I’ve been thinking about Newton’s third law of motion after recently revisiting it for my son’s science project: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a consoling law, built upon certainty. But human lives seldom hold such hard consolations. The leaders we elect, the borders we erect, the violence we permit produce consequences that outlive the choices that set them in motion. Mothers understand something of this. To bring a life into the world is to initiate a sequence whose consequences can never be calculated or contained. Across Guernica’s August–September double issue, motherhood appears as place, inheritance, origin, and impossible return. The works gathered here cast a look upon the afterlives of history; they ask what follows from our most intimate and collective decisions.

In fiction, Naeem Murr’s Bye-Bye Palestine traces the complex entanglements of lives back to a historical rupture whose convulsions remain present in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. “Haifa became known as Um Al Gharib, Mother of the Stranger,” Murr writes. The name holds the story’s central contradiction: a city figured as mother to those made strangers within it. In Emmy Rossum’s Tether, motherhood becomes its own law of action and reaction. In a futuristic world, a daughter uses her heightened olfactory abilities to mark the boundary between herself and her mother. Following a matrilineal inheritance through scent, she attempts to trace her way back to her own beginnings. In Yukiko Tominaga’s The Little Corner of the Factory, a child discovers the many forms love can take, and the hurt and betrayals it can contain. In a small room inside a rental hot-towel factory, the youngster is initiated into a tenderness that will outlast the people who teach it to her.

In nonfiction J. Malcolm Garcia’s narrative reportage Last Fight tells the story of a man living in the wake of his brother’s death. Nazeer, an Afghan interpreter who served alongside US forces in Afghanistan, is detained by ICE and dies within twenty-four hours of entering custody. Garcia follows a chain of consequence stretching from the war in Afghanistan to the American immigration system, tracing the afterlife of a vote, and the distance between a choice made in a voting booth and the body upon which its force eventually lands.

In A Nation Wrestles with God, excerpted from A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands, Ilan Stavans traces America’s long and unsettled relationship with the idea of God. From the use of divine authority in the service of empire to God’s persistent presence in the nation’s literature, politics, vernacular, and imagination, Stavans traces how belief becomes another force with an afterlife. The gods a nation creates continue to shape the lives over which it assumes the right to “play God.”

In Guernica’s first foray into the encounter between artificial intelligence and human epistemology, Liane Strauss and an AI read Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” together. Moving between Dickinson, Monet’s Water Lilies, and the irresolvable problems literature allows us to inhabit, Strauss discovers that an AI can identify ambiguity but cannot experience the doubt that lends it its resonant weight. The first instalment in a three-part series, the essay is a reminder that human knowledge begins in uncertain spaces.

In interviews, The Insistence of Beauty brings poets Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal into a reciprocal conversation about their new collections, LION and Roma Roam, respectively. A question becomes an invitation to step beyond the stories assigned to us, and in this exchange, each poet turns that invitation toward the other. Here, imagination creates another kind of afterlife: the freedom to move beyond violence’s last account.

In the latest installment of Guernica’s Posthumanitarian interviews series, After Development, Russell Reed speaks with Bhutanese scholar Dasho Karma Ura about the intrinsic relationship between our individual choices and communal happiness. Critiquing the humanitarian regime’s presentism, Ura suggests that our individual well-being cannot be separated from the ecological futures our present choices are already creating.

In Global Spotlights this month, Nwanne Agwu’s Faint Lines maps identity through maternal and paternal lines, and asks what it means to belong to people who came before us. Published first in Isele Magazine, the narrative reimagines home not as where one comes from, but as a place where one is recognized and held with love. 

Poetry in this issue enters the charged space where beauty and violence meet. In Tina Chang’s I’ve Gone to Look for America, Term One,  Pistil/Pistol, and I’ve Gone to Look for America, Term Two, roses tangle in the brain; a peony becomes first a woman’s cheek and then a bullet; the pistil carries within it the sound of a pistol. Within these poems, the inherited past exerts its force upon the present, but the speaker answers by naming herself—lion, flower, weapon, and “little spark”—and turning that inheritance toward another future.

Priyanuj Mazumdar’s there’s this blurry photo of me & my sister with our eyes closed moves through two family photographs taken fifteen years apart, tracing the intimate afterlives of a house, a childhood, and a mother’s love. Here, motherhood is the force exerted quietly from the edges of the image, its effects carried forward in the child.

In Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi’s Tidings of the Broken Flood, rupture becomes movement. In Feranmi’s poem, force does not meet its opposite but changes form, folding back into itself and entering whatever comes next.

Across this double issue, actions exceed the moments in which they are performed. The force may not return equally, and it may not return from the direction we expect. But it returns, nonetheless: in the stranger who still calls the lost city “mother,” in the child following a scent toward home, in the man left to fight for the meaning of his brother’s life and death, in the river continuing beneath an ash-heavy dawn.

As humans, what we set in motion outlives us. So might what we set against it.

—Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

A son traces four versions of home across Ọkpọsị and Abakaliki, following the names through which he is recognised: those of his mother, father, grandparents, and the brother whose death preceded his birth. Written by Nwanne Agwu, “Faint Lines” maps identity through maternal and paternal lines, family photographs, and inherited stories.

Published first in Isele Magazine, the story asks what it means to belong to the people who came before us, and reimagines home not as where one comes from, but as the experience of being seen with love.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

(here’s how things are named:

1. a) like they are
2. b) like we want them to be. 

–Nwanne Agwu)

You check a dictionary and it says a name is a noun that indicates or identifies a thing or an idea. You put a name in the place of a home, a skin you don’t choose at first but can get comfortable in. A cloth you can change if you want. Your name is the home you carry around, everywhere you go. You think of home as where your parents call home. As where your siblings are. As where you belong. As a person; everyone you have loved was once your home.

Home: where you feel seen.

You do not run to the dictionary to find the meaning of home because, in this one, home is just a place. You divide it by four.

Home 1 (Mgbom, Ọkpọsị):

Here, your mother is a toddler with mucus crawling down her nose. A man asks, Who are you? You say whose child you are, thinking that he must have known your mother. That, maybe, he had also heard your mother’s first cries as a baby. This man, from whom your maternal uncles and aunts inquire the years of their unregistered births and the events your grandparents never talked about, looks at you and nods. You know your home, he says. You look like where you come from.

Where do you come from? In Ọkpọsị, a person comes from, at least, two places: the maternal side and the paternal side. The two lines are the streams that form this river that could be anybody. One is as important as the other.

Mgbom is the first stream you know out of the two most important streams of descent. Here is where you meet the cousins that you do not have on your paternal side. Here is where you call home first, even though Abakaliki has been your birthplace before anywhere else. In Mgbom, your best friend is named Ọzọemena, a plea against recurrence. Your sister says he is the reincarnation of someone who died so many times; you don’t care. He is the first boy you love, the first that makes you notice and loosen up over an erection. With skin the colour of ripe mangoes, he sits with you; your dark skin, a clear parallel to his. He is plump where you are skinny and full of laughter as against your naiveté. With him, you don’t fear other parents. And when it is time to introduce yourself to his mother, you find your place in some names.

This is how you are known here: by your mother’s name, by her father’s name. You walk into your aunt’s yard and greet the people around. She holds your hand and says: This is Uzoma’s last child. In the moment, you feel pity for yourself. Like this is it, there’s loss in a name, things evoking tears. The women look at you with a certain tenderness but curiosity arises in the words of some of them: Children! He’s already grown. Isn’t he the one she named after her brother? Ah, he’s so quick!

You think of your mother seated with all these people, making jokes. They say she danced so much, so well when she was still young, alive and strong. Your mother was the okoso of her troupe, the feet that did magic on the ground, a body that swam and flew, that broke the limits of flexibility. Some would say that she was the life of the party and others would say she was a pot of music, dancing, singing, and using the instruments like she had left the womb holding them in her hands; destiny.

You think of your mother as art. You think of her as memories: butterflies that float away, sometimes aimlessly. 

In places where you think your mother is not known, you add the name of your maternal grandfather. My mother is Uzoma, the daughter of Okorie Akpoke. Or you say, I am a grandson of Okorie Akpoke; by this, you wait for questions on whose son you are, then you break their hearts by saying you are the son of a daughter and not the son of a son as they had expected. In this way, you tell stories about two different generations, people who broke their fears with faith, people who stepped in when others walked out, people who chose tears instead of faking a smile, faking a laugh.

While alive, your grandfather would talk about choosing to walk back to Ọkpọsị from the magistrate court in Afikpo because he had refused to bear false witness against someone who didn’t know him, who would still not have much regard for him even after the event. Your grandfather would rather suffer to keep a reputable name than dine with the wealthy for the opposite.

Uzoma (your mother’s name): safe way; good road; nice path.

Okorie (your grandfather’s name): born on an Orie day, a male-given name. A name mainly originated, you think, from the Arochukwu, a migratory Igbo ethnicity that lived in Ọkpọsị and interchanged cultures for decades.

Home 2 (Mebiọwa, Ọkpọsị):

Last night, you hid one of your father’s passport photographs in a book. See, you were actually going through the photo album of your family from the twentieth century. In it, were  black and white images dating between the fifties and the nineties. In the photos, your father’s wives are belles; standing on wedged heels, legs shooting out from knee-length gowns. They scare you now with the effect of age. Contrasts: gray hair against afro wigs, wrinkled skins against perfectly smooth bodies, eyes developing bags, smiles weakened into laughter. You search for depth and think of things that do not go beyond the lips. These women should be six, you see five. Your mother is also in the picture, the sixth and last wife of your father. The first died even before the fifth was married. You think of grief and see your half-brother, a motherless toddler walking among friendly enemies called stepmothers, learning to live within boundaries, to love back when he is loved, and to loathe when loathed.

See, all these women had the names of their fathers until your father happened to them. You think of a community and remember your father’s compound. Beehive. Anthill. You are the last child, they say you never saw a thing. Child of your father’s old age.

You walk out of your father’s compound and say you are the son of Agwu Nwogo. This is the magic itself, your father’s name is a door opener here. It is respect. Man says he keeps his life holy and you see it daily when he prays before doing anything. (You are motherless so when people talk about their praying mothers, you talk about your praying father who even prays before drinking, before eating, before leaving the house, while bathing.) You see it when he would rather keep quiet or argue, scold or accuse, than lay a curse on any of his children.

They say your father is a personality. His name is his personality, his reputation. They talk about his wealth and how he was a Messiah, about how he walked into places and had them changed forever. You look around for the wealth, you don’t see it, you go back to the pictures and are reminded that he once had servants, that parents celebrated and called themselves lucky if they noticed his interest in their daughters.

This is not the real home of your father as regards the patrilocal residential system practiced in Ọkpọsị. It is the maiden home of his maternal grandmother and also the maiden home of your maternal grandmother (the mother of your mother had been married from here into Mgbom and people always said that your mother went back to replace her mother).

This place that your father calls home accepted him through his mother’s uncle who had prayed for a boy from his niece. And because he was born here, this, too, became his home as his father had died before his birth.

Home 3 (Amaechi, Ọkpọsị):

This is the real home of your father, the root of his name. His father died during his expectancy and he was thought to be his father’s quick reincarnation. He was named after his father.

Your father’s father was born here by a very popular and wealthy mother. He was given his mother’s name as his last name.

Agwu: the name of a god who is also a spirit. Spirit of art and divination. Agwu means prophecy. Agwu becomes destiny. Agwu possesses a man and makes him a spirit in flesh.

Nwogo (nwa+ogo): the child of Ogo. Your father’s father’s last name comes from his mother’s name. Your father bears the name of his father and that of his grandmother as his surname.

You think of feminism and compare it to privilege, to power. The difference wherever we are is power. Your father says that every child his paternal grandmother had taken kept her name as their last name. Even when she remarried. Even after her death. He says power means everything, and in the hands of a woman, it is the same as in the hands of a man. You smile at his name, Nwogo. A reclamation, a belonging. Was this what she wanted of her children or what they already were even before she had tried?

In a dream, your great-grandmother is a curvy woman. Though silenced by age, her beauty still smiles at you. You ask if she is the source of your father’s daughters’ curviness and she starts laughing, her cheeks breaking into dimples and her face lighting up, the colour of ripe plantain. She says no, then says maybe, then smiles. And you stop dreaming. Now age makes you ask if that dream was in black and white like old photos. Craze! You forgot to ask her about investment, about power, about names. You dream again but you don’t see her.

Home 4 (Abakaliki):

Here, your father is a figure and a personality. Since 1959, he has lived and traded from here. He talks about Cameroon and other West African countries. He talks about hospitality in Obudu, Ikom, and Ogoja. Those are places he had gone to buy achi, ogbono, ekpiri, and their likes which he brought back to Abakaliki to sell. You see Gabonese notes in his pockets and wish they are recent. There are coins, too, in a bag, from various places: Nigerian pennies, Francs from different Francophone countries all looking alike. Useless. You once thought of using the ones with holes as keyholders. Your father has been to places and has retired. You ask him if Abakaliki is home to him and he says no. But you don’t believe him.

Your father is a nonagenarian, has outlived most of his peers, and is possibly the oldest Ọkpọsị man living in Abakaliki.

People say he doesn’t age and you laugh. In the photos from many decades ago, he looks young and possesses the swagger of youth. Now it’s just a gait and a cup of happiness daily. In his bedroom, your father exercises all the time and talks about his frailty. They won’t know that. At night, your father complains of things crawling on his skin. In the morning, he exercises like a slightly older childhood friend, who is still alive but lives in Ọkpọsị, had taught him.

You write your name beside his everywhere you can think of: Nwanneka Christopher Agwu. This too is reclamation, a name given to you after the death of the original bearer, your late brother, without whose death you would never have been born.

This name you have twisted and mangled and tried stretching and straightening is also your passcode. You say it at doors and watch them open or close. You smile when you hear it and you are not sure if this is who you are or who you want to be. If your name already has enough reputation on its shoulders. If people see you when they hear your name or if they think, instead, of your name when they see you?

A boy once joked that your name sounds funny; Nwanne Agwu, Agwu’s sibling. Am I speaking with Nwanne Agwu himself or Nwanne, the brother of Agwu? your mentor’s daughter had asked the day you spoke with her on the phone. In your legal documents, it is Christopher Agwu. But you have learned to choose and to never stop choosing.

In the end, you want to be seen because that is love. Where you come from, to be loved is to be seen, even when you are not there, even when you are just another fragment of memory, a rainbow: faint lines drawn in a curvature across the sky, begging to take the place of stars.

Seen. Completely. Loved.

“Faint Lines,” written by Nwanne Agwu, and originally published in Isele Magazine which describes itself as publishing “notable fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, art/photography, and reviews from writers on the African continent and around the world.”

It’s the scent.

The rot of seaweed. The syrupy garbage a child leaves behind. The filthy underside of a gull picking at something dead. The salt.

I walk the swallowed beach, where the sea keeps taking back what we once called land.

Years ago, I sat here with my mother. The inescapable scent of her made me sick. 

Velvet. Cumin. Yeast.

The wind from the ocean swept the yeast from her skin. And I was grateful for it. 

If I am the nose, my mother is the hand. I make things from scent, and she shapes clay. Or, she did. She always said sculpting was like midwifing. You don’t make the form, you help it be born. 

My work demands control. Focus. Precision. The lab smells like nothing. Not actually nothing. Even nothing has a scent.

Air. Aluminum. Isopropyl.

The nothing makes my skin itch, like waiting for a call. And then I begin.

Strawberry. Tomato. Bark.

In the silence of the lab, the scents are loud. They even speak. They mix, change, pervert one another—until they become something new. There’s instinct at play too—something that leads to creation. Is it a gift? Maybe it’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it’s a little something that’s all mine.

These small experiments—if exceptional—will one day live inside a bottle, purchased by a select few who value such luxuries, who can still afford them. A faceless woman I will never know, whose neck will be taken in by strangers, lovers, passersby. 

Marina. Wood. Rope.

Time ticks, then flies, swallowed by an unknown force. And suddenly I’m in the place I call home. The scent of the lab clings to me. I stare into the fridge and see nothing exciting. I scroll past decadent meals I’ll never order—too tired, too protective of my own body.

At the STERIX, I stand under fluorescent lights to buy toothpaste. Mint that stings my gums but promises oral health. I buy a diet soda too. Fuck oral health.

Cherry. Synthetic. Sour.

In the festive aisle, shiny, ugly balloons scream Happy Mother’s Day. An indictment.

I haven’t spoken to my mother in months. Longer. Since the rupture. The fight about Carol. This is rare for us. We’ve never gone silent with each other like this before. 

Should I get her a balloon? That feels dumb. Would I hand it to her? Face to face? I’m not ready for that. Am I sorry for what I said? I don’t even remember the words. I’ve blacked them out. Adrenaline and cortisol are happy helpers. 

It’s always been like this, a seesaw. A push-pull. Get too close, get burned. 

What’s it called when you torch a field to make it grow back stronger? A controlled burn? That’s what she thinks she does. Maybe it works.

I shouldn’t have told her about Carol. But to be honest, I know why I told her. To stress-test it. To protect myself. I haven’t really had romance ever; I don’t let it get that far.

Carol was kind, quiet. I like quiet. Carol was faint. 

Persimmon. Scallion. Musk.

Worked in marketing or something adjacent. Her tattoos were fading. Her teeth weren’t straight, but her mouth crinkled when she smiled. We didn’t have much in common, but she liked me. I like you, Eva, she said softly out loud. And I guess I liked that.

I floated Carol’s name casually. Showed my mother a picture. And let her do what she does.

She diagnosed Carol as ordinary. Being ordinary is, to my mother, the worst thing that you can be. She said liking me wasn’t the same as being worthy of me. That a life built beside a Carol was worse than being alone. Was I satisfied with so little?

I let her diagnosis land, knowing at once that it was over with Carol. I was poisoned. Or protected.

And then I said it, whatever vicious thing I said in return. The bit I don’t recall. I wanted to cut her. I wanted her hurt to be bigger than mine. And then she went quiet.

I asked Dr. Day if it was childish to measure pain like that, to compare who hurts more. Am I even capable of hurting her like she’s hurt me? And who makes the first move now? I asked. The less hurt one? 

Dr. Day replied, I think you’re trying to quantify in order to understand. You’re intellectualizing—that’s a tactic of avoidance. Instead of feeling it, you’re narrating. Even now, here, I can feel you telling a story. Not really connecting.

Now, months later, I can’t tell if I am feeling a missing or a guilt. My mother is alone. But I’m alone and I’m just fine. Aren’t I? There I go again, comparing. As if we are the same. We are not. She longs for togetherness. Companionship. A tether between us. And I am fine. We are not the same, Margaret and I. I refuse to think we could be. 

As I walk back to the place I call home, I smell a patch of real grass in front of a bungalow.

Palm. Piss. Green.

The city doesn’t smell like exhaust anymore. The roads belong to the fleets—silent, obedient, green machines humming along, always ready, filled by riders in the back, eyes lit by their own little worlds. No one looks up still.

My thumb hovers over the pixels that form letters that spell my mother’s name. But even though I won’t text her, the act of not texting does something.

A buzz on my screen: Hi, Eva.

II

We are seated at a lovely table with an ivory tablecloth. I know I will pay for our meal. My mother is and always has been frugal and this will be my olive branch. She is dressed nicely, in one of her two linen A-line dresses. I have seen her in this dress many times before. She’s taken care of it for years. Hand washes and irons it herself. 

And I know her scent.

Pepper. Talc. Yeast.

As a child in our small apartment, I was often trapped with the scent of her. So I learned early on to escape it. Other scents, mixed or layered, cover or distract. The absence of the scent was the only thing that settled my young anxious body.

A strawberry-shortcake scented marker stuffed deeply in a nostril. A smear of Icy Hot menthol on my upper lip. Anything strong enough to kill the scent of her. 

Today, in the restaurant, the yeast of her is actually subtle, barely noticeable. I still smell it, of course. Children remain hyper-attuned to the warning scent of a parent. And yet, somehow, the yeast has softened.

She’s overly cordial with the waiter, performing the role of a woman who belongs in places with ivory tablecloths. Today she smiles, laughs, says the menu is decadent! Just begging to connect. He doesn’t know that she hasn’t bought new underwear in years. We used to argue about it—how little she allowed herself. Not even a new toothbrush until the bristles splayed outward like broken bones.

She orders champagne, over-pronouncing the French. The waiter grins, genuinely charmed, and says, You deserve it, Mommy.  It’s Mother’s Day! It’s your day!

She beams and says with a laugh, It is my day! But I’m only a mother because of my daughter. And Eva is a miracle. 

She talks about me to this waiter as if we haven’t been estranged. Today, to this waiter, we are close. Mother and daughter. Which, of course, we are. We cannot un-be. 

She reaches to cradle my hand in hers. It is frail and veined and I can’t help but imagine her inevitable death. I somehow manage a smile and don’t pull my hand away.

Moments later, my mother sips the champagne. I do too.

Acid. Apple. Brioche.

It calms me to see her relax. Perhaps she won’t bring up the silence. Her French toast arrives.

Custard. Lard. Brûlée.

I worry if this level of consumption is contagious. The proximity. 

She says, Not to be morbid…

Oh, no.

But I was getting my affairs in order.

Oh, no.

Relax, I’m not dying.

My body softens. She notices.

Oh, you would want to know? Got it. I didn’t know if you’d care.

I just sigh and stay silent. There’s no right answer here.

Anyway, she continues, I was going through my affairs, and there is something.

What something? I don’t want something. I don’t want anything. But I stay silent. What could I possibly inherit? Maybe one of the last pieces she sculpted but could never sell? The art market doesn’t want an old woman. She reaches into her raffia bag, the one I got her years ago when my first scent sold out. She slides her screen across the table, like it’s a napkin. Like it’s nothing.

I don’t like the not knowing. I’m scared my face won’t make the right expression when I learn whatever it is.

Read it, she says.

III

I think about it for weeks.

A child.

Not something I’ve really ever considered. Until that brunch, I didn’t even know there was another one.

There were two embryos. One became you. The other has been on ice all these years. Waiting. Just in case.

I don’t know what she imagined. I certainly couldn’t have imagined this. She doesn’t have enough money to keep it frozen anymore. So, it’s mine, if I want it.

Technically a sibling, she says. But it could be—

A child. My child.

I haven’t spent my days fixated on what I can’t have. I spent enough of my early years wanting a father who never came. What might a long-lost father smell like? I wondered for decades before I put the thought away. Dreaming of unlikely things is, at best, a waste of minutes. And we don’t know how many minutes we have been given. 

It’s common now, for couples and singles not to even try. There’s no name for us. It’s just become a default. It crept in quietly, and then, suddenly, it was.

I learn that Embryo128PRQTY is female.

I know it before I know it. A flicker. It clicks into place like a memory resurfacing.

I’m furious with her for putting the possibility in my head. Or maybe it was always there—lurking, dormant—and she only unearthed it. Now it fills me.

Powder. Tart. Milk.

I don’t even know if I want it.

Crayon. Detergent. Cloud.

The thought of it defrosting. A sticky cluster of human material coming apart. Languishing. Unfed.

Banana. Marshmallow. Linen.

This cluster of cells. Whatever it is. Or will become. Or won’t. A sibling. Child.

Lavender. Strawberry. Vomit.

I don’t know these scents. But I want to.

At our weekly session, I tell Dr. Day, The idea is outrageous. Dangerous, illogical.

He says, You’re still in your head. How does it feel? 

How can you feel the unknown? I challenge.

Imagine into it, and see how it feels, he says.

I imagine my mother on the day of my conception, thawing me. Using a pen, signing a paper, when pens and paper were still commonplace.

Would this cluster—128PRQTY—ever know the smell of paper? By the time it’s old enough, perhaps there won’t be paper anymore.

I imagine myself in the lab, trying to recreate the scent of paper:

Dust. Starch. Pulp.

I imagine myself teaching this cluster about the world that came before. I am pulled by the possibility of this sharing, of connection, of knowing and being known. My gut twists with yearning. Is this a feeling? Needless to say, it infects me.

I sit, sweating, at Pacific Cryogenetics Institute. It’s a cold place, but my body is hot. 

A screen glows as I tap:

Yes / No 

Yes / No 

Yes / No 

Yes / No

I need ownership airtight. I want protection. I can’t owe my mother anything. She will be nowhere near this cluster—no stake, no say. Already, I’m afraid. For it. For me. That she’ll find a way in.

It is on 06/06/2075. I hold my eye to a sensor and with the soundless scan of a red beam, I pay. It’s done. Mine. This small cluster of human material—claimed.

IV

I don’t tell her, which was in accordance with what she offered me. I don’t want to let her into the softness. The softness is no place for her scalpel. I want the secret.

I like secrets. They make you feel special. Like when that older man hurt me—under the guise of love. I didn’t tell my mother about that. The blooming scent of her learning of my victimization would have been unbearable.

What is motherhood? A strange, wonderful, terrifying ache? A thing that rips you open and makes you whole?

Whatever it is, it’s just within reach.

At night, alone on a kitchen stool or sitting on the cold shower floor cradling the single finger of tequila I allow myself at the end of the day, I imagine Embryo128PRQTY and me, together. There we were side by side, in frozen petri-dishes in the soft, sterile dark, comforted by the hum of electricity.

Ethanol. Ozone. Preservative.

Did we know each other? Or just sleep side by side? And when I was selected for transfer, did it feel my absence?

I wonder, would my body accept it? Would it know I wasn’t really its mother? Would it reject me? Somehow sensing the wrongness of me?

Had Embryo128PRQTY been born a sibling, it would have grown beside me, holding my hand, sharing eye rolls when our mother criticized our thighs, pinched at her own cellulite in the mirror. 

Sock. Hairspray. Grape.

Would 128PRQTY have been the favorite? Taller? More worthy? Would we have shared a room? A bed? Would we have fought over crushes?

Lipstick. Carpet. Notebook.

Would we be neighbors now, with windows facing each other’s living rooms, unable to separate, even in adulthood? Or would we be estranged, running from the shared shrapnel of our mother.

Embryo128PRQTY has taken up residence, at least in my mind. Her possibility is deafening, as if she’s already waiting, insistent, relentless, demanding to be.

V

I don’t tell my mother I’m doing it. Maybe on some level she will know. But I don’t want her opinion. I don’t want her to change my mind. And secrets are intoxicating. 

I start tracking my cycle for a doctor whose manner is strictly clinical.  Her name is hyphenated, so I assume she’s coupled, but I don’t ask.

A technician calls the day before the procedure. She wants verbal confirmation of intent. Thaw is scheduled for tomorrow. Transfer the following day. I hear my voice say yes.

VI

I swallow the pill to relax my cervix.

The technician comes in and shows me an image. Here she is, Embryo128PRQTY.

A cluster of cells, mid-thaw, under the microscope.

She’s hatching, the technician says.

And she’s right. 128PRQTY is already in motion. Growing. Multiplying.

We don’t always see that kind of viability anymore, she says. I think she smiles under her mask. 

A sharp pinch as the cluster is deposited into my uterine lining.

It should begin burrowing immediately, she says. Since it’s a hatcher.

And then I wait.

VII

When I was younger, I never played dolls or babies. My mother was industrious—she fixed things around the place we called home. Built furniture. Took the sink apart with her hands.

Being a baby maker never was a goal. I didn’t feel unfulfilled. I didn’t sit longingly, watching families at four–seat tables. Sometimes I would dream, but dreams are things we cannot control.

My mother’s generation was the last that fought for motherhood, amidst the rising regulations. That’s why she calls me a miracle. She brought me into the world alone. I think that I might be repeating the pattern. But I do it anyway.

This cluster is just a cluster. Nothing more. Not yet. It might recognize that I’m not its mother. It might revolt, slough off, and cease to be.

When the blood comes a few days later, I call Dr. Hyphenated-Name. She asks, How much blood?

Only a few drops, in my underwear, I hear myself say, waiting.

Oh great. Implantation bleeding, she suspects. I realize how little I’ve read about this. How little I let myself believe.

It’s just a little shedding as she finds a comfy spot.

She, I register.

Powder. Sock. Bandaid.

A week later, a nurse takes my blood. My stomach is knotted with wait. I scratch at my scalp and sniff at the flakes of yellow caked under a fingernail.

Botanic. Scalp. Brine.

The reliable brine of myself calms me.

And again, I know it before I know. Somehow. Even before the nurse reenters with a broad smile. 

I walk out of the office in a daze. The cluster has taken to me.

Sunlight floods the top deck of the building. My eyes strain. I can see the ocean from here. What’s left of it. Where the richest lost their fourth homes when I was three.

You need a ticket now to get on the sand. Too unstable. Too unpredictable. It can’t be shared with too many at a time.

The nurse runs after me. I’ve forgotten the shots I’ll need to administer daily.

Congratulations, Mommy, the nurse says. You can expect bruising!

I don’t have a ticket for the beach. So I get as close as I can, to see blue, to feel warm. I want the cluster to smell the salt, through me, as soon as possible.

Will her sense of smell be as keen as mine? Will I be able to explain the scent of Juicy Fruit? Our mother used to love Juicy Fruit, I will tell this sister-child. No. My child. She is my child and I will tell her about Juicy Fruit. They don’t make it anymore, I’ll say. It’s banned.

In the days that follow, I don’t feel ill. I don’t feel radiant. I don’t feel much of anything, physically.

I work as always. But before, and after, I find myself lingering, talking to strangers. There’s levity in the chatter. It doesn’t feel strained, as it usually does. It reminds me of someone I’m not: my mother. I find myself talking to a barista. I’m pregnant, I hear myself tell him. Allowing the words outside of me for the first time. I shouldn’t be having coffee, but it’s the scent, I tell him.

Burnt. Velvet. Marzipan.

The yeast too, from the bakery, I tell him. Smells like my mother. Sweet, a little rotten.

He laughs easily. Perhaps it’s just the hormones making me chatty.

I haven’t seen my mother at all. She invites me to a Passover Seder at her cousin’s house.

Matzo. Apples. Cinnamon.

Historical, familial scents that tie us together.

I examine my body for obvious signs but find none, so she won’t know. As long as she doesn’t know, it can’t hurt.

VIII

She tells me I look great.

I’ve told her for years—no comments on appearance. So when she says I look great, I feel my forehead rise reflexively, reminding. She catches herself, throws her hands up. Sorry, sorry. No unsolicited feedback, she says.

Even positive? her cousin asks, ladling the soup.

Bone. Vinegar. Wine.

No feedback at all, thank you, I say firmly. 

My mother just smiles—Got it!—and nods. That feels new. And I want to believe her.

She looks nice too, but I don’t tell her. Even the smallest moves require strategy.

IX

Days later, I dream I am spreading, multiplying, a shape unrecognized, exploding like a constellation. I wake, consumed by fear of money and ownership. I transfer $99,999 into Margaret’s account. I feel immediately better.

I need to figure out my story. A gift? An early milestone birthday? Or maybe I’ll just tell her the truth. I wait for her call. She must have noticed. It’s not every day she has a windfall. She must have seen the numbers rearranged. $99,999. But she doesn’t call. Has she not noticed my hand in there?

So I fold. I call. I tell her, I’ve done it. The transfer. The cluster. So, the money. I just want this to be clean. So, that’s that. But did you not see the money?

She tells me she saw it. She appreciates it, certainly. It will help ease my life, she says. I didn’t call because I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it. Or at all. No unsolicited feedback, she reminds me, gently.

Oh, right, I say, suddenly on my back foot.

Then she says, Thank you for the gift. And for telling me. Though, I think I already knew.

Before the money? I ask.

I had a dream. About a child. Not a dream. A flicker, she says. She doesn’t know how to explain it.

Try, I say, desperate to be back on my front foot.

There are things we don’t understand, she says. I can often feel you. Or something of you. Even in the silence. Sometimes, I feel a door open, just a little, she says. There is a link between us. Even if you’d sometimes prefer there wasn’t, she says.

Look, I’m not telling people, I say. And anyway, it’s mine to tell—if and when I want. I’ve rehearsed it with Dr. Day—the phrasing, the calm tone. I remind myself: clarity is not cruelty.

Okay, she says simply.

I wait for the but. It doesn’t come.

So I say, Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell your cousin. 

Okay, she says.

Galvanized now, I continue: No name suggestions, no suggestions at all. No check-ins, no drop-ins, no gifts. 

Okay, she says.

I don’t know how this is going to go, I admit.

I understand, she says.

I need to find my way through this. I can’t hear myself when you’re too close, I say.

Okay, she just says again. I’m here if you need, she says. Be well.

And that’s it. The muscle I had been preparing goes unused.

X

The weeks are easy. I am well. A little tired, maybe. A little hungry. I nourish myself in ways I’ve never allowed. 

Something has awakened in me, alive. The skin between my legs will not be ignored. I touch the wet-furry-sticky.

Butter. Apricot. Brine.

I don’t dare taste it but I want to. When I climax, my uterus tightens like a vice, so perverse, so beautiful, so strange. I worry that I’m hurting you but it feels so good so I don’t stop. I’ve never been sexual. I’ve wanted to be, wondered if I could be, but have quietly accepted life without examination.

My mother is sexual. I know this because of the photographs I once found under her bed. In them, she’s holding a wire, triggering the shutter, facing up to the lens, fucking, but present enough to capture the photo. There’s a body on top of her but you can’t see the person’s face. Just skin and limbs, twisting.

Dr. Day once asked if I liked my sexual self. Not in a weird way. In a doctor way. This is a normal thing I suppose people consider. I just laughed, awkwardly. What’s a sexual self? The light was dim inside me till now.

Now I watch people fuck on the internet. Short people. Tall people. Live people. Recorded people. Old people. Fat people. Foreign people. Multiple people. Single people. Violent people. Sticky people. Animated people. Quiet people. Weird people. Anonymous people. Panting people. Screaming people. Insatiable people.

I wake myself up in the middle of the night to come. This is not me. At work, I am amazed what my body can do on a cold bathroom floor.

Ammonia. Cream. Dirt.

I watch myself in the mirror. Who is this? This back arching, mouth open, jaw unhinging sexual being.

I don’t tell my mother about the hunger. Or the mirror. Or that it feels like I’m borrowing her skin.

The cluster is no longer a cluster. It, she, you are large. I feel you twitch, turn, summersault. My elbow jerks before sleep. Your jagged elbow juts in my ribs, a warning, firing of nerves. Perhaps I need magnesium. I eat a banana but it doesn’t stop.

You are running out of room. A body inside a body pressing out against its walls. It feels like I am too. My queen bed feels small. Sheets wrap like bindings. I am tangled, overheated. The place I call home shrinks. We’re too much for this space. Your sensitivities—sunlight, fluorescence—are mine now too. I crave dark. I crave fat. I stand in my dark kitchen, eating a cold stick of butter at 3am. You are puppeting me.

XI

I have questions for the doctor. Not Dr. Hyphenated-Name. I’ve graduated. I see a birthing doctor now. She has a single last name. I assume she is single or she’s taken her partner’s name. I don’t ask about this. 

I ask about the changes. 

She says, Perhaps you’re syncing. An empathetic response.

I’m unsure if this is a thing, but Dr. Single Last Name is a legitimate doctor so I don’t question it.

Perhaps you’re channeling Baby, she says. Anything’s possible. Baby’s cells cross into your body through the umbilical cord. Some of those cells settle in your brain, your heart, your lungs. It’s called microchimerism. Your child living inside you, for the rest of your life.

I didn’t know that, I say.

Oh yes, she says. There are little bits of you floating inside your mother, lodged in her thyroid, kidneys, bone marrow, right now, she says. Pretty neat, huh?

I don’t like that at all.

Anyway, there’s still a lot about transference we don’t understand, Dr. Single Last Name says. Now, not to be alarming but I do want to touch on preeclampsia. The protein in the urine. The swelling. The blood pressure is not alarming yet but it is trending, she says. Have you been dizzy? Headaches? Flashing lights when you close your eyes?

No, I say. Although sometimes the lights come. 

Later in the STERIX, I stare at stretch mark potions.

My belly snags like a snake squeezing the life out of something powerless. Thirty weeks. Too soon for contractions. But I am on my knees. Strangers rush over, well-meaning, crowding. I don’t want them near me, near you. The scent of myself is suddenly sickening.

Lanolin. Milkrot. Brine.

What’s happening? The pain is enough to make me fold. There’s only one person I want. My mother. A stranger in the STERIX calls her. She is there almost immediately. We are back at Dr. Single Last Name’s office.

Nonproductive contractions, Dr. Single Last Name says. Tightenings. Just think of it as practice pain.

Your body is preparing. It’s not a bad thing, she offers. 

My mother stands nearby. Not overbearing. Just there.

I let her bring me to the place I call home. I sit shaking on the couch, recovering.

Did you ever get these tightenings? I ask, tentatively.

No, but we aren’t terribly alike, she says. Do you want me to stay or go?

I want her to stay. Just an hour or two, I tell her. Don’t get too comfortable.

She just nods, a soft smile. I don’t recognize this gentleness.

Thank you, I say. I don’t know what this thanking will do. What it might undo. A crack in a door for her waiting fingers.

I can’t lose myself in the vastness that is her.

I fall asleep. When I wake, she’s gone.

XII

For Margaret’s birthday, we go to the beach. We get a ticket and everything. It’s been years since we’ve done that. We are two of only a lucky few on a sunny day. The scent of her is neutralized in the salt breeze.

XIII

In the 39th week, it happens. I don’t go to the hospital right away. I want to savor these last few hours while we are still one thing. Connected by a cord. Tethered to each other. But the pain deepens until it’s something that cannot be un-started.

I am an animal. I am instinct. I am between life and death. The purest state I’ve known. I scream. And you are born.

I will never be the same. And then another tightening pushes out the after-birth.

Rancid. Tallow. Copper.

An atrocity that has been inside me sustaining you.

Death. Rot. Metal.

An organ to be discarded with the other parts of discarded people.

XIV

Then you are with me in the place I call home. The place we call home. You fill the space, even in your smallness. I feared I would not know you. But I do. You have nails, hair, bones I grew inside my body. You are delicious.

Rosewater. Chamomile. Water. 

Peas. Botanics. Honey.

Coconut. Lime. Yeast.

Yeast? But then it’s gone. I’m exhausted. My senses have diminished. Perhaps I am only imagining it.

XV

Swollen hands, shaky breath, dark urine. I don’t want to tell Dr. Single Last Name but it’s best for you that I am well.

Is there someone that can take care of Baby? She asks. You’ll be in the hospital overnight, she says. Maybe two. While we get this under control.

Then my mother comes, eagerly. Go, she says, taking you from me. And I have no choice. There’s no one else. I’m furious.

At the hospital, a round-faced nurse with a soft voice says, Relax, Mommy, for your pressure.

My mother brings you to visit. I notice a mole between your toes, like mine. Just like mine.

Are moles hereditary? I ask every medical professional who passes by. No one seems to know.

XVI

When I come home, my mother’s hands are tearing up the kitchen. Pans are clattering, scraping. The sugar in the air is cloying. 

Egg. Vanilla. Yeast.

That fucking yeast of her permeates the place we call home. But you are okay. I breathe you in.

Lanolin. Almond. Yeast.

It’s all over you. My nostrils are screaming. 

Margaret brings something on a tray.

Brioche. Maple. Yeast.

Bile springs to my throat. I say thank you.

At last, she leaves. I scrub every surface, open every window, until the yeast is gone.

I nestle beside you on cotton. 

Ozone. Neon. Jasmine.

A breeze brushes the top of your skull, soft, exposed, hurtable. I stare at you and call you Baby. I don’t know your name. It’s too important. I don’t want to get it wrong. I sniff you, forensically.

My brine. You have it. It should bring comfort. Instead, it unsettles.

XVII

I take you to the doctor for children. I have questions. This doctor has her partner’s name, a borrowed name.

See the mole between her toes? Like mine. And her earlobes? Webbed, like mine, I tell Dr. Borrowed-Name. It’s strange. The likeness. Except that my eyes are brown and hers are gray, I see no other differences. Also the brine. It’s unmistakable. My brine.

Dr. Borrowed-Name is confused. Brine?

My scent. I know my scent, I say with authority.

Well, babies usually look like their mommies, Dr. Borrowed-Name says. And you live together, so it’s unsurprising that you smell similar. But I don’t notice a distinctive odor.

Have you seen this before? I ask.

How much are you sleeping, Mommy? she asks.

I take a jagged breath. I’m not really her mother, I confess. Sure, I birthed her, but the embryo is, was, genetically my sister. Created alongside the embryo that made me.

Regardless of origin, you’re her mother, she says. And in either case, we would expect similarities. 

Down to the same moles? I say, challenging. And the brine?

I see you’re rattled, she says. And this feels very real to you. Mothers with preeclampsia are more likely to experience postpartum mood disorders. Neuro-inflammation impacts perception. We see confusion, delusion, paranoia. Lack of sleep doesn’t help. Do you have someone at home to help with Baby?

That’s not it, I say.

Dr. Borrowed Name says, Go home. Get some rest. Get some help with Baby if you can.

XVIII

I don’t go home. I don’t rest. I call Dr. Day. He’s not working but he hears the frantic cadence of my voice. We meet at a café on a street called Elm that used to have trees. Seeing him here feels special. The familiar waxy scent of him settles my anxious body.

I’m not crazy, I say. And he smiles.

So, brine, moles, ear lobe webbing, all like you, he says. You think, what, she’s you?

I shrug, scared.

Some kind of reincarnation? he asks. A clone?

No, no. I don’t think I believe in that. I don’t know what I believe, but not that, I say.

So, what? he asks. What are you thinking? 

I don’t know, what are you thinking? I say.

I don’t know, what are you thinking? And now it’s a game. Your turn, he says. 

I shake my head.

Before the transfer, you saw embryology reports? he asks.

Sure. Health testing, viability odds, I say.

What about origin? he asks. Why did you think it was a sibling?

The embryo had the same genetic contributors as are listed on my birth certificate, I say.

So you recall seeing your mother’s name? he says.

Yes, I say.

And what about a father? he asks.

Well, these reports don’t say mother and father. They say, like, genetic source, or egg source / sperm source, but no, there was no genetic source listed, it just said N/A. Like my birth certificate.

N.A. like initials? he asks.

No. N/A as in Not Applicable. That’s what my mother always said he was. It was sort of a joke. But also not. Because that’s what she actually put on my birth certificate. Margaret Caldwell and N/A. My mother said he didn’t want to be a father, so he’s not applicable. Why are we even talking about him? I don’t know who he is. And she won’t tell me, I say.

I know, he says.

I know you know, I say with an edge. 

Dr. Day takes a breath. I’m on your side. I know I can’t ever fully understand because it didn’t happen to me, but the absence of a father has always been big for you. It’s why you came to work with me. It’s what we’ve been building here. A recreation of that lost attachment. Something reliable. It’s why I met you here today. You matter, he says.

It makes me uncomfortable when he comes close.

Am I just… inflamed? Neurologically? I ask, dodging.

Maybe, he offers. But more information about Baby—or you—might help put your mind at ease.

XIX

Back in the place we call home, Baby sleeps. I open my Pacific Cryogenics portal. I scour it for anything I might have missed, any overlooked detail waiting to shift everything.

Oocyte Source: Margaret Caldwell 

Sperm Source: N/A

ID numbers, viability stats, a health certificate from SoCal Reproductive Center. No smoking gun. Nothing redacted. I try to get into Margaret’s portal, but it needs a 16-character password. And that means me needing Margaret.

I hate that I do it. Margaret picks up on the first ring. Like she’d been waiting.

I think I need help with Baby. Just for the night, I say. She arrives with a gift. My baby clothes yellowed with time. She saved them.

Cedar. Detergent. Yeast.

I explicitly said no gifts. But I need answers.

We sit over paella while I rock Baby. Margaret sips the last of some wine. I play the vulnerable, grateful mother in awe. I wanted to thank you. For the embryo, for Baby. For staying back, I say. And I think I get it now, I say, how much you loved me.

Loved?

Love. It must have been hard to stay away, I say. I can’t imagine ever being away from her.

Margaret nods, slowly.

I just want to know everything about her, where she came from, I say. I think she’s changing me. Maybe I’m tired. I mean, I know I’m tired. But here we are—three generations. It’s softening me. 

That’s good. You’ve always been a little hard, she says.

I swallow the fury. I stand to get the wine. I need to find my way to N.A. 

You know, when I was younger, I found something. I never told you, I say. 

What?

Photographs, I say. Under your bed. Of you with a man.

I pour her more wine, as if we’re friends, drinking, reminiscing.

You did? Huh. She stiffens. They’re rather explicit, she says.

Intimate, more like, I say. It was a peek at a secret side of you that I didn’t know existed. I’ve always wondered who that person was. I pause. Of course, you don’t have to tell me, I add.

She doesn’t offer anything, so I continue.

I know I say I want space, boundaries, but really… I think every child is desperate for every morsel they can gobble up about their parents’ private existences, I say gently. You can’t see his face in the photos, I say, leaning back, casual—like everything doesn’t depend on this. Was he someone important?

Momentarily, maybe, she offers.

Was he N/A? I say.

Her head straightens. What? she asks.

Was he my father? Was he not applicable? The one in the pictures? 

No, she says.

I always thought maybe he was. 

No, she says.

I nod, sipping. Well, so, what was he like? I ask. N/A, I mean.

We’re having a nice time. Don’t start this again, she says, eyes narrowing.

Okay, I say, pretending to give up. You’re right.

He didn’t want a family. He didn’t want to be included, she offers.

I know, but you didn’t think maybe he’d want to meet his daughter? I ask.

No, she says.

Or Baby, I say.

Well, she’s certainly not his daughter. She’s not anything to him, she says, draining her glass into the sink.

I try to soften my face. People change. Look at us. Maybe he’s different now too. And what if Baby wants to know one day?

You have to lay claim to someone to be family, she says. Or else it’s just genetic code. A helix in a blender. He wasn’t your father. He’s not her father. You need to rest. For your daughter. You’re tired, she says, picking up her purse.

You’re right, I say, but I don’t mean it. I need her to stay. There must be more. I’m sorry I upset you. I was intrusive. It’s the wine.

She nods, agreeing with me. Alcohol doesn’t suit you, something about your composition.

I swallow more rage. Then I swallow more wine. I ask if she can stay. I’m solicitous.

If it’s not too much of an imposition. I could use the help overnight with Baby, with the wake-ups.

XX

Baby sleeps. Margaret sleeps. I pretend to sleep. But really I’m waiting.

I open her lock screen. The code is still 3171. I look for her Pacific Cryo password but find nothing.

I pace. I don’t know what I’m looking for. But I look.

I look for names I don’t recognize in her contacts. 

I look for names with initials N.A.

I look for mentions of my name. 

I look for numbers unsaved.

I reverse look up the unsaved numbers: a hairdresser, a plumber, a hotline for political volunteering. Dead ends.

I look in photos. No one I don’t recognize. No men.

I look in folders. I find a folder inside a folder: Original Ceramics – Archive.

Two subfolders: WORKS FOR SALE / PERSONAL WORK. I open PERSONAL WORK. Photographs and the sculptures inspired by them.

Untitled, 2021.

Study, contour – neck. 

Variation in gray, 2045.

And a photograph of a face. A sharp jaw. A full mouth. A sloped nose. A webbed earlobe. Like mine.

I know this face. It has been used as a blueprint in my mother’s work. Reinterpreted, reimagined, over and over in sculpture. A jaw poured into handles. A nose in a curved vase. A face captured as inspiration, shaped and reshaped until the origin disappeared.

I upload the original photo of the face. I reverse search it. 

The engine prompts: Human/Circa/Composite/Engineered?

I input: Human. 2030–2040. Someone, anyone real who had that face. 

One match returns. With a name.

Nevin Archer.

N.A.

And an address. Cypress Knoll Road. Monterey.

XXI

I leave a note on the counter, Out for the day. Margaret will be alarmed, but I can’t manage her. Soon Baby and I are flying up the freeway to Monterey. 

To Cypress Knoll Road.

Seaweed. Balsamic. Pine.

When he opens the door, I know instantly.

Driftwood. Poppy. Brine.

His brine is my brine is hers. He is the source. I know it like a turtle knows the beach on which it was born. Baby must be his child, my sister-child, the brine seems to say. I announce who I am. I’m sorry to come like this, I say.

He doesn’t slam the door. He stands there, in shadow, waking up. Here is his child, holding a child, knocking before dawn.

We are inside now. As he makes tea. In the place he calls home.

I didn’t know you existed, he tells me. I mean, potentially, sure, but I didn’t know that you’d come into being. When were you born?

I tell him and he nods, as if making sense of time. 

I want to know more about my creation, I say. Where I came from. Where Baby came from.

He sips and says, I don’t know how much I can help. Me and Margaret were on and off for a few years. Met on an airplane. I was an architect back then. When that was a thing humans were still valued to do, he says.

Were you in love? I ask.

Oh… he kind of shrugs. No? Maybe something akin but not quite. 

Why make embryos then? I ask.

It was an easy lift, he shrugs. I’d eaten up so much of her time. I certainly didn’t think we’d end up together. No one ends up with anyone at the end anyway, he says.

So you didn’t consider the eventuality of me? I ask.

Margaret was a woman who wanted. She discontinued a pregnancy before me, he says. Regretted it. He shrugs. Sounds callous but I didn’t care one way or another. Kind of nice to think about having a legacy, he says. Especially if it’s of no consequence. Anyway, she did a – what did they call it? harvest? – and she got her embryo, he says. You. I never heard from her again.

I’m ready to open this door now. 

Embryos. I say, gesturing at Baby. Right? 

Huh? He’s confused.

Two embryos. I say. She told me this was the other one.

No, there was only one, he says. I remember because Margaret was disappointed. She only got one, he says. So if you’re suggesting that that is also my biological child, I don’t think so, he says. 

There are ants in my blood now. Crawling. 

Are you sure? She has your brine. I can smell it. Mine, hers, ours, I say desperately.

I don’t know what your mother told you, but we didn’t make that, he says.

XXII

When are you coming back? Do you have milk for Baby? Do you want me to make eggs? Margaret has been attacking my screen. I’m cleaning. Helpful? You know me. I like to be helpful. Ha ha. 

Baby and I are in a fleet car, flying south. I call Dr. Borrowed-Name. I hear myself screaming, How long does origin testing take?

Why? Take a breath. She says something about a psych eval. I hang up.

Dr. Single Last Name calls, concerned. Dr. Borrowed-Name had called her, concerned.

Are you taking the Hydralazine? I don’t tell her I’ve forgotten it. Headaches, shortness of breath, nausea?

I hang up. I override the speed limiter until we arrive. Behind glass, Pacific Cryo is closed. I lean on the bell. Ring, ring, ring. The heat rises. The tar on the road is beginning to blister. I smell myself already.

Acrid. Lemon. Brine.

Is my brine a scent Baby will come to hate?

A courier arrives. A woman inside appears. Embryo transport, I hear him say.

I get in front of her. I need help. This isn’t my baby, I say. It’s my baby, but it’s not the baby I thought Baby was. I need—you have files, my mother’s files, Baby’s files—there must be something—something that says who this is—

She says, Okay, hey, slow down. We’ll be open on Monday— 

No, I can’t, I can’t wait till Monday!

She looks at me, evaluating the threat. Come in for some water, for a moment, to let the baby cool down.

She brings me water. My eyes plead. Let’s start with your name, she says, studying me.

Eva, I say, ragged. Eva Caldwell.

Okay. Eva. This is or is not your baby? she asks. I realize she might be considering calling authorities.

Baby is my baby, I clarify, but Baby is not the baby I thought Baby was. My mother said she was my sister, a sibling embryo, but do you see her mole? And mine? I am removing my shoes and socks to show her. Her ear lobe web, and mine? And the brine. The same brine. Do you smell it?

Have you looked through the information in your portal? she asks.

Yes, but—look, Baby was an embryo given to me by my mother, so the answer must be in her portal. Please. Say I threatened you, say whatever you want, but I need to know who this is.

Okay, Eva. I won’t give you access to any files that aren’t yours. And we’re closed today. But I see your distress. And I don’t have anywhere to be. Besides admin and transport history, I won’t find more than you can access in your portal, but we can take a look together, she says.

She scans her eye. This is logging us in. Just to verify all this. She scans my eye. Okay. You are Eva Caldwell. As you said. Date of birth November 4, 2035?

Yes, I say.

She scrolls. Okay. I’m in your portal now. I see that Baby originated from Embryo128PRQTY. Here is the genetic health certificate, viability report. I also see you were registered at a cord blood bank in 2035, the year you were born.

I shrug. I don’t know anything about that.

It just means that the cord blood from your umbilical cord was stored—

What does that have to do with Baby? I say.

I’m just looking at all the information available to us here. She pauses, frowning at the screen. Hmm. That’s odd. It’s not dated.

What’s not dated? I ask.

Embryo128PRQTY, she says. The embryology report should show a date of fertilization, day 0. If Baby was a genetic sibling of yours from the same harvest made at the same time then those fertilization dates would match. Regardless, there should be some date of fertilization listed. She taps the screen. But it’s… blank.

Why would it be blank? I ask.

Could be an oversight… Her eyes study the screen. Okay, Embryo128PRQTY came to us from SoCal Reproductive, ten years ago. We inherited their inventory when they closed. We took over cryostorage. Oocyte source for Embryo128PRQTY is listed as Margaret Caldwell.

My mother, I say.

Sperm source is listed as N.A, she says.

Just like my birth certificate. So the genetic information appears to be a sibling match, I say. But I found N.A. He’s a man named Nevin Archer. He said they only got one embryo—me. 

Let’s see, she says, her fingers flying across the screen. Here’s the log. The transport history of Embryo128PRQTY goes back to 2037… 

That’s two years after I was born, I point out.

Right, and it transferred to SoCal Reproductive from… She goes silent.

Where? I ask.

EverKin, she says quietly.

What’s EverKin? I ask.

She sits back, silent, staring at the screen.

What? I say.

She pauses. I’ve never actually seen one before, she says.

Why? What do you mean? I ask.

She looks at me for a moment. Are you certain of your own lineage? she asks.

I’m not certain of anything, I say. Why?

Are you certain that Margaret Caldwell and Nevin Archer are the biological contributors to the embryo that led to your birth?

I think so, I say.

Then you would be right to think that Embryo128PRQTY was not a genetic sibling embryo.

Why?

EverKin only made same-sex donor embryos, she says. 

I blink. What do you mean?

She takes a breath. EverKin was experimental, she says. Synthetic embryo creation. A breakthrough for same-sex couples. They used stem cells. They extracted DNA and coaxed the cells into pluripotent cells. Ones capable of becoming any type of cell. They were able to make gamete-like cells – egg and sperm analogs.

Wait, I say. They made sperm?

No, she shakes her head, not traditional sperm, they didn’t need it. Just cells with the right signaling properties – enough to do the job. Same for the egg. They inserted both into a synthetic scaffold, an artificial egg casing. 

And this worked? I ask.

She nods. It was expensive. But it offered biological parenthood for those who couldn’t have it before. 

So what happened to the company, I ask. EverKin?

Government shut it down, she says. Almost immediately. Before most people even knew it was possible. “Unnatural,” they said. But that doesn’t hold water. Nature had done it already. 

I lean forward. What do you mean?

Certain animals can reproduce without any contribution from a male. Sharks. Komodo dragons. Certain birds before they were extinct. The instinct is older than we are. And scientists have done it with mice in labs for decades, she says.

I shake my head, trying to keep up. So, with Baby, where did the second DNA set come from?

I wouldn’t know, she says.

XXIII

We take shelter in a fleet car, on a dark side street near the ocean. Baby sleeps on my chest, clutching a single strand of my hair. It wraps around her finger, too tight. I unravel it. I roll down the window, just for a moment, just to breathe the salt. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I sink, fast and heavy. When I wake, my chest is lighter. Baby is gone.

The open window. 

I throw myself out the door, running, screaming, Baby, Baby, Baby, in the darkness, barefoot, wild. And then, a flicker.

Dune. Seaweed. Yeast.

I duck under the broken part of the barricade. The chain scratches my arms. I’m on the sand. My legs move faster than I knew possible. I am gulping air, lungs burning. Ahead, where the sea hasn’t yet swallowed the last stretch of land, I see my mother, standing at the edge, rocking Baby in her arms. Together. As if nothing is wrong. As if she didn’t take her.

Give her to me, I scream.

She tightens her grip. I just want to hold her. Just one more minute, she says.

But I’m on her. 

Brine. Yeast. Rot. 

Grabbing, clawing. Margaret twists her body so I can’t reach Baby. We fall into the surf. The shocking cold takes my breath. My knee hits a rock. Baby cries. 

You’re hurting her! I scream, fingers slipping on wet skin.

Margaret’s grip tightens. I tear at her hair, push my fingers into her eyes. Give her to me! Margaret falls back into the water. I come up with Baby and pull her close. Margaret tries to stand but a wave knocks her down. If I have to hold her under, I just might do it.

This is why! This is why I don’t want you near me, I scream.

I just wanted to share this with her, she says, the waves crashing around her. The water. The closeness. Like I held you, she says. I only ever wanted to protect you.

You’re a liar, I spit at her. I found Nevin Archer. I know he’s my father. 

Margaret pauses. And? she says calmly, wrapping her wet cardigan around her ribcage.

And I know he’s not hers. I say, I know about EverKin. 

Margaret goes still. 

So tell me who she is, I demand.

Baby is crying now, cold.

She’s yours, Margaret says.

No. Who is N/A? I ask. Who is her other half?

My mother is holding herself, shivering. It’s painful, she says. The letting go. You’ll see. 

Tell me, I plead. Who is it?

She looks at me. And I feel a flicker. I know it before she speaks.

You, she says. It was you. Baby is half-you. And half-me. We are the female contributors.

A sound escapes me. A horrible sound.

Why? Why would you do that?

I didn’t want you to be alone in the world. People can’t be counted on. My mother died when I was a child. I was alone. But after I had you, it was a feeling I didn’t know before. I was tied to you. To think that one day you and I would be separated? By death, or choice, or worse. The thought was unbearable. So, when you were two years old, I made her. For you. From us.

I stare at her, my brain gradually making sense of it. I believe her but– How? I demand, holding Baby closer.

The umbilical cord, she says. Both of our DNA was already present, side by side, in the cord. EverKin built the embryo from the cord blood.

Standing in the dark, cold, wet, clutching Baby, I feel warmth on my face. I realize I am crying. Margaret almost moves towards me, but doesn’t.

I thought if I made something that’s half-you, half-me, we’d always be together. If I was lucky, we might even raise her together. I might get to do it all over again.

Were you ever going to tell me? I ask.

I didn’t want you to reject her, like you rejected me.

It’s unnatural, I whisper.

Love is unnatural? she asks.

This isn’t love, I say.

It is. You just don’t know it yet. Somehow my love never made you feel loved. But hers will, she says. 

I should get Baby to safety. I should get her warm and dry. But I cannot resist the urge to gut Margaret one last time.

I hate you, I say. I hate you so much. It’s childish, but it’s what comes.

She shrugs, See? Rejecting. Look at how small your life was before this? she says. If not for me, you’d be alone. I made a family for you.

I didn’t ask for this, I say.

You can pretend you have no part in this, Eva, but you know your part and I know mine. You’ve always needed me to do the hard things for you, she says. 

That takes my breath. This is the last time you’re ever going to see me, I say.

Well then, I’m glad I got to see you like this. A mother. An animal that would do anything—including drown her own mother—to protect her Baby. I did my job. You’re worthy of her now.

Suddenly, police drones shred the sky. Lights sweep the beach. I clutch Baby and run.

XXIV

The new place we call home is east. No one knows us here. We can’t smell the ocean. That’s how I know Margaret won’t find us.

It’s bare, unremarkable. But each morning the sun spills through the back window. It’s where you grow. 

My love for you defines me. It is unrelenting. Wild. Desperate. 

I imagine it was like this for my mother. 

Time expands in your early years.

Aloe. Dairy. Strawberry.

But it also slips past.

Lint. Pulp. Candy.

I watch your mouth begin to make sounds. Fragments, then words, then ideas that spark and demand to be known. 

One day you will ask where you come from. I will say you come from me. It’s true. Half true. You were once a number—128PRQTY—a cluster, frozen. First hers. Then mine. Now entirely your own.

Sometimes, in the quiet of night, I imagine you leaving. The separateness. The ache twists me. But I know I must want that for you.

As you learn to run, leap, build, I open a small lab and return to scent. I had forgotten what it feels like to lose myself in the making of things. In things outside of you.

I am making something special now. A masterpiece. A particular scent.

It is you. Captured. This moment, and all the ones I imagine to come. Your whole life, in a bottle.

Dairy. Cotton. Wool. 

Lilac. Felt. Citrus.

Orchid. Sulphur. Burgundy.

Tuberose. Pine. Ash.

Women are creators. It is our purpose. A universal maternal language, passed down through centuries, across species. Whales and dolphins—when they still swam—felt it too. Bees and beetles—when they still flew—felt it too. That aching desire to create.

You are so delicate, so fierce, so small, but already you create. You draw with anything you can get your hands on. A twig, a rock, a bit of lead.

At first, wild lines. Then circles. Then faces. Faces that look like you.

XXV

Years later, I learn my mother has died. I wonder where her scent has gone. Maybe it follows her, wherever she goes. Or maybe, finally, it died with her.

There’s something for my daughter. A gift. Even in death, my mother has surprises. 

Whatever it is, it is at Pacific Cryo. I go back. It’s been years since Baby and I sat trembling in this lobby. The woman who helped us is long gone. But my daughter’s inheritance is here.

Twenty-seven EverKin embryos.

Created on the same day as she was. She wasn’t the only one. Siblings, in a sense.

It makes perverse sense that my mother made twenty-eight in total. She loved twos and eights. The roundness of them. The femininity of their shapes.

There’s nothing for me to do, they say. Margaret paid upfront for decades of storage. $99,999. A lump sum, transferred the week I sent her the exact same amount. When the money runs out—around the time my daughter comes of age—I’ll have to tell her. About who she is. About her inheritance. And the choice she will have to make. 

I try to imagine the future. As if the future is something a human mind can hold.

Until then, I let her draw faces.

These are the others, she says.

I grew up in an old stone house on Al-Salt Street in the steep, narrow maze of the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood above Haifa’s port. Not long before my birth, Haifa was a sleepy city of limestone block houses and citrus orchards squeezed between the Mediterranean and Mount Carmel, but a flood of European Jews and the strategic needs of the British during the war broke Mothra Haifa out of her chrysalis, with a steampunk head at the docks and suburban wings extending up Mount Carmel. Haifa became known as Um Al Gharib, Mother of the Stranger. 

“Yalla, Ibrahim, Habibi, take these sweets to the restaurant.” Mama calls me into our kitchen. I can smell the cool limestone and the herbs she’s drying. I’m seven, with a mop of black hair and otherworldly blue eyes. It’s early 1945.

Rossetti would have loved Mama, with her lush features and cascades of raven curls, a troubled Persephone, her dark eyes gleaming with the last light of the living world upon the Styx. Until she was thirteen, she lived in the village of Bayt Thul, where young men assessed the strength, grace, and beauty of the unmarried girls as they balanced heavy jarras of water on their heads: from the well to the wedding, as the old village saying went. 

And that village might have been her whole life, but her father married outside his clan, estranging both her parents from their families, and then a border dispute brought him to blows with a neighbor, whose heart gave out. Not only was her father jailed for murder, but the man’s family sued and won all his land and possessions. Destitute, Mama’s mother became a live-in maid for a wealthy Catholic family in Al Quds. Madam was Swedish, Sir from one of the ruling Ayan. Their son, a couple of years older than Mama, decided to play Professor Higgins and Mama emerged from this household speaking Parisian French, BBC English, and Lebanese Arabic (the family summered in the Matn mountains), though he never managed to teach Mama to read or write. Severe dyslexia, the words on the page like locusts swarming in a field.   

Mama, baking all morning, looks exhausted, ever trying to find ways to alleviate our financial straits. Taking the tray of sweets, I slalom down the winding streets, avoiding donkeys and hawker’s carts, threading through Jews and Arabs in traditional or European fashions, and beet red British soldiers in khaki shorts. 

Our “restaurant” is a food booth near the docks where Baba fries falafel palatable as rocks and serves ice cream that tastes of garlic and stale oil, delights that can only be sampled if a customer can find him. Today, presiding at his shigg under the shade of a carob tree a hundred yards from the booth, Baba hasn’t got around to opening. This is where Baba holds court every day, sitting with his cronies on olive oil cans topped with cushions. The people of our neighborhood (the men with affection, their wives with scorn) dub him the Sheikh of Salt Street.

Spotting me, he waves me over, crying out, “Ah, my little chicky’s here.” 

He and Mama are an odd couple. Baba, thirty years older and four inches shorter than she, is stocky, troll-like, with crazy eyebrows, a roguish gap between his front teeth, and a clownish halo of nappy grey curls. When he married Mama—a Moslem peasant—his Orthodox Christian family cut ties, though they provided him with several properties for income. Baba sold these properties to invest in a hotel scheme fabricated by a con man who forged the share vouchers. Baba’s too proud to ask his family for help, but a few weeks after my birth, Mama secretly snuck me to my grandparents in I’billin and agreed for us both to be chrismated. As a Levantine peasant, she’s O Positive for Gods, her animist people wisely appeasing every colonizer. In Haifa, she and I are Moslem. In I’billin, on our trips to beg money (Mama tells Baba we’re visiting her sick cousin Muna), we slip on our eight-pointed crosses and attend St. George’s.

There’s quite a crowd at Baba’s shigg. I nearly drop the tray as he pulls me into his arms. 

“My guests need tea, habibi,” he remonstrates, “and bring us a plate of those pastries.”

When I deliver the tray, Baba again snatches me onto his knees. “Is there a more beautiful boy in the world than this?”

“Alhamdulillah,” murmur several of the Moslems to save me from Baba’s vanity.

“That’s because he takes after his mother,” declares Savas Benrubi. One of the Greek Jews who made Aliyah in ’34, he resembles Mussolini and is famous for impersonating the dictator with a kitchen pan on his head.  

“Not just Um Ibrahim!” protests Abu Amir, sensitive to rumors questioning the origins of my blue eyes. “Who’s more handsome than Khalil?”

The laughter intensifies because Abu Amir, ancient, slumped, and toothless, half buried in a white dishdasha, is blind.

“The British,” interposes Rasheed Assaf, the retired bookseller, “sons of dogs though they may be, have a nice saying.” He switches from Arabic to English: “Handsome is as handsome does.” Rasheed is a slender, dignified man with a pencil mustache and lugubrious eyes, always wearing a suit and tarbush. He lost his wife, two daughters, and his faith in God during the typhoid epidemic that swept Palestine at the turn of the century.

Abu Nabil sententiously interjects, “The Hadith tells us what’s handsome. Jabir ibn Samurah said, ‘I saw the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) on a clear night. I turned my sight between him and the moon and to me he was more beautiful than the moon.’ Which is to say that the most beautiful thing in this world is faith.” 

As Abu Nabil says this, a couple of the other Moslems throw away their cigarettes out of respect for the Hadith, though Ahmed Deif, the baker, being famously tight-fisted, hands his to Savas for safekeeping.

Abu Nabil continues: “You need no other books but the Koran and Hadith. They embody all wisdom.” 

“All wisdom,” scoffs Rasheed. “To quote the great Al-Ma’arri: ‘The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.’”

And they’re off again, arguing. I love being among them, smelling the apple-scented smoke of the nargilah they share, listening to their stormy voices. 

Later that afternoon, I find Mama wiping down the whitewashed walls in her and Baba’s bedroom. She’s never idle. All the rooms are bare now. Over time she’s had to sell everything: the copper basin once used to soak wheat stalks for basketry (my baby bath!), the hand-made clay pots painted with iron oxide from the rocks of the Ghor, carpets woven by the Bedouin of Hebron. All gone, our home leached of color. All that remains is that wide-hipped, narrow-necked brass jarra sitting in the window niche opposite the bed, evoking Mama as a village girl tightroping home with every boy’s eyes upon her. 

“Mama,” I say sheepishly, “Baba has invited Savas, Marwan, and Yava for dinner.”

Baba’s always doing this, turning up late with three or four people in tow, forcing Mama to perform miracles to produce a dinner that won’t shame us. She sends me to fetch a couple of chickens from the one grocer who still affords us credit, and more sumac so she can make musakhan. When I return, reentering the kitchen, Yava is chopping parsley for tabbouleh while Mama grills eggplant. Yava, Savas Benrubi’s wife, fled Odessa in ‘41. She’s Mama’s age, 25, and petite, hardly taller than I am. She never wears makeup, dresses in shirts and trousers, her mousy hair in a pixie cut. Her face, with its tiny, retroussé nose and dimples, doesn’t suit her somber nature. She often visits during the day to catch Mama alone. I once walked in on them in my parents’ bedroom, the two of them sitting on the bed, Yava brushing Mama’s hair. It wasn’t haram for Mama to be without her hijab in front of another woman, but I felt a tightening in my chest at the rhythmic sweep of the hairbrush, the breathy silence between them. When Yava saw me, her pale skin flushed, and she shouted, “You’re like the goddamn Gestapo. Why are you always sneaking around?” Outraged, I waited for Mama to defend me, but she seemed in a dream, staring at me without recognition.

I hear the door open and run to it as it disgorges Baba, followed by Savas and Marwan clutching bottles of wine and boxes of sweets.

Marwan snatches me into his arms. “Give me those sapphire eyes. I’m going to use them for cufflinks.”

I squirm and giggle as Marwan nibbles my ear. He’s handsome as a film star, always wearing a fancy suit, with lots of rings on his fingers. A few years ago, he gave up his job as a mechanic to be Savas’ secrétaire personnel, though his education consists of a few years at the madrasa and he speaks nothing but coarse street Arabic. He now spends nearly all his time in Savas and Yava’s fancy villa up the hill near the British barracks in a neighborhood occupied by a swinging set of wealthy francophone Levantines. His wife and two girls, who live in the nearby Moslem neighborhood of Wadi Salib, are never mentioned.

My beleaguered mother, as ever, produces a masterpiece. The sumac chicken makes Marwan jump up from the table to insist someone kill him this very minute so the taste of it can be the last thing he knows on this earth. Savas rolls up a piece of pita like a fat cigar and declares, We shall eat it on the beaches, we shall eat it on the landing grounds, we shall eat it in the fields, in a strange British voice that Mama whispers to me is Winston Churchill’s. 

After we’ve eaten, Mama orders me to bed, but I slip into my usual spying place just outside, peeking at the adults through the gap above the door’s ill-fitting hinge. 

For a while the discussion is serious: the irony of Jews being rescued by Russians, and whether the Soviets will ever relinquish the land they’re conquering. Savas says that six months after the liberation of Greece, it’s clear that nearly the entire Jewish population of his original home, Thessalonica, has been wiped out.

Yava interjects that she received the good news that one of her cousins survived the Odessa massacre and is now in a place called Brighton Beach in America. 

Marwan asks Mama something I can’t hear, and she must have been evasive, since he protests, “Oh she’s so cagey. I think she must have a secret past. Is she a spy? Has she committed a terrible crime? We need to get it out of her.”

“Leave her alone,” Yava protests. I sense that Yava knows Mama’s secrets, which makes me dislike her.

“No, no,” Savas jumps in, “confession is good for the soul. We should all confess something. And no games, something serious. And since you’re so curious, Marwan, we’ll start with you.”

After thinking for a moment, Marwan says, “My confession is not going to seem like a confession, but it’s something I’ve hardly even been able to admit to myself. For the first time in my whole life, I’m happy.” He glances at Savas, and I’m low enough to catch sight of them touching hands beneath the table.

“Now it’s your turn, Savas,” Marwan counters.

“Okay.” After a sigh, Savas says, “I confess that all my life I’ve wished I didn’t look so . . . well, so much like a Jew.”

Flushing, Savas turns hastily to Yava. “You’re next, darling.”

Running her finger around the rim of her wine glass, she says quietly, “I often fantasize about killing Germans.”

“That’s hardly a confession,” Savas snorts.

“I’m not talking about soldiers.” Her finger reverses. “I’ve dreamed”—she glances nervously at Mama—“of killing every last one of those bastards.”

Everyone is quiet for a moment before Savas says, “Khalil, you’re in the dock.”

Baba looks troubled. He doesn’t like things to be serious, so he tells a story about when he was a boy and his mama locked him in the pantry as punishment for always running off to play with his friends. But he was desperate for a poo. He tells the story in his usual animated way, standing up, running around with his hands over his bottom, sending the tale in all kinds of directions before the denouement of him pooping in a big jar of pickled cucumbers.

Though Savas laughs all the way through, he insists on a real confession.

After a heavy sigh, Baba says, “When I thought Latifa had been killed by that bomb, I decided to throw myself off the steep cliff where the wheat is threshed in my home village.”

He’s talking about my birth. Mama was hugely pregnant in Haifa’s vegetable market when an Irgun bomb exploded, and she gave birth to me in all that smoke and chaos. Baba, searching Government Hospital, came upon the mangled corpse of a pregnant woman among bodies turned white by limestone dust.

“Now it’s your turn, habibti,” Marwan says to Mama.

“La, I don’t . . .” Mama looks distressed.

“Come on, what about those years in that wealthy house?” Marwan prods. “Don’t the maids know everyone’s secrets?”

“Leave her alone.” Yava slides a (hateful!) comforting arm around Mama.

“But she knows everything about us, and we know nothing about her,” Marwan protests.

Saving her, Baba snatches up her hand, kisses it, and sings:

“When the groom goes to meet her

To press to her forehead the golden coin

She’s lovely as a willow branch, fragrant as rosemary.

Praise be to God!

Listen to her. She is your life.”

Baba often sings this verse of their wedding song. Just before the wedding, the bridegroom is allowed one glimpse of his betrothed’s face. He sits opposite her, lifts her veil, touches a gold coin to her forehead and lets it fall into her lap. This symbolizes his promise always to provide for her. 

*

Late July of 1946. Jewish survivors are arriving on rusted-out ships. The British are trying to stop them, and from the house we can often hear protests at the docks. Many are making it ashore, becoming absorbed into the Jewish suburbs up the mountain or down the coast.

Mama orders me to go help Baba, but I find him conducting his shigg. Most of Baba’s old Jewish regulars are absent, but I see Laszlo Kovak, a towering, rail-thin Ukrainian. His craggy face looks pained beneath a luxurious gush of dirty blond hair. When he sweeps it back, you can see that he’s lost the tips of several fingers. Though he arrived only a few months ago he’s already learned the rudiments of Arabic and sometimes politely interrupts to ask the meaning of certain words. I’m often the one to respond, since Baba’s English is sketchy.

 When Baba pulls me into his lap, I whisper, “Shouldn’t we open the restaurant?” Saturday’s the best day, the dock area jammed with soldiers and boat passengers.

“Shall I feed them a little chicky?” he says, tickling me until I beg him to stop.

I know it’s useless and wistfully watch the crowds wandering past our shut-up booth. 

Laszlo slips away. Remembering something I’ve been meaning to say, I hurry after him.

“Mr. Kovak, sir,” I call.

When he turns back to me, stiffly, as if his bones pain him, I say in English, “I know you want to learn Arabic. I should tell you that my father’s Arabic—” I hesitate.

But he understands, and in halting Arabic says, “His Arabic not . . . high?”

“He uses a lot of village words, and his grammar is not always as it should be.”

Laszlo examines me curiously for a moment, his eyes startlingly blue, like mine. “That’s good to know,” he says. “How old are you, Ibrahim?”

“Eight.” 

“You’re a clever boy, and tall for your age, yes? I would have guessed you were twelve, thirteen.”

Despite Mama’s internalized voice murmuring mashallah and declaring for the benefit of any nearby djinn who might decide to kidnap such a paragon that I’m actually dumb as a donkey and scrawny to boot, I feel a warm swell of pride.  

“Can I buy you a slice of cake?” He leads me into one of the new Viennese patisseries appearing all over the city and orders me a soda and a slice of sachertorte.

I’ve never been into a place like this: marble-topped tables, burgundy velvet booths, chandeliers floating above us like bioluminescent jellyfish.

He retrieves a notebook and pencil. “I want to know everything about my new home,” he says. “Can you tell me about the nearby villages?”

I explain between bites of that delicious cake that the villages are all known for certain things—one for shrewdness, another for the beauty of their women, and so on—and that they all have linguistic idiosyncrasies.

“In Ram Allah,” I say, “they used hol—frightful—when something is amazing. In Bireh they’d use fok el-fok, up of the up, first rate.”

He questions me for a long while, insisting I have another piece of cake, scribbling down everything. He’s particularly interested in how the villages empty out during the six yearly harvests.

He asks, “Do you think the fellaheen feel more loyalty to this country or to their villages?”

I’m not sure how to answer this. “Well, they’re very attached to their villages. They don’t like their daughters to live among strangers, and even wealthy villagers who live in cities keep their village homes because it’s the place of their history and kinship ties.”

“What if something happened to the village?” he says.

Using my finger to scrape every last smear of chocolate icing from my plate, I say, “How do you mean?”

“Well, I heard the British sometimes destroyed villages during the revolt.”

I shrug. “I suppose they’d rebuild it.”

Laszlo narrows his eyes. I sense this isn’t quite what he’s after, but he doesn’t pursue it.

This line of questioning reminds me of the shanty towns east of the city, former tenant farmers who lost their livelihoods after the Jewish Fund bought land and threw them off, now neither city nor village people, living in homes made of crushed petrol tins.

“And what do the village people think of the Bedouin?” Laszlo asks.

I give this some thought as I suck the chocolate off my finger, recalling the Bedouin who come every year to harvest olives, women with nearly black skin, in bright thobes, with ankle bracelets and tattooed faces.

Then I remember something: “The fellaheen have a saying: ‘City people are the lords of the world; the fellaheen are the donkeys of the world.’ But Baba told me that when he was young the saying was different. It was the Bedouin who were called the lords of the world.”

Laszlo tips his head, thinking about this as I add, “Abu Nabil is always going on about them being the true Arab, free of national and colonial borders. But mostly people say they’re thieves and gypsies.” 

“Don’t you think they’re like the Red Indians?” he says. 

The similarities strike me: the Bedouin live in mobile tribes in tents, love horses, raid each other’s encampments.

“The pure and original Americans,” Laszlo murmurs, almost to himself. For a moment his face becomes so bitterly thoughtful he looks bilious. Snatching a napkin to his mouth, he hocks something out of his clotted lungs. Crushing the now soiled napkin in his large fist, he says, “Which of us is pure anymore?”

We both look out into the street, our gaze drawn by an old man in a thawb and kufiyah astride a donkey so small his sandals are scraping the ground, a sight that gives the lie to this Viennese terrarium.

He asks me to walk with him up the mountain. Soon he’s struggling for breath, the skin around his mouth taking on a bruised yellow tinge. After a half hour, he slumps with his back to the trunk of a tall pine. I hunker beside him in the wavering sunlight, breathing in the tree’s resinous smell. We look out over the city, the tumble of square white buildings and red roofs, the smoking caldrons of the oil refinery’s cooling towers, the breakwaters of the busy port.  

Pointing toward the river glittering in the distance, emptying into the taut bow of the bay that curves up to Acre, Laszlo says, “That’s the Kishon, right?”

I nod. “The Arabs call it Nahr Mukatta.”

“The river of something?”

“Of slaughter.”

“And we’re on Mount Carmel.” He pats the ground.

“My grandmother calls it Mount Saint Elias. She hates the Carmelites.”

“Hates them?”

“They’re French Catholics.”

“What’s she?”

“Greek Orthodox.”

“And who were those Nazis in the German quarter?” 

“Templars. They’re Protestants. They hated the Carmelites, too.”

He convulses with something that might have been a laugh. “This country’s crazy.” 

He points vaguely behind them. “And that way is the Jezreel Valley, right—the Emek—and the Sea of Galilee?”

I nod. “Arabs call the valley Marj Ibn Amir, which means ‘The Meadow of the Son of Amir.’ My grandmother calls it the Plain of Esdraelon, which is the Greek for Jezreel. It goes all the way to the Jordan River Valley.”

“You’ve been to the Sea of Galilee?” he asks.

“We’ve had picnics there. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s also called Lake Tiberias, right?” 

I nod. “Or the Sea of Kinneret. And some people still call it—”

“Enough, please.” He cuts me off, looking a little bilious, dipping his head between his legs and murmuring, “Doesn’t anything in this country have one name?”

When he recovers a little, he raises his head and says quietly, “Good God, we’re not much to show for thousands of years of history, are we?”

It takes me a second to realize he’s referring to us, a Jewish man and an Arab boy.

Turning his face up into the glimmering, wavering light through the branches, Laszlo says, “It’s so good to feel the sun. One day I want to own a little farm, perhaps in the Emek.”

“Where are you from?” I ask.

 “My parents were from Slovakia, and when they were kicked out, they moved to a shtetl in Ukraine called Justingrad. Most of the Jews we knew went to America, but my father insisted we stay for the pogroms. Why leave when you’re having so much fun, uh?”

Bitterness tautens his face. He turns to me, seeming to cruelly savor this bitterness, and says, “Where’d you get those blue eyes, Ibrahim?”

I know what he’s getting at. All my life, rumors have circulated that my real father must be al Inglezi or an Ashkenazi. 

“They’re in my family,” I say defensively. “Warda means Rose. It’s a name often used for people who are fair skinned, red skinned. In the past, I mean.”

The bitterness, draining, desiccates his expression, like a wadi in the summer, returning him to an arid blankness, only the shrinking blue pools of his eyes left. “They came in 1919,” he says. “I was one of a little bouquet of blue eyes blossoming in 1920.”

I can’t believe he’s only 26.

“You ever wonder who’s staring back at you in the mirror?” He spits onto the rocky dirt a phlegmy, slightly bloody effusion and then looks up through the cypress’s branches with a grimace.

“I don’t resemble anyone in my family,” he says. “Dark hair, dark eyes. Proper Jews. I don’t know how my mother or father could bear to look at me.”

I don’t understand what he means and I’m afraid to ask.

“We should have come here to Palestine or gone to America. Oh no, America’s godless, my father said, and Palestine’s full of Bolsheviks. So he moved us to Szeged.” 

He brushes the gap-toothed comb of his hand aggressively through that tawny gush of hair, mocking him with its lushness. 

I ask him if he’s ready to leave.

“I’m going to stay here a while. You go.” 

As I head down, he calls me back and pushes five Palestinian pounds into my hand. “For your help,” he says. 

Hurrying down the dusty, rocky path, I feel strange about the money, holding it like I hold a dead mouse when I find it in one of the traps Mama sets, running through the house to fling it into the street.

When I arrive home, it’s still early afternoon. I look into the small mirror that hangs beside the front door. As I wipe away the chocolate staining my lips, I become aware again of the five pounds I’m holding. You ever wonder who’s staring back at you in the mirror? 

Hearing laughter upstairs, I quietly ascend. The door to my parents’ bedroom is ajar. I look through the crack along the hinge to see Mama and Yava sitting up against the bed’s headboard. Yava’s wearing only her pants and bra. Her blouse must have lost a button. Mama is sewing it back on. Mama uses her teeth to snap the thread of the finished button and hands the blouse to Yava. But Yava doesn’t take it. Saying something I can’t hear, she jumps off the bed. She’s tiny, sprite-like, a pretty young boy. Running around to Mama’s side, she pulls Mama to her feet. Mama only feigns reluctance; she’s laughing. I feel a prickly heat that intensifies as Yava removes her pants, flinging them onto the bed, and then tugs on Mama’s dress. For a short while Mama continues to resist whatever this is, but suddenly, with an expression of mock exasperation, as if indulging the whim of an adorable child, she unzips the back of her dress and shimmies it off. She then slips on Yava’s blouse. Yava’s laughing now. Mama’s close to a foot taller, with a much bigger bust, so the blouse becomes a bolero top, and when she slips on the pants she resembles Alice after eating the cake. Yava, swamped in Mama’s dress, looks like a child playing dress-up. After also tying on Mama’s hijab, Yava retrieves the jarra from the windowsill and attempts without success to balance it on her head. Mama shows her, settling the Jarra upon her mass of black curls before walking around the bedroom with an exaggerated sway of her hips. When she returns to Yava, the two of them go very still, gazing at their reflections in the cheval mirror. Mama transfers the jarra to Yava’s head, holding it there to complete the transformation as Yava’s arm slides around the back of Mama’s exposed midriff. I can’t bear it. Sneaking quickly downstairs, I open and slam shut the front door, calling “Mama.”

I allow them a little time before ascending. When I enter, they’re dressed again, positioned awkwardly on either side of the bed. Running to Mama, for some reason I thrust Laszlo’s five pounds at her and burst into tears. Normally Mama has little patience for crying, but she falls to her knees, wrapping me in her arms.

I think Yava’s gone, but when Mama and I exit the bedroom, Yava is downstairs. Mama tells me to go to my room, but I remain on the landing, peeking down at them.

 Mama’s saying something I can’t quite make out, so I take a few quiet steps down as Yava raises her voice. “You need to make a choice.”

I can’t hear Mama’s response. 

“You deserve a life, Latifa,” she says, “What pleasure do you ever get?”

“Yava,” Mama sighs, as if this were a bone Yava has worried into splinters.

“Answer me. What life do you have here? And look at what’s happening. You’re about to be crushed, all of you.”

“What do you mean?”

Yava now takes firm hold of both Mama’s arms, as if she’s going to shake her or drag her out into the street. Becoming frightened, I hurry to the bottom of the stairs. 

“Mama.”

Yava, turning desolate eyes on me, releases her and rushes out.

I run to Mama and fling my arms around her. “What’s wrong with her?”

Mama doesn’t respond, staring at the front door with a faraway look.

“Mama?”

Suddenly, she tears herself from my grasp, shoving me away. “Why are you always sneaking around, always listening?” She smooths and tugs at her dress as if she’s infested with me before storming off toward the kitchen.

*

There has been trouble for a long time, but I can really feel it now in the restless, pre-storm breeze ruffling brows, swelling rumors, rattling newspapers. The jabberwocky of my childhood—Rothschild, Balfour, White Paper, Partition Plan—is coming to its final verse. Baba’s shigg swells so much it blocks the road, though there are no longer any Jews in it. Mama murmurs, “If you could defeat your enemies by drinking coffee and talking, the Arabs would rule the world.” 

A few days from the partition vote, I’m sitting with Baba at his shigg, surrounded by two dozen men, when Laszlo appears with a muslin sack slung over his shoulder. Baba’s happy to see him until Laszlo hefts the sack down, pronouncing gravely, “For your kindness, Khalil.” 

Coffee beans. Baba frowns, angry, injured, refusing to look at the gift, and says nothing. Laszlo turns a hard and regretful glance upon me, as if he wishes he could see through me; as if he wishes I wasn’t there.

Baba leaves the beans in the street. By morning someone has taken them.

On the 29th of November, my family is joined in our house by the stalwarts of Baba’s shigg: blind Abu Amir, Rasheed Assaf, and Abu Nabil. We listen to the radio as the votes from one country after another for UN Resolution 181 to divide Palestine into Arab and Jewish states are read out. Mama stands against the wall, throttling a tea towel. Baba looks baffled, sitting in his armchair by the log fire with a Jericho orange, flinging its peel into the flames with a fizz, the air filling with citrus. As the countries and their votes are read out, Rasheed clutches his head and murmurs an Al-Ma’arri quote about time crushing men like little pieces of glass, Abu Nabil asks for the deliverance of God, and Abu Amir, Baba’s echo, finally finds his own voice, shouting, “Bolivia, they decide what’s my country and what’s not! Iceland. Is this even a country? And they have the right to give my city to Ashkenazi Zionists? United Kingdom. What’s this ‘abstain,’ those sons of dogs?” 

The second the votes are cast, partition confirmed, gunfire begins, Arab fighters shooting at Haganah positions along Herzl Street and up into Hadar.

*

The British remain in Haifa, creating something of a buffer between the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. Some months after the vote, in early ’48, during a period of relative calm, I’m hurrying to the food booth to retrieve kerosene and cooking oil when someone calls my name. It’s Yava, who emerges from the shadowed doorway of one of the many recently vacated houses. Beckoning me over, clearly too scared to venture further, she hands me a sealed envelope. She shocks me then by falling to her knees, gripping my arms so hard it hurts, and begging me to please hand it directly to my mother. Like most people, she has no idea that Mama, who speaks such flawless French and English, can’t read a word. Yava hurries back up the hill, and as soon as she’s out of sight I run to the booth and steam the letter open. 

It’s written in English on lavender letter paper taken from the Bat Galim Hotel. In it Yava speaks of the first time she watched my mother remove her hijab; how this gesture toward undressing devastated her. Of how she longed to press that mane of wavy black hair to her face, to smell it and to smell my mother’s beautiful neck. (I want to tell Yava, with hotly jealous self-satisfaction, that Mama’s hair smells of her chamomile conditioner, and that her neck smells of bay leaf and olive oil soap.) Yava then speaks of Adam in paradise as neither male nor female—as both—before God split him to make Eve. After the Fall, Adam and Eve’s hunger is to be one again, to rediscover Eden in each other’s bodies. But God extended his curse of division, layering upon that first nakedness not only sex, but race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, caste, and class. Yava says: How cruel God is, and it has often seemed to me that love is not our way back to God, but our only defense against Him. As my father once exhorted me to obey him and be a good daughter, so God insists we give Him our love. I will not love Him. I will love you.

I sit in a doorway and read the letter over and over, confused about it being a woman who loves Mama like this, and by these strange ideas of returning to paradise by means of a lover’s body, of disobeying God by loving each other. 

After sealing up the letter again with flour and water, I hand it to Mama when I return home. Murmuring that she’ll ask Baba to read it later, she shoves it quickly into the pocket of her apron, unable to meet my eyes.

In February, news comes that the Haganah have killed sixty Palestinians in the village of Sa’sa’ near the Lebanese border, blowing people up in their houses. A week after this, a bomb goes off in Ben Yehuda Street Market, killing about the same number of Jews. A few weeks later, a bomb explodes in Haifa near Said Khoury’s garage, killing thirty people, including Abu Nabil. Rumors then become rife about a massacre in Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem. It’s now the middle of April 1948. 

Mama keeps telling Baba we should leave, but he believes people will be reasonable. On Radio Cairo, they’re telling us the Arabs are winning one glorious victory after another.

Then, late one night we’re shocked out of bed by a hammering at the door. It’s Savas disguised in a thawb and Keffiyeh. If he’s caught by the Arab forces, he’ll be killed.

Sitting down, breathing hard and rubbing his forehead, Savas glances at Mama with a pained look and says, “I need to tell you . . . Yava was shot by a sniper yesterday morning while hanging washing on our balcony. We’ve already buried her.”

Mama says nothing, her eyes going glassy as Baba begins to weep softly, almost absentmindedly, and says, “The world’s going mad.”  

“It’s been mad for a long while, Khalil.” Savas tells us he’s arranged to take Marwan, his family, and all of us to Cyprus, but we have to leave in the next couple of days. He warns us that Jewish soldiers are out for blood following an attack two days before on a convoy heading to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Eighty Jews massacred, including doctors, nurses, and patients. Baba says he won’t leave his country. Baba and I cry as we hug Savas goodbye; Mama remains numb and impenetrable.

*

Only the British army now stands between us and the Jewish forces, and though the British promise to stay until May, suddenly and without warning they evacuate. The Jews have all the high ground. Loudspeakers tell us they have the atom bomb and are going to use it on us. A couple of days after Tiberias falls, a massive explosion shatters all our windows. The Haganah are rolling barrels of explosives down the hill into Wadi Nisnas. 

Just days later, during Passover, the Jews attack full force, taking the airfield and railway workshops. They’re using mortars. We can hear explosions and the pop of gunfire. People flood the docks. Mama says we should join them, but Baba stubbornly refuses. An hour later, we hear a gunbattle outside, Arab voices soon giving way to Hebrew and a babel of other tongues. A hammering at the door freezes us, but a familiar voice calls, “Khalil, open up.” 

Baba does so, and there stands Laszlo Kovak, a STEN gun in his ruined hands.

After telling the men with him he’ll join them at Najada House by the bridge, he steps in, regarding us all cooly. “Khalil,” he says in the perfect Arabic we helped him learn, “you and your family need to leave the country.” 

He retrieves a wad of British pounds from his pocket. Before Baba can take them, I run over, snatching the money and flinging it in a fluttering shower out of the door. Laszlo says nothing. Ordering Mama to fetch a sheet and a broom, he fashions a white flag, handing it to Baba. 

“Bring food and water only,” he says, “It’s going to be a long, hot walk. The docks are hopeless. Head north to Lebanon.”

After checking the road, he takes a moment to gather the scattered notes, laying them just inside our threshold. “You’ll need money,” he says. 

He glances at me. Not regret or sorrow. It’s as if he’s looking at a ghost he doesn’t want to believe in.  

I beg to bring my football, but Baba says no. Mama dashes upstairs. I stand behind Baba at the door, his hands trembling around the makeshift flagpole as he peeks into the street. He has our house deeds and key. After a few minutes, he says, “Go tell your mother to hurry up.”

I find Mama in her underwear, strapping her bridal headdress with its few remaining gold Ottoman coins around her belly. She gestures me over to help with this. The brass jarra lies on the bed, a knitting needle beside it. Once her gold is secured, she flings on a voluminous abaya and ties up her hair. We hear shouting outside and the dry rattle of a machine gun.

“Mama, we’ve got to go.” 

When I take her hand, she tugs it free to snatch up the jarra.

“Why are you bringing that?”

She doesn’t know how to answer me. “We might need it,” she says finally, hurrying out.

As we join Baba, he gestures toward the jarra. “What’s this?”

Mama stammers, “It’s not heavy.”

“Amra Majnouna,” Baba says, “who’s going to steal an old brass jug?” 

He snatches it from her, handing it to me, “Yalla, Ibrahim, put it back.”

As I run upstairs, something occurs to me. I’d wondered where Mama hid Yava’s letter. Now I tip the neck of the jarra toward the sunlight lancing in the window and catch a flash of lavender. She was trying to fish it out with the knitting needle, still on the bed, like the instrument of an abortive crime. Why would she put the letter somewhere she couldn’t retrieve it? And how strange to hide it inside that jarra she once set upon her head to show off her funambulist grace to the village boys. Returning the jarra to the windowsill, I run out.

Baba has me hold the flag while he locks our door. We head north through the streets, then up over the hills, joining dozens of other families carrying what they can in carts, on donkeys, on their backs. As we crest a hill, we encounter a troop of about a dozen Jewish women soldiers.

One says in Arabic, “Are you running away, out of the country?” 

We say yes. It’s strange. They’re holding rifles and look so happy and so pretty; and as we go by, one of them, giddy with excitement, repeats, “Bye-bye, Palestine. Bye-bye, Palestine”; and it’s awful and humiliating but it’s almost as if she’s being nice, as if we were leaving her house after dinner. 

I glance back at Haifa’s tumble of pale buildings in the bright sun, the Mediterranean exhaling and inhaling its gentle waves, plumes of smoke everywhere, gunfire crackling. This is the last time I’ll ever see it.

*

I have an American passport now. My mama was Moslem, my baba Orthodox, my biological father, Catholic. I’d like to think I was born out of love, but I suspect, with my thirteen-year-old mother served up as a living doll for the tawny-headed and blue-eyed boy of that wealthy household, that the truth is more sinister. My daughter has no idea I’m Palestinian. She thinks I’m Lebanese. On our arrival in Lebanon in ’48, Mama, ever practical, pulled off her hijab, and we slipped on our Orthodox crosses, saving us from the fate of most of the Palestinian Moslems, abortive and unwanted, stuck in those miserable camps. I received a free and excellent education at an Orthodox school, and we were quickly made citizens. Baba, the Sheikh of Salt Street, was a man too idiomatic to be translated out of his world and died within a few months of a heart attack. Mama was one of the first casualties of the Lebanese civil war, stopped in her car by a gang seeking revenge for the Kataeb massacre of 27 Palestinians on a bus in Ain el-Rammaneh. She swore she was Moslem and Palestinian, but her identity document said she was Orthodox and Lebanese, so they cut her throat. At that time, I was living in Boston. I’d met my wife, Emma Levy, while at university there. Strange to think that my daughter, Ava, could return to Israel on a Birthright trip and choose to live in Haifa. I suppose I could go back now, too, but I’m too old. I’m not sentimental. Despite everything, I’ve had a good life. But I am curious to know if our old stone house still stands in that city of strangers, and if Mama’s jarra, wide-hipped and slender-necked, remains upon its ledge, gestating in its swollen belly Yava’s lavender manifesto for a new world.

Inside my father’s factory in Tokyo, there was a tiny room that he built. Rather, it was a corner sectioned by two pieces of plywood, just enough space for two average-sized men in a stretched-out position. A single futon, a TV, a hot plate, a hotel-sized fridge, a red velvet sofa, and a karaoke machine. It was more than enough for a single adult to live a modest life. There was no washing machine, and though we were equipped with multiple industrial washing machines and dryers in the factory, regular clothes had to be washed by hand and hung on the clothing pole outside during the day. There was a public bathhouse with an open-air bath located a few bus stops away, overlooking the highway traffic lights, which they advertised as metropolis illumination in your hand. Including the Angels who lived there, the room was my favorite place.

The sign outside of our factory still read: Silk, wool, embroidered textile, all handwashed in natural detergent. Faded color brightened. No stains are tough stains. My father’s grandfather started a kimono cleaning service in a once thriving neighborhood, frequented by geishas and other entertainers. Now my parents ran a rental hot towel business, delivering them to hotels and ryotei where secret rendezvous would take place. 30cm square wet white towels rolled and packed in plastic, ready to be used to wipe off the oily faces of a politician or yakuza. The business changed, shaped by the demands of the times; but my parents kept this one idea important to them.

My father was a communist who believed in world peace and equality. And yet, he had never attended a party meeting. The communist newspaper was delivered twice a day, morning and night, but it was my mother who actually read it. My father wasn’t an artist like Dalton Trumbo either, and when I told him that we were learning about capitalism in my history class, he said, “Karl Marx? That would be a good name for a sweet that Manshiro bakery would come up with.” Still, my father nodded whenever we saw the political party campaign car, and the candidate screaming into a megaphone, “No War, No poverty, No discrimination,” without a plan for how to achieve any of it. His eyes would twinkle like a boy who had never experienced a broken heart, and he would also say, “Everyone should be guaranteed basic needs.”

Besides the handful of loyal employees, we always had a few drifters too. I was the one who often found them, standing in front of the factory in the early morning on my way to school. They were often middle-aged men in drenched workers’ uniforms as if they had just escaped from Alcatraz or from their soggy pasts. My father was the one who called them “Angels.” Someone else might have found it sarcastic, but coming from a father who was as naive as to believe in the Communist Party’s empty promises, I didn’t doubt that he meant it entirely. And I thought that it wasn’t so much of a misnomer, since the people who worked in my father’s factory all seemed to appear and vanish without a trace. It would have been more appropriate to say that they had just swooped down from the sky. 

Much of the time, these Angels took advantage of my father. They almost always stole my father’s bike (and once even mine) as a means for their escape. We coined the phrase “disposable vehicles,” because so many bikes would go missing. The month-in-advance paycheck that my father loaned out would never be repaid, and my parents started to refer to the money as the “Angel retirement fund.” “Can you add 300,000 yen, retirement money for Mr. Kimura,” my father would say to my mother. “Alright, 300,000 yen for Mr. Kimura,” my mother would answer, opening the worn-out notebook. We spent one New Year’s Eve listening to a bill collector banging on our door. One of the Angels asked my father to help co-sign for a loan. The Angel told him he needed money to buy his kids a Christmas teddy bear. This was a classic lie that even a six-year-old me could figure out, but my father didn’t seem to doubt, or maybe he knew it was a lie but he still wanted to believe that the Angel needed the money more than he did. “The bill collector must be so cold out there. Let’s bring something warm to him,” my father said. His generosity reached even the man who seemed ready to break down the door to drag him out by his throat. 

“Let him do his job for tonight,” my mother said, stopping him. 

We slurped cup noodles in the candlelight and watched the year-closing music show on mute. The three of us snapped our fingers, whispering the lyrics with the songs. I imagined we were camping and there was a bear trying to get into our cabin. Our feet touched inside the warm kotatsu, full bellies, and whispering laughter. No matter how dangerous the outside could be, I had a father who still had room in his heart for his enemy and a mother who was not startled by my father’s kindness. 

Even when they owed my father money, these Angels who lived in the corner room always had a box of cigarette chocolate sticks for me. To me, the bear bill collector or stolen bikes seemed a separate issue from the Angels themselves. 

The Angels who lived the longest in the corner room were Techan and Yui. They were also the youngest. I didn’t find them like I did the other Angels. One afternoon, when I came home from school, I found two leather bags like the one a doctor might carry neatly placed by the sofa. I was sad because the previous Angel vanished two days before on my pink bicycle. I remember how excited I was to see the brand-new soap on the sink and crisp white shirts hanging on the hook. 

Techan devoted himself to the cleaning job like it was his calling. “There is nothing more satisfying to see things get cleeeean and freeeesh.” He had the thick Kansai accent that stretched to the end of his sentences. Yui worked only two days a week and for the rest of the week, he left the room early and came home late and we had no idea what he actually did. “Yui is going to be something so biiiiig and shine like a star. One day you’ll see him on TV.” This was Techan’s response when I asked where Yui was.

Friday and Sunday were the days that they both worked at the factory. We piled the worn-out white square towels during our lunch break. Whoever rolled the most towels in two minutes won. Techan and Yui came up with the game. With a timer in my hand, I shouted, “Ready, set, go!” and they would begin rolling seriously and silently. From seventy something Mr. Aoki, whose wife left him for a thirty-year-old male host to Yasu, who lost his right hand in the electric saw, to Yuriko, the retired geisha who sent money abroad for a son who she’d never see again, everyone cheered. The days when Tanaka-kun, a college drop-out who hyperventilated in public, felt good, he, too, joined the race. When he lost, he sobbed, and Techan and Yui hugged him and told him over and over again, “Everything will be alright.”

I loved Techan and Yui just like everyone else at work. Whenever I visited them in their room, they cooked dinner and even sang karaoke with me. “If something happened to you, people would blame them, then they would have no place to go, would they?” My father used to say and didn’t allow me to stay in the room with any of the Angels after working hours. But with Tetchan and Yui, my father let me have a sleepover. Yui put a fresh bath towel and a pillow on the red velvet sofa for me, and Techan and Yui crammed into a single size futon on the floor. 

Techan’s cooking was semi-homemade. Unlike the way I learned at my home economics class—soak the kelp and drop the bonito in the boiled water—he used an instant soup stock to make miso soup; “as long as all natural ingredients, it’s fine,” he said as he sprinkled the pellets into a pot. “If you can take a short cut, take it,” he would say. The finished dish tasted just as good as my mother’s.

Born and raised in Osaka, they cooked the best Japanese pancakes. “Tell you what. The secret of cookin’ knock-out Okonomiyaki is the way you stir. Don’t mix it, just fold. Use plenty of shredded cabbage and eggs. One egg per pancake, got it?” Techan would say. Once he finished folding the mix, Yui poured the butter on the hotplate. “Tell you what, Kayo,” Yui would take over the conversation, “the secret of cookin’ knock-out Okonomiyaki is the timing. Focus on the smell and sound. When it starts to emit the scent of bonito and the interval of the sizzling gets short, you flip it in one go.” He then stared at the comedy show on the screen. While Yui flipped the pancake, Techan sang along to the music on the show. He would spin like a pop singer and pass me the ladle to take over the rest of the song. Then he danced around me, while lightly touching one shoulder to another, and went around Yui and brushed his cheek. Yui was going to shine like a star, Techan said, but to me, he was the one who was the light of everyday life. 

We often watched a midnight quiz show where a young comedian who wore only a loincloth was slapped by the MC every time he got a wrong answer. “Kayo, you should never grow up to be a person who would slap a naked man’s butt without consent,” Techan would tell me. Yui followed Techan,“That’s right. You’ve got to have permission. For everything, whether to slap their faces, butts or even to steal someone’s man. You have to ask, ‘Can I slap your ass? Can I steal your husband? If they say yes, then you can.” They told me that this quiz show meant to educate kids about sharing and politeness.

Once the sake started having an effect on them, they told me “the story of how they met.” They were on the soccer teams of rival schools. 

“Nah, nah. You’ve got it all wrong, Yui. I was the one who spoke to you first. Yui was always shy, Kayo. If I waited for him to speak to me, I’d be a bald man.” 

“But, I spotted you first.”

“How woulda have known?”

“Kayo, Tetsu’s team was hella weak. We beat you guys even after we got a red card and lost one player.”

“The red card didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t focus on the game. Seeing you run like that…how could I? It’s still the same, I just couldn’t when you move so gracefully…”

“Crazy man.”

“Infatuated man, is what I was.”

After that, they’d gulp sake and proceed with stories of the places they had been, the regional food they had hated and loved, the odd jobs they had done—the stories which I’d heard over and over and yet could not understand the source of laughter that they shared. After each gulp, their Kansai accent got thicker, and the pace of conversation sped up like a manzai comedy. As I sipped my orange juice, I’d follow their conversation; it was like a ping-pong match. The same jokes at the same time; I could have been sick of listening, but I’d never stopped them. I somehow sensed that in this little corner of my parents’ factory, they were as free as they could ever be. 

I learned from my parents a kind of love which was rooted so deep that even a 7.0 earthquake could not shake it. But I’d never witnessed a love so fragile, like a young sprout tended to with careful attention. The love which could dry out without watering every day. The love you must watch every day, not to be stepped on by anyone. A partner you could drink many shots of sake with over the same story; I decided that this was the love I wanted when I was old enough to sleep with someone on one single futon.

On Valentine’s Day, the year I turned eight, Tetsu and Yui disappeared just like others. They didn’t owe my father anything. Their comic magazines that substituted as legs for the table, the tea towels they always brought to the public bath, the wire hangers, and even the small, cracked soap at the sink were gone with them. They left nothing behind.

My father handed me a neatly folded paper. 

“If they saw you, they said, they wouldn’t have been able to leave,” my father said. 

I found an unfamiliar handwriting, big, awkward, and strong strokes like the writing of a child who just started learning how to write.

Dear Kayo,

Good Luck with your life!

from Tetsuo and Yui

I stared at the five words trying to mine a deeper meaning. The meaning I found was that this tanned letter paper was the only evidence I had that they had existed in my life up until yesterday. 

When I saw the plywood at the corner of the factory, tears welled up in my eyes and put so much pressure on my head that I thought I’d suffocate, or that I would throw up my own heart. How could they leave me like this? I wished they had died instead, so I wouldn’t have to think of the possibility of seeing them ever again. I threw the letter away and didn’t step into my father’s factory again. 

The last man who lived in the corner room turned out to be a spy, not an Angel at all. It was the year I graduated from college. The spy lived and worked at the factory for three months just like all the other Angels. During the three months, he noted down my parents’ clientele, bookkeeping records, even our clients’ favorite gift lists. Not even my mother, who was vigilant around the business and in charge of bookkeeping, thought someone would try to take advantage of a small family business already on the verge of bankruptcy. 

They closed the factory under the guise of early retirement.

My father, whose hobby has always been bonsai, now spends four days a week cleaning parks for minimum wage, a job through the senior human resource center. My mother works full-time at a dry cleaner in the next town. My father is still a communist, and my mother is still the one who reads the communist newspaper. And I am still longing for someone whom I can share many drinks with over the same story.

At the core of the humanitarian regime is a commitment to international development: the promise that poorer countries can follow a formulaic sequence to arrive where wealthy ones already are. But it is clearer than ever that the modern economic development model is based on a flawed calculus, wherein even disaster response and resource depletion count as positive growth. The model fundamentally fails in its presentism, its emphasis on short-term gain cannibalizing any thriving future. Now more than ever, the sector is failing even by its own metrics, with rising inequality, foreign aid cuts, and the growing climate crisis threatening the precarious achievements of the eight decades since Bretton Woods.

The small Himalayan nation of Bhutan has existed largely outside the reaches of the development regime. Thanks to its geographic isolation, it is one of the only nations to avoid colonization completely. When foreign presence finally arrived in the 1960s in the form of road construction, it was treated with hesitation; in 1979, on his return from the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck declared that Gross National Happiness was more important than Gross National Product. Two decades later, Dasho Karma Ura took this proclamation as his mandate, architecting a complete measurement system for Gross National Happiness through his Centre for Bhutan Studies. In 2008, the first survey was conducted, and the country has measured its success by the collective happiness of its people ever since. As a rare extant alternative, Gross National Happiness became a constant counterpoint in my development education. It was the topic of my first research paper in high school, and years later in a senior-year tutorial with Stephen Marglin, Harvard’s last remaining Marxist economist, I argued that the framework might just solve the accounting problem of modern capitalism itself. 

Born just before the first foreign interventions began, Ura watched as Bhutan’s early encounters with the development sector began to alter its social fabric. While new infrastructure and hospital development brought clear benefits, each came at a direct cost to other factors vital to the social cohesion of his country. In his Gross National Happiness index, Ura includes the standard measures of development—household income, education, health—but positions them within a much broader web of factors constituting collective happiness: community vitality, time use, psychological wellbeing, cultural resilience, good governance, ecological diversity. Importantly, Gross National Happiness also takes a much more comprehensive definition of “work,” recognizing the contributions of domestic labor and the nonhuman world as inseparable from human welfare. Since the first index, Bhutan’s national happiness score has risen in every survey round, all the while becoming the world’s first carbon-negative country and graduating from the “Least Developed Countries” category based on conventional development metrics.

But can one of the world’s smallest nations, and one of the only ones spared from colonization, offer a model for the world? Ura believes so, having built Gross National Happiness as a scalar measurement system for the universal indicators of a good life. But the system offers more than an accounting fix; it calls instead for a renewal of generosity and virtue, both having been exponentially sacrificed through the proliferation of the development state. 

— Russell Reed for Guernica

Russell Reed: You were born in the village of Ura in 1961, before Bhutan had a currency economy. What did the Bhutan of your childhood look like?

Dasho Karma Ura: Bhutan before so-called modernization is the theme of my book, Bhutan: The Unremembered Nation, which is named as such because the greatest departures occur when there is very little transmission from one society to the next generation. In brief, it was a very secure society, well-adapted to abundance at the level of self-sufficiency. The need for money arises when there is extensive trade, so it wasn’t there at all. Barter left no desire for money back then. So you felt secure within a defined social, economic, and political horizon at that time. For good or bad, it was unchanging for hundreds of years.

Winters and summers were very contrasted, because the household would move to warmer places in the winter and return to our Ura base in summer. On either end of this seasonal migration, you had hosts who weren’t your relatives but whose importance was raised above that of your kin, because they were multigenerational hosts. We would leave Ura with gifts—highland woolen textiles, buckwheat flour, mushrooms, dry spinach—and in return, we would receive food grains. During our stay, we could contribute to household work and carpentry, and we’d bring rice, maize, oil, and seeds back home. The lunar new year was the time when everyone returned home with fresh food from the warm places, welcoming the new year together and beginning the cycle all over again.

It was a highly physical society. You acquired very specific practical knowledge about the locality, geography, and ecology of the place. The presence of the state was very moderate. Things were decided, maintained, and managed at the local level; all subsistence societies are a bit like that. Literacy was limited, but it was offset by other mediums of knowledge acquisition, transmitted orally or visually. In contrast, the degree and frequency of reliance on each other, and participation in each other’s lives for events both joyful and sorrowful, were very deep. It had neither the need for nor the awareness of the world far away. Events such as colonialism, war, conflict, and missionary activities were nonexistent to us. That was the Bhutan I grew up in.

Russell Reed: When did you first learn about the concept of international development?

Dasho Karma Ura: Medical and educational interventions preceded the construction of roads as the first expression of international development. I can’t place the exact moment in time, but it must have been the late 1960s or early 1970s when we became aware of the actors behind it. The road construction sector, represented mostly by Europeans and Indians, was the first radical intervention that changed traditional life.

The first tension in my own childhood was around admission to school, and continuation through the winter breaks. We gained literacy, as we call it now, with the local Lama; kids in Ura and the surrounding villages who had a little more than the median household would start reading and writing with the nearest Lama, usually for a few hours in the morning. In our case, the Lama happened to be on a mountaintop almost three hours of serious walking away. Our traditional curriculum involved a lot of memorization, mostly of thick prayer books. It leaned toward a religious understanding and imagination of the world.

In school, I remember reading a book called The Stream of Time. It must have been imported from India, where it arrived after being imported from Europe, because it began with the founding of Rome. This European history education continued in secondary school, learning about Richard II and Julius Caesar and the great British poems. This history had nothing to do with Bhutan, with Tibet, with any Himalayan country. It was all about the First World War, the Second World War, the founding of various big European states like Italy and Germany. All the social sciences were situated in relation to the Western world. At that time, I didn’t understand that there was any possibility for alternatives. In retrospect, I realized we could have learned Himalayan history, Himalayan sociology, and Himalayan politics instead.

Russell Reed: As international presence grew, what was the development sector’s vision for Bhutan?

Dasho Karma Ura: I started working in government in 1988, and I was soon engaged as editor of the country’s new five-year development plan. I continued that kind of work for over a decade. So I knew the normal package for these socioeconomic development plans—the values, the implementation mechanisms, the legitimating devices and principles. At that time, the frame was clearly coming from the international agencies at the forefront of development, and from the government of India. 

In my nearly four decades of awareness of that field, the international development ethos became like a swimming pool, and the nations were like swimmers: They could redefine themselves a little, but the template remained basically the same. By the time I joined the civil service and was placed in the Ministry of Planning, where I became editor of the five-year plan for at least three full cycles, Bhutan had already spent 20 years executing the so-called plan.

In the 1960s, the plan was primarily focused on road-building and the development of a few schools and hospitals funded by the government of India. Once that was complete, it paved the way for broader social aspirations in the ’70s, which centered on expanding Western medicine and Western schools. The early ’80s brought the attempt for a kind of self-sufficiency in government revenue through the exploitation of hydropower. Bhutan remained quite isolated, but air services began in the 1980s and brought another gigantic step toward standard international development. Then came the time of development with globalization. By the turn of the century, foreign television and digital technology began to take hold. 

Political changes also began in the late ’90s, and by 2008 the constitution was enacted and free elections took place. Through all of this, one constant aspiration of the Bhutanese was to consolidate a new sense of sovereignty. It was already there, but our increasing interactions with big powers required us to renew our sense of sovereignty. When you become aware of the bigger players around you, you have to ask: “In what ways can I play any role in this world as a microstate, with my limited resources and other confinements?” It was about culture, but another continuous factor from the third king to the fourth to the fifth was to ensure that the Bhutanese people experienced development holistically—mentally, physically—because that was a scriptural, traditional, and historic objective. Not as a so-called nation, but as individuals and communities, that has always been a signpost.

Russell Reed: In 1979, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck proclaimed that Gross National Happiness was more important than Gross National Product. What was he seeing happen in other countries already engrossed in the development sphere that made him concerned?

Dasho Karma Ura: The compulsion for economic growth was increasing, and he knew we needed to rebalance. He must have seen the portent for himself and his country. He must have seen the omission in other countries that were heavily preoccupied with economic transformation. It is difficult to name the root cause of this observation between industrialization, export orientation, and urbanization. He may have read the signs a little earlier than others, which is no surprise because he would have been influenced by the timeless observations of Buddhism.

Russell Reed: As the story goes, he actually made that proclamation on his way home from the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana, Cuba. Was he informed by these other world leaders who were already seeing the negative consequences of development?

Dasho Karma Ura: Possibly. It is quite likely he would have seen the pictures of rural Bhutan in his mind: low technological development, yes, but an unhurried, pacified, and secure life. No great ambitions toward a bigger house or vehicle. He might have seen the nascent restlessness of modern life, the separations among family members, the diminishing ethics of international relations. We can hypothesize about this sort of history, but the only thing we know for certain is that he mentioned gakid—peace and happiness—as his desired outcome.

Russell Reed: Over time, Gross National Happiness became an alternative measure. But “happiness” isn’t the most obvious antonym for “product.” Why happiness?

Dasho Karma Ura: Though it resists measurement, subjective awareness—the awareness of being calm, feeling positive and fulfilled, sensing that you are doing nothing wrong—marks the big moments in our lives. That feeling may come at the point of exhaustion after tennis or through intellectual work or through music. But regardless of their form, these are the precious moments that compose a desired life. There are causes aligned to it and causes inimical to it. That is where the difficult choice lies, because people have choices but not everyone has the choice to choose the right causes. We have many natural choices, but they are part of the larger texture of society. If that larger fabric is against you, it is a struggle to attain such a choice.

That moment of awareness must be sustained over days and weeks, at a high frequency throughout your life. The background is ethical; it is possible that a person who has access to a lot of good choices—exercise, contemplation, meaningful connections, a meaningful job—could feel content given those choices exercised. But if one attribute of his life is that he is hugely unethical, it won’t promote societal contentment or happiness. Being unethical is, by definition, undermining someone else’s good life, whether in the past or in the future. This is the ground on which you have to stand first for collective happiness: We must maintain a broad level of ethical virtue.

It is interesting that this series names a “Posthumanitarian” order, beginning after so much humanitarian aid has been bashed out of existence entirely. That is itself an expression of collective ethics, of the virtue of generosity emphasized in both the West and the East. It is a direct dismantling of the virtue of generosity at both individual and institutional levels. That is a major concern. We can indeed find alternatives, provided we bring virtue ethics among them. One thing we need to practice on a regular basis, for the happiness of society, is virtue—especially among those who have time, because they have fulfilled their self-sufficiency and therefore have time, money, resources, and capabilities to donate to others. In this way, we have to reawaken an alternative source, and we can do so through institutional evocation. The cultivation of collective happiness begins with the cultivation of virtue ethics at the individual level, producing societal-level happiness. They go together.

Russell Reed: Gross National Happiness is presented as a sort of antidote to Gross National Product—a direct alternative even in name. Why did you approach Gross National Happiness as a measurable alternative, rather than rejecting such forms of measurement altogether?

Dasho Karma Ura: The national accounts from which Gross National Product is calculated will not be undone easily. Even if you and I wish for it, it’s simply too entrenched. There are many institutions that bank on it, which hold the Gross National Product framework as their existential mandate. Very big institutions in trade, finance, and banking feed on the numbers generated from these national accounts. The speculative part of the world is nourished by it. So it’s not going away any time soon, and we must therefore do what we can with it.

On the other hand, even within those big institutions there is an acknowledgment that other work is necessary for societal function—the work done by humanitarian agencies, within households, by nature and by wild animals. The work done by sleep, even. They may not value it, but it is all completely necessary for the workers to work. So we all have to march, and we will reach a new place where we synthesize work with a much broader and deeper perspective of life. As an accounting system, it is incomplete, and many concerns aren’t addressed in the simple numbers presented in Gross National Product.

Russell Reed: Bhutan has a constitutional mandate for perpetual forest conservation, and it was also the first carbon-negative country in the world. What is the relationship between biodiversity conservation and collective happiness?

Dasho Karma Ura: If you’re in a rural area away from markets, you know how intertwined they are. At a layman’s level it is immensely obvious. In our surroundings here and now in Oxford, almost everything is manmade, but even the manmade has to come from somewhere—a lot of it from the non-manmade, from the natural order. So it’s obvious that we are directly dependent on the land and the forest, and the more diverse that land and forest around us is, the safer and more secure we are.

But below the threshold of your consciousness, there is also the importance of biodiversity and land diversity as aesthetic experience. This is a crucial component of daily awareness. Scientists explain it in terms of simplicity and complexity at the same time: simple rules underlying complex forms, like fractals. But for us, every visual is unique, because we notice them only from the perspective of where we are. It’s full of changing diversity at every single moment. The dependence of our sensory world on keeping us in heightened awareness is beyond any measurement or estimation. In a room like this one, you are fed static colors and paintings that dominate our thinking, but the ever-changing color, tone, and value of light is what energizes you. It comes with a pacifying influence. No one is ever angered by looking at a river. There’s an intrinsic power in it to calm you—from restlessness, from aggressiveness, from melancholy. 

Russell Reed: This framework diagnoses one of the foundational flaws of the modern economic development model, which is its presentism—or more generously, its short-termism. Measurements like Gross National Product count resource depletion and even disaster response as contributors to growth. That results in a sacrifice of the longer future, and a threat to sustained happiness.

Dasho Karma Ura: Temporal blindness is built into the calculation. It’s a flow measure, not a stock measure. Of course, an investor sometimes looks at the flow over a longer period, because he has to see where the cost-benefit ratio becomes favorable. But he does so without necessarily acknowledging that he has depleted irreplaceable stocks in the process. This results in a basic underestimation of, or indifference to, the future in the flow measure of Gross National Product. Even if cost-benefit analysis is extended out—say to 30 years for discounting—the rate of discounting becomes a matter of assumption rather than science. It sits somewhere between ethics and technique. To rebalance it, we must think about what happens once our body becomes just a mortal body, and what comes after that. It can only be rebalanced by ethics, not by accountancy. 

We need methods and training to reflect our behavior and consumption on a much longer time basis. You can think in terms of the next life, however laughable that concept seems to most people. But as a belief, which eventually becomes normative, accepting it means forcing yourself to think about what your behavior will be after you pass away. It launches you into a kind of journey about yourself beyond now, developing a reflexive judgment about your present self. We need many devices to think about the future—it’s very difficult to formulate. You don’t have all the variables to make a scientific, holistic picture of yourself in 10, 20, 30 years. Your life insurance is only one dimension. So I suppose good leadership has to specialize in that: What will the median person’s life look like in X number of years? And then we must design for the aggregate.

Russell Reed: Critics might view Gross National Happiness as a backward-looking policy, romanticizing the country’s long pastoral history. But at the same time, Bhutan is one of only eight countries to exit the “Least Developed Countries” category—a measure based on Gross Domestic Product. What is the relationship between Gross National Happiness, the past, and the future?

Dasho Karma Ura: The formulation of Gross National Happiness is very plural, accounting for ecological diversity, community, resilience, time use, health, education, living standard, culture, and so on. These are necessary conditions for happiness. In my opinion, Gross Domestic Product addresses the living-standard aspect of our existence and, to some extent, health and education. But there’s no necessary relation between them; you can have high income without strong education or health outcomes across the population. The rest of the plural dimensions of Gross National Happiness—community, relationships of trust at neighborhood, local, and governmental levels, generosity practiced at local levels, safety, frequency of high-quality interactions among members—represent a timeless aspiration for all societies. It was relevant in the past, and it will be relevant as long as we are social beings. Everything flows from the platform of time and nature; all things unfold from within those two domains.

There is pressure on how we use our time, which is theoretically the most equal resource we have. We’re not in complete freedom to allocate it to valuable activities within those 24 hours. Some may not sleep at night for various reasons, including night-shift work. Some may not get time for physical activity, or they may live too far from the forest to go for a walk. So time becomes a matter of privilege. Access to nature and a balanced use of time have been relevant to all civilizations of the past, and they will always remain relevant in the future. We will always be part of the environment, and we will always be in time—objective time, and the even more complex question of subjective time. 

Gross National Happiness represents a paradigm for the future. It holds the elements that all human beings should be entitled to. They’ll be known under different languages, but the substance is the same. Gross Domestic Product addresses the objective side of our existential needs, but once those are fulfilled—and we still struggle to fulfill them in the world right now despite all these years of development—we must emphasize sufficiency levels in Gross National Happiness. A culture of ethical compromise does not emphasize maximization, but rather the attainment of sufficiency for all. Beyond that, some things may be good to maximize—but never at the cost of deprivation for someone else. 

Russell Reed: Another common criticism of Gross National Happiness is that it comes from Bhutan, which is a very small country with an exceptional history of isolation from colonization and globalization. Is Gross National Happiness a protection for Bhutan from an ever-imposing world, or is it a model others can follow?

Dasho Karma Ura: As I mentioned, the elements embodied in Gross National Happiness are things every human being would like to fulfill. Yet these intentions may not be reflected in indexes like Gross Domestic Product. We need one dashboard where all of these things are shown, a single dashboard to trace which indicators are moving forward and which are moving backward. We don’t live well when one thing moves forward at the expense of others; we’re just left with riskier and narrower options. The measurement is absolutely scalable, allowing both upward aggregation and downward decomposition all the way down to the individual level. There is an individual sufficiency level for every single variable, so it’s applicable as a measurement from the village up to the nation.

It is designed as an easy approach for governments, too. Most of the time, governments have agencies looking after each of these areas. There are still some gaps in Bhutan; we don’t yet have a program to address someone suffering from too much anger or too much jealousy, though we do have teachings and meditation. By bringing each of these agencies together, showing the cause and effect of different interventions across the full range of happiness indicators, any government can adopt the practice of Gross National Happiness in its own setting.

Russell Reed: It seems your diagnosis for the development sector is that it conflates universal values with uniformity. Does the path to rebalancing an embrace of plurality lie in recognizing that universal virtues must be enacted and embodied at local and individual levels?

Dasho Karma Ura: Yes, absolutely. You characterize it well. We cannot be intimate and contributory to everybody; we can only be within our limited life and resources. We cannot be Jeff Bezos, but we are no less than him because we contribute meaningfully at the local level. He cannot reach everywhere either. The needs outlined in Gross National Happiness are universal, and they are mediated by friends, family, community, and neighbors. Nature, animals, weather, and the cosmos all play their role, too, in fulfilling your day.

Everybody needs the full opportunity to live well, 24 hours at a time. Within that there are universals: You need sufficient sleep with beautiful dreams; you need to wake up and take care of your body; you need, within all of that, to be rooted. Only then can you try to transcend your dual awareness, though you need to be fully functional to even attempt such transcendence. For this functional body and mind to experience joy, bliss, and ordinary pleasures, we need to have them simultaneously. In order to function well, we need sensory awakening every day, and then to transcend it.

Now, we need a global order to support this, because everyone is moving toward this potentiality at a different speed. Some, as kids, have no faculties yet. Some are phasing out of existence, vulnerable and fragile. We need to do everything possible so that people at every stage of life do not feel that their life’s purpose has ended so people feel life is precious, and can interact with others at a mutually positive level. And we need immense diversity so that we don’t stress the environment. Some must be nomads, some cowherders, some goat-keepers, some tailors, some hairdressers, some paddy cultivators, even if production is low and doesn’t make a profit. In that way, the earth can support anyone who moves on it—that includes insects, plants, fungi, and trees. Not everyone should aspire to office work.

Though we’ve advanced a lot in the last 300 years technologically, we now see the cost of it front-loaded. We must not discriminate between brain workers, hand workers, and foot workers. All kinds of work that contribute to this collective happiness, this fulfillment in life, are respectable. All kinds of knowledge that go toward bearing this fruit of happiness are respectable. And it all must be done without violence and conflict, with empowerment. It is such a system that we must continually maintain—though we are not big influential states or big influential people, we are architects of our own lives. As long as we dwell on this question, there will be food for a new movement. 

Russell Reed: As the neoliberal humanitarian infrastructure continues to crumble, do you feel called to reform the institutions behind it? Or do you see this instead as an opportunity to build something entirely new from its ruins? 

Dasho Karma Ura: Disaster is not necessary to conduct change. That is very costly, to be compelled to progress only by disaster. What we do know is that states have become extremely important actors in our lifetime, rightly or wrongly. In a place like Bhutan, the state was distant, only becoming present during military conflict with border countries or during tax collection. Otherwise, life was very much managed by the grassroots—a kind of decentralized democracy not well documented in the literature, but known to have been practiced all around the world. 

In many countries, we are seeing an embrace of well-being—not happiness, but well-being—as a concept. This seems to be a slow resurgence, but an increasingly important part of the conversation. But the major global course we’ve taken in recent years has been one of arms buildup, climate breakdown, and the capture of the economy by limitless concentration allowed by laws and institutions. And those institutions have facilitated such concentration even across preexisting borders and boundaries. All of this is quite contrary to the attainment of any form of well-being.

This brings me back to my original point, which is that we must resurrect virtue ethics. We must not depend on discipline from external forces; the market is supposed to discipline itself, external checks and balances are supposed to discipline individual aggression, yet the institutions protect them completely. So we have to build on virtue ethics, societal happiness, and new ways of sharing across boundaries and generations. That is, of course, a question of environment. It is in all this work that we may find our meaning in life. Strictly speaking, it simply must be done. What writer said that we are born for rebellion? Whoever it was, I agree.

A question can be an invitation to step beyond the story others have assigned us. In this conversation, poets Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal turn that invitation toward each other. Their questions move between two new collections, Chang’s LION and Handal’s Roma Roam, allowing each book to illuminate the other. Both collections are restless in form and geography. LION moves through myth, zuihitsu, documentary fragments, visual art, and dream, tracing female lineage and Asian American life amid violence, surveillance, and erasure. In Roma Roam, cities, bodies, languages, and histories enter one another; Rome reads at once as a place, a lover, an archive, and a consciousness in flow.

Across both books, survival is set forth as the recovery of interiority, the refusal of disappearance, and the difficult freedom of imagining oneself beyond violence’s final account.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica

Tina Chang: Your newest collection Roma Roam begins with place and roaming. You write, You tell me: I’m going to another country,/another city, another body./Perhaps my heart will stay uncertain, and I will destroy my history but I am leaving. How has place transformed within your collections and how has roaming changed your idea of home?

Nathalie Handal: Place has always been one of the first languages of my work, but place is never only place. It is movement, belonging. In Roma Roam, it becomes an accomplice, lover, body, and system of thought, where empire, migration, beauty, ruin, and longing collide. Rome is the poem’s waterways, the Mediterranean’s great spirit; the Tiber one of the city’s original sentences. Place becomes an argument with time, an archive of rupture and seduction, where history and intimacy are inseparable. And roaming resists itinerary and arrival. In earlier books, I often wrote toward fractured geographies—Palestine, inherited homes. Roma Roam reimagines home as multiple and unfinished. What holds the work together is not rootedness but route: where we are continually made and unmade.

That unstable self—the self as a site of opposing forces—makes me think of the contradictions held in the central figure of LION. What does the title LION hold for you, and how does the lion move through the book? In “Heartbeat: A Zuihitsu,” you write: In the Lion dream, I am predator / and prey, two faces, one turned / toward appetite, another toward / extinction. Is the lion a metaphor for the self or a figure of female power, survival, grief, appetite, violence, loneliness or is it a way of holding all of those contradictions at once?

Tina Chang: A lion in Chinese tradition is a very powerful force. When I was a child living in Taiwan, I remember stone lions that guarded the front of my family’s home. I was taken by them as they didn’t seem like one animal but many animals. The Chinese lion is an amalgamation and a dream. It’s the composite of the lion, dog, phoenix, tortoise, snake in some versions and in other versions it has wings. I love the idea of the impossibility and hybridity which is what the lion means to me. It is a force of contradictions: predator and prey, ferocious and tender, hungry and sated. I found the animal was closely associated with the feminine muscularity of the book. I could have chosen the word lioness but I wanted to claim terrain traditionally dominated by men while holding space for the concerns of living in a woman’s body.

Likewise, can you also talk about the title for your collection, Roma Roam? One word signals specificity while the other signals a dream journey of sorts. How did you combine two unlike elements?

Nathalie Handal: “Roma” gives us the specificity of the city—its architecture, mythologies, cinema, saints, decadence, ruins. “Roam” undoes fixity, turning the city into motion, into a way of inhabiting and being inhabited. And roam echoes Rome; the city is already inside the movement. The title also reflects something fundamental in my poetics. I’ve always inhabited the unstable border between place and movement, belonging and estrangement, rootedness and drift. Rome is the place, but roaming is the consciousness moving through it—an interior state, a fever dream, a historical current. To roam Rome is to be altered by it, but also to let one’s own histories—Bethlehem, New York, the sea, exile, desire—enter and alter its meaning.

This makes me think of LION, and of the way you enter lives that might otherwise be reduced to a single public narrative. One of the emotional centers of the book is your insistence on restoring interiority to women whose stories have been reduced to the fact of their deaths. You write of Michelle Go, I want to know something about her inner life. A train heads into its own dark mouth. Is lyric imagination, for you, a form of witness against erasure?

Tina Chang: Michelle Go was an Asian American woman who was killed during the pandemic and there was so much written about the details that marked the end of her life. Her story was reduced to a few minutes of a news article and that became her singular story but if we delve deeper, research tells us she was a cheerleader and worked for a plumbing company. If we research further we may learn about her childhood. As a poet, I imagined her life beyond the reported details. The imagination allows space for that lyrical impossibility. By contemplating the potential of Michelle Go, that rumination on the music of her mind resists erasure by insisting on the power of her interior life. In this way, there’s a kind of world-building through envisioned intimacy, thereby creating three dimensional realities of women beyond the journalistic facts of their deaths. 

In Roma Roam you approach intimacy with a city and love/lover which sometimes feels one and the same. Can you talk about that?

Nathalie Handal: The first poem was “The City,” published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets. It begins with Cavafy’s sense of the city as something we cannot escape because we carry it within us, then expands that idea: one city contains many cities, one body other bodies, one lover the traces of others.

That sense of one body carrying other bodies makes me think of LION, where familial intimacy feels like a living current—your mother’s heart, your daughter’s body, your grandmother’s hair, generations of women moving through one another. You write, “I make a promise to my mother that I will live,” and “I am knowing my mother / through this gentle body.” Is motherhood a refuge, burden, inheritance, a warning—or all of these at once?

Tina Chang: There are many kinds of lineages of which we are a part. The relationship at the forefront of the book is the relationship between the speaker and the mother. This is where all of her life’s lessons are learned; there’s growth through infancy, childhood, teen years, and into womanhood. With each phase of life, the speaker is mothered. When I first gave birth to my daughter, something shifted in me. I moved from thinking of myself as a single entity toward thinking of myself as a part of a delicate whole and, suddenly, I could see it: the wave of feminine energy that moved from my ancestors, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me, and then my daughter. While family and legacy can materialize in so many forms, this is one of them. Motherhood in its highest form is an offering. To mother is to give, to gift, to sacrifice, to restore all that was incomplete and broken. To mother is to promise to outlast the wreckage that life may bring. 

Nathalie Handal: Your collection is not a book of doom, even as it inhabits what can feel like impossible circumstances. What allowed it to remain a book of transformation rather than devastation?

Tina Chang: The heavier the emotions, the more I seek a balance, and that comes in formal and collaborative invention. After the killing of an Asian American woman, Christina Yuna Lee in 2022, I grieved her loss. This came on the heels of the killing of Michelle Go, who was mentioned earlier, who was pushed into the subway tracks as she was commuting to work. Prior to this, the Atlanta spa shootings in 2021 left eight people dead, including six Asian American women. After such colossal loss, I was filled with dread and fear. Locating the work of this collective of women artists, most of whom participated in a group art exhibition at the Eli Klein gallery to honor the life of Christina Yuna Lee, I was shaken awake. I collaborated with the work of six women artists in the making of this collection: Christina Yuna Lee, Astria Suparak, Hồng-Ân Trương, Haena Yoo, Hong Chun Zhang, and Joeun Kim Aatchim. Each of them has created language and worlds all their own and their bodies of work kept me spirited, inspired, and most of all hopeful. The power of their collective voice moved me away from doom and toward the empowered act of creation. 

Roma Roam also explores intensity of feeling, beginnings and endings, and everything in between. How do you end such a work that wishes to continue on?

Nathalie Handal: The city doesn’t end, and neither do longing, history, or water. Rivers keep moving, histories remain unresolved, longing changes form, cities keep speaking after we leave them. Roaming is not arrival but transformation—being altered by encounter and carrying that change forward. 

Tina Chang: What about the figures who roam or haunt each place? Who do you imagine is the envisioned “you” of these poems? Who do you envision is the recipient of these emotions and longing?

Nathalie Handal: The “you” is intentionally unstable. At times it is a lover, or the memory of one, becoming inseparable from the city itself. But the address keeps expanding: Rome as beloved and betrayer, Palestine as absence and inheritance, the Mediterranean as a living alphabet, or the self one has outlived.  Longing is rarely tidy enough to belong to one recipient; it spills across bodies, seas, and losses. I wanted the “you” porous enough to hold eros, grief, migration, and wonder in the same breath.

I recognize another kind of insistence in LION: not the erasure of devastation, but the refusal to let devastation have the final word. You write, “There is no greater art than to live,” and “We wonder, we begin again.” Is LION ultimately a book about survival? And if so, what kind? 

Tina Chang: The book begins in myth. The speaker is born “an ember of wanting,” and becomes visible and present in the world. Throughout, there is the myth of “the seekers” or entities of surveillance and sometimes destruction. As the speaker moves through the book, she is first invisible, or made to disappear. In the second and third sections of the book, the speaker is watched and pursued. By section four, there is a significant transition where the speaker begins to claim her own presence and that comes in the form of voice, community, and a feeling that she is most definitely not alone which causes her to claim her power. On a personal level, I arrived at the same revelation: I felt isolated and frightened during the pandemic. As I sought the work of other Asian American artists, their vision felt unstoppable to me and by leaping into that collective narrative I realized destiny was something claimed: I wasn’t working toward survival. I had already survived. 

Can we shift gears and talk about how you envisioned a structure for Roma Roam? I love “The Untouchable Waters” as its own distinctive vessel where an Italian translation appears at the base of the page while “Close-Up” draws from cinema. How did you decide on form in this newest work? How has form grown with you? 

Nathalie Handal: Form is a way of listening to what the poem wants to become. Each arrives with its own pressure, breath, architecture. One formal approach couldn’t hold a book that is cinematic, historical, multilingual, sensual, at times essayistic, at others elegiac. Rome is not one register. Neither is longing or memory. So I let the poems find the vessels they needed. “Close-Up” draws on cinema—the cut, frame, zoom, the way an image can hold emotional voltage without explaining itself. I wanted the poem to move like film: to pan, tighten, juxtapose. Rome is, after all, a film set; love and its illusions unfold frame by frame. With “The Untouchable Waters,” the two languages resonate across the page, the Tiber flowing between them—a river of history, migration, and what cannot be contained in one tongue. Form has grown with me because I trust it more now to be hybrid, intuitive, disobedient. My life has moved through languages, cities, and literary traditions; the poems do the same. I want form alive enough to hold fracture and music, documentary and dream.

That movement between fracture and dream makes me think of the formal restlessness of LION. You move through zuihitsu, lyric, documentary fragments, mythology, reportage, dream logic, and recurring visual motifs. How did you find the forms the book needed? Did fragmentation arise from the material itself, or from something closer to haunting and recurrence?

Tina Chang: There were two anchoring poems in the collection and they happen to be lengthier forms. One genre is the zuihitsu which translates from Japanese and means, “following the brush.” It’s akin to a stream of consciousness that embraces essays, poems, to do lists, emails, texts. I found this genre to be freeing yet disciplined. It offers a sense of meandering but it does hold a gravitational center. The Asian American female experience couldn’t be held in a strict form so the zuihitsu provided liberation. The second anchoring poem is a pecha kucha called “Tangle” that collaborates with Hong Chun Zhang’s visual art. Her ink paintings focus on varying emotional, familial, and political interpretations of hair. Here, the Japanese pecha kucha form encompasses twenty slides/images for twenty seconds. I responded to each image to build a long poem incrementally and this scaffolding created its own life force. 

I love your work with character. You say, “A man should know the distances between himself and home.” Can you explore this idea?

Nathalie Handal:  I’m interested in distance not only as geography but as consciousness: the distance between who we believe ourselves to be and what we do, between impulse and consequence, the self and its own truth. In Roma Roam, home is also integrity—a center within the self where one remains answerable to love, care, one’s own humanity. A man should know when he has strayed too far from that center, from the courage love asks of us. Sometimes the deepest exile is from who we might have been, had we known how to stay.

Perhaps another aspect of distance is hunger, which feels like a powerful current in LION—not only desire or grief, but a kind of famine of safety, recognition, belonging. Was hunger one of the book’s central engines from the start?

Tina Chang: I love how you phrase it, “famine of safety,” and that’s exactly right. In LION, hunger signals desire, seeking, a sojourn to find out what one is hungry for. Since LION is largely a myth, I’m not speaking of hunger for food or for materiality. Hunger is a story and a pathway to understanding human need and the lengths to which people will go to satiate themselves. When we speak of survival of the fittest, we are referencing strength, hierarchy, dominance as much as we are referencing caregiving, nourishment, community, and resilience. What the speaker is hungry for is the desire for visibility, free from judgement, gender bias, pursuit and brutality. In our current culture, to be seen is to face conflict, violence, and erasure. The ultimate hunger is to be safely seen. 

To be emotionally seen feels so central to Roma Roam. There is not only a personal rupture but also an infidelity that touches language, place, and history. How does infidelity function in the book?

Nathalie Handal: Infidelity interests me because it makes certainty impossible. The lover becomes strange, the past changes tense, memory becomes unreliable. But there is another infidelity in Roma Roam: to belong to several worlds, alphabets, and intimacies at once is to refuse the fantasy of a single allegiance. Rome understands this—it preserves and betrays its own past everywhere you look. The book doesn’t ask whether betrayal can or should be forgiven. It asks what betrayal reveals—about pleasure, power, the stories we tell ourselves to remain inside love. Perhaps the deepest infidelity is not to another person, but to the truth we already know.

If betrayal alters the past, LION makes me think about poetry’s relationship to the future. The speaker says, “We are, all of us, running toward the future,” and artist Hồng-Ân Trương writes, “The future is now.” How does time move through this collection, and what does an Asian American future mean to you?

Tina Chang: The future is a construct and a dream. It’s an invented idea that offers us consolation and hope, a way to build the present out of something unknown. Encountering Astria Suparak’s artwork showed me the face of an Asian American future from the perspective of white media and filmmakers who often envision a future complete with pseudo Asian iconography and even non-Asian actors playing roles intended for characters of Asian descent. Suparak’s work comments on these fabricated realms of future time, based on stereotypes.  I wanted to approach the poems in LION both domestically and mythically. As the book moves toward the future and the final poem, “Always More Than One of Us,” there is no more pursuit or threat of danger. In the future where we are mirrored in our own likeness, multiplied, and dictating our own outcome, we are safe.

As a global citizen—a Palestinian, Mediterranean writer shaped by the Caribbean, Latin America, Southern Europe, and Asia—you’ve lived amidst unimaginable destruction as well as extraordinary survival. What do you think we’re surviving, and what does it take to survive? When so much is being lost, how do you reach for beauty?

Nathalie Handal: We are surviving disappearance. We make archives of beauty: a poem, a gesture, a street remembered, a body loved. To make beauty in the presence of loss is to say: this, too, existed; this, too, remains. Perhaps beauty is what disappearance leaves unfinished.

Tina Chang: Yes, to survive is to be called to dream beyond erasure. When the body is restricted, surveilled, or threatened, it’s the mind that can mend the spirit and that’s what feeds us and offers us the intention to live fully, without bounds. The imagination strives relentlessly to be free. 

Tell me I am real, place your lens there.

Ensure I am rooted as safely as a gardenia,

in the aftermath of our intentions. My footprint 

steps on the neck of these tides, my grip 

shivers against the camera, a shutter moves 

with a candid eye and captures me so vividly.

The light never held me willingly, 

a participant, a gasp. When you find me, 

make sure to tell me I’m the subject. 

Simple sounds ring and record. Tell me 

who took a pen to detail the secrets of the past. 

I am the one riding through the machine, all 

the subtle parts that murmured appear now 

full of fury. I am destined for the earth, 

a ball of fire, dropping like coal into the sea, 

all the parts of me once hidden, now diamond

precious, a light to be caught. Little spark, 

little spark, call me by my name. 

I miss this life. What it had meant to give me. 

It was, after all, in the form of a flower.

The peony was my favorite, bright bulb

of concave petals, fuchsia of last night’s dream. 

The peony was the soft cheek of a woman. 

In the beginning, the peony was the bullet, 

ablaze, purposeful, and aimed at dawn.

The trigger was set against the opening,

a void. I march. I forget the man-made 

objects. Let go of the hunter lowering the axe 

to chop wood, his ammunition, scythe, at war. 

The dam was destroyed, rooftops drowned. 

The wind topples me. I lie down on tilled 

and fruitful land, hold tight to the stem, 

its willful life I surrendered. I cock the trigger, 

release my ancestors, seeing the future 

they were willing to die for.

Maybe when AI starts having sex and fears death, it will start making great art. 

— Jerry Saltz[1]

1. The Poem, and What the AI Overview Said

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” (340) by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading – treading – till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum –

Kept beating – beating – till I thought

My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

AI Overview

Significance: The poem is a powerful exploration of a mental breakdown, using the metaphor of a funeral to depict the speaker’s descent into madness and loss of reason.

2. Bodies of Water

Kept treading – treading – till it seemed 

That Sense was breaking through –

I’ve been reading this poem for twenty years and, like the river in the Heraclitus, it’s never the same poem twice.[2]  It’s not just me. The poem also changes in response to the changing world around it. Up till now, following the poem’s metaphysical lead—“in my Brain”—I’ve read the funeral metaphorically. Suddenly I’m not so sure. What if there is a real, human loss behind this poem? 

Who did Dickinson love so much that she entombed this person (very alive still) in the poem? Does it matter? I hear the dispassionate tone less forensically now, and wonder if it comes primarily from an effort to withstand the blow.

When I reach the final stanza—this has never happened to me while reading the poem before—I suddenly find myself at a loss: 

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

Reading horizontally, grammatically, I can kind of make sense of this. Kind of. Not really. I try to remember how I made sense of it on previous readings, but what little I do remember doesn’t add up. I understand all the words, the syntax is clear, but when I put all those pieces together for myself, I have more questions than answers.

What does it mean for a sturdy plank in reason to break? It feels like scales have fallen from the speaker’s eyes, but what wasn’t she seeing? Is reason a kind of blindness? What truth was it obscuring? Does the snapping of the plank produce a mystical vision? Does it signify a rebirth? 

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes mystical visions as partaking of a “noetic” quality: they seem to impart authentic knowledge of transcendent realities. Maybe being “finished knowing” in this poem is a precondition for Knowing. But James also characterizes these experiences as essentially salubrious, bringing lasting and beneficial change in understanding and well-being to those who undergo them.[3]  The concluding stanza seems to lead in a less propitious direction. Descents tend to carry negative connotations. The measured rhythm of the verse does its best to sustain a balance that suggests resilience, but it can’t contain the terrifying sensation that “dropped,” “down, and down,” “hit,” and “plunge” evoke. 

We are familiar with accounts of mystical visions that seem to require suffering or deprivation. Like Simone Weil’s migraines or the Jewish scholar St Paul being struck blind,[4] “hit a World” vibrates with the promise of new insights, mystical or otherwise. The phrase is candid about the pain, even violence, these insights may cause. The enlivening jolt of immersion in “plunge” likewise carries a mixed message, in contrast to the solid, stolid “Plank” (of reason) that we stand on.

Dickinson knew that there is no end to knowledge—we can never be “finished knowing.” Even to be confronted with the limits of our own knowledge increases it. We come up with countless strategies for reassuring (fooling?) ourselves that we are in control of what is happening to us—that we know what we’re doing—but the truth is that experience is disorienting, whether we are attending a funeral or reading a poem. We never know exactly what is happening. We learn by going through things. Is Dickinson describing the discomfort that comes with being immersed in a new experience—a profound, if temporary, state of being “finished knowing”?

James describes the transient nature of mystical visions and our lack of control over when they begin and when they come to an end. Does the concluding “– then –” of the poem, tethered to the poem and to the unknown beyond it, lean more in one direction or the other?

Looking back over my shoulder, I remember that the plank in Dickinson’s poem breaks on the heels of the speaker of the poem finding herself “[w]recked, solitary, here – .” More ambiguity. Though “wrecked” points toward violence, the breaking of the plank comes in with an inconclusive and then. Do we hear: “And then things went straight to hell?” Or “And then I had my amazing breakthrough?” Can it be both? How can we tell?

Immersed in these uncertainties, I find myself stranded—and then thinking about Monet’s Water Lilies. 

There’s always so much to do in Paris it can be easy to forget about the Water Lilies, housed as they are in the basement of the Musée de l’Orangerie on the edge of the Jardins des Tuileries.[5]  The city is full of Dickinson’s “– then –”. There’s the Mazarin Gallery in the National Library of France Richelieu, whose treasures include the first globe to use the word “America,” Dagobert’s bronze throne, Charlemagne’s ivory chess pieces, original manuscripts of Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, and handwritten scores by Bach, Mozart, Chopin, all watched over by the inhabitants of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, mortals and immortals alike, who flee and chase each other across the 17th-century painted vault above. There’s Foucault’s pendulum painstakingly demonstrating that the earth is rotating on its axis in the Pantheon across the Seine. There’s “the road running through Paris,”[6]  the sacred, magical, mythical, mystical, deadly Seine itself. But there is also so much to see in those two elliptical rooms built just for them. 

Nymphaeales—water lilies, lotus, and their aquatic kin—belong to the oldest order of flowering plants and date back at least as far as the early Cretaceous Epoch 135 million years ago, although possibly as many as 250 million years.[7]  In art, they date back over 4500 years, carved into the walls of the necropolis at Saqqara, site of the world’s oldest pyramid. 

My father liked to tell the joke about the little old lady who raises her hand during the Q&A after the lecture at the planetarium. “Did you say the universe would begin to collapse in 20 billion years or 20 million?” “Twenty billion,” the lecturer clarifies. “Thank goodness,” says the little old lady. 

Although I understand it’s not as big, 4500 years is as unimaginable to me as 250,000,000. I “split the difference” and ask AI how long it would take me to count to the lower estimate of 135,000,000. The Overview tells me that, in theory, and at a rate of one number per second, it would take me 4.28 years, counting aloud, although because of how long it actually takes to pronounce multi-syllable numbers (e.g., “one hundred twenty-three million, four hundred fifty-six thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine”), and once sleep and other necessary breaks are factored in, a more “realistic” estimate clocks in at over 30 years. This is fun, but none of it helps. I can identify a handful of constellations in the night sky, but it leaves me no closer to being able to imagine an infinite universe, or less awed at the prospect.

*

Impressionism, the AI Overview tells me, is “a 19th-century art movement originating in France (circa 1874), [that] revolutionized painting by focusing on capturing fleeting moments, natural light, and modern life through loose, visible brushstrokes and vibrant, unblended colors.” Sure. Although, is it “fleeting moments” that Monet is capturing in the Haystacks or the facades of Rouen Cathedral, the two series he was working on while he was planning and building his water garden at Giverny?[8]  Aren’t they more about the process of perception, how our perception changes “with the light?” 

I give the AI another chance, asking it about these two series in particular. It informs me that the purpose of these paintings was “to capture the ephemeral effects of light and color, using the same subject as a ‘neutral constant’ to record atmospheric changes.” The AI clearly has not spent a lot of time looking at or thinking about these paintings, or about the purpose of art. Monet was not a meteorologist. He was a visual artist working in the midst of a watershed moment in intellectual history, painting through and into a new skepticism with regard to human reason, a new valorization of human subjectivity, a new interest in what our instincts, senses, imagination, and individual consciousness know and can tell us about the world and ourselves. 

Although his physiological vision began to deteriorate in the latter half of the first decade of the new century, due to what he rightly suspected to be cataracts, confirmed in 1912, he avoided surgery for another ten years. It’s not just that he didn’t trust doctors. As James H. Rubin observes in his comprehensive addition to the World of Art series, “[I]n an era when objective vision (assuming it can exist) is no longer regarded as the basis for artistic creativity, one’s feelings based on visual stimuli, even if imperfect, are the source of art” (italics added).[9]  It wasn’t just artistic creativity. There was a widespread turn toward the subjective as the more reliable conduit to knowledge, a new understanding that one purpose of knowledge is to lead to self-knowledge. In light of these ideas, no subject matter is “neutral” or “constant.” It’s all flow, it’s all personal. The “atmospheric changes” being recorded are occurring within.  

*

Monet wanted to give the viewer of his Nympheas the “illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore.”[10]  Gesturing as it does toward the mystical as well as the philosophical symbolism of water, it’s a personal vision for an art that could carry its audience to a profound, even absolute understanding into the existence of things. Knowing, it implies, comes from a process more like baptism than taxonomy, and involves what’s frightening and chaotic about immersion, balanced by the promise of renewal, transformation, even wisdom.

Standing in front of any of the Water Lilies in the hush of the Orangerie’s elliptical space, I don’t know where I am. Am I standing on the banks of this body of water, on a boat in it, on the Japanese footbridge that I know is in the garden? (I’ve seen it in other Monet paintings and at Giverny itself, but it is not in these paintings.) Am I in the water? There is no horizon, no focal point to orient me, no center, no reliable sense of scale. I wonder what the painter himself would have made of “Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience,” the interactive virtual reality exhibition that’s been touring the world since 2019. Perhaps he would have been amused at the idea, since he had already done it.

Even in the gardens he designed and planted on the main property, Monet eschewed the linear, structured designs of the French impulse for the rampant, riotous English style and filled the beds to bursting. Poppies, sunflowers, nasturtiums, daffodils, primroses, willowherbs, irises, peonies, delphiniums, Oriental poppies, asters, and all variety of sunflowers spilled into the paths like a river overflowing its banks.

To be surrounded by the murals of Monet’s Water Lilies is to be immersed in his vision. The thin gold frame that surrounds each mural isn’t there to define the compositional boundaries; it acts to demarcate an aperture giving onto another world. It’s a world whose elements I can identify: archipelagos of lily pads and their occasional blooms of color, waterfalls of grass, a tree trunk rising up out of the water, another dancing, willow strands hanging down to the surface where they are met by their own reflections alongside the reflections of all that (I infer) exists beyond the frame: treetops, clouds, the sky, the time of day, all now part of the water in which the waterlilies are suspended. 

I am used to entering imaginatively into the scenes presented to me—in poems, prose, films, plays, and music no less than paintings—but the Nympheas are different. Although I can identify them, I’m still having trouble keeping all the elements separate. The individual forms located on, above, and below the surface, the surface itself, the reflections, me!—we all blur together. When I approach I do not take in more detail, I become smaller; I don’t see more clearly, I become entangled in the fleshy paint; I have to work harder to hang onto my knowledge that those mists and waves and drops of color are there to represent petals, pads, roots. My knowledge that I am standing before a painting on a two-dimensional surface is powerless against my feeling that something in there is luring me in, trying to pull me under. I am part of Monet’s “illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore.” While I am in it, I know so much more than I could ever account for, even if I were given “all the time in the world” to articulate it. And also so much less.

*

An AI can’t stop to think about Monet’s Water Lilies, or remember the last time it saw them, or understand what I mean when I say it doesn’t seem possible that it’s been three years now since I saw them in person, or reproduce the process by which my brain found itself stranded on the other side of Emily Dickinson’s final and then. 

We can look at a few brushstrokes of paint and see across oceans, millennia. We can enter sympathetically into an object and intuit “what is unique in it and consequently inexplicable.”[10]  An AI can name everything it “knows,” but it can only “see” one thing at a time. This is sad (if we’re into anthropomorphizing LLMs) but hardly a fatal flaw. A more serious limitation is AI’s inability to comprehend ambiguity.

My AI defines ambiguity as “incomplete or vague data,” and tells me it can “solve it” with “probabilistic reasoning” based on an assumption that it can “identify and resolve user intent.” It turns out that AI may share the source of one of its biggest limitations with the humans who designed it: hubris.

The problem with certain kinds of problems is that they’re like Maria in The Sound of Music: you can’t solve them. No one can. It is often one of these “problems” that serves as the inciting incident for a work of art, as opposed to a scientific study. You could say that “turning 30” and “feeling like you don’t really belong to your own family,” respectively, sets Franz Kafka’s The Trial and The Metamorphosis in motion. In John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” it’s (maybe) the desire to represent the everything of our lives in a work of art. It’s not just a problem of space, it’s a problem of time: How do we square “[t]his thing, the mute, undivided present” with “the present we are always escaping from / And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days / Pursues its uneventful, even serene course”?[11]  (Although, in the 552 lines of this poem, he gets as close as anyone.) 

As for the resolutions that take the form of happy endings, they offer more of a temporary stay than a solution. The discords of love, loneliness, libido—of life—are not really solved by the marriage that symbolizes harmony in, say, the comedies of Shakespeare and the novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. Genuinely joyful and worth celebrating, these happily ever afters are also new beginnings. Tying the knot, we know, is a deceptive solution. Those who believe they have put an end to their story by getting married have swapped one set of unknowns for another. The clarity (reason) that illuminates and untangles all the mayhem soon gives way to new muddles. The “all but” intractable problems and “all but” insurmountable obstacles our heroines and heroes have just struggled mightily to solve and surmount are about to come back in new forms. The strife and confusions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are only the dress rehearsal for married life, a foreshadowing and a metaphor for the real thing. 

One form these kinds of problems take is that of dilemmas, via the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “a choice between two (or, loosely, several) alternatives, which are or appear equally unfavorable; a position of doubt or perplexity, a ‘fix’.” Literature gives us a quintessential example in Oedipus Rex. For most of Sophocles’s play, we watch in horror as Oedipus learns that the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother has been fulfilled. The irony of his unshakable belief that he can change his circumstances, and already has, hits hard and stays with us long after the curtain falls.

Oedipus Rex opens on a problem. A blight is devastating Thebes. The oracle at Delphi, having been consulted on Oedipus’s orders, commands that the murderer of the prior king, Laius, be identified and banished. Only when the killer has been brought to justice, will the city be purified and the pestilence lifted. Oedipus believes that he is able to discover the truth and that, as the current king of Thebes, it is his civic and sacred duty. He’s right on both counts. What he fails to take into account are his own blindspots, the limits of his own self-knowledge, the unknowns within himself. He has spent his whole life thinking that he can avoid the defining dilemma of his life: accept your fate or be conquered by it.

What can feel impossible, to humans, is literally impossible for an AI. In its own words, Google’s AI tells me, “I do not ‘experience’ dilemmas the way humans do—I have no personal emotions, moral weight, or fear of consequences. Instead, I navigate dilemmas through a computational process based on programming, training data, and safety guidelines.” I appreciate that it puts “experience” in quotes. Clearly it does not experience dilemmas. An essential part of what makes a dilemma a dilemma is how it feels to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. An AI promises to solve a dilemma as if they weren’t a dilemma at all.

An important part of being human is learning to manage our emotions as we work through the moral implications of our choices—not least because we are not the only ones who have to live with the consequences. What Oedipus Rex the character illustrates, what Oedipus Rex the play dramatizes, is that for all his stature and intellect, there is no chance that Oedipus can reason his way out of his dilemma. His problem is, effectively, the problem of the human condition. 

Going back to the poem, I labor to add my own reasoning (something an AI can’t do) to Dickinson’s: 

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then –

It’s not all of reason that has broken, I suddenly realize—it’s just one plank. Dickinson isn’t scrapping Reason wholesale. She’s questioning its solidity, pointing up its deficiencies, what it can neither account for nor explain. She’s also finding out that the world doesn’t come to an end with the failure of reason. It may in fact come to greater, more palpable life. A chink in reason’s armor might, indeed, reveal devastating truths. It might also lead us to discover new worlds. Maybe she’s learning that we construct our certainties at our peril, and that uncertainty is not such a high price to pay for what lies beyond their limits.

References

[1] Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night (New York: Riverhead Books, 2022).

[2] As cited in Plato, Cratylus (402a) and Aristotle, Metaphysics (1010a).

[3] “Lectures XVI  and XVII: Mysticism” in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902.

[4] “[A]nd suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: and he fell to the earth… And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man…. And he was three days without sight.… And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.” Acts 9:3-4,18. The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[5] There are some wonderful oxymorons here in what is literally a “Greenhouse Museum” in a “Tile-making Factory Garden.” 

[6] Julien Green, The Strange River, 1932.

[7] In evolutionary terms, flowers were a kind of breakthrough, a new mutation designed to entice animals with color and scent so they would assist in propagation. It was a successful strategy. There are about 300,000 known species of flower-producing plants today.

[8] Monet had become successful enough to buy the house at Giverny in 1890 (he had been renting it since 1883). He painted the Haystacks (1890-1891), which were in fact stacks of grain (Meules, “wheat,” from millstones, the heavy stones used to grind the grains) in the fields near the house; and travelled from the station at Vernon, just down the road, to Rouen, a 1⅕ to 2 hour journey by train, to work on the series of Rouen Cathedral (1892-1893).

[9] James H. Rubin, World of Art: Monet (Thames & Hudson, 2020), p. 171. 

[10] Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T.E. Hulme [1913]. Stockbridge, MA, 1949.

[11] John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Poetry (August, 1974).

Sometimes Naseer Paktyawal awakens at four o’clock in the morning.

The two-story house creaks in the silence. Brown roof, brown brick, just like the houses next door and across the street. It sits fifty-one miles north of Dallas in the town of Princeton, and thirty-five miles from Richardson, where he had rented a two-bedroom apartment in the same complex as his now dead brother, Nazeer. The AC hums. The August heat already rising. Temperatures have reached above one hundred degrees. June was hotter.

Naseer tells me that at the early hour, before dawn, he often lies awake in bed facing the ceiling. His mind inevitably turns to Nazeer, who died in ICE custody in March, just five months ago. Forty-one years old, gone. Six children, three boys and three girls between the ages of fourteen and three, without a father. Now Naseer must take his place, just as Nazeer took their father’s place when he died of cancer in 2010. The responsibility weighs on him. Before Nazeer died, Nasser didn’t think much about expenses. Now he must. He wonders how he will support his brother’s widow, Ziba, and their children, alongside his own wife and four boys. The oldest is ten; the youngest is almost three.

He hopes his family will forgive him. He voted for this president. He thought Donald Trump would be good for the economy. He never expected the ICE sweeps. He believes his vote contributed to his brother’s death and cannot forgive himself. He hopes that when the children are grown, they will understand he did not want any of this to happen, but he will always carry his sense of guilt. 

He sighs, slumps his shoulders. Sometimes the burden feels too much. 

In the days after his brother’s death, reporters kept calling Naseer, asking about Nazeer. He would show them pictures on his phone: 

See Nazeer in Afghanistan, dressed in desert fatigues, an M16 in his hands, standing beside American servicemen. Nazeer had been an Afghan special forces soldier, part of an elite tactical unit known as the Zero Units. Created, funded, and directed by the CIA, the clandestine forces were officially housed within Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. But they operated largely outside the Afghan military chain of command, as a shadow force that answered directly to American commanders.

See the certificate acknowledging his work as a soldier: Department of the Army 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (A) Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Presented to Mohammad Nazeer. In recognition of your unconditional dedication to special forces, the fifth for freedom and against terrorism, your devotion to Islam, your family and Afghanistan. This certificate honors your sacrifice and service.Given this 8th day of September, 2006 A-Camp Goodwiin, Shikin, Afghanistan.

See the document from US Customs and Border Protection admitting him into the United States., class of admission OAR,  Operation Allies Refuge, a code assigned to Afghan nationals who were granted humanitarian parole into the United States. 

See his social security card: Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal valid for work only with DHS Authorization.

See his Texas driver’s license. Smiling into the camera. A full round face, black hair combed to one side, his beard closely shaved. 

See the photo of him standing before a lake. Squinting, a juncture of land green with vegetation behind his left shoulder. Freedom, his green T-shirt reads. 

See his work permit valid from January 30, 2024 to January 29, 2029. 

See State of Texas Certificate of Vital Record Certificate   of Death 142-26-042511, Parkland Memorial Hospital March 14, 2026.

See the stitched v-cut on his bare chest after the autopsy. A big hole sutured on his left side. A fresh red bruise on his left side. Naseer doesn’t know its cause. Was it from the autopsy or something else?

Naseer hands me the phone so I can look at the photos. It is midday on a Saturday. We are sitting on the second floor of his house, where traditional red Afghan carpets cover the floor. We lean against plush, oversized pillows. Naseer wears a green T-shirt, green khaki pants. A trim beard wreaths his face.

After Nazeer died, Naseer moved Ziba and her children in with his own family, but it soon became apparent that their apartment was too small to accommodate thirteen people. A friend told him about this house. Naseer wanted to buy it, but the realtor required an $8,000 down payment, which he could not afford. He made arrangements to rent it instead. The rent is $2,300 a month, but with water and utilities, his monthly expenses come to about $2,800. That doesn’t include food, clothing, school supplies, or unexpected emergencies, such as a leaking toilet, which can quickly add up. Naseer earns about $8,000 a month driving a truck, but things will be tight—he still owes money on his Volvo VN, an aerodynamic, long-haul truck. Ziba does not speak English, work, or drive. She and Naseer’s wife stay home to look after the children.

Naseer mulls over his options: Two weeks driving, one week home. That might just be enough to pay the bills. If not he will stay on the road longer. Diesel prices are high. Tablets, clothes, backpacks, all this stuff for the kids. He shakes his head.  He tries not to think too much.

I suggest he set up a GoFundMe.

Yes, he agrees.

*

I first heard about Nazeer in a headline that seemed to disappear almost as quickly as it appeared: an Afghan man who had served alongside U.S. forces had died in ICE custody. Then the news cycle moved on. Occasionally, it circled back to Nazeer, but not often. However, he remained a constant presence in my mind.

I had spent fourteen years in Afghanistan as a reporter. At times, I embedded with U.S. troops and came to understand the risks taken by the Afghan men who worked alongside them. The Taliban threatened their families. Even Afghans who translated for me received threats.

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I stopped working in Afghanistan and turned my attention to immigration. But I never stopped thinking about the translators and fixers I had known there. When Kabul fell in 2021 after the U.S. withdrawal, I tried unsuccessfully to help some of them get out.

Every death in immigration custody matters. But Nazeer’s struck me with particular force. It felt personal. He was an Afghan who had fought alongside U.S. forces—a person who, by virtue of that service, had once been considered an ally. Someone I may have even met when I embedded with the army.

He died less than twenty-four hours after being detained by ICE. Outside of Afghan and veterans’ communities, his death prompted little sustained public outcry. No one was held responsible, no apparent consequence beyond promises of an investigation. Dallas County officials in Texas formally sought to block the public release of the full autopsy report after federal immigration officials explicitly asked the local district attorney’s office to keep the records sealed during their active probe. When the report was finally made public on August 12, 2026 it left me with more questions than answers.

His death certificate lists the cause of death as anaphylaxis complicating acute asthma exacerbation. It also cites the toxic effects of methamphetamine, heart disease, and cigarette smoking.

Methamphetamine?

The report does not explain how methamphetamine entered the body of a heavily monitored detainee who, according to his family, never used drugs and had quit smoking years earlier. And there’s this: The death certificate lists the onset of Nazeer’s fatal injury as March 12, 2026. ICE records say he was not taken into custody until the morning of March 13. The paperwork, in other words, appears to say that the medical event that killed him began roughly a day before ICE detained him.

That discrepancy demands an explanation.

So does the reason he was detained in the first place. ICE cited allegations of food-stamp fraud and theft from 2025. But Nazeer had never been convicted of those crimes. Even so, ICE used the allegations to classify him as a criminal illegal alien and begin deportation proceedings.

Additionally, immigration officials said he had no record of U.S. military service despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 

Why would they say that?

A final question may be the simplest—and the hardest—to answer: Why did an acute asthma attack inside an ICE facility, under the watch of law enforcement and medical personnel, become fatal?

ICE officials did not respond to my calls; I did not expect them to. Answering honestly would force an admission of failure, expose the sheer cruelty and mindlessness of these immigration sweeps. The people responsible are supposed to represent the United States—not a banana republic. What does it say about us when a man is arrested, dies, and the truth about what happened is kept from the public because his life was treated as if it didn’t matter? Nazeer served the United States, which makes that betrayal even harder to accept. We have to ask: what kind of country are we becoming when some people’s lives are easier to disregard than others?

I reached out to Naseer and asked to meet him. He agreed. By writing about his brother, I hoped, in some small way, to acknowledge his service and the Afghans I had worked with and been unable to help.

*

America held such promise, Naseer tells me. Even when they were kids, Naseer and Nazeer wanted to come to the United States. As they grew older, videos of Afghan communities here, especially in Texas, deepened their desire.

The brothers and their eight siblings grew up in a four story, sixteen-bedroom, mud-brick home in a small village in Paktia Province in eastern Afghanistan. It is known for its high mountains, dense pine forests, and vibrant valley. Nazeer was born in 1984, Naseer four years later. Their grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins also lived with them. Some cousins moved out when they were older and built houses for their families. 

The United States is very different, Nasser says. Here, at eighteen, the parents put the children out. In Afghan culture young people marry but stay with their family.

A quiet, simple routine defined the Paktyawals’ lives, even after the Taliban first came to power in 1996. Their father worked as a carpenter, framing rough openings for windows. The boys attended school, played volleyball, cricket, and soccer, and flew kites. The Taliban monitored the roads but never bothered them. They lived in a small, conservative Pashto village, far below the government’s radar. Until September 9, 2001, when Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, was assassinated by two al-Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists, world events did not touch them.

Something is going to happen, their father said after Massoud’s assassination.

Two days later, on September 11th, a group of nineteen terrorists linked to al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes in a coordinated suicide attack against the United States. The boys’ father assumed the Americans would retaliate and moved his family to Kabul because he thought there would be better opportunities there with the U.S. forces in control. Nearly a month later, the brothers stood on their rooftop, watching American bombs fall on the outskirts of Kabul.

Following the collapse of the Taliban regime and the rise of Western-backed President Hamid Karzai, Naseer and Nazeer resumed their simple life in Paktia.

As a teenager Nazeer would skip school and spend the day at a movie theater watching James Bond and Rambo films. Or he and Naseer would go to the Kabul Zoo. They would jump the fence and go inside. Their parents didn’t know.

But by the time he turned twenty-one in 2005, Nazeer wanted to make money. A friend told him that the American military was hiring Afghans for good money—$400 a month—and training them as soldiers. Nazeer signed up. Naseer wanted to join him, but Nazeer said no. You need to finish school. He gave him money to entice him to complete his studies.

When he came home on leave, Nazeer would not talk about what he had seen in combat.

I’m protecting my country, he told his brother, and nothing more.

He said he liked how American soldiers talked to him and other Afghans as equals. They all ate together and, during downtime, played volleyball.

Five years later, Naseer signed up as an interpreter for the U.S. forces in Kandahar. Survival meant anonymity; the Americans never uttered his real name around other Afghans, fearing Taliban sympathizers in their midst. Instead, they called him Tarzan, a nod to his muscular build and flowing, shoulder-length brown hair.

Why did you join? Nazeer demanded of his brother.

Same as you, Naseer said. It pays good money.

It’s not safe, Nazeer said.

At least I’m now supporting the family like you, Naseer told him. Hopefully, one day I’ll go to America.

Naseer liked the work, but his family faced rising threats from Taliban sympathizers who opposed any Afghan cooperating with the Americans. In 2014, he secured a special immigrant visa designed for foreign nationals whose support roles for the U.S. government put them in ongoing danger. American soldiers he knew recommended that he ask to be placed in Texas.

Texas has a lot of opportunity, and it’s cheap, they told him, promising that jobs were easy to find. Naseer was also drawn to Dallas by a friend—one of about 3,000 to 4,000 Afghans living in the metroplex. This friend, who had served as a translator for U.S. forces, strongly encouraged Naseer to relocate.

Naseer agreed. By that time, he was married; his mother had arranged the match in 2011, but the couple had postponed having children due to his demanding work and the region’s growing instability. Now, he hoped to finally start a family in the safety of the United States.

Nazeer was happy for him. You will have a good life for your kids, he said. A better life. 

On the day he departed, they drove to the airport together with the rest of their family. They hugged and cried. Naseer felt fractured between the future waiting past the security gate and the family he was leaving behind. 

No matter where we go, he tells me, we Afghans support our family. Support our siblings. Support our relatives. We stay close to each other.

Naseer found work at a warehouse in Dallas and moved to Richardson, where he rented a two-bedroom apartment and began studying for his Commercial Driver’s License. In 2016, his first son was born. Three more children followed, the youngest still a toddler. In 2021, Naseer became a U.S. citizen.
After he arrived in Texas, he and Nazeer spoke on WhatsApp every day. Nazeer always asked about the children.

As the security situation continued to deteriorate, he left the army and drove a taxi because he thought it would be safer than working for the U.S. He had married in 2010 and had started a family. He had their well-being to consider. He told Naseer he didn’t know if the government would endure. 

We can only hope it will get better one day, he said.

But it only got worse. Naseer followed the news as the Taliban gained control of more and more of Afghanistan. When the government collapsed on August 15, 2021, he was frantic. He feared the Taliban would kill Nazeer for his work with the U.S. military. He told Nazeer, Go to the airport, take everyone with you. Show them documents proving that you worked for the Americans. Inform the troops at the gate.

Nazeer, his family, his mother, his sisters, and a brother—two other brothers had already left—drove to the airport. A panicked crowd closed in around them, and their mother collapsed. Nazeer’s sisters and brother took her home.

You stay, they told him. You have to get out.
Nazeer pushed his way to the gate with Ziba and their children and showed an American soldier his record of service. The soldier let him in.
That evening, the Taliban surrounded the family home and asked for both Nazeer and Naseer.

They are not here, their mother said without opening the door.
When she told Naseer what had happened, he said, You have to leave. Go to a friend’s house.
But the Taliban followed them. Three times they moved, and each time the Taliban tracked them down, demanding to know the whereabouts of Nazeer and Naseer. A friend helped them secure visas for Pakistan, and they fled to Peshawar.

When Nazeers’ flight reached Germany, he borrowed a phone and called Naseer.

You’re already in America, Naseer told him excitedly. You’ll be here very soon.

Nazeer called again from Washington, D.C. Then he flew to El Paso, where Naseer, his wife, and a newborn baby met him. Catholic Charities placed Nazeer in a hotel for two months before he moved to Richardson to be near Naseer.

He worked at a Dallas bakery for about a year before taking a job at a recycling center. Then he enrolled in a CDL class. After earning his commercial learner’s permit, he drove with Naseer for three months to train for his license. Nazeer took the wheel during the day, and Naseer drove at night.

Let’s play music, Nazeer would say, connecting his phone to Bluetooth and playing Afghan songs. 

Naseer liked the heavy-metal band Five Finger Death Punch and its rendition of “Bad Company”. The band added a distinct spoken-word bridge to its version: Eye for an eye / Tooth for a tooth / Blood for blood / We’ve all gotta die.

Because the song frequently repeats the phrase, that’s why they call me Bad Company, it is sometimes misremembered or searched for as Bravo Company, reminding Naseer of his days translating for U.S. forces.

Do you understand the words? Nazeer would ask.

Yea, Nasser said.

OK, I don’t.

You’ll get used to it, Naseer said.

Nazeer loved driving on Interstate 80 with no traffic. Rest stops everywhere. As they got close to the cities he’d say, You know what? You can drive. I can’t stand these small cars. They don’t pay attention. Ok, Naseer would say. He didn’t mind. They drove to California, Washington, and New Mexico delivering tires. On other deliveries, they’d get into Wyoming and then drive all the way to Salt Lake City. He liked the mountains of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington. After they’d make a delivery in Seattle, they’d rent a car and explore the city. Washington reminded him of Paktia because it was so green. He said if he ever left Texas he would move to Washington or Montana because its mountains and big trees and swollen rivers also reminded him of Paktia.

If something went wrong with the truck, Nazeer would learn how to fix it by watching YouTube videos. He never went to a mechanic. He’d do it. Radios, TVs—anything electronic he’d figure out how to make work again. The brothers drove a refrigerated truck transporting chicken, beef and ice cream. Then they began hauling heavy equipment like tractors, wood, machinery and pipes. The loads would be tied down with chains and tarps. Nazeer hated folding tarps. He’d say, You know what? I can help you take the tarp off but when it’s down it’s yours to fold. He didn’t want to deal with it. He hated the tarps.

Not long after Nazeer got his CDL,  the Texas Department of Public Safety suspended the issuance, renewal, and reissuance of the license and learner permits for DACA recipients, refugees, and asylum seekers, the category that applied to Nazeer. His work as a soldier made no difference. Between December 2025 and mid-2026, the state canceled more than six thousand existing commercial licenses held by legally present non-citizens. The downgrade left Nazeer furious. He had paid $4,500 for the CDL class. 

Things will work out, Naseer told him.

Easy for you to say, you’re a citizen, Nazeer snapped. You have nothing to worry about. 

Once you have your green card you’ll be fine. Be patient. 

Yeah, whatever.

Why worry? Your work permit is valid until 2029. You’ll have your green card before it expires.

Easy for you to say. 

He could have a temper, Naseer tells me, but it didn’t last long. A smile always returned to his face. He took his old job at the bakery. He worked from 7:45 in the morning to 7:45 at night six days a week. He’d make four hundred to five hundred loaves of bread. On Sundays he would get off at 6 o’clock and meet Naseer and some of their Afghan friends in a park to play volleyball. He hoped that one day he would be allowed to drive a truck again.

*

On March 13, 2026, Naseer was home eating breakfast when his phone rang.

It was Ziba, Nazeer’s wife. She was screaming. Crying.

They took him!

Naseer didn’t understand.

What? he asked. Took who?

Nazeer! He’s just gone.

It was about 7:30 that morning.

Nazeer had been taking his older children to school. They walked down the stairs of their second-floor apartment and were heading toward his SUV when two black, unmarked vehicles pulled up.

One stopped behind his car.

The other blocked the driver’s side.

The children screamed.

Men in black masks, carrying guns, got out and grabbed Nazeer.

From a window, Ziba watched.

Who are they? She shouted in Pashto.

I don’t know! Nazeer yelled back.

One of the men spoke to him. Later, when Nazeer called Naseer from detention, he would say the man identified himself as an ICE agent.

I have paperwork, Nazeer said he told him.

The man didn’t answer. He handcuffed Nazeer.

Baba! his children screamed the Pashto word for father.

They covered their mouths and began to cry.

He has asthma! Ziba shouted in Pashto. He needs his inhaler. He forgot it.

She was holding the inhaler in her hand, waving it desperately.

The agents put Nazeer into one of the vehicles and drove away.

They took him, Ziba said again to Naseer.

Naseer got off the phone and sprinted barefoot to Nazeer’s apartment. Ziba stood inside clutching her children. Naseer told her to take them to his apartment. He didn’t know what else to do. He wanted to protect them. He wanted everyone—his family and Nazeer’s—together. He lives with the memory of their terrified, tear-streaked faces, their desperate crying.  Ziba told him the men who took Nazeer wore clothes that resembled police uniforms, but she saw no police insignia.

They put him in a car and drove away, she said.

Naseer thought, Who do I call? He dialed Nazeer’s phone but he didn’t answer. He called again, his hands shaking, and this time Nazeer answered. He was inside the ICE detention center on North Stemmons Freeway in Dallas. It was about eight o’clock.

I don’t know what’s happening, Nazeer said. 

He complained that his asthma was bothering him and he had chest pains.

I’ll text you later, he said, before the phone cut off. About twenty minutes later, an ICE officer called Nazeer. 

We have your brother. His paperwork expired.

Naseer drove to the facility. After he parked, he walked inside and stopped at a window where an ICE employee sat.
You arrested my brother. I need to see him, he said. He has valid paperwork until 2029. Plus he has asthma, he needs his inhaler. 

We can’t let you in to talk to your brother, the man said. It’s Friday. Get a lawyer. 

He handed Nazeer a sheet of paper with a quick bar code.

Scan this paper for pro bono lawyers. It will show you some attorneys.

He has asthma, Nazeer says again.

We’ll take care of it, the man said.

Nazeer returned to his car and called 911. He gave the dispatcher his brother’s name. He has asthma, he said and needs help.

An ambulance arrived a short time later. Nazeer told them his brother was inside. 

I need you to check on him if he needs treatment. He is in pain. 

The paramedics disappeared through the gate. Naseer waited, pacing, for ninety minutes before driving around the perimeter. When he spotted another entrance, he realized the truth: the ambulance had already left with his brother. He called 911, again. The dispatcher told him the paramedics had checked on Nazeer. He was fine, the dispatcher said. He was not taken to a hospital. 

Back at home, Naseer told everyone he hoped Nazeer would be home by Monday. 

We’ll get an attorney and his paperwork will be validated. 

He called Nazeer’s friends. They were shocked. 

Why did they take him? they asked.

I don’t know, Naseer said. 

The first night of Nazeer’s detention, Naseer felt under so much pressure that he left the house to sit in his car and be alone. He wondered what he should do. He thought of selling his car to raise money for an attorney. Then his phone rang. It was Nazeer.

I can’t breathe, eat or drink, he said. I don’t know what is going on but something is happening to me.  

I sent you an ambulance, Naseer said. 

No one showed up, Nazeer said. I didn’t see anyone. I’ve told them I have asthma. I asked for a doctor. They aren’t giving me anything. My body is shaking. Something is happening to me. 

Naseer asked him to give the phone to an ICE agent. 

After a moment a man got on the line. 

Hello, he said.

I sent an ambulance this morning, but my brother says he feels worse, Naseer said. 

We’ll take him to our doctor, the man said. We can take him to an emergency hospital. 

If you take him, which hospital will he go to? Naseer asked.

We can’t tell you. 

He hung up.

Naseer went back into the house but could not sleep. 

What are they doing to him? he wondered.  

He got up when he heard the children begin to stir. He found them in the living room asking for their father. His own children’s sad expressions made him want to cry.  To distract them, Naseer drove them to a park fifteen minutes away. Just as they arrived at the entrance, his phone rang. He answered.

Are you Naseer? a male voice said.

Yes, who are you? Naseer said.

Your brother passed away this morning.

Naseer caught his breath and slammed the brakes. The children jerked forward in their seats restrained by their seatbelts. They stared at him, confused. 

Check your number, Naseer said. You must have the wrong number.

Is this Naseer Paktiawal? the voice said again.

Yes, Naseer answered.

Your brother has this as an emergency number. He’s in Parkland Hospital.

Who are you?

I’m with ICE, the voice said.

Naseer hung up and began crying. 

What’s happening? the children asked him.

Nothing.

They began to cry. He drove home.

When he entered the apartment, he called his mosque and told the imam what had happened. He got off the phone and turned to his wife, Ziba and the children. But the expression in their faces and their tears told him they already knew. 

As many as thirty people who attended the mosque began converging on his apartment to offer their support. They prayed together and then drove to Parkland Hospital to demand answers. No one would speak to them. They waited until almost nine o’clock that night, when a nurse told them that someone would see them. Thirty minutes later, Naseer and other leaders from the mosque met with a hospital administrator. He said ICE had brought Nazeer in a little before midnight. They gave him oxygen, and he appeared to respond well. They also gave him antibiotics and a sandwich. His tongue began to swell, and he was rushed to the ICU just after nine the next morning, where he died.

Naseer asked when he could see the body. 

Wednesday after the autopsy, the administrator said.

The next morning a large crowd of people, more than one hundred, Naseer estimated, came to the mosque to offer support. They wanted to block roads and protest. Naseer told them no. He did not want to stop people from going to work. 

Naseer spoke to his siblings and they all agreed to bring Nazeer’s body back to Paktia to be buried beside his father’s grave.  In 2025,  his mother and sisters and one younger brother had returned to Afghanistan after Pakistan began a mass deportation drive targeting Afghan nationals without valid standard visas, having enforced strict deadlines following a policy initiated in late 2023. The family found an apartment. Enough time had passed that the Taliban did not harass them.

A friend arranged for the casket and its transportation to Kabul. Seeing his brother’s body, Naseer felt as if he had lost a part of his own. When their father died, Nazeer had become the head of the family, and Naseer would do nothing without his permission. He was his father, brother, and friend. Now that Nazeer is gone, Naseer feels lost, as if a part of himself has left to be with his brother in Paradise.

Naseer swore his siblings to secrecy; their mother’s high blood pressure made the news too dangerous to deliver alone or unprepared. He insisted they all be there together, with two doctors standing by in case the shock strained her heart. With the family rallying from corners of the globe, Naseer flew into Afghanistan a day ahead of the body, meeting his brothers arriving from Germany and Oman.

As soon as Naseer walked out of the Kabul airport he saw men with long beards he assumed were Taliban. He wore a head scarf to conceal his face. Although he was a U.S. citizen he didn’t know who might recognize him and report him to the Taliban. Every day people talk about someone who had worked for the previous government and then that person gets killed. He saw checkpoints everywhere. 

The moment he arrived at the house and greeted his surprised mother, she asked, What’s happening? When his brothers from Germany and Oman arrived, she became more suspicious.

Why are you here? 

Naseer told her. His voice shook. He tried to be as direct as possible. There was no use prolonging it. No matter how he told her, the end would be the same, so he just told her. Nazeer is dead. He can’t describe that moment, how the words came out of his mouth sounding so hollow and matter-of-fact. His mother collapsed. 

The next day his siblings took Nazeer to Paktia and buried him beside their father. His mother wouldn’t let Naseer and his other two brothers attend the service. She was worried they would be seen by the wrong people. After she left for the funeral Naseer wondered how he would feel returning to Texas and not having Nazeer there to greet him at the airport. For the rest of his life he will never see his brother again. How would he face the children when he entered the house alone? Then Nazeer’s death would be real to them all. He was gone, truly.

*

Naseer and I leave his house for Richardson so that he can show me where he lived, the park where he and Naseer played volleyball and the bakery where he worked. The heat layers the air with what feels almost like a white glaze and I squint even with sunglasses. We get on the freeway and drive south for about 40 minutes before turning off onto a street with new high-rise apartments. Nazeer and Naseer lived nearby at Oakline Apartments. Trees shade the white buildings and green roofs. I stop and Naseer points at a building.

Nazeer lived there, he says. 

I look at the second-floor apartment and imagine Ziba behind the glass door, watching her husband as he was surrounded by masked men with guns. The parking space where the ICE agents stopped him stands across from where she would have been standing. His children were with him, I remind myself. Now the parking space is empty, the entire lot quiet. No hint of what happened here remains. I imagine the apartment has been rented to a new tenant. People disappear, new people move in.

The bakery stands in the center of a shopping center. Its shelves are stuffed with bread, rice and other goods. In the back, an Afghan man stands sweating in front of black ovens where Nazeer once worked. He is making naan. Naan is a large, flat, oblong yeast bread with a golden crust marked with decorative vertical lines and sprinkled with sesame or nigella seeds. I smell its smoky aroma from being baked against the walls of an upright brick oven.

The store owner, Noor Alhaq Lali, smiles when he sees Naseer. He shakes my hand and we sit on stools and watch the baker scoop loaves of nan out of the oven with a wooden turner.

On the day they took Nazeer, Noor tells me, he was supposed to bake a large order of bread. When Noor came to work, he saw immediately that Nazeer had not been in. He called Nazeer but he did not answer. He didn’t show up for the rest of the morning. 

Then a customer came in and said, You know Nazeer was taken by ICE. 

Noor called Naseer. He expected good news, that it had been a mistake and Nazeer had been released but Nasseer told him his brother had died in ICE custody.

He stares at the floor before he speaks again. Nazeer worked for him for about six months. He knew how to bake bread. Nice guy, got along with everybody. He and Nazeer would talk about Afghanistan. One guy from a country meets another guy from the same country and of course they share memories. Their friendship was like that.

Now we are all afraid, he says. No one knows what will happen.

I thank Noor for his time. Naseer and I leave the bakery and stop at Terrace Park. The grass stands dark and green from the spray of a sprinkler beneath the clear sky. 

Every Sunday night Nazeer came here to play volleyball with other Afghan men, Naseer says. He was happy. I still think he’s driving a truck somewhere. I’m still waiting for a message from him that he’s going to call me.

Naseer still has questions. He is seeking specific information regarding his brother’s medical treatment and detention, including the type of antibiotics administered by doctors and whether the assigned translator was fluent in Pashto. Additionally, he wants all official documentation such as the transcript of his call to 911 and all corresponding ICE agent reports. He suspects his questions may never be answered. 

We start driving back to Princeton. He wants to take the kids out this afternoon, keep their minds occupied. Sometimes they ask, Are we going back to Afghanistan? No, Naseer tells them. This is your country now. This is your Afghanistan where you will study and work and have families. 

He tells me that in Pashto, his name, Naseer, means helper or supporter. He is both of those things now for Nazeer’s children. He thinks he pays more attention to them than his own so they don’t think too much about their father. He will remind the youngest ones of Nazeer so they never forget him. It saddens him that he now speaks of his brother in the past tense so easily. What happened happened. Naseer must focus on their future and raise them the right way, so that Nazeer will be proud of both them and him. 

He hopes they will forgive him for voting for Donald Trump.

Every day Naseer thinks about Nazeer. He hasn’t deleted his messages on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. He listens to them over and over. He had a dream of Nazeer recently. They were at a truck stop. Naseer was holding a big wrench over his shoulder. Nazeer laughed at him. 

Whatever, Nasser told him, his go-to response when Nazeer teased him. 

He doesn’t know why he was holding a wrench. Nazeer was the one who could fix anything. 

Naseer waited for a sign, maybe for Nazeer to appear to him in some way and explain the dream, but nothing interrupted the dark but the fading image of his brother slipping from his mind. He stared at the ceiling. Unable to fall back to sleep, he searched for answers.

Excerpted from A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands, edited by Ilan Stavans. Published by Restless Books.

As the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close, it is enough to listen surreptitiously in a sports arena, a restaurant, or a high-school hallway to the way people speak to acknowledge the versatility of the word god in day-to-day parlance, both in so-called “highbrow” English and in the many vernaculars. Often disconnected from religious meanings, god is used as an intensifier, an interjection, or a slang term in a variety of contexts. These expressions are often disconnected from their religious origins and can carry a range of meanings, from surprise to affirmation. For instance, “Oh my god,” or “OMG,” or “God, that’s crazy.” Or “Thank God,” as an expression of relief or gratitude for a positive outcome. Or “God forbid,” used with the hope that a particular outcome does not occur. There is also “Goddam” to convey frustration or anger. And “On God”: a slang term—abbreviated as “ONG” when texting—popularized in African-American Vernacular English and social media, emphasizing sincerity or truthfulness, similar to “I swear to God.” “God’s gift”: a sarcastic idiom used to describe a person with an inflated ego who believes they are perfect or highly desirable. “Play God”: to act as if one has unlimited or divine power, often by controlling the fates of others. And “God-awful”: an adjective used to describe something as very unpleasant or terrible. And there is “Gosh,” “Golly,” “Goodness,” and “Jeez” (for Jesus) or “Jeez Louise.” 

At any rate, in the 1830s, when Noah Webster, who spent his life updating his lexicon, was approaching old age (he died in 1843), a new sensibility took hold. The New England Transcendentalists—a group of writers, philosophers, and social reformers centered around Concord and Boston in Massachusetts—believed in the primacy of individual conscience, the divinity of nature, and the potential for personal spiritual awakening beyond traditional religion and materialism. There is much that, in retrospect, could be said about the link between Transcendentalism and Eastern religions, especially the connection between nature and the divine. But the New England practitioners, at their core, were sternly intellectual, their quest filtered through ideas and less through emotion. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” I like to think of Transcendentalism as a movement of self-affirmation that embraced individualism, even—and especially—when it was misunderstood. There is nothing more American than this.

The leading figures of Transcendentalism were Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. A Unitarian minister who served as a junior pastor at the Second Church in Boston between 1829 and 1832, Emerson believed that truth and moral insight come from within, not from external authorities like the church and government. He believed that “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” Emerson argued that intuition should be praised over rationalism and empiricism, and that nature should be seen as a living symbol of the divine and a pathway to spiritual understanding.

In contrast, Thoreau—best known for the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and his book Walden (1854), the autobiographical reflection on his experience (two years, two months, and two days) in a cabin he built in the woodlands near Walden Pond, on property owned by his friend Emerson—lived out the values of simplicity, individualism, and protest. He looked for God in nature and in the act of self-reliance. He believed that “There is more of God, and divine help, in my little finger, than in idle prayer and trust.” He wrote, “God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.” Indeed, Thoreau’s view of God was deeply intertwined with his love and study of nature, leading him to a personal, experiential, and somewhat unconven- tional spirituality. He wasn’t a traditional Christian but rather believed in a divine presence immanent in the natural world, often referring to it as God. He saw God as an ever-present force, culminating in the present moment, and emphasized a God of love and potential rather than of judgment or wrath.

As for Fuller, she was raised in a Unitarian household, meaning she was exposed early to liberal theology. Yet she became disillusioned with the moralistic, patriarchal God of mainstream religion. She resisted the idea of a distant, judgmental deity and instead pursued a God of inner light and universal truth. In her writings—especially in her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century—Fuller yearned for a divine presence that could reconcile reason and emotion, masculine and feminine, freedom and duty. Her God was often more symbolic than personal, but still deeply spiritual. Influenced by Emerson and German idealists, Fuller often embraced a pantheistic view, where God was intrinsic in nature and the human soul. Her inner conflicts often reflected a desire to find moral certainty without dogma.

An aesthetic flourished around the Transcendentalists, which extended to include writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and, in his own category, Mark Twain. While these authors are quite different from each other, there is a feeling of exaltation, especially around a noninstitutional view of the divine, that permeates their oeuvre. Whitman’s religious views were complex and unconventional, drawing from various sources rather than adhering to a single established faith. Although he was exposed to Christianity and even had some early Quaker influences, he eventually developed his own unique spiritual outlook, often described as pantheistic and humanistic. He rejected traditional Christian doctrines like the divinity of Jesus and the authority of organized religion, yet he deeply respected the religious impulse and incorporated elements from various traditions into his poetry.

While Hawthorne did not adhere to any particular organized religion, he possessed a strong religious sensibility, and his works frequently explore themes of sin, guilt, and divine judgment. He was not a churchgoer, but his writings show a deep engagement with religious ideas and imagery, as in The Scarlet Letter (1850), which presents a critical view of the rigid, unforgiving, and often hypocritical nature of the Puritan religion as a governing institution in colonial America. The novel depicts Puritan society as drab, confining, and narrow-minded, stifling individuality and suppressing natural strengths. Hawthorne also highlights the severity of the Puritanical code of law, where religious beliefs are intertwined with legal punishments, leading to harsh and unjust treatment of those deemed sinful. He portrays some key Puritan figures, like Arthur Dimmesdale, as hypocritical and corrupt. While outwardly pious, Dimmesdale harbors a hidden sin, and through him, Hawthorne exposes the hypocrisy of those who judge others while concealing their own flaws. The restrictive nature of the Puritan religious institution even impacts the children, whose play is restricted and reflects their fear and intolerance of those who are different.

In contrast, Emily Dickinson’s relationship with God was complex and nuanced, characterized by both belief and doubt. She wrote: “They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.” While she never formally joined a church and expressed skepticism toward certain religious doctrines, her poetry demonstrates deep engagement with religious themes and a personal, albeit unconventional, approach to faith. 

Another key religious thinker in the mid-1850s was Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). (Abraham Lincoln is famously—though perhaps apocryphally—reported to have greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe by saying: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”) Henry Beecher’s views of God evolved from the strict, fire-and-brimstone theology of his father, Lyman Beecher, into a more loving and merciful interpretation. He emphasized God’s love and forgiveness, believing that it was more effective in drawing people to faith than fear of damnation. He rejected the Calvinist idea of total depravity and questioned the existence of hell, focusing instead on social improvements and humanity’s capacity for enjoyment. 

For his part, Twain seems to have maintained a bitter friendship with God. Or maybe they were frenemies. He said, with usual sarcasm: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” He was obsessed with the problem of evil throughout his life. Twain was raised in a Presbyterian household in Missouri and was familiar with the Bible, which he referred to extensively—often satirically—in his later writings. Though he flirted with belief in God in his youth, as he grew older and experienced personal tragedies (including the deaths of his wife and children), Twain’s tone grew more skeptical, angry, and ironic. He criticized organized religion and what he saw as the hypocrisy, cruelty, and absurdity of Christian doctrine. And he questioned the benevolence of God, the justice of eternal damnation, and the morality of religious institutions.

I had a barrage of roses tangled in my brain. 

I was taken with this fragrance, bedeviled 

with the bee’s pollen and night grace.

I desired and wanted all at once, pooled 

in a reservoir where my childhood drank, 

from a well stationed in the backyard 

of my memory. The struggling grass 

and the swinging tire, glass bottles 

set beside the fence as flowers. My mind 

returned here where refuge was the promise 

of growth instead of the bloom itself. 

I was a child of rust, browning at the interior, 

with a scent of floral determination. 

You’ll sometimes find me here, too, 

as a lion, the day’s nettle in my mane. 

If there was a roar, it shuddered the puddles 

which shook in delight. If there was stalking

it might have been by the train tracks, which never

functioned except sometimes there was a

faint bell at night, sometimes signaling

someone about to trip lightly on the runner.

The flood split from the north,

poured into a cradle of stone,

and softened into a breathing river.

Glass-creeks veined the earth,

shattering into faces—

smiles adrift in every shard.

Love:

a mouthless continent

whispering of suns unseen,

across broken throats of light.

Fractured stars unspooled,

the moon paddling torn clouds,

vanishing into the lung of the storm.

Remembrance:

wax drowning flame,

flame cradling wax,

fuel folding back into itself—

a small sun gasping beneath

the ash-heavy dawn.

Still, the river runs,

a rumor of light

carving its name into clay.

jalukbari, 2006

faces gulal-kissed / the sun is on a break / colors spread across our skin like nothing could hurt us / my mother’s legs in the background / she loves playing the behind-the-scenes artist / even when she’s painting self-portraits / the house my sister was born in is no longer standing / years of seeing people enter & exit like inconsiderate guests / every house has a beating heart / don’t go around breaking it / the day we left, i could hear the cries for a mile / new people live there now / drowning out every agonizing sound the old house makes

jalukbari, 1991

there’s this photo of my mother smiling in a bucket hat / so skinny & frail you would think dylan wrote blowing in the wind for her / i have seen the woman walk through the eye of a tsunami like a sport she plays for fun / apologizes for crying but give her hell & she turns it into paradise in seven business days & doesn’t expect so much as a thank you in return / my mother never flew in an airplane until my sister was born / my first day of school, she held my trembling hand & i felt like i could fly / i cried so much she had to come rescue me before noon / i’m her son, after all / i learnt how to share my robab tenga with my sister every summer evening / it wasn’t always easy / but i’ve seen my mother take my father’s grief & carry it on her shoulders like her own baby / how do i carry this burden of loving her like she loves my father?

Must a People Disappear for Us to Know That It Existed? The elegiac title of Ben Buckland and Carissa Western’s photo essay poses the question at the heart of Guernica’s July issue: Is our contemporary gaze fundamentally reactive? Does our attention gravitate only toward that which is already endangered? The works gathered in this issue question and resist this belated recognition. Across photography, nonfiction, fiction, interview, translation, and poetry, they ask what it means to look before disappearance, to listen before silence, to love before loss.

Buckland and Western’s photo essay turns to Sebeïba, the centuries old Saharan festival, and the ritual and cultural life of the Imuhar. The essay explores the uneasy ethics of visibility, and questions whether preservation, tourism, state interest, and spectatorship can ever be innocent when they arrive at the threshold of threatened worlds. 

Mahreen Sohail’s The Death Years measures motherhood against mortality. Moving between family history, inherited grief, and the terror of loving a child, the essay asks what it means to remember the dead while learning how to live.

In fiction, Herbert Girtley’s Bojack Blues gives us a story of friendship, hurt, and music rendered in a voice so assured it seems to gather force almost effortlessly. What begins as a man disappearing before a gig opens into a rich portrait of friendship between men. By a creek, two men slow down long enough to share a moment of pain, and in that sharing, create room for the communal, and the sublime.

Also in fiction, Andra Otilia Nicolescu’s Places of Memory, an excerpt from her unpublihsed novel Midnight in Exile, follows Paul and Ana into America late in life, where exile becomes at once a strange new beginning and a reckoning. Set in the aftermath of 1989, as the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe opens borders, old certainties of country, ideology, and home are unsettled. From the rubble of an old world emerges a layered meditation on migration, marriage, history, and the intimate revelations that arrive only after a life has already been lived.

In The Poems Will Not Stop: An Interview with Kathy Engel, Tyler Barton converses with poet, activist, and organizer Kathy Engel, who has spent a lifetime writing alongside struggles of Palestine, Nicaragua, Indigenous sovereignty, and social justice. Beginning with the 1982 barring of Mahmoud Darwish from a New York poetry event after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the conversation reflects on art, solidarity, grief, beauty, and the perennial work of refusing the separation between the poem and the world.

In Global Spotlights, Masami Kakinuma’s Go for it, translated from the Japanese by Sharni Wilson, brings us into a grandmother’s ancient home in rural Iwate. Folklore is braided with the muted disappointments of adult life as the story reimagines good fortune as something made possible by the courage to move toward the life one once wished for.

In poetry, Michelle Matthees’s Svetlana at the Dacha, 1938 and Joseph unfold childhood innocence inside the shadow of Stalinist terror. Together, the poems ask how private wounds become historical violence. In Denoo Edinam Yawo’s The Anatomy of a Bullet Alchemising into Death, violence begins as the wound and endures as inheritance stored inside the human body. The bullet becomes a language of displacement, secrecy, and grief—ancestral rites—carried from mother to child. In Her Five Children and Noose, Anna T. Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori, traces the point at which the domestic gives way to horror and probes what remains of care when the structures meant to sustain it have broken apart.

In this month’s conversation with Tyler Barton, Kathy Engel quotes Bayo Akomolafe: “The times are urgent—we must slow down.” The line could serve as missive from the July issue: to slow down and attend more deeply to the people made visible only at the edge of disappearance, to the dead who remain among us, to friendships that hold men through shame and hurt, to marriages still revealing themselves after decades, to poems that will not stop.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by: Ben Buckland, Melissa Monroe, and Andra Otilia Nicolescu.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

But first, everything anew. For them, the millennium came early. 

Early evening on the fifteenth of September 1998, America unfurled beneath steady seas of clouds beneath Paul and Ana’s eyes. Holding hands, they peered past the window crystals.  Trembling bodies, intent on a first look at their new country.

What if I don’t want to live in  any country? A four-year-old Maya had asked nine Septembers ago, when told that she would soon be leaving for another country, with her parents. No, that wasn’t an option.

Is nowhere not a country? 

Well, maybe just the seas and clouds, but then you’d have to turn into a birdfish, babygirl. 

Is it a story?

Those first few months, America was pure fiction. A “lifetime special” of new things. Funny things. Good things. Strange things. Times Square and department stores. 

Think of how striking it must all be, for them, Teresa had to remind Maya, whenever they marveled too deeply at ordinary things, whenever the newness of things revealed itself in unexpected ways (a teenager bringing pizza to your door, kids with purple hair, women with earrings in their tongues, men with tattoos on their faces, cold coffee from plastic cups, endless bounty of heaping fruit, gleaming dewy beautiful for their pleasure at every hour of every day). 

For all their years (a hundred and forty lived between them), Paul and Ana couldn’t be jaded. Not during those first trips into the City, not by the novelty of the Manhattan skyline, grey Goliath unfurling from the bend of the L.I.E. then, or by the city’s angles, tones, surfaces cascading in, piercing the light at the tunnel’s end. The tall streets, busy with every kind of person, singing the magic of togetherness in time, of now, of moving shouting being with wind and dirt and steam, under the narrow skies. Everything brilliant tesserae, bewitching mosaic in timeless flux. 

The capacity to be astonished. Breathlessness, in a good way. 

With relishing their children’s long-absent physicality came a profound sense of visceral rootedness. Thrilling reminder of how it is to know things that have become unknown.

Teresa’s face: aged, circumspect, truly adult for the first time, in a way he couldn’t have imagined. Those final remnants of her youth vanished by her bold audition for the American Dream, by diligently exercising the hard-won privilege of doctoring America’s folk back to sanity. A living face their lips hadn’t touched for eight years, last seen through a disappearing Skoda 100R Series window, on Saturday the twelfth of May, 1990.  

Her voice, disembodied for 3,048 varied days, attached now to its body’s gestures, eyes, limbs again. Thoughts, until recently penned in ink, now a hand resting on his shoulder.  

And Maya. Bodies borne of him, everything he’d ever made. Breaking the world open at his feet. 

Paul experienced the move to America as something of a swan song. It wasn’t Ana’s victory march, but a postscript punctuating an already spent conclusion. The end of a long narrative burdened by too many plot twists. 

First, they’d survived. Them—subjects of foreign kings and whims, of native-tongued monsters and other-tongued prophets (hear the German boots the Soviet tanks the Yankee bombs, the slogans and drums). They—old bodies. But relatively unscathed.

That last opus, a year so monumental it sent history in search of new meanings. Stand alone. Sign, signifier, and signified. 1989.

With revolution, worlds collapsed, inverting. Walls tumbled, airspaces yawned, enemies became mates and friends nemeses. 

And what do you do, when places forbidden transfigured into playing-fields, when demons and angels swap robes? When slogans reinterpret themselves and new meanings become possible?  

Everybody asked, nobody knew, but all that mattered was that the shouting never stopped, that hope was only getting started, new lives just beginning. 

Overnight, scarcity became plenty—products, products, all around! Politicians handed out blue jeans on the streets. The King of Pop came and went moonwalking off western winds, and young and old together succumbed to collective hysteria. A personality cult of a different kind—that cocktail of hope and freedom and love for the tormented body of an American god, too potent to bear. And Brazilian voices graced you, singsong, because everyone fell in love with a woman called “Isaura” when telenovelas replaced the Party on television, when television came with color, when fuck production quotas but long live the consumption!

And Ana? At last, she prayed to her Virgin and her baby in peace. Prayed for her family, for the souls of heroes felled for freedom to ascend to heaven on schedule. Blessed little Maya for the extraordinary foresight of being born on the cusp of freedom, no less. Fed her, while her parents bartered dollars for trips across newly opened borders, all the way to Istanbul. Where, two among thousands of budding entrepreneurs, they filled their car with the bazaar, and idled in a traffic jam of biblical proportions, idled for their impending profit. 

And Paul? Even during those forty long days, Paul was as productive as ever. So much to do, decommunize the rule of law, institutionalize democracy, streamline facilitate evidence accord transition transfer fix and administer—administer the bureaucracy of daily life. Lest we forget that all survival demands are the passionless things. (So busy he was, in fact, that he hardly had the time to think about ghosts past. To ask the questions he’d longed to exorcise. To wonder, where’s Bluma? Could I find her, now? What say you, this irony? Freedom, just in time for my sixtieth year!). 

And just as soon, the side-effects arrived. Because the cure for such a chronic illness—first shocking, the unsurprising, the ever-shifting commentators, new arbiters of free thought, opined—proved to be almost as dangerous in its side-effects, as it sequelae. The realities of unplanning, of liberalizing stabilizing privatizing, dispersed the revelers with concussive force. 

Great deceptions uncovered, how freedom forecasts doom, for some. The unbridled wizard of rogue capitalism, unbound from his cage, performed his party tricks: pensions dissipated, livelihoods threatened. Those who missed their daily bread, their promised recompense of lifetimes of quietude and acquiescence, wailed and mourned the deaths of their dictators on new television channels. Irony became something like products now lined the shelves, asking to be owned—but shiny bills in your pocket had sprouted so many zeroes over night, that you couldn’t make them worth anything.  

And what’s going to happen, and what should we do? Teresa and Nick, asked. Paul’s longstanding experience, coupled with his consummate optimism, predicted that eventually, the markets would tame themselves, come to shine in more socially democratic, charitable ways. Accept that inevitable compromise, the communitarian contract, inevitable station of all civilized humanity. That eventually, real democracy—ever incentivized by that strict European mother, waiting to welcome its lost children with open arms, should they behave, prove their repute— would deign to smile. 

But who ever knew, how long eventually might take? And so he just couldn’t say when, or how, or stay.

And with that, Teresa and Nick, like so many others, made the leap. Dove into the cracks that had opened, burrowed and wiggled and clawed their way to better. 

Teresa’s campaign to get her parents to America began almost as soon as she’d arrived, and proved as relentless as all her others. Sure, they wouldn’t be able to move for who knew how long, what with the gods of immigration blowing hot and cold, trumpeting their whims at leisure. But surely it would never be too early to start the convincing, figured Teresa.  

Inevitable though he knew the move would be—because how could he deny Ana her right to grow old with her children, her own small foreign corner of family, standing firm until the end—Paul feared that it would stifle his vigor. Soak-up his intellect and paint him lackadaisical and enervated. Entrap him, in a waiting room for absolutely nothing. 

Be patient, was the parting incantation he sometimes heard Ana whisper into the receiver, those years of stubborn resistance, while waiting his turn to speak to Teresa. A small window into that parallel universe of women teaching women how to convince their husbands, or fathers of things. The painstaking, stealthy art of claiming something, cajoling your due, from your husband. Passed down through generations, tricks for clearing paths of resistance—here’s how you weave coincidences, how you plant ideas, how you jostle from the margins, how you give and withhold, how you take patient detours. It pained him, to find Ana, and the girls, dealing in this real-politick of the powerless, deploying this absurd Aesopian-think. For surely, he’d never been that kind of man. 

That’s how we’ll get him used to the idea—give him time to close this chapter, she said, another time.  Which made him remember the chapter of her fourth and last pregnancy, which she spent in bed reading novel after novel (month after month four times over). And how difficult those decadently bourgeois books had been to procure, there being no hint of social realism between their lines. But procure them he did, because—in her only act of counter-revolutionary resistance—no way was Ana going to read books about the sacrificial love of star-crossed tractor operators. And while he’ll never know what books his wife did read during the long months, he’ll always be grateful for those words that safely shepherded his second born alive child into life.

This younger child, his namesake Paula, had always been a free spirit. Unconventional one who took flight like a tropical bird of paradise on the winds of revolution, to administer medical care to Caribbean islanders. 

Imagine Paul’s surprise to discover that even Paula had, if reluctantly, joined the America cheerleading team. Of this he learned one summer afternoon during Paula’s home leave, when, arriving home at an unusual time, he caught her plotting loudly with Teresa on the phone. 

Of course I’d be relieved if they went, Paula was saying, but you know he has a life here, contributes . . . No, you just act like he’s crazy for not groveling to chew the fact in your. . . Why should it be appealing? Yes, you need to frame it another way . . . God, I don’t know—is it me they’re paying to be a shrink? He’ll have to have some activities, at—

Tiptoeing back outside, Paul was in unequal measures disturbed and tickled by this inevitable reversal. His children dissecting his future, his doings, his choices. At least I’ve made it this far, is what he told himself. 

Paul’s resistance began to give way when the rallying cries turned to the familial (don’t you want more time with Maya, before college, and Paula will visit, and mom will be so happy!). To his health, to guilting him into living, as though that wasn’t what he’d been doing just fine, for so long. Take care, slow down, don’t consume yourself so, they said, like he’d been chewing himself from the inside out, the workforce will reorganize itself, the laws will draft themselves, this godforsaken country’s problems aren’t worth your health, and treatments in America are more advanced…in case, I mean…just. 

The temptations of America soon came filtered through yet another lens— Didn’t you know, that Queens is the paradise of our people, just like back home, really, your language rings through streets where you run into friends, we have stores. Truly, it sounded appealing, and it wasn’t even that far from Stony Brook, this microcosm of home called Sunnyside.

When at last they went, penning their own postscript, it was a peroration that Paul dared not complain about. Because how many hadn’t died, for that chance to live the end of their days in Uncle Sam’s benevolent playground, that realm that had won history?

Sometimes, it was better than he had hoped for. Presiding over that first Christmas, the feeling that all the life he needed had gathered itself around him, Ana, Maya, Teresa and Nick, Paula and Emil. The plentiful table, nothing to want, escape, negotiate—just life. 

Only the tree, felled and sagging under too much warmth and kitsch, had looked unhappy then. 

❈

Once they had settled in, life once again surprised Paul. This time, with its extraordinary capacity to adjust itself, to morph into routines, as consistently reliable and startling as daylight lancing darkness after a long night. For the first time, he felt that he would be perfectly content, should things continue in the same ways forever. There was nothing more to strive for, the striving having morphed into encouragement of their children’s striving—the prospects of which, given their winning personal characteristics of Caucasian, advanced degrees in the sciences, reasonable good looks, want discipline diligence and commitment, he found no reason to worry himself over. There was nothing more to fear, at least nothing that was not inevitable. Like time, about which nothing was evitable, but which long ago learned to accept as incontrovertible. 

On Long Island, nearing the turn of the century, the routine of their new lives had set in as solidly, as incontestably, as the new millennium. Which they’d rung in, in a fit of merriness, dancing to the lost notes of Boney M. and ABBA, at Nora Constantine’s house in New Jersey—which was much like how they spent many other weekends, when the five of them would pack into the car and head to New Jersey, or better yet, drive the car onto a boat, and cross the Sound into Connecticut.

The Stony Brook home—two-floored, four-bedroomed, gardened—was like a lush, sprawling story, big enough, good enough, to cradle them all in its benefic grip. And yet, became as gently familiar as their cramped apartment back home. Each day, the same intimations of life left them satiated, filled. For the first time in her life, on weekdays, Ana would sleep longer than her husband, than her daughter. Leaving her in the never ceasing comfort of the soft sheets (the duck-filled comforters of which she could only have dreamed a few years ago) Paul would put on the coffee—not on the stovetop in a small Turkish kettle, as Ana had done all of her life before, but simply with a click of a button on the automated machine—and wait for Nick and Teresa to make their ways downstairs. He replaced Ana in playing that part now, of father encouraging daughter to eat something before her day at the hospital. Every day, he would shuffle his way, lazily across the driveway, to pick-up The New York Times from the edge of the lawn and deposit the mail, usually bills that Teresa had signed the night before—because here, you didn’t have to queue at the Post Office, to pay your dues in a duly social manifestation.  

Every day, they exchanged morning thoughts and words, for half an hour, like he imagined families around the world always should have. Every day, he beamed with pride in the fact that his daughter, that very one that they’d created, had created herself anew. That she could leave her spacious house, drive her spacious car, and practice medicine in America, filling her days with the worthy tasks of caring for others, of helping life continue, carry on, satisfy its desire for living. Sometimes, and despite lacking a local license, he even drove the mammoth car, automatic, laughably easy to navigate, on the smooth American roads. 

Then, the full days with Ana. Somehow the same and variable, at once. The satellite television channel the children had gotten them, despite their automatic protestations, which added a pleasant dimension to their days—a string of continuity somehow. Neither of them enjoyed the vapid new shows that tried to mimic the melodramas of the Uruguayan or Colombian telenovelas, or the mindless droll-but-not-actually-funny inconsequential chatter, meaninglessness, of American TV shows. The forms just didn’t translate, somehow. When they were lucky, there would be retrospectives of vintage performances from their days. Lyrical ballads sung by glamorous, then young now old women, comedy skits that were truly funny, rapid-fire wit-laden performances that were all the more interesting, for the things they couldn’t say—their hints, their insinuations, their hidden messages. The large screen mercifully black, white, and silver, a comfort they didn’t realize they’d needed. 

Watching these retrospectives with Ana, Paul noticed for the first time how they both laughed at the same time. How much they’d experienced, understood together, without even the need to speak things. He understood now the placidity and tameness of American political comedy, like that the girls loved to watch late on Saturday night (that it was live from New York, seemed to be main selling point), probably had something to do with the lack of creativity inspired by the ability to speak things plainly, to mock in plain sight, to jostle outwardly. There was no fear, no terror, no threat, lying behind the surface of this comedy, which made it less effective. The one he liked consistently was the Daily Show. He also didn’t find groundbreaking, what with its usually in-your-face conclusions, things too plainly stated and mocked, the absurdities in much too plain sight. Or maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t know so many of the guest actors, musicians, like most other viewers must have, that lessened his enjoyment. But Maya did, and loved it, and so they always watched it together, the only ones to do so, and he liked the host, his enthusiasm, his seemingly genuine caring, warmed something in Paul.

And of course, his daily, parceled-out consumption of the New York Times, to which he would return several times a day. Sometimes, even the following days, armed with a notebook and his old fountain pen, to make strides in his English, to note new vocabulary words, phrases. So much did Paul love that beacon of American democracy, that Maya had most delightfully unexpected of surprises bought him the newly-minted fifth edition of the The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage for Christmas later that year. Where he found all manner of curious, or hilarious, exhortations.  

And there was plenty of time to read other books, too. In fact, in those early years, Paul felt his curiosity returning. Curiosity about the world, about history, about the organization of life—something he hadn’t felt since the early days. Like a self-forgotten anthropologist, sociologist awoken from a century-long dream, a color enthusiast finally able to tear off his sepia glasses lenses after a decades-long slumber. 

But awoken from what, exactly? From a lack of spare time, but also of possibility, and of uncensored words, in some good measure. It was good, too, to find himself interested in the same subjects he’d always been interested in. Never mind that most of it led to the inevitable conclusion, which he didn’t need to be reminded about, that this world leaves so much wanting. That all systems have their problems, and that life, as designed, rarely tends towards fairness. 

And so it was that those two years could have stretched on forever, or at least indefinitely, as far as Paul was concerned. 

❈

But it was all the new, unburdened time spent with Ana that most satiated Paul. Coming to know her in a different light, so many full decades later, after Teresa and Paula and Maya, was remarkable. 

Of course, they hadn’t said to each other, on the day of their wedding, only four short months after they met—Let’s do this, yes, forget our own selves where necessary, because every young Party functionary needs an adored wife at his side, to demonstrate his seriousness, his commitment to nation-building, and because every lovely young woman needs her knight, his armor and his promise. What better shield against this brutishly changeable world, making family, building lives other than our own? This, our only shelter against death and against country. 

And that’s just how it was, all those solid years of country-building and home-making, of child-scrambling and security-chasing, leaving little time, or inclination, for mutual soul searching, dilly-dallying, probing the beloved’s useless dreams.  

Paul wouldn’t change a thing. And yet, watching Ana prepare his favorite dishes for the first time, he’s amazed that he’d never known a moment like this before. Had she always ever so gently poked the dough that rose like a belly full of new life? So lovingly cradled the potatoes, washing them like precious stones? Sung those soft notes just beautifully so, paused to gaze beyond the trees with dreaming in her eyes? It made him shudder, to realize the ways in which his other’s look and hand and breath and skin, that she who touched and held and fueled him for so long, could yet conceal so much. 

These are the kinds of things Paul comes to know of Ana: 

The night before the miscarriage—the first, she says unprompted. She puts the knife, the eggplant down, straightens her back and gazes across the kitchen table. Fixes her pale gaze, splendidly still blue eyes, on the woody parcel of land behind their deck, as if addressing the squirrels who meander on the edge of the flowerbed. 

It was February, do you remember? 

How could I forget? He asks about that winter of 1955. It isn’t easy to forget a second year of crushed hopes, the death of Stalin having sent no calmer winds their way as yet. A year that landed screaming its dubious facts—how a decade passed since the war’s end, and things are worse; how he’s just turned twenty-six, and how there’s still no child, two years later—

Praporgescu. She names the street, their first home, tapping its memory like a hollow tree, and he sees the house, all twisting wooden bones and beautifully carved motifs. The timber gate, veiled in violet-purple, lavender-blue lilacs each May. 

The wagon-style house was large, three rooms off a hallway, a kitchen cramped at its end.  They lived in one room, Mrs. Nagy in another, and Fraulein Ute, Ana’s Salesian friend, in the last.  Mrs. Nagy’s husband, class enemy, had once owned the entire house, before the people’s representatives stepped in to remedy his exploits. Both his landholdings and his subjugated peasants, still foolishly weeping for him or for themselves, were then collectivized. And while Mr. Nagy marched himself to a prison camp (for such is our complicity against ourselves), Paul and Ana, devoted young harbingers of the luminous future, timidly obeyed their generous directive to quarter themselves in one of the Praporgescu rooms. 

It was a happy house for a while, before it was a sad house. Place where they dreamt and named their first child, who was labored, but never lived. 

Unthinkable, Paul thinks, that if Cantemir had lived he would have been forty-seven. Or that Teresa, Paula, Maya wouldn’t have lived at all, because isn’t that how it works, life wagered against life without logic? 

I wanted to die, then. The night before we lost him, Ana said. I couldn’t tell you. You might’ve locked me up, the old woman laughs. I woke up with a start, because Mrs. Nagy was swallowing her bitter life with wail-shouts like she did sometimes. And I knew that something terrible would happen. I felt that death was coming from the inside. Cantemir told me in a dream, that he didn’t want to come. He asked if it was a good world, if the world was good, and what could I tell him? 

Why didn’t you tell me? 

You had to leave. Remember it was that meeting that couldn’t be missed. How Leon wouldn’t let you, bitterly, she sees his face fall in sadness. No. Don’t worry. I would’ve been too scared, too young and stupid to tell you anyway. 

District sub-Secretary, Paul couldn’t miss the monthly meetings in the capital. The grueling 8-hour journey aside, it was a coveted position. Entrusted with sufficiently apolitical portfolios, bureaucratic enough, removed enough from the center to stay clean—but still, reserving a seat at a table. Which, if the reformers, Leon’s grand campaigns, prevailed, would become an entirely other proposition. The position, the result of a hard-won compromise with Leon, who had convinced him not to quit the Party, not to commit that special brand of suicide, not with a young wife with child. Patience, was Leon’s motto, wait out these hardline years. Turn away when you feel aghast, because that dream we fought for, it’s just around some corner.

But you were dancing—he says, wondering if he misremembers, but he’s sure, it was that same night when, rushing home like a madman, he stepped into the warmly-lit bosom of that old house to find Ana with Fraulein Ute in the kitchen, flour smeared in their hair, at arm’s length because Cantemir, invisible, lay between them. Looping, they laughed like children, and even Mrs. Nagy sat watching from the table, untensed until her smile became a glare with the sight of him.  

And then the dancing stopped—You must be hungry, Ana exclaimed, and—Yes, my dear, he said, although he rather would’ve danced, and Fraulein Ute, embarrassed and warmed pink up to the roots of her impossibly blonde hair, giggled her good night. Leaving them there, disoriented, some energy unspent and trapped. 

It was only hours later, from the depths of a dream he would never know, that he heard Ana’s blood curling scream. Running into the bathroom he slipped on the blood of wife and child, then dragged it across the carpet, the steps, and snow, screaming doctor! telephone! into the night, while Mrs. Nagy and Fraulein Ute hovered over Ana, screaming terrified.   

Did I ever tell you, Mrs. Nagy told me once that you’d think it was my fault? She was drunk, said you’d think I was an evil, a loose woman, for killing two of your children. That men like you would divorce stupid women like me, for not contributing to the national cause, she laughed now. Maybe then I would finally understand the poison that is the Party. And stupid girl that I was, oh God, I believed her!

Old bitch, Paul said, although of course she would’ve still been relatively young, compared to them now. Baba Yaga, he sighed, that’s what they used to call her, because they were still children. From so far away, it felt impossible that they had ever been that young, and lived those other lives. 

I was so frightened of her, sometimes, when you were gone, that I would knock on Frauelin Ute’s door. And she would let me spend the night with her, Ana said like it was something to confess. I never told you, because I thought you wouldn’t like it. She rubs the skin of a small, spotty potato, examining its surface as though it might offer a looking-glass onto those women sharing a bed. 

Fraulein Ute, she said, her eyes soft. I wonder where she is.

If she is, Paul thought. Two and a half years after they left Praporgescu, Ana stopped receiving regular letters from Fraulein Ute. Her last had described the growing difficulty of things, vivid memories of her once Bavarian summers. It was a coded plea, Ana, at last a new mom, had decided, and begged Paul to help her emigrate. And he had tried. 

Are you sure that they let her go? she asks now and slices her finger instead of the potato. Paul jumps at the sight of her blood falling, the same blood that he and the Fraulein had wiped off a different floor, crying themselves into the morning.

As sure as we can be of anything, he says. 

Ana watched him lingeringly sometimes, after such revelations. As though waiting for him, too, to confess to something. As though waiting for him to say, yes, I also never told you, how afraid I was, of those, my own nights in bed, with a foreign woman.

“Places of Memory” is an excerpt from the novel-in-progress Midnight in Exile.

Everyone round Hilton done heard tell of Bojack Rivers. Just like they’ve heard tell of that sharp buzz cut he’s always flauntin and those gold teeth and fancy rings he likes to wear on his pinkies. He’s the best bluesman in the Pine Belt, you ask me. Folks say he can master any composition you place in front of him or any record he cares to learn by ear. And at gigs, you best believe he’s totin that ebony Les Paul he calls “Bonita,” going on a long solo, even turning his back to the crowd like he’s Miles. Thing is, though, he’s got a history of falling headfirst into dogshit off the bandstand and I’ve been the one to clean it off of him, whether it’s been lending him a couple hundred cause he had a bad night with the dice. Or pulling him out of one his ole ladies’ houses when they were getting evil with each other. Or even digging his pickup truck out of a ditch on account of the gin he was drinking. Don’t get me wrong: I love him like we came out of the same womb but gah lee. Now I ain’t got no room to judge—Lord knows it—and there’s no denying that Bojack’s managed to get himself and his discipline together in these past four months, but I just caught word that he ain’t show for the lil walk through his bandleader, Miss Josie, wanted to have before the gig they got today. She’s told me in the past that he can be loose when it comes to practicing sometimes, but it ain’t never been like him to be as good as a ghost an hour and twenty before a show.

So now I’m sliding on these blue jeans I pulled from the dirty clothes hamper. My fiancée, Cheyenne, hands me my green Delta State cap and I jam it on hard, hard. Head out the bedroom door.

She asks, “How long you think it’s gone take to find em, E.J.?” 

I keep going down the hallway, knocking over one of them lil toy trucks, not saying a thing. I can’t find an answer that’s worth a damn. She yanks me back so hard her rollers nearly fall from her head. She sure did grow up with some brothers. 

I turn round to her and suck my teeth. Say, “Ain’t no tellin, and you know that.”

Cheyenne lets out an ole hiss. She hikes our boy Jeremiah higher up on her hip; he’s got a half-eaten cheese puff in his lil hand. I liked to cried when he was born.

I look out through the screen door at D-Lo, Bojack’s bandmate, the one Miss Josie sent to come get me. I refer to him as “the Ohioan” when he ain’t round. He’s sitting in his ‘13 Buick with a black pork pie hat on his head and a slim ole suit to match. He comes over to the house with Bojack sometimes to play Crazy 8s and watch some ball games. One time, I said he looked like a knockoff Lester Young, and he ain’t like that.

He honks the horn all kinds of crazy, yelling, “Getting cussed to death by Miss Josie ain’t what I scribbled out on my agenda for the day.”

I yell back, “It ain’t what I had on mine either.”

And it’s true. I planned on using my off day from the lumber yard to put some nice clothes on with my family and hear Bojack and the rest of Miss Josie’s five piece band play. It’s the first live show at The Bluebird in decades. Supposed to be a fancy get-together. Even folks in the Hilton Courier are writing bout it. I know the weight of this here situation—it’s clear as day—so I don’t know why D-Lo calls himself raising his voice as if I won’t wring his neck.

I kiss on Cheyenne’s cheek and head on out the screen door, finishing off the last of the Corona I had set down on the porch railing.

She says to me, “You and these Bojack blues…”

Which is what she always tells me in times like this. It ain’t no different from when I ran out to Casey’s that one evening cause I heard Bojack and another fella got into it over a dice game and pistols were said to be involved. Or like that afternoon Bojack’s ex girlfriend, Liv, left him high and dry on Highway 98 cause he was eyeing some lady at Golden Corral. Or when Bojack called me from a New Orleans jail cause he slapped a club owner for trying to short his pay.

*

Sometimes it just comes down to the principle of things. You show for me, I’m liable to show even harder for you. Just how my heart works. How I was raised. Bojack said he was brought up that same way and he sure nough done backed it up. 

See, bout four years ago, I came up on my daddy dead as a doorknob in his brown leather rocking chair. This was after I had worked a shift washing dishes at Louisiana Hot Spot. He had his hand in a can of those cashews he loved munching on. His mouth was as wide as an O, just like his eyes. Jesus. I reached down and kissed his lips, which were still warm, and called the people to come get him. I was at the bottom for weeks. Barely ate a thing. Didn’t shave or bathe or clean the house. Never left the couch less it was to fetch myself a beer. Stayed there so long I lost my job at the restaurant. Then Bojack came by after he got back in town—this was when he had that offshore job and that lil fro—to see bout me. He sat down next to me on the couch, looking bone tired. First thing he asked was, “Did ya eat?” And I pulled my head from underneath the covers, said, “Naw.” He got up and went through the refrigerator, saying, “Ain’t got a stick of butter in here.” So he went to Walmart, came back with a whole bunch of groceries, put them up in the cabinets too. He made me a pork chop sandwich fresh outta the grease and I ate just a lil half of it. He cleaned up the mess that had been building up since the funeral: the old Papa John’s boxes on the table, all the beer cans crowding round the couch, packs of cigarettes I had smoked through, the pile of dirty clothes sitting up on one of the other couches. Being that I was already half drunk by the time he came by and got even more drunk when he was out getting groceries, I was heaving vomit up out of my throat and right onto the carpet he had just vacuumed. He pulled me from the couch and took me to the bathroom, sat me on the toilet, and wiped my face clean with a rag. Then another round of vomit came shooting outta me and he held my head like it was a jewel while I hovered over the toilet bowl and cursed all of creation. After that, he sat me back on the couch, said he was going out to his truck, came back with his acoustic guitar and said he’d play me any song I wanted to hear. It went from “Spanish Joint” by D’Angelo to “Kiss of Life” by Sade all the way down to “Death Letter” by Son House.

You need folks like that. Folks that’ll drag you up out of that cold and nasty bottom, even out of sticky situations you don’t have no business being in. Hell, Bojack done did that too.      

Bout two years ago, me and Bojack were sitting on the trunk of my Taurus. We were on our break from that wretched engine plant we had got hired at. The pole light in the parking lot covered us like a bedsheet. There were other workers sitting out on the hoods of their cars or on the inside of em, passing weed on the low or stuffing their faces with food. Our hands were stained with oil and cramped up like we had rigamortis or something. Seemed like I couldn’t shake the sound of those conveyor systems from my ears either. Bojack was saying how bad he wanted to get out of the durn place with his guitar and I was going on bout saving enough bread to move up out of my Ma’s guest room. I had been munching on a bag of sweet heat chips when a big ole man with a thick ole beard walked up to us with a gal named Ginny on his arm. She worked cross from me at Module 5, where my main job was to screw spark plugs in and drill em while she pumped oil into the engine. She had a whole bunch of freckles on her face and hair the color of amber; she was looking gold underneath the pole light. She knew how to hold a conversation over those loud ass conveyor systems, so we had been talking bout who our favorite character on The Wire was and how she liked Sinead O’Connor and what high schools we went to. Nothing more than that. Not one time did she say she had a man and not one time did she say it was this broad shouldered joker who drove forklifts at the plant. He had on an Astros t-shirt that was too big for em, an elbow compression sleeve, and dirty work jeans. His mug was mean, mean. “Your eyes is meant for your head,” he said. “Not this one here.” I sucked my teeth harder than hard and the man came up closer to me, breathing all in my face. Ginny was standing there like she ain’t know me from a can of paint. All that time Bojack was quiet, going in his pocket for that switch blade his daddy got him way, way back. All of a sudden Ginny started yanking on the man, telling him to come on but the man ain’t see the blade or the smile coming cross Bojack’s lips. He was too busy staring me off in the eyes. A crowd started forming. “I done spent my whole life dodgin prison,” Bojack said. “And I’d hate to be headin there tonight. But if that’s what the Lord see fit for my life, well…” “You best get gone,” the man said, not even seeing the blade till Bojack flipped it open, smiling harder. Long story short, that man ended up on the ground that night, not due to any deep cuts all over his skin but due to that haymaker Bojack laid on em, making everybody round hoot and holler. 

We got fired behind that mess but again sometimes it just comes down to the principle of things.

    *

Now me and D-Lo are headin down Taylorsville Road. The smell of Mr. Daniel’s spareribs simmering on the grill runs right up my nose as we pass his yard. The sun’s still beaming up there, all round and orangeish, and it won’t be too long fore it’s settin. D-Lo’s got his eyes straight ahead, passin this pack of teenage boys on four-wheelers, poppin wheelies better than I ever could back in the day.

He says, “You ask me, Miss Josie shoulda been dropped his ass. He thinks that lil talent he’s gotten blessed with can keep him doing anything he wants, how he wants. When he wants.”

D-Lo looks at me, like he’s wanting confirmation or something. He gets none. Not Jack. Cause what if Bojack’s just in the thick of some trouble and here he is tootin up his nose?

He keeps on, saying, “He was just doing good these past couple of months though. He brought donuts to practice. Glazed. Jelly. Frosted. Ain’t that some shit? I assumed we really were looking at a changed man then. Guess that ain’t so now.”

I don’t say a word, just keep my eyes fixed on what’s lying on the other side of this here window: these ole bare fields that used to be scattered with Mr. Holman’s cattle, First Baptist Church, the graveyard MoMo Connie was buried in when I was nothing but a lil boy. It’s better for me to hold my eyes to what’s out there. If I turn to D-Lo, I might curse him. Might call him everything but a child of God for speaking on Bojack this way. Yeah, he’s got a point: I can hear some of the truth in the fella’s words, hear it loud as I don’t know what, but the right to let it go from his lips is reserved far away from him. Some folk might call it unfair, might say it ain’t a bit of right, but that’s just how it oughta be. In my eyes, anyway.

Cause, see, me and Bojack done only known this pork-pie-wearing fella for a few months anyway, ever since Bojack brought him round to the house, saying they were now practicing as a part of Josie Collins’ five piece band. He’s from Cleveland, grew up there in all that snow, so, quite naturally, he hadn’t been round much. Hadn’t been round when me and Bojack were looking for a slice of anything to fall into on Rankin Road with our Mongooses: Mr. Jonah’s garden full of cantaloupe, the bras of Tabitha Ingram and Shayla Pittman, those inflatable pools that used to feel as wide as Lake Pontchartrain in Miss Mo’s backyard. D-Lo hadn’t been there when we were sitting out in Lake Hollis with our daddies and our rods and those cans of Budweiser we wished we could chug. When we were pressing our young knees gainst those piles of Jasmine rice on Bojack’s mama’s kitchen floor for causing too much ruckus in her house. 

Naw, D-Lo hadn’t been round for that.

So I turn to him with my lip curled just enough to let him know he oughta tread lightly. He sucks his teeth and puts his eyes back on the road.

“Can you tell me where we’re going?” he asks. “Miss Josie’s texting and calling.”

D-Lo’s eyes oughta belong to a sad puppy’s, the way they’re fixin to well up as he’s waiting.

I say, “Bojack’s got him a friend round these parts. Figure they might know where he’s at.”

“Who?”

“Would tell ya if I knew myself.”

D-Lo’s eyes are facing forward again. His lips are mumbling something. I know he’s thinking I’m lying through my teeth, just tryna give him a hard time, but I ain’t. Some things just take a lil bit too much time to get into.

Quiet as it’s kept, I had heard bits of a “somebody” on Taylorsville Road from Bojack bout four months ago. A somebody who earned a fine ole Master’s degree in English Literature from Fisk University, had a painting of Nina Simone hanging on their living room wall, and encouraged Bojack to read more and drink burdock tea. Other than what they lived in (and where) and that they were new to Hilton, Bojack didn’t say much else bout em, tell you the truth. But I realized after bout two months that that “somebody” musta been why Bojack had gotten himself together in recent months. Coming to practice on time all the time. Leaving the gambling at Casey’s lone. Getting back into the Word a lil bit. Even giving guitar lessons to a couple of kids round town. But Bojack never said for sure when I pressed him bout it, asking who the new gal was.

“I’m keeping it real low,” Bojack had said one of those nights he’d come over to the house. “Cause if I brag on it now, it’ll been done snatched itself way come tomorrow mornin.”

And I picked up what Bojack was putting down, so I left it lone. Trying to yank anything from that fella’s throat only pushed it further down anyway. 

Now I’m wishing I woulda prodded more. Maybe then I’d have a number to call or a Facebook profile to message for Bojack’s whereabouts. 

But at least we’re coming up on this tamale-colored trailer now. It stands at the end of a dirt lane with red brick skirting at the bottom. Whoever did work on it musta been paid real nice for it. Attached to the trailer is a carport with a Nissan Maxima underneath and Bojack’s silver ‘75 Monte Carlo ain’t nowhere near it. Nobody’s sitting on the concrete steps leading to the screen door. Nobody’s standing in the window where I figure the kitchen is either. 

I say, “Turn right here.” 

When we reach the trailer, I get out with my eyes on the front door, hoping some kind of face will show. By the time I reach the top step and knock a few times, I realize nobody’ll be welcoming me. Not a soul. I turn round to look at D-Lo at the bottom step, ready for him to tear me a new asshole for wasting time, but he’s got his eyes scrunched and one finger in the air, walking to the side of the trailer like he’s some detective.

“The hell you going?” I call to him. “Your skull must be feenin for a bullet. Walkin behind somebody’s house like it’s yourn.”

“Ain’t know you were born half deaf,” D-Lo says. He doesn’t even slow his stride.

“What you hear?”

But D-Lo’s gone. 

I wait to hear a couple of bullets or maybe a few curses to ring out. Don’t hear any. So I move to the side of the trailer. Peek round the corner. And D-Lo’s approaching a woman in a white robe. She’s sitting on the steps of the back porch with her eyes on the yard, which is damn near bare with only a picnic table in the middle of it.

“Woulda put two hot ones in y’all if I had my pistol,” she says. 

She doesn’t turn, only rubs her fingers down one of her two strand twists. Her voice is low but loud enough for me to place her thick lilt. A Tennessee woman, she must be. Memphis. 

I say, “Told this one here that. But he’s a city boy. Don’t know nothin bout how to be round these parts.”

D-Lo turns round, tryna hold some evil in his face, but it does no good. I chuckle at him.

“We searching round for Bojack, love,” I say. “I’m sho you know but he’s got a show in an hour, and we can’t seem to find him nowhere.”

“And it must be a felony for him to pick up his phone,” D-Lo says.

The woman turns her head just a bit. “He told me bout you. Showed me your Facebook and all.”

“What he say?” D-Lo asks.

“Not you,” she says.

I step closer. “What’s your name?”

“Dawn,” she says, more like a whisper, really.

I reach for her hand, but she jerks back real quick. 

“Where he at, love?” 

 She stands up and goes towards the back door. She stops bout halfway through.

“He,” she says.

“He what?” 

“And I… Then he…”

“Then he what?” 

Dawn sucks her teeth. “He ran outta here saying he was going to Marion Creek,” she says. “Needed to cool his head.”

“And you just let him go on his merry lil way?” D-Lo asks.

She looks at the both of us like we’re the scum of the earth. Like we ain’t worth two wooden nickels. “He had all that evil sitting up in his eyes when I tried to grab hold of em,” she says. “Told me to leave him be.”

D-Lo sucks his teeth and holds his phone to show Miss Josie calling. I shake my head.

“He… Then I… And then we,” she says, headin to the back door. “Just get the fuck way from my house.”

We don’t move though. 

“Don’t cost a dime for me to call the Law, do it?”

D-Lo takes off for his car. I hold still with my eyes on the door as Dawn slams it shut, locking it just as fast as she opened it.

“Bring your  ass,” D-Lo says. “Point me to the creek.”

*

When we get back on the road, D-Lo says, “Bo must’ve did her dirt.”

I don’t say nothing but he might be right. Much as I hate to let it fester up inside and boil like my MoMo’s grits, Bojack’s probably done started back going over to Casey’s to mess with those dice too much and Dawn probably done got onto him bout all the risks—losing his life or his money or, hell, both—and he just couldn’t stand to hear it. Maybe Bojack had moaned another woman’s name when they were making love like they sing bout in those blues songs. Or maybe he just cut her loose cause he couldn’t stand the commitment. Didn’t know what to do with a woman that good. With two degrees and allat.

I say, “Ain’t no tellin.”

But I reckon it must’ve been bad for Bojack to be at Marion Creek to cool his head. We both hadn’t been that way in a while, but it’s a sack of memories resting there: I can see them now. The big ole cushion of sand we lay on while we chomped down those burnt patties and chicken wings my daddy had grilled. That old acoustic guitar Bojack used to mess round with, playing the songs of Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix like a lil savant at nothing but sixteen. That Budweiser bottle I cracked on Wild Bill’s head that one night. That moccasin Bojack killed with his daddy’s walking stick and held up with the kind of pride that carried itself over for weeks. That tussle we had over Pauletta Harris. Those tears we’d cried when we got drunker than skunks off that Taaka Vodka and let out what crowded our insides like sardines in a can: me coming up on my dead daddy in that chair, Bojack losing that music scholarship from Alcorn State, me learning Cheyenne was pregnant with Jeremiah and keeping him, Bojack showing the ring he bought from Kay Jewelers for his first wife.

Now look at me, gah lee. Speedin down this durn road, tryna beat the sun.

*

His silver Monte Carlo is parked on side of the road with the door wide open. Willie Dixon’s crooning “Nervous” on the radio and the engine’s growling underneath the hood. When I lean further into the car, I can smell all the woody sage with one durn sniff. On the passenger seat is Bojack’s billfold and his phone, dead, of course. Bonita sits up on the backseat, her body all worn down, her color faded at her edges; there’s even what seems like a swirling scar curving round one of her pickup switches. I would search round for more, but  D-Lo’s in the passenger’s window waving for me. 

“Not going down there by myself,” he says.

    I close the door and go towards the path leading down to the creek, which is sitting pretty at the bottom of a lil hill I done climbed and slid down since a boy. I wish I could savor what’s round us—the sound of the wind whipping up a quiet song, the leaves on the silver maples whirling about—but Bojack’s sitting at the mouth of this creek, where this  bed of sand is. His black dress pants are pulled up to his knees, his feet are in the water. His mouth is latched onto a bottle of Taaka Vodka, and his body is swaying long to Willie, sending lil ripples through the water. I’m at the bottom of the hill now, passing Bojack’s suit jacket and dress shoes, which are buried in the sand. A shame. All that good money gone to waste. 

“Boy, I tell ya,” Bojack says. He grins and shows his teeth. He’s got those slugs in today. And just one pinky ring on.

“Man, get up outta that damn water,” I say, leaning down towards him. “You drunk as all get out.”

“Ain’t drunk,” he says. “Just cracked this bottle open, swear fore God.” He hums a lil something sweet and low. 

I look back at D-Lo, who’s standing with his arms folded and his head shaking. I kinda believe Bojack though. He’s not reeking of liquor, just sweat from sitting up in this sun.

“Y’all a be somewhere off in the deep, you knew what was twirlin up in here,” Bojack says. He points a finger to his temple.

“Oh, we got an idea,” D-Lo says.

“What?” Bojack asks.

I tug him a lil bit from the water with his dress shirt, and he rises. Tug him some more towards the hill.

“You muhfuckas don’t know the half,” Bojack says.

“We gotta get you changed,” D-Lo says.

“Don’t you know where you gotta be?” I ask. 

Bojack breaks way and stops the three of us. “Know exactly where I oughta be,” he says, plopping back down on the sand. “Shoulda knew somethin won’t right soon’s I woke up.”

I reach down to pull Bojack by the shirt one more gin. We might be tusslin here in a minute. “Come on,” I say.

But Bojack goes on: “I wake up in her bed, she gets to sayin how she’s sick. I look at her. Her hair’s all thick and nice cause she just got it retwisted. She’s lookin good in that lavender dress too. I’m thinkin, ‘Don’t look sick to me one bit. Don’t sound like it either.’ But I just nod cause that’s my lady—or was, or is, or…”

D-Lo winces, steps a lil closer with his face scrunched up. I loosen my grip. Bojack sips from the bottle and swallows the liquor down like it’s ammonia swirling round in there. He keeps his head towards the creek, even though his eyes are someplace else. Far off.

Bojack goes on, “And I don’t wanna cause no fuss with her even though I’m .38 hot cause this evenin’s sposed to be the night I show up with her. Then I get to thinkin to myself, ‘Well, Bo, that’s real selfish for you to be thinkin like that.’ Start feelin guilty then.” 

“I don’t blame you,” I say. “Lord knows I don’t… But Bo.”

I show him D-Lo’s phone, which has Miss Josie calling it.

Bojack waves the phone away. “Damn The Bluebird right now!”

I hand the phone back, sighing, knowing we ain’t gone beat that sun, which is heading down past the horizon where those trees are standing at the end of the creek, looking all pinkish and perfect.

Bojack keeps at it, “So I get on up, kiss her on her forehead, and play with her lips with my finger. She’s got this mole on the right side of her lip that made me quiver when I first saw her round town. Got a brain like Berkeley too; I’m talkin stacks of books in her room soon’s you walk in. Jayne Cortez. Gloria Naylor. Nikki Giovanni. Same thing with her records: Bessie Smith, Memphis Slim, The Vilionaires. Her taste’s better than mine, hell.” Bojack chuckles; so do I, just a lil bit. “Anyway, I put my clothes on and head down to my house. Start gettin ready for The Bluebird. Then it hit me like a 7.62: I ain’t even ask her what I could do for her. Ain’t even ask her if she wanted me to run to the store to get some Tussin, at least. Hell, ain’t even ask her what kinda sick she was. I look round in my medicine cabinet in the bathroom and drawers: ain’t got a thing in there. Onliest thing I got is a can of Campbell’s Soup sittin on the kitchen counter. I snatch it, snatch Bonita too. I jump back in the car, feelin nothin less than a fool. Speed back down the road like I’m fuckin Earnhardt or somebody. I don’t know. I hop out. Get past the screen door, put my key in the latch. I’m bein all quiet cause I figure she sleepin. Naw. She ain’t sleepin. Ain’t sleepin one bit. She moanin. And her moanin’s mixed with some other fella’s moanin. I’m thinkin I done lost my last screw.”

I say, “Unh unh unh.”

D-Lo gets even closer now, still saying nothing. He’s got his phone in his pocket now. 

Bojack keeps his head forward and goes on, “I go out and get my blade from the glove compartment.” He takes the blade from his pocket and stares down at it, runs his fingers over its edges like he’s Rambo. “I go back in the house with this one here, not givin a damn if I’m quiet or not. Then the moanin stops. I haul ass down the hallway to her room. Get to the door, door’s locked. She’s tellin him get gone through the window. So I run back to the front door and guess who I see runnin through the front yard in his durn briefs?”

“Who?” I ask.

Bojack sips from the bottle again. “That pretty somebitch Coach Billups.”

“The lanky dude? High yella? Used to play at Grambling?”

“Damn right.”

I sit down in the sand beside Bojack and see all the hurt sitting in his eyes, waiting to drain itself. “Gah damn, boy,” I say and reach over for the bottle. “Ain’t figure it was this bad.” I sip and grimace. It’s been a while since I done had some liquor.

“And I get to thinkin he musta been sweet talkin her in them hallways up at the schoolhouse cause you know she teaches them sophomores.”

I hand the bottle back. “Naw, I ain’t know that. You ain’t said more than two things bout her to me since you met her.”

“Yeah, well. I told you why. Ain’t like I was hidin her… Took her to Hattiesburg every Sunday and we got all dressed up, went out to eat at Ed’s Diner, Crescent City Grill. All the nice spots over there. Took her to New Orleans too. Congo Square. Ate poutine, listened to some good music. Showed her where I used to live in Algiers. Allat.”

“So what you do next?” D-Lo asks. He sits down but only for a quick while. He stands up again and wipes away the sand from his pants.

Bojack goes on, “Nothin. Couldn’t do nothin, hell. She jumps on my back fore I can even get up outta the house. I’m talkin bout pulls me down so quick, the blade falls up outta my hand. Woulda thought it was Ray Lewis put me to the ground, cept she ain’t got no shoulder pads on or no raven up on her helmet. She’s buttass naked.” The three of us let out an unsure laugh then a looser one that goes and goes and goes. Then a hush comes. It’s nothing left but the quiet tween us and Willie Dixon’s voice, which stretches as long as the Pearl River. “I’m layin there and layin there and she’s cryin and cryin and I’m yellin for her to get offa me and she yellin, sayin she ain’t doin nothin, sayin she gone stay put and I’m a stay put and I’m a listen to her tell me how got dang sorry she is. Then she gets to sayin, ‘Oh baby oh baby oh baby oh baby.’ But I throw her offa me and get the blade but the muhfucka Billups, he’s gone outta the yard by the time I get up. I get to thinkin it’s awright cause I know where he stays. I pass his house sometimes—he stays right down the road from her, hell—and I be seein him out there playin with his daughter and son. Jumpin on the trampoline and allat. So I take one step out the door and she pulls me in one more gin and I just start to look at her and look at her and, hell, I get stuck just like that: one foot out the door. Ain’t sayin a word to her now. Just lookin. Then I turn round cause I feel my eyes burnin. Start lookin at that sun: it’s brighter than bright outside but feel like it’s goin down in my gut. She turns me back round and tells it to me just like this, she says, ‘I laid with him. Ain’t no excuse. Don’t want one. Ain’t askin for one.’ She says, ‘I had a taste for him and it hurt so good, hurt so bad to fill it. But it wont nothin but matters of the flesh.’ Then she looks at me deep off in the eye and she says, ‘Me and you, matters of Spirit.’”

“Damn,” D-Lo says.

“Ain’t never had no woman put it to me like that,” I say.

“And then she holds me,” Bojack says. “Holds me tight, like I ain’t got no blade off in my hand, like we ain’t standin in the middle of the front door for anybody to walk on by and see us. I get to thinkin back on her and me. How she’d have me up all night readin those books she assigned me like she was the professor and me the student. How she’d let me cook that shrimp creole for her cause she couldn’t never get it right herself. How’d she helped me get my breathin right, like we were monks somewhere over in Asia. How I just sat and listened to her tell me bout those kids at the schoolhouse while I rubbed her feet. How there’d be times when we’d just be laid up or sittin on the back porch or ridin in the car or sittin at Lake Hollis and not a word, a look, a gesture was needed tween us… So she’s grippin me and grippin me and I’m grippin her and grippin her then all of a sudden I turn her loose. Cause I remember. Member like hell. I try to leave again and she asks me where the hell I’m goin. I give her bout the meanest look I can muster. Tell her I’m goin to the creek and she bet not try to make her way there. So now I’m here.”

“Boy, I tell ya,” I say.

Except for Willie Dixon’s voice still reaching over to us, there’s another quiet at the creek that nobody is fool enough to try and break. Bojack puts the blade back into his pocket and takes another swig of Taaka Vodka, which is only halfway done. He stands to his feet and aims the bottle towards the woods, but it only reaches the middle of the creek, where it splashes and floats when it pops back up. I walk over to him, drop my head on his shoulder, and wrap an arm round his waist to hold us both up. He rubs his hand over the top of my ball cap and lets it sit there. 

I must be bout the stupidest fella in all of the county, doubting him how I was.  A doggon shame is what it is. Feels like I ain’t even worthy of his touch. But even still. We stand quiet, breathing what seems to be the same locked breath.

We don’t turn each other loose till D-Lo stands beside us.

“Didn’t know you were sitting on all that,” D-Lo says. “Had I know that, I…” He looks down at his shoes, frowning. “What to tell Miss Josie?” 

Bojack turns to D-Lo and burps a lil bit. “Tell her we’ll be on the way, hell.”

You’d think he’d be wanting to head home and listen to some more Willie Dixon, but he’s got himself an obligation and that there just comes down to the principle of things.                                     

*

While I’m driving the Monte Carlo, bout halfway to The Bluebird, I say to Bojack, “Worried bout you, boy.”

I look over at him in the passenger seat. His eyes are closed and his head’s leaning back on the seat. 

“I’m a play,” Bojack says. “Know them songs better than anybody in that band.”

“Ain’t talkin bout no music. Talkin bout you.”

Bojack’s quiet now.

“Worried bout you goin back to that old Bo. And you know bout what Bo I’m talkin.”

He doesn’t budge.

I say, “Seem like Dawn got your thick head right, kept you way from that old Bo. Better than I could.”

Bojack opens up his eyes, looks at me hard, hard. 

 “Went and saw her today cause we were huntin you. She told us where you was at. How else you think we found you?”

Bojack burps. “Hell, I don’t know. All I know is this: that gal got me right. Lawd hammercy.”

“You your own durn jigsaw to solve though.” 

Bojack’s quiet again. He looks out of the window with stale eyes, nodding a lil bit.

“Y’all through?”

Bojack sucks his teeth. “Would be a doggon fool if I said I was sho.”

And there ain’t no arguin with that.

*

I’m feeling shame for not having even changed out of my jeans, sandals, and wifebeater when we get to The Bluebird. The fancy people with their ole fancy dresses and fancy hats don’t make my shame any lighter, just like the fancy red drapes and white table cloths. Ain’t never seen this place like this. But at least Bojack has cleaned himself up and got rid of that dust on his suit and dried his feet off. Least he’s walking through the crowds of folks to the side of the bandstand. At long last. 

I see Cheyenne leaving a red booth with our boy and throw a hand up. They come to me at the front door. I got a taste for the catfish frying over in the kitchen and surely would like a piece after all this rippin and runnin.

“Found him at the creek blastin Willie Dixon,” I say. “Damn near had a full suit on.”

“I’ll be damned,” Cheyenne says.

“You ain’t heard the half,” I say. “I mighta been out there too, I saw what he saw.”

“What?”

“Tell you later.”

“Well,” Cheyenne says. She points to a wall beside the bandstand, where Miss Josie sits in a row of chairs with the rest of her band. “She been lookin stressed since I walked through the door.”

Miss Josie’s in a black tinsley dress with a gold cross pendant on her neck. Her eyes are locked on Bojack like an eagle set dead on its prey. She wastes no time in whispering something I just know is cutting into his ears. The ole gray haired bassist, Benny Coleman, steps closer. D-Lo and the drummer, his name’s Travis Kennedy, do the same. But Miss Josie holds one hand up and pauses all of em. I motion to go to the side of the bandstand too, but Cheyenne puts a hand on my gut.

“Unh, unh,” she says. 

And so I stand still, just picturing Miss Josie saying this’ll be the last show he’ll be playing with em. A lost gig and a maybe-lost woman. All in one evening.

When the band gets up on stage, Bojack goes to his spot a couple of steps in front of the upright bass and plops down in the wooden seat set aside for him. D-Lo adjusts the mic, making sure its height is to his liking. Miss Josie sits at her piano and messes round with the keys. The rest of the band get into position with their instruments. The crowd done goes quiet now. Bojack’s planning something as he plugs Bonita into the amp and tunes her: I see it in his durn eyes, see it in the sad grin coming cross his face as he stares down at her strings. Soon enough, the first notes to Jimi’s “Red House” try making their way out, but they’re hushed, timid, really. Bojack tightens his grip on Bonita and secures her on his lap. His fingers move like a group of clever copperheads sure of their way; his foot drums as their heart. Benny, D-Lo, and Miss Josie turn to him, but he’s not looking towards em; his eyes are closed as he slides up and down Bonita’s neck, making her squeal and squall while she makes him sway harder than he would in any pew on any Sunday morning. All of it seems like a private conversation finally made public. A conversation crumpling Bojack’s face, which is holding so much ecstasy, so much hurt up in it, that I can’t even tell which one I see the most of. But I know this much: whatever it is sitting on Bojack’s face is close enough to taste deep off in his mouth. Hell, I can taste it too and, from looking round, so can the crowd. A man sitting right in front of the bandstand grunts at the sound of Bonita’s growl. A woman back at the bar surrenders a hand and waves it real, real slow. Another man leaning on the back wall drums his foot with the same kinda gumption as Bojack’s, like they’re both beating something outta themselves and bent on beating it good. Even Cheyenne’s eyes are closed in concentration, cipherin every one of Bonita’s wails. When the other instruments chime in, I tug her closer to me and let the music take us over into Glory. Bojack raises his head to the ceiling, and I know he’s someplace else now, mining his day into a kind of gold. 

Text: Ben Buckland and Carissa Western

Images: Ben Buckland

The desert is green. Just a tinge—enough that you barely notice it at first and then you look again across the sand and it feels impossible. It’s been raining. Heavy drops in the afternoon. And the desert, this most patient of landscapes, is coming to life. Emptiness and stasis, it turns out, are illusions. If you watch closely, you can see the desert change.

We are here to witness Sebeïba, a festival said to be three thousand years old. Moussa, born in Djanet into one of its oldest families—the families, he says, who carry Sebeïba—tells us the story: when two rival tribes living in an oasis deep in the Sahara, locked in a long war, heard that Moses had been victorious over the Pharaohs, they laid down their weapons in peace. Or perhaps—for there are multiple stories—it began as mourning for the death of the Queen of Sheba, in the form of a poem and a hat (the tkumbut) made as a memorial for the local families who traced their lineage back to her noble tomb “so our next generation remembers our queen is dead.” Or maybe it is just the fear of the wind, says Moussa,* as a thick tesist (sand haze) hangs on the air around the oasis.

Like the desert, Sebeïba first appears unchanging. A day-long contest between two rival ksours of the oasis town of Djanet: El Mihan and Zelouaz, staged through dance, drumming and song. The swords and the scarves. The tall red hats. We could be time travellers and news of the Pharaohs fresh off the latest caravan. But if we look closer, Sebeïba’s meaning is as layered as its history, and it is evolving—subtly but profoundly, in response to forces from far beyond the oasis. 

Despite Sebeïba’s three-thousand year history, the way Ibrahim, a veteran teacher and scholar of history, describes it to us resists the idea of simple preservation. Not a re-enactment. Not a custom on autopilot. “The people who reflected on it,” he says, “were desert sages.” It has been reasoned through, not stumbled into.

The journey south begins days before, in Algiers, where a cold fog is flowing off the sea, creeping along the alleys of the Casbah and wrapping the minarets in long white scarves. Below, the Haussmann boulevards pile their grid upon the rocks and beyond, the Mediterranean. Fishermen and the dark, sleek bodies of swimmers on the cliffs. Cats waiting on the rocks for whatever is left of the catch. 

Here in these streets, the 20th century was at its cruelest—the crucible of torture that crushed opposition in the Battle of Algiers. Then later, the civil war’s too many uncounted deaths, and the question “qui tue qui” still waiting for an answer. 

In the desert, the Imuhar** were long overlooked. They lay at the margins, but no longer. The eyes of both the state and of tourists have turned towards the south. 

Flights to the deep Sahara take off and land in the middle of the night. We hear various reasons why: less turbulence in the cool night air, or that the planes are needed for more prestigious routes in the day. Whatever the reason, we arrive and the desert is deep dark; the sand piling up on the road, flowing over it in the wind, like the surface of a river in the headlights. As if the desert would take all this back if we just turned away for an instant too long. 

In Djanet, preparations have been ongoing for weeks. Women have been making food, polishing silver and swords, and inspecting tagelmust, their precious indigo, almost black in the shade. And in the past few days, practising the music and the dances (and selecting the dancers and musicians) that will determine which side of the oasis carries the day. These practice days are also when the youngest members of the community can learn and rehearse; though their exclusion from the more serious festival day is no longer as strict as it once was. Now when they enter the ritual they are allowed to stay. Moussa explains that, amid so much change, there is an even greater need to instill a love for Sebeïba among the young.

The importance of this day for the Imuhar of Djanet is heightened by the fact that most of the festivals and gatherings that used to thread communities together across the region no longer exist. We hear of their absence in whispers: Tafsit and Ziyara of the Hoggar are gone; festivals in Niger have stopped; gatherings across the border all but a memory. This in a context where governments are worried by the idea of transnational meet-ups and what they could mean for the fragile security of the Sahara, even if relations between the Imuhar and jihadist or broader independence movements are more complex than these fears might suggest.

Whatever the reasons, here, Sebeïba has adapted by becoming more local, less transnational. Judges once came from Niger and from Libya, unknown to the dancers until the contest began. Now the festival turns inwards. The community judges itself. 

In place of the Imuhar who once came from abroad, visitors to Sebeïba are now more often tourists. Mostly Algerians from the north who come, says Ibrahim, because they are “curious about this culture, which is theirs too,” despite its long years on the periphery of Algerian politics and society. 

They—we—gather at the edges of the wadi, as the men and women of each side of the oasis assemble. At times, we’re aware of the lenses. The phones held up. Of people asking for selfies. Of the Algerian TV crew and their drone and looming boom mic. In these moments, Ibrahim’s words feel darkly prophetic, that tourism, which funds continuity, also threatens to fossilise what we’ve come to see. “We fear that one day people will go looking for Sebeïba and we’ll be forced to buy a ticket … like at the cinema.”

But as the day draws on, the light softens and the dust rises, and the distractions and foreboding fade away until the whole scene feels mystical and timeless. The watchers dissolving into the haze until only four camel-riders remain, rising like ships above the dust. The swords of the dancers shaking, humming like the sound of giant beetle wings. Song and drums a low background swell. Rising like the sea.

Among the poems, Moussa tells us, are some that remain unchanged, poems as old as Sebeïba itself, and a key criterion by which the festival is judged. Others, he explains, evolve every year, reflecting recent changes. Praising whoever is “a hero” in society. 

“Our society is matriarchal,” explains Ibrahim, “the woman is at the base of everything.” And in Sebeïba it is no different: it is the women who lead.  “All the poems are from women, all the music and rhythm is from the women, everything is from the women, the men just dance,” Aicha, a locally respected performer whose family has farmed the oasis for generations, tells us. In the afternoon, as the percussion deepens and the atmosphere intensifies, the women’s formation, a pyramid of emerald and deep plum rising above the gathering dust, choreographs the final stages of the event.

As they play, their jewellery glints in the soft light—silver pieces reserved especially for this day. In everyday use the designs have changed, the metal is as much nickel and zinc as pure silver now. The tall red hats of the men (which some say are adapted Ottoman fezzes) evidence that change isn’t only modern. Though Ibrahim strikes a note of warning about both the changing materials and the newer fabrics that appear each year, Indian saris and glossy cottonade shimmering next to indigo. “If you have changed”, he says, “you will change again and again […] if you falsify today, you’ll falsify your whole life.”   

There is less too. The exquisite geometry of traditional jewellery is lost, along with those that used to make it. Families covet a few cherished pieces that still speak to geography and place. And fewer hats. As Moussa explains, the town now pools all the tkumbut and assigns them to the best dancers, rather than the inheritance they once were. In Zelouaz, the uzarnas, heavy drums, are gone too, for lack of those with the strength to carry and to play them.

Though all of that is forgotten in the moment, in the wild energy of the dancers and the crowd, as the music swells, swords clank together, and the two sides move across the wadi.

Later, once it is over, and the moon is rising over the desert, Moussa’s words come back to us. “Sebeïba,” he says, “is my ID card in the world … You will not find Sebeïba in other places.” In the hazy half-light the words ring differently. Sebeïba appears as the unique and irreplaceable character of Djanet.

Looking out across the landscape, the stone towers of the Tassili rise like dark forests. A pair of jackals dart, noiselessly, across the sand. A goatskin abayoug, once the sidepiece of the camel, bounces gently against the window of the car. The desert, neither empty nor unchanged. 

* Some interviewees are identified by pseudonyms. Given the sensitivities around discussing cultural and political identity in Algeria, names have been changed to protect those who spoke with the authors.

** We have chosen to use this term rather than Tuareg, both because the etymology of the term Tuareg is itself not agreed, and, more importantly, because those we spoke with preferred to self-identify as “Imuhar”.

My son likes tomatoes, birds, dogs, cats, string cheese, the pedestrian wait signal at the traffic light. He says, “park” and “up” and “off”. He says “baahir” for outside and “ao” for come. Since he was born, I am scared to think through to the end of a thought, in case I find myself facing an uncertainty: a future in which he is not happy, or he is unwell, or he is not there. I am aware I am in the middle of life now, a bustling, hard, joyous time where the days blend into each other. This is what my mother must have felt when she was pregnant with me. I keep trying to look for a way to live my life by watching hers. But it’s hard to take stock when I am in the thick of it. Every day is beautiful and also terrible in how quickly it goes by. 

During the year that she was pregnant with me, my mother lost one of her uncles and her brother-in-law. They died in front of her; she saw their dead bodies. She was twenty-seven at the time. And then, after I was born as one of a set of twins, she lost my brother just a few hours after his birth. I think about the way death shadows my writing; and I wonder if some of the losses she faced while I was growing inside her were inherited by me. At times, I think about how much of my history my children will worry over. Will they sift through my life the way I want to sift through my mother’s past? The deaths that chased her the year she was pregnant eventually gave way to a period of happiness that lasted thirty-eight years, until my father’s death. This past year was the first year she forgot their wedding anniversary, seven years after he died. 

Muhammed Ishaq (1987)

My mother says that she had trouble conceiving for seven years. Then she and my father moved to Baghdad and the doctors there told her she would have to go to London for treatment. They would take the eggs out of her body to strengthen and fertilize them, before inserting them back in. My father was employed by the government of Pakistan at the time, so he applied for funding to cover the procedure. His application was approved and she traveled to London in 1987. While there, she stayed with her oldest maternal uncle, Muhammed Ishaq, one of seven uncles and aunts on her mother’s side. 

Muhammad Ishaq was a kind, and gentle man who was always laughing, according to my mother. He had moved to England in 1962, leaving behind a wife and five kids. In England, he had a brief marriage with a Scottish woman, and from this he had another daughter, my mother’s step-cousin. 

While my mother was in England, she took English classes. Every week, her uncle would go with her to class and sit on a bench outside. She felt so guilty about him waiting in the heat for her that she quit the classes after only three or four weeks. 

One day, they were all at home and her uncle felt unwell. She asked him what was wrong and he said his chest felt heavy. By then his brief second marriage was over, though he maintained a close relationship with this daughter from that union. His wife from Pakistan had moved to be with him. 

Muhammed Ishaq collapsed in the living room, and died later that day. “When did you find out he had died?” I asked my mother, “And how did you react?” She told me then that she rode with him in the ambulance. She had worried that the CPR, performed amid the blaring sirens, would hurt his chest when he woke up. When they arrived at the hospital, the paramedics ushered him away, behind doors. Finally, a doctor came to them and asked if the man had any blood relatives, so my mother stepped up. They took her into a room and told her, very kindly, that he had actually died back at home. They had hoped to revive him, but it turned out they could not. This was the first person she ever watched die up close. My mother’s other younger uncle, Abdul Razzaq, flew back to Pakistan with the body for the burial. He said he had to buy a ticket for the dead body. When I spoke to him about his brother dying, some thirty-three years after the fact, he only said: “It was very hard.”

It makes me sad that my mother’s uncle died in front of her and while looking back at the long arc of her life, this—the first death she ever witnessed—only ended up being an afterthought. “I was in the ambulance,” she said, almost as if she was remembering again, after many years of having forgotten. 

My mother’s side of the family is traditional. Mohammed Ishaq moved to the United Kingdom, married and left another woman and yet his first wife still took him back. His children speak of him fondly; my mother speaks of him with love. The family has a relationship with the step-daughter. It reminds me that what remains after you die is not what you did and not the manner of your dying, but only how people felt about you. My uncle’s death taught my mother that death can come unexpectedly. She learnt that lesson two times over within that same year. Yet, for many years after my own father’s death, all I could think about was yellowing eyes, knees buckling into a wheelchair, a body so thin it looked like it would break apart at any second. 

What is better? To die quickly, or to be able to say goodbye? For my son’s sake, I hope I die quickly. For my own sake, I hope I get to say goodbye. Some days I can hear my son playing upstairs. We live in a small house, and both ends of the short flight of stairs are childproofed with a gate. But sometimes if I am downstairs and my husband or my mother are upstairs with my son, I hear him laugh and make a dash for the stairs. I think, sometimes, of him falling down the stairs, and his neck landing at an angle, hitting the metal gate downstairs, his small body bruised and still. And each time my brain short-circuits, thinking, oh no, oh no, oh no, until I hear the laughing upstairs continue. Ever since I became a mother, I am always in anticipation of something going terribly wrong. And my mother is always telling me, it will be fine, he will be fine, everything is fine. 

I told my father through the year that he was sick, that he didn’t know exactly when he would die, that he could live for years and years, and yes, maybe cancer would kill him, but it might be when he was eighty. “You will be fine,” I said. “It will be fine.” Sometimes he seemed cheered by this. I wonder how many times my mother looked at my father that year and wanted an end to the suffering, even if it meant she would lose him. 

By the time my mother left England, her uncle was dead and buried on a small plot of land in Pakistan. By then, she was pregnant with twins, one of them me.

Anjum Amin (1987)

After my mother had completed her treatment in England, and once her pregnancy had been confirmed, she and my father returned to Baghdad before travelling back to Pakistan as her due date approached.  My mother was in her final trimester. She was expecting to deliver in Islamabad. My mother’s older sister was married to my father’s older brother, Anjum Amin. This uncle, my father’s brother, was thirty-four at the time. He felt some discomfort and laid down on his bed to rest. His five-year old son, Ali, began to take off his shoes. The whole family, all my father’s brothers and sisters, had gathered to welcome my parents home. 

Eventually someone suggested taking Anjum to the hospital. Someone else suggested giving him a Nitrstat pill for heart attacks, but my father vetoed it, saying they should check with the doctors before medicating him. Anjum died en-route to the hospital, and for many years, my mother says, my father blamed himself for vetoing the medicine. My mother was sent to stay with her mother; everyone worried the shock and the weight of staying in a house struck by such an unexpected tragedy would affect her pregnancy. My father buried his brother the next day, and my mother’s sister became a twenty-eight-year-old widow with two children under five. She never remarried. When my father came home after the burial, my mother said his voice was hoarse from crying. I had never seen my father cry, so this story stayed with me for a long time. In pictures, Anjum Amin, the uncle I never met, is tall and thin. 

When my father died in 2017, three decades after his brother, my aunt said to my mother, “Now we are the same.”  But it was not the same. My mother had thirty-eight years with her husband, and my aunt had seven. I believe that had he lived, the sisters would have talked less on the phone. But they had shared the moment of loss. My mother says this aunt is her best friend. She is like my mother. Her son, my cousin, is like my brother. I want my son to be close to his children. 

*

When I was nine weeks pregnant with my son, I began to bleed. The doctors had not been sure I would be able to become pregnant. I carried with me my mother’s stories of her seven years of infertility. I went to the hospital with my husband, and while we waited in the Emergency Room, I went to the toilet every five minutes to see if I was still bleeding. When I called my mother, then visiting my brothers in Australia, she asked me what I had done to cause the bleeding. I shrank in the face of this questioning. 

I had not known that I wanted the baby until I was faced with its loss. I felt afraid suddenly of what lay ahead, but thankfully the pregnancy remained viable and I carried my son to term. Afterwards, when I knew everything would be fine, I told my mother she should not have made me feel like the bleeding was my fault and on the phone she sounded stricken, “I was worried,” she said, “I felt helpless.” I thought then of my father and the medicine he did not let his brother take. In Islam, we believe that you will die when the time of your death is written, never sooner or later. And the time of your death is written when you are born. This is meant as consolation to those who have lost loved ones. But still, people cannot help but say, you should have done this, you should have done that, if only this had happened this way. 

*

When I was six years old, my parents lived in Germany and, one night, I spiked a high fever. My father, probably still haunted by the sudden death of his thirty-four-year-old brother, drove through every red traffic signal in his way, his hand on the horn so the car made a continuous blaring sound as it sped down the streets of Bonn. Having been told this story so many times by my mother, I almost remember it myself. She says, in the hospital, after I had recovered, the doctors were taking some time to discharge me, and I was crying to have the needle taken out of my hand. My father took it out himself and was later told off by the nurses. “You should have been here sooner then,” he said, “She was hurting.” When he was dying himself, I sat with him in hospital rooms at night and told him that the hair falling on his pillow would grow back, that he looked better thinner, that the pain would fade. My mother played Surah Rahman by his bedside. I had forgotten about that until two days ago, when I thought it might soothe my son if I played a Surah for him to sleep to. The one I accidentally picked was Surah Rahman. Suddenly, I was back in the hospital room in Islamabad, and my father was making small moaning noises. My aunt, my mother’s sister, his long-dead brother’s wife, was in the room. “You’re looking good,” I often told my father. “He’ll be fine,” my aunt often told my mother and me. My cousin also stood in the room like a sentry. 

Every time my son touches my shoes, I think of my dead uncle whom I never got to meet. I think of my cousin taking off his father’s shoes a few hours before he died. 

Bilal Sohail (1988)

My twin died a few hours after birth. Now that I am a mother, I can understand what it might have meant for my mother, who had to grieve a baby she carried inside herself for nine months after seven years of waiting to have him. She told me when I was eleven and begging for a horse (“How many children do you have who are eleven and want a horse?”) about the twin I’d never met. I didn’t mention the horse again. We lived with our cousins, Anjum uncle’s son and daughter. By then I had two brothers, so there were always five children in the house. Still, our mothers must have watched us closely. My widowed aunt had had three miscarriages before having her two children. They built a happy home. We played cricket on the rooftop, drank from juice boxes, spent endless hours on the street making up games. 

*

At the hospital, right before my scheduled C-section, I had a contraction. I told the nurses I was in pain, but they did not believe me. They readied me for the operating table, took me to the toilet, and then I lay on the stretcher, stiff with pain. “I’m hurting,” I said. Still, they plugged wires on my body, calmly said a doctor would be in soon. They thought I was nervous because the procedure was about to begin, but suddenly a voice in the room urgently said, “There’s no heartbeat.” I heard that with my whole body. 

The room became alight with sound and alarms. Doctors rushed in and out. Then the pain stopped suddenly, and the baby’s heartbeat came back. The rest of the C-section went as planned. Later, I asked my doctor what had happened, and she said, “I think you had an intense contraction and the baby went into distress.” I joke about that sometimes, “I could only handle one contraction,” but I tell the story less and less as my son becomes older. It’s harder to imagine him not here as my love for him grows by the day. I miss who I used to be as a daughter, but I am beginning to love who I am as a mother. 

I was twenty-nine when my father died. While sorting through his papers, I found a small newspaper article announcing my birth. My mother said he had been furious to see the article, worried it would cause people to treat me differently when I grew up because of the nature of my conception. He loved me like that, fiercely, like a hard-won prize. I recognize that love as the love I have for my son, and I am grateful for the gift of having been loved and for being able to love back like that.

Sohail Amin (2017)

My father was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in May 2016. It took one year from diagnosis to death. This is the only person close to me who has died, though both my mother’s parents died during my lifetime. Before he died, the chemical imbalance in my father’s body caused him to hallucinate. He often worried he was in India, that the authorities there were going to imprison him. I wonder often where that fear came from. He was born in 1952, five years after the formation of Pakistan. Maybe it was something my father’s generation had inbuilt in them, this fear that the land under their feet was hard-won and could be taken away. He tried to instill in us the belief that nothing was ours, except what we earned ourselves. Everything else was luck or privilege. 

My brothers live in Australia. They like it there. Sometimes, I send them this quote by James Baldwin from a 1984 Paris Review interview, “I think it is a spiritual disaster to pretend one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you’ll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere.” 

The year after I got married, my father had been dead for four years. I had moved to the United States a year after he had died, gotten married three years after he had died. That was how I measured time then. On his birthday that first year after my wedding in 2022, I spent the whole day crying. I had cried like that only once before, when I had seen his dead body wrapped up in a shroud at the hospital. I told my husband I was crying because I was living a life which would be unrecognizable to my father now. He never met my husband, had never been to the United States. I had been close to him, and sought him out for advice on everything. Four years after his death, I felt unmoored again, wanting to have him back.

After the ambulance ride with her uncle, Muhammed Ishaq, in England in 1987, my mother rode in an ambulance again for the second time with my father in June 2017. My father’s stomach was filled with fluid, a condition called ascites that stretched his stomach out, and made it wet to the touch, his pores leaking fluid. He had to have the fluid removed every few days, a complication of the cancer. While in the ambulance, she held his stomach so it would not jerk around during the bumpy ride, causing him more pain. Later, after he had died, my mother told me that when she was getting in the ambulance with him it occurred to her that he may never come home again, alive. He did come back home, but only briefly. Soon after, he returned to the hospital, and then he died. We brought his body back to prepare it for burial. By then we were ready. We could not see him suffer anymore. 

Once, a friend of mine asked me to interrogate my writing about my father’s death: “just saying that he suffered isn’t enough to make readers care about the death of your father.” 

Maybe witnessing death with everything in you open to it, then recounting it and sharing it with others as something that belongs to you, is an act of worship. 

Among other things, this is what my mother has taught me: Look. These people died, but we remember.

*

There will come a time in my life, and my son’s life, when my mother won’t be alive either, and then one day I won’t be alive, and his father won’t be alive. I want to document the rest of her life for him, and in doing so, I want to document mine too. But these days, every day is new, and sometimes there is no time for the past. For example, I notice birds everywhere now, even when my son is not with me. I think, I wish he were here,  so I could point out that bird to him. He would follow it around until it flew away.

My mother also lost her mother, my grandmother, in 1999, when I was eleven years old. I was old enough to know Bari Ammi. But I don’t remember her well enough to miss her, and it pains me that there may come a time when my son doesn’t miss my mother. I did not write about my grandmother here, because thinking of my mother losing her mother makes me think of losing mine. Right now, my son calls us both mama. He asks for my mother when he is hurting, or when he cannot fall asleep. When I joke with my mother about how jealous I am, she says, “How many adults do you know who weep over their grandparents? He will love you the most.” She has seen enough of death in her lifetime to know that it will come for her. Every day, I think about the fact that my son will never know my father. But for now, the only possibility open to us is to enjoy my son’s life. He likes to be in water, he drinks the bubbles in his bath and we are resigned to it, he hates sitting on the potty, he needs to pet every dog he sees. At night, he cannot sleep unless a very specific routine involving milk, music, and shush-ing is carried out. These are mundane things that feel fantastic to us now. I cannot believe I am living this life. One day it will be a different life. For now, we watch the birds in awe.