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with a perpendicular one? Especially the most impenetrable perpendicular wilderness in the world? What I couldn’t even begin to explain was how both energized me by removing me from myself. Like seeing the world from behind a camera. She wouldn’t understand. She’d call it hiding. She’d call it cowardly. But it was none of these things. It was disappearing. I could see better this way.
    She watched me hesitate. “Okay, which makes you happiest, the desert, the mountains, or these scummy baths with me.”
    This time I am sure I did not hesitate. “I’m happy anywhere with you.”
    She laughed. “You don’t have to say that. But since you did, why?”
    I was still photographing her. From behind the lens, I replied, “Because you don’t remind me of my past.” And as I stepped onto a lower wall to get more of the ruins behind her, I realized that this was exactly so. She wasn’t like any of the women I knew in Karachi. Her energy was—different. It wasn’t sultry, wasn’t eastern. She was walking away from me now, walking away from my lens, and I noticed that her walk was determined and—how can I put it?—unstudied. As if no aunt had ever told her that women walk with one foot before the other. It wasn’t graceful but it was vigorous. There are men on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border who can spot a foreign journalist hiding in a burqa by the way she moves. Farhana would never pass. She could, however, keep up with them on the mountains. Not many women from Karachi could. And yet—of course I didn’t tell her this—they had more patience in bed. Farhana didn’t like to linger, not over food, shopping, or sex. The only thing I’d ever seen her linger over was her hair, and that was not with pleasure. All the languor was in her spine,the part of her she never let me put behind my lens. Everything else about her had the slightly lunatic energy of Nor Cal, uncomplicated and nervy. I mean, for heaven’s sake, she was passionate about
glaciers
. How many Pakistani women know two things about them? It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve
seen
them! I’ve even seen them
fuck
!
    She was sobbing. I saw it first through the lens. I saw it too late, after I’d taken the photograph of her wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She said it was the worst thing I could have said.
    The seagulls hovered, teetering in the breeze. Before they touched the rock it was beginning to sink in, yet each time I approached a landing, the wind pulled me away again. We loved each other, Farhana and I, for precisely opposite reasons. If I loved her because she did not remind me of my past, Farhana loved me because she believed I was her past. That day I came close to understanding; by the time I fully understood, we were already immersed in separate rituals of silence.
    I expected to keep to the coast to Point Lobos, but, veering inland, she began following the signs for Fort Miley. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. How could I apologize for all that drew me to her? Perhaps I’d been crude in trying to sum it up in the first place. (Or she’d been crude in asking.) That’s the line I eventually took, as we clambered uphill. “There’s too much about you that makes me happy to say why.”
    “Too late. You already said it.”
    Silence, then.
    There were picnickers in the grass. Behind them rose a plaque commemorating what had once been gun emplacements, from before World War I. The plaque read,
    Although they never fired on an enemy, coastal batteries here and throughout the Bay Area stood ready—a strong deterrent to attack.
    “You had enemies back then, too?” I muttered, before catching myself. “I didn’t mean
you
you.”
    She cut me a furious look. I bounced foolishly on my toes. She climbed further up to where enormous guns had once pointed out to the Pacific, guarding all three approaches to Golden Gate. There was a sublime view of Ocean