The Sweetness of Tears (15 page)

I was still on the couch, too tired to get up and too wound up to bother trying to sleep where I was, when, a little while later, I heard the key jiggle in the lock before the door creaked open, and a hand reached in to flick the lights on.

Colleen was already inside, mail in hand, when she saw me and gasped, “Oh! My! You scared me, Jo.”

“I’m sorry, Colleen.”

“I didn’t know you were home. I’ve got your mail here, from yesterday.”

“Thanks, Colleen. Come in.”

She put the mail down on the dining table before taking the few steps into the living room.

“When did you get home?”

“Last night. Late. Thanks again, Colleen. For taking care of everything. All the plants are thriving. Doing better than they would have if I’d been the one watering them.”

“That’s because I talk to them. You look exhausted.”

“Bone-weary. Too tired to move. I just want to sit here and do nothing.”

“Poor baby! You gonna be going away again soon? For work?”

“No. I quit.”

“Oh.” She paused. “Should I leave the keys on the table, then?”

“Nah. You keep them, Colleen, if you don’t mind. I’m going home for Thanksgiving next week. To California.”

“Oh, that’s nice. You haven’t been home for a while, have you?”

“A few months ago. But only for a day or two, when my brother came home from his tour in Iraq. I’m going to stay longer this time. While I’m there, I’m going to think about moving back home. To try and make the savings last as long as I can, now that I’m officially unemployed. You going anywhere, Colleen? For Thanksgiving?”

“Nope. My daughter’s coming to visit me. With her kids.”

“Oh. Well, feel free to use my place if you need more room for them to stay.”

“Aw—bless your heart, Jo.”

“I mean it.”

“Do you? That’s not a bad idea. If we get too crowded in my place, I might take you up on it. Well, I’m sure I’ll see you before you go. But if I don’t, you say hi to your family for me. And give your brother a big, giant hug from me!”

“I will.” Colleen had met Chris, once. When he’d come to visit me before being deployed.

“See ya later,” Colleen said, leaving, taking her cheery energy out the door with her.

I went through the mail when she left, seriously this time. Got out my checkbook and caught up on my bills. I called the cable company. If I was going to continue to be sleepless, I needed my cable.

I got through the day. Went out to stock up on some groceries. I called Dan. And Mom and Dad and Chris. Thanksgiving was going to be a big deal for Mom. The first one we’d all be at in a long time. Uncle Ron and his family would be there, driving down from Los Angeles. Grandma Faith would be coming home, too, just in time, back from a quick mission, the first one she’d gone on since Chris was at boot camp, going only after he’d come home from Iraq.

By evening, I was unpacked, stacking the new Urdu and Arabic DVDs in the cabinet with the rest of my movie collection. I cleaned up, wiping away the dust that had settled on the surfaces of tables and counters while I was away, and did some laundry. Took a hot bath. Made myself some cocoa. And took up my place on the couch again, a book in hand. After a while, I put it down, giving up the fight.

It wasn’t the parade of images that was getting in the way now. Just one—one bewildered face. There were plenty of reasons for him to be memorable. He’d been rounded up in a house raid in Karachi—one that had netted some pretty big fish and made it into the news. Everyone caught in that net was considered high-value, and the team had been pretty excited. These were some really bad guys. Most of them had been shot during the raid, and the Pakistani authorities hadn’t bothered to treat any of them. So they came to us with wounds, festering. His was in his thigh. He’d also been beaten up pretty badly. He couldn’t walk and had to be held up and frog-marched.

His name was Fazl. The guys called him Fuzzy, behind his back, and then, eventually, to his face. That was against protocol. We were only supposed to refer to detainees by their numbers. But in Fuzzy’s case, for some reason, everyone broke that particular rule. He was only a few years older than me. And something he’d said, more to himself than to me, mumbling, had stayed with me, striking a chord of memory—like déjà vu. It was a spectacular coincidence. It had to be. But it had nothing to do with what the guys on the team wanted to hear.

There’d been some hesitation about taking him with us at all. We’d walked through the cell block in Karachi, doing the usual preliminary screenings. The biggest fish, the one whose name was on the front page of the
New York Times
that week, spoke English, so I wasn’t called in to help with him. Outside of Fuzzy’s cell, we stopped, trying to get his story. About what he was doing in the house that had been raided.

One of the Pakistani agents came up to us and said, pointing at the guy we’d soon be calling Fuzzy, “This one is retahded.” We’d stared at him blankly. “He’s—not right in the head. An idjit. Stchupid, you know. The mind of a child. He says he was only a gatekeeper. He didn’t even have a gun on him. The others say the same thing about him.”

One of our guys said, “So—he was a bodyguard, eh? And the retarded thing—it’s an act. It’s standard op with these guys. To pretend not to know anything.”

The Pakistani agent shook his head. “He’s not pretending. He’s retahded, I tell you. Poor bahstard. You’ll get nothing out of him. And he’s not one of
them.
” He pointed his head in the direction of the cell block where the biggies were. “He’s Pakistani. Not Arab.”

The lead interrogator stood and stared at Fuzzy for a moment, unsure. This was unusual, to have a local agent discourage us from taking a detainee. The Pakistanis would have given us a lot more guys if we let them. There was a lot of money to be made, handing them over for American taxpayer-funded bounty.

Then the lead guy said, “We’ve got to be careful. They’re telling us that we’re bringing in too many of ’em who have nothing to give us.”

Breaking another rule, unwritten, I used a word we weren’t even supposed to think, saying, “You mean— they’re innocent?”

“I didn’t say that!” he snapped.

“Look,” one of the other guys on the team said, “we’ve got our orders. This was a big raid. Everyone in that house has something to tell us. Even this fuckin’ loser.”

That had settled it.

I
was the interpreter assigned to Fuzzy’s interrogation. If he was acting, he was really good at it.

No matter what we asked him, he’d always go back to the beginning, speaking in a very soft voice, so soft that I had to lean in close to hear what he was saying. “When I was little,” he’d say, “my mother died. We were in the city. And she died. I was all alone.”

“What the hell’s he saying?!” the interrogator, my least favorite to work with, thundered.

“He’s talking about how his mother died when he was little.”

“What am I, fuckin’ Freud, now? I don’t give a shit about his mother. Ask him about his boss. Ask him if he’s ever met Bin Laden.”

I did what I was told. But Fuzzy just started over again, still barely audible. “When I was little, my mother died. I was very, very little. We were in the city. The big city. We’d left home. She died. And I was all alone.”

He made the interrogator furious. Fuzzy suffered for that fury. But nothing that they did to him got him on the track they wanted him on. It wasn’t that he was being uncooperative. It was just that he seemed not to understand how to start in the middle of the story. He
had
to start at the beginning. After a while, after Fuzzy had been punished a lot for what the interrogator considered to be uncooperative behavior, the team tried a new tactic. They let Fuzzy start at the beginning.

“When I was little, my mother died. I was very little. We were in the city. I was all alone. Then Uncle came to see me. He said he would take care of me. He took me to a school.”

“What’s that he said?!” the interrogator interrupted. “Something about a
madrassa
?”

“Yes. But that’s just a word for ‘school’—he says he went to school.”

“Yeah! Fuckin’ jeehad school is what it is! Ask him about that! About where the school was. Did they have guns there?”

I asked Fuzzy about the school. But the interruption had caused him to start at the beginning. “When I was little, my mother died . . .”

“Jesus Christ! This moron is fuckin’ killing me!” The interrogator threw his hands up, curled them into fists, and waved them around for a second, and then sat down again.

Fuzzy, again, started at the beginning. It took a few moments for him to catch up to where he’d been before. That’s when I resumed my translation.

“Uncle took me to school. I learned there. But it was a hard school. They used to beat me. I learned to read the Quran. Uncle used to come and visit sometimes. When he found out that they beat me, he was angry. He took me out of that school and put me in another. He wasn’t really my uncle, he told me. He paid for my fees. Bought my clothes and books. Uncle was good to me. Sharif Muhammad Uncle.”

My eyes widened. I—I remembered that name.

The interrogator said, “What’s that he said? He gave you a name?”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly.

“Sharif Muhammad?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him who he is. Ask him how he’s connected.”

“He says it’s his uncle. Who took care of him when his mother died.”

The interrogator worked hard to bite back another outburst. With an angry exhale of breath, he let Fuzzy go on talking.

“Go and ask him,” Fuzzy said. “Find him. Sharif Muhammad Chacha will help me. He has always taken care of me. When others were unkind. He will come again to save me, I know,” Fuzzy said.

Finally, Fuzzy got to the point in his story that we were interested in, telling us that when he was done with school, he’d gone to work. In a series of jobs. Finally, through someone he knew, he’d been hired as the gatekeeper for the raided house.

“I was the one who opened the gate when people came. I was the one who shut the gate when people left.”

“What people?”

“I don’t know.”

We were at the end of the line of Fuzzy’s thinking. After that, he just went back to the beginning again. “When I was little, my mother died . . .”

When he caught up to the present the second time, the interrogator shot out more questions, a little more gently than before. He tried to come back to that name a couple of times. Sharif Muhammad. But all Fuzzy ever said was that he was his uncle. Not his real uncle. But an uncle who took care of him.

I broke the rules once more, asking Fuzzy a question that didn’t come from the interrogator.

Pissed, the interrogating agent barked at me, “What’d you ask him?”

“I asked him how his mother died.”

“Don’t go encouraging him! Who gives a shit about his damned mother?” After a pause, almost in spite of himself, the interrogator asked, “What’d he say?”

In a whisper softer than Fuzzy’s, I said, “He said she was hit by a car.”

I did what I was supposed to for the rest of that interrogation. But I wasn’t there anymore.
It couldn’t be,
I kept telling myself. They say the world is small. But Karachi is a city of 14 million people. It just couldn’t be related. To Sadiq. To my brown eyes and the story behind them.

Eventually, they gave up on Fuzzy. But they didn’t let him go. They sent him to Guantánamo Bay. Leaving me, in the midst of all the other crap I carried around, wondering about coincidence, which I used to believe was just another word for Providence—God’s plan for the universe.

T
wo days later, my boss—my former boss—called again.

“What the hell are you playing at, Jo?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t bullshit me. The Department’s got your application for clearance. They cross-checked you and realized you were one of ours. They’re furious!”

“Oh. That.”

“Look, Jo, I know you’ve been unhappy. But that’s no reason to turn your whole life upside down.”

“I don’t see that this is any of your business. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. And I applied for the other position months ago.”

“Well, I’m not gonna let you do this, Jo. Losing your nerve is one thing. But you can’t flip over and out like this.”

“I’m not flipping out. I’m straightening myself up. And I’m not losing my nerve. I just got it back.”

“Look, I know this whole thing has been messy, that some of your assignments have been a little—unconventional. Too much John Wayne, and not enough Jimmy Stewart. It’s what the times called for and there’s talk of some of that changing. Maybe. For the better. In the meantime, you can’t go off and start working for the other side!”

“The other side?”

“Hell, yes! That’s exactly what you’re doing, Jo.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“Oh yeah? Well, good luck paying the rent!”

This time, when he hung up, I could tell he wanted to slam the phone down. Too bad you can’t do that with a cell phone.

He was right about the last thing he’d said. I looked around at my apartment, and thought about the salary the lawyer had quoted, a fraction of what I’d made on contract. No benefits, either. And another six months or more before I was cleared, again, for security. From a different angle. They’d drag their heels this time. Standard Stalling Procedure. It felt good to think about all of this, to calculate my own redemption.

W
hen the phone rang again, it was my
new
boss calling.

“Hi, Jo. Just calling to catch up. All the paperwork’s in,” she said. Her name was Cheryl. She was a lawyer.

“I know. My former employer just called to scream.”

“Oh? Yeah. Well, this is unusual. To come from your line of work into mine.”

“I know.”

“It’s gonna take a while, though, to get in the door.”

“I’m ready for that.”

“Good. And— that other matter you were asking about?”

I knew right away what she meant. This new boss of mine was a little paranoid about talking openly on the phone. She was convinced that the government was listening in. She was probably right.