The room changes. Atef is lying on the floor. There are sounds—men coughing, spitting, the rasp of blankets against concrete. Some of the men are masturbating with loud grunts. Someone weeps.
“You talk or I take this.” Gruff, broken Arabic. His fingernail held between metal pliers. A faceless man tugs.
The snake is coming.
“You want to stay silent? Fine.” Somewhere, someone has spilled ethanol, the smell piercing Atef’s nostrils. Metal is wound around his head and his wrists; he wants to scream but cannot. “Ya Rab,” he mutters, and spears of fire shoot up the length of his arm. “La ilaha illa Allah,” and electricity snakes into his jaw, binding his teeth shut.
“Drink,” a male voice says in Arabic, and Atef sees a metallic shape—a flask etched with calligraphy. Atef reaches for the flask and suddenly he is gripped with the most fear he has ever known, fear that has nothing to do with the soldier or death but with some abstract loss, with the sudden knowledge that he is dreaming, just as the flask begins to fade and he loses his breath and, catching it, wakes.
Atef lies in bed for several minutes, heart thudding. The flask glints in his mind. He places a hand over his chest and breathes deeply, as Dr. Salawiya, his physician, has advised.
“The mind is a mystery. Give it time to catch up.” The doctor always says the same thing, has since Atef first went to him a decade ago. The Six-Day War was over and Atef had been released from prison, stumblingly finding his way to Amman, where he stayed with Khalto Salma for a few days before continuing to Kuwait, the tawny desert looking like a hopeful face from the airplane window. He and Mustafa had been arrested soon after the Israeli invasion of Nablus, the fifth day of the war, and swept up along with dozens of their neighbors, men from the mosque, cousins. The charges were spurious and arbitrary: organizing protests, pamphlet distribution, inciting violence. Planning infiltration was the charge for him and Mustafa. It’s not true, he’d wept to the guards once they were separated. Yes, they went to the mosque, Mustafa made his weekly speeches. They were angry. But they hadn’t done anything. He shook during those unceasing days of prison, having imaginary conversations with Mustafa, who had been taken elsewhere.
“It’s like a shadow life,” Atef once tried to explain to the doctor. “Like there’s another me, and that me is still stuck, like a skipping record.”
“It’ll get better. The dreams will come less frequently.”
It is true. No longer is Atef afraid to fall asleep, as he was for years, jerking awake from the edge of consciousness, convinced his palpitations were a heart attack, his dry mouth the result of a stroke. The dreams have lessened as the years passed, from several a week to once a week, now once every few months.
But though less frequent, the dreams have sharpened in focus. Atef hears his breath over the whir of the air conditioner, thinks of the electric shock buzzing his teeth. His jaw hurts.
He once read about a young woman who often dreamed of drowning, water rising above her, filling her mouth. One night her parents woke to the sound of gurgling, a muffled cry. They fell back to sleep. In the morning the girl was dead, her lips blue. Her lungs had filled up with water, an ocean of fluid from her own organs drowning her.
Such are the ways the body believes what we tell it.
Snatches of the dream—electricity, blankets, smoke from a soldier’s cigarette—spark in his mind, the images already dissolving, tamed in the quiet bedroom. Beneath the damask curtains, swaths of morning sun peek through, the bedroom like an aquarium.
Alia lies sleeping at his side, and Atef watches her for a moment, reassured by the sight of her splayed arms. She always sleeps on her stomach, face burrowed in the pillow, snarls of hair surrounding her head.
She’d cut her hair off while pregnant with Souad. That pregnancy, the third, was the worst, the heat leaving her dazed with nausea. Even in cool bathwater, which Atef would fill with ice cubes, Alia spoke of heat.
“It feels like wool,” she’d tell Atef, moaning, gathering her curls in fistfuls.
Atef was mournful when he saw it shorn, his wife’s shoulders suddenly bare. He loved the weight of her hair, the citrus scent he could bury his face in. But Alia liked it short, said it made her feel airy. Now, she cuts it every few months.
Atef swings his legs over the side of the bed. His body feels stiff, as though he has walked for hours. He squints at the clock on the bedside table. Nearly forty years old, Atef can feel the complaints of his body begin to gather momentum—the twinges, the blurred vision in the mornings, the occasional headaches. He blinks, and the numbers on the clock sharpen: 7:20 a.m. The plan he half formed last night before sleep returns to him: go to the market before Alia and the children wake and buy strawberries for Riham.
Atef walks down the hallway, his feet bare against the tiles. To his left, the bedrooms are lined up, one for each child—Souad’s an eruption of sorbet colors, toys strewn around the four-poster bed; Karam’s in navy and white, his wooden figures arranged neatly on the shelves; and Riham’s pristine, a bookshelf lined with spines of novels and encyclopedias.
When anyone asks about his children, Atef recites the names like a talisman, his voice full and grateful over each one. “Souad is five, Karam is seven, Riham is eight.” And now the talisman will be adjusted, for today is Riham’s birthday, her ninth.
Nine, he wrote in his last letter. The age fills me with sadness, for the solidity of the number, its cementing of her foray into adulthood, a lifetime of double digits. But I keep such thoughts to myself. I know Alia wouldn’t approve. She’d just look at me with that frown of hers and shake her head.
Atef hears Priya’s humming before he enters the kitchen, the toneless noise she makes while working, like a children’s lullaby. She stands with her back to him, the ironing board in front of the windows. He watches her lift and press the iron to a pink swath of fabric, one of the girls’ dresses. Steam comes out in tiny puffs.
“Good morning,” he says.
Priya glances over her shoulder and smiles. “Good morning.”
She still looks girlish, the years plumping out her cheeks and arms. Atef likes to think of Priya as a pillar, the center of the house, all of them crowding around her, coming for bandages and tea and laundry. Every two years she returns to India for a month, packing suitcases full of clothes and treats to bring to her husband and two children, children Atef imagines as miniature versions of Priya. The weeks she is away, the villa feels empty, all of them restless, aimlessly moving through the rooms. Someday, Atef knows, she will return for good. The prospect is a bleak one.
Now, Priya turns the dress over, smoothing the fabric on the ironing board. She speaks above the hiss. “There is coffee; would you like a cup?”