The shelling steadied him. He should, he realized half jokingly, take up knitting. Occupied hands were therapeutic. It was a discovery made rather late in his career of risk taking, though perhaps one he hadn’t had to arrive at sooner because his Samsonite had been his lucky charm. Now that he thought of it, the bag had little to do with good fortune. Its meaning to him was outside any measurable purpose. “It is still here,” he used to think gratefully when he saw it. For all that, still this. He looked around the hotel room, as if searching for another way of seeing things—at the board-hard bed he’d lain down on but not slept in, at the loafers he remembered sinking into the macadam the day he’d played dying, the plastic sack from the airport that held his stash of rip-top food, his once-compressed wallet bulging with new cards, and beside it, the sharp-cornered smoke-green passport of a man who didn’t exist. It was a scene many like him had evaluated over the years in many hotel rooms.

Most often, when possessions were at this minimum, in a hotel of this dreadful condition, his kind were thinking—systematically if they were good, and intestinally if they thought they were good—about what would happen next. What next? he thought. What next? He pictured it: everywhere in hotel rooms, men asking, What next? He took a red pen through all of them. He would not think of what next. He would refrain.

It came to him in moments. It was possible no one sent the driver. It was possible the driver had been involved in some other assignation. Unlike the Americans, who assumed so all the time, he, Hoseyn, wasn’t the protagonist of every story. He could have walked onto the wrong stage in the wrong theater. He could have parachuted into the field of potatoes when it was in the onions where he’d been supposed to land.

And if no one sent the driver for him, for Hoseyn, then what was he, Hoseyn, doing, exactly, in this hotel room? He was waiting for someone with motives he couldn’t guess at. He would react to this visitor’s arrival assuming motives unconnected to him.

He didn’t have to wait to see if it was Tehran or Americans who sent the driver.

He thought of jumping up and throwing the pistachio shells in the air like confetti.

He was not ready to trust his own breakthrough.

He listened to the sound of a shell fall on the small dune of shells he’d made. It was a tendril of a sound, and there was, strictly speaking, no word exactly for it. See, he told himself, you had to use a strand of hair to approximate the uniqueness of its sound, and even that, he said, listening to the drop of another shell, had not conveyed it.