What Changes Everything Read online

  Sher Agha shook his head. "So you are ready to take a new wife, then? Perhaps you dream of an Afghan woman?"

  "I love my wife." Todd spoke each word distinctly. "I ask to speak with her, and to my daughter. I want to assure them that I"m all right."

  "No one offered you that."

  "But if you are humane, if you are so different from those who run Guantanamo, you will allow me a chance at least to reassure her."

  In one seamless movement, Sher Agha pulled a knife from his voluminous clothing and began to wave it. "Don"t talk to me," he began, his voice loud and ugly enough that Todd flinched, and then he slashed the knife toward Todd"s leg, cutting his pants, slicing flesh, drawing immediate blood. "Do not talk to me about being humane." He drew back his arm as if to stab Todd, and then turned at the last second and threw the knife so that it lodged in the wall. "You do not know how lucky you are that it is me you deal with," he yelled. "But do not dare to

  use this language with me, after what you have done. You understand me?"

  Against his will, Todd flashed on a stark image of a man whose head was being yanked back by the hair, his neck laid bare as if for a beheading. It passed in an instant, like a snapshot he"d glimpsed. He felt sick to his stomach, made small and hushed by this terrible new certainty: they did not see him as a person. They cared about him not at all. Eventually they would kill him.

  After a minute he managed to raise his head to meet Sher Agha"s glare directly. He could not speak, however. He knew if he tried, his voice might tremble. He felt the air thicken between them for what must have been a matter of seconds, but felt like a quarter of an hour. Finally Sher Agha spit at the floor, and that seemed to release some of the tension.

  Todd knew this captor held complete power over him in a practical sense. But he also knew he needed to pretend that wasn"t the case, to reassert power of his own, even fictive power. He cleared his throat. "I need something to bandage my leg," he said. "And there is no need for me to be bound. Your guards are skilled; I can"t escape. But this way, I also cannot use the bathroom."

  Sher Agha studied him a moment. "Bah," he said. "Don"t bother me with this. Your legs will be freed soon enough."

  He turned as if to leave. "And my wife?" Todd asked, somehow wanting, needing now, to refer to Clari.

  "Your wife," Sher Agha said. "We will talk to your wife. I hope for your sake, my friend, that she carries on her body a picture of you. That she loves you. Then perhaps she will work with us, and we will send you home."

  "We do not have much money," Todd said carefully.

  "Then we can sell you to those who care more about killing infidels than gaining money.

  Do you want that?"

  Stay silent.

  "Do you?" Sher Agha yelled so loudly that Todd recoiled again.

  "No," he said.

  "No. That"s right. So you better hope your friends and your employer and your

  government will help your poor moneyless wife." He walked to the door. "Bah. This conversation begins to bore me. I will have them bring you a Bible. It might be a good moment to find God."

  Clarissa, September 12th

  She had a rhythm going, and within that rhythm, her surroundings had vanished; she could have been anywhere: an alleyway in Venice, a hiking trail in the Swiss Alps, the Coney Island boardwalk. She walked without attention to where her feet landed, yet she noticed that one footstep sounded and felt unlike the other. This surprised her. The same set of legs, with their given shape and heft, were doing the stepping, a repetitive movement; still, each footfall seemed a unique moment, landing on a different piece of sidewalk or on the sidewalk differently. At the same time, within that diversity, a flow had developed, now that she"d been walking for a while. Her energy had begun to run in a circular fashion from the ground, up one leg, to her belly and back down the other leg, sweeping her forward rhythmically: one, two; one, two; in, out; here we go. A marching tune is what she imagined. She was marching in a tiny part of her city, and on an even tinier part of the Earth, in the middle of the night, as if nothing else of import existed. The world had shrunk, finally. No FBI, no Afghanistan, no warfare or impenetrable kidnappers speaking in a foreign tongue about an untenable topic, the terms for release of a husband. It had finally condensed to something she could manage.

  How big did one"s world need to be, anyway? There were people who spent their whole lives in one zip code, and then people who constantly fled for new adventures, horizons and faces. She and Todd had had two different reactions to life"s losses, and it had created opposing desires that they"d never really discussed: in her, the belief in putting down roots to create meaning, and in him, the hunt for meaning in distant alleys beyond the boundaries of home.

  And now the differences were magnified. Now Todd was held prisoner on soil stained by decades of bloodshed, in a part of the planet that had felt to him almost like a second home and seemed to her so unlikely as to be imaginary.

  Todd had known, at least academically, the risks he took. He"d even, on some level, embraced them. It was part of how he looked at life: nothing mundane, thank you. Everything writ large. She had realized even before they married that Todd would never have the patience for aging: little aches and pains that developed into larger vulnerabilities, flipping through women"s magazines in doctors" offices, a morning marked by its regimen of medicines. He once told her he would not want to live long and go peacefully if that meant settling at some tottering age in some vacation home on a picaresque, boring lake; God, kill me first, he"d said.

  She"d been walking for two hours in what turned out to be a large and uneven circle, and now she was about 20 minutes from home. Beneath a tall streetlight, Clarissa saw a figure painted on a cement overpass wall. She paused; she"d never noticed it before. Below her feet ran the S train, a boring dinner partner, touching down at five stops before doing it all over again, back and forth, its monotonous life so tightly contained. At this hour, the track yawned empty, trains moving sleepily, so she had museum-silence to examine the woman kneeling with her hands in her lap. Her skirt, an American flag, mushroomed around her. On her head sat a bird, painted red, claws tangled in her hair, wings spread as though about to take flight. But it was her expression that particularly caught Clarissa"s attention. She had a closed face, like a passport inspector, as if she didn"t care what you thought of her; her job was to decide what she thought of you.

  Clarissa looked again at the bird. Was this an image of her and Todd, she kneeling, Todd ready to fly? Could street art over a shuttle track be articulating their barely spoken argument?

  More likely this was all just pre-dawn, sleep-deprived nonsense, the clarifying effect of crisp night air offset by the fact that this wasn"t—or hadn"t been, until lately—her usual hours to be awake.

  She leaned over to look once more and saw four letters that made her catch her breath. Afgh.

  "You like it?"

  She startled at a sound of the male voice near at hand, straightened and turned to look into wide green eyes. Where had he come from? She recalled in an instant that she stood only four blocks from the armory, with its mandated around-the-clock police presence. It housed the city"s roughest men outside of prison, those halfway between freedom and captivity with nowhere to go and little motivation to avoid crimes they"d already practiced, though not quite yet perfected, in an alleyway in the Bronx or up a fire escape in Manhattan. Outcasts living in testosterone-filled bunk beds with mornings, she imagined, of mold-cornered showers and bruised bananas, yesterday"s shirt and too few plans.

  There was no graying in the sky, no comfort in the sense that dawn was nearly there or even that daylight had ever existed. She"d looked at her cellphone a few minutes ago so she knew it was about 4:40 a.m., which might be a detail to remember later for the police.

  And then she took in more of the man himself. Maybe his late 20s, early 30s, thin, fit, wearing a backpack. Jeans with a rip in the thigh, the material held together with two large safety pins.
Clean-shaven, mussed hair, and hands looked stained by something. But he was clear-eyed. That was key. Because of that, she didn"t run. She did back up.

  "I only wondered," he said after a moment. "Because it"s mine."

  "Yours?" Clarissa hadn"t intended to speak, but the absurdity of him claiming a painting sprayed on a cement wall forced her words.

  The man laughed. "I mean I did it. See?"

  Embarrassed that she hadn"t understood at first, Clarissa looked where he pointed his flashlight, the edge of the woman"s skirt. She saw four letters: IMOP.

  "Yeah," he said, as though she"d asked a question. "That"s how I sign them."

  "That"s your name?" she asked, doubt threaded in her words.

  "No. My tag."

  "I-mop," she said it aloud, thinking it sounded like a cleaning product. "What does it mean?"

  He shrugged. "Just my tag."

  She pointed to the letters Afgh. "And what does that mean?"

  "Afghanistan," he said.

  Even though that had been her first thought, she was shocked to have it confirmed, and in such a matter-of-fact way. And then she wondered: was he telling the truth? People lied more in the dark, as though the shadows gave them permission.

  "Why does it say Afghanistan?" she asked.

  He paused, taking in her face. "Just does."

  "I…I have a connection to the country, and so I wondered…"

  "Yeah?" he said, his eyes still wary. "It"s a fucked up place."

  A block away, a car alarm sounded. She started, the way she did in the morning when her alarm clock went off. Only then did she realize this might be about when she would be waking

  up, in her regular, former life. Only then did she begin to feel tired.

  "I"m Clarissa," she said.

  "Danil," he answered after a moment.

  "You live around here?"

  "Around." He took a step away from her, preparing to go.

  "My husband." She spoke quickly. "He works with refugees. He was kidnapped. In Afghanistan, a few days ago. He"s being held there now. We aren"t supposed to talk about it, so my friends don"t even know. But that"s why I—why I was asking. I just wondered..."

  She felt him examining her again, maybe wondering whether she could be believed. "That"s rough," he said after a minute. He looked off into a dark horizon, and then back at her. "My brother was in Afghanistan," he said. "First Battalion, 32 Infantry, 10 Mountain Division."

  She stared at him, willing him to go on. "He"s back home now?" she asked after a moment.

  He shook his head. "Didn"t make it."

  "Oh." She released a breath of air. "I"m sorry."

  "Yeah." He gestured with his head to the painting on the wall. "This is for him. Or, I guess it"s for me, but because of him."

  Unlike the face of the woman he"d painted, his was open. Clarissa hesitated, then spoke without censoring herself. "You know, my stepdaughter keeps making me food—way too much of it. I live a few blocks away. You want something to eat? An early breakfast? You"d be doing me a favor if…"

  He held up one hand, shaking his head, but she kept talking.

  "I mean it"s not exactly breakfast food," she said. "But then, it"s not quite breakfast time when you"ve been up all night. And she"s a professional chef so I know it"s good and… and it"s kind of driving me crazy. I can"t throw it out, but I absolutely can"t eat it all."

  Still slightly shaking his head, he stared at her, then rubbed the back of his neck. It was an old man"s gesture; it surprised her. What was she doing inviting him to her home? What was she thinking, who had she become?

  "I"m sorry, that sounded weird," she said. "It is weird. It"s a weird time for me. Never mind."

  "Sure," he said.

  "What?"

  He gave an odd half-smile. "Why not? I haven"t had anything since a pizza slice for yesterday"s lunch, and the paint fumes left me hungry."

  Now that he"d said yes, she suddenly felt awkward. "So, well, okay…"

  "Are you hungry?" he asked.

  She paused. "Yes, actually. I am."

  "So let"s go have the un-breakfast," he said, as if it had been his proposal all along. "Let"s go eat your worry food."

  "You mean comfort food?"

  "The food nice people make to try to take away your fears. Only that never happens if you eat it alone."

  She smiled. "Right. So okay, then. Follow me." And despite the hours she"d spent awake, she felt a rush of energy that surprised her, and a flash of optimism—brief but welcome—that she hadn"t felt since the day Todd was taken.

  Mandy, September 12th

  "So how"s Jimmy?"

  In the computer room in the guesthouse, Mandy started. She"d hung up on Skype with her son five minutes earlier and hadn"t moved since then, thinking over the conversation—or mostly, the silences, the words unspoken.

  "Is it just me," she asked, "or are you exceptionally talented in sneaking up on someone?"

  Hammon laughed and handed her a glass. "It"s part of the job description, isn"t it? Here"s some fresh lemonade. Rumi made it. It"s delicious." He sat down on a worn couch.

  "Thanks," she said. "And thanks for not telling Jimmy about the kidnapping."

  Hammon shrugged. "It"s what we do."

  "I get that. And so does he, of course, which is why he has the sense there"s something I"m not telling him." She laughed. "I always had that sense too, when he was here."

  "And he probably worries even more than you did, since he"s seen how it can go down here," Hammon said.

  Mandy sipped the lemonade. She"d been thinking a lot about Jimmy. He was always at the edges of her mind at home, too, but it felt different here. She had time, she had distance, and she was often alone. In that space, she"d made a disturbing discovery.

  She was an emergency room nurse, and besides that a mother, and nurturing should come naturally where Jimmy was involved, but the emotion she"d been fighting and barely burying had been anger, pure and strong. In fact, she"d been repressing anger toward Jimmy for months now—for getting hurt in the war, but not exactly that. More precisely, for not getting better, for not finding a way to make things work again so that they could go on—maybe not like before, exactly, but go on. He was the one who"d lost his legs, the left below the knee and the right at the thigh. And still she was fuming: that he"d made the choice to go to war; that he"d gotten badly hurt, and now the rest of everything that followed would be changed. Nothing would ever feel to her wholly safe again. She could never return to the softness of that time when Jimmy had been a baby in her arms and her life had felt full of possibilities. Or even to the promise of the time before the war, when she"d imagined him a father playing football with his kids on the lawn while she and a daughter-in-law she loved put the finishing touches on a big dinner. She was mad, too, that all around her, the message she heard was that she should just feel grateful that Jimmy was alive.

  And so even as she"d been taking care of him—feeding him, helping him bathe, giving him pep talks, meeting with his doctors—surely, on some level, he"d felt the underlying foundation of her suffocated fury. He"d probably recognized it before she did. Worse, it had to contribute to his own anger and bitterness.

  So now, on top of newly recognized anger, she felt deeply ashamed.

  "It is good lemonade," Mandy said, breaking the silence that Hammon was so good at keeping.

  "That Rumi, he"s something," Hammon said. "How"s the work been going?" he asked after a moment.

  Mandy nodded. "Good. Fine." Then she shrugged. "Actually, I don"t know. They"re happy to have the supplies I bring, and they listen in a friendly way while I explain ways to improve patient care. But I don"t have the sense that they"ll follow through at all. I leave illustrated instructions, and I think they throw the sheets away the minute I"m out the door."

  Hammon laughed. "Well, there"s probably some of that, but you may be having a bigger impact than you realize."

  "I"m not sure. Yesterday at the center for addicts, the director pul
led me aside and told me not to be so public with the fact that I"m American."

  Hammon"s face grew more serious. "What was her tone?"

  "I don"t know. One of her assistants translated."

  "What did you say?"

  "I asked why. The assistant didn"t even repeat that question to the director. She told me the director"s husband was visiting family up north when he and his fatherin-law were killed during an American night raid. Collateral damage, she called it. Her English was good enough for that phrase."

  Hammon sighed.

  "I told the director I was sorry, and I hugged her. She hugged me back and the assistant hugged me too, but then she repeated again—don"t tell anyone I"m American. Better to say I"m German."