The Good Son Read online

  We got air-evacuated to a hospital, first in Afghanistan and then in Germany. They covered the whole thing up per usual, because as a unit we don’t exist, and the story that surfaced was internecine fighting between insurgent factions, and the Pakistanis lied too because they never admit that the U.S. has boots on the ground in Pakistan even though we do all the time. No one said a word about the blue-on-blue shit.

  None of which I told to Gloria then, and she didn’t press me for war stories-she probably got her fill at work-so we chatted and drank our beers and I asked her if she wanted to go out for something, drinks, a movie, a club, but she surprised the hell out of me by saying, “No, why don’t we stay here and have sex?”

  I have to say that I have not had much experience with regular women. I was too young in Pakistan and I grew up in the middle of a war surrounded by men. Then I was in jail and then in the army. There are plenty of women available around army bases, and not only whores; there is a particular kind of woman who is a groupie of the elite formations, they like being around lethality and hard bodies, and a small number are interested in marrying someone with a short life expectancy and G.I. insurance.

  I’d been with groupies enough, and lots of fun too, but we all regarded them as a kind of gym equipment. Maybe they felt that way themselves, I don’t know. Anyway, I’d never had a direct invitation like this and it threw me; what was the catch? I asked her, why me? and she said she liked my look, I had what she called the wolf look; I was a loner basically and so was she, and she said she used to stand in the doorway of the PT suite and watch Brenda torture me and also she would get a whiff of my sweat and she liked it; she thought it was chemistry. Which I guess it was, but confusing a little, American women being so much like boys are where I come from and not like women in that country at all. So that was our first date, and it became a couple-of-times-a-week deal, always the same.

  After I left Glori’s I drove to the PT clinic at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for my date with Brenda Crabbe. I’m renting a junker while I’m in D.C. I don’t care what I drive, unlike many of my comrades; that’s another thing I didn’t get growing up, the whole American you-are-what-you-drive thing. I get in, it goes, I get out, and I could care less what it looks like.

  It’s strange, driving in the real world again. You never get your cherry back; I mean, except for the odd drunk, driving long distances in the U.S. is pretty safe. But I still keep my foot on the brake most of the time and my eyes are scanning like a motherfucker, looking for death on wheels. Like just this morning driving up Georgia Avenue a woman in a Dodge van swung out of a side road and cut me off and I practically ran off the road, and what I was thinking was that if someone had done that in Iraq the grunt on the fifty cal above me would’ve trashed her and her little van, probably killed her and six kids. It happens all the time over there and no one even slows down.

  And I look at the neat rows of houses here and imagine them with their fronts blown out and all the domestic shit exposed: the TV and the couch, dishes, letters, and photographs all strewn like leaves in the fall; also, I can hardly look at my fellow citizens, like in a mall or on the street, without imagining them lying in blood, nicely dressed bureaucrats or businesswomen, reading their Posts, with their clothes blown off, no legs, a long streamer of guts running down the street and people stepping daintily over it.

  They tell us that we’re over there so it won’t happen here. High strategy is not in my job description, but you know, when you come back, you kind of secretly want your fellow citizens to get blown up a little; we don’t admit it but it’s true. How the fuck can they be so-I don’t know, normal, like in a dream of shopping and careers and ordinary daily bull-shit, while what’s going on over there is going on?

  Brenda gave me a big smile when I showed up at her station. She spends all her time with guys who are resentful and bitter because their bodies are fucked up beyond repair, and I try to ease the tension some by a little flirting through the pain, although she is a large powerful woman and plain as a manhole cover.

  So for an hour I lit up her life and she made me wish I was dead, and afterward I had some lunch in the cafeteria and walked over to Building 18, where they had Billy Olin. This is one of the crappy old buildings where they keep soldiers who are too busted up to fight but who the army hasn’t got around to kicking out yet. Peeling paint, black moldy walls, really decrepit; they were supposed to fix all this up but they haven’t got around to it yet. Personally, I’m not surprised or shocked. This is how the army is. What surprises me more is that people think they’ll get anything different from an organization whose main purpose is to kill people and whose leaders are easily distinguishable from Mother Teresa.

  There’s a couple of squashed water bugs on the floor of Billy’s room and he’s sitting in his wheelchair watching an animal show on a portable TV. I mean the show was playing, but I couldn’t tell if Olin was watching. He’s got a dent in his skull now, from a chunk of debris probably, and it’s hard to tell if anyone’s home in there. I try to go see Billy when I come for my sessions here; I’ve known him for a long time and I feel bad about what happened to him. I was the senior guy so I should’ve been the last man out, covering his back, but I went out first. Stupid thing to think, really, a bomb like that goes off and it’s more or less random what happens, but still.

  It’s not like we’re a band of brothers or anything. There are about three hundred of us, I don’t know for sure, and they arrange us in task forces for special missions, mix and match, shake and bake. Also, we’re not really soldiers, we’re spies, and spies have a different standard of unit cohesion and comradeship. We’re not warriors either, although that’s the bullshit they pass out in the kind of training people like me go through-elite warriors, Special Forces, SEALs, Delta: each level more elite warrior-ish than the one before, until you’re so elite you can’t get killed or shrunk down to a husk like this poor sucker. As it happens, I’ve fought with actual warriors and there’s a difference. The warrior’s an individual before anything else. Sure, he has a family, a clan, and a tribe, maybe even a national movement, but the main thing that drives him is personal: his honor, his fame. A soldier is a whole different thing. I take the silver solidus from the Man and I kill on command, nothing personal about it. The reason there are a lot more soldiers than warriors nowadays is that soldiers will beat warriors every time, if they’re well led and paid on time. This whole warrior thing is a sick fantasy to protect guys who’ve grown up secure in the burbs from realizing what business they’re in. I could give a shit, myself. I’ve been killing people since I was nine years old; it’s the only thing I’m really good at. And like I say, I’m not even much of a soldier anymore, given the outfit I’m in.

  I didn’t even know if Billy knew I was there, but like I always do I pulled up a chair and talked to him awhile. I talked about what was on my mind, which was mainly about my mother and the crazy thing she was doing. I guess I really didn’t think he could hear me, because this is a subject I would never bring up with the people I work with. As far as anyone knows, my life began at age eighteen when I enlisted. People ask where I’m from, I say D.C.: my mother’s a writer, my father’s a college professor. How come you know all those languages? I tell them I grew up bilingual in Urdu, and that Dari and Pashto are related languages I picked up as a kid on visits to relatives. A little exotic, yeah, but I’m not that forthcoming, I don’t expand, I don’t share those amusing family anecdotes that people seem to have, especially in the South, where so many of our troops come from. It’s not a big deal because most of what you talk about in military circles besides the strictly professional stuff is sports, fucking, and the shit the army pulls. I’m not known as a conversationalist, which is sort of okay in my part of the service. An advantage, in fact.

  So I went on about my mom, how she was traveling to Lahore from Zurich, probably on PIA. A good airline and it helps get her into her Muslim head. She’d be traveling as a Pakistani, in the full cos
tume and the head scarf, and she’d ask to be seated next to a woman, which of course they oblige if they possibly can. She flies business nowadays; she’s got the money and she’s paid her dues. She’ll fly east over the hot dry lands she crossed years ago, on foot, in rattletrap buses, and in trucks loaded with oranges or wailing sheep, back when she was a man, a rubber dick strapped to her crotch.

  Billy made no response when I got to this part, which kind of convinced me he was somewhere I couldn’t get to, although you do hear about guys in his condition who pop out of it years later having heard every word people said when they were in the vegetable state. I told him, just for background, as it were, that in 1979 she decided that she wanted to go on the haj. I didn’t have to explain to Billy what the haj was because he’s done the cultural sensitivity course too, just like me, although I didn’t need it. She went on haj not by plane direct to Mecca the way people do nowadays but overland and by coastal sailing ship, like they used to in the olden days. That’s why she went as a man. And when she got to the holy city, she switched and saw what it was like for women too, slipping into a burqa and hanging out with the ladies.

  And then she wrote a book about it and got essentially barred from the umma, the Islamic world. Infidels are prohibited from setting a toe on the sacred soil of Mecca, so that was one thing they had her on, although she always maintained she was a Muslim and would recite the Shahada at the drop of a hat, and had whole chunks of Qur’an memorized and could spout Hadith like a sheikh. So then they got on about how she’d violated the rules about the separation of the sexes, she’d shown her face outside the family, and her reply to that was since no one knew she was a woman how could she inflame the lusts of men? A fine point there, a little too fine for the ulema, because it’s also haram for one sex to wear the clothes of the other, and the Iranian ayatollahs issued a fatwa against her shortly after the book took off in the States.

  Our family in Pakistan said it might be a good idea if she made herself scarce for a while, maybe a century or two, until things quieted down, and Farid agreed, but despite the family’s wishes he stayed married to her. So after various other catastrophic incidents they eventually moved back to D.C. and my father got his post at Georgetown, and she stayed there for a while, but she started feeling antsy in the city and pinched by the life of a faculty wife and author, so a couple of years back she got a little adobe house in the Huerfano Valley of Colorado, and she works part-time at a mental health clinic in Pueblo, probably the only Zurich-trained fully loaded Jungian therapist in the poverty zones of southern Colorado. I wonder what the meth freaks and drunk Indians she gets in there think of that. Probably that she’s writing a book about them. Probably true.

  I went on that way for a while. It’s better talking to Billy than to the assholes at the post-traumatic stress disorder clinic I’m supposed to attend. I don’t have PTSD. Civilians think PTSD is what you get when something bad happens to you. It isn’t. People get scared and neurotic when something bad happens to them, or if they’re in stress too long. It’s a physical thing, really; the body fluids are telling you to run away, and if you get out of the stress you’ll pretty much recover. For example, speaking of amusing family anecdotes, my mother has had some pretty traumatic things happen to her, but each time she pulled up her socks afterward and went on to live what most people would call a successful and interesting life, if you don’t count risking her neck whenever the opportunity arises as a defect. Or the way she treated me.

  Real PTSD, on the other hand, is from doing bad things to other people. It’s what gives you the nightmares and sends you to the drugs and booze and makes you shoot your wife, kids, and self. Most of us aren’t designed to do the kind of shit you have to do in a war zone, especially in a war zone with lots of civilians. Or even to see what you see. Little girls in embroidered dresses lying by the side of the road like dead dogs, cars full of some family that was in the wrong place and they’re sitting there-Dad behind the wheel, Mom holding the baby next to him, three kids in the backseat-and they’re all roasted meat, teeth grinning out from the char. And so on. A small number of people don’t seem to get PTSD-a group that includes your basic concentration camp Nazis, your gulag operators, your professional secret police torturers-and obviously our own service has any number of such people, of which I am one. I haven’t cracked yet, is what I was explaining to Billy, and he kept quiet and listened, nodding and drooling a little.

  Sometimes I think I will kill someone, my CO maybe, or my mother, or a bunch of strangers in a public place, and then kill myself, but these thoughts fade, like they belonged to someone else. I love my mother, and if anyone harmed her I would definitely kill whoever. I have been through a lot of hard shit, but I believe I have a solid base and maybe, if you have that, nothing life throws at you can really touch you in your core; there’ll always be a magic circle you can hide inside. My mom always said that, and looking back I think I had it in the house of my grandfather, Bashir Bilal Muhammad Laghari, in Lahore, where I spent the first nine years of my life.

  I ran down after a while, said good-bye to Billy, and went over to the pharmacy. I was waiting for my pain pills, when something on a sign they had there reminded me it was a Thursday. Thursday is a big deal in Lahore, as in most Muslim places, kind of like Saturday night is for the infidels, party time, and that got me thinking about Thursdays at the Laghari house, my grandfather’s haveli, as they call it, on Bhatti Street near the Urdu Bazaar in Anarkali, in Lahore. Most Thursdays he would hold a mehfil, a gathering of his friends, who were the cream of Lahore society across all political factions. B. B. Laghari Sahib, Baba as we called him in the family, was a judge and a legal scholar. A more or less honest judge in a society where corruption is the national sport, he was respected by both the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, the major clan factions in Pakistani life, and his Thursdays were one of the few places where the warring tribes could meet in a halfway civilized way. I felt a little bad about not recalling what the day was. If you grow up in a religion your interior clock is geared to the holy days and the cycle of the festivals, but I don’t practice Islam much anymore.

  What they mainly did at the mehfil was listen to people sing ghazals in Urdu, to the music of the sitar, the surbahar, the sarangi, and the tabla-Indian versions of the guitar, bass, cello, and drums. Ghazals are all about heartbreak and longing, feelings familiar to me from an early age. My colleagues have country music and I have the ghazals. I often sing them to myself, and sometimes to girls. Laghari Sahib entertained most of the famous ghazal singers of the day, people like Muhdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali, which would be like us having Madonna or Pavarotti to a private party. I started getting invited to these things when I was around seven, along with my foster cousins and Wazir, my best friend, who was the son of my grandfather’s Pashtun bodyguard. While my contemporaries were watching Bullwinkle, I was listening to geniuses sing the poetry of Háfiz and Ghalib.

  So that was a kind of base, that house full of beauty and love and the most amazing generosity. It was unheard of in the social circles the Lagharis moved in for a man like Baba to take in a waif, a woman like a wild fox, my mother, and let his oldest son marry her, and love their half-breed child, me. And look what I did with it! As I walk out of the pharmacy clutching my dope, there in my head Ghalib is singing:

  I am neither the flower of song, nor the tapestry of music,

  But the sound of my own breaking.

  2

  S onia puts her cell phone away and looks out the window as the plane begins its taxi. She is wearing Pakistani clothes, a shalwar kameez of dark green embroidered silk and a black cashmere dupatta draped around her upper body and head. She had considered taking a coat, but then she would have had to lug it all through the trip and she likes to travel light.

  Next to her in the caressing business-class seat sits a young well-scrubbed businesswoman, reading a thick report. The young woman has not said a word to her and will not, Sonia thinks, for the duration of the flight.
Even the flight attendant’s smile is gelid when it falls on Sonia in her Muslim dress. They fear the Other, although neither of them would admit it. They mistrust the woman still bound by the patriarchy from which they have so recently escaped; more than that, even, they think her a possible sympathizer of the new enemy. The umma is not popular on international flights nowadays. Sonia doesn’t really mind; she is not a chatterer on airplanes, although in a Central Asian second-class train carriage she would be the life of the party.

  Sonia opens her briefcase and looks through the papers of the conference she has organized, the reason for this trip to Lahore. She has booked a conference room in a Lahore hotel, but she would really like it to take place in Leepa House, the Lagharis’ vast summer home in Pakistani Kashmir. Leepa House belongs to her husband, technically, but she has not asked him. He would not approve of her traveling to Pakistan in the first place, and certainly not to Leepa House, with all that is going on in that part of the country. But his brother Nisar has the use of the place, and she will ask him when she gets to Lahore.

  The plane passes ten thousand feet and there is the usual announcement; she reaches into her bag, extracts her iPod, and fills her head with the music of Abida Parveen, the famous throaty voice weaving the patterns of the ghazal in between the tap of the tabla and the whine of the sarangi. She sings about going away to build a house in a lonely and forsaken spot, never to see a human face, a house with neither roof nor walls nor doors…

  The song makes Sonia cry, as always. She wipes the slight tears away and feels a pang of regret and a passing self-contempt. She is like the bourgeois couple in the Anatole France fable, who stroll by a suffering match girl without a glance and then weep real tears watching La Bohème at the opera. She did not cry when she departed from those she presumably loves or when recalling the horrendous events that have marked her life. She puts this thought from her mind-she does it easily, a well-practiced skill-and thinks again of Lahore.