by Daniel Lowe
“Less gentle seeming when he’s carrying a gun.”
She shifted in her chair, and he heard her resettle her garments. Even with the blindfold, the room seemed to have darkened with nightfall.
“We reached your wife. You underestimated her, I think. She seemed very concerned about you. But perhaps that was just a manifestation of her grief.”
“Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. Like everything else, he’d held at bay what could have been easily imaginable images of Lynne getting the phone call about the murder, or answering the knock at the door, or receiving mourners alongside the coffin, near which photographs of their daughter at various ages—finger-painting in blues and yellows at age five, and water-skiing on a lake where one summer they rented when she was twelve, and laughing, arms linked, with girlfriends at age fifteen at a birthday party—told the half truths of a half-happy life.
“She wasn’t angry with you for not flying home, or for not answering her calls.”
“You must have had quite a chat.”
“Woman to woman. She used the words lost soul, and seemed to suggest that ransoming you wouldn’t change that.”
This he knew was false. “You didn’t talk to her at all, really, did you?”
“Does it make any difference?”
The peculiarity of the conversation struck him then, where the threat of her asking about his wife and daughter seemed more present than the blindfold, the rope around his wrists, or the man outside with the machine gun.
“What is this, exactly?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I have no value to you. I’m not a journalist. I’m not rich. Yesterday you used the words mid-level executive. We’re sitting here talking about my ex-wife. My daughter. I don’t understand why anyone would kidnap me.”
“You’re an American,” she said. “You were wandering where you shouldn’t have been. We didn’t choose you, especially. You happened by, more or less. You could have been anyone. What you were doing in Lyari I can’t imagine.”
“I was— I wanted to see how other Pakistanis live.”
“Don’t do that,” she said. Her tone was suddenly cold.
“Do what?”
“Don’t look for the suffering of others as a salve to your own wounds. It’s arrogant. You see where that gets you.”
“It wasn’t a salve. I was trying to—I don’t know. Put things in perspective.”
“Well, did you?”
He didn’t answer her, and she was silent for a while. Then she said, “Marc, you might be here for a long time for the simple reason that we hope to get something of value for you. I can’t promise that I—” She stopped herself for a moment and then cleared her throat before continuing. “When I heard that your daughter had been killed. And that you didn’t go home when you heard. I admit that interested me in ways that have nothing to do with your ransom.”
“You’re interested in a murder of someone you don’t know? In this country where innocents are killed almost daily?”
“Unlike your country? No one is ever shot dead in your own country? Where your own daughter died?”
He flinched at these questions. He would be unable or unwilling to muster a political argument even if it weren’t for his circumstances.
“Perhaps she wasn’t an innocent, but I’m sorry your daughter was killed,” she said eventually. “And you’re right to think, for me, she’s as faceless as any other daughter who lost her life senselessly. But I’m more interested in the story of a man who didn’t even return home when he heard she’d been murdered.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I’ve seen many men grieve. Say what you want, but men here are not afraid to show their grief. Or rage. Or how one feeds the other.”
“You think I’m not sad or angry?”
“What I think,” she said, and he heard her bring her hands down with a light slap on the top of her thighs. “What I think,” she said again, “is that you will have many long days here. At least you should be hoping for that. Here, with me. Or with Saabir or Azhar. You’ve noticed that their company doesn’t involve much conversation. And so you will mostly only have me to talk to. And I am—compensated for talking to you, for getting information from you that might lead to more money. But I am not in charge of your fate, and I’m not at liberty to jump into an SUV and travel across the border or take a plane to London. I’m trapped here, in many ways, just as you are. More or less alone with my first language. So almost every day, we’ll talk. If you want to talk about the weather, we can do that. Or stock prices at PepsiCo, and whether a bullish year for your company might loosen the purse strings of your ransom. Or we can talk about something else.”
“Like my daughter.”
“I assume you loved her?”
He felt the question like a low-voltage shock.
“What color were her eyes? I’ve never seen your eyes. Were they the same as yours?”
It was a strangely intimate question. He had not thought of his daughter’s eyes, specifically, in years, but they had been a kind of green-gray, like neither his nor her mother’s.
“Her name was Claire,” she said. “A French name, of course. Claire Laurent. France, home of your ancestors.”
“Another imperialist nation,” he said, still resisting memory.
“I’ve been to Paris. Parts of it are beautiful. The way the sun lights those buildings on the first warm days of April. But to the extent that all that architecture arrives on the backs of the poor—well, many parts of Karachi are beautiful, too. You must have made it down to the ocean to watch the sunrise.”
“So I’m still in Karachi. On the outskirts.”
She shifted in her seat again and coughed once. She’d lowered her guard.
“You may be,” she said. “You may not be. But it’s no real comfort either way. Would you feel any closer to home?”
But he felt he’d gained some slight advantage, whatever that may have meant.
“Who were you traveling with in Paris?”
“Well, it wasn’t your daughter,” she said. “My guess is Claire Laurent never made it back to her ancestors’ homeland.”
He was stricken again at the mention of her full name.
“She wasn’t the kind of girl to go to the senior prom, was she? But an attractive young woman. Her hair cut close to her head. That tattoo on her left shoulder. A tree with no leaves and one bird. Pretty in a lonely sort of way.”
“So you must have seen—” But his voice caught. “You must have seen her eyes.”
“She drank too much,” the woman continued. “There’s a picture of her drinking straight from a bottle of whiskey. And she liked to read. One photo has her lying on a bed with Jack Kerouac. His book, I mean.”
“Stop it.”
“Your wife—Lynne. Lynne said that she’d enrolled in a community college for the start of the next semester. Had finished her GED. She was turning her life around, though I admit I’ve never known what people mean when they say that.”
“Please stop.”
“How do you turn your life around once it’s been turned inside out?”
If his hands had been free, he would have stopped up his ears.
“I do not—” He was trying not to choke on the words. “I do not want to talk about this. How do you know these things?”
“I’m not a mind reader, Marc. But I know where to look. There aren’t very many secrets out there anymore, except among the poor. And no one cares much to hear any of those.”
He heard himself breathing heavily, and recognized the same separation between his state of mind and body that he’d had since he arrived, even before he’d heard Lynne’s message on the machine. In the first weeks, walking the most urbane streets of Karachi, with men in suits, women without scarves, their hair shining in the sun alongside others whose eyes peered out of their hijabs, and the odd juxtaposition of an exotic written and spoken language among images of American companies he rec
ognized (hell, represented), he was a stranger to himself, his life up to this point a kind of caricature that sat on his left shoulder and occasionally whispered its mundane preoccupations in his ear: What was the score of last night’s game? Sweetheart, this is a fine cup of coffee. It’s springtime. Time to throw some grass seed on the bare patches of lawn.
He heard her stand up then, and he thought she would leave without saying anything else, but instead she walked over in the direction of the window.
“Saabir won’t leave me alone with you for much longer.” Her clothes rustled, and the joint at her knee quietly popped. “You know, if you stand right up against this wall, and stretch, you can see the stars.”
Despite himself, he laughed.
“You have no idea how odd that sounds from where I sit.”
“No,” she said. She was quiet for a while, apparently contemplating the sky. “When I was in Paris, I was with someone I loved. It was years ago now. We traveled quite a bit because he had money. Money from his father, but money nevertheless. I loved seeing different places in the world. I may have been more in love with them than I was with him. But like many young men who come from money, he was taken with the people who lived on what he called the fringes. He gave those people his money, and some of those organizations did things to others that you would deplore. I deplored them, too. But I was young, like your daughter. I loved what I thought was the adventure. I loved him. He was killed, ultimately. Here. His throat cut. It’s not that it’s commonplace, but it’s common enough. For men like he was.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. But she seemed to ignore him.
“I hate the word radicalized,” she said. “As if people can be programmed to do awful things against their will. Do you know what I think radicalizes most people? Other than poverty. Do you know what radicalized me?”
She waited several long moments for him to answer, but he didn’t.
“Grief,” she said.
And then she took three steps to the door, knocked on it once to alert Saabir, and quietly closed it behind her.
3
When he woke in the morning, for the first time since his capture, no one was in the room with him. He sat up on his mat. Saabir’s had been rolled up and set against the wall in what he’d learned were Saabir’s meticulous habits of neatness. Saabir swept the floor every few hours with a broom he kept outside, even when no one had passed through the door. He brought in a short ladder to keep the window free of dust, but removed it immediately afterward. The emptiness of the room struck Marc as oppressive more than either Saabir or Azhar, as if, unknowing, he’d been delivered from a dream of friends and woken into destitution, with the last word the woman had said before leaving still resonating in his ears.
Outside, in the distance, he heard two men talking. About what, he had no idea, but he thought he understood the tone of their shortening sentences—they were exchanging lines of a familiar story—and then a burst of laughter from both. They walked on. To most everyone back home, but especially to those who questioned his move to Karachi (among them his mother, seventy-five now, who had begun forwarding e-mails with the names of Muslims serving in the president’s cabinet—as a safeguard or a warning, he wasn’t certain—and the post-separation friends who narrowed their eyes and said, “Marc, Pakistan? How about China or Brazil? You trying to punish Lynne?”), he’d fluorescently blathered on about the commonality of the human experience, how we were more alike than different despite fences, despite more profound religious and cultural barriers. But listening through the wall to conversations he couldn’t understand, at those moments a recognizable language would have seemed like a clothesline on which you could hang a worn, comfortable shirt and let the breeze sweeten its scent. At what point, at what age, he wondered, had he passed from longing for the exotic to longing for what had once been familiar?
Saabir came through the door with his rifle strapped to his back, and without looking at him handed him a bowl of rough-cut fruit mixed with grain. Saabir sat in the chair across from him and watched him eat, almost unblinking. Marc swallowed the cereal with difficulty, his throat dry from sleeping on the floor.
“Can I have a cup of water, please?”
But Saabir only continued to stare at him blankly.
“Some water,” Marc said again, and motioned as if lifting a cup to his lips. Saabir stared for another moment, and then slowly shook his head, averting his eyes in disgust. He stood up and put his hand on Marc’s chest and looked at him.
“Stupid,” he said, and shook his head slightly. “No stupid.”
Nevertheless he left and came back with the water, and stood only two feet away while Marc drank. When Marc finished he set the cup in his lap.
“You,” Saabir said. He was gazing down at him with his deep eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to make a calculation. He was handsome enough to star in films. Saabir reached out and laid the tip of his index finger on Marc’s forehead, lightly, letting it rest there, and then drew the finger gently down the length of his nose and chin until it came to rest again on his Adam’s apple, where he pushed slightly harder. The pressure made Marc swallow involuntarily. “You,” he said again, then with effort, “tell me. Tell me.” And then he removed his finger.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Marc said. Oddly, he was not feeling terribly threatened. Saabir stepped away.
“No time,” he said. “You do not. No time,” and then a sentence in Urdu that he spoke very quickly, as if in relief over a language that he knew well.
After this, Saabir pulled a scarf and a rope from the pocket of his salwar kameez—Saabir’s was more formal than many Marc had seen, a long, flowing black shirt over loose white trousers—and first tied Marc’s hands, then wrapped and knotted the scarf around his eyes. Saabir didn’t leave immediately to get the woman, and Marc sensed him standing in front of him.
“Blind man,” Saabir said, and then Marc heard him turn away and go out the door.
When she came in, she didn’t speak. She seemed to be moving about the room, taking an inventory of things. When she lifted the cup from his lap, he flinched because he hadn’t recognized she was that close. He again caught the fragrance of her clothes. She handed the dishes to Saabir outside the door, who spoke to her in soft, almost pleading tones. She closed it then and pulled the chair across the floor and sat down, remaining silent.
“Saabir,” he said, “might be in love with you.”
She offered something close to a snort. “Why would you say that?”
“You can hear it in the way he speaks to you.”
“How do you know he wasn’t saying, When do we get to kill the son of a bitch?”
This silenced him for a moment, and he turned his head. “Well, if he did, he said it with affection.”
“You know,” she said, “there are over twenty million people in Karachi.”
This seemed an odd non sequitur, so he said nothing, despite the fact that she had affirmed where he was being held.
“And you can still—” But she didn’t finish her sentence.
“He touched me in a strange way.”
“He touched you?” She sounded surprised.
“Yes. He put his fingertip on my forehead, then ran it down my face and pressed it on my throat. He said there was no time.”
“I see,” she said, and then it sounded as if she were impatiently brushing crumbs from whatever she was wearing. “Saabir is a complex man. We are only in control of so much, you know. When there’s a bombing, or something like a drone strike, even in a different part of the country, some people get upset. Almost everyone sees themselves as innocents, at that point. And some want revenge. You’re nearby, and you’re not an innocent, but in some ways, for them, it would be even better if you were.”
“So others know I’m here.”
“Twenty million people, Marc. It’s hard to keep a secret. We may have to move you at some point.”
“It’s not l
ike I was getting comfortable here.”
“No.” She sat quietly for a full minute, and then said, “We spoke to your mother. She has a charming Midwestern accent.”
“My mother.” He doubted it.
“We heard a dog barking in the background.”
“Penny,” he said involuntarily.
“Pardon?”
“The dog’s name.”
“Of course. She kept saying, your mother, if you’d only come back for the funeral. If you’d only come back for the funeral, you would be safe. Now she’s worried about losing both of you. Both you and Claire.”
“I don’t believe you even spoke to her.”
“Both you and Claire,” she said again.
“Look,” he said. “If I had some information you could extort from me, why not call in Saabir and have him beat it out of me?”
“Yes. As if that’s all he’s good for,” she said. “As if that would do nothing to him.”
“There’s not a thing I can tell you, Josephine.”
His use of the name she’d told him took the edge from her voice.
“We don’t want information. You know that. We want money.”
“Yeah, money. Right.”
“Your mother said she still lives on the little lake in southern Michigan where you grew up. She lived there even after your father left. You have to truly love a place to stay there after you’ve been brokenhearted.”
“You must have a great Internet connection.”
“She said that you were a fearless little boy, at least with regard to the lake. There was a raft that floated on empty oil barrels at the place where the water got deep. When you saw your older sisters sunning themselves on it, past the point you could reach, you taught yourself to swim at age five so you could cannonball off the tip of that raft in order to splash them and get them to scream. She told me that you and Penny Senior used to wander around in the shallows of the reeds, and when you weren’t tossing a tennis ball to the dog, you were trying to attract leeches that you’d joyfully pluck from your skin then drop in salt water just to watch them squirm. She said that you used to have underwater races with your friends, and that you were so good at holding your breath that once one of your friends started crying when you didn’t come up because he thought you’d drowned.”
