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Chapters (32)
  1. Cover
  2. PART ONE
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9
  12. 10
  13. 11
  14. 12
  15. 13
  16. 14
  17. PART TWO
  18. 1
  19. 2
  20. 3
  21. 4
  22. 5
  23. 6
  24. 7
  25. 8
  26. 9
  27. 10
  28. AFTERWORD
  29. 1
  30. 2
  31. 3
  32. 4

I settled down myself, and it cost me Irene and Adam, my lover and my son. A single moment of foolishness. Don’t stand your ground defiantly. Stay light. Flee if you can. Run before anyone entangles you. Life won’t forgive you for staying crouched in a corner. That is, until everything crumbles around you. Only then might your corner save you.

In Asia, I once went to visit a very poor village in a region within the earthquake belt. They were so frequent that the people there were used to them, even slept through them. Without the money to build houses that could withstand the tremors, they built their homes without roofs. Exposed to the birds above; naked before heaven. But they still worried about the walls coming down, so they crammed everything they owned into the corners: beds, sofas, appliances (if there were any), their food. Their whole lives in the corner. Shadowed. They would wake in the morning to see the rubble in the middle of the room, the cracked stones in the courtyard; would peer out at it all from their corners, then go back to sleep.

5

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ALMOST FOREVER

The road that leads abroad is better than the road around your block; the long road is better than the short. Truck over taxi, streetcar over truck, subway over streetcar, train over the lot. Train over plane, too, since the trip lasts longer.

The winding road is better than the straight one, for the same reason. Your role, Yehyia, is to take the straight road and loop it around itself, stretch it out. Your job is to obstruct the ambler, to stretch his stroll out; to ensure that the ships don’t dock and the planes don’t land and the traveler never arrives; to keep the road rolling on forever. And if that’s too much to ask, then almost forever.

Yehyia noted that his manager was asking him for the very same files he’d requested two days before, files the manager had previously asked Yehyia to send to another department—a department that had returned them promptly and practically unchanged: a few signatures here and there; a rubber-stamp or two. The manager added his own signature and off they went again. The files consisted of personal and professional documentation belonging to the people whose bleached, passport-sized portraits were dotted throughout: notarized requests, pleas, complaints, and quotidian legal measures—a license renewal, an application for ID, inquiries about an inheritance. The files themselves circled around and around, came and went in a loop whose chronic recurrence he occasionally caught wind of when a face or name stirred a memory, though the faces and names were so alike that frequently he doubted himself. Then one day a file came back with a name he definitely hadn’t forgotten—Ashgar Tawfiq, “Trees”Tawfiq—because the first time he’d seen it he had grinned to think of the woman’s father gazing fondly at his garden.