I suddenly realized I was lost. I had wandered too far and entered a different neighborhood. Al-Nab’a, according to the words of a blue metal sign hanging at an intersection. I stopped and turned in a circle. I found myself in unknown parts, tattered streets where severed limbs still hung from the power lines, while others wormed through the mud, still alive. Countless kids swarmed the streets at that unexpected hour, looking no different than they had the day they entered this life: barefoot, dirty, hair disheveled, skin splotchy, and desperately malnourished.

I moved forward as through a jungle. Rotten vegetables were smeared across the ground. There were fruit peels, plastic bags, bottles and cans, cardboard boxes, torn banners, and tattered clothes, knotted together and pissed upon by the sky. Bodies of large rats crushed by car tires, dried-up cockroaches, and flies buzzing in place as though glued to the air; crippled cats missing an eye or a leg and crouching under cars to escape the tormenting children. Beggars, refugees, the poor, the wretched, ragmen, hawkers, daytime drunks, scowling workers, tottering old men with teeth missing from their gaping mouths, the remains of women in tattered clothing, dyed hair, and makeup. These were the Lord’s flock, crowded in together, fallen from on high into this accursed valley, without any savior, with neither hope nor helper.

The lacerated scene was too much for me. My deficient life was too much for me. I felt a tide of nausea rising inside, and I bent over as I emptied everything in my belly onto the road and myself. Whenever I thought I had at last finished, a new wave of vomit exploded like a fountain. This continued until I thought I was squeezing my organs out through my mouth. Then it was over, and the dirt began soaking up the last of my spit. Some of the people there, passersby and children, ran up and gathered around to watch, but without showing any disgust that I had just expelled my guts. Instead, they looked at my feet intently, as though I was bringing something for them. Their gaze moved back and forth from the bulging eyes and distended veins of my flushed face to the sticky vomit that puddled beneath me. As the successive waves of vomit came, they scrutinized me, engrossed and astonished, as if I were an alien who had just arrived from another planet, peculiar to look at yet vaguely resembling them.

A hand from behind me extended a blue plastic bottle that was dripping cold water. Immediately I realized how thirsty I was. My soul, to its very depths, had become a barren desert. The hand shook the bottle, and a hoarse voice said, “Here. Drink.” I, meanwhile, was nailed in place, head bowed. My gaze moved between the cold water, the dirty fingers, thick and cracked, the sunburned forearm with its matted hair caked in dust, and the small, sticky, snot-covered faces that raised grave, expectant eyes to me.