The Opium Prince Page 17

  17

  The Stupid Man grew vivid in Daniel’s mind, and he thought he might be remembering him for the first time since he’d left Kabul. As a boy, Daniel had wondered why everybody called him stupid. How did they know? The man never said anything particularly stupid. Sayed warned him to stay away, and the Stupid Man would shout, “Have you no compassion? Look at me.”

  When Sayed went to prison, agha came to live at the house to take care of Daniel and would watch the Stupid Man with pity. He would also warn him to stay away from young Daniel, whose hand he held tightly when they walked past. Sometimes the Stupid Man went away for a few days, but he always came back.

  Leaving for school one morning, Daniel saw him through the car window slumped against a wall, head hung low. He searched the man’s face for a sign of this silent stupidity. The man’s head jerked up, then fell limp again. But in those brief seconds the Stupid Man and Daniel made eye contact, and the man’s eyes were full of a sharp-edged light. Daniel dipped out of sight, hiding beneath the car window glass.

  “It’s the flower.” The chauffeur held Daniel’s gaze in the mirror as he accelerated on the uneven road. “If you like the flower, you turn stupid like him.” He gave a nod to underline the importance of what he had just said. Daniel did not understand. He fumbled around in his backpack, found his French grammar book, and pretended to be engrossed by the pluperfect. After a few minutes, he put the book down.

  “What does the Stupid Man do with the flower?”

  The driver straightened his back and said, “The first flower, he ate. The second flower, he smoked. He puts the third flower in his veins with a needle.”

  The next morning, Daniel awoke at dawn from a dream, and though he couldn’t remember the details, he knew it had to do with the Stupid Man. He wanted to see him up close. He snuck outside.

  “Good morning,” said a hoarse voice.

  Startled, Daniel took a step back. The Stupid Man was against the wall with his legs stretched out before him. The man was like the skeleton they used in class to show you what men were made of once everything was stripped away.

  “Don’t you have school today?”

  “Later.”

  “School is important. Do you like stories?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “You can stand or sit, it doesn’t make a difference to me.” After a pause, the man added, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “I was talking to myself.”

  “Oh.”

  “I like talking to myself. It’s better that way, because I know what the answer will be. Wouldn’t you like that in school? To know the answers ahead of time?”

  To this, Daniel had no response.

  “You came for a story, so I’ll tell you one. I had a son once, but I don’t now, so there’s nobody to tell stories to anymore.”

  “Your son died?”

  “No. I did.”

  For a half hour, Daniel sat beside the old man. They looked straight ahead together as he told his tale, pausing sometimes to cough or wipe his nose, smearing mucus on his pants, his arms, the ground.

  The Stupid Man had grown up forty steps from a field of poppies, and when he was a young man, one of the farmers convinced him to help. The landowners were desperate for good men, not just to harvest but to help the growers keep track of numbers: amounts, weights, prices, profits. The Stupid Man had not been stupid back then—he had gone to school. They paid him well. One evening when he was working late, one of the harvesters whose teeth were all missing told him he would feel better if he smoked a little. “Don’t you want to try?” He gave him some to take home. “Don’t tell, or they’ll cut our hands off.” The man said this matter-of-factly and made a slicing gesture across his wrists.

  Soon, Young Stupid Man was smoking a few days every week. The landowner was kind, and they became friends. One day, he asked if he could be paid in resin instead of money. The landowner agreed and started asking him to do more and more tasks. Tasks that were riskier or that made him very tired, like working longer than anyone else. He did everything he was asked because it was the only way to get the sweet smoke that he needed more of every day.

  Then a girl he loved told him she was pregnant and told him to stop. She became his wife, and he turned away from the field and went far away from the poppies, vowing to never return. He tried working in a shop, but he missed the poppy and began to drink. It wasn’t the same. He started to steal to make more money. His son was often sick, and one day the woman took him with her and disappeared. So Young Stupid Man, who was not so young anymore, lived alone with a three-legged dog he rescued from a gang of mean boys and slept in a box that he carried around, tying the dog to a hook in one of the boards when he went to work.

  One day, the dog fell very ill, and Young Stupid Man needed money for a dog doctor, something only rich men could afford. He knew that dogs were just dogs, but he’d grown to love the miserable creature. So he went back to the fields. From then on, his life was both terrible and wonderful. He couldn’t resist the resin’s golden song. The old owner was still there and again agreed to pay him in opium—small amounts, enough to make him happy and keep him working. They weren’t friends anymore. One day, somebody said the owner was caught and put in jail. The Stupid Man didn’t believe it. Men like that were never really caught. The Stupid Man couldn’t save his dog, whom he found dead one day, vultures already pecking at the animal’s gangly frame.

  Eventually, he became too weak to work. The fields didn’t want him. He was poppy-sick and would remain so for the rest of his life.

  “See, I am a wretch,” the Stupid Man would say as he wandered through the country on feet so calloused they didn’t bleed, begging for money or opium. “Please help me. Just a little.”

  When people saw the constellation of pinpricks on his arms and the rotten teeth in a face that was still young, they would shake their heads and say, “Stupid man, you gave in to the flower.”

  Nights were the worst. It felt like someone had pushed scrolls of ice down his throat, then dragged him into a spitting, mighty fire. It was all a terrible joke played by a wicked djinn. As he lay there, wondering if he was awake or asleep and hoping he was dead, the fire burned his skin, and he would sweat so much that he hoped it was the ice inside him melting and pouring out of his body. But the ice grew only colder and harder, and the sweat just kept coming like a boiling river. He shivered and shook, his legs kicking at imaginary enemies. He swore sometimes at God, sometimes at the devil. He blamed both for the chains that fettered him. He grew ill and sometimes coughed up blood. He had only one wish left in his life, and that was that he should die indoors, not in an alley like his dog.

  The story ended. Daniel sat quietly beside the Stupid Man, and this was how Sherzai found them when he appeared from the house to greet a pickup truck that slowly rambled into view, depositing two construction workers on the street. When Sherzai saw Daniel, he grew angry and told him to go inside. Daniel gathered his books, and when he leaned out of his bedroom window, Sherzai was talking to the Stupid Man, who cried and said he was sorry and promised he had not hurt Daniel and would go away and never return. He got up and limped away, screaming nonsense. “This is what it looks like! This is what it looks like!”

  Agha returned to the house, his face sad. He was a good man, kinder than Sayed, though no one ever said so out loud. His own wife had died a long time ago while giving birth to their daughter, who died, too, and Daniel thought this had made agha sad for the rest of his life. That afternoon, Daniel learned why the construction men had come. It was his thirteenth birthday, and Sherzai had hired them to build a fancy work shed for him. When he came home from school the shed was ready, though the paint was still wet.

  Sherzai gave him a gleaming red box of new tools. After cake and a birthday song, he ran to his new shed. He pushed open the door, tripp
ing over the threshold in his excitement. Then he saw the Stupid Man slumped in the corner. The Stupid Man had wanted to spend the last moments of his life indoors; his wish had been granted. Daniel was sad, but also happy that his shed had provided the man with comfort on the last day of his life.

  18

  When Rebecca emerged from the bath, she curled up on the sheets and reached for Daniel with tender despair. Her sister’s death left her wanting to engage in the act that brought life. They lay awake afterward. She talked about Sandy as if recounting a story she’d heard long ago, not one she’d lived through. She’d forgotten about Taj, the club, everything. They held each other and whispered comforting things, and for a moment they were on the bluff in Santa Monica again, sitting side by side on a throne, the sea a glittering kingdom at their feet.

  In the early morning, Daniel rose and peered through the drapes while Rebecca slept. On the dew-silvered lawn he saw a ruined flower bed. This was what she had done last night before telling him the news. She had turned over the soil, tearing up the new buds meant for next spring. Kneeling, the gardener, who had been there from Sayed’s time, was picking at the earth with a small shovel as he repaired the flower garden. Daniel returned to bed and wrapped her in his arms.

  While she slept, the awful truth dawned on him. He couldn’t go with her to LA for the funeral. The destruction of the Gulzar field was coming, and the tale he’d spun to make it happen was so fragile.

  Over the years, he’d thought about what would happen if Sandy died. He’d wondered if she’d be alone, how old she would be. In his sorrowful imaginings, the details changed, but one thing never did. He was always at his wife’s side. He was holding her hand tightly during the service, and he would take care of everything, all the logistics that reduced tragic events to a collection of tedious moments—the paperwork and phone calls and schedules and dotted lines. He had never imagined that he wouldn’t be there. How had it come to this?

  When Rebecca woke up, he told her he loved her, and she said she loved him, too. They stared at each other, trying to remember what people said after that. When she told him to please find a flight for the next day, he told her he couldn’t go. It just wasn’t possible.

  “I can’t believe it, but it’s the way it is,” he said. It was true. “The way things are, there’s no one else. There’s so much hanging in the balance right now. If there was any way I could go, I would.” He was falling over himself as she watched him quietly. He promised he would do everything he could from here. He asked her to please believe him. “I’ve been through this in my mind over and over. I just can’t abandon this.”

  She pushed up on an elbow and continued to watch him, then she closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “What are you actually saying?”

  “There are too many things happening here, Becca. Serious things.”

  “I’m sorry, serious things?”

  “If I don’t go, innocent people could get hurt. People could die.” He tried to make it sound like this was a normal concern of his job.

  “What are you talking about? Somebody’s already dead. My sister.”

  “If I told you . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

  Slowly, she said, “If you told me, then maybe I would understand.”

  He took her hand, but she pushed it away. It wasn’t a forceful gesture, but it suggested exhaustion and resignation.

  “Becca, please trust me. I wish things were different.” He said what he found so difficult to say, and what he almost resented having to say because he thought it was obvious. “You’re the most important thing in my life.” A warm numbness came over him when he said it, a kind of relief painting over everything else he had felt. “You know that.”

  When she didn’t respond, he added, “Please believe me.”

  She rolled away from him. “Don’t worry. When I see my mom in the hospital, I’ll explain that the day she’s burying her daughter wasn’t convenient for you.” After a while, she cried. Not tears of grief for Sandy or that terrible night three months ago or the crash. These tears were for her and Daniel. She told him to leave.

  “I just need to be alone.”

  Downstairs, he sat in the dimly lit living room. His eyes fell on an ornament, an intricately carved mahogany fox. In one of its flanks was a tiny dent, too small for most people to see. It grew in his vision until the ornament itself disappeared, and all that was left was the flaw in the shape of the fox.

  19

  The next morning, she tossed clothes in a suitcase like coins into a fountain. He tried to comfort her, but she pulled away. He felt helpless, like he had broken another thing in Rebecca. The Scale of Sages had been cruel. He said softly, “My being there won’t bring Sandy back.”

  “No,” Rebecca said. “But it might have saved something else.”

  She spent hours on the phone, and in the late afternoon, he brought her luggage downstairs. She strapped on her shoes. “I don’t know if Laila told you, but Peter got a job at the university.”

  Surprised, he asked if Peter was returning to UCLA.

  “No, the university here. He’s going to teach English.”

  So it had come to that. He felt sorry for Peter. “We’re going to be late if we don’t leave soon,” Daniel said.

  He hadn’t driven a car since they had come back from the trip. He felt his heart rate rise and his palms grow clammy as he thought about being at the wheel. In his head, he could hear the engine purring deceptively. He reached for his shoes by the entryway.

  “Don’t bother,” Rebecca said. “I have a ride.”

  There was a knock before he could reply. Peter stood alone at the door, Laila’s empty Volkswagen pulsing in the street.

  Daniel pulled his wife aside. “What’s going on? I’ll take you to the airport.”

  “You’re too busy,” she said gently. She gave him a passionless kiss, then walked past Peter and waited in the car.

  “How is she?” Peter asked Daniel.

  “She’s obviously been better.”

  Peter launched into a winding explanation of why he was here. Rebecca had called to ask for a ride. Laila was at the clinic and couldn’t come. He was still talking when Daniel shut the door. He spent the rest of the evening in his study, poring over documents both authentic and false. He worked late into the night, trying not to think about poor Sandy dying in a no-name place with no friends, or about how much he wanted to be with Rebecca’s family. Instead, he thought about Greenwood. Even the most transparent man could become opaque when his livelihood depended on it. What a swindle Greenwood had pulled, checking out girls every chance he got. Maybe he’d hoped the seed inside him would simply die. But it had sprouted and bloomed, no poison strong enough to destroy what was inside him. Daniel wished an Agent Ruby existed for men with twisted desires.

  Daniel went upstairs and retrieved the photograph, which he had unimaginatively hidden under the mattress. He locked the envelope inside the safe in his study, spinning the lock again and again. The boy in the picture might have been Greenwood’s first, but Daniel suspected he wasn’t. He thought about the awful whorehouse he’d wandered into. Some youths were living under even worse conditions, used in back alleys and streets.

  At first, Dannaco-Hastings balked at Greenwood’s insistence that the Reform be changed. It would cost too much to reconfigure the pipes for the Gulzar field and re-dig the channel. Once he’d convinced them it would be worthwhile, they requested samples from the Gulzar poppies’ resin.

  “That’s already been done,” Daniel told Greenwood. The consultant tried to protest, but Daniel pushed the file across the desk. “It’s all there. Everything was tested less than a year ago. If we test again, we’ll be wasting resources, and you know both our employers hate that.”

  Seth, standing outside Daniel’s office, let out a laugh of disbelief.

  Eventually, Dannaco-Hastings accepted t
he report, taking Greenwood at his word. And so began the reshuffling of priorities in Smythe’s office and elsewhere, committees signing off on the firm’s request to destroy the Gulzar field. Daniel’s made-up file circulated among senators and congressmen with limited interest in Afghan poppies. Smythe’s office argued at first, but the information was undeniable, or so Greenwood told them. Dannaco changed its mind, and so did Smythe. Sherzai quietly went along but stopped taking part in meetings and calls, sending an assistant in his stead. Everyone moved fast. The smell of dark tea and Nescafé filled USADE night and day, and Seth and Iggy seemed to never leave at all. Neither spoke to Daniel. Iggy was too busy, Seth too angry.

  If the office was too chaotic, the house was too quiet without Rebecca. There seemed to be no middle ground left in Daniel’s life. Peter and Laila called and showed up at his door once, but he made excuses not to see them. Ian came by and asked for help on an old car. There was no time, Daniel said, when in truth, he no longer enjoyed working on cars. He couldn’t avoid his friend much longer, though. Ian would be at the Gulzar field the day of its destruction. In Washington, a committee had decided that the Peace Corps should be on hand to “help farmers and their families adjust,” whatever that meant.