her knees apart. The lure of invisibility. The power of deceit. These pleasures were ungodly and she endeavored to suppress them but they racked her with excitement all the same. She was no one in that instant, an animal with neither name nor history, which also meant that she was not a child. Her childhood meant less to her now than the wads of paper littering the floor.
A man came to the door as she sat there entranced and tried to force it open with his shoulder. He was wearing espadrilles and chinos and he abused the door in Arabic before he stepped away. He seemed to think that no one was inside.
She still wore a tank top that Decker had lent her and when the man had gone she looked down at her chest. Though the air in the terminal was perfectly conditioned she was sweating and her nipples stood out plainly through the cloth. The man was two stalls down from her now and she heard him muttering and fumbling with his belt. She pulled the tank top over her head and hung it from a hook and held her breasts in her cupped hands, as she sometimes did to lull herself to sleep. Her hands could still cover them, but only just. She felt secure again and let her mind wander for a time, listening to all the pissing men. Then she opened her toiletries case and brought out an Ace bandage that had once been her mother’s and wound it carefully around her ribs and chest.
Karachi proved a greater disappointment than the airport in Dubai. It reminded her of Oakland and Sacramento and the handful of other cities she knew, but it was hotter and more desperate and smelled of things she couldn’t put a name to. The housing complexes and vacant lots and even the construction sites seemed primeval to her, the ground cracked and septic, the packed bazaars and thoroughfares a scrim over some underlying ruin. It disgusted and dismayed her and the shame this triggered brought her close to panic. The fault was hers, she knew, and not the city’s. She was seeing it as her mother would have seen it.
She hailed an unmarked taxicab and rode with Decker to the terminal for buses headed north and bought two tickets. She’d expected him to protest, to insist that they spend that first night in the city, but he followed her like someone half asleep. He made no mention of his cousins in Karachi.
A bus left for Peshawar that same afternoon and they waited in the diesel-smelling courtyard of HINDUKUSH HI-WAYS, dipping flatbread into bowls of tepid dhal. The buses that passed as they sat on their duffels were garishly colored and slathered in images painted by hand: diamonds and horses and crude constellations, pomegranates and tigers, bluebirds and mountains and all-seeing eyes. She marveled at the profusion of graven renderings in a nation of Muslims but reminded herself how far from the true faith the country had fallen. She pictured the buses’ interiors as richly upholstered and smoky with incense, smelling of anise and cinnamon, like the restaurants she’d gone to on Sunday evenings with her father and mother, long ago and on the far side of the world.
Eighteen buses passed through the yard, each more ornate than the last, before the Bannu Line to Peshawar arrived. The passengers ignored them but the man who filled their teacups watched them closely. He watched her when she stood to use the toilet and he watched as she returned. When they settled their bill he gave an elaborate bow, leering frankly at Aden, and rested his right hand on Decker’s shoulder. He said something in Urdu as he took the cups away.
—What did he say to you?
—Didn’t catch it, Decker muttered, stepping past her.
—What was it?
—Stop looking at him damn it. Let’s just go.
The bus to Peshawar was empty when they climbed aboard, as though some disaster had struck the north without their knowledge. They sat down and waited with their bags on their knees, neither of them speaking a word, and her stomach began to cramp from the fumes and the dhal. Men boarded singly or in pairs, many of them holding hands, and seemed to fall asleep as soon as they sat down. They had a forsaken look to them, chagrined and defeated, though it was possible that they were only tired. Many of them were wearing freshly store-bought shirts with creases at the collars and the sleeves. It was the day before Juma’a and she imagined them bound for villages along the northwest border, in the tribal regions, to pass the Day of Assembly with their families before returning by that same reeking bus to whatever form of work it was that had left them so expressionless and still.
As they drove northward out of the city, past tarp-covered bazaars and ornate mosques and slime-clogged aqueducts, she began by degrees to recover. The sun rode low over the shining alluvial fan of the Indus and a line of cranes flew gracefully across its red disk as if the sprawl the bus moved through were no more than a trick of the eye. Decker’s head came to rest on her shoulder. His touch was innocent in sleep and drew her back into her body and she felt safe inside her clothes again and comfortable and calm. A sentence she’d read in some chatroom came back to her as her own head grew heavy: You can either touch each other’s skin or you can touch the face of God. She slid nearer to Decker and felt his coarse disheveled hair against her neck. He was beautiful and she wanted him against her. For the briefest of instants she wanted not to disappear. Then she thought of the waiter in the exhaust-stained courtyard and the look on his face as he’d whispered in Urdu. She thought of the way his tongue had come to rest against his teeth.
She came awake in the night to Decker’s breath against her neck. —Did you say something?
—Tell me, said Decker.
—What? I just woke up. I don’t—
—Tell me why you’re here.
—I don’t know what you’re talking about.
—On this bus. Heading north. Here with me.
She willed herself to think clearly. —I’m sticking to the plan we made, that’s all. The one we made in Santa Rosa.
—The hell you are.
She kept quiet and watched him. He seemed to be smiling.
—When you got your hair buzzed and started wearing those clothes I thought it was for both of us. For you to follow me. For us to keep together. He shook his head. —I was wrong about that. Or else you were lying.
—I wasn’t lying. Not to you. I’ve never lied to you.
He nodded to himself, considering her answer. —You like girls.
—Come on, Decker. That’s not even a question.
—What’s the answer?
She looked past him out the window. His round head hung reflected there with her own head behind. In silhouette she saw no difference between them.
—I don’t know.
They were in high country now with the least curve of moon. She thought of her conversion and the vows that she had made. As always the fact of it calmed her. A fire smoldered in the courtyard of a newly finished mosque and she saw herself arriving for the first prayer of the morning, the dawn light behind her, all heads turning as she stepped across the threshold. She imagined their indignation, then their wonder, then the voice of the mullah calling their attention back to prayer. She saw herself taking her place among them, gracious in her modesty, sovereign in her devotion. She turned the image back and forth in her mind, letting each of its brilliant facets catch the light. Then she imagined herself in her little room in Santa Rosa, staring up at the ceiling, listening to her mother’s labored breathing through the wall.
—I’m going to ask you a favor, she said. —No more questions.
—You don’t have many favors left to ask.
—You can go home any time you want. I told you that.
He shook his head. —Bullshit. You don’t speak Urdu or Pashto, maybe two or three words, and that fancy Arabic of yours won’t cut it anywhere outside a mosque. If I go home you’re done.
—You said yourself that I’d have made it—
—I don’t see you fooling this country for six whole weeks, Sawyer. I’ll tell you that much for free. You’d better have a story ready for them when they catch you in your panties and your bra.
She hesitated.