I’d seen the medals lining her shelves in her purple house in the Mission. She could ski, swim, dive, and even run better than me.

It was there — in the way her legs now receded in the dark, listless, asexual — that I felt the rawness of our every verbal assault, as if we were trying to scrub each other away with an increasingly astringent soap that broke in furious fists, leaving us more bloody, more exposed. I’d stepped into her shadow; she’d stepped into mine. Somewhere along the way, this war with a spook had become forever.

That day, and the next, Wes and Irfan didn’t disturb us. Wes and Farhana were meant to check in with their boss about their work’s progress, either by phone or fax, if possible. I found out later that when Wes called his boss from Naran, it was to tell him that there’d been a delay. His explanation? There’s been a bomb blast.

“What do you mean by accusing me of swimming away?”

“I’ve had enough. I’m going next door to stay with Wes. Irfan can come here.”

Oh, she was clever. “As usual, you haven’t answered the question.”

“As usual, you’re avoiding the right one. Should I tell you what to ask? Why don’t you ask what made you get in the boat?”

“You wanted me to.”

“No, it was what Irfan said. Don’t you remember? If Wes says it’s safe.”

“I suggested taking a long walk instead.”

“So why didn’t we?”

“Because you said you wanted to go in the boat! Wes has nothing to do with it.”

“Don’t deny that you were trying to prove something to him—”

“I was trying to prove something to you—”

“—that you’ve been jealous of him ever since we got here. From even before we got here. Since the day he practically saved your life!”

“What?”

“Will you deny that too?”

“The wound was shallow, Farhana. It barely pierced my — whatever it’s called!”

“Peritoneal cavity,” she swiveled around on the bed to face me and the light streaming through the window — the sun was clearly up now — legs crossed, arms crossed. She swung those legs, suddenly amused.

“I’ve said it before. You want me to say it again, I will. You could have easily called an ambulance instead. They’d have saved me.”

She started laughing.

“It’s Irfan who saved me, you know. Twice. First by sending money. A second time by pulling me out of the lake. A third if you count how he warmed me, with stones.”

She fell backward on the bed, laughing loudly. Her shirt was yanked up to her waist. Sunlight played across her crotch. “Well, he can come and stay with you here and warm you some more!”

She was so damn pleased with herself. “But before you fuck him, maybe you should fuck me!”

I aimed my words below the belt. “Who would want to fuck you?”


Farhana rose from the bed, pulling her shirt down. She packed in silence. She got dressed away from my eyes, in the bathroom, the door shut. (We seldom shut the door, even when pissing.) I followed her out to the adjoining cabin, though I didn’t know why. Irfan was out. Wes, in. He was shirtless and reading Flashman in the Great Game. If he saw me standing behind her, he didn’t show it. He wrapped a comforting arm around her shoulders, murmuring, “You all right?” as he shut the door.

I returned to our cabin. It was still ours. It echoed with the cruelest two accusations made.

Who would want to fuck you?

Nadir, you were swimming away from us.

Or,

Nadir, you were swimming away from us.

Who would want to fuck you?

I sat still for a long time. Really, which was worse?

Two months before we left — it was a sullen day in May, even in the Mission — I overheard her on the phone. I seemed to have come in at the end.

“… it boils down to. One person in the mood when the other isn’t?”

There was a pause while, I assumed, the listener spoke. Farhana shook her head. “I’m not only talking about sex. Sex is just a metaphor.”

I expected her to elaborate. A long silence instead.

Finally, she exhaled, “Yep, that’s what I mean, uh-huh.”

What did she mean?

“I mean, that day on the beach.”

Now I feared I could guess.

It hadn’t happened often but, often enough. Okay, increasingly often. Her wanting it while I didn’t. It had happened the other way more. It had happened the other way most of my life. Like a forgiving puppy, I bounced back at the merest hint of encouragement. Until recently.

She was saying, “I know, nothing worse than letting go just to fall on your face. Though letting him decide, you know, what’s hot, maybe that’s worse.” Silence. “Sure, I have, many times.” Silence. “Uh-uh.” Silence. “No. He doesn’t.”

I don’t what? And then panic: it was me she meant?

“Wes? Oh sure, yeah. It bothers him a lot.”

What?

I slammed the door. The door to the house with the five-sided bay window where she now spent more time with her laptop, searching for frightening headlines to text back to me. The door in the alcove where the gold rings of the columns now looked prosthetic, like gold teeth on a poor man from Tajikistan.

Why wasn’t I aroused by her lately?

Our departure was just weeks away. Ours. We had our tickets. Our maps. Our separate allies, Wes and Irfan. If she wanted me to cancel, there was no chance of it. I was increasingly excited about what I’d do in northern Pakistan, with or without her, and this had renewed interest in my work. Nor would she agree to watch me leave without her. There was not going to be a without, no matter how many bombs were dropped or bombers martyred, not after working all year to claim a with. We were going. We both knew it. We saw it clearly in the shadow in our bed.

I bought a brand new Nikon digital, a 300mm lens, and a 20mm extension tube. I photographed small fry. The rainbow in a dragonfly wing. A single California poppy. Farhana’s nipple.

I suppose the image of the magnified nipple and the blurred contours of the breast preoccupied me more than she did, but then, she was already preoccupied. Always on the phone, always talking about him, her work, her return, her anxiety about her return. Her breasts.

She liked me photographing them. Breasts that had begun to stir me only in the frame. At least I didn’t get off on images of other women.

That day on the beach? It excited her, seeing herself magnified. And color-filtered. Image pre-processing, not to be confused with post-processing, to enhance maximum photorealism. To make the infeasible feasible. She lay on her stomach; I drizzled sand on the mound of her buttocks. It cascaded down her curves, featherlike, matching her skin tone. When we viewed the images together, the texture of the sandspill on her flesh made her wet. We were nestled between the same cluster of rocks where I’d found her the first time, on the far side of the cypress grove. There were others around, though none in our nest, or so we thought. She rolled back onto her stomach, raised her hips high into my groin. The sand scrubbed my erection. I heard the figure behind me, his breathing. I could feel it on my neck. I assumed she mistook it for mine or would have stopped. There was no way she could have seen his shadow on her spine.

Later, we both lay on our stomachs a long time. When we eventually got dressed, we didn’t speak. He came when I did. She couldn’t have noticed.

Now I looked in the viewfinder of my camera. I’d kept the photos of the weeks before we’d left, including that morning on Baker Beach. There were several shots of her — muted backgrounds, magnified nipples. I hadn’t needed them since coming to this country, where secrecy seems to play the same role.


At lunchtime, I heard Wes and Farhana leave the adjoining cabin, presumably for the restaurant. I stayed inside. I hadn’t slept in a long time. We’d been arguing for two days, almost without cease. I shut my eyes.

Nadir, you were swimming away from us.

I hadn’t stopped seeing her, since that time at the bus stop. Sometimes she shrank into a distant, stamp-size image, as though I were looking through the gap in the front row of her teeth. A tiny girl in magenta and green, stick in hand, climbing a hill, chasing a black goat. But always, when she descended, the playback was at the wrong speed. Her movements grew rapid and jerky, trapped in a silent movie. Whoever shot that film had grossly undercranked it. The goat bounced like an epileptic, and Kiran shuddered backward and forward on the hill in the frame made by the gap between her teeth.

In this way, Kiran was my past.

Other times, I was looking at her from above, through a camera in an unmanned plane, and Kiran appeared in a burst of grainy images. Getting in the boat, hunkering in her seat, folding her hands nervously in her lap while heavy bracelets rolled down her wrists. Her movements slower now, her shape elongated.

In this way, Kiran was my present.

Or I was looking at her through a series of gaps, all cut into a cylinder, and she had not shrunk, rather, I was a mouse peering into a giant zoetrope. Her mother twirled nearby, black sleeves rimmed in pink thread, bangles sliding as her arm rose in objection. Ob-jection, OB-JECTION! When the cylinder spun, Kiran’s bangles as she fidgeted in the boat and Maryam’s bangles as she gesticulated in fury were in absolute synchronicity.

In this way, Kiran was my future.

I hadn’t forgotten how her mother’s shadow crossed mine in the sand, next to Kiran’s corpse. Sometimes, as I slept, Maryam appeared in my room, throwing her image against mine. Sometimes it would become Kiran, her discolored face breathing on my pillow, wet hair tickling my cheek. And she’d touch my cold neck the way her baby sister had done, brown on blue.