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It was getting harder and harder to find a piece of dry ground.

NINE

WE EXPECTED SOMETHING BETTER

What kind of place would Jordan be if it weren’t marooned on the map between the West Bank and Iraq? By now the country has been shaped by neighboring wars—census redrawn by the massive resettlement of Palestinian refugees, politics defined by making nice, memories stained by spillover fighting. And yet, in itself, Jordan doesn’t leave a deep impression. As capital cities go, Amman is bland: A spread of hotel lobbies and snips of desert and sleepy hills; a sand-hued turnstile churning the somnambulant traveler from one vivid elsewhere to the next. It is a city trading on its placid nature, destined and designed to be passed through on the way to, or from, bigger problems.

It was 2004, the time of year when gritty winter still clings to the landscape, and the sky sagged heavy as a damp sheet onto Amman’s seven hills. Nora* shushed up to the curb in a car thick with perfume and pop music. It would have to be Mecca Mall, she said. We didn’t have much time.

“Hey,” she pointed at a minivan up ahead. “I think that’s a mouse.” This was Nora’s code. It meant “I think that’s an intelligence agent.”

“How can you tell?”

“The picture of flower. Look how big it is. The mice love those pictures. They all have them.” (“The picture of the king. Look how big it is. Intelligence agents love those pictures. They all have them.”)

“I see them everywhere.”

“Well …” She tugged at the wheel. “There are a lot of mice.”

I knew something was wrong when I sat across from her at the café. Nora’s face played emotions like a movie screen—the jellyfish squeeze of her pupils dilating and contracting, catching pieces of light, the half smile that hung on her lips, always about to stretch into a shout of laughter that would rock her frame and squeeze her eyes shut. Today her shoulders hung low and her features had a vacant look. She had pulled her personality back, buried it deeper in her head.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, Megan,” she said with rote cordiality. “I’m fine. How are you?”

I laughed. “I’m fine, too.” She laughed too, a quick stab, and then her face sank back into ashy stillness.

“I can’t believe this about Abu Ghraib,” she said.

So that was it.

“I know,” I said.

I wasn’t supposed to have met her at all; it was a mix-up from the start. That had been more than a year earlier, when the invasion of Iraq was just beginning. I was stranded in Amman, waiting to go to Baghdad. For the time being everybody was frozen in place, the border closed, and the road to Baghdad a cemetery of bombed-out cars. Reporters stuffed Amman’s hotels, steaming and scheming into their beer at night. They twitched with plans to sneak into Iraq, or they had been in Baghdad already but lost their nerve and fled Saddam and his alleged arsenal of mass destruction. We all had the smell of meat in our noses, close but out of reach; we were crazed with hunger, not for a story, but for the story. Reporters begged for Iraqi visas from the embassy of a nearly defunct government, and waited for permits from the Jordanians to drive to the Iraqi border. We hunted for generators, stocked up on Cipro, piled helmets and flak jackets against minibars.

Spring came too early and too hot that year. Sandstorms clawed at buildings and machines. Fog came in the morning and bound the city blind, wrapped like bandages around the buildings. In these glaring, wilting hours, the televisions squawking nervously about collateral damage and new world order were as obscene as anything you can imagine. The invasion began and blood wafted over the sands, over the border, on eye-stinging winds. Amman filled with people and the people kept talking and all that gas built into pressure, sizzled like carbonation through the nightclubs and bars, hissed down the highways at night and punched lonely border outposts. Jordanians, aid workers, Iraqis who’d gotten out all mixed together, everybody on edge, angling and outraged. There were