I steeled myself. Well, aluminumed myself, anyway. I told myself Phaedra was going to look like hell, and might be more than a little hysterical, and would need no end of tender loving care.

Whereupon she appeared.

She was more beautiful than could be believed. I use the awkward construction purposefully; “unbelievably beautiful” is one of those clichés fastened on every sunset and most Swedish films, the latter of which are at best believably beautiful. Phaedra was something quite out of the ordinary. I have already told you what she looked like, and she still looked that way, but with a new radiance, a special glow, a lilt to her walk and to her smile that had not been there before.

Before she had been a beautiful virgin. Now she was as beautiful as ever, and she wasn’t exactly a virgin anymore. She was, from what I had heard, as far from the state of virginity as she and I both were from the state of New Mexico, and perhaps even farther than that.

“Phaedra,” I said.

“Phuc’mi,” she said.

“Phaedra, it’s me. Evan. Evan Tanner. From New York. You remember me, Phaedra.”

“Phuc’mi.”

“And your name is Phaedra Harrow. Once your name was Deborah Horowitz. Do you remember? And then you changed it to Phaedra, and then-”

“Phuc’mi.”

She was wearing a piece of silk that was sort of wrapped all over her and fastened at the shoulder. Purple silk. She said her new name a few more times, and then she unfastened the purple silk and unwrapped herself like a self-opening Christmas present, and I looked at the glory that had lived untouched with me in New York, and the same glory that had since turned on half the camel schleppers in Afghanistan, and I think I got a little weak in the knees.

“She wishes not to go with you,” said the “before” half of the Ban ad. “She wishes only to stay here. I do not think she understands what you say to her.”

She was right. Phaedra’s eyes gave the show away. They had the queer light of madness in them. I nodded and went out to the car. I came back with a bottle of Coke.

“Coca-Cola,” said Phaedra.

“She is mad for Coca-Cola,” said the madam. “There is an empty bottle she takes every morning to sleep with her.”

“She used to like wine,” I recalled. “But she wasn’t queer for the bottles.” I opened the Coke and gave it to Phaedra and turned to go back for another one.

“Get two,” the madam said.

I didn’t want to. I knew it would make her belch, and I could imagine what that would smell like. But I got two more Cokes, and we all three drank ours down. I was the first to finish. I waited patiently until Phaedra was through with hers. She put the bottle down and gave me her one response to life, saying the new name by which she was so well known in the area.

And I hit her over the head with the Coke bottle.

“My head hurts,” she said.

“You’re awake.”

“You hit me.”

I took my eyes off the road and looked at her. She looked better than ever, but the madness had not left her eyes. I put my eyes back on the road just in time to avoid putting the car off the road, and I agreed that I had hit her, by George.

“What with?”

“A Coke bottle.”

“Oh. Stop the car, Evan.”

“You know who I am.”

“Sure. I knew back there but I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t say anything, just what I said over and over. I get blocked all the time, I can’t even think. Stop the car.”

“What for?”

“Just do it.”

I stopped the car, and Phaedra came into my arms and unzipped my fly.

“Hey,” I said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“You always wanted to. From the first time you saw me you wanted to. Always. But I wouldn’t let you. I wouldn’t let anybody. They didn’t care that I wouldn’t let them, not here. I couldn’t even tell them. I couldn’t tell anybody anything because they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. They said things I didn’t understand, and they didn’t understand anything I said, and it was horrible. Why isn’t it hard?”

“What?”

“Your thing. I want it hard so that we can do it. Don’t you want me?”

“Of course, but-”

“I know how to get it hard. Just a minute.”

But I was gently pushing her away. I held her at arm’s length, and she looked unhappily at me and wanted to know what was the matter.

“You don’t want me.”

“Sure, but-”

“The hell you do. I want to go back there. It was nice there. I got as much as I wanted. All night long, practically. As soon as one was finished another one would come. They didn’t want to talk or anything. All they wanted to do was-”

“I know, I know.”

“How come you don’t want to, Evan?”

I looked into her poor insane eyes. She was so magnificently beautiful it was almost painful to look at her, and she was begging me to do more than look, and she might as well have asked me to swim the English Channel.

Come to think of it, that’s a rotten metaphor. I had already swum the English Channel. And I had crossed the burning deserts and, in the Hindu Kush, had driven through some of the tallest mountains, even if I hadn’t literally climbed them. I’d performed all the proper Herculean tasks, all for love of a girl named Phaedra, and the only thing left was to claim my prize.

And I certainly couldn’t do that.

Because this wasn’t Phaedra. This was a poor sick kid with her sweetness and charm temporarily (one hoped) buried under a sea of nymphomaniacal hysteria. This was not something one took to bed, no matter how much she asked one to.

In the first place, I got a little sick at the thought of it. It seemed indecent. If I hadn’t known her before it might have been different, but I had, and it wasn’t.

And in the second place, even if I had managed to rationalize the first place, the whole thing would have been roughly akin, in a purely physical sense, to the prospect of inserting a boiled noodle in a bouncing bagel. Not quite impossible, perhaps, but not bloody likely either.

She said, “I thought you were my friend.”

“I am.”

“Is something wrong with me?”

“No.”

“Then is something wrong with you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what’s the matter, Evan?”

“You’re not you,” I said.

“I don’t get you.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Huh?”

I pulled the car onto the road. Phaedra, rejected, hurt, cringed against the door on the passenger side. I drove for a little while and didn’t say anything. She announced that she was going to take a nap. I told her it sounded like a good idea. She pouted and said that she couldn’t take a nap because she was sexually frustrated. I told her to play with herself. She said that sounded like a fine idea, and she proceeded to do just that, while I proceeded to pay more attention to the road than the road really deserved. Finally she gave up and told me that it wasn’t the same at all. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said, and did.

When she woke up she was worse. She could barely talk at all, and she couldn’t keep her hands off me. This might have been somewhat more flattering if she had not been so obviously out of her mind. She would let loose with a wild peal of laughter, then make a grab at my groin, then burst just as suddenly into tears.

A little of this goes a long way. A lot of it, which is what I was getting, goes even further. I wanted very much to do something that would at least render her unconscious for a time, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to hit her again. I didn’t want to hurt her. She was more to be pitied than censured, just as her language was more to be pitied than censored. The only thing wrong with pity as an emotion is that it’s so goddamned tiresome. It bores the subject and does nothing for the object.

I drove on, doing my best to ignore her. She was as easy to ignore as an earthquake, and about as subtle. But I kept the car on what the map laughingly called a road – a new one this time, a more direct route from Anardara right through to Kabul, bypassing Kandahar and presumably cutting quite a few miles off our journey. This road was what I kept my eyes on, which was something of a waste, actually, since in most places the road was so narrow that one could have covered it adequately, leaving the other eye free to do what it wanted. Since there was nothing else it wanted to do, I kept my eyes, both of them, on the road, as I guess I may already have said, and while doing this little thing I concentrated on figuring out what to do after I got back to Kabul.