Elon Musk and I: Two Men Searching for an Impossible Homeland

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, the narrator tells Elon Musk that they are more alike than people imagine: a son of South Africa who left home chasing a dream, and a son of the Ghouta of Damascus who left his fleeing a nightmare. In this imagined story the bridge refuses to arrive, Manhattan withdrawing as Damascus appears between the cables, and at a little ticket window a woman stitching the light of dawn hears him ask for a ticket to Jisreen an hour before the fire. Musk rebuilds the narrator's house on a computer, spotless and exact, yet its door does not hesitate before opening; in a rocket the narrator plants a jasmine cutting, and on Mars they find a city where everything runs on time and there is no bench beneath a tree. A child holding a drawing of a house without a door asks where children will escape if the grown-ups fight on Mars, Roueida calls to say the food will get cold, and a Museum of Things That Survived holds a key, a family photograph and a cracked cup. At dawn Musk says he will take the child's question, room for a bench and a jasmine cutting, and the narrator goes home, sets a small plant by the window in New York, and names it Jisreen.