On the road before me, I see a blur of shimmering water. I know it is a mirage. I am almost alone on this length of desert highway. I pass a sign that tells me I can dine, refuel, and sleep at the next exit. If I stop, I can eat fast food and exchange friendly nods with other travelers. Families heading to the Grand Canyon. New Agers on their way to Sedona. Bachelorettes driving to Vegas. I don’t take the exit.
The drive to Scottsdale is more than six hours, and desert drives put me in a somber mood. The whispering engine is the only sound. Sometimes I listen to music in the car, but not on desert roads.
Thoughts of my past, present, and shrinking future float into my head uninvited. I am nearly seventy now, the age when people look back at their lives and tell others they have no regrets, even though they do. Some things don’t matter so much. Like the veins on my hands that look like purple worms, or the brown connect-the-dots on my thinning skin. Why don’t they call them freckles when you’re old?
But there are some things that time has forced me to reckon with. I’m not at death’s door, but watching your wife die forces a conversation not only with her but with yourself. Sending your son to war does the same.
When I arrived in Pakistan that night, the men drove me to Quetta. One of the guards’ cousins took me in. They fed me and let me shower and sleep, and never have those things meant so much. From there, I was able to call Rebecca. I learned I had a son. The labor nearly killed them both. I hitched a succession of rides to Islamabad, where the American embassy helped me get home. During that trip, I had hours on end to think. I was proud of having started something with meaning, something that would last. Not the destruction of the poppy fields, as I’d once hoped, but the religious resistance to the Soviet-backed Kalq.
I now know what I helped create when I gave that chaderi-clad woman a bag of diamonds. Would I go back and undo it? Sometimes I think, If only I could. But if only is a reflex that helps us build myths of what else could have been. I understand now that really, there are no alternate endings, only different paths leading to the same end.
I could never have gone back to that red flag, oozing like a wound in the Afghan sky. I could never have chosen that picture over the one I helped draw. Like war, love, and addiction, regret is a labyrinth with blind turns. I couldn’t have predicted the horrors that were eventually born of that movement, nor my son’s involvement in trying to free my homeland from what I helped build.
I never thought I would say this, but I miss the Cold War, when the enemy didn’t want to die any more than we did. How easy and predictable the Soviets seem now. How quaintly conventional to face soldiers who represent countries instead of the rogue battalions that roam the earth today, blowing people up from London to Baghdad. I remember when men wore uniforms instead of bombs.
Matthew returned from Afghanistan years ago, after his third tour of duty. He was stationed in Kandahar. The first time he was in Jalalabad, the second in Kunduz. His third tour was what killed Rebecca. I lost her to cancer ten months ago. They said it started in her liver and spread to her lungs, but I know it began and ended in her heart. My son was awarded a Purple Heart. No mother wants her child to earn a Purple Heart. Shrapnel tore through Matthew’s leg after an explosion that blew his Humvee off the highway. I know that road well. I once had an accident there, too.
Matthew will survive if he can end his dependence on the pills they gave him for his pain. Some of the soldiers smoked weed—do they still call it that?—and some drank, but more and more discovered the elegance of tablets and the tidy narcotic high. As Matthew says, one war ended for him and another began. My grandson is nine years old, living with his mother, who left Matthew last year. The place in Scottsdale is supposed to be one of the best. He’s been there thirty days, and it was his decision to go. I’m prouder of Matthew than of anything else in my life, and yet he has broken my heart.
Six months after he was born, I told Rebecca what I did in those last days before I fled. Having a child dissolved the divisions between us, and I was never able to hide anything from her again. When I confessed, she took my hand and made a confession of her own: she’d known about my father. Peter had told her that morning after the dinner party, when I found her and Laila in his hotel room. Still today, I watch the shadow play between my memory of my father and who he was.
Maybe one day my son will know the truth about his father and think of me with the same ambivalence. Rebecca added to the family myth with a story about me. She told Matthew that long ago, when Daddy’s people needed him, when terrible men hurt his country and his friends, he fought back. Daddy did what needed to be done. So little of this sounds true to me, but when everything is plunged into darkness, as it was in that red-versus-green world, truth ceases to exist. It is, to borrow a phrase I have checked off on countless medical forms, not applicable.
Scientists say the universe expands at an accelerating rate as more and more space is taken up by dark matter. But not all things that are infinite are dark. Rebecca’s love was infinite, and I have been blessed with glimmering color and light, the jewels that were my marriage, my family, my career. USADE feels far away now. After I came home, I spent the next thirty years fixing cars with Ian. In the sun and the surf, our children grew up together in the waves. I loved running that shop in Venice Beach.
I sent letters to Laila the first few years but never got a response. Rebecca sometimes said, “Leave her be. She’s part of a different world now.” I kept telling myself that one day, I would write to Sherzai. But there was too much to say, and so much less time than I thought. Agha was killed after the Russians invaded at the end of 1979, plunging my homeland into a war that never ends.
When I think back to that time, much of it is blurry. Maybe it’s better that way; there are things I do not wish to revisit. Now and then, when I read about the men and women who came back injured from fighting the movement I helped create, and the ones who didn’t come back at all, I feel as if I’ve just come from my own funeral and didn’t like the eulogy.
Peter never finished the book about my father. After I told him what I’d done, he quietly put it all away, and we never spoke of it again. He wrote a book about the opium economy instead, warning of its rise, and twenty years later was praised as prescient, appearing in newspapers and on TV.
When I was at USADE, Afghanistan produced one-third of the world’s opium. Now it produces eighty percent, maybe more. Almost all of that is grown in Helmand, with heroin labs stretched across the province. The pills my son is addicted to are derived from poppies grown legally in Turkey, while my father’s people struggle for food, water, and life. And there is an onslaught of new ways to feed those addicted to pills, with cheap, synthetic powder in tiny envelopes killing people like never before. Did it need to be this way? They fade in and out of the headlines, but they are always there. The addictions. The terror. The radicals. The war.
Years ago, I affixed Telaya’s mirror to a ribbon. It hangs from the rearview mirror of my car, which is the perfect place for it. It helps me see things that are behind me, reminding me that they are closer than they appear. Sometimes, I still hear Telaya’s voice in my dreams and awaken in the dark to her whispers, and it is as if the past itself is whispering to all of humanity: I am faster than you.
Tomorrow I drive my son home to Los Angeles, where he will live with me. Ian and Pamela are down the street. Their son, Sean, fought alongside Matthew in the war. All of us will do what we can to make my boy whole again. It is spring, and we have plans to go see the California wildflowers, Matthew, Sean, and I. Few things are as unforgettable as a sea of poppies pushing toward the horizon, striving for infinity.