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Pick one or two sentences to analyze from Chapter 1of Exit West. What do the sentences mean? What is the context for the sentences? What assumptions or implications are there? Why did you choose these sentences to focus on?

ALSO BY MOHSIN HAMID

NOVELS

Moth Smoke

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

ESSAYS

Discontent and Its Civilizations

RIVERHEAD BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014

Copyright

© 2017 by Mohsin Hamid
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices,

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Ebook ISBN: 9780735212183

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hamid, Mohsin, author.
Title: Exit west : a novel / Mohsin Hamid.

Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036296 | ISBN 9780735212176 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Refugees—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Political. | FICTION / Cultural
Heritage. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Love stories.

Classification: LCC PS3558.A42169 E95 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036296

p. cm.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely

coincidental.

Version_1

FOR NAVED AND NASIM

CON

TEN

TS

Also by Mohsin Hamid

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

CHAPTER

ONE

CHAPTER

TWO

CHAPTER

THREE

CHAPTER

FOUR

CHAPTER

FIVE

CHAPTER

SIX

CHAPTER

SEVEN

CHAPTER

EIGHT

CHAPTER

NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

CHAPTER

TWELVE

About the Author

ONE

IN A CITY SWOLLEN BY REFUGEES but still mostly at peace, or at
least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman

in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His
name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not
a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she
was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of
her jugular notch in a flowing black robe. Back then people
continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what
they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain
bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of
the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an
evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but
that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one
moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the
next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does
not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until
the instant when it does.

Saeed noticed that Nadia had a beauty mark on her neck, a
tawny oval that sometimes, rarely but not never, moved with
her pulse.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NOT LONG AFTER NOTICING THIS, Saeed spoke to Nadia for the first
time. Their city had yet to experience any major fighting,
just some shootings and the odd car bombing, felt in one’s
chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by
large loudspeakers at music concerts, and Saeed and Nadia had
packed up their books and were leaving class.

In the stairwell he turned to her and said, “Listen,
would you like to have a coffee,” and after a brief pause
added, to make it seem less forward, given her conservative
attire, “in the cafeteria?”

Nadia looked him in the eye. “You don’t say your evening
prayers?” she asked.

Saeed conjured up his most endearing grin. “Not always.
Sadly.”

Her expression did not change.
So he persevered, clinging to his grin with the mounting

desperation of a doomed rock climber: “I think it’s
personal. Each of us has his own way. Or . . . her own
way. Nobody’s perfect. And, in any case—”

She interrupted him. “I don’t pray,” she said.
She continued to gaze at him steadily.
Then she said, “Maybe another time.”
He watched as she walked out to the student parking area

and there, instead of covering her head with a black cloth,
as he expected, she donned a black motorcycle helmet that had
been locked to a scuffed-up hundred-ish cc trail bike,
snapped down her visor, straddled her ride, and rode off,
disappearing with a controlled rumble into the gathering
dusk.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE NEXT DAY, at work, Saeed found himself unable to stop
thinking of Nadia. Saeed’s employer was an agency that
specialized in the placement of outdoor advertising. They
owned billboards all around the city, rented others, and
struck deals for further space with the likes of bus lines,
sports stadiums, and proprietors of tall buildings.

The agency occupied both floors of a converted townhouse
and had over a dozen employees. Saeed was among the most
junior, but his boss liked him and had tasked him with
turning around a pitch to a local soap company that had to go
out by email before five. Normally Saeed tried to do copious

amounts of online research and customize his presentations as
much as possible. “It’s not a story if it doesn’t have an
audience,” his boss was fond of saying, and for Saeed this
meant trying to show a client that his firm truly understood
their business, could really get under their skin and see
things from their point of view.

But today, even though the pitch was important—every
pitch was important: the economy was sluggish from mounting
unrest and one of the first costs clients seemed to want to
cut was outdoor advertising—Saeed couldn’t focus. A large
tree, overgrown and untrimmed, reared up from the tiny back
lawn of his firm’s townhouse, blocking out the sunlight in
such a manner that the back lawn had been reduced mostly to
dirt and a few wisps of grass, interspersed with a morning’s
worth of cigarette butts, for his boss had banned people from
smoking indoors, and atop this tree Saeed had spotted a hawk
constructing its nest. It worked tirelessly. Sometimes it
floated at eye level, almost stationary in the wind, and
then, with the tiniest movement of a wing, or even of the
upturned feathers at one wingtip, it veered.

Saeed thought of Nadia and watched the hawk.
When he was at last running out of time he scrambled to

prepare the pitch, copying and pasting from others he had
done before. Only a smattering of the images he selected had
anything particularly to do with soap. He took a draft to his
boss and suppressed a wince while sliding it over.

But his boss seemed preoccupied and didn’t notice. He
just jotted some minor edits on the printout, handed it back
to Saeed with a wistful smile, and said, “Send it out.”

Something about his expression made Saeed feel sorry for
him. He wished he had done a better job.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AS SAEED’S EMAIL was being downloaded from a server and read
by his client, far away in Australia a pale-skinned woman was
sleeping alone in the Sydney neighborhood of Surry Hills. Her

husband was in Perth on business. The woman wore only a long
T-shirt, one of his, and a wedding ring. Her torso and left
leg were covered by a sheet even paler than she was; her
right leg and right hip were bare. On her right ankle,
perched in the dip of her Achilles tendon, was the blue
tattoo of a small mythological bird.

Her home was alarmed, but the alarm was not active. It had
been installed by previous occupants, by others who had once
called this place home, before the phenomenon referred to as
the gentrification of this neighborhood had run as far as it
had now run. The sleeping woman used the alarm only
sporadically, mostly when her husband was absent, but on this
night she had forgotten. Her bedroom window, four meters
above the ground, was open, just a slit.

In the drawer of her bedside table were a half-full packet
of birth control pills, last consumed three months ago, when
she and her husband were still trying not to conceive,
passports, checkbooks, receipts, coins, keys, a pair of
handcuffs, and a few paper-wrapped sticks of unchewed chewing
gum.

The door to her closet was open. Her room was bathed in
the glow of her computer charger and wireless router, but the
closet doorway was dark, darker than night, a rectangle of
complete darkness—the heart of darkness. And out of this
darkness, a man was emerging.

He too was dark, with dark skin and dark, woolly hair. He
wriggled with great effort, his hands gripping either side of
the doorway as though pulling himself up against gravity, or
against the rush of a monstrous tide. His neck followed his
head, tendons straining, and then his chest, his half-
unbuttoned, sweaty, gray-and-brown shirt. Suddenly he paused
in his exertions. He looked around the room. He looked at the
sleeping woman, the shut bedroom door, the open window. He
rallied himself again, fighting mightily to come in, but in
desperate silence, the silence of a man struggling in an
alley, on the ground, late at night, to free himself of hands

clenched around his throat. But there were no hands around
this man’s throat. He wished only not to be heard.

With a final push he was through, trembling and sliding to
the floor like a newborn foal. He lay still, spent. Tried not
to pant. He rose.

His eyes rolled terribly. Yes: terribly. Or perhaps not so
terribly. Perhaps they merely glanced about him, at the
woman, at the bed, at the room. Growing up in the not
infrequently perilous circumstances in which he had grown up,
he was aware of the fragility of his body. He knew how little
it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong
gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence
of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that
alone a person is almost nothing.

The woman who slept, slept alone. He who stood above her,
stood alone. The bedroom door was shut. The window was open.
He chose the window. He was through it in an instant,
dropping silkily to the street below.

•   â€¢   â€¢

WHILE THIS INCIDENT was occurring in Australia, Saeed was
picking up fresh bread for dinner and heading home. He was an
independent-minded, grown man, unmarried, with a decent post
and a good education, and as was the case in those days in
his city with most independent-minded, grown men, unmarried,
with decent posts and good educations, he lived with his
parents.

Saeed’s mother had the commanding air of a schoolteacher,
which she formerly was, and his father the slightly lost
bearing of a university professor, which he continued to be—
though on reduced wages, for he was past the official
retirement age and had been forced to seek out visiting
faculty work. Both of Saeed’s parents, the better part of a
lifetime ago, had chosen respectable professions in a country
that would wind up doing rather badly by its respectable
professionals. Security and status were to be found only in

other, quite different pursuits. Saeed had been born to them
late, so late that his mother had believed her doctor was
being cheeky when he asked if she thought she was pregnant.

Their small flat was in a once handsome building, with an
ornate though now crumbling facade that dated back to the
colonial era, in a once upscale, presently crowded and
commercial, part of town. It had been partitioned from a much
larger flat and comprised three rooms: two modest bedrooms
and a third chamber they used for sitting, dining,
entertaining, and watching television. This third chamber was
also modest in size but had tall windows and a usable, if
narrow, balcony, with a view down an alley and straight up a
boulevard to a dry fountain that once gushed and sparkled in
the sunlight. It was the sort of view that might command a
slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but
would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would
be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire
as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like
staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location,
location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the
historians.

War would soon erode the facade of their building as
though it had accelerated time itself, a day’s toll
outpacing that of a decade.

•   â€¢   â€¢

WHEN SAEED’S PARENTS FIRST MET they were the same age as were
Saeed and Nadia when they first did. The elder pair’s was a
love marriage, a marriage between strangers not arranged by
their families, which, in their circles, while not
unprecedented, was still less than common.

They met at the cinema, during the intermission of a film
about a resourceful princess. Saeed’s mother spied his
father having a cigarette and was struck by his similarity to
the male lead in the movie. This similarity was not entirely
accidental: though a little shy and very bookish, Saeed’s

father styled himself after the popular film stars and
musicians of his day, as did most of his friends. But
Saeed’s father’s myopia combined with his personality to
give him an expression that was genuinely dreamy, and this,
understandably, resulted in Saeed’s mother thinking he not
merely looked the part, but embodied it. She decided to make
her approach.

Standing in front of Saeed’s father she proceeded to talk
animatedly with a friend while ignoring the object of her
desire. He noticed her. He listened to her. He summoned the
nerve to speak to her. And that, as they were both fond of
saying when recounting the story of their meeting in
subsequent years, was that.

Saeed’s mother and father were both readers, and, in
different ways, debaters, and they were frequently to be seen
in the early days of their romance meeting surreptitiously in
bookshops. Later, after their marriage, they would while away
afternoons reading together in cafés and restaurants, or,
when the weather was suitable, on their balcony. He smoked
and she said she didn’t, but often, when the ash of his
seemingly forgotten cigarette grew impossibly extended, she
took it from his fingers, trimmed it softly against an
ashtray, and pulled a long and rather rakish drag before
returning it, daintily.

The cinema where Saeed’s parents met was long gone by the
time their son met Nadia, as were the bookshops they favored
and most of their beloved restaurants and cafés. It was not
that cinemas and bookshops, restaurants and cafés had
vanished from the city, just that many of those that had been
there before were there no longer. The cinema they remembered
so fondly had been replaced by a shopping arcade for
computers and electronic peripherals. This building had taken
the same name as the cinema that preceded it: both once had
the same owner, and the cinema had been so famous as to have
become a byword for that locality. When walking by the
arcade, and seeing that old name on its new neon sign,

sometimes Saeed’s father, sometimes Saeed’s mother, would
remember, and smile. Or remember, and pause.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED’S PARENTS did not have sex until their wedding night. Of
the two, Saeed’s mother found it more uncomfortable, but she
was also the more keen, and so she insisted on repeating the
act twice more before dawn. For many years, their balance
remained thus. Generally speaking, she was voracious in bed.
Generally speaking, he was obliging. Perhaps because she did
not, until Saeed’s conception two decades later, get
pregnant, and assumed therefore she could not, she was able
to have sex with abandon, without, that is, thought of
consequences or the distractions of child-rearing. Meanwhile
his typical manner, throughout the first half of their
marriage, at her strenuous advances, was that of a man
pleasantly surprised. She found mustaches and being taken
from behind erotic. He found her carnal and motivating.

After Saeed was born, the frequency with which his parents
had sex dipped notably, and it continued to decline going
forward. A uterus began to prolapse, an erection became
harder to maintain. During this phase, Saeed’s father
started to be cast, or to cast himself, more and more often,
as the one who tried to initiate sex. Saeed’s mother would
sometimes wonder whether he did this out of genuine desire or
habit or simply for closeness. She tried her best to respond.
He would eventually come to be rebuffed by his own body at
least as much as by hers.

In the last year of the life they shared together, the
year that was already well under way when Saeed met Nadia,
they had sex only thrice. As many times in a year as on their
wedding night. But his father always kept a mustache, at his
mother’s insistence. And they never once changed their bed:
its headboard like the posts of a banister, almost demanding
to be gripped.

•   â€¢   â€¢

IN WHAT SAEED’S FAMILY called their living room there was a
telescope, black and sleek. It had been given to Saeed’s
father by his father, and Saeed’s father had given it in
turn to Saeed, but since Saeed still lived at home, this
meant the telescope continued to sit where it always sat, on
its tripod in a corner, underneath an intricate clipper ship
that sailed inside a glass bottle on the sea of a triangular
shelf.

The sky above their city had become too polluted for much
in the way of stargazing. But on cloudless nights after a
daytime rain, Saeed’s father would sometimes bring out the
telescope, and the family would sip green tea on their
balcony, enjoying a breeze, and take turns to look up at
objects whose light, often, had been emitted before any of
these three viewers had been born—light from other
centuries, only now reaching Earth. Saeed’s father called
this time-travel.

On one particular night, though, in fact the night after
he had struggled to prepare his firm’s pitch to the soap
company, Saeed was absentmindedly scanning along a trajectory
that ran below the horizon. In his eyepiece were windows and
walls and rooftops, sometimes stationary, sometimes whizzing
by at incredible speed.

“I think he’s looking at young ladies,” Saeed’s father
said to his mother.

“Behave yourself, Saeed,” said his mother.
“Well, he is your son.”
“I never needed a telescope.”
“Yes, you preferred to operate short-range.”
Saeed shook his head and tacked upward.
“I see Mars,” he said. And indeed he did. The second-

nearest planet, its features indistinct, the color of a
sunset after a dust storm.

Saeed straightened and held up his phone, directing its
camera at the heavens, consulting an application that

indicated the names of celestial bodies he did not know. The
Mars it showed was more detailed as well, though it was of
course a Mars from another moment, a bygone Mars, fixed in
memory by the application’s creator.

In the distance Saeed’s family heard the sound of
automatic gunfire, flat cracks that were not loud and yet
carried to them cleanly. They sat a little longer. Then
Saeed’s mother suggested they return inside.

•   â€¢   â€¢

WHEN SAEED AND NADIA finally had coffee together in the
cafeteria, which happened the following week, after the very
next session of their class, Saeed asked her about her
conservative and virtually all-concealing black robe.

“If you don’t pray,” he said, lowering his voice, “why
do you wear it?”

They were sitting at a table for two by a window,
overlooking snarled traffic on the street below. Their phones
rested screens-down between them, like the weapons of
desperadoes at a parley.

She smiled. Took a sip. And spoke, the lower half of her
face obscured by her cup.

“So men don’t fuck with me,” she said.

TWO

WHEN NADIA WAS A CHILD, her favorite subject was art, even
though art was taught only once a week and she did not

consider herself particularly talented as an artist. She had
gone to a school that emphasized rote memorization, for which
she was by temperament particularly ill-suited, and so she
spent a great deal of time doodling in the margins of her
textbooks and notebooks, hunched over to hide curlicues and
miniature woodland universes from the eyes of her teachers.
If they caught her, she would get a scolding, or occasionally
a slap on the back of the head.

The art in Nadia’s childhood home consisted of religious
verses and photos of holy sites, framed and mounted on walls.
Nadia’s mother and sister were quiet women and her father a
man who tried to be quiet, thinking this a virtue, but who
nonetheless came to a boil easily and often where Nadia was
concerned. Her constant questioning and growing irreverence
in matters of faith upset and frightened him. There was no
physical violence in Nadia’s home, and much giving to
charity, but when after finishing university Nadia announced,
to her family’s utter horror, and to her own surprise for
she had not planned to say it, that she was moving out on her
own, an unmarried woman, the break involved hard words on all
sides, from her father, from her mother, even more so from
her sister, and perhaps most of all from Nadia herself, such
that Nadia and her family both considered her thereafter to
be without a family, something all of them, all four, for the
rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would
ever act to repair, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of
bafflement at how to go about doing so, and partly because

the impending descent of their city into the abyss would come
before they realized that they had lost the chance.

Nadia’s experiences during her first months as a single
woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even
surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family
had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance
company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did.
She secured a room of her own atop the house of a widow, a
record player and small collection of vinyl, a circle of
acquaintances among the city’s free spirits, and a
connection to a discreet and nonjudgmental female
gynecologist. She learned how to dress for self-protection,
how best to deal with aggressive men and with the police, and
with aggressive men who were the police, and always to trust
her instincts about situations to avoid or to exit
immediately.

But sitting at her desk at the insurance company, on an
afternoon of handling executive auto policy renewals by
phone, when she received an instant message from Saeed asking
if she would like to meet, her work posture was still hunched
over, as it had been when she was a schoolgirl, and she was
still doodling, as always, in the margins of the printouts
before her.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THEY MET at a Chinese restaurant of Nadia’s choosing, this
not being a class night. The family that used to run the
place, after arriving in the city following the Second World
War, and flourishing there for three generations, had
recently sold up and emigrated to Canada. But prices remained
reasonable, and the standard of food had not yet fallen. The
dining area had a darkened, opium-den ambience, in contrast
to other Chinese restaurants in the city. It was
distinctively lit by what looked like candle-filled paper
lanterns, but were in fact plastic, illuminated by flame-
shaped, electronically flickering bulbs.

Nadia arrived first and watched Saeed enter and walk to
her table. He had, as he often did, an amused expression in
his bright eyes, not mocking, but as though he saw the humor
in things, and this in turn amused her and made her warm to
him. She resisted smiling, knowing it would not be long for
him to smile, and indeed he smiled before reaching the table,
and his smile was then returned.

“I like it,” he said, indicating their surroundings.
“Sort of mysterious. Like we could be anywhere. Well, not
anywhere, but not here.”

“Have you ever traveled abroad?”
He shook his head. “I want to.”
“Me too.”
“Where would you go?”
She considered him for a while. “Cuba.”
“Cuba! Why?”
“I don’t know. It makes me think of music and beautiful

old buildings and the sea.”
“Sounds perfect.”
“And you? Where would you pick? One place.”
“Chile.”
“So we both want to go to Latin America.”
He grinned. “The Atacama Desert. The air is so dry, so

clear, and there’s so few people, almost no lights. And you
can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All
the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them
slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like
you’re lying on a giant spinning ball in space.”

Nadia watched Saeed’s features. In that moment they were
tinged with wonder, and he looked, despite his stubble, boy-
like. He struck her as a strange sort of man. A strange and
attractive sort of man.

Their waiter came to take their order. Neither Nadia nor
Saeed chose a soft drink, preferring tea and water, and when
their food arrived neither used chopsticks, both being, at
least while under observation, more confident of their skills
with a fork instead. Despite initial instances of

awkwardness, or rather of disguised shyness, they found it
mostly easy to talk to one another, which always comes as
something of a relief on a first proper date. They spoke
quietly, cautious not to attract the attention of nearby
diners. Their meal was finished too soon.

They next faced the problem that confronted all young
people in the city who wanted to continue in one another’s
company past a certain hour. During the day there were parks,
and campuses, and restaurants, cafés. But at night, after
dinner, unless one had access to a home where such things
were safe and permitted, or had a car, there were few places
to be alone. Saeed’s family had a car, but it was being
repaired, and so he had come by scooter. And Nadia had a
home, but it was tricky, in more ways than one, to have a man
over.

Still, she decided to invite him.
Saeed seemed surprised and extremely excited when she

suggested he come.
“Nothing is going to happen,” she explained. “I want to

make that clear. When I say you should come over, I’m not
saying I want your hands on me.”

“No. Of course.”
Saeed’s expression had grown traumatized.
But Nadia nodded. And while her eyes were warm, she did

not smile.

•   â€¢   â€¢

REFUGEES HAD OCCUPIED many of the open places in the city,
pitching tents in the greenbelts between roads, erecting
lean-tos next to the boundary walls of houses, sleeping rough
on sidewalks and in the margins of streets. Some seemed to be
trying to re-create the rhythms of a normal life, as though
it were completely natural to be residing, a family of four,
under a sheet of plastic propped up with branches and a few
chipped bricks. Others stared out at the city with what
looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy.

Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resting.
Possibly dying. Saeed and Nadia had to be careful when making
turns not to run over an outstretched arm or leg.

As she nosed her motorcycle home, followed by Saeed on his
scooter, Nadia did have several moments of questioning
whether she had done the right thing. But she didn’t change
her mind.

There were two checkpoints on their way, one manned by
police and another, newer one, manned by soldiers. The police
didn’t bother with them. The soldiers stopped everyone. They
made Nadia remove her helmet, perhaps thinking she might be a
man disguised as a woman, but when they saw this was not the
case, they waved her through.

Nadia rented the top portion of a narrow building
belonging to a widow whose children and grandchildren all
lived abroad. This building had once been a single house, but
it was constructed adjacent to a market that had subsequently
grown past and around it. The widow had kept the middle floor
for herself, converted the bottom floor into a shop that she
let out to a seller of car-battery-based residential-power-
backup systems, and given the uppermost floor to Nadia, who
had overcome the widow’s initial suspicions by claiming that
she too was a widow, her husband a young infantry officer
killed in battle, which, admittedly, was less than entirely
true.

Nadia’s flat comprised a studio room with an alcove
kitchenette and a bathroom so small that showering without
drenching the commode was impossible. But it opened onto a
roof terrace that looked out over the market and was, when
the electricity had not gone out, bathed in the soft and
shimmying glow of a large, animated neon sign that towered
nearby in the service of a zero-calorie carbonated beverage.

Nadia told Saeed to wait at a short distance, in a
darkened alley around the corner, while she unlocked a metal
grill door and entered the building alone. Once upstairs she
threw a quilt over her bed and pushed her dirty clothes into

the closet. She filled a small shopping bag, paused another
minute, and dropped it out a window.

The bag landed beside Saeed with a muffled thump. He
opened it, found her spare downstairs key, and also one of
her black robes, which he furtively pulled on over his own
outfit, covering his head with its hood, and then, with a
mincing gait that reminded her of a stage-play robber, he
approached the front door, unlocked it, and a minute later
appeared at her apartment, where she motioned him to sit.

Nadia selected a record, an album sung by a long-dead
woman who was once an icon of a style that in her American
homeland was quite justifiably called soul, her so-alive but
no longer living voice conjuring up from the past a third
presence in a room that presently contained only two, and
asked Saeed if he would like a joint, to which he fortunately
said yes, and which he offered to roll.

•   â€¢   â€¢

WHILE NADIA AND SAEED were sharing their first spliff together,
in the Tokyo district of Shinjuku where midnight had already
come and gone, and so, technically, the next day had already
commenced, a young man was nursing a drink for which he had
not paid and yet to which he was entitled. His whiskey came
from Ireland, a place he had never been to but evinced a mild
fondness for, perhaps because Ireland was like the Shikoku of
a parallel universe, not dissimilar in shape, and likewise
slung on the ocean-ward side of a larger island at one end of
the vast Eurasian landmass, or perhaps because of an Irish
gangster film he had gone to see repeatedly in his still-
impressionable youth.

The man wore a suit and a crisp white shirt and therefore
any tattoos he had or did not have on his arms would not be
visible. He was stocky but, when he got to his feet, elegant
in his movements. His eyes were sober, flat, despite the
drink, and not eyes that attracted the eyes of others. Gazes
leapt away from his gaze, as they might among packs of dogs

in the wild, in which a hierarchy is set by some sensed
quality of violent potential.

Outside the bar he lit a cigarette. The street was bright
from illuminated signage but relatively quiet. A pair of
drunk salarymen passed him at a safe distance, then an off-
the-clock club hostess, taking quick steps and staring at the
pavement. The clouds above Tokyo hung low, reflecting dull
red back at the city, but a breeze was now blowing, he felt
it on his skin and in his hair, a sense of brine and slight
chill. He held the smoke in his lungs and released it slowly.
It disappeared in the wind’s flow.

He was surprised to hear a noise behind him, because the
alley to his rear was a cul-de-sac and empty when he came
outside. He had examined it, out of habit and quickly, but
not carelessly, before turning his back. Now there were two
Filipina girls, in their late teens, neither probably yet
twenty, standing beside a disused door to the rear of the
bar, a door that was always kept locked, but was in this
moment somehow open, a portal of complete blackness, as
though no light were on inside, almost as though no light
could penetrate inside. The girls were dressed strangely, in
clothing that was too thin, tropical, not the kind of
clothing you normally saw Filipinas wear in Tokyo, or anyone
else at this time of year. One of them had knocked over an
empty beer bottle. It was rolling, high-pitched, in a
scurrying arc away.

They did not look at him. He had the feeling they did not
know what to make of him. They spoke in hushed tones as they
passed, their words unintelligible, but recognized by him as
Tagalog. They seemed emotional: perhaps excited, perhaps
frightened, perhaps both—in any case, the man thought, with
women it was difficult to tell. They were in his territory.
Not the first time this week that he had seen a group of
Filipinos who seemed oddly clueless in his bit of town. He
disliked Filipinos. They had their place, but they had to
know their place. There had been a half-Filipino boy in his
junior high school class whom he had beaten often, once so

badly that he would have been expelled, had someone been
willing to say who had done it.

He watched the girls walk. Considered.
And slipped into a walk behind them, fingering the metal

in his pocket as he went.

•   â€¢   â€¢

IN TIMES OF VIOLENCE, there is always that first acquaintance or
intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had
seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real. For
Nadia this person was her cousin, a man of considerable
determination and intellect, who even when he was young had
never cared much for play, who seemed to laugh only rarely,
who had won medals in school and decided to become a doctor,
who had successfully emigrated abroad, who returned once a
year to visit his parents, and who, along with eighty-five
others, was blown by a truck bomb to bits, literally to bits,
the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head
and two-thirds of an arm.

Nadia did not hear of her cousin’s death in time to
attend the funeral, and she did not visit her relatives, not
for lack of emotion but because she wanted to avoid being the
cause of unpleasantness. She had planned to go to the
graveyard alone, but Saeed had called her and asked through
her silences what was the matter, and she had somehow told
him, and he had offered to join her, insisted without
insisting, which strangely came as a kind of relief. So they
went together, very early the following morning, and saw the
rounded mound of fresh earth, garlanded with flowers, above
her cousin’s partial remains. Saeed stood and prayed. Nadia
did not offer a prayer, or scatter rose petals, but knelt
down and put her hand on the mound, damp from the recent
visit of a grave-tender with a watering can, and shut her
eyes for a long while, as the sound of a jetliner descending
to the nearby airport came and went.

They had breakfast at a café, coffee and some bread with
butter and jam, and she spoke, but not of her cousin, and
Saeed seemed very present, comfortable being there on that
unusual morning, with her not talking of what was most of
consequence, and she felt things change between them, become
more solid, in a way. Then Nadia went to the insurance
company that employed her, handled fleet policies until
lunch. Her tone was steady and businesslike. The callers she
dealt with only rarely said words that were inappropriate. Or
asked her for her personal number. Which, when they did, she
would not give.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA HAD BEEN SEEING a musician for some time. They had met at
an underground concert, more a jam session really, with
perhaps fifty or sixty people crammed into the soundproofed
premises of a recording studio that specialized increasingly
in audio work for television—the local music business being,
for reasons of both security and piracy, in rather difficult
straits. She had, as was by then usual for her, been wearing
her black robe, closed to her neck, and he had, as was by
then usual for him, been wearing a size-too-small white T-
shirt, pinned to his lean chest and stomach, and she had
watched him and he had circled her, and they had gone to his
place that night, and she had shuffled off the weight of her
virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss.

They rarely spoke on the telephone and met only
sporadically, and she suspected he had many other women. She
did not want to inquire. She appreciated his comfort with his
own body, and his wanton attitude to hers, and the rhythm and
strum of his touch, and his beauty, his animal beauty, and
the pleasure he evoked in her. She thought she mattered
little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician
was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she
supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him
from asking more of her than she offered up. He berated

himself for this subsequently, but not too much, even though
after their last meeting he would not stop thinking of her
until his death, which was, though neither of them then knew
it, only a few short months away.

Nadia at first thought there was no need to say goodbye,
that saying goodbye involved a kind of presumption, but then
she felt a small sadness, and knew she needed to say goodbye,
not for him, for she doubted he would care, but for her. And
since they had little to say to one another by phone and
instant message seemed too impersonal, she decided to say it
in person, outdoors, in a public place, not at his messy,
musky apartment, where she trusted herself less, but when she
said it, he invited her up, “for one last time,” and she
intended to say no but actually said yes, and the sex they
had was passionate farewell sex, and it was, not
unsurprisingly, surprisingly good.

Later in life she would sometimes wonder what became of
him, and she would never know.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE FOLLOWING EVENING helicopters filled the sky like birds
startled by a gunshot, or by the blow of an axe at the base
of their tree. They rose, singly and in pairs, and fanned out
above the city in the reddening dusk, as the sun slipped
below the horizon, and the whir of their rotors echoed
through windows and down alleys, seemingly compressing the
air beneath them, as though each were mounted atop an
invisible column, an invisible breathable cylinder, these
odd, hawkish, mobile sculptures, some thin, with tandem
canopies, pilot and gunner at different heights, and some
fat, full of personnel, chopping, chopping through the
heavens.

Saeed watched them with his parents from their balcony.
Nadia watched them from her rooftop, alone.

Through an open door, a young soldier looked down upon
their city, a city not overly familiar to him, for he had

grown up in the countryside, and was struck by how big it
was, how grand its towers and lush its parks. The din around
him was incredible, and his belly lurched as he swerved.

THREE

NADIA AND SAEED WERE, back then, always in possession of their
phones. In their phones were antennas, and these antennas

sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that
was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to
places distant and near, and to places that had never been
and would never be. For many decades after independence a
telephone line in their city had remained a rare thing, the
waiting list for a connection long, the teams that installed
the copper wires and delivered the heavy handsets greeted and
revered and bribed like heroes. But now wands waved in the
city’s air, untethered and free, phones in the millions, and
a number could be obtained in minutes, for a pittance.

Saeed partly resisted the pull of his phone. He found the
antenna too powerful, the magic it summoned too mesmerizing,
as though he were eating a banquet of limitless food,
stuffing himself, stuffing himself, until he felt dazed and
sick, and so he had removed or hidden or restricted all but a
few applications. His phone could make calls. His phone could
send messages. His phone could take pictures, identify
celestial bodies, transform the city into a map while he
drove. But that was it. Mostly. Except for the hour each
evening that he enabled the browser on his phone and
disappeared down the byways of the internet. But this hour
was tightly regulated, and when it ended, a timer would set
off an alarm, a gentle, windy chime, as though from the
breezy planet of some blue-shimmering science fiction
priestess, and he would electronically lock away his browser
and not browse again on his phone until the following day.

Yet even this pared-back phone, this phone stripped of so
much of its potential, allowed him to access Nadia’s

separate existence, at first hesitantly, and then more
frequently, at any time of day or night, allowed him to start
to enter into her thoughts, as she toweled herself after a
shower, as she ate a light dinner alone, as she sat at her
desk hard at work, as she reclined on her toilet after
emptying her bladder. He made her laugh, once, then again,
and again, he made her skin burn and her breath shorten with
the surprised beginnings of arousal, he became present
without presence, and she did much the same to him. Soon a
rhythm was established, and it was thereafter rare that more
than a few waking hours would pass without contact between
them, and they found themselves in those early days of their
romance growing hungry, touching each other, but without
bodily adjacency, without release. They had begun, each of
them, to be penetrated, but they had not yet kissed.

In contrast to Saeed, Nadia saw no need to limit her
phone. It kept her company on long evenings, as it did
countless young people in the city who were likewise stranded
in their homes, and she rode it far out into the world on
otherwise solitary, stationary nights. She watched bombs
falling, women exercising, men copulating, clouds gathering,
waves tugging at the sand like the rasping licks of so many
mortal, temporary, vanishing tongues, tongues of a planet
that would one day too be no more.

Nadia frequently explored the terrain of social media,
though she left little trace of her passing, not posting much
herself, and employing opaque usernames and avatars, the
online equivalents of her black robes. It was through social
media that Nadia ordered the shrooms Saeed and she would eat
on the night they first became physically intimate, shrooms
still being available for cash-on-demand couriered delivery
in their city in those days. The police and anti-narcotic
agencies were focused on other, more market-leading
substances, and to the unsuspecting, fungi, whether
hallucinogenic or portobello, all seemed the same, and
innocuous enough, a fact exploited by a middle-aged local man
with a ponytail who ran a small side business that offered

rare ingredients for chefs and epicures, and yet was followed
and liked in cyberspace mostly by the young.

In a few months this ponytailed man would be beheaded,
nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort, his
headless body strung up by one ankle from an electricity
pylon where it swayed legs akimbo until the shoelace his
executioner used instead of rope rotted and gave way, no one
daring to cut him down before that.

But even now the city’s freewheeling virtual world stood
in stark contrast to the day-to-day lives of most people, to
those of young men, and especially of young women, and above
all of children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some
small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming
and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence
that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.

Online there was sex and security and plenty and glamour.
On the street, the day before Nadia’s shrooms arrived, there
was a burly man at the red light of a deserted late-night
intersection who turned to Nadia and greeted her, and when
she ignored him, began to swear at her, saying only a whore
would drive a motorcycle, didn’t she know it was obscene for
a woman to straddle a bike in that way, had she ever seen
anyone else doing it, who did she think she was, and swearing
with such ferocity that she thought he might attack her, as
she stood her ground, looking at him, visor down, heart
pounding, but with her grip firm on clutch and throttle, her
hands ready to speed her away, surely faster than he could
follow on his tired-looking scooter, until he shook his head
and drove off with a shout, a sort of strangled scream, a
sound that could have been rage, or equally could have been
anguish.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE SHROOMS ARRIVED first thing the following morning at
Nadia’s office, their uniformed courier having no idea what
was inside the package Nadia was signing and paying for,

other than that it was listed as foodstuffs. Around the same
time, a group of militants was taking over the city’s stock
exchange. Nadia and her colleagues spent much of that day
staring at the television next to their floor’s water
cooler, but by afternoon it was over, the army having decided
any risk to hostages was less than the risk to national
security should this media-savvy and morale-sapping spectacle
be allowed to continue, and so the building was stormed with
maximum force, and the militants were exterminated, and
initial estimates put the number of dead workers at probably
less than a hundred.

Nadia and Saeed had been messaging each other throughout,
and initially they thought they would cancel their rendezvous
planned for that evening, Saeed’s second invitation to her
home, but when no curfew was announced, much to people’s
surprise, the authorities perhaps wishing to signal that they
were in such complete control that none was needed, both
Nadia and Saeed found themselves unsettled and craving each
other’s company, and so they decided to go ahead and meet
after all.

Saeed’s family’s car had been repaired, and he drove it
to Nadia’s instead of riding his scooter, feeling somehow
less exposed in an enclosed vehicle. But while weaving
through traffic his side mirror scraped the door of a shiny
black luxury SUV, the conveyance of some industrialist or
bigwig, costing more than a house, and Saeed steeled himself
for a shouting, perhaps even a beating, but the guard who
stepped out of the front passenger-side door of the SUV,
assault rifle pointed skyward, merely had time to look at
Saeed, a smooth, ferocious glance, before being summoned back
in, and the SUV sped off, its owner clearly not wishing, on
this night, to tarry.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED PARKED around the corner from Nadia’s building, messaged
that he had arrived, awaited the thump of the falling plastic

bag, slipped into the robe that it contained, and then
hurried in and upstairs, much as he had before, except that
this time he came bearing bags of his own, bags of barbecued
chicken and lamb and hot, fresh-made bread. Nadia took the
food from him and put it in her oven so that it might remain
insulated and warm—but this precaution notwithstanding,
their dinner would be cold when finally eaten, lying there
disregarded until dawn.

Nadia led Saeed outside. She had placed a long cushion,
its cover woven like a rug, on the floor of her terrace, and
she sat on this cushion with her back against the parapet and
motioned for Saeed to do the same. As he sat he felt the
outside of her thigh, firm, against his, and she felt the
outside of his, likewise firm, against hers.

She said, “Aren’t you going to take that off?”
She meant the black robe, which he had forgotten he was

wearing, and he looked down at himself and over at her, and
smiled, and answered, “You first.”

She laughed. “Together, then.”
“Together.”
They stood and pulled off their robes, facing each other,

and underneath both were wearing jeans and sweaters, there
being a nip in the air tonight, and his sweater was brown and
loose and hers was beige and clung to her torso like a soft
second skin. He attempted chivalrously not to take in the
sweep of her body, his eyes holding hers, but of course, as
we know often happens in such circumstances, he was unsure as
to whether or not he had succeeded, one’s gaze being less
than entirely conscious a phenomenon.

They sat back down and she placed her fist on her thigh,
palm up, and opened it.

“Have you ever done psychedelic mushrooms?” she asked.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THEY SPOKE QUIETLY under the clouds, glimpsing occasionally a
gash of moon or of darkness, and otherwise seeing ripples and

churns of city-lit gray. It was all very normal at first, and
Saeed wondered if she was perhaps teasing him, or if she had
been deceived and sold a dud batch. Soon he had concluded
that by some quirk of biology or psychology he was simply,
and unfortunately, resistant to whatever it was that
mushrooms were supposed to do.

So he was unprepared for the feeling of awe that came over
him, the wonder with which he then regarded his own skin, and
the lemon tree in its clay pot on Nadia’s terrace, as tall
as he was, and rooted in its soil, which was in turn rooted
in the clay of the pot, which rested upon the brick of the
terrace, which was like the mountaintop of this building,
which was growing from the earth itself, and from this earthy
mountain the lemon tree was reaching up, up, in a gesture so
beautiful that Saeed was filled with love, and reminded of
his parents, for whom he suddenly felt such gratitude, and a
desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for
everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so
beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had
experiences like this, and then he regarded Nadia and saw
that she was regarding him and her eyes were like worlds.

They did not hold hands until Saeed’s perspective had
returned, hours later, not to normal, for he suspected it was
possible he might never think of normal in the same way
again, but to something closer to what it had been before
they had eaten these shrooms, and when they held hands it was
facing each other, sitting, their wrists resting on their
knees, their knees almost touching, and then he leaned
forward and she leaned forward, and she smiled, and they
kissed, and they realized that it was dawn, and they were no
longer hidden by darkness, and they might be seen from some
other rooftop, so they went inside and ate the cold food, not
much but some, and it was strong in flavor.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED’S PHONE HAD DIED and he charged it in his family’s car
from a backup battery source he kept in the glove
compartment, and as his phone turned on it beeped and chirped
with his parents’ panic, their missed calls, their messages,
their mounting terror at a child not returned safely that
night, a night when many children of many parents did not
return at all.

Upon Saeed’s arrival his father went to bed and in his
bedside mirror glimpsed a suddenly much older man, and his
mother was so relieved to see her son that she thought, for a
moment, she should slap him.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA DID NOT FEEL like sleeping, and so she took a shower, the
water chilly because of the intermittent gas supply to her
boiler. She stood naked, as she had been born, and put on her
jeans and T-shirt and sweater, as she did when alone at home,
and then put on her robe, ready to resist the claims and
expectations of the world, and stepped outside to go for a
walk in a nearby park that would by now be emptying of its
early-morning junkies and of the gay lovers who had departed
their houses with more time than they needed for the errands
they had said they were heading out to accomplish.

•   â€¢   â€¢

LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia’s time, the sun having
slipped below her horizon, it was morning in the San Diego,
California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by
the sea, or rather on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The fittings in his house were worn but painstakingly
repaired, as was his garden: home to mesquite trees and
desert willows and succulent plants that had seen better
years, but were still alive and mostly free of blight.

The old man had served in the navy during one of the
larger wars and he had respect for the uniform, and for these

young men who had established a perimeter around his
property, as he watched, standing on the street with their
commanding officer. They reminded him of when he was their
age and had their strength and their suppleness of movement
and their certainty of purpose and their bond with one
another, that bond he and his friends used to say was like
that of brothers, but was in some ways stronger than that of
brothers, or at least than his bond with his own brother, his
kid brother, who had passed last spring from cancer of the
throat that had withered him to the weight of a young girl,
and who had not spoken to the old man for years, and when the
old man had gone to see him in the hospital could no longer
speak, could only look, and in his eyes was exhaustion but
not so much fear, brave eyes, on a kid brother the old man
had never before thought of as brave.

The officer didn’t have time for the old man but he had
time for his age and for his service record, and so he
allowed the old man to linger nearby for a while before
saying with a polite dip of his head that it would be best if
he now moved on.

The old man asked the officer whether it was Mexicans that
had been coming through, or was it Muslims, because he
couldn’t be sure, and the officer said he couldn’t answer,
sir. So the old man stood silent for a bit and the officer
let him, as cars were diverted and told to go some other way,
and as rich neighbors who had bought their properties more
recently sat at their front windows and stared, and in the
end the old man asked how he could help.

The old man felt like a child suddenly, asking this. The
officer was young enough to be his grandson.

The officer said they’d let him know, sir.
I’ll let you know: that’s what the old man’s father

used to say to him when he was pestering. And in some ways
the officer did look like his father, more like his father
than like the old man anyway, like his father when the old
man was just a boy.

The officer offered to arrange for the old man to be
dropped off if he wanted, with kin maybe, or friends.

It was a warm early winter’s day, clear and sunny. Far
below, the surfers were paddling out in their wetsuits. Above
the ocean, in the distance, the gray transport planes were
lining up to land at Coronado.

The old man wondered where he should go, and thinking
about it, realized he couldn’t come up with a single place.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AFTER THE ASSAULT on the stock exchange of Saeed and Nadia’s
city, it seemed the militants had changed strategy, and grown
in confidence, and instead of merely detonating a bomb here
or orchestrating a shooting there, they began taking over and
holding territory throughout the city, sometimes a building,
sometimes an entire neighborhood, for hours usually, but on
occasion for days. How so many of them were arriving so
quickly from their bastions in the hills remained a mystery,
but the city was vast and sprawling and impossible to
disconnect from the surrounding countryside. Besides, the
militants were well known to have sympathizers within.

The curfew Saeed’s parents had been waiting for was duly
imposed, and enforced with hair-trigger zeal, not just
sandbagged checkpoints and razor wire proliferating but also
howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles and tanks with their
turrets clad in the rectangular barnacles of explosive
reactive armor. Saeed went with his father to pray on the
first Friday after the curfew’s commencement, and Saeed
prayed for peace and Saeed’s father prayed for Saeed and the
preacher in his sermon urged all the congregants to pray for
the righteous to emerge victorious in the war but carefully
refrained from specifying on which side of the conflict he
thought the righteous to be.

Saeed’s father felt as he walked back to campus and his
son drove back to work that he had made a mistake with his
career, that he should have done something else with his

life, because then he might have had the money to send Saeed
abroad. Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping
the youth and the country through teaching and research
merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path
would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.

Saeed’s mother prayed at home, newly particular about not
missing a single one of her devotions, but she insisted on
claiming that nothing had changed, that the city had seen
similar crises before, though she could not say when, and
that the local press and foreign media were exaggerating the
danger. She did, however, develop difficulties sleeping, and
obtained from her pharmacist, a woman she trusted not to
gossip, a sedative to take secretly before bed.

At Saeed’s office work was slow even though three of his
fellow employees had stopped showing up and there ought to
have been more to do for those who were still present.
Conversations focused mainly on conspiracy theories, the
status of the fighting, and how to get out of the country—
and since visas, which had long been near-impossible, were
now truly impossible for non-wealthy people to secure, and
journeys on passenger planes and ships were therefore out of
the question, the relative merits, or rather risks, of the
various overland routes were guessed at, and picked apart,
again and again.

At Nadia’s workplace it was much the same, with the added
intrigue that came from her boss and her boss’s boss being
among those rumored to have fled abroad, since neither had
returned as scheduled from their holidays. Their offices sat
empty behind glass partitions at the prow and stern of the
oblong floor—an abandoned suit hanging in its dust cover on
a hat rack in one—while the rows of open-plan desks between
them remained largely occupied, including Nadia’s, at which
she was often to be seen on her phone.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA AND SAEED BEGAN to meet during the day, typically for
lunch at a cheap burger joint equidistant from their
workplaces, with deep booths at the back that were somewhat
private, and there they held hands beneath the table, and
sometimes he stroked the inside of her thigh and she placed
her palm on the zipper of his trousers, but only briefly, and
rarely, in the gaps when it appeared waiters and fellow
diners were not looking, and they tormented each other in
this way, since travel between dusk and dawn was forbidden,
and so they could not be alone without Saeed spending the
entire night, which seemed to her a step well worth taking,
but to him something they should delay, in part, he said,
because he did not know what to tell his parents and in part
because he feared leaving them alone.

Mostly they communicated by phone, a message here, a link
to an article there, a shared image of one or the other of
them at work, or at home, before a window as the sun set or a
breeze blew or a funny expression came and went.

Saeed was certain he was in love. Nadia was not certain
what exactly she was feeling, but she was certain it had
force. Dramatic circumstances, such as those in which they
and other new lovers in the city now found themselves, have a
habit of creating dramatic emotions, and furthermore the
curfew served to conjure up an effect similar to that of a
long-distance relationship, and long-distance relationships
are well known for their potential to heighten passion, at
least for a while, just as fasting is well known to heighten
one’s appreciation for food.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE FIRST TWO WEEKENDS of the curfew came and went without them
meeting, outbursts of fighting making travel first in
Saeed’s neighborhood and then in Nadia’s impossible, and
Saeed forwarded to Nadia a popular joke about the militants
politely wishing to ensure that the city’s population was
well rested on their days off. Air strikes were called in by

the army on both occasions, shattering Saeed’s bathroom
window while he was in the shower, and shaking like an
earthquake Nadia and her lemon tree as she sat on her terrace
smoking a joint. Fighter-bombers grated hoarsely through the
sky.

But on the third weekend there was a lull and Saeed went
to Nadia’s and she met him in a nearby café since it was too
risky for her to drop a robe into the street by day, or for
him to change outdoors, and so he pulled it on in the café’s
bathroom while she paid the bill and then with his head
covered and eyes on the ground, followed her into her
building, and once upstairs and inside they soon slipped into
her bed and were nearly naked together and after much
pleasure but also what she considered a bit excessive a delay
on his part she asked if he had brought a condom and he held
her face in his hands and said, “I don’t think we should
have sex until we’re married.”

And she laughed and pressed close.
And he shook his head.
And she stopped and stared at him and said, “Are you

fucking joking?”

•   â€¢   â€¢

FOR A SECOND Nadia was seized by a wild fury but then as she
looked at Saeed he appeared almost lethally mortified and a
coil loosened in her and she smiled a little and she held him
tight, to torture him and to test him, and she said,
surprising herself, “It’s okay. We can see.”

•   â€¢   â€¢

LATER AS THEY LAY in bed listening to an old and slightly
scratched bossa nova LP, Saeed showed her on his phone images
by a French photographer of famous cities at night, lit only
by the glow of the stars.

“But how did he get everyone to turn their lights off?”
Nadia asked.

“He didn’t,” Saeed said. “He just removed the
lighting. By computer, I think.”

“And he left the stars bright.”
“No, above these cities you can barely see the stars.

Just like here. He had to go to deserted places. Places with
no human lights. For each city’s sky he went to a deserted
place that was just as far north, or south, at the same
latitude basically, the same place that the city would be in
a few hours, with the Earth’s spin, and once he got there he
pointed his camera in the same direction.”

“So he got the same sky the city would have had if it was
completely dark?”

“The same sky, but at a different time.”
Nadia thought about this. They were achingly beautiful,

these ghostly cities—New York, Rio, Shanghai, Paris—under
their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before
electricity, but with the buildings of today. Whether they
looked like the past, or the present, or the future, she
couldn’t decide.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE FOLLOWING WEEK it appeared that the government’s massive
show of force was succeeding. There were no major new attacks
in the city. There were even rumors that the curfew might be
relaxed.

But one day the signal to every mobile phone in the city
simply vanished, turned off as if by flipping a switch. An
announcement of the government’s decision was made over
television and radio, a temporary antiterrorism measure, it
was said, but with no end date given. Internet connectivity
was suspended as well.

Nadia did not have a landline at home. Saeed’s landline
had not worked in months. Deprived of the portals to each
other and to the world provided by their mobile phones, and

confined to their apartments by the nighttime curfew, Nadia
and Saeed, and countless others, felt marooned and alone and
much more afraid.

FOUR

THE EVENING CLASS Saeed and Nadia had been taking was finished,
having concluded with the arrival of the first dense smogs

of winter, and in any case the curfew meant courses such as
theirs could not have continued. Neither of them had been to
the other’s office, so they didn’t know where to reach one
another during the day, and without their mobile phones and
access to the internet there was no ready way for them to
reestablish contact. It was as if they were bats that had
lost the use of their ears, and hence their ability to find
things as they flew in the dark. The day after their phone
signals died Saeed went to their usual burger joint at
lunchtime, but Nadia did not show, and the day after that,
when he went again, the restaurant was shuttered, its owner
perhaps having fled, or simply disappeared.

Saeed was aware that Nadia worked at an insurance company,
and from his office he called the operator and asked for the
names and numbers of insurance companies, and tried phoning
them all, one by one, inquiring for her at each. This took
time: the telephone company was struggling under the sudden
load and also to repair infrastructure destroyed in the
fighting, and so Saeed’s office landline worked at best
intermittently, and when it did, an operator could be swatted
out of the swarm of busy tones only rarely, and that operator
was—despite Saeed’s desperate entreaties, desperate
entreaties being common in those days—limited to giving out
a maximum of two numbers per call, and when Saeed finally did
obtain a new pair of numbers to try, more often than not one
or both proved to be nonfunctional on any given day, and he
had to ring and ring and ring again.

Nadia spent her lunch hours racing home to stock up on
supplies. She bought bags of flour and rice and nuts and
dried fruit, and bottles of oil, and cans of powdered milk
and cured meat and fish in brine, all at exorbitant prices,
her forearms aching from the strain of carrying them up to
her apartment, one load after another. She was fond of eating
vegetables but people said the key was to have as many
calories stashed away as possible, and so foods like
vegetables, which were bulky for the amount of energy they
could provide, and also prone to spoilage, were less useful.
But soon the shelves of shops near her were close to bare,
even of vegetables, and when the government instituted a
policy that no one person could buy more than a certain
amount per day, Nadia, like many others, was both panicked
and relieved.

On the weekend she went at dawn to her bank and stood in a
line that was already quite long, waiting for the bank to
open, but when it opened the line became a throng and she had
no choice but to surge forward like everyone else, and there
in the unruly crowd she was groped from behind, someone
pushing his hand down her buttocks and between her legs, and
trying to penetrate her with his finger, failing because he
was outside the multiple fabrics of her robe and her jeans
and her underclothes, but coming as close to succeeding as
possible under the circumstances, applying incredible force,
as she was pinned by the bodies around her, unable to move or
even raise her hands, and so stunned she could not shout, or
speak, reduced to clamping her thighs together and her jaws
together, her mouth shutting automatically, almost
physiologically, instinctively, her body sealing itself off,
and then the crowd moved and the finger was gone and not long
afterwards some bearded men separated the mob into two
halves, male and female, and she stayed inside the female
zone, and her turn at the teller did not come until after
lunch, whereupon she took as much cash as was permitted,
hiding it on her person and in her boots and putting only a
little in her bag, and she went to a money changer to convert

some of it into dollars and euros and to a jeweler to convert
the remainder to a few very small coins of gold, glancing
over her shoulder constantly to make sure she wasn’t being
followed, and then headed home, only to find a man waiting at
the entrance, looking for her, and when she saw him she
steeled herself and refused to cry, even though she was
bruised and frightened and furious, and the man, who had been
waiting all day, was Saeed.

She led him upstairs, forgetting that they might be seen,
or not caring, and so not bothering this once with a robe for
him, and upstairs she made them both tea, her hands
trembling, finding it difficult to speak. She was embarrassed
and angry that she was this glad to see him, and felt she
might start yelling at him at any moment, and he could see
how upset she was and so he silently opened the bags he had
brought and gave her a kerosene camping stove, some extra
fuel, a large box of matches, fifty candles, and a packet of
chlorine tablets for disinfecting water.

“I couldn’t find flowers,” he said.
She smiled at last, a half-smile, and asked, “Do you have

a gun?”

•   â€¢   â€¢

THEY SMOKED A JOINT and listened to music and after a while
Nadia tried again to make Saeed have sex with her, not
because she felt particularly sexy but because she wanted to
cauterize the incident from outside the bank in her memory,
and Saeed succeeded again in holding back, even as they
pleasured each other, and he told her again that they should
not have sex before they were married, that doing otherwise
was against his beliefs, but it was not until he suggested
she move in with his parents and him that she understood his
words had been a kind of proposal.

She stroked his hair as his head rested on her chest and
asked, “Are you saying you want to get married?”

“Yes.”

“To me?”
“To anyone, really.”
She snorted.
“Yes,” he said, rising and looking at her. “To you.”
She didn’t say anything.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She felt great tenderness well up in her for him at that

moment, as he waited for her reply, and she felt also a
galloping terror, and she felt further something altogether
more complicated, something that struck her as akin to
resentment.

“I don’t know,” she said.
He kissed her. “Okay,” he replied.
As he was leaving, she saved his office details and he

saved hers, and she gave him a black robe to wear, and she
told him not to bother stashing it in the crack between her
building and the next, where previously he had been hiding
the robes he exited in for her to collect, but rather to hold
on to it, and she gave him a set of keys too. “So my sister
can let herself in next time, if she arrives before me,” she
explained.

And both of them grinned.
But when he was gone she heard the demolition blows of

distant artillery, the unmaking of buildings, large-scale
fighting having resumed somewhere, and she was worried for
him on his drive home, and she thought it an absurd situation
that she would have to wait until she went to work the
following day to discover whether he had traversed the
distance to his home safely.

Nadia bolted her door and laboriously pushed her sofa
against it, so that it was now barricaded from within.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THAT NIGHT, in a rooftop flat not unlike Nadia’s, in a
neighborhood not far from Nadia’s, a brave man stood in the
light of a torch built into his mobile phone and waited. He

could hear, from time to time, the same artillery that Nadia
could hear, though more loudly. It rattled the windows of his
flat, but only in a gentle way, without any risk, at present,
of them breaking. The brave man did not have a wristwatch, or
a flashlight, so his signal-less phone served both functions,
and he wore a heavy winter jacket and inside his jacket were
a pistol and a knife with a blade as long as his hand.

Another man had begun to emerge from a black door at the
far end of the room, a door black even in the dimness, black
despite the beam of the phone-torch, and this second man the
brave man watched from his post beside the front door but did
nothing visibly to help. The brave man merely listened to the
sounds in the stairwell outside, for a lack of sound in the
stairwell outside, and stood at his post and held his phone
and fingered the pistol inside the pocket of his coat,
observing without making any noise.

The brave man was excited, though it would have been
difficult to see this in the gloom and in the customary
inexpressiveness of his face. He was ready to die, but he did
not plan on dying, he planned on living, and he planned on
doing great things while he did.

The second man lay on the floor and shaded his eyes from
the light and gathered his strength, a knockoff Russian
assault rifle by his side. He could not see who was at the
front door, just that someone was there.

The brave man stood with his hand on his pistol,
listening, listening.

The second man got to his feet.
The brave man motioned with the light of his phone,

pulling the second man forward, like a needle-jawed
anglerfish might, hunting in the inky depths, and when the
second man was close enough to touch, the brave man opened
the front door of the flat, and the second man walked through
into the quietness of the stairwell. And then the brave man
shut the door and stood still once again, biding his time for
another.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE SECOND MAN JOINED the fighting within the hour, among many
who would do so, and the battles that now commenced and raged
without meaningful interruption were far more ferocious, and
less unequal, than what had come before.

War in Saeed and Nadia’s city revealed itself to be an
intimate experience, combatants pressed close together, front
lines defined at the level of the street one took to work,
the school one’s sister attended, the house of one’s
aunt’s best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes.
Saeed’s mother thought she saw a former student of hers
firing with much determination and focus a machine gun
mounted on the back of a pickup truck. She looked at him and
he looked at her and he did not turn and shoot her, and so
she suspected it was him, although Saeed’s father said it
meant nothing more than that she had seen a man who wished to
fire in another direction. She remembered the boy as shy,
with a stutter and a quick mind for mathematics, a good boy,
but she could not remember his name. She wondered if it had
really been him, and whether she should feel alarmed or
relieved if it had. If the militants won, she supposed, it
might not be entirely bad to know people on their side.

Neighborhoods fell to the militants in startlingly quick
succession, so that Saeed’s mother’s mental map of the
place where she had spent her entire life now resembled an
old quilt, with patches of government land and patches of
militant land. The frayed seams between the patches were the
most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs. Her
butcher and the man who dyed the fabrics from which she had
once had made her festive clothes disappeared into such gaps,
their places of business shattered and covered in rubble and
glass.

People vanished in those days, and for the most part one
never knew, at least not for a while, if they were alive or
dead. Nadia passed her family’s home once on purpose, not to
speak with them, just to see from the outside if they were

there and well, but the home she had forsaken looked
deserted, with no sign of inhabitants or life. When she
visited again it was gone, unrecognizable, the building
crushed by the force of a bomb that weighed as much as a
compact automobile. Nadia would never be able to determine
what had become of them, but she always hoped they had found
a way to depart unharmed, abandoning the city to the
predations of warriors on both sides who seemed content to
flatten it in order to possess it.

She and Saeed were fortunate that their homes remained for
a while in government-controlled neighborhoods, and so were
spared much of the worst fighting and also the retaliatory
air strikes that the army was calling in on localities
thought not merely to be occupied but disloyal.

Saeed’s boss had tears in his eyes as he told his
employees that he had to shutter his business, apologizing
for letting them down, and promising that there would be jobs
for them all when things improved and the agency was able to
reopen. He was so distraught that it seemed to those
collecting their final salaries that they were in fact
consoling him. All agreed he was a fine and delicate man,
worryingly so, for these were not times for such men.

At Nadia’s office the payroll department stopped giving
out paychecks and within days everyone stopped coming. There
were no real goodbyes, or at least none that she was part of,
and since the security guards were the first to melt away, a
sort of calm looting, or payment-in-hardware, began, and
people left with what they could carry. Nadia hefted two
laptop computers in their carrying cases and her floor’s
flat-screen TV, but in the end she did not take the TV
because it would have been difficult to load onto her
motorcycle, and passed it instead to a somber-faced colleague
who thanked her politely.

•   â€¢   â€¢

ONE’S RELATIONSHIP to windows now changed in the city. A window
was the border through which death was possibly most likely
to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round
of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside
was a spot potentially in the crossfire. Moreover the pane of
a window could itself become shrapnel so easily, shattered by
a nearby blast, and everyone had heard of someone or other
who had bled out after being lacerated by shards of flying
glass.

Many windows were broken already, and the prudent thing
would have been to remove those that remained, but it was
winter and the nights were cold, and without gas and
electricity, both of which were in increasingly short supply,
windows served to take some of the edge off the chill, and so
people left them in place.

Saeed and his family rearranged their furniture instead.
They placed bookshelves full of books flush against the
windows in their bedrooms, blocking the glass from sight but
allowing light to creep in around the edges, and they leaned
Saeed’s bed over the tall windows in their sitting room,
mattress and all, upright, at an angle, so that the bed’s
feet rested on the lintel. Saeed slept on three rugs layered
on the floor, which he told his parents suited his back.

Nadia taped the inside of her windows with beige packing
tape, the sort normally used to seal cardboard boxes, and
hammered heavy-duty rubbish bags into place over them,
pounding nails into the window frames. When she had had
enough electricity to charge her backup battery, she would
lounge around and listen to her records in the light of a
single bare bulb, the harsh sounds of the fighting muffled
somewhat by her music, and she would then glance at her
windows and think that they looked a bit like amorphous black
works of contemporary art.

The effect doors had on people altered as well. Rumors had
begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere,
often to places far away, well removed from this death trap
of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew

people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they
said, could become a special door, and it could happen
without warning, to any door at all. Most people thought
these rumors to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-
minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a
little differently nonetheless.

Nadia and Saeed, too, discussed these rumors and dismissed
them. But every morning, when she woke, Nadia looked over at
her front door, and at the doors to her bathroom, her closet,
her terrace. Every morning, in his room, Saeed did much the
same. All their doors remained simple doors, on/off switches
in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open
or closed, but each of their doors, regarded thus with a
twinge of irrational possibility, became partially animate as
well, an object with a subtle power to mock, to mock the
desires of those who desired to go far away, whispering
silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams
of fools.

•   â€¢   â€¢

WITHOUT WORK there was no impediment to Saeed and Nadia meeting
during the day except for the fighting, but that impediment
was a serious one. The few remaining local channels still on
the air were saying that the war was going well but the
international ones were saying that it was going badly
indeed, adding to an unprecedented flow of migrants that was
hitting the rich countries, who were building walls and
fences and strengthening their borders, but seemingly to
unsatisfactory effect. The militants had their own pirate
radio station, featuring a smooth-voiced announcer with a
deep and unnervingly sexy voice, who spoke slowly and
deliberately, and claimed in a decelerated but almost rap-
like cadence that the fall of the city was imminent. Whatever
the truth, being out and about was risky, so Saeed and Nadia
typically met at Nadia’s place.

Saeed had once more asked her to move in with him and his
family, telling her that he could explain things to his
parents, and she could have his room, and he would sleep in
the sitting room, and they would not have to marry, they
would only, out of respect for his parents, have to remain
chaste in the house, and it would be safer for her, for this
was no time for anyone to be alone. He had not added that it
was especially unsafe for a woman to be alone, but she knew
both that he thought it and that it was true, even as she
parried his suggestion. He could see that the matter
unsettled her, so he did not say it again, but the offer
stood, and she considered it.

Nadia was herself coming to acknowledge that this was no
longer a city where the risks facing a young woman living
independently could be thought of as manageable, and equally
importantly she worried for Saeed each time he drove over to
see her and back again. But part of her still resisted the
idea of moving in with him, with anyone for that matter,
having at such great difficulty moved out in the first place,
and become quite attached to her small flat, to the life,
albeit often lonely, that she had built there, and also
finding the idea of living as a chaste half lover, half
sister to Saeed in close proximity to his parents rather
bizarre, and she might have waited much longer had Saeed’s
mother not been killed, a stray heavy-caliber round passing
through the windshield of her family’s car and taking with
it a quarter of Saeed’s mother’s head, not while she was
driving, for she had not driven in months, but while she was
checking inside for an earring she thought she had misplaced,
and Nadia, seeing the state Saeed and Saeed’s father were in
when Nadia came to their apartment for the first time, on the
day of the funeral, stayed with them that night to offer what
comfort and help she could and did not spend another night in
her own apartment again.

FIVE

FUNERALS WERE SMALLER and more rushed affairs in those days,
because of the fighting. Some families had no choice but

to bury their dead in a courtyard or at the sheltered margin
of a road, it being impossible to reach a proper graveyard,
and so impromptu burial grounds grew up, one extinguished
body attracting others, in much the same way that the arrival
of one squatter on a disused patch of government land can
give rise to an entire slum.

It was customary for a home that had suffered a
bereavement to be filled with relatives and well-wishers for
many days, but this practice was presently circumscribed by
the dangers involved in making a journey in the city, and
while people did come to see Saeed’s father and Saeed, most
came furtively, and could not stay long. It was not the sort
of occasion to ask what precisely Nadia’s relationship was
to the husband and son of the deceased, so no one did, but
some did inquire with their glances, and their eyes followed
Nadia as she moved around the apartment in her black robe,
serving tea and biscuits and water, and not praying, though
not ostentatiously not praying, more as if she were busy
looking after people’s earthly needs and might do so later.

Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so
did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept
only once, when he first saw his mother’s corpse and
screamed, and Saeed’s father wept only when he was alone in
his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though
by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his
sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence
of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best
friend.

Nadia called Saeed’s father “father” and he called her
“daughter.” This began when they first met, the terms
seeming appropriate both to her and to him, and being
acceptable forms of address between the young and the old,
even when not related, and in any case Nadia had taken one
look at Saeed’s father and felt him like a father, for he
was so gentle, and evoked in her a protective caring, as if
for one’s own child, or for a puppy, or for a beautiful
memory one knows has already commenced to fade.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA SLEPT in what had been Saeed’s room, on a pile of
carpets and blankets on the floor, having refused Saeed’s
father’s offer to give up his bed, and Saeed slept on a
similar though thinner pile in the sitting room, and Saeed’s
father slept by himself in his bedroom, a room where he had
slept for most of his life but where he could not recall the
last instance he had slept alone and which for this reason
was no longer completely familiar to him.

Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had
belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out
of the current others referred to as the present, a
photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a
particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects
that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music
collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked
emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the
fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part,
was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly,
years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to
visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him
echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these
three people sharing this one apartment splashed and
intersected with each other across varied and multiple
streams of time.

Saeed’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants, and
small-scale fighting had diminished nearby, but large bombs
still dropped from the sky and exploded with an awesome power
that brought to mind the might of nature itself. Saeed was
grateful for Nadia’s presence, for the way in which she
altered the silences that descended on the apartment, not
necessarily filling them with words, but making them less
bleak in their muteness. And he was grateful too for her
effect on his father, whose politeness, when he recalled he
was in the company of a young woman, would jar him from what
otherwise were interminable reveries and would bring his
attention back for a while to the here and now. Saeed wished
Nadia had been able to meet his mother, and his mother able
to meet her.

Sometimes when Saeed’s father had gone to sleep Saeed and
Nadia sat together in the sitting room, their sides pressed
close for connection and warmth, perhaps holding hands, at
most exchanging a kiss on the cheek as a farewell before bed,
and often they were silent, but often they spoke in low
voices, about how to escape from the city, or about the
endless rumors of the doors, or about nothings: the precise
color of the refrigerator, the increasingly sorry state of
Saeed’s toothbrush, the loudness of Nadia’s snore when she
had a cold.

One evening they were huddled together in this way, under
a blanket, in the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, for
there was no grid electricity in their part of the city
anymore, and no piped gas or water, municipal services having
entirely broken down, and Saeed said, “It feels natural to
have you here.”

“For me too,” Nadia replied, resting her head on his
shoulder.

“The end of the world can be cozy at times.”
She laughed. “Yes. Like a cave.”
“You smell a bit like a caveman,” she added later.
“And you smell like a wood fire.”

She looked at him and felt her body tighten, but she
resisted the urge to caress.

When they heard that Nadia’s neighborhood had fallen to
the militants as well, and that the roads between the two
were mostly clear, Saeed and Nadia returned to her flat so
she could collect some things. Nadia’s building had been
damaged, and parts of the wall that faced the street were
gone. The backup-battery shop on the ground floor had been
looted, but the metal door to the stairway had not been
forced, and the overall structure looked more or less sound—
in need of substantial repair, certainly, but not on the
verge of collapse.

The plastic rubbish bags that covered Nadia’s windows
were still in place, except for one, which, along with the
window itself, had been destroyed, and where the window had
formerly been a gash of blue sky was now visible, unusually
clear and lovely, except for a thin column of smoke rising
somewhere in the distance. Nadia took her record player and
records and clothes and food, and her parched but possibly
revivable lemon tree, and also some money and gold coins,
which she had left hidden in the tree’s clay plot, buried
within the soil. These items she and Saeed loaded onto the
backseat of his family’s car, the top of the lemon tree
sticking out of a lowered window. She did not remove the
money and coins from the pot in case they were searched at a
militant checkpoint on the way, which they were, but the
fighters who stopped them appeared exhausted and wired and
accepted canned supplies as payment to pass.

When they reached home Saeed’s father saw the lemon tree
and smiled for what seemed like the first time in days.
Together the three of them placed it on their balcony, but
quickly, because a band of armed men who looked like
foreigners had begun to gather on the street below, arguing
in a language they could not understand.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA KEPT HER RECORD PLAYER and records out of sight in Saeed’s
room, even after the customary mourning period for Saeed’s
mother was over, because music was forbidden by the
militants, and their apartment could be searched without
warning, indeed it had been once already, militants banging
on the door in the middle of the night, and in any case even
if she had wanted to play a record there was no electricity,
not even enough to charge the apartment’s backup batteries.

The night the militants came they were looking for people
of a particular sect, and demanded to see ID cards, to check
what sort of names everyone had, but fortunately for Saeed’s
father and Saeed and Nadia their names were not associated
with the denomination being hunted. The neighbors upstairs
were not so lucky: the husband was held down while his throat
was cut, the wife and daughter were hauled out and away.

The dead neighbor bled through a crack in the floor, his
blood appearing as a stain in the high corner of Saeed’s
sitting room, and Saeed and Nadia, who had heard the
family’s screams, went up to collect and bury him, as soon
as they dared, but his body was gone, presumably taken by his
executioners, and his blood was already fairly dry, a patch
like a painted puddle in his apartment, an uneven trail on
the stairs.

The following night, or perhaps the night after that,
Saeed entered Nadia’s room and they were unchaste there for
the first time. A combination of horror and desire
subsequently impelled him back each evening, despite his
earlier resolution that they do nothing that was
disrespectful to his parents, and they would touch and stroke
and taste, always stopping short of sex, upon which she no
longer insisted, and which they had by now found ample means
to circumvent. His mother was no more, and his father seemed
not to concern himself with these romantic matters, and so
they proceeded in secret, and the fact that unmarried lovers
such as they were now being made examples of and punished by
death created a semi-terrified urgency and edge to each

coupling that sometimes bordered on a strange sort of
ecstasy.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AS THE MILITANTS secured the city, extinguishing the last large
salients of resistance, a partial calm descended, broken by
the activities of drones and aircraft that bombed from the
heavens, these networked machines for the most part
invisible, and by the public and private executions that now
took place almost continuously, bodies hanging from
streetlamps and billboards like a form of festive seasonal
decoration. The executions moved in waves, and once a
neighborhood had been purged it could then expect a measure
of respite, until someone committed an infraction of some
kind, because infractions, although often alleged with a
degree of randomness, were invariably punished without mercy.

Saeed’s father went each day to the home of a cousin who
was like an elder brother to Saeed’s father and his
surviving siblings, and there he sat with the old men and old
women and drank tea and coffee and discussed the past, and
they all knew Saeed’s mother well and had stories to relate
in which she featured prominently, and while Saeed’s father
was with them he felt not that his wife was alive, for the
magnitude of her death impressed itself upon him again with
every morning, but rather that he could share some small
measure of her company.

Saeed’s father tarried at her grave each evening on the
way home. Once as he stood there he saw some young boys
playing football and this cheered him, and reminded him of
his own skill at the game when he was their age, but then he
realized that they were not young boys, but teenagers, young
men, and they were not playing with a ball but with the
severed head of a goat, and he thought, barbarians, but then
it dawned upon him that this was the head not of a goat but
of a human being, with hair and a beard, and he wanted to
believe he was mistaken, that the light was failing and his

eyes were playing tricks on him, and that is what he told
himself, as he tried not to look again, but something about
their expressions left him in little doubt of the truth.

Saeed and Nadia meanwhile had dedicated themselves single-
mindedly to finding a way out of the city, and as the
overland routes were widely deemed too perilous to attempt,
this meant investigating the possibility of securing passage
through the doors, in which most people seemed now to
believe, especially since any attempt to use one or keep one
secret had been proclaimed by the militants to be punishable,
as usual and somewhat unimaginatively, by death, and also
because those with shortwave radios claimed that even the
most reputable international broadcasters had acknowledged
the doors existed, and indeed were being discussed by world
leaders as a major global crisis.

Following a tip from a friend, Saeed and Nadia headed out
on foot at dusk. They were dressed in accordance with the
rules on dress and he was bearded in accordance with the
rules on beards and her hair was hidden in accordance with
the rules on hair, but they stayed in the margins of the
roads, in the shadows as much as possible, trying not to be
seen while trying not to look like they were trying not to be
seen. They passed a body hanging in the air and could hardly
smell it until they were downwind, when the odor became
almost unbearable.

Because of the flying robots high above in the darkening
sky, unseen but never far from people’s minds in those days,
Saeed walked with a slight hunch, as though cringing a tad at
the thought of the bomb or missile one of them might at any
moment dispatch. By contrast, because she wanted not to
appear guilty, Nadia walked tall, so that if they were
stopped and their ID cards were checked and it was pointed
out that her card did not list him as her husband, she would
be more believable when she led the questioners home and
presented the forgery that was supposedly their marriage
certificate.

The man they were looking for called himself an agent,
though it was unclear if this was due to his specializing in
travel or to his operating in secret or to some other reason,
and they were to meet him in the labyrinthine gloom of a
burnt-out shopping center, a ruin with innumerable exits and
hiding places, which made Saeed wish he had insisted Nadia
not come and made Nadia wish they had brought a torch or,
failing that, a knife. They stood, barely able to see, and
waited with mounting unease.

They did not hear the agent approaching—or perhaps he had
been there all along—and they were startled by his voice
just behind them. The agent spoke softly, almost sweetly, his
whisper bringing to mind that of a poet or a psychopath. He
instructed them to stand still, to not turn around. He told
Nadia to uncover her head, and when she asked why, he said it
was not a request.

Nadia had the sense he was extremely close to her, as if
he were about to touch her neck, but she could not hear his
breathing. There was a small sound in the distance and she
and Saeed realized the agent might not be alone. Saeed asked
where the door was and where it led to, and the agent replied
that the doors were everywhere but finding one the militants
had not yet found, a door not yet guarded, that was the
trick, and might take a while. The agent demanded their money
and Saeed gave it to him, uncertain whether they were making
a down payment or being robbed.

As they hurried home, Saeed and Nadia looked at the night
sky, at the forcefulness of the stars and the moon’s
pockmarked brightness in the absence of electric lighting and
in the reduced pollution from fuel-starved and hence sparse
traffic, and wondered where the door to which they had
purchased access might take them, someplace in the mountains
or on the plains or by the seaside, and they saw an emaciated
man lying on the street who had recently expired, either from
hunger or illness, for he did not appear wounded, and in
their apartment they told Saeed’s father the potential good
news but he was oddly silent in response, and they waited for

him to say something, and in the end all he said was, “Let
us hope.”

•   â€¢   â€¢

AS THE DAYS PASSED, and Saeed and Nadia did not hear from the
agent again, and increasingly questioned whether they would
hear from the agent again, elsewhere other families were on
the move. One of these—a mother, father, daughter, son—
emerged from the complete blackness of an interior service
door. They were deep inside a vast pedestal floor, below a
cluster of blond-and-glass towers filled with luxury
apartments and collectively named, by their developer,
Jumeirah Beach Residence. On a security camera the family
could be seen blinking in the sterile artificial light and
recovering from their crossing. They each had a slender build
and upright posture and dark skin, and though the feed lacked
audio input it was of sufficient resolution that lip-reading
software could identify their language as Tamil.

After a brief interlude the family was picked up again by
a second camera, traversing a hallway and pushing the
horizontal bars that secured a heavy set of double fire-
resistant doors, and as these doors opened the brightness of
Dubai’s desert sunlight overwhelmed the sensitivity of the
image sensor and the four figures seemed to become thinner,
insubstantial, lost in an aura of whiteness, but they were at
that moment simultaneously captured on three exterior
surveillance feeds, tiny characters stumbling onto a broad
sidewalk, a promenade, along a one-way boulevard on which
slowly cruised two expensive two-door automobiles, one
yellow, one red, the whining of their revving engines
indirectly visible in the way they startled the girl and boy.

The parents held their children’s hands and seemed to be
at a loss as to which direction to go. Perhaps they were from
a coastal village themselves, and not from a city, for they
gravitated towards the sea and away from the buildings, and
they could be seen at multiple angles following a landscaped

pathway through the sand, the parents whispering to one
another from time to time, the children eyeing the mostly
pale tourists lying on towels and loungers in a state of
near-total undress—but in numbers far fewer than normal for
the winter high season, though the children could not know
this.

A small quadcopter drone was hovering fifty meters above
them now, too quiet to be heard, and relaying its feed to a
central monitoring station and also to two different security
vehicles, one an unmarked sedan, the other a badged van with
grilles on its windows, and from the latter vehicle a pair of
uniformed men emerged and walked purposefully, but without
undue or tourist-alarming haste, along a trajectory that
would intersect with that of the Tamil-speaking family in a
minute or so.

During this minute the family was also visible in the
camera feeds of various tourists’ selfie-taking mobile
phones, and they seemed to be not so much a cohesive unit but
rather four disparate individuals, each behaving in a
different way, the mother repeatedly making eye contact with
the women she passed and then immediately glancing down, the
father patting his pockets and the underside of his backpack
as though checking for tears or leaks, the daughter staring
at skydivers who were hurtling towards a nearby pier and
pulling up at the last moment and landing at a sprint, the
son testing the rubberized jogger-friendly surface beneath
his feet with each step, and then the minute ended and they
were intercepted and led away, apparently bewildered, or
overawed, for they held hands and did not resist or scatter
or run.

•   â€¢   â€¢

FOR THEIR PART, Saeed and Nadia enjoyed a degree of insulation
from remote surveillance when they were indoors, owing to
their lack of electricity, but even so their home could still
be searched by armed men without warning, and of course as

soon as they stepped outside they could be seen by the lenses
peering down on their city from the sky and from space, and
by the eyes of militants, and of informers, who might be
anyone, everyone.

One previously private function they now had to perform in
public was the emptying of their bowels, for without piped
water the toilets in Saeed and Nadia’s building no longer
worked. Residents had dug two deep trenches in the small
courtyard in the back, one for men and one for women,
separated by a heavy sheet on a clothesline, and it was there
that all had to squat to relieve themselves, under the
clouds, ignoring the stench, face to the ground so that even
if the act could be viewed, the identity of the actor might
be kept somewhat to oneself.

Nadia’s lemon tree did not recover, despite repeated
watering, and it sat lifeless on their balcony, clung to by a
few desiccated leaves.

It might seem surprising that even in such circumstances
Saeed’s and Nadia’s attitudes towards finding a way out
were not entirely straightforward. Saeed desperately wanted
to leave his city, in a sense he always had, but in his
imagination he had thought he would leave it only
temporarily, intermittently, never once and for all, and this
looming potential departure was altogether different, for he
doubted he would come back, and the scattering of his
extended family and his circle of friends and acquaintances,
forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss
of a home, no less, of his home.

Nadia was possibly even more feverishly keen to depart,
and her nature was such that the prospect of something new,
of change, was at its most basic level exciting to her. But
she was haunted by worries too, revolving around dependence,
worries that in going abroad and leaving their country she
and Saeed and Saeed’s father might be at the mercy of
strangers, subsistent on handouts, caged in pens like vermin.

Nadia had long been, and would afterwards continue to be,
more comfortable with all varieties of movement in her life

than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was
stronger, perhaps because his childhood had been more
idyllic, or perhaps because this was simply his temperament.
Both of them, though, whatever their misgivings, had no doubt
that they would leave if given the chance. And so neither
expected, when a handwritten note from the agent arrived,
pushed under their apartment door one morning and telling
them precisely where to be at precisely what time the
following afternoon, that Saeed’s father would say, “You
two must go, but I will not come.”

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED AND NADIA SAID this was impossible, and explained, in case
of misunderstanding, that there was no problem, that they had
paid the agent for three passages and would all be leaving
together, and Saeed’s father heard them out but would not be
budged: they, he repeated, had to go, and he had to stay.
Saeed threatened to carry his father over his shoulder if he
needed to, and he had never spoken to his father in this way,
and his father took him aside, for he could see the pain he
was causing his son, and when Saeed asked why his father was
doing this, what could possibly make him want to stay,
Saeed’s father said, “Your mother is here.”

Saeed said, “Mother is gone.”
His father said, “Not for me.”
And this was true in a way, Saeed’s mother was not gone

for Saeed’s father, not entirely, and it would have been
difficult for Saeed’s father to leave the place where he had
spent a life with her, difficult not to be able to visit her
grave each day, and he did not wish to do this, he preferred
to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more
to him.

But Saeed’s father was thinking also of the future, even
though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared that if he
said this to his son that his son might not go, and he knew
above all else that his son must go, and what he did not say

was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when,
if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s
child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was
younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child
protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten
them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the
parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost of
strength is required, and the arc of a child’s life only
appears for a while to match the arc of a parent’s, in
reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve
atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve
lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old
man hampering them these two young people were simply less
likely to survive.

Saeed’s father told his son he loved him and said that
Saeed must not disobey him in this, that he had not believed
in commanding his son but in this moment was doing so, that
only death awaited Saeed and Nadia in this city, and that one
day when things were better Saeed would come back to him, and
both men knew as this was said that it would not happen, that
Saeed would not be able to return while his father still
lived, and indeed as it transpired Saeed would not, after
this night that was just beginning, spend another night with
his father again.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED’S FATHER then summoned Nadia into his room and spoke to
her without Saeed and said that he was entrusting her with
his son’s life, and she, whom he called daughter, must, like
a daughter, not fail him, whom she called father, and she
must see Saeed through to safety, and he hoped she would one
day marry his son and be called mother by his grandchildren,
but this was up to them to decide, and all he asked was that
she remain by Saeed’s side until Saeed was out of danger,
and he asked her to promise this to him, and she said she
would promise only if Saeed’s father came with them, and he

said again that he could not, but that they must go, he said
it softly, like a prayer, and she sat there with him in
silence and the minutes passed, and in the end she promised,
and it was an easy promise to make because she had at that
time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a
difficult one because in making it she felt she was
abandoning the old man, and even if he did have his siblings
and his cousins, and might now go live with them or have them
come live with him, they could not protect him as Saeed and
Nadia could, and so by making the promise he demanded she
make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of
things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those
we leave behind.

SIX

THEY SLEPT LITTLE that night, the night before their departure
from the city, and in the morning Saeed’s father embraced

them and said goodbye and walked off with moist eyes, but
without faltering, the old man thinking it best he leave the
young people rather than make them agonize over stepping
through the front door with him watching from behind. He
would not say where he was going for the day, and so Saeed
and Nadia found themselves alone, unable once he was gone to
chase him down, and in the quietness of his absence Nadia
checked and rechecked the smallish backpacks they would
carry, smallish because they did not want to arouse
suspicion, but each full to bursting, like a turtle
imprisoned in too tight a shell, and Saeed ran his fingertips
over the apartment’s furniture and the telescope and the
bottle containing the clipper ship, and he also carefully
folded a photograph of his parents to keep hidden inside his
clothing, along with a memory stick containing his family
album, and twice he prayed.

The walk to the rendezvous point was an interminable one,
and as they walked Saeed and Nadia did not hold hands, for
that was forbidden in public between genders, even for an
ostensibly married couple, but from time to time their
knuckles would brush at their sides, and this sporadic
physical contact was important to them. They knew there was a
possibility the agent had sold them out to the militants, and
so they knew there was a possibility this was the final
afternoon of their lives.

The rendezvous point was in a converted house next to a
market that reminded Nadia of her former home. On the ground
floor was a dentist’s clinic long lacking medicines and

painkillers, and as of yesterday lacking a dentist as well,
and in the dentist’s waiting room they had a shock because a
man who looked like a militant was standing there, assault
rifle slung over his shoulder. But he merely took the balance
of their payment and told them to sit, and so they sat in
that crowded room with a frightened couple and their two
school-age children, and a young man in glasses, and an older
woman who was perched erectly on her seat as though she came
from money, even though her clothes were dirty, and every few
minutes someone was summoned through to the dentist’s office
itself, and after Nadia and Saeed were summoned they saw a
slender man who also looked like a militant, and was picking
at the edge of his nostril with a fingernail, as though
toying with a callus, or strumming a musical instrument, and
when he spoke they heard his peculiarly soft voice and knew
at once that he was the agent they had met before.

The room was gloomy and the dentist’s chair and tools
resembled a torture station. The agent gestured with his head
to the blackness of a door that had once led to a supply
cabinet and said to Saeed, “You go first,” but Saeed, who
had until then thought he would go first, to make sure it was
safe for Nadia to follow, now changed his mind, thinking it
possibly more dangerous for her to remain behind while he
went through, and said, “No, she will.”

The agent shrugged as though it was of no consequence to
him, and Nadia, who had not considered the order of their
departure until that moment, and realized there was no good
option for either of them, that there were risks to each, to
going first and to going second, did not argue, but
approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its
darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what
was on the other side, and also did not reflect what was on
this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end,
and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his
face was full of worry, and sorrow, and she took his hands in
hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and
without a word, she stepped through.

•   â€¢   â€¢

IT WAS SAID in those days that the passage was both like dying
and like being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of
extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping
struggle as she fought to exit it, and she felt cold and
bruised and damp as she lay on the floor of the room at the
other side, trembling and too spent at first to stand, and
she thought, while she strained to fill her lungs, that this
dampness must be her own sweat.

Saeed was emerging and Nadia crawled forward to give him
space, and as she did so she noticed the sinks and mirrors
for the first time, the tiles of the floor, the stalls behind
her, all the doors of which save one were normal doors, all
but the one through which she had come, and through which
Saeed was now coming, which was black, and she understood
that she was in the bathroom of some public place, and she
listened intently but it was silent, the only noises
emanating from her, from her breathing, and from Saeed, his
quiet grunts like those of a man exercising, or having sex.

They embraced without getting to their feet, and she
cradled him, for he was still weak, and when they were strong
enough they rose, and she saw Saeed pivot back to the door,
as though he wished maybe to reverse course and return
through it, and she stood beside him without speaking, and he
was motionless for a while, but then he strode forward and
they made their way outside and found themselves between two
low buildings, perceiving a sound like a shell held to their
ears and feeling a cold breeze on their faces and smelling
brine in the air and they looked and saw a stretch of sand
and low gray waves coming in and it seemed miraculous,
although it was not a miracle, they were merely on a beach.

The beach was fronted by a beach club, with bars and
tables and large outdoor loudspeakers and loungers stacked
away for winter. Its signs were written in English but also
in other European tongues. It seemed deserted, and Saeed and
Nadia went and stood by the sea, the water stopping just

short of their feet and sinking into the sand, leaving lines
in the smoothness like those of expired soap bubbles blown by
a parent for a child. After a while a pale-skinned man with
light brown hair came out and told them to move along, making
shooing gestures with his hands, but without any hostility or
particular rudeness, more as though he was conversing in an
international pidgin dialect of sign language.

They walked away from the beach club and in the lee of a
hill they saw what looked like a refugee camp, with hundreds
of tents and lean-tos and people of many colors and hues—
many colors and hues but mostly falling within a band of
brown that ranged from dark chocolate to milky tea—and these
people were gathered around fires that burned inside upright
oil drums and speaking in a cacophony that was the languages
of the world, what one might hear if one were a
communications satellite, or a spymaster tapping into a
fiber-optic cable under the sea.

In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense,
no one was. Nadia and Saeed quickly located a cluster of
fellow countrywomen and -men and learned that they were on
the Greek island of Mykonos, a great draw for tourists in the
summer, and, it seemed, a great draw for migrants this
winter, and that the doors out, which is to say the doors to
richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in,
the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured,
perhaps in the hope that people would go back to where they
came from—although almost no one ever did—or perhaps
because there were simply too many doors from too many poorer
places to guard them all.

The camp was in some ways like a trading post in an old-
time gold rush, and much was for sale or barter, from
sweaters to mobile phones to antibiotics to, quietly, sex and
drugs, and there were families with an eye on the future and
gangs of young men with an eye on the vulnerable and upright
folks and swindlers and those who had risked their lives to
save their children and those who knew how to choke a man in
the dark so he never made a sound. The island was pretty

safe, they were told, except when it was not, which made it
like most places. Decent people vastly outnumbered dangerous
ones, but it was probably best to be in the camp, near other
people, after nightfall.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE FIRST THINGS Saeed and Nadia bought, Nadia doing the
negotiating, were some water, food, a blanket, a larger
backpack, a little tent that folded away into a light, easily
portable pouch, and electric power and local numbers for
their phones. They found a patch of land at the edge of the
camp, partway up the hill, that wasn’t too windy or too
rocky, and set up their temporary home there, and Nadia felt
as she was doing it that she was playing house, as she had
with her sister as a child, and Saeed felt as he was doing it
that he was a bad son, and when Nadia squatted down beside a
scraggly bush and bade him squat down as well, and there
concealed tried to kiss him under the open sky, he turned his
face away angrily, and then immediately apologized, and
placed his cheek against hers, and she tried to relax against
him, cheek to bearded cheek, but she was surprised, because
what she thought she had glimpsed in him in that moment was
bitterness, and she had never seen bitterness in him before,
not in all these months, not for one second, even when his
mother had died, then he had been mournful, yes, depressed,
but not bitter, not as though something was corroding his
insides. He had in fact always struck her as the opposite of
bitter, so quick to smile, and she was reassured when now he
held her hand and kissed it, as if making reparations, but
she was a bit unsettled too, for it struck her that a bitter
Saeed would not be Saeed at all.

They took a nap in the tent, exhausted. When they woke
Saeed tried to call his father but an automated message
informed him that his call could not be completed, and Nadia
tried to connect with people via chat applications and social

media, and an acquaintance who had made it to Auckland and
another who had reached Madrid replied right away.

Nadia and Saeed sat next to each other on the ground and
caught up on the news, the tumult in the world, the state of
their country, the various routes and destinations migrants
were taking and recommending to each other, the tricks one
could gainfully employ, the dangers one needed at all costs
to avoid.

In the late afternoon, Saeed went to the top of the hill,
and Nadia went to the top of the hill, and there they gazed
out over the island, and out to sea, and he stood beside
where she stood, and she stood beside where he stood, and the
wind tugged and pushed at their hair, and they looked around
at each other, but they did not see each other, for she went
up before him, and he went up after her, and they were each
at the crest of the hill only briefly, and at different
times.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AS SAEED WAS COMING DOWN from the hill to where Nadia again sat
by their tent, a young woman was leaving the contemporary art
gallery she worked at in Vienna. Militants from Saeed and
Nadia’s country had crossed over to Vienna the previous
week, and the city had witnessed massacres in the streets,
the militants shooting unarmed people and then disappearing,
an afternoon of carnage unlike anything Vienna had ever seen,
well, unlike anything it had seen since the fighting of the
previous century, and of the centuries before that, which
were of an entirely different and greater magnitude, Vienna
being no stranger, in the annals of history, to war, and the
militants had perhaps hoped to provoke a reaction against
migrants from their own part of the world, who had been
pouring into Vienna, and if that had been their hope then
they had succeeded, for the young woman had learned of a mob
that was intending to attack the migrants gathered near the
zoo, everyone was talking and messaging about it, and she

planned to join a human cordon to separate the two sides, or
rather to shield the migrants from the anti-migrants, and she
was wearing a peace badge on her overcoat, and a rainbow
pride badge, and a migrant compassion badge, the black door
within a red heart, and she could see as she waited to board
her train that the crowd at the station was not the normal
crowd, children and older people seemed absent and also there
were far fewer women than usual, the coming riots being
common knowledge, and so it was likely that people were
staying away, but it wasn’t until she boarded the train and
found herself surrounded by men who looked like her brother
and her cousins and her father and her uncles, except that
they were angry, they were furious, and they were staring at
her and at her badges with undisguised hostility, and the
rancor of perceived betrayal, and they started to shout at
her, and push her, that she felt fear, a basic, animal fear,
terror, and thought that anything could happen, and then the
next station came and she shoved through and off the train,
and she worried they might seize her, and stop her, and hurt
her, but they didn’t, and she made it off, and she stood
there after the train had departed, and she was trembling,
and she thought for a while, and then she gathered her
courage, and she began to walk, and not in the direction of
her apartment, her lovely apartment with its view of the
river, but in the other direction, the direction of the zoo,
where she had been intending to go from the outset, and where
she would still go, and all this happened as the sun dipped
lower in the sky, as it was doing above Mykonos as well,
which though south and east of Vienna, was after all in
planetary terms not far away, and there in Mykonos Saeed and
Nadia were reading about the riot, which was starting in
Vienna, and which panicked people originally from their
country were discussing online how best to endure or flee.

•   â€¢   â€¢

BY NIGHT IT WAS COLD, and so Saeed and Nadia slept fully
dressed, not removing their jackets, and huddled together,
wrapped inside their blanket, which was above and around and
also below them, providing a degree of cushioning against the
hard and somewhat uneven ground. Their tent was too small for
them to stand, a long but low pentahedron, in shape like the
triangular glass prism Saeed used to have as a child, with
which he would refract sunlight into little rainbows. He and
Nadia held on to each other at first, cuddling, but cuddling
grows uncomfortable after a while, especially in tight
quarters, and so eventually they slept back-to-front,
initially with him pressed against her from behind, and then,
at some later point as the moon passed unseen high overhead,
he turned and she turned and she pressed against him.

In the morning when he woke she was watching him and he
stroked her hair and she touched his bristles above his lip
and below his ear with her finger and he kissed her and
things felt good between them. They packed up and Saeed
hefted the large backpack and Nadia the tent and they traded
one of their smallish backpacks for a yoga mat that they
hoped would make sleeping more comfortable.

Without warning people began to rush out of the camp and
Saeed and Nadia heard a rumor that a new door out had been
found, a door to Germany, and so they ran too, in the middle
of the crowd initially, but striding swiftly so they were
soon closer to the front. The crowd filled the narrow road
and overflowed into the margins and stretched many hundreds
of meters at its longest, and Saeed wondered where they were
going, and then up ahead he saw they were approaching a hotel
or resort of some kind. As they drew nearer he glimpsed a
line of men in uniform blocking their way, and he told Nadia,
and they were both frightened, and started to slow down, and
allow people to pass them, because they had seen in their
city what happens when bullets are fired into an unarmed mass
of people. But in the end no bullets were fired, the
uniformed men simply stopped the crowd and stood their
ground, and a few brave or desperate or enterprising souls

tried to make it through, running at high speed on either
side, where there were gaps, but these few were caught, and
after an hour or so the crowd dispersed and most people
headed back to the camp.

Days passed like this, full of waiting and false hopes,
days that might have been days of boredom, and were for many,
but Nadia had the idea that they should explore the island as
if they were tourists. Saeed laughed and agreed, and this was
the first time he had laughed since they arrived, and it
warmed her to see it, and so they carried their loads like
trekkers in the wilderness and walked along the beaches and
up the hills and right to the edges of the cliffs, and they
decided that Mykonos was indeed a beautiful place, and they
could understand why people might come here. Sometimes they
saw rough-looking groups of men and Saeed and Nadia were
careful to keep their distance, and by evening they were
always sure to sleep at the periphery of one of the big
migrant camps, of which there were many, and to which anyone
might belong, joining or leaving as they saw fit.

Once they met an acquaintance of Saeed’s and this seemed
an almost impossible and happy coincidence, like two leaves
blown from the same tree by a hurricane landing on top of
each other far away, and it cheered Saeed greatly. The man
said that he was a people smuggler, and had helped people
escape their city, and was doing the same thing here, because
he knew all the ins and outs. He agreed to help Saeed and
Nadia, and he cut his rate in half for them and they were
grateful, and he took their payment and said he would have
them in Sweden by the following morning, but when they woke
there was no sign of him. He was gone. He had disappeared
overnight. Saeed trusted him and so they stayed where they
were for a week, stayed at the same spot in the same camp,
but they never saw him again. Nadia knew they had been
swindled, such things were common, and Saeed knew it too, but
preferred for a while to try to believe that something had
happened to the man that had prevented him from returning,
and when he prayed Saeed prayed not only for the man’s

return but also for his safety, until it felt foolish to pray
for this man any longer, and after that Saeed prayed only for
Nadia and for his father, especially for his father, who was
not with them, and should have been. But there was no way
back to his father now, because no door in their city went
undiscovered by the militants for long, and no one returning
through a door who was known to have fled their rule was
allowed to live.

One morning Saeed was able to borrow a beard trimmer and
trim his beard down to the stubble he had had when Nadia
first met him, and that morning he asked Nadia why she still
wore her black robes, since here she did not need to, and she
said that she had not needed to wear them even in their own
city, when she lived alone, before the militants came, but
she chose to, because it sent a signal, and she still wished
to send this signal, and he smiled and asked, a signal even
to me, and she smiled as well and said, not to you, you have
seen me with nothing.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THEIR FUNDS WERE GROWING THINNER, more than half the money with
which they had left their city now gone. They better
understood the desperation they saw in the camps, the fear in
people’s eyes that they would be trapped here forever, or
until hunger forced them back through one of the doors that
led to undesirable places, the doors that were left
unguarded, what people in the camps referred to as
mousetraps, but which, in resignation, some people were
nonetheless trying, especially those who had exhausted their
resources, venturing through them to the same place from
which they had come, or to another unknown place when they
thought anything would be better than where they had been.

Saeed and Nadia began to curtail their wanderings to
conserve energy, and thus reduce their need for food and
drink. Saeed bought a simple fishing rod, available for a
less exorbitant price because its reel was broken and the

line had to be spooled out and pulled back in by hand. He and
Nadia journeyed to the sea, and stood on a rock, and put
bread on the hook, and tried to fish, alone, two people by
themselves, all but surrounded by water the breeze was
chopping into opaque hillocks, concealing what lay beneath,
and they fished and fished for hours, taking turns, but
neither of them knew how to fish, or maybe they were just
unlucky, and though they felt nibbles, they caught nothing,
and it was as though they were merely feeding their bread to
the insatiable brine.

Someone had told them the best times to fish were at dawn
and dusk, so they stayed out alone longer than they otherwise
might have. It was getting dark when they saw four men in the
distance, approaching along the beach. Nadia said they should
go, and Saeed agreed, and the couple walked away, quickly,
but the men seemed to follow, and Saeed and Nadia increased
their pace, increased it as much as they could manage, even
though Nadia slipped and cut her arm on the rocks. The men
were gaining on them, and Saeed and Nadia began to wonder
aloud what of their things they could leave behind, to
lighten the load, or as an offering that might sate their
pursuers. Saeed said perhaps the men wanted the rod, and this
seemed more reassuring to them than the alternative, which
was to consider what else the men might want. So they dropped
the rod, but soon after they rounded a bend and saw a house
and outside the house were uniformed guards, which meant the
house contained a door to a desirable place, and Saeed and
Nadia had never before been relieved to see guards on the
island, but they were now. They came close, until the guards
shouted at them to stay back, and there Saeed and Nadia
stopped, making it clear they would not try to rush the
house, sitting down where the guards could see them, and
where they felt safe, and Saeed considered whether to run
back and retrieve the rod, but Nadia said it was too risky.
They both regretted dropping it now. They watched for a while
but the four men never appeared, and the two of them set up

their tent right there, but were unable to sleep much that
night.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE DAYS WERE GROWING WARMER, and spring was stuttering into being
in Mykonos, with buds and scattered flowers. In all the weeks
they had been there Saeed and Nadia had never been to the old
town, for it was off-limits to migrants at night, and they
were strongly discouraged from going there even by day,
except to the outskirts, where they could trade with
residents, which is to say those who had been on the island
longer than a few months, but the gash on Nadia’s arm was
beginning to fester, and so they had come to the outskirts of
the old town to get it tended to at a clinic. A partly
shaved-haired local girl who was not a doctor or a nurse but
just a volunteer, a teenager with a kind disposition, not
more than eighteen or nineteen years of age, cleaned and
dressed the wound, gently, holding Nadia’s arm as though it
was something precious, holding it almost shyly. The two
women got to talking, and there was a connection between
them, and the girl said she wanted to help Nadia and Saeed,
and asked them what they needed. They said above all they
needed a way off the island, and the girl said she might be
able to do something, and they should stay nearby, and she
took Nadia’s number, and each day Nadia visited the clinic
and she and the girl spoke and sometimes had a coffee or a
joint together and the girl seemed so happy to see her.

The old town was exquisite, white blocks with blue windows
scattered along tawny hills, spilling down to the sea, and
from the outskirts Saeed and Nadia could spy little windmills
and rounded churches and the vibrant green of trees that from
a distance looked like potted plants. It was expensive to
stay nearby, the camps there often having migrants with more
money, and Saeed was becoming worried.

But Nadia’s new friend was as good as her word, because
very early one morning she put both Nadia and Saeed on the

back of her scooter and sped them through still-quiet streets
to a house on a hill with a courtyard. They dashed inside and
there was a door. The girl wished them good luck, and she
hugged Nadia tight, and Saeed was surprised to see what
appeared to be tears in the girl’s eyes, or if not tears
then at least a misty shine, and Nadia hugged her too, and
this hug lasted a long time, and the girl whispered something
to her, whispered, and then she and Saeed turned and stepped
through the door and left Mykonos behind.

SEVEN

THEY EMERGED in a bedroom with a view of the night sky and
furnishings so expensive and well made that Saeed and

Nadia thought they were in a hotel, of the sort seen in films
and thick, glossy magazines, with pale woods and cream rugs
and white walls and the gleam of metal here and there, metal
as reflective as a mirror, framing the upholstery of a sofa,
the switch plate for the lights. They lay still, hoping not
to be discovered, but it was quiet, so quiet they imagined
they must be in the countryside—for they had no experience
of acoustically insulating glazing—and everyone in the hotel
must be asleep.

As they stood, though, they saw from their full height
what was below the sky, namely that they were in a city, with
a row of white buildings opposite, each perfectly painted and
maintained and implausibly like the next, and in front of
each of these buildings, rising from rectangular gaps in a
pavement that was paved with rectangular flagstones, or
concrete laid in the manner of flagstones, were trees, cherry
trees, with buds and a few white blossoms, as though it had
snowed recently and the snow had caught in the boughs and
leaves, all along the street, in tree after tree after tree,
and they stood and stared at this, for it seemed almost
unreal.

They waited for a while but knew they could not stay in
this hotel room forever, so eventually they tried the handle
of the door, which was unlocked, and emerged into a hallway,
leading to a staircase, one flight down which led them to an
even grander staircase, off which were floors with more
bedrooms but also sitting rooms and salons, and only then did
they realize that they were in a house of some kind, surely a

palace, with rooms upon rooms and marvels upon marvels, and
taps that gushed water that was like spring water and was
white with bubbles and felt soft, yes soft, to the touch.

•   â€¢   â€¢

DAWN WAS BREAKING in the city and still they had not been
discovered and Saeed and Nadia sat in the kitchen and
pondered what to do. The refrigerator was mostly empty,
suggesting no one had eaten from it in some time, and while
there were boxes and cans of less perishable food in the
cupboards, they did not want to be accused of stealing, so
they brought their own food out of their backpack and boiled
two potatoes for breakfast. They did however take two teabags
from the house, and make themselves tea, and each used a
spoonful of the house’s sugar as well, and if there had been
milk in the house they might have helped themselves to a tiny
splash of that too, but there was no milk to be found.

They clicked on a television to see if they could discover
where they were, and it was soon clear to them that they were
in London, and as they watched the television with its
intermittently apocalyptic news they felt oddly normal, for
they had not watched a television in months. Then they heard
a sound from behind them and saw a man was standing there,
staring, and they got to their feet, Saeed hefting their
backpack and Nadia their tent, but the man turned wordlessly
and headed upstairs. They did not know what to make of this.
The man had seemed almost as surprised by his surroundings as
they were, and they saw no one else until nightfall.

When it was dark people began to emerge from the upstairs
room where Nadia and Saeed had themselves first arrived: a
dozen Nigerians, later a few Somalis, after them a family
from the borderlands between Myanmar and Thailand. More and
more and more. Some left the house as soon as they could.
Others stayed, staking claim to a bedroom or a sitting room
as their own.

Saeed and Nadia picked a small bedroom in the back, one
floor up from the ground, with a balcony from which they
could jump to the rear garden, if necessary, and from there
with luck make an escape.

•   â€¢   â€¢

TO HAVE A ROOM to themselves—four walls, a window, a door with
a lock—seemed incredible good fortune, and Nadia was tempted
to unpack, but she knew they needed to be ready to leave at
any moment, and so she took out of their backpack only items
that were absolutely required. For his part Saeed removed the
photo of his parents that he kept hidden in his clothing and
placed it on a bookshelf, where it stood, creased, gazing
upon them and transforming this narrow bedroom, at least
partially, temporarily, into a home.

In the hall nearby was a bathroom, and Nadia wanted to
take a shower more than anything, more even than she wanted
food. Saeed stood watch outside, while she went in and
stripped, and observed her own body, leaner than she had ever
seen it, and streaked with a grime mostly of her own
biological creation, dried sweat and dead skin, and with hair
in places from which she had always banished hair, and she
thought her body looked like the body of an animal, a savage.
The water pressure in the shower was magnificent, striking
her flesh with real force, and scouring her clean. The heat
was superb too, and she turned it up as high as she could
stand, the heat going all the way into her bones, chilled
from months of outdoor cold, and the bathroom filled up with
steam like a forest in the mountains, scented with pine and
lavender from the soaps she had found, a kind of heaven, with
towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she
felt like a princess using them, or at least like the
daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy
in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton
such as this, to feel this exquisite sensation on their naked
stomachs and thighs, towels that felt as if they had never

been used before and might never be used again. Nadia began
to put her folded clothes back on but all of a sudden could
not bear to, the stench from them was overpowering, and so
she was about to wash them in the tub when she heard a
banging on the door and realized she must have locked it.
Opening up, she saw a nervous and annoyed and dirty-looking
Saeed.

He said, “What the hell are you doing?”
She smiled and moved to kiss him, and while her lips did

touch his, his did not much respond.
“It’s been forever,” he said. “This isn’t our

house.”
“I need five more minutes. I have to wash my clothes.”
He stared but did not disagree, and even if he had

disagreed, she felt a steel in herself which she knew meant
she would have washed them anyway. What she was doing, what
she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was
about the essential, about being human, living as a human
being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered,
and if necessary was worth a fight.

But the extraordinary satisfactions of the steamy bathroom
seemed to have evaporated as she shut the door, and the
washing of her clothes, watching the turbid water flow from
them down the drain of the bathtub, was disappointingly
utilitarian. She tried to recover her former good mood, and
not be angry with Saeed, who she told herself was not wrong
in his own way, just out of rhythm with her in this moment,
and when she emerged from the bathroom wrapped in her towel,
her towels, for she had one around her body and another
around her hair, and with her dripping but clean clothes in
her hands, she was prepared to let the little confrontation
between them go.

But he said, looking at her, “You can’t stand here like
that.”

“Don’t tell me what I can do.”
He looked stung by this comment, and also angry, and she

was angry as well, and after he had bathed, and washed his

clothes, which he did perhaps as a conciliatory gesture or
perhaps because once he was cleansed of his own grime he too
realized something of what she had realized, they slept on
the slender single bed together without speaking, without
touching, or without touching more than the cramped space
demanded, for this one night not unlike a couple that was
long and unhappily married, a couple that made out of
opportunities for joy, misery.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA AND SAEED had crossed over on the morning of a Saturday
and by Monday morning when the housekeeper came to work the
house was already quite full, home perhaps to fifty
squatters, from infants to the elderly, hailing from as far
west as Guatemala and as far east as Indonesia. The
housekeeper screamed as she unlocked the front door, and the
police arrived quickly after, two men in old-fashioned black
hats, but they only looked in from outside, and did not
enter. Soon there was a vanload more of them, in full riot
gear, and then a car with two more who wore white shirts and
black vests and were armed with what appeared to be
submachine guns, and on their black vests was the word POLICE
in white letters but these two looked to Saeed and Nadia like
soldiers.

The residents of the house were terrified, most had seen
firsthand what the police and soldiers could do, and in their
terror they spoke more to one another than they otherwise
might, strangers speaking to strangers. A sort of camaraderie
evolved, as it might not have had they been on the street, in
the open, for then they would likely have scattered, and the
devil take the hindmost, but here they were penned in
together, and being penned in made them into a grouping, a
group.

When the police called over their bullhorns for everyone
to exit the house, most agreed among themselves that they
would not do so, and so while a few left, the vast majority

stayed, Nadia and Saeed among them. The deadline for their
departure drew nearer, then nearer still, and then came and
went, and they were still there, and the police had not
charged, and they felt they had won some kind of a respite,
and then something they could never have expected happened:
other people gathered on the street, other dark- and medium-
and even light-skinned people, bedraggled, like the people of
the camps on Mykonos, and these people formed a crowd. They
banged cooking pots with spoons and chanted in various
languages and soon the police decided to withdraw.

That night it was calm and quiet in the house, though
there were sometimes snatches of beautiful singing that could
be heard, in Igbo, until quite late, and Saeed and Nadia lay
together and held hands on the soft bed in their little back
bedroom and were comforted by this, as if by a lullaby,
comforted even though they kept their bedroom door locked. In
the morning they heard in the distance someone making a call
to prayer, at dawn, perhaps over a commandeered karaoke
machine, and Nadia was alarmed, waking from a dream and
thinking for a second that she was back home in their own
city, with the militants, before recalling where she really
was, and then she watched, a bit surprised, as Saeed got out
of bed and prayed.

•   â€¢   â€¢

ALL OVER LONDON houses and parks and disused lots were being
peopled in this way, some said by a million migrants, some
said by twice that. It seemed the more empty a space in the
city the more it attracted squatters, with unoccupied
mansions in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea
particularly hard-hit, their absentee owners often
discovering the bad news too late to intervene, and similarly
the great expanses of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens,
filling up with tents and rough shelters, such that it was
now said that between Westminster and Hammersmith legal
residents were in a minority, and native-born ones

vanishingly few, with local newspapers referring to the area
as the worst of the black holes in the fabric of the nation.

But even as people poured into London, some were venturing
out of it as well. An accountant in Kentish Town who had been
on the verge of taking his own life woke one morning to
discover the blackness of a door where the bright entrance to
his small but well-lit second bedroom had been. While at
first he had armed himself with the hockey stick his daughter
had left in his closet, left there along with much else she
had abandoned for her gap year, and subsequently he had taken
out his phone to call the authorities, he stopped himself to
wonder why he was bothering, and proceeded to put away the
hockey stick and his phone, and fill his tub as he had
planned, and to place the box cutter he had purchased on the
little scalloped ledge next to the organic soap his ex-
girlfriend would never again use.

He reminded himself that he needed to cut lengthwise if he
was serious, up his forearm and not across it, and though he
hated the idea of pain, and also of being found naked, he
thought this was the right way to go, well considered and
well planned. But the nearby blackness unsettled him, and
reminded him of something, of a feeling, of a feeling he
associated with children’s books, with books he had read as
a child, or books that had been read to him rather, by his
mother, a woman with a gentle lisp and a gentle embrace, who
had not died too young but who had deteriorated too young,
her illness taking with it her speech, and her personality,
and in the process taking his father too, making him into a
distant sort of man. And as the accountant thought this, he
thought he might step through the door, just once, to see
what was on the other side, and so he did.

Later his daughter and his best friend would receive via
their phones a photo of him, on a seaside that seemed to have
no trees, a desert seaside, or a seaside that was in any case
dry, with towering dunes, a seaside in Namibia, and a message
that said he would not be returning, but not to worry, he
felt something, he felt something for a change, and they

might join him, he would be glad if they did, and if they
chose to, a door could be found in his flat. With that he was
gone, and his London was gone, and how long he remained in
Namibia it was hard for anyone who formerly knew him to say.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE RESIDENTS OF THE HOUSE Nadia and Saeed now occupied wondered
if they had won. They savored being indoors, for many had
spent many months without a proper roof over their heads, but
they knew deep down that a house like this, a palace like
this, would not be surrendered so easily, and their relief
was therefore fragile.

Nadia experienced the environment of the house as a bit
like that of a university dormitory at the start of classes,
with complete strangers living in close proximity, many of
them on their best behavior, trying to add warmth to
conversations and strike poses of friendship, hoping these
gestures would become more natural over time. Outside the
house much was random and chaotic, but inside, perhaps, a
degree of order could be built. Maybe even a community. There
were rough people in the house, but there were rough people
everywhere, and in life roughness had to be managed. Nadia
thought it madness to expect anything else.

For Saeed existence in the house was more jarring. On
Mykonos he had preferred the outskirts of the migrant camps,
and he had grown accustomed to a degree of independence from
their fellow refugees. He was suspicious, especially of the
other men around, of whom there were many, and he found it
stressful to be packed in so tightly with people who spoke in
tongues he did not understand. Unlike Nadia, he felt in part
guilty that they and their fellow residents were occupying a
home that was not their own, and guilty also at the visible
deterioration brought on by their presence, the presence of
over fifty inhabitants in a single dwelling.

He was the only one to object when people started to take
for themselves items of value in the house, a position that

struck Nadia as absurd, and physically dangerous for Saeed
besides, and so she had told him not to be an idiot, said it
harshly, to protect him rather than to harm him, but he had
been shocked by her tone, and while he acquiesced, he
wondered if this new way of speaking to one another, this
unkindness that was now creeping into their words from time
to time, was a sign of where they were headed.

Nadia too noticed a friction between them. She was
uncertain what to do to disarm the cycles of annoyance they
seemed to be entering into with one another, since once begun
such cycles are difficult to break, in fact the opposite, as
if each makes the threshold for irritation next time a bit
lower, as is the case with certain allergies.

All the food in the house was very quickly consumed. Some
residents had money to buy more, but most had to spend their
time foraging, which involved going to the depots and stalls
where various groups were giving out rations or serving free
soup and bread. The daily supplies at each of these were
exhausted within hours, sometimes within minutes, and the
only option then was to barter with one’s neighbors or kin
or acquaintances, and since most people had little to barter
with, they usually bartered with a promise of something to
eat tomorrow or the next day in exchange for something to eat
today, a bartering not so much of different goods, exactly,
but of time.

•   â€¢   â€¢

ONE DAY Saeed and Nadia were returning home with no food but
modestly full bellies, after a reasonably good evening of
foraging, and she was experiencing the peculiar sweet
aftertaste and acidity of mustard and ketchup, and Saeed was
looking at his phone, when they heard shouting up ahead and
saw people running, and they realized that their street was
under attack by a nativist mob, Palace Gardens Terrace being
roiled in a way that belied its name. The mob looked to Nadia
like a strange and violent tribe, intent on their

destruction, some armed with iron bars or knives, and she and
Saeed turned and ran, but could not escape.

Nadia’s eye was bruised and would soon swell shut and
Saeed’s lip was split and kept bleeding down his chin and
onto his jacket, and in their terror they each gripped with
all their might a hand of the other to avoid being separated,
but they were merely knocked down, like many others, and on
that evening of riots across their part of London only three
lives were lost, not many by the recent standards of where
they had come from.

In the morning they felt their bed was too tight for them
both, raw as they were from their injuries, and Nadia pushed
Saeed away with her hip, trying to make space, and Saeed
pushed as well, trying to do the same, and for a second she
was angry, and then they turned face-to-face and he touched
her swollen-shut eye and she snorted and touched his swollen-
up lip, and they looked at each other and silently agreed to
start their day without growling.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AFTER THE RIOTS the talk on the television was of a major
operation, one city at a time, starting in London, to reclaim
Britain for Britain, and it was reported that the army was
being deployed, and the police as well, and those who had
once served in the army and the police, and volunteers who
had received a weeklong course of training. Saeed and Nadia
heard it said that nativist extremists were forming their own
legions, with a wink and a nod from the authorities, and the
social media chatter was of a coming night of shattered
glass, but all this would probably take time to organize, and
in that time Saeed and Nadia had to make a decision: whether
to stay or to go.

In their small bedroom after sunset they listened to music
on Nadia’s phone, using the phone’s built-in speaker. It
would have been a simple matter to stream this music from
various websites, but they tried to economize in all things,

including the data bundles they had purchased for their
phones, and so Nadia downloaded pirated versions whenever she
could find them, and they listened to these. She was in any
case glad to be rebuilding her music library: from past
experience, she did not trust in the continued availability
of anything online.

One night she played an album that she knew Saeed liked,
by a local band popular in their city when they were in their
teens, and he was surprised and happy to hear it, because he
was well aware she was not overly fond of their country’s
pop music, and so it was clear that she was playing this for
him.

They sat cross-legged on their narrow bed, their backs
propped up by the wall. He extended a hand, palm up on his
knee. She took it.

“Let’s agree to try harder not to speak shittily to each
other,” she said.

He smiled. “Let’s promise.”
“I do.”
“I do, as well.”
That night he asked her what the life of her dreams would

look like, whether it would be in a metropolis or in the
countryside, and she asked him whether he could see them
settling in London and not leaving, and they discussed how
houses such as the one they were occupying might be divided
into proper apartments, and also how they might start over
someplace else, elsewhere in this city, or in a city far
away.

They felt closer on nights when they were making these
plans, as though major events distracted them from the more
mundane realities of life, and sometimes as they debated
their options in their bedroom they would stop and look at
each other, as if remembering, each of them, who the other
was.

Returning to where they had been born was unthinkable, and
they knew that in other desirable cities in other desirable
countries similar scenes must be unfolding, scenes of

nativist backlash, and so even though they discussed leaving
London, they stayed. Rumors began to circulate of a
tightening cordon being put in place, a cordon moving through
those of London’s boroughs with fewer doors, and hence fewer
new arrivals, sending those unable to prove their legal
residence to great holding camps that had been built in the
city’s greenbelt, and concentrating those who remained in
pockets of shrinking size. Whether or not this was true there
was no denying that an ever more dense zone of migrants was
to be found in Kensington and Chelsea and in the adjacent
parks, and around this zone were soldiers and armored
vehicles, and above it were drones and helicopters, and
inside it were Nadia and Saeed, who had run from war already,
and did not know where next to run, and so were waiting,
waiting, like so many others.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AND YET while all this occurred there were volunteers
delivering food and medicine to the area, and aid agencies at
work, and the government had not banned them from operating,
as some of the governments the migrants were fleeing from
had, and in this there was hope. Saeed in particular was
touched by a native boy, just out of school, or perhaps in
his final year, who came to their house and administered
polio drops, to the children but also to the adults, and
while many were suspicious of vaccinations, and many more,
including Saeed and Nadia, had already been vaccinated, there
was such earnestness in the boy, such empathy and good
intent, that though some argued, none had the heart to refuse
him.

Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt
like, and so the feeling that hung over London in those days
was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery,
exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead
with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with
tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded

there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the
storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life,
waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our
mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.

The cherry trees exploded on Palace Gardens Terrace at
that time, bursting into white blossoms, the closest thing
many of the street’s new residents had ever seen to snow,
and reminding others of ripe cotton in the fields, waiting to
be picked, waiting for labor, for the efforts of dark bodies
from the villages, and in these trees there were now dark
bodies too, children who climbed and played among the boughs,
like little monkeys, not because to be dark is to be monkey-
like, though that has been and was being and will long be
slurred, but because people are monkeys who have forgotten
that they are monkeys, and so have lost respect for what they
are born of, for the natural world around them, but not, just
then, these children, who were thrilled in nature, playing
imaginary games, lost in the clouds of white like balloonists
or pilots or phoenixes or dragons, and as bloodshed loomed
they made of these trees that were perhaps not intended to be
climbed the stuff of a thousand fantasies.

One night a fox appeared in the garden of the house where
Saeed and Nadia were staying. Saeed pointed it out to Nadia
through the window of their little back bedroom, and they
were both amazed to see it, and wondered how such a creature
could survive in London, and where it had come from. When
they asked around if anyone else had seen a fox, all said no,
and some people told them it might have come through the
doors, and others said it might have wandered in from the
countryside, and still others claimed foxes were known to
live in this part of London, and an old woman told them they
had not seen a fox but rather themselves, their love. They
wondered if she meant the fox was a living symbol or the fox
was unreal and just a feeling and when others looked they
would see no fox at all.

Mention of their love had made Saeed and Nadia a bit
uncomfortable, for they had not been very romantic of late,

each still perceiving the grating of their presence on the
other, and they put this down to being too long in too close
proximity, a state of unnatural nearness in which any
relationship would suffer. They began to wander separately
during the day, and this separation came as a relief to them,
though Saeed worried what would happen if the fighting to
clear their area began so suddenly that they would not both
be able to return home in time, knowing from experience that
a mobile phone could be a fickle connection, its signal
thought in normal circumstances to be like the sunlight or
the moonlight, but in actuality capable of an instant and
endless eclipse, and Nadia worried about the promise she had
made Saeed’s father, whom she too had called father, to stay
with Saeed until he was safe, worried what it would make her
to be proven untrue to this promise, and whether that would
mean she stood for nothing whatsoever.

But liberated from claustrophobic closeness by day,
exploring apart, they converged with more warmth at night,
even if sometimes this warmth felt like that between
relatives rather than between lovers. They began to sit on
the balcony outside their bedroom and wait in the dark for
the fox to appear below, in the garden. Such a noble animal,
noble though it was fond of rummaging in the trash.

As they sat they would on occasion hold hands, and on
occasion kiss, and once in a while feel the rekindling of an
otherwise diminished fire and go to their bed and torment
each other’s bodies, never having sex, but never needing to,
not anymore, following a different ritual that still resulted
in release. Then they would sleep, or if not sleepy go back
onto the balcony and wait for the fox, and the fox was
unpredictable, it might come and it might not, but often it
did, and when it did they were relieved, for it meant the fox
had not disappeared and had not been killed and had not found
another part of town to make home. One night the fox
encountered a soiled diaper, pulled it out of the trash and
sniffed at it, as if wondering what it was, and then dragged
it around the garden, fouling the grass, changing course

again and again, like a pet dog with a toy, or a bear with an
unfortunate hunter in its maw, in any case moving with both
design and unpredictable wildness, and when it was done the
diaper lay in shreds.

That night the electricity went out, cut off by the
authorities, and Kensington and Chelsea descended into
darkness. A sharp fear descended also, and the call to prayer
they had often heard in the distance from the park was
silenced. They supposed the karaoke player that might have
been used for that task was unable to run on batteries.

EIGHT

THE COMPLEXITIES of London’s electricity network were such
that a few motes of nighttime brightness remained in Saeed

and Nadia’s locality, at properties on the edges, near where
barricades and checkpoints were manned by armed government
forces, and in scattered pockets that were for some reason
difficult to disconnect, and in the odd building here and
there where an enterprising migrant had rigged together a
connection to a still-active high-voltage line, risking and
in some cases succumbing to electrocution. Overwhelmingly,
though, around Saeed and Nadia it was dark.

Mykonos had not been well lit, but electricity had reached
everywhere there were wires. In their own fled city, when the
electricity had gone, it had gone for all. But in London
there were parts as bright as ever, brighter than anyplace
Saeed or Nadia had seen before, glowing up into the sky and
reflecting down again from the clouds, and in contrast the
city’s dark swaths seemed darker, more significant, the way
that blackness in the ocean suggests not less light from
above, but a sudden drop-off in the depths below.

From dark London, Saeed and Nadia wondered what life must
be like in light London, where they imagined people dined in
elegant restaurants and rode in shiny black cabs, or at least
went to work in offices and shops and were free to journey
about as they pleased. In dark London, rubbish accrued,
uncollected, and underground stations were sealed. The trains
kept running, skipping stops near Saeed and Nadia but felt as
a rumble beneath their feet and heard at a low, powerful
frequency, almost subsonic, like thunder or the detonation of
a massive, distant bomb.

At night, in the darkness, as drones and helicopters and
surveillance balloons prowled intermittently overhead, fights
would sometimes break out, and there were murders and rapes
and assaults as well. Some in dark London blamed these
incidents on nativist provocateurs. Others blamed other
migrants, and began to move, in the manner of cards dealt
from a shuffled deck during the course of a game,
reassembling themselves in suits and runs of their own kind,
like with like, or rather superficially like with
superficially like, all the hearts together, all the clubs
together, all the Sudanese, all the Hondurans.

Saeed and Nadia did not move, but their house began to
change nonetheless. Nigerians were initially the largest
among many groups of residents, but every so often a non-
Nigerian family would relocate out of the house, and their
place would almost always be taken by more Nigerians, and so
the house began to be known as a Nigerian house, like the two
on either side. The elder Nigerians of these three houses
would meet in the garden of the property to the right of
Saeed and Nadia’s, and this meeting they called the council.
Women and men both attended, but the only obvious non-
Nigerian who attended was Nadia.

The first time Nadia went the others seemed surprised to
see her, not merely because of her ethnicity but because of
her relatively young age. Momentarily there was a silence,
but then an old woman with a turban who lived with her
daughter and grandsons in the bedroom above Saeed and
Nadia’s, and whom Nadia had helped on more than one occasion
to ascend the stairs, the old woman being regal in posture
but also quite large, this old woman motioned to Nadia,
beckoned Nadia to come stand at her side, to stand beside the
garden chair on which she was sitting. This seemed to settle
the matter, and Nadia was not questioned or asked to leave.

Initially Nadia did not follow much of what was being
said, just snippets here and there, but over time she
understood more and more, and she understood also that the
Nigerians were in fact not all Nigerians, some were half

Nigerians, or from places that bordered Nigeria, from
families that spanned both sides of a border, and further
that there was perhaps no such thing as a Nigerian, or
certainly no one common thing, for different Nigerians spoke
different tongues among themselves, and belonged to different
religions. Together in this group they conversed in a
language that was built in large part from English, but not
solely from English, and some of them were in any case more
familiar with English than were others. Also they spoke
different variations of English, different Englishes, and so
when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she
did not need to fear that her views could not be
comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among
many.

The activities of the council were mundane, making
decisions on room disputes or claims of theft or unneighborly
behavior, and also on relations with other houses on the
street. Deliberations were often slow and cumbersome, so
these gatherings were not particularly thrilling. And yet
Nadia looked forward to them. They represented something new
in her mind, the birth of something new, and she found these
people who were both like and unlike those she had known in
her city, familiar and unfamiliar, she found them
interesting, and she found their seeming acceptance of her,
or at least tolerance of her, rewarding, an achievement in a
way.

Among the younger Nigerians Nadia acquired a bit of a
special status, perhaps because they saw her with their
elders, or perhaps because of her black robe, and so the
younger Nigerian men and women and the older Nigerian boys
and girls, the ones who often had quick jibes to make about
many of the others in the house, rarely said anything of that
nature to her, or about her, at least in her presence. She
came and went unruffled through the crowded rooms and
passages, unruffled except by a fast-talking Nigerian woman
her own age, a woman with a leather jacket and a chipped
tooth, who stood like a gunslinger, with hips open and belt

loose and hands at her sides, and spared no one from her
verbal lashings, from her comments that would follow you even
as you passed her and left her behind.

Saeed, though, was less comfortable. As he was a young man
the other young men would size him up from time to time, as
young men do, and Saeed found this disconcerting. Not because
he had not encountered anything similar in his own country,
he had, but because here in this house he was the only man
from his country, and those sizing him up were from another
country, and there were far more of them, and he was alone.
This touched upon something basic, something tribal, and
evoked tension and a sort of suppressed fear. He was
uncertain when he could relax, if he could relax, and so when
he was outside his bedroom but inside the house he seldom
felt fully at ease.

Once, he was alone, arriving home while Nadia was at a
meeting of the council, and the woman in the leather jacket
stood in the hall, blocking his way with her narrow, jagged
form, her back leaning against one wall, a foot planted on
the other. Saeed did not like to admit it but he was
intimidated by her, by her intensity and by the speed and
unpredictability of her words, words that he often could not
understand, but words that made others laugh. He stood there
and waited for her to move, to yield space for him to pass.
But she did not move, and so he said excuse me, and she said
why should I excuse you, she said more than that, but all he
could catch was that phrase. Saeed was angry that she was
toying with him, and alarmed also, and he considered turning
around and coming back later. But he realized at that moment
that there was a man behind him, a tough-looking Nigerian
man. Saeed had heard that this man had a gun, though he could
not see it on him, but many of the migrants in dark London
had taken to carrying knives and other weapons, being as they
were in a state of siege, and liable to be attacked by
government forces at any time, or in some cases being
predisposed to carrying weapons, having done it where they

came from, and so continuing to do it here, which Saeed
suspected was the case with this man.

Saeed wanted to run but had nowhere to run to, and tried
to hide his panic, but then the woman in the leather jacket
removed her foot from the wall, and there was space for Saeed
to pass, and so he squeezed through, brushing her body with
his, and feeling emasculated as he did so, and when he was
alone in his and Nadia’s room he sat on the bed and his
heart was racing and he wanted to shout and to huddle in a
corner but of course he did neither.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AROUND A BEND, on Vicarage Gate, was a house known to be a
house of people from his country. Saeed began to spend more
time there, drawn by the familiar languages and accents and
the familiar smell of the cooking. One afternoon he was there
at prayer time, and he joined his fellow countrymen in prayer
in the back garden, under a blue sky that seemed shockingly
blue, like the sky of another world, absent the airborne dust
of the city where he had spent his entire life, and also
peering out into space from a higher latitude, a different
perch on the spinning Earth, nearer its pole than its
equator, and so glimpsing the void from a different angle, a
bluer angle, and as he prayed he felt praying was different
here, somehow, in the garden of this house, with these men.
It made him feel part of something, not just something
spiritual, but something human, part of this group, and for a
wrenchingly painful second he thought of his father, and then
a bearded man with two white marks in the black on either
side of his chin, marks like those of a great cat or wolf,
put his arm around Saeed and said brother would you like some
tea.

That day Saeed felt he was really accepted by this house,
and he thought he could ask the man with the white-marked
beard if there was space there for him and Nadia, whom he
called his wife. The man said there was always space for a

brother and sister, though sadly not a room they could share,
but Saeed could stay with him and some other men on the floor
of the living room, provided that is he did not mind sleeping
on the floor, and Nadia could stay upstairs with the women,
unfortunately even he and his own wife were split up in this
manner, and they were among the first residents, but it was
the only civilized way to cram as many people into the house
as they had managed to do, as was righteous to do.

When Saeed told Nadia this good news she did not act like
it was good news at all.

“Why would we want to move?” she said.
“To be among our own kind,” Saeed answered.
“What makes them our kind?”
“They’re from our country.”
“From the country we used to be from.”
“Yes.” Saeed tried not to sound annoyed.
“We’ve left that place.”
“That doesn’t mean we have no connection.”
“They’re not like me.”
“You haven’t met them.”
“I don’t need to.” She released a long, taut breath.

“Here we have our own room,” she said, softening her tone.
“Just the two of us. It’s a big luxury. Why would we give
that up to sleep apart? Among dozens of strangers?”

Saeed had no answer for this. Considering it later, he
thought it was indeed odd that he would want to give up their
bedroom for a pair of separated spaces, with a barrier
between them, as when they lived in his parents’ home, a
time he now thought of fondly in a way, despite the horrors,
fondly in terms of how he had felt for Nadia and she had felt
for him, how they had felt together. He did not press the
point, but when Nadia brought her face close to his in bed
that night, close enough to tickle his lips with her
breathing, he was unable to muster the enthusiasm to bridge
the tiny distance it would have taken to kiss.

•   â€¢   â€¢

EVERY DAY A FLIGHT of fighter aircraft would streak through the
sky, screaming a reminder to the people of dark London of the
technological superiority of their opponents, of the
government and nativist forces. At the borders of their
locality Saeed and Nadia could occasionally glimpse tanks and
armored vehicles and communication arrays and robots that
walked or crawled like animals, bearing loads for soldiers or
rehearsing the disarming of explosives or perhaps preparing
to do some other unknown task. Even more than the fighter
planes and the tanks these robots, few though they were, and
the drones overhead, were frightening, because they suggested
an unstoppable efficiency, an inhuman power, and evoked the
kind of dread that a small mammal feels before a predator of
an altogether different order, like a rodent before a snake.

In meetings of the council Nadia listened as the elders
discussed what to do when the operation finally came. All
agreed that the most important thing was to manage the
impetuousness of the youngsters, for armed resistance would
likely lead to a slaughter, and nonviolence was surely their
most potent response, shaming their attackers into civility.
All agreed on this except Nadia, who was unsure what she
thought, who had seen what happens to people who surrender,
as her former city surrendered to the militants, and who
thought that the young people with their guns and their
knives and their fists and their teeth were entitled to use
these things, and that the ferocity of the little was
sometimes all that kept them safe from the predations of the
big. But there was wisdom in what the elders said too, and so
she was unsure.

Saeed also was unsure. But in the nearby house of his
fellow countryfolk the man with the white-marked beard spoke
of martyrdom, not as the most desirable outcome but as one
possible end of a path the right-minded had no other choice
but to follow, and advocated a banding together of migrants
along religious principles, cutting across divisions of race
or language or nation, for what did those divisions matter
now in a world full of doors, the only divisions that

mattered now were between those who sought the right of
passage and those who would deny them passage, and in such a
world the religion of the righteous must defend those who
sought passage. Saeed was torn because he was moved by these
words, strengthened by them, and they were not the barbarous
words of the militants back home, the militants because of
whom his mother was dead, and possibly by now his father as
well, but at the same time the gathering of men drawn to the
words of the man with the white-marked beard sporadically did
remind him of the militants, and when he thought this he felt
something rancid in himself, like he was rotting from within.

There were guns in the house of his fellow countryfolk,
more arriving each day through the doors. Saeed accepted a
pistol but not a rifle, since he could conceal it, and in his
heart he would not have been able to say if he took the
pistol because it would make him safer from the nativists or
from the Nigerians, his own neighbors. As he undressed that
night he did not speak of it, but also he did not hide it
from Nadia, and upon seeing the pistol he thought she would
fight with him, or at least argue, for he knew what the
council had decided. But she did not do so.

Instead she watched him, and he looked at her, and he saw
her animal form, the strangeness of her face and her body,
and she saw the strangeness of his, and when he reached for
her she came to him, came to him though she moved slightly
away, and there was a mutual violence and excitement to their
coupling, a kind of shocked, almost painful surprise.

Only after Nadia had fallen asleep and Saeed lay there in
the moonlight that crept between and around the blinds did he
consider that he had no idea how to use or maintain a pistol,
not the faintest clue, beyond the fact that pulling the
trigger should make it fire. He realized he was being
ridiculous, and must return it the very next day.

•   â€¢   â€¢

A THRIVING TRADE in electricity was under way in dark London,
run by those who lived in pockets with power, and Saeed and
Nadia were able to recharge their phones from time to time,
and if they walked at the edges of their locality they could
pick up a strong signal, and so like many others they caught
up with the world in this way, and once as Nadia sat on the
steps of a building reading the news on her phone across the
street from a detachment of troops and a tank she thought she
saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a
building reading the news on her phone across the street from
a detachment of troops and a tank, and she was startled, and
wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news
and be this news, and how the newspaper could have published
this image of her instantaneously, and she looked about for a
photographer, and she had the bizarre feeling of time bending
all around her, as though she was from the past reading about
the future, or from the future reading about the past, and
she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this
moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into
two Nadias, and one would stay on the steps reading and one
would walk home, and two different lives would unfold for
these two different selves, and she thought she was losing
her balance, or possibly her mind, and then she zoomed in on
the image and saw that the woman in the black robe reading
the news on her phone was actually not her at all.

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and
nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions
pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from
hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming
together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders
nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people
were questioning what role they had to play. Many were
arguing that smaller units made more sense, but others argued
that smaller units could not defend themselves.

Reading the news at that time one was tempted to conclude
that the nation was like a person with multiple
personalities, some insisting on union and some on

disintegration, and that this person with multiple
personalities was furthermore a person whose skin appeared to
be dissolving as they swam in a soup full of other people
whose skins were likewise dissolving. Even Britain was not
immune from this phenomenon, in fact some said Britain had
already split, like a man whose head had been chopped off and
yet still stood, and others said Britain was an island, and
islands endure, even if the people who come to them change,
and so it had been for millennia, and so it would be for
millennia more.

The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter
was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it
seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in
her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done
anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had
changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.

But then around her she saw all these people of all these
different colors in all these different attires and she was
relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred
to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth
for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had
passed, and a new time was here, and, fraught or not, she
relished this like the wind in her face on a hot day when she
rode her motorcycle and lifted the visor of her helmet and
embraced the dust and the pollution and the little bugs that
sometimes went into your mouth and made you recoil and even
spit, but after spitting grin, and grin with a wildness.

•   â€¢   â€¢

FOR OTHERS TOO the doors came as a release. In the hills above
Tijuana was an orphanage called simply the House of the
Children, perhaps because it was not precisely an orphanage.
Or not only an orphanage, though that is what it was referred
to by the college students from across the border who would
sometimes come here to do volunteer work: painting,
carpentry, the hanging and spackling of drywall. But many of

the children in the House of the Children had at least one
living parent or sibling or uncle or aunt. Usually these
relatives labored on the other side, in the United States,
and their absences would last until the child was old enough
to attempt the crossing, or until the relative was exhausted
enough to return, or on occasion, quite often, forever,
because life and its end are unpredictable, especially at a
distance, where death seems to operate with such whimsical
aim.

The House sat on a ridge at the crest of a hill, fronting
a street. Its chain-link-fenced and partly concrete-floored
play area was at the back, facing a parched valley, on which
the other low dwellings of that street also opened, some of
them rising on stilts, as though jutting out to sea, an
effect that was incongruous, given the dryness and lack of
water all about. But the Pacific Ocean was only a couple
hours’ walk to the west, and besides, stilts made sense
given the terrain.

Out of a black door in a nearby cantina, admittedly an
atypical place for a young woman like herself to be found, a
young woman was emerging. The owner made no fuss over it, for
the times were such, and once this young woman had emerged
she rose and strode to the orphanage. There she located
another young woman, or rather a grown girl, and the young
woman hugged the girl, whom she recognized only because she
had seen her on electronic displays, on the screens of phones
and computers, it having been that many years, and the girl
hugged her mother and then became shy.

The girl’s mother met the adults who ran the orphanage,
and many of the children, who stared at her and chattered as
though she was a sign of something, which of course she was,
since if she had come then others would come too. Dinner that
evening was rice and refried beans served on paper plates,
eaten on an unbroken row of tables flanked by benches, and
the mother sat at the center, like a dignitary or a holy
figure, and told stories that some of the children, being

children, imagined happening to their own mothers, now, or
before, when their mothers were still alive.

The mother who had returned on this day spent the night at
the orphanage so her daughter could say her farewells. And
then mother and daughter walked together to the cantina, and
the owner allowed them in, shaking his head but smiling as
well, the smile bending his mustache, and making his fierce
visage somewhat goofy for a moment, and with that the mother
and her daughter were gone.

•   â€¢   â€¢

IN LONDON, Saeed and Nadia heard that military and
paramilitary formations had fully mobilized and deployed in
the city from all over the country. They imagined British
regiments with ancient names and modern kit standing ready to
cut through any resistance that might be encountered. A great
massacre, it seemed, was in the offing. Both of them knew
that the battle of London would be hopelessly one-sided, and
like many others they no longer ventured far from their home.

The operation to clear the migrant ghetto in which Saeed
and Nadia found themselves began badly, with a police officer
shot in the leg within seconds as his unit moved into an
occupied cinema near Marble Arch, and then the flat sounds of
a firefight commenced, coming from there but also from
elsewhere, growing and growing, all around, and Saeed, who
was caught in the open, ran back to the house, and found the
heavy front door locked shut, and he banged on it until it
opened, Nadia yanking him in and slamming it behind him.

They went to their room in the back and pushed their
mattress up against the window and sat together in one corner
and waited. They heard helicopters and more shooting and
announcements to peacefully vacate the area made over
speakers so powerful that they shook the floor, and they saw
through the gap between mattress and window thousands of
leaflets dropping from the sky, and after a while they saw
smoke and smelled burning, and then it was quiet, but the

smoke and the smell lasted a long time, particularly the
smell, lingering even when the wind direction changed.

That night a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants
had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children
and women and men, but especially children, so many children,
and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors,
of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl’s Court, or near the
Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores,
whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have
happened, for there was a pause, and the soldiers and police
officers and volunteers who had advanced into the outer edges
of the ghetto pulled back, and there was no more shooting
that night.

The next day was quiet, and the day after that, and on the
second day of quiet Saeed and Nadia removed the mattress from
their window and dared to venture outside and forage for food
but there was none to be found. The depots and soup kitchens
were shut. Some supplies were coming through the doors, but
not nearly enough. The council met and requisitioned all
provisions in the three houses, and these were rationed, with
most going to the children, and Saeed and Nadia getting a
handful of almonds each one day, and a tin of herring to
share the next.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THEY SAT ON THEIR BED and watched the rain and talked as they
often did about the end of the world, and Saeed wondered
aloud once again if the natives would really kill them, and
Nadia said once again that the natives were so frightened
that they could do anything.

“I can understand it,” she said. “Imagine if you lived
here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly
arrived.”

“Millions arrived in our country,” Saeed replied. “When
there were wars nearby.”

“That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t
feel we had as much to lose.”

Outside on the balcony the rain clattered in pots and
pans, and periodically Saeed or Nadia would get up and open
the window and carry two of these to the bathroom and empty
them into the stoppered tub, which the council had designated
part of the house’s emergency water supply, now that the
taps had run dry.

Nadia watched Saeed and not for the first time wondered if
she had led him astray. She thought maybe he had in the end
been wavering about leaving their city, and she thought maybe
she could have tipped him either way, and she thought he was
basically a good and decent man, and she was filled with
compassion for him in that instant, as she observed his face
with its gaze upon the rain, and she realized she had not in
her life felt so strongly for anyone in the world as she had
for Saeed in the moments of those first months when she had
felt most strongly for him.

Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia,
could protect her from what would come, even if he
understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the
inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is
most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than
this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not
to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To
flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point
even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its
fate, if only for a while.

“What do you think happens when you die?” Nadia asked
him.

“You mean the afterlife?”
“No, not after. When. In the moment. Do things just go

black, like a phone screen turning off? Or do you slip into
something strange in the middle, like when you’re falling
asleep, and you’re both here and there?”

Saeed thought that it depended on how you died. But he saw
Nadia seeing him, so intent on his answer, and he said, “I

think it would be like falling asleep. You’d dream before
you were gone.”

It was all the protection he could offer her then. And she
smiled at this, a warm, bright smile, and he wondered if she
believed him or if she thought, no, dearest, that is not what
you think at all.

•   â€¢   â€¢

BUT A WEEK PASSED. And then another. And then the natives and
their forces stepped back from the brink.

Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to
do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody
and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had
determined that some other way would have to be found.
Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed,
and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood
that the denial of coexistence would have required one party
to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have
been transformed in the process, and too many native parents
would not after have been able to look their children in the
eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation
had done. Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there
were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one.

And so, irrespective of the reason, decency on this
occasion won out, and bravery, for courage is demanded not to
attack when afraid, and the electricity and water came on
again, and negotiations ensued, and word spread, and among
the cherry trees on Palace Gardens Terrace Saeed and Nadia
and their neighbors celebrated, they celebrated long into the
night.

NINE

THAT SUMMER it seemed to Saeed and Nadia that the whole
planet was on the move, much of the global south headed to

the global north, but also southerners moving to other
southern places and northerners moving to other northern
places. In the formerly protected greenbelt around London a
ring of new cities was being built, cities that would be able
to accommodate more people again than London itself. This
development was called the London Halo, one of innumerable
human halos and satellites and constellations springing up in
the country and in the world.

It was here that Saeed and Nadia found themselves in those
warmer months, in one of the worker camps, laboring away. In
exchange for their labor in clearing terrain and building
infrastructure and assembling dwellings from prefabricated
blocks, migrants were promised forty meters and a pipe: a
home on forty square meters of land and a connection to all
the utilities of modernity.

A mutually agreed time tax had been enacted, such that a
portion of the income and toil of those who had recently
arrived on the island would go to those who had been there
for decades, and this time tax was tapered in both
directions, becoming a smaller and smaller sliver as one
continued to reside, and then a larger and larger subsidy
thereafter. Disruptions were enormous, and conflict did not
vanish overnight, it persisted and simmered, but reports of
its persistence and simmering seemed less than apocalyptic,
and while some migrants continued to cling to properties they
did not own under the law, and some migrants and some
nativists too continued to detonate bombs and carry out
knifings and shootings, Saeed and Nadia had the sense that

overall, for most people, in Britain at least, existence went
on in tolerable safety.

Saeed and Nadia’s worker camp was bounded by a perimeter
fence. Inside this were large pavilions of a grayish fabric
that looked like plastic, supported by metal trusses in such
a way that each reared up, and was airy within, and was
resistant to the wind and rain. The two of them occupied a
small curtained-off space in one of these dormitories, the
curtains suspended from cables that ran almost as high as
Saeed could reach, above which was empty space, as though the
lower part of the pavilion was an open-topped maze, or the
operating rooms of a huge field hospital.

They ate modestly, meals composed of grains and vegetables
and some dairy, and when they were lucky, juiced fruit or a
little meat. They were slightly hungry, yes, but slept well
because the labor was lengthy and rigorous. The first
dwellings that the workers of their camp had built were
almost ready to be occupied, and Saeed and Nadia were not too
far down the list, and so by the end of autumn they could
look forward to moving into a home of their own. Their
blisters had given way to calluses, and the rain did not much
bother them anymore.

One night as Nadia slept on their cot beside Saeed she had
a dream, a dream of the girl from Mykonos, and she dreamt
that she had returned to the house they had first arrived at
in London and had gone upstairs and passed back through the
door to the Greek isle, and when Nadia woke she was almost
panting, and felt her body alive, or alarmed, regardless
changed, for the dream had seemed so real, and after that she
found herself thinking of Mykonos from time to time.

•   â€¢   â€¢

FOR HIS PART Saeed often had dreams of his father, whose death
had been reported to Saeed by a cousin who had recently
managed to escape from their city, and with whom Saeed had
connected by social media, the cousin having settled near

Buenos Aires. This cousin told Saeed that Saeed’s father had
passed away from pneumonia, a lingering infection he had
fought for months, initially just a cold but then much worse,
and in the absence of antibiotics he had succumbed, but he
had not been alone, his siblings were with him, and he had
been buried next to his wife, as he had wished.

Saeed did not know how to mourn, how to express his
remorse, from so great a distance. So he redoubled his work,
and took on extra shifts even when he barely had the
strength, and the wait for Nadia and him to receive their
dwelling did not shorten, but it likewise did not increase,
for other husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and men
and women were working extra shifts as well, and Saeed’s
additional efforts served to maintain his and Nadia’s
ranking on the list.

Nadia was deeply affected by the news of the old man’s
passing, more even than she had expected. She tried to speak
to Saeed about his father, but she stumbled over what to say,
and on his side Saeed was quiet, unforthcoming. She felt
herself touched by guilt from time to time, although she was
unsure what precisely was making her guilty. All she knew was
that when the feeling came it was a relief for her to be away
from Saeed, at work on their separate work sites, a relief
unless she thought about it, thought about being relieved not
to be with him, because when she thought about this the guilt
was usually not too far behind.

Saeed did not ask Nadia to pray with him for his father,
and she did not offer, but when he was gathering a circle of
acquaintances to pray in the long evening shadow cast by
their dormitory, she said she would like to join the circle,
to sit with Saeed and the others, even if not engaged in
supplication herself, and he smiled and said there was no
need. And she had no answer to this. But she stayed anyway,
next to Saeed on the naked earth that had been stripped of
plants by hundreds of thousands of footsteps and rutted by
the tires of ponderously heavy vehicles, feeling for the
first time unwelcome. Or perhaps unengaged. Or perhaps both.

•   â€¢   â€¢

FOR MANY, adjustment to this new world was difficult indeed,
but for some it was also unexpectedly pleasant.

On Prinsengracht in the center of Amsterdam an elderly man
stepped out onto the balcony of his little flat, one of the
dozens into which what had been a pair of centuries-old canal
houses and former warehouses had been converted, these flats
looking out into a courtyard that was as lush with foliage as
a tropical jungle, wet with greenness, in this city of water,
and moss grew on the wooden edges of his balcony, and ferns
also, and tendrils climbed up its sides, and there he had two
chairs, two chairs from ages ago when there were two people
living in his flat, though now there was one, his last lover
having left him bitterly, and he sat down on one of these
chairs and delicately rolled himself a cigarette, his fingers
trembling, the paper crisp but with a hint of softness, from
the damp, and the tobacco smell reminded him as it always did
of his departed father, who would listen with him on his
record player to audio recordings of science fiction
adventures, and would pack and puff on his pipe, as sea
creatures attacked a great submarine, the sounds of the wind
and waves in the recording mixing with the sounds of the rain
on their window, and the elderly man who was then a boy had
thought, when I grow up I too will smoke, and here he was, a
smoker for the better part of a century, about to light a
cigarette, when he saw emerging from the common shed in the
courtyard, where garden tools and the like were stored, and
from which a steady stream of foreigners now came and went, a
wrinkled man with a squint and a cane and a Panama hat,
dressed as though for the tropics.

The elderly man looked at this wrinkled man and did not
speak. He merely lit his cigarette and took a puff. The
wrinkled man did not speak either: he walked slowly around
the courtyard, leaning into his cane, which made scraping
noises in the gravel of the footpath. Then the wrinkled man
moved to reenter the shed, but before he left he turned to

the elderly man, who was looking at him with a degree of
disdain, and elegantly doffed his hat.

The elderly man was taken aback by this gesture, and sat
still, as if transfixed, and before he could think of how to
respond the wrinkled man stepped forward and was gone.

The next day the scene repeated itself. The elderly man
was sitting on his balcony. The wrinkled man returned. They
gazed upon each other. And this time when the wrinkled man
doffed his hat, the elderly man raised a glass to him, a
glass of fortified wine, which he happened to be drinking,
and he did so with a serious but well-mannered nod of his
head. Neither man smiled.

On the third day the elderly man asked the wrinkled man if
he would care to join him on his balcony, and though the
elderly man could not speak Brazilian Portuguese and the
wrinkled man could not speak Dutch, they cobbled together a
conversation, a conversation with many long gaps, but these
gaps were eminently comfortable, almost unnoticed by the two
men, as two ancient trees would not notice a few minutes or
hours that passed without a breeze.

On his next visit the wrinkled man invited the elderly man
to come with him through the black door that was inside the
shed. The elderly man did so, walking slowly, as the wrinkled
man did as well, and at the other side of that door the
elderly man found himself being helped to his feet by the
wrinkled man in the hilly neighborhood of Santa Teresa, in
Rio de Janeiro, on a day that was noticeably younger and
warmer than the day he had left in Amsterdam. There the
wrinkled man escorted him over tram tracks to the studio
where he worked, and showed him some of his paintings, and
the elderly man was too caught up in what was happening to be
objective, but he thought these paintings were marked by real
talent. He asked if he might buy one, and was instead given
his choice as a gift.

A week later a war photographer who lived in a
Prinsengracht flat that overlooked the same courtyard was the
first neighbor to note the presence of this aged couple on

the balcony opposite and below her. She was also, not long
after, and to her considerable surprise, a witness to their
very first kiss, which she captured, without expecting to,
through the lens of her camera, and then deleted, later that
night, in a gesture of uncharacteristic sentimentality and
respect.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SOMETIMES SOMEONE from the press would descend on Saeed and
Nadia’s camp or work site, but more often denizens would
themselves document and post and comment online upon what was
going on. As usual, disasters attracted the most outside
interest, such as a nativist raid that disabled machinery or
destroyed dwelling units nearing completion or resulted in
the severe beating of some workers who had strayed too far
from camp. Or alternatively the knifing of a native foreman
by a migrant or a fight among rival groups of migrants. But
mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day
goings-on of countless people working and living and aging
and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere,
and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be
of much interest to anyone but those directly involved.

No natives lived in the dormitories, for obvious reasons.
But natives did labor alongside migrants on the work sites,
usually as supervisors or as operators of heavy machinery,
giant vehicles that resembled mechanized dinosaurs and would
lift vast amounts of earth or roll flat hot strips of paving
or churn concrete with the slow serenity of a masticating
cow. Saeed had of course seen construction equipment before,
but some of what he saw now dwarfed in scale anything he had
previously seen, and in any case to work alongside a heaving
and snorting building engine is not the same as glimpsing one
from a distance, just as for an infantryman it is a markedly
different experience to run alongside a tank in battle than
it is for a child to watch one on parade.

Saeed worked on a road crew. His foreman was a
knowledgeable and experienced native with a few short tufts
of white hair ringing a mostly bald scalp that was covered by
his helmet unless he was wiping away his sweat at the end of
the day. This foreman was fair and strong and had a stark,
afflicted countenance. He did not make small talk but unlike
many of the natives he ate his lunch among the migrants who
labored under him, and he seemed to like Saeed, or if like
was too strong a word, he seemed at least to value Saeed’s
dedication, and often he sat next to Saeed as he ate. Saeed
also had the added advantage of being among those workers who
spoke English and so occupied a status midway between the
foreman and the others on the team.

The team was a very large one, there being a surfeit of
able bodies and a shortage of machinery, and the foreman was
constantly devising methods of using so many people
efficiently. In some ways he felt he was caught between the
past and the future, the past because when he had first
started his career the balance of tasks had similarly tipped
more towards manual labor, and the future because when he
looked around him now at the almost unimaginable scale of
what they were undertaking he felt they were remodeling the
Earth itself.

Saeed admired his foreman, the foreman having that sort of
quiet charisma that young men often gravitate towards, part
of which lay in the native man’s not seeming the least
interested in being admired. Also, for Saeed and for many
others on the team, their contact with the foreman was the
closest and most extended of their contacts with any native,
and so they looked at him as though he was the key to
understanding their new home, its people and manners and ways
and habits, which in a sense he was, though of course their
very presence here meant that its people and manners and ways
and habits were undergoing considerable change.

One time, as evening approached and the work for the day
wound down, Saeed went up to his foreman and thanked him for
all he was doing for the migrants. The foreman did not say

anything. In that instant Saeed was reminded of those
soldiers he had seen in the city of his birth, returning on
leave from battle, who, when you pestered them for stories
about where they had been and what they had done, looked at
you as if you had no idea how much you were asking.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED WOKE BEFORE DAWN the next day, his body tight and stiff. He
tried not to move, out of consideration for Nadia, but opened
his eyes and realized she was awake. His first instinct was
to pretend he was still sleeping—he was exhausted, after
all, and could have used more time undisturbed in bed—but
the thought of her lying there and feeling alone was not a
pleasant one, and besides she might have noticed the
subterfuge. So he turned to her and asked, in a whisper, “Do
you want to go outside?”

She nodded without gazing at him, and each of them rose
and sat with their back to the other, on opposite sides of
the cot, and fumbled in the dimness with their feet for their
work boots. Laces rasped as they were cinched and tied. They
could hear breathing and coughing and a child crying and the
struggling sound of quiet sex. The pavilion’s muted night-
lighting was about the intensity of a crescent moon: enough
to allow sleep, but also enough to see shapes, though not
colors.

They made their way outside. The sky had begun to change,
and was less dark now than indigo, and there were others
scattered around, other couples and groups, but mostly
solitary figures, unable to sleep, or at least unable to
sleep any longer. It was cool but not cold, and Nadia and
Saeed stood side by side and did not hold hands but felt the
gentle pressure of their arms together, through their
sleeves.

“I’m so tired, this morning,” Nadia said.
“I know,” said Saeed. “So am I.”

Nadia wanted to say more to Saeed than that, but just then
her throat felt raw, almost painful, and what else she would
have liked to say was unable to find a way through to her
tongue and her lips.

Saeed also had things on his mind. He knew he could have
spoken to Nadia now. He knew he should have spoken to Nadia
now, for they had time and were together and were not
distracted. But he likewise could not bring himself to speak.

And so they walked instead, Saeed taking the first step,
and Nadia following, and then both striding abreast each
other, at a good clip, so that those who saw them saw what
looked like a brace of workers marching, and not a couple out
on a stroll. The camp was desolate at this hour, but there
were birds out and about, a great many birds, flying or
perched upon the pavilions and the perimeter fence, and Nadia
and Saeed looked at these birds who had lost or would soon
lose their trees to construction, and Saeed sometimes called
out to them with a faint, sibilant, unpuckered whistle, like
a balloon slowly deflating.

Nadia watched to see if any bird noticed his call, and did
not on their walk see even one.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA WORKED on a mostly female crew that laid pipe, colossal
spools and pallets of it in different colors, orange and
yellow and black and green. Through these pipes soon would
run the lifeblood and thoughts of the new city, all those
things that connect people without requiring them to move.
Ahead of the pipe-layers was a digging machine, like a wolf
spider or praying mantis, with a wide stance but a pair of
dangerous-looking appendages at its front, coming together in
a crenellated scraper near where its mouth would have been.
This digging machine carved the trenches in the earth into
which the pipe-layers would unfurl and unstack and lower and
connect the pipes.

The driver of the digging machine was a portly native man
with a non-native wife, a woman who looked native to Nadia
but had apparently arrived from a nearby country two decades
ago, and who quite possibly had retained a trace of her
ancestral accent, but then again the natives had so many
different accents that it was impossible for Nadia to say.
This woman worked nearby as a supervisor in one of the food
preparation units, and she would come to Nadia’s work site
on her lunch break when her husband was there, which was not
always, because he dug trenches for multiple pipe-laying
crews, and then the woman and her husband would unwrap
sandwiches and unscrew thermoses and eat and chat and laugh.

As time passed, Nadia and some of the other women on her
crew began to join them, for they were welcoming of company.
The driver revealed himself to be a chatterbox and jokester,
and relished the attention, and his wife seemed to relish it
equally, though she spoke less, but she appeared to enjoy all
these women listening enrapt to her husband. Perhaps this
made him grow in stature in her own eyes. Nadia, who watched
and smiled and usually said little in these gatherings,
thought the couple a bit like the queen and king of a domain
populated otherwise solely by women, a transient domain that
would last only a few short seasons, and she wondered if
perhaps they thought the same and had decided, nonetheless,
to savor it.

•   â€¢   â€¢

IT WAS SAID that with every month there were more worker camps
around London, but even if this were true Saeed and Nadia
noticed an almost daily swelling of their own camp with new
arrivals. Some came on foot, others in buses or vans. On
their days off workers were encouraged to help out around the
camp, and Saeed often volunteered to help process and settle
the camp’s latest additions.

Once he handled a small family, a mother, father, and
daughter, three people whose skin was so fair that it seemed

they had never seen the sun. He was struck by their
eyelashes, which held the light improbably, and by their
hands and cheeks, in which networks of tiny veins could be
seen. He wondered where they came from, but he did not speak
their language and they did not speak English, and he did not
want to pry.

The mother was tall and narrow-shouldered, as tall as the
father, and the daughter was a slightly smaller version of
her mother, nearly equal to Saeed in height, though he
suspected she was still very young, likely just thirteen or
fourteen. They watched him with suspicion and in desperation,
and Saeed was careful to speak softly and move slowly, as one
does when meeting a nervous horse or puppy for the first
time.

During the course of the afternoon he spent with them,
Saeed only rarely heard them speak to one another in what he
thought of as their odd language. Mostly they communicated by
gesture, or with their eyes. Maybe, Saeed thought initially,
they feared he might be able to understand them. Later he
suspected something else. That they were ashamed, and that
they did not yet know that shame, for the displaced, was a
common feeling, and that there was, therefore, no particular
shame in being ashamed.

He took them to their designated space in one of the new
pavilions, unoccupied and basic, with a cot, and some fabric
shelving hanging from one of the cables, and he left them
there to settle in, left the three of them staring and
motionless. But when he returned an hour later to bring them
to the mess tent for lunch, and called out, and the mother
pushed aside the flap that served as their front door, and he
glimpsed inside, what he glimpsed was a home, with the
shelves all full, and neat bundles of belongings on the
ground, and a throw on the cot, and also on the cot the
daughter, her back unsupported but erect, her legs crossed at
the shins, so that her thighs rested on her feet, and in her
lap a little notebook or diary, in which she was writing
furiously until the last moment, until the mother called out

her name, and which she then locked, with a key that she wore
on a string around her neck, and placed in one of the piles
of belongings that must have been hers, thrust the diary into
the middle of the pile so that it was hidden.

She fell in behind her parents, who nodded at Saeed in
recognition, and he turned and led them all from that place,
a place that was already beginning to be theirs, to another
where going forward they could reliably find a meal.

•   â€¢   â€¢

THE NORTHERN SUMMER EVENINGS were endless. Saeed and Nadia often
fell asleep before it was fully dark, and before they fell
asleep they often sat outside on the ground with their backs
to the dormitory, on their phones, wandering far and wide but
not together, even though they appeared to be together, and
sometimes he or she would look up and feel on their face the
wind blowing through the shattered fields all about them.

They put their lack of conversation down to exhaustion,
for by the end of the day they were usually so tired they
could barely speak, and phones themselves have the innate
power of distancing one from one’s physical surroundings,
which accounted for part of it, but Saeed and Nadia no longer
touched each other when they lay in bed, not in that way, and
not because their curtained-off space in the pavilion seemed
less than entirely private, or not only because of that, and
when they did speak at length, they, a pair once not used to
arguing, tended to argue, as though their nerves were so raw
that extended encounters evoked a sensation of pain.

Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention
is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently,
for personalities are not a single immutable color, like
white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades
we reflect depend much on what is around us. So it was with
Saeed and Nadia, who found themselves changed in each
other’s eyes in this new place.

To Nadia, Saeed was if anything more handsome than he had
been before, his hard work and his gauntness suiting him,
giving him a contemplative air, making out of his boyishness
a man of substance. She noticed other women looking at him
from time to time, and yet she herself felt strangely unmoved
by his handsomeness, as though he were a rock or a house,
something she might admire but without any real desire.

He had two or three white hairs in the stubble of his
beard now, new arrivals this summer, and he prayed more
regularly, every morning and evening, and perhaps on his
lunch breaks too. When he spoke he spoke of paving and
positions on waiting lists and politics, but not of his
parents, and not anymore of travel, of all the places they
might one day see together, or of the stars.

He was drawn to people from their country, both in the
labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther
they moved from the city of their birth, through space and
through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection
to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was
unambiguously gone.

To Saeed, Nadia looked much the same as she did when they
first met, which is to say strikingly fetching, if vastly
more tired. But it was inexplicable that she continued to
wear her black robes, and it grated on him a bit, for she did
not pray, and she avoided speaking their language, and she
avoided their people, and sometimes he wanted to shout, well
take it off then, and then he would wince inwardly, since he
believed he loved her, and his resentment, when it bubbled up
like this, made him angry with himself, with the man he
seemed to be becoming, a less than romantic man, which was
not the sort of man he believed a man should aspire to be.

Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for
Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him
unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but
still find nothing. He was certain that he cared for her and
wished good for her and wanted to protect her. She was the
entirety of his close family now, and he valued family above

all, and when the warmth between them seemed lacking his
sorrow was immense, so immense that he was uncertain whether
all his losses had not combined into a core of loss, and in
this core, this center, the death of his mother and the death
of his father and the possible death of his ideal self who
had loved his woman so well were like a single death that
only hard work and prayer might allow him to withstand.

Saeed made it a point to smile with Nadia, at least
sometimes, and he hoped she would feel something warm and
caring when he smiled, but what she felt was sorrow and the
sense that they were better than this, and that together they
had to find a way out.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AND SO WHEN SHE SUGGESTED one day, out of the blue, under the
drone-crossed sky and in the invisible network of
surveillance that radiated out from their phones, recording
and capturing and logging everything, that they abandon this
place, and give up their position on the housing list, and
all they had built here, and pass through a nearby door she
had heard of, to the new city of Marin, on the Pacific Ocean,
close to San Francisco, he did not argue, or even resist, as
she thought he might, and instead he said yes, and both of
them were filled with hope, hope that they would be able to
rekindle their relationship, to reconnect with their
relationship, as it had been not long ago, and to elude,
through a distance spanning a third of the globe, what it
seemed in danger of becoming.

TEN

IN MARIN, the higher up the hills one went, the fewer
services there were, but the better the scenery. Nadia and

Saeed were relative latecomers to this new city, and the
lower slopes were all taken, and so they found a spot high
up, with a view across and through the Golden Gate Bridge of
San Francisco and the bay, when it was clear, and a view of
scattered islands floating on a sea of clouds, when the fog
rolled in.

They assembled a shanty with a corrugated metal roof and
discarded packing crate sides. This, as their neighbors had
explained, was earthquake friendly: it might fall in a
tremor, but it was unlikely to do its occupants too much harm
because of its relatively light weight. Wireless data signals
were strong, and they secured a solar panel and battery set
with a universal outlet, which accepted plugs from all around
the world, and a rainwater collector fashioned from synthetic
fabric and a bucket, and dew collectors that fit inside
plastic bottles like the filaments of upside-down lightbulbs,
and so life, while basic, was not quite as rough, nor as cut
off, as otherwise it might have been.

From their shanty the fog was a living thing: moving,
thickening, slipping, thinning out. It revealed the
invisible, what was happening in the water and in the air,
for suddenly heat and cold and damp could not merely be felt
on one’s skin but be seen through their atmospheric effects.
It seemed to Nadia and Saeed that somehow they lived at once
on the ocean and among the peaks.

For work Nadia hiked down, first through other unpiped and
unwired districts like their own, then through those where
grid electricity had been installed, and then through those

where roads and running water had reached, and from there she
caught a ride on a bus or pickup truck to her place of
employment, a food cooperative in a hastily built commercial
zone outside Sausalito.

Marin was overwhelmingly poor, all the more so in
comparison to the sparkling affluence of San Francisco. But
there was nonetheless a spirit of at least intermittent
optimism that refused entirely to die in Marin, perhaps
because Marin was less violent than most of the places its
residents had fled, or because of the view, its position on
the edge of a continent, overlooking the world’s widest
ocean, or because of the mix of its people, or its proximity
to that realm of giddy technology that stretched down the bay
like a bent thumb, ever poised to meet the curved finger of
Marin in a slightly squashed gesture that all would be okay.

•   â€¢   â€¢

ONE NIGHT Nadia brought back some weed a coworker had given
her. She did not know how Saeed would react, and this fact
struck her as she hiked home. In the city of their birth they
had smoked joints together with pleasure, but a year had
passed since then, and he had changed since then, and perhaps
she had changed too, and the distance that had opened between
them was such that things once taken for granted could be
taken for granted no longer.

Saeed was more melancholic than he had been before,
understandably, and also more quiet and devout. She sometimes
felt that his praying was not neutral towards her, in fact
she suspected it carried a hint of reproach, though why she
felt this she could not say, for he had never told her to
pray nor berated her for not praying. But in his devotions
was ever more devotion, and towards her it seemed there was
ever less.

She had considered rolling a joint outdoors and smoking
the weed by herself, without Saeed, concealed from Saeed, and
it had surprised her to be considering this, and made her

wonder about the ways in which she was herself putting
barriers between her and him. She did not know if these gaps
that had been widening were mostly her doing or his, but she
knew she still harbored tenderness for him, and so she had
brought the weed home, and it was only when she sat beside
him on the car seat they had bartered for and used now as a
sofa, that she realized, from her nervousness, that how in
this moment he responded to the weed was a matter of
portentous significance to her.

Her leg and arm touched Saeed’s leg and arm, and he was
warm through his clothing, and he sat in a way that suggested
exhaustion. But he also managed a tired smile, which was
encouraging, and when she opened her fist to reveal what was
inside, as she had once before done on her rooftop a brief
lifetime ago, and he saw the weed, he started to laugh,
almost soundlessly, a gentle rumble, and he said, his voice
uncoiling like a slow, languid exhalation of marijuana-
scented smoke, “Fantastic.”

Saeed rolled the joint for them both, Nadia barely
containing her jubilation, and wanting to hug him but
restraining herself. He lit it and they consumed it, lungs
burning, and the first thing that struck her was that this
weed was much stronger than the hash back home, and she was
quite floored by its effects, and also well on her way to
becoming a little paranoid, and finding it difficult to
speak.

For a while they sat in silence, the temperature dropping
outside. Saeed fetched a blanket and they bundled it around
themselves. And then, not looking at each other, they started
to laugh, and Nadia laughed until she cried.

•   â€¢   â€¢

IN MARIN THERE WERE almost no natives, these people having died
out or been exterminated long ago, and one would see them
only occasionally, at impromptu trading posts—or perhaps
more often, but wrapped in clothes and guises and behaviors

indistinguishable from anyone else. At the trading posts they
would sell beautiful silver jewelry and soft leather garments
and colorful textiles, and the elders among them seemed not
infrequently to be possessed of a limitless patience that was
matched by a limitless sorrow. Tales were told at these
places that people from all over now gathered to hear, for
the tales of these natives felt appropriate to this time of
migration, and gave listeners much-needed sustenance.

And yet it was not quite true to say there were almost no
natives, nativeness being a relative matter, and many others
considered themselves native to this country, by which they
meant that they or their parents or their grandparents or the
grandparents of their grandparents had been born on the strip
of land that stretched from the mid-northern-Pacific to the
mid-northern-Atlantic, that their existence here did not owe
anything to a physical migration that had occurred in their
lifetimes. It seemed to Saeed that the people who advocated
this position most strongly, who claimed the rights of
nativeness most forcefully, tended to be drawn from the ranks
of those with light skin who looked most like the natives of
Britain—and as had been the case with many of the natives of
Britain, many of these people too seemed stunned by what was
happening to their homeland, what had already happened in so
brief a period, and some seemed angry as well.

A third layer of nativeness was composed of those who
others thought directly descended, even in the tiniest
fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been
brought from Africa to this continent centuries ago as
slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in
proportion to the rest, it had vast importance, for society
had been shaped in reaction to it, and unspeakable violence
had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile,
a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all future
transplanted soils, and to which Saeed in particular was
attracted, since at a place of worship where he had gone one
Friday the communal prayer was led by a man who came from
this tradition and spoke of this tradition, and Saeed had

found, in the weeks he and Nadia had been in Marin, this
man’s words to be full of soul-soothing wisdom.

The preacher was a widower, and his wife had come from the
same country as Saeed, and so the preacher knew some of
Saeed’s language, and his approach to religion was partly
familiar to Saeed, while at the same time partly novel, too.
The preacher did not solely preach. Mainly he worked to feed
and shelter his congregants, and teach them English. He ran a
small but efficient organization staffed with volunteers,
young men and women, all Saeed’s color or darker, which
Saeed too had soon joined, and among these young men and
women that Saeed now labored alongside was one woman in
particular, the preacher’s daughter, with curly hair she
wore tied up high on her head with a cloth, this one woman
the one woman in particular that Saeed avoided speaking to,
because whenever he looked at her he felt his breath tighten
within him, and he thought guiltily of Nadia, and he thought
further that here, for him, lay something best not explored
at all.

•   â€¢   â€¢

NADIA PERCEIVED the presence of this woman not in the form of a
distancing by Saeed, as might have been expected, but rather
as a warming up and reaching out. Saeed seemed happier, and
keen to smoke joints with Nadia at the end of the day, or at
least share a couple of puffs, for they had adjusted their
consumption in recognition of the local weed’s potency, and
they began to speak of nothings once again, of travel and the
stars and the clouds and the music they heard all around them
from the other shanties. She felt bits of the old Saeed
returning.

She wished, therefore, that she could be the old Nadia.
But much as she enjoyed their chats and the improved mood
between them, they rarely touched, and her desire to be
touched by him, long subsided, did not flicker back into
flame. It seemed to Nadia that something had gone quiet

inside her. She spoke to him, but her words were muffled to
her own ears. She lay beside Saeed, falling asleep, but not
craving his hands or his mouth on her body—stifled, as if
Saeed were becoming her brother, though never having had a
brother she was unsure what that term meant.

It was not that her sensuality, her sense of the erotic,
had died. She found herself aroused readily, by a beautiful
man she passed as she walked down to work, by memories of the
musician who had been her first lover, by thoughts of the
girl from Mykonos. And sometimes when Saeed was out or asleep
she pleasured herself, and when she pleasured herself she
thought increasingly of that girl, the girl from Mykonos, and
the strength of her response no longer surprised her.

•   â€¢   â€¢

WHEN SAEED WAS a child he had first prayed out of curiosity. He
had seen his mother and father praying, and the act held a
certain mystery for him. His mother used to pray in her
bedroom, perhaps once a day, unless it was a particularly
holy time, or there had been a death in the family, or an
illness, in which case she prayed more often. His father
prayed mainly on Fridays, under normal circumstances, and
only sporadically during the week. Saeed would see them
preparing to pray, and see them praying, and see their faces
after they had prayed, usually smiling, as though relieved,
or released, or comforted, and he would wonder what happened
when one prayed, and he was curious to experience it for
himself, and so he asked to learn before his parents had yet
thought of teaching him, and his mother provided the
requisite instruction one particularly hot summer, and that
is how, for him, it began. Until the end of his days, prayer
sometimes reminded Saeed of his mother, and his parents’
bedroom with its slight smell of perfume, and the ceiling fan
churning in the heat.

As he was entering his teens, Saeed’s father asked Saeed
if he would like to accompany him to the weekly communal

prayer. Saeed said yes, and thereafter every Friday, without
fail, Saeed’s father would drive home and collect his son
and Saeed would pray with his father and the men, and prayer
for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a
ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of
being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a
man who stood for community and faith and kindness and
decency, a man, in other words, like his father. Young men
pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray
to honor the goodness of the men who raised them, and Saeed
was very much a young man of this mold.

By the time he entered university, Saeed’s parents prayed
more often than they had when he was younger, maybe because
they had lost a great many loved ones by that age, or maybe
because the transient natures of their own lives were
gradually becoming less hidden from them, or maybe because
they worried for their son in a country that seemed to
worship money above all, no matter how much other forms of
worship were given lip service, or maybe simply because their
personal relationships with prayer had deepened and become
more meaningful over the years. Saeed too prayed more often
in this period, at the very least once a day, and he valued
the discipline of it, the fact that it was a code, a promise
he had made, and that he stood by.

Now, though, in Marin, Saeed prayed even more, several
times a day, and he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love
for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other
way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not
otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are
all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and
woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those
who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity,
unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-
ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and
yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out
of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of
death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a

better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation,
and as a hope, but he felt that he could not express this to
Nadia, that he did not know how to express this to Nadia,
this mystery that prayer linked him to, and it was so
important to express it, and somehow he was able to express
it to the preacher’s daughter, the first time they had a
proper conversation, at a small ceremony he happened upon
after work, which turned out to be a remembrance for her
mother, who had been from Saeed’s country, and was prayed
for communally on each anniversary of her death, and her
daughter, who was also the preacher’s daughter, said to
Saeed, who was standing near her, so tell me about my
mother’s country, and when Saeed spoke he did not mean to
but he spoke of his own mother, and he spoke for a long time,
and the preacher’s daughter spoke for a long time, and when
they finished speaking it was already late at night.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED AND NADIA WERE LOYAL, and whatever name they gave their
bond they each in their own way believed it required them to
protect the other, and so neither talked much of drifting
apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while
also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the
severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built
together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else
would share, and a shared intimate language that was unique
to them, and a sense that what they might break was special
and likely irreplaceable. But while fear was part of what
kept them together for those first few months in Marin, more
powerful than fear was the desire that each see the other
find firmer footing before they let go, and thus in the end
their relationship did in some senses come to resemble that
of siblings, in that friendship was its strongest element,
and unlike many passions, theirs managed to cool slowly,
without curdling into its reverse, anger, except
intermittently. Of this, in later years, both were glad, and

both would also wonder if this meant that they had made a
mistake, that if they had but waited and watched their
relationship would have flowered again, and so their memories
took on potential, which is of course how our greatest
nostalgias are born.

Jealousy did rear itself in their shanty from time to
time, and the couple that was uncoupling did argue, but
mostly they granted each other more space, a process that had
been ongoing for quite a while, and if there was sorrow and
alarm in this, there was relief too, and the relief was
stronger.

There was also closeness, for the end of a couple is like
a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can
remind us of the value of things, which it did for Saeed and
Nadia, and so even though they spoke less and did less
together, they saw each other more, although not more often.

One night one of the tiny drones that kept a watch on
their district, part of a swarm, and not larger than a
hummingbird, crashed into the transparent plastic flap that
served as both door and window of their shanty, and Saeed
gathered its motionless iridescent body and showed it to
Nadia, and she smiled and said they ought to give it a
burial, and they dug a small hole right there, in the hilly
soil where it had fallen, using a spade, and then covered
this grave again, pressed it flat, and Nadia asked if Saeed
was planning on offering a prayer for the departed automaton,
and he laughed and said maybe he would.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SOMETIMES THEY LIKED to sit outside their shanty in the open
air, where they could hear all the sounds of the new
settlement, sounds like a festival, music and voices and a
motorcycle and the wind, and they wondered what Marin had
been like before. People said it had been beautiful, but in a
different way, and empty.

The winter that year was a season that had splashes of
autumn and spring mixed up in it, even an occasional day of
summer. Once as they sat it was so warm that they did not
need sweaters, and they watched as the sunlight poured down
in angled bursts through gaps in the bright, roiling clouds,
and lit up bits of San Francisco and Oakland and the
otherwise dark waters of the bay.

“What’s that?” Nadia asked Saeed, pointing to a flat
and geometric shape.

“They call it Treasure Island,” Saeed said.
She smiled. “What an interesting name.”
“Yes.”
“The one behind it should be called Treasure Island.

It’s more mysterious.”
Saeed nodded. “And that bridge, Treasure Bridge.”
Someone was cooking over an open fire nearby, beyond the

next ridge of shanties. They could see a thin trail of smoke
and smell something. Not meat. Sweet potatoes maybe. Or maybe
plantains.

Saeed hesitated, then took Nadia’s hand, his palm
covering her knuckles. She curved her fingers, furling the
tips of his around hers. She thought she felt his pulse. They
sat like that for a long while.

“I’m hungry,” she said.
“So am I.”
She almost kissed him on his prickly cheek. “Well,

somewhere down there is everything in the world anyone could
want to eat.”

•   â€¢   â€¢

NOT FAR TO THE SOUTH, in the town of Palo Alto, lived an old
woman who had lived in the same house her entire life. Her
parents had brought her to this house when she was born, and
her mother had passed on there when she was a teenager, and
her father when she was in her twenties, and her husband had
joined her there, and her two children had grown up in this

house, and she had lived alone with them when she divorced,
and later with her second husband, their stepfather, and her
children had moved off to college and not returned, and her
second husband had died two years ago, and throughout this
time she had never moved, traveled, yes, but never moved, and
yet it seemed the world had moved, and she barely recognized
the town that existed outside her property.

The old woman had become a rich woman on paper, the house
now worth a fortune, and her children were always pestering
her to sell it, saying she didn’t need all that space. But
she told them to be patient, it would be theirs when she
died, which wouldn’t be long now, and she said this kindly,
to sharpen the bite of it, and to remind them how much they
were motivated by money, money they spent without having,
which she had never done, always saving for a rainy day, even
if only a little.

One of her granddaughters went to the great university
nearby, a university that had gone from being a local secret
to among the world’s most famous in the space of the old
woman’s lifetime. This granddaughter came to see her, often
as much as once a week. She was the only one of the old
woman’s descendants who did this, and the old woman adored
her, and also sometimes felt baffled by her: looking at her
granddaughter she thought she saw what she would have looked
like had she been born in China, for the granddaughter had
features of the old woman, and yet looked to the old woman,
overall, more or less, but mostly more, Chinese.

There was a rise that led up to the old woman’s street,
and when she was a little girl the old woman used to push her
bike up and then get on and zoom back down without pedaling,
bikes being heavy in those days and hard to take uphill,
especially when you were small, as she was then, and your
bike too big, as hers had been. She had liked to see how far
she could glide without stopping, flashing through the
intersections, ready to brake, but not overly ready, because
there had been a lot less traffic, at least as far as she
could remember.

She had always had carp in a mossy pond in the back of her
house, carp that her granddaughter called goldfish, and she
had known the names of almost everyone on her street, and
most had been there a long time, they were old California,
from families that were California families, but over the
years they had changed more and more rapidly, and now she
knew none of them, and saw no reason to make the effort, for
people bought and sold houses the way they bought and sold
stocks, and every year someone was moving out and someone was
moving in, and now all these doors from who knows where were
opening, and all sorts of strange people were around, people
who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones
who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were
younger, and when she went out it seemed to her that she too
had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the
same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it.

We are all migrants through time.

ELEVEN

ALL OVER THE WORLD people were slipping away from where they
had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness,

from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from
overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields, and slipping
away from other people too, people they had in some cases
loved, as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, and Saeed from
Nadia.

It was Nadia who first brought up the topic of her moving
out of the shanty, said in passing as she sipped on a joint,
taking the slenderest of puffs, held in her lungs even as the
idea of what she had said scented the air. Saeed did not say
anything in response, he merely took a hit himself, contained
it tightly, exhaling later into her exhale. In the morning
when she woke he was looking at her, and he stroked the hair
from her face, as he had not done for months, and he said if
anyone should leave the home they had built it was him. But
as he said this he felt he was acting, or if not acting then
so confused as to be incapable of gauging his own sincerity.
He did think that he ought to be the one to go, that he had
reparations to make for becoming close to the preacher’s
daughter. So it was not his words that felt to him like an
act, but rather his stroking of Nadia’s hair, which, it
seemed to him in that moment, he might never have permission
to stroke again. Nadia too felt both comforted and
discomforted by this physical intimacy, and she said that no,
she wanted to be the one to leave if one of them left, and
she likewise detected an untruth in her words, for she knew
the matter was one not of if, but of when, and that when
would be soon.

A spoilage had begun to manifest itself in their
relationship, and each recognized it would be better to part
now, ere worse came, but days passed before they discussed it
again, and as they discussed it Nadia was already packing her
things into a backpack and a satchel, and so their discussion
of her departure was not, as it pretended to be, a discussion
of her departure, but a navigation, through words that said
otherwise, of their fear of what would come next, and when
Saeed insisted he would carry her bags for her, she insisted
he not do so, and they did not embrace or kiss then, they
stood facing each other at the threshold of the shanty that
had been theirs, and they did not shake hands either, they
looked each at the other, for a long, long time, any gesture
seeming inadequate, and in silence Nadia turned and walked
away into the misty drizzle, and her raw face was wet and
alive.

•   â€¢   â€¢

AT THE FOOD COOPERATIVE where Nadia worked there were rooms
available, storerooms upstairs, in the back. These rooms had
cots, and workers in good standing at the cooperative could
use them, stay there, seemingly indefinitely, provided one’s
colleagues thought the need to stay was valid, and one put in
enough extra hours to cover the occupancy, and while this
practice was likely in violation of some code or other,
regulations were not much in force anymore, even here near
Sausalito.

Nadia knew people stayed at the cooperative, but she did
not know how the policy worked, and no one had told her. For
although she was a woman, and the cooperative was run and
staffed predominantly by women, her black robe was thought by
many to be off-putting, or self-segregating, or in any case
vaguely menacing, and so few of her colleagues had really
reached out to her until the day that a pale-skinned tattooed
man had come in while she was working the till and had placed

a pistol on the counter and said to her, “So what the fuck
do you think of that?”

Nadia did not know what to say and so she said nothing,
not challenging his gaze but not looking away either. Her
eyes focused on a spot around his chin, and they stood like
this, in silence, for a moment, and the man repeated himself,
a bit less steadily the second time, and then, without
robbing the cooperative, or shooting Nadia, he left, taking
his gun and cursing and kicking over a bushel of lumpy apples
as he went.

Whether it was because they were impressed by her mettle
in the face of danger or because they recalibrated their
sense of who was threat and who was threatened or because
they now simply had something to talk about, several people
on her shifts began chatting with her a lot more after that.
She felt she was beginning to belong, and when one told her
about the option of living at the cooperative, and that she
could avail herself of it if her family was oppressing her,
or, another added quickly, even if she just felt like a
change, the possibility struck Nadia with a shock of
recognition, as though a door was opening up, a door in this
case shaped like a room.

It was into this room that Nadia moved when she separated
from Saeed. The room smelled of potatoes and thyme and mint
and the cot smelled a little of people, even though it was
reasonably clean, and there was no record player, and no
scope to decorate either, the room continuing to be used as a
storeroom. But Nadia was nonetheless reminded of her
apartment in the city of her birth, which she had loved,
reminded of what it was like to live there alone, and while
the first night she slept not at all, and the second only
fitfully, as the days passed she slept better and better, and
this room came to feel to her like home.

The locality around Marin seemed to be rousing itself from
a profound and collective low in those days. It has been said
that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable
future for oneself, and, not just in Marin, but in the whole

region, in the Bay Area, and in many other places too, places
both near and far, the apocalypse appeared to have arrived
and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while
the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went
on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people
to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge,
unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the
result was something not unlike relief.

Indeed there was a great creative flowering in the region,
especially in music. Some were calling this a new jazz age,
and one could walk around Marin and see all kinds of
ensembles, humans with humans, humans with electronics, dark
skin with light skin with gleaming metal with matte plastic,
computerized music and unamplified music and even people who
wore masks or hid themselves from view. Different types of
music gathered different tribes of people, tribes that had
not existed before, as is always the case, and at one such
gathering, Nadia saw the head cook from the cooperative, a
handsome woman with strong arms, and this woman saw Nadia
seeing her and nodded in recognition. Later they wound up
standing beside one another and talking, not much, and just
in between the songs, but when the set ended they did not
leave, they continued to listen and talk during the set that
followed.

The cook had eyes that seemed an almost inhuman blue, or
rather a blue that Nadia had not previously thought of as
human, so pale as to suggest, if you looked at them when the
cook was looking away, that these eyes might be blind. But
when they looked at you there was no doubt that they saw, for
this woman gazed so powerfully, she was such a watcher, that
her watching hit you like a physical force, and Nadia felt a
thrill being seen by her, and seeing her in turn.

The cook was, of course, an expert in food, and over the
coming weeks and months she introduced Nadia to all sorts of
old cuisines, and to new cuisines that were being born, for
many of the world’s foods were coming together and being
reformed in Marin, and the place was a taster’s paradise,

and the rationing that was under way meant you were always a
little hungry, and therefore primed to savor what you got,
and Nadia had never before delighted in tasting as she did in
the company of the cook, who reminded her a bit of a cowboy,
and who made love, when they made love, with a steady hand
and a sure eye and a mouth that did little but did it so very
well.

•   â€¢   â€¢

SAEED AND THE PREACHER’S DAUGHTER likewise drew close, and while
there was some resistance by others to this, Saeed’s
ancestors not having undergone the experience of slavery and
its aftermath on this continent, the effects of the
preacher’s particular brand of religion diminished this
resistance, and with time camaraderie did too, the work Saeed
did alongside his fellow volunteers, and then there was the
fact that the preacher had married a woman from Saeed’s
country, and also that the preacher’s daughter was born of a
woman from Saeed’s country, and so the pair’s closeness,
even if it prompted unease in some quarters, was tolerated,
and for the pair themselves their closeness carried both a
spark of the exotic and the comfort of familiarity, as many
couplings do, when they first begin.

Saeed would seek her out in the mornings, when he arrived
for work, and they would talk and smile sidelong, and she
might touch his elbow, and they would sit together at the
communal lunch, and in the evenings when their work was done
for the day they would walk through Marin, hike up and down
the paths and the streets that were forming, and once they
walked past Saeed’s shanty, and he told her it was his, and
the next time they walked by she asked to see the inside of
it, and they went in, and they shut the plastic flap behind
them.

The preacher’s daughter found in Saeed an attitude to
faith that intrigued her, and she found the expansiveness of
his gaze upon the universe, the way he spoke of the stars and

of the people of the world, very sexy, and his touch as well,
and she liked the cut of his face, how it reminded her of her
mother and hence her childhood. And Saeed found her
remarkably easy to talk to, not just because she listened
well or spoke well, which she did, but because she prompted
him to want to listen and speak, and he had from the outset
found her so attractive that she was almost difficult to look
at, and also, though he did not say this to her, or even care
to think it, there were aspects of her that were much like
Nadia.

The preacher’s daughter was among the local campaign
leaders of the plebiscite movement, which sought a ballot on
the question of the creation of a regional assembly for the
Bay Area, with members elected on the principle of one person
one vote, regardless of where one came from. How this
assembly would coexist with other preexisting bodies of
government was as yet undecided. It might at first have only
a moral authority, but that authority could be substantial,
for unlike those other entities for which some humans were
not human enough to exercise suffrage, this new assembly
would speak from the will of all the people, and in the face
of that will, it was hoped, greater justice might be less
easily denied.

One day she showed Saeed a little device that looked to
him like a thimble. She was so happy, and he asked her why,
and she said that this could be the key to the plebiscite,
that it made it possible to tell one person from another and
ensure they could vote only once, and it was being
manufactured in vast numbers, at a cost so small as to be
almost nothing, and he held it on his palm and discovered to
his surprise that it was no heavier than a feather.

•   â€¢   â€¢

WHEN NADIA WALKED AWAY from their shanty, she and Saeed did not
communicate for the rest of the day, nor on the day that
followed. It was the longest cessation of contact between

them since they had left the city of their birth. On the
evening of their second day apart Saeed called her to ask how
she was doing, to inquire if she was safe, and also to hear
her voice, and the voice he heard was familiar and strange,
and as they spoke he wanted to see her, but he withstood
this, and they hung up without arranging a meeting. She
called him the following evening, again a brief call, and
after that they messaged or spoke to one another on most
days, and while their first weekend apart passed separately,
on the second weekend they agreed to meet for a walk by the
ocean, and they walked to the sound of the wind and the
crashing waves and in the hiss of the spray.

They met again for a walk the weekend after that, and
again the weekend after that, and there was a sadness to
these meetings, for they missed each other, and they were
lonely and somewhat adrift in this new place. Sometimes after
they met Nadia would feel part of herself torn inside, and
sometime Saeed would feel this, and both teetered on the cusp
of making some physical gesture that would bind them each to
the other again, but both in the end managed to resist.

The ritual of their weekly walk was interrupted, as such
connections are, by the strengthening of other pulls on their
time, the pull of the cook on Nadia, of the preacher’s
daughter on Saeed, and of new acquaintances. While the first
shared weekend walk that they skipped was noticed sharply by
them both, the second was not so much, and the third almost
not at all, and soon they were meeting only once a month or
so, and several days would pass in between a message or a
call.

They lingered in this state of tangential connection as
winter gave way to spring—though seasons in Marin seemed
sometimes to last only for a small portion of a day, to
change in the time that one took off one’s jacket or put on
one’s sweater—and they lingered still in this state as a
warm spring gave way to a cool summer. Neither much enjoyed
catching unexpected glimpses of their former lover’s new
existence online, and so they distanced themselves from each

other on social networks, and while they wished to look out
for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in
touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder
of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for
the other, less worried that the other would need them to be
happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact,
and then a year, and then a lifetime.

•   â€¢   â€¢

OUTSIDE MARRAKESH, in the hills, overlooking the palatial home
of a man who might once have been called a prince and a woman
who might once have been called a foreigner, there was a maid
in an emptying village who could not speak and, perhaps for
this reason, could not imagine leaving. She worked in the
great house below, a house that had fewer servants now than
it did in the year before, and fewer then than in the year
before that, its retainers having gradually fled, or moved,
but not the maid, who rode to work each morning on a bus, and
who survived by virtue of her salary.

The maid was not old, but her husband and daughter were
gone, her husband not long after their marriage, to Europe,
from which he had not returned, and from which he had
eventually stopped sending money. The maid’s mother had said
it was because she could not speak and because she had given
him a taste of the pleasures of the flesh, unknown to him
before their marriage, and so she had armed him as a man and
been disarmed by nature as a woman. But her mother had been
hard, and the maid had not thought the trade a bad one, for
her husband had given her a daughter, and this daughter had
given her companionship on her journey through life, and
though her daughter too had passed through the doors, she
returned to visit, and each time she returned she told the
maid to come with her, and the maid said no, for she had a
sense of the fragility of things, and she felt she was a
small plant in a small patch of soil held between the rocks
of a dry and windy place, and she was not wanted by the

world, and here she was at least known, and she was
tolerated, and that was a blessing.

The maid was of an age at which men had stopped seeing
her. She had had the body of a woman when she was still a
girl, when she was married off, so young, and her body had
ripened further after she birthed and nursed her child, and
men had once paused to look at her, not at her face, but at
her figure, and she had often been alarmed by those looks, in
part because of the danger in them, and in part because she
knew how they changed when she was revealed to be mute, and
so the end of being seen was mostly a relief. Mostly, almost
entirely, yet not entirely, for life had given the maid no
space for the luxuries of vanity, but even so, she was human.

The maid did not know her age, but she knew she was
younger than the mistress of the house where she worked,
whose hair was still jet and whose posture was still erect
and whose dresses were still cut with the intention to
arouse. The mistress seemed not to have aged at all in the
many years the maid had worked for her. From a distance she
might be mistaken for a very young woman, while the maid
seemed to have aged doubly, perhaps for them both, as if her
occupation had been to age, to exchange the magic of months
for bank notes and food.

In the summer that Saeed and Nadia were parting into
separate lives, the maid’s daughter came to see the maid in
that village where almost everyone had gone and they drank
coffee under the evening sky and looked out at the reddening
dust rising in the south and daughter asked mother again to
come with her.

The maid looked at her daughter, who looked to her as
though she had captured the best of her, and of her husband
too, for she could see him in her, and of her mother, whose
voice came from her daughter’s mouth, strong and low, but
not her words, for her daughter’s words were utterly unlike
her mother’s had been, they were quick and nimble and new.
The maid placed her hand on her daughter’s hand and brought
it to her lips and kissed it, the skin of her lips clinging

for an instant to the skin of her child, clinging even as she
lowered her daughter’s hand, the shape of lips being mutable
in this way, and the maid smiled and shook her head.

One day she might go, she thought.
But not today.

TWELVE

HALF A CENTURY LATER Nadia returned for the first time to the
city of her birth, where the fires she had witnessed in

her youth had burned themselves out long ago, the lives of
cities being far more persistent and more gently cyclical
than those of people, and the city she found herself in was
not a heaven but it was not a hell, and it was familiar but
also unfamiliar, and as she wandered about slowly, exploring,
she was informed of the proximity of Saeed, and after
standing motionless for a considerable moment she
communicated with him, and they agreed to meet.

They met at a café near her old building, which still
stood, though most of the others close by had changed, and
they sat beside one another on two adjacent sides of a small
square table, under the sky, and they looked at each other,
sympathetic looks, for time had done what time does, but
looks of particular recognition, and they watched the young
people of this city pass, young people who had no idea how
bad things once were, except what they studied in history,
which was perhaps as it should be, and they sipped their
coffees, and they spoke.

Their conversation navigated two lives, with vital details
highlighted and excluded, and it was also a dance, for they
were former lovers, and they had not wounded each other so
deeply as to have lost their ability to find a rhythm
together, and they grew younger and more playful as the
coffee in their cups diminished, and Nadia said imagine how
different life would be if I had agreed to marry you, and
Saeed said imagine how different it would be if I had agreed
to have sex with you, and Nadia said we were having sex, and
Saeed considered and smiled and said yes I suppose we were.

Above them bright satellites transited in the darkening
sky and the last hawks were returning to the rest of their
nests and around them passersby did not pause to look at this
old woman in her black robe or this old man with his stubble.

They finished their coffees. Nadia asked if Saeed had been
to the deserts of Chile and seen the stars and was it all he
had imagined it would be. He nodded and said if she had an
evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing
in this life, and she shut her eyes and said she would like
that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did
not know, then, if that evening would ever come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mohsin Hamid is the internationally bestselling author of
the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How
to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and the essay collection
Discontent and Its Civilizations. His books have been
translated into more than thirty languages and have won or
been short-listed for numerous prizes, including the Man
Booker Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation
Award, and the Betty Trask Award. Hamid’s essays and fiction
have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of
Books, The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications.
Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and
much of the rest in London, New York, and California.
 
Facebook.com/MohsinHamidOfficialPage
mohsinhamid.com

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Also by Mohsin Hamid
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
• Contents
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• CHAPTER TWELVE

About the Author