I wrote: Do you continue not to like your life?

H did not answer.

* * *

That night the big guns aiming toward Syria would not give it a break. Unable to sleep, I walked across the road to where Khaled used to keep house and where Ali-Akbar and the Three Magi of the sniper team would come every afternoon unless they were pulling duty at the sater. It seemed like a lifetime ago. In real terms only a few months had passed. Nostalgia can blanket a man when the people who populated the dangers he knew are no longer there. I knocked on the door and no one answered. But people were staying here. Recently washed clothes hung from clotheslines. I knocked again and when there was still no answer I let myself in. Same room. Nothing had changed, except for the fighters who lived here while the war continued. In a corner the same mattress lay where Shorty, one of the Three Magi, had taken a long sleep after his best friend Ali-Akbar’s martyrdom. Shorty was a compact twentysomething from Qom whose prayers tended to go on interminably. That day, the way he slept after Ali-Akbar was killed, it was as if he were cleansing himself of something. When he woke up it was like he’d slept a thousand years and during that time he’d made many ablutions. We didn’t talk about Ali-Akbar again until Tehran.

I crawled onto the mattress and closed my eyes. Before long there were men in the room. All of them young Iraqis. Their AKs hanging off the same hooks where Khaled and Martyr Ali-Akbar and the Three Magi used to hang their weapons. The television was on. This was new. There hadn’t been a TV before. And they seemed to clearly receive the channels broadcasting from the Gulf. I sat in silence alongside the other men watching a Hollywood movie in English with Arabic subtitles. Every single actor in the film looked astounding, the women and the men. A story about a future world where survivors of some catastrophe live in a bubble and the heroine is mermaid-like and more beautiful than anything in The Arabian Nights.

We were mesmerized. Just a few kilometers from the sater we sat watching the world of the beautiful. Their fictions broadcasting right into this broken room that the enemy almost managed to capture some months ago on their way to steal fuel they needed to get them to the capital of their fictitious empire down the road in Syria. I do not know how to translate any of this. I do not know in how many worlds a person can live simultaneously before they lose themselves completely. There is not language enough to explain all of this.

So I sat and watched the film to the end. And when it was over somebody turned on the lights, food was brought, and everyone came over and kissed the new guest twice on the right cheek as if I were their long-lost brother. No one asked who I was. They’d only seen me across the road at the mokeb serving tea and rice and chicken to their brothers, and that was all they needed to know.