Internment(88)

“Ameen,” I whisper. I see Jake’s weary eyes close.

I know it’s for the last time.





This desert is stained with their blood.

Soheil. Noor. Asmaa. Bilqis. Jake. Others whose names I don’t know. I’ll learn their names. I’ll etch them into my heart. When I step out past the fence with its razor wire, I will make sure the world knows who they were and what they sacrificed. I won’t let them be forgotten.

Morning light streams through the window in my trailer bedroom. I pull myself up to sit on the edge of the bottom bunk in this tiny, terrible room. My clothes from last night, the ones marked with Jake’s blood, lie bunched in the corner. Before going to bed, I scrubbed my face and hands until they were pink and raw, but his blood still mingles with the dust under my fingernails.

It is surreal. This moment. The one I’ve wished for, but that came at so high a cost.

I don’t remember much after the gates opened yesterday, after they took Jake away, first lifting him like a rag doll onto the gurney and then placing him into the back of that sterile, cold ambulance. It wasn’t him, though, was it? Not really. A person is more than a body, more than blood and bone and flesh. More than the sum of their parts. Jake was kind and brave and flawed. A human being, like the rest of us, trying to find his way on this journey where our paths crossed too briefly.

There’s a gentle knock at the door. “Beta, are you okay? Do you need help?” My mom’s voice is so soft, like she’s worried that loud words will cut me. The door creaks open. She and my dad enter.

My dad is wearing a makeshift sling tied around his neck—a shirt holding his arm in position, close to his body. My eyes grow wide.

“It’s probably only a hairline fracture,” my dad says. “I’ll be okay.”

My mom sits next to me and wraps me in her arms. I don’t cry. I’m not sure if I have any tears left. Mostly I feel hollow, like a shell of a person.

“We can go now,” my mom says. “We’re free to go.”

Free? What does that even mean? For now, it will simply have to mean being free to walk out of this camp. That will do.

My parents tell me what I missed in my fog of despair and sleep. The government ordered the immediate closing of Mobius and the release of all the internees. Dozens more Exclusion Guards arrived last night to help us gather our things and ready us for the return home.

Home.

I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of stepping through our front door, sleeping in my own bed. Seeing David.

The Before, my old life, is gone forever. When I walk out of these gates, it will be to a scarred world. The After. Honestly, I don’t know how to go on from here. How to truly leave Mobius behind. But I have to. Jake’s story ended here. And Soheil’s. Mine doesn’t, even if I feel like all I’m made of now is dust.

My mom helps me stand up. “Do you want me to help you pack?”

“No,” I whisper. I’m not taking anything with me. I want no memory of this place, but I know it is imprinted on my mind forever.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Mom hands me a note. “It’s from Ayesha. She knocked while you were sleeping but didn’t want to wake you. Her family caught an early transport out, but she said she’d see you soon.”

I clutch the note to my chest. Ayesha. She’s out. They walked out. I close my eyes, and my heart lifts a little. There’s no way I could’ve endured life in here without her. I’m so relieved that she’s safe. That she survived. We barely got to talk about Soheil. My heart aches for her.

“I’ll meet you outside. I need a second,” I say.

My mom walks into the common area of the trailer and grabs a small bag of her and my dad’s things.

My dad kisses me on the top of my head. “We’ll be right outside, beta.” He steps to my mom and takes her free hand in his. They walk out together. The door shuts behind them.

I look around the tiny space that I’ve occupied with my parents for what feels like forever. I can hear the clatter of their teacups as they sit at the table, trying so hard to have a sense of normalcy here, of home. I hear Ayesha’s laugh as we talk in my bedroom. I see Soheil outside my little window playing soccer, motes of dust catching the late-afternoon light. I run my fingers over the invisible barcode on the inside of my wrist. No one else will be able to see it, but I’ll know it’s there. Always.

One last look around before I walk out into the heat and sun and dust.

Mobius is bustling like an outdoor market. The people who haven’t left yet head toward the Hub and the open gate that once shut us in. Some wave at me, and I nod and smile back. “Happy” isn’t quite the right word, but I’m content knowing that Nadia and Nadeem, Suraya, and all the others are walking out of here—going home.

There are ghosts at Mobius. I hear their whisperings like dry leaves swirling against hard earth. I feel them in each step on this dry, cracked dirt.

Once, Jake told me about a friend of his who was a pararescuer with the Air Force. Their motto is That Others May Live. All these things that might happen next, that should happen—repealing the Exclusion Laws, closing the black-ops sites, impeachment—that’s what people died for.

So that others may live.

I stand between my parents, gripping their hands. We walk together up the Midway for the last time, holding on to all the parts of ourselves that haven’t been taken away. We walk past the Hub and through the open gate, watching, waiting, as others file onto idling buses that will take them to the train station and airports and home.