Do you remember, once we were going to a soccer field behind your secondary school in Falls Church and you asked me to let us out of the car in the big parking lot, just so that you could show me the place where an angry, armed high school pupil had killed a girl from your class? We found a few wilted flowers on the spot. We stood there, you spoke softly, still unsettled by the event, you raised your arm and pointed toward the school building in front of us and said: “I was at that window, and I saw everything.”

My PTSD, and your PTSD.

We are two bodies filled with traumas that were never appropriately treated. I feel guilty for not having taken you out of Sarajevo during the war. That’s why I’ve been indulging you all these years, fulfilling your wishes and protecting you. And I know that this doesn’t do you any good: all these years I have been weighing you down with care and supervision, I’m a burden that slows you down and from which you would, probably, gladly free yourself, but nevertheless you put up with me. My additional problem is the way in which your PTSD manifests itself. You are attracted to danger, and that’s a consequence of the war, adrenaline dependency. That’s why you spend whole nights in empty spaces, under the stars, meeting people there who have their own reasons for insomnia. Everyone here is armed. The world is a dangerous place. I, too, am a frightened man. Perhaps you should have a dog to be near you on these nights and look after you. A German shepherd? A husky would suit you, one with blue eyes. Two wolves in the desert! I’ll bring you a puppy to grow up beside you. And I’ll buy a bandana, which you could tie around his neck. Maybe blue? To go with his eyes . . .

It was still light when we reached Phoenix, three hours before my flight; we had enough time to go back once more to “our” apartment. The sun was going down, so the evening light above the city was orange. In the parking lot in front of the complex, we found a free space. We went through the narrow door into the courtyard between the six buildings, linked by iron fences. The light of the setting sun no longer penetrated here, and suddenly it was dusk; lamps were being lit in the windows of the ground-floor apartments, and as we walked I glanced into the rooms in the hope of possibly seeing a familiar face. At a stone table beside the empty swimming pool a girl was sitting in the company of three men who paid no attention to us. She was very young, and I thought that at the time when we lived here she hadn’t yet been born. The empty beer bottles and the blue canvas chair faded in the sun were still beside the door of our apartment. The windows were dark, either there was no one there or the tenant had fallen asleep. I sat down on the canvas chair. “There’s no point in taking your photograph now,” said Harun. “The light’s not good enough.” I sat on the canvas chair, which I may have brought here twenty years earlier, looking at the empty bottles of Miller Lite beer, which I might have left behind, and waited for something to happen. It couldn’t be that I’d come back and this place had no response to my return. I sat on the canvas chair after a week spent on the road, after troubled dreams in cheap motels and deserts under the starry sky. And I had felt more or less at home everywhere, apart from here, at the address 1601 Camelback Road, no. 201! Here I am most foreign. And now I can calmly forget everything.