Sparks Like Stars

by Nadia Hashimi

  When I read about the bags of cash the CIA delivered to the new president of the country, I almost heard my father’s voice—corruption doesn’t happen without cooperation.

  My homeland, my story, overwhelms me. Some nights turn into morning and I realize I’ve been surfing the web for hours trying to make sense of war and politics.

  It had seemed safer to focus my energies on a fairy tale, and so I turned to Anastasia Romanov as a healthier option, like snacking on celery sticks instead of fries. But eventually, my obsession waned. I’d read all there was to read about the fate of the Romanovs, and new breadcrumbs appeared only rarely. I had stopped poking around altogether—until last summer. I’d finished dictating the last of my operating reports over the phone in the physician lounge and, on a whim, typed “Anastasia Romanov” into the search box of the internet browser.

  They had uncovered more bodies, those of the missing. The DNA tests confirmed that they were the final two missing Romanov children, one set of remains representing each child. Anastasia had not escaped.

  I’d stepped out of the physician lounge and called Mom.

  She didn’t survive, I blurted out. They found more bodies.

  What bodies? Who are you talking about?

  Anastasia.

  Mom was silent.

  Romanov. Anastasia Romanov.

  Mom still said nothing.

  Did you hear me? It’s confirmed now. She never made it out. All this time, people have been wondering—

  Aryana, listen to me. Mom’s voice had been steely and low. She sounded like she was trying to reach through the phone line and reset me. You are not Anastasia. You are you, and you are here.

  Of course, I had said, suddenly understanding how unhinged I sounded. I’d felt a heat creep up my neck as I tried to regain my composure. I know. I just thought it was interesting.

  If I leave the house now, I can be there in—

  Mom, I’m really fine, I’d said to her in a voice I’d perfected—bright enough to reassure but not so saccharine as to alarm her. And anyway, I’m getting together with Dayo tonight.

  Anastasia Romanov had inspired books, movies, conspiracy theorists, and imposters. People put time and money into investigating her fate. But were they hoping to find Anastasia alive or hoping to prove bullets and blades had ended her too? What titillating truth did people want to hear?

  And then there was the darker question, one I was certain I was alone in pondering. And one that I pondered only when I was alone. Had Anastasia lived, would she have wished that she hadn’t?

  Chapter 37

  “Why do we have to tell her?”

  My patient’s daughter speaks in a conspiratorial voice, even as she tries to keep her expression neutral. I’ve just asked her to translate for her mother that her pancreatic cancer is spreading quickly.

  Her mother, cachectic and slightly hunched, watches us with minimal interest.

  “It’s unethical for me to lie to her,” I say.

  “But she’s not asking if it’s gone into other organs. So you wouldn’t be lying,” pleads the daughter, a woman in her early twenties. People become experts at finding loopholes when they face losing someone they love.

  “It is a lot for you to take this all in and then to translate it for your mother as well. I really do think we should bring in an official interpreter,” I say gently. But the daughter hadn’t wanted a stranger in the room for this conversation. She hadn’t realized that would mean she’d be the one who had to describe to her mother the mechanics of her demise, the brevity of daylight left to her. At the young woman’s side was a tote bag heavy with her mother’s medical records and bottles of supplements, antioxidants and turmeric and an oil of some rare tree more common back home, where no one seemed to get this kind of cancer.

  The daughter took off from work to be here. She has taken many days off work to be with her mother, who cleaned houses so that she would have clothes like her classmates, a pair of roller skates, and the expensive calculator she needed for math class.

  My patient puts a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. She says a few words to her daughter. Her daughter shakes her head and smiles. The mother looks at me and then back at her daughter. They exchange a few more words, and slowly the daughter’s face is transformed.

  My patient didn’t come here today to find out something she didn’t know. She came so that her daughter could hear, from me, the truth behind the ache in her bones, the drag in her step.

  She is wearing a paper gown and looking at me imploringly, the thin skin of her hand wrinkling as she comforts her daughter.

  “I can see how much you love your mother,” I say.

  “She . . . she has done everything for me,” she replies, her voice breaking with frustration.

  Finding the right words is like plucking wildflowers from a tangled brush.

  “She put your needs first. Let’s work on understanding her needs and wishes now.”

  The extra time I spend with them sets me back, making me a few minutes late for the next appointment. It is a domino effect, one that happens more often than I’d like because compassion is not easily rationed. I bounce from room to room, checking wounds and scans, charting treatment courses, offering surgery to one patient and a hug to another.

  I fall into my office chair to sign off on orders and see a sticky note on my computer screen. It’s a web address with my assistant Lacey’s signature smiley face on the bottom.

  Curious, I type the web address into the browser and see that one of my patients has transformed her food blog into one about her journey from diagnosis to treatment. She’s written a post on her first visit with me, when I surprised her by asking about her work and family before asking about her symptoms. I remember her nodding and biting her lip in our last visit. It had taken time to get her talking. She’s posted pictures of herself with her family, a tangle of limbs and grins on a scruffy sofa.

  I close the browser. Clinic is messy enough as it is. The operating room is a theater sanitized of microbes and emotions. When I bring scalpel to skin, I am gloved and gowned, capped and masked. Patients are transformed too, draped in completely sterile blue sheets so that only the relevant square of skin is exposed.

  My cell phone rings.

  “What’s up, Dayo?”

  “My blood pressure,” she replies. Dayo was two years ahead of me in residency, where we were the only women in the program. She chose to subspecialize in breast care while I chose oncology.

  “What is it this time?” I say, glad to hear her voice. Dayo never gets angry without reason, nor does she ever not turn her anger into action.

  “I just sent you something I got from an ER resident. She was intubating a critical patient, and some dude tells her that she looked hot doing it.” I hear her greet someone cheerily, then pick up where she left off. “And this dude happened to be her supervising attending. Such bullshit.”

  “Completely. I’m sure you provided her with some sound advice already. When are you off next week? You owe me tacos.”

  “People are getting tired of my advice. Reporting this stuff doesn’t give anyone satisfaction. Anyway, call me when the taco truck is on your block,” she says before she hangs up.

  Dayo, whose family had immigrated from Nigeria when she was sixteen, started off as my mentor but became so much more when the city imploded.

  I was two months into my fellowship and one hour into a subtotal colectomy when a tech entered the operating room and announced that one of the towers at the World Trade Center was on fire. From then on, updates floated into the room every few minutes. At the news of a second plane striking the second tower, I saw Arg in my mind. The screech of fighter planes strafing the palace echoed in my ear. The smell of cauterized skin sent my heart pounding. If the team in that room could have seen my vital signs at that moment, they would have asked me to take a seat.

  But I have trained myself to breathe my way through fire and ash. I focused on the procedure and didn’
t let my eyes go anywhere outside the surgical field, draped in blue. I made rounds on the floor, checking in on my patients and reviewing labs and doing my best not to look out the windows.

  A man in a thin gray gown stood in the doorway of his hospital room, tethered to an IV pole. He looked over at the empty nurses’ station. A young nurse emerged from the room next door, her scrubs stiff and her sneakers crisply white.

  Please, the man had moaned. He held on to his IV pole with one hand and pressed his paunch with the other. I haven’t taken a shit in three days. Can’t you give me something?

  Nothing changed on our unit. Infections and pain, life and death, all carried on as usual.

  The city outside shut down, all eyes turned to the news. I stayed in the hospital, not only to care for our surgical patients upstairs but to be available to help. I wasn’t the only one.

  I walked through the emergency room, where doctors and nurses sat on gurneys or gathered around television screens to see what was happening just a few subway stops away. Rooms and equipment had been readied for the crush of patients that everyone believed would soon arrive. With the number of people working in those buildings, every hospital in New York City was on alert.

  We didn’t dress a single wound.

  People in and around those towers either survived unscathed or died on the scene. There was nothing in between.

  Once the wireless networks were working again, I got a call from Mom every two hours. It was a glimpse of what she must have been like in the field, assessing risks, gathering information, and disseminating plans.

  Over the weeks that followed, the identities and nationalities of the hijackers were revealed. Fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi. Not one was Afghan, but rumor had it that the mastermind behind the attacks, Osama bin Laden, was hiding in the caves of Afghanistan. The collective heads of the world swiveled toward my homeland. The evening news showed women covered head to foot in bright blue burqas, cowering under the raised switch of a long-bearded man.

  For years, I’d scoured newspapers for updates. Now, everywhere I looked, I saw the eleven letters of my country’s name, the shape of it becoming as distinct and recognizable as her borders outlined on a map. It had become a country I didn’t recognize, in both pictures and principles.

  I wanted to shout. I wanted to hide. I wanted to tell people things had been different.

  After one grueling fourteen-hour day in the hospital, most of it on my feet, I wanted nothing but a hot shower. Thick gray clouds cast a dreary mood on an already mourning city. I wore a quilted black jacket. I was at the revolving doors, about to exit the hospital, when I realized I’d forgotten my umbrella in the call room. I was so anxious to get home that I stuffed my hands in my pockets and pulled the hood of my jacket over my head to stay dry.

  I took the train home. While standing at the crosswalk, I sent Dayo a quick text to ask if she wanted burritos, salads, or Thai. She lived only four blocks from my apartment, so we got together whenever our schedules aligned. I heard someone hollering across the street and glanced up just as I hit Send.

  Three men stood on the opposite side of the road, their hair matted with rain. I felt their eyes on me and looked back down at my phone. Plenty of men behaved badly in the subway or on the streets, offering unsolicited opinions on my figure, suggesting I smile or asking for a sip of my coffee.

  These men had something different to say.

  We’re going to bomb your people back to the Stone Age.

  Get the hell out of this country.

  I felt like my jacket had vaporized. I wanted to turn around but wondered if they would follow. And if I crossed to their side of the street—

  The light changed.

  They were coming toward me. I stood still, drops of rain cascading down my cheeks and soaking through my jacket. I stood rooted, but not out of bravery.

  When they were close enough that I could see they were nothing but ordinary men, one of them made a gun of his fingers and pointed it directly at my head.

  All of you.

  I stumbled backward, colliding with a trash can full of upturned umbrellas. They were already half a block away when I grabbed the handle of one of the umbrellas and gripped it tightly. I looked around but couldn’t tell if anyone had seen or heard anything.

  With the broken umbrella still in my clutches, I jogged home, breaking into a run at times and looking over my shoulder.

  I didn’t realize I was shaking until I tried to slide the key into the front door of my apartment building. I took a deep breath and looked up, catching my reflection in the glass. My eyes were wide and my skin pale. The fleece hood was plastered to my head, making it look like I was wearing a hijab.

  I knew why they’d targeted me.

  They’d seen me for something I wasn’t—a devout Muslim. But they’d also seen me for what I was.

  My cell phone buzzed. It was Dayo, saying she would take care of the food. I texted her back that I needed to prep a lecture. Dinner another time, I promised.

  I shoved my wet jacket into the front door closet and dropped the umbrella on the floor. I fell onto my sofa and then slowly slid to the floor. I was angry at myself for feeling so paralyzed.

  I closed my eyes and saw the guns pointed at my family. The explosions, the smell of artillery, the thuds of their bodies crumpling to the floor. All of it, exhumed and sprawled across the floor in front of me.

  I hadn’t heard Dayo call my name. I jumped at her touch, shoving the sofa back as I scrambled. Dayo pulled away, as if her fingers had touched a hot stove.

  Aryana! What’s going on with you?

  In all the years she’d known me, watching people live and die around us, Dayo had never seen me like this. She moved my coffee table aside and sat across from me.

  I’m not going anywhere.

  True to her word, Dayo stayed right there on the floor with me until I managed to right myself. Rummaging through her bag, she found a napkin and handed it to me so I could blow my nose. I told her about my hood looking like a hijab and the things the men had said to me.

  Dayo sighed.

  Such stupidity, she had said, incensed. My family in Nigeria has been calling me nonstop. My aunt is telling my mother I should come home right away. This is the same woman who refused to leave her home during the civil war.

  I exhaled slowly and noticed a white plastic bag on the table. Dayo had ordered the food while I was still on the train and picked it up on her way over. It wasn’t like me to cancel on her at the last minute, and she’d wanted to check on me.

  They really got to you, she said as I rose to my feet. Why do you think that is?

  I don’t know, I said. I wasn’t getting much sleep. The city smelled like char. I’d watched two patients die that week. I could have offered Dayo a thousand reasons for my sensitivity.

  Dayo would have seen through it, even though, until then, I’d only told Dayo what I’d told everyone else about my past.

  I’m going to sit here. You can talk to me or ignore me or go to sleep if you like, but I will not leave you alone like this, she’d said.

  I knew her family had lived through a war as well. And now we’d both lived through the ugliest event in New York City’s history. I wasn’t going to shock her with what I’d seen. Curled on my couch, I told her I’d been dreaming of two soaring towers crashing down on my lost family while I watched from the rooftop of a vacant hospital. Then I told her the rest.

  It was so long ago. I don’t know why I’m crying about it today.

  Lightning and thunder, Dayo said. You know what happens in a storm? You see lightning before you hear thunder. After the flash, you hold your breath and count the seconds and listen for the bang. You don’t hear the bang until later.

  We sat together, watching the news replay George Bush explaining to Americans what motivated the terrorists to attack. They hate our freedoms, he said.

  Watch people believe him, Dayo scoffed. She turned the television off, went to my CD player,
and filled the apartment with U2’s music. It wasn’t enough to drown out the sounds of the world outside.

  Never forget, the city swore.

  Never forget, the country echoed.

  Chapter 38

  “Knock knock,” my assistant chirps as she pokes her head into my office. “I just put the chart in the holder. Room three is ready for you, Doc.”

  “Got it. Thanks, Lacey.”

  Lacey’s ponytail swings as she half walks, half bounces down the hall. “Or it might be room four,” she calls back.

  She’s a twenty-something-year-old with the personality of sunshine but none of its brightness. She’s gone before I can complain.

  I pick up the chart she’s left for me and see that it’s a patient I operated on two years ago. She’s done remarkably well and only comes in every six months. Her imaging and bloodwork all continue to look clean, so this should be a pleasant visit.

  I open the door with a smile but stop short when I see a man sitting in a chair, staring at the exam table. His face is drawn, and the scruff on his face is a mix of silver and black. He has olive skin and dark eyes. His collared shirt and charcoal slacks hang on him, and he’s alone—both ominous signs.

  When he sees me, he straightens his back and makes a motion to stand.

  “Please,” I say, gesturing for him to remain seated. I don’t have his chart, so I cannot refer to him by his name. A mistake as simple as walking into the wrong room can knock a patient’s confidence out completely and get us off on the wrong foot, so I sit on the wheeled stool and roll myself so that we’re face to face. The edges of my white coat hang past my knees. “Thank you for your patience. How are you doing today?”