Part 9 (1/2)

Todd opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, he heard, so clearly it almost seemed real, the voice of Amin. Stay silent.

”And even those of you who pretend to do good-to build schools, to...” and here Sher Agha glared at Todd, ”to help refugees-you are liars.”

”I am not a liar.” Again, Amin”s voice, more urgent. Stay silent. And in fact, Todd regretted his words as soon as he said them. They gave more power to this man; they legitimized the accusation. He s.h.i.+fted his weight slightly to the left, but kept his gaze firm.

Sher Agha bent over and looked into Todd”s face, as if examining an insect. ”What is your religion? You are Jewish?”

”Raised Christian. But I am not practicing.”

”So you are G.o.dless.”

Say no. ”No.” Todd took a slow breath before continuing. He reminded himself of his long practice of pausing before breaking silence. ”I believe,” he said after a moment, ”in one G.o.d who cares about us all. Who pays no attention to borders or ethnic differences.”

Sher Agha straightened and ran his fingers into his dark beard. ”But you don”t personally wors.h.i.+p this G.o.d? You don”t want your own holy book?” He gave a short laugh, then added: ”You do not feel that prayer will be useful to you now?”

”I pray,” Todd said. ”In my own way.” Say yes. ”But yes, thank you, I will take a copy of the Bible.”

”Your own way.” Sher Agha spit on the floor. ”So does the heretic.” He strode around the edges of the room, circling Todd once before turning to face him again. ”You have no photograph of your wife?”

Todd met his gaze but did not answer. He did not want to talk about Clarissa. He was trying to hold her in a special place in his mind, apart from this situation, so that when he thought of her, it would feel like a sliver of freedom. He needed that now, and he didn”t know for how long he would need it.

”But why not?” Sher Agha asked after a moment.

Todd laughed, a cracked sound he barely recognized. ”Your men didn”t offer me time to gather my belongings.”

Sher Agha scoffed. ”The foreigners I have met, they carry pictures of their wives. If they love them.”

Should he ignore that remark or refute it? This all felt like some kind of complicated test that he was struggling through, doing poorly, and that would be crucial later.

Sher Agha shook his head. ”So you are ready to take a new wife, then? Perhaps you dream of an Afghan woman?”

”I love my wife.” Todd spoke each word distinctly. ”I ask to speak with her, and to my daughter. I want to a.s.sure them that I”m all right.”

”No one offered you that.”

”But if you are humane, if you are so different from those who run Guantanamo, you will allow me a chance at least to rea.s.sure her.”

In one seamless movement, Sher Agha pulled a knife from his voluminous clothing and began to wave it. ”Don”t talk to me,” he began, his voice loud and ugly enough that Todd flinched, and then he slashed the knife toward Todd”s leg, cutting his pants, slicing flesh, drawing immediate blood. ”Do not talk to me about being humane.” He drew back his arm as if to stab Todd, and then turned at the last second and threw the knife so that it lodged in the wall. ”You do not know how lucky you are that it is me you deal with,” he yelled. ”But do not dare to use this language with me, after what you have done. You understand me?”

Against his will, Todd flashed on a stark image of a man whose head was being yanked back by the hair, his neck laid bare as if for a beheading. It pa.s.sed in an instant, like a snapshot he”d glimpsed. He felt sick to his stomach, made small and hushed by this terrible new certainty: they did not see him as a person. They cared about him not at all. Eventually they would kill him.

After a minute he managed to raise his head to meet Sher Agha”s glare directly. He could not speak, however. He knew if he tried, his voice might tremble. He felt the air thicken between them for what must have been a matter of seconds, but felt like a quarter of an hour. Finally Sher Agha spit at the floor, and that seemed to release some of the tension.

Todd knew this captor held complete power over him in a practical sense. But he also knew he needed to pretend that wasn”t the case, to rea.s.sert power of his own, even fictive power. He cleared his throat. ”I need something to bandage my leg,” he said. ”And there is no need for me to be bound. Your guards are skilled; I can”t escape. But this way, I also cannot use the bathroom.”

Sher Agha studied him a moment. ”Bah,” he said. ”Don”t bother me with this. Your legs will be freed soon enough.”

He turned as if to leave. ”And my wife?” Todd asked, somehow wanting, needing now, to refer to Clari.

”Your wife,” Sher Agha said. ”We will talk to your wife. I hope for your sake, my friend, that she carries on her body a picture of you. That she loves you. Then perhaps she will work with us, and we will send you home.”

”We do not have much money,” Todd said carefully.

”Then we can sell you to those who care more about killing infidels than gaining money.

Do you want that?”

Stay silent.

”Do you?” Sher Agha yelled so loudly that Todd recoiled again.

”No,” he said.

”No. That”s right. So you better hope your friends and your employer and your government will help your poor moneyless wife.” He walked to the door. ”Bah. This conversation begins to bore me. I will have them bring you a Bible. It might be a good moment to find G.o.d.”

Clarissa, September 12th She had a rhythm going, and within that rhythm, her surroundings had vanished; she could have been anywhere: an alleyway in Venice, a hiking trail in the Swiss Alps, the Coney Island boardwalk. She walked without attention to where her feet landed, yet she noticed that one footstep sounded and felt unlike the other. This surprised her. The same set of legs, with their given shape and heft, were doing the stepping, a repet.i.tive movement; still, each footfall seemed a unique moment, landing on a different piece of sidewalk or on the sidewalk differently. At the same time, within that diversity, a flow had developed, now that she”d been walking for a while. Her energy had begun to run in a circular fas.h.i.+on from the ground, up one leg, to her belly and back down the other leg, sweeping her forward rhythmically: one, two; one, two; in, out; here we go. A marching tune is what she imagined. She was marching in a tiny part of her city, and on an even tinier part of the Earth, in the middle of the night, as if nothing else of import existed. The world had shrunk, finally. No FBI, no Afghanistan, no warfare or impenetrable kidnappers speaking in a foreign tongue about an untenable topic, the terms for release of a husband. It had finally condensed to something she could manage.

How big did one”s world need to be, anyway? There were people who spent their whole lives in one zip code, and then people who constantly fled for new adventures, horizons and faces. She and Todd had had two different reactions to life”s losses, and it had created opposing desires that they”d never really discussed: in her, the belief in putting down roots to create meaning, and in him, the hunt for meaning in distant alleys beyond the boundaries of home.

And now the differences were magnified. Now Todd was held prisoner on soil stained by decades of bloodshed, in a part of the planet that had felt to him almost like a second home and seemed to her so unlikely as to be imaginary.

Todd had known, at least academically, the risks he took. He”d even, on some level, embraced them. It was part of how he looked at life: nothing mundane, thank you. Everything writ large. She had realized even before they married that Todd would never have the patience for aging: little aches and pains that developed into larger vulnerabilities, flipping through women”s magazines in doctors” offices, a morning marked by its regimen of medicines. He once told her he would not want to live long and go peacefully if that meant settling at some tottering age in some vacation home on a picaresque, boring lake; G.o.d, kill me first, he”d said.

She”d been walking for two hours in what turned out to be a large and uneven circle, and now she was about 20 minutes from home. Beneath a tall streetlight, Clarissa saw a figure painted on a cement overpa.s.s wall. She paused; she”d never noticed it before. Below her feet ran the S train, a boring dinner partner, touching down at five stops before doing it all over again, back and forth, its monotonous life so tightly contained. At this hour, the track yawned empty, trains moving sleepily, so she had museum-silence to examine the woman kneeling with her hands in her lap. Her skirt, an American flag, mushroomed around her. On her head sat a bird, painted red, claws tangled in her hair, wings spread as though about to take flight. But it was her expression that particularly caught Clarissa”s attention. She had a closed face, like a pa.s.sport inspector, as if she didn”t care what you thought of her; her job was to decide what she thought of you.

Clarissa looked again at the bird. Was this an image of her and Todd, she kneeling, Todd ready to fly? Could street art over a shuttle track be articulating their barely spoken argument?

More likely this was all just pre-dawn, sleep-deprived nonsense, the clarifying effect of crisp night air offset by the fact that this wasn”t-or hadn”t been, until lately-her usual hours to be awake.

She leaned over to look once more and saw four letters that made her catch her breath. Afgh.

”You like it?”

She startled at a sound of the male voice near at hand, straightened and turned to look into wide green eyes. Where had he come from? She recalled in an instant that she stood only four blocks from the armory, with its mandated around-the-clock police presence. It housed the city”s roughest men outside of prison, those halfway between freedom and captivity with nowhere to go and little motivation to avoid crimes they”d already practiced, though not quite yet perfected, in an alleyway in the Bronx or up a fire escape in Manhattan. Outcasts living in testosterone-filled bunk beds with mornings, she imagined, of mold-cornered showers and bruised bananas, yesterday”s s.h.i.+rt and too few plans.

There was no graying in the sky, no comfort in the sense that dawn was nearly there or even that daylight had ever existed. She”d looked at her cellphone a few minutes ago so she knew it was about 4:40 a.m., which might be a detail to remember later for the police.

And then she took in more of the man himself. Maybe his late 20s, early 30s, thin, fit, wearing a backpack. Jeans with a rip in the thigh, the material held together with two large safety pins. Clean-shaven, mussed hair, and hands looked stained by something. But he was clear-eyed. That was key. Because of that, she didn”t run. She did back up.

”I only wondered,” he said after a moment. ”Because it”s mine.”

”Yours?” Clarissa hadn”t intended to speak, but the absurdity of him claiming a painting sprayed on a cement wall forced her words.

The man laughed. ”I mean I did it. See?”

Embarra.s.sed that she hadn”t understood at first, Clarissa looked where he pointed his flashlight, the edge of the woman”s skirt. She saw four letters: IMOP.

”Yeah,” he said, as though she”d asked a question. ”That”s how I sign them.”

”That”s your name?” she asked, doubt threaded in her words.