First Home

©2000 Khaled Hosseini
All rights reserved.

I am in my first home. I hear the drumbeats, rhythmic and ever present. They thump in my head.

The man on the other side scratches at the wall. I know his voice well; he has been speaking to me across this wall for some time now. I feel his presence just on the other side of this thin wall that separates us, so close and yet so far. He speaks to me every day, but I hold my silence. My home is silent, except for the drumbeats. Rhythmic and ever present.

And now I hear her voice. She too calls out to me. She too taps on the wall. I can feel them both on the other side. They beckon me to answer. But my home is silent, and so am I.

They say something to each other and laugh. More rapping against the wall. Sometimes I tap back and listen for their startled voices, their laughter.

Hard to believe I will kill them both, someday in a not-so-distant future. When there is no wall between us and no more drumbeats.

I can see it so clearly:

I step into their bedroom, into a wedge of silver moonlight streaming through the window. I stand at the foot of their bed and watch them sleep peacefully, their faces so white and serene. A warm breeze flutters the curtains as I creep around the bed, my shadow so tall in that slice of light. I stand and watch them sleep, a grin blooming on my lips. Moonlight reflects off the stainless steel blade of the kitchen knife in my hand. I raise the knife. A low, hoarse chuckle escapes from my lips.

His eyes snap open. For a brief moment, our gazes lock. And in that instant, he realizes he has been right to worry. They both have. I have overheard them, heard the disquiet in their secret whispers, seen the anguish in their eyes. More than once I have heard them speak a word I cannot yet understand. That word is therapy. But the time for worrying has passed. There is no anguish in his eyes now. Only a brief, terrible moment of understanding. And then a silvery arc slices through the dark and he is clutching at his throat. In the moonlight, the blood spurting between his fingers looks purple blue. Now she stirs awake. Her eyes widen as I bury the knife in her chest. She tries to say my name and instead makes a wet choking sound. Then I step back and watch them wriggle on the bed, drowning in their own blood. I can't stop grinning. I just can't.

After, everyone will wonder in horror. How could this happen? I know the answer now, but by then I will have forgotten it. We all forget what we used to know. The answer is simple.

It just does.

There is no reason. There is no cause and effect. Oh, they will postulate and theorize as they have for centuries. They will investigate and probe; it is their nature. Our nature. They will blame it on the water. Perhaps something in the air. They will blame it on rock music. They will blame it on genetic mutation—and why not? They blame everything else on it.

But the answer doesn't lie in the water or the protein in our food. It's not in music or violent cartoons. It certainly is not the organic bonds between the nucleic acids of our genome.

The answer is we are what we are. I know this now, in my first home. My quiet home. We all did at one point, when we lived in our first home, where silence reigns save for the drumbeats. Everything is so clear there, all the answers so transparent.

But they will want to know anyway. They will want to understand how a six-year-old boy could butcher his parents in their sleep. Surely there must be a higher reason, an etiology of some sort.

But the truth is that the dark side of us was there before everything else. It was there in that first mitotic split.

I know this now. I know it as I lay suspended in amniotic fluid, in the silent darkness of my mother's womb, where the only sound is the drumbeats of her heart. And my father cooing across the living wall that separates us.

It's almost time. Almost time.

Brace yourself, mother.

It's going to be a long, painful labor.

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