Prologue
The girl lies crumpled and still in the road, like a thing thrown away. It cannot be that I am the one who has done this to her. Just a moment ago, she ran across the road, lively, smiling, and quick. Beside me, my wife is screaming. I cannot move, but I do, my hands heavy as I take them from the steering wheel and step into the desolate road. My legs protest, but I walk. I fall to my knees and take the girl’s hand. A small whimper. She is alive.
“Please, don’t move. You’re going to be all right.” My voice breaks, sounding alien, each word between a quiver and a sob. The girl’s limbs are tangled, her head tilted at an impossible angle. A bruise blackens her neck. Her red dress grows darker, blood blooming through the cotton, which rises in the breeze and settles back onto her body a shroud.
The endless desert, the Afghan sun, the silent sky. They watch. The road is the only thing in motion. The asphalt ripples in the heat, as if ready to open up and engulf us, making the sands of Kabul Province our tomb. I stroke her hair as her pain threads its way into me. Into places I didn’t know existed. I let out a sob, but it sounds far away.
As she tries to sit up, blood spills from her brow, streaming down her face and throat. Her bare feet are wrapped in a film of dust and sand. I try to steady myself, but my hand slips in something greasy and slick, a rainbow of engine oil and blood. The asphalt buckles again.
“Where are your people?” I say. “Tell me. I’ll find help.” I squeeze her fingers gently, afraid to break another thing.
Her lips barely move when she asks, “Am I dying?”
“No. You’re going to be all right,” I lie.
She starts to speak. “Don’t talk anymore,” I beg, fearing the words will end her, take the last energy that could keep her alive. Where are her parents? Sewn on her dress are little round mirrors, and I see a hundred fractured close-ups of my face.
She struggles again to raise her head and say something. I cradle her in my slippery hand. In the car, the music plays on. Beethoven’s chords shred the air into shards. Rebecca is crying, fumbling at the buttons and dials in vain, plucking at the cassette that won’t stop.
With shocking force, the girl grasps my arm and hisses, “I’m only ten. Maybe nine. It’s not fair.” She tries to point to something. “My doll,” she says. Her eyes close.
“No. Stay awake, please. Please try. I’ll find help.” I say these words, but I understand for the first time what it means to be helpless. I hear what will be her last breath, air drawn in sharply as she dies. I watch her face for a single sign, wondering if maybe I believe in miracles after all. I swear to a god I don’t believe in that I will be faithful if he shows his power now, just this once. I will never ask for anything else.
I wish I could say that I didn’t see her at all. That she whipped into view from nowhere, an apparition out of the desert. But it isn’t true. I saw her, but only as a blur of color trailed by a playful tangle of long, dark hair. The music stops at last. Then Rebecca is there, bending over the sunbaked road. She has something in her hand: a yellow-haired doll with a mirror-dotted dress. Sweat and tears trickle from my face, salting my lips. I gather the child in my arms and hold her close, rocking her back and forth. Her form is so small, bones hollow like a bird’s. Still, her weight nearly breaks me. I must find her people. I rise, afraid I might drop her.
Rebecca insists she will go with me, her tears flecking the girl’s feet, and I am a mere echo when I respond, No. Please, wait in the car and lock the doors. I have never been so alone, the gates in my mind clicking shut, walls closing in until everything is crushed but my unbreakable guilt. I look up. No clouds, no birds, no god. Only sun, hitting the desert like acid rain.
I walk in the middle of the road, counting my steps, turning the rhythm into a two-note lullaby. One-two. Three-four. In 108 steps I reach the steep incline in the road. I climb, knowing what I will find on the other side.
At the top of the hill, the desert stretches below me. There they are. I see hundreds, maybe thousands, of Kochi nomads in reds, greens, blues, and every tone of beige and gray. This is what infinity looks like. An undulating mass of men, women, children, animals, and tents against a wall of sky. I see rifles slung across men’s backs, the glint of steely blades at their hips. Fearless, was how my father described them. Fearless and proud.
I have few memories of my mother, Dorothy, but one stabs into me now. I used to run to greet the nomad caravans when they came into town because I wanted to play with the children. My father told me they lived off the land and fought for what was theirs, that even their youngest were brave as lions, and I longed for adventures with six-year-old nomads in the desert. My American mother would stop me, my hand in her iron grip until my fingers hurt as she told me about their thousand-year-old laws, by which even unintentional sins could be capital crimes.
I try to forget her words as I start down the sloping highway. I cross the line where asphalt gives way to sand. It takes me eighteen steps to be noticed and thirty to reach the first goatskin tents. It must have taken the girl less than four running steps from the side of the road to the middle of it. I try to banish the image of that blur. But a child’s voice whispers, Look at me, from the deepest recesses of my mind.
Kochis of every age assemble to take in the curious sight of us. For years, they will talk about the stranger who walked among them wearing city clothes and carrying a dead girl. I meet the gaze of an old man, his face a study in shadow, strands of gray escaping from his turban.
“Telaya,” the man says, pointing to the girl. Then he asks, “What happened?”
I cannot say, “I found her like this. Someone must have hit her.” There is no phantom killer; there is only me. I tell him she was running so fast that I didn’t have time to stop. He watches me in silence.
The crowd hovers, a ring of strangers coiling and uncoiling like a cobra. Staring at the corpse, people ask questions I don’t answer. Others are quiet. I want them all to disappear. The accident and the girl’s death are a private disaster between her and me, made profane by prying eyes and whispered speech.
“Go that way,” says the old man.
He points to more tents, more sheep, and more people in bold colors lit brighter by the implacable sun. As I walk, people abandon their tasks to join the silent congregation forming behind me. I pass two men brushing strips of shorn wool. Sitting cross-legged on a rug speckled with sand, girls who would be children in America but are women here sew tea leaves into pouches. As I pass, the sounds of life and work stop, and I feel as if the silence will make me deaf or blind or mute, destroy one of my senses to match the loss of some other indescribable thing the moment the girl died. A few feet away, several tents are wide open. They are brimming with artifacts, jewels, carpets, and mirror-dotted clothes. These are things the nomads will sell as they trek from village to village on their way to Kabul, Ghazni, Jalalabad. But today, I am the wanderer and the nomads are the ones who are still.