Neda’s magazines advised readers to imagine terrible and terrifying figures as children. Next, they advised readers to picture them naked. For my own part, I added the detail of them sitting on “the throne.” And so, whenever I passed through a militia checkpoint, I would sit the gunmen down on a toilet, and they would seem ridiculous to me. As everyone knows, laughter is the best antidote to fear, so I imagined tyrants, soldiers, bosses, slanderers, liars, and criminals with their pants bunched up around their ankles, in the very moment that their constipated bowels strained to push out a stone-hard turd. I would build up the details of the picture, and every time I thought I had finished drawing it, I would think of something else to embellish the image. I did that with everyone who made me afraid, who hurt me, who humiliated me and savaged me. The number of those people was too great to be counted: at home, in the neighborhood, at school, in the university, in the community, and out in society, with everyone. Thurayya alone was the only person I did not dare put in that position. If I built up the courage and the idea slunk along at night into my subconscious, I would wake up in terror, as though I had imagined God Himself sitting where it is not at all proper to put him.

Shaygha appeared, slung over the shoulder of the goon who had just gone out, her head dangling and the side of her face pressed against the man’s back. It was obvious from the slackness of her limbs that she had been drugged, and even now she was tottering across a delicate rope that separated consciousness from unconsciousness. The goon heaved her up, raising into view her blurry gaze and a face that was bloody and bruised. I felt a burning inside. I felt regret. I felt impotence and defeat. I tried to get away from the man holding me so that I could embrace her, but the bastard pulled my elbows back until the ribs nearly popped out of place one by one.