Wanderlust (13 page)

It was he who seemed to first question what we were doing, to have the nerve to say, “I don't know how I feel anymore.” I proclaimed that I was still very much in love, but this was in part because I didn't want to admit the possibility that it could just go away. Falling out of love for the first time is as surprising as falling in love. It's even similar: There's the bewilderment at the heart's revolutions, and a sense of finally understanding what people have been talking about. Only instead of feeling like you've been granted a superpower, you feel like it's been taken away.

I told Graham that I would finish college as quickly as possible, and that then we could be together. But when I discovered that the
U.S. State Department offered college internships, and that if I won one I could spend the next summer abroad, that happy pretravel conviction came over me again. This time it wasn't just one trip dangled in front of me but a whole possible career, one that would let me roam the world. I would travel, learn languages, and . . . well, I had only the vaguest idea what diplomats did. They went places, I knew that, and I longed to feel the slip-slide of unfamiliar territory once again. Graham was surprised when I told him I was applying to go abroad. I knew that choosing departure would be different this time.

I wrote a statement explaining to the State Department that I wanted to go to Kabul. I wanted to go because of romantic novels like M. M. Kaye's
The Far Pavilions,
because of Rudyard Kipling, because of history classes on the Great Game, because Afghanistan was different and difficult and far away. Graham was neither aggressive nor pointed as he questioned me about my desire; he merely observed that we would be apart again. “I might not even get it,” I told him. “You will,” he said, and I knew he was right. Despite his mildness, I felt angry and provoked as two things clashed inside me. There was, on the one hand, my dreamy vision of being with him. On the other hand was my feeling that this internship and all it represented—going abroad again, finding my own path—was an absolute right. Though still merely an idea, I felt that it was a part of me I had to defend.

I was at Whistler with Graham's roommates when my mother called with news: The United States had no diplomatic presence in Afghanistan at the time, but the State Department would be pleased to assign me instead to ten weeks at the consulate general in Karachi, in neighboring Pakistan. I jumped up and down on the sofa, yelling “I'm going to Karachi!” Everyone told me this was cool. They had no idea where it was, but they had a world map on their living room wall,
courtesy of Graham, and I stood on the sofa and pointed it out. In any case, they understood that I would embark on a wished-for adventure, and wished-for adventure was a currency we had in common.

It was then, in the dead of winter, when I decided I would go away again, that we both began to understand that we would break up. I'd made a choice, and it was not to try for love, with all its risk of pain, but to travel.

For months after Graham and I broke up, we stayed in touch by telephone and letter, and then for years afterward I would think of him in a longing way. I would imagine that he was watching over me, and I would make choices based on whether or not they would impress Graham, who would never know about them anyway. I would feel like I was surpassing Graham: He'd inspired me to travel, but I would go beyond.

In the spring I went to a small house party with college friends on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill. This was the kind of thing I'd only recently started doing—between my year abroad and all the time I spent visiting Graham, I didn't have many friends in Seattle. Most of the people at the party went to my university; I shared classes with a couple of them, Arabic with Terry and political science with Jeff. Then there was Terry's girlfriend, her best friend, and her best friend's boyfriend. I liked them all and they liked me back; they were even a little impressed with me in exactly the way that the Penny Lane manager was not. I had established my credentials as an adventurer. But I didn't know them as well as I wished I did, and I felt grateful to be included. I now saw that this was a hazard of being away all the time, this failure to entwine myself with people in one place. But maybe it didn't matter: I'd soon be away
again for another three months. And then who knew what. I still didn't think much of Seattle.

We took ecstasy and stayed up all night, lolling on the floor like a litter of puppies, sharing our waves of euphoria. A tall man with long blond hair arrived; he caught my eye because he shared Graham's look. The new man's name was Stu, and he arrived with a woman whom I later learned was his girlfriend. Stu had dropped out of college, where he'd dabbled in architecture, engineering, and ethnomusicology, and was now rebuilding a house for his great-aunt.

He sat down next to me and didn't leave my side until the morning. We talked the entire time. I told him about Egypt and Yemen, and he told me about the time he'd spent in Thailand and Bali, mostly with his girlfriend, who seemed to be keeping her distance on the far side of the room. In Bali he had spent months studying wood sculpture, carving and whittling with a teacher next to a stream. He had wanderlust too. When I told him I would be spending the summer in Pakistan, he seemed genuinely impressed and excited; he talked about
qawwali
music and the
tabla
drum. I lay back and listened, at ease, letting him tell me about the place where I was going.

The next day Stu's girlfriend moved out of their houseboat. The night on Queen Anne had been some kind of final straw after four years, open wounds, an affair on her part with an Israeli she met in India, and a slide into friendship and recrimination. She and Stu broke up, and he asked a friend for my number and called me after two weeks. In the following month we grew close.

I was of two minds about the fact that we'd met on ecstasy. Did the chemical euphoria mean that what we had was fake? Or had it just opened us up faster than would have happened anyway? One of the greatest love stories of all time is about a potion. Tristan was sent
on a trip to Ireland to fetch Iseult, his uncle's betrothed. On the sea journey back to Cornwall they swallowed the elixir, and after that were powerless to control their love.

The spring was still chilly, and we lay on a mattress on the floor of his houseboat, in front of a wood-burning fire. We did more drugs, mushrooms this time, with my new group. By bestowing his love on me, Stu had confirmed me in their circle. I wrote papers and took exams. Stu had grown up in Seattle, as had his parents, as had his grandparents, all four of whom lived nearby. I let him be my anchor. The night before I left, he stayed over at my loft and helped me wash a sink full of dishes that I didn't want to leave for my roommates. Then I was off.

chapter eleven

T
he heat took me in its fist.
Jane, a freckled consular officer on her first tour, had come to see me through customs and take me to my assigned home. We rode in the back of an air-conditioned car across Karachi, where for miles the buildings bristled with rebar sticking up from the roof, as though the whole metropolis were waiting for another story to be added on. Dense traffic belched exhaust into the bright haze, and when we stopped, vendors selling newspapers and flower garlands rapped at the windows. Motorcycles buzzed by carrying families of five. From the low-lying sprawl we moved into broad avenues and colonial facades, and finally turned into a gated lane. Tucked in the middle of the city's thousand-plus square miles
,
it felt far away from the buzz.

The consulate general, in its wisdom, had given me a two-story, four-bedroom house, with formal and informal dining rooms, a roof deck, a walled garden with mango trees and a well-watered lawn, and servants' quarters occupied by a man named Taj, his wife and daughters, a few chickens, and a cat. A guardhouse flanked my gated driveway, occupied in shifts by leather-faced old gentlemen, called
chowkidars,
who had red-dyed beards. My house in turn sat on the narrow lane of consular homes.

After Jane left, Taj proposed a deal, to which I agreed. I was obviously less work than a normal diplomatic family. For a reduced
rate—and the right to keep living in his quarters until more lucrative residents arrived—he would do my laundry, shop for groceries, and prepare meals. I felt like a cheat. All my traveler's ideas about selfsufficiency evaporated, and now I found myself with a servant who, to my astonishment, called me
“memsahib.”
I associated the word with all those novels about the Raj.

I climbed up to the roof, but could see little of the city beyond the white-walled homes of the compound around me. In the flat bright sky, the black silhouettes of birds made lazy, loping circles. Cormorants flew in flocks, while birds of prey—eagles, kites, and vultures—hunted alone, periodically dive-bombing into the city below. I tried to count the birds but stopped at fifty-five.

I felt disoriented and alone, all the more so when Taj served me
chicken biryani
on formal china and silver at the head of the dining room table. This made me feel excruciatingly self-conscious, so I asked him to bring all my subsequent evening meals on a tray to my room. Laundry would take some negotiation too: Taj's rule of thumb seemed to be that, when in doubt, an item should be both ironed and starched. I started doing my underwear in my bathroom sink.

After dinner my first night I pulled an armchair up to my second-story bedroom window. I wanted to feel the heat again, so I opened the window up to the evening air, which was still saunalike, and let it wash over me. My distance from anywhere familiar weighed on me like a physical force. For thousands and thousands of miles, there was no one who was thinking of me. The summer stretched ahead like a tunnel.

The next day I put on a skirt and shirt that I hoped looked professional as well as modest enough to walk around outside, thinking,
wrongly, that one popped out for errands or lunch. Jane drove me to work. The first thing I noticed about the consulate general was the line of visa applicants. There were hundreds of them—men, women, and children—all wearing
shalwar khamis
, the national uniform composed of a long, loose tunic over pantaloons. The line stretched along one whole face of the building, which occupied most of a block, and around the corner, where it snaked between metal barricades. It wasn't moving.

As we entered the compound by car, a high metal gate opened to reveal a metal drum as tall as our hood, which slowly retracted into the ground. Before we were allowed to drive in, guards inspected the undercarriage using poles with mirrors on one end.

I was given my own office in the political section. I reported to Kevin, a skinny political officer with glasses and a beard. He'd been a high school history teacher in Connecticut until he'd passed the Foreign Service entrance exam on his third try, and so had a teacher's patient way of explaining things. Kevin gave me some newspaper clippings and phone numbers, and told me to start finding things out. This, apparently, was what political officers did. They found things out and reported them to Washington, writing memos on orange and black computer screens. Every memo we wrote had to be classified on a scale of “unclassified” through “top secret,” but nothing, no matter how innocuous, was ever actually labeled unclassified. Washington wanted reports on environmental issues, which no one on staff had the time to do, so this nonpriority portfolio was handed to me. Kevin was working on child labor: Washington was concerned that the Pakistani workforce included children under fourteen.