What you have to do is silence the world. You have to tell the world to quit wailing, to calm itself, to let you think.
Short Fiction Excerpt | Saeed Teebi | Issue 36
Excerpt from “Enjoy Your Life, Capo” from Her First Palestinian and Other Stories
What you have to do is silence the world. You have to tell the world to quit wailing, to calm itself, to let you think. Just as important: you have to pick one world, and listen only to that world’s wailing, that world’s screams. Nothing else. Otherwise, you will be like all the ashen crazies tramping down the street, cursing their imagined enemies while their minds, like their clothes and lives, disintegrate into nothing.
Romero tells me this. He is focused, goal-oriented. He has kept us on track even when I have become unreliable. Our operation is almost complete. It is papered, and not illegal, and none of us will go to prison for it. If I repeat these facts enough, they might even matter.
Why can’t you enjoy your life, capo? This is Romero’s terminology, not mine. He is used to making real money, so criminality does not perturb him. Bridle Path mansions are in our future, he says, and infinity pools, and opportunities to supplement our wives.
What I want most is silence. Since the tumult started, since children began to be unearthed from the rubble of downed buildings, I ache for silence.
I don’t really want all that. What I want most is silence. Since the tumult started, since children began to be unearthed from the rubble of downed buildings, I ache for silence. It is one thing for my wife, Marcy, and my daughter, Firdaos, to be glued to their Twitter accounts and their satellite stations — finding more reasons to wail, more seeds for their future nightmares — but I cannot do that. I am trying to work.
Self-preservation is crucial. When I realized things were becoming overwhelming, I asked Firdaos to show me how to mute words on my phone. During May 2021, the major ones are obvious: Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, Gaza, Sheikh Jarrah. But the seepage was persistent. Soon, I had to mute the names of tiny villages and neighbourhoods, the names of the ones who were killed, the names of the arrestees and detainees, the home defenders, the worshippers, the healers, the reporters, the hunger strikers, the passersby, the children, the babies — one by one, as soon as I found out that they, too, had become part of that distant, deafening inferno.
The amount we have been promised is immense. It takes my breath away, to put it in romantic terms. But in exchange for this amount, our co-conspirators want our technology immediately.
Yesterday, if possible, in light of the current situation, says Romero.
And so we have been meeting them by video conference all day for the past three days, with scant regard for our differing time zones, trying to finish the paperwork. As we do, I have been learning to suppress my hatred. You work on that sort of thing gradually. You focus on the areas of overlap in your lives, not the areas of — what’s the diplomatic term? — conflict. The strategy works. With each meeting, we grow a little closer, feigning connection on the basis of little human facts about each other. You, too, have children? You, too, experience sun, rain, relatives, death? A measured exchange to make ourselves mutually acceptable. Within these bounds, we appear to enjoy one another.
Then our work becomes a transaction, and nothing more. I force myself to believe that to be true.
Is it our fault the market is stupid, capo?
Romero is right. The market works in mysterious ways. We have the buyer that we have.
Romero turns on our side chat. Mind your body language, he says. You look bewildered. I put my head on straight. My code is clean. It is without sins. Let’s remember that. There can be no debate that I created it to help people. I used to fantasize about the newspaper headlines. “Local Entrepreneur Leads by Caring,” or something comfortingly banal and affirming like that. A classic feel-good story. A quote from Marcy saying how proud she is of me. Perhaps a lede with one of the many patients I helped survive. And — dare I dream? — even a word or two from the original inspiration for it all, my tenacious fighter, Firdaos.
This is the world I want to belong to. But it is not the world I am in.
A TRIP TO the hospital is rarely an inspiring occasion, except that it was for me. More than two years ago now, Firdaos, then fifteen years old, was admitted for monitoring, struggling with another one of her periodic infections. By my count her fourth time, the cystic fibrosis now a familiar, unwanted guest, forcing us to grit our teeth and bear its visits until it deigns to leave. The usual cords of medical bondage were again attached to my daughter, a nurse or doctor coming in every ten minutes to check on her pulmonary function and respiratory rate.
Marcy had gotten better at putting on a brave face, but I knew she was roiling with anxiety inside. I was too. I tried to focus on prayer, but my mind kept taking refuge in logistics. All I could think was: Can’t this be done better somehow?
A few days later, Firdaos’s infection had subsided, and she was released from the hospital, a nebulizer over her face. Our whole house exhaled with her return. Not long after, I read online about new research claiming there was evidence that each human being has a unique breathing pattern. That was the kindling.
I started working up some ideas, stitching together parts of an algorithm. I couldn’t afford to pay anyone to help me — by this point in my blundering, we had to check our bank account before ordering pizza — so I did all the coding myself. It took seven months before I had anything resembling a prototype.
It was buggy, and regularly timed out. That’s where Romero came in. He had consulted on a few projects at DataHat, my old company. He never failed to isolate the critical issue and resolve it efficiently — a savant of software and, having seen some of his invoices, paid like one.
At my invite, he rolled up to the house on his motorbike, spitting out his toothpick on my lawn as he advanced to the front door. Sat at my desk and squinted at my monitor. Scrolled down the screen quickly, like a hyena bounding over the savannah. After complimenting my code — “clean like my mother’s kitchen floor” — he tipped the chair into a reclining position and studied me.
“Salah, my friend,” he said, “video intake is your issue. I can fix it. Watch the error rate vanish once I’m done.”
I asked him how much. He took my right hand and told me to spread it open. “You keep four fingers, I take one,” he said, tugging on my pinky. “Minority partner. You the capo, me the soldier.”
From the beginning, Romero enjoyed acting like we were in the Mafia. A fun charade for two middle-aged computer programmers.
That night, I tacked on two rakat after my last salat. Then I asked Allah for guidance: he said go ahead with Romero. By then I was up to at least three or four out of the five prayers daily; my religion was back on the upswing ever since Firdaos had gotten sick.
It took Romero just three weeks to work his magic. Then we were off to the races. We consulted lawyers, applied for regulatory approvals, even commissioned some branding. Soon we were shopping around Version 1.0. My friend Husam in medical marketing introduced me to purchasing managers at local hospitals. I prepared a spiel and sang it like a lyric:
The revolutionary BreathCatch technology and Api allows for the wireless monitoring of a patient’s breathing and vitals. It analyzes recorded and live video (at frame rates that are within the capabilities of most phone cameras) to detect the unique “breath fingerprint” of a patient: consistent patterns in their facial features, cadence, and spatial environment as they inhale and exhale. The BreathCatch technology uses the breath fingerprint, and any deviations from it, to generate metrics about the patient’s health over time.
Months of meeting after meeting, in claustrophobic Zoom rooms, sharing our screens, presenting our wares. Right at the start of the pandemic. Romero always by my side, hyping up everything I said like a human set of cymbals.
Uniformly positive feedback, I told Marcy. She had been through too much with me already. I think of the decade I spent at DataHat, complaining to her every night about the manager who co-opted all my best ideas, and made sure I never got promoted. Or the day I abruptly quit DataHat without a warning, either to the company or to Marcy. My parents had recently died, one after another in the span of a year, and the bereft child in me was acting up. I told Marcy that I needed the freedom to do things how I wanted, to not be beholden to anyone.
“Everyone in software takes a plunge like this at some point,” I said.
Marcy touched my wrist. “Go for it,” she said. We had some savings back then, but she still picked up tutoring sessions on the weekends to pad her teaching salary.
“I promise you won’t have to do that for long,” I had said.
Except that, after a couple of years of the entrepreneur’s life, and with several failures under my belt, I was no longer sure that was true. Marcy had long ago stopped asking follow-up questions when I told her about a new venture, though I didn’t stop volunteering answers.
“No bites yet on BreathCatch, Marcy, but lots of promising nibbles. Don’t worry, this isn’t like my other projects. This time the concept is innovative, solves a real problem. Romero says the feedback we’ve been getting means it’s a matter of when, not if. You have to give people time and space for an idea to take hold in their minds.”
“I believe in you, Salah,” Marcy always said.
I HAVE TO FOCUS. In our side chat, Romero predicts that our co-conspirators will next want to discuss the mechanics of the escrow. What? Why? I steel myself for battle. I am so ready to put these people back in their rightful place as my foes. They are bureaucrats and government lawyers and data scientists, but from the beginning, I have had to work hard to not envision them in army fatigues. Whenever they make a demand — an “ask,” is the genteel way us co-conspirators put it — it’s like the hot mouth of a Tavor is pointed at my face.
But there are no Tavors in the face of a muta’awin, are there? The villas of collaborators like me are raided very infrequently, the hand restraints placed very gently on their wrists, just for show, if at all. Their dossiers are kept in an entirely separate department of Shin Bet.
Collaborator. Not a scent of treachery in that word in English. On the contrary. Before I went out on my own, did not every resumé I ever submitted to an employer describe me as “collaborative”? Collaboration is critical to creating value. And now that I have created the biggest item of value in my life, am I to suddenly stop being collaborative?
Yes, I should stop. All the time, all I want is to stop.
The second-in-command unmutes himself to relay the latest ask: “We want a window of time to inspect the software in escrow, to verify all the goods are as they should be, before we release the payment to you. Don’t worry, we only need a very limited period, not nearly long enough for us to copy it all for free.” (Hearty laughs from all the faces tiled on my screen.)
I waffle. Every decision is an opportunity to escape. There have been many review meetings, phalanxes of their experts inspecting the software as if it were the body of a newborn. I have held my co-conspirators’ hands as they waltzed through the lines of my code, sometimes reading them aloud to each other with symphonic appreciation. Where they didn’t understand something, I was the model of patience as I explained it to them, stifling every outward sign of disdain. Why, then, the need for more inspection time, when the baby is already caged in escrow, waiting to be handed to its new parents?
Romero consents on our behalf, adds a condition or two.
Every little thing does not have to be an agonizing decision, capo.
Soon, this will all be over, tossed into a dark basement of my memory and shrouded in binding confidentiality provisions. Lupara bianca, in the parlance. Then, Romero assures me, we will have nothing but comforts.
After how hard our road was, capo? You can never convince me we don’t deserve it.
ROMERO AND I followed up with each purchasing manager we met, three or four times at least. Gradually, the responses evolved from “Not right now, but we’ll contact you if anything changes” to “Please stop calling us, our decision is final.”
We kept working, undaunted. Our clinical trials yielded good results but needed something anecdotal to tug on hearts. We knew the optimal specimen was Firdaos. Young, vibrant, and in a never-ending fight just to keep breathing — who wouldn’t sympathize with that?
My relationship with my daughter then was not at its peak, not anymore. That magical time was a few years ago, when she was in middle school. Back then, my late-night coding sessions often stretched until the muezzin app on my phone signalled the time for dawn prayer. Firdaos, already showing signs of being my opposite, was an early riser.
Unbidden, she would slip out of bed and find me in the master bathroom. We would do our wudu together at the double vanity, as quietly as we could lest we disturb her mother’s sleep. We’d polish off the brace of rakat, chat a while on our prayer rugs, and then move to my office. There I would show her some coding basics, watching her eyebrows rumple in concentration as she absorbed another if-else statement. When I got sleepy, she’d pester me to leave her with a coding exercise to do on her own, so she could show off how well she’d completed it the minute I opened my eyes again.
As she got older, Firdaos lost interest in coding, replacing it with reading, blog writing, Twitter debates. Her disease took a toll, too: she became more distant after every debilitating flare-up, as if she wanted to prove to her parents that she could manage on her own. My bond with her endured, but it felt mostly historical, like it wasn’t based on anything current anymore. Still, sometimes if I got out of bed early enough, I might find her sitting in my office, tapping on her laptop or leafing through the newspaper. It made me happy to think of it as a sign of her lingering attachment to me.
My office was where I found Firdaos the morning that I told her about BreathCatch. She was touched that I invented a whole system to monitor her health. But the teenager in her bristled when I asked if I could install an old phone in a corner of her room.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I can’t see your picture. It just analyzes your breathing and sends me the information. You’ll forget it’s even there.”
The readings arrived at my console whenever Firdaos was in camera range. If they showed that her vitals had taken a turn for the worse, I texted to ask how she was doing.
I can’t believe you can figure out I’m not right from a phone cam, she texted me back once. I haven’t even coughed! It’s a little creepy.
Romero and I drafted reports based on the clinical trials, and on Firdaos. In block quotes, we said that BreathCatch showed a 97.5% accuracy rate in detecting moments when a patient’s breathing was in or near distress. For software that could run off a phone cam, this seemed extraordinary to us.
Not that our precious case study was available much in those days. During the spring of 2020, the pandemic forced Firdaos’s public school to shift to virtual learning, but she was so involved with all the protests going on at the time that I hardly saw her. I did see her traces, though. There were markers and large pieces of cardboard left on the living room floor, along with splayed pairs of scissors that blended hazardously into the rug. There were attempts at catchy slogans scribbled and crossed out next to aborted sketches of George Floyd. A Black girl named Adie began to frequent our backyard, she and Firdaos chatting with their masks tucked uselessly under their chins.
“I think it’s good that our teenager is so engaged in the world,” said Marcy. “She’s not letting her condition stop her from living her life.”
It was true. The movement for racial justice seemed to ignite Firdaos. She went to all the demonstrations and rallies, no longer embarrassed to be seen using her medical accoutrements if she needed them. She wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers calling out their coverage of the riots in the United States. She covered our lawn with signs bearing the names of recent victims of police violence. She even started a group called Palestinians for Ending Anti-Black Racism, through which she started organizing online.
One day I noticed that she had changed her Discord profile picture to an old photo of a full-cheeked Black woman wearing a polka-dotted bandana.
Is that an old Black Panther or something? I texted.
Wow, the ignorance, she replied.
According to the lecture my daughter later delivered, the picture was of Fatima Bernawi, one of the first Palestinian women freedom fighters. Bernawi, a Jerusalemite of Nigerian descent, had been imprisoned for attempting to bomb an Israeli cinema in her hometown shortly after the war in 1967. Bernawi looked like a punk rock star: angry eyes, tongue out in defiance, jet bangs peeking out from under her headwrap.
“I’m surprised you don’t know her,” Firdaos said. “You call yourself a Palestinian?”
There’s no greater accountability than that which your children demand of you. As the lockdown wore on through the summer, Firdaos increasingly brought Adie inside our house for the comfort of air conditioning, and they spent hours together in Firdaos’s room. This was against the rules at the time, but Marcy let it slide. She said she didn’t want to regulate our daughter’s life too much, not when the disease was already in charge of most of it.
“Plus, they’re both wearing their masks, aren’t they?” she added.
At first, Adie’s presence in Firdaos’s room tripped up my software. So I cobbled together a patch that enabled BreathCatch to distinguish multiple people and record their vitals separately. It surprised me that the girls’ masks didn’t degrade the quality of the readings much. With small modifications, the software was able to detect a person’s breathing patterns no matter what they had on their face.
Those were strange times. The software had become quite powerful, but the pandemic made it so hospital and clinic budgets were maxed out attending to more immediate needs. I was always either distracted or in a bad mood. I started waiting until Marcy was sound asleep before coming to bed myself, just to avoid telling her how grim things looked for my new venture.
On a particularly bad day in the middle of June, I was in my car, trying to distract myself with a drive on the 401. I put on Abdul-Basit’s recitation of Al-Rahman, one of my favourite suras, which I hoped would calm me. His voice as he enumerated God’s blessings brought me back to the day when Marcy and I had our nikah in a small ceremony at my parents’ house, and my mother played this melodic sura. Even before that day, Marcy was like the daughter my mother never had.
Marcy’s family had been our next-door neighbours, and after her own mother passed away prematurely from cancer, her overwhelmed father was only too glad for preteen Marcy to spend some after-school time with the kindly, veiled immigrant lady next door. Marcy became a fixture at our house, teaching my mother some slang and explaining to her the workings of middle school; in exchange, my mother let Marcy watch her as she tended the garden or wrapped grape leaves for dinner. By the time I had completed university, I was struck by how attractive and mature Marcy had become, and how much a part of our family she already was. Marcy seemed to see something in me, too, though I don’t doubt that, at least partly, she saw my mother.
It was an hour lost in this memory, and in Abdul-Basit’s voice, before I even looked at my phone again and noticed a spate of missed calls from Marcy.
Firdaos’s principal had called. Firdaos and Adie had been caught on closed-circuit cameras brazenly defacing school property. With black spray paint, they had scrawled RACISM HAPPENS HERE TOO on the school’s front doors, across several classroom windows, and on the tennis court. They did it in broad daylight, without hoodies or hats or anything to conceal their identities. They didn’t even hasten their steps as they were leaving.
The next day, Marcy and I had a video call with the principal, Ms. Warner. She was in her late fifties, with a silver bun on top of her head and a manner of speaking that made you feel she was disappointed you didn’t know better. Ms. Warner wanted us to know that the school had been very sensitive to the emotions of students during this difficult time in race relations. There had been special video listening sessions that were made available, with school administrators and child psychologists present. There had been resources created for those affected, and for their allies like Firdaos. The school had even issued a formal statement in support of Black Lives Matter, which was unprecedented and, some would say, controversial. Ultimately, however, the actions of Firdaos and Adie were unacceptable. The upshot, as I understood from reading between the lines, was that while the school would’ve liked to discipline the girls, they were afraid to in light of shifting public sentiment. And so they were willing to resolve the issue quietly, provided the parents of the two well-meaning (but culpable) teens paid to repair the damage.
This seemed like a reasonable solution to me, but I wanted to consult with Firdaos. I asked Ms. Warner if she had spoken to Adie’s parents. Ms. Warner said that she had; the Taysons wanted time to think the matter over.
I looked at Marcy, who nodded at me to respond. “In that case,” I said, “we will do the same.”
ON THE SCREEN SHARE, the row marked “Escrow” is now green, meaning completed. Only a few more rows of collaboration to go.
The second-in-command mentions that he would like to revisit the intellectual property terms. I can almost hear my heart rate quickening. Stay calm, stay calm. This is a normal business negotiation between human beings. To prove this to myself, I go over the human traits that I have learned about the second-in-command: three children, a second wife, likes sports, does not like hot weather. That last bit I gleaned today. As part of our compulsory five minutes of small talk, the second-in-command said: “Our weather is sometimes difficult in the summer, even if we are right next to the sea.”
The thing to avoid here, if I were to anticipate Romero’s advice, is lingering on the words our weather. When the second-in-command says that, it is obviously not meant to insult, obviously not meant to inflame. I have to be very firm with myself about this. We cannot be adolescents here, trying to detect hurts where there is only normal communication. The second-in-command does not mean that he owns the weather. He simply lives in an area, and the weather in that area is, as a figure of speech, his weather.
The second-in-command mentioned the name of his city in our earliest introductions. A hub city for technology in their technology-proud country. It was called something ending in -na, I believe. Or maybe something ending in -ya, or -on. I don’t remember. I made sure to expel it from my mind as soon as I heard it, so I would not be tempted to locate it on a map later. If I did look on a map, the area might seem familiar. It might have a former name that did not end in -na or -ya or -on, a former name in my own language, not theirs, and so one that I could not so easily forget. Perhaps his weather would be revealed to be my grandfather’s old weather, or my grandmother’s old weather. Perhaps I would be tempted to think of it as my rightful weather. And all that for what, a figure of speech?
Let’s focus. I message Romero: I would like to keep an open mind here, but what more could they possibly want? We are already selling them our entire technology, totally and completely.
The second-in-command says, “We would like to add that you will give us everything you may invent in the future that is in any way related to this software, or related to breathing generally.”
Fury.
Is what I am hearing real? They want to lay claim not just to the best idea I have ever had but also to any ideas I may ever have? Is this what passes for a joke among them, their way of toying with the Arab they have on a string? My daughter struggles to breathe, I witness her languishing every day — yet I am to stop myself from thinking of ways to help her, or else risk losing them to these criminals?
The thought of Firdaos makes me desperate. Without warning, I turn off my computer camera and pick up my phone. I see she’s changed her profile picture again — it’s back to the Bernawi photo, which she hasn’t used since last summer’s George Floyd protests. And she’s added some of my muted words in hashtags on top of it.
#FreePalestine #SaveSheikhJarrah #EndtheOccupation #EndIsraeliGenocide
Romero messages me in our side chat. Where are you? Did you walk out? This ask is not strange, and our lawyer agrees. They just want to make sure you’re not holding back anything. It’s baked into the price.
I turn my camera back on. Borrowing some boldness from my daughter, I address the second-in-command. “So, about this request then . . . What if we say no?”
“That would be a problem,” he says.
“In that case, we have a problem.”
Excerpt from "Enjoy Your Life, Capo" from Her First Palestinian copyright © 2022 by Saeed Teebi. Reproduced with permission from House of Anansi Press, Toronto. www.houseofanansi.com
Saeed Teebi is a writer and lawyer based in Toronto. His story “Her First Palestinian” was shortlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize. He was born to Palestinian parents in Kuwait and, after some time in the U.S., has lived in Canada since 1993.
Her First Palestinian and Other Stories by Saeed Teebi House of Anansi Press, 2022
Finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Elegant, surprising stories about Palestinian immigrants in Canada navigating their identities in circumstances that push them to the emotional brink.
Saeed Teebi’s intense, engrossing stories plunge into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family’s destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country. A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanizing roommates. A lawyer takes on the impossible mission of becoming a body smuggler. A lonely widower travels to Russia in search of a movie starlet he met in his youth in historical Jaffa. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor. These taut and compelling stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the Palestinian diaspora with grace and insight.
Short-listed, Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, 2022 Nominated, Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, 2023 Short-listed, Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, 2023 Runner-up, Writers' Union of Canada Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 2022
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