Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Strings
Amal Al Shamsi
aas1005
Literature and Creative Writing
Deepak Unnikrishnan
Spring 2020

Leaving 2
Strings 10
Ritual 13
Familiar 14
Neck of the Hourglass 16
Lamya 17
Batch X 23
Age of Bronze 29
Cavity 32
West Village 38
Jasem 48
Really 53
Haya 55
Thief 58
Black Sheep 61
Almost Crescendo 62
Science of Cons 63
Fire 71
Interlude 77
Get Lost 79
Dream Envelope 81
Red 83
Kicking 86
Dice 94
Good Again 101
Detour 106
Oneway Street 108
. 110
1

Leaving
The kids in the neighborhood used to call it the tortoise house. Even after they grew up
into adults, it was the tortoise house. They would say, “Let’s go see what’s happening in bait al
sulhafaa.” Hamza could see why. His mother’s house had a large dome, not demure enough to be
mistaken for a masjid, for it stretched across the entire expanse of the roof. There was not even
space for a water tank or satellite dish.
From below, the roof seemed to have moss growing up the curve, as if the absurd
structure defied the weather. But when standing at the gate and looking up, the green glistened
and gave themselves away as scattered little green tiles. Mismatched and irregular, looking like
someone had spilled them there.
When Hamza’s parents moved into the house, it really had been an empty shell, waiting
patiently to be filled. His father’s father built it for his eldest son, but that man decided to live
alone and didn’t want to waste such a grand house on just himself. Hamza never asked if his
mother liked the house or if she would have ever chosen anything like it, because it hurt him to
know about things that he couldn’t change. She must have liked it enough.
The green tiles story was a hard one to acquire, his mother always laughed in a special
way when he asked. But he got it eventually when his father was sick and they couldn’t travel for
a whole year. Hamza and his siblings took turns throwing tantrums that year, angry but unable
to direct their anger. Hamza didn’t even care about the stupid tiles by the time that his mother
told him, sitting outside on the garden bench, holding his head.
One evening, she climbed up to the roof while her husband was out for prayer. She had
asked her friend, whose husband was a contractor to get her something to decorate the dome
with. She wanted to add her own touch to the place. He brought her a small bucket of dust and
told her to mix it with water to make concrete, then gave her a heavy bag of things that clicked
together.
She made multiple trips up and down the metal ladder and slathered concrete until she
ran out of tiles. When Hamza’s father had come back, she said, he looked around for her in the
house for what he said were many hours. Until he came out and saw her shape on the roof,
wiping the tiles with the colorful shawl around her shoulders.
“​Maynoona​!” he called out to her. When she recounted this to Hamza, she put on a gruff
voice and puffed her chest. Hamza felt even angrier at him. His mother didn’t notice, she said
2

she loved it when his father called her that, because it was honest. Maybe over time, it sounded
like love.
“When I came down, he was ready to be angry with me but I knew he couldn’t be. I
dusted off my hands and said, ‘Take it off, if you don’t like it.’ I knew that he was too lazy,” she
told Hamza, hands holding back the hair from his sweaty forehead.
The evening was cool but a thin layer of mist hung around the air, making it hard to
breathe. Hamza didn’t want to go inside where his father would just be calling out all the names
he remembered to get someone to come over. It was always something menial. “Get my socks.”
“Close the window.” “Open the window.” “Tell the neighbor’s dogs to shut up.”
They could be abroad, but they weren’t out of respect for him and not wanting to leave
him behind. That was the limit of Hamza’s respect.
Coming back to the house over ten years later, he wanted to remember something else
about the tortoise house. He wanted to remember his brothers, sneaking out, the smell of the
sun when it leaked in through the open doors. But all he could see was the dome and his
mother’s hands placing the tiles.
Parking his car to one side, under the shade of the sterile mango tree, he looked at the
house. He couldn’t imagine a tortoise’s body hiding inside it, anymore. In fact, the dome looked
ridiculous and unnecessary for the first time ever.
Lamya asked if he wanted to close the gate and Hamza shook his head, turning the
engine off. He fetched the boxes from the back, he would have chosen garbage bags but it was
not worth disappointing his wife.
Inside, the house was jumbled with things, as it had always been. There were glass
bottles of oils by the entrance, some empty and most of them grasping onto their last drop.
Unscrewing one of them, he turned it over and shook the last drops onto one hand. It smelled
like burnt roses, like a rose after a long barbeque party. He coughed and held it in front of
Lamya’s face, distracting her from removing her shoes. She recoiled before catching herself, but
he laughed to signal that it was all right.
“Must have made that one herself,” Hamza said, smiling a bit. He poured another bottle
over his hand to cover up the smell. This one smelled of jasmine, but had grown old and seemed
to slide directly off his hand onto the tiles below.
3

Lamya looked at him sideways, picking up some of the empty bottles and placing them in
boxes carefully. She seemed to want to say something. Instead, when she was done, she reached
out a socked foot to wipe away the oil from the floor. They traded looks and laughed quietly.
They spent some time like this, cleaning up the house. His wife stayed close to him for
the first hour, maybe trying to gauge his level of comfort. Then, she moved upstairs, from room
to room, much quicker than he did. She moved past his mother’s bedroom, leaving the door
closed.
There were pieces of paper everywhere. In the drawers, he found the paint handprints
that he and his siblings had made in school, sealed in glossy plastic. They were such a silly thing
to keep, that could be any child’s miniature blue fingers. Hamza would toss them away if they
hadn’t had his mother’s notes around them, deciphering the smudged prints. She loved palms
and reading them, to the disdain of much of his father’s family as well as her own. It was a grave
disobedience. But they couldn’t call her a liar. She was either good, meaning that she was some
sort of heathen, or bad, meaning she was just lucky most of the time.
Hamza never doubted that she was wonderful.
He could see her writing, but didn’t have the heart to read it. He felt he would be letting
her down in some way, if he saw that she had predicted for his or his siblings’ lives to go
differently. Now she was gone, she couldn’t change her mind or modify her divinations. Why
point out the mistakes of the dead?
He put the papers on the floor like he put everything else that he didn’t know whether to
keep or throw away. There were growing piles all across the house. He trusted that Lamya would
come around and decide on his behalf.
He met her halfway up the stairs as she was climbing down, barely seen behind two large
boxes. “Give me, I’ll put them outside,” he told her.
“These are to keep.”
“Why?”
Lamya continued down the stairs, gently putting the boxes down. “When are the men
coming for the furniture?”
His brothers were keeping the furniture, using a few pieces in their house, probably, and
storing the rest. They had arranged moving men to handle big things like that. “Sunset,” he told
her. “Tell them not to touch the carpet downstairs.”
“Do you want to keep it?”
“Not especially. We need somewhere to sit when the rest come.”
4

He continued up the stairs. They seemed tilted, worn down on one side. Everyone in the
family moved close to the wall, spiraling upwards, while guests tended to hold onto the worn
metal railing on the other side. He thought he had lost the groove, the ease of gliding up, but
before he could fully think this through, he was in front of his old bedroom. The path was
ingrained in him, his feet wanted to take him down the hallway and to the left to his old room.
He deliberately angled them to the next door over.
His father’s room seemed comically large now that it was stripped down to the bare
essentials. The bed was flipped onto its side to make room for spent canvases and rags. He had
spent hours painting some days and when he was done, he painstakingly covered it all back up
to make a clean slate. His mother wasn’t nosy, he wouldn’t say, but she had spent years trying to
peel back the layer of white oil paint. Maybe she thought her husband had left something
profound underneath, secrets.
All that was left to indicate that he had done anything at all was the mess left behind, the
paintbrushes and the stains on his hands. His mother would try to piece together an image from
these clues, and the colors he seemed to use. Blues, always, and this off-putting hue of orange
that lingered as specks on the white walls. It was fun to guess while he was younger, but it grew
old, his father never spoke a lot, to begin with and there was only so much prying that his sons
and daughters could commit to.
Not everyone was meant to be a father, he learned at a young age, but it never stuck.
Maybe Hamza should have just told her. His father, in his later years, while Hamza was
finishing school would need help sometimes lifting the tins of paint. He could not bend at the
hips easily to reach them. Hamza brought over one of his school desks for him to lay his paint.
His father got that godforsaken orange all over it. But at least Hamza got to see what it was all
about finally. The man had painted a very basic structure of a valley, in different shades of blue.
It was unclear if the blue was water, clouds that had sunk down, or formless houses. The
linework was abysmal and his fingers smeared the edges of the canvas.
Young Hamza wanted to laugh.
He left the room to give his father space, saying nothing, as if he hadn’t seen. But it came
to him sometimes, and in his mind slowly became something almost worthwhile. At least it was
a peek into the man’s mind when it seemed that all that was there was the immediate present.
Hamza supposed that he too had a past, but where could that be?
That evening, many years ago, while he was laying on his bed, his father came in and
grabbed his ear. Twisting it, he said with a lilting tone, “So you’re spying on me, huh?”
5

Walking through the now-abandoned room, Hamza lazily arranged the canvases on top
of one another. The first layers were peeled off, almost sanded off, but the bottom layer seemed
to have come off with it, leaving behind the gritty canvas. In the drawers of the paint-speckled
school desk, there were papers so worn out it took a while to recognize them. Picking them up,
they almost fell apart in his hands. How many palms had rubbed over these postcards, or how
many times had the same pair held them? There was a message on the back, almost completely
illegible. It was sticky where a postage stamp had claimed to be. The image boasted a dazzling
blue sea overlayed cheaply by a secondary image of colorful tiles. ‘​Miss you in Algiers​.’
Lamya peered in from the hallway.
He folded the postcards in half, feeling them ache and tear slowly through the center.
Wherever these canvases would end up, the postcards would go with them. Something Hamza
and his family just were never meant to be part of.
“I didn’t know what to do with these canvases.”
“I was just about to ask you,” Hamza said.
“Her room, I left it for you,” she told him, “Will you wait for Qasim?”
“No, I thought you could… you know. I don’t think…”
She walked in, lingering beside him before stopping next to the window. The curtains
were missing, he could tell she was wondering where they went.
“They took down the curtains after he died,” Hamza said. It sounded dramatic, so he
added, “It smelled like food. He always ate in this room by himself.”
Lamya moved a cloth over the window sill. In the sunlight, the dust floated gracefully
around her. “Oh,” she said.
“My sisters can check her room. Later,” he said, “It’s okay.”
He knew what would be there. All the clothes were not hers, she bought them for her
daughters, dresses for them to wear. All untouched. Her style never fit their palates, but she kept
them anyway. Then there would be Arnaud’s things, maybe. The blazer he bought her with the
purple lining. It was her first and only blazer. It didn’t suit her, Hamza thought, but she looked
wonderful.
Still, he didn’t want to see it. Maybe his sisters called the man, Arnaud. Surely, he would
come and keep some of the things, if he liked.
“Or we can eat. Do you want to rest?” She asked.
6

They ate outside even though it was hot and he could barely taste the food in the
humidity. Halfway through, they sat in the car with the AC running. Lamya called home but no
one was there, the children were still at their friend’s houses.
She stayed inside the car while he went back inside. She must have known he wanted to
be alone by the way he shut the car door. Inside, he sat on the stairs and tried to cry. Except
there was nothing to look at to cry about, there was almost nothing left. He made a pathetic
noise that came from his throat and he sat for a while.
Hamza’s sisters and brothers came when the house was empty. They convened together on the
carpet in the downstairs living room, the only piece of the house left. Hamza left to borrow one
of the neighbor’s plastic lawn chairs for his sister to sit on. He felt bad for the oversight. He
ended up bringing two over to make up for it, the second of which his pregnant sister used to lay
her feet on, hands on her swollen stomach. The rest of the family sat in a circle around her, on
the carpet.
Ali, his second eldest brother, brought a dallah of coffee and poured some for everyone.
He handed Hamza two cups.
“I don’t know if Lamya wants,” he said.
Hamza looked up and found her folding something by the stairs. He smiled a little and
gestured for her to come over. Then, he touched her wrist and she sat down beside him.
“As I said, no one will even try to take this house, it’ll always be Um Qasim’s,” Hend said,
reclining in her chair.
“Good,” Qasim said.
“Saeed, your boy, what’s his name, is getting married– beginning of next year, has he
found a house?” Ali asked him.
Saeed stretched his arms, leaning back. He was getting big around the middle, maybe it
was the way that the youth were built these days, he was the youngest out of the bunch. “They
are building one, close to her family.” He then turned his head, “What about you Hamza?”
Lamya looked at him, he could not read her expression. “It’ll be a while, we think. Until
we would need this house,” she told his brother.
Saeed glanced at him before fixing his eyes on Lamya. “Right, I forgot your children are
still so small.”
7

They continued to discuss the future of the tortoise house, but Hamza was not listening.
He was tracing the pattern of the carpet, pulling at the loose threads. He could tell his wife was
observing him, but he could not spare the energy to be part of the conversation. He was ready to
go home.
They never came to a decision about who would keep the house. Hamza bid them all
goodbye, but paused in front of Qasim. The way that his brother was looking at him made him
feel like he was a pane of glass. “How long will you be gone this time, ha?” He said, but it was not
a question. His brother stood up to hug him, unlike everyone else, and then hugged Lamya, too.
Hamza drove back home, Lamya was speaking about his sister’s baby and he was
nodding along.
It must have been then that Lamya realized that Hamza was not returning.
In the car, as she drove him to the airport, Lamya told him that she packed some good pens in
his briefcase. “From a conference, so you can display them at your desk.”
“There are only children to impress,” Hamza said with a laugh. “Thank you.”
Lamya hummed.
“Are you embarrassed of what I do?” He didn’t know why he felt that he had to get under
her skin.
She thought about it for a while. From the radio came a jingle about stovetop counters
that practiced self-hygiene. They cleaned themselves, essentially. She turned the volume down,
he thought she had gotten tired of the terrible tune but she had wanted to say something. “I am
only embarrassed that you would rather do it somewhere else than here.”
She climbed out of the car when they reached the terminal. A hand held his even as they
walked the short distance to the doors, both sighing at the cool air that came their way. They had
a few minutes to spare, so she came with him to get a coffee. In his mind, he felt it would be rude
to go right to the check-in desk.
“Will you be able to manage? Just ignore what they say, if they ask you to take the
house,” Hamza said.
“I thought you’d want it.”
“I’d rather it make someone happy, or at least have someone live in it, it’s miserable how
it is,” he told her. “Unless you want it.”
8

“Don’t worry about it,” she told him. The shorter hair at her forehead danced around her
face. It felt like she was letting him go.
Hamza moved in first. In one quick motion, he embraced her, feeling her shift between
his arms. There were many eyes on them, even if they could not see them, but he didn’t want any
regrets. Lamya curled her arms back around him and rested her cheek on his shoulder. She must
have known it was a goodbye. Even if he came back, he wasn’t going to be the same.
”You’re acting like the Americans already,” she said, smiling a little when she pulled
away. She handed him his passport, pressing it into his hand. After that, it seemed like looking
at him took a lot of effort.
Waiting for a beat, Hamza said, “I’ll call you when I reach.”
“Call Haya first.” Walking to the check-in desk alone, he felt himself moving backward.
9

Strings
In two instances, Hamza remembered himself through his mother’s eyes. When Hamza
was born, the first words he must have heard were: “where is the string?”
His aunt tried to whisper prayers into his ear but his mother kept interrupting. “Where is
the string?”
“Ssh.”
“I didn’t see it.”
The nurse peeled off her gloves and almost instantly slid into new ones. “She’ll need
some water and rest.”
“Where are you going?” His mother asked.
The nurse moved to check the squeaky metal cot and the baby inside. His aunt stood next
to her, moving her sheila over her mouth.
“Tell me what they’re saying,” Dalida asked her sister.
His aunt kept her head hanging over the cot, making thoughtful faces. “One moment, I’m
trying to do something here.”
The nurse tapped her clipboard on the metal and left the room. The door made no sound
behind her.
Dalida wanted to move her toes. Dull pain swirled around her chest, it felt like it was
trying to push lower but could not. Her body must have split in half, oh what if it did? They
would stitch her together. Maybe they could give her a better pair of legs.
In her mind, she was bending over and scratching them beneath the starchy covers. The
air conditioning was hitting her chest but it felt so far away, so she wasn’t sure how to do
anything about it. If they closed the A/C, it would be so hot.
Then she remembered her son’s stomach and got scared again. “I didn’t see the string.
Where did it go?”
Her sister was laughing. Dalida looked up and saw her sitting at the side of the bed. “You
are incredible,” she told Hamza’s mother. “But what are you saying?”
“Was my boy born without a string?”
A sweaty palm moved to her even more sweaty cheek. “Was it that easy? It didn’t look
easy.” Her sister wiped her hands on her lap. “Maybe I should give birth here, too, if the doctor
is that good.”
“Bring it to me, I want to see it,” his mother pleaded.
10

“I think they threw it away.”
“Liar. There wasn’t one.”
Her sister’s hand moved to her hair but paused, not knowing what to do with it. It was
balled up in clumps on either side of her head. “Your son has a lot of hair, too, but they cut it
already.”
His mother shut her eyes, smiling.
“He’s perfect.”
“I don’t care if he’s not.”
“It’s your day, whatever you say.” The woman laughed and returned to the cot. She
seemed to search for her reflection on the metal rungs.
The room seemed so far away from the sounds outside. “Did you see it?”
“Come on, Dalida,” her sister said, angling her face. “To be honest, I wasn’t looking the
whole time.”
Even if they brought it to her in a clinical plastic casing, she would not believe it.
When the nurse came to change the baby’s fabric cocoon, Dalida strained her eyes to see.
The new fabric looked soft, with colorful images of small trees and laughing fish. The infant’s
shiny chest had no end. It was unpunctuated by any dip, any small skin-colored knot. Were they
sure it was a real child?
The doctors had asked Hamza’s father whether he would like a belly button made for his
son. A nurse brought Hamza and nestled him on his mother’s chest.
“Let’s not mess with nature,” the man must have said.
His mother’s sister looked at him with wide eyes, “Nature? What nature is this?” She
thought Dalida was asleep, her eyes were red from secretly weeping. Dalida stirred in the bed,
opening her mouth and closing it. Hamza felt himself slipping away from her chest.
The boy was too young to get a prosthetic one, something about his vital organs growing.
His mother said no, anyway. It was never Dalida's choice, but no one corrected her.
It all scared her, until it didn’t.
Slowly, she stopped fearing baths. When she bathed Hamza, she cupped her palms above
his stomach and let the droplets trickle down to his skin. There was no dip to catch them and
they slid straight down.
11

She had overcome the urge to press her thumb down and make a dent, even though she
knew she’d be successful. Young things are, after all, like clay. It would hurt and he would cry
but then he would forget.
There was a photograph of her leaning over the edge of the bathtub. In the gap beneath
her elbow, a reddish thing in a shallow plastic tub lay complacently. The edges of the photograph
curl slightly inwards, worn out.
She said to him that his father took it, but then the man wasn’t there to answer.
12

Ritual
At night, she kneels next to Hamza and whispers prayers. He can’t be sure it happens.
Hamza looked up at his mother, two pairs of identical eyes looking back at each other. She was
so close to his face. At that moment, the curve of her nose and the wiry strands of her eyebrows
were his whole world, there was nothing else that existed.
“Do you lie in your sleep too?” She asked. She seemed upset.
Hamza could not see her mouth and thought their minds had melded together. He had
yet to wake up but his breath began to grow shallow.
“No, no. Sleep again, come on,” His mother said. Suddenly his world was masked by a
dark hand as she gently stroked his face. A hoarse voice murmured while the hand moved down
to his chin.
He fell asleep. Leaking into his dreams were her words, “Let this boy slip out of all
knots.”
When she was his father, his mother was scared of Hamza. She was scared that he would
be alone forever, because he had never been connected to anything. When he passed, she saw it
as a kind of new life. She never told anyone, but they could tell. Hamza’s stringlessness became a
source of comfort, that one of her sons would feel like this forever.
Then she met Arnaud. Even clever people can be hypocrites, talking but not meaning it.
But he could not blame her. He enjoyed that she loved him so much, most times he could believe
it was about more than his missing navel.
13

Familiar
While they were young, most of them teen hermits, Dalida sat her children down
together in the living room. In those days, she had worn her hair long like a young girl’s. “What
do you think?” she asked them. A slim gold band lay in her palm. A sliver of pearly gloss ran
across the surface.
“What do we have to do with it?” Hamza’s youngest sister asked.
Qasim picked up the ring and passed it from one hand to the other. Hamza watched him,
sitting on his hands.
“I want your help, that’s all,” their mother told them. She neither smiled nor frowned. If
she cared that any of them were angry or uncomfortable, she did not show it.
Hamza reached out a hand from beneath him to hold the ring. It felt like it would melt at
his touch, it was so thin.
You already know what you want. Better to do it now, mama,” Qasim said. He was trying
to be polite about it, Hamza could tell. “You decided, are you just asking to make yourself feel
better?”
“The ring is nice,” his other sister said. She would know, she just got one herself.
Now Dalida smiled. Slowly, she got up to her feet. “Thank you, Sara.”
The smell of soup leaked in from the kitchen. “We can have a party here,” Hamza said.
“Right? Nothing to take the attention from Sara, of course–”
Sara laughed and shook her head. “You couldn’t even if you tried, sorry, mama.”
“But it’ll be good for him to at least see the house,” Hamza continued. It had been
obvious that the man would move in with them, they all knew just by looking at him. Arnaud
was a doctor, otherwise handsome and with big bright eyes, but he worked at a pharmacy and
lived in an apartment.
“I don’t want a party,” their mother said. “Come, let’s go eat.”
“Don’t forget this,” Hamza called out. He stood up, holding out her ring. The rest of her
children trickled out of the room around them.
She waited for him to walk over to her then held his hands together. One of them, that
had been nestled beneath him, was numb so it felt like three different hands.
“I learned a lot from you, you know,” she told Hamza. She was talking about his stomach.
She leaned in to kiss his cheek but he pulled away. She smelled like chamomile and the smell
reminded him of being sick. “But still, I can’t be like you.”
14

“Obviously not.”
“Why does a person hate to be free?” She was thinking aloud again.
Hamza felt a bit sorry for her. She moved her hands away and put the ring back into the
pocket of her pants. Hamza can’t remember the courting or anything else really before she
married Arnaud. Maybe for good reason.
15

Neck of the Hourglass
“Is it hereditary?”
They were sitting together on the sand in Coney Island. She was slowly pushing her feet
into the sand, moving outwards. Her skin was cool against his ankle.
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
Hamza smiled a little. “Is that what you were thinking about?”
The clicking sound of metal crept in from behind before a wave of shouts drowned it out.
If he focused, maybe he’d hear the sound of waves and the simmering of his skin in the sun,
maybe hers as well.
“Yeah,” she admitted. She was smiling, then smiling some more as he leaned back on his
arms as if to inspect his navel.
“I don’t think so, no. Unfortunately.”
“Aw,” she told him.
“Why–– are you particularly invested in my genes?” Hamza said, because it seemed like
a romantic thing to say at the time.
“Definitely,” Elena told him.
She seemed like she would stay a part of him, but he only remembered her sometimes,
when he heard waves hit the coast.
16

Lamya
Lamya was in the main hall, knees tucked under her in the folds of her dress, toiling with
her hair thoughtfully. Hamza stopped at the doorway, wanting to smile. He found it endearing,
how she would glance down to see if the strand would curl, it always just fell flat once again
against the sharp edge of her elbow.
He had moved that sofa next to the door so that their daughter had a place to sit while
she waited, impatiently, for her parents. The purple velvet had stains from her favorite yogurt
tubes. Hamza caught her smudging it away with her fist but Hamza covered for her in front of
Lamya, saying he had left bags of groceries there by mistake. Lamya had not said anything to
show that she didn’t believe him. Then, when they were alone, she looked at him with a smile in
her eyes.
“You’re waiting on me, for once,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow.
His wife unfolded herself from the sofa in one smooth motion. “You’re too late, Haya is
already at her friend’s house,” she told him. She always moved the large mass of hair behind her
before she took a step, and especially when she had the intention to embrace him.
Hamza looked over his shoulder as he held her, craning his neck to see the stairs. “Are
you serious? I said I’d be here after dinner, no?” He turned back to her. Her chin was on his
shoulder, she looked sideways at the staircase. “She’s hiding from me, upstairs, you both are
always tricking me.”
“Hamza, she’s not going to wait on you. Like I do,” his wife said, but she was smiling.
“We can pass by the house and pick her up. If she wants to come.”
Hamza shifted and she drew back. “Maybe it’s for the best. But now, who am I going to
have fun with?”
Lamya turned her back to him with a laugh.
On the nights before her long conferences, Hamza would watch with rapture she
practiced her speeches. That evening, Lamya was standing while he sat on the edge of the dining
room table. Haya, who had started off by his side, was now digging her knees into his lap as she
tried to close the last button of his shirt, effectively choking him.
“Sit down, Hamza. Haya. I want you to focus,” she told them.
17

Hamza leaned his head back exaggeratedly as if to take a deep breath away from his
daughter’s fumbling while his daughter cackled and kept a firm grip on his collar.
“Hamza.”
“Haya, haya. Your mother will not do her best tomorrow if you choke me to death. My
neck is too fat for that,” he said, scooping her up and managing to twist her around so she was
sitting on his lap properly, facing her mother.
Lamya looked at them for a while and set her papers down beside them.
Hamza dropped his shoulders. “Huh? We were just getting ready,” he began to say, but
she began to walk to the kitchen. “Come on, don’t lead us on like this. We want to hear it,” he
called after her.
He turned to his daughter. “ Yeah, Haya?” His daughter was leaning her full weight
against his chest. Her colorful clips scratched at the underside of his chin.
“What is it about?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Hamza admitted, “We were just getting to it.”
Lamya came back with a glass of water and she stood at the doorway, sipping at it.
“I’ll start reading it myself, Lamya. Do you want me to butcher your master work?”
She smiled and shook her head. “I was just thinking. I remembered Faisal is going to be
there. So I need to add something.”
“The person who always asks the stupid questions?”
“They’re not stupid, just make me look stupid.”
“Is he a magician? That’s not possible,” Hamza told her. He picked up her papers but she
walked over and asked for them back. “Are we not getting our show?”
She left a kiss on Haya’s cheek and took a seat on the chair next to them. “Mhm.”
“Is that better?” she asked. She was holding the papers with both hands, for a moment
she seemed torn between setting them down and holding them higher.
Hamza was sitting on their bed. He needed a while to unzip his lips, to revert to his
natural state.
“I just thought he’d ask about the policy in between, you know, restricting movements of
non-degradable materials between states,” she said, dropping her hair. He watched it fall, clump
around her shoulders before snaking down. “What do you think?”
“It’s clever,” he said. “Now, he can’t tell you anything.”
18

“That’s not true.”
At the end of her practice sessions, she would always lean over to him and try to glean
something. Hamza was stubborn and just smiled, not admitting defeat, not admitting that half
the words that left her lips had not registered any actual meaning.
“Why would you have it on paper, if the whole point is about materials and using less,”
Hamza asked.
“People don’t realize that digital files are just as taxing on resources,” Lamya told him,
looking defeated for a moment. She ran a hand over her forehead, for a moment. When cast in
the shadows, he noticed the deep indents under her careful eyes. He felt bad for noticing, like
she would be annoyed with him.
“Well, it makes a bit more sense than last time,” he said.
“Yes, but what do you think about it?”
Hamza paused. “Is it fair to make the jump and try to stop all people from keeping
these… these ‘materials’?”
Lamya smiled. “Of course.”
“Of course?”
“Of course you’d be concerned with that.” She dropped the papers on his lap. “I’m a little
tired, so it’s enough for now.”
“Happy to help,” he told her, folding the speech in half.
Heading to the bathroom, she laughed over her shoulder, probably at her dumb husband
who couldn’t understand. It was okay, he had a way of making her feel guilty.
His office was a short drive away, but he always took the route that skirted along the sea.
The cars behind him screeched their horns and he turned up the radio to drown them out. That
morning, the news reporter was screaming about a study that finally proved that transmitted
recordings of voices were warping the cerebral frontal lobe and its ability to judge physical
distance. “In the near future, expect a total dissolution of personal space,” the woman’s voice
stated monotonously.
Indoors, a man named Poulsen had pulled a chair up to Hamza’s desk and looked up
with big eyes as he walked in. “Do you mind?” He put Hamza’s pen down, perhaps
self-consciously. It was just a pen his wife had brought from a hotel in Dubai. “They need you on
floor six. C.D may have let slip that the globe concept was yours.”
19

“Let me at least put my things down,” Hamza said with a laugh, folding his sunglasses.
“They really want you on their team,” the man was saying. “If I may say it, honestly,
you’re being wasted here.”
“Did I hire you? Can’t recall.”
Poulsen smiled.
“I’m being wasted wherever. Now listen, there’s a new batch of Earl Grey downstairs that
I want your approval on. Shall we?”
The man grinned, smoothing down the finely pressed line on his slacks. “It’s your world,
sir.”
Sitting in front of the steering wheel in his office parking lot, Hamza raised his hands. He
watched the way his hands transformed in the passing headlights. They looked like his father’s
hands, creased and sturdy. The light cast deep shadows on the lines in his palms that his
eccentric mother had read, ignoring the revulsion of the rest of the family. The curved line that
stretched to the base, she would say to him when he was just a kid, meant that he would be
rooted in his home. ​This ​home, she would say. When she got it wrong and he left for New York,
she told him over the phone that his hands were as much of a liar as he was.
He thought of the way his wife spent time with her, not understanding much of what she
was saying, but trying. His mother spoke in the same language that the palms spoke, in
convoluted spirals. It was one of the things Hamza adored about the woman. It all clashed
horribly, in a terribly entertaining way, with Lamya’s deduction-oriented brain. In the evening,
when his sister’s and brother’s children were being goaded away to sleep, his mother would
always bring up Hamza’s palms. She would look pointedly at Lamya’s unswollen feet.
When they returned home, Hamza’s wife would look at him and say, “Your mother told
me about the cross-hatched line.” It seemed that she was catching on, he knew she would. She
had managed to gather a semblance of an understanding, maybe she had only paid attention to
the part about how many kids– how many Hamza’s mother predicted he would have. Lamya was
sitting with her legs crossed so that their knees touched, a hand gently wavered on its way to his
shoulder.
Hamza instead looked at Haya who was balancing against the tall white column by the
staircase. The little girl couldn’t stretch her arms around the marble, making Hamza laugh.
20

The cross-hatched line on his hand, his mother would tell everyone that would listen,
meant that her son would bear many children. When her son kept putting it off, then finally,
seemed settled about having just one, she took it back. She changed it to two. “Come on, boy,
just two. One more.” He was thinking of this as he watched Haya sit down on the stairs, he
remembered it all vividly. The way babies sat was a spectacle, squatting slowly then falling. His
wife was waiting for him to answer.
He walked over to his child and brought his face down. Her small hands pulled at his
hair, getting her meaty fingers stuck in his curls.
Carefully climbing out of her heels, his wife moved a hand across his back as she headed
up the stairs. Hamza spent that night curled under the kitchen table, waiting to be found by his
daughter, even while her mother called for her, summoning her for bedtime. The girl wobbled
and toiled her way to her father, babbling loudly.
Lamya probably still blames him for the small scar on her baby’s chin, but what it did
matter, they were having fun.
Since he could now never know and there was no risk involved, he wondered what his
mother thought of him. No matter what any of her children did, she could somehow spin it into
something about herself. He just wanted to feel that she was somewhere out there shaking her
fist, still caked in henna. The thought was troubling enough, he clambered out of the reverie. The
radio boomed out at him as he pulled out of the parking lot, taking a shortcut back home.
“I don’t know why I’m remembering this,” Lamya said, one day.
She was perched on the windowsill. She never pretended to be delicate yet he held her
steady by the knee just the same. Her shadow thrown against the wall was a funny shape, a
swelling half-circle where there hadn’t ever been before.
“What?” Hamza asked.
She turned her head to him, a small upturn on her lips. “I wish you could just read my
mind, already.”
Hamza closed his eyes.
After a while, she said, “Listen. The police car’s siren and that's a fire-engine. Our city,
too, has its native birds.”
“Hm?”
21

“I read that in a poem.”
“When do you have the time?”
Lamya turned to him, looking down. The sunlight fanned out against her round cheeks,
bruised by the heat. “That was from before. I wanted to know more about New York since I
heard you went there. I was afraid I would have nothing to talk about when I met with you.”
New York, the tops of the pointy buildings itched behind his eyelids. The memories felt
faded and fresh. “Say it again,” Hamza asked.
“Can you hear? The police siren, fire-engine siren. Our city, also, has its native birds.”
His body was caught in a wind tunnel between two large buildings, his chest tightened.
“How can you still hear all that after all those years of living there?”
A faint clinking came from outside.
Hamza looked up at Lamya and she seemed ready to cry, but he had stopped being good
at reading those things.
“I’ve never lived there,” she said.
“I know,” he told her, quickly.
She moved a hand to her stomach, turning her knee towards the glass. His hand slipped
off onto the warm windowsill.
Hamza moved his thumb against the seam of her dress, she edged away with a small
smile. “Tickles?” he asked her.
“No.”
22

Batch X
His first time traveling to New York was for college. What he felt was mostly excitement
but he had some concerns: he didn’t know if he should stress the ‘H’ or swallow it like he saw the
people doing around him. He took cues from Faisal and Hussain, the two boys that rode next to
him on the plane. They let him in on their bags of chips and spotted him with some cologne as
they were preparing to embark.
“Who sayin?’ Faisal joked, “Who sayin’ Al Nabati, you’ve been expelled for being too
studious and boring.” Hamza felt he had known them all his life.
There was a school in New York that Hamza found himself enrolling in, he had never
planned to go. It wasn’t London, that was the most appealing part of it, his father went to
London. Faisal didn’t say much of his decision and Hussain said he’d go anywhere away from
home.
“How dignified must it have been, to be the first batch to fly from home? To go abroad to
study?” Hussain was saying. “Now we are just batch X, doesn’t even matter.”
When they touched down and gathered their bearings, the three boys tried to pass time
outside as they waited for their shuttle on the street outside JFK. Hamza pretended to forget the
name of the airport just so that Hussain would cup his hands around his mouth and call it out,
mixing in expletives because “what else does the ‘F’ in JFK stand for?” Then Hamza would call it
out again, laughing as a large man and his wife almost kicked over his suitcase.
It was hotter than they expected, Hamza itched under the collar of his long-sleeved shirt.
But they were emboldened just by being in the proximity of the real New York, Manhattan.
Being on the street of the big New York City where people said whatever they wanted to. It was
something they had learned from movies.
“Who is in– Let’s take a cab, a taxi. He’s taking too long to come,” Hamza told the rest of
the boys.
Hussain was coughing into his elbow but looked up at him midway through. “You’re
going to try to stop one with your hairy leg?”
Faisal cackled at this.
“No, I’ll stop it with yours,” Hamza said.
The boys laughed. Some other boys, familiar faces from their flight walked past the
automatic doors. Not knowing what to say, they just took their place beside them. Faisal reached
23

out a hand, making the introductions. The tallest one with the forty-year-old mustache walked a
few paces away from them, stepping onto the road and craning his neck. They would later know
him as Salem. Hamza wondered if he had any idea what he was looking for.
“Should I sleep or are we not so far away?” Faisal asked. They were on the shuttle,
knocking shoulders.
At the front, Salem made noble efforts to try to speak to the driver, who had to yank the
wire from her ears each time before shoving the earpiece back in. “What can you buy for this
again?” He asked, pushing around coins on his palm, tilting it for the driver to see. A coin fell,
rattling around somewhere but the boy didn’t seem to even turn his head.
Hamza twisted his torso to look out the window. Raed sat on the other side of Hamza,
blocking most of his view of the window. He had a sharp nose and clean face, while the other
boys talked, he wormed his arms out of his coat. Raed was the one that had a beer on the plane,
not looking at any of the other boys much. He joined Hamza in the line earlier and pulled both
their bags along as they edged towards the passport control. Hamza let it happen, amused.
In the shuttle, Hamza tried not to sleep, although he felt invisible hands on his shoulders
trying to drag him down onto the fabric chair, to settle into the outdated neon triangle pattern.
The window was sliced neatly into diagonal lines as the shuttle mounted a bridge.
Peering down, Hamza could see buildings poke out at him, not too high but big enough. There
was an expanse of gray that stretched to the horizon, spliced by orange from the glass that
winked back the sinking sun’s light.
“Are we on the gold bridge?” someone asked in the back.
“Golden Gate.”
“Idiot.”
“Let’s watch a movie,” Hussain said, as if he hadn’t watched four on the plane.
Hamza nodded passively as the boy flicked his shoulder, waiting for an answer. He was
stuck in a reverie in which he leaped out of the shuttle and ran along the edge of the bridge,
chasing the sun into the depths of concrete. And to think, he would be walking around in it,
pushing his feet into it, knowing its names, Hamza already felt his time there would be gone too
fast.
Their apartment building was on a street corner in the Lower East Side. When he had
first sought out New York for college, he thought he’d stay by himself in one of those artist
24

apartments, the open-plan ones, although he drew the line at having the bathroom sharing the
same air as the kitchen. His mother, on the other hand, was asking everyone she knew if they
knew anyone else going, saying things like “my boy can only make coffee, if I send him there he
will come back like those actors, only bones.” She found Faisal and his mother in a suitcase
store. Hamza was unsure why she was there but she was always the type to just go to shopping
centers just to look, going from store to store no matter what they sold. He worried about her,
sometimes, he sent her some of the interesting books he collected from his professors but she
still held this hobby. In any case, she became fast friends with the pair and the rest of the boys
fell into the picture gradually.
Waiting for the rest to find their suitcases, Hamza looked up at the building, counting
his way up the floors to try to spot their new living space.
“Does the ground floor count as the first?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Hey, get your bag,” Hussain said, grunting as he lifted his own, “Do you want us to carry
it for you or something, Hamza?”
Hamza turned to him. “Would it take all of you to carry it?” He grinned, taking it from
Salem, grunting as he lifted it onto the pavement. He made another exaggerated sound to mask
the first.
“Let’s leave our bags in the lobby and see what there is to eat,” Faisal said.
Salem tried to push the glass door with his elbow but it took two pairs of shoulders on
the glass to get it to budge.
“Why not go up and see the place first?” Raed asked. “I want to see if we’ve at least got a
TV.”
“Let us go up first. It’s New York, they’ll take our things,” Salem told them.
“There’s no one even here,” Hussain replied, annoyed.
He was right, the lobby was just a hallway to a dimly lit staircase and two sets of
elevators. They could hear sounds above them of someone vacuuming, a car sharply veered to a
stop somewhere behind them.
“I’m hungry,” Hamza said, holding the button of the elevator. “But I need the bathroom.”
They waited for what felt like five whole minutes until they heard the dull ding, the doors
opened a couple of seconds before the elevator cabin jolted into place.
25

The living room was indistinguishable from the kitchen. When Hamza walked out of the
bathroom on one end, moving towards his shared room, he ran into the drawers that one of the
boys had left open.
He nudged it closed with the same shoulder, wincing.
“Let’s go?” Faisal asked. He had put his suitcase on the bare mattress of his bed. They
had chosen the room furthest from the front door because it had the only window that faced
partially onto the street.
“Which idiot was going through the kitchen already? It’s not a hotel minibar,” Hamza
said.
Raed walked in, sitting next to the luggage on the bed. He had an oily spot next to his
collar and smelled like musk. “We can turn it into a minibar,” he said.
Hearing the commotion, Hussain walked over from his room. “I want real food, not from
a bar or whatever,” he told Raed sharply.
“Look at him, he’s ready to argue,” Faisal snorted.
“Idiot,” Hamza said. His shin hurt.
“Roll up your sleeves, come on, fight!” Faisal held two fists up to Hussain.
Salem knocked into the door frame as he peeked in, the rest shifted to make way. Hamza
felt he had to press his back further into the window to get some space to himself. “The guy
downstairs said they have good bed stuff, we have to stop in 14th station, or something,” Salem
said.
“Can we eat those?” Hussain said, sounding like he was gritting his teeth together.
Faisal looked at Hamza with a grin.
“Just saying,” Salem said.”
“Well, shut up.”
Hamza raised his hands, “Hey! When did this room become a meeting place, why are you
all here? Like little chicks following me, yallah, let’s get out so I can breathe.”
They found a small Mexican restaurant after fifteen minutes of deliberating and walking.
Hamza ate the quickest out of them all and had a lot of time to look around. It had finally sunk
in that he was there, with this group in a foreign place. He wondered what their houses looked
like, where they lived before this. Instead, he noticed that Raed almost systematically itched his
ear, flicking away the hair that fell over it and that Hussain’s facial hair stopped right under his
26

chin, the hair on his lip was the same that framed his eyes. He wondered which of the boys could
pass as his brother, Faisal probably, maybe because he liked him best.
When he had enough of their faces, he looked out of the window. Regular people passed
by the scene, but to him, they seemed meaningful. A woman pressed her back into the glass,
crumpling her blouse as she talked loudly into her phone about her roommate. He had this
strange feeling that he couldn’t explain. He felt it again when they were walking home, taking
the long way because Salem found a park on one of the maps that he wanted to pass by. Raed
had gone home. It was getting dark and something about the streetlights made Hamza want to
walk slowly.
The park was more of a patch of grass in between streets. A young male trio was sitting
on the seesaw, laughing obnoxiously. None of them looked up at them as they entered the
enclosure. The place was lit only by the streetlights outside, almost completely dim in the center,
almost as if it were a blind spot.
“Feels like I’m in Paris,” Hussain said, kicking at the pages of a newspaper stuck to the
leg of a bench.
“Don’t say that,” Raed snickered, “Wouldn’t that be full of couples together?”
Hussain, sated, seemed not in the mood to be annoyed. “I was joking.”
“Good, I thought you were thinking of Paris because you were in love with one of us,”
Faisal laughed before pausing. “Is this even a park? Really felt like getting on some swings.”
Salem smiled a little. “This is how parks look like here. At least now we know.” He
walked in the opposite direction of the laughing boys.
Hamza also smiled a little.
They tried and failed to find the swinging door again to exit before they agreed to just
climb over the little fence. Salem raised one long leg over it. Hamza was lifting his own, laughing
at Hussain almost tripping, when the gate began to move. Slowly, it began to stink into the grass.
On their way back home, Hamza bumped into a man bringing out old picture frames that
were rotting at the corners. He seemed to be in the middle of adding it to the various other
pieces of furniture alongside the street.
He apologized, but the man couldn’t hear him over his own loud cursing.
“You’ve made a lovely living space for the garbage bags,” Hamza told him. The man
grabbed him by the lapels of his coat, gripping tightly before letting go.
27

That was one of their last outings as a large group. Interests faltered and Hussain was
one of the main advocates of just staying home. He knew all the shortcuts from his classes back
to the apartment, calculated the most minimal exposure he could have with the city.
It was often Salem, Hamza, and Faisal that roamed the city. Salem often picked the
destination, marking it on a map that he carried in his shirt pocket. They almost always ended
up around Alphabet City, a name that Hamza wished he came up with.
28

Age of Bronze
When he had just arrived, New York had seemed like another planet that was designed
to get him to forget anything else. He could not see the sea or any curved horizon, it was a flat
plane with many obstacles. In those days, it all seemed so large and out of proportion yet he was
sure he could make his way around on foot. That day, it was all very small and yet he felt he
could never make it home. The garbage bags along the pavement, crinkling heavily with the rush
of automobiles made him feel that he was walking along a glorified treadmill.
He probably should remember the first words she said to him. What he remembers
happens some time after, sitting opposite her on the park bench close to one of the lecture halls.
She was cast in the shadows of the gargantuan brick building behind her. He squinted a bit in
the sun, trying to decently bite down on his cold sandwich. It was meant to be cold, even the
meat tucked into it, very bizarre.
She had told him, “I’ve never seen anyone like you before.”
It was a weird thing to say. Wasn’t that the point? Where was she meeting stock
characters? Could she take him to this land of duplicates? She laughed a lot at these questions,
making him sit up straighter and grin.
The cup in her hands was almost empty, he could see through it. She hesitated before
taking another sip of tea then set it down. “You’re all in the sunlight and here I am, so cold,” she
said. She was smiling.
“Come sit here,” Hamza told her, it suddenly felt like a lot to ask. “Or if you’re too lazy,
I’ll pull the table over.”
She was already moving over to his side. Pausing beside him, she waited for Hamza to
look up at her. “I should have stayed there to see if you would have actually done it.”
Elena would sometimes still be there, in the park, when he walked out of his afternoon
lecture. He would be unfurling his shoulders and neck, Faisal at his side. The boy would be
quiet, all talked out for the hour. The first few times, Hamza had walked past, very determinedly
looking at anything in his path, the plaster columns, the swinging door to the mini cafe. After the
day that they got lunch and walked farther than the courtyard, he felt it safe and not too
desperate to at least notice her publicly. She was nodding emphatically, talking to a group of
other students, but catching his eye, she shot her arm up and grinned.
29

Faisal was suddenly re-animated for the rest of the journey home. “Who was that?”
“Does she know me?” “How do you know her?” “Will you at least mention me around her?”
Back at their rooms, Raed maintained that he knew a lot of girls and did not get the fuss,
he crossed his arms and refused to sit with the rest of them on the rug.
Salem offered his leather jacket to Hamza for the days he’d see her, he said, “Your
shoulders need the help, sorry brother.”
It was mostly her hair, vaguely blonde and cut above her collarbones, that was the topic
of conversation with his friends. They would sit in their shared apartment, in front of a rowdy
football match, and someone would say something lewd about it. It was light, how was it with a
girl like that? Even then, Hamza had been on his toes, careful. But he couldn’t help divulging. It
was nice, it was nice. They rarely left it there.
Hating capitalism was all the rage, he had no idea why they had both chosen business
and sat through talks to learn about money-making. She got mad when he saw what he had
drafted all over her notes, but he had liked being told off. It never went on for too long, as she
began to point out his spelling mistakes. Then she read it all out, loudly: “​Make letters touch
again, stop the segregation of letters in the English language. Viva la cursive​-- You sure you’re
not a poet, Hamza?”
He sat, arms crossed, fighting off embarrassment.
Soon they were ready to pack up, not done with their coursework but done with the
people that kept knocking into their knees in the little cafe. Hamza didn’t know where it came
from, he took hold of her hand for a moment to lead her. She had been holding both their drinks
and was in the process of handing him his cup. Lukewarm tea spilled across his fingers, Elena
screwed up her face in apology before he laughed.
“If you don’t want it, no need to punch it out from my hands,” she said and he laughed.
In between sips, she watched him grin and had asked him what he liked to do outside of
being there, studying, sitting, and getting her tea. He thought he was clever when he said, “I bet I
can name you to your favorite place in this hometown of yours.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll take you,” he said, taking a longer step, “Now.”
“On foot?” she said, incredulous.
30

They walked, he put his hands in the pockets of the leather coat. He felt small wads of
paper and who knows what, a strangely intimate place to be sticking his hands in– his friend’s
jacket pockets. He thought of what to say.
“I know the guy that owns that place,” the girl said, pointing with her cup in the direction
of a boutique. The orange lights slid around the window frame, outlining a rack of clothes.
“Oh, really?”
“Crazy story.”
Hamza waited for her to say, but she did not.
They arrived at the East River Esplanade. It was a spot Hamza had come upon a couple
of evenings before, needing a break from the same old voices at home. The sun was setting lazily,
but still very warm. Elena said nothing, pinching the lips of her cup to a close and crumpling it
slowly.
“So?”
Elena took a few steps forward before turning back to him. “Well, you’re not wrong…”
She shifted her hips to pull the hem of her skirt down. Then, crouched by the barrier,
looking out onto the Hudson River. He turned away without thinking.
“The saddest river in the world.”
Hamza looked back at her, unsure.
She turned to him and smiled. “If you really want to stay here, you have to admit things
like that to yourself.”
Hamza bent down beside her. “Who said I want to stay here?” They watched the dark
water, he tried not to notice the stench. Then he said with a smile, “Stop reading my mind, it’s
private.”
The girl laughed beside him, using his shoulder to straighten back up. It was getting late,
probably.
He rode the subway alongside her, accompanying her home after that. He got lost for
hours trying to return to his apartment. He felt regret, why did he turn away when she got
down? Did it make him look disinterested? Or prudish.
He should have looked.
31

Cavity
Faisal left New York, in stages. He was gone by their final year of college.
New York City had tasted like youth, but it felt watered down towards the end of his time in
college. He could pinpoint the last moment to a dingy supermarket with harsh overhead lighting
and a rolled-up mattress.
“You’re just telling yourself that,” Raed said, “To make yourself feel better.”
He inspected a can of tomato sauce before he shook it.
“Get the glass one. Tastes better,” Salem said.
Hamza felt they should all shut up.
Faisal was clasping the handles of the metal basket, pulling them apart and clacking
them together, probably not even hearing the noise he was making. Supermarkets were lit like
interrogation rooms. The fluorescent light distorted Faisal’s face, dragging his skin down with its
weight. He somehow looked darker, his nose cast a sharp shadow like it was cutting his mouth in
half. That morning his sister had finally broke it to him that their father was out of work and he
would soon be asking his son to come back home from America to help out.
“Listen, let’s go one last time. I’ll invite you all to the chicken place,” Hamza said, holding
out a hand to take the basket. They were buying groceries for the first time in months, in a bid to
help Faisal save enough money to stay.
“No, stupid. You go, if you want it,” Faisal said.
“I know you want it. Don’t make me eat alone, I’ll look like a loser,” Hamza told him.
Raed snorted. “Everything happens for a reason.” If there was one of the guys that
Hamza could not deal with, and they all took their turns on the list, it was Raed.
“It’s the truth,” Salem said.
“Very philosophical.”
“That’s basically telling me to fuck myself,” Faisal told him. “You know what? Forget that
I brought it up. Can we shut up about it?” He moved down the aisle with his basket, pretending
to look at the products. He picked up a jar of dusty yellow cheese.
“Salem, do you honestly believe?” Raed was still asking. “Everything for a reason,
whatever.”
Salem secured the bag of chopped lettuce in the crook of his arm. Under his eyebrows,
his eyes were moving slowly. “I want to,” he said.
32

“So you don’t?”
Hamza moved towards Faisal, taking the jar of cheese out of his hand. “We tried this,
remember? The one that smells like paint.”
The two other boys walked over as well. “I said, I want to. Maybe it would make things
easier. But you can use that saying to justify terrible things,” Salem said.
“Faisal, listen to this. What was the reason for atomic bombs?”
“You really want to talk about that right now?” Hamza said.
Salem gave Hamza a nod, as if affirming his call to shut Raed up.
“I just want to talk, why are you all Hussain today?”
Faisal turned around at this. “What else do you want me to say? That I am throwing my
life away by going back? I could say the same about staying here. You know I want a break from
home. You know I wanted to go to London–”
“And you could have!”
“But I didn’t. For a reason. If I don’t think it’s for a reason then I’ll live like a crooked
person,” Faisal said. He said the word ‘crooked’ like it was the word ‘cooked’, but in fact crooked.
“A sad, crooked person. Even if it’s a reason that I disagree with, at least I can just accept it. If it
helps me make this choice then what does it have to do with you?”
Hamza had to step in. “Faisal, listen, would two more years away from home really
matter? Come one, won’t you miss us? Even just a little bit?”
“You’ll have the room to yourself,” Faisal told him.
Hamza laughed and hit him on the back of his head. “Yeah, true. But who will wake me
up in the morning with their disgusting snoring? I’ll sleep through the whole day.”
“Am I only useful–”
Raed still had more in him, interjecting. “Would you rather have wasted two years
studying, for nothing? For going to a job you could have gotten either way? I think you could do
better than a family footstool. I think everyone can agree.”
“If that’s my calling, it’s my calling. I’ll live with it.” Faisal moved around the corner to
the next aisle.
Hamza sighed but decided to let him be. They needed pasta. “Where’s the stringy pasta?”
“Vermicelli,” Salem supplied.
“Oh, yeah good, we can make that now and for breakfast.”
Faisal came back from around the corner.
“You done?” Raed asked him.
33

Salem tried to take the basket from Faisal’s hands.
“Ignore him,” Hamza told his friend.
“Can you all please eat outside, I don’t care.” Faisal said, “I want to be alone.”
Raed smirked. “You’ll burn the building down.”
“I’m serious.”
The boys were quiet for a while. There was a sharp ringing then a woman mumbled
something over the intercom. She must have left it on because it stayed fuzzy for a while.
“If that’s what you want,” Hamza said.
They began to walk in the direction of the fresh produce, where there seemed to be some
people moving about. Raed picked up his pace and Hamza adjusted himself to move out of the
way. The sauce aisle seemed endless, curving into the spice aisles and lab-grown cheese section.
Coming out of the mess of the aisles, they ran into the end of the store. An employee in what
seemed to be a bright green bib disappeared behind a door, it blended into the wall. A glossy
image of an enormous family collectively beaming at an apple was once again complete.
“We should get apples.” Salem said, making Hamza laugh.
When Hamza turned around, Faisal was trying to curb a reaction. His face was pulled
back tight, mouth against his teeth. “Where’s the damn cashier?”
Hamza laughed harder, making Salem smile a little as he moved away to try to find the
exit. The employee swung open the door, knocking into Raed. He wheezed as his body ejected all
the air from inside of him.
“Sir,” the woman said with bemusement, looking around at them before she took off into
the aisles.
“​Sir​? Excuse me, graceful madame,” Raed groaned, holding his back.
There was a low shaking of breath, Faisal was laughing.
“Tell him,” Hamza said, finally swiping the basket from out of his hands.
“I won’t give him that satisfaction,” Faisal told him.
They tried to follow the path that the woman took. Raed complained that his lungs
popped from the shock.
When Salem saw the state of Raed as they met back up at the cashier, he grinned with his
teeth. “Everything happens for a reason. I’m believing it.”
Faisal pushed him out of the way, digging for his wallet as the cashier began her
scanning. Her nails pierced into the bags, leaving small punctures.
34

“Don’t try,” Hamza said, moving next to him. Faisal pulled out bills to pay anyway and
none of them had the strength to pick any more fights, including the decapitated Raed.
The weather outside was chilly, like walking in the frozen section. The pavement was wet,
as it seemed to consistently be. Hamza stepped right into a puddle, too preoccupied with trying
to figure out what to say to make him stay. Kicking his foot in annoyance, he lagged behind the
others for a while. Then, he stopped in place. He watched the boys move in front of him, getting
smaller.
Salem and Raed were talking, but their heads bobbed lazily like it was just small talk.
They moved carelessly letting the bags thump against their thighs as they moved. Faisal was not
as tall as the others but he kept up a steady pace in the front. Hamza could just barely make out
his navy blue coat. If he closed his eyes, they would continue to walk. Things would happen to
them, external to himself. Faisal would choose to stay or go back home and Hamza would be
none the wiser, if he stayed still on that wet pavement.
“Did you get kidnapped?” Raed called out, twisting his head back and holding his arm
out to slow down Salem.
Salem had that look like he was just pulled out of a thought, or sentence.
“Who would want him?” Faisal said from the front.
“The miserable truth.” Hamza caught up with them, slowly, not bothering to rush. The
way back seemed longer, Faisal was turning down odd streets. “Do you know where you are
going?” Hamza asked him.
“Don’t ask me that. I am tired of that question.”
Salem laughed a bit at this.
“Oh, it’ll be weird without you,” Raed said, offhandedly.
Hamza glanced at him. Faisal continued moving forward.
They came to a bend in the street. In the end, there was that rolled-up mattress that the
boys would pass on their way to their university buildings. It leaned against the cast iron fence of
a little park. They had no idea it was a corpse, but still skirted around it.
“It’s still here,” Hamza said, gesturing with his chin.
“What?” Faisal asked, looking back at him before answering his own question. “Oh.
What, do you want to bring it home?”
“Remember how you thought it was an art piece?” Raed asked, snickering.
They stepped onto the road to avoid the little arrangement. That night, there were
colorful wrappers, Ferrero Rocher chocolates, small bits of paper, and bits of ribbon strewn
35

across the soiled mattress. Hamza quickly looked up, half-expecting someone to spot someone
just leaving the area.
“What are you doing?” one of the boys asked.
There was a sharp stench as Hamza edged closer to read one of the notes, curiously. He
jolted back and moved his sleeve over his mouth and nose.
Raed picked up a wax stub from nearby, a kind of makeshift candle. “Look at this, what is
this like a memorial?”
“Eugh, put that down,” Faisal told him, repulsed.
He dropped it and it rolled down the pavement.
Hamza followed suit and moved away, pulling at Raed’s elbow. “That’s a dead body.”
Salem froze before nodding his head. “That would make sense.” Where they were
standing, where the rolled-up corpse lay, was across from a funeral home.
“Is no one going to bring it in?” Hamza asked.
“Probably a homeless person,” Faisal said.
They quietly shuffled away. They made it to the corner of the park before Raed stopped
to retch. Salem made them find a bodega to get the poor guy gum before they could continue
home.
“That’s a sign, as sure as it could come,” Faisal said. He was talking about leaving New
York.
Raed was frowning, pushing another gum into his mouth. Hamza felt disgusted,
although he also felt bad.
“Don’t you think?” Faisal asked.
Hamza had wanted to say that that could be said about everything, if Faisal was looking
for a sign that he should go home then he would find it everywhere. He wanted to say that he
was being selfish, for leaving them. But he didn’t.
“Faisal, you are not just tormenting yourself but everyone else,” Hamza told him.
They dropped Faisal off at the apartment, giving him all the grocery bags, before they
continued forward. Over sticky fried chicken, they talked about selfishness.
Salem visited the funeral center the next day to pay for the burial of the mattress person,
and came back angry. The woman was ready to go through with it for a flat charge of a large
amount of money, the exact figures of which Salem would not disclose.
“Just tell us,” Hussain said.
36

“If it means that much to you, we can all chip in,” Hamza agreed.
The mattress was gone within a week, anyway. Faisal, close to the end of that semester.
37

West Village
A quarter of a lifetime later, it was Jasem’s first day in the city. The boy was en route to
Washington for his studies, dropping in to see his father– probably under Lamya’s orders.
Hamza made reservations at a nice place in the West Village.
“Let me come pick you up,” he told his son the night before.
“For what? Just send someone,” Jasem told him. He paused. Hamza listened in on the
sounds of a paper bag being rummaged through, a gruff voice in the back asked for a straw.
“Are you driving?”
“I parked. Oh, baba–”
“Is it your car?”
“Yeah, what else?”
“Nothing,” Hamza said.
“Haya told you?”
“You think I don’t know anything?” The boy had gotten into an accident that past month,
the police fined Hamza like it had been Jasem's fault.
His son laughed. “It’s not that bad. The door closes now, it just doesn’t open.”
“Good that you won’t drive here,” Hamza had said. “I’ll send someone.”
His son, being the way that he was, left the cab at Fifth Avenue. He called Hamza, who
had been meandering around the general scope of the restaurant, and said that he was cold and
tired. Hamza found him smoking next to his bags, perched on a storefront. He was not much
taller than any other boys but by the way he held himself, most people forgot. His face was a
young boy’s, as well, but it was swathed with a neatly groomed beard. There was a softness still.
One that Hamza felt obliged to notice, the way that his shoulders hung back behind him. No one
had shown him how to draw them forward, like a tortoise shell over his chest.
“Hello!” the boy said with a grin, waving him over. He had the decency to put out the
cigarette on the windowsill behind his back.
Hamza walked over to him. He gathered his son’s shopping bags, hooking them onto his
wrists. “I don’t even know what to get angry about first.”
“That’s good,” his son told him.
“How did you even have time to buy me gifts?” Jasem seemed to stiffen before Hamza
shook his head, smiling a little. “Don’t worry, I know they’re not for me.”
38

“I feel selfish.”
Hamza could not argue so he hugged him with one arm, stood there for some time and
pulled away.
His son smiled a bit. “It’s too cold. Can we go home?” Hamza pulled his scarf loose and
wrapped it around his son’s shoulders instead. The boy laughed as he adjusted it, pulling it
underneath his coat. “I want a bath.”
“Okay, but later. I’m hungry,” Hamza said and ushered the boy to follow him.
It was amusing to watch Jasem try to stay on his two feet in the rattling subway car. He
snickered, latching onto the pole by the door, suitcases in hand.
“Even I speak better English than this guy.” His son remarked when the conductor
slurred the name of the station with each stop.
Hamza let his son step out of the train before he did, walking slightly behind him.
“How am I supposed to know where to go?” Jasem laughed, tripping over his father’s feet
as he tried to slow down.
“Careful,” Hamza said. He moved a hand up to hold his son’s back but thought better of
it. “I’ll throw stones in which direction,” he told him.
The nice seats by the Highline that Hamza had reserved were now occupied but Jasem seemed
pleased by the adjacent table. The boy ordered quickly and then leaned back in his chair with an
exaggerated sigh.
“You worked hard, huh?” Hamza asked him.
Jasem nodded. “Actually. Is this really your life?”
Hamza folded his hands on the table.
“When did you come here before?”
“I just asked my friends what is the most expensive place with the most boring food, they
told me here,” Hamza answered. It was somewhat true.
Jasem scoffed. When the food came, he insisted on taking a picture of Hamza next to his
plate. Looking at his phone, he smirked “Wow, the lighting makes you look my age, mashallah.
No wonder you like this place.”
Hamza laughed but as he looked at the boy, he wondered what kind of life he thought his
father lived. He must think they are one and the same.
39

Picking up the cutlery, he began to work his way into the steak. They had both ordered it,
medium cooked. Hamza felt that a salad he made at home could be heartier, given the portion
they were given, but it did look tasty.
Jasem soon joined in, chewing for a long time as he looked at Hamza. Eventually, he
looked away.
“What?” Hamza asked, after a while. He was already almost done with his food.
“Hm?” Jasem turned his head. He was wearing a lazy smile.
Hamza gestured to his son’s plate. “Good?”
“Yeah, it’s nice. But I ate so many croissants in the airport, waiting for the man to find
me.”
“It should have been easy, I said look for a boy that looks like he is going to a beach in
Miami.”
Jasem cackled. “Oh, okay.”
A waiter passed by in the narrow space between the tables, his protruded elbow wove in
and out to avoid the talking heads. Another, right behind him, stopped at their table to pick up a
fallen napkin. He went through elaborate motions to straighten it only to push it into the fold of
his apron.
Over on one end, there was a long bar. That corner was dimly lit and Hamza could only
see the silhouettes of the crowd that stood there, shifting ever so slightly. They drew closer to the
seated portion, lapping at the edge, before pulling back in. Across from him, Jasem gulped down
his water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What do you miss the most about
home?” The words seemed like they came from a script, one that the boy himself did not feel
inclined to read. The light-heartedness in his tone had evaporated without Hamza noticing.
Hamza tapped his palm against the edge of the table. “Probably Haya.”
“Is she an object? I said, ​what ​do you miss!”
Hamza laughed. “A person can be a what.”
“No. I don’t accept the answer.”
“What do you want me to say?”
Jasem shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t want you to say anything.”
“Really?”
“No, like I don’t have an answer I want you to say. Just say what you want. Not that
hard.”
40

Hamza could tell his son was losing interest a bit and felt a little disappointed in himself.
But why? He didn’t owe him a thing.
His son barely blinked as an unfamiliar waiter came to take their plates away. She had
wet curls fashioned into spirals along her forehead.
“Thank you,” Hamza told her.
His son leaned back in his chair then straightened up again.
“What about you?” Hamza asked, because he wanted to ask about something.
“Me?”
“All your friends, it’ll be difficult without them,” he told him.
“I won’t be away forever,” Jasem said.
The leathery placemats gleamed up at him, now that the dishes were gone.
“Besides, I need a break from them,” the boy laughed.
“Of course.” A pause. “Life won’t be easy here, you know? Don’t expect this,” Hamza
gestured to the restaurant, “Or what you are used to at home.”
“I think I can handle it,” Jasem said, his expression barely changed.
“I’m telling you you cannot,” Hamza told him, “Be prepared for that.”
His son let out a huff of air. “What good is telling me that? Thank you, let me just prepare
overnight.”
“I’m just telling you so you don’t look like a fool later.”
“God forbid I look like a fool,” his son said, “God forbid, Baba, can you imagine?”
Hamza turned his head away. He kind of wanted the boy to stumble, he wanted him to
get caught again. As long as Hamza wouldn’t be involved, and he was certain he wouldn’t.
“I never expected you to care so much,” his son said.
“I don’t, really.” Hamza said, he could not help it.
“I want something sweet. Do you want?” Without waiting for an answer, or maybe
knowing he would not receive one, Jasem angled his shoulders into the path of one of the
swarming staff in aprons, speaking to them about the desserts.
The room seemed to dim. Hamza watched the light play out on the boy’s face, sharpening
his chin and dragging it down. In a day, he would be gone.
41

They were in Hamza’s apartment. Hamza stepped over the open suitcase, dribbling hot tea down
his fingers. The television was on, switched to a comedic act in which the lead woman would
make observations about New York City then turn to the audience and ask “Am I Right?” The
unseen audience patiently waited until she finished the question before laughing raucously.
Jasem was in the same clothes, just barefoot. He sat on the arm of the couch, talking on
the phone. It felt like looking at a collage, a foreign piece stuck onto an already existing plane.
“No, no. That’s what I said, but…” He looked up as Hamza drew closer, pulling the
phone from his face. “He’s here, anyway.”
Hamza swapped the cup of tea for the phone. It was Haya. They talked about Jasem
without really talking about him. Hamza tried to organically move his way across the room,
checking the window as he hmm-ed and nodded. Once he was in the kitchen, he said so to his
daughter.
“Don’t say that, you’re making it obvious.”
“What else do you want me to say?” Hamza asked her.
Haya sighed. The rush of air made crinkles in the soundwaves, tickling his ear. “Mama
was just worried because he took out a lot of money. Plus, his dumb friends gave him some, too.
So it must–”
“How do you know that?”
“Faris’s sister comes to the house when he comes,” she said.
“So it must what?”
“It must be something dumb going on.”
“Maybe.”
“So mama thinks if you talk to him about whatever it is…”
Hamza looked at the tiles in the kitchen. From far away, it seemed there was no space
between them, that they were overlapping even. But they were placed evenly apart, there was
not a world in which these tiles had ever touched.
“He’s a grown man. What he does is on him now, Haya.”
As soon as he said it, he regretted it. On the other side, Haya seemed stumped. She said
nothing. Hamza felt her irritation, but could not figure out how he could uncoil it.
“Just want you to focus on yourself. That’s all.”
“You’re unfair.”
42

Hamza left the kitchen, not wanting to talk about it. “Where is your mother? Or did she
already call?”
“Just try to speak to him, that’s all I will say. I don’t want the responsibility of--”
“Of what?” Jasem asked her, taking the phone. He seemed perplexed, eyebrows knotting
before slowly they unravelled again and he laughed.
The two talked for a while more as Hamza sat beside his son. The tea hung at the edge of
the table, half-full. He sipped at it. Eventually, Jasem hung up.
“Well, is she right?” Jasem asked. He was pointing at the TV. The lead lady was talking
about attractiveness as measured by whether there was a lobby in the guy’s apartment building.
Hamza stood up. “How would I know?”
“Yours has one.”
“And I’ve never needed it, even once.”
They were in the cab together, on the way to the airport. Jasem needed all the space he could get
for his suitcases but Hamza felt he should be there. The two nights his son had spent with him
had felt like a different period of his life, removed from everything else. By the time he had to
leave, Jasem was all talked-out, running out of stories– at least the ones he could share with his
father.
“Ask me again, what I miss about home.”
Jasem turned to him, not understanding.
“Just ask me.”
“Okay,” Jasem said, before asking.
“I miss driving.”
His son seemed briefly amused before he turned his head back to the window.
“Wait, wait,” Hamza said. “You said, you didn’t want any specific answer from me.”
Jasem hummed.
“I can’t say I miss you because you’re here,” he tried.
“You don’t need to say that,” his son said.
“I miss the desert, the sand, even getting stuck,” Hamza laughed a bit.
Jasem’s eyes lit up again. “Really?”
It wasn’t exactly true. He didn’t care for the desert or driving, but those were the first
images of home that came to his head. Maybe he missed being shaken around in the back of his
43

father’s Suzuki Patrol while his barely teenaged brothers and sisters drove around in the dark, or
he missed being a child. Most of all, he knew it was what Jasem would like to hear.
“Yeah.”
“You never took us, though.”
“I don’t know how to drive on the sand that much,” Hamza admitted.
“Who drove you then?”
“Whoever.”
Jasem laughed. “Qasim, right?”
Hamza nodded his head. “Sometimes him. He doesn’t come to the house a lot, right?”
Jasem shrugged. “No one really does.”
“Well, he called me to ask if you arrived.”
“Who told him I was coming to New York?”
Hamza grinned a bit. “Being with the police told him.”
Jasem made a face. He picked at the meat on the plate, pulling it apart.
“You know when I was small, we only had one car.”
“Which one?”
“Suzuki, white patrol car.”
His son grinned at the thought, teasing. “That’s what made mama fall in love, for sure.”
“I was eight, maybe, from where will your mother come and fall in love?” Hamza couldn’t
help but laugh anyway.
“Okay, okay.”
“We never had anything to do in the day time other than stay outside and play with the
other kids. Unless our grandmother came, we weren’t allowed to come inside the house until
sunset,” Hamza said. He was unsure why it mattered to say this. “Can you believe it? I
sometimes would pray to be a grownup just to sit inside and watch TV.”
“Hard times,” his son said.
“It was.”
“Then what?”
“Then, what? Then, my father. Sometimes it seemed like he just wanted to be strict for
the sake of being strict. Age meant everything to him. Only my mother would sit on the balcony
and watch us, or come in pants and walk with us to the centers.”
“Like Sahara?”
“Even older.”
44

“What did you do there?”
Hamza laughed. “Just walk in the cold air. Or look at the fish in the aquarium. We always
liked the bathrooms, so much.”
“Weird thing to like so much,” Jasem said. He leaned his head against his hand.
“They had the best taps. Like automatic.”
“You’re aging yourself again.”
“Maybe. But the point is that the day usually meant nothing to us. That’s why at night, I
slept in clothes that were comfortable but also that I could wear outside, hoping they would let
me come.”
Jasem turned so his body was angled towards Hamza, his leather jacket whining with the
effort, his long legs stretching beneath the driver’s seat. He seemed tired, but his face did not
give it away.
“Is this interesting to you?” he asked.
“Yes,” his son said, then added, “Why else would I shut up and listen?”
Hamza searched his eyes before speaking, “I don’t know.”
“Just continue.”
“Nothing, just that the only times I felt I was doing something, not just passing time were
those times. At night, whenever they would let me come. I would sit up straight on the bed,
making sure I looked them in the eyes as they snuck past the front door. Weeks passed until I
gained their trust, until I proved to them I was no tattletale snitch, lapdog to my father.”
“Am I?”
Hamza laughed a little. “Is everything about you?”
“Of course not.”
The buildings outside quickly melted away. With a small jolt, the car slid onto a long
stretch of highway alongside small stubbly structures.
“Then what?”
“Then they invited me, at long last. At that point, I had so much pent up excitement that
I could walk outside the house with them, just breathe in the night air, and walk back inside and
still feel fulfilled. But they were not the type to take it easy on me. I sat in the trunk of their
friend’s old Cruiser, which was parked at the end of the street. Then we shot into the night.”
“Did you ever get promoted to the front seat?”
“No,” Hamza said.
“Oh,” Jasem said, suddenly laughing. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t expect that.”
45

“Because then Sara got married and Qasim went to police school and no one was left.”
Maybe to himself, he said, “It’s over quicker than it lasts.”
He thought of his mother. She must have known it was lonely at home after that. Sitting
next to him at breakfast, she said, ‘I need to speak with you.’ She passed him bread and he
snapped at her that he had to hurry, because that was what he did at that time. She caught him
in the evening and pressed the key to his father’s Pajero. It felt electric and he was overjoyed, too
stuck in this joy to realize that she meant to come with him. When it was dark, he tried to wake
who was left but they wouldn’t budge for the whole moon, not since Qasim left. With his tail
between his legs, he walked outside and found his mother in front of my father’s car. She said,
‘Quickly! What’s the matter with you, it’s so hot.’
Her hair was tucked into a long, thin cloth that she swathed across her entire upper body
and head. Some henna red strands still peeked out. She seemed in that moment, like she had
been weaving in and out of the night her whole life.
He hesitated by the driver’s side but she seemed ready to jump in the driver’s seat
herself.
He feigned ignorance, but couldn’t fool her.
‘Yalla! I know you can drive!’ He could. Revving the engine just to stop her taunts, they
set off. It was silent until he reached the sand, holding his breath as they dipped and rose over
the mounds. Then, when it seemed like there was no one else alive other than them as far as they
could see, it was different. He let his foot slip and let the tyres tumble forward on their own
accord. Eventually, his howling laughter became a match for his mother’s shrieking.
Leaning all the way forward until his chest almost touched the windshield, Hamza drove
wearing a manic grin. He remembered his hair being tugged backwards by the wind and his
mother’s head bumping against the car’s ceiling. “Stop!” she would cry whenever he faced any
minor obstacle. He would swerve around it but then she would grab his arms until he pushed the
brakes. Yet when he turned to her, she was always smiling with all her teeth, like her eyes, they
were always crowned with delight.
Some time later, he stopped to catch his breath on the side of a road, head dizzy, smiling
as his mother told him off in a half-mocking way. His cheeks felt cold and when he brought his
hands to them, they were wet.
When his father’s fury cooled down, he was able to take the Pajero out in the daytime.
Although he was barely fifteen, everyone in the town had seen his face for so long that
they could swear he was older.
46

Hamza wanted to say all this to Jasem but it would take too long. So instead he said, “It
was always so hot, so stifling. The only good memories are these ones because we were going too
fast to notice how slow the world was turning, over there.” It sounded almost like an apology.
“When my father’s friend took me out to a flattened path and told me, drive 15 meters in a
straight line. I held myself back from making a lap around the entire world, just to get that little
card. I became a grown-up, an adult. Then I tore that card into little pieces and used them to fly
away.”
Jasem said nothing, only looking down at the seat between them.
After a while, he stretched his neck to see the display next to the driver. “Twenty
minutes,” he said aloud.
The driver stirred and looked at him through the rearview mirror, giving him a pressed
smile. “Right. Terminal 8, twenty minutes.”
Then, his son smiled back in the same pressed way. He looked back at his father. “Will
you let me enjoy this for a while?”
47

Jasem
There were things that Hamza felt could not be done. That changed when he had a son. Jasem
had a small stitch along the back of his leg from when Hamza let him loose in their house.
Hamza blamed himself, on behalf of the rest of his family that would not outwardly do so
themselves. The image weighed heavily in his memory, finding his son splayed out on the
kitchen floor on his elbows, unable to keep himself up while he wailed. As he carefully picked
him up, he had rocked him gently but jerked every now and then as he tried to keep his
breathing in check. Hamza had wanted desperately to put him back on the ground, to ask his son
to stand, needed to see his legs hold his little body up. But the boy’s feet hung limply from his
father’s arms.
Lamya seemed to want to scream when she came running in. But the boy seemed to suck
up all the air in the room with his heaving sobs. On their ride to the hospital, their
seven-year-old girl sat in the front seat and Lamya lay in the back, face hidden in Jasem’s hair as
she held him. He thrashed every now and then, whining.
When the nurse called his name, Lamya carried the boy into the doctor’s room, not
looking back at Hamza and her daughter. They came out within a couple of minutes. Apparently
when the doctor asked the boy to stand, he simply got up to his two feet and ran around. Maybe
that was his first lie.
Still, doctors were worried that his muscles wouldn’t develop properly from the strain he
had experienced. His mother, wife, and himself would take turns massaging the boy’s legs to
stimulate muscle growth. They did so, once in the morning and later in the evening. But
sometimes more, when they weren’t sure if someone had tended to him. It all made for a very
pampered kid.
One morning, when the weekend spirit was smothered by a thick layer of smog, Hamza
sat with Jasem and his sister while they watched TV. The boy was on his back, kicking his legs
and annoying Haya who moved away to the floor. Hamza did not stop him, he felt his heart grow
lighter. The boy’s swinging legs now could bruise, everyone in the family had a blueish stamp.
“Are you going to massage?” Haya asked.
“Do you want to try?”
The girl turned to look at her brother. Hamza rubbed his palms together to warm them
up before lightly pressing them on his son’s shin. The kid bent his legs at the knee, recoiling.
48

“He doesn’t want spa time.”
Hamza laughed, moving his hands to carefully hold Jasem by his socked feet. “Too late to
cancel your booking, sir,” he said, mostly for Haya’s amusement. The boy lolled his head to the
side. The TV screen was propositioning glasses that increased the viewer’s enjoyment of
vegetation, a government-funded venture to get people involved in the limited natural landscape
of the region.
“No one in our family wears glasses,” Haya said, “How come?”
“Your mother fooled you too?” Hamza asked with a grin, glancing at her. He turned back
to Jasem, stretching his legs carefully and pressing his palms down just above the boy’s
kneecaps.
“Oh, yeah.”
The boy balled his fists lazily, not moving his head from where it lay, cheek on the soft
leather. His eyes seemed to be rapidly moving, but it was just the reflection of the TV screen.
“When can we let him walk again?”
Hamza moved his hands together down the chubby expanse of the boy’s leg, stopping at
where the bony jut of the ankle should be then he gently stretched the limb. He held it there for a
few seconds before slowly bending it.
“When we go to pick up Mama?”
He repeated this motion, five times on each side. Jasem let out a frustrated stream of
spittle, he didn’t enjoy this part. His diaper would rub against his thighs and cause him to rash.
“We’ll see,” he said belatedly. It was many hours until then. He then picked up the tub of cream
from his lap and applied it to the kid’s skin. At this, Jasem stopped his thrashing. He must have
learned that this meant that the massage was coming to a close. Hamza’s mother always wanted
to apply oils when she was helping Jasem. To her olive oil could revive a mummy, it could do
anything, so of course it could help the boy’s legs. Hamza didn’t mind, but he always laughed
with Lamya afterwards that their son smelled like a salad, or that he was fresh off the plane from
Italy.
With the leftover cream on his hands, he leaned over to swipe some on his daughter’s
arm. She shrieked and jerked back to wipe it off on the sofa.
“Now I’m going to smell like a baby all day,” she groaned.
“You are a baby,” Hamza told her.
He let Jasem relax for a bit, an arm extended to act as a ledge between him and the floor.
Uncomfortable from leaning over, he swiftly gathered cushions to safeguard the boy from
49

falling. The boy was starting to close his eyes. “Are we boring you?” Hamza asked, laughing
quietly.
Neither child responded.
Hamza straightened his back and let out a sigh. With careful movements, he lifted his
legs onto the couch and laid his head on the boy’s feet, startling him.
“You’re going to squish him.”
“Good,” he said.
Haya laughed and moved a finger up to her brother. Jasem held it instinctively, trying to
jerk himself to a sitting position.
“When I was small, I used to run when I heard the girls praying. I was very bad, I would
lay down right in front of them so that they would have to put their heads on me when they got
down. Sometimes my sisters would tickle me or kiss my head before they stood up.”
“Is that allowed?”
“I don’t think making a child happy is forbidden,” Hamza said.
“Then can I do that? When you pray,” Haya said, head hanging back as she grinned at
him.
“You’re not a child,” Hamza said.
“You just said I was a baby.”
“Exactly.”
The girl snickered.
They stayed there for a while until Jasem almost kicked Hamza’s nose clean off. Hamza
sat up, holding the bridge of his nose with a pained smile. “He already knows how to fight back.”
Hamza snickered. “Hold your brother. I’ll go clean my hands.”
He left for the kitchen and ran his hands under the water by the sink. He cupped some of
the cold water to his nose for a while, grimacing.
In the kitchen window, he tried to see his own reflection as if he expected his nose to be
in a completely different area of his face. Reflected in the glass, he saw the hallway and thought
of the back door.
Turning off the tap, he walked down the hallway and left through the door, the sounds
from the TV cut off abruptly as he closed it. He was barefoot but walked around the house
through the garden, finding solace from the sun’s heat in the house’s shadow.
From there, he found his gym shoes in the back of the car and left through the gate.
50

It got dark as he walked down the streets. He didn’t like decisions, but he made a pattern
for himself. With every turn he faced, he would go left, right, straight, left, right, straight, and so
on. Sometimes the road took him on a path of its own. Sometimes he chose to turn into the
shade or to avoid a place where he heard kids playing or people talking.
By the end of it, he was at a place as equally as uninteresting as everywhere else. He
knew if he turned around he would see a mosque and a small barbershop, a fruit cocktail place.
He would see the dukkan, the cars beeping with men inside them, trying to stay hidden. There
was nothing new to be discovered.
He wanted to feel lost, he wanted to feel anxious that he would never make it home.
Perhaps he did, a little. But really, it was like pulling the end of a tape measure, soon enough it’ll
recoil back in itself and within a split second, be back with a loud ​crack​.
The lights were on upstairs. Hamza kicked off his shoes outside then went in, closing the
door quietly. Lamya’s work bag was on the sofa by the door.
He stopped to listen, but he was too hungry to concentrate.
In the kitchen, he ate rice from the pot on the stove.
Then, the lights came on.
“Oh, Hamza,” Lamya gasped.
Hamza turned with the spoon in his mouth, then took it out and placed it on the counter.
“Sorry, I had forgotten to eat.”
Lamya seemed to want to laugh but did not. “You’re always so busy.”
She set down what must have been Haya’s dishes in the sink before holding out a hand to
him.
Hamza took it with his left hand then swapped it for his right which was closer to her. He
almost didn’t want to. He wanted her to be angry at him, or at the least unimpressed.
“You want me to at least heat some up for you?” she asked.
“Who picked you up from the conference?” Hamza asked back.
His hand slipped out of hers as she shifted to the stove, switching it on. She still had her
hair done up and there were tiny red lines on the nape of her neck from that scratchy necklace
that hurt but she loved to wear anyway.
“Well, Reem’s son now stays with her mother who lives in that house I told you was
close, so I went with her,” she told him, looking over her shoulder at him with a small smile.
She was going out of her way not to accuse him, as if he was someone who was too
thoughtless to be held accountable.
51

“Right,” he told her.
“If you’re going upstairs, can you bring Haya water?”
Hamza was not planning on it, but he went to the fridge to get a bottle.
“Not cold, please.”
Hamza stopped to look at her, “This one is for me.”
Lamya laughed a bit, “Okay.”
He retrieved another bottle from the cabinet and headed upstairs, but he took them both
with him as he entered his room. It was their room, Lamya, Haya, and his.
“Go say goodnight to your brother,” Lamya said to Haya, kissing her forehead. She
looked up at Hamza afterwards.
In his crib, Jasem had his eyes closed. Hamza pinched the boy’s nose lightly to get his
attention. The boy whined and started to cry before Hamza picked him up, pressing a kiss to the
soft tufts of hair on his head.
His arms got tired rocking, but he didn’t want to put him down. He feared the child
would just slip onto his bed, not noticing the change at all.
52

Really
Hamza had a mixed relationship with the way he spoke. The New Yorkers slurred as if
their tongue had been sliced at its root, or perhaps it grew too long for them to control it. He had
to ask the school principal three times what he was saying. The man was sitting right in front of
him, in the shabby office where the corners of his placard were lined with rusty edges. Even the
most ambitious real estate agents could not convince any hip couple that the exposed brick had
that ‘rustic, lived-in feel’. It was way past that stage, slathered many times in paint to try and
disguise the strange jutting of the wall.
“Forget about it,” the principal said. His eyebrows knitted together.
The principal moved a hand to pull his dress shirt away from his body. It looked more
like a women’s blouse, maybe he and his wife were the same size. An equivocal relationship.
Hamza nodded. “Forgotten.”
The man before him readjusted himself on the cracked leather chair. He was sitting in a
way that made Hamza think of sitting at home when guests arrived and they had to hide the oily
ketchup stain on the arm of the couch. “Let me remind you again, sir, that we are glad to have
you onboard,” the man said, “It takes a lot to make things run smoothly around here.”
Coming out of Hamza, every word had weight, enunciated and followed through to the
last breath. “Of course.”
“I recognize that our compensation likely doesn’t exactly match up to your expectations,”
the principal began.
“Oh. No. I told you before, Chuck. Don’t worry about it,” Hamza interrupted him,
holding his hands up.
“All right. Well, uh, legally speaking, you are only registered as a standby substitute, so if
we think of it that way then the salary aptly fits the job,” the man told him. ​I am not responsible
for you walking in whenever you feel like, ​he seems to say without saying it.
“It is no matter, trust me.”
“Well, all right. As long as we are on the same page then.” Chuck, the principal, seemed
relieved, his shoulders slowly sloped back down. “Another thing. If you find it fitting, uh, do you
think you can guide the students with history as well?”
53

Hamza stood before the history class, in a room that was also not hip-couple material.
There was a map blown up behind him. He supposed his face cut off the projection of the
Atlantic, he stepped outside and squinted somewhere from Africa.
That afternoon was spent with lots of made-up capital names and Mr. Hamza trying to
constantly redirect the kids. “No, Lithuania is not an island, look again.” With every whine and
straying pair of eyes looking out the window, the man felt he was retreating further into himself.
What did it matter that the world had other cities? He might never fly beyond the East Coast,
nestling back into the center, where he once thought the world had shifted into place just for
him. He was as naive as the kids before him. Their mouths collecting spit, their frail elbows
unable to hold up their drowsy heads.
He made an effort to walk between each desk, flip to an interesting page, try to kickstart
his brain to look forward, just look forward. The bell rang. “Okay, be free,” he told them. Their
bones shed their stiff crusts and they bolted to the courtyard. The room exhaled in time with
Hamza. He sat on the table and moved one hand before the other over his face, it wiped away
with some sort of smile.
54

Haya
“You didn’t need to do that.” He was cradling the sound of his daughter next to his ear,
back in his apartment.
“What do you mean?” He asked, shimmying the pan on the stove. It whistled in delight.
His daughter was softly laughing, there was another voice on the other end and Hamza
winced slightly as there was a sharp sound of shuffling. “Baba,” she said, he pictured her smile
and long hair collected behind her beloved peach headband, unruly but charming, like her
mother’s. “Here, listen,” she instructed, the sound of shuffling returned, punctuated with
silence. “Well, now she’s quiet. You say something. Introduce yourself.”
Hamza shifted on his feet. “Hello. Hello?” He felt a little silly, which made him smile.
“Say something, little rascal. Or I’ll send you back.”
He could hear more laughter on the other end.
“I order you to say something. Make yourself heard,” Hamza said, “Yallah.”
There were still only faint sounds, nothing to latch onto.
“Haya. ​Haya​,” Hamza called out, drawing out his daughter’s name. He had chosen it
because it was easy to say and meant something nice, like all their names did. His wife had
agreed, he hadn’t asked her what names she had considered before his suggestion. Or at least
that had been his assumption, for apparently she had been telling Haya stories of her
subliminally goading him towards the name choice.
His daughter picked the receiver back up, still laughing. “Sorry, baba, she is shy from
male voices,” she joked.
“There’s a difference between shyness and respect,” he told her but was grinning
nevertheless. He wanted to feel warm. “Forget about her, I am glad you like the cat. But what
about you?”
“She’s so gorgeous, really, where did you find her? Be serious, how much did you beg
Hamed to carry a cat? Me and mama have never seen such a cute one, maybe he finally has a
soft spot,” she told him.
Hamed, the sheepish gardener that he had employed for their little estate many years
ago, exactly how long he was unsure, was not easy to bribe. His fear of cats seemed like
something to be wary of. He had wondered what kind of man would shrink at the sight of a cat,
55

especially in a city that was flocked with felines. Yet it comforted Hamza when he later
recognized the man’s spinelessness meant he was of little threat to his family.
“Are you talking about the gardener or the cat?” Hamza snickered. He could tell that his
daughter’s attention was not on him, but even then, he was content to just listen.
”Baba, what am I going to give you in return, huh? I don’t even have an idea of what you
might want or need over there. More tea? I found this towel set that was so soft, like the one in
the hotel you took us to when I still couldn’t swim, remember? In… Portugal. It was the same
beach where you ripped your pants, on all the traps.“
“Thank you for reminding me of that,” he said, chuckling. “You could send me an empty
envelope and I would boast about it for the rest of my life.”
“Of course, baba. But, what if I book us all a trip, hm? Doesn’t that sound nice? An empty
envelope with some online tickets.”
He told her to wait a moment and busied himself with preparing his scrambled eggs.
Once he had served it on a plate, he heard a meowing from the other side and picked up his
telephone again.
“Did you hear?”
“I tricked her,” Hamza said, laughing. Now, the cat would not stop making noises.
He could hear Haya cooing at the small thing and he listened for a while, idly moving a
finger around his plate. “I am serious though, baba, really. Let me do something,” the girl told
him.
“My eyes, please stop. I wanted to surprise you and keep you company, don’t think
anything of it.”
“Okay. It’s what you want.”
Hamza feared that the line would go cold.
He heard a soft rumbling sound, which Haya clarified through whispers was the cat’s
purring. Hamza moved his plate to the table and stood there for a while, soaking in the sounds.
As he was about to speak, his daughter let out a cry, there was a small thump and then Haya’s
voice came closer.
“The cat got tired of me, already,” she said.
“Or of me,” Hamza corrected. She was laughing and he joined her.
They shared silence, Hamza pressed down onto the red stain on the ground with his
socked feet absently. His stomach rumbled.
“Are you going to eat?” she asked him, “Don’t starve because of me.”
56

“Because you say that, I will,” Hamza replied.
The connection seemed to waver, perhaps she was shaking her head.
“Did you eat?” he asked her.
“We were preparing food since the morning, remember? I am helping mama at her house
with the guests.”
“Hah, yes.”
They shared another lapse of silence.
“Baba, why are you calling me a lot now?”
Hamza busied himself with his food, although now it was painfully evident that it was
mostly a pretense.
“I don’t mind,” his daughter said. “I talked to Jasem. He said he bought some things for
his kitchen and he’s trying to cook. Can you imagine?” Then after a while, “It would make me
feel so much better if he was close to you.”
“You don’t trust him then?” He couldn’t blame her, but it was also not on his hands.
“I do.”
“Then what?”
“Do you want to talk to mama?”
He licked his finger and looked out of the window. “It’s all right, thank you. I have to go.”
“Where?”
Hamza was taken aback by this question. “I have to sort something out. What else?”
“As you like,” she said. He felt jilted, he wondered when she got like that. His daughters’
voice weaved in and out, she must have been moving around. “If she asks,” she said, “I’ll tell
mama you got this cat for. For her birthday.”
“For what?” Hamza asked. “I got her a wallet.”
“I know,” she said.
57

Thief
When the day reset, he decided he’d swing by the school. Hamza picked up the hat on his
bed and turned it around in his hands. Haya said this would look stylish on him. She also held
the belief that umbrellas were for people with empty hands.
He moved to the mirror in the living room and stopped in front of it for a moment. His
eyes fell on his figure which bumped into the frame on either side of the mirror. He was
becoming pudgy and could no longer pin the blame onto the broadness of his chest and
shoulders, the manly build onto which fists would thump and girls would sometimes linger, he
would like to think.
Hamza felt brave and mustered a look at his face, it was not bad. His beard, tended to
and spruced up with some oil, helped significantly. He practiced a small smile, just because.
Although he looked like a fresh new print of his father’s father’s original stencil, he had his
mother’s cunning ways, her wiliness.
On his head, the hat looked good. It cast a flattering shadow over his wrinkled forehead
and the crow’s feet next to his eyes. When he tilted his head upwards, he was unrecognizable. It
sat atop the dark curls, pushing them down to the sides of his head. He itched his ear. They were
large and stuck out. Receivers, one could call them. He was a good listener because words got
stuck in the spirally shape.
It was enough. Hamza didn’t want his day to turn sour so he shook his head vigorously.
Impressive, he thought, the hat stayed on for the most part.
He wore it to the school. The hat did a fair job of trapping little droplets in its folds. The
children were all in stitches as he walked into the classroom, perhaps because of the hat itself or
the way he had whipped it off so that it sprayed them with the ensnared rain.
“Mister!” they all cried. The boy in the front held his head with wide eyes.
“Oh, don’t worry, the gel is waterproof, no?” Hamza asked with a chuckle.
He particularly liked the moment that the children’s mirth was instantly erased when he
pulled out a stack of arithmetic worksheets, like a magician and a rabid rabbit. “What? Let the
rain tell you the answers, like morse code,” he grinned as he handed it to the boy with the
gelled-down curls.
When it was lunchtime, they moved out onto the courtyard.
58

Hamza had somehow perfected the teacher squat, he could hold it for a whole rambling
story of what a kid did over the weekend while two other kids were pulling at his wrist and a
fourth bumped into him while sprinting to the swings.
“Why did you do that?” he asked the kid who had been artfully narrating how he had
thrown away his mother’s cheesecake.
“Wait, it wasn’t me. Now I remember. It was my bigger brother,” the kid was saying, then
turned to the girl next to him, “All my cousins come over when my mom makes it.”
Hamza opened his mouth to give his condolences to the cake when another girl cried out
that she had just remembered her new cat. She badgered Hamza to call her father to remember
to feed it.
It was a long matter but once it was settled, Hamza gingerly stood up, making a show of
stretching his legs to the delight of the amused children who ducked away. He knew the children
liked him because he let them be. Did that make him a good teacher or a bad one? He wasn’t
there to really teach in any case.
Sometimes, the students would just play tug-of-war with his ears. Yet, Hamza enjoyed it.
He enjoyed how for a moment, everything goes.
“She was doing ​eeee​, so I was going ​eee​,” as Talia adequately put it.
On the courtyard, Hamza was picking sunflower seeds with his teeth on a bench while he
kept watch over the children. Any snack that took a while to unravel and consume, that was the
best for Hamza. He thought, it’s just like music, it’s all worth it when it builds up to that
crescendo of the chorus. Admittedly, he knew nothing about music and was by all measures
tone-deaf.
The kids were not giving him any reason to be concerned. He wandered around the gate,
working on the seeds and thinking of a movie he had seen the previous day. It was not often that
everything was as it should be. He got bored. Leaving the bag of sunflower seeds on his
designated bench, he approached some of the children. There had to be something.
“Where’s Eisa?” he asked, offering the children some of the sunflower seeds from his
open palm.
They shook their heads, one of them pulled out a rubbery sweet from their mouth.
“Maybe he skipped ahead and has a job now,” she offered before pushing the sweet back into her
mouth.
Hamza looked at them. “You’re hiding him?” They were good, but Hamza was a little
better.
59

“Who is Eisa?” one of the other girls asked.
“Ah,” Hamza nodded. “He’s changed his name, has he? For a grownup one. Let me go
inside and inform his mother of his outstanding achievements.”
The kids shrugged. Hamza snickered, somewhat amused.
He continued to circle around until he ran out of seeds, licking the salt off the corners of
his mouth. As he narrowly dodged some swinging children, he found Eisa crouched by a faded
hopscotch outline, chewing on the sunflower seeds. Hamza’s sunflower seeds. The boy had
swiped them off the bench. He was eating them– shell and all.
Within a fraction of a second, Hamza felt indescribable rage. The sun and all its sons
could learn envy for the first time in this rage. The boy’s eyes flitted up to him.
“Can I have these, sir?” he asked. He held up the crumpled packet.
The contents of his angry spell could fill two whole days.
“You have already helped yourself,” he told him. He walked away and sat on the
pavement by the school’s back entrance until the bell rang. Hadn’t he already spent the last
drops of his patience on thieves?
His knees ached.
Still, the day felt incredibly stretched out. Outside, his son’s foot was hovering over a
trap. He was waiting to fall to the ground.
Hamza’s knees ached.
60

Black Sheep
When his father still lived in his house and even after he left, Jasem compiled a nice
assortment of things from other stores and other people’s houses. He was proud of the things he
gathered, because they were all quality finds. It hadn’t always been that way, the security guards
at the malls could provide a testament to that.
Hamza had mistaken his son’s interest in divinity for admiration. Haya wasn’t too keen
on it, even though she pretended when they were at her grandmother’s house. But the boy’s eyes
would light up. Hamza thought, for a moment, that he felt the same spark as they watched
Dalida dust her grandson’s palms in baby powder and then parse through the lines. They both
were in awe with the way she did not flinch when the gardener called to tell her that pipes burst
in the farm and revived the trees. She already knew. The hair left behind on her pillow case told
her she should expect good news.
Hamza had been mistaken. The boy would grow up with sticky fingers. He could not see
something good and leave it at that. He had to make it his own. So, he started consulting his
grandmother and got her caught up with his petty affairs. She could tell him where to go, what to
take, and how to take it. She was getting old then, she had been getting old for some time.
Unbeknownst to her, her gift was being tarnished by Jasem.
When he was caught sometime later, Hamza was forced to make some arrangements.
News reached to his mother. She was not a fool, she could tell she was wrapped up in it.
She was struck. Perhaps it was the shame, or the feeling of being taken for a fool. Even with
Hamza, she didn’t speak for some months. Dying her hands with black henna up until her
elbow. It was like she had gone.
61

Almost Crescendo
After a brisk walk, briefcase thumping against his thigh, the world all looked all right. It
stopped being tinged with red spots, one for every instance that a thief had done him wrong. His
father used to tell his elder brothers, who then told Hamza, that one hand is not enough to
compensate for theft, because the thief still has the other, then they have their teeth, then they
have their tongue. Once a thief, always a thief, Baba said to his grave. But that was enough, he
said whenever Hamza tried to ask for more. Hamza didn’t believe it, anyway. What did that man
know about theft and losing? Enough, the old man said, those were the old days. All Hamza has
left of him are those vague things, those bits of string that are too short and mean nothing.
Perhaps the only thing they could agree on was that only crazy men expect anything.
Hamza held the bridge of his nose until he was breathing at an acceptable volume and
could hear the noises around him again. A woman was calling out to a man across the street, he
could listen in but he had already missed the first half of their interaction, so he would be lost in
any case.
His head felt fuzzy again. He waited to cross the street along the edge of the pavement. A
man in a suit tore past in a clunky bike. Over him, the scaffolding hung low. Every building had
an external skeleton of scaffolding, every one of them was getting a facelift. Although Hamza was
not a very tall man, living in this city placed a pressure on the back of his neck. He thought it was
kind of comforting, in a way. To his right, someone had peeled off a poster from the wooden
scaffolding and underneath it was a commercial for shoes. A woman’s glossy high heels hung
loosely off the corner of an office desk, somehow suspended by the leather straps.
Hamza thought to himself that he should call that woman from the embassy. He did so
as he crossed the street. The other side rang for a while before going silent. The smooth screen
felt warm and so he kept it at his cheek.
In his vapid youth, maybe on a street somewhere not so far away, he talked like this for
hours until the keypad left a scarlet pattern on his cheek. It had seemed dreamy like the girl had
reached out and sketched the small boxes onto his face herself.
He had to put the phone down eventually, to get into his apartment building.
62

Science of Cons
What was the feeling of coming home? Hamza thought of it as a promise that had been
kept. You are back, and you, you are the same as always. Nothing could amount to it.
He sat down on his couch for a while. Gradually, he closed his eyes. How unacquainted
he is with the back of his eyelids. He had trouble sleeping, his mind was constantly churning
stories. He hated to quiet it, to not hear anything. He had developed a method some time to fall
asleep, sometime after his children were born. That was how he knew he was maybe getting old.
The first step was to think of himself as a room, his eyelids were the shut curtains. Then, he
slowly pulled away from himself, seeing the room stretch out from a slim horizon. He didn’t
allow himself to decorate the room, only to inhabit it. It was him, for the time being. He just had
to keep retracting, not thinking of anything but the empty room until he eventually bored
himself until he fell into a shallow slumber.
A shrill ringing cut through some time afterward. It was hard to tell how long he’d been
gone.
The curtains come suddenly up, sticking once again to the ceiling. It was dark outside.
“Hello,” he said before the phone was even at his ear. He repeated himself, clearing his
throat.
“Hamza,” a woman’s voice responded, “I was about to leave the office when I saw your
call.”
Hamza suddenly felt ashamed of himself, thinking back to those heels on the street
banner. Why did he think of her? He really did want to call her before that, it just was a strange
connection he made in his mind. “Thank you for calling back. Am I taking up your time? It’s
okay if you have to leave. It’s nothing important.”
“You’re the only one that calls me and admits that what they have to say is not
important,” the woman laughed. “I was just in a meeting discussing the placement of the–”
“Don’t get me in trouble by sharing classified information,” Hamza told her before
pausing. He grinned a little bit as she laughed some more. He was also not in the mood to talk
about anything else, he wanted to talk about himself.
“Okay then.”
“Reem, do you actually like working?”
“You want me to answer that while in my office?”
63

Hamza stared at the glass table before him, the way it indented the carpet beneath it.
“It’s not an incriminating question.”
She seemed to be laughing again. “No, it is not.” He heard her shift around, but she made
no other move to respond.
“Do you feel like you have to? Even if you don’t need to?” he asked her.
“Are we still talking about occupations? Or the general act of answering
non-incriminating questions?” Reem replied, there was something curved about her words, like
they were smiling. But he could be wrong. Hamza knew nothing more about her than that she
wore a navy blazer, worked at the embassy, and vaguely knew his brothers in school.
“I can’t even remember,” Hamza told her, somewhat dishonestly.
There was a clicking on the other end, as if she had hung up. He kept his phone on his
cheek. Then her voice came again. He had been wrong, her words were not smiling, they were
slippery. “When we met, you kept looking for something to hold you down. Some legal clause
that said you had to be doing something, holding an occupation, in this country to stay. You
needed direction, maybe, if you excuse me from speaking frankly.”
“I excuse you,” Hamza said.
“Oh, good. I hope I can continue to be frank. Well, I didn’t expect to relive all that again
now– four years later. I don’t want to hear that you’re still at the same place,” she said, “And I’m
only saying this because I knew Qasim, because I feel like that makes me know you.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Remember that number I shared with you? That consultant, who–”
“That’s why I am calling. I misplaced the number.”
“Oh, of course!” The woman seemed relieved. She paused for a moment before asking,
“Got a pen?”
“Yes,” Hamza said without moving.
“All right. Ready? Two, one, two, three, three, six…” She continued to recite while Hamza
smoothed his foot over the bump in the carpet. Then, he thanked her and hung up.
Hamza had wanted to be stubborn, but he was not stubborn, he was an over-thinker. The
consultant’s meeting area was full of clean lines, all white with accents of bright orange. It was as
if the room was trying to convince you that it knew something that you did not.
64

When Deniz walked in, she left the door open.
They exchanged hellos and she shook his hand.
Her gray blouse cuffed tightly at her wrists and the nape of her neck, as if the blouse
itself was holding her upright. She took a seat across from him on the sleek white bench. Her
hands were empty. This comforted him right from their first meeting. He always felt anxious in
movies when he saw therapists with their notebooks, scrawling away while their patient spoke.
They must be missing so much of what is being said. He could not think of anything more
terrifying than a story poorly told. Well, he could, he hadn’t visited a clinic in years. He dreaded
the vulnerability he felt, the possibility that someone could look at him and tell him that there
was something wrong about him. He knew there must be.
This was not a therapist, in any case, Deniz was just ‘Deniz’ and she had a big office but
she called herself a ‘conscience consultant’.
In her description online, she referenced the super-ego and her dedicated study in
embodying its voice to guide her– socially advantaged– clients towards living atypical yet
fulfilling lives.
“Pleasure seeing you, Hamza. How are things?” She asked, in a way that communicated
that she didn’t mind nor even desire to be asked the same back.
“Always something to think about,” Hamza told her. He wanted her to ask another
question, not knowing how to unfold.
“That’s good. If that’s what you want, of course. I recall your concerns with directionality
and–”
Hamza nodded his head. “Right. Finding a hobby, I think we decided on.”
“Well, not a hobby. A pastime, an avocation of some recreational desire. Something to
derive meaning from,” she said, brushing something off her knee. She looked up at him. “How
did that go?”
“Well,” he said. “As I told you before, I substitute for teachers sometimes.”
Deniz looked surprised, but quickly smiled. “Impressive, Hamza. I didn’t know you were
interested in teaching or had that kind of experience.”
Hamza wanted to laugh. “Yeah.” Neither did he. It was one of those things. He had just
walked in, seen an unruly room of kids with no one at the desk and decided that could be it. He
felt nervous. “I like the thought of desire being recreational, it’s ridiculous. How can you
studiously and earnestly desire?”
Deniz smiled. “That’s a funny question.”
65

“Thank you. But it’s a little bit tragic, actually.”
“Is it really?”
“It sort of is. We always talk up ourselves and our dreams, that if we only had the time,
we would have ornate tea ceremonies, officiate a reverse wedding, and… whatever else there is to
dream about. But it isn’t true, we are left with nothing if we get to the point of having ‘enough
time’. We invent duties, things we suddenly will be held accountable for.”
Deniz crossed her arms. “As in what? Who is holding us accountable?”
“Huh?”
“You’re stalling.”
Hamza closed his mouth.
“Now tell me, what do you feel we are being held accountable for?”
Hamza paused. It was an answer that came to his mouth easily but he wasn’t sure how to
let it out. Deniz waited patiently, however, as he put it together. “I want to say everything.
Because that’s just the first thing that comes to my head, and I think it may be true.”
“Faith leaves traces,” she said.
“Not traces, because it’s not gone. I won’t say that, but yes,” Hamza moved his hand
along the armrest, thinking. “What I was meaning to say was my children.”
The woman stayed quiet, but he didn’t say anything else.
She uncrossed her arms. “I forgot to ask, would you like some coffee?”
Hamza smiled a little, “Of course.”
Deniz took her phone out of her pocket. “Do you mind if I get one as well?”
“Why would I?” He asked.
Deniz shook her head, “Don’t even get me started, the types of people I meet with
sometimes…” She then smiled at him and told the person over the phone to fetch two cups.
“My mother told me she trained her lovebirds to cry when she put her cup down,” he
said, feeling suddenly like he was about to cry. “They could tell it was empty. Only with tea
though. Coffee confused them.”
When it arrived, he took a sip although it was still too hot. He did not have anywhere to
rest it so he held it in both hands. Just holding that pose, the heat between his palms, made him
feel like he was around a fire. If he pretended, he could hear the pleasant sound of wood
crackling in the heat.
66

“Step one is usually to just start speaking. About anything. My advice to clients who are
more withdrawn, which doesn’t seem to be your case, is usually to vocalize the fourteenth
tangent you would go on if you were just floating in a void, no end in sight.”
“Is this something that helps?” Hamza asked, incredulous. “Was I by myself in this
void?”
“Yes.”
Hamza must have still looked confused.
“What does this sound mean to you?” She pulled open the drawer and then shut it, it
whined on the way back in.
The inside of his mind felt warm, like it was panting.
“When I was young, I watched a street cat being thrown around in the darkness from my
bedroom window,” Hamza began, without meaning to. “It was making such a terrible sound. I
can’t forget it.”
“Listen again.” She repeated the motion. This time the drawer screeched and fought, but
it eventually opened and shut. It was the sound of air being stolen from his veins, it was the
sound of Jasem.
Deniz looked closely at him. “Can I ask you something?”
Hamza wanted to say that he was paying her to ask him endless somethings. “Yes.”
“The accountability we mentioned, and this feeling of always being watched, I can’t help
but see them as related.”
Hamza took another sip and waited.
Deniz drank from her cup as well.
“I was waiting for the question. I guess you are right. But I don’t mean it in that way. It’s
something else entirely,” Hamza told her. “Why, although there are no consequences otherwise,
do I feel that I am supposed to do certain things or be a certain someone?”
“That’s a question that cuts right to the core of philosophy,” Deniz said, “In a game with
no rules and no winners, why do we feel bad when we don’t do ‘good’ things?”
Hamza shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re right, it’s not even a game. But I want to know, what is that certain someone you
feel you have to be?”
Outside of the window, behind her head, there was the faded facade of another building.
It seemed to be leaning towards them. “If I knew, wouldn’t I have been that person?”
67

“Hamza, you could know and not want to be that person. Not want to do those things.
And that’s perfectly all right. That’s why I told you, there is nothing wrong with doing nothing.
Purpose is the thing that you were fed to get up in the morning, open the door, and trod off.”
“Deniz, how do you know all that?” Hamza said, turning to her again.
“Because it is true. Now, can you tell me? I feel that it is important for me to know so I
can be genuine in giving you advice.”
“My ears are bent from advice.”
Deniz smiled.
“There are so many things I did because I had to.”
“Unselfish acts?”
“Something like that.”
“And now what?”
Hamza picked up the mug again because he was not sure what else to do. “I escaped it for
a while, but it comes back. It came back, and I just am not ready to be that person again.”
He could tell that Deniz was looking at him from the corner of his eye.
“It is my son that needs to be here, talking to you, not me,” Hamza told her. “I don’t care
that he plays cards and steals, or that he is a fool and not even good at it.”
“Did you ever ask yourself why he does that?”
Hamza did not. “It doesn’t matter.”
“He may feel a loss. He may be filling it through these measures. Sometimes the loss
from being neglected–”
“Stop, not that,” he said, he wasn’t willing to entertain it.
“All right,” she said. With one expert move, she switched, “So you don’t care. Then what
is the issue.”
“I can’t bring myself to do anything about it.”
“Do you have to?”
Hamza sighed. “Have you not been listening?”
“All right. Well, what is stopping you from just getting it over with?”
“I don’t want to help. I can’t forgive him for bringing my mother into it.”
He stood up, not expecting Deniz to say anything at all. He walked over to the window
behind her. If he turned, his elbow would knock into the back of her office chair.
“Maybe I just don’t care.”
68

Deniz’s voice came from behind him. “Then you wouldn’t have it weighing on you like
this.”
“Maybe. But maybe it’s just the bittersweet fact that I’m not entirely a, well, a monster.”
There was no sky to be seen. He saw the reflection of the office against the window’s surface,
mixing in with the world outside. “It’s my right to live as I want, is it not?” Hamza believed this.
“I just really can’t face them all.”
“What about your wife?”
Hamza laughed a little. “She might be easier. She is good at hiding things. I wouldn’t
even know if she was disappointed.”
Deniz seemed to shift in the chair behind him. When he glanced back, she was facing the
window as well. “What goes on in your mind when you say that?”
He thought back to that time. Lamya had known that Jasem was bringing his
grandmother into his mess and said nothing. She was protecting the boy, or maybe she
genuinely believed that he was doing something right, somehow. Or maybe it was all to spite
Hamza.
“There was no one I admired more purely than my mother,” Hamza tried to say. His
chest burned. “The things she could do, they were beautiful. No one has ever done or will ever
have her strength. But that boy tainted it.”
He took some time to parse through the haze of anger, now cooled down into a thick
smoke. “She was so disappointed in herself, when the boy got into trouble. I found her at the
window, waving her hands outside. Frantic. She said that they were black now. Whatever that
meant. How could he use her like that? She was old and she trusted everyone completely.”
Deniz sat still.
Hamza shrugged. “That’s it.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s not.
“So what else?”
“I stood by her no matter what. I believed her, I was her boy, her gift. I still believe her.
But I hate that, because of the boy, for a moment––” Hamza saw his mother waving her arms
outside, terrified and frail, “I thought to myself, maybe she is…” It was difficult to say. “I thought
for a moment, this is a madwoman.’ And I can’t forgive myself. I hate the boy for making that
happen.”
“And your wife?”
69

“Lamya had let it happen.” Lamya knew. Lamya knew, for who knows how long. It felt
even more like betrayal when he recounted it aloud. “You know she always makes herself to be a
great moderator, a binding force, but it was… she was not, not always, at least.”
He could see Lamya’s face in his mind. The way her mouth was tightly drawn to her lips,
she must have still been irritated. Or maybe she was angry at herself for getting caught. “He
didn’t mean it,” she said. He had stood still while she hugged him.
If Deniz had any particular opinion, it did not show on her face. She remained seated,
arms crossed. She watched coffee slip between his fingers. His hands were shaking.
Hamza looked at her for a while, not really there.
“If not him, do you forgive her?”
It didn’t seem like an option in his mind. Hamza said nothing more.
“I’ll tell you what to do. Call her. On the phone, you will tell her as if you were telling
someone else. Just as you told me.”
He knew in his mind, he would not.
As he walked out, He wished he had his hat. What a perfect occasion for that damned
hat. He felt a pool of sweat collect along his forehead.
70

Fire
A firetruck hurtled past from behind, forcing Hamza’s spine inward and lengthening his
stride. The hose dangled from behind, flirting with the ground. Firetrucks, ambulances, police
cars with their sirens on, Hamza used to look out of the window and it was like seeing a grim
reaper. How arbitrary, the fate that led them to the house on the same street but not his house.
What must it be like to grow up in New York as a child, he thought, the sirens calling like bird
calls.
The sound made him loosen up, a call back to the fire in which he made a hot fuss and
everyone stayed in their houses until it died down.
No reason behind it, supposedly, that palm trees spontaneously combust into flames
sometimes. They are essentially built like candle wicks, from what he’s seen, ready to burn down
from the tip of the frond to the base within minutes. It can’t be said whether palm trees are
genetically predisposed to this behavior, if they are just bad seeds, or if it is purely circumstance.
Back home, there were so many quiet days in the neighborhood after the children got old
and began to scatter from their family home. Hamza’s family home was a couple of streets away
from the sea, close enough to smell the salt in the air but too far to hear the waves, see any blue,
or get any cool air. Perhaps it had always been the same way. Everyone confined their troubles
within their personal estates and stayed in the car until the gate thudded shut. It was many years
after Qasim’s german shepherd got loose and swallowed concrete. That was one of the final
grand occurrences. It took a few days of dealing with the men from the construction site at the
corner of the street, paying off for the materials, burying the animal in the patch of land behind
their house, between two old palms. Neighbors cooked meat outside in peace for the first time in
years, tyres’ skid marks reached their gate uninterrupted, and the men bringing water to the
others up in the scaffolding could call out to each other in their language leisurely. There was a
flurry of being alive, but then that became their new quiet.
In the patch of land opposite their house, Hamza had asked Qasim to place a marker
over Big Ben, the german shepherd. They were both still in school at the time, Qasim not for
much longer. Maybe Big Ben could tell that his favorite was close to leaving, so he died quietly in
the back of the house.
Hamza knew his brother well, he knew he wouldn’t show any sort of sentimentality like
that unless it seemed against his will. Qasim yanked at a dry frond then drove it into the mound.
When he was done, he rubbed his palms together, where the skin was peeling.
71

“My hands are broken, just for you and your stupid begging,” he said, then he went
inside. He was sad about the dog, even though he felt he shouldn’t be.
The grave marker fell before the next morning, and Hamza made the school bus wait as
he ran to straighten it. But it was probably gone within the next few hours, swept away.
There was not enough space for another house on that land, or even an electricity box,
really. So it stayed barren. When one of the houses had a party, guests would occasionally park
their cars there, scraping against the trunks of the trees.
In the years to come, Hamza’s brother did not want to, but he got another dog and they
named it Ben, just Ben. It was a pitiful puppy and everyone could tell he didn’t love it at all, but
they kept it until Qasim married and moved out. He wed before Hamza left for college, at the age
of twenty-three, and it was ludicrous to think, but perhaps he just wanted to leave the house
with the replacement Big Ben.
Who knows how long they’ve been there, those palm trees. His mother lived in that
house longer than Hamza had been alive, she must know, but he never asked her. There are
those questions that he wondered about but didn’t care to ask. He didn’t want to waste her
breath, he respected her too much.
He imagined her walking in the hallways when the fire started, she had just gotten out of
the hospital and she was already antsy, not knowing where to start in the house that had
seemingly emptied itself while she was sick. She would be retrieving knick-knacks from boxes
and making them visible again on every surface, calling for dust to coat them. Arnaud used to
cram them all back into drawers, but now there was no one to enforce any type of minimalism.
This would go on for a few minutes before she got tired again and slowly took off her shoes to
succumb to sleep.
Hamza must have been at the gate, leaving his car. He had his wife’s flight on his mind.
Hamza leaned on the car door lazily, thinking of where to get those vacuum-sealed bags, Lamya
would be overjoyed to hear that she could take another coat with her. She said she’d call before
sunset, nothing yet. Would that small shopping center by the roundabout have the bags?
He heard a hissing that sharpened as he turned his head towards the gate. A wispy, gray
plume trickled upwards against the pale evening sky. He smelled heat, his ears tickled with a
new crinkling sound, almost delectable, delicious.
A light weighed on the corner of his eyes, ducking down and stretching back up. Hamza
pushed himself upwards and headed onto the street outside. The palms before him were alight.
72

There was a fluttering of wings as birds took to the sky anxiously, fluttering for a bit, not sure of
where to go before they disappeared.
Hamza scanned the street, eyes bleary. He didn’t want to be alone in this. Nothing else
moved. He jolted as a branch fell with a hollow howl. The ground drank in the heat greedily.
Where was everyone else? He found it more difficult to breathe, he hastened towards the empty
lot but then did not know what to do next.
The fire was moving steadily towards the surrounding houses. He wanted to turn to
someone to tell them that.
“Fire!” He bellowed. His mother’s house would be just of reach, he thought. He hurried
past the gate of the adjacent villa. With his fists, he banged on the gate to get their attention.
“Fire!”
He heard a door shut then rustle open. He sped past to the villa on the other side, pulling
out his cell phone and dialled the police number, explained the situation and waited to get
transferred to the fire department branch. The gate was open. Hamza hesitated before running
past it to knock on the door.
“There’s a fire!” He told the man on the phone. He supplied them with the address.
He was out of breath when a small boy opened the door. The boy stared up at him
blankly.
“Can you go and tell your parents there’s a fire?”
The kid began to weep. An older woman came to the door, he recognized her as the
woman that frequented his mother’s house. She often asked for advice, mostly just so she could
vent her menial problems. “Who are you?”
“Doesn’t matter, well, son of Dalida– there’s a fire, mother, I’ve called the firemen
already.”
The woman twisted her shawl tightly around her neck, her face grew sour. “Where is the
fire?”
He turned his head to the left where the smoke was expanding like a dark cloud.“Next to
your house. It’ll spread to your trees.”
“So you called them?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
“Then what, inshallah, do you want me to do about it?”
Hamza looked at the boy who was still sobbing weakly against her hip.
73

She partially closed the door, but Hamza did not hear her retreat. Behind it, she was
muttering, “Now why are you crying like a baby? Be a man.”
Hamza rushed down the steps.
The palm fronds were shaking as flames licked down the center part, splitting down to
the leaves. He could not tell which tree fouled the other, they both crackled dryly under the
weight of the hungry orange light. He somehow expected the blue of the sea to be visible against
this light. Hamza took a seat on the curb, waiting for the truck to come along. It had been ten
minutes. He felt his skin darkening in the heat. A man came out of one of the houses, glancing at
the fire. The man then watched Hamza closely for a while.
When the firemen came, there was not much left to extinguish. The palm trees had
mostly worn themselves out. The men in uniform traded looks as one of them hosed down the
remaining sparks. Up until their arrival, Hamza had made a considerable dent in the fire with
his neighbor’s garden hose.
They asked him how it started, muffled in their masks. But they seemed more concerned
with him. His voice must have been highly disconcerting over the phone.
The firemen debated where to grab dinner, looping Hamza into the conversation. He
suggested the cafeteria with the picture of the grapes on the banner, but declined their
invitation.
Hamza’s mother had come out of her house some time ago, in slippers, her home dress
peeking out from under her abaya. Silver peeked out of the scarf on her head. She held him by
the forearm, pulling him back as the water started to trickle off into the street. A fireman was
looking into Hamza’s eyes with a flashlight, saying nothing. Then, clicking the light off, he
nodded his head towards Hamza’s mother. It was like he could not believe something, but he
walked back to his group to help them roll up the hose.
“What would we do without you?” His mother was holding him by the chin.
He smiled out of embarrassment. His beard felt warm against his skin, as if the hair was
trapping the heat.
His mother left to the house and returned with platters of pastries, fussing over them not
being heated up. The firemen took off their gloves to eat. They smelled like rubber. They didn’t
know that what they consumed so offhandedly was four of his mother’s hours, standing and
taking breaks, stirring and holding her wrists. Possibly the only thing on their minds was that
74

the meat was a bit off, or the curls on the bread were not tight enough. How arbitrary it was, that
they should eat it.
That night. his wife flew to Germany with two coats, holding one in her arms.
Some time later, when he arrived for another visit, he stopped the car next to the empty
lot and called Qasem. It had been a while since he had heard his voice.
“Are you still in your cave?” His older brother had been sheltering himself in Al Ain. He
hadn’t really, he was just working on an operation. He was assigned to the area when he became
a serious police officer, not that he had ever been a traffic cop or a desk jockey. It had crossed
Hamza’s mind that maybe the man selected it, he would be the type to like being far away,
surrounded by hills, just him and his family for miles. Hamza could never tell him.
The voice on the other side was far away but sturdy. Was this voice ever childlike and
afraid? “Is mama there, asking about me?”
“I’m just visiting her.”
“As I’ve heard,” Qasim said. “She was telling me she found things in our old rooms.”
Letters to girls in his class, some letters back. Old photos of a foreign sky. “Yes,” Hamza
chuckled, “I have them at hand. Can make a personal delivery to you, if you want.”
“You crazy guy,” he said, laughing a bit.
“I know. I threw them.”
“Good.”
“I’m joking.”
“Throw them. Make another fire.”
“Did mama tell you about that?”
“I think. It’s ​hasad​.”
Hamza felt himself begin to sweat, it was hot outside. He looked around at the lot, there
was no ash left. Someone had cut down the blackened trees, then covered the stumps with sand.
He felt too lazy to check. “From who? Can you be jealous of palm trees?”
“Everything, Hamza,” the man said, maybe he was smiling. He smiled when he meant to
laugh.
“You’re right. Those trees were about to live forever.”
“They were there before Big Ben.”
Hamza wanted to smile.
75

“I hope you didn’t do anything stupid like try to preserve the place for him,” Qasem said.
“You always do stupid things…”
“Qasem,” Hamza said, almost apologetically, “It fell out of my mind.”
“Good.”
76

Interlude
Melancholy isn’t an adult emotion.
Hamza was in class 5, the Cave Dwellers, which he admittedly liked best. They gave him
a lot of material to work with, mentally.
The children were splitting a piece of chalk between themselves, playing a game. Rain
belted down against the glass, slanted. Hamza felt that if he peered outside he would see the
cloud that was pouring down on them and it would look back at him, bawling while making eye
contact.
The class continued on with their murmuring and secretive glances in the background
until a sharp whinny cut through the storm.
“No, it’s me!” a voice cried shortly after.
Hamza shifted his head to see. “Huh? Who is it?” he asked. The voice had come from
Talia, the girl that sat on the side and always looked out of the window. He was always about to
call her Daliah, what kind of name was Talia? Talia Daliah had dusty blue chalk on her hands
that she was now wiping against her cheek. He half-expected hooves to sprout out of her wrists
which made him laugh. “How did you make that sound?”
“I won,” she told him.
The objective of the game was that whoever could get the littlest piece was the winner,
because they weren’t selfish. Although, the children had never said the rules aloud before, nor
declared that there was ever a winner. In fact, they barely made a sound until one of them
thought they had won, which is when they began to quarrel and needed to be pulled apart. It had
taken several weeks of rainy lunchtimes for Hamza to even guess what they were doing.
“You can’t win though, right?” Hamza asked.
The children were not looking at him, not even the girl anymore. One of them clasped the
first girl’s hands together and rubbed them between his palms. “Now, it’ll be me,” he murmured,
eyes fixated on the task at hand.
“Hello?”
The door creaked open, paused, swung back then latched back onto the frame. Fat drops
beat against the glass and Hamza shifted his weight off the window frame. He had done this
once before, taken them out of their trance, but he wasn’t sure he could do it again.
77

It occurred to Hamza a couple of times that he could just sit down at the front of the
room and leave them be. It wouldn’t be too bad to be ignored, but then what was the point of
even being there? What was he getting out of it?
Shifting sideways past the miniature desks, his eyes scoured the room. One of the
children had laid their open sandwich on the table, across the peanut butter was a thin layer of
light blue dust.
Hamza knocked his knuckles against the corner of the table to get the child’s attention.
“Careful when you eat that,” he said.
The boy next to him smiled up at Hamza. It was his first real interaction since noon. The
boy leaned over and swiped a finger against the blueish peanut butter, studying it for a while
before spinning around to join the girl with the blue cheeks.
Hamza’s stomach growled. He continued on in his search for the original piece. Towards
the end of the row, furthest from the window was a girl with tired eyes. When the children
around her tried to show her their tiniest slivers of chalk, she nodded her head as if it were a
boulder on a leash and smiled. The sleeves of her sweater hung loosely, and the bulge at her
tummy moved about.
“Are we the only ones not playing?” Hamza asked her, leaning his head forward to get
her attention. He walked over and felt a crunch beneath his shoe. They shared a grimace.
“I think you just broke the game,” she said quietly.
“I think so,” Hamza admitted, a little embarrassed. He lifted his foot up, scrunched up
his toes inside his shoe.
“It’ll go on forever, I guess,” the girl said. She had long, unruly hair that branched out
from her braid. It was pressed down at the edges of her face, from the pair of hands that had
tried to stamp it down. Her mother’s hands, Hamza would imagine.
Hamza bent down to sit on his knees on the rubbery floor. His elbow clinked against the
legs of her table, he felt the pain ring dully up to his shoulder. “Do you not want to play with
them?” He asked, maybe to distract himself.
“Where even are you?” the girl asked.
When he stretched his chin to answer, she was gone. Across the room, she flitted
between the clusters of students, her sleeves floating behind her.
78

Get Lost
Hamza didn’t need to look at the reflection in the window. He could see the redness of
his eyes like rosy vignettes around the curves of his eyeballs, framing his sight. He peered in
between the sore redness as the subway rattled along the Q, allowing his lids to fall halfway,
lashes tickling the skin beneath.
There came a faint thudding, a kind of uncoordinated knocking. Hamza looked up
curiously. Two teenage boys were leaning against the doors, elbows knocking into the glass. The
scene felt ominous. One of them angled his head to itch his scalp against the corner of the
doorframe. A smell wafted towards Hamza. He could only think of green, the insides of a
compost bin or an overturned meadow.
“Dude, dude, help,” the boy called out breathlessly to his counterpart teen. He had half of
his face hidden beneath his coat.
His friend smirked, moving a lazy finger up before hissing as he touched the glass.
Twisting it to one side and then to the other, the boy studied his finger. He then looked up at the
other, who had not yet succeeded in breaching the glass seal. “Was that hot or cold? I can’t
remember,” he said softly.
The first boy exhaled and a small stream of smoke slid out of his nostrils. He swiftly
clapped a hand over his mouth, as if in shock.
“What? What? Come on, man!” the second cried, holding his hand to his chest as his
friend squinted at him.
Hamza stretched his neck to see past them, the train was skipping a stop but it was no
matter. He jolted back into his seat when the two boys erupted into hysterical laughter. The
second boy dipped his head into his friend’s coat, coughing.
The smell of hash enveloped Hamza into a distant memory, of a woman who would laugh
when he coughed it out. He would curse, say that it was just a cigarette gone rotten, all to hide
that he was just bad at smoking. Besides, all that it made her do was close her eyes and pretend
to get to her feet only to fall onto him and laugh helplessly. They would stand in front of the
river, counting the miserable pigeons. Hamza would say how he used to pick birds out of the sky
in the desert while she would recoil and tell him off. Then, she’d laugh and admit that maybe
some of them deserved it. Before them, the ducks flapped their wings but stayed put. They
stayed like that, as long as he could remember, her head in the crook of his arm, leaning away to
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exhale smoke. She continued to laugh every time he said that they should just leave all that
college business, their parents, and their friends and run away. His voice was strained but she
would not listen, perhaps that was the point that he began to plan on her behalf and became too
much.
The teenagers remarked about the temperature of the glass for a couple more stops,
completely unfazed by the crowds rushing out and squeezing into the car. Hamza thought, this is
what teens can be like, harmless and humorous. He felt the urge to crawl back in time, to be in
those moments with her, to inhale deeply. It was a stupid idea, what if he just left it all again and
wanted to stay with her? He often asked himself if he would go back and change it all.
It had been a while since he had thought of her, Elena from his college days. What was he
supposed to do with her and her secrets? They must weigh him down, somehow, even though he
can’t feel it. He can’t decide what was the last memory of her. For a moment, he saw the image of
a small boy with her eyes, it lolled around in his arms in a cloth diaper. He could feel its weight.
There was no belly button, just a smooth surface. His chest seized. What was this kid? It was his,
for sure. Did he forget something? He could maybe hear his own voice speaking in a lilting tone.
You’re a clumsy beetle.​ They must have had a child, it was this child. Why would he have left?
He had meant to stay, maybe.
His nail beds were sore when he got up on Flatbush Avenue, far from his stop. It was
embarrassing but he had been chewing on his fingernails. He now wiped his hands onto his
jeans, relishing in the warm air that pressed against his skin as his cheek had gone numb. The
boys were gone.
80

Dream Envelope
Sometimes, he slept with his shoes on. There was no one to apologize to. He was rolled
tightly in his quilt, trying to form a barrier against the raging sirens that took turns bellowing
with the rainstorm.
Hamza always had dreams, every night that he could remember. His mouth filled with
the bitter taste of rust. Slowly unraveling, he found himself in a wet cave, sweating on his
bathroom rug.
There was a spiral disc spinning into the dirt and Hamza had found this endearing. He
gently scooped it onto the rug and watched it stretch and swell, dripping between his toes. He
grew disgusted and tossed it at the wall. The lights went off. Hamza assumed that he had fallen
asleep although he is not sure if that is within the realm of possibility in dreams.
Then cars were speeding past, rattling on the street that must have overtaken the cave.
His mind had scrapped the first setting and reworked it. Hamza reached his arms out to flatten
himself out onto the warm asphalt but another pair of hands slid over them. He felt a sharp pain
in his mouth and warm liquid streaming down his chest. As best as he could, he peered down to
find the spiral disc, for some reason feeling the need to get rid of it once again, but he could
barely sit up.
He rolled his eyes around instead. He felt sedated, pleasantly so.
“Why has the rain stopped?” he asked aloud. There was no answer.
He tried to repeat himself but found it difficult to speak, bloody spit dribbling down his
chin. His tongue wagged around the gaping spaces in his mouth. Looking up under the blinking
streetlights, he felt sick. A pale face darkened by time in the sun, wiry eyebrows and a curved
nose hung over him. The man was carefully flicking Hamza’s last crowning tooth from his gums.
“How do you have my face?” he asked around the fingers.
Carefully, the man collected them in both hands and counted them. Hamza watched him
curl his too-pink lips with each number. But this was not his face. The face moved down and it
looked like Qasim’s. Hamza wanted to close his mouth. He only noticed that he was shrieking
when the pain spread to his ears.
The man did not seem to hear him.
Hamza’s feet felt cold, he tried to rub them together but they too were held apart. He
managed to push himself onto his elbows and could suddenly see himself from a distance,
watching his shoes being pulled off by the man. It seems almost like a loving act, carried out
81

with reverence. But that was another layer of lies. Why was he even wearing shoes to bed? He
thought. He tried to distance himself further from the decidedly offensive act.
Still, Hamza watched dream Hamza make a pained face before he reached out a hand to
the son. His legs are too long, and his feet too far away, and he never reaches. The man was
putting on the stolen shoes that seemed so comically large on his feet. Next, he dusted off his
own pair of ugly sneakers which hissed in his hold. He managed to roll them up neatly and slide
them into his father’s breast pocket where they continued to squirm.
Hamza recalled waiting for the man to speak. Standing there, above him, it was his son
He could speak again, somehow, taking time in between words to swallow the warm liquid
pooling on his tongue. “Are you finished?” he asked. There were tiny phantom teeth in his gums
that sharply pinched his tongue as he spoke.
The boy was pressing both palms down on his father’s chest. Hamza felt this action was
redundant, as he was already incapacitated and undermined. The man was just reaching for
excess. Jasem’s face split into a scowl that rendered him unrecognizable, no longer the spitting
image of his father. Hamza tried to reach his hands up to hold the man’s face in place, to keep it
that way. Jasem swatted his hands away.
“I keep forgetting how foolish you are, it’s a little insulting, isn’t it, baba?” he asked.
Hamza was thinking of shoes in animal encasings, of a clever woman in a crisp blouse
offering a tour of the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe this thinking was in retrospect. They
identified people in mass graves by their shoes, the woman was saying. He had made a joke that
caused her to smile and pull him aside at the end. He wished that he could remember what he
had said.
The boy looked at Hamza as if he had spoken. Hamza just wanted him to leave at this
point.
They were back in the cave, light was pouring in from different angles. Hamza was
digging his thumb into the dirt.
“I said, when I die, they will think it’s you.”
Hamza didn’t understand. Wasn’t it supposed to be the opposite? That was why people
became parents.
“Don’t lose my teeth,” Hamza said because he thought that would be a real pity.
82

Red
When he was young, he never left from one room to another without a bowl of freshly
peeled pomegranate in hand. His aunt, once spotting him picking them out from his bowl of
rice, deemed it to be his favorite and would always hassle those around her to “get Hamza
fdaitah pomegranate”. He never told her he sometimes just pressed it to the roof of his tongue to
get the juice and then spat the chewy shells into the grass in the garden.
The other boys would always be inside with the tutor who spoke Arabic weirdly and
made them write every sentence in Arabic followed by cursive English.
Hamza was the quickest writer, looping his letters so tightly together that after a while
the tutor would glance at his paper and say, “Bravo,” eyes crossing and going dizzy. He had a lot
of free time after discovering that trick, as he walked away from the table he felt the glares that
were directed his way from the other kids.
He munched on his pomegranate, opening his mouth and closing it loudly, just because
he could.
From that age, he already knew that one of his aunts had two husbands. His mother
corrected him when he asked, she has one and Hamza should not call them his uncles. She was
living in the family house’s guest room. It was not hard to find out, whenever he waited in the
kitchen for her and her pomegranates, people spoke of it. The chef spoke to the driver through
the window, women he never saw before passed through the hall.
“Hamza, no boy is like you,” his aunt was saying to him. She turned to the rest of the
boys, who were holding their spoons with their fists.
“You should see the mess he makes with the ruman,” his cousin said, “All over the
garden.”
Hamza kicked the boy under the table and grinned around his spoon.
Their uncle passed by his sister and reached behind her to get the laban. “Wait, ‘til you
get kids.” He was talking to the kid.
His aunt’s face seemed webbed after that. The two left to the grownups room.
When he saw her again, she was picking the pomegranate from the grass. She held her
heart when she saw him standing behind her. “Ay, where is your respect, huh?” But she soon
softened up and touched his hair.
83

“Sorry,” he said, trying to take the pebbly fruit from her hand. His father asked him to
call everyone inside, he tried to remember to say this.
“What are you going to do, eat it?”
Hamza shrugged his shoulders.
“I know you won’t. You’re smart, not like others. Do you know that?”
“Okay.” He didn’t like talking to grownups that much. He felt he had to play dumb, or
they got mad.
She looked at him then turned back to the garden. “You always seem happy with
everyone else, what is this? It’s me, huh, never doing enough. Sick, maybe, I’m sick. If I don’t
look and turn around, maybe this one will just go inside and not come back. No surprising me. I
won’t be surprised.”
“I’m going inside,” Hamza told her, he remembered the feeling of embarrassment on her
behalf. Her hair seemed like it was struggling to hold the ground, coming out in tufts from her
braid, streaked with a silvery red.
Her face changed again as she turned. She jerked an arm around him, dropping the fruit
everywhere again. She felt overly warm and her fingers hooked onto his shoulder like they had
been encased in stone. “No one is here for me,” she said. Something was shaking. “I tried, the
first time and nothing. All to nothing. Now…”
Hamza watched a cat crawl over their garage, shaking its tail slowly. It didn’t notice him.
“You’re the only one who is here,” she said, “Somehow, you always know.”
He stayed still. He recognized it, it was that ugly cat. The one that he and the other boys
would try to lure. But it could only see out of its left eye and always missed the trap. Somehow
though, it ate all the chunks of meat.
She lifted his shirt. She was looking at the flat space where maybe a belly button should
have been. People liked looking at it. Except his father, he liked to forget. When she was done,
she gave him a weak smile and straightened up. He turned away to pick up the seeds. When he
looked up, she was normal again. She shook them all out of his hands. “You’re going to make so
many people so lucky. I know it. Then you’ll forget me… True? It’s true, I know this. But it’s
okay.”
“Baba said to come inside. The funny American jokes started on T.V.”
She hit his face with the back of her palm. “Just tell me to shut up if you don’t care.”
He felt the urge to cry or run inside, but did neither of those things. He decided to not
say anything lest he embarrass himself for being hit by this woman.
84

Inside, the jokes on the TV really were funny.
His brother, Qasim, had just come back from the shop with his friends. This excited the
children because he never returned empty handed. This time, he brought ​ishara​, ice cream that
came in three colors and looked like a traffic light. Qasim always gave the plastic bag to Hamza,
making him feel proud, like he had bought all the treats for everyone. He took his time handing
them out.
They ate it on the floor to not get anything dirty. The heat made it melt fast so it was a
battle to the end, to see which one of the children would finish first. Hamza hated that, because
sometimes his brain would freeze and he would have to stop to hold his head.
85

Kicking
The sound of children came from the front of the house, bouncing over the car that stood
in the middle of the driveway.
Hamza was standing in the kitchen, scraping the dregs of coffee from his favorite cup,
when he had been listening to the sound of children from the front of the house. Holding it by
the outer rim, Hamza tapped the metal against the window sill, checking in between intervals if
the grounds were letting go. Coffee was some sort of compost, it would be good for the grass, he
reasoned. Why did he want it gone so badly when he would just add more of the powder in soon
after? It was one of those things. He imagined the stale taste of old coffee, contaminating the
new batch, even though he knew it was all mental.
A boy’s voice rang in his ears. He set the cup down on the edge of the sink. As a boy
himself, he had turned the town upside down, coming home to him in different clothes than he
had left. “Wash then sleep, okay?” Sometimes his sisters would say, if they passed him. “Tell
your father you prayed.”
Was he a better adult for it? Hamza could not know. But he thought the girl ought to
have the same kind of liberty. As daft as it was though, he was always curious about her, what
she was like removed from him.
He walked over to the door before meaning to, he could tell it was meant to be shut. The
door always shuddered when it was slammed closed, unlatching from the door frame and
weaning open slightly. Hamza stepped outside anyway.
Haya was on one side, hair falling out of its bunch. Jasem was bent over, tearing out tufts
of grass. Two other children he vaguely remembered were resting on the grass, one pulling
string out from his bag. Jasem saw this and reached out to grab it,
“If she likes whales so much, she can have whale teeth,” Haya was saying.
“Whales have little mops,” Jasem told her.
“More prickly like brooms,” the only other girl was saying.
“That’s funny,” the other boy said.
“How would we give her whale teeth?”
“Kick, kick, kick,” Jasem said mindlessly, he was wrestling his thumb free from the
twine.
“Kick the teeth in!” the other kid cried, face screwed up.
His daughter roared in laughter.
86

Hamza balanced himself, resting a hand against the car.
The girl looked up. He felt he had been compromised. She broke into a grin. “Oh, baba
came.” On her feet, she pushed back her hair, leaving a dusty brown streak above her eyes.
“Kick, kick, kick.” Her leg swung up and down, jolting out and spraying grass.
Jasem got up as well, a little unsteady on his feet. He repeated the same motion, grinning
wildly. It seemed violent when he did it, Hamza told him to stop.
Haya spotted the cup he was holding, hopping over while her leg continued to swing
forwards. “Can we use that?”
He told her they could, then gave it to her. He turned back into the house, feeling dizzy.
Some afternoons after that, they were eating lunch when Jasem knocked over juice into
his rice. Hamza held his mouth closed as the liquid spread across the wooden tabletop, feeling it
drip through the artisanal cracks onto his socked feet.
Perhaps in anticipation of him boiling over, Lamya shared a conspiratorial glance with
the boy. Annoyed at his wife’s misjudgement of him, Hamza licked his fork clean from the
chicken-y residue. Then, he began to stir the boy’s bowl, smiling at the way his son watched with
rapture as the rice turned pink. Haya seemed to want to laugh but covered her mouth, glancing
at her mother.
“It needs more juice,” Jasem whispered. His mother folded her arms underneath the
table.
Hamza moved his chin up towards his daughter. “Give him some of your Vimto,” he said.
Lamya’s hand lifted up his cup and poured a little more red into the boy’s bowl. They continued
this play for the rest of lunch, some of Haya’s hair even got involved.
By the end of lunch, their chairs were nestled side by side on the long, rectangle table.
Lamya got up across from them. It was Hamza that had wanted a circle table so that they could
be closer together, but Lamya found that it made no sense. She would sigh and tell him that they
would never know where to put the chairs. Certainly, it didn’t matter. She was a clever woman
that mustn’t have cared too much, but at that point, they just wanted to disagree.
Hamza remembers that feeling of getting under her nerves. He couldn’t explain it, he felt
he was being pushed away and this was his retaliation. He used to be the one that everyone
wanted to be around, then suddenly after the kids, he was this man.
“Where did you go?” Hamza called out to her. The kids laughed as they played.
“Getting a towel,” Lamya called back from the other room.
87

When she returned, before she got to cleaning, Hamza stretched the Vimto rice towards
her. “Come on, stop being like this. Just for fun, try it.”
Lamya, the spoon of red at her lips, paused and stretched the cranberry mash towards
him. “Come on, stop being like this. Just for fun. Try it.”
“She won’t like it,” Haya had said.
“You’re right, Haya,” her mother said.
Hamza took the spoon, polished it off, and set it down on the table. He then scooped up
Jasem, the only child he could still carry, and they left for the living room. Haya held onto his
arm from behind, following along.
“She’s not so fun, is she?” he whispered to them. “Your mother.” Maybe he was hoping
she could hear.
“What are you trying to do?” Lamya asked him later that night, when they were back in
their room.
Hamza told her he had meant to get a proper brush. Lamya was bemused that he kept
misplacing the combs she set out for their daughter. Somehow, by the end of evening, Hamza
realized that he had not said a word to her since they parted for breakfast.
Haya was sitting on the floor, breaking crackers into small bits before eating them off her
palm. Hamza sat behind her on the sofa, gathering her hair. “Ow!” she whined as he pulled at
one of the shorter strands to stay in its bunch atop her head. He carefully undid the hair tie,
letting the hair slowly fall, obscuring the red and white dog she had worn on her back.
“You know if you keep it up all the time, what’s the point of such long hair?” He asked.
That had been his second attempt at helping her with her hair that day. It wasn’t long, in
comparison to the hair that he was used to, but her mother had always kept up short hair and it
suited her.
The girl tucked the rest of her crackers in her mouth before moving her hands to her
head, smoothing down her hair. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s nice,” Hamza said. He really thought so, although he always imagined it would get a
little curlier. He shifted to sit on the floor beside her. “If you like it, but it’ll look nice anyhow.”
“I’ll cut it,” she said.
“If you want to.”
88

Some days later, she came home after school and must have asked her mother to take her
for a haircut. Hamza had returned from a day of sitting still at work. He picked up his daughter’s
scooter from the grass and walked to the front door, calling out to her.
Lamya smiled from the couch before walking over, taking the scooter from him. “Tell her
it looks nice.”
“Huh?”
Hamza walked over to his room where Haya was collecting pens from his desk. Her hair
stopped below her ears, not much longer than his own. He thought she looked nice, although he
couldn’t imagine thinking otherwise.
“Let’s go play?” he asked her.
He let her choose their path, the scooter wheels bumped over the rocks as she skidded
along. Every time they stopped to take a break, he watched her move a hand to the top of her
head. He felt the same way when he shaved his head, those couple of times, trying to get used to
the sliver of weight that wasn’t there anymore.
She had been too tired to ride home, he held the scooter in the crook of his arm, carrying
her on his back, still unbound by age.
“Why did you choose the rocky path?” Hamza asked, chuckling as she shifted her ankles
away from the scooter as it shifted in his grip. “You are always too tired after.”
“I’m not tired,” she said. She thought for a while, or maybe just stayed quiet. “On the
smooth part, I’m always too fast for you. It’s boring to just wait.”
Hamza laughed some more. “I just let you catch your breath, that’s all.”
Haya hung her head to the side, Hamza shifted his weight to keep balanced. “Do you like
my hair?”
“Obviously,” he said.
That night, he heard her crying in bed. She said she hated her hair. Hamza heard her
mother talk softly to her. Lamya came back to their room with a strange expression.
He made an extra effort to kiss Haya’s head each morning. It was a weird gesture, felt in
reverse. He felt she was mad at him ever since, somewhere beneath it all. Her brother shared a
similar look, but it was harder to hide in an embrace.
89

Hamza could maybe trace it all back to something further back. Haya was about five
years old and Jasem was still a year away from them. He remembers that she still slept between
them even though her mother had said she was too old, and argued that at that point, she would
be too attached and never leave their bed. But the girl wore her mother down, it was hard to get
her back in her room after Hamza had let her sleep next to him.
He had been waiting for Lamya to return, window open beside his bed, getting antsy
from sitting at home all evening.
Perhaps she was drowsy on her way back home, she may have been feeling under the
weather at that time, or maybe something happened at work. It had been a strange time. Haya
had not been talking in school, unable to focus on the flashing lights. The teachers kept calling
them to explain that their daughter turned around and shut her eyes whenever they began
working with the projector screens. Hamza felt he understood, he imagined the light turning
into visible lines, smearing into streaks, pushing against his brain. She must have gotten it from
him, he hated sitting in front of his work screen, following the numbers that moved on a clean
yet jaded conveyor belt. Lamya had not not given up, in the evenings, she sat Haya in front of the
television and observed her.
Hamza recalled wondering when she would walk through the door, he tried to stay
awake. He had propped open the window so that the heat and flies buzzing would keep him up,
but fell asleep anyway.
He awoke to the sound of a car’s humming engine before it cut off. Haya did not move
from his side. About to turn over, he heard a car stopping and starting nearby, engine revving.
He angled his body as if to block the sound from the sleeping girl.
“Hamza!” a familiar voice cried. He sits up, feeling reluctant. “Hamza!” The voice is
wrung out to its last syllable.
He found himself outside their gate, looking at Lamya parked outside the neighbor’s
house, crying into her hands. The memory warps itself there. He sees her look back at him,
teary-eyed but also she doesn’t, she stays hidden inside her car, so impossibly far away. He both
rushes over and stays where he is.
“What are you doing there?” He calls out. The bricks are cold under his bare feet.
She might have said something.
“Did something happen?”
“I got lost,” she said.
“From where?” Hamza was standing next to her.
90

Lamya dragged a hand over her face before sitting upright. “The dinner ended late.”
“How did you get lost?”
“What kind of question is that?” she asked. The neighbor’s gate was reflected in the
windshield.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’m just confused.”
She held her head for a while. “I thought you locked the door. I don’t know where my
keys are.”
Hamza became aware that they were on somebody else’s doorstep and reached out to
open the car door before hesitating. “This is not our house though, obviously,” he paused.
“Right?” She did not seem to be talking in her sleep.
“I know,” she said, beginning to sound irritated.
“Then what happened?” he asked, “Did you forget what the house looked like?”
“Hamza, can we just go inside? It’s cold.”
Hamza was sweating. He stepped aside so she could reverse and drive past the gate.
Then, he shut it and waited for her to leave the car before he approached, guiding her up the
steps to their own front door.
“Do you have the keys?”
“The door is open.”
Hamza waited for her to enter then shut it. He turned the key and the beaded keychain
clicked together quietly.
“Why did you lock it?”
He paused. “We always do.”
Lamya walked halfway through the living room before coming back to the door to take
off her shoes.
“Did something happen?”
“I don’t know.”
Hamza watched her walk down the hallway before he looked back outside. He knew
somehow that no one in the neighborhood had been awakened. Or at least shifted in any
significant way behind closed shutters. Then, he went to their room to carefully take the sleeping
Haya into his arms, moving her to the other room. He kept the door open, then moved to their
bedroom.
Lamya put a robe over her clothes and was rubbing her face.
“Everything okay?”
91

She looked up at him, almost in surprise before her eyes returned to their normal shape
and size. Her eyes had black moons pooling beneath them.
“Haya is sleeping.”
She seemed to soften at this. Guilty, maybe, that checking wasn’t her first instinct. “Were
you asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Do I look terrible?”
Hamza did not know if she had actually wanted an answer. He didn’t know what answers
he himself wanted.
“We need to get another key, because I lost mine.”
“Sure, tomorrow I’ll do it.”
“I did actually lose it. Because you always keep it in different places.”
“You’re right.”
“I hate when you do that, you know, it’s not you to just agree with me,” Lamya told him.
Hamza snickered tiredly. “Oh, you don’t even know.”
“That’s more like it,” she said, though she didn’t sound pleased.
Hamza laughed at this. “None of us will act like ourselves today, they predicted. Didn’t
you hear that on the radio?”
“I don’t listen to talking when I drive.”
“Hm?”
“Never mind,” she said, “I don’t understand anyway.”
“Me neither,” he said.
Lamya pulled the duvet from under one of the pillows with one hand, then she tried it
again with both. Her hair stuck to her cheek as always, split up into strands like sun rays
stretching across her skin. Hamza felt that time had left them behind sometimes, that no matter
how much they moved around and changed things, they still looked the same. This could be
Lamya just waking up, piecing things together to prepare for a day at work.
“How didn’t you recognize this house?” Hamza asked.
“It happens.”
“They don’t look the same, Lamya.”
“Please don’t start,” she said, stopping.
“What?”
92

“They do. Okay? They do. They have windows, doors with handles, gates, roads leading
up to them.”
Hamza stood still, looking at her. “Okay.” He then moved over to her to wrap his arms
around her. She rested her head for a while. He felt for a moment that she had been
sleepwalking, but that didn’t make sense. “I just want to know what’s wrong.”
She seemed to wrack her brain for a while, or maybe she just stood still. “Just that
moment where… I don’t know where. I got lost and felt angry, like where were you?”
“I was inside.”
“I know that.”
“So what then?”
She straightened up. “Can you close the window?”
“Yes.”
She was in the bathroom when he returned.
Lamya slept in little increments until late in the morning while Hamza played with Haya
in the other room. She was still asleep when he was helping Haya prepare some juice in the
kitchen, the one with more ice than substance, what they called the frozen no-juice juice. He did
the pouring but let Haya carry the drinks in two rubber cups over to the living room. With every
other step, she squeezed them and some of the juice ran down her fingers. Together, they drank
the juice on the floor, watching T.V.
When Lamya woke up, they brought out their special picnic blanket and set it up on the
living room carpet. Haya brought another rubber cup and more juice, which her mother
pretended to drink.
But the previous night was always there, lingering after that. He couldn’t scratch it. Why
did Lamya never want to bring it up? She was just embarrassed, she would tell him, then move
on to something else. It felt off to him. Late at night, he wondered if there was something in him,
his spirit in the rocks along the driveway that repelled her, began to drive her away.
When he tried to open it back up, she seemed agitated, telling him, “Not everything is
about you.”
93

Dice
He got a call from the woman at the embassy and picked up by accident. Reem, on the
other end, seemed as composed as ever, not giving anything away.
They were to meet in Midtown at three. As he approached the building, he watched the
flag waver as it caught a sliver of sunlight. The red seemed to turn scarlet and bleed into the
white stripe in the middle. He could see Reem behind the glass doors, lingering as she stopped
to respond to someone far behind her. She was laughing as she walked out onto the street but
her face quickly fell when she spotted Hamza. His eyes fell onto the file in the crook of her arm.
“Salam alaykum,” she said, coming across the courtyard. She was dressed in navy blue up
to her sheila, which hung loosely around her face.
He returned the greeting before smiling at her, uneasy and wanting to stall. “Nice spot
for your office, isn’t it?”
She glanced behind her. The building seemed to shrink back, not knowing what to boast
about. “I enjoy it.” She was smiling when she turned back to him. “Do you want to talk as we
walk?”
“Lead the way,” he said, nodding his head. She skirted around him, pointing with the
envelope back towards downtown. “Where are we going?”
“Oh, I thought I asked,” Reem said, beckoning him as she crossed the street. A bike
pulled to a halt beside her. “It’s my lunch break and I was hoping you wouldn’t mind us going to
that cafe by the park?”
Hamza did not. They walked alongside one another for the four blocks, in which time she
slipped into Arabic on occasion as she talked about how she used to get lost in her first few
weeks, and the one cafe she came across once but never found again. Hamza stumbled a little
with the switch in language, but reciprocated, it had been a while. Perhaps she noticed and
changed direction, asking about his brother and family back home. They spoke a bit about this
until it seemed there was nothing left to say.
He held open the door to the cafe, instead of a name, it boasted a large blue spiral that
was plastered over the glass door. She walked through, stopping at a small table by the window.
“Is this all right?” she asked him.
Hamza moved to pull out a seat for her but she shook her head.
“I’ll go order something. But in the meantime, I want you to take a look at this,” Reem
told him, setting the envelope on the table. She moved a hand across it as if smoothing it down
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before looking up at him. Her face was full of sharp edges, down the bridge of her nose to the
point of her chin, but her gaze made it all seem soft like she was trying not to scare him away.
Standing like this, she was a good head taller than him, he suddenly didn’t like the way she was
looking down at him.
He realized she would stay put until he said something, so he did. “All right.”
“Want anything?” she asked him.
Hamza took a seat. The metal chair scraped against the concrete floor loudly, making
another noise as he sat down. The envelope seemed slim. He debated to himself whether this
was good news, slowly tearing open the flap.
The document inside was stern, it stood upright in his grip without a crease. The eagle
insignia towards the top confirmed this. Hamza’s eyes ran through the document once, then
twice, then he turned it over to see that it was blank on the back.
His son was to report to a hearing for petty theft. Jasem’s name was clearly printed in
capitalized letters. A date, going back to a few months ago, was stamped into the bottom. With
one swift motion, he tucked the papers back into the envelope.
Beside him, a couple was moving their table closer to the window. The screeching made
Hamza feel sick.
In front of him, Reem was adjusting her navy sheila, tightening it by gathering it at her
chin, then with an elegant motion, tossing it over her shoulder.
He stood up, causing the table to shift with another ugly sound. Pinching the envelope by
the edge, he picked it up and made his way out of the door. He could feel her eyes on his back
but kept moving. He didn’t want to hear her ask about it or have to explain anything.
Moving past the park, wanting to go around the corner as quickly as he could, he started
to fold the envelope as small as it could go, until it could just fit inside his front pocket. After
that, he felt he could exhale and stopped for a while to shut his eyes. A shoulder knocked against
him and he jolted forwards to brace himself but still, he did not open his eyes.
On the subway home, he felt like a stray penny in a ratty tin can, knocking on the sides as
it was shaken up and down and side to side. Except he was soft. No, he was a little piece of lint
that fell in from someone that had dropped the penny into the tin can. Hamza sat there, jostling
about, the corners of the envelope digging into his thigh.
Later that evening, Reem called him to tell him that his son was actually being held for
bribery and attempting to unlawfully fly home. She suggested that he got over there and sort it
95

out. She did not address him deserting her at the cafe, she just said her bit and bid him good
night.
The airport terminal was cold and he hung around the convenience store, loading and
reloading the sky scanner website. It was the same place where he had picked up Jasem, half a
year ago. He was many hours early, but Lamya would not stop calling him to make sure he left
the house. The sun was barely even up, but Hamza had stayed up all night anyway. It was
pathetic, worrying about Jasem, when all they could do in the meantime was wring their hands.
As he watched the little airplane icon move across the screen, he thought of the sound of
a rolling dice before it landed. In his mind, the dots spill across the table.
He had shared the news with Haya and her mother back home, he had to. Now, his
daughter was on her way to him, and had made those plans despite his annoyance and
insistence that she was making a big deal out of it.
At the end of the long hall, filled with the clamor of clunky wheels hitting the rubber
floor, Haya emerged. She appeared to stretch, growing as she singled herself out of the crowd.,
Hamza could only think of the most obvious thing, that Haya was real. He felt that if she found
him and looked at him with recognition in her eyes, he would be real, too.
His daughter wore the hood of her jacket over her head and the strings tucked inside.
Her dark hair was pressed to one cheek in messy strands. As she searched for him, her eyes
seemed to fill her whole face. He thought of Lamya, raising his arm to fetch the girl’s attention.
She slid over towards him “Oh, baba, I didn’t recognize you in a sweater,” she told him,
kissing his cheek.
He laughed, pulling her suitcase towards him to safeguard. She pushed it away as she
hugged him around the middle tightly. When he looked down at her, he saw her eyes were
screwed closed.
He brought his hand to the back of her head, holding it there. Hamza had so many
questions to ask his daughter, but none mattered.
“Can you believe I’m here?” she asked into his shoulder.
He could not.
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Her face was creased when she pulled away, pale in the bright overhead light. He could
see the blame tucked into the folds. “Did you call a cab? Are we leaving to find him today?”
“Not today. You need to rest, first.”
Haya moved her hand to the handle of her suitcase then pulled it back when she found
Hamza’s hand resting on it. “Tomorrow then?”
Hamza hadn’t purchased the tickets yet, he wasn’t sure what was delaying him.
“Tomorrow,” he told her. “Do you want some coffee? It’s a long ride.” Together, they walked to
the car waiting outside.
Haya rested her backpack against her chest even though there was room in the trunk.
Absently, she played with the zippers, inspecting the pockets before once again looking out the
window. He wanted to see the place through her eyes, he hoped she would understand once they
arrived at the city. There was a quiet joy that climbed gently up his spine at seeing her, muffled
by their circumstance and his own stiffness. Hamza rested a hand on the seat between them. He
tried to think of things his father would say to him but couldn’t remember.
“What are you thinking?” Haya asked him. Her eyes flitted to the top of his head, the
curls were flattened by the hours spent waiting.
He did not know. He was thinking of something before she asked and now it scurried
away to the back of his mind. “Nice to see you. You changed so much,” he said, the words felt
recycled and hollow.
The girl looked at him blankly for a moment before her mouth pursed into a smile. She
stretched her neck to see the screen on the dashboard, they were half an hour away.
“What about you?” Hamza asked.
Haya took her time readjusting in her seat, she crossed and uncrossed her legs before
stretching them beneath the driver’s seat.
“The flat isn’t comparable to our house back home– of course– but you were never too
worried about those things, right?”
His daughter tilted her head as if thinking. It was maybe different talking to her on the
phone, she couldn’t afford these long pauses. “I’m sure it’s nice. Do you live next to anything
famous?” she asked. “Or is everything in New York famous?”
Hamza chuckled at that, “I think everything is a little famous. I’ll show you some things,
if you want, I can take you where we went last time… A nice place.”
“Where you went with Jasem?” she asked, she seemed to want to say more.
“The food actually wasn’t that tasty. There is another–”
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“Baba, when we get home, can I use your phone to call him?”
He let out an annoyed sound, not knowing where it came from. Her face changed. “I
think we need to give him some space, no? We are already all caught up untangling the knots
that he keeps tying himself in.”
“That’s a strange way to describe what people in a family do for each other,” she said. If
he shut his eyes, she was a child speaking with her mother’s voice.
“Do they?” he asked her, as if also asking then why didn’t anyone let him know
beforehand.
There was something moving around her head, static, but she said nothing. Instead she
turned to the front and eased the hood of her head. Beneath, was a mane of wavy hair, just
barely grazing her chin. She ran her fingers through it, bringing the hair forward to her face
before pushing it back.
Hamza was stunned but did not give it away. “When did you do that?”
“Since one year,” Haya said, then stopped, “No, almost two.”
He stopped to think, eyebrows touching. “No. I saw photos of you recently.”
His daughter laughed. “And you didn’t notice?”
“No,” Hamza said, “I would have.”
“It must suit me,” she said.
“Long is best. Like your mother’s,” Hamza told her. He had liked that his children got his
curls, that was the most they got from him, probably for the better. His daughter had a soft, full
face and the hair cut through it like something sharp.
“Maybe I’ll try to grow it overnight.”
Hamza moved his hand off the middle seat, holding his seat belt instead. “You can use
my phone. I don’t know if you’ll get through to him, or if it’s a good idea to try to call.”
There was a long silence before she responded. “Thank you.” Then, after another while,
“Can I see the tickets?”
He moved a hand to his phone although he knew they weren’t there.
“Or let’s just wait until we reach, I’m getting dizzy,” she said, her voice grew soft. She
turned her body towards the window.
“You’ll get more carsick that way, lay down,” Hamza told her, reaching out and lightly
touching her shoulder. It was so warm, she must have been sweating. His daughter stayed put,
he couldn’t see her face but he imagined her closing her eyes.
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“Can you tell him to drop us off at the food place?” Haya said from somewhere in the
crook of her arm.
“Don’t you want to go home first?”
She was quiet for a while. “We’ll go home when we get Jasem,” she said.
Hamza studied the back of her head for a while. He let the car almost reach the
intersection of his apartment before he leaned over and told the driver to continue on to West
Village.
The pair ate very little. Haya dipped her fork into the balsamic vinegar on her plate,
delicately swirling it around into little spirals that curled into her artichoke roast at the center.
She looked up at her father, caught his eye and looked back down.
“What did you want to say?” he asked her.
Haya shook her head, “Nothing, baba.”
She pierced the artichoke again, rolling it over before cutting a small piece. Hamza did
not know how she was eating it, it looked and smelled like it was lazily made up by someone who
had never seen a vegetable before. The girl’s eyes flitted back up to him. “Do you have something
to say?”
Hamza did not. He felt uncomfortably full but ate some more anyway.
The walk back was anything but brisk. Hamza took the long way, moving the suitcase
along beside him. There was something funny about the sounds it made as it crackled over the
pavement, sometimes squeaking against the sides of other pedestrian’s shoes.
Haya moved beside him. He stole glances at her as she looked around, the different signs
bathing her in multicolored lights.
“Isn’t it something?” He asked. The question had been spinning around in his mind for a
while. He had been trying to find the right time to ask it, when they weren’t at a crosswalk, or by
some loud group of people that would steal Haya’s attention.
“Huh?” she asked from beside him.
He repeated the question louder, leaning towards her for a moment.
Haya nodded her head and smiled. “You like walking, don’t you? So it suits you.” A man
from a small sushi shop came out of the kitchen with a bulky black bag, depositing it
unceremoniously on the side of the road.
Hamza held her elbow to help her sidestep around it.
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“Everyone is so relaxed,” she said, “Like they’re the only ones in the world.”
“Is that good?”
Haya’s eyes were drawn to the street where a gust of wind knocked over someone’s sign,
it read: ‘Big Brother turns me on, but I cannot turn him off!’ She seemed to want to say
something but instead just took a photo, glancing at her father with a little grin as if seeing if he
would bring it up.
He did not, although the corner of his mouth lifted.
“I think you like it,” Haya said, “So it must be good.” They turned another corner, Haya
slowed down a little. When Hamza glanced back, she was holding the hem of her jacket. “Can I
take this off?”
“I don’t know how you survived this long, already.”
At home, Hamza expected Haya to stick out like her brother did, unable to blend
seamlessly into the scene. Yet, she quickly made herself comfortable, helping herself to the
bathroom as soon as they entered.
“Do you want to go somewhere tomorrow as well? Since you seemed to like the walk
back, I was thinking…” Hamza began, but his daughter’s face told him that she was chewing on a
response. “What?”
“So we’re not leaving early tomorrow?”
Hamza shrugged. “No.”
Haya moved over to her backpack, rummaging before gathering up neatly folded clothes.
“Why not?”
“Nothing we can do about it. I don’t control the planes.”
She sighed. Her thumb was going over the folds of the fabric in her arms, looking at him
plainly.
“So we might as well do something in the meanwhile, no?”
“Are you trying to forget why I am here?” she asked. Her voice was warm, like the way
one speaks to a child.
“If you only want to talk about your brother, we’ll only talk when it’s about your brother,”
Hamza told her. “May I at least tell you that I will be sleeping on the sofa, please make yourself
comfortable here.” He turned away, leaving to his room to turn the light on.
He waited until she was sleeping there until he shut off the TV and turned in, himself.
100

Good Again
Hamza took a shower in the morning before it was time to go.
In his room, he began to get dressed. A soft strip of navy coiled around Hamza’s neck as
he carefully tied a Windsor knot. The tie had a glossy sheen and a deep red underbelly, he wore
it to the occasional school ceremonies and to the airport, always.
The first time, he was just a boy. He had tied it around his collar in a messy sailor’s knot
and ran to the open gate where his brothers were waiting, antsy. His mother had caught him by
the end and jerked him back. “You want your father’s family to look like garbage, ha?” She was
yelling, yanking it off him and tugging his collar into obedience. Hamza had tried to twist out of
her hold, not understanding, he was just about to be set free. His mother slowly smoothed her
hands down his blouse, starched stiff and itchy– he had planned to ditch it in the airport. The
Pajero was honking at them, but it was as if she could have her ears stuffed with cotton. So very
carefully with her head bowed, she tied a Windsor, maybe she learned from listening to the
foreign channels on the radio. Hamza’s eyes were shifting wildly from her small hands to the car,
it would not be impossible for his brothers to just fly away without him. Mouth stretched to yell,
he turned back to his mother. She was softly crying, the woman before him, who never did
anything quietly, even climb the stairs. He put his hands on his mother’s shoulders, kissed the
top of her head over the fabric, and left. He did not come back for many years, but she had
already known.
Hamza could not help but think of this. There was no way that one could stretch and
warp his mistakes and call them blessings, he had tried many times, sitting on his knees with his
hands clasped together. Yet, when he flew back home from England and tore his double life in
half, his mother was ill. His mother could no longer hide behind the guise of a phone call. She
would lay on her bed, holding her son’s hand and fretting over every single little line and bump
of his veins. “If I die without all my sons being married…” she said, feeling like her rowdy self
after a big lunch of zaatar slices and some juice, “I will be so angry at God. Do you want your
mother to die like that?” At dinner, he sat with his brothers while his mother was asleep, while
his father sat outside her door. None of them brought their children anymore, because there
were no other women left in the house to play with them. They told him about one girl, their old
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Pajero friend’s sister, she had always had her eye on Sultan but when that seemed improbable,
she had let it slip that she was keen on Hamza, too. But he met Lamya, waiting in line at the
store, he was picking up flowers. He never asked her what she was getting. Their encounter, of
course, had not seemed significant then, even if he made it out to be so when he recounted it
years later. He just knew it was meant to be when he ran into her again at the lobby of a hotel, he
had been on a work dinner with clients and she was speaking at a conference. Any thought of
keeping his job left his mind, he asked to meet her as soon as it was possible. His mother almost
bounded up out of the bed when she heard. She lived for a while after that, even sat with Haya in
the car on the way to elementary school.
The ride to the airport was a long one and Hamza was secretly relieved when his
jetlagged daughter fell asleep. He wished she would continue sleeping until they boarded the
plane, maybe they could just go somewhere else together.
The flight to Washington was brief, but it felt longer because Haya refused to speak to
him from her seat four rows in front of him. She was upset that he had lied about the tickets and
that they had just nearly snatched the last pair for the day. Hamza shut his eyes, ready to turn in.
Inside the building, behind a grand metal desk three officers attended to his demands.
One of them, the one with tight skin around his face that seemed close to cracking as he yawned,
was looking through a file. The one next to him spoke into a walkie talkie, laughing a little before
looking up at Hamza. “Yeah, you can go through.”
Hamza took Haya’s hand, standing up.
“Hold on, we gotta authorize you, pal,”
They led him and Haya to an open space in which the tiles on the floor seemed at war
with one another, too far apart, revealing cracks or piling on top of one another. The space was
concave and holes in the ceiling let little light in from overhead. It was about to be evening and
Hamza saw no other light source. There was a lingering heat and the air was dry. They did not
step further ahead of the officers.
One of them motioned for him to go ahead.
“What are we doing?” Hamza asked.
“Room on the right,” the officer said, in lieu of an answer.
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The holding cells were lined with a long metal bench. Along the wall, the bricks were
painted over in a clean, rubbery white. There seemed to be no more than four. Dull navy bars,
evenly spaced out, seperated the cells from the hall. There was a sharp scuffing of shoes as they
approached the one on the right. Jasem stood upright, peering out. His face was red and swollen
on one side, but not worryingly so, like he had been leaning on his cheek for a while. He looked
like he hadn’t slept, his coat was rolled up to his elbows, like it didn’t occur to him that he could
take it off. His hair stood up around his face. It was a bit of a pathetic scene, like the boy had
read the wrong script and thought he was somewhere else, somewhere morbid. It’s just a room,
barely even a cell.
“Who is this man to you?” The officer asked from behind them, knocking his knuckles
on his badge.
“Haya!” his son cried. He then looked at his father. Hamza feared the boy would cry.
“What now?” Hamza turned to the officer.
His daughter was whispering to Jasem, placing a hand over his on the bars.
“Shall we sit down and talk?” the officer said.
The man let Jasem out and went through the formality of cuffing his wrists together.
This made his face tighten. They were led down the hall to another clean, unremarkable room
with three metal chairs and a collapsable table.
“One at time,” the man said to Haya, but the thought of her being alone with him was not
something he would allow. Hamza argued with them until they let her come in. Another officer
entered after her.
Once they got the setup right, Hamza looked at his son warily. The boy’s tears had dried,
he could follow the streaks down his cheeks.
The men handed Hamza a folder and ran him through the available options, but he was
half-listening. From the corner of his eye, Jasem was pretending to listen to his sister, but his
eyes kept flitting over to his father.
“At the end of the day, he is an adult, and it is his call,” the original officer told him.
“Then why did you call me over?” Hamza asked, trying to be discreet.
The man grinned a little.
Hamza didn’t know what to say so he kept quiet until the other men left the room to
make some calls. Haya petted his hand, saying something under her breath that made the boy
smile a little. Jasem would have seemed his usual, casual self if he hadn’t been sniffling in
between, a desperate effort to keep his nose from running, still soft from the tears.
103

Jasem managed to move his hair out of the way. Hamza caught the glistening of metal
around Jasem’s wrists. “Few more days and they would have shaved my head, I hear. Feel like I
could have looked good like that,” he said. The boy was being dramatic, Hamza wanted to tell
him that but did not feel like sparing the effort. Plus, if he was anything like Hamza, a shaved
head would not suit him.
“I just realized, since I’ve had some time to think,” Jasem began, “It’s like Carlito’s Way.”
Hamza wanted to glance over his shoulder. He was worried Jasem had begun to ramble,
and would break into a hundred pieces. “What do you mean?”
“Have you seen that movie?” He was talking to Haya now.
“No,” she said.
“It’s with Al Pacino,” the man paused, he turned to his father. “You don’t know a lot
about New York, huh?”
Hamza shook his head, it was all incredulous. A little dream the tin can he had for a head
had cooked up.
“You’re not scared anymore,” he said. An observation.
Jasem shrugged. He had been somewhat keeping his composure but ever so often, the
chair would whine as he kept shifting his weight. Jasem would try to fold his hands then realize
he couldn’t, then hang them on his knees. Other than that, he looked exactly the same. Hamza
didn’t know what he was expecting, he had only been held there for a day.
“They just want to get the file, Jasem,” Haya said.
“Then I’m out?” he asked.
Hamza could not face him, he looked at the table between them.
“Yeah,” his sister said.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Jasem said. It seemed too rushed.
“Jasem, don’t ruin it all,” Hamza said. In truth, he was exhausted.
Jasem turned to look at the door for a while. “I mean it,” he said.
“Okay,” Hamza responded blankly.
The doors swung open and the police officers were wearing grim faces. He could only
deduce that that meant good news on his behalf.
“You found the file with the original report?” Hamza asked them, getting to his feet.
They spared him a glance, moving behind Jasem and hoisting him up onto his feet. The
man muffled the pained sound, biting his lip into a small smile.
Hamza felt intense relief. The guards remained stationary.
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“Whatever I need to sign, let’s go. I’m not in the mood to press charges anymore, you’ve
worn me out,” he told them.
“Good to hear, sir,” one of them said, but his mouth twitched to let him know it was a
joke. There could be no charges held against them.
Hamza waited by the door outside until it was over and Jasem signed some papers and
signed off a lot of his father’s money. The boy would be sent home first, ahead of them, it was
not explicitly stated but he must have known he would be continuing his studies at home.
At the airport, Hamza did not think, just reached for Jasem and crushed him between his
arms. He could tell Jasem was crying again by the way his body shook. He must have known
Hamza was trying to say goodbye and mean it, this time. When he pulled away, his own face was
wet but it dried fast.
“Please see me, please see me,” the man was chanting quietly.
“Jasem, please stop,” Hamza told him. Then, “I will, I will.”
105

Detour
The desert only gets hotter the longer you stay away from it. He could barely open his
eyes for the first few days. That was okay as he was spending it all cooped up inside, vainly
making up for lost time.
It was just as he imagined, he was moving around in someone else’s skin. It was
ill-fitting, both too tight and too slack. There were no strings to keep it up, only pull him in
different directions.
But there was Haya, who would look at him smiling sometimes without immediately
looking away. There was also Qasem who held him for a long time without saying anything. His
wife stood with her hands behind her waist.
Upon seeing her, he had forgotten how he had imagined her to look.
When he had the chance to, he walked out of the living room. Haya caught him, holding
him still for a moment with her eyes before she turned away. Outside, Lamya was standing in
the garden. Her arms were still tucked behind her. She was looking in the direction of the gate,
somewhere, quiet.
Hamza felt he had been so incredibly lonely.
When she turned to him, she seemed to want to apologize. “I didn’t see you there,” she
told him. “Are you already running away?”
Hamza kept his hands by his side as he moved towards her. “And what about you?”
“Haya will be sad if the cat leaves again,” she said.
He could see it now. By the gate, the cat scraped against the iron gate, its elegant white
tail floating after it.
“Lady,” Lamya said softly. That was its name, perhaps.
The neighbor’s rooster cried out, making him jump. She laughed beside him.
“How did I ever forget that devil?” he asked, smiling a little at her.
His wife shrugged. He felt like an imposter calling her that.
“Lamya,” he said, so that she would look at him again.
She turned towards him, but her eyes kept flitting over to the direction of the cat.
“What will you say if I ask you to marry me again?”
Lamya turned her shoulders away. The shawl fell off one shoulder and she let it hang.
“You always say such things,” she said, eventually.
“What things?”
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“The kind of things that are funny, but I don’t know if I should laugh at,” she answered.
“Feel free,” Hamza told her. It was ridiculous, it felt like something foreign couples
would do.
She let out a wisp of a laugh, moving the shawl over her neck.
“Not like that,” he said.
“Let’s go inside, at least pretend to like the party they’ve thrown,” she told him.
They walked together towards the door, over the cracked bricks and the serpentine body
of the hose that ran across the large courtyard.
“What if I did though?” Hamza asked her.
“If you did ask?” Lamya was standing on the steps, slipping out of her shoes.
Hamza nodded, then said, “Yes.”
“I would say I could not accept. Or I would,” Lamya turned to him. “It wouldn’t matter,
because you won’t ask.”
Something metal clattered against the marble inside. He needed to hear it, more than
ever he wanted someone to tell him what to do. “I am asking now.”
“Fine, stay.”
“Okay.”
Lamya seemed so far away this time as she spoke. “Great. But you’re not going to. So,
let’s just have this moment.”
He wished she had slammed the door behind her, but she held it open with her elbow,
looking in.
107

Oneway Street
“Who is this cake for anyway?” One of Hamza’s sisters asked, laughing as she sliced it
into thick pieces.
“Haya, I think,” Hamza said, just because.
“It’s for you, Sara,” another of the sisters said, “How are you cutting– do you see children
in this house or elephants?”
His daughter brushed past them as she walked away with a slice of cake on a small plate.
There was icing on the back of her hand, a dusty yellow. Jasem grinned at her from his reclined
position on the sofa and she rested the plate on his lap. Hamza could not tell if she had wanted
that slice for herself or had intended it to be for him. He doubted she would be honest if he
asked. As she sat beside him, the fork fell off the plate and onto the floor.
Hamza thought of the past. He thought of his daughter as if he was not there looking at
her. He could tell it took some time getting used to him. The way he was now, quiet more times
than not. When he wasn’t looking at faces, it was like his eyes were facing inwards. There was
also his sense of dress, which plausibly the most difficult thing to get used to. All things that
couldn’t be known over the phone.
Sara insisted that he ate, so he skimmed some of the icing. But mostly, he drank tea. He
went through three cups, not saying much. No one prompted him to explain at all, and he did
not.
Qasem moved across the room towards him. He hitched up his kandora to his calve to
bend one leg over the other. He looked at Hamza then down at his cake, taking a couple of big
spoonfuls. Hamza reached for the tea pot to pour some more tea for himself. The spout was
curved and he missed miserably, the now-lukewarm tea dribbling down his hand. He went to
wipe it off on his sleeve and caught his son watching from the side. The boy dipped his head
back down, rearranging the fork on his plate. They met eyes again and this time, Jasem was
smiling with half his mouth.
Hamza shook his head, as if making a joke of himself, setting the teapot down.
108

When the guests had finished trickling out, the sun had long ago set. Hamza did not
know where to go.
Lamya went upstairs to help Jasem unpack and Haya followed after them, taking two
steps at a time.
He stood, hand on the banister, for a long time. It felt impossible, the staircase closed in
on his mind and sent him into a sort of vertigo. He was afraid that even if he could make it up,
he might never come down alone.
“Baba!” a voice called from upstairs.
His breath went the wrong way, fighting its way out instead of gushing peacefully down.
Hamza felt like he was experiencing reverse growing pains, excruciating.
Downstairs, the home gym had been converted into a rest stop. Maybe he had never
meant to go upstairs at all.
His suitcase was neatly unfolded next to the bed and the room smelled like mint. Taking
in a deeper breath, he smelled something dry like cat food.
He made to go sit down, but a hand moved to his back. It was Haya.
He broadened his smile when she gently took his hand. The gesture had felt odd the first
time, his father had never held his hand or any of his sisters’. He didn’t mind it.
Most of all, he wanted to understand that this was really happening to him. Yet, he knew
there was a tiny sliver in between that stopped him from feeling it all entirely. Tiny slivers of
thread that bound him to other places, he hoped she could not tell.
109

.
The door closes in the New York apartment, a light shines through the round peephole.
His figure moves past, casting a shadow over the field of view. Is he retreating? Coming toward
the light? The curtains draw shut and it is difficult to tell in the dark. From inside, a phone rings,
or perhaps that’s the kettle whining.
The man is seen on the subway, walking along the fence of a school, and heading back in
the apartment.
Nothing else seems to happen.
Occasionally, he snores.
110