About six weeks after Deepa and Ajay left, my brother returned from Amman. Jehad’s university was closed for winter break, and the United States had given Saddam one month to withdraw from Kuwait. Jehad warned us that the United States would attack and probably wipe us all out if Saddam stayed. I disagreed. I thought Saddam was invincible. I believed he’d be the Arab leader who would finally defeat Western imperialists and Zionist colonizers. My recent interest in politics made me feel smart to speak with my brother with such a vocabulary.

When an American invasion was clearly imminent, I stopped reading and watching the news. I kept myself busy to stay out of the house, because I could not bear to listen to Mama, who was cheering for the Americans to come. “People just can’t go around stealing other people’s countries,” she said. “It’s wrong. For better or worse, Kuwait is our home. It’s our duty to defend it. When did you stop loving this country? Don’t you know the only tax collected in this country is for the Palestinian resistance? We cannot deny that!”

I left without answering and stayed more and more with Um Buraq, coming home as little as possible, until our home boiled and evaporated and then vanished with history’s disappeared bits. But that wouldn’t happen yet.

There was something else. I had a secret life during those months. No one, not even Um Buraq, knew. I took up with an Iraqi soldier. I wasn’t yet ready to give up on men. Part of me wanted to know if men could be good; if it was possible for physical intimacy with a man to be something honest, loving, nurturing, powerful, and passionate. I wondered, too, whether I was lovable. I needed to know, because I thought we might all die soon.

His name was Mubshir. He manned a checkpoint I passed frequently. A few glances and flirtations later, he gave me a number and time to call a public pay phone, where he would be waiting. At first we met by the sea, but as things developed, we began meeting in an abandoned apartment in the Salmiya district. We found a kind of refuge in each other, especially when it became clear that he would be forced to fight the Americans soon. He thought he was going to die and worried how death would come. But we didn’t talk about that much. We fucked with little respite to keep from thinking about it.