News From the Red Desert (47 page)

Mr. Clark stopped kicking him. Rami Issay was very tired. Mr. Clark and Captain Waller left the shed and locked the door behind them. Rami Issay closed his eyes. He slept.

When he awoke, a thin finger of light slid through the gap between the door to this shed and the concrete pad he lay upon. Past dawn, then.
He remembered how when his children were young they would wake up at dawn every morning, no matter whether that was at five in the morning, in the summer, or at eight. He remembered those summer mornings, and wishing to God that they would go back to sleep. He remembered silently willing that, and letting his hopes get up in the short intervals of silence. But in the end, there was no pretending they were asleep. Though he pulled pillows over his ears and tried his best to eke out another hour of sleep.

He shouldn't have. He should have gotten up every one of those mornings and said good morning to his daughters. If he could change something, it would be that. It wouldn't be the business at the film. He had not caused that, so he could not apologize, even to himself, for what happened there. But he had decided to stay in bed those mornings when his children awoke. And he shouldn't have.

T
hat same early morning, Rashid sat in a café in Peshawar. He was very thin and dirty. He had been introduced by his companions as one of the faithful, and so he was permitted to sit there and was given a glass of hot tea. He had walked for weeks and was only just now getting used to not waking up in the grass at dawn to start walking.

Crossing the mountains had torn his feet open and he had fallen many times. When he got here, he used the toilet in the café and he had looked at himself in the spotted mirror on the wall and been surprised at yet another transformation. He was skeletally thin. Between the depressed healing fractures in his cheeks and the missing teeth, he looked nothing like he had. He seemed misshapen and diseased, when he had been beautiful. He did not care much about that, really, though he was surprised by how much he had changed.

What was more important to him was the way he had recovered his own interior posture in the mountains. The exertion of climbing had acted as a sop for his anger. He learned to direct his rage into his legs, as they burned. He climbed like that: his legs feeling stronger, and his rage departing his head and lodging in his thighs. It made him feel capable of anything. When they had got to the tops of the highest passes, the
view of Afghanistan and Pakistan had been more beautiful than anything he could have been prepared for. The Afghan plains stretching out to the north, all the way to Kandahar, had looked like a sawn plank. And to the south, the mountains of Waziristan rolled forward like waves in an angry sea.

Rashid thought that he should not linger here—in this café or even in this city. It was expected that he and the other men he had walked across the mountains with would leave at the end of the month for a training camp in North Waziristan. In recovering his own interior posture, he had understood again his revulsion for what would be learned there. He was his own self. Not what he had become while he was in that little room.

In the morning he would leave. Quietly and without discussion. He knew how to travel at night now and not draw suspicion. He would survive. He sipped from his glass of tea. He would need some clothes. He looked up and down the street. There were two laundries in sight. He would need some money. This required more thought. But not so much that he should remain here another day.

Outside, in the street, a truck pulled up. Men who were sitting in the back jumped out and hoisted their bags. They looked around and up and down the street. They knew one another but not this place they had come. Rashid watched them. One of them was the interpreter, John Wayne. The man driving the truck stepped out of the cab. Fazil.

Rashid watched them both as Fazil pointed to the door and the men from the box of the truck trooped slowly inside and sat down at a long table set aside, perhaps just for them. Fazil followed them in. After he closed the door behind him he looked around the café and saw Rashid Siddiqui, but did not recognize him. His eyes moved on to the other strangers, assessing them for threats.

Fazil sat down at the long table, too. The men he had driven here had all been in Sarpoza prison and had walked over the mountains. All month, very thin men had been descending out of the mountains with that story. Two new training camps had been built to accommodate them.

Rami Issay lay on the floor of that little room. It should have been beginning to get warm, under the morning sun, but he had not known such cold. He breathed shallowly and rapidly. His broken ribs hurt less this way. He felt like he was standing just on the edge of consciousness. He thought that he was tired. Tired from the long night following many long nights. Tired of loss. He decided to give way and let himself rest. And he did. He inhaled very deeply, and then slowly let out all that air.

He did not breathe in again.

Stewart Robinson was sleeping but Deirdre O'Malley could not. It was late at night in New York and she sat up in a chair looking out her window on 8th Avenue. She was remembering what she had said and what Jeremy and General Lattice had said on the Charlie Rose show. She did these shows regularly now—she had replaced Jeremy as the Sunday panel go-to guest for Afghanistan—and she knew this was usual, this wincing about awkward phrasings and imprecisions. She needed to let it go. But more and more, now, she couldn't. She rewrote everything she said in her head but still she didn't get anything right. She did not understand why she could not let it rest. She did not understand what was so dissatisfying about what she had said and that revising it satisfactorily was not possible.

Outside, ambulances and police cars let their sirens run almost continuously. The streets were busy, even so late, and watching the restless motion outside eased some of the anxiety within her. She watched Stewart sleep, in her bed. They had met the third day after she arrived in Afghanistan. He had been only halfway through his walk. She liked that they went back so far. Before either of them was famous. In the cab from the studio to the restaurant, Stewart had told her that he had decided to do no more interviews and stop writing any more about the war. He had become too associated with it. And anyway, now it was clear that the war was lost. He thought the reckoning to come could be terrible.

She challenged him on this. “Should we not be talking about that as much as we can?”

He said, “I supported and argued for the mission for a decade. I think it's time to listen to people who had better judgment about the situation in the first place.” It was quiet in the cab for a while.

Then she asked, “What's next for you, then?”

“I am at loose ends. Maybe a novel.”

“About what?”

“A Brit, living in New York and trying to make sense of popular music.”

“You could not be more of a fuddy-duddy if you tried.”

“I know.”

“New York, huh?”

“It's just an idea. Alternatively, I've been thinking about trying to write a detective series set in Cyprus.”

“Cyprus is pretty.”

“It is.”

“Have you ever spent a winter in New York? It's appalling.”

“So I hear. In Cyprus, they hardly have a winter at all.”

“Exactly.”

Then they were in front of their restaurant.

At that moment, as she sat in her streetlight-lit chair looking out the window and wearing only a shirt, Rami Issay died, and she, and everyone else he had touched, felt that touch leave. For Deirdre it came as a sudden pain. In her darkened apartment in Chelsea she felt a stab under her right breast so sharp it made her gasp. It worsened for a long moment and she wondered what it was that was hurting her. But that was no more clear to her than anything else, that night.

Stewart woke up then, and looked at her, hunched over on her chair. He got out of bed and kneeled beside her. She could scarcely breathe. He put his arms around her and that helped a little.

In Peshawar, Rashid knew exactly what had had happened. He doubled forward in the little café, and he breathed slowly and carefully. Because he was young, and had not yet lost many people, it was the most pointed sensation he had experienced. He waited for it to pass. It continued. He looked over at Fazil.

Fazil had stopped speaking, too. And he held his abdomen and breathed lightly. He did not know what had just happened and Rashid would not tell him.

John Wayne looked at Rashid's face at the other table, and he looked at Fazil's at his. He wondered who they could possibly have in common. Because John Wayne had not spent much time in Rami Issay's company, his pain was not as intense. In another moment, it was gone. He watched as first Rashid and then Fazil gripped the table edges in front of them and breathed in slow, deliberate respirations and shut their eyes, waiting for the sensation to pass.

A waiter brought a tray of rice and some flatbread. John Wayne had not eaten in days. He needed to put some weight back on, get his strength back. He waited just a moment or two and then he reached for some bread. That training camp sounded demanding.