Right and I’d like to invite corle Miller who will introduce our [Applause] speaker thank you so much sting uh I hope this is well positioned I’m sure you’ll tell me if not um in j John coach eyes story playing Metal Gear Solid 5 the phantom pain a young boy in modern Sacramento his
Bedroom door to play a video game set in 1984 Afghanistan inside the game he discovers the likenesses of his own father and uncle and knowing that his uncle was killed just days after the game setting the boy mounts a virtual Rescue Mission using the in-game tranquilizer gun he knocks out both
Brothers and begins fing them away from the specific site where he knows his uncle will die after intense combat fleeing Soviet forces he carries them into a Cave System where as Kai writes though you cannot be sure whether your father and his brother are still alive you keep moving into a Darkness so
Complete that your reflection becomes visible on the screen of the television in front of you and it is as if the figures in the image were journeying inside you delving into your flesh to be saved this moment is all the more arresting because throughout basically the entire story The protagonist’s own
Living family including the father have been knocking on the door begging to be let in I assigned the story to my undergraduate students last weekend and in class someone proposed that we offer the plot to chat GPT it delivered a story resplendent with Triumph the protagonist of Chachi PT’s version
Successfully recues the video game uncle and this leads to a series of tearful and joyous reconciliations between boy and father boy and World family and history there is hope and Redemption even in the darkest of times chat GPT helpfully informed us my students spoke though about how
Much more meaning we found in coach eyes version how it held and invited us into its own tensions its own antinomies this refusal to resol olve the boy locking his real father out in order to save the digital double family both the sight of History’s wounds and their soul balming
The inescapable always appearing within our venues of Escape animates Kai’s collection The Haunting of hotak and Other Stories a book in which parents sew together the body of their son as delivered in little shipping packages a junior academic turns into a small monkey and then a warlord in different Hemisphere and a college
Student starts a hunger strike to impress an activist Crush in the collection’s last story The Haunting of kotak kochai addresses a surveilling Spirit assigned to a family in West Sacramento perhaps the same one this Spirit seems to know everything about the family A Sister’s Espionage a Brother’s morbid YouTube habit the
Father’s infirmity there a whole lot and the spirit waivers in this same mission of salvation but in the end when the old father falls from a ladder the spirit saves his life and after this the father annoys his family with his search for the Divine even as the family protests
Kochai writes searches for you in shattered glass in broken bro en tile in the strips of his wallpaper the splinters of his doors his tattered flesh his warped nerves and in his own Beating Heart where through it all the voice Whispering that he is loved is yours this simultaneous grasp on the one
Hand of the Towering injuries of history and Colonial violence as it stretches across continents in decades and on the other of the absolute imperative to love one another Even in our fears and frailties and to search the world for its Light May strike some here or elsewhere as contradictory but for me it
Is one of the mirac of Kai’s work that there these oppositions seem to make love and care and presence and humor and the plain Joy of his words on the page neither hopeless nor triumphant but all the more urgent even in its confusion and difficulty nor do these virtues only
Appear in his work Jam has been here for only a couple of days and more than one of us myself included has reflected on the extraordinary attention generosity and care he has shown to us and to our projects to read his work has been to refresh our belief in the possibilities
Of Art and to know him has been to refresh our belief in the possib ities of our own making J John coi’s work has appeared in the New Yorker zo Trope and the best American short stories among many others he’s the author of The Haunting of hotak and Other Stories
And 99 nights in Lugar he has been a finalist for the national book award and the pen Hemingway award for debut novel and is the winner of the 2023 Aspen wordss literary prize and at various times has been a Truman capot hotter and stegner fellow I’m humbled and Overjoyed
To introduce to you now a writer from whom I believe we all have much to learn Jam John kochai [Applause] um sorry about that uh first of all thank you Corley for that beautiful beautiful um introduction uh it’s really very touching um I want to thank the um
University of Utah I want to thank the English Department and um and and the galley itself for uh for hosting me here today I want to thank uh um all of you for U blessing me with your presence um it continues to be uh a profound honor
And a shock that uh that anyone would show up to hear any of my work and so um in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza where there has been entrapped a population of 2 million Palestinians half of whom are children condemned from birth to live and then die inside of an
Open air prison I would like to read the following poem by the Palestinian American poet Naomi shahab the small vases from hion and what do the headlines say nothing of the smaller petal perfectly arranged inside of the larger petal or the way tinted glass filters light men
And boys praying when they died fall out of their skins the whole alphabet of the living heads and tails of words sentences the way they said Ya Allah when astonished or Y an for I mean a crushed glass under the feet still shines but the child of hibron sleeps
With the thud of her brother’s falling and the long sorrow of the color rad I’m going to start today by um reading from a story called hungry Ricky daddy while our apartment hovered on the brink of a four-sided Civil War over a miraculous microwave i’ bought at a flea
Market in Fremont my little brother’s best friend Ricky Daddy tried to live off of the food given out at student body meetings on campus Mondays it was the P PSA Tuesday the ASA Wednesday the PSU and Thursday the ASU every Friday the brothers from Davis got together
After Juma for free pizza in the quad see Ricky daddy whose real name was Abu Bakr saleim was saving up to buy an engagement ring for a Palestinian hijabi who’ barely spoken a sentence to him not for his lack of trying because the second or third in t had left her heart
Immune to The Temptations of his chiseled upper body not that there was anything wrong with our Ricky he seemed to us quite lovable with all the looks and charm of your average pushon boy and the pure-hearted grace of an orphan virgin and and even though at
First we didn’t believe the fact of his virginity what with those curls muscles dimples he swore to his celibacy often and without shame it was more than his looks though that made us doubt him we used to memorize his Instagram DMS as if there were verses from the Quran on
Liners witty comebacks Emoji game like Jordan all of that and we were supposed to believe the kid still had his vCard at 21 but my little brother Mahmud swore that if Ricky’s dick ever got wet he’d know about it we’d all know about it because Ricky couldn’t lie if you made
Him say wah first we demanded a demonstration the 10 of us gathered in the kitchen and asked Ricky when was the last time he jerked off I don’t jerk off he blushed say w we said he couldn’t say wah you haven’t jerked off in the past week he couldn’t
Say wah you haven’t jerked off today please stop he said so he did but only because we loved him even convinced of his virginity we still couldn’t figure out why exactly he wouldn’t give up that dig my brother who’ switched to psychology to up his GPA for med school
Explained that before Ricky’s grandma died she used to harp on Ricky Non-Stop about his dick and balls rotting away in the seventh level of jahanam Saved exclusively for zena we felt content with that expl with that explanation and accepted him as he came our Ricky daddy virgin boy despite despite his Purity Ricky’s
Looks and his Instagram fame gave him a bad rep amongst the good girls on campus that was why we thought Ricky had no chance with nabila though to be honest we didn’t know if you could call nabila a good girl per se I mean she was on her
Dean and everything roamed about campus first year of her PhD in Islamic jurist Prudence head to toe in these dark outfits that revealed only her face handsome but pale and sort of bare and her hands in her ballerina slippers she prayed father sunah na everything but we
Were pretty sure the girl was on like six different watch lists she had an in with the Marxist the anarchist the islamist and might have been connected to Hamas back in Palestine because the FBI almost certainly had a tale on her she kept a low profile online no Facebook Twitter Instagram where Ricky
Thrived or even a tumbler besides her revolutionary habits there was also rumor spreading among the Arab sisters that she already had a man waiting for her in Gaza a cousin of hers a Rebel we explained this all to Ricky but he laughed it off Rebels Die Young he
Choked once he’s gone I’ll swoop but why swoop we asked why her she’s four years older 3 in taller and about 100 IQ points smarter Ricky didn’t say anything he just smiled the way he did his lips sort of parted almost pouting but his teeth still hidden our apartment had its
Own problems see there were three rooms in our place me and my brother and Ricky stayed in one one room room because we were all from load none of us snored at night and neither of them bothered me when I made or read Quran usually Ricky would be quietly coding or texting while
Mahmud over studied for exams he would almost certainly pass our three Arab buddies Abed the Egyptian ikam the Syrian and Yasin the Palestinian stayed in their own room as kids they’d all gone to Maj together Yasin was a bodybuilder who tried to make up for his fluffy eyebrows with stacks of muscles
He wanted to crush Israel between his bicep and his forearm itam was an imam’s kid a former Ki addicted to Kush each puff was another verse forgotten Abid was like eight different people he wanted everyone on campus to love him hippies Nazis sufis sopis Zionist soldiers Frat Boys he did back flips at
Parties for no reason three ptun stayed in the third room two of them were twins on wrestling scholarships they wore matching muscle shirts and skinny jeans and whenever they went out for beers they would come back in the night and get into fist fights over girls they
Claimed at bars zalai was the third pashun a kadi from Stockton he kept a shotgun in his closet filmed the twins fight every night and uploaded these videos on YouTube for the ad money twins didn’t even know Fahim an Indian kid from elgrove shared the living room with
Haad the Kashmir their rooms were sectioned off with curtains and they paid less rent than everyone else while fim stayed up all night listening to Ahmed and watching Gilmore Girls ha worked on his rap album they usually slept in the morning and got along pretty well because hyad had developed
The talent for ignoring fim’s Islamic lectures and the whispering that emitted from his curtains whenever he phoned the white girl who was not his girlfriend that was until the day fim brought the rabbit he tried to sneak it in at night without telling anyone but because the
Rabbit stayed in his room or so we thought no one bothered him about it we all acted like the rabbit didn’t exist ignoring the shadow of its cage the carrots and the fr the munching and squeaking and pooping but then one morning hayad woke up with flea bites
Running up and down his legs when he asked fim if his rabbit had fleas fim responded with a 30 minute story about how the prophet loved animals haar like always let it go but when the rest of us heard what had happened we demanded an apartment meeting which fahem avoided
For two weeks straight by hiding out at his cousin’s place until we ambushed him at 2 in the morning as he was coming back to microwave some Frozen doll the twins put him in a headlock for 5 minutes before he admitted that the rabbit was in his car zai broke in stole
The cage and hauled it away to Stockton no one ever saw it again after that fim began to treat hyad like wouldn’t say Salam to him wouldn’t lecture him threw out his food on purpose complained about his wraps woke up early in the morning to watch reruns of Ninja Warrior
On full blast then inch by inch fim began to move his curtains into Hadad side of the living room within a month his room was about a foot wider than it had been haar called an apartment meeting and showed us photos documenting the gradual extension of fim’s curtains
He showed us the indentations in the carpet from where his dresser was moved 10 Ines to the right he showed us the bookshelf at the end of fim’s bed that would never have fit in the beginning of the semester he showed us the little holes in the wall where his rod used to
Hang hyad wanted his foot of space back fim denied its existence they both demanded a vote haar had me my brother and two of the Arabs on his side but the twins voted for fim because he was a TA in one of their intro to ethics courses
Zai by default also went with the twins and so did who never liked haar because he was a Shia it was 5 versus 5 we needed Ricky to break the tie but Ricky was busy having switched up his strategy with nabila Ricky had started attending any event he thought she might show up
At Marxist book clubs SJP meetings anti- police rallies postcolonial Theory courses the plan was to prove himself during meetings and classes so that nabila would see he wasn’t a spy problem was he didn’t know about anything hadn’t read through a whole books in Charlotte’s Web and yet to our surprise
Ricky daddy began frequenting the library at first he was mostly there on his laptop reading Wikipedia articles and watching 10-minute YouTube documentaries about Palestine he examined Illustrated diagrams and sketch animations of Israeli land grabs and settlement extensions he watched Street executions and cell phone clips from the
Bombings in Baza he consumed as much of the internet info as he could until eventually he had to move on to real books about a month into our apartment war with fim still gradually eating into hayad space my little brother decided to punish the opposition by confiscating our shared microwave that’s when
Really escalated I bought the microwave for 15 bucks at a flea market in Fremont just hoping to Nuke leftover cabal but the radiation didn’t just heat the food it somehow made it tastier wah all you had to do was hit popcorn for any item and wait 7 minutes for your faith in
Allah’s Providence to be restored I could nuke a weak old slice of pizza and the thing would taste better than it had fresh everyone in the apartment knew the microwave was a godsend something like a miracle so when Mahmud up and stole it away our opposition sort of lost it the
Night the twins returned to the to find the microwave missing they almost wept thought we’d been robbed when they figured out my brother had stolen the microwave they treat they tried to break into our room we had to use a dresser as a blockade then zalai hearing the
Commotion and the horrific news brought out his shotgun and aimed at our door not wanting to harm the microwave the twins leapt at zalai just as he fired pushing his shotgun toward the Arabs who were all passed out inside the shotgun pilot shattered their door zalai fled
The Arabs attacked the twins there was a tussle in the living room and haar’s curtains were torn his laptop smashed and his pleading ignored eventually the twins got ikam and Abid into arm barss and tied them up with Hay’s curtains and dragged them to the student clining just
Before the cops arrived and beat the out of the Somalian brothers who lived next door poor guys got arrested me and Mahmud stayed hidden all night in the next day until we managed to sneak out toward dark and took refuge in Ricky’s sport of books on the sixth
Floor of the library Mahmud brought the microwave along Ricky looked like his curls were a mess he had eye bags and yellow teeth he was failing three of his CS classes and he wouldn’t shut the hell up about Palestine he told us about the Ottomans and the nakba and the DAR aen
Massacre he told us about the PLO and The Six Day War he showed us on a map the borders of theide wall the locations of military checkpoints and how the Israelis had separated Gaza and the West Bank like orphan siblings he told us about the Brotherhood the in Father the
Birth of Hamas and the Oslo Accords he read us recipes for Mansa makba and M he told us about the capture of Lea khid the assassination of Yasin and rantis and the odd journey of she Adam he went on and on well into the night drawing from this book and that reading us
Quotes showing us pictures bodies massacres walls olive trees we fell asleep to his reading poem in Arabic by next morning I forgotten everything he tried to teach me and went off to class later that night my brother and I returned turned to Ricky’s Den for shelter only to find himself researching
University appeals cases on his laptop apparently nabila was getting expelled an article in the Vanguard reported that she was filmed making anti-semitic remarks when IDF veterans tried to disrupt a speech the the SJP had organized in the quad after an 8-year-old girl was run over by settlers
In nablo a shouting match turned into a fist fight turned into a brawl the video was all over the Internet toward the end of the Blurred clip someone who might have been nabila shouted in Arabic may Allah destroy the Israelis her hearing was set for next month but just a few
Days after the brawl nabila disappeared back in Palestine we heard to marry that cousin of hers when we told Ricky instead of sobbing as we thought he would he was all questions who was the who was the cousin when was the ncah where would they stay what would happen
To the revolution we didn’t have those answers but yasim probably would We messaged him on Facebook and he left us on scene until we offered the microwave in exchange for his entel our phones dinged like Windchimes Yasin had spoken to his sister who had spoken to her aunt
In Jerusalem who had found out that nabila’s cousin’s name was Yousef that he was with the Islamic Revival that he was locked up without charge in Israeli prison and that in fact he just started a hunger strike about 6 days earlier to be officially charged with a crime
Nabila and Yousef were set to be wed after his release but until then she would wait for f for her Beyonce in the West Bank the West Bank Ricky asked we showed him the messages again expecting him to wallow to bleed instead the very next day Ricky left the library ordered
Three schwarma Platters at Sam’s restaurant and announced his and announced his very own hunger strike during lunch the strike began in our apartment at the start of the winter break when all our roommates except V had gone home we made a YouTube video announcing Ricky’s intention to starve his body
Until until Yousef Muhammad was charged with the crime he read a verse from the Quran condemned the crimes of Israel in the US lay down on an old to Shak and began to starve we posted about the strike all over Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and waited at first nothing
Much happened I suppose people thought Ricky might have been bluffing but around the third day of his strike when the hunger pangs and stomach cramps got so bad for Ricky we thought he might give up the Palestinian sisters started coming by thanking Ricky for his bravery and snapping photo snapping photos of
His hunger the pain in his face seemed to disappear into his dimples about 6 days in words started really spreading and students from the MSA and ASA came to try to convince Ricky to stop while students from the SJP and the ASU came to argue with those who came to convince
Him to stop from time to time distant relatives we guessed from the East Coast came to visit too they entered his room muttered for a while and left dejected though none of them could have have known about nabila ich amama or kala or cousin made a passing remark about the
Folly of love we didn’t see them again then a reporter from the Vanguard came to do a story Afghan students starves to free Palestinian terrorists 3 days after that someone left a pig carcass in our parking lot Ricky’s muscles started melting two weeks into the strike the
Pangs in his belly had stopped all together and he felt nauseated and numb all the time a few days later a local channel gave Ricky an interview our original YouTube video was buzzing and the article from the Vanguard spread from blog to blog supporters and haters gathered in a parking lot they had
Protests and demonstrations and fist fights eventually there are maybe 20 students staying in our apartment at all times looking after Ricky even our roommates came home early Yasin Premed checked Ricky’s poll ikam read him Kuran the twins carried him from bed to bathroom zelai called up some of his
Buddies from stock in for security hayar bought him a $200 pillow Abid did back flips and me and Mahmud were the only ones he’d let wash him he was getting weaker by the day lightheaded and slow he couldn’t stand up so easily anymore when I rubbed his arms or his chest with
A washcloth I thought his skin would tear free around the end of the third week cops and doctors from the University Hospital arrived at our place demanding that Ricky eat ready to force feed him with medical equipment the CIA used on prisoners and guano but Ricky’s followers all locked arms in front of
Our parking lot and then our apartment and then the door of our room shoulder toosh shoulder leaving no inch of space for the cops to pass through they may and be beat a few of us but we held strong for our Ricky then on the 26th day of Ricky’s hunger strike Mahmud
Secretly checked up on Ricky’s resurrected Facebook page 10,000 plus followers since the strike when he saw a message request from an account without a picture that was just called sister fell he would have immediately ignored the message had it not started out by calling Ricky Abu Bakr Sim at first
Ricky was upset about the secret Facebook account but his temper quickly faded when he realized who had messaged him he smiled first time in a week and started doing what he did best for 5 hours straight when he should have been reciting Quran or making or contemplating the transient nature of
The Mortal body Ricky texted nabila at the end of the day Ricky asked Mahmud to delete all his old photos and posts on Instagram Facebook Twitter and even Myspace after that he went on bring me a camera and Link me up to a live feed all right Ricky we said without question and
Don’t call me Ricky anymore he said my name is Abu Bakr Saleem before we set up the live feed we combed his hair and his beard which now reached past his Adam’s apple and we washed his face and moisturized his lips his vanity still breathing and we got
Him ready to face the whole world just beneath the open window of our dingy little apartment the speech he read was not his own nabila had sent it to him bit by bit on messenger just hours before Americans it began my name is nabila Muhammad wife of YF Muhammad who
Has been on hunger strike for five consecutive weeks on his body is a medical device connected to surveillance room operating 24 hours a day his heartbeats are slow and May stop at any moment and doctors officials and Intelligence Officers sit on every side of him waiting for his end I chose to
Speak to you intellectuals writers lawyers journalists poets and Civil Society activists I invite you to visit my husband and see how he hungers Americans it went on you may feel the impulse to write a story about my husband you could write for example of his melting flesh of his bared rib C age
And of his stuttering breath you could write of his eyes that no longer belong to him and after you write the story you may publish it and add it to your curricula and when hundreds of your students read it they will believe that the Palestinian dies of hunger romantically fanatically and without
Sense and you would then rejoice in this ferary ritual and in your cultural and moral superiority but my husband was arrested and imprisoned without charge because it is the military that rules our lands and yours and the intelligence apparatus that decides and all the other components of society merely sit from a
Distance and watch so as to avoid the explosion of our criminal bones for I have not heard one of you interfere to stop the loud whale of death and the quiet torture of our dark bodies it is as if every one of you has turned into grav diggers and everyone wears his
Military suit the judge the writer the journalist the merchant the academic and the poet and I cannot believe that a whole society was turned into guards over our debts and our lives nonetheless you may be sure all of you hearing this that we will die satisfied and having
Satisfied we do not accept being deported from our lands we do not accept your courts and your laws if you have passed over our country and destroyed it in the name of a God or a principle you will not pass over our elegant Souls which have declared Disobedience for the
Defeated will not remain defeated and the Victor will not remain a Victor history isn’t only ever measured by battles and massacres and prisons but also by the incremental blood drip of the thinnest veins then we cut the feed and posted everywhere and waited the video barely made a blip the
Outrage over last month’s police harassment had subsided after a boat of Frat Boys went missing somewhere along the Los Angeles Coast Abu Baker wallowed in obscurity his body had shrunk and he grew more reserved in his suffering we couldn’t seem to get through to him it
Was like we were watching him float away but inside himself our food began to taste like dirt and our lies felt unforgivably stupid in the wake of his misery we couldn’t take it anymore we joined the stripe first it was me and Mahmud then Yasin andam then Abid and the pashun then hyar
Word got around and by that by the time Abu Bakr Salim started losing his memory we had over a hundred Muslims starting starving with us across Davis in Sacramento we began buzzing online again and our movement turned Statewide we had students from all the uc’s and CSUS
Joining the strike by the 41st day when you couldn’t stop vomiting bile or soft splatters of blood our movement had become National west coast East Coast until around 6 weeks in we had organizations in the UK and France striking with us too a Syrian artist in
Belgium took a still of Abu Bakr Slim’s face from the video of nabila’s speech sepia toned it with an app and put the image on a poster the next day people were wearing T-shirts and sweaters with Abu Baker’s starving face plastered across it he still looked pretty
Then on the 52nd day of Abu Baker’s hunger strike bloody sores grew out of his back and swelled and burst open like hungry mouths his beard and his curls had grown long and wild and he seemed to go blind from time to time even though our apartment had been turned into a
Makeshift Clinic with two or three doctors visiting us each day we got so desperate to keep Abu Bakr alive we began to microwave the five cups of TR he drank after each of the daily prayers hoping its magic might keep his heartbeating if he closed his eyes for
Too long and stopped chanting bismah we would rush to his side and hold a mirror to his lips and wait for him to open one eye and joke is that me in there the it all the vomiting and and lapses in Consciousness Abu Bakr kept on texting nabila about God knows what
Because he could not let us see and would not let us type though his fingers seemed to be on the brink of breaking two months into our ordeal fem finally joined the strike about 5 minutes after that so did the white girl who was not his girlfriend a few hours
Later CNN came to interview her by that night she had become a worldwide sensation the next morning Trump flew to Tel Aviv and personally requested that Netanyahu officially charge YF Muhammad with a crime so after 68 days on strike Yousef Muhammad was for formerly charged with inciting violence because his
Protest has had caused several riots in Gaza he was moved to a different facility and with his left hand still handcuffed to a hospital band yusf Muhammad spoke YF Muhammad spokesman for the Islamic Revival graduate student poet orphan and husband ended his fast with a date and a glass of milk before
Promptly dying of heart failure almost exactly 10 hours later Abu Bakr saleim formerly known as Ricky daddy ate a microwave date drank a cold glass of milk typed a message to nabila and stopped starving my roommates and I were the ones who washed Ricky for the janaza he
Had no other family me and Mahmud did theja while the rest of the guys helped L only fim could not bring himself to touch Ricky’s body and so instead he kept filling our plastic water jug with hundreds of flower petals three times we washed his body with lotus water and
Camur and then we trimmed his beard and cut his hair and brushed his teeth and cleansed his sores until his stench of death was smothered by tree bark and flower petals before the strike Ricky once told us a story about Sheik Abdullah aam who was killed in a car
Bomb in Pisha but whose body it was said was left without any Mark or wound or blemish and it wasn’t that I expected Ricky sores and bruises to disappear with his dying but after he died and he wrapped his body in a cfan I wanted so
Badly for his corpse to be perfect again that I could not bring myself to say the Dua for the dead during his burial in the end he was so light I swear to Allah I could have carried him the 15 miles from the mosque to the Grave by myself I
Would have done it too had my roommates let me two days after Ricky died I messaged nabila’s secret Facebook account and for whatever reason maybe she thought Ricky’s account had been hacked maybe she just didn’t want to hear from me she never replied 7 months later nabila gave
Birth to a daughter in Bethlehem story went that just before the hunger strike started she was about she was able to smuggle Yousef sperm out of the prison in a disinfected candy wrapper she never went on to marry she took up her husband’s former position as spokesman
For the Islamic Revival and due to the public nature of his death and her daughter’s birth and her speeches which became more striking with her accumulated years of suffering and and her habit of always wearing the full nikab so that almost no one on earth knew what she looked like nabila became
A sort of Icon her speeches and writings were collected into an award-winning book of essays and after assisting in the Islamic revivals takeover of the West Bank which some say was orchestrated through the compliance of the idea she began her own Splinter organization her followers worshiped her and swore by
Her immortality though there were reports she had been assassinated by mad and that it was actually her daughter who had taken up her nikab and her position as the secret face of the Palestinian islamist resistance we never believed the rumors of a dying in fact over the years of her
Increasing Fame at one point or another each of us from Ricky’s apartment tried to contact nabila in order to declare our love and and offer our lives we swore to be gentle husbands or loyal soldiers and none of us ever married anyone else except for fim instead I
Graduated from Davis sought Solitude at Zuna lost faith in the white sufis went to Turkey got caught up in the civil war came back to the States was arrested for funding terrorism tried to travel to Palestine was denied entry and eventually ended up in Afghanistan in that time I sent nabilah so many
Messages and letters and asked her so many stupid questions I never thought she would read them I asked for example if she loved Yousef and if Yousef loved her and if she loved him what was it she loved I asked her who he was and what he
Read I asked her if her daughter was the second coming of Christ I asked her if she ever watched the video of Ricky giving her speech I asked her if she noticed how he’ combed his hair and brushed his beard I asked her what she
Thought of the way he spoke her words I asked her if she might let Ricky take her out on a date in Jenna after we all died I asked her what Palestine looked like I told her I imagined many Rolling Hills and olive trees and roads built of white
Stone I thought he looked very beautiful nabila replied one morning some years after Ricky died and then asked me who had moistened his lips just going to read um One More Story apologies I’ve lost this enough rangina does not know what to say to her brute of a son who will not stop
Shouting about pills or an or a stolen envelope of Cash He meant to donate to the Orphans of lar because he’s rambling now absolutely rambling in front of her beloved daughters come all the way from Fremont to visit rangina in this Lonesome living room her son has decided
To paint the most despicable shade of blue just sitting there the poor girls watching their old mother get hered by her only living son on the earth who is shouting I found the torn envelope in your drawer of photos and of course there’s no way for her to respond to all
Of his accusations when without weeping like the child she had been once married off to 60-year-old Nomad at the precious age of 15 or 14 or who knows how old exactly though rangina did recall she was not too old to be playing with the dolls she fashioned out of clay from the
Edges of the rivers near where her youngest son would one day be murdered when her mother approached her in a coat of Ash or dust or snowflakes and informed her that within the year she would be married and moved and pregnant again and again pregnant leading to so
Many little unmarked graves in the apple orchard beneath the falling blossoms as if Allah all praise be to him we’re saying look I know I know but then there’s this until the baby stopped dying with the birth of her eldest son the Survivor the Rambler still somehow rambling beneath the half-lit ceiling
Light he has failed to fix for the past 3 months no matter how many times rang moans this Darkness will swallow me his massive frame blocking the television and the fake fireplace and the cabinet containing R’s favorite photograph of wuk his head shaved his mustache barely sprouted his soft lashes sparkling with
Frost his lips slightly parted as if he is about to speak but then his older brother the Survivor speaks in his place rambling about the pink pills from the target CVS instead of the pharmacy at Ry which was where Dr Ahmad had sent all her medications before he died before
Her eldest son moved the family out of out of their three bedroom house in broadrick to their five bedroom house in Bridgeway despite the fact that she secretly preferred the smaller house and the bigger bedroom she shared with her eldest grandson just six at the time and
So Meek and so gentle he would hold her hand every night to fall asleep and then there were the ancient oak trees in the backyard and Fel Market down the road only a mile or so a 15-minute walk for some dried mulberries or kishmish or fresh bread or a conversation with
Another Afghan while in Bridgeway she was surrounded for Miles by nothing but her houses her white neighbors and their houses her white neighbors and their dogs and their houses their vicious dogs always barking always yapping and lunging always on the brink of tearing away from their owners to rip open her
Insides like she had seen the Communist dogs do in the pits of the Orchards where her children had picked apples while searching for her eldest son who thank Allah all praise be to him was not eaten by those dogs or blown to Pieces by the bombs or shot near the bank of a
Stream her white neighbors dogs preventing her from going outside and taking a walk and shedding the pounds piled up on her belly and back and thighs and she supposes the valves of her heart otherwise why wouldn’t her son stop rambling that she had forgotten to take her blood pressure meds or had
Accidentally hidden them in the sheets of her bed only for her son’s Snoop of a wife to find them one day and claimed that rangina was hoarding them to gift to her only living sibling on the earth who yes perhaps is an addict and a swindler and a wife beater but who also
Has very severe heart problems and when you consider the state of lar that is the ongoing years of bombings and shootings and random roadside executions thean the Soviets the muin the Taliban and the Americans well how could you blame her poor brother for deciding to steal is it even stealing a small slice
Of the land that should rightfully belong as much to her as it does to her son the Rambler and his Viper of a wife always watching always listening Whispering informing gr’s brute of a son whether or not rang is taking her pills or stockpiling her napkins or shutting
Off her oxygen tank to keep from overheating or waking up in the night unable to breathe or telling the truth on the phone to her daughters or spitting lugies directly beneath the corners of the carpets where no one looks except apparently for her son’s
Snoop of a wife a farsy w you know like G’s mother a weak willed woman her son’s wife laughs at everything eats your insults doesn’t say to your face but then reports every word back to her husband who rushes rang a big man rambling about respect and kindness
Though he certainly doesn’t ramble very respectfully even now even in this Lonesome living room finally filled up with all her children rambling in front of her beloved daughters come all the way from Fremont with their little babies just to see her rambling so loud she can barely hear Alex Beck Say on
October 7th 2001 operation enduring Freedom began in this country by December the US had dropped 12,000 bombs and missiles with the weary resignation of a dying man the same resignation she had seen in the long-haired boys she hid in her home in the soft grass of the cows pen between ambushes and firefights
Boys so young they could have been her sons boys so beautiful they could have been dreams all of them armed and dying and pretending to be prepared to die and her son among them her eldest son just as beautiful just as young just as resigned to die in the wake of his
Younger brother’s death but now Alive Now old now ugly now Angry now pacing up and down the living room now yanking at his beard now rambling along with their daughters the traitors about the pink pills rang has inadvertently lost the pills he says are for her heart but
Picking up on the words anxiety and Mania and panic words she remembered and repeated to her daughters her trusting daughters from whom she learned that the words referred to ailments of the mind not the body as if rang had become a mad woman as if she couldn’t beat her entire
Family at Checkers as if she weren as if she weren’t still memorizing sudas every night and day as if she weren’t at the very peak of her mental faculties no matter what her son’s wife had to say behind her back when she was talking on the phone in the yard beneath the cherry
Tree all day in the yard or in her bedroom or at her brother’s house leaving rang most days all on her own in this house so empty so dark so quiet her grandchildren in their bedrooms playing games watching Tick Tock leaving her alone with her couch and her breathing
Tubes and her television and her favorite photograph of watak and her oxygen tank which she had heard can sometimes randomly explode in this house made of sticks with its fences barely 6 ft High barely an inch thick completely incapable of protecting her from the neighbor’s dog or the registered sex
Offenders that live two blocks away let alone burglars and rapists and Richard Ramirez and Eddie Gallagher and Robert Bales nothing like the walls of her home in lad 20 ft High 4 feet thick and strong enough to withstand rockets and missiles and bullets from the Communist coming for her second eldest son watak
Whom nonetheless whom they killed by the bank of a stream near the water Rushing Water so heavy so light so early in the morning that Frost still nipped the leaves and snowflakes fell mysteriously from the heavens as Allah all praise be to him had intended had always intended
But then there she is her son’s wife complaining in Whispers to her traitor daughters about having to constantly lift ranga’s oxygen tank onto her dresser then back onto the floor then back onto her dresser then back onto the floor about the aching in her wrists as if rang’s withered lung lungs hadn’t
Been ceaselessly aching since the night her body absorbed so much smoke and debris from Soviet cluster bombs she had Ash leaking out of her nose and ears and lips a trail of Ash following her from one end of the world to the other from loar to Pisha to Birmingham to Hayward
To broadrick to Bridgeway to her favorite seat just in front of the television blocked by her rambling daughters and her rambling son and now his rambling son that is the very same grandson she had sung to sleep for 5 years the same grandson whose ass she
Had wiped until he was in first grade until they moved him into a room with his brothers in this too big house with its too many doors too many windows Too Many Lights too many televisions Too Many Memories as in for example the night her son’s wife discovered that her brothers had been
Murdered in lar for nothing for no one in snowfall just a mile or so away from the spot where watak had been murdered for nothing for no one and snowfall 40 years earlier and rang held her son’s wife in her lap and wanted very dearly
To tell her the story of how her own younger brother the jokester the prankster laughing at everything inventing jokes out of dust out of horror out of Sorrow had been pinned one snowy day between two trucks in cabul how his internal organs had been crushed and bled but his heart kept pumping just
Long enough for him to look about to raise his arms to gesture for help and to whisper a final message into the icy ear of a stranger who disappears forever who might be dead who might be living just waking and sleeping and praying and eating and dying with rang’s beloved
Brothers final words knocking about in his head with a summary of last week’s episode of er just another memory a story that begins but once in cabul amid snowflakes a dying boy gesture not knowing that the dying boy was rang’s dying brother that those words that
Story belonged to her but of course she didn’t remind her son’s sobbing wife of the story of the death of her brother or the death of UK because rang knew what nobody knew the weight of his body heavy with water because she had heard the gunshots from her home because she had
Known it was him before she had known it was him because she had rushed onto the wartime roads like a mad woman her hair unveiled her nostrils burning with the stink of gunpowder and blood because though wuk was twice her size she had lifted him out of the stream all Soden
And punctured as light as the day she had birthed them because Allah all praise be to him grants power to his bereaved because she was the first to find what as if he were waiting for her then now there here her boy her boys forever silent forever rambling and r
Now wonders how much longer she is supposed to just sit and suffer her entire family rising up against her because she says enough before she shouts at her rambling son and his Whispering wife and her nodding daughters and her muttering grandson enough enough rambling enough advice enough pills enough nightmares enough
Lung damage enough ghosts enough beautiful dying boys enough bomb smoke enough burning apple trees enough staring white neighbors enough heavy breathing enough W enough panic attacks enough a addict brother calling for money enough spite enough grudges enough heartaches enough dead enough sins enough Sons wife having to wash her in
The tub because she can no longer stand up under her own weight enough weight enough waffles enough W enough ongoing occupation enough Taliban enough bushes enough clintons enough muds enough puppet presidents serving white Masters enough wck enough unanswered prayers enough Brothers jokes turned into sad stories enough ACH in knees in back in
Lungs in heart enough breathing tubes enough inhalers enough pills enough beaten mothers enough gunshots and films enough wounded enough babies dying enough hateful eldest son enough rambling enough advising enough calming enough loving enough hating enough generations of grown children rambling enough rangina shouts and Rises up out
Of her seat and strips off her breathing tubes and limps outside her children at her back at her sides circling and pleading and still somehow rambling where over and over where her stupid children and her stupid grandchildren her whole stupid family too big too small too loud too quiet too fast too
Slow too lar she says without saying and climbs into one of her son’s Salvage Civic sedans and grabs the key out of the cup holder where he always keeps it and almost runs over her daughter backing out of the driveway she straightens the car car in the culdesac
And spots her son running toward her from the house Shifting the car into drive she plans to head down brother Island Road onto Golden Gate onto Jefferson onto the freeway onto I80 onto SFO into the international terminal toward the Turkish Airlines ticket counter where she’ll unstitch a seam in
Her purse and pull out a stolen bundle of cash meant for the Orphans of lad and buy a first class ticket to Afghanistan in Kabul she’ll exchange her dollars for afghanis and call for a taxi and pay extra to travel down to muhmad to her
Old village in no K to the bank of the stream where W once died and she’ll climb past the chinard trees and down into the water and stare up at the leaves and the birds and the clouds and the Jets and the ghosts and the drones
And the angels and the cosmos and Allah all praise be to him and she will float in peace and in silence except apparently for the blasting of a COR horn her eldest son had had failed to repair only days earlier the same eldest son is now slumped beside rangina in the
Salvage Civic she has just crashed into the pole of the Lamplight she watches every night from her bedroom the horn blares louder as the rest of her family surround her car and are once again but her boy her first born the one who lived through the cold through the hunger through the mountains
Through the war her Survivor her Rambler is so quiet it stirs her dying body into action shards of windshield Tumble from her arms and shoulders like the first snowflakes of a new season as she reaches out to feel for the pulse of her only living son on the earth thank you
source
