“The Long Middle”—a short story

Continuous Revolution, a soundtrack by Nour Sokhon

She watches them assembled around the bonfire. The pit was only ever fed this much waste when the council was called, as it was tonight, to discuss the song they heard blowing backwards on the wind. Some folk used the opportunity to lighten their load, burning soiled clothes or photographs they were ready to let go of. She observes that the revolutionaries don’t laugh much, or even “hold space” anymore. They aren’t telling jokes to avoid the silence; they have, after all, become it. Their skin toughened by blisters from the chafing of equipment, the dry heat, and the rough, red sand buffing the youth off them. 

In a white and red striped beach chair, dirtied by the journey, a young man with a headtorch is fixing the sole of a boot, pausing intermittently to listen to what is being said. There was some consensus on the meaning of the message transmitted from the bloc ahead. That romance was over. They were split on whether it couldn’t be found where the march was going, or was no longer permitted. Some felt it was a warning that the group should turn back. 

On a checkered blanket sprawled across the grit, a woman lies on her side, propped up by one arm, watching her finger draw patterns in the dust. Her single long plait falls over her shoulder when she looks up and jumps into the conversation. 

“What even is there to go back to? A deserted city—”

“Dogs digging through trash—”

“The dogs will be long dead. Be dog-like rats, all that’s left of—”

“No other City would take us now, will they? Not that—”

“Who would take in a gang of radicals?”

A kettle of tea whistles on a small campfire. The woman with the plait sits up and grabs a towel to wrap around the handle, lifting the kettle from the flames. Rabal takes the pause to regain control of the conversation. The walk has stripped him down. His usually round face has lengthened; even his cheeks look more muscular. He leans forward, removes his thin wire glasses, and presses his palms into his eyes. As this season’s councilor, he is going to have to mediate, to listen to the back-and-forth prattle of the movement’s most vocal members. Mostly, though, he is going to have to make that prattle make sense.

Rising to his feet, Rabal pats down the noise to bring his comrades to silence.

“Whatever vote we take, we take collectively, that’s law. Either we all continue, or we all turn back… to the dog-rats, or whatever. I’d also add that we can just stop. Here. Wait to see if the bloc behind catches up. If they don’t, it would mean they’ve turned back.” 

People start to grumble; someone loudly protests. Rabal speaks over them. 

“Our conversations have to work towards a unified decision.”

Nar watches all this from the edges of the camp, where the light of the fire melts into the darkness of the wild. Since Simone left, she no longer sits with the group in the evenings. Tonight, however, she needs to know what they will decide about the news they’ve heard. To her, the decision is clear as day. They’d better not turn back.

Rabal could have guided that better, Nar thinks to herself. He should have reminded them about the horizon.

One of the few Fighters not out on night watch stands up. He raises a hand.

“There is no sign that the bloc ahead is turning back. It was their song, their warning.” He straps his rifle back over his shoulder and heads out to let them talk.

Rabal splits the camp up into its factions. He gathers the Thinkers, who mostly take it in turns to sigh heavily and monologue. The Listeners are rounded up by Jeanie, who immediately takes on her authoritative tone. Nar can no longer make out the conversations, so she spins around, lies back, and turns to the stars. The sky is crystal clear; the stars almost look like they’re joking. Closer to the ground, crickets scratch the cold air. Without clouds, the air is deeply cold. She pulls her woolen jacket closer around her body, careful not to let the dirt of her sleeves touch her face, and quietly sings the news to herself:

a rebel turns to the revolution and goes
my heart was mine, but fell like firewood,
humbled and captive to the pit,
as it rises again transformed,
it’s entirely yours. no romance anymore.
after the poetry drifts, I carry nothing,
just this ember; a heart, to light the road.
formation is the only way we will live.

She pulls the photograph of Simone out of her notebook. In the darkness, it’s impossible to make out anything on that square of film paper, but she doesn’t need the light; she’s memorized the photo. Taken on a particularly ecstatic day of mischief against the government, the rebels had stormed the civil service offices and stolen as many files as possible. Some to publish online, others to set alight. Then the night came. She slowly repaints the scene in her imagination, trying so delicately not to move a thing out of place. The adrenaline after the office storm, the creak of the floorboards, the stuffy heat. They had pooled together their money to buy fish and a bottle of wine. Simone had lived in the attic above a local drinking hut. They ate with their fingers and drank in gulps. I wanted her so much it made me nauseous. The hullabaloo rising through the floorboards; drunk revolutionaries swaying to chants that wouldn’t cease looping in their heads. The two of us on the mattress, a thin white sheet tangled around our hips and knees, which I would kick off with impatience. What floods back isn’t the memory of her deep inside me; it is the memory of her fingertips stroking the hairs on my arms. How can someone be so close without touching your skin? The ashtray filled with half-smoked cigarettes that night, more addicted to the smell of her neck, the stickiness of our thighs pressed into one another, until they weren’t sticky anymore, but slick with sweat and spit and cum. Our mouths so wide—

Nar jerks awake. 

Sometimes she wishes she could erase the photograph from memory, just to see Simone again for the first time.

you’ll see I carry nothing,
except an ember

The realization hits her like a punch to the gut: Simone will have composed the song sung backwards. The song that says romance is dead. A sob breaks through. She grits her teeth; she hasn’t felt this angry since Simone had broken off to the next bloc. Seized by the ache, she gasps for air between sobs. It’s just not what people do. It’s overdramatic. Nar needs the song to be true, needs the wanting to be thrashed from her as dirt beaten from a carpet. “How could she—” she whispers. She takes hold of her breath to avoid being heard. She gets up and walks swiftly to her tent. 

*

Once again, her stomach has woken her early. She has grown accustomed to the different strains of hunger—the rumble, the bloat, the sharp twang. Today was all ache.

She pulls the bandana from her eyes, blinks through the muted dawn light saturating the beige tarpaulin. She lifts herself from the roll mat and shuffles towards the tent’s opening, lowering the zip to let the air in. The lingering smell of bonfire overwhelms her. 

A fragile quiet hangs in the murky light. She puts on her uniform, shaking her boots for insects. The beige overalls have become looser, a blessing, but so have the boots. She pulls her laces tight, the movement’s chorus looping in her head, forward of now, always forward, forward.

A suppressed cough comes out of a tent nearby, probably old Hadi, wheezing from sixty years of spray painting in cramped spaces. The comrades are stirring, and it will be another day without a minute to herself. 

The camp has been set up more lackadaisically than usual; even the lorries aren’t lined in single file. Someone has unloaded the medical station without unpacking it. The campfire is still smoking from the night before; she takes it as a sign that a decision wasn’t reached.

On a foldout table, a large saucepan of lentils sits. She lifts the lid off and waits for the escaping steam to disappear before spooning out a small portion. Bland, tasteless mush. She holds it in her mouth for a moment before spitting it out, not even aiming for the refuse pile. It lands like puke on the arid ground, splattering among sprigs of foliage. A fly immediately circles the mess. She walks across the plains, waiting for the other Listeners to join her at the bike formation. 

Rabal appears, waving a cigarette.

“Got light?”

She offers the Zippo at the end of the long chain around her neck. Rabal takes a deep inhale and holds the cigarette out to her. She shakes her head.

“Listen,” he exhales with his whole chest. “Something about the news isn’t right. I’m not sure we’re ready to make a decision.”

“Rabal, as seasonal leader, sometimes you just have to tell people what to do. People are having a moment of struggle, starting to ask themselves all sorts of questions. Thinking their way out of decisions they’ve already made. This is part of your job. You can’t let their insecurities win.”

“What if it’s something else, like interference from a State?”

“Then even better. Use it for our benefit. A chance to remind people why we chose to never turn back.” He doesn’t answer, she continues, “Or what, you let them go back to an uninhabitable no man’s land?”

He crosses his arms and looks out into the rocky expanse, absorbed by his thoughts. His blue-green eyes stand out against his dark skin. She smacks him on the shoulder. He jolts; his eyes refocus on her. 

“I got to start up the engines,” she says, and takes three steps, then stops and turns around. She walks back, grabs the cigarette from his fingers, and takes in one long, glorious puff. “Fuck, I miss these,” she mutters, before walking away. 

“Nar,” he shouts after her. “I need your help with this.” 

She doesn’t turn around.

*

One by one, the Listeners drive forward. The sun rises fast, hurrying them on. A long, thin, metallic microphone stretches out from the front of each of their motorbikes. Adjusting her filtered headphones and the sound device hoisted around her waist, Nar sets off to the far left of the group. 

Her motorbike is the cleanest, dusted down at the end of each day; most of the others remain caked in dust. The perfume of petrol lifts off the long, hot road, and Nar breathes it in, smiling as if she were pleasantly intoxicated. This machine—with its black engine casing with the embossed gold lines, the green leather seat, those oversized circular wing mirrors—is where she spends most of her time. This, here, with the vibrations shaking her bones, is home.

It’s almost inaudible at first, but as their ears come into focus, they recognize the same strange song, blowing backwards through the wind.

The group is in perfect formation. Outside, the sound is coarse and loud, the thunder of engines, the turning of gravel under tires. But inside her headphones, all is calm and clear. Her hand tightens around the handlebars, twisting the acceleration. The speed clears her thoughts; the muscles in her face relax. She rolls her head back and chants: “FREE, FREE THE REVOLUTION!” and the others shout back: “MOVEMENTS KEEP ON MOVING!”

Ahead of them are the Fighters, clearing the path of threats. They’re dressed in black overalls, different from the Listeners, who all wear beige. The Fighters give Nar a sense of containment. 

The ground is littered with trash—crisp packets, a lost glove, someone’s telephone book. Leaning back, Nar turns a knob on the audio controller around her waist, struggling to catch a note. They are still miles off the trail of the bloc ahead, but she likes to be the first to catch the song.

Up ahead, a pack of wild dogs is circling a pile of rags. She does a double take. The rags are clothes. The clothes have a body. One dog scratches at the pile, the fabric falls, a scarf tumbles a few feet in the wind. It gives Nar a chill; it’s similar to a scarf she lost. 

 She shakes the chill off. We are in formation, protected by the Fighters. As she advances, the carcass comes into sight. Leathered-looking. She turns away. She has never been good with gore.

“Dead body!” She shouts over her shoulder to Jeanie.

“What?”

“Look—a dead body.”

Jeanie shakes her head and makes no gesture towards stopping.

A falcon circles overhead. Jeanie turns back to the road. 

Nar takes one last glance at the body; three more dogs are now chewing at the flesh, fighting one another for the juiciest organ. The familiar scarf waves longingly in the breeze.

They pull up for their first listening post. Nar flings her leg over the bike and pulls off her headphones. The wind has picked up. Behind them, a yellow mist hovers in the air from all the dust kicked up.

Around them, the Fighters stand in formation. Black scarves wrapped around their heads and faces, with just a slit open for the eyes. 

Once the engines cut and the shuddering of the bikes subsides, all they can hear is the wind trickling loose sand against the rocky surface. Nar runs her fingers through her hair, filthy with grease and grit. She must get the scissors on it in the coming days. She kneels to the ground and places her headphones on, adjusting the knobs on the device, and listens.

It’s almost inaudible at first, but as their ears come into focus, they recognize the same strange song, blowing backwards through the wind. Nar looks to Jeanie, who is standing up ahead, struggling to decipher the words. Bu, a tall Listener with an angular face and dopey eyes pulls his hand from his pocket, producing a bag of small stones to count the syllables.  He is laying out the notation when Rabal and the Thinkers arrive. Rabal stands over his shoulder, his eyes darting over the constellation of rocks. The song is slow, “like a sad choir,” Nar hears Rabal say in a hushed voice. “The same as yesterday.”

* 

They take midday shade under a pair of mesquite trees. Rabal pulls four cashews out of his top pocket and hands two to Nar.

“Can I ask you something? You and Simone were the great romance of the early days of revolution.” 

“Romance isn’t strategic.” 

“When we still had the Old City, when people played instruments in the streets. There was music then—”

“There were also citizens living like teeth pressing against a muzzle.” Nar leans her head back against the tree. It was a different place, a thousand days ago or not even a thousand days, who knows, when thousands and thousands of bodies had flocked to the roadblocks, thousands and thousands of bodies. A tall woman dancing with a hand drum in the streets of the Old City, her beautiful eyes disappearing behind curls as she swung her head in time to Nar’s saxophone to say yes, yes, this. You get me! Those hooped earrings poking through hair that frizzed in the heat. There were children handing out flags, young adults handing out bottles of water, and there was Simone and Nar, always finding one another in the mass. A relationship birthing itself from attentive resistance and lack of personal space.

“We don’t have any of that now,” Rabal says. “Don’t have that place for a Simone out there to dance with a hand drum and a Nar to jam along with her sax. Without that chaos, is it possible to fall… into rhythm, into count, with another person? Or people, even?”

She tries not to remember the slanging matches after they’d hit the road, her and Simone crying from opposite sides of the tent, their names like flies in one another’s mouths. “I saw in her what I felt in myself, she needed to spit me out. I hate being made weak.” The shadows are short, the sun high and impossible to hold; it weighs heavily on them. “Also, it’s fucking embarrassing to be the drama in a bloc. People heard our arguments. That’s bad. When everyone knows your business because you made it theirs. It’s bad.”

Rabal casts his gaze to the others, who are sharing a flask of water. Around them the desert appears endless, at once terrifying and familiar. Nar closes her eyes and is already drifting off when she hears Rabal speak. 

“I don’t believe you think all that’s true.” 

*

The camp is only just being laid out and unpacked when the Listeners arrive. Long rolls of white tarpaulin are neatly placed alongside metal poles, arranged according to the assemblage. The Listeners walk through the camp, engulfed by the ruckus of voices yelling instructions, and by the oppressive heat of engines, still hot from the journey. Two teenagers with shovels are walking out to the periphery to dig the toilets. A group of Fixers are sharing the weight of huge two-hundred-liter plastic containers, carrying them from the back of a lorry to a square marked in the sand that would become the kitchen.

“Full offload?” Jeanie shouts over to one of the Fixers, whose hair is stuck to their forehead with sweat. 

“That’s right,” they answer, grateful for the chance to pause. “Be a three-day stop.”

A sudden combustion. The cracking of wood, the cries of a comrade. Nar swings round to find the noise. Tuji, a former composer for the opera house, is frantically pulling guitars, percussion, and flutes off the back of one of the lorries. As he pulls out each instrument, he smashes it to the arid ground. 

Several Fixers step forward, prying a flute from Tuji’s hands. A Fighter with a patchy beard appears, grabs at Tuji to restrain him, but Tuji escapes, swinging his arms. He stops for a moment, his skinny body bent forward, his eyes darting from one person to another. 

“If there’s no love ahead,” he yells, breathless, shaking with fury and exhaustion, “Then what—tell me!—what is the use in music?” 

No one says a word. Rabal steps forward. “Tuji, come—” 

“No!” Tuji jumps back. His arms straight and tense by his sides, his body both rigid and weak. He runs back to the lorry, throws a small box of tambourines that crash to the sandy floor, then a hand drum, trying to smash its skin over his knee. Nar runs to stop him from hurting himself, but Bu gets there sooner. 

He wraps an arm around Tuji and guides him to the fire pit, demarcated by a circle of rolled carpets and blankets, whispering something into Tuji’s ear. The closeness of Bu’s body seems to calm Tuji, who is now resting his head on his shoulder. The teams slowly return to their tasks. Nar watches the furniture being lowered for the campfire living room, the exact same furniture that had been lowered from a lorry onto the roadblock on the ring road when they first brought the Old City to a standstill. They had even used a generator to set up a fridge. On the fridge was a magnet that became lore; they never knew where it had come from, but it became Simone’s favorite phrase: “We are each other’s land.”

It was what they said to one another after the breaking news: The Nation’s Money Soon to Run Out!; Greedy Governors Follow Ministers into Luxury Exile!; No More Jobs!; Fuel Crisis!; A People Abandoned!. Their answer was always “well, we are each other’s land.” Then there was no more news. So, they spent their time on the ring road, writing songs. Their music became the sound of steadfastness; brittle music with long notes. In the street gatherings, crowds would sing their songs as the days of revolution thickened with glee, then hunger, then gunshots.

The hourglass is emptying. Rabal and Jeanie go on exchanging furrowed brows, closing their eyes to process what one another is saying. They’re running the clock, Nar realizes.

 It was at that ring road that Professor Nabi held the public assembly where he had said, “Now that the international community has declared our nation uninhabitable, the only option is to get on our feet and commit to movement, recruiting anti-state revolutionaries along the way. There is no end to revolution, only the long middle.” She could remember the diagrams he passed around. In thick black ink was the whole march: a train, made up of blocs, moving towards the horizon. He handed out manuals. At the head of the march were the decision-makers, passing messages backwards through songs, like the farmers used to sing the warnings of the season to the next village. For the mechanics to work, no one could ever go backwards.

Both Simone and Nar were swallowed whole by their devotion to the resistance. They did their military training together, chose their bloc, applied for the same roles in formation, and prepared their stockpile for the mass exodus. When the end of winter had come and it was time to set off, neither of them had felt uprooted like others. By then, they were using “we are each other’s land” in place of “goodnight” every evening.

The cool of the night spreads through the air as Nar zips up her tent and heads to join the others by the pit. The flames of the bonfire grab helplessly into the empty space above, trying to haul themselves out of their own heat.

She throws herself down next to Rabal. Some comrades are playing cards and laughing. Rabal throws a fistful of small rocks into the bonfire and watches them glow. 

The crackle of burning wood, the distant cheers of a player with a winning hand, the intricate silence beneath it all. Nar’s nervous system relaxes; her shoulders loosen from around her neck.

“Saw a dead body today,” she says, biting at the hard skin around her thumbnail. 

Rabal peers at her over his glasses, an eyebrow raised. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. I know it could be any of us, but it actually made me proud, to be so close to death is like, somehow…” She trails off, thinks for a while, then says, “Like it contours the whole fact of being alive.” She laughs lightly at herself. “Do you know what I mean?”

Something must be damp in the bonfire. As it burns, the smoke thickens and plumes towards Rabal. He wafts it with his hat and covers his mouth with the neck of his poncho. “Not a clue,” he eventually answers.

Suddenly, he jumps to his feet, shouts: “Mic check!”

Those who had been playing cards holler “Mic check!” followed by those in the kitchen, and eventually the few who’d retired early emerge from their private tents. “Mic check!”

“Now,” he calls out, and those who hear it repeat: “Now.”

“We vote,” he calls out. Some people react with murmurs of “What the heck,” and “I’m not ready, are you ready?” while others, including Jeanie, repeat loudly for the others to hear: “We vote.”

Rabal calls everyone into position.

“Can I suggest we take five minutes?” He turns an hourglass over and holds it steadily in his hands. “Starting now.”

Some factions erupt into debate, but the Listeners face each other soberly, as if they have a prior agreement on how to act. 

“I’ll go first,” Jeanie says. Before she can go any further, Rabal crouches at her shoulder and starts whispering in her ear. Bu looks over to Nar, who is looking confusedly at Rabal and Jeanie. She overhears “Simone” and then, she’s sure, she also hears her own name.

The hourglass is emptying. Rabal and Jeanie go on exchanging furrowed brows, closing their eyes to process what the other is saying. They’re running the clock, Nar realizes. But before she can say anything, the hourglass in Rabal’s hand empties.

“That’s time!” Rabal shouts. The conversations peter out. 

Firelight flickers across Rabal’s face as he stands to make the closing statement. Then they vote.

It is a landslide in favor of continuing. The whole camp sighs in relief. Rabal pretends to shake a bottle of champagne, mimes pushing the cork off with his thumbs. Everyone cheers when the imaginary cork shoots over their heads, drenching them in fizz. The comrades raise a hand as if lifting their glass for a toast.

The rest of the night is a party, hands held above heads, dancing, miming sharing steaks and doing drugs. They speak for the night with ease and reverie; the Fighters shoot the sky in celebration. So overcome with the merriment, Nar forgets to quiz Rabal about his impolite whispering with Jeanie. At one point, the two of them run like children to her tent to retrieve her notebook. She throws Simone’s photo into the flames. Watches as the corners curl, then char. Until only white ash remains.

*

The next morning the temperature has dropped considerably. Nar makes the most of the stay day and sleeps in. When she finally emerges from her tent, she heads straight to the kitchen for a bite of whatever the Feeders have found to harvest. A notice on the counter reads: the dried foods are still in negotiation with a local who isn’t accepting the deal. She feels thankful and sorry for the Feeders who felt they had to explain themselves.

The wind has been moving like a slipping tongue this season, and there is no way to be sure anyone understood the words.

There are some sad-looking greens in freshly washed bowls. As Nar picks through them, a young man with freckles and a short afro is cradling his leg on the cushions beyond the foldable table. Nar doesn’t recognize him. She stares in his direction until he catches her gaze.

“Hey!” He sits up. “I’m Shaz, an engineer. I belong to that bloc ahead. Only gone and bust my knee though, so I fell behind. Nothing to worry about. Your Fixers spent the night getting me right.”

They chat about last night’s party. Shaz seems confused, keeps saying, “I’m sure I’m misunderstanding but—that’s a pretty bolshy way to pay respects after the news we sent back to you.”

“We only have respect for the grounding principles, my guy,” Nar replies. “Don’t have any respect for romance.”

“Maybe not. But not really the point. Simone was a good one. She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

The bowl of greens in Nar’s hand smashes to the ground. “Simone didn’t even want to be here. Besides, what do you know of her business?” 

“Well, I knew her pretty good!” He says, almost mockingly. “But that’s not the point. She’s dead.”

Nar’s legs go weak. She lowers herself to the floor. Barely breathing. No, no, no. No, no, that wasn’t the plan. But what even was the plan? To meet again? To do better? She can barely swallow.

Shaz is looking at her. She can’t move, her body is frozen, but she is outside of it. Looking at the familiar scarf.

When the sound comes back to her ears, Shaz is speaking.

“What you talking about?” Her voice is barely audible.

“How is Nar doing, anyway? It can’t be good for a person to hear news like that on the wind blowing backwards.”

“I’m Nar.” Her voice comes out feeble and shaking.

Others begin to arrive in the kitchen. Rabal is suddenly behind her. 

Her ears are ringing. She needs everyone to stop looking at her. 

*

Rabal had wanted to reach out to pull Nar close to him, but he was afraid he might throw up; the stone in his stomach, the self-loathing for the relief he felt, that if she had looked him in the eye, he would never trust himself again. He had squeezed his eyes shut to stop the tears falling. When he opened them, Nar was gone.

By the time the sun forces into the western sky, everyone is mournful.

The night workers who haven’t much relation to the sunlight workers paid no mind to speaking freely. They are overheard saying: 

“I’m not saying Nar didn’t want to hear it correct, but she’s up there with the rest of the Listeners receiving the songs.” 

“They say her tech wasn’t working.” 

“They say someone meddled with it, to keep the peace.” 

“No one knows where they took the body.” 

“Apparently Rabal had figured it.” 

“Attacked by a gang of nation-state boys, apparently.” 

The wind has been moving like a slipping tongue this season, and there is no way to be sure anyone understood the words.

The Thinkers queue up outside Nar’s tent. Bulging with apologies, sorry for not knowing. All the same, they spread their blame to Rabal. Nobody gets an answer from her, nor do they dare unzip her tent and impose.

The next morning, when the movement powers up, and engines are heard growling off ahead, no one complains of Nar being late. As all reports do in the Long Middle, this one snakes backwards along the track. Only the movements behind ever hear the song, know the truth. That Nar had done the incomprehensible: turned Back.