He wears a dish-dash, the traditional men’s robe, and over it a gaudy assortment of gifts from various Europeans who had shown up to prowl for riches—a khaki topee, an infantry jacket with four pips on each shoulder and a triple row of gongs on his chest. With such peacock adornments above the waist, what he wears below can only be disappointing: between Sam Browne belt and combat boots there is nothing but the gruelly skirt of the dish-dash.

He leans forward tautly, as if he’s ready to spring, a man of unsuppressed mayhem who thought napalm, once he learned about it, was an instrument of social change. In one hand he grips a knife, in the other a large pistol, and he seems, suspended in time, undecided which to use—shoot and be sure, or stab for the fun of it? General Qazwini has a sturdy drive toward tumult; if, implausibly, he were ever to find himself without his steel companions, he might throw a rock at you, or a jar, just to test his marksmanship, and see which way you’d fall.

I know he wants to make my valediction as difficult as possible, but I’m not going to give him the chance. Shakily but not without a certain clumsy dignity I wobble toward the door. He stands there blocking me, eager to play smashmouth.

“Where,” he asks, “do you think you’re going?” The heel of his hand slams into my chest and I fall. My dignity, fragile at best, collapses with me; I have no real desire to reassert it.

“Get up,” he says.

“What the hell for? If I’m not going anywhere…?”

“On your feet. We’ll start with some deep knee-bends.”

I can’t believe it. I lie there in my prison-putrid pants. “I’m not moving,” I say.

He draws one of his pistols and fires. The round kicks up dust a few inches from my ear. The son of a bitch is insisting I die healthy, but here is an opportunity to turn his spleen in a useful direction, a swift, relatively immaculate end to all the pain and the bullshit, certainly preferable to death by multiple perforation. But Lord God Jesus, how we cling to the earth when we’re faced with the possibility of never seeing it again. Let the void swallow me up, but not yet.

I do deep knee-bends until my legs are spasmed and my brain goes numb. “Pick it up another notch,” Qazwini says. “Stretch!”

I duckwalk in circles, covering a country mile, staggering with uncertain nausea. Push-ups follow, he sounding off in the pitiless cadenzas of a Marine D.I. He seems to find excitement in my torment. I might have drowned in my own sweat, but fortunately he had a short attention span. After about ten minutes, or maybe it was two hours, he grows bored with the regimen. “Enough for the day,” he barks abruptly.