The Rhodesian gunsmith and I were sitting around, watching some lousy movie on cable as usual. He was naming all the different kinds of guns as they appeared in the movie and commenting on their comparative advantages.
The Danish botanist was depressed, lying on the couch. I knew he was depressed because a little bit earlier I had pointed in his direction and shouted,
“Look at him! He’s depressed!”
“I am,” he had confirmed. “Every day I think I’m going to get my visa extended.”
He was facing disappointment on a daily basis, reminiscent of the woes that had initially surrounded Paul Senior’s visa extension application, slowly torn in half before his very eyes at the Ministry of the Interior. The botanist was aiming for not only a visa extension but also some permits to extract vegetation from Afghanistan that he found relevant to his botanical research in some way. It all seemed highly unlikely to me given the track record of other foreigners I had witnessed before him but I was keeping my potentially negative mouth shut due to his already-descending depression. He was the third Danish expedition dispatched to the Wakhan Corridor. I think he said the last one was deployed about a hundred years ago.
But so far he was trapped in Kabul due to these aforementioned visa concerns, as were many others (c.r. the Swiss motorcyclist, until his eye had gotten so infected he had to go home because he was becoming a medical emergency and just the sight of him was starting to get a little bit sickening).
The next day, at the office, I went to print something, but when I tried to retrieve it, the printer was missing. I saw it later on, sitting in a wheelbarrow outside Building A.
