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I woke up in an old Pakistani sleeping bag one morning, stretched on a fetid mattress in the Spin Ghar hotel, and found that, for the first time in months, I was too worn out and sad to get out of bed. The adrenaline had dried up in my sleep, and there was no other force left. I stared at the ceiling, craving Steve Earle, a Shiner Bock, a long drive on a Texas road with the windows rolled down. I thought about a half-forgotten day deep in the Rio Grande borderlands, an ancient bar with a broken jukebox, shooting pool with the door hanging open on the limpid afternoon until a big purple thunderstorm rolled in off stretches of mesquite. Impossible that those things still existed somewhere, that I was still carrying around the key to an apartment I hadn’t seen since early September.

I left Afghanistan—the light that falls like powder on the poppy fields, the mortars stacked like firewood in broken-down sheds at the abandoned terror compounds, the throaty green of the mineral rivers. In the back of the car, I stared into a scrubbed sky as empty plains slipped past. It was Eid al-Fitr; Ramadan was over, and a hungry land sat down to eat. Along the road women split pomegranates, and the red juice stained their fingers. Men roasted lamb shanks over open fires, and children turned from the blaze to watch us pass with eyes like globes. The road was cloaked in the amnesia of holidays. We drew close to the Khyber Pass. The mountain route would drop us down into Pakistan.

Then everything slipped: A tire snagged on a roadside rock and the car spun out and swung in sickening loops. The grill of a cargo truck reared up before us, and I was certain I was about to die, so I closed my eyes. I remembered that drunks survive accidents because they don’t stiffen, and told myself to go limp. The car, this seat, was a fixed point in a slipping-away landscape. I was the axis now; the country, the mountains, the war, and the wide yards of dirt stretching back to Tora Bora revolved around me.

That was illusion, of course. I was the one careening. I was the one out of control. These old hills, what did they care? This smuggler’s path, the road to Pakistan and India and China—these things stood where they’d always been. I was the element that did not belong; we were the ones who had come plunging in. I remembered what Naseer, the translator, had said. “I am not afraid of killing. This is a country of killing. Only I am afraid for my family.” His eyes were calm and knowing.

There was a great, grating crash and everything, everybody slammed. The car stopped, shuddering and smoking, wrinkled as a steel leaf. I sat and breathed. Alive should have been impossible. I scrambled from the car and took the air, cold and sweet with gasoline. I was running then, pounding over the empty land. The adolescent guard laughed so hard his Kalashnikov clattered onto the rocks. I stopped and shook. The men looked politely away.

THREE

AS LONG AS YOU CAN PAY FOR IT

Coming home from war is a strange and isolating experience. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given all the books and movies detailing the strange and lonesome journey home from war. But after Afghanistan, I didn’t expect it. After all, it was only a few months. I knew I had been scrambled a bit by the things I’d seen, but I didn’t understand that I was returning to a country transformed. I couldn’t anticipate the changes in the atmosphere, and in the people I knew. There was still raw trauma in the air, and the remnants of a fear I had been too far away to feel in full force. I was carrying my own fear around, but I kept it quiet, turned my ribs into prison bars to trap it inside. This seemed to me proper, to carry it there, unseen.

And then I was at my mother’s house in Connecticut, walking known floorboards, the same naked trees in the windows, blocked by familiar walls. The silence of the house screamed in my ears, and my bones and skin hung like shed snakeskin that wouldn’t fall away. A plane lumbered overhead, slicing white blood from a bright