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  for my daughter Merritt

  and

  in memory of

  Pat Conroy, old courage teacher

  1945–2016

  This is a lesson in the intimacy of distance.

  —DON DELILLO, Players

  . . . when Americans pray, they pray first that history will step aside and leave them alone, they pray for the deafness that comes with a comfortable life. They pray for the soothing blindness of happiness, and why not?

  —BOB SHACOCHIS, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

  Prologue

  They watch it in Washington, in London, Berlin. Al Jazeera runs it on a loop, and down in a subbasement at Langley analysts play with its pixels, enlarging this, erasing that. There’s a team at one of the strip-mall spy shops along the Dulles Toll Road that does nothing but contrast. You heat the color, you cool it. Another shop does sound, sonic mapping, a processor advancing the volume forward at the rate of picoseconds.

  They watch it at home, too, American homes living their American lives. At least until it disappears from first the networks and then the Internet. It will reappear, of course, in a few days’ time, pirated on a thousand servers, but for the moment those who know better than you have seen to its erasure. But before it vanishes she will find it.

  She will watch on her wafer-thin tablet, sitting on the far corner of the made bed, barefoot and cross-legged and huddled over the screen as if to keep all the changing light for herself. She is scared, of course, but she is also ashamed. Her husband, John, is at work—John is always at work. Her children in the living room in front of PBS Kids. But there’s still the fear, irrational as it may be, that someone will walk in and then it’s all hey, babe, what are you—or Mommy, I need—and how could you ever explain it? The how-to-explain-it part which, beyond the shame, is its own form of grief. Because grief is there, make no mistake about that.

  There is grief.

  But why can’t she get past it?

  Shouldn’t she be able to get past it?

  Tess considers this more often than she should. She’s unloading the dishwasher or changing a pull-up—step out, baby, step out for mommy—or watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and it comes to her that perhaps it isn’t her fault, that perhaps it seeks a certain viewer and then adheres? Like the way the street people always seem to single her out, not deep calling to deep—ha! what a joke, Tess, so funny, you—but crazy seeking crazy. Husband and children around her and somehow they come straight for her. Homeless and bad-eyed. Dreadlocked and dirty. And here’s Tess with her pockets stuffed with tissues and small bills. Green Chiclets like you don’t even know they make anymore. They just see something in you, honey. Her husband explaining. They’ve got a radar for it. It’s true. She knows it’s true. There’s a gawkiness about her and some days she expects to be led away in restraints. Other days she feels a hand-clap from sanity. But not this week, not today.

  Today, she watches in the bedroom.

  She watches the black flag with its swirl of white letters, elegant in everything except intent, and then the flag is gone and what she is looking at is a man in all black: pants, shirt, boots. His face hooded. Only his hands show and in one is the long blade of what she has read is a ceremonial dagger, a khanjar. At his feet kneels a man in an orange jumpsuit—orange for noncompliant in Guantanamo protocol, she has read this, too. They are alone in a desert: colorless sand, a wash of pale blue sky. The horizon bisects the standing man just above his waist. He shows the dagger, raises it. The kneeling man—Western, exhausted—makes no move, not for several seconds. And then he cants his head. She watches for it, studies the time markers for twitches, anticipates the slightest of gestures. When he begins to speak—the man in black, she means, this in the thirty-ninth second—words begin to block across the bottom of the screen, that otherwise lovely Arabic script.

  But he is speaking English.

  He is speaking perfect English in what strikes her as a rather refined British accent. She only half hears. Over multiple viewings she has absorbed it, and the more she absorbs it the less sense it makes. Or not sense exactly—sense isn’t the right word. It’s all Allahu akbar and infidel this and infidel that. America, Obama, Israel, the Jews. It’s interchangeable and not relevant to what it is she’s trying to get to the bottom of. She wants an answer to the gut-level panic she feels every time she watches the video; she wants to know why it’s so satisfying. She wants an answer as to why she can’t stop watching. It’s evil, yes, but don’t give her evil for an answer. Somehow that feels too easy. That there’s something coming off the screen—yes. Just sitting there with the tablet in her lap she feels it. A radiation of sorts, a presence. Something dangerous she has invited in.

  A demon, her husband would say, were her husband ever to know.

  But don’t give her demon either. Too obvious, too easy—no matter how true it is.

  Don’t give her blood or terror or horror. Don’t talk to her about the train wreck of decapitation or the lure of suffering. Some bottled-up Christian thing. So long as there was a living memory of actual crucifixion the cross was not an icon. No pendants, no bracelets or T-shirts. No elaborate HIS PAIN, OUR GAIN tattoos. She heard someone say once that it would have been like walking around with a picture of the electric chair on your back. She doesn’t know the answer except to say that isn’t it.

  All she knows is that she can’t stop watching.

  All she knows is that it has begun to permeate things: her hair, her clothes, her room, her life.

  Outside is an entire world of sunlight and bees and the way her children run through the dewy grass imagining they’re animals, jaguars and pumas, but none of it is half as—she wants to say real, but the word feels so heavy, so freighted with the kind of significance that generally speaking embarrasses her. So she doesn’t want to say anything. She only wants to see it. She only wants to feel it because feeling it is so much—Christ forgive me—feeling it is so much like prayer that it frightens her.

  She puts the tablet on the floor, checks the kids, checks the driveway, and then eases back to the bedroom. Shuts the door halfway. Mutes the volume for the tenth time. She has a website listing the kidnapped bookmarked; you have to refresh the page to make sure there hasn’t been another. Next will be the man in the basement, the American with his flaking scalp, completely alone but for a handmade chessboard.

  Tess knows things about him.

  He has skin problems and a graduate degree in philosophy. Right out of undergrad he spent two years teaching elementary school in the Mississippi Delta with a service organization. These things are known. What else? The chess pieces are little cardboard squares, the images scratched in ballpoint pen. One of the released prisoners smuggled out a pawn. She’s seen a photograph of it online.

  She knows the story, too.

  How he was driving in northern Iraq, west toward the Turkish border when he and his translator—a Shia who had fled Tikrit—stopped at an Internet café to e-mail the pictures the journalist had taken. He was meticulous about this, always a little paranoid. He’d seen other journalists lose their entire cameras, taken from them by local police, government officials, anyone with a pistol and the ability to point. It was so deeply ingrained, this fear, that he could barely photograph a fe
w kids playing soccer in the sun before he was plugging his memory card into an Internet connection and e-mailing them to New York.

  They were less than forty kilometers from the border, could be there in a half-hour, but it was the border he feared. They stopped. Dusty, dark, cool. Men drinking arak. A few computers against the far wall. Two thousand dinars for a half-hour. No one meeting anyone’s eye until a large bearded man with a knife on his belt—there was a name for it, too, this knife—a scimitar! A bearded man with a scimitar in his belt stood up, barked something drunkenly at the journalist and his translator, and staggered out.

  Ten minutes later they were on the road. Five minutes after that they saw the roadblock. Hooded men. Kalashnikovs. A Hilux across the asphalt. They pulled over. What else could they do? It was surprise as much as fear. The roadblock wasn’t supposed to be there. But then again the man with the scimitar wasn’t supposed to be there either. Other prisoners, those who had been released—Turks and Italians, a trauma surgeon with the Red Crescent—spoke of how out of place he seemed, shackled in the basement with his handmade chessboard and psoriasis. They talked about how he didn’t seem to belong, and this is the part that scares her most, the lure of randomness, the gravity of chance.

  She opens a second tab to check CNN. U.S. and French jets are bombing targets on the outskirts of Kobane. Turkey has closed the border. It’s possible the man in the basement is somewhere in the city. It’s possible the man in the basement can hear the bombs falling.

  What she can hear are the boys in the living room, arguing.

  And what she wants to know is what difference does it make if she watches or not? She believes it matters, the this or that of her choosing, only she can’t say how. For the moment she puts the questions aside, closes the CNN tab so that in the center of the screen beats a great arrow, right-facing and almost heart-like in its insistence, and she touches it so he can begin to die again, and so that she can watch again.

  And so that she can think again: amen.

  Part One

  The Man in the Basement

  1.

  John Maynard took his Prilosec, hugged his kids, and headed out the door to work. This, he believed, was as it should be. There were limits to what could be known—he knew that now—the unknowable was vast. So instead of the unknowable, he had a house in a nice neighborhood on the edge of town, and in the evenings he and his family would walk through the pine- and diesel-scented humidity, north Georgia simmering in the unblinking summer heat. Everywhere sculpted lawns and chirping sprinklers, expensive cars gliding over the cobblestones—a universe of cut grass and chlorine. He walked to work and never minded it. The walk meant he was alone, at least for the mile past the community gates to the college on Highway 76, where, from the edge of campus, you could see the gentrified downtown with its coffee shops and CrossFit. Beyond that stood a line of gas stations and souvenir stores, the handmade Cherokee moccasins machine-made in China, the idling caravans of RVs. Beyond that there were only trees, mountains and trees.

  Those trees, those mountains—the absence of the larger world—was, perhaps, the point.

  John was in his fourth year as director of the Garrison College counseling center and had spent much of the first three holed up in his office with forms and online learning modules and every other administrative duty the college threw at him. In between videos on workplace behavior and sexual harassment he visited various campus groups, cultivating a deep and enviable list of followers on Twitter through which he disseminated the occasional inspiring/spiritual/multicultural quote. It was a way to appear busy, as much to himself as anyone else, and there were days he told himself he looked forward to the moment when he could spend more time outside his office. But just as often—more often lately—he admitted to himself he was hiding. To come out would be to risk exposure, the chance for them to know what he had done. Which would tell them not who he had been, but who he was still.

  His office was the perfect place to disappear.

  The Sojourner Truth Center was spare and modern and buried in a dense forest on the back side of campus. Thirty offices housing a collection of academic and professional odds and ends, all the entities too small to command their own space: Gender Studies, career counseling, the Office of Social Justice. Despite the façade it had an antique feel: beautiful conifer trees around a finger of lake. Peeling blue paint and carpenter ants—someone from maintenance was always spraying—shelves of books read and forgotten.

  It was only in the last spring he had started to make trips out to the college quad, the stone fountain and fir trees. The cobbled walks that spoked from the center. He would walk out and try to take the measure of the place. The lawn care was world-class and he had come to appreciate it, the flowers, the predawn gauze of sprinklers. The students complained. A group of them had come to him wanting to organize a protest. How much of their precious tuition was going to irrigation, to mulch beds, to ground cover?

  Too much, John was certain, but equally certain it didn’t matter. Later, when he told the story at dinner parties, people laughed. But he had approached the matter seriously. He asked the students if they thought it a sin, this constant attention to appearances, and they had looked at him with equal parts sympathy and dismissal.

  Maybe not a sin, professor, so much as a misappropriation of funds.

  They were right, of course, yet the moment you stopped believing in sin something settled. It was what happened to them at Site Nine, this forgetfulness, this failure to believe, and the moment you stopped believing you started talking about tactical mistakes, policy errors instead of distance from God. But God, John knew, is alive, and so is the Devil.

  He thought often of the Devil.

  At night, sitting with the lights off, drinking his gentlemanly bourbon, he could see the students who would slip through the trees down to the banks of the lake and there, on blankets, or beneath blankets, make love. Unseen. Or so they imagined themselves. It held no real interest for him, no prurient fascination, though he always watched. The methodical rippling of old quilts or, on the rare occasion, and only among the fearless, the bodies atop the quilts, the panels of flesh, the sounds which from behind a pane of glass he could only imagine.

  So yes, he watched. The way they touched, the way their bodies met and parted and met again, seemingly without the slightest consideration of God or the Devil—he envied that. Sometimes, having friended nearly half the student body on Facebook, he tried to put faces—or legs or stomachs or backs—together with names, amazed that anyone anywhere had enough energy to do anything, let alone make love beneath the late-summer stars. John Maynard was very tired. But if his wife, Tess, wasn’t happy—and on this he was agnostic—he could at least counter that he was exhausted.

  But exhaustion was a small price to pay if it meant the past was lost, blessedly lost.

  Then one day the past reappeared in the shape of James Stone.

  John saw him from a distance, leaned against the smoked-glass exterior of the Truth Center, one foot hitched against the wall, hands laced over his stomach as if in anticipation of pain. He stood, John thought on seeing him, almost as if he knew John was waiting for him, which John both was and wasn’t. This was on a Saturday in late August, Move-In Day, and the smile on Stone’s face seemed to imply he was about to rewrite the day. Another thing that both was and wasn’t the case.

  “Jimmy,” John said.

  “So now it’s Jimmy, is it?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I scare you?”

  “Surprised me.”

  “Surprised you. Seems like a fair response. Not exactly generous, but fair.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Delighted to see you, too, John.” Stone pushed off the wall and stretched his arms as if waking. “You know you never used to call me Jimmy. It was always, ‘Stone this,’ ‘Stone that.’ ”

  “We haven’t said a word to each other in what?”

  “As if that�
��s my fault.”

  “Six years it must be.”

  “Six years.” He waved them away with a brush of his hand. “You know you never even said goodbye the day you left. Just headed up the road to Kraków and caught the evening Lufthansa to JFK. Gone before I knew it.”

  “I had to see someone.”

  “That sort of hurt my feelings, leaving like that.”

  “I had to see Peter.”

  “Peter? Fuck Peter. You left us. It was just Ray Bageant and me, alone with all those goddamn Polish commandos. The slivovitz and prison tats. And not so much as a goodbye from you.”

  “That was sort of the point, the not saying goodbye.”

  “The one guy with the rhinestone sheath for his mobile phone. You remember this? All the little charms of Site Nine.”

  “I work here now.”

  “Of course you do. Why else would I be here?” Stone stepped from the pine bark and pointed at the building’s rear doors, one of which was propped open. “Did you see them inside there? Those guys are GBI.”

  “What guys?”

  “Georgia Bureau of Investigation. See the plates?”

  He was talking about the license plates on the two SUVs that John now noticed parked sideways across a line of handicap spaces. State of Georgia. Fulton County. Fulton being Atlanta.

  “Oh,” John said finally. “What are—”

  “Don’t worry,” Stone said, “they aren’t here for you. Not yet. But ‘oh’ is certainly right, my friend. They’re taking his hard drives, his phone records. Got his filing cabinet on hand trucks. Every last bit of his stuff.”

  “Whose stuff?”

  “Professor Hadawi, of course. Aren’t you two tight?”

  “Edward Hadawi you’re talking about?”

  “I think I heard that somewhere.”

  “What do you mean ‘not yet’?”