Daniel wouldn’t wait until Monday to ask Smythe whether Greenwood was really right about Agent Ruby definitively being used, with no room left to negotiate. When everyone was gone, he called Smythe at home in Washington. The consultant hadn’t been bluffing. When Daniel tried to convince Smythe not to proceed, Smythe reminded him that Kabul was still too close to Moscow.
“Daoud is letting the Communists have their way with him,” the undersecretary barked. “When has that ever ended well? If you think it can, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. And it’s not in Brooklyn, it’s in fucking Siberia.” Smythe coughed. “We’ve got to get Daoud to see Uncle Sam as his buddy so he can wash off all that pink and put on his star-spangled boxers. You follow?”
“And if nothing ever grows on those fields again, then what?”
“Something’s bound to.”
Daniel tried to answer, but Smythe cut him off. His speech slower, he repeated, “Something is bound to.”
“I’m telling you that if we poison all these—”
“Poison? Who said anything about any poison?”
Daniel tried a different tack, insisting that the Ministry of Planning wouldn’t comply, but Smythe told him Sherzai’s office had already signed off. “This is a great thing. A very great thing. And if I were you, I’d get on board, unless you want to be selling Chiclets in Yugoslavia.”
“Chiclets?”
“What can I say, I hear they like gum out there. It’s the sugar and the constant chewing, I guess. Ha!” The hacking sound reminded Daniel of that James Brown song.
He argued, but it was no use. Smythe had heard enough. “Son, most people don’t even know where this goddamn country is. Let Dannaco do its thing with Agent Ruby. If it works, it could be big. Now, go to sleep or do whatever people do at whatever hour it is out there.” He hung up.
Outside, leaves floated aimlessly on the surface of the swimming pool. Daniel stripped off his clothes and dove, and in the water he found much-needed solitude and silence. The pressure of the water against his temples provided him a kind of peace. He liked to imagine it was squeezing out what he didn’t need, leaving behind only the essential truths.
He thought about the Yassaman poppies and wondered at the miracle of such flowers growing in the desert, eruptions of color and life rebelling against this fallow land. It was tragic that such beauty and resilience had to be destroyed. He swam laps beneath the surface until his arms ached. One. Two. Five. His chest grew tight. He pushed to the top and gasped as he swallowed air.
The blackmail churned in his mind. The answer came to him as he tried to catch his breath. Daniel was the one bluffing. Not Bob Greenwood or Leland Smythe. Not Taj Maleki. If they used Agent Ruby on Yassaman, Taj might slaughter dozens of people, their blood making the poison seem meaningless. He thought of his promises at USADE. Of his father’s fight against the English, then the poppy growers. Of Telaya and the importance of being counted.
Daniel was no longer afraid. He knew what to do about the blackmail. He had promised to reform the Yassaman field. And yet, a person’s character was not determined by which promises they kept, but by which promises they broke. The Scale of Sages had yielded an answer. Some things simply weighed more than others.
Upstairs, the bedroom was chilly. He rarely thought about the revolver he kept locked in his nightstand. He was hardly alone in keeping one. But tonight he unlocked the drawer. He suspected Rebecca was awake, but when he whispered her name, she said nothing. Her breath was the rhythm he normally fell asleep to, although these past months that rhythm rarely came as she lay silently awake. Instead he listened to the rhythm of the nightstand clock, an antique his father had brought back from India. Even as a boy, Daniel had loved the clock because he’d noticed it was irregular, pausing between the tick and the tock longer than it should. His father insisted they were spaced perfectly evenly, but they weren’t, and Daniel’s solitary knowledge of the clock’s flaw made him feel like he had a special relationship to time. He had brought it with him to college. The first time Rebecca spent the night, she asked Daniel if the ticking was supposed to be off like that. He knew then that he was in love. One day, he and this piano-playing girl would navigate time together with that synchronized understanding behind all great romances. They would form their own irregular rhythm, a cadence that belonged to no one but them.
He thought about what had happened at the end of the party. After Taj left, Laila had approached Daniel. “Rebecca doesn’t get migraines,” she’d said. “That’s something I would know.”
“She doesn’t tell you everything.”
“She doesn’t tell you everything.” Laila asked Daniel to fetch her medical bag from her car. When he found it in the trunk, it wasn’t shut all the way. His eyes fell on a small mass of brown resin wrapped loosely in cloth. He took the bag upstairs and found Laila outside the bedroom waiting for him. The door was closed. She told him Rebecca was fine, just tired. He dropped the bag to the floor and held out the small brick. “So she won’t need any of this?”
She took it from him and said, not without pride, “I buy it on the street sometimes. There are never enough pain pills for my patients. A piece like this goes a long way.” She continued with her justifications, although he hadn’t asked for any.
“It’s against the law,” he said.
She crossed her arms. “Sometimes you don’t get a series of choices, but a lack of options. Speaking of which, Peter is here because he lost his job. He didn’t get tenure. His stuff wasn’t serious enough, apparently. Too journalistic.”
Despite himself, Daniel felt a pang of sympathy for his old friend. “He didn’t say anything.”
Laila raised her eyebrows in a look that suggested he was stupid. It had never occurred to Daniel that Rebecca had told Laila about her affair, but now it was obvious she knew. “He’s just traveling now, trying to think about what to do,” she continued. “Visiting friends around the world.”
Softly, she added, “Rebecca told me what happened.” He thought she meant the affair, but then she said, “It’s horrible, to have an accident like that.” She took his hand and squeezed his fingers. “Don’t feel too bad.”
The tears came so abruptly it shocked Daniel as he fought them back. “I just didn’t see her.”
Laila said, “I mean, it’s possible her parents didn’t even care that much. You know how those people are about girls.”
Yes, Daniel thought, I know how they are. He remembered Telaya’s weeping father and crying mother. He was afraid Laila’s words would provoke the girl, and that she would chastise him for the cruel company he kept. “What?” he said.
“They don’t belong in the world we’re trying to build.”
Daniel wondered if he had heard her correctly. “Who’s ‘we’?” he asked. “The inspired crew I saw you with downtown?”
For a moment, she looked like she wanted to take up the fight, but then her shoulders slumped and she shook her head slowly. “It’s the only way forward, Daniel.”
“So it’s either Russian puppets or a future of backward superstition? Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Daniel, no one knows what they’re doing. We can’t predict the future—we can only turn our backs to the past.”