“But there are thousands of stories—like this park here.” He gestured toward the window, which looked out on the park with the abandoned Ferris wheel. “Who built it? Why did they build it? And why is no one coming here to use it, but people are just sitting on the road? No one does these stories.”

I told him about a story I had been reporting for two years. It involved a brutal killing in southern Afghanistan. I had collected half a dozen coherent and conflicting accounts of why the killing had occurred. Much of what I’d been told was impossible to verify, and the crime scene was too dangerous for me to visit for any length of time without a military escort. Rehman smiled. “I will tell you a story,” he said. “Once, there was a mental hospital. All the mental patients were looking into a hole in the ground, and they didn’t see anything. Finally, a doctor came over and looked into the hole. ‘I don’t see anything,’ he told the patients. ‘How do you expect to?’ they asked. ‘We have been looking into this hole for years. You just got here.’”