“Lovely.”
“It’s Marcus Aurelius. Seriously.”
“He doesn’t really qualify as news.”
Suddenly I’m angry.
“You know what, Diego? Fuck you. Would you feel this way if it wasn’t just Afghans who were killed? If it were one of you?”
Omar sees me and approaches. He can see I’m upset. He raises the camera and snaps a photo. I draw my breath in sharply. Later, I’ll ask him to delete the photo. I’m here to observe, not to be observed.
“Look . . .” I say.
“We lost one too, Liz. Not Academi. U.S. military.”
“Oh.”
Omar puts the camera up to take another shot of me and I give him the finger. He smiles and snaps the shot.
“Did you know him?”
“He was Seventh Group.”
“Oh.” Diego’s old unit.
“You know you can’t print anything until . . .”
“I know.”
“I was with him in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says. “We went way back.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” he says. “A good guy. Great soldier. I think he’d have thought it was okay, going out like this. In combat, you know?” He didn’t sound sure.
There’s more to be done, but Bob texts me, he wants us back at the office. Bob’s got better contacts in the military anyway, so I figure, let him work it. On the way back, I look at the windshield stickers of the cars we pass. “Fighter Car. If You Follow Me Will Be Die.” “You Are My Heart Always.” One has an insignia of the presidential palace, and former president Hamid Karzai. Another, the face of the mujahideen Ahmad Shah Massoud. And then a Toyota Camry with “I Hate Girls.”
The next day, we find out the name of the 7th Group soldier—Master Sergeant Benjamin Kwon, “Benjy” to his friends. We don’t get the names of the eight Afghan armed guards who also died, not that there’d be much point in hunting the names down. UNAMA claims zero civilian casualties for that attack, though they put the days’ total at 368—52 killed and 316 injured, with 43 of the dead and 312 of the injured civilians. Diego doesn’t pick up the phone when I call him to get more detail. The Taliban claims the police academy attack and the Camp Integrity attack, but not the first bomb. Bob takes this to mean it was an accidental early detonation, a bomb headed for somewhere else, aimed to ruin other lives.
The day after, while we’re still scrambling, there’s a fourth bomb, this one at the entrance to the airport, killing and injuring twenty-one people, though by this point the numbers have blurred to just numbers. As I finish typing up the latest death toll it occurs to me that I’d been pumping out articles on how violent Kabul has become, this city that I’ve always told my family is safe, that I’ve told them is the one place in Afghanistan they don’t need to worry about me, and that if they’re following the news at all they’re probably freaking out.
So I call my mom. And my mom is concerned for me, and worried for me, like she always is, but it’s pretty obvious she has no idea that Kabul has been exploding. She goes on about how Uncle Carey’s mind is a touch battier than it always was, and they’re thinking about moving him in with my sister so that Linda can help look after him. And when I tell her about the bombings she just says, “That’s why I don’t like you over there, Lisette. All those bombs.” And when I get angry and tell her this is different, this is new, that hundreds of people have been killed or injured in the past three days alone and that doesn’t happen here, she tells me as soothingly as she can, “I know, my love, it’s terrible.” Because to her, to my mom, a woman who follows the news, who is smart, who is interested in foreign policy, who has a fucking daughter living in Kabul, this is certainly terrible but also just what happens over there. It’s not a surprise. And I realize that no matter how jaded I’ve become, I’ll never be as jaded as the average American.
“I don’t think you know what it feels like to have a child in a war zone,” she tells me. “To be a parent is to always have . . .”
“. . . a piece of your heart,” I say. “I know, Mom.”
“A piece of your heart,” she says, “traveling around outside your body.”
And I’m ashamed, talking to my mother, though I’m not sure why, just that I feel foolish, and that I also have the absurd desire to crawl into my mother’s lap, my very petite sixty-seven-year-old mother’s lap, though at the same time I’m so angry, or maybe just feeling betrayed, and if I showed up at her house tomorrow I know I’d sit in stony silence while she made me tea and talked about how America is falling apart and it’s mostly George Soros’s fault. But then she asks me what she always asks me: “When are you coming home?” And I surprise myself with what I realize is an honest answer.
“Soon.”
5
ABEL 1999–2001
Just before he handed me the gun, Osmin spoke of revenge, but that desire was down at the bottom of a well, under the water, so that all I could see when I searched for the feeling was my own reflection. Words like Mother, and Father, they, too, were under the water, and to even try to think them made my chest constrict. Easier to forget those words, which meant nothing. I was a newborn child. Peeing myself at night, like a child. Blinking in confusion at the light every morning, like a child. Helpless, like a child. But when I held the gun, I did not feel like a child. I felt like I had achieved something. I even thought that, if I died, just holding it meant I already knew what I needed to know.
“When you are young,” Osmin laughed, seeing me changed by the gun, “you
