The Afghan Special Forces had staked positions in the yard, and Steve switched cameras so that one moment we were watching the soldiers shooting into a dark window and the next we saw the insurgent crouched just inside as bullets blasted grooves in its frame.
“Shall we place bets on which one lasts the longest?” Steve asked and turned back to the room. “Aw, come on. Is this how you want to live — huddled up like rats?”
“We have to name them first,” Tam said.
The insurgent threw a grenade into the yard, and the soldiers leapt for cover.
“Jesus!” someone cried out in a breathy, terrified voice.
“Okay,” Steve told us. “That one’s clearly Jesus. They could be twins except for the body armor. What about this guy?” He switched channels.
“Moses,” Tam replied. This was typical Kabul humor, at once proof and negation of the human spirit.
“And number three?” Steve asked.
“I know, I know,” the German called out, “how about —”
“No!” we interrupted, drowning out his voice.
“But there are no Afghans here,” he said.
“Have some respect, you fuckin’ infidel,” Steve told him.
“How about Elijah?” Tam suggested.
Everyone agreed, habituated enough to the circumstances to put down twenty dollars on the insurgent of choice. I picked Elijah because he held back and let the other two take risks. As Jesus was rigging up explosives on the steel door at the bottom of the stairs, he caught a bullet in the throat and detonated them. This time we felt it: the lights flickered and there was one less camera, the others capturing only drifting smoke. Although Jesus had been a favorite, no one was thinking about the heap of twenties.
Lana Del Rey hadn’t stopped singing, now crooning “National Anthem.” Steve went to the iPad mounted on the wall, brought up her image — that classic retro mug shot — and changed the song to “Born to Die.”
For an hour, the last two Taliban held out as the Special Forces worked their way inside. The German, an aspiring videographer, mourned not having his gear and recorded with his phone, asking questions like, “Do you regret your decision to take a job here?” and “What are you feeling right now?” He was repeatedly told to fuck off until Steve — who paused from switching between feeds that revealed his home being systematically disfigured — simply said, “Come on, mate, quit being a cunt.”
The terrified people were eating up the bandwidth, tweeting and IMing, making work hard for the journalists who were seeing their Afghanistan payout. A young American named Holly, who was often at social outings and worked at a shelter that rehabilitated Afghan street dogs, bawled on Skype with her mother, saying she loved her, though the line kept cutting out.
“Tell her the connection is overloaded,” Tam said. “Each time the call drops, she probably thinks you’ve been killed.”
“Tell your mommy the bad guys will be dead soon enough,” Steve reassured her. “Have a drink before it’s all gone and, hell, sit back and enjoy the show. You’ll never see another one like it.”
Though the attackers were just outside the safe room, the gunfire sounded more distant than I’d expected.
Steve’s coolness gradually waned. Maybe the show had gone on longer than he’d planned. To calm his guests, he anatomized the door: a ten-inch-thick slab, essentially an iron box filled with concrete and sliding on ball bearings in an iron frame built into the wall.
He unlocked the metal trunk that served as a coffee table. It held four handguns and three short rifles. He gave a rifle to Clay and to another contractor, and asked who else knew how to shoot. Tam said she used to go to firing ranges with an ex in the States. The woman who’d had glass in her eye told us that as a teenager she came in second in the state fair for skeet shooting.
“These aren’t skeet,” Steve told her, “and adrenaline is a different game.” He handed her a pistol, the people near her inching away. Tam and two men also took guns.
We arranged the couches into a barrier. On the screen, Elijah was setting up explosives on our door. We crouched shoulder to shoulder behind those of us holding weapons. Everyone had gone pale. Someone began throwing up in the bathroom. Justin was praying, and Alexandra was looking at Clay as if she’d put her bet on him.
Two members of the Special Forces crept in from the living room and got Elijah under crossfire. There was a resonant boom. The floor shook, reverberations clapping in the room. Our ears rang and a little smoke rose from under the door.
“I told you we were safe,” Steve said.
The people who had money on Moses tried to divvy up the pot, but their hands shook so badly they kept dropping the bills until they finally gave up and hugged each other.
“Imagine,” Tam said, “they could have cleaned out twenty foreigners in one go.”
My mind refused to consider what had just happened. I was too busy forming memories that instantly seemed like artifacts. But four days later, after talking to Frank, I studied those memories: the young German attempting his blasphemous joke and then insisting there were no Afghans, and Tam making her comment about how many foreigners would have died. Idris, who was supposed to have driven Justin to the party, definitely wasn’t there.
When the last Taliban fell beneath a volley of bullets, we cheered.
The whiskey was gone and Steve told someone to crack the gin. We poured it in cups and knocked it back.
“Finish the gin! Finish the gin!” I’m not sure who started the chant, but even Holly drank. She was crying uncontrollably. On the screen, the security forces were scanning the building, carefully moving through. We clapped as Holly shook and wept and tipped the cup back, gin dribbling from her chin and spotting her shirt. Weeks later, I would hear her at L’Atmos, where she stood at the bar and described the firefight as the greatest thrill of her life.
I think it dawned on all of us then, as we turned from Holly to the door, that we would have to open it and walk out and see the granular images from the screen become flesh, the remains of men who’d died or blown themselves to pieces.
Steve was smiling, his hand on the lock.
EACH TIME I left my apartment after the attack, I felt the city in a way I hadn’t before — its hunger, that primordial urge become urban panic. People charged, tromped, scurried with postures of determination, drudgery, or rage. Men full as ticks passed others so thin muscles twined bones, their loose, ragged clothes not masking the inequity, their profiles like glyphs. They were on their own trajectories and hardly noticed me. I saw that now.
Where the asphalt ended, I followed the dirt road up through the square, earth-colored houses crowding TV Hill — one of the ridges above Kabul, its slope a suburban ziggurat and its summit loaded with the eponymous antennae and red-and-white striped communications towers.
I was here without another expat or Afghan — friend, interpreter, or fixer — and I didn’t squint down at Taimani and find my house, measuring the time it would take to backtrack to that speck of walled safety.
I sat on a stone with a splotch of white paint on its edge, a marker from demining years back. Wind whistled through the transmission towers, and the sun bore down out of a winter blue sky. Azan echoed over