A powerful smell was in the air. It smelled a bit like dust. Like wet cement and sawdust and burnt things—phosphorus—was that the word for it? Plastic, dust, gunpowder. Like sitting too close to fireworks. Sami opened her eyes to see sharp broken rubble—piles of debris, stacks of cement bits everywhere. Light was coming from a weird place: she looked up and saw the center of the ceiling was crushed. Through an immense hole dangled a tangle of metal rods or pipes. In the back, to one side, was a staircase with a twisted railing of once-elegant metal scrolls that led up to an opening in the crumpled ceiling.
What is this place?
She stood up slowly, running her hands over her arms and face, but she was completely unhurt.
Where am I?
Somehow, this was not a dream. She was very much here, in this place. The light was hot and strong and the air almost wet with humidity—a bit like the air in Florida. Other smells started to emerge from underneath the dust and gunpowder. She smelled diesel and wet pavement, a damp, greasy, roasting smoke. There were also wisps of spices—cumin, cardamom—earthy as the scents coming from an old cupboard.
Sami moved toward a window in the cement wall where street sounds poured in from down below. Just an empty frame; the window held no actual pane—it was like someone had cut the glass out with a knife. Looking out, she could see she was up high, maybe on the top floor of an eight- or ten-story building. Below was a city. Honking cars and sirens filled the air along with children’s voices, high and urgent, as they ran through junk piles on the street, tossing a red ball. Men in berets shooed the children, and other men in zip-up white jumpsuits trudged around burnt, splintered wood, metal rods, and hills of refuse as high as snowdrifts. Abandoned shells of cars seemed to drift through the dust. Looking straight down, Sami realized the lower front of the building she was standing in looked like it was completely torn up into a huge heap, like an unmoving avalanche of wreckage between the building and the street.
Studying this view, she thought that something about the scene below seemed awfully familiar.
Her legs turned rubbery. And then her whole body seemed to fill with cold jelly.
Her mother had a few snapshots of herself in her old neighborhood in Beirut, grinning, posing in her navy school uniform, behind her a rubble field and city buildings. Eight or ten stories high.
In one snapshot, Sami remembered seeing a little boy running in the background, almost a blur of movement, holding a red ball.
Now a sound filled the air—haunting and swirling, almost mystical. She knew, without even thinking about it, that this was the adthan, the call to prayer. Teta used to say that sound was what she missed the most about living in Lebanon—the daily punctuation, a call to pause and reflect. Five times a day the musical recitation came crackling through loudspeakers on top of the mosques, telling people it was time to stop what they were doing and pray.
At last Sami knew she was in Lebanon. She tried to tell herself she was dreaming. But she couldn’t. Somewhere in her dimmest consciousness was the memory of an enormous force hurtling her, smashing her through layers of time and space. Someone or something had gotten hold of her and sent her not into a dream or fantasy, but back into her mother’s history.
Sami scanned the room, taking stock of the situation. It looked like this place might once have been some sort of store or workshop. There were wire hangers scattered across the floor, a toppled plastic mannequin, an overturned desk and chair. Near the window stood a large metal frame, which she realized must have held a mirror at one point. Now it was empty, surrounded by tiny glass fragments. The frame itself was silver metal scrollwork in the shape of wild, irregular waves.
The call to prayers stopped and the street noise resumed, although it seemed subdued, as if much of the city were praying silently. She leaned out the window as far as she dared and tried calling out to the people below, but Sami’s breath was whipped away in the wind and the distant roar of jackhammers and traffic. The window frame was covered with cement dust and splintered wood. Something cut into her fingers as she held on too tightly.
She leaned back in, turning, looking for a way to get downstairs and out of the crumbling building. Every now and then a vibrating moan and shudder ran through the walls, as if the entire thing was about to collapse on itself. One door led to an empty elevator shaft that descended into piles of trash and broken glass twenty feet down. The staircase stopped after three steps, torn away, dangling metal into the rooms below. But the floors of lower rooms, Sami saw now, leaning over the elevator opening, were blasted out all the way to the ground. The building was an empty shell, barely propped up by a few rusted beams and bolts. She needed to get out of there, she thought, and right away.
She hurried back to the window, and was relieved to see a few men still standing in the street, talking, one of them making notes on a clipboard. She hoisted herself into the wide stone shelf that had once held a glass pane and drew breath deep into her lungs. Cupping the sides of her mouth, she screamed as loud as she was humanly able: “HELP ME.”
In the moment of the scream, everything seemed to slow down and magnify: she saw things close up—the silver buttons on the uniforms of the officers, the blade of a toy helicopter trapped in the detritus, the streak of white in a man’s black hair. Sami saw the black-haired man shield his eyes and squint up in the direction of her scream. He looked directly at her. And then a thought like a distant whisper reached her through the whirl of noise. Samara.
Startled, she froze in place. She seemed to hear her own pulse in her head over all the other noises. Sami and the black-haired stranger stared at each other. Gradually, she noticed there was something vaguely familiar about his face. His hair grew long, then short, and his form changed from male to female and back to male again.
“Do I know you?” she whispered.
I need to talk with you. The thought came to her as if from very far away—farther than the street below—strained and summoned with great difficulty. I am waiting.
Who are you? She tried to send her thought back to that distant point. But some force like an onrush of wind swept her back into the room. She hit the floor and felt the impact from her tailbone to the top of her cranium.
Then Sami felt something else, much deeper—another muffled groan, terrible and low, like a sound of dying. It came from all around, from the floor and the walls and what was left of the ceiling above her. The building seemed to shiver, then tremble, and dust and bits of cement and glass started to rain down, mixed up with brilliant sunlight and crazily blue sky. A shard of mirror fell toward her, tumbling slowly, lazily, reflecting the entire broken room, then reflecting Sami herself, stunned. And she knew, even before she started sliding, falling head over heels, that the entire building was going down.