A sudden fist of coarse, dry sand hits me in the face; khamsin, the storm that haunted my childhood every year. Fifty days, khamsin.
It gusts into the hotel room through the crack in the window I made, covering, in an instant, every surface with red dust. Yil’aanak. Yil’aankon. Fuck you all. I slam the window shut. Instantly, Room 204 and all of Amman become a prison again. Sand grates my lungs.
Minibar bare. The wind outside howls. Red, swirling sand. I wait. I hear Baba’s voice from a vanished time and place say, “Just fifty days.”
I was five and I believed him. It was all I could do. And all we could do was wait, fifty days indoors—we couldn’t breathe—while the winds whizzed and wreaked havoc like missiles, ruining crops, uprooting trees, cloaking Douma in darkness the color of dry blood. And Baba at the window, looking out, repeating just fifty days, while his orchard was decimated.
Baba, Douma seem so far away. Time is a terrible distance. You seem so far away, Sama. I’m waiting on the phone. The seconds, treacherous, engorge the chasm between Amman and Boston. I cannot hear your thoughts, picture the look on your face. I can’t even see out the window. Only a streetlight, hazy. A spot of mustard amid the copper dust, against the glass, like a stain.
I wait for the storm, inevitable.
“You want Naseem and me… to come to Amman?”
I expected you to shout. You do not. No scream from you, Sama. Just the words, distinct and sharp, staccato, like shrapnel.
“You want to take a premature baby out of the NICU…”
“There are hospitals in Jordan—”
“… uproot our lives…”
“Sama, what other choice do we have? I can’t return to Boston, and you might be next. We can’t wait for you to get deported—”
“Are you mad?!”
There it is. Thunder and sand and winds that could uproot trees and buildings. I can feel you shake through the phone. I can feel half the globe shake between us. The window rattles.
“You want to take us back to Syria?!”
“It doesn’t have to be Syria! We can go—”
“We’re not going anywhere! Sami’ni, Hadi? Not going anywhere! We’re staying right here, in Massachusetts. Your wife and son are going to stay right here, waiting for you. Come home—”
“I can’t!”
I burst.
The tarmac, LED-lit. The black-on-night silhouettes of the two officers. Their grip on my arms like steel, colder and tighter than the cuffs biting my wrists.
The tears erupt—“I can’t come back!”—flow, sear, destroying me.
Outside, a storm of red and stars, anger and terror both, filling the air with dust, the future we painted yellow, the crib, white, I didn’t assemble before I left.
“I can’t come home!”
I can’t breathe. I can’t see the sky anymore. The storm has engulfed even the streetlight.
“Samati.”
“No! Not Samati! Not yours, Baba’s, anyone’s! That’s exactly why I left Syria. That’s why I put an ocean between me and that place!”
“Sama, please listen—”
“Almost seven years, Hadi! You can’t uncross such a distance. Not even you can make me do it! I left so no one could tell me how to live, no one could trap me—”
“What the hell do you know about being trapped?! What do you know about suffering, Sama?”
I must stop shouting. I can’t. I must silence my brain. I could put a bullet through it. I don’t have one. I don’t have anything.
“At home, in Douma, they are queuing to fill plastic buckets and bottles from wells because the water was shut off! My own mother has to wait for the neighbor’s son to fill a five-gallon jug for her because she’s too old to carry it. She’s too old to wait for hours in the cold. And he only comes once every few days and doesn’t always remember. My mother, Sama. And she doesn’t want to bother him, so she tries to make the water last…”
“And you want me to take our son there—”
“No! Come to Amman! We’ll figure it out when you do. We could go to Beirut, Paris. We could—”
“No!”