She wrapped her arms around my thighs and inhaled. She breathed out. “I love that scent,” she said. “Come and sit next to me.”
We sat in silence for a long time.
She then leaned over the black box and took out a pair of cuffs and pushed me onto the bed.
“Hey!”
When I attempted to stand up, she put her hands on my chest. “Trust me.” The pen holding her bun up fell out and her hair covered her face. It was quiet outside. “Now lie down and relax.”
She cuffed my arms and legs, and when she pulled a scarf over my mouth and gagged me, I closed my eyes.
“I asked for a good listener because I am going to tell you a story first,” she said. “It’s about an Ethiopian girl who was born to love, and on the way, she was forced to discover a different path to happiness...”
She must have talked all night long. I could hear the birds chirping, the muezzin calling, and the church bells ringing. Bela Sefer was rising, starting another day, another attempt at hope at the crack of dawn.
“They say I am a jinni. I will possess you. Your voice will become mine.”
I thought she laughed, but perhaps she just smiled. Her tin shack amplified every noise, as if the only way to live here was to double up its thrills.
But she didn’t possess me. She freed me. As I began talking, I heard my high-pitched voice again, the feminine sound that earned me ridicule at school, which some said was because an evil spirit had possessed me and I’d suppressed it for all these years. Yes, I could hear my old voice, the voice of a woman inside me, the voice I had buried under the pretense and deceptions of manhood. I closed my eyes and listened to the echoes of my own voice.
I could no longer distinguish between Hayat’s voice and mine. We are one. We are one.
She left the room, reappearing moments later with a lit candle in her left hand and a razor in her right. When I parted my legs, she walked over to the book that was sitting on a bedside table — Intercourse, an Outdated Concept: Alternative Sex.
As her right hand swooped between my legs, I remembered how my mother had thrown herself over me in defense when my father wanted the local woman to circumcise me.
A howl went through the forest, Hayat, and me.
A howl went through the forest, Brhan, and me.
Part III
Madness Descends
Insomnia
by Lelissa Girma
Haya Hulet
6:15 p.m.
He was sitting at the Terrace Café somewhere in Haya Hulet and watching the people going up and down the road. The day had been long, and the setting sun seemed to promise an even longer evening. His body was tired, but his mind continued to churn with a nagging persistence. It had been more than fifty hours since he last slept. He feared if he went home he would not be able to fall asleep and would have to walk through the streets again. Based on how he was feeling now, he was unsure if he would ever sleep again.
The street was bustling with cars and people on their phones. Across the street, there was a private hospital with visitors pouring in and out and tires squealing when they pulled into the parking lot. As he ordered, he remembered that coffee had caffeine, then realized the caffeine would have no purpose since his body had stopped responding to stimulants.
The girl who served him gazed intently at his face as she gently set down the cup. She was expecting him to recognize her, but he was too tired to recognize anyone, and focused his attention on the oily-looking liquid in front of him. When the girl started to walk away, however, he began to notice her, especially how her pants fit her so well that day. Her body almost seemed malleable, taking the shape of the clothes she wore. He stirred the coffee, thinking about how the fabric looked so rigid that it must be abrasive.
When he turned his head toward the street, he sensed that the rhythm of pedestrians and cars had quickened, and his heart began to pick up its pace as if to match the commotion outside. He pressed his hands to his temples and felt them throbbing. I must get some sleep today, he promised himself. The noise was making him more and more tense. Amid the traffic, taxis stopped and lured people with their honks, and people were running around with seemingly no sense of direction. The laughter, the whispers, the woman pulling along her children with runny noses, parking attendants writing on tickets, tacking them under wipers — all of this brought up an urge in him that he had to fight against. He could visualize this so clearly, the bottle of Baro’s dry gin just at his fingertips. While he was fighting the urge, the madness of the street seemed to settle down. He eased into a daydream, thinking of the woman with her lipstick-smudged matchbox and her laughter. He caught himself getting lost in the wheels of memory, and returned his attention to the street.
He saw a group of girls all in the same clothes and walking in perfect sync. He studied them closely, wanting to register them in his catalog of beauty. Then he counted more than a dozen men who had shaved heads — the local skinheads with their shiny scalps. Looking at them from where he sat, he imagined how cold they must be and began to worry because he believed their heads were made of something soft like the shell of a boiled egg.
6:27 p.m.
He finished his coffee. He heard a voice in his head say, Go home and sleep. Stop thinking, go to sleep. He wondered if somebody could hypnotize him. A part of Yannis’s piano routine rang in head.
He heard the laughter of a girl. That spontaneous laugh that would start casually then extend like she was imagining another layer to the joke, or she was combining all of the laughter she’d had throughout her life in that one moment. Once she began to laugh, it would go on and on until everyone laughed alongside her, contracting her glee. She would get worried in the middle of her laughter that it was going to die suddenly, and would refresh it by extending it with sounds that had nothing to do with laughter.
6:28 p.m.
He shook his head and turned his attention back to the street.
A man got out of a taxi and walked toward the private hospital. He was holding a construction helmet, which he placed over his head once he reached the entrance.
He thought that he had made it up — it made no sense that a man would wear a helmet to enter a hospital to visit a patient. If what I did see was real, he thought, then those skinheads should learn from him and protect their soft heads.
He waited for the man to come out. When he didn’t, he called for the waitress and paid. This time he smiled and she smiled back. She had teeth like the tines of a fork. When she turned, clanking his cup on the tray, he studied her from behind, and continued to do so even after she was gone.
6:49 p.m.
As he stood up, the urge came to him again. This time he knew he couldn’t fight it. His body was tired, he had a headache, and he was having memories that made it feel like something outside of him was ordering him about. His body begged for sleep and though he would have gladly granted it, he had forgotten how. If he went to a bar and spent another night without sleep, he knew he was going to damage his brain. He began to sweat. He didn’t want to go home anymore. He knew that if he went and couldn’t sleep, he would probably go mad and take rat poison, or do something else very unpleasant.