“Stop it.”
“Your wife—Lynne. Lynne said that she’d enrolled in a community college for the start of the next semester. Had finished her GED. She was turning her life around, though I admit I’ve never known what people mean when they say that.”
“Please stop.”
“How do you turn your life around once it’s been turned inside out?”
If his hands had been free, he would have stopped up his ears.
“I do not—” He was trying not to choke on the words. “I do not want to talk about this. How do you know these things?”
“I’m not a mind reader, Marc. But I know where to look. There aren’t very many secrets out there anymore, except among the poor. And no one cares much to hear any of those.”
He heard himself breathing heavily, and recognized the same separation between his state of mind and body that he’d had since he arrived, even before he’d heard Lynne’s message on the machine. In the first weeks, walking the most urbane streets of Karachi, with men in suits, women without scarves, their hair shining in the sun alongside others whose eyes peered out of their hijabs, and the odd juxtaposition of an exotic written and spoken language among images of American companies he recognized (hell, represented), he was a stranger to himself, his life up to this point a kind of caricature that sat on his left shoulder and occasionally whispered its mundane preoccupations in his ear: What was the score of last night’s game? Sweetheart, this is a fine cup of coffee. It’s springtime. Time to throw some grass seed on the bare patches of lawn.
He heard her stand up then, and he thought she would leave without saying anything else, but instead she walked over in the direction of the window.
“Saabir won’t leave me alone with you for much longer.” Her clothes rustled, and the joint at her knee quietly popped. “You know, if you stand right up against this wall, and stretch, you can see the stars.”
Despite himself, he laughed.
“You have no idea how odd that sounds from where I sit.”
“No,” she said. She was quiet for a while, apparently contemplating the sky. “When I was in Paris, I was with someone I loved. It was years ago now. We traveled quite a bit because he had money. Money from his father, but money nevertheless. I loved seeing different places in the world. I may have been more in love with them than I was with him. But like many young men who come from money, he was taken with the people who lived on what he called the fringes. He gave those people his money, and some of those organizations did things to others that you would deplore. I deplored them, too. But I was young, like your daughter. I loved what I thought was the adventure. I loved him. He was killed, ultimately. Here. His throat cut. It’s not that it’s commonplace, but it’s common enough. For men like he was.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. But she seemed to ignore him.
“I hate the word radicalized,” she said. “As if people can be programmed to do awful things against their will. Do you know what I think radicalizes most people? Other than poverty. Do you know what radicalized me?”
She waited several long moments for him to answer, but he didn’t.
“Grief,” she said.
And then she took three steps to the door, knocked on it once to alert Saabir, and quietly closed it behind her.
3