What Changes Everything (16 page)

       Someone should warn her, this woman who didn‟t seem to understand.

       As she moved away, he became caught in an airless moment of doubt. Here he was, faceto-face with a question that had been nibbling at him for months. How much responsibility did one person have toward another? If what you mainly had in common was being alive at the same moment and in the same physical space, and then being present enough to see a need, how far must your outstretched hand reach?

       Put another way: what did family, in the broadest sense, mean?

       This interlock of blood connections, this steady entity that traveled together over

generations, linked by a sense of common history and a mandate of loyalty—what happened when that history frayed, interpretations of the past divided, loyalties unraveled? At that moment, wasn‟t it fair to rethink the narrowness of an obligation to those who first tucked you in at night, and revise the definition? Couldn‟t Joni be his sister? Couldn‟t a woman on the street at night be his aunt?

       And, in return, shouldn‟t someone else look after his own mother?

       So here he was. His theory in practice. And his turn.

       Who was he? Someone who helped, or not?

       Then his mind swung the other direction. Only fifteen minutes more, that‟s all he needed to finish up here, to complete the only undertaking that brought him relief: this time, the face of a soldier in a purple splotch of color. His more mature way of saying: fuck your war. See? He was growing up.

       This woman wasn‟t in immediate trouble, as far as Danil could tell. Besides, he had to watch out for himself. Out here, no one had his back but him. He had to stay aware, cemented to his surroundings, and at the same time operate as if in a bubble, his energy focused on his work. It took effort to get into that space and he wasn‟t ready to move out of it yet.

       But maybe this was the way it happened: one excuse after another to divert one‟s eyes, to let the stranger walk by. To pretend need didn‟t exist.

       He took a deep breath, and shuddered in an echo of the woman‟s tremor. Then he silenced his mind and turned back to the stencil on the wall: his loud whisper in the dark, a public intimacy, a swipe of spray paint that, remarkably, soothed like a lullaby.

"
Y
ou love your country?"

       "Yes I do," Todd said. "But I also love Afghanistan."

       "Bah." Sher Agha made a scoffing sound. He‟d arrived this morning and, watching him through the window, Todd had become doubly certain he was in charge. It was in how Sher Agha held his shoulders back while talking to the other guards, and in the way they leaned in toward him. He wore a white turban. Deep dimples sunk into his cheeks. His face reminded Todd a little of Ahmad Shah Massoud‟s, only more worn, and his eyes did not contain the thoughtfulness of Massoud‟s.

       Todd sat uncomfortably in the middle of the room. His ribs were still painful. They‟d also bound his ankles right after dawn prayers for no reason discernable to him, and that made it impossible for him to stand. "Afghanistan," Sher Agha said, "is not one country. I am Pashtun. Your country makes patriots. People like you who think of themselves as American, without loyalty to the land of their grandfathers. But this does not make you open-minded. America does not produce humans. Humans would not behave as you have in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo."

       "I agree that was wrong. But it wasn‟t me."

       "Yes," Sher Agha said, nodding as if with satisfaction. "And then you, all of you, deny responsibility. This is your pattern."

       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. An
d in fact, Todd regretted his words as soon as he said them. They gave more power to this man; they legitimized the accusation. He shifted 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 Godless."

       
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 God 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 worship this God? 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. "B
ut 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 assure 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 reassure 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 passed 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 reassert 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 wi
ll 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 God."

       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 repetitive 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 fashion 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 marc
hing 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;
God, 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 overpass 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 passport 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 shirt and too few plans.