I put my hand in my pocket for my wallet. I took out a twenty-dollar bill, which the woman snatched from me, saying, “Mr. Joe swore he’d kill her as soon as he found her. He said he’d slit the throat of whoever stole her from him, after first cutting off the man’s dick and feeding it to him.” She laughed, showing her black teeth. This was the first Ethiopian I’d seen who didn’t have teeth that gleamed white as snow.

I gathered myself up and hurried away, half-running, while her piercing, metallic voice followed behind, floating the whole length of the street. “You didn’t say your name, mister … Don’t you want me to tell Shaygha you asked about her?”

———

The door was still locked from the previous evening, and that damned Hazim hadn’t returned as promised. They left me like that until the early morning hours of the following day, and I dozed in my chair, still wearing my clothes, hungry and uncertain. Details from my past came bubbling up. I saw scenes of myself in my old apartment before the specter of the tower destroyed its peace and quiet. I heard the voice of Thurayya telling me to get dressed quickly because my First Communion was about to begin, and it would be very bad to keep Jesus waiting to come into my heart.

I was nine at that time, and Sa’id was sixteen and a half. I asked him to go with me, but Thurayya scoffed at my request, saying she needed him at home, and I didn’t need him—or anyone—to attend. Sa’id just looked at me and smiled, even though he was perfectly able either to persuade Thurayya or to dig in his heels, as he did whenever something seemed good for him to do. Where was my father, you ask? He had left through the window. So Thurayya decided I needed no companion, that I could go on my own like an adult.

Early that morning, I took a shower, combed my hair, and put on my white suit. It was actually Sa’id’s suit, the one he had worn for the same occasion. Alterations had been made, but no matter how hard they tried, the tailors failed in their task, a fact that became clear the moment Thurayya saw me and declared that nothing would ever fit a body like mine.

When I left our building, I originally intended not to go to my Catholic school, where the ceremony was to be held, but instead to a movie theater not far away that was showing a kids’ movie at ten o’clock. I would spend two hours there and then return home, pretending to have taken the Messiah into my heart. But I got scared that the school administrators would notice my absence and tell the monks on me, and I would get in trouble. So I walked down the sidewalk, hanging my head and thinking about what I would say when asked why my family wasn’t there. I came up with an appropriate reply: “They’ll be coming later,” or else, “They’re here, just sitting in the back.”