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.

I wrote to H: Tell O Channel that they must end the Abbas show with his falling for the enemy sniper woman. Abbas and the woman begin a cat-and-mouse chase that is their version of a flirtation. The flirtation of the best two snipers in Iraq. But in the end, one of them has to kill the other. This is the law of this land. And it is not the man who kills the woman. It cannot be.