (15 page)

They were climbing a long grade now, and Deirdre was sucking wind. “Too many years at sea level in Baghdad,” she said, aloud. They knew what that was the second she said it. So did she, once the words were out of her mouth. She winced and didn't say anything else, opting to use her breath to breathe.

Her consolation was that everyone else was puffing too. Most of the infanteers were carrying sixty-pound loads, including body armour
and weapons. Then there was the man with the 7.62-mm machine gun, another forty pounds. Fortin increased the pace a little. In another circumstance, the men would have been irritated. But now they felt like they had been let out for a run. Beneath them they could see the oxbows of the Arghandab as it wound sinuously across its valley. In the distance, the woodsmoke haze of Kandahar, where the markets sold fist-sized blocks of polished lapis lazuli that could have been formed out of this perfectly blue sky, compressed to the point of substance. Deirdre had bought some, as had each of the soldiers, the first time they saw it in the bazaar, though heaven knows what any of them would do with it.

As the afternoon rapidly slipped into evening, the café was still hot in a way it usually was not so late in the day and when the room was nearly empty. Fazil was behind the till. The heat made him think of summer—soon his children would be let out of school. His wife had made arrangements for them to continue religious instruction at a local madrassa, but nevertheless, they would have more free time and little Hamid and Aisha would be excited. He had not seen them in a year and when he skyped or spoke to them on the telephone they were shy and anxious with him. He wished he could travel home more easily, or at all safely. But he couldn't. Another convoy of buses and fuel tankers had been attacked the night before. The Taliban had run them close together and then lit them on fire and let the occupants—workers bound for American bases like KAF—burn. War had brought him here and war kept him here, so far from his children. Who would be all he would value as an old man, memories of whom would be all that remained to him as he breathed his last breath. And here he was, making less of his fatherhood, the only thing that would endure. Would war even be possible if all the parents of the planet just stayed with their children?

That thought leapt from Fazil, brooding silently behind the counter, into the mind of Just Amachai, who normally exerted herself greatly not to pine for her own son, being raised by her parents in Thailand. From whom she had heard almost nothing in six months. They lived in a village near the Malay border with neither telephone nor electricity. They went to the post office to use the telephone when they could. When they managed to call they always told her everything was fine, and that her son was doing well at school. Absence had diminished her place in his life. She slept on a cot on a dusty Central Asian air base surrounded by coarse people just so she could send money home, and in return she was forgotten. Of course she was. Every absent parent in the world is forgotten. Still, she told herself, one does what one must to provide.

To provide what, if not herself? Money. Tuition. School uniforms. Food. A new roof. Electricity. A scooter. And did her son want any of those things as much as he wanted her on the day she left? She had come here and remained here also because it was easier, for her. She went to work and mailed the money home and her parents did the loving of her son and she did not have to live in the back of her parents' house and listen to all the other children in the neighbourhood go to school in the morning, but not her son. She told herself that her parents loved her son, too, and that he knew it. And that soon she would be home.

Anakopoulus sat at the table beside Just Amachai. He had glanced at her when she walked in but now he looked out the window at the dusty land beyond, and the blast barriers and the sandbags that partly enveloped every standing structure. He looked at all this, but he did not dwell on any of it. He thought about how many weeks had gone by since his error and how he had not been contacted by anyone from the various security branches. Maybe he had gotten away with it after all. Maybe it was all going to be okay.

Of course it wouldn't be. Like they were ever going to stop looking until they caught him? Like they weren't burrowing into the internet
right now, looking for the traces that would lead to him? The internet was big, was all. There was a lot of code to examine. Any moment there would be a knock on the door. “Please stand up, Master Sergeant.” At times he thought that everything after that point would be easier. The fear was what was so painful. As an adult, he had not been afraid much. How do frightened people bear this? He felt anxious dread sweep up from his prostate and spread throughout his body like a rigor, making it quiver and making him feel short of breath. He forced himself to clear his thoughts for a moment. Just breathe. Think of nothing at all but your breath. And that created a blank space that allowed Just Amachai's ruminations about her child to spread from her thoughts into his.

He experienced a pastiche of images of tender women, introducing their daughters and sons to him. Anakopoulus had been with women with children since his late twenties. At the end of each relationship he felt nearly as much grief for the lost children as for the lost woman. He found mothers more appealing than childless women. He liked that there was always something in their lives more important to them than him.

Susie's son was fifteen now and, he knew from his Facebook lurking, still basketball-mad. This was not Anakopoulus's sport—he followed football and baseball—but for the sake of the boy, he'd acquainted himself. He had bought season tickets to the Mavericks and he'd taught himself to admire the fluidity of the game. When they played together, whatever advantage he had due to his size—the boy had been nine, then—was offset by his unfamiliarity with the game. They returned to his house after long afternoons at the park, spent wordlessly bouncing that ball, and leaping and throwing. Sometimes they had gone hours without speaking. With his technique it was only a matter of time before he tore his rotator cuff, he figured. Which would be fine by him. In the meantime he would bounce that damn ball as many times as he needed to.

The boy had to be thinking about college. Soon, he'd be studying for his SATs, looking at the different scholarships. As this thought occurred to Anakopoulus, the clamp tightened again on his chest. The child was on his way out of childhood, and the one tendril of adult manhood in his young life—Anakopoulus—had been pulled from his fingers with
no regard at all for what the boy had to say about that.

If he got caught and prosecuted for treason, that would be bad. The kid would see his face in the paper. Though maybe he had written Anakopoulus off by now.