Your Kabul is gone, he had said the night he took me to Antonia.

“He was a high-ranking general,” his daughter manages to get out, her voice choked.

“A soldier,” I say, knocking the stars off his epaulets with a single word. “I see. And where was this?”

“In Kabul. Afghanistan,” his daughter replies, but I keep my eyes on Shair.

“Such a shame, what happened to that country,” I say, shaking my head. “Were you in the army back when it all started?”

“You know my country,” Shair says. He tilts his head, curious.

“Quite a history. Did you see the beginning of it all in ’78?” I ask.

He lets out a long breath and nods.

Tinny music erupts from his daughter’s purse. She pulls out her phone and answers it.

“Yes, Madar,” she says, speaking in Dari. “We’re talking to the doctor now. I can’t talk to her now, Madar. Fine, but quickly.”

She steps out of the room, the phone pressed to her ear.

I wonder if he will speak more freely with his daughter out of the room and if she knows what kind of man he really is. Shair shifts on the exam table. Paper crinkles under his thighs, making his every fidget obvious.

“Doctor, where you are from?” he asks me.

I respond with a tight smile. He doesn’t get to ask me questions and certainly not ones about my family. I feel a small pulse of satisfaction at letting his question go unanswered.

“It was a beautiful country then, wasn’t it?”

My voice nearly breaks. I focus on my breathing as I wait for him to answer.

“Yes, but people,” he says, wistfully. “People make it for waste.”

I have made fake profiles to enter chat rooms and join discussion boards to listen to people who remind me of my parents, people who share black-and-white pictures of Kabul fashion shows and laboratories with women holding test tubes. They post snapshots of hippies from the West and Indians on vacation in Kabul. They came for the pearly grapes, for the kebabs sprinkled with sumac, for the crystalline lakes and healing shrines.

He looks out the window of the exam room.

I remember the night he grabbed me by my neck and pressed my face to the car window.

Your people are gone.

“The coup must have been a very dangerous time, especially for you as a soldier.”

Shair shrugs.

“It is gone now. Finish,” he says.

I clear my throat.

“I read about what happened in the palace. There was a coup, right? What happened to all the people who were there that night?”

Shair is staring at the paper towel dispenser across from him. Or perhaps the diagram of the gastrointestinal system just beside it. Somewhere on the wall is a black hole that is slowly, steadily, sucking him in.