Chapter 69
It was the first week of May, but it felt like high summer.
The train stalled in the tunnel’s belly, making me late for class.
Men in button-downs strangled the Metro poles, pit stains blooming on their shirts.
A man did backflips in the car, forcing everyone into a painful collective witnessing.
I looked at my phone. Anwar was describing another dream where he was climbing a tree that grew every time he reached up, how at some point he stopped being able to see the ground.
I told him his dreams followed a pattern of things never ending, the falling through floors, now this tree that grew into the sky in perpetuity.
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That’s what Yusuf says! That I am afraid of being trapped in cycles and of endless repetition.
How did you like the soap?
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I liked it! My dad thought it was a block of cheese though
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Ahaaahaha what??? I don’t understand. It looks nothing like cheese. And it was in your bathroom, yes? I could hear my dad if I had food in the bathroom. “Habibi! What’s food doing on the toilet? Come clean this. Who taught you to eat on the toilet? Are you sick?”
I told him maybe one day I could see his family’s farm in person even though I could barely make it to California—how was I going to get to the West Bank?
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Maybe! They’re making it harder for foreigners to visit but you have an American passport I’m guessing so you can get anywhere.
I looked up travel to the West Bank just to see.
The State Department basically said don’t go there because a terrorist might attack you.
Anwar explained the areas, who controlled what.
I thought I understood until I looked at a map online and was confused again.
Why was the geography so patchy? It looked like a skin condition, something breaking out in hives.
It seemed like most of the actual land was Israeli-controlled, but more people lived in Palestinian-controlled areas?
How was there supposed to be Palestinian statehood if Gaza and the West Bank weren’t even connected?
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I find your situation confusing. You’re not a state? Or you’re a city but not inside a state? I don’t see how your thing isn’t as confusing.
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We’re a district! DISTRICT of Columbia.
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To: catherineelise202@
Ah, like in the Hunger Games. What is Columbia?
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It’s named after the guy who stole the land
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:/
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:’(
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Can I ask you a difficult question?
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Sure
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When you were enslaved, how did you move past it?
I explained that I wasn’t enslaved, my ancestors were.
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But you said that “you” were brought there on a boat!!! You see how that’s confusing, no? Who was brought on a boat if it wasn’t you??
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What I meant was I still have to live with what was done to my ancestors.
Like my whole existence is rooted in that old trauma no matter how far from it I get.
I speak English and live in the most powerful nation in the world because my people were stolen.
It’s a weird luck but also a curse. Otherwise I’d probably still be in Zimbabwe or something. Idk where I’d be
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Okay, like the Nakba here. You know, now that I’m thinking about my dreams, it seems obvious to me, my fear of cycles and repetition.
When I walked into the classroom, a random man was sitting at Janine’s desk: dark blond hair, wisps of gray around the ears. He was typing on a silver MacBook, drinking from a WAMU radio mug. Everyone looked confused by him ignoring us.
I sat down. “Uh… hi.”
He looked up. “Hi!” Then returned to his laptop.
Who was this?
I froze when Nia fluttered in wearing a miniskirt and sat beside me. I hadn’t seen her since the threesome, still felt sore about it.
Leaning into me, mint-gum breath, she whispered, “Where’s Janine?” I said I didn’t know.
The man was suddenly at the chalkboard like he’d teleported himself there. He wrote, “Get your politics out of my art!” And “All art is political.” Was he purposely trying to confuse us?
“As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Professor Ford is out today,” he said.
Pink pixie cut raised her hand. “Where is she?”
“She’s sick.”
I looked at Nia, but Nia looked surprised.
Not to be ageist, but when you said someone in their seventies was sick, it made people worry.
I was afraid her absence had something to do with what she’d said last class, but wouldn’t she have sent us an email if something had happened? Maybe she was sick.
“When’s she gonna be back?” Alex asked. “We only have one class left.”
The man whose name we still didn’t know said, “I’m not sure. I’m sorry. I’m just an adjunct stepping in for today. I’m Matthew, by the way.” He nodded at the board before exhaling, stressed. “What do you guys think these statements mean?”
Alex looked at his phone. “Oh shit.”
“What?” Nia said.
“They just canceled the commencement speaker.”
“Who was speaking at commencement?” Pink pixie cut asked.
“I don’t know. I know it was a woman, but now it’s some corporate spokesperson.”
I googled the spokesperson’s name. “Oh great, an accused rapist.”
“Hey, guys, let’s get back on track.” Matthew bent over to look at the paper on his desk. “What about”—he paused, seeming confused—“A genre. holiday. romance? Oh”—he tapped the paper—“a genre holiday romance meant to entertain. Is that political?” He added, “I’m guessing no, right?”
“But why can’t a book just be fun?” Nia said.
Alex nodded gravely. “Joy is a radical act.”
I joked, even though I agreed fun could be an end in and of itself, “Yes, let’s all go jump in a bouncy house.”
“What?” he said.
I hadn’t meant to say that aloud.
Matthew turned to me. “Did you want to add something?”
Despair cast its long shadow over me. I hated talking about art as a political force.
People always reached for the empathy argument when defending literature’s political merit.
But why should I have to make up fake people for someone to care about real ones?
There were real people dying, losing their homes, being detained, being bombed.
Most of our stories wouldn’t even make it into the world, let alone change it.
Words could mean everything or nothing. Weren’t we not calling what was being done to Gazans genocide because those with the power to name things refused?
Weren’t they calling everything DEI? What the fuck even was DEI?
No one knew: It was just a term they decided would mean something.
“Culture War” was a misnomer. It was a war of stories, a tale of two Americas.
A story didn’t have to be true, it just had to be good.
Just ask the tens of millions of people who’d chosen the story in which I’m a character without a speaking role, a character who gets killed off before the third act.
Matthew was still watching me. “I have nothing to add,” I said.
As we were leaving class, Nia looped her arm through mine. How easily I softened when she was near. It was hard for me to harbor bitter feelings toward her.
“Do you think Janine’s really sick?” I asked.
Nia kissed her teeth. “Of course not. It’s bullshit. I read what you sent by the way.”
I’d forgotten I’d sent her my writing. It was before the threesome, before I got fired. I was staring down the barrel of a different life, far away, it felt, from the one recorded in my novels. “All of it?”
“Duh. Why wouldn’t I?”
I made a face.
“Don’t make that face. I have something positive to say!”
“Okay.”
She turned her palm upward the way Janine did when she was about to ruin your life. “It’s interesting.”
I paused. “That’s the positive thing?”
We walked upstairs to the main floor. Students lounged on the sofas, AirPods in, typing on their laptops.
“Yes, but I was wondering, why are they separate projects?”
“What do you mean?”
“It feels obvious that the story about the parents is connected to the love story about the young woman. Why are you forcing them apart?”
The weather was too warm when we stepped outside.
Students were sprawled on the lawn, studying for their last final.
I stared at my beat-up Converses. Nia’s feedback moved through me like a running river.
I was so fervent about separating Amira from her past, her parents, for fear they’d be spun in service of an explanation.
But what I’d done was strip her of history.
I hugged Nia, crushing myself to her with relief. She laughed a breathless, surprised laugh, like the wind had been knocked out of her. Forgetting where we were, forgetting the new context of my romantic life, I let my thumb slide over the curved muscle of her neck, and I kissed her on the mouth.
She pulled away, smiling uncomfortably. Watching her wipe her lips with the back of her hand filled me with dread, though it was a dread over what had already happened.
“We actually only do threesomes,” she said gently.
I wanted to laugh. Or cry. I wasn’t even supposed to be kissing anyone but Jay. Already I’d forgotten the rules. “Sorry.”
“It’s cool.”
I took my phone out to text Tristan that things had to be over when a girl in black cargo pants charged toward us across the lawn. “What the fuck, I’ve been calling you,” she shouted. I had no idea who this person was.
“I was in class,” Nia said. “What’s wrong?”
“You didn’t hear what happened?”
“Yeah, they canceled the commencement—
“No.” The girl’s voice cracked. “ICE was here—they took Aisha. They were in the dorms.”
“Fuck, okay, g-get that immigration lawyer on the phone. Here, let me find her…” Nia’s hands trembled, thumbing through her contact list. She seemed totally different to me then, someone capable of the same kind of fear as the rest of us.
“Wait.” Nia’s eyes darted across the screen. “Wait, they fired Janine?”
My heart was a fist clenched so tight it was painful to stand.
The lawn overflowed with students in shorts, laughing, unchanged by the events.
I wanted to shout at them, Don’t you get it!
Don’t you get what’s going on here?! But I’d had my laughs too.
Not laughing wouldn’t change anything. The problem was I had no clue what would.
The girl in cargo pants said, “They fired sixteen professors, mostly from the Middle Eastern, Asian, and African Studies programs. What I was trying to say is the university has agreed to all the administration’s demands. We are under federal oversight.”
The fear that’d been building and building was a tower toppling on me.
Janine told us this would happen, yet part of me didn’t believe it.
Janine: with her kitten pumps, her weird cat, her lofty lectures.
Janine: who thought I had something to say even though I kept squandering the chance to say it, searching for the right words.
We walked fast. I tripped over the cracks on the pathway.
Nia was on the phone with the lawyer. I thought about Aisha, who I didn’t know, being yanked from her dorm, handcuffed, like the girl at Tufts who screamed on the street as people in baseball caps crowded her.
The campus blurred past as we walked. I didn’t know where we were going or whether I was supposed to be coming, but neither Nia nor the girl said anything.
They were both on their phones. Then Nia paused on the walkway.
She slipped a hand into her hair, staring at the sky, bewildered.
My hand found her shoulder. I’d never thought much about her size, but I felt how small she was then, how easily she could be abducted, crushed. “It won’t end like this,” I said. She seemed to believe me, which made me believe me, even though I had no idea where that came from.
We turned into the library, hurrying down a series of steps, speeding down a carpeted hallway. My heartbeat had slowed, but now I was sweating, aware of a needling urge to bite my nails. I did what Milan said and thought of all the bacteria on them, my hands in a ball.
Black cargo pants said, “BSU wants to do something and the pro-democracy group on campus. Can we pull together an encampment by tonight? I still have tents from last year.”
“It’s too fast,” Nia said. “There’s supposed to be a heat wave this week. We can’t have people passing out because we didn’t plan.”
Even I understood that wasn’t happening tonight—it was already late afternoon—but the girl kept pushing it.
Nia paused in the hallway to rub her cheek.
“I just… I don’t know if an encampment is the most effective approach.
Everyone’s going to be gone for the summer in a few days so who’s the audience?
One school erecting an encampment won’t get any attention after last spring.
It feels like we need to do something else.
We need to make a point. We need to make news. ”
Commencement weekend began that Friday. The ceremony was moved indoors to Heathrow Hall because of the heat wave. It’s where the university president’s office was.
“I don’t know how this would work,” I said, buzzing with anticipation, “but what if we took over Heathrow ahead of the ceremony?”