I told Neda about all this one time when I was drunk. I started crying and became delirious, talking about that secret spot on my back! She pulled me toward her, peeled off my shirt and stood behind me. With her finger, she traced the square between my shoulder blades and pressed her lips to its center. I felt a hole opening there and imagined a strange feather floating out. Which is to say that I felt as though my heart was being torn out from behind. Neda was a colleague at the college where I gave lectures on creative writing to children who dreamed they might become writers one day, even though they didn’t have the talent, resolve, or stubbornness required to assure anything of the sort. I taught them and strove desperately to convey something of the meaning of literature until I began to feel for them what Thurayya must have felt for me. When I told this to Neda, she advised me to resign. Easily persuaded, I resigned, justifying my decision as a desire to devote myself entirely to my writing. Neda was the only person to whom I disclosed my secrets: this one, that one, and all the rest. Even so, when she dumped me, she selected the bag closest to hand—Victoria’s Secret—as the receptacle into which she would toss my secrets in order to return them to me. And then she was gone, after telling me that I was weighing her down, that she could no longer carry me along with her.

Thurayya, Neda, Miss Zahra … That’s the story of my luck with women. No, there’s Mary too. My own Virgin Mary, whom no man’s hand had touched, and who carried me in her heart and filled my need for a mother. Yes, and Shaygha, the little woman who loved me, and whose memory still makes my heart bleed after all these years. And then there was that blessed angel who fell from the sky and screamed at the mob thronging around me to go away when I would have choked on the tears forming in my eyes. She screamed and shook with emotion, as though I were hers, had come from her, as though she knew me and had only stumbled across me on her way as I lay prostrate on the ground. She only had to push them away and bend over me for her dark hair to pour down like cooling water upon my head and face, which were boiling with violence and the burning sun. “What are you doing here?” I would have asked, had I known her, but she was a stranger. She put her hand on my mouth to wipe away the dirt. “Don’t be afraid!” she said. “I’m here with you, and I won’t let anyone else get close to you.” I nearly laughed as I listened to her reassuring me in her soft voice. “Are you an angel?” I asked, struggling to get the words out through the intensity of the pain. Then I grabbed her hand and squeezed. It was soft and warm as a sparrow. She called an ambulance and waited with me until it arrived. Her presence protected me and kept away the bullies. They hadn’t actually scattered out of fear, but in confusion and surprise at the sight of that woman who appeared out of nowhere. They were uncertain about her exact connection to me, and they could only assume that the woman—who didn’t resemble that place or its residents or its smell—was there with me. They forgot the trouble they had so recently stirred up and became spectators, watching the elegant, beautiful lady, who looked like the ones they saw in advertisements and on TV—pure and misty, as though someone had erected a filter to separate her from the land of reality where the rest of us existed.