*
This is what Sara learns: her son had been flown, severely wounded, to a base hospital at Bagram. “That’s Afghanistan,” David adds when the godfather says the word, even though he’s just named the country, their destination, an hour ago. His inimitable instinct to footnote everything for everyone is still intact, she thinks; his always operating on the assumption others knew less than he did undeterred by the possibility that in these last decades Sara might have grown a little bit, read some books. In this, he had not changed.
He goes on: Jason had gone missing off of a mission, a very high-level mission but one whose details had not yet been released to the press in the hope that first their son would be recovered. While the story of a missing American had been leaked, Washington claimed to know no more than this, whetting the press’s—and the people’s—appetites; another day in the life of the wars was immediately elevated to a “story.” Sara mentions the reporters at the end of her drive. She mentions that she had heard he had gone missing and that somewhere along the way he had been injured. She says she heard this not from the official channels but from another Team mother, who heard it from her son.
“He would have been leading the assault team,” David says. “His rank, his experience, the nature of the mission. It’s unclear where and when he was injured. And it’s unfathomable that they would leave someone behind so—we can’t speculate.” And then he speculates. “He was probably injured in the house.”
“What house?” asks Sara. And she immediately thinks, Kill House.
“They were clearing a house. Or several houses. They were clearing a large compound. They were looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“Could you speculate?” It’s hard not be sharp with him.
“Sara.”
“I want to know where he was. I want to picture it.”
“Actually, you don’t.”
“I do.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
She could not tell if he was lying. He had pulled his sunglasses back down.
“I do not know where they were,” he repeats, looking down at his hands, fingering his bracelets. He enunciates each word as if English were a foreign language he had newly begun studying. “I swear to you. But I know that something went wrong, and when it did, the rest of his Team was unable to recover Jason in time. They had to extract the men they could. Jason either escaped or—or it’s possible he was taken in by someone. Locally. It’s possible someone took him in and cared for him. We do not know that yet either.”
“And how did they find him?”
“The intel guys found him. Someone gave him access to a communication device, and he used it. That’s all I know.”
“A communication device?”
“A phone.”
“That sounds alarmingly imprecise.”
“At this time we know very little. But they found him, and he was alive, and they brought him to the hospital. And as soon as I knew any of this, I set about getting you to him. I worked very hard to try to get you to him before the story was released in any way to the media.”
“How—how did you know all of this?”
David stays silent.
“How did you get me here? Why am I here?”
“I knew his condition was critical.”
“His condition is critical?”
“He is going to be all right, Sara.”
David explains that he had been following the progress of the mission and its aftermath thanks to an old friend in the Teams, now at JSOC. David had been among the very first to learn that Jason was the American who was missing. He had been the one to raise holy hell to be sure Sara was notified a.s.a.p., even before they had perfect information. They sit in silence for a while. Anita Ekberg brings plates of chocolates and bread. David asks for marmalade, and a jar of marmalade appears. Sara wonders whether, if she asks for her son, they could pull him from the wood-paneled cupboard, too.
“David?”
“Yes?”
“Where have you been?”
“Pardon me,” he says. And he stands up. “Just give me a minute.” And goes to talk to the captain.
When he returns, he has an apple in his hand, and a knife. He hands it to her. He knows she can peel it, that it will give her something to do with her hands. Like an infant, he prefers his fruit without the skins. And she dutifully complies, noting that the knife is sharper than any one she has at home. He starts over again, artfully eliding her question.
“I saw him.”
“What?” she says, and looks up.
“Mind the knife,” David says. “I saw him three months ago.”
“Where?”
“Germany. His team was transitioning and I ran into him in the airport.”
Sara puts down the apple. “You ran into him?”
“Yes. And Sara, he—he doesn’t know it was me. I didn’t tell him who I was. I thought it was too much.”
“Well, that was an adult decision.”
“But I talked to him. He’s—God, he’s great, Sara.”
“I know my own son.”
“Sara, he was ready. He was ready for this.”
“How can you say that? Did he talk about himself, or did you just talk at him?”
“He talked a little bit. But I saw him with his guys. I know how to read that dynamic.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he was ready.”
“He was ready to die?”
David swills the ice in his drink. He looks out the window. And without looking back at her he says, “Yes. He was ready to die for something he believed in.”
“How would you know anything about that?” she wants to say. And then without saying anything, she can feel his disapproval shifting the space between them. How does he do it? How does he commit the crime, then make the victim feel like the criminal?
David takes his coat off. He rolls up his sleeves. He reaches across the table and takes Sara’s hands in his. And he talks about Mecca. He tells Sara why he loves this part of the world. He has become spiritual, an effect that—maddeningly—makes him more attractive as, having lacked it before, he was always a bit too hyperconcerned with the now.
He tells Sara about falling in love with the way of life he found “here,” and why he decided never to leave it. He tells her about lying in a Saudi hospital, having almost died. He says he began “for the first time in my life” to consider what “I really wanted.” He explains how this was made possible through the generosity of a few local, well-connected friends. He tells her that the lies he had to tell those years ago felt “Augustinian.”
“Pardon?” Sara says.
“You know, in the service of a higher purpose.”
“Right. ‘Make me chaste: but not yet,’ ” Sara says.
“Exactly,” he says, as if she’s just aced an oral exam he was administering.
He talks about falling in love with someone with whom he had shared the last decade, and how she left him abruptly (“a taste of my medicine”). He talks about how this experience made him think about the things he had left behind and made him miss his son.
“Miss your son,” Sara says.
“Yes!” he says, as if he’s divined the solution to a riddle, rather than stabbed at the center of her heart.
And he tells her how he got back in touch with the guys who subsequently gave him the tips that allowed him to happen to be at the airport in Germany that day, and about how the guys had told him how proud they were, already, of his son, the man his son had grown to be.
Sara is silent for a while until he says, “It’s not breaking any law.”
“Pardon me?” she says, firmly.
“It’s not breaking any law to change your life, Sara. To start again.”
But when he takes her hands and starts to talk a
bout how faith will carry them through anything, Sara pulls them back, and shakes them in the air, like he’s made her dirty. She stops listening. He keeps talking. And although she feels betrayed and in shock, something in her is still deeply comforted not to be alone in this moment. Now this man is her only family. And like all the moments in life that defy the dictates of reason, this one morphs from the shocking to the scenic in the space of an hour, like a soap opera plotline.
*
“Thus endeth the lesson?” she asks, finally, when he pauses for air. His eloquent riffs on mourning rituals and the Hajj are wasted on her; she knows him too well and can only experience his speeches as variations on a theme, his only theme, cool proselytizing. Yet even given this, she still experiences a familiar pull, a movement toward rather than away from him. She would go with him now if he asked her to.
David leans forward and lowers his voice so the godfather cannot hear him when he says, “You look exactly the same.”
And she doesn’t say anything, so he raises his voice and continues. And then he moves to sit with the godfather. She can hear them. “So. Their HC-130s flew low, so low, over Africa that night; they didn’t want to be detected.” He is making his hand into a plane, sliding it just an inch above the table, along the top of the mosaic. She sees now, sitting back, what it is: it’s a map. “That was part of the reason the mission was so high risk; they were flying into an ostensibly friendly nation, but that nation was harboring terrorists. Amin was a liar. A narcissistic, psychopathic liar—the worst kind. Alas, not a rare breed. So the Israelis made the decision not to tell Amin their plans. But they were cleverer than even that. They kept Amin on the phone throughout the planning of the mission and leading right up to its launch. They kept him on the line with one of their great—retired—generals, someone he knew, someone he trusted. They kept him under the impression that this general was negotiating for their government, without ever saying so, of course. They let him think he was in the position of power. They let him think that if things went well, he would be seen as a hero. They coddled him. They delayed him. They prevented him from imagining that they were simultaneously planning one of the most dangerous and high-risk operations in the country’s history.”
“Amin—” says the godfather.
“Amin believed he was engaging in a sophisticated back channel. He believed that these late-night conversations with the general were assurance that he had the Israelis lying down. But they had him exactly where they wanted him. Like a fish on a line.”
“And the team went in at night.”
“And it wasn’t until that general called him up—at his home—and woke him the morning after the raid that Amin knew something had happened.”
“What did he say. The general. To Amin.”
“He probably said, ‘Congratulations.’ ”
“Congratulations.”
“Yes, ‘Congratulations.’ And ‘Thank you. Thank you, General Amin. We are so grateful to you for your help.’ ”
“And Amin had no idea what he was talking about.”
“None.”
“Impressive,” says the godfather.
“Yes. The raid was carried out swiftly; they weren’t on the ground much more than an hour, I don’t think. Because once Amin had the sense something was happening, everything was over. A nation coupling power and psychosis is the thing we have most to fear.”
“I would think so,” Sara says. She has moved to stand over them.
“I know so,” says David.
As the men keep talking, Sara realizes she has not felt this much emotion since the day Jason left on his first deployment. Before that, it was the day of his decision to join the Teams. And before that, the day of his acceptance to the Academy. And before that, 9/11. Further back than that, her mind will not go.
*
Her emotional history’s high-water marks were almost exclusively losses. And the first shock of fresh loss, she now remembers, feels so much like fear. This is where the anxiety comes from. When he notices her breathing, David offers her a pill. She takes it without asking what it is. At a certain point, the godfather leaves them. He moves to the back where a screen descends from the ceiling and allows him to watch Patriot Games with the sound turned off.
“You know the weekend after his graduation from the Naval Academy there were—” Sara starts but then stops.
“There were what?” said David.
“There were, like, twenty weddings in the little chapel at Annapolis.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“And he—he asked me, ‘Mommy, do you wish I was getting married, too?’ ”
“And what did you say.”
“I said …”
“You said?”
“I said commitment is not a substitute for meaning.” She looks up at David. “I was angry.”
“Are you still angry?”
She feels the plane dip. “Is everything all right?”
“We’re descending. Sara, we’re almost there.”
“Dick Cheney delivered the commencement address. At graduation.” And she laughs awkwardly.
“Sara, we’re almost there.”
“You should have been there, David.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why weren’t you there.”
BAGRAM AIR BASE,
BAGRAM, AFGHANISTAN
Just before landing, Sara checks herself in the bathroom again. Her white streak is oddly prominent in this light. He found me, she thinks. She used to fantasize about David finding her, running into him in Adams Morgan, on the street, or in the law library at school. And in the fantasies she was always impeccable, of course. And he would hold her, and beg her forgiveness, and promise never to leave again. And in those fantasies he didn’t look half as good as he did now. That was the thing about fantasies: we think what we hate about them is that they exceed our reality, and then something reminds us that what we hate about them is that they don’t even come close.
David gives her a shawl to pull over her hair. Apparently there was a stash of those onboard, too. It’s black. As the door to the plane opens into a wall of bright heat, she sees an armored military SUV, presumably waiting to take them. There are three officers standing there, a fact that strikes her as a bit excessive. David helps her down the stairs; she’s a bit shaky from all the time in the air.
En route, David sits in the front seat and talks politics with the young lieutenant driving them. The godfather has his arm around Sara, and as they pull in front of where they’re going, he squeezes the back of her neck tightly, touching one point in particular with his index finger. He whispers in her ear, “I love him, too.” She does not know if he is talking about David or Jason. When they get to the hospital, he stays in the foyer while she and David are walked down a white hall and met by a very young doctor.
“Where is he?” says David.
“Sir,” the doctor starts.
And Sara can tell by the look on his face.
“Christ,” she says.
And the doctor says something that sounds like “an hour ago” and something else that sounds like “tried” and then some things that sound like “fight” and “brave” and “battle.” And then Sara loses consciousness. When she wakes up, she is lying on a bed, and David is holding her hand. “I want to see him,” she says.
*
He is not wearing his uniform. He is wearing clothes clearly given to him by someone else. A white linen shirt and loose white linen pants. He never wore white, as she can remember. He looks cared for. He looks as if someone has cared for him and cleaned him. His face is immaculate, except for one long—and deep—cut running from his ear down to his chin; it looks more like a threat than a battle wound, but she catches her breath when she sees it. Who did that to him. He has a full beard, which surprises her. She wants—badly—to open his eyes so that she can see them but understands this is irrational. I have so much left to tell you, she thinks. And she can feel the sadness sw
elling and shifting into rage.
David leaves the room briefly and returns with scissors (marked PROPERTY, U.S. GOVERNMENT) so he can cut the locket off of his son’s neck. Jason is wearing it attached by a piece of thin leather. Sara takes the scissors, cuts if off, and slips it into her pocket. David then cuts off a piece of Jason’s shirt and offers it to Sara.
“I don’t want that,” she says.
“You didn’t dip him in the river,” he says, folding the cloth into his hand and folding his hand into a fist. “But he is immortal now.” He kisses the top of her head. Sara asks for a moment alone with her son.
She kneels down on the floor and presses her forehead into the side of the bed. The floor is ice cold. Why didn’t they get us here faster. She holds on to her son’s forearm, the same place she’d held so many times throughout his life—the “special place” that would calm him when he woke up in the night, or when something had upset him. She had not touched him there in a long time, the inviolable line where a mother no longer comforts her son once he’s become a man having been crossed long ago.
She thinks about the physicists and their black holes. She remembers another professor from that same film, old and English and very Oxbridge, describing what it might feel like to fall into a black hole. He described how, before you lose last sight of the world, you are able to see things happening, lots of things happening, at a radically accelerated rate. These things would be flashing by your eyes so fast as to appear like “fireworks.” The fireworks of the future. And the image last seen of you by others, he explained, is the image frozen at the exact moment when you cross the event horizon, or the edge of the hole. Cross, poof. The quality of your disappearance is lucky for the others; their last image of you has grace, and there is nothing graceful as you fall deeper into the hole and are ultimately destroyed. Had he said, “obliterated to bits”? He had said “It would be a very exciting way to end one’s life.” And then he said, smiling, “It would be the way I would chose, if I had the choice.”
Eleven Days Page 20
