The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [56]
“Oh, sorry, didn’t know you were in here,” I said. He turned to me.
“Kim,” he said, looking directly at me.
“What?”
“Kim,” he repeated in a low voice, and then he started to walk toward me. “My little mathlete.” Sean knew that I was math student of the year in high school.
I could see what was happening.
“Oh my God. You’re not gonna kiss me, are you?”
“Oh. Yes. I. Am.”
As always, Sean knew how to punctuate a sentence. He kissed me.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, breaking the spell.
Afterward, I walked out to the daybed. Sean was nowhere to be seen. Then he poked his head out of the kitchen door. “Kim, can you help me?”
I walked into the kitchen. He kissed me there, near the sink and the cabinets. Hardly romantic. Tom walked inside.
“Oh. Sorry,” he said, turning abruptly. After kissing me one more time in the kitchen, Sean called the taxi company and went back to his room at the Gandamack, which was a good idea. I kind of liked Sean in that vague way that many women kind of liked Sean. But we all knew Sean still loved his ex-wife, and he loved conflict even more.
I was also trying not to date in Kabul, as Afghanistan resembled Alaska if you were a woman—the odds were good but the goods were odd. Although some foreigners here had found love, I had found dead ends. Most of us were running from something, or running toward adrenaline, adventure junkies who when paired up were as combustible and volcanic as baking soda and vinegar. I was realistic. Most female foreign correspondents I knew were single. Most male correspondents, married or entwined. To do this job right took all my energy. And I was plagued by what-ifs. I was now friends with my awkward fling Jeremy, but what if I dated somebody in this aquarium and it went wrong? What if I traveled too much to sustain any relationship? What if I was a frog in boiling water, as overheated as anyone else who chose this life?
A few days later, just before I left for my first trip to the States in more than two years, Sean and I met for lunch near the pool at L’Atmosphère, a real change of scenery, considering we usually sat in the garden. As a woman, I felt the need to clarify what had happened, talk about it, hash it out, examine our relationship under a microscope, turn it over and poke it until dead.
“So that thing?” I asked.
Sean made his usual English attempt at avoiding confrontation—he looked down, shrugged, mumbled, and stared at his fingernails. I deciphered his meaning.
“Fine,” I said. “Friends.”
The party was winding down, and the Fun House was starting to seem like a rerun. When I came back from Chicago almost two months later, still suffering the culture shock of sudden immersion in billboards, skyscrapers, and constant noise, Sean regaled me with new romances, but with danger, not women, with stories of going off to meet militants in eastern Afghanistan, allies of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who had ties to Al-Qaeda. He met with some Afghan militants, but their Arab friends said Sean couldn’t come to their camp, and Sami also thought it was a bad idea. Sean had also been pinned down by enemy fire while out with the Afghan army and a few British soldiers in Helmand. Clearly, he was gathering a lot of material for his documentary. He soon left again for Helmand, where he would almost get himself killed. Again. Sean could never get enough, would never get enough.
As if to underscore what was happening, the headlines on Afghanistan seemed as over the top as a teenage primetime drama in its third season. The country produced a record amount of opium and heroin in 2006, and now churned out more drugs than the world’s addicts could consume. The UN drugs chief called the drug levels “staggering” and warned that the south was displaying “the ominous hallmarks of incipient