PART FIVE: Still Room 435, The Midnight Hours, Thanksgiving Day -- 12:30 am to 7:30 am

News reports on any great calamity have the same hypnotizing effect on a person as a multiple car accident or an infomercial. You simply can’t pull yourself away. My friend in Saudi Arabia had not answered my last SMS (“Should I be worried?”), my mother was not talking to me. I was alone, except for CNN, BBC and the local channel.

I noticed at the moment of realizing my aloneness that the curtains in my room were still open. And across the street, a woman was standing on her mildewed balcony, looking blankly across the road. Who was she? Why was she looking? I drew them shut in one fell swoop. The rod almost came down with my tug.

At sometime after 2 in the morning, the phone rang. I had fallen asleep with the remote control in my hand. I was in a semi-seated position, my head leaning against the headboard. The quilt was on the floor.

It was Brian. “David, do you have a Bolivian passport?” During my last three years as a practicing attorney in New Orleans, I had served as Honorary Consul of Bolivia, and though I always kept a stockpile of Bolivian passports in my safe, and probably had a valid argument for granting one to myself, I never did.

“No.”

“You really need to get another passport because they’re after Americans.”

Did he think it was like going to the supermarket? But, I said nothing. “Listen, David, we called the State Department and we told them where you are and what’s happening. They said to keep a low profile and not attempt to go outside.”

Geez, fucking brilliant, aren’t they? My country’s finest. “Brian, I have to try to leave. There is not a single fucking car on the road. This is a city of 19 million people. There is nobody anywhere in sight. I need to get away.”

“Did you call the airline?” My mother laughed sarcastically in the background: “Airline? Does he think a plane is gonna land in a god-forsaken war zone?”

“There’s no answer," I whispered sullenly. I had asked the manager and the receptionist both to call Oman Air, both in Mumbai and in Delhi, to change my reservation. I had even given them my E-ticket. But, could I really trust people who had the gall to tell me a gas line had blown up and whose primary interest was collecting bar tabs when bombs were exploding less than a kilometer away?

Brian told me to call home throughout the day, not to worry about the time or the cost of AT&T roaming charges, and not to go out. I guess he hadn’t heard that the door to the hotel was blocked. My mother screamed in the background: “Tell him to close the curtains.”