Dream in Wartime

January 2017

It is like a purge.

I am with Black women, university students, and immigrants at the gate of an old checkpoint. It's still dark but already warm. We know we haven't long. The mobs are coming with guns, bricks, machetes, and acid. Some of us retreat into the vacant station and hide in the common rooms. We flatten ourselves beneath conference tables, fold our arms to protect our heads, and wait.

After a few minutes I change course, slip out toward the exterior hall in the building's rear, keeping to the wall, low to the floor. But they have arrived. A large group—guns and acid—take the interior conference rooms and offices. A smaller group rounds the corner on a multibladed mower, sweeping the width of the corridor. They laugh over the electric hum as they approach our naked limbs, our screams.

The mower passes over me. Somehow, I am spared. A few others also survive. The floor is wet and red and loud.

Rumbling ride atop our bodies. Rumbling then quiet.

In a hall behind us there is an old iron bed frame, metal coil bedsprings, and I squeeze under it, not to be brazen in my aliveness, not to taunt the killers with my flesh. I shove myself under, scraping my back, snagging and tearing cloth all the way under though I am still visible through the coils. Others join me. Our fear is a steady current and I can hear nothing. Spitting white specks and blood, the killers climb atop the bedsprings and stab at the corners and cut the metal, peel it back, and stab stab stab stab. Then at a signal they disappear up the stairwell to the higher floors.

As soon as they leave, I run.

I run to the loading dock, to the heavy machines. I run to the day workers in the resistance, moving slabs of rock—remnants of old temples and churches, and I say "Mister, mister, I can work, I am small, I can work … I can work for you. Let me show you, Mister." The boss shoos me away at first but I am small (a small boy) so I squeeze between giant planks of stone, panels of ancient hieroglyphs and say to him "Mister, I am small. I can work. I can do things, get in small spaces." And he gives me an assignment.

"Take this stone to the border."

I am afraid to go—that is where I have come from—but I take the stone slabs on my back and shuffle, shoulders slumped, toward the gate. In an instant a larger, faster man takes the stones from me and is gone. Then I am with the boss, in calmer times and he says "Hi,______!" calling me by my old name, and it is clear he has recognized me from before, when I was his student, when there was order, and he knew my parents, and decided to save me but could not show favoritism or weakness of emotion so he gave me an assignment but to another to take when I would hesitate—not yet acclimated to the quick rhythm of the work.

And in this scene, we are enjoying almond chai and there is a girl here, too, from my past, the time of order. Maybe we were students in the same school—not together, not in the same class or even during the same years—but that one thread we cling to. We are the same age. She is like my twin.

In this scene, the man eases back in his chair. I rest my elbows on the tempered glass tabletop. The girl, my sister, swings her legs back and forth, scuffing her white shoes on the powdered-steel frame. We sip tea and eat figs in the clean open air.