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.

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.