CHAPTER 4

Williamsburg, Virginia, 1984

As we travelled to Williamsburg, my father sung, crooned, to me in the backseat of our car a song he and I had always sung together:

Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money
Maybe we’re ragged and funny
But we’ll travel along, singin’ a song
Side by side.
...
Through all kinds of weather
What if the sky should fall?
Just as long as we’re together
It doesn’t matter at all.

It was hot and humid that autumn of 1984. The world coasted by alongside the humming regularity of the interstate’s yellow lines. The song finished, my father and Janet snarled at each other quietly in the front seat. This at least was familiar, amid everything else that wasn’t. Once again, I had no idea where we were headed — only that wherever we landed was going to be my new home.

I had spent the summer with my mother in Northern Virginia, learning new American music on the radio by listening to her singing. The arrangement between them was that I lived with my father during the school year and spent the summer months with her. Initially they had agreed to joint custody, but it hadn’t worked out that way, and I knew she was sad about this. I also knew my father would do just about anything to keep me by his side.

My mother liked Lionel Richie’s ‘Stuck on You’, and she sang it to me in her car, which she called her blue jay. If she didn’t know the words to a song, she hummed along to the melody anyway, and that summer was filled with the music of her gentle voice. She was remarried by then, and had a job as a technical editor. I told her about Pakistan: the sailing black birds called kites that rode hot-air currents, the games of soccer and cricket with the boys who had lived on my street, the cone-shaped paper cups of water at school, and the days our teachers let us go home because it was too hot.

My clothes had been out of style and gawky when I returned, and she took me shopping at Tysons Corner for striped tube socks and shorts with white trim and new Puma tennis shoes. She also indulged my endless hunger for Dannon yogurt. She stood next to me and watched me stir, prolonging the ordinary and the routine, something not infused with the extraordinariness of my visit. It was too short, too weighted with the anticipation of departure.

I was happy to be with my mother, but sad to be in America, which seemed like such a bland place. I hated these in-between times because they made me long for a decisive moment when I finally decided to be with one or the other of my parents. I hated them because they forced my hand.

My father came to pick me up from her townhouse at the end of summer. I hadn’t seen him since Pakistan. He stood in the doorway talking in his deep voice, grinning and flirting. She put a hand on my shoulder and leaned against the wall of the house. I could have been mistaken, but I thought I caught her blush, perhaps momentarily swept back into the graces of his warmth. Or maybe it was something else entirely. When my mother waved goodbye, she bent her fingers at her first set of knuckles, an action that looked to me like she was imitating the wings of a small bird.

In the car, on the way south, my father raised the volume on the classical radio station. Janet absently twirled a finger through her auburn curls. I watched as rest stops and Winnebagos and signs for gas stations and Motel 6s and Denny’s slid by. I had no idea where we were going; my father wanted to surprise me. He told me I would love our new home. It was a great place for a kid my age, he informed me.

After a couple of hours, we pulled off the highway and almost immediately began to pass tall poles with flashing orange lights and hatchings, like railroad crossings, that read ‘Warning’ and ‘Government Property’. I thought we had made a wrong turn.

But my father looked ahead, to where an American flag hung loosely from a pole beside a modest guardhouse. Two metal bars blocked the road. The guard came out and, after giving us the once-over, snapped sharply to attention as the security bar rose and our car moved through. People didn’t normally gesture so officially to my father.

He turned to me with an oversized grin. ‘Welcome home, Scotty.’ He was the most excited person in the car.

‘What is this place?’ I asked.

He said it was called Camp Peary. That didn’t answer much for me. He added that it was a base — like a military base, only different. More importantly, it was our new home, and I would find lots to enjoy here.

A road wound through forest laced with hanging moss. The sun sank through branches to rectangular fields where groups of deer grazed. I exclaimed when I saw them, and so did my father. Now, I was genuinely excited. Black iron lampposts were planted evenly every 20 metres. Modern, one-storey ranch houses with covered carports, fake-wood siding, and winding gravel walkways lined the perimeters of the fields.

A military jeep pulled up across from us. The soldiers inside wore white armbands stitched with the letters M and P — for military police, my father explained. They waved, and we waved back.

My father stopped at an intersection of three massive fields. Across the smallest of the three was an old, two-storey farmhouse. He turned around to face me. He was still grinning, full of excitement that we were together again in a new place with a new home, about to start on some new adventure. The house had a huge front yard and a circular driveway. Beside it was a little white garage, and beyond that, through a copse of marshy trees and undergrowth, a creek. The lush expanse of the land — its sheltered position behind those gates, as if it were a magical kingdom — was enchanting. I was transfixed, lost suddenly in a wilderness of America, surrounded by forests and rivers, happy to be so firmly planted again within the magical realm that my father was able to create.

‘Mom already fixed up your room,’ he said, breaking the spell. ‘Go take a look.’ I silently cursed him the word ‘mom’, so soon on the heels of my visit to my mother. To hide my anger, I tore across that field toward the house. On the porch there was a floral-cushioned swinging chair, and potted palms and ferns crawled up the screen door. Inside, I recognised my father’s teak wooden tables. The foreignness of everything was what made it familiar. There was a red sandalwood box with gold clasps that held cloth napkins, low table lamps from India, rugs from Iran and Afghanistan, a dark wooden sculpture of the Hindu pantheon that had hung in all our houses, and a delicate likeness of a plow made from shesham wood. A rocking chair that had belonged to my grandmother rested in one corner.

I raced upstairs to my room. The ceiling slanted over a bed in the corner. Near my bed was a hatch, a passageway to an attic. I opened it and peered down a long, unlit alcove, already planning for its secret uses. A little red sailor’s lamp with an anchor on the base sat on my bedside table. Most of my belongings had arrived by sea freight: a brown stuffed bear and a pink rabbit that used to belong to my father, toy soldiers of the American Revolution, boxes of my great-grandfather’s WWII medals, an atlas and a globe, and rows of books — Zane Grey novels, my father’s old books about cowboys and Indians, Hardy Boys mysteries, a token Nancy Drew. The small bronze horse my father had given me in Yugoslavia stood by my bed. I picked it up and polished it gently. Only then did it feel like home.

That evening, I sat with my father in his study. He had grown a beard over the summer, and he was smoking a pipe. He wanted to know if I liked Camp Peary. Yes, I told him, I loved it. It was true. The land was big and green and smelled of cut hay and clay and dried river salt. The elements left me feeling more prone to possibility.

We ate well that night, warm and open to the comfortable feel of a new country. Summer gnats swarmed outside the screen door. But inside, we were protected with candles and clean linen and the clink of glasses — and my father’s deep voice extolling the activities and possibilities of our new home.

After dinner, it began to rain; long summer sheets descended through the trees. My father tucked me in. I lay with my head at the foot of the bed watching the giant maple thrash outside my window. Crickets chirped loudly, just audible through the din. The air smelled electric, of grass and pitch and wet road. But there were no geckos on the walls, no muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.

The next morning my father asked if I had made my bed. I shook my head. ‘This isn’t Pakistan,’ he said. ‘We don’t have servants here.’

For those first few weeks, I missed my former country. I missed the smell of pepper trees, leaves being burnt in the morning, and the pungent, rotting scent given off by flower petals being crushed under tyres. I missed eating caramel in the kitchen while our cook, William, talked and cut carrots and measured spices. I had asked if we could bring William to America, and my father had said no.

Letters postmarked Pakistan and bearing the international red, white, and blue flag markers arrived for me. My friend Sohail wanted to tell me that my friends missed me. America was strange, I wrote back.

One Saturday I went swimming with my dad at the Camp Peary pool. The bottom was deep, and a dull green light leached upward. Unlike the outdoor pool in Islamabad, which was filled with children’s boisterous voices, this one was quiet and empty, seconded away in the back room of a gymnasium and surrounded by concrete and a few opaque windows. We were the only ones there that day, and the sounds of our splashing echoed.

The following weekend, we played catch in our vast front yard. ‘Gotta keep your tongue in the right place,’ he said, indicating his own and punching his mitt with a balled fist. We drove around parts of the vast, unexplored base in his green Dodge pickup, and he let me sit on his lap and steer. That night, he tucked me in, sat on my bed, and made sure everything was okay.

Then, ‘You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning,’ he sang in the morning before my first day of school. ‘You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up today.’ I hesitated, and he leaned in close and ran his fingers along my chest. ‘You need a gowering,’ he threatened. ‘Gowering’ was his word for tickling me with his beard. He rumbled his voice in anticipation of the impending attack. I squealed in delight. He moved in and I screamed until I was thrashing to get out of bed, panting and sweating and wide-awake.

One evening, two boys rode over to our street. Jeff was curly-haired and bright. Reid was an elfin boy with feathery blond hair that fell down to his sharp cheekbones. Reid and I had lived together in India as infants. They were the first boys I met at Camp Peary, and when I saw how in command they seemed I realised how lost I had been feeling. They invited me to accompany them on their bike ride, and I happily acquiesced. My dad waved goodbye from the driveway.

That night, Reid told an improbable story about India that involved bottle rockets and firecrackers. I remembered nothing like that in my time there. ‘Remember?’ he asked hopefully, and because I wanted to make friends I said yes.

Jeff and Reid were soon coming over most days after school, and if there had been a time when we weren’t best friends, none of us could remember it. They took me all over. We biked down long dirt roads to the edge of the base, where chain-link fences rose up in long, vertical walls that cut through the forest. We played fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons and Gamma World, creating alter egos and measuring our powers of charisma and intelligence. We walked to glassy lakes deep in the woods where the only noises were the resonant thumps of leaping bass. We went along the York River, past a sewage turbine and the small algae- and stone-filled tributaries, to an overlook, where we played with a giant M60 machine gun — the same kind used in Rambo: First Blood, Jeff informed me. The gun was mounted on an abandoned Huey helicopter.

Sometimes we would just set off in one direction in the morning and walk or ride our bikes until we couldn’t anymore. We wound up lost in forests or wading through impossible streams. I lived for these excursions, so completely and perfectly did they manage to elicit equal amounts of fear and excitement. I longed for the daylight to last, for as long as it did I could prolong the absolute freedom those woods conferred.

But there were limits to our world. Camp Peary was not endless wilderness; it was under 62 square kilometres, and marked on maps as a Defense Department property. Long fences bisected the trees, stretching off in both directions. We went exploring because, sometimes, Camp Peary felt oddly empty. As the months wore on, I began to wonder why I was living there, and my father didn’t make any effort to clarify this for me.

The bus that picked me up for school every morning had a prescribed route through the camp — the driver wasn’t allowed to deviate at all. Kids from outside the base weren’t allowed to get off the bus in Camp Peary without written permission. Every day we passed through those gates at the entrance and entered an outer world, one with restaurants and shopping malls, with litter and chaos, devoid of animals — the ordinary world. But no one was allowed to see my landscapes. It was reserved for the Camp Peary People. We were the Camp Peary Kids.

There was a movie theatre in the camp that for many weeks played only one movie: Red Dawn. Jeff, Reid, and I went. I got shivers when I saw the opening scenes: a group of boys about our age sitting bored in a classroom until suddenly, out of the window, one of them sees a white parachute with a man attached drifting slowly to earth. A second chute follows, then a third, and soon the whole sky is filled with hordes of invading paratroopers. It was the story of a Soviet military invasion of the United States — the dawn of World War III as seen through the eyes of a group of kids from a small western town. I watched with unhinged fascination. I saw Jeff and Reid and myself as the boys who flee to the mountains to wage a guerrilla war against the occupying army. It was righteous. The kids loot the local hardware store of all its rifles and shotguns and ammunition, and its stocks of hunting reserves, camouflage jackets, shovels and axes, and spools of rope. They fill the pickup with cans of soup, macaroni, boxes of anything they can find. Their small resistance group, called the Wolverines, survives a harsh winter.

Toward the end of the film, the Russians are moving up a long, clear-cut field, just below the tree line, hunting for the rebels, and the ground suddenly rises up. A square patch of straw pops neatly up off the tundra, like a secret door. Then another. The advancing Russians are mowed down en masse. I whooped in silence. This was reassuring and familiar to me. Our games were all about stocking up with weapons; our trips into the woods were calculated acts of resistance. And the Russians were near; you could feel them.

Scattered all about Camp Peary were restricted areas. Sometimes Jeff and Reid and I rode past them on our bikes, or stopped at the forbidding gates that warned us away: ‘This is a Restricted Area. No Access Allowed.’ Behind the gates long roads, so different from the mud tracks that criss-crossed the rest of the land, disappeared in straight lines into the oblivion of the forests, walled in on either side by pines and bramble.

Sometimes, helicopters thundered over Camp Peary. Black shadows flew along the ground. Looking up, I saw the underbelly, the straight tail, and the metal legs elongated. They flew towards the woods. They would wake me up in the mornings, or at night. Usually they came just as dusk was falling, in twos and threes, splayed out broadly against the sky. They scared and thrilled me, and they beckoned: I wanted to be part of the secret endeavour.

At other times, at dusk or in the afternoons, planes overhead dumped bodies through side cargo doors, and they would bloom into the delicate white blossoms of parachutes, wafting in spirals towards the pines. When I asked, my father said the military did training here, but that was all he would reveal.

What were the helicopters flying out there for? Who was doing military training? Those woods seemed to hold as many questions as answers. Sometimes, alone, I’d walk into the forest and weave among the trees, picking off branches like an Indian scout, leaving track, looking for some clue to what was hiding in there.

But very often, those dusks were just still, with only the high-pitched thrumming and sawing of the cicadas. If I was still enough, the vast area where I lived and roamed felt like a large and complicated heart whose valves needed this position of repose to function properly.

In the mornings my father would bike calmly to work on his 12-speed Trek, taking the river route along the York. He had told me he was a teacher. What was he teaching? I asked. But the answer was not forthcoming.

One day Jeff told me I should follow him up the hill by the river, near the sewage turbines. He showed me where to go, stopping underneath a building with dark windows and pointing up. I saw the back of someone’s head. Our fathers supposedly taught in these oddly nondescript buildings, in cloistered woods, away from public scrutiny. My father had told me he worked for the foreign service, as my grandfather had. I thought my father and his students must have been ‘diplomats’. But this place wasn’t ‘foreign’. I wondered why we were stuck on a base in the middle of a wilderness of tidewater and marshes. And around this campus, the young men were stolid and serious, too old to be students. I was how old a student was.

Not long after this, my father left for a few days. He did this sometimes. ‘Gotta see a man about a horse,’ he chuckled. He had shaved his beard, but kept a moustache. He looked much thinner, almost like a different man.

‘What kind of man?’ I asked.

‘Oh, the one about a horse,’ he replied with a wink, which meant there was nothing more to say. If I got ever mad at this secrecy, he would arch his stern eyebrows at me until I couldn’t keep my frown any longer, and I’d start to laugh. ‘Don’t smile,’ he’d say. ‘You can’t smile if you’re angry.’

I thought, then and now, that this was his cleverest move. It was like trying not to think about a pink elephant when someone says not to — impossible.

But I had my own concerns, too. I was always behind in school because of the constant changes, the tardiness, and the many differences between the various school systems of my childhood. I didn’t do well in classes and hated the work. I believed that learning was about convincing, and I was impossible to convince. At school I argued with my teachers all the time. Ms Williams, my teacher, told me I would make a good lawyer, so she staged mock-trials and picked me to conduct public examinations and cross-examinations on whichever subject I chose.

Other teachers weren’t so accommodating. One of them drew me aside and said that I, along with a feeble-looking kid with glasses and a silent Asian girl who barely spoke English, would be in a separate reading group called Special K. Special K turned out to be the remedial group.

My father kept telling me I was smart, but I knew otherwise. In the evenings, if he came home from work early, or on weekends, he sat me at the dining-room table and lectured me with unending patience on fractions and semicolons. He counted numbers on his hands, twisting them into unlikely shapes and folding his thick fingers into themselves. He tried to tutor me on the decimal system, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Sometimes Janet took over, patiently wading through grammar or science with me. I threw temper-tantrums over homework. But my father persisted in his belief about my intelligence. ‘I love you more than the sky,’ he said, ‘cause the sky never ends.’

That first year at Camp Peary was marked by fun and frivolity, particularly with my father, but also the sense that something was unravelling. My father and I starred in a play together at a local base theatre that year, a melodrama called Dirty Work at the Crossroads. He played a corn-fed farmer with a southern accent; I played a young maiden named Little Nell, and I had to wear a dress. People, in this case an audience of base employees, screamed with applause for my father, who put on a stellar performance with a baritone voice and a corn pipe, and they clapped courteously when I sang a solo in a very high-pitched falsetto.

When we were in Pakistan, my father had bought a Willys World War II jeep and had it shipped to Camp Peary. It took a year to get there, but finally it arrived one week. On nice days he parked it in our driveway for display, and when it rained, in the garage. He took family portraits of us in front of it to include with Christmas cards. When he left the jeep outside one night with the top down, it rained and the camouflage canvas shrank so that it became impossible to cover.

On weekends he asked us to dress up in nice clothes and took us for rides around the base. He always wore a long brown trench coat with a turned-up collar and a scarf on these occasions. He smoked his pipe and wore an English cap. Families came to their doors to watch us go by, and later commented on our tours. ‘We saw you and your father,’ they’d say. ‘Quite a car you have there.’

He looked like a dandy. Spiffy, he’d say. When an in-law who played the bagpipes came to visit us one winter, my father drove us around in the Willys with the bagpipes blowing across the snowy fields. People shook their heads. Janet laughed in embarrassment. I sat in the back, alternately proud and embarrassed.

But at home it was often tense. Our house was small, the walls thin. At night I hung at the top of the creaky wooden stairs and strained to listen to the conversation coming from behind his closed doors. I would hear sighs and drawers being shut in various rooms, and now again a laugh, the general effect like some complicated breathing machine.

One day, Reid, Jeff, and I trekked into the woods on a mission to go as deep into the wilderness as we could — farther than we had ever ventured before. It was a Saturday, so we had the whole day. We had been riding our bikes for about an hour when Jeff suddenly stopped. In the distance we heard gunshots. Jeff dumped his bike and motioned for us to do the same. We stashed them in a grove and continued on foot. The sound of the firing grew louder. Eventually we came to a small berm and crawled up to its summit. We peeked our heads over and froze. There, in the distance, about a dozen men were shooting weapons into the woods. They looked determined and calm, like my father when he was concentrating. Behind the men were a smaller number of supervisors, wearing caps and carrying clipboards. One strolled with his hands behind his back, plastic earmuffs on his head, murmuring orders.

My first instinct was to run away, as quickly as possible. We weren’t supposed to see this. I was afraid of what the men would do to us if they caught us spying on them: torture us with bamboo stalks like they had done to Rambo, or prod us with cold gun barrels like they did with James Bond? Worse, what if my father found out? Jeff’s face was pale, and Reid was sombre.

‘What are they shooting for?’ I asked.

‘They’re soldiers,’ said Jeff, with authority.

‘How come they don’t wear uniforms?’ Reid asked.

‘They don’t need to wear them here.’

We had shards of understanding — that was all.

Soon after this, the three of us took off early one weekend morning towards the southern edge of camp, following the river at first and then veering up into thicker parts of forest. Eventually the road we were following petered out, and we dropped our bikes and began walking. We passed one ridge, then another, and forded a trickle of stream that led to the river several hundred metres below. The woods were untamed, tangled with thistles, grass, and poison oak. We picked ticks off our bodies and thorns out of our socks. We were far from home. I had a grand feeling of independence. We played games while we hiked, imagining ourselves in a magical forest. Jeff talked about dragons and elves, and the treasures that awaited us at the end of our trip. My walking stick became a golden staff that could shoot lightning bolts. Reid threw stones like balls of fire.

Then, from a distance, one of us saw the glint of something metallic and shouted to the others. We raced towards this thing, which was shining like the hilt of a sword.

When we came to the clearing, we stopped running. There were two metal silos, whose sides shimmered in the light and shade as if underwater. A chain-link fence encased a house-sized square around them. Each silo was marked with white insignia and serial numbers. They were huge, at least 15 metres tall, and round as oil barrels, capped off by cylindrically shaped warheads with numbers painted on their sides. Nuclear missiles, I decided, based on my extensive viewing of war movies.

I had never seen a missile before, and yet here were three of them, so close I could reach out and lay my hands on the metal. They were tall and eerie — sleek instruments of death. I was afraid we would trigger unseen alarms or tripwires or pressurised anti-tank mines, as we had seen in movies. Jeff warned us there might be grenades scattered on the ground. I felt as if we were being watched, and peered into the shadows. All I could see were birch leaves clattering to the ground; a wind had come up and was blowing them around, thankfully erasing our tracks. Nearby there was a low, earth-coloured concrete bunker with flat, sloping sides that led directly into the ground — and probably deep into it, I thought. I knew there were more missiles, hidden in underground silos, ready to blast off at any moment.

Guarding the bunker was a small M4 Patton tank, its small wheels wrapped in thin treads, and its round turret with a short gun barrel. We climbed up on the tank, too, and sat there marvelling that such a fine weapon would be abandoned here in these woods.

After awhile, I sat down on the bunker and leaned back so that I was looking up at the roof of tree branches, the sky peeking through. I figured the inside of the bunker was connected to an underground maze of tunnels that stretched deep into the earth, to an alternate city buzzing with activity — with computers and switches and men in white lab coats able to operate the buttons that would fire these missiles off at a moment’s notice. I knew that presidents had red telephones for circumstances such as these, and I was sure that one of those lines must lead directly here.

But all was so quiet. I peeked inside the entrance and it was dank, covered with leaves and wet earth.

The bunker had a horizontal opening less than half a metre high on one side. It was dark inside, and we didn’t know how far down it went. Reid and I held on to Jeff and lowered him in. He crawled around, poking at walls, but didn’t find other tunnels. His voice echoed up to us.

From inside the fence the forest looked different, more like camouflage. The branches swayed and threw sunlight across their tops. I knew we were well hidden. I just didn’t know why, or from what.

We pulled Jeff out looking a little afraid. ‘Where are we?’ he asked, out of breath, suddenly disturbed by what we had stumbled upon.

We looked for other signs of missile activity, but could see none. I wondered how the missiles launched, how they looked when airborne, and what it would be like to see a missile coming toward you — a giant bird of death.

Jeff had wandered to the edge of the fence. ‘Come look at this,’ he shouted. He motioned for us to stop behind him. He was staring at the ground. There, nestled among the leaves, was a small oval-shaped metal object. Reid was transfixed.

‘What is it?’ I asked, feeling a wave of panic.

‘It’s a dud,’ said Jeff.

‘A dud what?’

Reid explained that it was a grenade that couldn’t explode. Jeff picked it up. There was no pin, he said, showing me the hole, explaining that all the explosive material had been emptied out. The grenade was small and round, and cut into squares. When it exploded, Jeff said, the squares broke up into little pieces and cut into your body. That was called shrapnel.

‘That’s what kills you,’ he said, ‘the shrapnel.’

Reid held it and pretended to throw. So did Jeff. When it was my turn, I cradled it in my hand. I felt how it could roll off my fingers so easily. I wanted to throw it. I wanted to see it roll. I checked inside to make sure the explosive had all been emptied. It smelled of burnished metal.

We carried it around, tossing it back and forth as we played around the tank and the bunker. The afternoon began to fade; the air began to cool. We wondered who else knew about this place. Our fathers? Surely.

Eventually, some hours after we had discovered them, we realised the missiles were fakes. Jeff went up close and saw the seams. They were just lots and lots of oil barrels that had been stacked together and painted. If the missiles weren’t real, what were they doing here? Someone had put them here on purpose. Was this a deliberate ploy to mislead the Soviets into thinking that they knew where America’s military arsenal was stored? It seemed plausible.

We kept the mysterious discovery secret from our fathers. But we began to look for more clues as to what was going on in our bucolic riverside community. We discussed the possibilities over milkshakes at a place called The Café that overlooked the York River. It looked like something from a movie set. The waiter wore a little white hat — whether a sailor’s or a chef’s, it wasn’t clear. On the wall above our usual table, a sign read ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’. The men around us always talked quietly, as if they were trying to figure out a puzzle. They drank coffee. But it felt like a simulacrum of friends talking over coffee, not the real thing.

The more the three of us explored, the more I realised that we didn’t need to leave Camp Peary. The base had enough mystery of its own.

One day I went to a restricted area on my own. It was near the general store, on the way to the camp’s main gate. I pulled my bike up to the perimeter and stashed it in the bushes. I walked to the edge of the gate, stepped under, took a few steps, and then went right in, around a small bend in the path. A little further on was a huge pile of tyres and trash. I stood looking for a while, trying to figure out what was so forbidden about a pile of trash, when I heard a voice. It was Toot, the main guard at the front gate. He was the base policeman, and a deer-hunter and former marine — not a man to be messed with. He stared at me.

‘I got lost,’ I volunteered.

‘No, you didn’t. You snuck in here.’

‘I didn’t.’

Toot moved past me and walked to the other side of the pile, blocking my way. ‘Not allowed in here,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘So?’

‘I don’t know.’

He nodded for me to leave. ‘I don’t want to catch you in here again, or anywhere else that’s off-limits.’

I left, but the encounter hadn’t thrilled me like my others. It just made me uneasy. I was suddenly aware that my trespasses were more than just a passing annoyance for the adults, and that perhaps the dangers on the base needed to be kept quiet for our own protection.

As the seasons changed and we became less enthralled by the mysteries of Camp Peary, the three of us began to see its downsides. The boys and I often dreamed of running away. Jeff told us he had done it once — just started walking down a road, prepared to leave and never return. I imagined doing it, too, but then I saw myself stopping for fear of the unknown, for fear of encountering or causing trouble and losing the things that were familiar to me. But the fantasy of escaping grew within us, and it was reinforced by our proximity to adults who acted strangely and were constantly dodging our questions. We knew there were lies in the air. We shared our frustrations with each other, and complained about being sequestered on a base where visits from outsiders required military authorisation — where the whole outside world was, in fact, some-thing people in the camp generally regarded with suspicion, or even derision.

When we did leave the base, it was often to visit the nearby colonial town of Williamsburg, which was a farcical illusion if there ever was one — an entire village devoted to keeping alive the customs and cares of 18th-century American colonists. The town was filled with blacksmiths and coppersmiths, horse-drawn carriages, and soldiers with tri-cornered hats prancing around talking in Old English. There were also hundreds of thousands of tourists who visited each year, turning it into even more of a circus than it already was. Between colonial Williamsburg and Camp Peary, it wasn’t hard to choose which was the more pleasant reality; but the notion of reality itself was what began to seem fuzzy.

It wasn’t just the stifling secrets of Camp Peary. At home, at night, my father and Janet continued to hiss at each other. I would try to listen in, but could never hear much. During the day, they were rarely together. Janet was in the kitchen much of the time, or outside in the garden picking lilies and hibiscus to arrange in vases or for garden parties. Her gardening seemed like dentistry to me — it was the science of rearranging roots in the flesh of the ground, pulling protruding random life into some more app-ropriate shape and poking it into bowls, where spikes held it in place. Tulips and lilies were caught in our front yard, along the sidewalk that led to the front porch. Sometimes I thought about booting their heads off with a swift kick — sending the seeds flying into space and leaving the petals there, gasping on the ground like red lips.

There was a long hill on the banks of the York that I had never managed to descend fully on my skateboard. It was too steep for me, and my skills were lacking. One day my dad suggested we go together. We got to the top of the hill and stood looking down at the steep incline. I glanced over at him nervously. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Bend your knees,’ he said. ‘Keep yourself low.’

So I did. And then I started to roll. At first it was okay; I was coasting down nicely. But then the board began to wobble from side to side, and I began to lose control. Then suddenly I was off, looming out forward horizontally, until I landed on my face on the footpath. Blood began to pour from my nose and forehead. My father was there in an instant, cradling my head in his arms and wiping the blood away. When we got home, he took me into the kitchen and asked Janet to prepare a wet cloth.

‘Don’t treat him like a baby,’ she said, looking back at me from the kitchen sink.

‘Just get the damn cloth,’ he snarled back at her. ‘Can’t you see he’s hurt?’

I sat there quietly and whimpered. I couldn’t suppress the smile of vengeance. Whenever Janet and my father fought, I always chose his side.

A few months later, I did get the chance to leave Camp Peary. I went to California to spend the summer of 1985 with my mother and her second husband, a cruel air-force colonel who ran his house like a barracks. He stacked canned goods alphabetically in the cupboards and combed his hair neatly, even on weekend mornings. My mother was unhappy with him. He was a deeply unfeeling man, cold and controlling. He had no sense of smell, which I equated with having no emotion at all. He had two sons from a previous marriage, and both of them cowered in fear every time he appeared. I desperately wanted my mother to leave him. I could see she wanted to as well, but I think the threat of another domestic failure haunted her. I passed by their bedroom door on several occasions and heard hushed voices, and it soon became clear that they were having urgent discussions about the poor state of their relationship.

Toward the end of summer, as much as I wanted to stay in the warm glow of my mother, I was happy to get away from the colonel. But when I arrived back at Camp Peary, I discovered that Jeff and Reid had left for good while I was gone; I was friendless.

Amy was also going. She was only with us at Camp Peary for a year. I hardly ever saw her, anyway — she was either in her room or with her friends. At the beginning of our second year in Camp Peary, she left to finish high school in California and live with her father for a while. And though I hadn’t seen much of her, her absence from the house made it all the quieter.

By then, I had stopped receiving letters from Pakistan. At my age, a year can seem an eternity, and half of that is a lifetime.

But just before I began 7th grade, a boy named Paul arrived to Camp Peary from Thailand. His brother rode a motorcycle, and owned an AK-47 that he had somehow shipped from Thailand and hid in the woods, he said, and one day he would show it to me. We became friends. Soon the woods became a refuge for us, an escape from the cloistered atmosphere of the rest of the base.

One day Paul taught me how to smoke. We sat on a log, and he slapped the pack against his wrist, pulling out a cigarette and slipping it in his mouth. He struck a match and touched the flame to it. The smoke lingered in his mouth kind of sexily, and then disappeared. He handed one to me and I mimicked him, striking the match and inhaling. I began to cough violently. But I loved it — not only the smell of fresh smoke, but also the illicit nature of it.

We returned to the same spot, just out of sight of the trees, every day. After school Paul would put his fingers to his lips. ‘I need a drag,’ he’d whisper, and we’d head off. We had stashed the cigarettes in a tin can under a log. We smoked until we were dizzy. Afterward, we chewed gum to hide our breath, stashed our butts carefully in the canister, and rubbed our clothes with pine needles to erase the scent.

My father sensed my lies and smelled the smoke on me. One day he hid himself and pinpointed the spot where we emerged from the woods. He found the canister, the butts, and the matches. When we went back the next day, our stash had mysteriously disappeared without a trace. I went home, without a clue that my father was behind it.

When he came home from work that day, all he said was, ‘I found your stash.’ He had been tracking me while walking Duke in the fields, he said. In fact, I had seen him walking the dog from what I thought was the safety of the woods. I didn’t imagine he was shadowing me. How benign his behaviour had looked from a distance, how unaware he had appeared. That was the trick, then: lull your targets into safety and then ambush them. His discovery of my cigarettes was galling, but enlightening.

I lost my phone privileges, wasn’t allowed into the woods, and was given more chores. By the time my restrictions were eventually lifted it was almost winter, and I took to the woods with my friends again.

When the snows fell, we had full-blown battles in the forests. We had gotten hold of pump-action BB guns that could hold up to 100 BBs at a time. We trekked into a patch of woods near a small creek and built an underground fort near one of the boulders that were scattered along the slopes. The shelter, like the one in Red Dawn, was a few metres deep and wide enough for two of us. We wove together branches and leaves and vines that we packed with dirt and flopped over the top for camouflage. When there, we sprayed the air and trees with gunfire, faces red and puffed with anger. Branches cracked and fell to the ground around us. There was laughter and panting, the rustle of leaves, the clickity-click of BBs being loaded. We screamed and killed each other again and again. I had never had so much fun.

But my father thought I might have even more fun if I followed in his footsteps and joined the Boy Scouts. So one night Paul and I accompanied him to small cabin where the Camp Peary scouts held their weekly meetings. The front-gate guard, Toot, was the scoutmaster. The scouts were a sorry bunch, half a dozen or so boys in ragged uniforms, all sons of the base’s employees. Many of them were stoned much of the time. Few had any merit badges, and most were unenthusiastic about earning them. However, my father encouraged us to make the best of it.

Sometimes Toot took us camping. Even he, our fearless leader, recognised the apathy of his scouts, and he concentrated instead on his signature achievement — making a killer venison stew, which he wouldn’t stop talking about.

My dad came on some of the trips, but I tried to avoid involving him. He had been an eagle scout, such a standout, when I could barely tie a bowline knot. Instead, I delighted in rebelling by frequently, and loudly, labelling my fellow scouts as a group of ‘dickless wonders’. I had heard the word somewhere — maybe in a movie — and took to repeating it in an attempt to show my independence and what I believed was my great capacity for humour. (I can’t say the other scouts appreciated it.)

I liked the idea of learning to be capable and resourceful, but I realised that I liked it a lot more on the wrong side of right. I bombed at the Boy Scout jamborees, with their competitions for archery and knot-tying and teepee-building, where boys with flashy red neckties and bandoliers marched to the sound of trumpets. I enjoyed wallowing in my manifest inferiority. I liked plotting in the quiet of the forest, with a few fellows, the sabotage of some imaginary evil empire. But I wanted to do it alone, to hog the glory. I failed in the communal world somehow.

At a local jamboree that spring, Paul and I grew bored. So while the other scouts were preparing for an evening ‘rollcall’, we snuck off into the woods with a younger kid from our troop. After walking for awhile, we stopped to rest. Paul and I lit up. Go ahead, we said, proffering a lit cigarette to the kid. He refused. We puffed on our own and laughed.

When Toot found out, he kicked us out of the troop. My father stopped talking about the eagle scouts. He put me on restrictions again, this time for two months. But I wasn’t having any of it. I began to smoke pot, as most of the older kids did. I was only 12, but some of them were into cocaine and guns, so my transgressions didn’t seem so bad.

When the spring of 1986 rolled around, I had tired of living in the strange, forested land of Camp Peary. The thoughts of running away coalesced into an idea that maybe I should get out from under my father’s controlling eye for a while. My mother and her air-force tyrant had divorced, and she was living alone in California. She had been depressed. She had many problems with her parents. And for the last six years, although I had spent summers and some weekends with her, my relative absence from her life had taken a toll. She had wanted to have me around more, she had told me the summer before. So I called and said I wanted to come live with her. I thought I heard her sob.

That summer my father drove me back up Interstate 64. He was kind the whole way. But when we got to my grandparents’ house in Maryland, where he was to drop me off, he turned off the engine and broke down. I had never seen my father cry before, but he did then. He sobbed like a child; his whole body shook. I don’t know how I made it out of the car, but I did, into my grandparents’ basement, where I slumped in a chair and closed my eyes.