Frankenstein in Baghdad

“Have you ever seen a golden piece of shit?” he asked. “Do you think it would be beautiful or just another piece of shit?”

He didn’t know why he had asked this. But when he looked at her, he found that she was just a tree with cracked bark, another eucalyptus tree on Abu Nuwas Street.

She was the only person who could give him hope and make him act a little mad—madness and hope that he greatly needed right now.

He didn’t want to perish without understanding why he was dying and where he would go after death, so he clung to life, maybe even more than others, more than those who gave him their lives and parts
of their bodies—just like that, out of fear.

You’re getting more and more like them. You’re trying to be one of them. Anyone who puts on a crown, even if only as an experiment, will end up looking for a kingdom.”

Anyway, the best way to protect yourself from evil is to keep close to it.

but who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day.

“‘Each of us has a measure of criminality,’ the Magician said, smoking a shisha pipe he had prepared for himself. ‘Someone who’s been killed through no fault of his own might be innocent today, but he might have been a criminal ten years ago, when he threw his wife out onto the street, or put his aging mother in an old people’s home, or disconnected the water or electricity to a house with a sick child, who died as a result, and so on.’

He makes everyone feel reassured and strengthens their faith—because he doesn’t fully believe in anything himself.

I’d go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing—fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we’re dying from the same fear of dying. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. And we’re going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end.”

He believed that emotions changed memories, that when you lost the emotion associated with a particular event, you lost an important part of the event

Although he wore glasses to read, Abu Anmar wasn’t blind and could see that the junk dealer was mentally unbalanced