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

Aya remembered that day: they had a large barbecue to celebrate the beginning of spring. That was before Mama started sleeping a lot, before the weight of things began to bear down on them.

Next to the photograph was Ziad’s journal, a simple black notebook. Ziad had liked to write by hand, even though it took so much longer than just dictating thoughts to a tablet. He had said he enjoyed the material aspect of writing, the physicality of ink and the slow movement of pen on paper. He never did like technology, was always so mistrustful of it.

Her father had insisted no one was allowed to touch any of Ziad’s things, as if Ziad had just gone to buy some vegetables and would soon be back. Against her better judgement, she picked up the diary and opened it to the final page. In his neat handwriting, she read the last entry, dated one day before he died:

There is an oral tradition of grandparents passing on their stories of Palestine, which helps keep Palestine alive. But is it not too much of a stretch for them to have figured out how to use these stories to imprison us? The truth of collective memories is that you can’t just choose to harness the good ones. Sooner or later, the ugly ones begin to seep in too…

The heaviness returned, the choking sensations. She closed the diary and stumbled out of the room.

Closing the door behind her, she made her way to the bathroom. She examined her tired face in the mirror, marvelled once again at the disappearance of the large gash on her forehead. She turned on the faucet and began to brush her teeth. It took a moment to register the gritty sensation of dirt and the taste of soil on her tongue. She spat the toothpaste out. She noticed the water coming out of the tap: sandy brown, bursting out of the faucet in exhausted sputters, leaving light brown splotches on the white porcelain sink.

“Baba!” She ran out of the bathroom and into the hallway. Her father emerged from his bedroom, half-asleep. “The water coming out of the tap is brown!”

Her father followed her into the bathroom. She had left the tap running, but now only crystal-clear water ran through.

“I swear it was brown.” She caught her father’s eye. “I swear I wasn’t imagining this.”

Her father sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Aya, what’s going on?”

She took a deep breath. “I dreamt of Ziad last night,” she confessed.

The look on her father’s face unleashed a flood of tears from somewhere deep inside her.

“I miss him,” Aya said.

Her father pulled her into him. “I know, habibti,” he whispered in her ear.

Ziad appeared in her dreams again that night. They were sitting in a clearing on top of a mountain. She recognised the view: they were in the spot where that photograph was taken, of the four of them on Mount Carmel. Ziad spoke in a slow and assured way as he picked at the blades of grass by his bare feet.

“Everything seems so still. You would never think that we are hurtling through the universe at a crazy speed.”

“What’s with all these riddles?” she asked.

“All I’m saying is that things aren’t always what they seem. You know what they taught us in history books. That stuff, about how we liberated Palestine, how the occupation is over now?” Aya nodded for him to go on. “It is so advanced, the occupation. They have all these technologies… technologies of control and subjugation. And Gaza—our home—is like a laboratory for all that experimentation.”

“But that’s all in the past…” She picked up a dark blue flower, cradling it in her palm. “We’re liberated now. Look around. We are free.”

Ziad snorted. “You know how us Arabs are. We are trapped in the rose-tinted memories of our ancestors. These cached memories wrap themselves around us like a second skin.”

Ziad uprooted a blade of grass and began to break it apart into smaller pieces until the blade was nothing but a tiny stub, which he then squashed between his fingers. Aya watched him without saying a word. He appeared furious—it was a rage that far surpassed regular teenage emotions. The anger was darker, deeper than anything she had seen before. She saw it etched into his features, felt it radiate from his body.

He tossed the squashed remnants of the blade of grass behind him. Finally, he looked up at her.

“We’re just another generation imprisoned by our parents’ nostalgia.”

She looked at the flower in her palm. She had picked this flower off the ground only moments earlier. Now, examining it more closely in her palm, something appeared strange to her. The dark blue petals reflected the sunlight in a peculiar way. She brought her palm towards her face to get a better look.

The petals were made of hard steel, the edges jagged and sharp.

“Fragmentation bullets,” Ziad said, noticing her shocked expression. “They blast from a gun and explode inside your body, blooming like flowers inside the flesh.”

The bullet rolled out of her palm and fell to the ground with a soft clink. The sound felt so far away. The world was spinning.

Ziad chuckled bitterly. “Tools for murder now masquerading as life.”

She looked at him. “What does all this mean?”

Ziad didn’t hesitate. “It means you have a decision. You can stay here, cocooned in these memories of a long-lost paradise, or you break free of this prison.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, looking her straight in the eye. “That’s what I did.”

Persistently, he came every night. She looked forward to sleep, to being with him in her dreams. Her dreams began to feel more real than waking life, and infinitely more important. Through her encounters with Ziad she felt herself awakening to something, although what this was, she could not yet put into words.

In waking life her father watched her, concerned. She brushed aside his worries. She tried to play the role of a normal teenage girl. One afternoon, she overheard her father talking to someone on the phone.

“She has withdrawn,” he whispered to the mystery person on the line. “I can hear her talking to him. I’m worried she’ll do what he did…”

One night she woke up to find the wall of her bedroom torn down. A picnic blanket hung from the ceiling to cover the gaping hole where the wall used to be. It was the picnic blanket her father often brought to the beach. Using the blanket to cover the destroyed wall was almost comical, like a man trying to protect his modesty with a leaf. A strong gust of wind blew through the room. As the blanket blew up in the air, Aya caught a glimpse of Ziad silhouetted against the starry sky.

“It’s getting harder now,” he said, stepping in from behind the blanket.

“Harder?” She sat up in bed, wrapping her duvet around her to protect herself from the wind.

“The more you know, the more the logic of the simulation breaks down.”

He motioned for her to get up. She put on her slippers and followed him through the hole in the wall.

Ziad hopped from one piece of concrete to the next, swiftly grabbing on to the steel foundations that jutted from the concrete with the ease of a seasoned acrobat. She followed suit as best as she could, and they landed on the ground with a soft thud.

Their once-picturesque Gaza City neighbourhood, with its wide leafy streets, exquisite limestone buildings, quaint cafés and vintage furniture shops, now looked like a war zone. Most of the buildings on their street were destroyed. The supermarket next door to their house had collapsed on itself. Some buildings had missing walls or half-caved-in ceilings, partially covered by colourful cloth in a desperate attempt to reclaim privacy. She saw families cooking out in the open, people brushing their teeth in exposed bathrooms.