The Fires Read Free Page A

to Moscow. Ridiculous that he couldn’t just make the short hop over to Tashkent, but there was a full day of meetings in Moscow between him and Uzbekistan.
    And then things began to go wrong, not terribly wrong, but just enough to put him on edge. The company driver who took him back to the airport offered a shortcut through a neighborhood of cement block shacks, and they no sooner had turned the corner off the main avenue when one of their tires went flat. Paul had had to wait there in the dark, inhaling the smell of gasoline, standing
water—there were puddles all around though it had not rained that day—and the odor of a dozen cooking fires, while smoking his first cigarette in two years. He cadged it from the embarrassed driver and felt a little silly himself. What would he tell Gina? He told her everything, but then most of what he reported in the last few years had been good things, and if not good, then at least merely trivial, not degrading like this, giving in to his old habit.
    The air was cold up here, and he smoked harder, as if it might warm him a bit. I should find one of those cooking fires and stand close to it, he told himself. Imagine, a stranger, a westerner, American no less, going up to one of these little cement shanties and knocking on the door. Well, he knew they would be hospitable and invite him in. And he would be offered the meal they had been counting on for their next day’s fare.
    His mouth watered. He was hungry. His bowels gurgled and pitched as he sucked in more smoke, held it…exhaled into the dark.
    â€œHow are you doing?” he said to the driver.
    The man looked up from his labor at the front of the car, but said nothing.
    Paul pictured what it would be like in this part of town, all over the city, in fact, if the project went through. Better light! Better energy! All across these dark and ominous mountain nations, people could begin to live a different life.
    As if to mock his thought at the time, an old woman came limping up the lane, pulling something behind her. It took a moment before Paul could make it out, some kind of wagon, it seemed to be at first. But the closer she got the better he could see—a travois, no wheels, just a cart in triangular shape that she dragged behind her, and inside it, a child of perhaps three or four, an oddly pointed knitted cap on his head, his eyes wheeling about wildly in the viewing of nothing—he didn’t seem to notice Paul or
the driver or the car, though the old woman at least recognized their presence by walking a bit further to the right as she dragged her burden behind her—the child spitting as he chanted to himself, some mixture of looniness and local melody.
    Paul shouldn’t have scolded himself, but he did, thinking, why the hell do you have to do this to yourself, every time you see a child in some sort of distress, thinking back to your own lost babe?
    But this wouldn’t be my child. My child, my daughter—there he said the word to himself—would have grown up healthy and normal, whatever normal means these days.
    Yes. He sucked in the smoke and held it in his lungs. And he wondered if their child had lived if he might have chosen another line of work, one that would have allowed him more time at home. Gina, with her museum job, certainly could have found a way to stay at home. If the girl had lived, well, then she would have been there with him most of her childhood, wouldn’t she?
    What if? He exhaled, and then immediately sucked in another cloud of smoke. What if we had been able to have another? I might have changed professions. To what? Who knows? The venture capital firm that Holden always wanted me to join, that would have been a possibility. My kind of engineering has a lot of possibilities. He puffed out the smoke and laughed out loud. Drill a hole and see the world. Yes.
    â€œSir?”
    The driver told him the tire was ready. He took one last look around. The woman