And then somehow he is not. He is curled in a fetal position in the middle of the street. Gulping air. Shuddering with a chill. As though the city walling him in is a reservoir suddenly emptied.
He hears a screaming that seems to come from many men, but its only source is Cloven. His ponytail has come undone. Strands of long inky hair fall across his face. He staggers back, clawing at the virtual reality goggles. Instead of red, they now glow white. The illumination soon seeps from his nose and mouth and ears, the tips of his fingers, cracking through his skin, consuming him, making his body, and then the street, and then the city indistinguishable from light itself.
Epilogue
THE LINE ISN’T LONG at Customs. No one wants to come to this country. Especially now. It isn’t safe. Always on the news for another kidnapping, another beheading, another suicide bombing. She flew from New York to Berlin to Dubai to here, and on the last leg wore a hijab that has soured with her breath.
The floor is made of broken tiles and the walls are dirt-colored. A light fuzzes on and off. Four soldiers with assault rifles stand nearby, watching the line with stony expressions. A stand-up fan with a rusty blade blows nearby, but makes no difference, the air hot and dry, baking her throat. When it is her turn, the agent waves her forward. He has a thick black mustache and wears a blue collared shirt with a black tie. Sweat rolls down his forehead, and he dabs at it with a handkerchief. When he sees her passport, he says, “Let me guess. Aid worker? Or reporter?”
“I’m a journalist,” she says, and shares the authenticating letter from her editor at Harper’s.
He takes it, gives it a cursory read, and then begins to fold it into smaller and smaller squares. “You’re here to tell the world all about our troubles.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“We are not entertainment.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Yet you’re here to write your little stories.”
“Maybe my little stories can make a difference,” she says. “Maybe I can help.”
And now he has folded the letter so many times that it can be bent no further, a tight white square pinched between his fingers. His tosses it to her and she pockets it quickly.
“What about the dog?”
She looks down at Hemingway, who wears a blue vest with a fluorescent yellow border. “He’s a service animal. I have epilepsy.” She pulls out another paper, but he waves it away and stamps her passport and makes a note on her Customs card. His eyes are already on the next person in line when he says, “I would take care when you’re here, Ms. Falcon.”
And then the man behind her—a big man with a jutting forehead, dressed in preacher blacks—steps forward. And the Customs agent says, “Let me guess: a missionary? Here to save the heathens of this backward country? How wonderful.”
Lela doesn’t turn to look, but she listens to his familiar baritone and smiles beneath her hijab when Juniper says, “I’m just here to shine a little light on the dark.”
?
The magazine set her up with a trusted fixer—a man named Abed who wears a prayer cap and an overlong shirt embroidered at the breast. He meets her in baggage claim. He takes her suitcase and smiles at her dog. As they walk outside—into the furnace-blasted air—he tells her how much he admired her work in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, especially “The Red Zone,” the Ellie Award–winning, 10,000-word feature she wrote about what happened in Portland. “You are fearless,” he says, and she says, “Hardly.”
“And yet here you are.” He holds out his arms as if to acknowledge the airport, the city, the country as a whole. A few men with wiry beards pause to look at them.
She readjusts her hijab and lowers her voice. “That doesn’t mean I’m not afraid.”
Sometimes it all feels like a dream, but that’s true of everything in life. Every moment—stored in the unreliable hard-wiring of your mind—is suspect, a foggy replication, a prejudiced illusion. She rereads her article every now and then just to prove to herself it happened. She trusts in the writing. That it won’t shape-shift on her like everything else in this impermanent, virtual world. And that she might make some incendiary difference with it.
Juniper walks by then, but she doesn’t acknowledge him except with a stare. He carries a heavy duffel to a taxi waiting in the roundabout. It’s an old Subaru with white doors and a yellow hood and trunk, the paint peeled off in long scratches. When he tells the driver the name of his hotel and settles his body into the rear seat, the shocks give a squeak and the taxi lowers noticeably with his weight.
She watches the taxi pull into the dusty stream of traffic before telling Abed, “Let’s go.”
?
She’s staying a few blocks away from the U.S. Embassy—in a safe house with seven other reporters and three aid workers. One of them—an Irish writer working for the Guardian—pours hot water over tea leaves in the kitchen. The others she can hear snoring or typing or listening to music in their rooms. “What story are you here for?” the Irish reporter asks, and she says, “You’ll hear about it soon enough.”
“Ah, come on. Just tell me.” He’s smiling but she can sense the twitchy eagerness behind it. Journalists aren’t colleagues but starved dogs chasing the same bone.
“I’d tell you,” she says, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
He laughs, not knowing she means it.
Abed will pick her up tomorrow for the first of her interviews. In the meantime she needs to prep and get some sleep and reset her clock.
Her room is the size of a closet. The desk and the single mattress take up so much of the floor that she can’t lay her suitcase down. Hemingway whines before entering and then turns three circles on the bed before settling into the nest of blankets. She’s going to join him soon, but first she plugs the sim card into her phone and powers it up.
While she waits for the screen to brighten, she hears the call to prayer as it purls and echoes through the city. It’s a sound she feels inside and outside her, like a waterfall’s shushing boom or a wolf’s plaintive howl. She goes to the window and pulls aside the blackout curtain to look out at the city, at the streets crammed with motorcycles and bicycles and cars, at the stacks of mud-colored buildings. Across the way, she watches a man lay down his Kalashnikov rifle and unroll a prayer mat. He is guarding a French restaurant whose windows are barricaded with piles of sandbags.
Her phone startles her with a chime. She lets the curtain fall back into place and ignores the text messages and voicemails and inbox alerts. Instead she brings the phone to her mouth and says, “I missed you, Hannah.”
“Don’t get all gross and sentimental,” the voice says. “I’m right here.”