Each week, I write my required essay and trudge to my tutorial—a one-on-one session with this or that brilliant and eccentric professor, beginning with the offer of sherry and snuff and ending with the strong suspicion that nothing we’ve just discussed applies to the real world.

We’re under constant surveillance, pitted against one another, tested well beyond our limits. Sleazy instructors grope the female students in the name of preparing them for harassment in the field. Aging instructors shout at any student who uses the Internet or, God forbid, a cell phone. Division chiefs from Langley go undercover as instructors to

“Dr. Khan committed his life to leveling the playing field,” he says in precise English. “He saw his country humiliated by India on the battlefield. Then he himself was humiliated by an Indian soldier on a train crossing the Pakistani border. The soldier took his favorite pen. It wasn’t a big thing. But he did it because he could get away with it.”

The black-folder, tip-of-the-spear gang doesn’t come to the meeting themselves. They send representatives I think of as gray folders—spook look, spook jargon, but stuck here at HQS when they’d rather be out in the field. Some of them tried and didn’t make the cut. Others are still training. The worst are the has-beens: former field officers cooling

We’re not used to roaming this city freely. It doesn’t feel as good as I’d imagined. When the minder is with us, the threat has a form. Without him, it becomes a nebulous, all-powerful force. Empty doorways and shapes among the shadows.

On the way back, Jon stops me in the hall. “Doesn’t look to me like you’re too into this one,” he says. “Yeah, well, guess that’s the service part of service,” I laugh. “Nope,” he says, “the service part of service is doing the thing you’re called to do.”

There is a wall between us, and we can’t follow the age-old advice—communicate!—because we’re explicitly forbidden from saying anything that might suggest vulnerability in our marriage anywhere in-country. We take walks sometimes, when the tension becomes unbearable, around lakes in parks, my hands on my rounded belly as we talk out of the sides of

I think of the time I saw a banker repossessing a home drop a woman’s house keys into the garbage. Her kid had made the key ring. It clanged when it hit the metal base. A few months later, I read a newspaper article about a banker’s murder, and part of me understood. Ants flee the stomping boot of power. Until, one day, they don’

The fear injects my thoughts with venom. Beltway BS. No wonder we’re losing this war. Bunch of risk-averse desk jockeys calling the shots. The taxi jerks to a stop at an intersection, and I look up. The plastic back of the driver’s seat is covered in graffiti. Most of it is in Urdu. Some is in Arabic. One creased sticker off to the side is in Engli