Roughly a week later, they had me dressed up in their traditional clothes, too. Hell, Mujahid personally let me move into his cell to sleep there. Everybody who’d been around him for a long time was completely surprised. He’d never let a random newcomer get both of those privileges before. Hell, I was surprised, too.
One afternoon, after our weekly study circle back in the cell, I was laying on the top bunk while Mujahid was sitting below me, sewing a sock.
“Mujahid...” I said.
“Yes, Brother Rico?” He didn’t even look up from his needle.
“Why do you allow traditional Muslims and Black Muslims to run together in here? Isn’t there a big divide between the Arab or South Asian Muslims and the African American ones? I did some research before, and it said you guys didn’t even want to be defined under the same definition of Islam. Given the racial differences and the different ways people adapt the religion.”
Mujahid paused, pulling the thread tight.
“That may be true,” he said, his voice calm. “But if they praise Islam and practice the basic principles, then in my eyes, a Muslim is a Muslim. We read the same Quran. The only real difference is that some of the Black brothers compare the Quran to the Bible because of their backgrounds. Traditional Muslims like myself don’t do that. But that’s the only difference. We all praise Allah, so who cares?”
Okay, wow. That was pretty deep. Mostly because the man genuinely did not give a fuck.
“I find it funny how you don’t see the difference,” I said, leaning over the edge of the bunk. “But so many people see it differently in Christianity.”
“I find that silly, too,” Mujahid sighed, shaking his head. “You’re all Christians. So who gives a fuck about purgatory, Lilith, or whatever other bullshit is in the Bible? The world would be a lot easier if people of the same basic religion stopped having so many variants. It would remove the differences so they could just say they’re all Christians.”
“Okay, that brings up my second question,” I said, resting my chin on my hands as I looked down from the bunk. “Why are you doing all of this for me?”
“What do you mean, Brother Rico?”
“I mean, why did you help me? I’m not saying I’m ungrateful, but you’re doing a lot for me that you didn’t do for the other brothers in the group. So... being the Amir—the 'high priest' of this place—why do you have this weird fascination with me specifically?”
This question made him stop. He sat there in silence for a long while, the needle hovering just over the thread.
“I don’t know,” Mujahid said quietly, finally looking up to meet my eyes. “I just felt compelled to help you. Not only that, but actually talking to you... it made me see my little brother in you.”
Mujahid looked down at his calloused hands. His voice got incredibly quiet, and I had to lean over the edge of my bunk just to hear him.
“He was from Iraq,” Mujahid said. “During the military campaign to take out the insurgents. My little brother... he was autistic. But he was smart, and he was incredibly sweet. Always apologizing to everybody for everything. He was just too kind.” Mujahid let out a short, bitter laugh. “He was friendly to everyone he met. No matter who they were, his heart just kept bleeding and giving. He was even friendly with the coalition soldiers. But our father... I was young, and I didn’t know it at the time, but our father was actually part of the insurgency. Part of the Taliban.”
He took a slow, heavy breath.
“Our father tried to force us to become suicide bombers,” Mujahid whispered. “I was assigned to a church. My little brother was assigned to a school. Neither of us wanted to do it, but with those monsters, it was either you obey or you die. But my brother... he said something to our father that has stuck with me to this very day.”
Mujahid paused, staring blankly at the cell wall.
“He looked right at our father and said:
If I’m in a lose-lose situation, and you guys are really dedicated to Allah... then why does the fear of death scare you, but you expect me to do this? The Quran told us not to fear man, but to fear Him. So I fear no man.”
A tear ran down Mujahid's graying beard.
"Before anyone could move, my brother shoved me out of the room and slammed the door shut. He locked it from the inside. All I heard from the other side of the wood was a muffled
Allahu Akbar!
... and then, a deafening explosion.
He was gone. My brother died in that room, taking our father and the twenty other insurgents with him. He'd detonated the vest right there in their hideout to save me and those kids at the school.
I guess my brother thought I would’ve run the other way when he pushed me. He had no clue I was still standing right behind the door, just a few feet away when it went off. I should’ve died in that blast. But I didn’t."
Mujahid wiped his eyes under his glasses.
“Sometime later, I managed to escape and make it to the States. I lived a normal life. I got married, and we had a family with three kids. But I never forgot him.”
I sat there on the top bunk, completely silent.
He saw him in us,
the voice in my head murmured, its usual defensive shield completely dropping.
He saw the same brave, self-destructive kid who would rather die standing than live on his knees.
Yeah. That was exactly what he saw.
“But what did you do to get locked up in here?” I asked, looking down at him. “You don’t seem like a bad guy, for real.”
Mujahid didn’t say a word. He just reached under his pillow, pulled out a folded stack of legal papers, and handed them up to me. I grabbed the sheets and started reading.
Bro... my heart completely dropped.
Twenty-seven counts of murder in the first degree.
“Twenty-seven hats...” I whispered, staring at the ink on the page.
“Back when I was younger,” Mujahid said, his voice flat and distant. “I had a son in middle school. He was the brightest of my kids. All A's, not even a B. His name was Hamza. My eldest was named Zayn. He was a little ladies' man. All the girls on the block loved him. Pretty boy, too. You know, he got his looks from his daddy.”
We both let out a small, quiet laugh.
“And my second oldest, Maryam,” Mujahid continued, his chest heaving slightly. “She was so... so fucking gorgeous I can’t even put it into words. It’s hard for me to describe how much I loved them all.”
I slowly folded the papers back up, looking down at him.
“Why do you keep saying
was
?”
“...Because... they all died,” Mujahid said, his voice dropping into a hollow, dead whisper. “I know that kids aren’t supposed to be perfectly obedient. I understand that. My own disobedience to my father is the only thing that kept me alive. But I thought the States were safer than Iraq. I got loose on them. I was so less strict, and I allowed them to go to a party on the rough side of town, thinking they’d be completely fine. Then... shots rang out. Two gangs came to the party. They completely missed each other, but they killed six innocent people in the crossfire. The last three were my entire family.”
He stood up, looking right at me.
“Not long after that, I killed them,” Mujahid said, his eyes turning into cold, unyielding iron. “I killed them dead. I tried to systematically exterminate the two entire gangs in the city, just because some motherfuckers didn’t like the colors the other ones were wearing. Since they started the war, I finished it for them—and for all of their friends. I was on death row for a few years, until the new governor commuted my sentence and gave me life.”
I sat there on my bunk, my chest tightening as the gravity of his words hit me.
Twenty-seven hats,
the voice in my head whispered, completely stunned into silence.
This man didn’t just crash out. He waged a whole war.
Yeah. He really did. He was a man who had lost everything, just like I almost had, but he’d taken his get-back to the absolute limit.
Mujahid described the cycle of violence. He talked about how hate and the unhealthy ways we deal with our pain only feed the beast. He said the only way to break that cycle is by giving and showing love to others.
Then, he looked up from his sewing and asked me a question.
“What do you hate, Brother Rico? Deep down in your heart, what do you hate the most in this world?”
I sat on the top bunk, thinking about it.
I thought I hated Nathan. But deep down, I couldn’t say that was the biggest thing. I couldn’t say I hated my mother, either, because even after everything she did to me, I still didn’t. I couldn’t even say I hated the system, because even though it’s garbage, it’s just a system.
But I did know what I hated the most. Something buried deep inside my chest.
Humans.
People as a whole, not the individuals. I hated how people could do terrible things and feel absolutely zero remorse. I hated how humanity didn’t care about other people’s suffering. I hated that there was a system in this world that didn’t care about the context of what caused a crime, only the cold, hard fact that you did it. I hated humanity. I hated the world that had systematically taken away everything and everyone I had ever loved.
Mujahid had a family once. He had people who loved him. I had that for a second, too. But unlike Mujahid, I never had a brother or a loving mother. I didn’t even have a father to be an abuser to me. I was always completely by myself. Whenever I finally found someone, they never stayed long.
I hated how unfair this world was. I just wanted to live. And when I actually found someone I could connect with, the world took her away, too. When I tried to heal—when I actually tried to be healthy and move on—the world just came back to mock me. So I gave up.
I looked down at the concrete floor of our cell. “It’s too late to break my cycle, Mujahid. Now, it’s either life or death for me.”
But Mujahid didn’t believe that.
“No,” he said, his voice soft but unyielding. “Even though I can see the darkness in you, you do not let the darkness control you. You control your own darkness. Whatever voice is in your head telling you to do something terrible, you actively fight it. You choose not to do it. That makes you special, Rico.”
He stood up, looking at me.
“A person who can live in a life of absolute darkness, but still chooses the light, even when it’s so far down the tunnel? That’s a rare thing. And that’s probably why Allah has kept you alive for so long. You have a strong,
unbroken will.
”
Mujahid went back to his sewing like he hadn’t just cracked something open in my chest. I sat on the top bunk for a long time after that, staring at a water stain on the ceiling shaped like nothing in particular, turning his words over.
Unbroken will.
Yeah, okay. Sure.
The voice in my head didn’t sound convinced. Neither was I. But hearing it out loud, from a man who’d buried three kids and could still thread a needle without his hands shaking, made it sit different than when I told myself the same thing at three in the morning.
Three days later, a CO banged on the bars.
“Kovacs. You got a visit.”
I didn’t move.
A visit?
Nobody visits me. Not anymore. I actually looked over my shoulder to see if he was talking to somebody else on the tier.
“Kovacs. Let’s go.”
I couldn’t tell you why my stomach dropped on the walk down. Maybe it was Mujahid's voice still rattling around in my skull. Maybe some part of me already knew, before I knew.
They didn’t put me behind the glass. Contact visit. The steel door groaned open, and I stepped into a room that smelled like bleach doing a bad job of covering something older underneath it.
There was an old woman at the metal table.
Wrong room,
I thought.
They brought me to the wrong room.
She had to be somebody's grandmother, some sweet church lady waiting on a grandson who wasn’t me — small in a way that didn’t make sense, folded in on herself, an oxygen tank hissing quiet at her hip, her hair gone the color of static.
Her hands were flat on the table. Still. Like she was scared to move them.
Then she looked up.
And the voice in my head — the one that has never once shut up in twenty years, the one that runs commentary through funerals and fistfights and felony arraignments —
It didn’t say anything.
Nothing. Not one word.
I knew her hands before I knew her face. Before anything else clicked, I knew the exact shape of those fingers, because I used to lie on a bedroom floor watching them, waiting to see if they were going to open or close.
Eighteen years, and my body remembered her faster than my mind could catch up.
I stood in the doorway and didn’t move any closer. The guard shut the door behind me anyway, like my legs had already made a decision my head was still arguing with.
She was the one who broke it.
“Please... please forgive me, Rico.” Her voice cracked on the first word, thin as the line feeding her oxygen. “Don’t let me die knowing I ruined your life before it even started.”