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  “What sort of questions do you have for us?” Ahmed says, his left hand resting on the picture of his son’s face. “We will answer them.”

  Laura puts her fork down and wipes the oil from her mouth with a tissue. She pulls out her notebook and begins firing questions at them. I rapidly translate their responses, whispering into Laura’s ear until it seems as if they are directly speaking to one another, like I am no longer in the room.

  They tell her about the protests, how they organized themselves and what they are demanding. Um Abdallah describes how, when the tear gas was falling she could see the angel Gabriel in the smoke (“If that’s not a sign from God of the Islamic state then explain to me why I saw him?”). They tell us of the media representation of them as thugs and terrorists, but they are excited. They are convinced they don’t need the government anymore. They have created their own world, and it can only grow from here.

  My own voice rises in excitement as I translate. Ahmed catches my eyes.

  “You know what they say about the president’s gaze,” he says. “How it unpacks your existence bit by bit until you are naked and helpless, your most secret thoughts out in the open for all to see. But we are not scared anymore. We are not blinking.”

  He continues to gaze into my eyes as he speaks. Is he suspicious, is he questioning my commitment to his ideals? The look in his eyes reminds me of the president’s.

  Um Abdallah speaks up, her voice rising. “If it’s true what they say, that Abdallah is dead, then he is our martyr in heaven watching to make sure the revolution is completed. We will make the entire country burn so that his death is not in vain.”

  The conversation turns suddenly, as Ahmed begins to talk about his philosophies. Laura asks him about his thoughts on the West.

  “One must avoid the wicked influence of the West on our society,” Ahmed says matter-of-factly. Laura scribbles furiously as I translate his words.

  “For example, your men look like women and your women look like men. This is permitted in Western societies, even encouraged as equal rights,” I hear myself explain to Laura. “So now in your countries you have men who sleep with men who look like women. This is like dressing a pig up as a sheep and slaughtering it so you can have some lamb.”

  “It’s a beautiful thing, this revolution,” Um Abdallah says. “Now it’s the simple people in the country, the poor and the downtrodden and the illiterate who are giving us an education.”

  Another thought occurs to me, the realization that we are from the same country, the same city even, yet we never truly knew each other. I want to tell Ahmed some things and to ask his opinion of many more. I want to agree with some of his views and challenge him on others. I want to tell Um Abdallah that my best friend is also being held by the regime for who he is, for who he wants to be, but I cannot find the words to do so. How will they react if I tell them Maj was arrested while at the old cinemas? How can I explain that I am like them, misunderstood, vilified by the regime and the media? I don’t have the words to say any of this, and the brief moment of deep solidarity I feel dissipates before my eyes.

  Ahmed stands up abruptly. “It’s time to pray.” He moves to a corner of the room and turns toward me. “Aren’t you coming?”

  I am about to shake my head but then I realize that he is not asking me a question. There is no more disguising my opinions in translations, no more hiding in the shadows. I am either here or there, with him or not. Surely a true fundamentalist would be confident enough in his own beliefs not to force them on others.

  I stand up and follow him to the corner of the room. Ahmed puts his hands to his head and kneels down, and I do the same. I fight a sudden urge to grab him by the arm and pull him away from his prayer. I want to take his hand and dance the tango with him in his living room. No more preaching and fighting, this side over that. Let’s choose ambivalence; let’s just dance to the beat of this nonsense. Or if not dance, let’s make love. I would like to make love to Ahmed, force his dishdasha up, grab him by the thighs, and take him in my mouth. Show him a good time, help him loosen up.

  When we return to the table I notice Nora has left a message on my phone: The bartender says he saw Maj leave alone. It’s not looking good … I put the phone in my pocket and take a seat at the table.

  “I hope you will present the truth about us,” Ahmed tells Laura.

  Um Abdallah takes the photograph of Abdallah from the table and pushes it into my hands. She looks at me as she does this, in a way that makes me feel that if I refuse the photograph I am complicit in his disappearance. I put it in my bag.

  “You will help us find him,” Um Abdallah says.

  Laura says nothing, and I find myself both hating and respecting her for refusing to make promises she cannot keep. I want to tell Um Abdallah that Laura will mention her son in her article, assure her that we will find him. But I’m stuck, as Laura isn’t saying anything and Ahmed will certainly notice any attempt to alter the exchange. Instead I remain silent and stare at Um Abdallah and Ahmed. Their faces look like an empty home whose inhabitants had gotten up, gathered their things, and walked away.

  After I’ve dropped Laura off I drive aimlessly through the western suburbs. The streets are wide and leafy, a far cry from the noise and crowds downtown. Even the heat feels different here, less urgent, more playful. I’m in no hurry to go home, to Teta and Doris and that bedroom. I try Maj’s phone again as I drive by his house, but it’s still turned off. Driving through the roads of my old neighborhood I am reminded of our last months here before we moved, just before I turned thirteen. Those months following my father’s death nearly killed Teta. She spent most of it in her room, emerging only to go to the toilet or refill her jug of water. Ever since my mother left I had wanted to die, so at the time I had felt that at the very least Baba’s death brought Teta and me to the same level of mourning.

  We did not speak of his death at the time. The only way to understand the implications of his absence was in the facial expressions of teachers, classmates, and old family friends. Like a detective, I stole glances through doors and windows, hoping to catch Teta in an unguarded moment. More often than not all I caught were glimpses of her putting on her creams and makeup, or the sound of her blow-drying her hair. Every now and then I would catch her staring out a window or at the photos of Baba that increasingly cluttered her bedside table.

  For the first few months after Baba’s death Teta put into me what she could no longer put into her son. All the food I craved, she cooked. She rubbed arrack on my belly when I had an upset stomach and shoved spoonfuls of tahini down my throat when I woke up with a neighing cough. I was the last thing she had left. I was not just her grandson now. I was also her son and her husband.

  This did not last long. Soon enough I was back inside the citadel of Teta’s rules. “Don’t walk barefoot on the cold floor or you’ll get diarrhea. Don’t turn the television off if you see me sleeping on the sofa, it will wake me up and I won’t be able to fall asleep again, and God help you if I lose my afternoon nap because it will disrupt my sleeping schedule for weeks. Don’t greet the guests in your pajamas. Use the same damn glass for drinking water, you don’t need to use a new one every time. What are you a prince? Just put the glass on top of the water cooler so you won’t forget you’ve used it. Be a man. Don’t eat rice after eight, your stomach doesn’t work in your sleep and you’ll have indigestion in the morning.”

  The week before school began that year I decided I would run away. There was nothing left for me at home, and I needed to find my mother. Unlike Teta, my mother might be able to speak to me about Baba’s death, to answer difficult questions and explore uncomfortable subjects, with no regard for shame. I felt certain that the best way to find her would be to do as she had done and simply walk out the door, and I would naturally find myself following in her footsteps.

  When Teta went into her bedroom for her afternoon nap, I carefully packed a bag with things I might need for my journey. I put in my pla
stic water bottle, a banana, two books, my Discman and a couple of CDs, a box of Band-Aids, a spare T-shirt, and my favorite sandwich — halawa in pita bread microwaved for exactly thirty seconds until the halawa was soft and melted. When Teta’s snores drifted down the hall, I tiptoed to the front door and quietly let myself out.

  Outside, I took a left and walked down the road, sprinting past the giant monstrosity of Omar’s house before anyone could see me. At the end of our street I took a right and walked in the direction of the supermarket. The late-summer sun was beating down on me. It would be a good investment to buy a Slush Puppie to cool me down, I thought, stepping into the shop.

  Slush Puppie in hand, I walked toward the main traffic light. The road widened and eventually would merge with the highway leading downtown, then on to al-Sharqiyeh. It wouldn’t be easy to walk down the highway, but if I stayed close to the edge I’d be fine. As the highway came into view, a terrible loneliness overcame me like vertigo. At home Teta and I had grieved, but it was only out in the quiet, leafy streets that I realized how on my own I was. I was free, yes, but I was also terribly alone in my freedom. And what would Teta do when she woke up and realized I was no longer there? There would be no going back. If she were to know I had tried to run away she would never forgive me.

  I sat on the sidewalk and peeled my banana as I contemplated my options. Even though my mother had always been the one I could talk to, she was never a good listener. This was not for lack of trying. In fact, she always tried to listen, but her mind could never focus for too long, or else she would push her own thoughts into my head, taking my words and twisting them to suit her mood. Still, I could talk to her more than I could talk to Teta. With Teta there was little to be discussed apart from whether I was getting good enough grades, what I would study at university, and what I would name my firstborn.

  On the other hand, my mother had walked out the front door two years ago and had not been in touch since. Teta — stoic, reliable, and oppressive — had always been by my side. Mama was as loving as she was unpredictable. How could I be sure she would not leave me again, this time to die? Besides, I had already spent most of my money on a Slush Puppie, had already eaten my only banana, and I had only been gone for half an hour. What would I do this evening, or tomorrow, or the day after that? But to return to Teta’s house with its oppressive silences would be a different sort of death …

  Teta was still in her room when I came back. A cool breeze flowed through the house and down the hall. I walked to my room. The door to Teta’s bedroom was ajar. Peering through the crack, I saw Teta sitting on her bed. She was in the process of dressing herself. Her large breasts hung down until they touched the tips of the light brown gain, an old body shaper she wore to push in the bulge of her stomach. Teta always wore her gain, long after it had been replaced by more effective corsets. She wore it as a uniform, paired with a light sweater and a fifties pencil skirt. Her hair, which she washed once a week, was always blow-dried into a tidy bob, her roots dyed monthly since the eighties to maintain that golden sheen.

  There she was, sitting on the bed, the silky fabric of her gain stretching across her rounded stomach. I watched her study her hands thoughtfully. I was about to turn away when she looked up. She caught my gaze, and in her eyes was a flash of panic. Or maybe it was vulnerability? Whatever it was, I ran to my bedroom and shut the door. I stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. When I emerged in the early evening, we sat down for dinner and did not speak. After that Teta made sure to lock her bedroom door before removing her mask.

  All at once I am aware that I am driving by the old supermarket. I park Nawaf’s car, go inside, and buy an orange-flavored Slush Puppie, and walk through the fields of asphalt toward where our old house used to be. On the way, I see what was once Omar’s enormous villa. It’s now a gym and fitness center. On the top floor a number of women run on treadmills. A few months before graduation, news spread that Omar’s father was implicated in a corruption scandal. In response he had taken all he could and fled the country. Omar’s now somewhere in Europe, making films. His father apparently lives on a yacht on the Mediterranean Sea. I suppose he might still be there, on his yacht.

  Our house was one of a number of houses that have been torn down and replaced with a glitzy shopping complex. This does not make me sad. Rather, I feel an inevitable emptiness. I take a seat across from the shopping complex, on a bench under a leafy orange tree. I enjoy the shade and watch the chic-looking women in oversized sunglasses, shopping bags hanging from their elbows, their high heels clicking on the paved road as they complain about the departure times of flights to London. I catch snippets of conversation around me, pleasant, meandering, pointless. After a while the calmness begins to annoy me, the voices grate on my nerves.

  In a café next door, a young couple is having lunch in the sun. The man, dressed in a smart business suit, is telling a story while the woman, picking at a quinoa and feta salad, listens intently. At the punch line, she throws her hands in the air and lets out a boisterous laugh. Bits of quinoa from her fork fly in the air behind her, landing a few feet away. Two pigeons immediately descend on the crumbs.

  The sun’s burning rays on the ground and trees, combined with the fruity smell of the Slush Puppie, create a familiar perfume that brings back more memories of my childhood. Suddenly I feel like I am back there myself, as if it was only yesterday that I was twelve years old and had just lost my father.

  His death changed everything. I was now the man of the house and completely unprepared. Alongside this, other feelings began to creep up on me, dangerous feelings that challenged Teta’s rules. On the outside you couldn’t tell what was happening. But in private I created a secret cage in my mind where I stored these dark thoughts. Like birds, I captured them as they flew by and put them in my cage for a time when I may need them. In that cage I stored secrets I could not so much as whisper to myself, for fear they might escape into the world. They were free to roam in the cage but unable to escape, lest they be discovered by Teta. With no words and no diagnosis, I could neither understand nor treat my symptoms. My dreadful misfortune remained nameless. Until George Michael.

  “British pop star George Michael, formerly a member of the hit duo Wham!, revealed to the world that he is gay on Friday night during a CNN interview,” a blond woman on the television announced one evening in that cheerful American voice, as I lay on the living-room carpet doing homework. “It was the thirty-four-year-old singer’s first interview since his arrest for allegedly engaging in a lewd act in a Beverly Hills park restroom.”

  Gay. That’s the word, I thought. Suddenly everything was clear. I checked to make sure Teta was still busy cooking dinner in the kitchen, and then inched toward the television to get a closer look. I wanted to take it all in, to study the screen like it held the secret to my survival.

  “I don’t feel any shame,” Michael was now saying on television, his face obscured by large black sunglasses. “I feel stupid and reckless and weak for having allowed my sexuality to be exposed this way. But I do not feel any shame.”

  I got up and went to the bathroom. I turned the faucets on to let the water drown out any noise and stared at my reflection in the mirror. When I gained the courage I mouthed, then, ever so softly, whispered two words to my reflection: “I’m gay.”

  As the words rolled off my tongue I watched the way my mouth moved to see how the phrase fit. I said it again and again. Sometimes I was distracted by my own reflection, by my teeth, or by a smudge on the glass mirror. My mind momentarily turned to Doris and whether Teta would yell at her for not cleaning the mirror well enough. But my thoughts inevitably refocused on the contours of my mouth and how it moved when I spoke those two words, what the reverberations of my breath felt like against my lips, how the words fogged the mirror as I exhaled, warping my reflection. I said those two words in the lowest of whispers so that I could barely hear myself. I said them first as a question, then as a statement, and finally as a sad sigh.


  I’m gay.

  There was a release in the first time I said it, the first time I had put those thoughts and feelings into words and let them escape from the secret cage. It was not yet a confirmation. But it was the beginning, the teasing out of the possibility of what my strange affliction might be.

  I was different from everyone else.

  I was doomed to be alone.

  I was going to spend eternity rotting in hell.

  But the word gay wasn’t good enough. It was too far away, too intangible. Other than George Michael, there did not seem to be a whiff of gay in the air. Did this disease not exist here? How had I become contaminated? Had all the American television I watched infected me with gay? The word, destined to be confined to foreign lands and chance headlines in English newspapers, seemed to be both a fantasy and also wholly unsuitable to my life, an otherworldly identity that jarred with who I was.

  I collected similar words, trying them all out in the bathroom mirror to see how they fit. The bathroom became my favorite room in our new apartment. Heavy blue tiles decorated the walls, and apart from a small fan in the corner that looked out onto the alley below, there were no windows into the outside world. It was contained, enclosed, controllable. I spent hours in there, or as long as I could get away with before Teta began banging on the door. I feigned constipation and was consequently stuffed with prunes and yogurt, but it was worth it.

  The first word I came across was in religion class. On normal days the class would degenerate into a question-and-answer session that consisted of our teacher giving bored pronouncements on whether things were haram (plastic surgery: not haram if for medical reasons; going to the gym: haram, one should not distort the body Allah gave you; oral sex: haram, but it’s complicated and she wasn’t going to discuss it).

  One day someone from the president’s office was visiting the class so the teacher was forced to give us a lecture. She told us the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose sins — which included homosexuality — had called down the vengeance of God, who punished them by raining fire on the cities. God ordered the Prophet Lot to escape and never look back. But as Lot and his wife escaped, his wife took one last look at Sodom and immediately turned into a pillar of salt.