Free Demons by Wayne Macauley Page B

night without a camera
and a boom mike somewhere around. Act natural, they said, but acting natural’s still
acting, isn’t it? And with the camera always in my face I found myself acting out
what I thought was natural while also feeling—how can I explain it?—that it was not me in my body but me in the camera , watching me act. Do you know what I mean? I was
acting like Cameron, the border security official, the way he, the other Cameron,
imagined he should.
    Late in the shift a family came through: a couple, mid-thirties, and their three
kids, the oldest a girl in her teens. The man claimed to have been a driver for a
detachment in Uruzgan and had a letter on army letterhead signed by someone called
Captain Smith. I believed it to be a fake. We put the family in the interview room
while I searched the database for Captain Smith. I found no such serving member.
I told the Afghani male—his English was good, he shook his head—then asked why they
had travelled here? He said they had family. I must have looked impressive, doing
the US cop-show routine. The crew were happy with the footage. I brought in my superior
and briefed him (unbelievably, he didn’t double-check the Captain Smith thing) and
he agreed the family were illegal and would need to be put on the next available
flight out. The Afghani man pleaded, cried, hit his head with his hands; the wife
and kids were crying too. Please, please, he said, they will kill me. Late the following
afternoon, while I was in bed asleep, they escorted them onto the plane.
    It was a few weeks later that I heard the news: the man and his family had only been
back two days when they were gunned down in their house. Only Hasti the fifteen-year-old
girl survived by hiding under the other bodies and playing dead. It was on the front
page, part of a series the paper was doing on the aftermath of the surge; the reporter
on the ground had investigated and found the family had been sent back in error.
The man—his name was Mehrzad— was a driver and Captain Smith, the leader of the forward
detachment for which he worked, had written a letter for him. Accompanying this article
was a photo of the surviving daughter, dressed traditionally, looking off-camera,
a backdrop of village roofs and rugged, snow-capped peaks.
    It was an awful feeling; I’d never felt anything like it before. I couldn’t sleep.
I kept seeing that picture in my head of the family being shot (the article said
they’d been pushed with rifle butts into a room at the back of the house and mown
down with a machine gun), of them cowering in the corner, of the young girl opening
her eyes after the killers had gone and realising she was the only one alive.
    The doctor gave me sleeping pills. They helped, but they also left me so washed out
I hardly ever got up before midday. Aria started getting cranky with me—you asked
me what was wrong so I’m telling—and yelling at me to snap out of it. (If only I
could!) To her my guilt—guilt that was literally making me sick—was misguided. What
are you fretting for, she’d say, you did nothing wrong, those people might have been
terrorists, they could have been plotting some suicide attack or something; you sent
them back, you were doing your job, why should you feel guilty? I tried to explain
that it wasn’t that simple, that I had every right to feel guilty, I’d made a mistake
that had cost the lives of four people, including two little kids. But Aria wasn’t
listening. She was thinking about the new nail polish, the new dress her friend had
bought, the new shoes for Saturday night.
    I’m sorry, I said, said Evan, but I’ve got to stop you there: we are talking about
my daughter, after all. I mean, I know she’s got her faults and that but, listen,
I’m going to be straight with you, Cameron, I don’t get it. You and her, I don’t
get it. Cameron looked at the ground. Neither do I, he said. He looked up. I bought
her a drink, that’s all. I was there with a