What Strange Paradise

The west you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you are the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world are not good and bad, they are engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be the engines and you will always, always be fuel.

But the two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad—they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.

Today you are the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though you never existed.

Every man you ever meet in nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed.

She seemed so often a compendium of all her past selves, none of whom Vanna could ever interrogate, young women at various forks, turning this way or that. There were swarms of her, and Vanna did not know a single one.

Amir took flight. Headlong into the seaborne sky, the roof of the great inverted world. In meeting him the water was not cold or concussive but warm and tranquil, its temperature the temperature of a body, the temperature of blood. With ease and without pain, he flew past the surface, past the depths, past the places where light and life surrendered and the domain of stillness began. And then lower, farther, past the crust of a million interlocking bodies who’d braved this passage before him and come to rest at the bottom, sick with the secrets of their own unallowed mourning. Past the smallest flour-white bones, past the world at the feet of the world. To the lowest deep, then a lower deep still. Until finally to a dry womb of a place in which were kept safe and unchanging everyone he had ever known, and everyone each of those had ever known, outward forever to encompass the whole of the living and the lived. And each of these the boy met, in their old lives and their new lives waiting, and from each drew confession and each he felt into as though there were no barrier between them, no silo of self to keep a soul waiting. What beautiful rebellion, to feel into another, to feel anything at all. —

Vanna could not help but think of ancestry as a king of shackle one could never fully unclasp, an umbilical cord that, not matter how deeply cut, could never be severed.

In this country he felt a great distance from almost all the children he'd met, such that he could think of friendship only as a thing that depended on him being useful.

Because that's how we take the future from them," Walid said, animated now. "Look at Stockholm, look at Munich, look at New York-- who's picking up the garbage, cleaning the toilets? Who's doing the work? Us. Who's doing the living? Them. But in ten, twenty years, we'll be the ones running the computers, the machines, the *infrastructure*, and they'll have nothing left but poems and stories." "So they'll still do all the living," Maher replied, "and we'll still do all the work.

And what do you think the prerequisite for kindness is? Have you ever tried to be kind to someone better off than you?

The refugees peer from their small, tattered tents to watch because this is what they have become: watchers, honed by captivity into seasoned observers of incremental change.

We're not coming from outer space, you're telling me they've never seen a Muslim before?" "I'm telling you the exact opposite.

They think there is only so much living to go around.

There was a freedom in it, a temporary dispersal of the mundane.

What beautiful rebellion, to feel into another, to feel anything at all.

two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad—they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.

Of course I filled it out properly. Every day ‘properly’ changes, and every day I still fill it out properly.

Vänna could not help but think of ancestry as a kind of shackle one could never fully unclasp, an umbilical cord that, no matter how deeply cut, could never be severed.

With utter confusion, he tries to make sense of the baffling play he’s just witnessed, performed with such intensity by a troupe whose actors were barricaded from one another by walls of language and place and purpose, two opposing scripts come alive on one shared stage, its director absent or impotent or wholly uncaring.

Everywhere these identities warred and the warring produced no victorious identity, no identity at all, only the sense of manifold incompleteness, the universal aftertaste of conquest.

Perhaps it was not the presence of a revolutionary at a revolution that so enraged the secret police who took them, but the presence of an ordinary man.

To become soldiers required they be rid of a certain kind of human reticence. The pulling of a trigger was in the end a rote, mechanical movement--anyone could be taught it. The difficult thing, the necessary thing, was to first kill off the instinct not to pull it. A person free of this instinct requires the full theater of war, its protective mythology, with which this particular absence of restraint decent into sociopathy.

He turned to Maher. "That's how I know you won't make it: you carry stories around. You've got a storybook idea about how it'll end up, you've got a storybook view of the world." Maher shrugged. "Books are good for the soul," he said. "Books will ween you off cruelty." "And what will you be left with then?" Mohamed asked.

In their silent reticence was evident the reality that somewhere along the journey they'd passed the point where human goodness gave way to the calculus of survival.

Farther out, the water sheds its sandy complexion and turns a turquoise of such clarity that the tourists’ sailboats seem to float atop their own shadows.

He quickly learned you could tell the quality of a product by how Western the people on the packaging looked.