I play it as I slip off my shoes and sit at my desk. She tells me she has a cold, one she is sure she picked up from Mamá, then she asks after me, asks how work is going in Kabul. At the end, just before she hangs up, she says, Odie goes on and on about how you don’t call. Of course she won’t tell you. So I will. Markos. For the love of Christ. Call your mother. You ass. I smile. Thalia. I keep a picture of her on my desk, the one I took all those years ago at the beach on Tinos—Thalia sitting on a rock with her back to the camera. I have framed the photo, though if you look closely you can still see a patch of dark brown at the left lower corner courtesy of a crazed Italian girl who tried to set fire to it many years ago. I turn on my laptop and start typing up the previous day’s op notes. My room is upstairs—one of three bedrooms on the second floor of this house where I have lived since my arrival in Kabul back in 2002—and my desk sits at the window overlooking the garden below.
