Free A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus Page B

office feeling so satisfied. He closed the door behind him and, standing on the top step of the hall stairway, turned to look at the doctor’snameplate. The letters in the name swam in front of his eyes, a hydra of vowels in a pool of murky consonants. There was what seemed to be a mid-syllable hyphen and two q ’s flagrantly u -less. Marshall put his lips together, accomplishing the name’s initial m -sound. He made a soft, feminine moan, trying to breathe life into the characters that followed. It was impossible. Nor would he ever succeed in recalling this specific arrangement of letters. He frowned and went on his way.
    The inflammation didn’t respond to the antibiotics and within a few days its edges had become painfully itchy. “Don’t scratch,” the doctor warned at their next appointment, prescribing an ointment. Over the next month they tried several treatments on the rash, which hardly diminished. They talked, mostly about September 11; Marshall waited for the doctor to issue another observation about his wife. None came, as if the word “high-strung” had adequately dispatched her. The doctor’s limping, doe-eyed assistant—his daughter, it turned out—often brought the two men small sweet cups of tea, a regular service at the doctor’s first medical clinic, in Kunduz, Afghanistan, before the Soviet invasion. While they sipped, the doctor described his family’s terrifying yearlong passage to America, through Iran and Pakistan. The girl had been hurt by a land mine. After being told this, Marshall would have been embarrassed to ask him how to pronounce his name.
    Looking for razor blades in the drugstore one afternoon, he impulsively purchased a container of baby powder. He doused himself with the talc every morning for a week and the rash finally disappeared. He returned for another follow-up visit anyway. He found ease in the brownstone and its muted, dimly lit waiting room. The doctor impressed him with his sobriety and quiet heroism. The daughter smiled shyly. He was congratulated for his pink and healthy skin.
    “I wish talc would work on my other problems,” Marshall said sourly.
    The doctor made a clucking sound. He was very much a New Yorker in dress and comportment. His accent was mid-Atlantic. The clucking sound, however, was unmistakably foreign. “No resolution yet?”
    “I’m afraid not.”
    “Be strong, my friend,” he said, smiling more warmly than he ever had before in Marshall’s company. “You’ve survived worse.”
    The doctor put his hand firmly on Marshall’s shoulder. Marshall had hoped his remark would elicit a personal comment. He could have remained there, sitting on the examination table, for the rest of the day.
     
    THIS WAS the month the U.S. pressed its military campaign against the Taliban, using intense aerial bombardment and its special forces to assist the Northern Alliance, which, after some initial hesitation, began its march toward Kabul and laid siege to Kunduz and Kandahar. Every day brought news of another U.S. raid; also, of missed targets and slain civilians. Joyce studied the maps in the Times intently, so that she soon knew the country’s arid, high-relief terrain, swept by an ocher Martian dust, and how its ethnic groups, the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, were distributed across it. She located the big cities, as well as the Taliban and anti-Taliban strongholds outside and within them. She attended the warfare’s fits and starts, which were dependent on shifting alliances, treachery, and the question of whether the U.S. would need to commit ground troops. She savored the beauty of the Afghan people who stared into the cameras: blue-eyed, dark-browed, sultry, fierce. The women wrapped themselves in purple and maroon robes, gold-threaded kerchiefs, and lacypaisley scrims. One evening when Marshall had the kids Joyce went through her jewelry box and found an old Middle Eastern bracelet, inlaid with lapis lazuli, which she had often worn