by Samira Ahmed
All they wanted was to live.
I open my eyes.
I want to live, too.
I take a deep breath and step out of the line, in front of Jake and the others. The Director squares his shoulders to me, a combatant readying for battle, his neck wiry, his eyes unblinking. He thinks he can cut me down. I’m about to show him that I’m a warrior, too. I drop the bullhorn and talk to the Director in as steady a voice as I can manage. “Step aside. It’s over.”
The Director’s red face stretches into a tight grin; his fists shake at his sides. He looks at me with a rage so palpable it fills the space between us with fire.
“Shoot her,” he says. His voice is low, but everyone hears him.
All the motion slows around me. The air is still. And suddenly death feels awfully close. I hear my mom scream, my dad yell something, but the sound is muffled.
The Exclusion Guards and the Director’s private security detail don’t move. Panic and confusion fill the air.
“Stand down!” Jake roars at them as he steps forward next to me. The Exclusion Guards who joined us earlier follow Jake’s lead and step up.
One of the guards who is standing by the Director turns to him. “I didn’t sign up for the National Guard to shoot innocent Americans. I signed up to defend my country.”
One by one, the other guards peel off, so all that remains between the Director and the rest of Mobius is his security detail.
The Director bellows at them, “Shoot her, goddamn it! I said, shoot her—that’s an order!”
One of his security detail scans the crowd and the guards standing with us, then looks at the Director and slowly shakes his head. “She’s a kid, sir.”
The Director turns his back to us, his shoulders drawn, hands at his hips.
I don’t know if I’m breathing anymore. I can’t feel my body.
Jake touches my arm, and I finally draw a breath and speak to the Director’s back. “You’re alone. You’ve lost.”
The Director spins around, barreling through his remaining security as he draws a handgun from his waistband.
A single shot rings out.
Pop.
Like a firework going off. That’s what it sounds like. A firework.
And that is all.
Because in the next instant, time moves like a viscous liquid, dampening all sound. The screams, the stampede of thudding feet against hard dirt, guttural wails, the thwack of the Director’s body being slammed to the ground by his own security, the barked “GO! GO! GO!” as Exclusion Guards, weapons drawn, rush the Director and his security team.
I try to move and realize I’m down on the ground, dirt in my face. Screams come from every direction. And there is blood. I push myself up and see it on my T-shirt, my arms.
But it’s not mine.
I whip around to see my parents. My dad is on the ground, clutching his arm, groaning; my mom hovers over him. I crouch next to them. “Dad! Dad!” I yell.
“He’s okay. He’s okay—” My mom stops short. She stares past me. All the color drains from her face.
I’m afraid to turn my head and look. Chaos churns all around me. Dust chokes the air. Slowly I pivot my body.
A scream rips through me.
Jake is lying on the ground, clutching his stomach, blood oozing from between his fingers.
“Jake! Oh no. No. No.” I kneel next to him, placing my hands over his, pressing down like I’ve seen in movies. But it’s not the movies, and the blood won’t stop. It’s not stopping. God. There’s so much blood. How do I make it stop?
Jake looks up at me and parts his lips. He coughs, sputtering up blood.
Fred races over, and when he sees Jake close up, his face turns gray. He gulps. “Hang on, Jake. An ambulance is on its way.” He tears off his shirt and wads it up, pushing it down over the wound. Jake grimaces and gurgles, a deep, awful sound. “Layla, keep the pressure on, you hear?” Fred directs me. “I gotta clear the path for the paramedics to get in here. Talk to him. Keep him awake.”
Jake’s eyelids start to droop.
“Jake. Jake.” My voice catches in my throat. “Jake? Stay awake, okay?”
His heavy eyelids tremble open. His lips part. I can see he’s trying to speak. But no words come out. With a jerky motion he moves a hand to his stomach; his fingertips graze mine. A vise squeezes my heart. I press harder against Fred’s shirt. It’s soaked with blood. I can’t stop the blood.
I close my eyes. Tears stream down my dust-stained cheeks. “Jake,” I whisper, my voice catching. “Jake, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. For everything.”
Can he hear me? Does he understand? He stepped in front of me. Jake, why did you step in front of me? I know you think you failed me, but this… this shouldn’t be your penance, Jake.
“Layla. I… You…” His voice fades.
“Don’t talk, Jake. Save your energy. I can hear the ambulance. Keep your eyes open, okay? I’m here. Stay with me. Stay awake.” I turn my eyes toward the sky and pray. The rest of the world falls away, until there are only the sounds of my steady inhalation and exhalation in contrast with his rattling, wheezing breath. I sniffle and wipe the back of my hand across my nose. I feel the streak of blood my fingers leave on my cheek.
This can’t be how the story ends for Jake. Not here. Not in this terrible place. I want to will this horror away. Bend time and space to give him something better than this. I wish I could give him the magic hour at Castle Lake when he was a boy with his mom. I wish I could give him fresh air to breathe. I wish I could give him a compass to find his way home.
I press down harder against his stomach. His eyelids flutter a little. Don’t close your eyes, Jake. Please. Please. I look down. My hands are smaller than his, but it’s like he’s shrinking, losing his muscle mass. He’s trying to wrap his fingers around my hand, but he can’t. His skin is so cold; the pads of his fingers are almost blue. His eyes are open but they’re glassy, and I don’t even know if he can see me anymore.
I can feel his life ebbing away. Please, God. We already lost Soheil and so many others; please don’t take Jake, too. Is there something I can do? A covenant to make that will save him? But there is no bargaining with death. When it comes, it gives no quarter and doesn’t care about your merits.
I hear my mother’s voice and other voices. I glance up and see my parents and people from different blocks kneeling in a semicircle around us. Hands cupped in front of their faces, heads bowed, murmuring a prayer: “Merciful God, forgive him his trespasses. Make wide his grave and light his path. Raise him unto the highest heavens.”
“Ameen,” I whisper. I see Jake’s weary eyes close.
I know it’s for the last time.
This desert is stained with their blood.
Soheil. Noor. Asmaa. Bilqis. Jake. Others whose names I don’t know. I’ll learn their names. I’ll etch them into my heart. When I step out past the fence with its razor wire, I will make sure the world knows who they were and what they sacrificed. I won’t let them be forgotten.
Morning light streams through the window in my trailer bedroom. I pull myself up to sit on the edge of the bottom bunk in this tiny, terrible room. My clothes from last night, the ones marked with Jake’s blood, lie bunched in the corner. Before going to bed, I scrubbed my face and hands until they were pink and raw, but his blood still mingles with the dust under my fingernails.
It is surreal. This moment. The one I’ve wished for, but that came at so high a cost.
I don’t remember much after the gates opened yesterday, after they took Jake away, first lifting him like a rag doll onto the gurney and then placing him into the back of that sterile, cold ambulance. It wasn’t him, though, was it? Not really. A person is more than a body, more than blood and bone and flesh. More than the sum of their parts. Jake was kind and brave and flawed. A human being, like the rest of us, trying to find his way on this journey where our paths crossed too briefly.
There’s a gentle knock at the door. “Bet
a, are you okay? Do you need help?” My mom’s voice is so soft, like she’s worried that loud words will cut me. The door creaks open. She and my dad enter.
My dad is wearing a makeshift sling tied around his neck—a shirt holding his arm in position, close to his body. My eyes grow wide.
“It’s probably only a hairline fracture,” my dad says. “I’ll be okay.”
My mom sits next to me and wraps me in her arms. I don’t cry. I’m not sure if I have any tears left. Mostly I feel hollow, like a shell of a person.
“We can go now,” my mom says. “We’re free to go.”
Free? What does that even mean? For now, it will simply have to mean being free to walk out of this camp. That will do.
My parents tell me what I missed in my fog of despair and sleep. The government ordered the immediate closing of Mobius and the release of all the internees. Dozens more Exclusion Guards arrived last night to help us gather our things and ready us for the return home.
Home.
I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of stepping through our front door, sleeping in my own bed. Seeing David.
The Before, my old life, is gone forever. When I walk out of these gates, it will be to a scarred world. The After. Honestly, I don’t know how to go on from here. How to truly leave Mobius behind. But I have to. Jake’s story ended here. And Soheil’s. Mine doesn’t, even if I feel like all I’m made of now is dust.
My mom helps me stand up. “Do you want me to help you pack?”
“No,” I whisper. I’m not taking anything with me. I want no memory of this place, but I know it is imprinted on my mind forever.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” Mom hands me a note. “It’s from Ayesha. She knocked while you were sleeping but didn’t want to wake you. Her family caught an early transport out, but she said she’d see you soon.”
I clutch the note to my chest. Ayesha. She’s out. They walked out. I close my eyes, and my heart lifts a little. There’s no way I could’ve endured life in here without her. I’m so relieved that she’s safe. That she survived. We barely got to talk about Soheil. My heart aches for her.
“I’ll meet you outside. I need a second,” I say.
My mom walks into the common area of the trailer and grabs a small bag of her and my dad’s things.
My dad kisses me on the top of my head. “We’ll be right outside, beta.” He steps to my mom and takes her free hand in his. They walk out together. The door shuts behind them.
I look around the tiny space that I’ve occupied with my parents for what feels like forever. I can hear the clatter of their teacups as they sit at the table, trying so hard to have a sense of normalcy here, of home. I hear Ayesha’s laugh as we talk in my bedroom. I see Soheil outside my little window playing soccer, motes of dust catching the late-afternoon light. I run my fingers over the invisible barcode on the inside of my wrist. No one else will be able to see it, but I’ll know it’s there. Always.
One last look around before I walk out into the heat and sun and dust.
Mobius is bustling like an outdoor market. The people who haven’t left yet head toward the Hub and the open gate that once shut us in. Some wave at me, and I nod and smile back. “Happy” isn’t quite the right word, but I’m content knowing that Nadia and Nadeem, Suraya, and all the others are walking out of here—going home.
There are ghosts at Mobius. I hear their whisperings like dry leaves swirling against hard earth. I feel them in each step on this dry, cracked dirt.
Once, Jake told me about a friend of his who was a pararescuer with the Air Force. Their motto is That Others May Live. All these things that might happen next, that should happen—repealing the Exclusion Laws, closing the black-ops sites, impeachment—that’s what people died for.
So that others may live.
I stand between my parents, gripping their hands. We walk together up the Midway for the last time, holding on to all the parts of ourselves that haven’t been taken away. We walk past the Hub and through the open gate, watching, waiting, as others file onto idling buses that will take them to the train station and airports and home.
I see Khadijah auntie walking, resolute, cane in hand. She catches my eye and raises her fist next to her shoulder, giving me a small, kind smile before she boards a bus to whatever life awaits her.
My mom whispers in my ear, “They’ll take us to Independence. David will be waiting there for us. For you.”
I walk out, unsure of what lies ahead. Of how to recover from this camp that burned itself onto my skin. Blood and dust and razor wire. How will life ever be normal again? I’m not even sure if my body remembers how to take a real breath. If I will ever stop glancing over my shoulder. Ever feel free.
I stare down the desert road.
I might not know exactly where I go from here, but I’ll find my direction.
I take a small step forward.
I don’t look back.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
When fascism comes to America, it will come draped in the flag.
You don’t need to be a student of history to see how nationalism, disguised as patriotism, can take hold of a country, justifying terrible and cruel acts. You only need to turn on the news.
The American government’s “zero tolerance” border policy has literally torn children from their parents’ arms as they attempt to cross into America for a better life, many seeking asylum and running from danger. As I write this, nearly 13,000 children, including infants and toddlers, many forcibly separated from their parents, have been detained by the government, often caged, before being transferred to shelters. In September 2018, under the cover of darkness, around 1,600 migrant children were taken from those shelters and relocated to a tent city in Tornillo, Texas—where they sleep in bunks, twenty to a tent, with no access to school. This camp is neither licensed nor monitored by child-welfare authorities. Further, there are orders for the Navy to erect austere detention centers in abandoned airfields in California, Arizona, and Alabama to hold nearly 120,000 migrants.
Make no mistake. These are internment camps. This is internment.
Pay attention to the racist demagoguery and scapegoating that aligns with that policy: immigrants and migrants are “animals” who “pour into and infest our country.” They are “rapists” and “criminals” who put a strain on our economy. Then turn to our history books to understand the rhetoric of extermination that has been used again and again by authoritarians the world over.
Consider, too, that half of all Latinx characters in popular TV shows are depicted as criminals. Representation matters. Racist stereotypes spread through our culture and politics too easily and give cover for racist politicians, who first dehumanize groups and then enact policies that take away their livelihoods and, often, their lives.
No moment in American history exists in a vacuum. Nationalism and fascism are not new; indeed, they are a part of American soil. This fact gave birth to this novel. The events in Internment—though they take place “fifteen minutes” into America’s future—are deeply rooted in our history. You are bearing witness to them now, in our present.
In 1924, riding a wave of anti-Asian sentiment, the US government halted almost all immigration from Asia. Within a few years, California, along with several other states, banned marriages between white people and those of Asian descent.
With the onset of World War II, the FBI began the Custodial Detention Index—a list of “enemy aliens,” based on demographic data, who might prove a threat to national security, but also included American citizens—second- and
third-generation Japanese Americans. This list was later used to facilitate the internment of Japanese Americans.
In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Alien Registration Act, which compelled Japanese immigrants over the age of fourteen to be registered and fingerprinted, and to take a loyalty oath to our government. Japanese Americans were subject to curfews, their bank accounts often frozen and insurance policies canceled.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked a US military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. More than 2,400 Americans were killed. The following day, America declared war on Japan.
On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the US secretary of war and military commanders to “prescribe military areas” on American soil that allowed the exclusion of any and all persons. This paved the way for the forced internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, without trial or cause. The ten “relocation centers” were all in remote, virtually uninhabitable desert areas. Internees lived in horrible, unsanitary conditions that included forced labor.
On December 17, 1944, FDR announced the end of Japanese American internment. But many internees had no home to return to, having lost their livelihoods and property. Each internee was given twenty-five dollars and a train ticket to the place they used to live.
Not one Japanese American was found guilty of treason or acts of sedition during World War II. The 442nd Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, comprised almost solely of second-generation Japanese American soldiers, remains the most decorated unit in American history.
In war propaganda, Japanese Americans were depicted as enemies of America, animalistic, murderous, unable to assimilate to American culture.
And now here we are again. Refugees forced into internment camps. Muslim bans. Border walls. Police brutality. The rights of gun owners being valued more than the lives of our children. Racism. Islamophobia. Ableism. Homophobia. Anti-Semitism. Scapegoating immigrants. The politics of exclusion. The rise of nationalism and white supremacy, unmasked and waving our flag.