You Think That's Bad (2 page)

“So it was kind of a romantic thing,” she said.

“Yeah, it was totally physical,” I told her. “Like you and your mom.”

Carly had gotten this far by telling herself that compartmentalizing wasn't
all
bad: that some doors may have been shut off but that the really important ones were wide open. And in terms of intimacy, she was far and away as good as things were going to get
for me. We had this look we gave each other in public that said,
I know. I already thought that
. We'd each been engaged when we met and we'd stuck with each other through a lot of other people's crap. Late at night we lay nose to nose in the dark and told each other stuff nobody else had ever heard us say. I told her about some of the times I'd been a dick and she told me about a kid she'd miscarried, and about another she'd put up for adoption when she was seventeen. She had no idea where he was now, but not a day went by that she didn't think about it. We called them both Little Jimmy. And for a while there was all this magical thinking, and not asking each other all that much because we thought we already knew.

That not-being-on-the-same-page thing had become a bigger issue for me lately, though that's something she didn't know. Which is perfect, she would've said.

What I'd been working on at that point had gone south a little. Another way of putting it would be to say that what I was doing was wrong. The ATOP we'd developed for Minotaur had been an unarmed drone that could hover above one spot like a satellite couldn't, providing instant lookdown for as long as a battlefield commander wanted it. But how long had it taken for us to retrofit them with air-to-surface missiles? And how many Fiats and Citroëns have those drones taken out because somebody back in Langley thought the right target was in the car?

There was an army of us out there up to the same sorts of hijinks and not able to talk about it. Where I worked, everything was black: not only the test flights, but also the resupply, the maintenance, the search-and-rescue. And the security scrutiny never went away. The guy who led my last project team, at home when he went to bed, after he hit the lights, waved to the surveillance guys. His wife never understood why even in August they had to do everything under the sheets.

On black-world patches you see a lot of sigmas because that's the engineering symbol for the unknown value.

“The Minotaur's the one in the labyrinth, right?” the materials guy in my project team asked the first day. When I told him it was, he wanted to know if the Minotaur was supposed to know where it was going, or if it was lost, too. That'd be funny, I told him. And we joked about the monster
and
the hero just wandering around through all these dark corridors, nobody finding anybody.

And now here I was and here Kenny was, with poor Carly trying to get a fix on either one of us.

“So what brings you to this neck of the woods?” I finally asked him once we were well into our second drinks.

“You know how
sad
he was,” Carly asked, “when he couldn't get in touch with you anymore?”

“How sad?” Kenny asked. Celestine seemed curious, too.

“I thought we were gonna have to get him some counseling,” Carly said.

“It's hard to adjust to not being with me anymore,” Kenny told her.

“So did he ever talk to you about me?” she asked.

“You came up,” Kenny answered, and even Celestine picked up on the unpleasantness.

“I'm listening,” Carly said.

“Oh, he was all hot to trot whenever he talked about you,” Kenny said.

“Sang my praises, did he?” Carly's face had the expression she gets when somebody's tracked something into the house.

“When he wasn't shooting himself in the foot about you, he was pretty happy,” Kenny said. “I called it his good-woman face.”

“As in, I had one,” I explained.

“Whenever he tied himself in knots about something, I called it his Little Jimmy face,” he said. When Carly swung around toward him, he said, “Sorry, chief.”

“That was a comic thing for you?” Carly asked me. “The kind of thing you'd tell like a funny story?”

“I never thought it was a funny story,” I told her.

“There's his Little Jimmy face now,” Kenny noted. When she looked at him again, he used his index fingers to pull down on his lower eyelids and made an Emmett Kelly frown.

“We started calling potential targets Little Jimmies,” he said, “whenever we were going to bring the hammer down and maximize collateral damage.”

Carly was looking at something in front of her the way you try not to move even your eyes to keep from throwing up. “What is that supposed to mean?” she finally said in a low voice.

“You know,” Kenny told her. “ ‘I don't wike the
wooks
of this …' ”

“Is that Elmer
Fudd
you're doing?” Celestine wanted to know.

And how could you not laugh, watching him do his poor-sap-in-the-crosshairs shtick?

“This is just the fucking House of Mirth, isn't it?” Carly said. Because she saw on my face just how many doors she'd been dealing with all along, both open and shut, and she also saw the We're-in-the-boat-and-you're-in-the-water expression that guys cut from our project teams always got when they asked if there was anything
we
could do to keep them onboard.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” she said to herself, because her paradigm had suddenly shifted beyond what even she could have imagined. She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.

Because here's the thing we hadn't talked about, nose to nose on our pillows in the dark: how
I've never been closer to anyone
isn't the same as
We're so close
. That night I threw the drink, she asked why
I
was so perfect for the black world, and I wanted to tell her, How am I
not
perfect for it? It's a sinkhole for resources. Everyone involved with it obsesses about it all the time. Even what the
insiders
know about it is incomplete. Whatever stories you
do
get arrive without context. What's not inconclusive is enigmatic, what's not enigmatic is unreliable, and what's not unreliable is quixotic.

She hasn't left yet, which surprises
me
, let me tell you. The waitress
is showing some alarm at Carly's distress and I've got a hand on her back. She accepts a little rubbing and then has to pull away. “I gotta get out of here,” she goes.

“That girl is not happy,” Celestine says after she's gone.

“Does she even know about
your
kid?” Kenny asks.

The waitress asks if there's going to be a third round.

“What'd you do that for?” I ask him.

“What'd
I
do that for?” Kenny asks.

Celestine leans into him. “Can we
go
?” she asks. “Will you take me back to the
room
?”

“So are you going after her?” Kenny asks.

“Yeah,” I tell him.

“Just not right now?” Kenny goes.

I'd told Carly about the first time I noticed him. I'd heard about this guy in design in a sister program who'd raised a stink about housing the designers next to the production floor so there'd be on-the-spot back-and-forth about problems as they developed. He was twenty-seven at that point. I'd heard that he was so good at aerodynamics that his co-workers claimed he could
see
air. As he moved up we had more dealings with him at Minotaur. He had zero patience for the corporate side, and when the programs rolled out their annual reports on performance and everyone did their song-and-dance with charts and graphs, when his turn came he'd walk to the blackboard and write two numbers. He'd point to the first and go “That's how many we presold,” and point to the second and go “That's how much we made,” and then toss the chalk on the ledge and announce he was going back to work. He wanted to pick my brain about how I hid budgetary items on Minotaur and invited me over to his house and served hard liquor and martini olives. His wife hadn't come out of the bedroom. After an hour I asked if they had any crackers and he said no.

That last time I saw him, it was like he'd had me over just to watch him fight with his wife. When I got there, he handed me a Jose Cuervo and went after her. “What put a bug in
your
ass?” she finally shouted. And after he'd gone to pour us some more Cuervo,
she said, “Would you please get outta here? Because you're not helping at all.” So I followed him into the kitchen to tell him I was hitting the road, but it was like he'd disappeared in his own house.

On the drive home I'd pieced together, in my groping-in-the-dark way, that he was better at this whole lockdown-on-everybody-near-you deal than I was. And worse at it. He fell into it easier, and was more wrecked by it than I would ever be.

I told Carly as much when I got home, and she said, “Anyone's more wrecked by
everything
than you'll ever be.”

And she'd asked me right then if I thought I was worth the work that was going to be involved in my renovation. By which she meant, she explained, that she needed to know if
I
was going to put in the work. Because she didn't intend to be in this alone. I was definitely willing to put in the work, I told her. And because of that she said that so was she.

She couldn't have done anything more for me than that. Meaning she's that amazing, and I'm that far gone. Because there's one thing I could tell her that I haven't told anybody else, including Kenny. At Penn my old classics professor had been a big-time pacifist—he always went on about having been in Chicago in '68—and on the last day of Dike, Eros, and Arete he announced to the class that one of our number had signed up with the military. I thought to myself:
Fuck you. I can do whatever I want
. I was already the odd man out in that class, the one whose comments made everyone look away and then move on. A pretty girl who I'd asked out shot me a look and then gave herself a pursed-lips little smile and checked her daily planner.

“So wish him luck,” my old prof said, “as he commends himself over to the god of chaos.” I remember somebody called out, “Good luck!” And I remember being enraged that I might be turning colors. “About whom,” the prof went on, “Homer wrote, ‘Whose wrath is relentless. Who, tiny at first, grows until her head plows through heaven as she strides the Earth. Who hurls down bitterness. Who breeds suspicion and divides. And who, everywhere she goes, makes our pain proliferate.' ”

My mother liked to remind me that at the age of four I left a garden party one rainy afternoon with my toothbrush in my fist, fully intending a life of exploration, only to be returned later that afternoon by the postman. Her version of the story emphasized the boundaries that her daughter refused to accept. Mine was about the emancipation I felt when I closed the gate latch behind me and left everyone in my wake, and the world came to meet me like a wave.

On April 1, 1930, the first night of my newest expedition, I had a walled garden, overarched by thick trees, all to myself, and still was unable to sleep. I considered rousing my muleteer early but summoned just enough self-discipline to let him rest.

Orion wheeled slowly over the village roofs, and the wind stirred the wraith of a dust storm. I lay listening to the soft and granulating sound of the fall of fine particles. In the starlight I could see the mica in the sand as it gathered on my palms.

My traveler's notebook has on its oilskin cover in English, Arabic, and Persian my name,
Freya Stark
, and my mother's name and address in Asolo, and the promise of a reward should the notebook be returned. Atop the first page, I inscribed an Arab proverb that I've adopted as one of my life philosophies:
The wise man sits by the river, but the fool gets across barefoot
.

The river in this particular case is perhaps the remotest area in the entire Middle East: the Persian mountains west of the Caspian
Sea. This is country that has hardly been explored and never surveyed. The only map I had encompassed fourteen thousand square miles and featured three dotted lines and a centered
X
marking a seasonal encampment for one of the region's nomadic tribes. The rest was blank.

I'm accompanied by a guide, Ismail, and our muleteer, Aziz. The former looks like a convict, ties his trousers with string, and reeks of stale cheese. The latter has none of the former's dignity and seems perpetually gloomy, mostly because his colleague has informed him that he's almost certain to be killed. Both have long since given way to despair at the prospect of protecting a British woman traveling alone.

My plan was to locate the ruins of the mountain citadel of the Assassins, that sinister and ancient sect that for two hundred years held the entire East in its reign of terror. Their impregnable fortress, somewhere in a lost valley of the Alamut, is described by Marco Polo at length in his
Travels
. And because Schliemann discovered Troy by continually rereading the
Iliad
while he searched, I brought along my copy of the
Travels
, marked with the annotations of twenty-two years. Besides my aluminum water-bottle, when filled, Polo's account was the heaviest object in my saddlebag.

I no sooner had stepped onto a Lebanese dock before confronting the questions I'd be asked for the next three years: Why was I there? Why was I there alone? What did I intend to accomplish? Upon offering unsatisfactory answers to all three enquiries, I became a master of wrinkling customs officials' brows with perplexity and concern.

I was thirty-four and so thin from my physical travails and my sister's death that other passengers on the cargo ship began to save and wrap foodstuffs for the next time I might happen by. I was a bereaved Englishwoman who'd grown up in Italy and had only just torn free of the octopus of my mother's demands, a child of privilege who'd lived mostly hand-to-mouth, a lover of erudition who'd been mostly self-taught, and a solitary and fierce believer in independence
who was prone to fixations on others. I owed everything to an aunt who'd given me a copy of
Arabian Nights
for my ninth birthday, a kind-hearted Syrian missionary who'd lived down the hill, a sister who had never lost faith in me, and those long months of illness that had left me the time to negotiate the labyrinths of Arabic and then Persian. Once I was stronger I walked an hour to the station three times a week to take the train to San Remo, where for seven years I furthered my progress with Arabic verbs in the company of an old Capuchin monk who'd lived for half his life in Beirut.