We are taught the image of the bank robber: White-black striped. Slinking con-man dodging the searchlight. The banker teller shivers under the countertop, eyeing bags of small bills. Here there is a gin, and the gun points at innocent backs.
In the One and Only Movie Theater in Sulaimani I aided and abetted a criminal. He came in a torn up pillow case, on proud tottering legs. He was three years old. The cashier, frozen behind the countertop, eyeing small hands and small fingers. And here, too, there was a gun.
What I mean to say is, there were laws strange to me, The Stranger. My mother taught me to not to sit like the wild revolutionary boys With their backwards pants and their newspaper-rolled cigarettes. But you can still hear the diaspora In my clumsy qu and khe sounds.
I did not know The Permit Codes. When I noticed him outside of the One and Only Movie Theater, I stepped on the sensor and lent it my weight. Little ghost, too small to trigger the automatic door.
I be the woman was his mother, Pacing on the sidewalk a few blocks away, That purple hijabi woman with nowhere to put her nervous hands. She caught me in her searchlight eyes. She was afraid, but her mouth twitched in an arch smile: “Are you lost, little sister?” / “Whose side are you on?”
We are taught the image of the villain Sacks with the sign of the dollar over each shoulder. The wrecking and the wrecked lives, All positioned in a perfect thought experiment.
But where in the experiment do I place: Nervous-bird hands/Purple scarves swirling in dust whirls? Hollow cheeks/Pillow case for a shirt?
While I am distracted by the questions in a Syrian woman’s smile: Tiny brown legs pounding the carper, Tiny brown arms clinging to a red-white striped bag of popcorn. It’s bigger than his body. I have never seen more full joy in a thinner face. Whooping in triumph, fleeing One and Only A pile of quick-thrown Iraqi pocket money on the countertop behind him.
Woman and boy melt into the city: like masterminds, or mice. Later, I walk by the Parliament building And see black-white stripes above the doors.
The nature of theft is that sometimes, “Criminal” is tacked onto small, nervous joys. Stripes are painted. The complicit shiver. Searchlights never fail to land on a gunman. In the One and Only, On a gray green afternoon of dust whirls and old fabric I unlearn the robber, and learn him again.