Page 1 of What is Lost

PENGUIN

Once upon a time,about a week before Christmas, John and Roni watched a movie during a lull on-call. This wasn’t unusual. They’d met at Fort Benning during DCC, the Army’s Direct Commission Course designed to teach civilians commissioned in college how to be soldiers (whether they wanted to learn or not). After DCC, both John and Roni were assigned to stay on at Martin Army Hospital. By the time that particular Christmas rolled around, they’d watched a lot of movies and shows together.

John, a complete cinema geek, chose the film. The story revolved around a girl named Susie who was murdered by a neighbor. The story, based on a novel, didn’t really dwell on the gruesomehowof her death but what happened to the girl’s family and the killer afterward. The movie was prettygood in a weepy, three-hanky, good-cry way. What stuck with Roni most, though, was the film’s first scene, which revolved around little Susie, her dad, and a penguin.

The penguin lived in a snow globe. Little Susie worried about that because while the snow was pretty, the penguin was all alone in there. Susie’s dad told her not to worry, though. The penguin was happy, he said, because the world in which it was trapped was perfect.

Among other things, Roni was a shrink. She recognized that what the father in the movie said was a good, wise dad-thing to say. Like all parents, Susie’s dad probably figured his kid had plenty of time towake up, Little Susie, wake up.After all, the girl was young; her world was circumscribed and insular. Her world was her family. Susie existed in a perfect world, with plenty of food and clean clothes and love—and so was blissfully unaware of how much things always change. Families. The world. A kid, too, much to her parents’ chagrin as they watch their sweet child morph into a narcissistic alien whose myopic worldview is reduced to a pinprick. Where she is center stage, like the ballerina in a perverse kind of music box: someone about whom the rest of the world revolves instead of the other way around.

The penguin was a metaphor for the whole movie, of course. Nothing and no one stands still.That hammer calledRealitytrembles on an insubstantial thread over a child’s perfect world.

Eventually, though...boom.That hammer must fall and the glass shatter and, to mix a metaphor, down comes baby, cradle and all.

Despite what Roni’straining analyst once said, Roni finds dwelling on the past futile.

When she became a shrink—how she got there from emergency medicine is a whole other story—Roni told her patients that life was a bit like a doughnut.Look at the doughnut,she told them,not the hole.The hole is nothing. The only reason the hole exists is because you’re standing on the doughnut. Give up the hope of a better past and stay with the doughnut. Stay with what exists. Stay with the Now.

She clings to that belief: that thereisa doughnut. A life raft that is her real life to which, one day, she will return, if she can.

Although this will be tough, seeing as how everyone else has gone—and only she is left.

Other than knowinghow many days have passed since that disaster at Kabul Airport before the U.S. pulled out for good, she doesn’t know much otherthan in the most general sense. She is very far away from anything remotely resembling civilization. The only reason she knows she’s still in-country is because her guards are all Taliban. From the look of the soaring, snow-covered peaks, though, she thinks she is well north and east andwaypast the Korangal Valley. There are many days when the mountains are socked in either with clouds or snow, but, on a clear day, the view is dizzying: a wide plateau far below hemmed by jagged mountains for as far as the eye can see.

It’s not as if she never sees another soul. She tends to the injured. She patched up all the boys who survived. An auntie—any of the half dozen or so older women who cook for her jailers and the workers—brings her meals and clean clothes, accompanies her on the noon walks she is allowed along the mountain paths, and even keeps an eye out as she takes her nightly bath, a luxury that, much to her surprise, her captors have not been unwilling to allow.

The Taliban aren’tnasty. No one slaps her around. None of the men touch her, though that is more likely something passed on by orders from above because they don’t like her. Even if she weren’t an American, her presence is like a pebble in a shoe: an irritant. She’s a woman but also good at her job. So, they can’t afford to lose her.

What this really boils down to is simple. She is agood-luck charm, a get-out-of-jail-free card, and the equivalent of a really well-balanced knife or a trusty Kalashnikov.

And when you have a great tool—or that lucky rabbit’s foot—why, you take care of it.

Looking on the bright side,being squirreled away in a lightless cave for fourteen hours out of every twenty-four does gives her plenty of time to think and regret.

Which is also driving her kind of crazy.

That is why, when she actuallyhearssomething at a time when she should’ve heard a whole lot of nothing except her memories and the imaginary conversations she holds—some with Driver, a few with her dad, but many...no,mostwith John John John John—rattling around her skull like the last few nuts in a jar...she thinks,Oh. My God. I really have gone insane.

Which she keeps on thinking—until the sound comes again.

When, from the darkness, something...squeals.

Oh.She freezes. Her breath hangs in her throat. Her skin tingles.That was?—

Anothersqueee.Then...pop.

Oh.Her heart stutters. A thrill of fear pebbles her skin with gooseflesh. She knows what this is: the sound of rock under a heavy boot.

Someone is coming.

Can’t be food. She’s fed twice a day: Afghan bread, yak butter tea, and yogurt in the morning and, for supper, a steaming bowl ofash, more bread, assorted fruits and vegetables in season—peppers and okra and legumes and sweet apricots—which she assumes her captors either buy or steal from the villagers in the valley below. Always a bowl of sweet, creamy chai at the end of the day, too. (My God, she wouldkillfor a cup of coffee, though.)

But she isn’t due for a meal for several hours yet. She’s only just finished dressing wounds.Not right.She sniffs her hands to be certain, to be sure her mind isn’t playing tricks with time—and catches the faint sting of antiseptic. That always fades by the time an auntie arrives with her evening meal.So, it’s too soon, way too soon.

Anotherpop.And now, finally, the dull thud of boots on rock.

A single set, she thinks—and that, too, is wrong,reallywrong. An auntie is always accompanied by a guard. Men always come in pairs: one to stand guard as the other fits a key into the manacle around her right ankle. They also are never thesame two men for any length of time. The pairs rotate, switch off; a man she sees one day might not return for the next three or four. She can’t imagine why except the fear that, perhaps, familiarity might breed a sense of camaraderie or even sympathy. (Or temptation, there is always that.) Whoever is in charge probably worries that the men might even get tolikethe woman who takes care of their boo-boos the way that, perhaps, their own mother had when they were boys—and liking or feeling any kind of gratitude toward her. Seeing her as a person, won’t do.

Her eyes strain to make out something, anything, and then she realizes what else is wrong.

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