“It’s so much suffering over there, you learn to tune it out. The hungry kids chasing the car, the bombed-out shells of homes that were once places where happy families lived. You remind yourself you’re there to make a difference. It’s a matter of relative weight, right? So much is a matter of weight. Things need to not weigh the same, you know? You can’t just react to every tiny thing, or you can never do anything big. And then I went and reacted to the tiniest thing.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. One good night’s sleep, that’s all I need.
The kitten incident happened while I was on my way to the assignment of a lifetime—to interview a female warlord. It was going to be amazing. She was going to let me spend the day with her. A female warlord in the hills of Afghanistan.
“You can’t even imagine what a coup that would’ve been,” I say to 34. “This was somebody you couldn’t get to—like ever. And like a fucking miracle, she agreed to this meeting. The one meeting she’d do—ever. Everyone wanted that meeting, but I got it.”
I scratch against the grain of the sheet, throat too thick to talk, remembering the way my fixer looked at me when I got out of that Jeep. He was being paid by the magazine to take me around and translate for me and protect me to a limited extent, but in that Jeep, I was boss. We stalled out in this ruined intersection. The engine cut, and that’s when I heard the tiny mewl.
My voice is a whisper. “And then I see the paw poking out of that hole. I couldn’t leave it, crying like that. At first I thought, ‘I just have to see what’s up,’ you know? I got out and I go over, and I could see it in there. It was under a bunch of steel and mesh under this stone slab. And once I saw it, I had to get it out, you know?”
The clock on the wall clicks away. One second. Another.
I’m back there a little bit. “I made my fixer pay a few guys to move the slab. It took two fucking hours to round up enough guys to move that stone slab. They thought I was insane. Maybe a little like you do right now.”
His pulse is a drum in his neck—even I can see it. I smooth down his sleeve, wondering who cuts his beard. I hope it’s not Donny. Fucking Donny.
“Fuck fuck fuck, you have to calm down,” I say, and I don’t know who I’m talking to—him or me. “They freed it, though. Put it in my arms. It was every kind of selfish, I guess. I passed by so much suffering there. You pick your battles. Until you don’t. And mine was the kitten. What was I doing?” I close my eyes, and it’s like I can feel the grit on my knees and the kitten’s tiny ribs. I’m back there breathing in the dust, with my fixer looming above me, unsure whether to watch me or look away.
“I’m holding that little thing, crying. I’m sure the mother was long gone. Probably dead. I couldn’t stop crying. So yeah, that was impressive. And then like an asshole I get in the Jeep with the kitten in my shirt, and he’s driving like hell to make time to get to the meeting, but we both knew she’d be gone. I kind of didn’t care. I got it to drink water. It was so scared, but it liked being in my shirt. That’s all it needed, you know? It just needed somebody to hold it. To give a fuck.”
Am I really pouring my guts out to 34? Suddenly I can’t stop.
“We got to the market where the meet was supposed to happen, and the warlord had already left. I would’ve spent a day with her. It would’ve been amazing.”
I think back, remembering how excited I was to land that interview. When you get to spend a whole day with a subject like that, they start to forget you’re there, and you get really genuine stuff. Unguarded truth. The stuff they don’t know not to tell you. Of course she was gone by the time we arrived. I just felt numb about it. I was all about the kitten. I had my fixer drive us to this small village at the edge of a relatively lush area. Just this random area I’d seen pictures of.”
I sigh, remembering.
“I was basically Caligula at that point,” I add. “Caligula with a kitten. I dropped it off. It seemed like a nice place for a kitten. A good food supply. And then I went out and got so fucking drunk. God.” I tip my head back and gaze at the stained tiles on the ceiling. This is 34’s view forever. “You’d at least think saving the kitten would make me feel better. But it didn’t. It made the kitten feel better. I hope.”
Those next couple weeks I drank and drank. Fixers gossip like old women. The world of journalism is not a large place, and there’s always somebody hungrier. With every sweating bottle of beer, I felt my career crumble a little more. I’d found the one thing that was worse than getting emotionally involved. Worse than fucking an interview subject. I missed a career-making interview to save a trapped kitten.
“It was just so helpless and scared, though,” I say to him. “And so thin. It weighed nothing and its little claws…its little fucking claws. It needed me. It just needed…” I gust out the last word—“something.”
The room starts to look wavy through my tears. They trail down my cheeks like hot, wet fingers.
“Okay! See? Happy now?” I sniffle, thankful my back is to the window. “This is why I don’t talk about the fucking kitten. This—”
My throat thickens up, like a band, tightening around it.
“This—” I whisper as the sobs take on chest-convulsing lives of their own, like too many got trapped inside my heart that day, and now they’re all trying to punch out at once.
Everything inside me is a chaos of heat and pain. The room is wavy. I can’t see. I can’t think.
I grab hold of the sheet, telling myself I’m in Minnesota, but really I’m in that collapsing hospital. I’m on the dusty street. I’m in the half-crushed cooler, I’m swimming in antiseptic, I’m in a Jeep, I’m holding the kitten crying against my belly, sobs like a fist inside me.
Something crushes my hand. Hard grip.
Warm skin.
My eyes fly open.
Patient 34 is holding my hand.
He pins me with a torn expression.
My mouth hangs open. My heart thunders.