Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist

She offered me her arm and we strolled together, speaking softly; the mist of our breathing preceded us. “This is a good place for me right now,” she said. “I feel calm here.” “You seem calm,” I said, resisting the urge to add, too calm. “I’m sorry I’ve been hiding,” she said. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to see you. It’s just that I could see I was pulling you in, and I didn’t want you to get hurt. I thought it would be better for you like this.” “Why would I get hurt?” I asked. “It hurts when you care about someone and they go away,” she replied. “But where are you going?” I asked. She shrugged and did not answer.

We walked on in silence but for the sound of snow crunching under our feet; my ears began to ache from the cold. “Do you write here?” I asked. “No,” she said, “not in the sense of putting stuff down. But I think a lot. I imagine.” “And do I sometimes figure in your imaginings?” I asked. “Sometimes,” she said, smiling. “Any fantasies of kinky sex,” I said, “with an exotic foreigner given to role-playing?” She laughed and squeezed my arm; for the first time her face seemed to soften, to become almost vulnerable. But then she again receded inside herself. “You helped me,” she said. “You were kind and true, and I’m grateful.”

It was the certainty with which she placed me in the past tense that struck me most about her statement. I felt hope being quenched within me, and although I said, “Do not be grateful, be lustful — come back to New York with me,” I said it without that core of conviction that gives words their power; she leaned her head momentarily against my shoulder, but she was not compelled to respond. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as we made our way to the main building together, wondering how much of her detached and seemingly ascetic state was a consequence of the medication she was consuming. For a moment, I was seized by the wild notion of abducting her and taking her away with me in my rental car; surely my ministrations would be more productive in restoring her to reality than the chemicals she was subjecting herself to here. But the absurdity — and disrespect to her — of such an act was immediately obvious to me, and I did nothing of the sort.

“Do you know how to ski?” she asked me. “No,” I said, “I have never been.” “Chris and I,” she said, “used to go every winter — Colorado, usually, or once in a while Vermont. We even did a little cross-country together in Central Park, when we were kids. We each got a pair as a present and we snuck out with them without telling anyone. We got into trouble. Our parents called the police. It was fun, though. Anyway, this place reminds me of that. Especially the snow on that slope. It’s so gentle and it seems so soft. You should go sometime.” We had reached the gravel of the driveway. “You should take me,” I said. She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said, “but you should still go. Try to be happy, okay? I’m sorry about everything. Please take care of yourself.”

She gave me a hug and afterwards she stood there, looking at me. But he is dead, I wanted to shout! It was all I could do not to kiss her then; perhaps I should have. I had to choose whether to continue to try to win her over or to accept her wishes and leave, and in the end I chose the latter. Maybe, I told myself as I drove away, it was a test and I failed; maybe I should have risked it. I almost turned around and went back, but in the end I did not do so. Things might have worked out rather differently if I had turned around; then again, things might have worked out exactly the same.

I cut a desolate figure in the office after that, angry and preoccupied with thoughts of Erica and of home. I was negligent at my administrative duties, and did absolutely nothing to seek out a new assignment for myself. I half expected someone to come to my desk with a pink slip to put me out of my misery. Instead, Jim summoned me to issue a surprising stamp of approval. “Listen, kid,” he said, “some people around here think you’re looking kind of shabby. The beard and all. Quite frankly, I don’t give a shit. Your performance is what counts, as far as I’m concerned, and you’re the best analyst in your class by a long way. Besides, I know it must be tough for you with what’s going on in Pakistan. What you need is to get yourself busy, which I’ll admit isn’t easy when we have as dry a pipeline as we do right now. But I’ve got a new project, valuing a book publisher in Valparaiso, Chile. It’s going to have to be a small team, just a vice president and an analyst. Normally, I’d offer it to someone with more experience. But I’m offering it to you. What do you think?” “Thank you, sir,” I muttered. He laughed. A bit of enthusiasm, please,” he said, adding, “It’s a lot of responsibility. There won’t be any backup for you.” “You can rely on me,” I said, this time with what I hoped was greater apparent sincerity. I do not know if I succeeded, however, because although Jim smiled in response, his expression was one of puzzlement.

But I observe that you, sir, have stopped eating. Can it be that you are full? Very well, I will not insist; I will, however, order us some dessert, a little rice pudding with sliced almonds and cardamom, the perfect sweetener for an evening such as ours, which is taking a turn towards the grimmer side. Such dishes may not normally be to your taste, but I would encourage you to have, at the very least, a tiny bite. After all, one reads that the soldiers of your country are sent to battle with chocolate in their rations, so the prospect of sugaring your tongue before undertaking even the bloodiest of tasks cannot be entirely alien to you.

WHEN YOU SIT in that fashion, sir, with your arm curved around the back of the empty chair beside you, a bulge manifests itself through the lightweight fabric of your suit, precisely at that point parallel to the sternum where the undercover security agents of our country — and indeed, one assumes, of all countries — tend to favor wearing an armpit holster for their sidearm. No, no, please do not adjust your position on my account! I did not mean to imply that you were so equipped; I am certain that in your case it is merely the outline of one of those travel wallets in which the prudent secrete their possessions so that they are less likely to be discovered by thieves.

I myself employed no such precautions on my trip to Chile. We again flew in the relative comfort of first class, but I was no longer excited by the luxuries of our cabin; unlike Jim, who was as usual accompanying us for the commencement of the project, and the vice president who would be my immediate commanding officer for the full duration of this tour, I turned down our flight attendant’s many offers of champagne. For all the hours that we were airborne, I neither ate nor slept; my thoughts were caught up in the affairs of continents other than the one below us, and more than once I regretted coming at all.

I wondered what I could do to help Erica. Seeing her as I had seen her last — emaciated, detached, and so lacking in life —pained me; I recalled the dog we had had in my childhood and his passivity and desire for solitude in those last days before he succumbed to the leukemia induced in him by that brand of tick powder a veterinarian would subsequently tell us never to use. But Erica was not suffering from leukemia; there was no physical reason for her malaise beyond, perhaps, a biochemical disposition towards mental disorders of this kind. No, hers was an illness of the spirit, and I had been raised in an environment too thoroughly permeated with a tradition of shared rituals of mysticism to accept that conditions of the spirit could not be influenced by the care, affection, and desire of others. What was essential was that I seek to understand why I had failed to penetrate the membrane with which she guarded her psyche; my more direct approaches had been rejected, but with sufficient insight I might yet be welcomed through a process of osmosis. I could imagine no alternative but to try; my longing for her was undiminished despite our months of near-complete separation.