“She’s strong like a man?”
“No. Eyes. Eyes of man. See?” Saabir belatedly recognized the irony of the word, smiled, and then pointed at Marc very deliberately, and with the same finger slid it across his throat.
“Josephine,” Saabir approximated, and smiled again, while Marc involuntarily brought his fingers to his Adam’s apple.
“Eat,” Saabir said, and rose to go to the door to fetch food from wherever it was prepared for him, probably in one of the low houses near this one, but someone knocked before he got there, and Saabir slipped outside where he overheard what sounded like an urgent conversation between Saabir and who he guessed was Azhar.
Then Saabir burst through the door and walked over to where Marc was still sitting on the mat, and reached down and grabbed him under each armpit and pulled him to his feet.
“Hey-hey,” Marc said. “Just tell me what you want me to do.” But Saabir was already standing behind him, slipping the blindfold over his eyes and yanking it hard, and tying the rope around his wrists so there would be no risk of the knots loosening. Saabir then pushed him toward the door, and outside; mingling with the bright, damp smell of the morning was the exhaust of a car, throttling low in what he knew was the narrow road that ran a few feet away from the house, and Saabir was pushing down on his head like a television cop—despite a rising sense of fear Marc laughed at the thought—and then he was inside and Saabir slammed hard into the driver’s seat and the tires slipped for a half second before they went speeding away.
Marc clenched his teeth as they drove. He reasoned they were not taking him away to execute him, since clearly they had been taken by surprise. Still, this kind of flight was cold comfort, and he could feel his pulse in his bound hands. He guessed someone had learned where he was being held hostage, whether that was a Pakistani agency contacted by the American embassy, or some other terrorist organization, or, as the woman suggested, an angry family who had lost someone to a drone missile. They were banging over rough patches of road, and he hadn’t eaten anything, and he’d read somewhere that you couldn’t get carsick unless your eyes were open, but within fifteen minutes his stomach was turning over, and he groaned, and lay across the seat to try to steady the impact of the rocking car, which was almost impossible with his hands tied behind him. Saabir said something to him in Urdu, likely that it was better for him to lie down, anyway, in terms of them being observed, but if Saabir had been ordering him to sit up he wouldn’t have found the strength.
He wished he could fall back to sleep, which had been the elixir for this kind of nausea when he was a boy, facilitated by the pale yellow tablet of Dramamine that was actually intended to knock him out, he learned, when Claire as a small girl suffered from the same kind of carsickness, and, on particularly long drives, Lynne would sometimes have her take half a pill just to curb her restlessness. When she was a baby, she’d hated the car seat, hated it, had howled in protest to the point of exhaustion during long drives, and once when he’d yelled at Lynne, who had given up, “Can’t you shut that kid the fuck up?” she’d said, “How would you like to be strapped into a big blue box on wheels with no way to understand why you’re not allowed to move, or play, or sit in your mother’s lap? She’s pissed off because it doesn’t make any sense,” which had never occurred to him before, but now, lying on his side with the smell of exhaust seeping through the floorboards, he fully understood.
*
His father slammed the brakes hard while pulling to the side of the road, threw open the van door, and led him out into the woods. He stood next to Marc, his arms crossed, and hissed, “Well, goddamn it, throw up. C’mon, throw up, for Christ’s sake. We’re two miles away from camp, and you couldn’t wait. So throw up.”
Under the blindfold, he opened his eyes. For a moment, he thought his father was behind the wheel, or that he himself was driving, and Claire was in the backseat, and he was hissing at her. He must have fallen asleep, gratefully, and his stomach had settled and the road was smoother. He started to sit up, but Saabir said, “No.” The pit in his belly was drilled deeper by hunger, but at least there was no nausea.