Then Mary came. She made a new place for me in the house, a shelter. She taught me how to forget who I was, how to emerge from the corners by plunging into an observation of life around me. I would sit and watch her working for hours, immersed in wiping, washing, rinsing, polishing, and cooking, abstracting herself from mundane life as she entered into some tiny detail—a speck of dust, a spot of grease, a dirt stain, a seed or a grain—until I learned how to enter that detail along with her, leaving behind my body and all the troubles it brought. When I’d mastered that process, I moved on from watching Mary to tracking the movement of ants, sparrows, and the neighbors’ cat, whose “insouciance” I adopted, the kind that allowed it to spend languid mornings on the balcony, enjoying the sunlight and watching the world from above as it cleaned itself or swatted at a fly or a cockroach. I adopted the standoffishness and indifference of animals and forgot myself for a time, luxuriating in the happiest moments of my life, moments when I wasn’t me, when I fully detached myself from existence, lacking everything that made up the chains of this goddamned Mr. N.

I shared that with no one, barely acknowledging it even to myself, afraid I would become even more loathsome to Thurayya. All the same, I could feel my so-called mother’s distaste for me growing despite all the precautions I took. I attributed it to her fatigue, or nerves, her harried thoughts, her excessive sensitivity, or the feebleness of her body, which ought never to have been allowed to suffer the affliction of bearing two sons. Well, of course there are mothers out there who stop at one child, and those with two or three or more. Mary, for example, even though she didn’t have children, was undoubtedly a three-child mother—whereas Thurayya was scarcely a mother at all, and should have quit while she was ahead. If I’d been born a girl, perhaps she would have forgiven me? But no, to see a second boy come out of her made me meaningless in her eyes, a repetition, a defective copy, with no connection to its point of origin.