Ground Zero
Photo by Tommy Bond / Unsplash Two months had passed since American military personnel, nonprofit workers, and Dari and Pashto translators shouldered past the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, waved their passports, and boarded cargo planes bound for the border. Wyce spent his waking hours following the story online. He cupped his hand around his phone to block the bone-dense Florida sun and learned that, while he’d been teaching a graduate seminar on the history of twentieth-century literary adaptation, another city of the former Afghan Republic, his birthplace and homeland, had fallen to the Taliban.
His mother, who still lived above the same computer repair store in Queens, where they’d first landed in America, called him daily. Her voice disintegrated more each time they spoke.
“Ma, you’re not still taking those painkillers, are you? The doctor said your knee should be manageable now. You can stop. You can throw away whatever’s left in the bottle.”
She laughed into the receiver. The laugh ended in a wheeze that segued into a fit of raspy coughs. “Manageable for whom? For you? You have no idea what I suffer.”
Privately, Wyce was glad his mother had some salve to rely on. Phone calls were no longer connecting to her brother in Shīnḍanḍ. He had lived with them when Wyce was a child, tending to their rooftop coop of snow pigeons and shuffling the playing cards before another round of panjpar. If pharmaceutical-grade opioids were on hand, Wyce would be taking them too.
“Phone your brother,” she said, ending the call abruptly to answer someone else’s.
After Wyce’s night class, during which half of his students were completing homework for other professors, his brother finally answered, the chortle of dorm-room laughter echoing off the thin plaster of his suite in upstate New York. “How are you handling everything? Are you taking care of yourself?”
His brother said he was chill, classes were fine. Was Wyce watching the game?
Just then, a round of roars erupted from the suite, then howls, then the flipping of a keg nozzle. Wyce held the phone away from his ear. No, he wasn’t watching the game. Who could possibly focus on sports at a time like this? He considered bringing up the evacuation, and how prisons across the eastern flank of the country had been broken open to swell the Taliban’s ranks with even more war criminals, but he thought better of it. Some gulfs were too wide to repair. His brother had been born in America. He’d been glued to the Cartoon Network, while, at the same age, Wyce had sold goat knucklebones to boys who played bujulbazi in a refugee camp.
Wyce had been hired as a professor after the runaway success of his first and only novel, a gay bildungsroman that loosely adapted with the context of an Afghan refugee. The advance was more than he’d ever imagined. He’d made the final spot of bestseller list for one, and only one, week, and he’d even begun to earn royalty checks. He’d known little about selling a book. His editor had insisted on changes, small embellishments with the aim of building out the story’s dramatic tension. “Could we make the father more abusive? What if the gentle imam had a gripe with the boy’s effeminacy?” When the book hit.
