in my euphoria, they hadn’t bothered me.
Tam was busy interviewing people in Dari, her camera set to video. She’d already published two pieces on the safe room: a photo-essay of the attack featuring pictures I hadn’t noticed her taking with her phone, and a witty story about how it feels when the people on TV are trying to kill you. Soon, she would have a car bomb article, a slide show, and a video report ready so that when the police announced the victims she could plug in their names.
I hailed a taxi and continued to the Inter-Continental on its hill overlooking the city. For a travel piece, I interviewed the manager about its history back to 1969, when people sipped champagne on the terrace and women lay in bikinis by the pool. I ate lunch there and fished online, but found nothing about who’d died in the bombing. I settled into a chair with a view. At a distance, Kabul bore no trace of any attack, except for maybe 9/11, which had drawn the world’s attention here and transformed a modest capital into this sooty, sprawling metropolis.
I intended to write about the car bomb, but the details I’d witnessed were generic — no different from hundreds of other events like it. I took Humboldt’s Gift from my backpack and tried to read, but the morning’s events made it impossible to concentrate. I felt both as if I’d come here to experience these attacks and as if nothing I’d lived here mattered. My persistent state of alertness was at once potent and disconcerting.
That evening, when I opened my door, Tam was reading the collected works of Gertrude Stein on my bed, near the bukhari, a cylindrical metal woodstove that, once lit, immediately radiated heat. She was alone, a crimson scarf spooled on her shoulders. In the next compound, the Afghan death metal band was rehearsing. I’d written a piece about them and gone to a few of their parties, but since the success of their album, they were no longer as friendly and I’d begun to resent the noise.
I lay on the bed next to her. This was something she liked when we saw each other — not talking, just touching. As she rested her cheek on my shoulder, I had the impression that I was with a superhero’s vulnerable alter ego.
The reverberations of the blaring music ceased, and I undressed her, kissing her skin. She was conscious of her hips since it was hard to exercise in Kabul, so I slowed for them. She had dozens of tiny poppy tattoos, one for each person she’d seen dead. They clustered on her shoulder blade, circled a biceps, framed her heart, and otherwise freckled her in random spots: an ear, a knuckle, a breast. She lay with her chin back as I kissed up along her chest. I moved my fingers over her throat’s long lines and her collarbone.
“I read a passage today that made me think of you,” I told her. As I took the book from my backpack, she kept the fingers of one hand on my waist. I’d found a stash of Saul Bellow novels in an expat’s home and become obsessed with him. His awareness and self-examination, his study of others, was addictive. The Americans I knew seemed to have emerged from a civilization that had since declined.
I leafed through for the passage that reminded me of when I’d met her during a dinner at the Wall Street Journal house. She’d been drinking gin and tonic, a ceiling light shining on her sculpted clavicle as she told me that though her father was Manhattan high society, her mother, a model from Alabama, had named her Tammy after a favorite aunt. When the dotcom bubble imploded, they moved to Burlington, Vermont. Tam, then a teenager, asked if she could change her name before enrolling in her new school. Attentive for the first time in her life, her father suggested Tammany, for New York’s Tammany Hall, but she read about its corruption and would have refused if not for the original Tammany: the Native American chief who made peace with the English settlers. She was a child of the nineties, a chic hippie educated in a Manhattan Montessori, from whose vantage the earth appeared in a golden age, and the name suited her idea of what America was meant to be.
As I searched through the novel, her cell chimed. She swung her legs down and crossed the room, her hips curving deeply, the rice-paper lamp at the bedside casting her shadow.
She read the text and was suddenly haggard. I put the book aside, and she returned to lie against me, her hand with the cell on my chest.
“Tam?” I said. The way she touched me had changed. Her tears ran along my throat.
“It’s Alexandra,” she told me. “She and Justin were in that car.”
My grief was slow in coming, my emotions stunned. I could sense the mechanical intonations of the city beyond the room — the battering of a truck motor, a motorcycle’s whine — more clearly than whatever was happening inside me.
She shifted onto her back, her gaze abstracted, as if the low smoke-dimmed ceiling was the night sky and her attention moved along the constellations.
EVENTUALLY, we went to Tam’s house, where she and her friends gathered — hugging, crying, or sitting, their heads lowered like those of people fathoming an impossible equation.
A plainclothes officer, a well-groomed man in his forties, came by with an escort of two green Ford Rangers. He sat with us, holding the tea Tam had served as he explained that there had been three people in the car. The scant remains offered few clues, but the car belonged to the school where Justin taught. Justin and Alexandra were missing, as was one of his students, a young man named Idris, who was Justin’s driver. The Taliban had tweeted that the victims were killed for immoral contact with the Afghan girls they were subjecting to Western educations. Justin must have been the target, since many mullahs forbade men from teaching girls after puberty, but Alexandra had recently become involved at the school as a mentor, so her death wasn’t incidental.
After the officer left, we discussed why the Taliban would bomb a car when they could have stormed the school and killed its teachers and founder, a septuagenarian named Frank Alaric who’d been in Kabul since the American invasion. Tam phoned Frank, offered her condolences, and then mostly listened.
“I would love to do that,” she said finally, “but I’m starting a documentary on the US Special Forces. It’s a long one . . . Yeah, a month of embeds at different bases . . . I leave this week, but I’ll come see you as soon as I’m back. I’ll do a feature. I promise.”
Even when grieving, Tam existed to create stories. She hung up and said Frank sounded almost proud to have been targeted. He vowed he’d never shut down his school.
By 2 a.m., the last of our friends had gone, leaving Tam and me alone in the house she’d shared with Alexandra. We decided to get some rest, and in bed she pulled close.
When I’d moved to Kabul, I’d tried to shift from travel writing to journalism, selling pieces to a Tokyo online zine that distributed to cell subscribers. The editors liked having a correspondent in Afghanistan, and I liked the idea of being one. The title served me well, and I sent in short articles about culture and social life, even about conversations overheard in bars.
The people I met in the expat scene — journalists and aid workers who’d spent decades abroad and had personas big enough to contain their restless lives — fascinated me. At parties, we laughed about those who’d become unhinged in their quest for purpose while we quietly worried about our own. I’d been drawn to Tam because I wanted to understand where she found her courage. She was both ruthlessly ambitious and emotionally fragile, and I learned more than I expected from her. After the safe room, I realized what kept her here. I’d seen the attack I’d lived through anatomized in the online news and repeatedly played on CNN. I’d experienced the connection to something bigger that came with living in a war zone.
Tam’s bedroom felt hot and closed in, and I had the impulse to get up and shut the bukhari’s flue, but the air was cold on my damp skin. I became aware of the house’s silence, my heart banging with the desperation of a trapped animal. My thoughts no longer moved in an orderly progression. The vacuum I’d existed in since the attack was gone. The room seemed to contract, the dark thick and smothering.
What I was feeling took its time rising and then did all at once, with a pulse as long and transfixing as a seizure — a sense that something else had to happen, that none of this made sense if it all ended here. The Taliban habitually claimed responsibility for foreign casualties, but the targets of the car