Maybe she said my name. Maybe she said, Oh God is that you?
“Have you seen my dad?”
“I miss you,” I said, instead of answering.
Dad had left me alone by the kitchen window where the signal was the strongest, and it had started raining, a gentle shower hitting the peeling blue façades at an angle.
“I miss you too. You seen him?”
“Yeah, a few times.”
“How is he?”
Her question told me she was still in a world where truth existed, even though she was living in a country that wanted her dead. I wouldn’t be able to tell her about the threat levels, about the drones sailing over the collapsed roofs, about Building K or Building T.
There were no words for how any of us were doing in the Rabbit Yard. Liat and I looked at each other through our screens. I thought of Amin, also looking into the world through a screen, from a place on the other side of everything.
“I’m running out of credit,” I said, because it was less of a lie than anything I would’ve said about her dad.
“Can I call you? Can you add me?”
“That probably doesn’t work on this phone,” I said. “Bye.”
I sat by the window. Alien. Looked down at my hands and thought strings and ropes were running under my skin. A Jew, a Muslim, and a beggar walk into a bank. Have you heard that one? What do you call a Muslim in a dress?
I shut my eyes. We had been born in Sweden without being Swedish, and that made us unreal. Only by dying would we become real again.
I logged into my old Sensly account, where I still was a regular brown-haired Swedish girl. I wrote a hit list. Five best things about Mom. Number five: she was strong. So strong. Four: she was the best in the world at listening to me talk about my problems in school and stuff, and about what I thought about the world. Three? Three was her smile when she talked about God and how God’s light shined right through her. Number two: her way of teasing dad, which made the whole family laugh until it hurt.
I sat in the window, typing on the satellite phone’s large, clunky keys.
Number one was how, when I was little and couldn’t sleep, she used to tell me stories, and how on lots of nights I still whisper her words to myself, in her voice.
He put his cigarette out in an empty soda can.
“What’s this?” He’d finished reading and set the papers aside, far from him, nervous and troubled.
“She wrote that.”
“The girl who tried to blow up the comic book store?”
I nodded, said, “She was in al-Mima while you were there.”
“I heard.” He knocked another cigarette from the pack, spun it between his fingers; I think he was trying to center himself after having been drawn in to the girl’s story. He mumbled:
“At first it’s like, no way are they going to hit you. Cuz you’re Swedish.” He laughed at that last bit, then put the cigarette between his lips. Let it hang there, unlit. “Yani, a Swedish citizen.”
Again I was thinking he looked dazed or high. I wanted to ask him to crack a window, but I was afraid of changing the subject now that he’d finally started talking about al-Mima.
“They hit you?” I asked. He lit the cigarette.
“Hit me,” he said, nodding formally. The cherry crackled as he dragged on the cigarette. He seemed, in some indeterminate way, even more crazy than the girl from Tundra. “And they had machines, you know what I’m sayin’?” he said. “They stuck cables to your head, brother.”
I wanted him to explain how the girl had learned Swedish. I wanted to know why she didn’t remember her real family. What had happened to the prisoners at al-Mima? What did she want with me?
“It was like getting zapped with electricity,” he said, “the hairs on your arms stood straight up, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes,” I said, taking frantic notes on his way of being and articulating himself more than the story he was telling, which so far I recognized from other accounts of al-Mima.
“Then you got all dizzy and couldn’t remember your name and shit. It was like being stuck right at the edge of sleep, brother.”
I came to think of a phrase the girl had used to describe how memories of the future surged in her at Hondo’s: like waking from a dream.
But nothing had to mean anything.
“Then you started remembering stuff.” He glanced at me. “Crazy things, brother.” He stifled a cough. “Yo, I was lying there with the cables and everything in my head, remembering how I’d driven a car full of explosives straight into a building in Mogadishu.”
“When?”
“That’s the thing, brother.” His front teeth were chipped, the chips showed whenever he laughed—a serrated row of shark teeth. “It never happened. But I remembered doing it.” He shook his head as though denying the whole experience, driving it from himself, then lifted his hands, rubbed his neck, and whispered in a way that suggested he didn’t really believe himself either: “I remembered doing it in the future. I’d exploded.”
He put his head in his hands. Time passed. Then he looked up at me, searching for something. Trust? Understanding? He sucked his broken teeth with a scowl that maybe meant he was trying to reconnect with what had been wiped out. “I can’t explain.”
“The girl said she remembers things from the future, too. She doesn’t think she’s the same person that was taken to the desert. She thinks she comes from another world. Another time.”
“Swear. Say wallah,” he said. After I’d assured him I wasn’t lying and explained that the account he’d read was the girl’s testimony, what she claimed to remember, he told me—fumbling and ravaged—about what had happened to him in al-Mima. It was in this smoky apartment in depopulated central Sweden that I realized the girl wasn’t alone in her illness. Her madness and its specific expressions had come from al-Mima: the victims had somehow made sense of the torture with the help of fantasies about it being a gateway to other times and lives.
The blinds were pulled down and as the man was speaking, darkness fell and the streetlamps lit up—their cold light filtered into the room in straight lines.
She’s kneeling. She’s wearing a hood; they put it on her during the flight. She has no idea where she is. They arrested her on her way home from school. It’s possible that’s when she tried to resist, or it was whenever the guards tore off her clothes and dressed her in the orange jumpsuit. It’s possible she tried to tear herself free when they shaved her head.
Maybe she’s already bruised.
She tells them she’s a Belgian citizen, first in Flemish then in English.
I know this because it’s what any of us would shout into the dark. I’m a citizen, there are higher powers watching over me.
Maybe she hears men laughing at her pleas, at her naïve and archaic credos.
I wonder if she’s panicking, if she feels like she’s choking.
Maybe she saw a hazy strip of light under the black fabric as she was being led between the airplane and car under the vast, stark desert sky, and could tell by the shade or intensity of the colors that she wasn’t in Europe anymore.
They pull off her hood.
There are masked people in front of her. In the room is a yellow plastic bucket, a faucet, a bench. A video camera. Simple objects transformed—now threatening and thick with violence. A drain covered by a moldy plastic grate. Metal rings attached to cement walls. Even the sand along the baseboards—everything has a barren quality, full of potential pain.
A place beyond the world. Or at its center.
She asks what they want with her. She even starts rambling about her willingness to cooperate, which she hopes will assert her innocence: all they have to do is ask and she’ll tell them anything, but the masked people stay silent—I imagine they’re letting the terror of silence saturate the room.
Along one wall, near the steel door, are black metal cabinets, which several witnesses take to be computers. One of the masked people goes
to them, rolls out a bundle of white electrical cables and fastens them to the girl’s shaved head with suction cups. Fans inside the cabinets begin to whir. She is still kneeling; she feels dizzy, breathes fast, the hairs on her arms bristle. Absolute zero. After a while she realizes she can’t remember her name. Terrifying. She doesn’t remember who she is, where she comes from, or how she ended up here. She’s searching for a reference point, for a foothold in the scraped-out, filthy room, in the masked faces, the expressionless eyes. The dull sound of the fans in the large computers makes her think of a washing machine or an airplane engine, or of a large predator, or maybe of nothing in particular.
Maybe she’s thinking: like being stuck right at the edge of sleep.
One of the masked people gives her strange instructions:
“I want you to empty yourself.” Several victims recount these words. “Empty your consciousness.”
Presumably she nods, obedient and jittery.
“I want you to try to remember specific things. Can you help us with that? Try to remember someone who has the black flag with the emblem on their clothes or in their apartment. Do you know it? Daesh’s flag?”
Maybe she tries to interject—she’ll give them names right now, on Facebook some of her boyfriend’s relatives and friends have the flag as their profile picture—but she gets cut off. “It might be a Muslim who practices martial arts. Try to remember stuff like that. Muslims who removed themselves from society, who might have weapons at home. You might even be the one doing these things, do you understand? Try to remember.”
She nods at this last part, unsure what the words mean.
You might even be the one.
They strap ski goggles blacked out with paint and headphones on her. A hollow, unmodulated crackle is playing.
They leave.
Time passes. Hours, days. Noise and darkness. Darkness and noise. Emptiness.
Maybe she’s connected to a drip and medical personnel are furnishing her with catheters.
Sometimes a damp rag is squeezed into her mouth.
I looked up into the snow falling over the courtyard.
A tremor runs through her, like an animal twitching as it dreams, and she makes small sticky and fractured sounds.
I looked through the peephole. It was dark out there.
She’s disembodied, like she doesn’t really exist anymore.
When they finally take off the headphones and the blacked-out ski goggles, she turns away from the bulb in the ceiling and screams as though she’s been kicked hard between the legs.
For a long time all she can discern are gray shadows, gray light. Her ears have gotten used to the crackling in the headphones and voices sound rough and uneven.
“What did you see?”
She leans forward and thick vomit spills across the cement floor. No sense of identity, no solid core.
Who is she?
This must be what it’s like to witness your own annihilation.
“As this was happening, did you ever feel like you were someone else?” I asked. The Swedish-Somali took a drag on his cigarette, squinting in thought.
“I don’t know. I remembered things that were going to happen. Things I was going to do in the future. But I think I was still myself in all of those memories.” He started fiddling with the cigarette pack on the table, shoveling the ash and dust around, drawing a few meaningless characters, and repeated: “I don’t know.”
Toward the end of the conversation he told me something that would become key.
A few times during his stay in al-Mima he was taken from his cell to a room where he was put in front of a screen and asked to study film clips and photographs. Veiled women and bearded men with long jallabias crossed squares and train platforms. Black-and-white, low resolution, jerky sequences captured by security cameras. He scanned through passport photos and private pictures from cellphones, relaxed, often joyful in a way that felt creepy when seeing them there, in that room in the desert. Young men with their arms around each other in a mosque, or with expensive cars.
An archive.
The masked people asked him if anyone in the pictures, anyone at all, was going to be with him when he was blown up in the future.
“I didn’t recognize anybody,” he told me. “But I pointed sometimes.”
I took notes, I felt empathy, I wanted to hug him, or at least touch his arm as he sat there wrapped in cigarette smoke, isolated from all that is human.
“You know why I did it? Why I pointed people out?”
“Because otherwise they’d have hit you?”
“They hit me anyway. No, it triggered the memories, somehow,” he said, and scratched his shaved head. I wondered if he laid awake at night, if he had a hard time differentiating between his actual memories and the strange hallucinations he’d had in al-Mima. He said: “I did it because I knew I was in the desert because someone else had been there before me, sitting in that same chair and looking at that same screen. Some other Muslim had seen my face and pointed at it.”
We crunched along a narrow gravel path. The girl was wearing a thin jacket and chunky pink plastic sandals. It was our first meeting outdoors. She’d given me another stack of paper, which I’d put in my shoulder bag. At this point I’d accepted that her account, more than anything, was a way to get me to keep coming back to Tundra. I might have been the only person not getting paid to see her.
“If it’s possible to stop the genocide by stopping Hamad and Amin,” I said, “what does that say about hate?”
We were in the park surrounding the asylum, I had my cellphone out recording our conversation.
“What hate?”
“The hatred people feel for those of us who are not what you call Swedish. The people in the Rabbit Yard in your story. What does that say about the hatred of us if the future you remember was prevented just because you stopped the attack on Hondo’s?”
In the past year, two books of reportage on the attack had been published. One focused on the mistakes that had been made during the police response—starting with the shot fired at Hamad, which went completely against the Swedish police’s standard procedure in a hostage situation. The other book contained a few of the hostages’ stories, notably Christian Hondo’s, who also talked about his store, its history, and the philosophy behind it.
A movie about the attack had been made by a new production company.
“If what you’re telling me is true,” I said, “then they hate us only because of what we are or are not doing, and it has nothing to do with the people who hate us. You’re letting them off the hook, because you’re saying their hatred was a result of the attack.”
She shrugged at my logic. Whenever I looked at her, waves of something like love washed over me. I would’ve wanted to get to know her beyond the fence, outside all of this.
Maybe it was a sign that I was now as lost as she was.
“I met a man who was where you were.”
“In the Rabbit Yard?”
“In al-Mima,” I said, and she let out a disappointed laugh.
“Oh yeah?” She scratched her head, she had a boy’s haircut. It’s possible the orderlies had given it to her because it was easy to maintain. It wasn’t the first or last time her head was uncovered during our meetings. I don’t know if this necessarily meant anything special.
“You don’t remember a room where you sat in front of a screen showing pictures of other people? In al-Mima? Pictures from security cameras and passport photos and so on.”
She shook her head, suddenly suspicious, she said, “Why are you asking?”
“The company staffing the prison, and that tortured you and the others who ended up there, seemed to have access to some method of planting false memories—and possibly entire fake identities—inside people. And for some reason they wanted to connect these with real people by showing the prisoners pictures.”
“How do you know?”
“I suspect it’s so,” I said. “I don’t know anyth
ing.”
Insects rose and dove around us. The park wasn’t very big and we kept passing the same trees and bushes on our walk.
“I think the beatings and the water torture were just a way to create the stress needed for the method to work.”
“Well I don’t remember any room with a screen.” Walking along in those ugly plastic sandals, she snuck a look at me.
But this must’ve been where you saw Amin for the first time, right?” She didn’t answer, she didn’t really seem to know how to orient herself in this conversation. “It must’ve been why you recognized him on the streetcar, right? Might it even be the reason you came to Gothenburg?”
“Maybe,” she said. She wrapped her arms around herself. I could’ve hugged her right then. The terrorist from February seventeenth. The Belgian Black Widow. I wanted to embrace her. I felt sick, on the verge of going crazy. She went over to a blooming bush, heavy with white roses like knotted lace, squatted down, and gingerly lifted one. Something in her way of crouching aged her; she was like an old woman in her garden at the end of life. She looked like Mom.
“Do you feel hopeful?” She asked this without looking up at me. I was taken aback both by the question and by the fact that I didn’t have an immediate response. I was one step behind her and felt the heat from the brick wall on my face. She continued, “Hopeful about Sweden? About life with your family here?”
A weight dropped through me. When a minute had passed without me answering she changed the subject. As though to spare me.
“Amin had mad skills with mopeds.” She laughed at those words and her innocence even made me smile. “One day he took apart his 180. I mean, before the attack and everything, when we were just two normal people, you know? He took the motor apart, chain, transmission, everything. Laid it out in the courtyard. Then put it back together again exactly like before. I took pictures. He was planning on sending them to a garage.” She changed her voice, mimicking a young man’s, the accent stronger than her own. It was Amin speaking, through her mouth: “Yo, after they see these pics, they gotta give me a job.” She squinted thoughtfully into the light, at me or the sky.
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