“Some of us have more favorable numbers than others. You’re up against men who are smarter than you, with much more money. This will become farmland.”
“It’s already farmland,” Taj said.
Daniel wished this pointless tour would end. He had essentially been brought at gunpoint and couldn’t decide if he was supposed to behave as if the gun was there or not. Part of him thought the khan meant to end his life, but he was strangely unafraid. It was as if the accident had snuffed out some capacity for perspective or feeling. Some events were so immense, they could drain someone of a lifetime of emotions.
“Make this disappear.” Taj spoke as if reiterating something they had already agreed upon. The gun was still in his hand. “Leave my field.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Did I not take you away from the elders when you begged for someone to save your life?”
“I didn’t beg. And it’s not the same thing.”
“Indeed it isn’t. Some would say the favor I’m asking for is small in comparison.”
Daniel began to wonder if his faith in the region’s safety was misplaced. He thought again about the war on drugs in other countries. USADE had lasted just four weeks in Burma, its director gunned down on an open road. The violence had to start at some point, before which people said, Those things don’t happen here.
Daniel turned and walked toward the car.
“Not yet,” the khan said. “Give me an answer.”
Daniel kept walking. “I’m only one man.”
“You’re a Sajadi, and the director of your agency. They’ll do what you say.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s my government, not me, that’s taking your field.”
“Men like us don’t have governments.”
“Men like us?”
“Whenever a man has a government, then the government has the man. If you are wise, which of course you are, you will aim your loyalties elsewhere.” Taj pointed to the shapes at the eastern edge of the field. “Look closely,” he said. “Do you see?”
Daniel’s eyes fell on the lumpy bundles beside the machines. They looked like large, grotesque weeds sprung from the earth without order or design. He walked toward them. One of them stirred. They were not weeds; they were human beings. Dozens, maybe more, with threadbare clothes and provisions bundled into sacks. A pageantry of want.
“Without an opium harvest, they will be paid nothing,” Taj said. “Don’t you care?”
“Your fake concern isn’t any more convincing now than it was—”
“When you killed the girl?”
Daniel didn’t reply. He looked at the poppy pickers. Seth and Iggy, USADE’s best engineers, came to Yassaman two days a week, sometimes more, and had told him the channels were coming along, the crews working diligently. But there were other crews, too, the poppy workers, mainly villagers and Kochis, whom Daniel saw each time he came to observe. They worked from sunrise to sunset, serving the khans, whom no one ever saw. This year, the poppy workers kept to one edge of the field to avoid the machines and crews on the opposite side.
“Leave our land alone,” Taj said. “It isn’t yours. It belongs to the poppies and those who pick them.”
“The people who want you out have more resources than you could dream of.”
“You have no idea what I dream of. And I have a resource they cannot match.”
“What would that be?”
“Hunger,” Taj said. “It is the greatest resource of all, because it is infinite.”
“It won’t exist anymore once we’re done here.”
“Americans watch too many movies. You think people in poor places dream of fields of rice and wheat. But the poorest people don’t dream about the means to an end. They dream about the end itself: enough money to live and something extra to give to their children. Your crops will never outearn the poppies.”
On the gentle wind, the flowers whispered in agreement. Or maybe they were mocking the nearby land, visible from Yassaman. The Gulzar field was a naked, barren lot where a handful of poppies struggled to grow. Fever Valley sometimes reminded Daniel of New York, where Tiffany neighborhoods were divided from ghettos by mere blocks.
They stood at the threshold of the shack, its metal door ajar. The smell of old tea, sweat, and tobacco drifted into the night, but there was another smell, too, pungent and foul. Daniel heard a scraping sound. He turned toward the road, which he could barely see. “I’m going back to the car.”
“No, you’re not.” The Manticore touched Daniel’s shoulder and added matter-of-factly, “I’m not ready to leave. And you’re my ride.”
Daniel pulled away. He could not orient himself in the vast darkness. He tried to gauge where the car was, but they hadn’t walked in a straight line.
“Do you know why this business will always exist?” Taj asked. “Even if the people in these fields stopped being hungry, I could count on a different hunger. The wealthy world’s famine is its craving for drugs. There will never be enough.” He vanished into the shack. “Come in. I want to show you something.”
Daniel hesitated before following. Inside, the stench was immeasurably worse. Taj lit a candle on a paper plate heavy with hardened wax. Vomit was pooled on the floor beside a metal frame bed Daniel recognized. What he did not recognize was the person in the bed, covered with a blanket. Rodents had chewed holes in the thin fabric. They were lapping at the vomit now.
“This man is one of my new workers for the season. He has stolen poppy pods from me. My men said he was so heavily drugged when they caught him, he could barely speak.”
“He overdosed?”
“He couldn’t even wait a few weeks for the resin to perfect itself. He just tore at the pods.”
Daniel was unable to look away.
“I said they should leave him here,” Taj continued. “I had other matters to tend to. Your friends with their machines didn’t seem to notice him collapse. Perhaps noticing is not part of their job.”
The rats scattered as Daniel sank to his knees and removed the blanket, discovering that beneath was not a man, but a boy in the throes of adolescence, a thin stubble and a sprinkling of blemishes on his face. He was chained by his wrist to the bed. He tried to say something, but managed only a moan.
“He’s alive,” Daniel said.
“They usually just fall into a long sleep and never wake up. That must be a pleasant way to die. But this way isn’t bad, either.”