From their first-class seats on Pan Am flight 673, Daniel and Rebecca watched Los Angeles resolve in the smog. Lanky palm trees reached for the sky, their fronds swaying in the December breeze. In this city of perennial summer, everything grew. Orange trees grew in ordinary yards. The city grew, sprawling to the valleys and beyond. Gang membership grew with the drug trade, and boys grew up on street corners fighting turf wars while just ten miles away, rich men’s investments grew beyond their wildest dreams, and so did their egos, along with the piles of money they spent on hopeful actresses whose breasts grew overnight thanks to surgeons and silicone. It was a city where red was the color of carpets and gang emblems, where red could get you shot if you wore it on the wrong street just as easily as it could get you photographed if you made it to the premiere in your designer shoes.
Despite a flight full of Americans, the Buicks and El Caminos that circled LAX, and the smog that greeted him upon landing, Daniel wasn’t truly back in LA until he slipped into Walter Menlow’s wood-paneled station wagon. As they drove toward the Palisades, Daniel was unbothered when traffic came to a standstill on the 405. There were too many people on the freeway, that was all. There was no camel blocking the road, no rabid dog foaming its way around the cars. None of the drivers leaned on their horn, and all of them stayed in their lanes. Rays of sun glanced off a thousand metallic hoods.
At the Menlow house, a stucco ranch with plush carpeting and parking for two cars and an RV, they ate barbecue ribs on the patio and retired early, exhausted. In the days before Christmas, Daniel and Rebecca saw friends and visited favorite restaurants. She seemed to find a second wind. He accompanied her to expensive maternity stores, telling her she looked good in everything. It was true. One morning, he did what he’d longed to do since arriving. At the Santa Monica airport, he reserved a small plane. He had never been confident enough to have a passenger with him, and Rebecca had never asked to go. Alone, he raised the Cessna into the sky, and as he rose the world sank softly into the sea. Sometimes, it was easy to forget that the ocean was neither blue nor green. The sparkle ran no more than forty feet deep. Below that, it was darkness. The sky was deceptive, too, with its illusory thin blue veneer.
Christmas Eve was a subdued affair. Friends and neighbors gathered in the living room around the lightless tree, which graced the room like a somber but beloved relative. Everyone talked to Rebecca’s belly in a high-pitched voice, as if the baby had already said something cute. They all told Daniel he would make a great father. People said all sorts of things they had not the slightest basis for believing. He eventually fled to the garden with his cigarettes, taking refuge on a bench by the orange tree.
Well past midnight, when everyone else was asleep, he rose out of bed to watch television, as he had every night since arriving. Twenty channels broadcasting day and night was a diversion he had missed. He flipped through the channels, spending no more than two minutes on any one show. Hours later, he was nearly asleep on the couch when he was jarred by the sound of Farsi being spoken alongside English. The screen displayed a map, showing the audience where Afghanistan was. An invisible voice rattled off a list of American agencies and organizations that were there.
A few miles from downtown Kabul, the broadcaster said, three men on horseback had laid siege to a Russian auto parts factory. They’d ridden into the compound, drawn their swords, and killed eight men who were unlucky enough to be standing outside, beheading two of them. The foreman managed to slam the gates shut before they could do any more damage, locking himself and the others inside. Cursing the infidels, the horsemen displayed the heads on spears and rode downtown as cars and people stopped, incredulous.
Witnesses spoke of crying men, fainting women, and screaming children. Cars stopped and beggars watched, paralyzed. Wild dogs appeared from the alleys, drawn by the smell of flesh. Soldiers arrived. As if made crazy by shock, one of them cocked his weapon and shot the first horse, which collapsed on the boulevard. The horsemen shouted, calling the soldiers atheists and Communists, and the soldiers fired more shots, killing all three horsemen.
Religious militants reacted. The clothing shop that secretly sold liquor, which Ian had mentioned at the party, was ransacked. Clothes were dumped on the sidewalk, doused with alcohol, and burned, every bottle smashed. Places Communists gathered were sprayed with graffiti, their windows broken. Clerics decried the mayhem committed in the name of their religion, but the vandalism continued into the evening.
One incident was unlike any of the others. The whorehouse Daniel had wandered into, where he’d tried to help the teenage girl, had been brought down with a very different tactic. A masked assailant had killed the owners and two customers inside, setting the women and children free before fleeing as silently as a cat. In Los Angeles, the anchorman read off a list of names. Among the bodies was an American identified as Robert Jeffrey Greenwood.