Two months had passed since American military personnel, nonprofit workers, and Dari and Pashto translators shouldered past the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, waved their passports, and boarded cargo planes bound for the border. Wyce spent his waking hours following the story online. He cupped his hand around his phone to block the bone-dense Florida sun and learned that, while he’d been teaching a graduate seminar on the history of twentieth-century literary adaptation, another city of the former Afghan Republic, his birthplace and homeland, had fallen to the Taliban.
His mother, who still lived above the same computer repair store in Queens, where they’d first landed in America, called him daily. Her voice disintegrated more each time they spoke.
“Ma, you’re not still taking those painkillers, are you? The doctor said your knee should be manageable now. You can stop. You can throw away whatever’s left in the bottle.”
She laughed into the receiver. The laugh ended in a wheeze that segued into a fit of raspy coughs. “Manageable for whom? For you? You have no idea what I suffer.”
Privately, Wyce was glad his mother had some salve to rely on. Phone calls were no longer connecting to her brother in Shīnḍanḍ. He had lived with them when Wyce was a child, tending to their rooftop coop of snow pigeons and shuffling the playing cards before another round of panjpar. If pharmaceutical-grade opioids were on hand, Wyce would be taking them too.
“Phone your brother,” she said, ending the call abruptly to answer someone else’s.
After Wyce’s night class, during which half of his students were completing homework for other professors, his brother finally answered, the chortle of dorm-room laughter echoing off the thin plaster of his suite in upstate New York. “How are you handling everything? Are you taking care of yourself?”
His brother said he was chill, classes were fine. Was Wyce watching the game?
Just then, a round of roars erupted from the suite, then howls, then the flipping of a keg nozzle. Wyce held the phone away from his ear. No, he wasn’t watching the game. Who could possibly focus on sports at a time like this? He considered bringing up the evacuation, and how prisons across the eastern flank of the country had been broken open to swell the Taliban’s ranks with even more war criminals, but he thought better of it. Some gulfs were too wide to repair. His brother had been born in America. He’d been glued to the Cartoon Network, while, at the same age, Wyce had sold goat knucklebones to boys who played bujulbazi in a refugee camp.
Wyce had been hired as a professor after the runaway success of his first and only novel, a gay bildungsroman that loosely adapted The Karate Kid with the context of an Afghan refugee. The advance was more than he’d ever imagined. He’d made the final spot of The New York Times bestseller list for one, and only one, week, and he’d even begun to earn royalty checks. He’d known little about selling a book. His editor had insisted on changes, small embellishments with the aim of building out the story’s dramatic tension. “Could we make the father more abusive? What if the gentle imam had a gripe with the boy’s effeminacy?” When the book hit stores, Wyce saw that a subtitle had been added to the original title in italics: One Man’s Harrowing Escape from Islam.
No one in his family had read it. He’d never asked them to. As the award nominations and interview requests rolled in, he began to feel estranged from the meaning that his manuscript had accumulated. Strangers came up to him at signings to decry extremists and color-blind immigration policies. They fixated on the characters and storylines that suited them and ignored the ones that didn’t. Eventually, under the grip of a fervent lung infection, Wyce was forced to cancel the final leg of his book tour and, when AIPAC reached out to his agent offering a sizable fee for him to speak about the horrors of Islam, he resolved to put the whole project behind him.
The evacuation had jolted Wyce awake. Suddenly, he had something more palpable than a digital file on a computer full of unfinished documents. He joined group chats with Afghan poets, writers, and creatives, and they circulated fundraisers, shared immigration lawyers, and completed futile applications for humanitarian parole. He fielded voice messages from people he’d known during visits to Kabul as a teenager and, later, on university-funded research trips for book projects that had never materialized. These contacts told him in scratchy voices that the banks had closed, that the borders had shut down, and that the local markets were void of stock. Any produce left was rotten or exorbitantly priced.
He sent wire transfers to second cousins and former neighbors, and when they asked for something, anything, more durable — visas, seats on a chartered plane, guaranteed safety for their children, things he could neither promise nor provide — he told them to let him make some calls. He replaced sleep and sustenance and support with endless hours of podcasts by foreign-policy hawks and satellite radio updates on the National Resistance Front. Knowledge was the most redemptive form of power. Wasn’t that what he labored to make his students believe?
One night, depleted and wine soaked, Wyce found his knees buckling in the fire exit of his apartment building. The ankle sprain wasn’t acute, but it localized a pain he’d been struggling to cohere. Cradling his foot, he called his mother and confessed that he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d tried to make it work. He’d tried to scrounge together a certain kind of life for himself in this reptile pit that teetered on the brink of the world, but he craved home.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “If you think about Afghanistan too much, you’ll go crazy. Stay in Florida. It’s not just anywhere they’ll pay you to speak about your little books.”
His profession remained opaque to his mother. All through his MFA, she’d thought he was doing an MBA, and all through his PhD, she’d thought he was an apprentice librarian.
“Half his life in school, can you believe?” she’d say to her friends when they went out to Panera Bread after attending Jummah prayer, nevertheless pleased that she could tell them her son was a doctor of some sort. “I could have taught him to sort books myself. All that education, and for what?”
The next day, Wyce’s ankle was engorged. He emailed his students to say he’d been injured and to provide asynchronous work before the next class. Only one of them responded, though not with any reference to his ankle. The student wanted to know the due date of the final essay, which was clearly marked in the syllabus. Perhaps he was asking too much of his undergraduates. They were barely adults, but their classes were more frequent than those of his graduate students, which made them the people he saw the most every week. His neighbors were alien to him, and with no decent public transit in the area, he barely laid eyes on strangers. He decided to make more of an effort to connect. He searched for other Afghans in his neighborhood, in the rest of Miami-Dade County, and failing that too, in the whole southern tip of the state, the long knobby nose of which jutted out into the Caribbean. There were the Iranian Jews who made charcoal kabob in the Gables and fluffy basmati rice at that one Lebanese spot in Aventura, but those were exchanges of commerce. He wanted something else, something genuine, a culturally authentic experience to undercut his isolation.
For that reason, he considered it fortuitous when an old student of his named Shams — whom he’d first taught during a visiting professorship gig he’d landed in Australia — emailed him about a developing crisis in their MFA program, which they’d traveled to the US from Melbourne over the summer to begin. Wyce had fought a selection committee of his peers to get Shams an offer at the program where he taught, despite the lackluster writing sample that they’d submitted, and when Shams ultimately enrolled in another program, which had an all-white faculty but did admittedly pay a more competitive stipend, he felt that his staunch advocacy for Shams had been in vain.
Shams’s email detailed their first few weeks in workshop. A white student had submitted writing for peer review deigned to be explicit, peppered with racist and homophobic slurs, and that, according to Shams, graphically portrayed the rape of women. Failing to accept feedback, the white student had raised his voice. He’d told the class that he had a girlfriend who approved of the story and that he loved Black people, so he couldn’t be racist. The class divided into factional solidarities, and by the next night, a second student had livestreamed an attempt on her life amid growing pressure on the workshop instructor to resign. Shams wanted to know if it wasn’t too late to change their mind. Was there still a place available in Wyce’s program?
Wyce had taught creative writing long enough to know that what seemed like life and death to students became laughably overblown with time. Rivalries faded; intensities dimmed. The responsible advice would be telling Shams not to let the situation steal focus from the writing project they’d traveled all that way to America to complete. The distraction wasn’t worth it. Wyce’s ankle still hurt, though, and he’d finished the last of the charcoal kabob for breakfast. He wrote back to Shams and insisted that what was happening in their program was simply unacceptable. He’d see what he could do. Wyce sent an urgent email to the department chair and the program director. A pellet of sweat crossed the ridge of his widow’s peak. He described how Shams — a child of working-class immigrants, nonbinary and neurodivergent — was a prolific emerging writer and would be an asset to the institution’s diversity efforts. The admissions panel had already extended an offer to them once; it should have no problem doing so again.
Within minutes, Wyce received a screenshot of the policy for admitting new students, including a reminder of the lapsed deadline for finalizing incoming cohorts digitally highlighted in yellow. The director’s flat refusal stung, as though Wyce were the one receiving bad news from a prospective program.
That night, Wyce limped up the stairs of the Motel 6 in Hialeah to meet the man he’d been speaking to online. He knew that Charles would have a short, rotund figure and psoriasis on his neck and elbows. The room smelled of amyl nitrate and the burning of sandalwood incense intended to mask it. On the television, a porky white sissy in frilly pink lingerie appeared on all fours with a pacifier in her mouth. Charles was in bed, stroking his dick. His lips curled in horror. He’d recognized Wyce from the university.
When his birthplace of Herat was stormed by the Taliban, Wyce had tried the punching bag. He’d tried transcendental meditation, tried to transport himself elsewhere with Almodóvar films and mezcal. He’d tried desperately to cradle Petula, despite her wish to be left alone in the hanging chair on the balcony. Nothing soothed him for long. Unable to sustain an erection without worst-case scenarios floating into his mind, he’d opened an account on a fetish website and started chatting to the profile closest in distance to his office, a headless torso. That didn’t bother him. Wyce’s profile also showed only a headless torso. Before they exchanged pictures, Charles had asked if Wyce worked at the university. Wyce had said no and told him he was on the custodial staff at the mortgage broker across Route 1. Charles liked that. He said he kept his profile blank of images to screen for his colleagues at the university. “They’re all too stuck up to be on here, though,” he wrote, adding a winky face with punctuation. “And they don’t like the stuff we do.”
Wyce had figured out his identity: For many years, Charles had served as the associate dean of the School of Humanities. He had a wife and three grubby children. Wyce said he couldn’t send face pictures because he was discreet. What he did share were pictures of his capsular butt, his athletic torso, and his fantasies of annihilation. That was enough to engender weeks of filthy conversation with Charles. It thrilled Wyce to attend committee meetings with him, to observe his poor technique on exercise machines at the garish health center, to pass him in the hallway on the way to the restroom. Wyce would give Charles a cursory nod, and Charles would stiffen his mouth into a polite smile that he delivered on rote. It was Charles’s duty to be professional with his colleagues and subordinates. He managed several academic departments, and he’d overseen a number of brutal budget cuts and furloughs since Wyce was first hired.
“You shouldn’t be here,” stuttered Charles. He drew his dick to his belly as though closing a Rolodex. He folded himself over for protection. “What are you doing here?”
Wyce hovered by the entrance. He had never planned on meeting Charles in person. It was the taboo that kept him entertained. Charles never used sunblock; the neglect showed as craters on his skin. But Charles was the only one with the power to expedite a new student after the semester had already begun. He couldn’t get visas or seats on a chartered plane, but he could get this. The lacquered door handle dug into Wyce’s tailbone. There was no going back now.
Wyce cleared his throat and made his demand as he swiftly snapped a series of photographs of Charles in his pathetic fetal position. He threatened to expose Charles if he refused to comply, and to his surprise, Charles unfurled on the bed like an unclenched fist. He seemed surprised that the only thing Wyce was negotiating for was a minor administrative override.
He said he’d be in touch with the department chair and the program director in the morning. There’d be no repercussions if nothing ever came to light. Wyce thanked him and then apologized. He said he’d never meant to resort to such drastic circumstances. He observed the pile of porno cases stacked by the DVD player and the bottle of Cialis that was lit up under the lampshade like a nativity scene. He wasn’t satiated yet. He wasn’t ready to return home to his empty apartment and an aloof Petula. Wyce felt the softness between his legs begin to twitch unexpectedly. He swayed on the spot for a moment and then stepped into the room. A greedy grin mushroomed across Charles’s face.
Charles’s stroking resumed. On the adjacent duvet cover, as discussed in their online correspondence, he had laid out an assortment of feminine cross-dressing gear, including wigs, bibs, and women’s-size-twelve stripper heels, all of which Charles said he stored in a secret pay-per-month rental unit in Doral during the week.
Wyce unbuckled his trousers, and they fell to the floor. He was votive stepping out of the ring of fabric. He glided over to the duvet spread and glowered at its perversion. Something else was on display too, a thumb-sized hollow chamber surrounded by a row of flat black bars that featured a small padlock with a metal latch. Wyce had only ever seen sissies in chastity cages online.
Wyce’s gaze lingered on the device, and Charles groaned.
“Pick it up,” he said sheepishly. “Try it on, baby girl.”
The object was light to hold, and though Wyce’s fingers trembled, it compelled him.
Soon, under the thin red lace of pantyhose, the cage was visible only as a bulb of black metal. It clamped down tight around the base of his balls and grew warm and imperceptible against the flaccid skin that hung there, now unable to take blood and harden. He hummed in pleasure.
That night, Charles came vigorously. Wyce didn’t get off. After Charles showered and dressed, he placed the key for the chastity cage on the table under the lampshade. His eyes were fixed on the stained carpet. Emptied of cum, he was again more concerned with covering his tracks than reveling. After Charles left, Wyce decided not to unlock himself. A cursory scroll of Reddit informed him that the cage was designed to be kept on for only a few hours at a time, but he wasn’t ready to take it off. Not yet.
Hobbling down the Motel 6 stairs, and strangely reverent of his new appendage, Wyce felt that something feral had finally been domesticated. That he was in control.
Wyce prepared for the arrival of Shams by emailing them links to housing collectives and tips for accessing the covert coffers of research funding. He refrained from offering to retrieve them from the airport. There were boundaries to respect between students and professors, even at the graduate level.
The first time they met on campus for coffee, Shams was forty minutes late. They had sent ahead their order, a double espresso without sugar, which was cold by the time they joined Wyce under a banyan tree.
“They keep speaking to me in Spanish here. It’s ceaseless. Does this happen to you?” Shams wore leather pants, a long-sleeved black shirt that came down to their knees, and combat boots smudged around the edges with dried mud. Their forehead glistened with a sheet of sweat.
Wyce laughed and sat back on the bench. A lizard with an orange frill around its neck baked on the brick nearby. “Get used to it. There’s none of our kind of brown here. It takes a while to adjust.”
Shams downed the cup of espresso in one go. Then they interrupted Wyce, who was trying to catch them up on the material they’d missed in the first few weeks of class. “So I’ve been speaking to an agency working with Afghan families, five hundred people in total who’ve been evacuated to South Florida. Apparently, they could use some volunteer help with welcoming them and getting them oriented. I’m going over later today.”
Why hadn’t Wyce thought of reaching out to a nonprofit? Across the lawn, the department chair exited the adjacent building, striding under the eave, probably between appointments. Wyce wanted to shrink his neck into its socket. She glanced briefly toward the pair and visibly pursed her lips in the middle. Wyce’s heart began to race, and he noticed that he’d lost track of the conversation.
“Don’t you think it’s a little early to be helping anyone else adjust to the city? You just got here.”
They rolled their sleeves up above their elbows; the light brown hairs that ran the length of their arms held a sheen of dew that reflected the light. “I’m better off than they are. If you’re too busy or whatever, you don’t have to help out. I can do it alone. I just thought I’d ask.”
The papers in need of grading were the first thought Wyce had. He hadn’t yet read the Edith Wharton excerpt he’d assigned to his graduate students, and none of his lesson plans for the next week were written because he’d decided to design a new course from scratch that semester, back when it was still inconceivable that America would abandon a country it had spent two decades occupying militarily. The first year he taught, Wyce would stay up late devising syllabi on diasporic literature, on the radical dispatches of third-world feminists and the war on terror. Now, he preferred the critical distance of lecturing on Patrick White and Coetzee. It was safer. He could leave the classroom without the classroom following him.
As Wyce started articulating why he had no capacity for additional responsibilities, a row of creases surfaced on Shams’s forehead. It made Wyce fear that he was failing them somehow, letting the minutiae of pedagogy cloud the broader priorities that really comprise a life.
“But anyway,” he concluded, leaning forward and deepening the depression he’d made with his finger in the now concave side of his plastic coffee cup, “of course I’d be happy to help in any way I can. What could be more important than that?”
Shams smiled. For a moment, it looked like they wanted to hug Wyce. Then they reclined on the bench. They told Wyce about their Polish mother and their Afghan father, the hoops they’d jumped through to get a stable prescription for PrEP, their trouble finding the injectable hormones they were using to transition, “not to go from point A to point B,” they said, “but to gender-hack my body.” It was the kind of familiarity Wyce had craved. He desperately wanted to share the secret satisfaction he’d been deriving from his chastity cage, the intoxication of forced erection control. Yes, it was inappropriate to confide in a student about such things, but didn’t they share something that superseded the university? Would Shams really appraise him differently?
Wyce looked down at his watch. “I have to go teach my undergrads now. Would you like to come over for tea before the volunteer induction? It’s not possible to catch a train there. I’ll drive us.”
They seemed nonplussed by the invitation. Entertaining a friendship beyond the strict parameters of the university didn’t have to be disastrous. It wasn’t like Wyce was making any kind of sexual advance. He had nowhere near the clout of Avital Ronell or Spivak. His career couldn’t weather a scandal like that.
When Shams showed up at his door, their long gray sack of a shirt was drenched, and their hair was so slick from sweat that it might as well have rained. Wyce offered to let them take a shower, a pleasantry, though Shams gladly accepted it. The whole time they were in there, Wyce anticipated what they might be noticing. He hadn’t made the bathroom presentable. He walked to the closed door and back to the kitchen several times, almost expecting Shams to ask him through the column of hot water what the newly opened stainless-steel cleaning solution was doing among his toiletries.
He adjusted the Carrie Mae Wheams photography book on the coffee table and steeped a new thermos of green tea from the Chinese grocer, grateful to the cage installed snugly around his ball sack and shaft for anchoring him amid the uncertainty.
Wrapped in Wyce’s linen tunic and still dripping wet, Shams stepped onto the mosquito-proofed balcony at last. They wore a nervous expression and wavered a little on the stoop. Then they brushed Petula off the hanging chair in the corner where she liked to lounge, took the seat, and said they couldn’t come with Wyce anymore.
“What do you mean? It was your idea in the first place.”
Shams pulled the hem of the tunic around their knees, stretching the delicate fabric, ruining a garment that didn’t belong to them, that they hadn’t even asked to wear. “I misjudged how strong that edible was, dude. I took way too much.”
“What edible?” Wyce scanned the balcony and the entryway leading onto it for some further explanation. His shoulders started to itch.
A childlike giggle spread across Shams’s face. “I ate it all before I left home.”
“Come on, please, it’s getting late. We have to leave now.”
Again, they shook their head, and this time the motion caused the hanging chair to rock, almost knocking into Petula, who was orbiting the seat in an attempt to reclaim her spot. “Just the thought of meeting new people right now is giving me a panic attack. And they’re Afghans? They might not gender me correctly. They might be homophobic. I don’t know, dude.”
Wyce’s tea was still too hot when he sipped it. The cup rattled. Someone was waiting for them. Real connection was finally on offer.
“What if I gave you two hundred bucks? Would you come if I put cash in your hand right now?”
From their embryonic repose, Shams inspected Wyce, their eyelids scrunched tight. “Five hundred and I’ll come,” they said at last. “But you have to lead the conversation and drive me home.”
After a guided meditation video on YouTube and an ATM stop, Shams and Wyce were an hour late. The initiation consisted of one matronly Haitian woman holding a clipboard and standing in front of a rundown apartment complex where the refugees were temporarily housed; it was not dissimilar to the Motel 6 in Hialeah. She was coordinating the large-scale operation of delivering donation bundles to room numbers and assigning volunteers to new arrivals.
“Can we select the kind of people we get paired up with?” Shams asked, going red as they started to speak. “I’d like to work with other LGBTQIA people. If possible, I mean.”
Wyce stared daggers into the back of their head. “We’ll take whatever we’re given,” he said.
The Haitian woman, on whose breast was embroidered the name Catholic World Services, ignored Shams and handed Wyce a small slip of paper with a room number on it. She said that there were only three people who hadn’t been formally welcomed, sisters sharing a room. “The operation is already wrapping up. Why come at all if you’re going to be so late?”
Wyce eked out a feeble laugh, as if she’d made a joke. She stared staunchly at him.
The three sisters in question refused to open the door, addressing them in a guarded voice through the narrow slit of the chain lock. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Should we tell them we’re gay?” Shams whispered under their breath, perhaps unaware that their voice was louder than they thought. “Do you think they know already?” It was possible that being vulnerable with the women might disarm them, but Wyce didn’t know anything about their beliefs or background beyond the thick Bamiyan dialect of the one who was talking.
“Why did they bring us to this place? This is uninhabitable terrain. The woman told us Walmart for food. We walked two hours to get there. In this heat. Are they trying to kill us?”
Wyce floundered to make his response sound convincing. “People do it. They live whole lives here. It’s not always so hot or hostile. I promise. You could be happy.”
Her beady eyes leered at Wyce from the slit. Another pair of eyes appeared beside them. “Leave the basket down there. Then go, Americans,” said the woman who was holding the door. Unlike that of Wyce and Shams, her Dari was impeccable, authoritative even. Wyce felt the blister of her words. He couldn’t imagine the true scale of the pain without the protection of his cage.
The door shut firmly in their faces. One room over, an elderly man with a goatee sprouting from his chin was seated outside on the cushion of a manual walker, smoking a cigarette. A younger woman with brown skin was perched on his lap. The pair stopped speaking entirely as, filled with something close to remorse, Wyce and Shams left the bundle on the mat.
Shams took off down the stairs, and Wyce hobbled closely behind them, swearing at the dull pain that exerting pressure on his injured ankle induced. When Wyce reached the parking lot at last, Shams was leaning against the passenger door, heaving under waves of dread.
The following Friday, Wyce entered a friend’s housewarming party in Coconut Grove to find that Shams was already there, perched astride the pool table. They were engrossed in conversation with a tall woman whom Wyce didn’t recognize. The moment Wyce laid eyes on them, a strange emotion flowered inside him. Shams was already making friends.
That morning, a dermatologist had inspected the sores developing around Wyce’s pubic bone. They had started out as a redness and then grew more irritated, developing a swollen yellow character that filled with pus secretions, which got severer the longer Wyce kept the cage locked onto his body. “It can’t just be stress,” the dermatologist said, lifting his glasses to the bridge of his nose. “The outline of the sores is too precise. Something else is going on.”
Wyce confided in the doctor, who displayed more concern than surprise. He told Wyce to cease use of the chastity cage immediately, or else the sores would continue to worsen. An infection in that area could easily spread and impact other organs, other bodily functions. The consequences could be permanent. Something firm dislodged inside Wyce, and with it came the looming certainty of his own despair.
This was the last night Wyce would wear the metal appendage. He couldn’t ignore the doctor’s advice forever, but he could revel in one final moment, a victory lap of sorts, though each time he plundered the rum bar, it aggravated the sores, which bristled with bursts of pain as the fabric of his underwear rubbed against the inflamed skin along his pubic bone. He kept his interactions with Shams brief and cordial. Since that day at the motel, the last time he’d seen Shams outside the classroom, a stiff tension had developed between them. He’d heard whispers that Shams was sharing passages from Wyce’s novel in a group chat with other students in the cohort, berating him with yawning emojis and the word sellout. He knew it was best to leave it alone. There were enough people in attendance at the housewarming that they weren’t forced to interact. But then, when Wyce saw Shams hug the host goodbye, he instinctively followed them outside, the alcohol mollifying his pain at the same time that it emboldened him.
He caught up to Shams by a prickly hedge that carved out the perimeter of someone’s property. An escaped pet macaw dived between two flaming-orange flamboyán trees overhead, shrieking. “Shams, Shams, hold up a minute.” Shams turned around. They were the only two people in sight. Pedestrians were a rarity in this city. “I wanted to ask how you’re faring. With the evacuation. With everything.”
Shams touched their elbow. An iguana in the hedge made the bush twitch as if it were convulsing. “As good as can be expected, I guess. It’s hard to feel.”
“Listen, I have something that might help you.” Uneven on his feet, Wyce rocked forward and then regained his balance. Shams took a step back. “It’s already made me feel a helluva lot better. By leaps and bounds. I mean it.” Against the odds — the racist borders and the administrative deadlines and the war criminals — they’d found each other. Why was Shams so stubborn? Why didn’t they see it? “I want to give it to you. But you have to trust me, okay?”
Shams looked uneasy. That knot Wyce had noticed in the corner of their mouth when they first met up on campus had returned. They scanned the distance, scratched the back of their neck, and then returned their gaze to Wyce. “Uh, okay?”
A blue Tesla backed out of a driveway and careened toward Route 1. Wyce fished the key out of his pocket, tucked his thumb under his shorts and underwear, and pulled the fabric of both garments around the metal appendage that surrounded his genitalia. He wasn’t expecting Shams to recoil in horror so suddenly, to start backing away, to press their open palms toward him. “Wait, wait, just one second,” he urged, trying to multitask, lurching forward as he fumbled with the lock. His sweaty fingers were making the latch slippery. He groaned from the spires of pain. “Chastity’s the only thing that worked for me. Will you just try it on before you say no?”
“Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you? I don’t want to see that shit. Gross. It looks infected. And cover yourself up. Have some decency.”
By the time Wyce had inserted the key and unlocked the latch, Shams was jogging away from him. They crossed the street and kept cutting glances over their shoulder. Wyce considered running after them. He could explain that there was nothing sexual about exposing himself. He had only done it to help them with their grief. He’d never meant to write a novel that fed into stereotypes about Islam, one that conservatives had twisted into fodder for occupation and invasion.
Wyce held the hollow metal contraption limp in his hand. The key was still wedged inside like an antenna. As the elastic from his underwear slowly returned to its resting position, grazing the length of his shaft and rubbing along the open sores that festered around its perimeter, all the blood drained from his face. His judgment had been clouded. The brief sense of relief from guilt and shame and loneliness had only delayed the inevitable. Come Monday, there would be consequences for his decision, for overstepping a boundary with his student. Emails, disciplinary procedures, perhaps even a Title IX investigation. The cage clanged to the ground.
Dead was his uncle. Lost was his homeland. Gone was the morsel of comfort he’d found.
