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By Root 486 0

for a few seconds, not wanting to look down. Finally I glanced, realizing what I had done. I swallowed and looked at my left hand, wondering what I should do now. I wiped my hand on my jeans, then wrote in my notebook: “Pieces of people on the railing of truck.” More than a hundred and forty people had died, including many who had sworn to give their lives for Bhutto, who was unharmed. I had seen more death—the tsunami, two different earthquakes. But I could somehow understand natural disasters. This was a human disaster, and I couldn’t make sense of the hate. We flagged a ride back to the hotel from a man named Mujahid. I walked quickly to the lobby bathroom, pulled off my tennis shoes, and yanked hand towels off the roller as fast as I could, pumping soap onto them and drenching them in hot water. Then I scrubbed my shoes, trying to get the paper towels into the grooves of the soles, trying to clean them. I cried as the water ran pink, then clear. I shut off the water, looked in the mirror, dabbed my eyes, and walked back to the hotel room in my socks. I dropped my shoes outside the door, next to my boyfriend’s. I went inside to write.

Looking back, if my adrenaline addiction had a rock bottom, this was it—wiping my bloody hand on my pants, scrubbing the blood of strangers off my shoes, pushing away the tears so I could write a story. Years later, I realized that never again would I get this close to a bomb scene, never again would I report inside the perimeter, because never again would I want to. But at the time, a mark of how far down the rabbit hole I had fallen, I saw it as just another tragedy I needed to stuff in the growing box in the back of my head. Shut the top and move on.

The next days were a blur. Of going to the morgue and seeing people try to identify family members from limbs, and smelling that peculiar, unmistakable stench of death—sweet but overripe, overwhelming but still unable to cover the something rotten beneath. Of sobbing family members, hair-pulling grief. Of squeezing past angry crowds to slide into Bhutto’s compound.

Bhutto decided to meet with a few foreign reporters, but after years in exile, she miscalculated the new vibrant national press, who saw it as a major insult that Bhutto was favoring foreign journalists. As we waited for Bhutto, Pakistani reporters pushed inside and started arguing. Bhutto tried to calm everyone down. An old woman shoved her way into the room, grasping at Bhutto. There seemed to be no security, no real attempt to protect her. The old lady was hustled out, the bickering continued.

At one point, bored, I rolled my eyes and made faces at friends standing on the other side of the room. Unfortunately, I was standing next to Bhutto, and the Associated Press chose that moment to take a picture. My eyes bugged out of my head, as did my hair. I looked like a cartoon character. It was, most definitely, the worst photograph ever taken of me in my life. It would run in newspapers around the world, and I would hear from people I hadn’t talked to in years, asking what had happened to me overseas.

But now, oblivious, I sat down to the right of Bhutto and introduced myself.

“I interviewed you on the phone once.”

She nodded. “Of course, I remember you, Kim.”

She introduced herself to everyone, and we were all instantly smitten. Up close, Bhutto didn’t show all of her fifty-four years. She still had ink-black hair, a regal narrow nose, a crooked smile, and only a few wrinkles around her eyes. She wore a gauzy white headscarf that she used like a prop—it would slip back on her head or her shoulders, and she would gracefully put it back in place. We all knew about her cynicism, about the deal she had made with a dictator. But Bhutto had that power that only the rare leader does—to make every person feel like the most important one in the room.

After a few days, I flew back to Islamabad and waited for the next bomb, the next fracture in this fractured country. Dave flew to England, where I planned to meet him soon for a well-earned vacation. I chose to ignore rumors that Musharraf