Here is another story about Esraa; are you dizzy yet? Are you swaying with the waves of the fever?

Here is a story about choices.

This story is from before Karim is taken, but after Esraa has lost her mind—has she lost her mind? This story is from after her fiancé has been killed, but before she has started to really live her life as though her fiancé has been killed. This story is from before she starts writing her own poetry—she’s still just throwing out Nasser Rabah lines whenever the sparkles start falling into her eyes—but it’s after I’ve already kidnapped Don Quixote.

Yeah, it was me. Fuck me, right? Don’t tell anybody, especially don’t tell Rocinante what I’ve done. Everyone is sure that Don Quixote is dead, or else he is lost. He is certainly not coming to rescue anybody; nothing works like that anymore, no. The world doesn’t work like that. The world works in this way instead: Rocinante is walking along with a little boy, who has a head. The little boy has a neck to hold up his head, too, and he has a little string around his neck—loose, he can breathe, he can breathe, and his blood can flow, and he has a key on his little string. The little boy is sitting up on Rocinante’s back, and they are walking, walking, and they are searching.

They are searching for the great Enchanter’s tower where the noble Knight is chained up, and once they free him, he will save the world. They are searching and searching. They have left this place and searched around on the other side of the wall already, and found nothing, and now they are back. It is inevitable that their search has taken them back to Gaza; it is the only place; there is no other place that makes sense; there is no other place that the Noble Knight could have ever gone to, is there? Where else, but here? What else, but this?

In reality, Don Quixote is a man made of sticks, rotting. I am keeping him chained up in my room in Boston, actually, instead of out there, saving the world, and that is what he would be doing, saving the world, and there’s hardly anybody who could stop him; power like his, it grows in kind with the evil it faces, and he would be a hurricane if I set him loose now, and then the story would be over and done with, just like that, and then what would be left for me? He eats up all the stories that you put him in, and that’s just boring.

This little boy is Dulcinea’s son, thinks Rocinante, knows Rocinante. He tells himself a little story about it. The boy is special; he has been sent; he is a sign that Don Quixote is going to be found; he is going to lead the horse to his Master. Rocinante tells himself a little story about finding Don Quixote, making his way, finally, to the top of the right tower or the basement of the right dungeon, and there he is, waiting. Rocinante tells himself a little story about oh, such a Hero he’s going to be, finally saving Don Quixote.

They’ll never find him, don’t worry.

This is a story about Esraa; do you know what Esraa is doing? She is going out to get water for her family. Her family needs water, and she can walk in this story, so off she goes, with two big jugs, empty. She holds one of them up over the top of her head to shield herself from the sun, and it doesn’t help at all, but now that she’s started doing it, she’d feel even sillier to stop. She is dizzy in the heat.

Are you dizzy, yet? That’s a common side-effect, along with mild memory-loss, mild-to-severe memory-gain, and tingling or numbness in the extremities. The Veil is growing thinner and thinner, is what’s happening. Keep your eyes out for accidental glimpses from one side to the other, and back. A woman and her two little daughters go missing, or they get lost, or maybe they are just gone for a perfectly good reason;

How many
Days

Has that been, now? Two? Five? Six? A man is saved from shrapnel by the moon in the shape of a person. Bony old horses go walking around with little boys, searching for Heroes. A girl with one arm and three minds vanishes in the night—and

How many
Days

Has she been gone, now? Everything is rumbling, and screeching, and roaring. A child is hiding in a basement. An old man is chained up in an apartment, crying out that he has to stop all this—he has to fix all this. There are windmills turning and turning and turning.

Esraa goes to get water for her family, and today is an easy day, she gets two full jugs of water, easily, today, and she turns around and starts back with them. Esraa goes walking down the street with her two full water-jugs—they are heavy as sin, both of them, and she’s not nearly strong enough to hold either one up over her head anymore. They are plastic, if you care. They are four and a half gallons, each, and they are rectangular, with rounded edges.

They are blue, if you care, like the sky, and if you don’t care they aren’t that color at all—the sky is black and the sun is white-hot when you take away the oxygen and nitrogen and all that’s left is broken glass; the white-hot sun glints off of a bit of broken glass up in a bit of broken building a little ways up the street from Esraa, straight into her eye, and she squints, and that’s why she doesn’t see the windmills, turning and turning, beneath her feet. She trips, and she falls and she doesn’t. She stumbles and drops her water-jugs and catches herself with her bare hands against a ruined bit of wall before she hits the ground.

Her head smashes against the dusty cobblestone road. The cartilage in her nose cracks, and all the yolk comes draining out of her capillaries and down the front of her face, but she’s managed to keep her water safe, at least.

One of Esraa’s two water-jugs breaks completely when it hits the ground, it flexes under the weight until the side bursts, ruined, and water everywhere. The other one, the cap is just popped off, and by the time Esraa’s got her balance back and walks over to pick it up, it’s almost completely drained out into the dirt, but at least it’s still in one piece.

She cries, like a child cries, instead of how an adult cries, and she cries and she cries until it’s all out of herself, and then she takes the cap from where it landed, a few feet away, and what’s she supposed to do next? She came out to get water, and here she is with no water, or not much more than a few dribbles—what’s she supposed to do?

She turns around, without much of a thought, and starts back the way she came, towards the water-truck a few blocks away. Until now, today has been an easy day, and maybe this will be the only thing that happens.

Slowly, slowly, Esraa gets back up onto her feet. She is a horrible mess. She is an omelet. She’s got her water, safe. She’s got a pounding headache. She’s got a throbbing in her elbow, she’s gone and twisted one of her arms, too, is what she’s done. She’s limping, as she’s moving down the street; her legs are both fine, actually, nothing wrong with them, but she’s limping. Maybe that’s because she’s carrying so much weight of water, and she’s holding one of her two jugs awkwardly, because of her twisted elbow, and that’s upsetting her balance.

Maybe she’s limping because that’s just what you do, after you fall—you limp, is what you do. Maybe she’s hoping someone else will see her limping and help her, because all the blood on her face and down her front doesn’t quite seem to be enough. People are just carrying on. She’s just hoping someone will ask her if she’s alright, maybe; she doesn’t care if they actually help; she doesn’t want anyone to actually help. She just wants to be asked, maybe, please.

Esraa tells herself a little story about her fiancé being here, next to her, and catching her as she fell. Or maybe he is helping her carry one of these jugs—or maybe both of them. Or maybe he is just asking her if she needs help. Or maybe he is just here with her, just here with her. A story about him.

What is his name, again? Does he have a name?

Rocinante and the little boy are coming through an alley and out into a main road. They are doing their best to stay out of the sunlight—shadows and awnings and overhanging ruins—anything they can find. Did you know that horses can sweat? Rocinante is desperate for a drink of water. His cloudy old eyes see people carrying water jugs, and some of them are empty, going in one direction, and some of them are full, going the other way, but to him it’s all just blurs, blurring about.

The boy on his back can see much more clearly, but he’s like what? Five years old? Three years old? I forget. All he can do is say “water” to somebody as he’s passing, because he’s thirsty, too, and all he can get back from that is a little nudge; a woman with two full jugs and a bloody face says that the water is that way, and she points, and she puts down one of her jugs for a moment to push Rocinante, gently, on the side of his bony old snout and turn him towards the right direction.

Does nobody understand what is going to happen? If they keep poking little pinholes in the Veil, like this? If they keep stretching out the thin drumskin until those holes are wide enough to put your wrist through? What are they doing? What do they think that they are doing?

Esraa walks past the rubble with her one empty water-jug, now, and she watches people at work, trying to dig somebody out—some little child who has been swallowed up, who’s lodged in the throat, they’re trying to dig him out. They’ve got mostly the wrong tools for it—wood-saws and hand-drills and chisels and blow-driers and nailclippers, but they’ve got a few ropes, too, and those hard-hat-helmets with the little flashlights on them, and a long bit of sturdy metal to use as a prybar, and they’re really doing the best they can.

Esraa turns her head and she watches it as she goes by, like watching some guys in a cherry-picker trying to get a cat down out of a tree. What are they doing? What is that machine for? How did that poor thing get up there? Will he live or will he die? Hmmm? Hmmm? She carries on by. Maybe it’s more like walking past a basketball game and wondering who’s going to score.

All of these men, at the end of today, when they go back to the Civil Defense Center to rest or just sit and thinking about resting, when they are all back in the same place from all the other bits of rubble where they’re working today, they will be firebombed, all together, and turned to soot and smoke, they will be beautiful orange-gray-black-brown, billowing up into the air and the night. Everybody understands their crime.

Rocinante and his boy are moving in the direction of water, now—probably. Here is how the world works; the world works in this way: there are lots of people, going in the same direction, going for water, and plenty of them see the little boy all alone up on the back of the bony old horse, and when there is room in the crowd to move past them, they move past them, the water is up ahead.

Where are his parents? Why is he alone? The water is up ahead. It isn’t until they start getting closer that somebody finally says something. Some man in a bright-orange vest—another member of the Civil Defense, here to help, here to help—he’s a helper. What is his name? Does he have a name? His name is soot and smoke, tonight, it doesn’t matter about his name. He immediately helps down the little boy from Rocinante’s back and starts asking questions—where are his parents? Is he okay? Where does he live? Did something happen to him? Does he have any injuries? What’s his name? Does he have a name?

And he’s like, what? Three years old? So he doesn’t know how to answer any questions except for his name, and the man he tells his name to is soot and smoke, so it will never reach the future anyways. The man asks about the key, and the boy doesn’t know how to answer. The man asks the boy if he wants some water—has he come here for some water?

Esraa’s blood has all dried in the sun. Her face isn’t sticky, it’s just sour. Has she ever broken her nose, before? She thinks about it, she’s never, she’s never. She doesn’t know anything about how to fix a broken nose, does she? She thinks about it. One of her brothers has had a broken nose, but she can’t remember how that went. She knows that Basma broke her nose recently, didn’t she? Her and both her daughters. She’s going to call Basma as soon as she gets home and ask.

She’s walking and she’s walking. Her elbow isn’t feeling better. What has she gone and done to her elbow? Did she twist it? Did she bump it? She feels as though she’s twisted it in such a way as to cause her to bump herself from the inside, is how she feels. She feels like soon she is going to have to shift her water-jug to the other hand and carry both of them with just one arm.

There isn’t a chance in hell of her being able to actually do that, of course—she isn’t nearly strong enough, even when she’s fed, and she’s not. She’s dizzy from hunger—always this slight hunger, always, always this slight dizziness, now; like the feeling of a missing tooth; like a bald patch; like a scar—always. She’s dizzy in the heat. She’s dizzy from the effort of how far she’s carried all this water, already. She’s dizzy from the thinning Veil, it’s one of the most common side-effects.

There’s no way she can carry this much further. By this point, she’s nearly to that ruined building where that bit of broken glass, up in the third floor, had caught in her eye and made her trip. She glances up at it, no glare of sun, this time, and it’s closer, and she can see much more clearly now what nobody would ever be able to see clearly unless they were looking right at it and wondering about it, and why would anyone do that? It’s not broken glass, is what it’s not. It’s glass, but it’s not broken.

Here is what a child looks like through the scope of a rifle: even magnified, he is still

So
Small.

Does nobody understand what is going to happen? Does nobody realize what it means to keep poking and poking and poking the Veil this way? Do they really think that it will just

Stay
Here?

Do they really think that it will just

Stop with
This?

You can make out the individual hairs on the boy’s head, isn’t that amazing? You can make out the individual fibers of his shirt. You can make out the individual skin-cells of his tiny face. You can make out the individual atoms of his breath. Everything is

Clear.

He is only a machine. He is only atoms and breath. He is a stone, rolling down a hill. He is a trolley, rolling down a track towards a fork. He is a process that can be interrupted—look at all the ways to interrupt him. A man is crouched down, talking to him, the child, and his arms are thin with hunger, sure, his muscles are wasted away, but it wouldn’t take all that much to reach out and twist the boy’s head like a bottlecap.

The man still has enough strength in his hands to reach out and crush the boy’s throat with a press of his thumbs. He could pick him up and impale him on that bit of rebar, there. Maybe he could take that key off the string and bury it in the side of his neck. He could throw him to the dirt and stomp on his chest, turn his ribs to woodchips. He could just beat him with his fists until he’s a puddle. But no, he’s just crouching there, talking. He’s nodding.

He’s taking the boy’s hand, and instead of ripping out the joint of the shoulder, or swinging him around like a sack of lightbulbs and smashing him against the ground, he’s just gently leading him towards where the water-truck is parked, a little ways away. There’s the bony old horse, following after.

There’s the back of Esraa’s head, as she’s walking with her empty water-jug. You can see the way her hijab is wearing down around the edges. If you knew her through more than a lens, you would know the way she picks-picks-picks at the edges while she’s sitting, while she’s anxious, while she’s talking to me, while she’s remembering things.

She pulls off tiny tails of thread like from a paper mouse, and she rolls them into little pills between her fingers and once she likes the shape of them she flicks them away, and what does that say about a person? She makes each one perfect, and then she makes herself lose them. We are always telling ourselves little stories.

What was his name? Did he have a name? Or was he just “Esraa’s fiance”? Did I ever actually bother naming him?

Through the scope of a rifle, what you think about the tattered edges is that that’s just how they are, the clothes of a

Rat,

Living like how rats live. Whenever you see a movie about rats wearing clothes, they’re always tattered and shabby, aren’t they? They’re always full of holes. Here is what the back of a woman’s head looks like through the scope of a rifle: it looks like a hole waiting to happen—but that’s just too dramatic—that’s just too much. Here is a better idea:

Esraa follows a coincidence; the front door of the ruined building where the sniper has set up is open, of course it is; the building is ruined; the sniper must have gotten in somehow; what’s to lock, anymore? She takes her two heavy jugs of water and pushes into the entry-hall with her shoulder—into the shade of something like a ceiling, and she sits herself down for a bit against the wall, and she breathes.

Has she made too much noise, coming in here? Has the soldier upstairs heard her? Is he going to move to a different building, now? Is he going to come down here and get rid of her? Esraa listens up the crumbling stairs, she listens for footsteps, and she doesn’t hear anything but the occasional slight creaking as the gutted structure shifts and sags. She imagines the whole thing suddenly collapsing and swallowing them both away, her and the sniper.

She imagines it collapsing because of how she is leaning against the wall, now. She imagines it being on purpose—all part of her plan. She imagines the Civil Defense crews digging her out of the rubble, later, alive, somehow, she will be alive, and she will nod to each of them with fire in her eyes. “One by one,” she will tell them. “One at a time, if I have to,” she will tell them, and then, once they’ve put bandages on all her scratches, she will go shuffling off to find the next building full of soldiers to bring down on herself.

She tries not to laugh loudly enough that she can be heard.

Here’s what she’s really going to do, she knows: she’s going to sit here in the shade until she’s rested enough to keep going, and then she’s going to get up and keep going. She reaches up with her hand and touches her nose, just slightly, just to see, and she pulls back again before she yelps in pain. Yeah, that’s definitely broken.

There are lots of people at the water-truck, here. More than the first time Esraa came. It’s a little later in the day, and the crowd has grown. It’s not a line, really. More of a cloud, or maybe what it is is a soup of amino-acids around a ribosome, just floating this way and that way until they match a bit of the sequence and get bound up in it. Is that a good metaphor? Nobody is quite pushing or fighting, and the way it feels like is that somehow, if there was a line, there would be pushing and fighting.

There would be arguments about where the line starts and ends. There would be arguments about cutting for this reason or for that reason, or about if you can hold places for people, of course you can! Of course you can’t! There are no rules, like this, and what can anyone do but just accept it, as it goes, as they have been accepting and accepting. Like a rock accepts rolling down a hill; is it going to stop and turn back the other way?

The man in the orange vest leads the boy, gently, why so gently? Towards the water-truck, where another man in another orange vest is looking after the tap. There are words, exchanged, but you can’t hear those through the scope of a rifle. There is water, exchanged, for the little boy, and then for the bony old horse, following after.

This is all wrong. This is all wrong. You are watching someone slip up a muddy hill—they are getting nowhere. There’s nowhere to go, really, but down to the bottom, and everyone is trying to climb up. So much waste. Getting water, here, this boy, this horse, all these people. Food. Medicine. Shelter. No momentum, up or down, just sloshing in the mud, disgusting. Come on. This needs to pick a way. This story needs to start moving, and there’s nowhere for it to move towards but the bottom.

Where did that woman get to?

It only takes a few minutes for Esraa to get her strength back up, or else it only takes a few minutes for her to lose her patience. Something should write something about boredom in war, someday, she tells herself. Or maybe Rabah has already written something about that. There isn’t anything coming to her head.

She’s dizzy, remember? It’s time for her to get up and bring her water the rest of the way home. It’s time for her to stand up. She stands up. She presses lightly on the wall behind her, one last time, just to see if she can take the whole thing down, and then carefully, calmly, she picks up one, and then the other of her water-jugs. It’s time for her to step back out into the street, into the sun, and carry on walking towards her family’s tent.

But she’s dizzy. That’s the reason I’m going with. She’s dizzy, and that’s the reason that she stumbles towards the foot of the staircase instead of out the front door. Never mind, that she isn’t stumbling; she’s walking, smoothly, steady. Her elbow isn’t hurting so much anymore. That little rest helped. She lifts herself up onto the first step. It’s concrete, so it doesn’t creak, of course, but she feels like it will creak.

She lifts herself up onto the second step. She’s keeping her feet quiet as she can. She puts down one of her water jugs on the second step and uses her free hand to grab hold of the bannister, pull herself up a little easier. It’s only two flights of stairs she’s going to have to climb, probably, but even just one four-and-a-half gallon jug is a heavy thing—have you ever tried carrying something like that up a bunch of stairs?

Up she goes, one step at a time. She is listening, the whole while, to the sound of her feet, can she hear herself? Could anyone else possibly hear her? She is listening, the whole while, to the sounds above her. Can she hear anyone coming? If someone is coming down to meet her, wouldn’t they be trying just as hard as she is to be quiet?

And, to be honest, she’s the better part of deaf, isn’t she? She’s had one of her eardrums blown out by the pressure-waves of the bombs, hasn’t she? Sometimes, I forget that about her.

She thinks that maybe it might be a Resistance sniper who she’s sneaking up on, right now, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing? She knows that she’s wrong; it’s not. She just knows. She tries to dig through her dizzy thoughts some more and remember if there really are no Rabah poems about the boredom of war—aren’t there? Mustn’t there be? There must be, but all that’s coming to her head is

“It wasn’t you they saw on the television screen;
It wasn’t you they filmed coming out crumbled from the rubble;
Then who was
Applauding
And
Clamoring for death?
This is what war makes you:
It takes your skin off and gives you a tent.”

And that’s nothing to do with boredom, is it?

Esraa makes her way towards the part of the cloud of people that’s closest to the tap on the water-truck, and she floats, and she floats, and she floats, until her surface-proteins match the antigen, and suddenly, it is her turn, just like that.

The man in the orange vest directs her to hold her water-jug beneath the tap, and to keep it held there until it is full, it is getting heavier and heavier in her hands. And now stop. And now, take it away. Off you go. Esraa turns and starts back on the long trip, again, to her family’s tent. They’ll be wondering what’s taken her so long, or maybe they won’t; there’s always something.

Look at her face, through the scope of a rifle. Look at her sweat; she’s barely sweating, in all this afternoon sun. Her body doesn’t have the water for it. She isn’t going to be able to sweat until she stops to drink, and isn’t that funny? The water will go right into her mouth and right back out of her face.

You can make out the individual pores on her forehead and around her unbroken nose. You can make out the individual hairs of her eyebrows and eyelashes. Look at her left eye, you can see straight into the pupil and through to the retina, through to the optic nerve, and from there to the occipital lobes, and from there to everything. You can see all of her thoughts. You can see all of her feelings, with your own eyes; you understand how it all works. The process of continuing, and continuing, and continuing. The process of carrying on. It doesn’t take much to interrupt it.

“This is what war makes you:
Bored”

Says Esraa to herself as she makes her way up the last few stairs to the third floor. She says it on the inside of her throat; none of the sound reaches her mouth or her lips. Just in her throat. A strangely shaped breath. A little bit above her, and a little bit ahead of her, two-hundred grains of nitrocellulose ignite and detonate with a loud, sharp “crack!” that would damage Esraa’s ears if she was closer to it, and if one of her eardrums hadn’t already been burst before this. The soldier, the sniper, he is wearing good hearing-protection. His rifle is just a soft “pop” to him. Esraa’s footsteps coming up behind him are nothing at all.

She moves slowly, and then quickly; nevermind how dizzy she is, she moves quickly, and then bluntly. She moves with decision, and four-and-a-half gallons of water over the head makes up a mind, just like that. The soldier’s hearing protection doesn’t help; a loud, sharp “crack!”, and he is dead, or at the very least no longer alive enough for this story. Isn’t this a lovely story? This is a story about choices.

It’s a perfect shot. At this distance, you can’t hear the “crack!” of the rifle, just the whistle cutting the air, like a skinned knee, and the “tip!” and the “tap!” of the bullet entering in the front of its target, and exiting out the back, and the soft “thud!” of burying itself in the dirt afterwards. I might not have seemed like a bullet at all. It is like a person tripping on the sidewalk, or sneezing in the middle of a restaurant during flu-season, or swallowing a sip of water wrong and starting to cough.

The people standing near Esraa when the bullet hits, is it even a bullet? They’re splattered on their shoulders and on their arms and on their legs and on the sides of their faces. Esraa drops her water-jug; what’s the point? It’s not a water-jug, anyways. It’s all just mangled plastic, now.

Maybe it wasn’t a bullet. Maybe nobody aimed for her water-jug and pulled the trigger. Maybe it just exploded, like someone getting distracted by their phone and walking smack-first into a telephone-pole or a road-sign. Maybe it just exploded, like someone making it halfway to the bus-stop before realizing they’ve forgotten their wallet, letting out a loud curse, and then turning around and running back the other way. These are just the things that happen. Nobody screams. Nobody scatters. Nobody comes rushing in to help. The cloud just carries on drifting, drifting.

The man in the orange vest whose name is soot and smoke is looking around for someone else to look after this boy he has, here. Someone to take him back to the Civil Defence headquarters, maybe, and from there make a better, more thorough search for his parents. This man, here, he’s too busy helping make sure that everyone has water. Those men, over there, they’re too busy with the rubble.

And whose horse is this? He calls out to the people, whose horse is this? Rocinante is gently sipping at the flat tin of water that’s been put out for him. He’s feeling a little better with that, though he’s old enough and bony enough at this point that it doesn’t mean so much to him, eating or drinking. He’s thinking about how he’s going to carry on his search in a few minutes, once he’s had his rest.

Him and his boy, they’re going to have to carry on looking for Don Quixote. Somewhere around here, somewhere around here, the noble Knight is somewhere around here, waiting to be saved, so that he can save everyone else, so that he can save everything. Start pushing the world back uphill. They aren’t going to find him by just standing around, standing around. Rocinante’s cloudy old eyes are scanning the skyline for towers—where are all the towers?

Where is anybody going to lock up a noble Knight if not in a high, menacing, tower? He and his boy have already checked all the towers on the other side of the wall, metal and glass—and nothing. They’ve dodged a thousand bullets and bombs and gone leaping over barbed-wire and gone running through traffic-heavy streets and up stairwells and stood waiting in elevators, and nothing. Maybe Don Quixote is locked up in a subterranean dungeon, instead. Somewhere below all of this.

But what’s such a thing as below?