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so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this, and then he
regarded Nadia and saw that she was regarding him and her eyes were like worlds.
They did not hold hands until Saeed’s perspective had returned, hours later, not to normal, for he
suspected it was possible he might never think of normal in the same way again, but to something
closer to what it had been before they had eaten these shrooms, and when they held hands it was
facing each other, sitting, their wrists resting on their knees, their knees almost touching, and then he
leaned forward and she leaned forward, and she smiled, and they kissed, and they realized that it was
dawn, and they were no longer hidden by darkness, and they might be seen from some other rooftop,
so they went inside and ate the cold food, not much but some, and it was strong in flavor.
• • •
SAEED’S PHONE HAD DIED and he charged it in his family’s car from a backup battery source he kept in
the glove compartment, and as his phone turned on it beeped and chirped with his parents’ panic, their
missed calls, their messages, their mounting terror at a child not returned safely that night, a night
when many children of many parents did not return at all.
Upon Saeed’s arrival his father went to bed and in his bedside mirror glimpsed a suddenly much
older man, and his mother was so relieved to see her son that she thought, for a moment, she should
slap him.
• • •
NADIA DID NOT FEEL like sleeping, and so she took a shower, the water chilly because of the
intermittent gas supply to her boiler. She stood naked, as she had been born, and put on her jeans and
T-shirt and sweater, as she did when alone at home, and then put on her robe, ready to resist the
claims and expectations of the world, and stepped outside to go for a walk in a nearby park that
would by now be emptying of its early-morning junkies and of the gay lovers who had departed their
houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to
accomplish.
• • •
LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia’s time, the sun having slipped below her horizon, it was
morning in the San Diego, California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by the sea, or
rather on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The fittings in his house were worn but painstakingly
repaired, as was his garden: home to mesquite trees and desert willows and succulent plants that had
seen better years, but were still alive and mostly free of blight.
The old man had served in the navy during one of the larger wars and he had respect for the
uniform, and for these young men who had established a perimeter around his property, as he
watched, standing on the street with their commanding officer. They reminded him of when he was
their age and had their strength and their suppleness of movement and their certainty of purpose and
their bond with one another, that bond he and his friends used to say was like that of brothers, but was
in some ways stronger than that of brothers, or at least than his bond with his own brother, his kid
brother, who had passed last spring from cancer of the throat that had withered him to the weight of a
young girl, and who had not spoken to the old man for years, and when the old man had gone to see