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T
HE COMPLEXITIES of London’s electricity network were such that a few motes of nighttime
brightness remained in Saeed and Nadia’s locality, at properties on the edges, near where
barricades and checkpoints were manned by armed government forces, and in scattered pockets that
were for some reason difficult to disconnect, and in the odd building here and there where an
enterprising migrant had rigged together a connection to a still-active high-voltage line, risking and in
some cases succumbing to electrocution. Overwhelmingly, though, around Saeed and Nadia it was
dark.
Mykonos had not been well lit, but electricity had reached everywhere there were wires. In their
own fled city, when the electricity had gone, it had gone for all. But in London there were parts as
bright as ever, brighter than anyplace Saeed or Nadia had seen before, glowing up into the sky and
reflecting down again from the clouds, and in contrast the city’s dark swaths seemed darker, more
significant, the way that blackness in the ocean suggests not less light from above, but a sudden dropoff
in the depths below.
From dark London, Saeed and Nadia wondered what life must be like in light London, where they
imagined people dined in elegant restaurants and rode in shiny black cabs, or at least went to work in
offices and shops and were free to journey about as they pleased. In dark London, rubbish accrued,
uncollected, and underground stations were sealed. The trains kept running, skipping stops near Saeed
and Nadia but felt as a rumble beneath their feet and heard at a low, powerful frequency, almost
subsonic, like thunder or the detonation of a massive, distant bomb.
At night, in the darkness, as drones and helicopters and surveillance balloons prowled
intermittently overhead, fights would sometimes break out, and there were murders and rapes and
assaults as well. Some in dark London blamed these incidents on nativist provocateurs. Others
blamed other migrants, and began to move, in the manner of cards dealt from a shuffled deck during
the course of a game, reassembling themselves in suits and runs of their own kind, like with like, or
rather superficially like with superficially like, all the hearts together, all the clubs together, all the
Sudanese, all the Hondurans.
Saeed and Nadia did not move, but their house began to change nonetheless. Nigerians were
initially the largest among many groups of residents, but every so often a non-Nigerian family would
relocate out of the house, and their place would almost always be taken by more Nigerians, and so the
house began to be known as a Nigerian house, like the two on either side. The elder Nigerians of
these three houses would meet in the garden of the property to the right of Saeed and Nadia’s, and this
meeting they called the council. Women and men both attended, but the only obvious non-Nigerian
who attended was Nadia.
The first time Nadia went the others seemed surprised to see her, not merely because of her
ethnicity but because of her relatively young age. Momentarily there was a silence, but then an old
woman with a turban who lived with her daughter and grandsons in the bedroom above Saeed and