CHAPTER 20

Mexico, 2006

In the spring of 2006, on another break from Baghdad, I asked my father to go on holiday with me in Mexico. He had just returned home from another tour in Bosnia as an independent contractor.

I picked him up at the airport in Puerto Vallarta, and we headed to the little town on the Pacific coast where I was staying. We turned a corner and drove down a muddy road, where women in brightly coloured robes were selling Huichol beads, straw dolls, and clay statuettes of the Virgen de Guadalupe. A dirt road paralleled the beach. A few young guys wandered by, carrying surfboards. We passed women in sundresses, dogs resting in the shade of cars and tin porches, and hibiscus and bougainvillea springing out from the underbrush and the sides of houses. The road wound up and around the north end of the village, and the ocean spilled out below, underneath a sloping terrace of wild grass and neem trees and acacias that held black frigatebirds, iguanas, and geckos. He wore sunglasses. I felt like we were a couple of gringo thugs.

The war in Baghdad was as bad as it had ever been. There were revelations about Iraqis being killed in CIA detention facilities. It seemed like the world was coming apart. I asked him where he was going next. He stared out the windows at the shirtless brown men pouring cement and laying tile, but if he noticed them he didn’t give any indication. ‘I have …’ he began, and smiled to himself. ‘I’ve been having some moral qualms.’

I turned sharply and looked at him. ‘Oh?’

‘I might not go back again,’ he said. It wasn’t clear if that meant anywhere, or just to the places that provoked the moral qualms.

I asked him if it was the first time he had felt that way, and he nodded.

‘It must have been something pretty serious,’ I said, trying to draw him out, but he shook his head, uncomfortable with specificity. We kept driving. I reminded him about the CIA contractors who had been accused of murder, those who had been implicated in torturing Iraqis in CIA detention facilities, and those in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He knew about all of this, of course. He nodded in disgust.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We’ll see.’

The last time my father was anywhere near here was almost 40 years earlier, when he had brought my mother to Puerto Vallarta for their honeymoon. This stretch of coast was nothing more than a string of fishing villages then. You could stand at one end of Puerto Vallarta and see the other end. There were two taxis in town, and a couple of thousand people. They rented a little bungalow right on the beach for eight dollars a night.

During the honeymoon, my father spoke to his cousin, Graydon, and invited him down to join them. This was made much fun of in years to come. How could you bring your cousin on your honeymoon? Graydon brought his fiancée. They were a young quartet, full of romance and possibility. The beaches they lay on have disappeared since, buried under cement and rebar.

We settled into our house, just above the beach, where the sound of the breakers rolled from day into evening and night. I put him in the room where I normally stayed and moved my blanket out onto the couch in the living room. I asked if he was comfortable and he said he couldn’t be more so. He plugged in his computer to show me pictures later. He arranged his insulin kit on the bedside table. He carefully spread his clothes out on the dresser. He admired the art on the walls. Meanwhile, I went outside and got stoned on a whim, for I didn’t smoke regularly, and came back.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘Just gorgeous.’

We went to sleep to the sound of the ocean. The waves crashed and retreated and crashed again as darkness fell and the whirring ceiling fans came to life and began to thump.

The next day I took him up to the hills in the next town over, where I had bought a small, fixer-upper house. The hills were lush and verdant, filled with palms and Higueras and Parrotta trees, where birdnests filled with eggs hung down like burlap sacks. In the hills there was a pond where iguanas and parrots lived, and horses roamed among the palms freely. From the top of one hill was a view that stretched all the way down to the little town below, and beyond that shone the blue panel of the sea. Burls of clouds rose up from behind the hills and crept along horizontally. My father talked about building a house. He took pictures and gazed out through the trees, enraptured.

On the way back home, he brought up an article I had written a couple of years before, about an Afghan warlord named Pacha Khan Zadran who had been a particularly nettlesome figure for the Americans. Zadran had probably been responsible for an ambush and nighttime attack on me and my friends near Gardez a few years earlier; his thugs controlled the area we were working in, and had the sources to know where we were at any given time. Later, when my father had gone to work at the CIA’s base in Khost in 2004, Zadran had continued to be a problem; the warlord was still operating in and around Gardez and Khost. Sometimes he fought alongside the Americans, sometimes against them. As we were driving along through the canopy of trees back to our rented house, my father lamented Zadran’s fate. ‘They should have killed him,’ he said. ‘I told them they should.’

And then he added, ‘But they never listen to me — that’s why I can say things like that. I’m not important enough.’

I didn’t say anything. After a long silence, he asked me if something was wrong. I shook my head. We drove along under the valley trees, which were dry, still, and unbloomed; dusty-looking.

‘I’ll be excited when they come up with a real, viable desalination machine,’ he eventually said, as if to no one in particular. ‘That’ll change a lot of things.’

I kept on driving. He said nothing more. We turned into the town and made our way to the house, where I collapsed on the sofa.

I wondered if his outburst had been a sudden expression of a desire for revenge — if it made sense to him that the perpetrator of the attack against me years before should just have been killed. A warlord couldn’t, of course, simply be killed. Or rather, he could, but not for an offence like that. It was simply a fantasy of sorts. I had never heard my father express the idea that someone should be killed. If most people’s dads said those kinds of things, I thought, it would seem innocuous.

That night I brought up again the CIA contractors in Iraq accused of murder. They had tortured Iraqis in dank prison cells and gotten away with it. My job, as a journalist in Iraq, had been to find the full story behind it. But I didn’t know anything more than anyone else. ‘They were contractors,’ I said, vaguely. Were they really like you, I wondered to myself. I couldn’t square the idea I had of my father with this much larger reality.

He changed the subject. It made him uncomfortable, but I didn’t really care. I wanted him to be uncomfortable just then, to see how it felt to get grilled, to be uneasy. He asked a question, and moved the conversation on to something else. He began taking pictures of me. It seemed that he could hardly keep his attention on one thing for more than a few seconds. I couldn’t stand it. I told him I didn’t want to be photographed, but he went on taking pictures anyway.

That night, we went to dinner at a restaurant that overlooked the town square. I asked for a table on the edge of the floor, near a broken palapa roof. The light in the corner was dim. To the side of the roof a full moon had risen. Around it, a thin halo amplified the moonlight and cast it in an out-of-focus haze. I ordered wine. I looked at him across the table. He sat with his arms crossed and looked at me. His sun-kissed face seemed angry; his brows were furrowed. I waited for the wine to come, and when it did, I finished it quickly and ordered another.

‘Good wine,’ he said.

‘Mmm.’

My heart was beating hard. We started talking in general terms about his work — I had taken his advice to work on my ‘elicitation skills’. I asked him suddenly if his career had made it more difficult to establish personal relationships or intimacy.

He scrutinised me. I was sweating. Over the years, his privacy had come to seem to me like a precious commodity. Sometimes I wanted his confessions; sometimes I wanted nothing. He told me he couldn’t think of anything about his job that made it especially difficult to have personal relationships. He said he didn’t understand what about my childhood was strange or weird. ‘What was stranger about your growing up than …’ and he mentioned another family whose parents worked for the real state department, and whose moves and constant instability mirrored my own in virtually every other way.

So I told him. It was strange to come home and find one of his drivers’ licences with an alias I had never heard before sitting on the microwave. Or have a CIA psychiatrist examine my mental fitness for another of his foreign postings.

‘Where?’ my father asked, incredulous. ‘Where did that happen?’

‘In Virginia,’ I said.

‘A psychiatrist?’ he asked again, unbelieving.

‘Yeah.’ I nodded, sipped more wine, and leaned back in my chair.

‘What did he want to know?’

He had a list of questions and he was checking off my answers on a piece of paper, I told him. ‘Oh, and there was also something I had to fill out at home.’

‘There was?’ He was struck.

‘That was weird.’

‘What kind of questions?’

‘If I had taken drugs.’

‘I don’t remember that at all.’

‘Really,’ I muttered, marvelling at how he could have forgotten something, which, at the time at least, had seemed so monumental.

But he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t remember that at all.’

I sat staring at nothing in particular for a long time. A few tables away, an elderly couple was finishing off a pair of drinks and it struck me suddenly that the woman might be trying to listen to us. The couple was quiet, perhaps only contemplative, basking in the evening air and the unencumbered view of the hills, where a thousand small lights were spread like floaters in a fishing net. But for a moment all I heard were dangerous words, like ‘CIA’ and ‘operations’, words that had no place on this soft night. His eyebrows were arched, and I was glad that he was facing away from the rest of the diners. Did I engineer this on purpose — this subtle removal, far enough away from the crowd so that the others would have difficulty in hearing us, or working out what remained unspoken between us? Did I, as he had so often accused me, direct him here to interrogate him, to get the answers I wanted to hear? Instinctively, I brought my hand up to my lips and made a sign for quiet with my fingers while looking past him at the other table, and without skipping a beat his voice descended a pitch and his head bent down a few degrees. This was part of the game, too. These subtle shifts are part of any human exchange but, with us, it took on something of the cloak-and-dagger. I wanted to be able to relate to him on this level, to speak his language of secrecy.

He asked me what else.

‘There were a lot of weird things,’ I said.

We were silent a while.

‘What about Tlatelolco?’ I asked.

‘What about it?’ he said. ‘I wasn’t there on the night of the big massacre. I was there another night. I think you’re confusing two nights.’ Then he laughed. ‘Scotty, I wasn’t involved in any massacre. I never saw anything like that. I promise you.’

I actually knew this by then, for as I dug I had realised that I had conflated the dates of two separate incidents. I had, on my own, absolved him of any crimes. But I wanted to hear it from him, again. Ultimately, I wanted an acknowledgement that my memories, real or imagined, were at least something — that I hadn’t dreamed it all, that his faulty and selective memory was not mine, and that I was not crazy if I remembered my life with a twinge of fear, sometimes, or paranoia. I may never know how much of that fear could be chalked up to my own genetic make-up, the quirks of my brain chemistry, how much my own sensitivity to life trumped, in the end, whatever my father did or did not do. As wonderful a father as he was, and is, however, a part of me still needed to hear him recognise that both of us — me just as much as him — were children of the CIA.