The Arsonists' City

by Hala Alyan

“Mama, yes. He said during his last surgery, he was holding one, and after he spoke to it, the thing apparently spoke back. Told him he had to sell his father’s house! What a liar your father is.”

“I don’t know, Ava,” Mazna says. “As far as I’m concerned, you speak to hearts, that makes you an interesting surgeon. The hearts speak back, that makes you a little loosey-goosey upstairs.” Her mother ducks her head offscreen; a feather of smoke floats by.

Najla just sent me a text with nothing but a question mark. A question mark, Ava! Does that seem like a reasonable way to respond to your mother’s calls?”

But Naj wouldn’t change her mind, not about moving there or about getting her own small apartment, a decision that caused uproar with the older generation—a girl, only eighteen, living alone like some gypsy, as his mother had said.

Syrian soldiers had entered the country in the seventies and overstayed their welcome by about three decades, as her father liked to say.

Naj dangles a leg out in front of her, rotates her ankle. She broke it years ago, and it still hurts sometimes. That’s because the body does a lot of remembering for us, her father once told her.

very Vivien Leigh in Streetcar.

The Body is like a borrowed dress, and though she struts in it and admires it in storefront windows, the truth is, it frightens her.

“Good Allah in His plush purple chair!”

“I don’t understand,” she says, “how in the same city you can have people going to the beach and also dying from bombs. How a place can let both those things happen at the same time.” He seems amused. “This country is honest. You have to give it that.” “But these men fighting each other—they were playing football together a few summers ago.” “They still are.” “It’s like some part of their brains got flipped on.” “Like a sleeper cell.” Mazna sits at a table and looks at him blankly. “They’re like spies,” he explains. “They’re inactive until their commander decides to wake them up.”

There’s a note of wistfulness in her voice. “You know who I always loved?” she asks suddenly. She doesn’t wait for Mazna to answer. “Vivien Leigh. In A Streetcar Named Desire. When she firsts meets Stanley.” Lulwa sighs. “With that perfect hair and beautiful dress.” “She was pretending. From the beginning.” Mazna is surprised to hear her own voice.

Grief will make you do crazy things. It will electrify the elegant, flower-stem neurons in the amygdala of your brain, will pluck them like an instrument.

Her mother had looked at her and said, “I read the most interesting article about keto diets the other day,”

She was afraid of having children, like most women, afraid of all the ways the world could wreck them. But those stores reminded her that there were myriad tools for repair. There were ointments for insect bites and minor burns and headaches; syrups for coughs; lipstick and hairspray for broken hearts. Everything had a remedy.

It’s not that Mimi isn’t curious. His mother has been an enigma his entire life, exacting and stunning, an impossible standard to hold women to but also fragile in a way his sisters don’t see. But the love lives of people, dead or alive, forty years ago feel very, very far away when your own life is in flames. His life’s in flames.

“Too early to tell.” The chief brightens. “Maybe it’s arson? You don’t see much of that here, but there are certainly enough psychopaths with matches in this city.”

Mimi hugs them both, and behind them the old lady starts up again, cursing the day their father decided to have children.

The man is pummeling the dough again, sprinkling flour over it, and Mimi watches all of it, soothed by its familiarity. He could be in California. Austin. Damascus. There’s only one way to make bread.

She looked unhinged, her color high, her eyes blazing, brittle and beautiful, like she might set the building on fire.

If this were a movie, the woman would start crying, and so Mazna does.

a new baby means starting over. Late nights.

You soften in the end because they’re all you have. It’s not right and it’s not what you wanted, but here you are.

“I think people deserve to have their secrets.”