I had no sympathy—not for her or for myself or anyone associated with the periodical. True, it had been, hands down, the best paper around. But we knew that as writers and editors our lives were bound by a piece of thread. We had nothing that was ours. Even our writing wasn’t ours. It was either commissioned, which made us drudges and hacks; or, even if the idea was ours, it still had to go through the obstacle course of the censor’s bureau. We were liars. But mostly we just lied to ourselves, thinking that we were engaged in the life of the world, that we mattered, that we were somehow softening the ugly edges of living where we lived. But the good old censor always had the last word. That was a reality we would never escape.

Atia remained silent and so did I. Below the mokeb roof I heard someone calling my name.

“Do you have to go?” Atia asked.

I asked her to wait and peered down. A circle of people—Cleric J and several young men and another man I’d never seen before. The new guy with them was a bit disheveled and I could tell he wasn’t one of us. Maybe he was around forty, maybe a little older. His eyes gave him away. There was irony in them and an acknowledgment of the absurd. This man has to be a Westerner, I thought.

I put out five fingers asking for five minutes. Cleric J nodded and the men walked toward the room I shared with the cleric in the back of the mokeb.

“Atia, did you only call to tell me the Citizen has been sold? Good riddance, really.”

“How can you talk like that?”

“Easy. Everything is for sale. Even you, my very best friend. So why not the Citizen?”

“Have you considered that I might be happy?”

What if she was?

I was worried that this war would end and I’d have to reinvent the wheel of everyday life again. Some people, like Cleric J and Egyptian Mo, were already seriously talking about the next fight. Cleric J’s words verbatim: If we don’t find martyrdom in Iraq or Syria, inshallah, there’s Yemen.

I thought about Yemen and Atia’s happiness as a continuum, one long black-and-white reel beginning with devastation and ending in a marriage of convenience.

“I apologize. I am happy for you, Atia.”

“Mafiha wants to quickly put a new magazine together and he’d like you to run the art section again, immediately. He’s got all kinds of money backing him.”

I didn’t lose anything by agreeing.

“Fine. Tell him I’ll do it. I’m not going to Yemen anyway.”

“Yemen?”

“Nothing. Talking to myself. Tell him I’m on board.”

“But there’s a problem.”

“I’m listening.”