Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
Don't be a wuss.
My mother's voice banged through me. Or maybe it was simply a stunning, deep-seated reaction to the woman. Maybe I was discovering my angry side. I raised the camera to my face and snapped a photo of a man staring at us while opening up his cell phone. He turned and walked quickly away down the boardwalk. I turned the camera to a second glaring man, and he did the same. Some people were staring out of curiosity, but a total of six men scrambled away from the view of my lens, like cockroaches scrambling away from the light. I had my motor drive on, which had given me pictures of each from the front or the side.
For once, Scott wasn't noticing his surroundings. So enthused about my picture taking at first, he was now walking two steps in front of me, inhaling, exhaling, staring at the boards, trying to blow the woman's opinion of us-as-myth out into the sea. He finally grabbed me by the bottom of my shirt and pulled me along impatiently. I said nothing to him about what I had just captured on film. I couldn't make sense of it.
SHAHZAD HAMDANI
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
3:10
P.M.
DINING ROOM
H
ODJI CAME BACK AFTER HIS MEETING
to say what I had suspected: USIC rejected the plan to fake our deaths. However, they would work on a plan to move us to a different locale, he reported. But as we did not qualify for the Witness Protection Program, they would have to find loopholes in USIC rules and regulations, which could take a week or more.
Tyler wanders off in a foul mood, but I stay with Hodji to bring up "swans" and "food #16" and whether any Americans had been reported missing in Mexico who might be hostages. While we worked together in Pakistan, Hodji had talked to me at liberty so that I could chase online any concept that fell into my brain. Here he is worried about USIC's rules of violating national security and losing his job. USIC is so huge a concept in America, and it was only background noise to our intense partnership in Pakistan.
Instead of answering my questions, he gets up out of his dining room chair and moves Tyler's out of the way. Tyler had flung it backwards to make his moody escape, and the sound of it still rings in my ears. Hodji reaches my chair and merely drops his arms around my shoulders and rubs my hair. I am not comfortable laying my head on his paunch. My village is given to kisses but not hugs between men.
He speaks before I can tell him to remove himself. "Aw, relax. Let me hug you for once. I have nothing else to offer you. I am a small man in a huge, overwhelming organization called the government."
I unravel his spider arms from me anyway. "Maybe you should tell them you choose your freedom and dignity over their payments to you."
"Don't needle me, please. I need every dollar I can get right now. Alicia is divorcing me."
I look up into his tense face. Hodji's wife, whom I have never met, has been married to him for seventeen years. He has never spoken ill of her, but the fact that he has spent much more time with me than with her speaks loudly of uncomfortable situations. Hodji also has a son, Twain. I wonder what will become of this boy my age, whom I have never met, if his parents divorce. Women petitioning for divorce is almost unheard of in my little corner of Pakistan.
"What of Twain?" I ask.
"He ... found out about you, finally. After all these years..."
"He knows my name?"
"No. His mom hired a private detective who followed us the day back in March when I took you down to see Ground Zero. I knew I was being tailed, but I thought it was USIC and standard policy. Headquarters is entitled to tail us, tap our phones, or polygraph us any time they want, to make sure we haven't flipped. Alicia thought I was out cheating..." He laughed sadly. "Anyway, Twain found out I'd been entertaining a kid his age all these years, and he sides with his mother. I guess you could say he's jealous, and with good reason. The divorce is not about you—don't worry. It's about me. It's about my job, my dedication to ... god knows what, all of a sudden. But you'll have to take it on faith that I can't answer your questions."
"Even though I give to you the answers that raise the more questions?" I ask. Then, seeing his tortured look, I mutter, "Sorry."
I am trying to feel sorry about him and Mrs. Montu and Twain, but I am familiar with what phone calls and e-mails he got over the years. Perhaps they did not complain of him being gone for months to be with me, but they do not honor him either. They want to know what they will get out of him. "We have to replace the car." "We have to join the country club so Twain can swim on the good team. When is your next bonus?" "Why didn't you call last night to find out how Twain did on his history test? Maybe you don't care."
Maybe we had a roomful of subversives in Uncle's Internet café, all armed, and I was scripting up to three terminals at once.
He works to keep the world safe, but it is not enough unless it has to do directly with them.
I say as much to him in the most polite terminology I can find. He swallows hard and looks for his own words.
"You just have to accept it," he finally says. "They're normal. We're not."
"You are extraordinary. They just don't see it."
"Well. Extraordinary is not grounds for divorce. Or if it is, here they call it 'mental cruelty,' 'desertion,' and 'verbal abuse.'"
I am stunned. "What bad thing did you say to Mrs. Montu?"
"Nothing. Er, I don't know. I haven't seen the divorce complaint. Perhaps not saying enough is verbal abuse. At any rate, she wants to marry somebody else. I'm not going to stand in her way."
I have led a sheltered life insofar as men with women are concerned, but I do not miss the implication of this.
"Will you countersue for this cheating?"
He rubs my hair absently, staring as if to see past my eyes and into my spirit. "Don't you think I've got enough fights going on right now? My wise Egyptian mother used to advise, 'Pick your battles.'"
"You will miss your boy," I say.
"I've
always
missed my boy. Things happen so quickly. I don't know when he reached an age where he was bitter toward me instead of looking forward to my being at home. Last year, I guess. When he was a freshman, he would still be staring out the living room window, watching and waiting as I pulled up in the car after three months in Pakistan with you and your dad and Ahmer."
I feel as if I have done something awful. As if, when my parents died last September, I took another boy's father and kept him for myself. Hodji must sense that I feel this way because he speaks quickly.
He says, "Thank you for being unselfish you. Thank you for everything you do for me, for my country. If you did it for my country, you did it for my family."
But I am uncomfortable with the words. I did many things for my father before he died, relative to his own life as a v-spy for the Americans. He never said thank you, and I never listened for it. My family left me in Pakistan for three years when they came to America. I was to help Uncle Ahmer with the Internet café he had owned with my father. I only saw them for three weeks of the year when they would come home to visit me. I missed my father dreadfully but did not think to complain. For a son to do the best for his father, it is not something I was raised ever to question.
But I am driven further into unhappiness as Hodji leaves. He will be gone three days; he will not have news on where we are going for at least a week, and there is nothing for us to do but wait.
Tyler has grown restless, perhaps tired of these four walls, which remind him of his mother. I follow up the stairs, where he is blustering that the place even smells like her still. I suppose it is normal for a house to smell like its inhabitant for a while after she leaves, though I don't smell anything except ammonia and the overwhelming rubber of many surgical gloves. Nurse Alexa lets Tyler use what cleaning supplies he wishes, if he uses the gloves and mask to protect his skin and lungs. I think he is imagining the smell of his mother.
"There's so much dust in this room, it's, like, taking form," he complains, standing atop his desk with his dusting gloves on. Then he asks me not to penetrate his door frame and bring the dust from his mother's room into his room. "I'm seeing spooks in the dust."
He has just dusted yesterday after having admitted as much. His obsessive-compulsive disorder, which had been noticeable but tolerable, seems to have taken on a life of its own, what with this bad news.
"Tyler, do come down off that desk and be of help to me," I plead. "We need to ID these three new log-ins: Chancellor, Pasco, and HotKeys. They either have hostages or mysterious, unwilling participants in their experiments. And we need to know where VaporStrike went with his rotting monkey corpse in the steel drum. Earlier you were concerned he might be near us. Does that no longer worry you?"
"Why should I care?
Why?
" He rests his forehead on one of his many wall-length shelves. "Go find them if you're so pure at heart. If I can't have money, I want a little appreciation. Doing something for nothing is, to me, like trying to run your car with no gas." He picks up the dust cloth again and rubs hard at some disk cases he's taken out. "To hell with USIC."
I try, "Instead of thinking of yourself, think of a hostage being injected with toxins against his will."
"Do not guilt me." He says it with enough emphasis that I know I have guilted him. "Why couldn't Hodji get USIC to agree to burn down my house?"
I say with a shrug, "They think that it is cruel to any mother, even yours, and too radical a lie. Don't worry. Hodji will think of something else."
"Wish he wasn't traveling." He seems devoted to personally dusting all six sides of every disk case in that row. "I can see how much we matter. You and I are way down on USIC's list of priorities—why? Probably because the intelligence we're feeding them is far more interesting."
"We do not know that Hodji is going to Mexico," I reply, though I suspect he is, obviously.
"Don't you understand?" Tyler says through clenched teeth. "I
wanted
to be dead. I want to start over! This house has stuck out like a sore thumb ever since my mom was arrested. Everyone in this town knows she lived here. And while I'm here, I feel like I'm sore, too. Call it a psychological tick. But Hodji's ideas were important to me. Now? I'm just Tyler-the-Screw Ping."
Angrily, he sweeps every CD off the top shelf, and hundreds of cases hit the floor, the bed, the wall. I hear Nurse Alexa shouting up the stairs for what happened.
"We dropped some CDs. Do not worry," I shout down to her.
"There's one thing USIC needs to think about that they refuse to think about," he says.
"What is that?"
"The ... psychological end of being this messed up. They think it's none of their business. They think that's a doctor's business. That's the problem with this country. Everybody's a goddamn specialist. And I don't think any doctor is going to write me a prescription slip for a new identity. They would say a new identity is none of
their
business. Can somebody from that dumb, way-huge, massive bureaucracy of Intelligence use some intelligence? Please?"
Nurse Alexa has not believed my tone, as she appears behind me, winded from climbing the stairs. Silently, she begins picking up CDs, having taken note of Tyler's fury. One good thing: Tyler has taped each case shut with a small piece of clear tape, I notice, trying not to roll my eyes.
"My uncle would say that ... that you cannot run away from trouble. You have to fight the trouble where you are, or it will follow you," I say, suddenly hearing roosters crow behind me. I mutter, "Omar is online."
Tyler looks torn; he wants to jump down. But he remains on the desk. "How many times have I been beaten up in school? I never quit going," he says. "But this is different. I came to this country with a fake name, a fake passport, and a fake identity shoved straight up my ass. Now I want something of my own choosing. What is it about USIC that they can't, uh,
get involved
with that?"
CORA HOLMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
3:25
P.M.
LIBRARY
"
S
COTT
, we just can't get involved with that. We can't share classified material with outsiders, even if they just want to help. Not even you," Mr. Steckerman was saying to him in the parlor. I was in the next room, the library, trying to add something to my blog. But as usual, I imagined the hundreds of eyes reading it and drew a blank after only a few lines about being out of the hospital. I watched the double doors that separated the two rooms but knew Scott would feel betrayed if I simply closed them. His voice rose.
"You know what, Alan? When you tell me there's nothing you can do, you don't have to look so ... so proud about it. What do you have to be proud about, when you're telling me you're just a ... a helpless little fish in a huge pool?"
"I'm not meaning to look proud, Scott."
"You're right. Actually, you don't look proud. You look ... pitiful. Pitifully small."
"I am, I suppose."
I flinched, deleting a line of my blog that came out clunky. Mr. Steckerman was getting the better of Scott by going along with him. But it was maddening, even from the next room. Marg had opened the windows, and I could hear the wind rustle through the trees from my comfy seat on the couch. I tried to ignore them as I stared into my screen and forced myself to retype the line.
"So small you can't even make a petty decision?"
"Scott, for you to help us, we would have to reveal classified material, and do you know how tight national security is right now? Tighter than it's been since World War II. Now tell me where the two of you went this afternoon. It's important."
Scott laughed triumphantly. "We were abducted by aliens."
"Not funny."
"Who's laughing? You reap what you sow."
Scott had seen Mr. Steckerman's car parked outside as we drove up, and almost as an afterthought had asked me to leave the rolls of film in one of the outbuildings. He distracted the man while I hid the film under an antique carriage missing a wheel. They were having a fairly heated conversation when I came in. Mr. Steckerman wanted to know where we had been. We had said we went to the CVS, but we had no bag, no purchase. I had made a fast exit into this room while he and Scott argued about why Scott couldn't work for USIC.