“I can see again, somewhat, if that’s what you’re asking. Turns out what I needed is this special eye drop. It’s very expensive. You can only get it in the black market. But now that I’m working under you, I can afford it. So, thank you, I suppose.” I started to go.

“Saleh, are you mad that I married or mad that I married Mafiha?”

I looked around. No one was supposedly watching and of course everyone was. “Is this a conversation we should be having now?”

“Probably not.”

I motioned to leave again.

She said, “There’s something I must tell you.”

“Another bombshell?”

We stood there for a moment and I recalled something. We had been in the middle of a combat operation with Cleric J and the other men of the mokeb tagging along, when a bomb blew up right near me. Beautiful green smoke enveloped everything. Just then I was doing something that no one in their right mind should have been doing at that moment: I was on a cell phone talking to Atia in Tehran. It was suicide, but this was far from a professional war and everybody and their mother was on their phones anyway, taking self-portraits of their own goddamn demise. My ears were ringing and I spoke into the phone: “Atia, I think I just died. I’ll call you later.”

I was convinced there had to be a giant round hole in my stomach. I reached and touched myself. Everything was there, no missing body parts, no bleeding out, no shortness of breath or feeling cold. I should definitely not have called Atia again, but I did. “Atia, I’m not dead.”

She had cried into the phone.

“Another bombshell, yes.” She glanced away from me on the busiest floor of the Citizen, swallowed hard, and said, “Mafiha is coming out with a new book.”

I shrugged. “Man’s a regular factory of new works. When is he not coming out with a new book!”

“This time he has a coauthor.”

“Nice. So you guys are already writing books with one another. I thought you and I would do something like that one day. But I guess the Book of Life had other plans for us, Atia.”

“Don’t philosophize.”

“All right. So who’s the lucky man or woman he’s writing this book with.”

“It has already been written.”

There was a long pause and I waited for her to go on. But she just stood there. I remembered her when she was fresh out of the university. Young girl from the provinces. Full of ideals. Those first monographs she’d written for the Martyrs Foundation—they had changed the equation. It was the first time someone had written about our war heroes not as flawless, but as men who had greatness and not such greatness in them, warts and all. She’d received a lot of flak for it. The Ministry of Censorship wanted long chunks of the books out, but Atia stood her ground. She’d fought to explain that heroes would be that much more interesting if we saw them in their entirety and not just as removed icons we could not touch. They’d eventually listened to her, because Atia was that kind of woman. She did not back down. She was the one who asked the hard questions when she went to interview the “big men” of the regime. She had upended the landscape of biographical writing in this country, and she’d done it single-handedly.