She puts her hand around my neck and she’s stopped crying now, but I can feel that her face is still wet and so I kiss her again and try to wipe away those tears with the palm of my hand, and she kisses me harder for a moment and my head is flying with a thousand thoughts of my life about to begin right now, restarting at this very moment. Me with Sam. Sam and me, making love. Me in Sam and Sam in me. And I move my arms around her back to hold her better, to comfort her, to love her, I will love her like no one’s ever been loved before, or at least like I’ve never loved anyone, like I could never have loved Noor, and just then I feel myself deeper into Sam, closer than I ever have been before. Ever. Ever. And the taste of Sam’s tongue against mine is so salty and sweet and soft that I can’t ever have been happier, ever, ever, and it stops. Sam’s tongue slows, her mouth freezes. She pulls away.
She stares at me with bleary eyes, confused as a girl awoken from a dream. Her mouth strains towards an “o”, a stretch to ask why. Or maybe to say
oh-no.
I stare back at her, and her eyes study me, taking me in.
“Na, Nabil, I...I don’t know what just happened here.” Silence. A sniffling, an exhalation. “We can’t do this.”
You want to do this. You put your lips next to mine. You didn’t pull away — not straight away, anyway.
“You, you know we can’t do this, right? You understand, don’t you?
You let me kiss you. You kissed back.
Her eyes fill up again, searching mine. They look like they will spill over again, but just build up at the edge of her bottom lids, holding. I watch her, unable to string together a reply. She takes one of my hands in both of hers, lets her eyes close, sets free the waterfall. Her tongue reaches out to catch one without her knowing. She breathes in quick and breathes out slow. “I know you understand. I know you know why this can’t be.” And she rises, leaving my hand alone in mid-air, only a moment ago held in hers.
~ * ~
50
Leaving
Sam told me she needed to sleep for a few hours. Four, to be exact. That nothing could be done, no decisions could be made, no discussing why we can or can’t do anything, until she had four solid hours of sleep. She read somewhere that sleep experts have discovered that we sleep in four-hour cycles which are in sync with our dream sequences, and therefore, give us enough time for deep sleep and rapid-eye movement. So if you can’t sleep eight hours, the study found, better to sleep four. To sleep five or six would only frustrate the mind’s internal clock, which would know that it was being woken up in the middle of a four-hour cycle. With that, she left me here, on the sofa with my shirt still spotted from her tears, and went to bed. I reminded her that I thought we should leave the hotel as soon as possible, and that we should do it at night, when no one would be watching. And she reminded me that she needed to pay the Hamra for her last month of hotel bills, and that the main reception desk wouldn’t be open until five. She promised to wake up in four hours, at 4.45 a.m., and pack up her essentials. Then she further reminded me that if we violate the curfew without a special permit -something Technical Ali apparently has no problem attaining - we might wind up dead anyway. And who would drive us? No sign of Rizgar or his car.
It’s been more than an hour that I’ve been lying here in the dark, in the spare room across the hall from hers, the one where Carlos sleeps whenever he is here, the one where Marcus slept at least once, and where other men might sleep in the future.
I get up and turn on the light. Maybe I’ll try to read one of her books, because there is no way I’ll be able to sleep. How can Sam?
I walk through the suite to get a glass of water from the kitchen, and stop at her door on the return trip. Put my ear against it, wince when I hear it creak. Stillness. Soundlessness. Not even the heavy breathing of a troubled sleep.
Lying on my back again, I go through the selected pieces of the story I will feed my family when I bring Sam home tomorrow. Today, rather.
I will bring Sam home today.
I feel the rush of blood around my chest, the pounding in the pulse points in my neck, wired like Frankenstein in the old black-and-white film, rising from the dead, feigning health and happiness. I close my eyes, and Ali’s face fills them.
Maybe the deadline is you.
Open. Better open. I will simply lie here, eyes open, and wait. Wait for the light to come. Keep myself from slipping into that crazy corner of my mind, the one that thought I could fill Sam up with me, instead of words and stories.
A trio of beeps, sounding four or five times, and then the click that brings it to an end. Sam is stirring just as she promised, using the bathroom and letting the door slam, rattling mine.
I go into the kitchen to make coffee, the real one that takes time. The
dallah,
the pot for making real coffee, was in the cabinet all along, next to the other basic crockery the hotel leaves for its guests. I suppose Sam never thought to use it.
I stand and stir, watching the dark foam rise and fall and rise again. Make it sweet, but not too sweet. By the time it is done, I turn to find Sam pulling along a large black suitcase, made of hard plastic and rounded at the edges, into the main room. Manipulating the handle, she wheels the upright case next to her desk and sits down in her chair. She looks at the laptop, dark and idle, and taps twice on the space key.
“I made some coffee.”
“I have to call Miles.”
“Now? I think we should leave here before people wake up. Before everyone sees us leave. You can stick a note under Joon’s door and tell her you’re all right. Or leave a note for Carlos and ask him—”
“I need to tell Miles what happened. I should have called him the minute we got home. I should at least e-mail them.”
“Sam?” She doesn’t turn, starts typing away at the computer. “Sam! Would you listen to me?” I take the coffee off the stove, pour it into two porcelain cups. I bang the
dallah
back down harder than I should.
“Don’t start getting angry at me, Nabil. That’s the last thing I need right now.”
“It’s not a matter of angry!” In my head I imagine myself taking the coffees and sending them across the room, letting them fly past Sam’s head, just close enough to shock her, before landing on the sliding glass door, a crash of black and brokenness. Instead I leave them on the counter, and move towards the sofa that separates us. She watches my approach and then stands, moving incrementally, her arms crossed in front of her.
“I want you to understand. It’s not anger. I’m just trying to help you. Not just you. I have my family to think about. These people already know you’re here. Maybe they know where I live.”
Sam claps the computer shut and pulls out the plug.
“Listen to me for a minute!”
“I
am
listening. I’m listening while I pack. You want me to pack, right? This stuff has to come too. If they know where you live, then let’s not go to your house.”
“Actually, I don’t think they know where I live. Ali called me a professor’s kid. Which means he doesn’t know who my father is, I don’t think.”
“But what about those guys who grabbed you? They knew.”
“Outside my house? Just small-time neighbourhood thugs. I doubt they have anything to do with these guys.”
“Nabil,” she says. “I’m worried about Rizgar.”
“Me too,” I say, but in fact, I’m even more worried about what I tried to do on the sofa a few hours ago. Right here, on this sofa, us kissing, only hours ago. “Rizgar probably just went home after a while. He wouldn’t stay out after curfew.”
Sam reaches to pull plugs out of the power strip, quickly winding them up.
“We need to get you out of the Hamra, and then we need to discuss how to get you out of Iraq altogether. I mean, I presume that’s what you want.”
Sam leans on the desk space where the computer was. “I have seven thousand dollars.”
“And?”
“I’m just telling you.”
“Are you saying you want to pay them? Maybe you think you can bargain with them, like in the market?”
Sam shrugs. “No. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just telling you so you know. I just want you to know the truth about everything.”
“You want me to go back to these schmucks who held us hostage and offer them two-thirds and see if they’ll be satisfied? Buy them off, just like Harris buying the documents?”
“What?” Sam’s face falls with disbelief. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just telling you facts so that you know what our options are. I thought you might like to know, okay? Because I’m not a walking bank. I only have seven grand. That’s what I have left, anyway, not that I couldn’t get more if I borrowed from someone, like Joon or Marcus.
I can see she’s not thinking clearly. She can’t be. Can she really be thinking of paying our own ransom, after we’ve been set free, and after all her lessons to me about the ethics of paying for things? Then again, it would be the only way for Sam to keep working in Baghdad. Maybe she can send in an invoice to her editors, along with the handwritten receipts she’s been making each time she pays me or Rizgar. Mark it $10,000: This week’s price of doing business in Baghdad.
“Get this: the paper is running the story tomorrow. It’s going through final edits now. They’ll send me a draft before it runs.”
“What?”
She looks at me and nods, demonstrating a mix of incredulity and matter-of-factness. “I just saw it in my e-mail now. They said they’re ready to run the story tomorrow. They think they have everything they need, now that there’s no doubt Harris’s story was based on fake documents. They said they’ll send me a copy of the story later today.”
“But, I thought—” I stop and swallow, wondering if my surprise will only make her feel worse. Sam, my boss, in charge of me perhaps, but not her own story. “You mean, you’re not even going to get to write it?”
Sam has a resigned expression on her face that reminds me of certain students of mine, those who barely passed but to whom I kept giving second, third and fourth chances. “Apparently not,” she says. “They’re just taking whatever information I can give them, and then writing it in Washington.”
“Oh,” I say. “Did you know they would do that?”
“Nope.”
I go to the counter to get the coffees, which aren’t giving off the steam they were only minutes ago. I stretch my hand across the coffee table, holding a cup towards Sam. “What about the people who decided to have the fake documents made? What about the people who just created these things to, to blame this guy, this Congressman Jackson, and to make money? Didn’t your editors also want to know who did that?”
She takes the small cup, holds it under her nose, shuts her eyes while she breathes in deeply. She sips, then rolls her eyes at me. “They did last week. They don’t seem to want it now. They think the story’s done.”
“But what if the newspaper runs the story and Ali finds out? And you’re still in Iraq?”
She’s a pretty one, too. Lucky man.
“That’s possible. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t find out for a few days. I mean, how would the average Iraqi know what’s written in the
Tribune
?”
“Maybe Ali is not the average Iraqi,” I say. “We have to leave in three minutes. Drink your coffee.”
She lifts the cup to her lips, sighing with exhaustion into the small black sea.
~ * ~
51
Sighing
The early morning is a nervous blur of packing bags and paying bills, of negotiating for a new taxi driver who, I suspect, is an informant for someone, of simple tasks constantly disrupted by a feeling in my blood that we are not safe. That Ali will jump out and recapture us at any moment, that he will drive our taxi off the road and shoot the driver and stuff us in the boot. The screen in my mind keeps replaying the moment when he held the gun to Sam’s head, the others also pointing theirs. As the taxi makes its way over the Jadriya Bridge, I make up a new rule. When I catch myself re-living episodes like this, as if it’s all before me, I will turn my watch upside down, which will be the equivalent of shutting down the screen in my mind, simply lowering the curtain and closing the theatre doors. When I need to know the time, I’ll take the watch off and check to see if I’ve succeeded, even for a few minutes, in putting it out of my mind.
I join Sam in looking at the view of the water and the early fishing boats floating serenely, as if this morning were the same as any a thousand years ago, when the fishermen, I imagine, were equally oblivious to the political upheaval of the day, the overthrow of the Muslim caliphate in Baghdad. I wonder if Sam knows anything about that time when we were the very heart and mind of the Islamic world. I wonder if the Americans know that they didn’t invent regime change for us, because we’ve already had it for aeons.
Traffic is only now beginning to thicken, and we drive through Mansour, not far from the school where I once taught.
Qabil.
Before. Before the whole city became my classroom, in which I am no longer a teacher but a new student.
Sam, who had seemed deeply uninterested in conversation, turns to me.
“I’m glad you told me what you told me last night.”
I look at her and wait. My teeth catch a sliver of the inside of my cheek.