"Cowboy Tango at Kabul Restaurant"

 

 

 

Was it the skirt’s fault? I will wonder this later.

In the skirt’s defense, I just drove here from a tango lesson on the other side of Islamabad. And please forgive the skirt, but on this Sunday night of all nights I wanted to feel its fuschia cotton swirl against the curve of my calves as I danced. I wanted the tiny mirrors sewn into its hem to flash, wanted to imagine myself twirled in the arms of a stranger through the sweaty heat of a night in Buenos Aires. I wanted to feel young and glowing and sinuous in a way I never knew, at 17, that I could still feel in my thirties.

I did not want to think of bombs and refugees.

Whether it’s the skirt’s fault or not, it is a small kind of relief to step back onto the dark street holding the hot plastic bag of mutton kebabs, out from under the shivering fluorescent tubes of Kabul Restaurant.

I wear a leather bomber jacket to cover my arms and this long Indian skirt to cover my legs. But I got the feeling, under the bright lights in that restaurant where women only eat in the “family room” upstairs, that it wasn’t enough.

So I did the usual things. I sat down while I waited for the kebabs so I wouldn’t be too visible. I pressed my ear against the cell phone, as Simon kept talking on the other end in that way of his that doesn’t require a response. I looked down at the table to avoid eye contact – too easy to catch the wistful eye of a man who has seen American movies, after all, and knows that a blond woman looking his way in a restaurant could never be an accident.

This long skirt would be more than modest in other parts of the world, but it’s not quite right for Pakistan, even the diplomats-and-foreigners enclave that is Islamabad. The reason: if you look really, really closely and there’s a bright light just behind me – like maybe the one in Kabul Restaurant – you might be able to begin to imagine the outline of my legs. 

I will wonder, later, if the boy was in the restaurant too, if he sat also under that fluorescent light.

“Assalam aleikum,” I say to the owner on my way out, the cell phone still pressed hard to my ear. One eye on the cash register, he flicks a match against the doorframe to light his cigarette, waves the hand with the match in the air. 

I’m not sure if he’s waving at me or just putting out the flame, but he looks like he’s got all the time in the world – and maybe he does. The men working here are all Afghan refugees, waiting for the war to be over. 

He brings the cigarette to his mouth, pinched between thumb and forefinger. He inhales, as if in slow motion. The brown skin around his eyes crinkles against the smoke. 

Before I came here, to this place they now call “AfPak” – as if you could erase the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan just like that, as if no one where I come from would be offended if the rest of the world decided to call us USMex or CanUS – I met a journalist who’d worked in Afghanistan.

He was young, maybe 25, and he said he started smoking there to cover up the smell of the bodies. The dead ones, I mean. 

He said that even after he left Afghanistan the smell would come and go. He’d be drinking a café au lait or lying in bed with a soft dark woman he’d met dancing on the beach the night before. And it would come back into his nostrils, that smell, and he would light a cigarette.

I’m happy – in a sad sort of way – to say that I’ve never been around the smell of dead bodies. And I’ve never picked up smoking. 

But I do wonder about a vice I may have acquired instead, working with refugees in these places, trying to pick up the pieces shattered by war.

Men that are bad for me.

Brilliant, shiny, sparkling, fascinating men that are out to Save the World – and escape themselves while they’re at it.

Emergency Cowboys, we call them. I inhale them, these men, and I feel a brief sense of relief as they fill my lungs, the sweet distraction of entering into their dramatic, brilliant, painful worlds.

But if I keep breathing their air, they may do long-term damage to my lungs.

Simon is still talking as I walk to the jeep. His voice cuts in and out on the line – no surprise, when you think that I’m in Pakistan and he’s in Africa. I press the phone so hard against my ear that it aches, trying to weave the rush of words together into meaning.

“One of my staff – road to Rwanda. Yesterday. Checkpoint. Someone shot a gun – at the jeep. Completely freaked out.”

His voice is tight. I can see him, slouched in his chair at the office he should have left hours ago, eyes tired, a cowlick standing up in his brown hair. I used to love to run my fingers through that hair, soft and sweet-smelling as new green grass.

“Merde,” I say. It’s a joke, to see if he’s listening. Simon hated it when I practiced my bad French on him, even back when I was going to move to the Congo with him and needed to practice. “You speak so slowly,” he’d say. “It’s boring!”

Now he keeps talking, a landslide of words.

“They’re not doing enough for security. You know – usual stuff. Canadian girl, only 25 or 26 years old. Freaked out, wanted to go home. I told all my staff not to take the road until I can be sure it’s safe –”

I balance the bag of kebabs against my hip, squeeze the phone between shoulder and ear to open the door of the jeep. Once I’m inside, my finger hits the “lock all doors” button. A reflex, even after what happened back in Chad.

Maria. My stomach drops at the thought. Why is it so much easier to put yourself in their place when you know the person?

That’s the problem, of course, with my job. “Emergency Communication Specialist” means: 

You try to get people on the other side of the world to care about what happens, right here, when we go to war on others’ land with all our technology, all our stories of heroes, all our drones-so-no-one-on-our-side-will-be-hurt. 

You try to get people on the other side of the world to consider what happens, when we go to war, to millions of faceless children-women-people.

But Maria. With Maria, I can remember the way she flopped her arms around in circles as we ran laps around the French Base, the way she looked like a tall gawky bird trying to lift off from the gritty yellow sand. I can remember how she laughed so hard, at that last dinner party we gave together, that I could see her molars with their silvery fillings.

Maria. I can remember the next scene in her life as if I was there, even though, by a stroke of luck, I wasn’t. I wasn’t with her that day, in the truck we shared when we were both in Chad, in that truck we shared for safety. The truck that we always locked from inside.

Maria. A boy who looked 15, in military uniform. A Kalashnikov.

If I had been there, I wonder if my life would have flashed before my eyes, like they say, or if instead crazy thoughts would flip through my mind.

He really needs a belt to hold up those fatigues. Or how about a decent meal? It seems you’ve got the cash for brand-new fatigues, so how about some nice fatty mutton for this boy, a plate of gooey okra or boule that will stick to his ribs?

Or would my thoughts go instead to what another journalist once said to me?

We’ve created a whole generation of boys, all over the world, who think of a Kalashnikov as a credit card.

The facts. What I know is this: Maria fumbled to unlock the window, to give him the truck. The boy panicked. He pointed the Kalashnikov-credit-card. He shot it. Point-blank.

I make myself take a breath, remind myself where I am now. 

Good thing it’s safe in Islamabad. 

Well, except for the bombs. And they’d never bomb Kabul Restaurant. It’s mostly the Western-owned places, like the Marriott or that little Italian restaurant. Or the big markets earlier in the evening, when they’re crowded with people.

I take another breath, slow, through my nostrils. The kebab smell fills the jeep, earthy and fatty and slightly burnt from the grill. The phone is still pressed to my ear, the cartilage starting to ache. I switch ears.

“ – and you know how that is. My staff can’t travel, unsafe road. So there are hundreds of thousands of Congolese we can’t get to. Can’t help. But then – of course hundreds of Congolese women are raped by soldiers every day. So what’s one scared Canadian?” Simon finally takes a breath.

“Simon, listen. I’ve got to –”

“Hey, did you see the interview I gave last week on the rapes here? Rape as a weapon of war. Again.”

My stomach turns in the dark muttony air. It’s not just the thought of Maria, of the Canadian girl, of the Congolese, of rape again used as a weapon. It’s also talking to Simon – or rather listening to him talk, in that hurtling, head-first way of his. 

Something half sinks, half floats in the pit of my stomach. Like maybe I’m wrong and he’s right and he really is as great as he looks on the surface, as great as I told myself he was at first.

I glance at the SUV to the left of me. Inside sits a large Pakistani woman with at least six kids. The lights are on inside the car and they’re all eating their kebabs, talking, licking their fingers.

“You know, I’ve got 300 staff under me here,” Simon says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I was there when you did the interview, remember?”

“How could I forget, heartsweet?” he says, all soft so I think of his melty brown eyes, of how he would look at me when we were alone together and quiet.

Then, just that fast, his voice has the old edge.

“That was when you signed those papers at the notary saying we were just like married so you could come here with me. Remember that? As good as married.”

I remember it well. How I waited outside the notary’s office in a coat not warm enough for Europe in December. How snow fell around me and I called Simon to ask where he was. How he shouted.

Starting with: “I’ve been calling all over the country to make this happen!” 

And ending with: “I don’t know why you would want to be with me anyway! I’m only just barely taller than you, like some kind of a dwarf!”

Now he says:

“I think I’ve really changed. Everyone says I’ve really changed, that I’m a lot more mature since I started this job. That I don’t let things get to me like I used to.”

Uhoh. I can see where this is going. The next line will be something like:

“I still have those papers you signed. You should get your ass over here. Your beautiful ass.”

The first time Simon put his hand inside my jeans and held one side of my butt as we walked down the street in Morocco, the waves were loud against the break-walls of the little town of Essaouira and the sea wind was whipping through the narrow lanes like something alive. 

The men in the little shops at the fish market down by the water were tending the coals under their grills and my hair was blowing in my eyes and even though I already had that sort of sinkingfloating feeling in my stomach, I kept telling myself that Simon was so excitingbrilliantromantic, so everything I’d ever wanted.

And then there was his hand inside my jeans. Gripping my wind-chilled flesh with fingers spread wide, like tentacles but warmer.

I couldn’t believe it. Essaouira is one of those places where it is still shocking for a man and a woman to walk arm-in-arm, let alone kiss. 

He had already worked in Afghanistan by then. We both knew better.

“Stop it,” I said. I pulled my long black wool shawl down so it fell past my knees in the back. I pulled his hand out, under cover of the shawl. “Seriously. Stop it.” I looked at him hard so he would know I wasn’t kidding.

He asked me to marry him three times in two weeks. 

Four Alaskan tourists, all schoolteachers, said, “Marry him. You’ll never be bored.” A sweet Hungarian woman gripped my hand as we left her B&B: “Marry him. He’s brilliant. And he adores you!”

I said no, of course. He said:

“I won’t ask you again. You’ll have to ask me next time.”

One day, to test just how far I might go with this thing, I tried out the words on my tongue. I was folding clothes into my suitcase in the living room and he was in the shower with – I imagined – water pouring down around his ears.

“Will you marry me?” I whispered it, the smallest of whispers, into the folds of the sweater in my hands.

“YES!” he said. The shower stopped.

“How did you even hear that?” I said.

“It was a joke!” I said. 

He came out with his hair combed back and the skin on his face smooth from shaving. He put on his best shirt. He looped his arm through mine.

“We’re getting married!” he said, more than once, on the way to the little café on the corner. Smiling, with his skin a little pink from the shave, a little tender.

He was funny, you know. He was actually very funny.

I kept telling him it was a joke. He pretended not to hear.

Did he tell the waiter we were getting married? I can’t remember. 

Just my cheeks, red with half-wondering if he’d believed me at first.

In my memory Simon put his hand down the back of my pants over and over, on the streets of that town in Morocco. Like a little boy, with that cowlick in his hair, tugging a girl’s ponytail for attention. Except this was Morocco, and I was 35, and he was 34.

It might have been only twice. But the minutes we spent like that, his hand on my butt, me telling him to stop and trying to wriggle away without making it more noticeable, seemed eternal. I wore that black shawl long over my butt every day just in case.

It didn’t always work.

That second time I remember, sweet minty steam drifted through the air from a tea stall. The call to prayer crackled, raspy and melodious and mournful, from a minaret on the other side of town. The sun was just beginning to set all soft and orange over the sea.

And a man in a white prayer cap walked past us, and he said:

‘This is Morocco. You should be ashamed.”

The wind coming from the sea down the narrow lane seemed to pick up, then. It whipped against my hot face with that strange sense of something alive.

Shame. Whose shame?

Maybe it was just the sea wind, but I thought I heard voices, cold whispery ones from within the tall stone walls of the town. Voices stronger here, but ones I’ve heard before.

Your shame, they said. No secret. You know it, Simon knows it, the man in the prayer cap knows it. This is your shame. Your body, your shame.

And I knew it wasn’t true and that maybe it was just 15 years of living in places like this, places where men know all about American women from Hollywood films and the occasional tourist looking for a lover dark and exotic. 

But still those voices were there, whispery and insidious as the cold ocean wind. Voices you can hear anywhere in the world, voices other women hear as well.

“Boys will be boys –”  “– Why didn’t she stop him?” “What did she think she was doing anyway, wearing that outfit? Looking like that? Out that late at night?”

This was not the first time I’d been to a small town in Morocco. I had some whispers of my own, about that place. But I tried to remind myself that for every scene in Morocco, I could remember another in my own country.

Morocco. The oily smell of black olive soap in a hammam. In the warm steamy cave of the room, naked old ladies scrubbed each other’s backs, naked fat ladies sat with bellies sinking down to their thighs, naked girls rubbed gooey black soap onto their arms. 

I couldn’t understand what they said, and some eyes turned, frank, on me and my white skin and pale eyes and flat belly that had never carried a baby even though I was just over thirty. Elbows were dug into ribs and heads were nodded in my direction and giggles floated through the air. But I was so happy to be here after the stares of men on the street – to be here with my skin breathing in steamy air, naked and among women – that I just giggled back and so quickly they forgot me.

Across from me sat two girls, maybe 13 years old. One was moon-faced, pale. The other was dark and skinny and beautiful, to me. Her teeth flashed white in the dark room and the girls’ laughter chimed out loud and free here as it wouldn’t on the street. 

I sank back onto the stone bench. I breathed a deep sigh into the steamy air. I closed my eyes and listened to that free, free laugh.

Plop. The gentle smack of flesh on damp stone as a body lowered itself to the bench next to me. An upper arm pressed, soft and damp, against mine. I opened my eyes. 

The woman had the soft, fleshy, important look of a woman who had given birth to a generation. She said something, loud, to the room. Eyes turned to the two girls. The chiming laugh stopped, white teeth stopped flashing. Eyes traveled down a boney chest, across ribs that pressed gently at dark skin.

Laughter roared hard through the dark cave of the room.

The dark girl pulled skinny knees up to her chest, sank herself back into the shadows against the wall where her face was hidden.

The hammam. Not just a place to relax and gossip and steam and scrub, but also a place to assess the bodies of girls, bodies hidden on the street. A chance for a mother to calculate how many babies her son might make, with this girl or that. How much her son might delight in clutching hips rounder and whiter than his own on a wedding night.

This girl, with her out-loud laughter, her white teeth – a skinny body and dark skin like that could mean all kinds of things. Marriage to a shoe-cleaner. A drunk. A man many decades older than she. A man who is just plain mean.

Oregon. A high school locker room, when I was thirteen myself. The smells here were different: Chlorine and Ivory soap and Aqua-Net.

I came through the swinging door from the track field, pushed hair back from a face pink and sweaty with exertion. So good, such a relief to feel my legs pounding around the track, to feel my young animal body do what I asked it to do. To run off some of the confusion of being thirteen, of hearing the Senior boys walking behind a group of us Freshmen girls:

“So what do you think of the new crop?” This said loud.

Nudges whispers snorts of laughter. Words we couldn’t hear.

Inside the locker room, two Junior girls toweled their hair. One said, in a low hissy voice:

“Yeah, but jeez. Did you see the thighs on her?” She saw me, stopped talking.

Frozen. Were they talking about me? I’d spent all last summer jumping on a mini-trampoline, mouthing the old words from my sister as I bounced:

“YOU’RE –” on the down bounce. 

“Going –” on the up bounce. 

“TO –” on the down bounce. 

“Have – A – huge – BUTT – like – ME.”

Then I would bounce some more.

NO I’m NOT. No I’M not. NO I’m NOT.

Morocco. That first trip, again, when I had just turned 30.

I ran on the beach in the damp gray fish-smelling light of morning. I wore a long tunic down past my knees, like the ones women wore in the town. I wrapped a shawl around my shoulders and chest. It wasn’t easy, running in that get-up. Still a man made a U-turn when he saw me, started to jog behind me in his shirt and slacks.

Enough. I started up the long concrete staircase toward the cliff town above. I tried not to look back, told myself the man must be tired of his little game. One foot in front of the other. 

But my stride was so short in that tunic. It hobbled me, as I jogged up those stairs. I had to take two steps for every one.

I looked down at the beach, finally, from halfway up the stairs. The man was walking slowly along the sand. But what must it be like for a girl, one like the 13-year-old at the hammam, to realize this early on what being a woman would mean?

Hobbled.

Oregon. Thirteen again myself. Twirled strands of blue and yellow crepe paper in a darkened high school gym, a stereo wailing Cyndi Lauper.

That’s all they really wa-a-a-a-a-ant  – 

Two-inch white heels squeezed my toes. I tried to remember that I loved to dance.

Is some fu-u-u-u-u-un –

As a kid I used to love my sock feet sliding on kitchen tiles under a yellowy overhead lamp. I glided, slid, leapt to some tune carried in my head. I flew, right there in the kitchen as brown rice steamed for supper.

But this. Dancing in a circle of girls in that way that isn’t really dancing, just teetering on your heels in a circle, turning your hips to the side so they look small. Trying to look like you’re the pick of the crop. 

Next to me, my best friend Amy tossed back her hair with its assymetrical perm. I was bored, so she must have been really bored. She pulled her hair up over her head with both hands so her boobs stuck out and her hair fell in a fountain like Cyndi’s. She bumped her shoulder into mine and mouthed the words, pretending to look at me but really looking across the gym at Michael, that Senior boy she liked.

Girls just wanna have fu-un.

We looked at each other for real then and the spirit of Cyndi took us over and just like that we were really dancing, we held up our hands like microphones and leaned our heads into each other and bounced up and down and Amy stopped smiling really big in that way she never used to smile back in middle school, that way that looked fake to me. And for a minute it was just like when we were driving around together in the Chevy Nova she wasn’t supposed to drive without her mom because she only had a Learner’s Permit and we were mouthing the words to each other and whipping our heads around like crazy and then

The song ended and Amy tossed her hair toward Michael again and he looked away, like he didn’t know her.

We stopped bouncing up and down. We went back to shifting from one foot to another, just barely moving to the music like all the other girls, even though now it was Karma Chameleon and that was the best song ever.

Look look. This is me, having fun.

And so for a while I forgot how to whir and whoosh through the air, how to glide and slip and spin on the soles of my feet under a yellowy kitchen lamp. 

Do you know what it is to dance like that, to feel yourself just one more animal moving through the world, with the air against your skin and your bare feet stomping to the sound of your own heartbeat?

Morocco. Drums in the guesthouse where I was staying on that first trip, drums I could hear all the way from the beach. Drums that made my bare feet dance a surreptitious little dance through the door as I came in from under a tiny sliver of moon.

“Come! Join us.” A small back room full of drummers sitting on cushions on the floor. A jingly belt tied below my waist, tiny silver coins like stars. Should I? Well. Two other women had these belts on, and one was white but one was from some other part of North Africa so maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. 

And those drums. Those drums.

Just try to stand still with drums like that, in a desert beach town on a night in Morocco with a sliver of a moon that you can still see through the window and you only live once and so my feet started to move and the silver coin-stars started to shake at my hips and “Wow, you’re a natural” someone said and 

no, I wasn’t a natural. I just had the hips for belly-dancing. Womanly hips, the kind that looked their best in a place like this, an old-fashioned place where curves were still beautiful, where this part of me that was most like a woman was not something to run or trampoline or diet or slice off but was instead beautiful, even as it jiggled along with the silvery coins on the belt. Was even more beautiful because it jiggled, instead of staying all still and skinny and quiet and repressed.

But then – just as fast as I felt the drums enter me, felt the earthiness and oldness of this thing of being a woman and being beautiful and moving my body to a drum – I saw the face of the owner’s son, the one who had wrapped the belt around my waist when I came in from the beach. His eyes were wide and he looked up at me from his cross-legged seat on the ground, looked up at my hips. His smile was wide and wet and in the whirring blurring drumming dancing moment

I saw him lick his lips, eyes damp and shiny as if I was a glistening plate of chicken tagine – slow-cooked meat sweet with apricots and salty with preserved lemons – and the lid had just been lifted from the clay pot and the steam was rising and the whole thing was making his mouth water to bite into sweetness and softness and brine.

And just that quick, with the off-sound of a hand smacking the rim of a drum, my reflexes set in. The drums stopped calling me through the soles of my feet. My hips slowed, the silver-star-coins went from jiggle to shiver to tremble to. Stop.

I imagined a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Pretending I didn’t hear it. Wrapping myself up in a quilt. Hoping the lock worked and that he, the son of the owner, didn’t have a key.

None of this, for the first time.

So. My shame, for having hips like that and daring to dance to those drums. My shame, back in high school in Oregon, for having hips at all. My shame, on the later trip to Morocco with Simon. 

How can I explain this? It’s not that I really think it’s my shame, exactly. It’s more that those whispers are always there, the ones that urge me – that urge women – to see it as our fault. As something we could have prevented. If only.

Does it sound like I’m being too sensitive? Could be. And up to now, it’s what’s kept me safe.

Maybe that’s why I want to make this whole thing someone else’s fault right now. So I can feel safe.

I make myself remember where I am again. Islamabad. Anywhere else in the world, it wouldn’t be such a good idea to sit where the lights from Kabul Restaurant are so faint. But that’s the thing you wouldn’t expect, if you didn’t live here: apart from the bombs every so often, and the other stuff brewing under the surface that an outsider never really understands, this is such a safe city, relaxed and wide-avenued and leafy and set against the peaceful green of the Margalla Hills.

I half-notice a tall boy, a teenager, standing by the fence a few yards in front of the jeep. His back is to me and he’s moving his hands in front of him, unbuckling his belt, I think.

Oh, he’s going to pee against the fence. 

I look away to give him privacy, and also so I don’t have to see. 

“Simon, I really have to go. Just –”

“Yeah, I have to go too. It’s really late here. But think about it, heartsweet. Just think about what I’m saying.”

He looked at me, the man in the prayer cap, when he said those words. 

“This is Morocco. You should be ashamed.”

But even if the eyes peering from the walls of that Moroccan sea town might see it as my shame – does that make it someone’s fault?

So easy, to blur over all the rest, to forget the sadness and beauty of the sun going down over the sea and the knowing-but-also-not-knowing that in that place it was my shame, my responsibility. So easy to make it all about Simon, about how he knew as well as I did about the place we were in and what this would mean there. 

Not fair, of course, to make it the fault of the jeans I was wearing under that shawl. Or the fault of that man, who after all was just going to the mosque to pray, who was just saying to two young Westerners what would have been said to him.

Some fierce little part of me thinks that if I make it Simon’s fault, instead, I can erase not just the whispers from the walls but also those days of belly-sinking sadness-love-confusion between us.

I try it out, now, making it his fault. I think:

All of Simon’s interviews, now, his crusade about war waged by rape – 

He will probably be doing this for decades, putting the lives of those hundreds of thousands of Congolese before his own. By that measure, he is a better humanitarian than I.

But does he ever think that to walk down the street in Morocco with his hand on my butt, to refuse to stop when I said to, could have echoes of the same?

Ah. Fault. How satisfying, how simple, to make it his. 

Is this what wars are about? A jolt of clean pure energy. To be right yourself, and the other wrong.

Fault aside, I wonder about myself too. What sacrifices did I think I had to make for love?

Was I living in one of those Harlequin romances I used to devour as a kid, the ones where the hero kidnaps the heroine because he can’t live without her for another day, but it’s all ok because it’s proof of his undying love? 

Or was it that he put his hand on the one part of my body that I didn’t want to see myself, and so I was blind?

After the man in the prayer cap said that to us – to me – we went back to the big old riad we had all to ourselves. I wrapped my arms around my knees in the leather chair in front of the fire and sat there for a long time, watching flames eat away at wood. 

I could just go, I thought, the fire warm on my face. I could just walk away.

Again. I could walk away again, I thought. So many times I’ve walked away, it must be more me than them. 

I lifted my hands so the cold tips of my fingers were just above the flame’s fingers of yellowy-orange. Simon turned to me.

“It’s just that it’s so juicy,” he said.

Then his lips twitched, like what he was about to say next was going to be really funny. 

“I only know one person with a butt as big as – ”

I talked over him, fast, before he said the words I knew were coming, the ones that could live in me like an echo.

“ – My butt is nowhere near as big as hers!”

It wasn’t funny. Because he’d dated her before me. Because she had been my closest friend in Chad, before Maria, and she hadn’t spoken to me since Simon and I got together. Because I felt even worse now. Not only had I dated him after they’d split up, after hearing the play-by-play from her on their fights, their plans, their fights again. But now he’d made me say this about her.

Like it was her fault or something, the size of her butt. Like it was my fault. Oh God, I’d betrayed the sisterhood. 

And also because, honestly, my butt was nowhere near as big as hers. 

“Oh.” He said, opening his eyes all wide. “Did you think I was going to say something not wonderful about your beautiful ass?” 

He squeezed it then, a little too hard, digging in his fingers like he was checking a cantaloupe for ripeness. And that’s what he’s called it ever since. My beautiful ass. 

I decided way back in Morocco to consider it a compliment, but I know he says it with a little twist of something rotten.

And still. Still, I sit in this jeep, wiggling the gearshift with one hand, listening to words I’ve heard before.

“Simon, I’m going now. I need to drive home.”

“Ok. But just one more thing, heartsweet –“

I’m hungry for the hot kebabs and starting to feel cold and my left hand is on the gearshift and the right is on the key in the ignition but maybe I just don’t want to break into my own dream. He’s such a good talker, so bright and articulate and funny and in all the outward ways exactly the man I was always looking for. The man that wanted adventure and also wanted babies and that loved me loved me loved. And so a little voice says “Hm, maybe – ”  

After all, what I thought might be Love, here in Pakistan, has turned out to be Something Else. It has been a year since Simon and I split up, after all. Maybe he has changed. And maybe, maybe if we just tried something new, if we learned some new way to talk to each other – my stomach dives and floats and dives down again at the thought.

Then I hear a sound, a thunk on the passenger window. 

People are always trying to sell you things at night here – big fistfuls of white jasmine flowers or cashews in a paper cone. They’re always knocking on my window, not knowing that I have American reflexes and might jump at a knock on a car window in the dark. 

But I’m used to it now. I look over. Why, I wonder, is he holding his hands that way, both of them cupped at the window with his arms stretched out long before him?

That’s when I see the gun, its muzzle pressed against the window in the direction of my head.

At the other end of the arms is the face of a teenage boy. He nods his head toward the door. Open it. Let me in.

The greasy smell of mutton fills the car, musky and heavy as an unwashed body pressing me down with its weight.

Oh my God. I wasn’t in the truck with Maria that day. But here he is. A boy. With a gun.

I don’t know what he wants. But – mutton. The word rings crazily in my ear. Mutton. The sound of a grunt, of air pressed out of a belly, of a body thrown down on a dirt floor. Oh my God. The lights, the fluorescent lights. The skirt-opaque-cotton-modest-enough-for-anywhere-but-here. 

I drop the phone on the floor. It’s still open, still connected to Simon somewhere in the Congo, and my voice is high in my throat with the most uninteresting of last words. Oh my God. Oh my God. 

I don’t know if I’ll get through this. I may die like this, with Simon still talking away at the other end of a bad phone line. But if I do, I will remember it in my bones. 

It may be no one’s fault at all.

But keep listening to that voice, and I could end up dead.