weat poured within the heat of her robe, cooling her skin. The men sitting with her in the truck bed leaned wearily on their rifles and sucked down cigarettes. A dust cloud rose in the distance, blocked out the sun. She held back tears, knowing somewhere in that cloud her countrymen burned.

In an arcade in Olney, Maryland, Asara Abezzadeh played a Marvel Comics fighting game against a short man in a store-bought Spiderman costume. He had posed heroically by the arcade machine and proclaimed: “Spiderman requests an opponent!” She would lose her virginity to him within the week.

Spiderman played as himself, she played his nemesis Dr. Octopus. Black kids from the housing projects and skinny teenage boys with retro Nintendo characters on their shirts cheered Spiderman on. He mashed the control buttons; she methodically destroyed him with adamantium tentacles. Asara was tall, slim and boyish, with short black hair framing an oval, cream-colored face. Gold flecks tinted her hazel eyes, freckles dotted her small nose. The type of girl boys invited over to play videogames, slowly realizing they were in love with her.

Spiderman turned to her. “Spider senses…tingling. Sensing girls who go to my old high school.” He tore off his mask, revealing his secret identity: an olive-skinned man, his black hair so pointy and shiny with gel it looked like glass sculpture. His thick lips always stayed parted, waiting for an excuse to grin. Adam Khan.

Asara remembered a time Adam made her laugh during lonely days trapped in her house. “Such a shame,” her mom had said. Asara didn’t know what the “shame” was. It couldn’t be the Afghanistan war coverage Mom always had on TV. Reading the Olney Gazette in her easy chair, Mom fiercely ignored the TV generals bragging about their precision missiles. Asara wanted to comfort her, tell her she could let herself be sad, but Mom’s strict orders rang in her head. “Never talk about Afghanistan! They will hurt you.” Mom looked at the front page photo of Adam Khan leaning through a doorway, staring at something outside the frame. He looked handsome, Asara thought. Pimple-faced, lazy-eyed handsome. She read over Mom’s shoulder.

…hopes to study…

“The boy is Student Council president, newspaper editor, honor student, and they interview him because he is Afghani. Only because they can connect him to their war.”

Khan will attend the University of Maryland next fall, where he hopes to study education. He wants to one day become a History teacher.

“I don’t know much about Afghanistan,” said Khan. “I’ve never been there. I don’t want to go there. Right now I just want to graduate and have fun.”

Asara could tell Mom had reached that last part when she shook her head and said “Such a shame” again. Adam’s disrespect excited her. She stopped her laughter before it left her mouth, held it in until History class the next day. Adam leaned in the door, wearing the same white t-shirt and doe-eyed gaze from his photo. “That’s my pose, baby!” he said. “I am so hot right now!” She laughed so long and loud her friends asked if she was okay.

Asara pushed back the memory and focused on the Adam in front of her, who talked to her like an old friend. Shocked he even recognized her, she quietly answered his questions: her name was Asara and she was a sophomore now; yeah, Sherwood High still sucked; yeah, he was so lucky he graduated. He smiled warmly, showed interest in her boring life, though his hooded brown eyes glanced away every few seconds. Always on the lookout for new excitement. He asked if she wanted to hang out with him and his friends tomorrow and she nodded, her heart threatening to rip from her chest.

“Yo, Spidey!” said a black kid. “Do something cool!” Computerized grunts from fighting games, the “Damnit!” when somebody’s pinball dropped down the hole filled the split second of silence. Adam’s eyes looked weary, like someone else’s eyes stuck in his face. Putting on the rotted mask, he jumped off the skiball ramp, arm extended to shoot a web. Asara laughed reluctantly. When her family went to mosque the next day, her mind didn’t wander the marble pillars, imagining adventures in the temple out of Arabian myth. She knelt on her balush and asked the Prophet to watch over Adam Khan.

She passed depressions of scorched earth where the millennia-old mountains shrugged off the daily bombing. The straps of the bundle on her back bit into her shoulders. After a long day trudging the dusty path, the cave came into sight. A bearded, disheveled man in the entrance aimed a rifle at her. She ran to him, embraced her husband like she could join their bodies together.

Asara threw on her old Baltimore Ravens jacket, the one with holes in the pockets where notes and pencils and CDs squirreled into the stuffing. Just a minute before she’d been playing a Final Fantasy game, lost in the characters’ quest to save all they held dear from destruction. Now she tiptoed downstairs, tense with anxiety. Part of her wanted to run to Mom and apologize for even thinking of sneaking out, or at least ask her permission. Asara almost laughed out loud. Sure, Mom would let her go out at night with the guy in the Spiderman costume crouching on the roof of the red Ford across the street.

She peered into the kitchen where pilao boiled on the stove. Her parents and their Afghani friends sat around the dinner table, smoke coiling from the men’s pipes. They traded stories, bragged about their children in Pashtun, the old language. Asara wanted to bite into the rice- and tobacco-flavored air. Dad kissed the foreheads of her two little sisters in his lap; she smiled at the memory of his prickly mustache against her cheek. Getting up to check the stove, Mom pecked him on the lips, the most affection they ever showed. Lately Asara noticed how her stern face relaxed when around Dad. She wanted to watch Mom, look for a smile. But Adam was waiting. Before she could reconsider, Asara crept out the front door and closed it carefully, swearing to return in an hour.

Adam jumped to the ground, grinning his snaggle-toothed grin, very much by himself. He swept the Metallica CDs and parking tickets off the passenger seat so she could sit down. “Nobody else is coming,” he said with a shrug. “I mean, who actually studies?” He shook his fist. “Them kids and their darned learnin’.”

Adam’s Sherwood Class of ’02 cap tassel twirled from his mirror. He pulled onto Maryland Route 108, the road that ran through Olney. They passed a field checkered with square ditches that would sprout homes in yet another housing development. Asara glimpsed the full moon caged behind oak trees in dense, black woods. It moved as they moved, until it shone over the sleeping town. Skateboarder kids did tricks outside the Starbucks in the shopping center. Asara wished them a long, carefree night.

“One night we were driving around Olney,” said Adam. “Me, Keith, and Milstein were trying to find a gas station with Faygo pop. Like, we were obsessed.” Asara wanted to quest for Faygo. She wanted to drink it in the lights of the Mormon Temple and philosophize about The Simpsons. “We got lost and ended up in Baltimore.”

Adam laughed way too long at his own story. Asara noticed threads sticking out of his costume. The fading spider emblem looked like a coffee stain on his chest.

She dumped the pack off her sore shoulders, opened it to reveal the gifts from their village: dynamite, mortars, bullet belts. Gripping her shoulder with a trembling hand, he insisted she go back. He was right; what did a young wife who could barely cook pilao have to offer? Vows she’d made repeated in her mind, promises to obey his will as if it were Allah’s. She gasped as his grip tightened. Beneath the dirt, his bloodshot eyes shifted in a gaunt face. Hazel eyes she’d only seen a few times yet filled with a fear she couldn’t look away from. She suddenly knew that returning to their village would be the most shameful thing she could do. She reminded him that everyone had to fight, talking more forcefully than she meant to. Whatever happened, she wasn’t leaving him.

Adam decided to explore a parking garage in Rockville. With its sprawling strip malls, Rockville was the only town in their county that felt like a real town. Their footsteps echoed in the garage. Huge clumps of dirt hung like stalactites from the ceiling. Adam jumped up, pulled one off and, just as quick, hurled it at the back window of a car. It exploded in a burst of grey debris. Asara glanced around nervously. Every time Adam said or did something he looked back at her and she smiled until her face hurt.

“I’m sorry, Asara,” said Adam. “I forgot to tell you what a dumbass I am.”

“I could figure that out.” Asara imagined them as big-eyed anime superheroes. Super Sonic Team Dumbass! Funny Eight Leg Bug Man, Atom Khan! Pretty Princess Asara! Saving Tokyo from evil robots with giant dirt frisbees! She pumped a fist in the air, imagining her stats zooming across the screen:

Name: Pretty Princess Asara
Birthplace: Kandahar, Afghanistan
Power: Love

Adam leaned out a window overlooking the potted trees on the sidewalk. She reached out her hand for him.

Name: Atom Khan
Birthplace: Olney, Maryland
Deathplace: Olney, Maryland
Power: Intelligence, Humor, Charisma
Weakness: Recklessness

Maybe he grabbed her hand and ran because he saw a guard. She didn’t see anyone, and realized she didn’t care. They burst out of the garage, into a park where business buildings blocked the moonlight, creating a deep gloom. The homeless slept on benches, in the empty fountain. Caught in the quiet solemnity of the place, Asara reminded herself these were only unfortunate people who needed a place to sleep. Adam’s arm slipped around her shoulder. His now-serious face made her feel safe. She leaned into him, giving him her trust, her safety, letting him become the protector.

Her burqa allowed her to only see in rectangles. A rectangle of mountain road, a rectangle of wooden huts, a rectangle of women tending their children. She bought a bag of rice from a woman, slipped her a note with the money. The woman stuffed it in her black burqa, the wrinkles around her green eyes deepening in a veiled smile. Jeeps roared into the village, consuming the marketplace in dust. Pale men in brown army uniforms jumped out, pushing villagers to the ground with their AK-47s, yelling gibberish. The Soviets ran from hut to hut. Memories of rape in her village streets, her friends’ sobs and writhing, naked bodies, made her own private parts feel unclean. Frantic, she looked for the woman with the message. She wondered how many of the women clutching their children to them also delivered letters to rebels, planted mines on roads, fired their rifles at Russian convoys.

Asara and Adam sat at the counter in a 50s-style diner, next to a jukebox playing droning doowop. She guessed they programmed it that way to make customers sacrifice a dollar, end their agony with some Beatles or Supremes. Adam grunted as he tugged off the Spiderman shirt. “So glad to have that damn thing off,” he said. He wore a white t-shirt, just like in his newspaper photo. “We used to come here all the time in high school. We’d just smoke weed and eat big, greasy hamburgers. Then we’d throw rocks at cars. The usual idiocy.” He chuckled silently at the memory.

“Pot-smoking,” said Asara. “There might be something against that in the Koran.”

“Oh no! Allah forgive me!” They both laughed.

“I guess you like it better here than at school.” She tried to sound as naïve as possible.

“What makes you say that?”

“You go to University of Maryland,” she said, “and you were in Olney, on a Thursday afternoon.” She smiled. “You must be studying hard.”

“Yeah, college sucks. I’m failing most of my classes. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to go to school with all my friends from high school. Oh well.”

She remembered Adam Khan running onstage in a Spiderman costume during the Battle of the Bands, karate fighting the lead singer. The crowd shouted his name like a battlecry. She remembered Adam Khan in an overused Spiderman costume, showing a flash of weariness before doing another stunt. At that moment, she wanted him to become a teacher. She wanted to marry him and think of him with love and envy.

“I used to act out, too,” she said. “Like, my parents sent me to this private school when I was little. I didn’t want to go. Everyone there was so snotty. They couldn’t tell my ancestry wasn’t European for, like, three months. But after that, they were all, ‘Can you sing in Arabic? Can you belly-dance?’”

“Belly-dance!” Adam howled. “Did they wanna see your magic lamp, too?”

“I just got fed up. So one day this girl was showing off her beauty pageant trophy, and…” She saw a smile creep on Adam’s lips. “I told her she must not like herself, if she has to come to school to show off this cheap-looking trophy. She pushed me, so I knocked her down and threw the trophy in the street. It was good timing, because a car came around the curb and smashed it.” She paused a minute while Adam laughed so hard he started wheezing. “That’s probably not as bad as anything you’ve done. I still got kicked out, though. And my mom’s like, ‘Look what you get for your big mouth! You can go to public school with the losers!’”

“Yeah, that sucks you had to go to school with people like me,” he said. “When people act stupid I just try to make them laugh. I wouldn’t have been badass enough to bust up that bitch’s trophy.” He winked. “It’s always the quiet ones, I tell ya.”

Asara slowly placed her hand over his. Adam’s brown eyes stared expectantly into hers. His quick breaths tickled the thick black hairs on the back of her neck. She kissed him. His tongue was hot and forceful, darting nervously in her mouth like a trapped fly, but she let him lead. She closed her eyes to the mopping janitor, the waitresses smiling at them, the watchful clock on the wall.

The Russians looked so miserable she thought killing them might be a favor. Bare-chested under the merciless sun, they smoked opium at the bottom of the ravine. Turbaned rebels lined the ridge, aiming rifles given by the American military. Beside her, her husband gripped his gun until the knuckles around the stock turned white. Scared of dying, scared of leaving a single one alive, scared of the sun sweating all the water from his body. He shouted the order and gunfire thundered through the mountains. The crack from their rifles felt like a rock slamming her head. Gunsmoke choked her, stung her eyes. Below, men fell. One second they played cards, smoked, stared at photos, the next they lay face-first in the sand. She fired until the barrel burned her hands, determined to kill them all so this could end and he could go back to the cave.

“Maybe if we take Endor Road we’ll get there faster.”

He squeezed her hand. “First off, chill out. We’ll make it. Second, you’ve lived here too long not to know it’s Ednor Road. This is Olney, not the Battle of the Ewoks!”

Adam looked focused as he sped under blinking yellow traffic lights, instinctively navigating the suburbs. Like Spiderman probably looked when driving his girlfriend home. The dashboard clock read 9:15. The thought of Mom catching her felt like blood freezing in Asara’s veins, but Adam’s reassurance calmed her. She asked him to tell her about college. He replied with stories about frisbee outside the library, study sessions put on hold to go sledding down snow-covered cobblestone streets, discount tickets to Maryland Terrapins basketball games. She wished he would drive slower, or the road could magically get longer.

The troop huddled around the dying fire, chewing the rabbit meat she’d cooked, passing the opium pipe. These days, they found its smoky forgetfulness as necessary as food and bullets. Being the only educated one, her husband recited ancient poetry word for word. He told the story of Khalid bin Walid, the “Sword of Allah” whose warriors defeated the Romans at Mu’ta with cunning traps. Wearing a thin head scarf that let the whistling wind sting her cheeks, she closed her eyes and saw the small army on that cold night a thousand years ago. She heard their murmured prayers, unaware of the strength they would show the next day. She cried at the thought of their blessed courage. Her husband sang a somber Ghazal love song:

Dast as talab nadaram ta kame-e man bar-ayad
Ya tan rasad ba janan ya jan ze tan bar-ayad

I will never lift my hand from searching until I obtain my desire. She desired His courage. Either my body will arrive to my beloved, or life will leave my body. She would strike His enemies or die trying. Her eyes opened to the cave fire burning hot as the desert sun. Pure passion welled in her, big enough to explode from her and destroy the darkness outside the cave. She thanked Allah for the sacred duty of serving her husband. Joining her voice to his song, words she never learned sprang to her tongue, singing with him until a scream tore from her throat.

She shivered in the freezing cold. He held her tight, warming her with his body. They became one flickering shadow on the cave wall.

A highway sign flew past in the dark: OLNEY—8 MILES. Asara rolled her window halfway down, stuck out her hand and cupped the icy air in her palm. The screaming vocals of the Linkin Park CD in the Walkman hooked to Adam’s tape deck made his old speakers buzz. As the clock crept to 9:30, she cared less and less about making it home. Asara reached down a hole in her jacket pocket, pulled a Japanese pop CD out of the stuffing and switched it with Adam’s CD, flashing him a defiant smile.

“I never got into that anime stuff,” Adam said. “I’ve always been an American comic book kinda guy. Can you name one anime person who can beat Wolverine? Huh? Huh?”

“I can name lots,” she said.

“Can you even tell what they’re saying on this CD? They could be saying anything!”

“Nope, and I don’t care!” She sang along at the top of her lungs. “Hitori de wa, tooi ashita wooooo…” Adam translated: “Kill Americans, we’re gonna kill you alllll…”

Laughing, they stopped for gas. Two teenage girls with green and purple hair sat on the stoop outside the mini-mart, dividing up a pack of Newports with their black-clad boyfriends. They lived in the small cluster of houses nearby, couldn’t imagine life a mile down the road. Behind the gas station, trash lay heaped in a dead field, patches of yellow grass sticking up from the cracked dirt. The land would spring to life years later, when the stoop kids shopped for their own kids at Wal-Mart. Stuck forever in small-town limbo. As they walked hand-in-hand into the mart, Asara imagined all the places she and Adam would visit after he graduated. France, England, Japan, anywhere.

“Oh my God!” Adam said. “Ten cent Faygo!” He plunged his arms into the neon green plastic barrel, like they’d buried the best flavors just for him.

Asara wrapped her arm around his shoulders, scratched the curly hairs on his throat. She pointed a finger in his face. “It’s not that exciting. Really.”

He pointed at her. “Really, Asara. Really.”

“Really,” they said, their fingers an inch from each other’s faces. “I’m gonna go pee,” she told him.

“Well, try not to fall in. Really.”

Sitting on the toilet in a stall with no doors, she had to look away from the tension on the restroom walls:

FUCK THE WAR!!

grow some balls commie       The powerful create, the weak destroy

Could you hippies be any more cliche?

UR ALL A BUNCHA FAGS!!!

She could hear the voices shouting hatred. Asara pulled a pen she kept in case she felt like doodling from her jacket. Right above where someone would write Fuck you, rag-head! a week later, she wrote: ALLAH AKBAR. Satisfied, she walked to the Ford, feeling warm in the evening chill. God is great. That was her message.

Adam wasn’t in the Ford.

She watched five teenagers laughing on the mini-mart stoop.

In the day he yelled at everyone to keep their post, called for a change of guard when someone fainted from the heat. At night he made love with desperation. He curled against her in drugged slumber, his sunken stomach rumbling. She traced her hand over the face nestled on her breasts; his chiseled nose, thin lips and small overbite. Remembering the first time she saw that face, she laughed at how bratty she’d been, complaining for weeks about how her sisters got big celebrations for their weddings. But Soviet helicopters bombed large gatherings, and her parents put safety over tradition. She walked through the hut, wearing that beautiful dress only a handful of family would see, glad her veil blinded her to the small assemblage. Her uncle sang passionately, like the whole village had indeed come: “Ahesto bero, mah e man ahesta bero.” Walk slowly my light of night, go slowly.

She struggled to remember her vows, words swearing loyalty, fealty, obedience. What if the priest could tell she had doubts? Would God know? She cried. When her betrothed lifted the veil she looked down, ashamed this had to be his first impression of her. He cupped her chin in his hand and gently turned her face toward him. She saw a stranger, with the kind smile of someone she wanted to know.

The troop hadn’t heard news of Soviets for weeks. In the north, the swelling Taliban forces fought local warlords. In the south, drug lords burned villages. War had become life. It was how people got food, got shelter, practiced their faith. She kissed his forehead. At least one person in this country deserved peace.

Asara curled up in the passenger seat, trying to make herself as small as she felt. Adam turned a cartwheel for his new friends. They laughed at his performance. Fear and jealousy knotted her stomach, like when she glimpsed kids outside Starbucks through Dad’s car window. Kids who smoked pot and threw parties and drove around Olney looking for adventures, making the night last forever. She wanted to go home, put on Final Fantasy and forget Adam.

“Hey, come on and meet everybody.” Adam grabbed his Spiderman shirt off the front seat. The stoop kids waited patiently for him, their cigarette smoke wispy in the cold. Asara turned away from his tempting smile. Frowning, he reached over her, pulled the mask out of his glove compartment. She grabbed his wrist. Something swelled up from her belly: a burning urge to protect everything in the world special, unique and good. She needed to keep his strength with her. All of it. Pulling him down, she hungrily kissed his neck, his lips, his chin, his eyes.

Refugees milled silently about the camp. The baby on her breast bit her nipple to get her dried milk. Her legs ached from a day of keeping rhythm with the hundred other shuffling feet. Sometimes she thought Pakistan didn’t exist at all, and they’d wander forever through the black mountains. She offered her husband a bowl of watery stew and he didn’t answer, his face a dusty mask with the blank stare of the displaced.

Suddenly, the familiar crackle of American rifles exploded all around them. Her husband ran. She clasped the cold metal of his gun. The rifle in one arm and the baby in the other, she hurried through the pitch-black camp, chaotic with screaming refugees. She glimpsed two bandits praise Allah as they tore a bag of rice from a woman, stuffing their mouths like ravenous wolves. Another yelled a jihad battlecry and shot a woman in the back. She found her husband whimpering behind a tent, cringing at the sight of her. She thrust the rifle at him. Why didn’t he get up? After those months in the cave, he was scared of bandits? He threw a wild punch that clipped her on the jaw.

Dazed, she looked at the baby wailing on the ground, then at her quivering husband. Hefting the rifle, she shot a bandit. His hand flew to his throat; he collapsed to the ground. Positioning her body in front of her family, she killed any bandit who came near. One of them fell, smoke rising from a hole in his chest, hands raised plaintively to the stars. She shot him twice in the head before he could gurgle his last prayer. Her husband grabbed the butt and, for a second, their fingers touched. She released the gun. Screaming his lilting battlecry, he disappeared into the night.

“Adam!” Asara screamed. “Adam!” So the whole world would hear. “Adam!” She screamed Adam’s name until Adam disappeared from her thoughts and she screamed just to be heard. “Adam!” She screamed until a pair of hands gripped her shoulders.

“Are you okay?” Adam asked, panting. His eyes lingered on her, and she had no doubt he cared only for her at that moment. Her feet, toes desperately locked together, slipped down his sweaty ass. She wrapped him in her arms, kept him with her. The backseat chafed her. A ball of fire burned between her legs.

If Adam started driving at that moment, he might have gotten her home in time. Instead, they lay in the cramped backseat, shifting uncomfortably. Asara felt calm, calmer than she thought she’d be when the time came. Adam stroked her hair with a trembling hand but otherwise kept still. For some reason she didn’t understand, Asara told him how, on nights like this, Mom stayed up late while Dad worked at the E.R. Her hair in a long black braid, she read his poetry books, looking so old Asara couldn’t believe she was only thirty-two. She never disturbed Mom’s meditation; she’d just get a pissed-off look and a “Go to bed.” Now that she thought about it, Mom seemed restless. Too worried to sleep until Dad came home. It made sense. After all, she did fight with him against the Russians; you can’t get more devoted than that. Adam mouthed the word “Wow.”

When Adam spoke Asara listened. His parents came from Afghanistan during the war, too. Sometimes he felt he had to justify the crap they went through. Asara asked if all that pressure was why he came back to Olney so much. Adam sighed. His friends had gotten so serious, knowing exactly what to do with their lives. He had no idea. Adam kissed her and flashed the smile he would give her so many times during the month they dated. Uncertainty in his voice, he told her not to worry about him. They talked until they silently agreed neither of them had the answers. Arms around his waist, Asara thought of the sad-eyed girl in the old wedding photos who looked just like her, the aching devotion that drove her from her village, until she and Adam dressed and he took her home.

A shrill wind blew into Pakistan from the mountains, howling through the refugee camp. Her husband shut their tent flap and gently took their child from her. “Asara,” he said, a light in his eyes to match that of their fire. Giving into weariness, she closed her eyes on the sight of them together.

 

[END]

© 2006 Elwin Cotman - Contributor's Bio

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