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.”