“I know, I know.”
“How come you don’t want to, Evan?”
I looked into her poor insane eyes. She was so magnificently beautiful it was almost painful to look at her, and she was begging me to do more than look, and she might as well have asked me to swim the English Channel.
Come to think of it, that’s a rotten metaphor. I had already swum the English Channel. And I had crossed the burning deserts and, in the Hindu Kush, had driven through some of the tallest mountains, even if I hadn’t literally climbed them. I’d performed all the proper Herculean tasks, all for love of a girl named Phaedra, and the only thing left was to claim my prize.
And I certainly couldn’t do that.
Because this wasn’t Phaedra. This was a poor sick kid with her sweetness and charm temporarily (one hoped) buried under a sea of nymphomaniacal hysteria. This was not something one took to bed, no matter how much she asked one to.
In the first place, I got a little sick at the thought of it. It seemed indecent. If I hadn’t known her before it might have been different, but I had, and it wasn’t.
And in the second place, even if I had managed to rationalize the first place, the whole thing would have been roughly akin, in a purely physical sense, to the prospect of inserting a boiled noodle in a bouncing bagel. Not quite impossible, perhaps, but not bloody likely either.
She said, “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am.”
“Is something wrong with me?”
“No.”
“Then is something wrong with you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then what’s the matter, Evan?”
“You’re not you,” I said.
“I don’t get you.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Huh?”
I pulled the car onto the road. Phaedra, rejected, hurt, cringed against the door on the passenger side. I drove for a little while and didn’t say anything. She announced that she was going to take a nap. I told her it sounded like a good idea. She pouted and said that she couldn’t take a nap because she was sexually frustrated. I told her to play with herself. She said that sounded like a fine idea, and she proceeded to do just that, while I proceeded to pay more attention to the road than the road really deserved. Finally she gave up and told me that it wasn’t the same at all. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said, and did.
When she woke up she was worse. She could barely talk at all, and she couldn’t keep her hands off me. This might have been somewhat more flattering if she had not been so obviously out of her mind. She would let loose with a wild peal of laughter, then make a grab at my groin, then burst just as suddenly into tears.
A little of this goes a long way. A lot of it, which is what I was getting, goes even further. I wanted very much to do something that would at least render her unconscious for a time, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to hit her again. I didn’t want to hurt her. She was more to be pitied than censured, just as her language was more to be pitied than censored. The only thing wrong with pity as an emotion is that it’s so goddamned tiresome. It bores the subject and does nothing for the object.
I drove on, doing my best to ignore her. She was as easy to ignore as an earthquake, and about as subtle. But I kept the car on what the map laughingly called a road – a new one this time, a more direct route from Anardara right through to Kabul, bypassing Kandahar and presumably cutting quite a few miles off our journey. This road was what I kept my eyes on, which was something of a waste, actually, since in most places the road was so narrow that one could have covered it adequately, leaving the other eye free to do what it wanted. Since there was nothing else it wanted to do, I kept my eyes, both of them, on the road, as I guess I may already have said, and while doing this little thing I concentrated on figuring out what to do after I got back to Kabul.
I had to take her some place where they could do something for her. That much was obvious. Some place quiet and restful and eminently sane. Those qualifications gave me three reasons for ruling out the place I had originally assumed we would go, since New York was neither quiet nor restful nor sane, and never will be. In New York all I could do would be to turn her over to an analyst, which would involve paying around thirty dollars an hour for a period of several years to establish that Mrs. Horowitz had discouraged little Debbie from smearing her fecal matter on the wall. I could think of many things for which to blame Mrs. Horowitz, but this was not one of them, and I couldn’t see any reason to spend thirty dollars an hour for revelations of this nature.
Or else we could go back to Switzerland. They have a thing there called the Sleep Cure, and I supposed that Phaedra could take it. They just keep you asleep almost forever and let your unconscious work things out on its own. You get better, the idea seems to be, but because you are asleep during it all your conscious mind doesn’t know that you’re better. So you go on being the same old lunatic, but deep down inside you’re sane.
I may have that wrong. Somehow, though, my own personal situation is such that I’m illogically biased against anything called the Sleep Cure. Mea culpa, perhaps, but sic friat crustulum.
Oh.
About seventy miles out of Anardara, I knew where I would take her.
And about ninety miles out of Anardara, the helicopter opened fire on us.
Chapter 13
At first I didn’t know what the hell it was. I heard a droning noise, but the chopper was overhead to our rear and I didn’t see it. Then there was a rattling noise. Puffs of dirt dug a line across the road in front of us. I hit the brake, and the helicopter hovered into view up ahead, and another blast of automatic weapon fire dug up the road.
Phaedra’s eyes were wide open. “What the hell is that?”
“A helicopter. Out of the car. Fast.”
“But-”
“They’re trying to kill us.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Get out of the car and make it quick. Open your door. That’s right. Now go for the ditch – no, wait, give them a minute to swing across to the other side. Jump for the ditch when I tell you… Okay, now!”
She made a half-hearted leap for the ditch. I sprang out after her and goosed her along, and we wound up in the ditch by the side of the road. She started to straighten up. I grabbed hold of her, pulled her down.
“It smells in here,” she said.
We were calf-deep in water, and she was right; it smelled. I guess it was some sort of drainage ditch, but that didn’t make sense because the area we were passing through was relatively arid. From the aroma it could have been a sewer, except that this was an even more ridiculous notion. We were in the middle of nowhere, with no towns or villages nearby, let alone a city large enough to have sewers. I decided it was just one of those great underground springs that happened to surface. But instead of being a pure, clean, cold underground spring, this one stank like a sewer.
“What are they doing, Evan?”
“Circling.”
“Why?”
“To make another pass at us.”
“They want to make a pass at us?”
“Not that kind of a pass. They want to zoom in on us and shoot the hell out of us.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they friends of yours?”
“That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I mean, do you know who they are?”
“No.”
“Well, you don’t have to bite my head off.”
“Yes.”
“You do?”
“I mean yes, I know who they are,” I said.
“You just said you didn’t.”
“I just saw them again. Those crazy sons of bitches.”