When I think back on these last few months—on the way the pieces of flesh appeared on the sidewalk and the children fed stray ears to stray dogs, on the way Rahmatulla disappeared in Guldara and was found chunk by chunk in Qarabagh and Kariz Mir and Bagram—the only place I can find any real humor is in that first headline in “Outlook Afghanistan.” It read:
The Blue Ghosts: How Long Have They Been Here?
I can understand if you don’t find that funny, especially if you weren’t here for it, but for me, the laugh is that there was no question of whether or not they were here, or what the fuck they are in the first place. There was only the mystery of when they arrived. Certainly they weren’t doing the same things during Najibullah, or the years of monarchy and muddled tribalism before that. But they could’ve been there, in the villages at odd times of the day, fetching water or wandering between compounds, or sitting silently in the darker corners of Kabul, watching shoes outside of Mosques. They could’ve been there, but they weren’t doing then what they’re doing now, and it’s what they’re doing now that makes it so hard to find humor in this place and time.
It was a scrawny, Midwestern ISAF soldier named Marcus Hobbes who was unofficially credited with first discovering the existence of the Blue Ghosts. This credit was unofficial for two reasons: The first was that ISAF policies regarding remote surveillance, especially when pertaining to the strategic capabilities of the great white Orwellian blimp hovering over Kabul day and night were— and are—strictly confidential, such that even a hint of the idea that some 19 year old kid from Columbia, Missouri was spending night after night peering into the compounds of average Afghans was cause for enormously incredulous denials from ISAFcommanders to the effect of “the cameras only focus on real targets identified by strictly vetted informants and only after review by a surveillance policy board.” This, of course, was not true, and belies the second reason why Marcus Hobbes was not given a medal for what is without a doubt the most important discovery of modern times. The second reason is that Marcus Hobbes, video analyst extraordinaire, had been censured on seven different occasions for masturbating on the job. He was, in fact, a prolific masturbator, and, as luck would have it for a young jack-off with a fetish for voyeur scenarios, he was detailed to a dark, lonely room, where he was given free range to some of the most sophisticated camera technology in the world, and carte blanche to use it as he saw fit. The only unfortunate aspect to his workplace, as Marcus saw it, was the tendency of his superior officer to check in on the eagle-eyed Private now and then, and occasionally—seven times—catch him masturbating.
Time number eight was made worse in part by the fact that he finally thought he had had his problem beat via the installation in the hallway of a microphone so that he could hear the Sergeant approaching. He did hear the Sergeant approaching. He heard each footfall loud and hollow and growing in ominous Desert Boot crescendo until he knew the handle on the door would turn and he would be discovered, kneeling in the glow of the 57 inch screen, left hand on the remote control, right hand up and down, up and down with no prompting from the now paralyzed motor skills section of his helpless brain. But what could he do? The further he came down on the Burqa—the closer he got—the more excited he became until he was about to get his first glimpse of what would have almost certainly been his ecstatic clincher: the thin legs below the last fold—when he suddenly realized that there were no legs, no ankles, no little 1930s Betty Boop shoes, nothing that he had come to expect over night after night of fantasizing about the mysteries beneath the pleated blue cloth. And he could not stop hammering away at his own flesh, and he began to sob, and to come, and to scream, and it all happened just as the Sergeant opened the door and yelled, “Jesus Fucking Christ, Hobbes! Eight Times!”
And maybe that part of the story would’ve been funny too, but not if you saw what happened to Hobbes later, when he finally met a Blue Ghost close-up at Massoud Circle.
Poor, young Marcus Hobbes. Even between his first remote sighting and the moment he was unceremoniously scattered about Kabul with the rest of the Close Protection Team he was assigned to after his eighth “auto-erotic incident,” Marcus was not exactly hungry for the fame his discovery could have brought. Embarrassment at the stains on his record was one thing, but the real problem was that it seemed to be the discovery itself that first caused all the trouble, though, as Stanley McChrystal and later Barak Obama would point out in their own little Rumsfeldian versions of known unknown speak: “Just because they appear to act only when they are discovered now, does not mean that they would not have acted without ever having been discovered, or indeed that they are not acting undiscovered upon those who can no longer give us eye witness accounts of their discoveries or lack thereof.”
Still, Congress began to ask: If we didn’t look at them, would they still be dangerous? If we just left them alone and no one ever said, “HOLY SHIT! A BLUE GHOST!” would they wander around peacefully, minding whatever own business they had? Hadn’t they been wandering around peacefully before that hairy-fisted kid first saw them?
How long have they been here?
But that gets into the larger issues of the Blue Ghosts, and that gets dull quick. The Blue Ghosts are not scary when they’re in the newspapers or on TV or being debated in Parliament or Karzai’s office. The Blue Ghosts are only scary when they’re real and upon you—when you realize that whatever they are, and however long they’ve been here, they are not human, but that they see you. And having seen one myself, and having known that fear, I want to tell you a story.
It was late, but I needed a drink. I called Aman and asked him to get the car ready for the three block drive to El Aire. I put on a pair of jeans and an old t-shirt and wrapped a scarf around my neck for good measure, with two fringed corners hanging at different lengths down my front. I took a quick hit of weak hash that I had gotten off a filmmaker and his fixer, and went downstairs to make the short trip. Aman was rubbing his eyes in the drivers’ room and calling for a guard to come with us. I said no, I’d ride up front and we were just going around the corner. The guard stopped tying his boots and asked, “Cujo Meri?”
Out, I said.
We bumped down the road and I pushed the heavy front door open and told Aman to keep his phone near his head if he was going to sleep –I wouldn’t be long—and went in to be frisked in the air-lock. I had forgotten to take my leatherman out of my pocket, so I had to check that in one of the drawers at the front, and then made the walk into the courtyard, meeting the eyes of the door-facers in each couch group as they looked me over to see if I was familiar. No one made me feel I was.
The crowd was mostly gun monkeys and Christians, so I got a heiniken alone and recalled aloud the heady days last month when beers were only $6, and the barman said “supply and demand” and I gave him an extra dollar anyway because I’m American and can’t help myself. I sat alone and drank two beers, looking awkwardly around to see again if I knew anyone. I thought I recognized a few folks at one of the low tables by the front wall, but they were wearing baseball caps and had “good-governance” consulting contracts, and I knew I wasn’t welcome at their table anymore anyway. My mind wandered: It would only take one man and one grenade to really shake up the expats; a nice, soft lob up over the front wall of El Aire. Contractors make meaty shrapnel shields, and I stayed at the bar, and called Aman for a ride home.
He didn’t pick up.
I called three times, and began to get uneasy. It wasn’t that I’d have to walk home, it was that I was beginning to think that everyone was commenting on that stoned looking guy at the bar who’d been sitting by himself for half an hour, gawking at people with friends. I tried to put my phone in my pocket smoothly, but half fell off the stool, dropped my Nokia, and with no one in particular to make a self-depricating cover-up comment to, I simply announced loudly, Hoob Kah! which turned the heads of the table nearest the bar, all scrunched eyebrows and half-pursed lips and “who the fuck is this guy?” as far as I could tell. No one looked at me when I walked through the courtyard on my way out, but I had the feeling this was an intentional avoidance, a “don’t look, but…”, and that was just as bad as if the tables had risen in unison and given me an ironic round of applause.
All this is to say, I was no longer all that high, and I was certainly not drunk when I left the bar that night, but I was suffering from an unhealthy—and undoubtedly undeserved—level of self-consciousness as I walked past the guards out front, and that might explain why I turned left instead of right, and took what was the long way, or—as I later learned—the wrong way, home.
I took off and re-slung my scarf in a futile attempt to make my six-foot, blonde-foreign frame look just a bit more Afghan, at least to a passing car or a far off pedestrian. There was a guard sitting alone in a wash of yellow, incandescent light at one of the houses, and I nodded Salam Aleikum to him and rolled off a few versions of How are you? in Dari as I passed. He smiled with wide eyes and mumbled back a startled “Hoobasti?” and I looked down the street into the darkness ahead. He was the last human I saw that night.
I remember a light breeze, and I remember it growing. It was not the usual kind of hot air gust that regularly sent Kabul’s famously fecal dust particles flying into the spaces between exposed muscle fibers and ass fat cells of hanging sheep carcasses on butcher street. It came up slowly, pleasant in its first few advances up the Beaufort scale, until it began lifting sand into the path of my legs and torso and upper body, and finally required adjustments of my scarf, first to cowboy outlaw, and then to Afghan outlaw, and after three minutes I was leaning forward, one hand across my chest, and the other acting as a slotted visor, allowing me to squint out between my middle and index fingers as I stumbled in and out of potholes I couldn’t make out anyway.
And though it came up gradually, it died suddenly. I saw a paper cup sailing toward me, and was getting ready to swat it away with the back of my visor hand, when it began dropping about a meter away, and fell gently onto my left shoe as if it had lost not just its accelerating force, but also all momentum. I pulled my scarf back down around my neck and looked back to see if there was anyone else in the street who had witnessed the gale, but there was no one. The light at the guard’s house behind me was off, and he was gone, hiding from the storm somewhere inside his employer’s compound. In front of me the darkness was even more blinding than it had been before. I kept going. When I got to the main road, there was a small light still on where a new mosque was being built on the Taimani side, but it only lit up the bits of road in front of me about as much as my cellphone screen would have done, had I had the guts to shine it.
When I got to my street and went to turn left again, there was a small trash fire burning in one of the gutters. Burning trash is never pleasant, but this tiny fire—no bigger than a cook stove flame—was giving off such thick, grey-white, hot smoke, that I began to cough uncontrollably within half a block of it. And it was while I was doubled over, a clenched fist at my mouth and a flat palm on my spasming sternum, that I first saw the bright blue piece of fabric, lying just out of reach of the flames, in the same gutter, a few feet from my door. I could see that it was dirty, and old, or maybe I just knew those things instinctively because of the way it looked cast aside at the edge of the road, with a small piece of cardboard partially covering it, in a part of the gutter where our water tank dropped its overflow from the roof above. And I could see that it was a burqa. I could see that for sure. The little fire was burning so intensely, giving off so much white light, that I could see the details of the grill’s embroidery from where I was standing, two compounds away. And I could see the spark that flew off and fell inside the grill.
And then I saw this—and you don’t have to believe me. I don’t fucking care. It doesn’t matter to me one bit what you do with this information. I am far from Kabul now. Far from Afghanistan and far from them. I pass no judgement on them or you or any decision made on the part of anyone. Do what you want.—But I saw this:
The cloth wrinkled, and rose. There was no breeze. No rising gale. The cloth simply flitted up into the air, to the height of a human, and hung there, limp, rippling, as if the burqa were a robe on a hook in a hotel bathroom, buffeted by a breeze from the combination of air conditioning and a shit-stink exhaust fan. But there was no breeze, no hook. And then it grew.
A dust devil began to twirl in a depression on the far side of my door. It dragged a spiral of what can only be described as gunk up from the ground with it, and started to pull more and more detritus into its whirring as it spun. Bits of trash and plastic water bottles and broken glass and—I can’t vouch for this visually, because at high speed who can tell the difference between shit and soil, but it must’ve been—feces (human and otherwise, I’m sure) and all the gum I’d spat in that spot, and all the cigarette butts my friends had flicked before they hopped into their Trust Taxis or NO GUNS Land Cruisers or local-yokel thin-skins, all the crap we used and left behind—and probably a few lost pieces of things people care about, like silver and jewelry—and all the filth and stench and aimless, exhaust-black dust of the street twirled up into the kind of floating mess that looks like all the shit it’s made from, but also like something more strikingly artistic and comprehendible when it whips around at eye level and doesn’t just lie there like useless crap at your feet. From all sides and sections of the street, from the gutters and the potholes and the stones jutting up through the rough dirt and the smooth, solid parts and the jagged, broken pipes poking out here and there, from everywhere around me these tiny tornadoes appeared, and yet, no wind touched me. I stood there, alone in my fear, as all around me the road rose. And I thought about physics. Don’t ask me why. Terror takes the mind to strange places, but I guess I was just seeing something I couldn’t explain, so I thought about physics. I thought about how all these forces, all these strange things that seem to happen in our world, the way the planets move, tides, gravity, light—everything is defined by math. And I wondered if this was in the math. I wondered if we had just looked harder before, we would’ve known how long the Blue Ghosts had been here. Young Marcus Hobbes wouldn’t have been saddled with the weight of the discovery (or, for that matter, its consequences), it would’ve been some old guy at Princeton, or Harvard, or Yale, sitting in a fat leather chair, playing with equations and scenarios, adding and subtracting invented constants, and we would’ve seen them coming. And I just stood there alone, terrified and blank-faced, wondering where the logic was, and how long it had been here. And the burqa hung alone opposite me, until, one by one, sometimes merging before they entered, sometimes avoiding each other like twister magnets until the last moments, the funnels of debris swept up into the cloth, and gave it shape.
I cannot be specific about the shape it took. There is no telling a woman from a man from a sack of potatoes or a punching bag in a burqa, regardless of the occasion, and I cannot tell you which sex I saw that night, or if the form had defining features at all. I know the reporters like to know those kinds of things, but I’m not a journalist, and I don’t think it would make you feel better anyway, because whatever I saw, whatever it was that became of that mass rising from the street and finding its way into hiding beneath that simple, blue cloth, was the last thing I saw. The fire in the street went out, and so did I.
