But this was what had come to him, this was what woke him up and led him to his desk, and Waleed, uncertain about so many other things in his life, was always sure about his writing. He had started with a small memory, one in which he woke up in a sudden fit, damp with the sweat, alive with panic.

After the move from the District, Waleed had begun to have nightmares. He would wake up shouting, calling for his mother, telling her the roof had been blown off, the ground had given way, their house was nothing but dust and rubble, rubble and dust.

I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

It was not the voices in themselves that prompted such anguish with disastrous consequences, but the disruption of something beyond, and something that might be considered innate and particularly human: a sense of self, of the privacy of the self, and a precarious notion of free will.

If any light or hope can be found in this profoundly sad expression of the human predicament, it might be in the way that, as these determined and desperate acts of self-harm arise in some, they as mysteriously pass. I remain nevertheless haunted by the events I have described.

He was my baby brother and I was supposed to take care of him. The fact that I had nothing to give him filled me with shame. The fact that I didn’t want to talk to him filled me with shame. I didn’t want to talk to him because I knew he would talk about Anabel. I didn’t want to think about her, so I couldn’t think about him. I shoved my phone back in my purse, left his text unanswered. My father, I thought, would have been disappointed in me.