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Arabic and French and English, crowd the shelves. Husayn looks like a man who practices his scowl in front of a mirror. He is thin like a weed, dark, with a soft, fleshy mouth. But in his eyes a flame stands, a fire that makes your bones twitch under your skin. I wonder if he is high or crazy.
    Only eight or nine people are at the apartment; the only one I talk to for longer than five minutes is a young man with a scar marring the corner of his mouth; his lip looks twisted. He tells me his name is Khaled, same as mine. He seems nervous, also like me. Food and drinks, and I am introduced all around, the baby brother. Or am I the promising candidate? I nod and smile and shake hands and try to keep my hands steady.
    They talk, but they do not start chatting of plots or bombs or retribution. They talk of politics—hatred for the Israelis, disdain for Syria, aggravation and fury with the West. They sound like old men, not young firebrands. The cigarette smoke thickens like a cloud because the windows are kept shut at Husayn’s insistence. I notice, after twenty minutes, that I am the recipient of many sidelong glances.
    This is a test.
    Fine. I wish to fail the test. I smoke my last cigarette, sip at tea, and tell Samir that I’m walking down to the corner store to get some more cigarettes.
    “I have cigarettes,” he says, fumbling at his pocket.
    “Not the kind I like.” Whatever brand he offers, I will instantly hate.
    “Poor students shouldn’t be picky,” Husayn says. Next to him, the boy with the scarred mouth nods, gives me a nervous smile, and offers to walk with me.
    “No, I’ll just be a moment,” I say. I give a false-note awkward laugh. I want out of the room. Maybe I’ll take a bus home and tell Mama and Papa that their two oldest sons have lost their minds. I excuse myself and walk into the rain.
    The store sits on the corner. I buy the cigarettes and I stand under a store awning, the warm honey of smoke calming me, in no hurry to return, watching the pedestrians a block away on fashionable Rue Hamra. My brothers. Getting involved with a wannabe terrorist-slash-bookworm who lives in an expensive apartment. Madness. I start to build the arguments in my mind, the words I will use to tell them they’re making a mistake. Blood of Fire, what a name. I imagine the drive home as my brothers will try to convince me that they’re serving justice. Perhaps they are. Yes, I understand their frustrations with the political system, with the West, with the rest of the Arab world, and . . .
    The blast sounds more like a truck coughing up a ton of grit, more a rumble of machinery than death. I have heard explosions before. This one’s boom grabs my bones. I freeze and then horror fills my skin. I am running down the street, the cigarette crushed between my fingers and I don’t feel the cinder scorch my hand.
    The boy with the scarred mouth, the other Khaled, smacks into me, knocks me down, slams a foot into my chest as he keeps running. I get up and run toward the apartment building.
    Smoke from Husayn’s building roils into the rain. The third floor, where Husayn’s apartment is. Was.
    A body, burning, crumples from the window. Falls, arms cartwheeling, smashes into the rubble-filled sidewalk as I run toward it.
    Gebran. I start to scream. His arms that carried me burning, his fingers that strummed Bach and folk songs burning, his dark curly hair burning. He lands in front of me, ten feet away. I land on top of him to smother the flames. I don’t feel his flames, I don’t feel pain, I feel his death pass through me.
    Hands grip me and pull me up from Gebran. A mask of surprise covers his dead face. Smoke wafts from his shoulders, his hair. Sirens wail. I bolt up the stairs, fighting against a surging tide of panicked tenants fleeing the building.
    The floor is a ruin. Husayn’s apartment and the one next to it are destroyed. The fire rages in the two apartments, but from the stairwell I see fragments of the