Bright, Precious Days

43

Silver Meadows, New Canaan, CT.

10/27/08

Dear Russell:

I wanted to say how sorry I was about Jack, but really, that’s the least of it. I’m not sure how to apologize for what I did to you, but I have to if I’m going to move on. Step 9. I’m up here at Silver Meadows, once again. Clearly I didn’t learn much the last time. I thought if I tried to explain what happened, you might understand, though I don’t expect you to forgive me. But I want at least to try to make amends. Where to begin? With the failure of my third novel? Returning from my sad little six-city book tour, I still had a kind of residual celebrity, which kept my social life interesting, and I turned to journalism. Because even if there’d been a demand for my fiction, I was utterly without inspiration.

And then the planes hit the towers. Ian McEwan summed it up the next day in The Guardian: “American reality always outstrips the imagination.” Hard as it had been earlier, it was even harder now to imagine the role of fiction in this changed world. I wanted to be involved in the response to the most shocking event of my lifetime. But my various employers had their specialists: real journalists, foreign correspondents, policy experts. I tried to land an assignment in Afghanistan and then, later, Iraq. Even though I thought that war, the WMD war, was utterly fraudulent, I wanted to cover it, to swim the currents of history.

And suddenly, out of the blue, I got invited to a wedding in Lahore. The groom was from a wealthy Pakistani family, attended NYU and then became a fixture of the downtown party scene in the nineties, which is how I knew him. Always throwing parties, entertaining squads of models, sharing his drugs. He went home after 9/11 and settled down with a girl from his social class, though when I called him about the invitation, he said that the wedding festivities would resemble the New York bacchanals of his youth. “Lahore’s insane, man. It’s a party town. Come for the week. You won’t regret it.” This sounded attractive, and it occurred to me that I could turn the occasion to advantage. This could be my side-door entry into the great struggle.

I pulled together a list of contacts in Pakistan, journalists and government officials. My roommate from Amherst was an undersecretary of state, and after advising me not to go, he gave me phone numbers and briefings and deep background. I hoped to talk my way into some serious journalism about the Taliban and Pakistani politics; in the meantime, I had a single assignment for a travel piece about the city. So I embarked for Lahore, where the wedding was everything the groom had promised and more. Drugs were abundant and the festivities moved around town, from gated compounds to sprawling lofts. It’s a majestic city with a patina of elegant decay, though I quickly gravitated toward its squalor. I met an English girl, a cousin of the groom’s, and a week after the wedding the two of us were holed up in an apartment in the Gulberg neighborhood, where I discovered opium. Two weeks turned into four.

Marty Briskin eventually reported me missing. And the next thing I knew, the story was in the Herald Tribune: “American novelist missing, believed kidnapped, in Pakistan.” When I’d failed to show up for an interview with a Pakistani intelligence operative, he’d called my friend at the State Department, and when Marty called the consulate, the search was on. Meanwhile, I got a text from the groom, asking if I was okay, telling me about the Herald Trib. A day later, there was a message on a jihadist Web site from a group that claimed it was holding me.

At first, it just seemed embarrassing. But then I sensed an opportunity. I’d already done my homework on the various jihadist factions, and in several Internet cafés I researched the stories of recent hostages. I thought, at the very least, it was good for an article, so I decided to hide out for a while and see where it went. Then, oddly enough, three weeks later I actually did get kidnapped, held against my will in a squalid room in Heera Mandi, the red-light district, after trying to buy drugs. I got robbed and pistol-whipped by two thugs and locked in a room, which I escaped from through a window after twenty-four hours.

Nine weeks after arriving for the wedding, I turned up at the consulate in Lahore, disheveled, skinny and seemingly disoriented, with cuts and bruises from the beating in Heera Mandi that validated the kidnapping narrative, so I stuck to it. The debriefing at the consulate was relatively easy, the one in Washington much tougher.

It was strange, undergoing a real-life interrogation by my countrymen in a windowless conference room in Washington, D.C., about imaginary interrogations in a windowless mud-and-wattle hut in Waziristan. I was scared of these government boys, but I stuck to my story, and when this tough little CIA geek in an oversized suit really had me up against the ropes, I said, “Weren’t you the guys who claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” Finally it became clear that whatever the truth, I didn’t have any actionable intelligence, so they cut me loose. I got the feeling that in their eyes, the propaganda value of a story about an American journalist faking his own kidnapping was strictly negative. And in the context of the official post-9/11 narrative — the war on terror — the lie was more useful than the truth, to them as well as to me.

Back in New York, Marty carefully managed and rationed press access, the idea being not to overdo it, to give me just enough exposure to drive up the price of the memoir without letting the public and the press get tired of me. He played the Today show against Good Morning America, Larry King against Anderson Cooper. I couldn’t help wondering if Briskin had suspicions about my story, but like a good defense lawyer, he never asked me any questions, although he eventually told me that Random House had some concerns that seemed to derive from sources in the State Department, and I think that’s why he decided to go with you for less money than he might have gotten from the big boys. As for me, you have to believe I somehow imagined that I was doing you a favor, making up for my shitty behavior the last time around. It’s hard to explain, but by that time I almost believed my own story, with the help of a steady diet of drugs and alcohol. I was genuinely indignant when the reporter from the Times started dogging me after that ridiculous jihadist Web site questioned my account. As the evidence mounted, I became angry, and bitter, feelings that culminated in my disastrous appearance on Charlie Rose. That was the peak of my delusion — and, as many suggested, I was indeed drunk and high. The next morning, I knew it was all over and I felt strangely relieved. This is something you hear about over and over in AA and NA meetings, actually. Exposure of a great secret, of a pattern of lying, can be curiously liberating. But I realized, eventually, that my catharsis was your crisis, and I’m terribly, terribly sorry for the position I put you in. And I hope to find ways to make amends to you in the future.

Sincerely,

Phillip