Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“Habibti Aya,” her father said, stroking her hair. “You’re a woman now.”

“Do you remember what happened before you fainted?” the doctor asked.

“I was thinking of Ziad… I was in the water, thinking of Ziad…”

“Ziad is my son,” her father explained. “Aya’s brother… He… he passed away last year.”

“There were these three boys…” Aya said, suddenly, recalling the bodies on the beach. “Little children… their bodies…”

“Habibti Aya,” her father interrupted.

The doctor looked at Aya. “Three boys?”

Aya’s head moved in a vague resemblance of a nod. “There was dirty water… rubbish everywhere and burning tyres and… and the bodies of three boys… next to a football… their arms and legs were twisted and…”

“That’s enough,” her father interrupted. He turned to the doctor. “It was a hot day yesterday… It must have been the heat…”

The doctor nodded. “Trauma can lodge itself deep in the body, emerging when we least expect it…”

“I understand,” her father said. “It’s just… first her mother, then her brother…” His voice trailed off.

The doctor prescribed some pills, which he said would help her rest. That night Aya quickly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. In the morning, she woke up with the feeling of having emerged from a dark cave of infinite blackness. The doctor was right: the bandage had disappeared overnight and the deep gash above her forehead had healed. She took a long, hot shower and tossed the remaining pills down the toilet.

She got dressed and put on the pad the doctor had given her. She recalled her father’s words: You’re a woman now . Something inside of her felt changed. It was an awakening of sorts. She felt it in her body as much as in her mind, a strange disquiet that had settled inside her, a tingling sensation.

Returning from school that afternoon, she found her father in the living room listening to the news. He seemed to be in a dreamlike state, sitting down on a chair and staring out of the window, barely listening to the newscaster, who was reporting on the spike in teen suicides across Palestine.

“Baba?”

Her father jumped in his seat, his hand pushing over the glass of tea next to his chair. The glass crashed on the floor and shattered into pieces.

“Aya, you scared me!” he said, irritated. The robo-cleaner—responding to the sound of the crash—emerged from the cupboard and began to clean up the glass on the floor.

“I’m sorry…”

He sighed and anxiously picked at the skin around his fingernails. “I should probably take a small sleep.”

Aya nodded. Her father stood up and went to his bedroom. He was always so absent-minded, as if he lived in another dimension and was just trying this world on for size. She didn’t blame him. From that moment last year, when she saw Ziad hanging there, she had felt as if a hole in her chest had opened up, leaving all her insides to tumble out like a spool of thread. Since then, some days she felt okay, and would wonder whether the worst of the pain was over. Then, when she least expected it—when she’d be sitting in class or else walking along the corniche—that image of Ziad would flash before her eyes: his limp body swaying, his head leaning lifeless to one side.

Aya shook her head to erase the image from her mind. She walked to her mother’s bedroom and opened the door. Her mother was asleep, as usual. The last time Aya had seen her awake was perhaps twelve days ago. She had emerged from the bedroom for a brief moment to grab a couple of figs. She ran into Aya in the hallway and they spoke for a few minutes. She asked Aya how school had been, and whether she was happy. Aya said she was, and her mother smiled.

“Good,” her mother said, giving Aya a kiss on the cheek. Then she returned to bed.

That night Aya dreamt she was walking through an enormous field of olive trees. The sky appeared much closer to the earth, the moon so large and bright the entire field twinkled like a sea of diamonds. Sounds had an intense clarity: she could hear the rustling of each olive branch in the wind, the crickets chirping at a deafening volume.

There was shuffling behind her. Turning around, she recognised the familiar figure—tall and lanky—and the unmistakable tangled mess of brown hair.

“Ziad?” The name caught in her throat.

“It’s me,” he said, in that voice that was so deep for an eighteen-year-old.

He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. He looked tall and strong, not like the last time she saw him. She ran up to him and threw herself against him, half-expecting his body to disappear, and for her to simply fall through him and onto the ground. Instead her body crashed into his solid frame. His arms wrapped themselves around her and she sunk into his chest.

“Ziad, it’s really you!” She looked up into his face. He smiled down at her, that familiar half-smile, the bottom two front teeth slightly crooked.

She hesitated. “But you died?”

He shrugged. “In your world, death isn’t really dying. In a way, I guess it’s more like waking up.”

“But I saw you! If you didn’t die, then where have you been?”

“I’ve…” he paused, considering his words carefully. He had always taken his time to find the most precise way to describe his thoughts and feelings. “I’ve been… outside of things. There are… responsibilities…”

A sudden fury exploded from inside of her, a rage that had been building for the last twelve months.

“Why did you do it? Didn’t you love us? Didn’t you think about Mama and Baba? Didn’t you think about me?”

Her anger amused him. He began to giggle, his eyes forming tiny slits.

“You’re laughing! You’re laughing too, you donkey!” She smashed her fists against his chest.

“Stop, stop!” he protested. He grabbed her fists and held them in front of him. “It’s okay,” he whispered in her ear as she began to cry.

They walked through the olive grove for a long time. She was happy to be near him, to feel the warmth of his body and succumb to his gentle teasing. She told him everything that had happened, things she had been doing. She updated him on the neighbours, on friends and on the other kids in school. She did her impersonations of all the people they knew. She had forgotten how much he laughed at her impersonations, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t done any since he died. After a while, when she had run out of sentences, they simply walked side by side in silence. Finally, she asked the question she had been avoiding.

“Does this mean you’re back now? Or is this just a dream?”

He was quiet for a moment. He stopped walking and turned to face her. A hardness settled in his features.

“Have you heard of the allegory of Plato’s Cave?”

She shook her head.

“Never mind.”

“Why?” she insisted.

He looked up at the sky. “Do you think a fish knows it’s swimming in water?”

She shrugged.

“We live in the world like a fish in water. Just swimming, oblivious to our surroundings.” Ziad sighed, then poked her arm. “Aya, are you not planning to ever wake up?”

She woke up. Outside her window, the birds were singing: kereet-kereet… kereet . Daylight streamed through the shutters. The olive grove returned to her. If the whole thing was just a dream, it felt more real than life.

Getting up, she snuck down the hall to Ziad’s room and opened the door. The room was as it was on the day he died. His shelves still held his basketball trophies, a few stuffed toys from his childhood. In the wardrobe, his clothes were still on hangers, bearing faint traces of his smell, which seemed to weaken with each passing day. Next to his bed was a novel by Franz Kafka, with a receipt from the arcades operating as a makeshift bookmark. On his desk there was a photograph of the family taken five years ago. All four of them were having a picnic on Mount Carmel, the port of Haifa in the distance.