Chapter 43

Ziad turned the handle on the door and slowly pushed it open.

Behind the door was a makeshift and spartan office space. One folding table served as a desk, with two large piles of paper on each end, staplers, pens, pencils, and such strewn about. The far wall had one slightly open window cut through the middle. A rack of metal shelves sat behind the desk, heavily laden with boxes of papers and folders.

But what caught Ziad's eye was the young woman behind the desk.

Not very tall, but not very short either. Skin complexion typical of her ethnicity, yet unusually clear and smooth, saving for one large scar that ran vertically down one cheek and slightly into her upper lip, causing that side of her mouth to tilt slightly upwards into what in some situations might be called a smile and sometimes a smirk.

She wore a fashionable and carefully arranged green hijab over her otherwise remarkably causal clothes- coyote brown jeans, boots, and a green and white-striped shirt.

All this framed her eyes- large, brown, and piercing.

The eyes of Mariam Jarrah.

Ziad's sister.

At least, it sure as shit looked like Mariam Jarrah. Older than what Ziad remembered- It had been over a two years since he had last saw her, and the scar was definitely new- but still indubitably Mariam.

Ziad just stared at her.

She smiled warmly at him.

"It's been a long, long time, Ziad."

Ziad's mouth hung open and swung in the slight breeze coming through the window.

Mariam frowned.

"You haven't lost your voice, have you? I see you've taken up tattoos as a new hobby."

She stood up and gestured at his arms, which were exposed by the rolled-up sleeves on his shirt (stolen from a farmer who decided to hang his laundry out in the open in a clearing in the jungle between the prison and Jakarta).

She then took a tentative step towards him, steadying herself on the table. She bent over and picked up a wooden cane.

"I'm so fucked up. I need this thing to walk, now."

She hobbled over to Ziad, still in a statuesque state.

The alliteration of that last thought broke Ziad from his shock-induced reverie.

"But... How?"

Mariam chuckled.

"How am I alive? Well, you have a lot of doctors to thank for that. I'm still not quite all here, though."

She tapped her right foot with the cane. It made a tapping noise.

"See this? Prosthetic. An Israeli shell took it. But wait, that's not all. I'm pretty sure they ended up replacing all my blood, I got so many transfusions."

She held up her left hand. It sported only her thumb, pinkie, and index finger.

"Even worse- I can't even flick people off anymore."

Ziad still didn't quite get it.

"But... But why the hell did everyone think you were dead if you were in fact saved by the miracles of modern medicine?"

"Well, that is an interesting story, indeed. Remember that Irish soldier, McCormack? Well, to put it simply he lied. To you, to Shlomi, to Mother, to everyone. Shlomi has told me about that summer, when you went to Israel and Lebanon to meet with the Major. Remember why he sent you that letter? So you would come with all haste down to the Middle East to talk to him. And it worked. It just required an accidental artillery bombing of a poor undefended UN orphanage. So, Major McCormack paid the right corrupt Israeli soldiers and boom! An Israeli artillery battery accidentally-on-purpose bombs the wrong target. And what a mistake! A UN orphanage instead of a Hezbollah training camp."

Mariam sighed heavily.

"The Israelis are not malicious enough to do that on purpose, nor stupid enough to do it accidentally- so I know, and Shlomi discovered later, that McCormack arranged the whole attack. So, my friends and many children were killed. I was... Badly injured, as you can see. Another young Lebanese woman was there at the time, and I'm afraid she died while covered in a liquefied version of my leg, as well as about two litres of my blood. So a cursory check made it seem like the dead woman was me, while I went to the hospital as the poor young woman. I was unconscious, of course, immediately after the first shell exploded, taking my leg with it. Trauma. Shock. Etc. I was asleep for two months. As things go, with that sort of injury and being in a near-coma for so long, I did not remember very much. So imagine what it must be like- I awoke to find two very concerned parents by my bed, crying in joy that their wonderful daughter had survived. I believed for too long that I was their daughter."

Mariam turned away from Ziad and looked out the window.

"It was awful when I remembered who I was. Having to tell them that she was dead... Not fun, to say the least."

"No shit," muttered Ziad.

"Then I soon discovered that I was not in Lebanon, nor Israel, but an American military hospital in Germany. Why I was brought there, I do not know. In the bed beside me was a young officer who had been accidentally shot during a training mission. He just lay there and read fantasy novels. A very interesting person, once I got to know him."

"I was in that hospital recuperating, re-learning how to walk, until November 11th, 1996. The attack happened in mid-April of the same year. After, I left Germany and went to America. I'd never been, and you remember I always wanted to go. Father hated it, so I was of course rebelliously drawn to it."

Mariam laughed suddenly, "I worked briefly at a kebab shop run by a Tajik expat in New York. You know the kebab I make is absolute shit. But they wouldn't know good kebab if it danced naked singing 'Rock Lobster' right in front of them."

"I then returned to Israel- I had assumed Shlomi would believe I was dead, and I still wanted to return to him. But I could never conjure up the courage to do so. I finally did a few months ago, and I showed up at his house in Jerusalem."

She gave Ziad a stern look.

"Imagine my surprise to find the furniture gone and replaced by stacks of Russian weapons. My books had been replaced with training manuals, my dishes with AK-47s-"

"AK-74s, please," Ziad interrupted, "I would never stoop to stealing AK-47s."

"Whatever. Either way, Shlomi wasn't there when I arrived, but turned up the next day. He was equally surprised by the state of his house. He was more surprised to find me sleeping in our bed, alive and well. So I told him my story. Then he told me his story."

"So that's 'How.'"

Ziad nodded.

"So... Ziad, what's your story? What are all these tattoos? You look like a thug. Those scars are new, as well."

Ziad chuckled darkly.

"Now, that's a story for the ages..." he muttered.

"FORTY-SEVEN MEN? YOU MURDERED FORTY-SEVEN MEN? IN AN INDONESIAN PRISON?"

"Well, if you put it that way, it makes me sound like the bad guy!" whined Ziad.

Mariam had, by this point, sat back down at her makeshift desk. She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands.

"Ziad," she sighed, "You realize that if you were a character in a movie or book you would most definitely be the bad guy. Protagonists are given leeway in the body count, yes, but forty-seven is just ridiculous. And the casualties caused by protagonists are almost always either innocent bystanders caught in a car chase or killed in order to establish the character as a flawed anti-hero. Yet by the end, the protagonist inevitably regrets his or her extraneous killings and reforms. Or, if the author wants to go for a darker note, turns evil and is killed by his or her own growing maliciousness."

"Mariam," said Ziad, "You have a remarkable propensity to unnecessarily expository paragraphs."

"Ziad," said Mariam, "You have a remarkable propensity to unnecessarily pedantic sentences."

"Touche," muttered Ziad.

"You two truly are siblings," remarked a casual voice from somewhere near the door.

Ziad and Mariam immediately turned to the door. Shlomi stood there, grinning slightly.

"Hello, Ziad." said Shlomi.

"Hello, Shlomi," said Ziad, slowly breaking into a real smile. "So... We're having a happy-family-gathering story time. So I have one question for you, Monsieur Shlomi."

"Ask away, my little Lebanese friend."

"Well, one, I'm actually taller than you now, and two, I out-muscle you now. I'm not so little anymore."

"A fair point."

"And two, my question: how the fuck did you escape Mr. Patil's henchmen?"

Shlomi smirked.

"Easy enough. I didn't. They beat me half to death, dragged me out into the ass-end of the city, and dumped me in a ditch beside a field. Left me to die. Luckily for me some Argentine soldiers from the UN peacekeeping force had particularly bad maps and decided that field was a good place to set up their field operations base. So they drove up and found some goats and a half-dead Israeli. I think the goats proved more useful, ultimately."

"Nice," scoffed Ziad.

"I know. I'm a real slick guy," said Shlomi. "But now that all this is cleared up, I'd like to break some minor news."

"Oh?" asked Ziad and Mariam.

"It's nothing too important, really."

"Ok?"

"I mean, not really a big deal."

"So... fucking say it?"

"Ok, ok. Like I said, no biggie. The South African nuclear program, supposedly canceled back in 1991? Yeah, it continued in secret. Oh, and the little bitty piece of news I said was no big deal? Thirty of those nuclear warheads have been stolen. Again, not a huge problem."

Ziad sighed.

"Fuck you, Shlomi. Fuck you."

Author's Note:

So... I decided to be kind to the Ziad for the first time in his poor life and let Mariam actually be legitimately alive.

This kindness will be... Compensated for.

Stay tuned for what I believe will be the final arc of Ziad's story. How many chapters that will come out to, I do not yet know. But this is the beginning of the end.