Danny Ramadan
When Adam Switched
Nine months ago, each of us slept in his assigned post, but since the incident that killed our commanding officer, we have decided to gather in this one. During the day, we walk back and forth between posts kicking sand with our holed boots and searching for miserable rabbits to hunt with our shotguns. Sometimes we walk alone, sometimes we walk together, exchanging random jokes and insulting one another’s inability to target.
We gather at night. Our fingers smell of gunpowder, our breaths are weak and shallow, our clothes are covered in dry blood—some of it is recent, some we are not sure. We start a fire and grill the scrawny rabbit without oil or spices. We eat with our fingers and smudge the grease on our pants. Our uniforms haven’t been washed for weeks, but water is scarce, and we save it all for drinking when we get it. We collect raindrops in our metal bowls. We value the metal bowls; they’re all that’s left. All the glass bottles are broken and all the spoons are lost. We gather the bowls on the rooftop of our post, anticipating rain. Adam wakes up early to bring them in so the water doesn’t evaporate in the harsh morning sun. He didn’t choose this task, but we all agree he should be the one to do it while the rest of us enjoy an extra couple hours of sleep before the heat drenches our beds and covers us in sweat.
Winter is gone, and spring is slipping by fast. Adam says that the weather feels like the jellyfish his father used to catch in his fishnet and throw to the boat hull for him and his brother to watch. The poor, brainless creatures would crumble under the late August sun. Adam wants to explain some more, but we all ask him to shut the fuck up.
We are thirsty. Two of us have gone missing after chasing the mirage of water evading them between the sand dunes. One was tricked by the illusion. He was our driver, and he rode his old Soviet jeep, our only vehicle, up and down the dunes until he disappeared, never to be seen again. The other knew it was a fantasy but preferred to indulge in it rather than wait pointlessly by the dead transmitter. He walked toward the optical illusion, ignoring us as we called him back, until we couldn’t see him anymore. We talked about him yesterday, but none of us could remember his name. Weeks ago, we joked about drinking each other’s piss. But today, when someone tells the same joke, it doesn’t make us laugh as much.
We avoid the commander’s hut after his death the same way we did while he lived. We walk circles around it, only getting close to shut its door every morning after the night wind blows it open. He was a meek man, that commander of ours. He was told by his superiors to bring us here, and he never asked why. We assume it’s the terrorists nearby, or our proximity to the Iraqi border. No one knows for sure. We all agreed the best story was that the commander shot himself in the face while cleaning his gun. We settled on this to cover for one of us who said he shot him over an argument about water supplies. We all gathered in the commander’s hut when we heard the gunshot. We saw them both: our dead leader, bleeding in his bed, and the soldier holding the gun. We reported the death of the commander through the old transmitter, but we did not hear back.
He is probably not the first, nor will he be the last, dead commander in this war. We argued over his final resting place. Some offered to carry him out of our camp, away from our gathered mud huts, beyond the broken fence, into the dark desert. Some wanted to dig his grave right there inside his office. Adam thought it funny: he read a story once about a man who hid the body of his dead friend under the floorboards, only for the dead man’s loud heart to reveal the truth. We tell Adam to shove his stories up his ass and decide to leave the commander’s body in his bed. A fine idea at the time, when we thought someone would come for him. No one came. For a while, the hut smelled like rotten meat. Now, we can’t smell a thing.
Sometimes, we exchange fire with the terrorists. We hear them shriek from across the sandbanks, close enough to recognize individual voices, too far to hear the words of their religious chants. These are usually followed by one or two mortar shells and a short burst of machine gun sounds. Adam says that the first time he heard the rattling noise of a machine gun, it reminded him of his grandmother’s Singer sewing machine. She used to put her glasses, as thick as a bottle heel, on her nose, he said, and slide the fabric through the machine while her feet seesawed its pedal, producing an endless loop of clicking noises as well as dresses for women in his family. We ask him to describe the dresses and it takes him a minute or two before he realizes we are mocking him. He falls silent.
We always thought that the terrorists’ chants were stupid on their behalf.
Why announce their intention to fire at us and lose the element of surprise? We concluded, weeks ago, that they are not invested in this war, similar to us. Their attacks are an act of responsibility assumed to justify their isolation in this godforsaken place. We’ve come to appreciate the warning. We respond in kind, screaming the usual “Allah, Syria, Bashar al-Assad” chant for a minute or two before firing the routine mortar shell or machine gun round. We are running low on water, but mortar shells we have aplenty.
There was that time one of us shot two rounds of bullets straight up to the sky, and we all laughed hysterically until the bullets rained down upon us. We ran in circles; the terrorists must have thought we were dancing. We were shouting as if our voices would shield us against the fallen death. One of the bullets dove through one of our helmets and ruptured it, leaving one of us close to death. We discussed the matter feverishly, and the one who shot the bullets was evidently sorry. Opinions were divided; Adam wanted us to carry the injured on a stretcher or with a pole to which we’d tie his hands and legs—like the prisoners of African tribes Adam had seen on television with his brother— and walk in the direction of the closest military camp. We were quick to shush him as we didn’t know the right direction and only the long-dead commanding officer could read maps.
Finally, we managed to unify our voices and agreed to end the poor soul’s suffering, his shouts now dazed and animalistic. Adam refused to help, even when we all agreed we could see bits and pieces of the injured soldier’s brain stuck to the inside of his helmet. Instead, he stood there watching us gather around the soon-to-be dead man. We buried the soldier a couple hundred meters away from our post, closer to the post he was supposed to guard. Adam refused to dig the grave. We reported the accidental death back to our leadership via the transmitter, blaming the terrorists. That’s when the transmitter died, and we never heard back.
Adam is irritating; we all agree. We don’t know why this city boy with soft skin and thin fingers ended up here. We are the forgotten ones with no families to vouch for us, no relatives to cry over our deaths. We are the orphans of Syria, prisoners released from years of punishment when the Syrian army was low on men to serve in the corners of this unorganized war. We used to gather in the prison’s courtyard, our only time in the sun, and fight one another—Adam was never there.
Adam looks like a soft soul, unable to kill a cockroach with a slipper. Usually, the sons of the city find the right connections to avoid being thrown in the middle of the desert with us. They serve as guards at flashy Damascus nightclubs owned by military commanders. Or they pay a poor soul a monthly salary to stand in for them while they sit in their mothers’ homes drinking milk with their coffees. Before the war, if one of us was offered the chance to be paid to say he was so-and-so, he would take it. Free food, free accommodation, getting paid just to stand there. It was a sweet deal, and easy: all the wealthy and powerful do is appear at the military exam, spend a month or two in training camp, and, when they are finally assigned, give their documents to the replacement, who shows up at their assigned post. Since the war started, however, the supply of doppelgängers has dropped, and the price per head has gotten much higher. Now, the chance of being killed, of losing an eye or a limb in a battle with the terrorists, is a gamble. We wonder if Adam couldn’t afford to hire someone and was forced to join as himself.
We decide to go through Adam’s enrollment files when he is not around. They are in the pile of papers stacked on our dead commander’s desk. We wait for him to go to sleep one night, and then gather in the dead commander’s office, ignoring the large pool of dried blood and scattered bones by the commander’s bed. We find Adam’s papers and rush to decode the commander’s lousy handwriting. We discover that Adam’s father forced him to join the military camp, insisted they take him and send him wherever he was needed. We recognize the father’s name; he is a well-known figure in the fishing industry, with many government connections and enough resources to hire ten replicas for his son. What kind of sin did Adam commit for his father to abandon him in this way, we wonder. The papers, otherwise, provide no answers.
We rarely sleep. We spend the night chitchatting, talking shit, watching the stars, or enthusiastically describing our sexual escapades, which many of us know are delusional or pure fiction. But we never dispute; we listen as one of us tells of the time he squeezed the nipples of a young woman between his fingers. Another speaks of the married woman from next door who grabbed his member and cuddled it expertly while her husband was at Friday prayers. We used to go deep into the dark desert to masturbate. We hid behind the gathering huts, or the last standing fence. Now one of us walks a couple of short steps away from the campfire and returns red-faced, zipping up his pants. We laugh, and we tell him not to play with it or else he will go blind. Minutes later, another of us turns his back, and we laugh again.
Adam says that while he and his brother did everything together, as twins do, they never did that together. He is identical to his brother, he says, in every way that a naked eye can see, but he never had the urge to uncover what he couldn’t see. We doubt that, we tell him. He must have looked down there before, in joint baths as children, in the swimming pool changing room as adults. We insist that he is lying and he protests. We ridicule him until he walks away, claiming he wants to pee.
Adam is the oldest, but looks young and petite, the shortest of us all. His uniform is the cleanest because he walks carefully and changes into a pair of shorts and an undershirt during the afternoons, a soft hoodie over a pair of jeans at night. He talks gently and uses “I” sentences and apologizes when he raises his voice. Once, we pushed him into the mud for shits and giggles. He fell onto his arms and knees, an inch deep in filth. He tsked his tongue repeatedly and gave us a dirty look before walking back to his post to clean himself with an old towel. We’d expected him to flip out, to call us names or punch one of us in the face, but he didn’t. He remained calm, and by the evening we all forgot it happened.
Adam returns from his pee break holding a large bottle. Our attention peaks, and we survey him as he explains that he found it buried in the sand, his flooding pee having uncovered the bottleneck by the commander’s hut, two hundred meters behind our own. Using sand to clean its outside, he realized that he was holding an abandoned bottle of vodka. A prized possession in the middle of the desert. Who buried it? The commander? How would he have managed to smuggle it here? We don’t know. We ask these questions while looking at the standing Adam with the bottle in his hand.
We ask him to share, and he insists that drinking on an empty stomach, while dehydrated, might not be the best idea. We scorn him for denying us the joy of drinking and one of us takes the bottle from him. We open it, each taking a greedy swig from the bottle’s lips, cleansed of piss with sand, before passing it along. Adam looks at the bottle for a second, brings it to his nose to smell and immediately retreats. He almost declines, but when he sees the joy of upcoming mockery in our eyes, he reluctantly empties a gulp or two of vodka down his throat.
Not half an hour later, we are all drunkenly laughing, some standing, some sitting, some laying on their backs looking at the dark skies, stunned with its stars. We roll the empty bottle between us like a ball, kicking it with our feet, laughing when it breaks against the stones surrounding our agitated fire. We all feel sorry for a second at the lost glass bottle, maybe useful for saving water, but then we forget about the whole thing.
We each tell of home: our mothers, all older women with tight lips and soft foreheads who wore long, black shawls and brought us homemade dessert during our days in prison. Our childhood homes, all starkly furnished, with hidden corners for mischief-making. Our fathers, all dark-eyed men who came home late and rarely spoke of anything but the economy of the country. The president will bring back Syria’s prosperity, they insisted. Your days will be better than ours, they lamented. Yet here we are: prisoners in an open cell.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Adam says. He interrupts our laughter, then repeats himself. We heard him the first time, and the second, but he repeats it a third. His face glows in the fire, cheeks red. His eyes are glued to the flames, as if he sees shadows right before they dissipate. We wait. He remains quiet, so we blame him for ruining the mood and killing our buzz. We ask him why he can’t just be one of the people, why he can’t just be one of us.
“I did everything right not to end up here,” he says, swearing he should have been exempt from military service. We mock him. Most Syrians end up here, some way or another. He sits motionless, until we think he is done for the night. Then, he takes off his right shoe and shows us his big toe.
Its base has an ugly scar, clear marks from the stitches that reattached the toe to his body. We gather around to see, pointing fingers, whispering to one another, as if he can’t hear us. We all know that if you are missing your big toe, the one you need to run, you can avoid going to the front lines and end up with a desk job in the city. He claims his brother talked him into cutting it off. We ask him to tell us the story, and finally, for the first time since he joined us here, Adam opens up.
When they were younger, Adam and his twin brother were inseparable, he claims. He says that they fought about who was birthed first and continued to argue over the years on the number of minutes that separated them on the night of their first cry. Their arguments got nasty many a time, but they secretly both enjoyed it. Twins ran in their family; Adam’s father devoured his own twin in the womb, according to their grandmother, and their grandfather had a twin who died fighting the French in the late forties. Their grandfather mourned his dead brother for years and was haunted by the day he had to wash his twin’s body, when he’d held an identical corpse to his own in his hands and cleaned away the blood of war, the residue of bullets.
Adam says that his brother was going to die in the womb as well. The two twins were snuggled inside the belly of their mother when the umbilical cord that was nurturing one of them wrapped around the other’s neck, getting tighter and tighter. The doctors had been worried since the start of the pregnancy. They were not sure which baby would survive, so they kept a close eye on both. Their mother spent nine months laying on her back, drinking endless glasses of grapefruit juice, the only thing she craved and could stomach. Adam’s grandmother disagreed; she said his mother spent her days sneaking into the kitchen and eating black olives from the jar. She saw her on a late night, wrist deep in olives, trying to catch a juicy, black one with her bare fingers.
As the due date got closer, the danger of one twin ending the life of the other got higher, and Adam’s mother had to have a C-section to save the lives of both infants. She didn’t want to do a C-section; all the women in her family prided themselves on the fact they had natural births at home with no doctors or drugs. She also knew that if she had a C-section once, she wouldn’t be able to have a natural birth ever again, wouldn’t be able to give her husband the tribe of children he’d dreamed of. “We will have these two boys,” Adam’s father said to his wife in the last minutes before she went under. “You will give me boys, and that’s all I want in life.”
Their father once told them the truth about their birth. They were sitting on his boat—he’d taken them fishing in the middle of the night—but both disregarded the information in favor of their heated argument. The C-section story, though, did add oil to the fire of the children’s fights on the position of the older. Instead of their righteous passage through their mother’s body, they were pulled out by the hands of a doctor, who decided then and there who should be the elder.
The two grew up completely identical, according to Adam, who says his mother had to dress them in different colors to tell them apart. She would dress one in blue and the other in green, and then the next day she herself would forget which color was which child and rename the two of them once again. Her confusion was understandable: she spent days with her husband trying to find a birthmark, a finger too short, a toe twisted in an unusual direction, a hair growth behind an ear that would distinguish them, but she was never successful. It became a game for the parents, who searched through the bodies of their newborns for any marks, analytically recounting every mole and every wrinkle of skin.
But the boys were completely identical throughout their childhood. Even their baby teeth were indistinguishable, before falling out on the same day. At first, the boys didn’t realize how similar they were. But when they hit the age of three, they could finally tell that they were each other’s copy. They played a game of switch on their parents, their relatives, and even the neighbors. One of them would pretend to be the other for hours, or days, until they abruptly decided to reveal the truth, or forced their parents to guess. Was he really the other twin? No one knew. Adam insists that sometimes even the twins couldn’t tell, nor did they care.
As they got older, the twins found new ways to benefit from their identical appearances, especially with the matching school uniforms forced upon them. They divided classes and exams between them and worked out a perfect schedule based on a well-organized calendar of sick days and exam exempts. While one of them focused on arts and social studies, the other focused on math and biology. By the end of their school years, at the age of sixteen, their switching game had become habit, and its benefits included a great school record for both.
Adam sighs. He scratches his face; his voice is hoarse. We can’t tell if that’s the alcohol affecting him, or if he is recalling an unhappy memory. He says that the divide took place on a day his brother and he were riding their bikes home from school. He can’t recall which one of them was which that day, and he insists that’s an important part of his story. We let him continue.
He says that when his brother hit a roadblock driving ridiculously fast down a hill, his bike twisted around, and he lost control of the handlebars. Adam says he can see the whole accident in slow motion: his brother screaming, the bike flying a couple of meters in the air, sliding to its side, and trapping his brother between its metal. Adam didn’t know what to do other than watch his brother’s bike deliver him into oncoming traffic. Rooted in place, he anticipated the loud crash. But the driver coming toward his brother managed to stop right at the perfect second, hitting the sliding bike strongly enough to send it flying, but not strongly enough to kill its passenger.
Adam snapped to and rushed to his brother’s aid. He was on his back, aching loudly, howling in pain. His shoes had flown off and his feet were stuck in the bike’s chain and ring. To Adam’s horror, he saw his brother’s large toe was severed and had landed a few feet away. Adam swears the toe was still wiggling while the blood gushed from his brother’s wound. “Fuck, fuck fuck fuck,” Adam repeated, trying to stop the bleeding. He took off his T-shirt and stood topless in the middle of the street, using the shirt as a cloth, stuffing it around his brother’s open wound.
“Fuck, this is not good,” Adam’s brother said between howls. “We have our final exams in a week.”
Adam was bewildered that his brother could think of school. “You’ll be fine,” he insisted.
“No, you idiot, you are taking my math exam,” his brother said.
People gathered around the two of them; some were curious, others offered to take them to the hospital. The driver of the car that hit Adam’s brother paused for a moment before scratching the road and rushing off.
“You need to cut yours off too,” Adam’s brother said, and Adam thought that his brother had gone mad. The folks around tried to come closer, but the two brothers ignored them. “I have to take your history test and you have to take my math one. It’s the only way. Cut it off right now.”
“I’m not cutting off my own toe,” Adam protested.
“People will be able to tell us apart if I show up with an injury while you waltz in.”
Adam tells us that he realized their game of switch had gone too far, but he was a dumb sixteen-year-old who couldn’t think of another way. So Adam pulled off his right shoe. He thanks the stars he had thought to check which of his brother’s feet was the injured one before they went further. He slipped out of his smelly sock and inserted his toe between the metal chain and the sharp ring of his brother’s bike.
“Do it fast,” Adam said, his voice trembling.
Silence fell on the street, the people around them dazed by the move. Adam’s brother held the pedal crank arm of the bike with one hand and his own wounded foot with the other and pulled with all his might. A woman passing by screamed, and two men ran, too little too late, to try and stop the painful scene from happening. Sadly, blood was gushing again, from Adam’s foot now, and his big toe flew away like a little bug.
“We switch today, you’re Adam, and I’m your brother,” his brother whispered. Adam explains that this was their final switch. At the hospital, the doctors managed to reattach Adam’s toe, which had lost some sensitivity but turned pink with blood flow the minute they stitched it back together. His brother’s toe, however, didn’t. The cut wasn’t a clean snap and the toe died, leaving the boy with unbalanced feet.
When their father came to the hospital, his face was red with anger. His shouting, heard across the white halls, woke sick people up from their afternoon naps. The two boys had no option but to confess to everything.
“Who is who then?” the father asked, eyes bouncing between the two. The boys, in all honesty, couldn’t tell. After years of switching back and forth, they didn’t know who was Adam and who was his brother. They sat there confused, crying, insisting they weren’t sure.
“The toed one is you, Adam, the injured one is your brother,” the father said, and the two complied.
Over the next week, Adam managed to memorize all he needed to for his social studies exams, and while he didn’t ace them, he got a decent grade. His brother, however, couldn’t understand any of the math equations, after years of neglecting the subject, and failed miserably.
Adam stumbles over the next part of his story. His voice is quivering, and his eyes are dim. We exchange looks as he talks. We wonder if his story is believable or if he is completely insane. He maintains that he didn’t mean to do what he did, but he had no other choice. When the call came for re-enrollment in the military, ten years after the bike incident, Adam was requested to appear, while his brother was not. Their father had gotten them doppelgängers back when they had to do military service the first time, and neither of them had thought about it since. Adam, by then in his final year of medical school and his second year of engagement to a fellow top of her class, couldn’t believe it, that a committee might determine him suitable to join the Syrian regime army forces and fight terrorists. His brother was still living at his parents’ home, switching apprentices every few months once his employers realized he was not fit for manual labour. The two of them rarely talked. Adam says that his brother blamed him for his failings, that he was jealous of Adam’s success. They’d stopped fighting over who was older. They wouldn’t even share stories about girls anymore.
Adam followed the war on TV; some reported the dead of the regime and others reported the dead of the rebels, and they all looked similarly dead to him. He held the enrollment request between his hands and read it six million times, trying to figure out a way to avoid it at a time when he couldn’t afford the going rate for a dopplegänger without the help of his family—a solution he detested. Standing in front of the mirror one day, he realized his resolution was staring him in the face.
Adam asked his brother to meet for coffee at the university lounge. He asked him if they could play the switch game one more time. “You have that missing toe. They will examine you and find you’re not suitable for military service,” Adam said after he paid for his brother’s breakfast, and three cups of coffee. “Think of it, they will give you a desk job somewhere and you’ll end up with a good salary instead of all these jobs you keep failing at.”
But his brother wasn’t hearing any of it. “Are you fucking kidding me?
They will enroll me with a missing limb if they could. I won’t do this.”
Adam says the two of them argued for hours, then days. They argued in the street, at coffee shops, and in their old shared bedroom, which now only housed his brother. Their arguments got louder, and their mother and father had to intervene, trying to figure out what the twins were fighting about after years of tense silence. The two brothers, however, kept the topic to themselves. Then the day finally came when their argument turned physical. Adam threw a punch at his brother, who responded with a kick. Adam flew out of their bedroom door and slipped onto the top of the stairs. His brother stood over him. “Things always go your way,” his brother shouted, preparing to kick Adam in the face. Adam claims he did what he did in self-defense. He did not mean to trip him: his foot was in the wrong spot, and his arms shoved on their own accord. His father walked into the house to find his brother at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck and milky eyes. Their mother was howling.
Adam sits silently for a minute. He pauses before he says that it was all planned since the day they were born. He believes they had one soul, one of them had to die to save the other. The umbilical cord was tight on his brother’s neck all along. He didn’t kill him, he insists. He only ended his suffering.
The firelight is dimming, and the desert air is heavy. A long cough. A lone sigh. The moon hides behind a single cloud, and we are drenched in darkness. We sit silently there, and we look at one another through the fire’s smoke and its reflections. Long beards. Shaggy hair. Dirty uniforms. Scars. We huddle closer. Sweaty palms. Rough skin. Loud hearts. A coyote howls in the distance, and we shiver. Moments later, we can’t tell which one of us is Adam anymore.