hurt, but pain was a faraway sensation, small shards biting into my skin. Someone began wailing. I gasped, but smoke made me gag. The large windows had been blown out. People were fumbling about, shouting, their voices muted by the thud of my pulse and the ringing in my ears.
I crawled to the balcony, my head a primitive camera, a box with a hole punched in. There was no me, none of my fear, just details: an intact beer stein and tumblers on the floor, shattered glass so thick and white on the leaves of potted plants it resembled snow. I lifted my head above the concrete edge of the balcony.
At the end of the driveway, the gate was blasted open, barely connected to its twisted frame. A man stepped through it, and my body retracted and curled, my head jerking away from the sound at my ear: a hummingbird’s passing. Small puffs of atomized concrete spurted from holes in the ceiling of the room behind me. I heard gunshots.
EXPLOSIONS, SHRAPNEL, INDISCRIMINATE BULLETS — so many expats had died over the years that I couldn’t help but picture my own end: in a restaurant garden one evening, after telling a near-death story, or in a bar, a guesthouse, any of the places foreigners sipped wine, whiskey, and cocktails, smoked pot or snorted methylphenidate — knockoff Ritalin shipped in from Iran or Pakistan, and sold without a prescription.
The deaths of expats were rarely fully explained. They’d been caught in the gears of war, the overarching historic machinations, plots cooked up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, funded by Islamabad or Riyadh, or power struggles between Kabul and Kandahar, between Afghanistan and America — the circle jerk of politicians, generals, businessmen, warlords, opium kings, and transient diplomats. They were bystanders near someone important, or targeted directly, in strikes against the occupation’s colonial machine. Even journalists were threatened, for publishing propaganda — stories the Taliban hated and we loved — about brave Afghan souls risking everything to be Western: the athletes and musicians and actors, and, above all, the women.
Thinking back on the attack, I wondered which of us had drawn the Taliban. Of the twenty-one people in the house — Americans, Canadians, Australians, Brits, and so on — most were behind-the-scenes office types or neophyte reporters. Security contractors were generally killed opportunistically while guarding a target. Justin taught Afghan women, but in a school too obscure to inspire such an organized assault; someone would just shoot him in the street. And like Justin, Alexandra was new here, the women’s rights organization she worked for one of many.
Tam was perhaps the best known among us, but though she’d told stories about being targeted for her exposés, the police or government were usually her antagonists, not the Taliban. Besides, before we’d started dating, I’d heard expats debunk the plots against her, chalking them up to vanity, self-promotion, and a dash of paranoia from having lived here too long.
Later, security video footage sold to CNN would reveal that a man had run by the front gate and thrown a duffle bag loaded with explosives against it. After the blast, I lost track of Tam, not sure if she’d stayed where she’d fallen or left me there. On the floor, my body was a flare of adrenaline. Behind the ringing in my ears, Lana still crooned, but softly, as if the attack were her doing, and she was whispering to us, calling us somewhere.
I don’t know why I went to the balcony. In my shock, my brain had become less a thinking organ than a recording device. Bullets whirred past and thudded into the ceiling.
“This way,” a man shouted behind me. “The safe room is back here.”
I scrambled inside and across the living room. Downstairs, there was the clanging of a metal security door closing.
We all followed a burly man with a golden crew cut — definitely ex-military, certainly a security contractor — back to the lounge, a small room with two couches, a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, and a steel trunk for a coffee table.
“Anyone missing?” he called from the doorway, to no one in particular. The safe room remained open, and people were shouting, “Close the door! Close the fucking door!”
“There’s no rush,” he said. He wore a black button-down and jeans, and appeared a young forty. He must have been our host, his accent British or Australian. A piece of pulverized glass shone on his lapel like a diamond.
The gunfire rattled on, with enough lulls to suggest that people were moving about and the guard was returning fire. From the balcony came the sound of an occasional bullet ricocheting. Another explosion, in the courtyard this time, heaved the air and hit us with a wall of sound, resonating in the safe room like an ocean wave slamming into a cove.
The host went out and came back hauling a young man by the arm — a German I’d recently begun noticing at parties. He’d hidden in the bathroom, spots of urine on his pants.
“Check if anyone’s missing,” our host said. Alexandra, Justin, and Clay stood near the wall. Tam was fiddling with her iPhone, selling the story before it had finished happening.
“Everyone here?” he asked and then shouted into the house, “Last call!”
He reached into the door frame, slid out a slab of iron, heaved it shut, and locked it with a lever. The sounds in the room became muted, like those on an airplane. Faraway gunshots popped, quiet as pebbles tossed at a window, as if the attackers had come here to court us.
With the safe room closed, I realized the silence wasn’t that of an airplane at all, but of a bunker, far beneath the earth.
“Let’s have a look,” he said and took a remote from its holster on the TV. He changed channels, from ESPN to Al Jazeera to a replay of Friends to a grainy colorless image of the compound yard, the guard booth obliterated and a dead man lying where he’d taken cover near a Toyota 4Runner riddled with bullet holes. Then he switched to a feed showing the metal security door at the house’s entrance. Three bearded men in shalwar kameez and body armor were inspecting it.
A woman in the back of the room called out a question, her voice a fearful chirrup. It took me a moment to realize she’d asked whether the men outside were Taliban.
“They are now,” he told her and turned from the TV. “Come on, everyone, there’s no need to be scared.”
“I’m not,” Tam said, holding up her phone. “I’m trying to get reception. I need to tell my editors what’s going down.”
“Now this is a proper safe room,” he replied as he made his way to an iPad console. “The walls are too thick for much cell reception, but we’ve got Wi-Fi. Password is end of the world, all one word.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And what is your name?”
“Steve Hammond.”
“And you’re from?”
“South Africa.”
“And is there any reason you would be targeted?”
“I have twenty foreigners partying at my place.”
This was what I envied about Tam: she had the presence of mind to ask questions others would consider only once their survival was guaranteed. She was already trying to deduce the target, an activity I’d engage in later, recalling memories as vivid as frescoes.
The room was crowded and hot, and we repositioned ourselves, easing out of our protective huddles. In the back, two people helped a woman who had glass in her eye.
“And this safe room is secure?” Tam asked, pausing from her typing to assess me and the few other journalists among the guests.
“Secure as it gets,” Steve replied. “There’s no access to us but through two steel gates on the ground floor and this one here. I’ve already put out a call to the police. And for those of you who are feeling queasy, there’s a bathroom behind that sliding panel.”
Tam was studying him.
“And what do you do for a living?” she asked.
“I sell safe rooms, among other things.”
A few expats