The map of the various zones was on bulletin boards fixed to walls and put up on metal stands everywhere. White, striped, checkered, and black patches.
I don’t remember my own name, but I remember that map.
I was standing by the window. Dad was at a rickety desk with metal legs, a photo album open in front of him; he was leaning over it and touching the dirty pages, wavy with damp and age.
People laughing into the camera.
He’d found the photo album when we were cleaning out the apartment: a child on its mother’s shoulders; a woman wading into the sea, her smiling face in profile. Dad kept leafing through it. The mom and dad with their arms around each other. The child, alone. The family didn’t look Swedish. But they seemed to be happy anyway.
I wondered if they were Swedish citizens who’d moved away after the riots and everything, or if these were three of the many refugees who’d lived in the Rabbit Yard before it was turned into a camp for us.
I don’t remember many living people from the Rabbit Yard, but there were thousands. I do remember the family in the photo album. Their dark eyes and laughter frozen for eternity.
I only remember the living as whispers, as shadows on the wall.
A power station made of giant metal discs piled high into towers and a number of drab brick buildings sunk into the last of the snow in the industrial area flew past the train window.
I went through my notes about the man I was on my way to meet, rereading the questions I wanted to ask and thinking about how to begin. I was having a hard time concentrating, the thumping of the rails was lulling and I’d been up all night. After a while I put my headphones on and shut my eyes.
A man was calling into a local American radio station. He sounded confused and disjointed, a black man going by his voice, maybe middle-aged, with a whiff of mental illness. He was talking about a group of children. They’d knocked on his front door one night, but ran away when he opened up, and later in the night they’d stood outside his bedroom window, peering in. Distressed, he said their eyes were like black holes leading to nothing.
I was listening to an audio file Isra had sent me. I’d started collecting testimonies about time travel and multiple dimensions, in an attempt to get an overview of the state the girl from Tundra was in.
I slipped between sleep and waking.
The radio host let the man talk, asking questions every now and again. The man claimed the children had asked for shelter from the cold and he’d let them in, only to be forced to “travel through time”:
“Each time it happens I lose part of myself.” His voice, which was nearly overwhelmed by the quivering frequency and atmospheric disruptions, sounded terrified—as if the children with the empty eyes were in the room in which he was speaking. “I had a family. But I’m lost in time now,” he said. “I’ve lost them to time. I couldn’t tell you what they look like anymore.”
The conversation stopped. I slowly opened my eyes. Drifts of timber behind a fence. Logging machinery, claws and arms resting on the frosty earth.
The girl in the clinic claimed her consciousness had been sent back in time and somehow landed in Annika Isagel’s apathetic body at al-Mima. For some reason she hadn’t just gone back in time, but sideways, to our world, which was different from the one she’d left behind: in her world Amin’s sister hadn’t died, as had happened here. So she’d come here to take the sister’s place, but also to stop the attack at Hondo’s. This was just about as clearly as I understood her delusions. I wondered what it was in the human soul that surfaced as an idea about stepping in and out of time, as if moving between rooms in a house. Some sort of dream about nothing being definitive. Outside, post office terminals, roundabouts, and open fields passed by. Do I dare stay in this country? I wasn’t just an origin seeking its future on the Western world’s screens. I was carrying shards of another world, different grammar in which I ordered space and time. I was Muslim, and it was during those years that I started to think this made me a monster in Sweden.
The man I was meeting was waiting outside the Pressbyrån kiosk at the train station, smoking. He was around twenty-five and dressed in a blue warm-up jacket with the Italian national soccer team’s emblem on the chest. We shook hands, went to the parking lot, and got into his red Mazda. We drove through town with the air roaring through the windows, which he’d rolled down because he was still smoking.
“I didn’t think you’d want to meet me,” I half shouted over the noise from the wind. He glanced at me, then turned his eyes back to the road.
The apartment was in a three-story brick building. The hall and stairwell smelled of dog or cat piss, and three girls who could have been in elementary school rushed by in their quilted jackets, taking no notice of us.
He unlocked the door, and led me into the hall. The stench of smoke hit me, as though something had caught fire, but it was only that the apartment hadn’t been aired out. A studio apartment with a kitchen nook. Black leather sofa, an unmade mattress in one corner. The floor was piled with clothing and fast food containers, the place seethed with self-imposed isolation, like a sniper’s nest. A Barcelona scarf was hanging on the wall. The man went into the kitchen, rinsed out a drinking glass, filled it with water, and put it on a coffee table covered with cigarette butts and soda cans.
“Have you prayed ‘asr?” he asked. The afternoon prayer, named after shadows stretched by time. I shook my head and we took turns washing ourselves in his bathroom and then prayed together. He prayed an extra prayer when we were done with the prescribed ritual. I sat on the prayer mat, watching him finish his bows and Koran recitations.
He was born in Sweden to Somali parents; had been arrested by American mercenaries during a trip to the south of the country five years ago; and was taken to al-Mima, accused of having been a member of al-Shabaab, which has been designated a terrorist organization. Unlike the girl, he’d been set free only when al-Mima was shuttered and razed.
The journalist from Aftonbladet had forwarded my request to him. I don’t know why his reply had taken a year to arrive. When he was done praying, we folded up our prayer mats and sat on the sofa.
“So you’re writing a book about her? The terrorist?” His hair was trimmed, his beard grew in tufts on his chin and cheeks. According to the article in Aftonbladet he’d never been a member of al-Shabaab, but had written a number of social media posts in support of them. More than anything, I think he’d called the girl from Tundra a terrorist ironically, playing with how casually the label was tossed around.
The sofa’s dry, cracked leather groaned when I rearranged my legs.
I took out my phone, turned on the recorder.
“You could say I’m writing about what happened that night.”
I put the phone on the table, but he took it, powered it down fully, handed it to me, and said:
“Yani, I can get into trouble.” He made a vague gesture in the air. “They’re listening, you know what I’m sayin’?”
If we hadn’t just prayed together, I would’ve suspected him of having smoked hash or something—his movements were irregular and he was unable to look me in the eye.
If I couldn’t record the conversation, I’d need a pen and notepad. Searching through the books and papers in my bag, I put a number of items on the table in front of us—among them, the latest installment of the girl’s story.
“That’s a lot of trash, brother.”
“It’s material for the book. Sorry.”
He reached for the pile of papers, and because I couldn’t think of a reason why not, I let him look through them.
I picked up my glass of water, took a sip, and said, “What did they do to you out there?” I didn’t say the name of the place out loud. I’ve never liked doing it. Al-Mima. As if the sound itself had power.
“So what, you don’t read the papers?” he hissed, and I couldn’t tell if he was actually being hostile or just trying to protect himself from the shame he must feel because of my gaze and
the information that had gone public about him. About his body.
“They did experiments on you. Tortured you. You want to talk about that?”
The way he was staring at a scrawl of smoke hanging in the twilight of the apartment seemed to say that every stone, every grain of sand had cracked in half. Instead of responding, he read the girl’s account.
I’m writing to you because you can still be saved.
Liat’s dad and I were sitting outside the gym he lived in with lots of other people, mostly white Swedes and Jews. Snow dusted the trash and gravel around us. I was sitting on a metal railing, blowing into my hands to warm them.
The office chair he was sitting in had no wheels and kept almost tipping over. He wiggled in it while unleashing blasts of moaning melodies on a trumpet.
“At first he didn’t say anything, right?” I said. “He just stood there by his desk, panting.” I was telling him about something that had happened in Building K that day during class. A guy had stood up and interrupted the teacher. “Everyone thought he was going to end up in the black zone, but then he started shouting about how he hated Islam and stuff. Distancing himself. And the teacher straight up started crying.”
“Of course,” said Liat’s dad. He had a higher threat level than me and was on a different schedule, so he wasn’t in Building K in the mornings.
“Wallah moron.”
“Moron,” he said, then made the trumpet whine. White clouds of breath floated out with each shrill note.
The teacher—a woman with braided hair who was supposed to teach us the theory of evolution using pictures of ape-people and fish—had reported the guy to the guards, and his threat level was lowered. He was moved to a better apartment, in a zone with heat and running water.
“You know what those lessons are actually about, don’t you?” Liat’s dad asked.
“Learning stuff,” I said, and he went serious, eyes drilling into me. He and Liat’s mom had left Israel before Liat was born because he hadn’t wanted to do military service there, and I think the light in his eyes had something to do with it. Not being capable of murder. He said:
“It’s about making sure there are certain people who you can talk to in any way you please.”
“Why?”
“Because then you can do anything to us.”
A drone buzzed by. It was like a manta ray with small jet engines set in a sturdy, articulated aluminum frame; it turned its camera globe on us, and when we held up the small paper IDs with our threat level printed both in writing and as a barcode, it zipped off between the buildings.
“When I was like nine,” I said, “Liat saw something online and decided we were going to be bombers.”
“What are bombers?”
“Yani writers,” I said, and when he didn’t get me then either, I waved my hand around like yo, you’re really going to make me explain it, but then I said it anyway: “Taggers.”
“Taggers,” he said, and grinned.
“Taggers,” I said. “So we took our allowance and bought white spray paint at the energy station and started tagging walls and underpasses and everything.”
“You were nine?”
“Nine or ten.”
He fingered the trumpet, put it near his lips, opening and closing the brass valves, and said, “I think I know how this one ends.”
“We got busted by security,” I said. “They never took us in but they held us down and spray-painted our faces.”
He laughed. The trumpet, which was pressed to his mouth, snorted and wailed.
“So that’s what happened,” he said.
“Yeah. What’d you think?”
He shrugged.
“Her mom said she came home with white paint all over her face. I thought she’d tried to make herself suedi.”
Dad peeled off the slice of pork and threw it on the floor. He stared at his bread for a long time, then pushed his plate away and got up.
Classes in Building K about the positive effects of colonialism in the Third World, why the death penalty was justified in a democracy like Sweden but not in a dictatorship, and the importance of personal hygiene.
I remember spending hours staring at a spot of mold on our kitchen wall. I thought it was like a satellite image of a dark storm, and if I sat there long enough it would start to spin.
This was the second summer in the Rabbit Yard.
We stood in line for the water truck. One of the guards hit a guy in the face and I remember feeling completely calm, like it was no big deal, something that happened all the time. The guy who got punched—an Arabic teenager wearing an Adidas jacket—screamed and fell to his knees, and the guard kept wailing on him.
I remember the dull buzz of the electric truck’s engine. Those of us standing in line glanced at each other, but our gazes didn’t reach all the way, they bent and splintered like fiberglass canes.
I got to know the guy later, even though I don’t remember his name anymore. He had a friend, and their favorite thing was to sit in one of the doorways telling each other ghost stories. The one doing the talking would shine a flashlight on his face, doing voices and everything. Their favorite subject was what happened in Building T, which was a fenced-in five-story building where, like, social security and health offices and whatever had once been, when the Rabbit Yard was a normal suburb. Building T was on a hill, so its greenish copper face could be seen from almost anywhere in the Rabbit Yard, and I heard you ended up there if you got caught trying to escape. The guys said they experimented on people in there. They’d noticed birds didn’t fly over it, and if guard dogs were forced to go inside the fence, they’d panic and bark themselves hoarse.
Whenever the Crusading Hearts came through they were armed with knives and iron pipes and sometimes they had spears or axes—there was usually one who was wasted and being laughed at and filmed by the others. Yani #swedishumor.
They always arrived in the evening or at night, and for the most part they stuck to the black zones, but one time Dad and I could hear them yelling and clomping up and down the stairs. We hid in the closet under a blanket.
We heard our front door open. They ransacked the apartment, pushing over the furniture and kicking things.
People said the guards opened the gates for them.
A scream came from the apartment above, where a Swedish woman lived. She’d ended up in the Rabbit Yard for sheltering enemies of Sweden at home. I clung to Dad, hugging his tense, frightened body. It sounded like someone was dragging her down the stairs—we heard a series of dull, hard thuds.
The intruders in our apartment ran out into the stairwell. When I peeked through the crack of the closet door I saw the last of them leaving. She looked young, wearing a black jacket and white sneakers. She was taking a final look at the apartment. Our eyes met. A Swedish flag was tied over her nose and mouth. I remember her blue eyes.
My classmates had talked about how being a Crusading Heart was good for your career, yani that it looked good if you wanted to get into business or politics, so I don’t think they were wearing masks because they wanted to hide their identities. They wanted to show us we no longer deserved to see them, in the same way the woman who’d examined us might have been wearing gloves because we no longer deserved to be touched by a Swede.
The girl stared at me, then turned and walked out the door.
I thought she’d tell the others about us and they’d come back, but that didn’t happen.
Later, we crawled out into the clutter. Dad gathered his photo albums and put them back on their shelf.
“It’s airborne,” he muttered, apropos of nothing. He’d got it into his head that they were poisoning us that year, zapping us with invisible death rays or something. He smacked his lips. “You know the taste, right? It’s like foil.”
Sometimes the words we used with each other didn’t seem to belong to our language anymore, they were just sounds being forced out of our throats, hollow sounds, like air whistling through a broken ventilator f
an.
The ham had small holes where the meat mixture had set around air bubbles. As I took it off the bread Dad watched me, resigned, curious but indifferent. The light in his eyes was snuffed out. I threw it on the floor and brought the bread to my lips. It must have been winter already, because a few snowflakes were falling through a broken window high up in the dining hall ceiling.
I stopped myself from gagging and took a bite.
I didn’t actually do it out of hunger. I did it because Dad was about to crack, and if he cracked, he’d cross a line and would stop being himself—my only parent, Dad who took care of me and taught me about the silence in writing through his own.
He threw himself over his bread. He even licked his fingers and ate each crumb off his plate, thinking he was saving me from what I was saving him from.
I pressed my forehead to the plastic tarp, which was thudding in the wind. It was toward the end of Ramadan and not many of us in the Rabbit Yard had fasted, but we had gathered in the soccer field to pray the special prayer that marks its end. We were using large tarps instead of prayer mats, because they were banned as ideological symbols. I sat up and felt the wind on my face and thought nothing in the world is like God and that’s why God’s power is fearsome. I prayed, without words, sitting with my hands cupped like a bowl, and sent everything straight up.
After, in the apartment, Dad took a clunky military-green device from his pocket. He said it was a satellite phone that would work even though the web was blocked in the Rabbit Yard. Who knows how he’d gotten hold of it.
“I paid enough to talk for a few minutes,” he said.
Liat still had the poster of blue-haired Oh Nana Yurg on her wall.
Liat’s eyes were heavily done up, and she was wearing black lipstick, a retro look that was in, out there in the world. She leaned over her screen to get a better look, and winced as if something had frightened her. When I looked in the little window in the corner, where I could see what she was seeing, I understood why: I didn’t look like myself. I looked dead. Wallah #zombie.
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