He dragged me by my hijab along the length of the corridor from the room to the car. He shoved me into the back seat, pushed me in with his shoe. I curled up into a ball, I am a sin with tails. Some other things happened. He swore at me the entire way home. When the traffic light was red he’d take the black iqal off his head, turn around, and hit me with it. He stopped the car, pulled me by my arm. I dissolved in his hands, wet myself, collapsed. He lifted me by my arm, dragged me outside my poem, returned me to his grasp. The tomb opens its mouth.

He pushed me to the stairs, descending to the nightmare. He threw me on the bed, slapped me with his shoe. Raided my notebooks and pens, put them in a black plastic bag, and took them upstairs. He built a pyre in the courtyard. He burned García Márquez and Dostoevsky and Naguib Mahfouz, al-Mutanabbi and al-Maari, Mahmoud Darwish and Muzaffar al-Nawab. He sentenced them to death by fire on charges of heresy. My chest opened up to embrace my destruction. I am but fragments.

He came back panting, ashes dirtying his clothing, his hand, his forehead, and the tip of his nose. He circled the room twice, then headed toward the computer and yanked it from its place. He took the hard drive, the screen, and the cables that looked like arteries, the arteries extending from my heart to his. He took my only love story and left. Uprooted the tree inside me. I heard the sound of it falling. It was thunderous.

Again he came back, panting. He saw me huddled between the pillows, curled up into myself. I am a tear.

He pulled my hair: Where’s the cell phone? I pointed to the bag. He opened it, dumped everything out, tore through its organs and limbs. He took my phone, the car key, my ID and driver’s license, he took my life and left. Before he went upstairs, having fully completed his mission, he turned around one last time.

“From now on there will be no more university,” he said. “You’ll stay right here until the man who’s willing to take you comes—God help you both.”

 

I knew right away that the pain I was feeling was worse than any I’d experienced in my life. Not the pain of the blow, but the pain that came after—the horror of the eternal tomb and the vast empty desert of space, the horrible quiet that follows the storm. The destruction was complete and there was nothing ahead of me other than waiting forever for things that would never happen to happen. I would remain in a bubble of absence for three long years, decaying in the belly of the dragon, alone and confused and half crazy.

It was as if the whole thing were happening all over again: being orphaned, the tomb. The serpent of pain sheds its old skin and returns to life, with a wound that stings and burns even more. On that night, I curled up into a ball and whispered the only words I’d hoped to say before the disaster struck: Goodbye, Isam. Crying is a long road I walk barefoot.

Before me were many cells. Every day was a cell. Every cell led to another. The future? A figment of the human mind. From the place where I was curled up in a ball, like a dying baby chick, I knew that the future was merely “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

In the beginning I resisted. I snuck outside the tomb and hid in Wadha’s room. With trembling fingers I pushed the buttons on the phone and waited. A voice burst out: Dad! Hurry! Fatima is calling her boyfriend! My aunt’s voice came out of the receiver: Hello? Saqr rushed at me. Hello? He pulled me by my hair. Hello? He dragged me downstairs, always downstairs. Hello? I went down fourteen steps, beneath the line of consciousness. I live there. Hello?

After that attempt he started to lock the door. They’d open it for me when it was time to eat. That went on for months. After he got lazy and relaxed his grip, I didn’t come out. I never made that phone call.

Relatives? I sat in their company like a marble statue. I was plucked from my tomb like plants are pulled from the ground. No one looked at me. I was nothing.

I see more than I can handle, more than is reasonable. The nail protruding from the table leg—I see it planted in my waist. The cracks in the wall—I see them in my chest, I see its whiteness in my eyes. I see my skin cracking like the paint on the wooden door. The world falls to pieces and collapses. Where are you, Isam? I am sick, my chest is bare, and my heart defenseless! Come smuggle me out of here, like something prohibited, like wine and marijuana and love. Come save me.

 

I have to die. Stamp out my senses bolting from so much fright. I have no window and there’s not enough air. There is no sense in fighting, every struggle is a prolongation of the torture session called my life. In the end I will die, so why not now?

I search for scissors, a knife, a pen. Anything to sink into my wrist so I can flow outside of myself, slowly. Everything is far away. Saqr comes down to the basement every two or three hours, monitoring the progress of my ruin. He sees me sobbing and circling my cage like an animal, feels reassured, and goes back up. How can I die under surveillance?

I want to kill my sense of myself, to bury everything I am, to forget, to get very old, to get very old and forget. To empty my memory of myself, to peel my reality off like a skin, to peel off love and writing and everything in between, everything that might possibly send me back there, where my head burst against the wall and the poem ran red from my mouth.

I dream of love and poetry. I see Isam placing his fingers on my face, on my cracked skin, searching for me underneath. His face is everywhere, eating me from inside. His questions shatter my spirit: do your ears get red when you’re angry? Just how much can a poet love you, Fatima?

I close my eyes, I summon his face, I see him suffering, reeling from so much loss, his voice pierces my head, he calls me . . . O Fatima, before you leave, before you die, before you’re buried alive! Kiss me, love me, destroy me! I sit on the edge of his bed, I take his hand, I feel the fever rising from his body and passing into mine. I smile at him, I smile at him all sadness. I say goodbye, goodbye, my love, I will betray you in the worst way, I will forget you.

 

At the dinner table, day nine and a half.

Where’s Fatima? Saqr asked. Badriya told him that they’d opened the door and I hadn’t come up, then they’d called to me and I didn’t answer. He went down the steps panting, spittle flying everywhere. He yanked the blanket off my body and pinched my forearm. Still pretending to be asleep? He pulled me upstairs by my hair, the bright light hurting my eyes. He sat me down opposite him. I saw him eating and heard him raving: You see what you make me do!

The spittle flew from his lips and landed on my face. First thing we see of you is this face? You’d rather die than sit with us? Or did you study French and write a couple of poems and now you think you’re better than everyone else?

He waved a chicken leg in my face and continued: From now on there’s going to be rules. The world isn’t at your beck and call! I never laid a hand on you and now I’m the one who gets slapped in the face. You understand? I shook my head. Why aren’t you eating? I don’t want to eat. I want to die of hunger. He grabbed my cheeks with his oily hand, the smell of grease burning my nose. He squeezed my face until I opened my mouth, and forced rice inside, shouting: Eat, God damn you! Eat!

 

I was circling the bed and stepped on a piece of paper. The crackling under my feet gave me goosebumps. I’d missed hearing that sound. Any sound. I started tapping my fingers, throwing things, and discovered that I could talk, that I could use my own voice, and talk to it.

I talked to myself. I argued with myself. I laughed with myself, me and my face in the mirror, I am the evil witch and I am the one eating the apple. The things around me talk too. The crack, the roach, the keyhole. The chattiest, and rudest, is the Mitsubishi air conditioner. She examines me and laughs.

“What are you laughing at?” I ask.

At how crazy you are.

She laughs more; I hurl a box of tissues at her. “Next time it will be a shoe, Mitsubishi.”

Susu, please.

“Susu?”

Yes, Susu.

“That’s a name for a dancer in a cabaret.”

She laughs. I threaten her. “From here on out there are going to be rules!”

Oh yeah?

“I make the rules here!”

Since when?

Another shoe at Susu’s cheek. Bad Susu, Susu with the rotten teeth, Susu who swallows nails, Susu the oblivious. Ill-mannered Susu, no one loves her because she drools and makes the walls crack.

“You’re such a bad girl! Bad and ugly! No one loves you! No one wants to see you! I’m going to lock you in the basement! I’m going to hit you with a shoe! I’m going to burn your notebooks and destroy your things! You won’t see the street or the sky or the birds until the idiot who agrees to marry you comes, God help you both.”

 

What had to be done was done. They straightened me out. I am an obedient and compliant girl, capable of being brought into submission. I go upstairs. I sit on the chair. I open my mouth. I eat a couple of bites. I waste away. I disappear. I am an illusion.

I sit with them in the evening as they watch television and I stare into the mouth of nonexistence on the wall. I am a perfect corpse and I excel at my death like a star player. There is no longer anything requiring anyone’s intervention or comment or objection. I am nothing. The system has won.

Finally I knew what it was that I had to do to please the big brother. I had to empty my heart of my heart. Kill the poem inside me. Return to the empty space that was before the big bang, to nothingness. Nothingness is the best that can happen to you. Nothingness is the shortest road to paradise. The life of nothingness is a life without sins. The absence of sin is right. The absence of life is right. I am a creature of nothingness. I perform my duties perfectly. I eat, I remain silent, I stare, I remain silent, I remain silent. What you do doesn’t matter when it comes to a life of nothingness. What matters is what you don’t do, a list of forbidden fruit that goes on forever. What matters is that you don’t do something, not that you do. I no longer do things, and the things that I do are few and not harmful, like breathing, peeling the chipped paint from the door, sitting in the chair, chewing, swallowing, washing my hands, looking at the wall.

I don’t wait for orders. There’s no longer any need to beat me with a whip. I am a perfect creature performing its role in this “non-life” as perfectly as possible. I am the bird enamored of its cage, the one with a phobia of the sky.

*

There’s a blue ink pen in my bottom drawer. How did this vagabond survive the pyre? The sight of it disturbed me so much I closed the drawer and jumped onto my bed.

There’s a pen in my drawer, and I have plenty of walls for writing. What was I going to do? Would I write? What would I do with the pain if it returned? What would I do with writing? Writing is an act of remembering—what would I do with memory? Memory is an act of love—what would I do with love, what would I do with Isam? This little pen is capable of destroying everything, it disrupts the system that we, the big brother and I, created to keep my death coherent. This pen is a danger to me.

I thought for a few seconds then made up my mind. I opened the drawer, took out the pen. I broke it in my hands and threw it in the garbage. Susu laughed: Look at yourself, trembling over a pen! If you’re that afraid of a pen, how do you feel about the air-conditioning vents?

“They disgust me.”

Susu laughed. “What a faker you are, Fashila, you failure. The only thing you can do is talk. In fact, the last thing you want is for me to leave you by yourself.”

“I’d prefer the company of ghosts to yours.”

The broken pen lifted its head and asked me: Then why did you kill me? Its blood ran over my fingers, blue and very bourgeois.

 

Six months went by, and then time lost meaning and I stopped counting. Consciousness is shaped by time. No time, then, no consciousness, and hence, no pain.

The notebook of poems that I hid under the carpet—Saqr hadn’t found them and didn’t burn them. I had to do it myself. Rip out the pages poem by poem. My poetry is a bare tree, my hand is autumn, everything is in the process of falling thunderously nowhere. I outdid myself torturing myself, more than the big brother had dreamed of doing. I told him, Give me the whip, I’ll take care of it. I will beat my heart until everything inside comes out: love, poetry, and everything in between.

My bony yellow hand reached out for a poem a day. Without reading it a last time, I would start to fold it several times, my skillful fingers mechanically transforming it into a paper boat. I filled the laundry bucket with water and put the boat on its surface. I lay down on my right side and waited, with great forbearance, for the boat to grow heavier, for the paper to soak up the water, for the ink to dissolve and the boat to sink to the bottom of the bucket, for the poem to finish its slow, poetic, beautiful death, to drown in a bucketful of tears and meet its final end. The end of its suffering, estrangement, and beauty.

My poems drowned. I saw them crying and calling for help, and I didn’t save them. I saw them waving their hands and swallowing water, breathing it in, dissolving in it. I killed my poems, while lying stretched out on my right side, pondering the process of drowning them like someone waiting for their socks to dry on a clothesline.

I killed my poems and walked in their funeral procession. I prayed for them and asked God to make them more worthy beings in future births. Both a gun and a knife cut flesh.

 

The prison mate got sick. She started looking at me victoriously and informing me that she was going to die, that she was going to leave me alone in the tomb and go to a better place. She started making a strange clicking sound, drooled on the wall more than usual, could no longer rotate her head, and started blowing hot, foul-smelling air in my face.

The place sank into a suffocating humidity, and I lay down on my right side watching her last pangs of death. You respectable old spinster, Mitsubishi, where do you think you’re going? The world is an awful place. Stay here with me. I’ll clean you more. I’ll wipe the dust from you and take care of you, okay?

Saqr came down to the basement on a patrol, circled the place, and stopped in front of her. They exchanged meaningful glances, Susu and Saqr. He informed her that he was going to replace her with another. This old woman, fifteen years old, it’s surprising she lasted this long. That’s what he said. Saqr rarely praises anyone. No doubt Susu was proud of herself, despite her battle with death. She died content.

 

“Saqr has arthritis,” the maid said.

That took long enough.

“Saqr started taking shots for diabetes.”

This last news was devoid of meaning.

 

I saw Isam, tugging on my shirt, shaking me until I woke up.

Fatima! Fatima! It was Badriya. Badriya? She was shaking my shoulder. I pushed her. Fatima, wake up! Was it a dream?

“Do you usually sleep until afternoon?”

Time has no meaning when you’re kept in a bubble of nothingness, to sleep in the morning and eat breakfast at night. The system is just a pretense. Did something happen? I want to talk to you about something. I couldn’t look at her face—a blotch of white light had erased the right side of it.

“Did someone die?”

“No.”

“What is it then?”

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

A person without desire is a free person, a dead person, a person protected from disappointment and betrayal and pain. I am fine.

“What do you want?”

“I have nothing to do with this, Fatima.”

“With what?”

“Everything. How Saqr treated you, preventing you from going to school. I tried to convince him to let you go back to the university. I just want you to know that I don’t agree with what happened to you, but when it comes to you it’s out of my hands. You know Saqr and . . .”

“Is that what you wanted to say?”

“No.”

She got up and walked around the room, then turned toward me, an idea shining in her eyes.

“I wanted to tell you that I have a way for you to get out of here.”

“I don’t want a room on the second floor.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean get out of your brother’s house for good, to have your own house, Fatima. Do you want that?”

Leave the tomb? How? Who cares what’s outside anyway, when the whole world is here? How would I give up my death that I’d worked so hard to achieve? How would I leave the tomb, when my limbs were scattered throughout the place, how could I leave the nail jutting out from the table leg and the broken drawer? And Susu with the rotten teeth, what about her? Everything in front of me was trembling in fear, saying, Don’t leave us.

“What’s wrong? Don’t you want that?”

“I don’t know.”

Susu whispered, “You don’t want anything.”

“Fatima, are you okay?”

“Everything is fine.”

“Are you going to give me an answer?”

“To what?”

“I’ve found you a husband, Fatima! Do you hear what I’m saying?”