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asped as they were cinched and tied. They could hear breathing and coughing and a child crying and
the struggling sound of quiet sex. The pavilion’s muted night-lighting was about the intensity of a
crescent moon: enough to allow sleep, but also enough to see shapes, though not colors.
They made their way outside. The sky had begun to change, and was less dark now than indigo,
and there were others scattered around, other couples and groups, but mostly solitary figures, unable
to sleep, or at least unable to sleep any longer. It was cool but not cold, and Nadia and Saeed stood
side by side and did not hold hands but felt the gentle pressure of their arms together, through their
sleeves.
“I’m so tired, this morning,” Nadia said.
“I know,” said Saeed. “So am I.”
Nadia wanted to say more to Saeed than that, but just then her throat felt raw, almost painful, and
what else she would have liked to say was unable to find a way through to her tongue and her lips.
Saeed also had things on his mind. He knew he could have spoken to Nadia now. He knew he
should have spoken to Nadia now, for they had time and were together and were not distracted. But he
likewise could not bring himself to speak.
And so they walked instead, Saeed taking the first step, and Nadia following, and then both
striding abreast each other, at a good clip, so that those who saw them saw what looked like a brace
of workers marching, and not a couple out on a stroll. The camp was desolate at this hour, but there
were birds out and about, a great many birds, flying or perched upon the pavilions and the perimeter
fence, and Nadia and Saeed looked at these birds who had lost or would soon lose their trees to
construction, and Saeed sometimes called out to them with a faint, sibilant, unpuckered whistle, like a
balloon slowly deflating.
Nadia watched to see if any bird noticed his call, and did not on their walk see even one.
• • •
NADIA WORKED on a mostly female crew that laid pipe, colossal spools and pallets of it in different
colors, orange and yellow and black and green. Through these pipes soon would run the lifeblood and
thoughts of the new city, all those things that connect people without requiring them to move. Ahead of
the pipe-layers was a digging machine, like a wolf spider or praying mantis, with a wide stance but a
pair of dangerous-looking appendages at its front, coming together in a crenellated scraper near
where its mouth would have been. This digging machine carved the trenches in the earth into which
the pipe-layers would unfurl and unstack and lower and connect the pipes.
The driver of the digging machine was a portly native man with a non-native wife, a woman who
looked native to Nadia but had apparently arrived from a nearby country two decades ago, and who
quite possibly had retained a trace of her ancestral accent, but then again the natives had so many
different accents that it was impossible for Nadia to say. This woman worked nearby as a supervisor
in one of the food preparation units, and she would come to Nadia’s work site on her lunch break
when her husband was there, which was not always, because he dug trenches for multiple pipe-laying
crews, and then the woman and her husband would unwrap sandwiches and unscrew thermoses and
eat and chat and laugh.
As time passed, Nadia and some of the other women on her crew began to join them, for they were
welcoming of company. The driver revealed himself to be a chatterbox and jokester, and relished the
attention, and his wife seemed to relish it equally, though she spoke less, but she appeared to enjoy all
these women listening enrapt to her husband. Perhaps this made him grow in stature in her own eyes.