Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

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.
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