In the following weeks, Daniel felt a calm settle over him that matched the stiff quiet of the army-strewn streets: a forced order rather than peace. He spoke with Rebecca every week, at least when the phones worked. Living at her parents’ house was hard because of the constant reminders of Sandy. But she talked about LA as if reading from a brochure. The air was soft, the climate soul-renewing. Sun had a direct effect on mood, she recited. Scientists said so.
He didn’t want to tell her about his demotion, but it wasn’t something he could hide. She was angry on his behalf, insisting that he’d done wonderful work and concluding that his colleagues and superiors were either jealous or stupid and likely some combination of both. She told him he didn’t have to work for Washington at all. He could do anything he wanted, she said.
At USADE, Daniel moved into Seth’s old office, a small space with a small window and a permanent smell of tea and sweat. He kept to himself, crunching numbers for the budget, writing reports when Seth asked him to, telling himself the work was still worthwhile. But with every day that passed, it became harder. Nothing more had been mentioned about the desk job in DC.
The State Department’s fears that the horsemen had signaled a game change faded. The turmoil was over, Smythe said, nothing but a moment of drama, unsurprising in the restless third world. Sometimes the Teletype spilled over with nervous thoughts from the State Department or the desk of an especially interested congressman. But the program continued, the USADE staff growing calmer as time passed. Locally, President Daoud held occasional radio chats. His voice grew tired even as his message grew more forceful.
Daniel met with Ian every week, sometimes more. They spent hours in the shed building things they’d tried to convince themselves were useful. A rocking chair. A new drawer for Ian’s desk. One afternoon in the middle of April, they completed a bread box they agreed was “rustic” when it turned out less elegant than the picture. When a project went south—the shape of the item wrong, the wood splintering, or the hardware going in crooked and refusing to come out—Ian insisted that these projects were just quick-and-dirty skill-honing sessions anyway. “Tools like these, you gotta use them or they go bad,” he said, making muscular gestures around the shed.
Daniel nodded, though he knew that tools didn’t go bad just as he knew these afternoons weren’t about honing skills. They were, like so many events during those strange and sour months, an effort to force a sense of normalcy on life when things were turned upside down. Spending his days in an office run by Seth, coming home to a house without Rebecca, being on a side opposite Laila . . . it was like tuning in to a baseball game and finding out your favorite players had all been traded.
Seth had completely commandeered the office, calling meetings at all times of the day. To say he was unkind would be an exaggeration. He mostly ignored Daniel. To say that Daniel plotted against Seth would be an exaggeration, too, but he began to think about ways to regain his position, spending hours laboring over new strategies for the Reform. He pored over maps and talked with local engineers, some of the more successful and cooperative farmers, and officials from the Ministry of Planning, although he never called Sherzai, who had officially requested that Daniel be sent back to America. Sometimes he appeared in Daniel’s mind the way Telaya did, staring at him with deep, glassy eyes and whispering the truths he couldn’t bear to hear.
Sherzai had spent much of his life working for the government, first hired by an official who admired Sayed and agreed to do him a favor by hiring his friend. He had risen because he was wiser and smarter than anyone had guessed, even if he was from the wrong tribe. Agha knew about Daniel’s forgery and had said nothing, so he hadn’t betrayed him, not really. He had protected him. This was how Daniel decided to look at it from now on.
Days later, looking at a map, Daniel drew a small X in a southeastern section of Helmand Province, which lay hundreds of miles southwest of Fever Valley. Somewhere near that X, a field of poppies had once grown. Washington had a project there with a much bigger budget than Daniel’s fledgling office, but it had little to do with poppy fields. They built dams, reservoirs, highways, and canals and supported farmers who were working to become more efficient, all with the help of the river basin and reservoir. There was even a place called Little America, a place some eight blocks deep and two blocks wide, where Americans and Afghan officials lived, working with a big corporation that made Dannaco-Hastings look like a corner store. The scattered poppy fields that were coming up were designated as “out-of-project areas.”
Many years ago, that X had contained an explosion of red blossoms. Not like Fever Valley, but still a respectable sweep of delirium. It was abandoned now. The 1953 Sugar Fire, thus named because opium resin smelled like overripe fruit when it burned, had driven the growers out. The winds had carried the cloying scent for miles on that September morning. Daniel remembered. He had been eight then, old enough to form lifelong memories. His father had started that fire. And not by accident. Sherzai had told Daniel and insisted he stay in the car, but Daniel had secretly followed the men, who walked into a mountain and vanished. He sneaked through the same crevices they did, climbing down the ragged paths made by nature, and then he saw it. A massive valley ringed by mountains and bursting with poppies. It was like a mythical kingdom, perfectly hidden and impossibly rich.
There was even a small river, albeit a shy and pale one. Sayed and the others poured gasoline on rags and tossed them on the flowers, which coiled and twisted in the flames. Daniel slipped from behind a boulder, and Sherzai caught sight of him, taking him back to the car. His face smeared with soot and his clothes smelling of smoke, agha told Daniel his father was a brave man who did what needed to be done. At home, the Sugar Fire went undiscussed, Sayed refusing to answer Daniel’s questions. As always, the task fell to Sherzai. Daniel sometimes wondered what he would think of his father if Sherzai hadn’t been there to make sense of the man. After the fire, fear drove some of the poppy growers out. The poppy operations still in progress in Helmand were not on the best plots, nor were they run by men with Taj Maleki’s skill.
The highlight of February was Ian’s purchase of a car made for royalty: the former king’s limousine. Daoud’s regime had confiscated the monarchy’s fleet of cars the day of the coup four years ago, and their long-promised auction finally took place. Standing at Daniel’s front door on Valentine’s Day, Ian’s whole face was a wide-open smile, his cheeks pink. He wore blue jeans and an old T-shirt, his standard uniform now that Pamela had gone back to America in the rising tide of violence. No more pistachio shirts with arrow collars; the bolo ties were gone, too.
“Did you get me chocolates?” Daniel said.
“Heart-shaped ones, and a dozen fucking roses.” Ian grinned. “They’re in the limo.” He crooked his thumb over his shoulder. “But if you want them, you’ll have to come along. You haven’t worked on a car with me for ages. Let’s go.”
The royal limo was in good shape, but it was old, its coat dented and dull and the radio dead. While Ian tidied up the body with a dent-puller, Daniel repaired the radio. He felt himself sweating through his oil-stained shirt, although the weather was cool. He also felt happy, as if making the car whole again made him whole again, too.
“She’s ready,” Ian said, tossing his tools to the ground. “All she needs now is a new coat of paint and she’ll be fit for a king. Again.” He leaned in, screwing up the volume on the radio.
“Pretty staticky,” Daniel said.
Ian shrugged. “Some antenna somewhere not working, I guess.”
“It’s a beautiful car,” Daniel said.
Ian slung an arm around his shoulder. “How come you call a beauty like this an ‘it’?”
“Because it’s a thing.”
“Whoa. It is not just a thing.”
“Whatever you say.” There was a time when Daniel would have agreed with him.
Ian pointed to the tiny fridge pushed up against the back of the driver’s seat. He wiggled his bushy eyebrows. “Open it.”
Arranged neatly on the only rack, which was marred by patches of rust, was a heart-shaped box of Belgian chocolates. Ian was laughing silently, chest heaving.
“Where are the roses?” Daniel said, laughing too. He felt giddy from hours of work, hunger, beer, and the smell of gasoline. They leaned back in the car’s luxurious seats, eating chocolates and wondering why girls liked the stuff so much. Daniel had talked to Rebecca just hours ago. She was happy. She was healthy. The baby was growing. She missed him. Everything was normal. Except that nothing was, and a seed of dread was growing inside him. He sensed that when everything exploded, he would be going with it. He fought this feeling night and day, finding solace in the thought of reuniting with Rebecca and making a new home somewhere in a tidy little house with a tidy little fence. Every time he thought of this, his stomach tightened.