I Wish I Was Dead
By Bilal Bikile
At the end of Ahmed’s walkway stood three tall scowling men in triangular formation like stranded bowling pins.
Planted in the center, was a rounded boulder of a man, yellow-skinned, Israeli, and clean shaven, parked with interlocked fingers sitting atop his belly. The skin of his face, likely capable of bearing a burly, shaggy beard like that of a hasidic rabbi, was full of rocky bumps and pus, they must have pained to touch. To his left, lingered a tall, muscular man who served in the IDF as they all did. He wore a black baseball cap and a rage like that of a dog with rabies, all but growling and foaming at the mouth, wanting to sprint forth and tear Ahmed to pieces.
From behind the white storm door, Ahmed stared them down, sipping a cup of coffee while holding the saucer in his hands. They did not intimidate him, and he knew why they had come.
Israel had just been attacked. October 7th, or Israel’s apparent 9/11, was the day before. He could hear outraged conversations, cursing of Hamas and ‘fucking Muslims’ on the sidewalk outside his Santa Monica apartment window the whole of the day. 700 Israelis killed, more than 400 Palestinians dead, 2300 others wounded in Gaza.
Ahmed envisioned the skyfall of subsequent rockets, one after the other, mothers’ screaming, children wailing, the lifeless dangling of limbs. The numbers were growing, and the news was never accurate enough. With his own two eyes, he’d seen more sizzling, decaying flesh under the desert sun back home than the media would ever report.
The men stood there waiting. Without a word, or utter of intention, they had woke him with the ring of his doorbell, stepped back, and peered at him mercilessly from the sidewalk.
“Just like back home,” Ahmed thought.
Prior to relocating from Gaza to Los Angeles, Ahmed overlooked the zionist grip fondling and milking away whatever it wanted from the American local and federal governments. He’d heard of Israeli influence in America, but never envisioned it as such. Driving down Santa Monica boulevard, however, with the park centerpiece being an installation of Israeli flags, he knew he was not amongst ‘friends’.
Ahmed’s phone began to ring. It was Benjamin, his landlord. He’d been anticipating the call.
“Benjamin, what is going on? Why are these men standing outside my home?”
Benjamin paused on the other line before he spoke. Ahmed continued scowling back at the three huffing henchman outside.
“I need you to take your things and leave my apartment today, Ahmed.”
Ahmed became flustered, his blood pressure rose and his face became a flushing red.
“Why? I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”
“You just need to take your things and leave. The gentlemen there will help you if you need assistance.”
“Have I done something wrong? Did I do something to you Benjamin?” Ahmed was beginning to shout.
“No! You have not done anything. You just need to leave!”
Ahmed knew why, but he wanted to hear it. Tell it straight, that is how he preferred it. He couldn’t bring himself to believe this was happening even here, in America – the land of the free, with laws and justice, or so it goes.
“Benjamin, just tell me why.” He said bluntly. “It’s because I am Palestinian, right?”
Benjamin’s voice changed, like a director had just called the scene, and he was the actor, then fully shifting back into himself.
“I don’t have to tell you why, Akhmed.” He said. “You are a smart guy. Get the fuck out of my apartment if you don’t want a problem.”
He then hung up the phone.
Ahmed stood in the foyer looking at his tiny studio apartment. A twin mattress on the floor, a small black computer chair tucked into a scratched up wooden desk he found on the street, and two suitcases, housing everything he owned. The fridge belonged to Benjamin, inside it all but a water bottle and leftover chicken tikka masala from two nights before. He couldn’t eat much after everything started.
Ahmed shook his head in intense disappointment, nearly bursting into laughter at the absurdity of his realization. “Wallahi I had more than this back home,” he muttered. And if he ever had less, like when his first home was occupied by settlers, and the next house disintegrated and flattened in a strike, he at least had his family, who could never equate to whatever number of American dollars he might accumulate here.
The third man outside received a phone call from Benjamin ordering them to move in and begin removing all of Ahmed’s belongings into his car. If he doesn’t comply – although he better comply – there’s no telling what they could get away with.
They marched in unison down the slim path, the two on the sides stomping unevenly with one foot on pavement and the other on the grass. Ahmed noticed them approaching and quickly shooed them off, shouting, “I don’t need your help!” and locked the storm door.
They could see his shadow shuffling about behind the door and through the single window, as he packed his things, so they quietly stood in their place, but did not retreat.
He began moving items one by one into his vehicle outside, the men’s soulless eyes never leaving him. He pretended as if ghosts lined his path, carrying his things and walking all but through them. He placed everything inside his forest green Honda CR-V that was gifted to him from the local mosque. A Palestinian-American named Muhammad, a kind philanthropist and engineer, had established a program in LA helping newcomer Muslims get on their feet. From homeless families, to non-Muslim civilians struggling to make ends meet, Muhammad’s gentle hand lent support to so many, practically every person in the city who ever needed a dollar had heard tales of his generosity. Upon meeting Ahmed, he hardly requested the backstory. The pain in his eyes told so much, it was as if he could piece it together himself. After all, he too had lived it.
Family members maimed, their blood stained hands digging in concrete debris, strained wrists in zipties, scars on their cheeks and chests from torture – it was like looking into a mirror, only the reflection never changing despite being years apart.
“If you’re going to live in LA, you’ll need a car,” Muhammad told him. Ahmed did not ask, nor did he want to, but he hadn’t a choice. He was in need, and was grateful for the help.
The same car would now serve as shelter as he packed what was left of his harsh life inside it. Tears did not moisten his dry, dark face. At least this time around, violence was not the means of which his home was being taken from him. When they had raided his family home in Gaza, a smoke bomb woke his 2 year old niece, who traumatized the family with her breathless screams. An innocent child, choking alone in her room, she trembled like a tender leaf in a storm. Ahmed could only keep his head down, remembering her closed, crying eyes, repeating like a mantra on his tongue, “Alhamdulilah, Alhamdulilah.”
There was not much to pack. Blankets, his packed suitcases, toiletries, a water jug, his backpack ready for travel with his Palestinian passport, documents, wallet, and cash. For six months, he had stayed in the Santa Monica studio apartment, where just across the street his neighbors had Israeli flags in the window. It was as if he knew this day might come.
The men did not attempt to help him. They had no desire to. They simply stood at the side, smoking cigarettes, and talking amongst themselves, laughing and joking now that he had complied with their criminal decrees. Far from home, all that was on his mind was the battle which would ensue. The retaliation, Israel seemed to find so much joy in. Netanyahu had his death pact, instating his people so their messiah could return. Ahmed was free from it all, but his heart still resided in a place of olive trees and sounds of the muadhin calling to prayers five times a day.
He finished moving his belongings and dropped a sweater in his driver seat to begin backing out of the driveway.
“You all go to hell!” he shouted out of his car as he drove away, and they may as well have chased after him in fury, spitting in his direction, yelling the nastiest of curse words, the large one virtually throwing a middle finger at him from down the road.
Where to go? Ahmed thought. People were not inviting here. There was no shelter for someone like him. Back home, he could turn up at any house with lights on, not know the family, their history, not a name or acquaintance, and trust he’d find a place to sleep, maybe even eat. Only homeless shelters would provide that here, but he was not homeless. He was robbed and oppressed. There was no family to go to, they were all back home, preparing for the massacre en route.
It was unfair, the beauty of the day, the sun high in the sky, clouds staying out of its way allowing it to shine down on everybody in the city except him. But as soon as that idea dawned on him, “Alhamdulilah,” he muttered again to himself as he drove down the paved, safe boulevard.
He noticed the homeless people with tattered shoes, torn backs on their jackets, pushing carts and scratching their crackle-skinned necks. Individuals whom fortune had abandoned appeared on every block. Women walked in laughter past them, mouths wide open laughing from their filled stomachs, their skin full of glitter, gleaming like the moon shining in the afternoon, bodies basically in the nude. A stench of dissociation and repulsion of truth emanated off of them and the starving men, walking past them and their necks on an immediate swivel, “Alhamdulilah” he said once more.
Nowhere to go but the mosque. Back to God, his only recourse. “I have nothing but Allah,” he told himself. Sitting in his car, in the hot masjid parking lot, baking in the sun. No one was around to hear his complaints, except God.
***
Israel launches a retaliation on Gaza.
How many rockets? How many children? How many dead? Injured?
Ahmed got all his news from WhatsApp.
“How is our dear family?” Ahmed would ask his sisters back home. The questions he would send in rapid succession, questions upon questions, only to be met with gray check marks staring back at him, unchecked and unread. The phone holder on the other end, too occupied with death at their doorstep.
For how long will this continue? Ahmed thought.
He remembered just being a child, running errands for his busied mother in the city streets. Soldiers would tower above him in every alleyway and main street wearing rifles for protection from stones across their chests. If he walked those same streets today, the softest reaction would be a great beating, and forced escort away from the area, if not an arrest and jail-time, incommunicado.
Peaceful words are always on tips of human tongues, but hatred reaches the limbs much faster, by an ever stronger fist. “Who says we cannot get along?” Benjamin told him when they first met. “I know you are Palestinian, but we are in America. We don’t have to agree on everything. That’s why we live here.” The words actually put a smile on Ahmed's face.
“A good Jewish man,” he would say, describing him to family and friends. “A good man from Israel, gave me a place to stay in my time of need.”
That was before hatred could become manifest.
It’s something of an obligation, Ahmed found, upon the people of Israel. No matter where they go, who they are amongst, by what means unification it takes – their people come first. A flowery notion in theory, but a despicable one when genocide is involved, and ironically enough, they’d be the first to tell it so.
His phone sits on his chest, as he rests in his car in the mosque parking lot. He washes himself in the bathroom before they close, prays in congregation with mentally removed, busied American Muslims, running off to work between prayers. For meals, he eats rationed feasts of rice, meats, fruit, and tea on Monday and Thursday evenings when they break fast on the patio at night. Every other day, he snacks on donated food left in the halls by congregants.
Nights pass, but he speaks not to anyone of his condition. Muhammad is on a business trip, and he will have to wait until he returns to even garner the ability to ask for help once more. He eats alone in corners, pondering upon his family. The imam makes qunuut in a few prayers, raising his hands supplicating to Allah for the relief of “our brothers and sisters in Gaza.” Tears flow from every face, but he does not cry. He ran out of tears in Palestine.
Ahmed was already slim, but he discovered new bones shaping beneath his skin every day now. Growing skinny and old, he was now 45 years of age, unemployed and living out of his car in California, alone. Unmarried with no children, his sisters and parents, the remainder of the family he had left, refused to leave Palestine with him.
“We will die here,” they said on the day he left to America.
They sent him off well with prayers of prosperity, but he forgot prosperity didn’t live here. Not in America, despite how much he found that to be true, but not in this life – a life which only meant death. “Frequently remember the destroyer of pleasures,” the Prophet Muhammad once said. Death, the ultimate slayer of enjoyment. Good thing for Ahmed, he could never forget it. Visiting graveyards was the advice of the Prophet. Ponder on one’s future resting place, see what the end goal is, reorient to be free of pain in search of pleasure. Ahmed’s home was a graveyard, too. He could never escape it. He simply wanted a taste of pleasure, merely a hint of it – to get away from it for all but a second, a second yet to come.
Ahmed received video calls sporadically from his family, now in the thick of brutal Israeli retaliation. They were as okay as they could be, housing stranded families, eating the last of their food store, sharing what was left even if it meant splitting a grain of rice in two.
Ahmed wanted to see how long he could go forward, keep moving, and find something for himself. He never completed his education, but he knew how to read. Physical labor was an option, but his back hurt. And now he would wake up everyday with a headache, his neck strained from sleeping uncomfortably in his vehicle. The headache wouldn’t go away as well, for Israel was sending bombs now, and it was only a matter of time.
Occasionally assisting at a mediterranean restaurant in Glendale, he was able to pay his low rent through the work. The owner who hired him kept everything under the table, in cash, saying it was as a means of helping, while paying far less than the minimum wage. Ahmed, still in the process of receiving his green card, could only take what he could get.
When Muhammad returned, he called him and relayed the story.
“That is illegal what they did.” Muhammad said. “You will have to sue. We’ll find a lawyer.”
Getting kicked out of his apartment was all but another day in his dejected life.
“Is there maybe anywhere I can sleep?” Ahmed replied.
Muhammad got him a hotel for the week. When he checked in and laid on the comfortable mattress is when the deaths started rolling in. Laying on his hotel bed, his head sinking into the fluffed pillows alongside his heart that broke as he tossed and turned in subsequent sleepless nights, his red eyes facing the messages on his phone screen.
First his youngest sister – shrapnel slit her stomach open, her intestines falling onto the floor.
Then his older sister — pulled from the rubble at an illegally targeted hospital where she worked as a nurse.
Then his brother – shot point blank in the head by an IDF soldier who he attacked with a knife after his sisters returned to Allah.
Then his parents, both at once — bombed in their home, flattened, their sweet hands and feet he would kiss departed from their bodies and scattered in the concrete covered streets.
He lost 18 family members that week.
Tears in a hotel room, bawling with the uncried tears of his family with his face on the floor in submission to God. This had become his most natural state. A job, what is that? University? Not for him. A family? His family is gone, they no longer exist, and he wasn’t there to help. He will have to wait some time before seeing them. Only in Jannah would they reunite – that was the only way.
“I wish I had stayed,” was all he could think. But there was nobody left to tell it to. Who will hear his story? Who will do something about it?
***
Protests lined the streets. Blue stars on white flags sat across the way. Slices of watermelons were being eaten on the other side, with hummus and olive oil being dished out of the loud speakers. His keffiyah rested atop his head, the only energy in his body reserved for this. This was his job. This was Ahmed’s contribution to society. Vengeance was not in the equation – not yet – for he hadn’t his own, but anger and rage were, so he let them loose. Swarms of bodies, moving in succession like the people on the day of judgement all stomping forth with one case, to find God’s judgement and justice, they marched and shouted: from one body of water to the other, a land of dead people should be free, and some of them were, now one with the earth, soil surrounding them, white garments close to their skin.
***
The lawyer called:
“Tell me what happened.”
“I was kicked out of my apartment for being Palestinian.”
“How do you know that was the reason?”
“My landlord is Jewish. He called me the day after October 7th and told me to leave. He sent three men to stand outside my door and intimidate me.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said that I’m a smart guy, that I can figure it out.”
“Do you have your lease agreement?”
“Lease agreement?”
“Yes, you’re rental contract, for the apartment?”
“No. I was paying cash.”
“Then what he did was not illegal.”
The words entered Ahmed’s ears, dropped into his gut and stayed there.
“So I can’t do anything?”
“Just report it as a hate crime, that’s all you can do.”
“...how do I do that?
“I’ll send you instructions.”
“…Okay.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
***
Ahmed smokes a cigarette in the hotel parking lot while sipping a cup of tea from the lobby. Nobody contacts him. He is free of relationships and obligations, no need except his own. He watches the cars flying by and honking, the smell of congestion and aura of stressed people in the streets. Dense thoughts float in and out of his head and some words occasionally exit through the speech on his tongue. A few words stay there, and keep coming back. He whispers some of them quietly.
“I wish I was dead.”
He pauses, holding the cigarette between his fingers, blowing out smoke watching it escape as if savoring the words that just exited his mouth. He was surprised at how true they felt, like a fact he’d been searching for all his life had finally revealed itself. His voice grew in strength, and he repeated it louder,
“I wish I was dead.”
With it, a tightness in his chest he didn’t realize was so rooted almost simultaneously disappeared. He repeated it again, sucking at the cigarette with every repetition. His whisper grew into a statement, and before he knew it, he was shouting at the top of his lungs.
People near the lobby entrance looked at him in concern. They were confused at the site, for a great smile grew, and sat firmly on his face.
His arms raised in the air like victory had overcome him, the clamoring sound of those words exiting him vehemently. “Ya Allah! Ya Allah!” he yelped, his hands raised high in prayer.
People heard the Arabic and became fearful, but he doesn’t see them. It's as if angels surround him, light from above descending and caressing him softly. He felt the sunlight encompass him for once.
Nobody exists. He doesn’t either. He’s not a real person anymore. Maybe he never was.
His stomach clenched tightly and he fell into his seat in his car, bursting into tears once more. He cries ardently, and all that can come off his tongue are those soft words, until his eyes dry out. He finds the tears again the next day and the next with his head on the floor in his hotel room. Nothing changes. Not yet.
