“It is up to you!”

I turned around and saw the Najafi kid, his unlikely curly blond hair caked with the dust of northern Iraq and Syria, whispering in my ear. “You are Cleric J’s man while he’s gone. Whatever you say goes here.”

The kid’s whispering suddenly turned all attention our way. The Tunisian remained on the ground, coughing weakly. “Ma,” he whimpered.

I gestured to the Najafi kid, who picked up one of those ubiquitous bottles of water for the fighters from right by his foot and took it over to the boy. I was not sure, but it felt as if we were slowly being sucked into some evil. Nearly all the men in that mokeb had had some kind of history with the Iranians going back to the Saddam days; it was a factor that carried cachet. And to be Cleric J’s rep carried even more. As I started toward the two men, I noticed that Saeed was at the periphery of the circle, camera in hand, filming. When you spend enough time with a group of men, even if it’s through the revolving door of a mokeb, when you feed them for days on end and call them heroes even if you only half mean it, when you give them aspirin (because that’s all you have) even though it’s voices they’re hearing inside their heads and they thank you anyway like you’ve given them the last elixir on earth, something happens between you and them—call it a bond, a special contract of blood that an outsider best not meddle with.

One frown in Saeed’s direction was enough for the four burly men who had held him down before to do it again. The mokeb seemed to be in a time warp, everything slowing down—the North African on the ground, starved and eminently executable; the two men who had materialized out of nowhere looking annoyed and confused; and Saeed pinned like that, his camera thrown to the side, its lens open and layered with fresh dust.

“I’ll get you for this, Saleh.”

It was the last thing Saeed said as they manhandled him out of the mokeb and away from the Eye of the Horse.

* * *

The boy was killed two days later.

I went blind for six hours with the news. Afterward, I drank in the miracle of vision like it was my first time seeing. Even the sight of mounds of discarded plastic bottles was like witnessing a wedding. I forgot that North African boy we killed because he was guilty and because we could. Someone had to do it, and the guilt only stayed as long as I had time to dwell on it in darkness. When light returned to my eyes, the boy was history. I did not give a fuck about his fate. Well, maybe I did. But tangentially. Maybe it was he who had set the trip wire that killed Ali-Akbar. I doubted it. But I did not dismiss it either. It was easier this way; it allowed me to live with us. Maybe the world was right and we were beasts after all. But what did the world know? Where was the world anyway, and what did it have to do with the Eye of the Horse?