Cover

Dedication

For Amin, my eternal flame

Prologue

Until now, my history has remained buried in me the way ancient civilizations are hidden beneath layers of earth and new life. But people insist on digging into the past, poking at relics of yesterday to marvel at the simplicity of extinct creatures. We display the evidence of our superiority in glass cases, housed in grand buildings sometimes half a world away from where they were found.

In London, I saw the Elgin Marbles, lifted from the Parthenon, the Gweagal Shield stolen from Aboriginal Australians, and the brilliant Koh-i-Noor diamond. In the language of my childhood, Koh-i-Noor means Mountain of Light, a name that obscures the diamond’s dark history.

But I cannot be too critical. Not while I have my own plundered treasure in a box, far from where it was unearthed. How it came to be with me is the story that I have never wholly told, not to the woman who helped me flee a country on fire, not to the woman who raised me as an American, and not to the man I almost loved.

Were it not for the day my buried life appeared before me unannounced, I might have kept it all hidden forever. And I might not have asked those questions I’d stifled to preserve this unexamined life.

What are you? I have been asked as I pay for my coffee, as I check out a book at the library, as I explain to my last patient of the day how I will remove the tumor growing inside him. As if I am a species, not a person. People throw identities at me and look to see if one will stick: Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Argentinian, Eastern European. I trigger a railroad switch and divert their questions away from crates of ammunition and streams of pity and preserve for myself the first and only peaceful decade of my life.

But untold histories live in shallow graves. Some nights, the cold wakes me and I find I’ve clawed my way out from under the covers. I count the stars to catch my breath.

Once upon a time, a little girl with velvet ribbons in her hair crouched deep in the belly of a palace, tucked behind copper pots and urns and cartons heavy with treasures of a lost world. Each time she was shaken by the urge to scream, she plunged her teeth into the soft flesh of her forearm. She knew only that she should remain perfectly silent and prayed no one would hear the thin echo of the song her father would sing when he found her awake well past her bedtime.

While I slumber, you are open-eyed

I am naïve but you are ever wise

Because of him—in spite of him—she did not wail in the dark.