Allah.
Help me.
Allah.
The door opened. The woman came back in. She switched on the machines, one by one, and pulled out a bunch of wires with suction cups on their ends. She stuck them to my forehead and shaved scalp. I pulled harder at the straps, and she hushed me. She took out a long needle and brought it to my left arm. I said, “Please,” I said, “I’m sorry I escaped.” I remember the needle straining and stinging my skin, then she connected a tube from one of the drip bags to it.
She left the room and later, after a few minutes or maybe as long as an hour, she returned with a man dressed in white, who carefully flicked the drip bag with his index finger.
“Can you contact my dad? Can you tell him I’m here?” My mouth was dry, my lips stuck to each other. The man ignored what I’d said.
“Right now we’re giving you a medicine that inhibits motor function,” he said. He was a pleasant, fit Swede who actually reminded me of a handball coach Liat had had a long time ago—the more I stared at him, the more I was convinced it was really him. “Do you know what it means to inhibit motor function?” he asked, and the tubes brushed against my skin when I shook my head.
“It means soon you’ll notice that you can’t move,” the man said. The liquid ran through the tubes, pale red, like raspberry juice. “And in a second we’re also going to administer a nerve toxin. It will feel like your entire body is burning.” The man said this with total calm, and I wanted to scream but my mouth wouldn’t move, it had stiffened half open and only a faint moan escaped from my throat. I could feel drool spilling from my mouth, down my chin.
“Clamp,” the woman said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the man take a shiny spoon-shaped object from a drawer, which he then stuck in my mouth. It had the icy bitter taste of stainless steel and clamped my tongue into place against my lower jaw. At the very least they wanted me to survive. The worst of my panic dimmed a bit.
“We’ll start with fifteen milliliters a minute,” the woman said, and even though my eyes were locked at a point on the ceiling, immobilized, I could sense the man touching the drip bags above me.
The pain came fast, spreading up my arms, along my back, and out into my body. It was a raining void, rays of nothing.
I lay on my mattress. Bilal studied me with a gaze that both pitied and abandoned me. Wallah, the way a security camera would look at you if it could feel bad for everything it had to see. I sat up and leaned against the wall. When I spoke my voice was hoarse.
“Why are they doing this?”
Bilal had been killing time by picking bits of foam off his mattress and lining them up in a long row on the floor. He pulled off another grimy yellow grain and said, “Knowing why only makes it worse.”
To eat, we were given steamed vegetables and a spongy, grayish-purple cube that could’ve been meat or fish or anything. The soft plastic cutlery would barely cut the cube, and when I mentioned this to Bilal he ran the white knife across his throat to show you couldn’t kill yourself with it either.
Sometimes I washed myself in the aluminum sink and prayed at what I thought might be the right time, even though it was impossible to tell since there were no windows. They took Bilal when the lights were off and we were sleeping. He fended them off listlessly. The room was eerie without him, like being alone in the dark with wild animals nearby. I remember wringing my hands and I can’t explain how my knuckles and tendons frightened me.
They shoved him through the door a couple of hours later and I pulled his limp, feverish body to his mattress and carefully laid him out there. There was love, I noticed, in sitting next to his unconscious body and caressing his shaved head.
When he woke up they’d turned the ceiling lights back on and we’d been given food, which had already gone cold. He ate anyway, potatoes, carrots, and that purplish-gray meat or whatever it was, everything cut into strips. “They’re recording it,” he said.
“Recording what?”
His hands shook and he kept spilling his food, which I picked up and put on my empty plate.
“They’re recording the pain and saving it. That’s what the tubes and machines are for,” he said. “They use the recordings when they steer their drones. Yani, the military and all.”
“How do you know?”
“A Swede was in this cell when I arrived. One of those activists, right. She told me.” He gave up trying to put the food into his mouth and feebly pushed the plate away. “They send signals to pilots, but upside down, like one of those, you know, what do you call them? Negatives. A negative. It makes them feel like they’re really flying up there, over the desert. Like they don’t have bodies, you know what I’m saying?” He backed up, leaned against the wall, and said: “I told you knowing doesn’t help.”
I asked what happened to the Swede who’d been here before him, and he said, “She told me something else. Something I have to tell you.”
“What?”
“The third time they do it, you die.”
I stood at the window and looked out over the trees, whose leaves had fallen, knocked off by the rain.
“Go ahead and lie down here.”
That time it had been a man, maybe one of the ones who’d taken Bilal in the dark, strapping me to the bed and sticking suction cups to my head.
I’m trying to remember the pain so I can describe it to you, but it’s just a white shine, it was like winter sun flashing in puddles and broken windows in the Rabbit Yard, when I used to stare out the window, before.
Top five things to do while waiting for them to come get us for the last time. Number five: tear foam crumbs off the mattress and arrange them in a tidy row. Four: stare at the wall with #madpanic. Three: whisper God’s name, over and over, to try to push away the pain still in your limbs like ice in your teeth. Number two: listen to the sounds from the vent, then hum the exact same sounds louder and louder until Bilal stares at you and cracks up. One: talk about all the crazy things Liat did.
“I taught her to drive, did you know that?” Bilal said once when we were doing thing number one. “We drove to the parking lot at the Mål of Gothenburg one night. Right over there, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“She told me. Said she had mad skills.”
“Driving? She sucked.” He laughed softly, fell silent, then used his sock to sweep away the line of foam crumbs.
Things happened in Building T that I haven’t wanted to write about. Like when I was taken away the second time a cleaning cart in the corridor started rolling toward us all by itself, and the two guards who were escorting me stopped. The cart slowed down a few meters away from us, turned, and started rolling back so quickly it flipped over and crashed into a wall. Greenish water spilled across the floor. The guards didn’t move a muscle and each held one of my arms. It took like five minutes before they dared go on.
One time when the ceiling light turned on, those foam crumbs Bilal and I used to fiddle with had arranged themselves in a wavy or swirl pattern. It would’ve taken hours for anyone to have set them up like that, and Bilal swore on his mother that he hadn’t done it, and anyway it happened in the dark.
I think these things were related to the experiments they were doing on us, and because time was breaking down.
Balagan.
Bilal flipped out when they came to get him the last time. He backed into a corner and shook his head.
“Bilal. It won’t help.” The man who knew his name was tall and had scarred sunken cheeks—a guard I hadn’t seen before. Bilal hunched as though he were seeking shelter from a strong wind blowing through the room, and I remembered how once I thought that Dad’s hands cupped in prayer were like a fortress.
The man waited by the door, they were in no rush.
“Come on, Bilal.”
Bilal was looking for something to cling to and latched on to the toilet bowl. His shoulder blades moved under his T-shirt as he wrapped himself more tightly around it, until the man with the scarred cheeks finally
stepped into the room and started prying him off. They tussled for a while.
This is an image from the place I come from: a man clinging to a toilet bowl because he doesn’t want to die.
My daughter was transfixed. I was holding my breath so as not to scare the deer, and carefully bent down so I could whisper in her ear:
“It’s a love poem.” Words that just came. The deer had dashed past the screen at the bus stop. It was twilight, no traffic, I felt reverence, sanctity; I was holding a grocery bag, it rustled and the animal jerked to attention, looking right at us with one eye. “A love poem from God,” I whispered, and with a few stilted bounds the animal vanished into the woods. From the sidewalk, my daughter looked into the bare trees and shadows.
“Is every deer a love poem?” she wondered aloud. I thought about how open she was to the power of language. I asked her to take a seat at the bus stop.
“Are we going somewhere?” She was dangling her feet. Sweden was not at war. We were not being annihilated in death camps. Yet Isra and I were preparing to go away. Our visa applications had been accepted.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re going to take a trip.”
“On the bus?” she asked. She didn’t know she was about to leave her preschool, these seasons, this entire landscape. She was about to leave her childhood behind.
“We’re going to take an airplane to another country. Where my sister lives.”
“Now?” she asked, shocked.
“No. With Mom, of course. But then we’ll live there.”
She looked toward the forested area across the road where the deer had receded from view.
“Is it because we’re Muslim?” I nodded curtly. Then I realized I was letting her inherit my mother’s fear.
I visited Tundra twice that spring. The first time we mostly talked about the year the girl had spent with Amin before they met Hamad. During our second meeting, on a day in March when a snowstorm had rolled in over the clinic, she’d almost exclusively channeled the part of herself that didn’t recognize me, and might have been responding to something inside herself that was starting to remember her true self. I tried talking to her in English, but she withdrew and stood in a corner hugging herself, staring at me from some lost place within herself. I knew these episodes were signs of her slow recovery—the doctors had also mentioned it in an email—but when it happened I felt an inexplicable, devastating sorrow, because it meant that the girl I knew, the girl who was writing down her strange story, was disappearing.
Ramadan still came that year too. We gathered at the large mosque in Gothenburg to pray the final prayer and afterward there were balloons and treats for the children. Our final Ramadan in Sweden. Our friends had started to say goodbye, even though the trip was still far off. Mido tried to convince us to stay, he said there was still hope, and Isra and I were needed: if we couldn’t stay in Sweden neither could he, and he and his family had nowhere else to go. But our decision had been made. The movement that began as a tremble in my body one fall evening years ago, when I first read the girl from Tundra’s pages, had found a direction.
Still, something about her remained unresolved. A thorn in me.
When you said you were moving away, I was happy for you. I don’t have any memories of Canada from my future. That’s a good thing, I think. But I’ll miss you. Then again there’s so much I miss. In a way I miss myself most of all.
I don’t remember the last time they strapped me to the bed. I remember a voice talking about not being able to drive home if the snow kept coming down like this. I pulled at the straps and prayed to God. I turned my head to the side so I could watch the snow falling outside the window, falling down over the dark mouths of the subway entrances and over the soccer fields that had become graveyards, and for a moment it was like it was falling upward, backward.
Someone caressed my forehead. Maybe because I was crying. I saw a moth. It was crawling over the drip bag, as large as a child’s hand, and then flew at the window, toward the falling snow.
6
Brussels, early June, eighteen months before the attack on Hondo’s. The hollow din of a power drill echoed in the hospital’s parking lot. An ambulance driver was dangling his arm out the open window and trying to set the radio, which kept picking up some sort of disruption—a strange bleeping—he was swearing as he jumped between frequencies.
People coming through the automatic glass doors were gasping in the heat, fanning themselves with free magazines, grimacing at each other, and panting like dogs.
As a security guard, a Tunisian immigrant, was heading for the bus stop after her shift, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere out in the blue.
Did she think she was dreaming?
The news had reached inside the hospital, too, and patients and personnel alike made their way to the windows; they stood in their near-identical outfits, with their hours heading into overtime, afflictions, and IV-stands.
Their hands like pale starfish stuck to the glass.
It was June and it was snowing.
The phone rang at reception and the woman who picked up heard a series of drawn-out wails, which sounded to her like a signal picked up by a radio telescope, an atonal whale song from deep space. She sat, phone in hand, looking out through the glass façade at the snow falling harder, whirling along the curbs, melting into streams that flowed into the sewer, and then a gauzy blanket spreading across the ground.
Every telephone within about a kilometer’s radius of the hospital started ringing and continued to do so for minutes. Those who answered heard the same strange wailing, modulating signal.
A group of teens on mopeds stopped and jumped off; they stretched their arms out and spun around, children once more.
A taxi driver who’d just dropped off a patient removed his shirt and knotted it over his face. He walked around tugging at people, trying to bring them to their senses.
“It’s an unknown wind-born substance, take shelter you idiots,” he said in broken Flemish. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll be looking into your bathroom mirror holding clumps of your own hair.”
An old man with a walker was catching the snow on his eyelashes. A woman in a hijab was having a snowball fight with her husband at a bus stop, laughing into the snowstorm’s beating, confetti wings.
A clear plastic tube was below her nose. She stood at the window a long time, trying to access something important, someone who’d been important to her. A deep sorrow moved through her, a feeling of it all being too late, that this was already after the fact. She steadied herself with her drip stand. It was snowing, and without really knowing why, she started crying.
A man and a woman sat at the edge of the bed, speaking empathically in a language she didn’t understand. It was the day after the snowfall. She was having a hard time concentrating on their words and gestures because she sensed a threat at the periphery of the great nothingness that had taken possession of her. She didn’t know who she was or where she came from. The man and woman were saying—this much she could understand from all their pointing—that her name was Annika.
An ordinary woman and a tall man with dark thinning hair, both vacant yet sullen. The man handed her a passport, and she read the name. Annika. She couldn’t recognize the person in the photo.
After they left for the evening, she went to the window. Annika did. She wondered about the snow she’d seen. How could it be a summer’s day. The face she’d seen in the mirror resembled her, but belonged to someone else. Annika.
The man and woman came several days in a row. They’d left the passport with her, in a dresser in the hospital room, and they kept taking it out and pointing at it during their visits. This is you. She wanted it to be true. She wanted to have a mom and dad. But she didn’t think she did.
Everything was wrong.
From her hospital bed, she watched with growing surprise as a woman spit water back into a glass and then took it over to the small sink where the faucet sucked it back up.
A flaw
in time.
She lay awake at night plotting her escape from the hospital in anticipation of being found by those who wished to harm her, whoever they were.
The wind blew through the thin blanket she’d wrapped around her shoulders. It was early in the morning, she’d brought her passport because of a hunch that it would be important for something she’d have to do, and a few items of clothing. These things were in the blue plastic liner from the trashcan in her hospital room, and she was wearing a pair of too-big shoes she’d found in the closet.
She headed for the tall buildings on the horizon, walking along freeways and through train tunnels. At a crossing surrounded by office buildings, a traffic signal changed and people were set in motion. Their pinched faces as they bumped into her had something cruel about them, as though they were holding a password, a code that would unleash terrible violence on her.
She ate bread crusts and cold French fries out of discarded Styrofoam boxes. Why were they lying about her at the hospital? Why did her body twitch when she saw the uniformed guards posted at the entrances of shops and banks? What had happened to her?
It often felt like she was being annihilated, as though all that was left of her was a lingering sense of despair outside on the curb. She spent her nights huddled on sidewalks, in the waning flicker of broken halogen lights, and it was only after a week or so of this that she realized she hadn’t slept since waking up at the hospital at least a month before.
Her existence was an unrelenting stream of impressions. From the city birds, she learned to eat from outdoor patio tables instead of the trash. Old and young men tried to get her into their cars. Once a man tried to pull her into a public toilet, but she kicked him and fled.
One night she was devouring whatever was left on the plates in an outdoor seating area, it must have been late August, a mild night, the patio half deserted but full of wrought-iron furniture and branded umbrellas. A couple on vacation was talking about the food, and she realized it was the first time she could understand what other people were saying; the sounds gained traction on a surface inside her. It was as though she began and ended in the same breath. The man laughed and his teeth showed, large and with food stuck in them.
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