“Don’t tell me I have to share the row with you,” Natalie said, sitting in the window seat of the airplane, row G.
In disbelief, Hasan looked at Natalie, the graying white woman, pressed against the window with her purse across her lap. He acted as if he didn’t hear her. He lifted his carry-on suitcase into the overhead storage unit like everyone else boarding behind him.
“Maybe we can arrange to rearrange our seats once everyone has boarded,” Hasan said softly. By this point, the passengers in the rows surrounding them had turned around to face them. Hasan watched their faces through the cracks in the seats. None of them bothered to help him.
“They’ll have to move us,” Natalie said. “I refuse to sit next to one of you people.”
The airline stewardess, a white woman in a pencil skirt, walked over to their row and bent down to Natalie as if talking to a disruptive elementary school student.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Please, get it together. This is a full flight, so we want to get everyone boarded as soon as possible,” the airline stewardess said in her soft, school-teacher voice as if Natalie had talked during nap time or fallen asleep during a lesson. “If you can’t get it together, I’ll be forced to ask you to leave the plane.”
“Me?” Natalie said. “He’s the problem. They’re the problem. People like them should stick to their own spaces. That’s how it worked when this country was better.”
At this, Natalie pointed her finger into Hasan’s chest.
“I’m American just like you,” Hasan said, unconvincingly, as if somebody had been reading him the lines from the tarmac.
“Cut!” the director shouted, walking over to the airplane set, a partial mock-up of an airplane cabin.
Hasan stood in five rows in an unfinished airplane cabin cut down the middle. Behind the director, a cameraman used a smartphone attached to a professional rig.
The director shook his head and listed the actors’ mistakes during the scene: “Background extras, will you act? I need to hear gasps. You are on a flight to Puerto Rico, Cancun, or something, not a funeral.”
They ran through the scenes five more times. Each time, Hasan felt the weight of Natalie’s finger dig deeper into his chest. By the fifth time, he felt an imprint of her finger wedged into his skin. On the fifth take, he fell to the ground when she landed her finger. Nowhere in the script was this much force called for. When it came time to say his lines, he sat there holding onto the floor, unable to speak. The director yelled, “Cut!”
Hasan watched the director walk over to the cameraman. The cameraman replayed the video for the director. Hasan watched the men watch a video of him, waiting for their approval like a child. Natalie helped him off the ground, but she didn’t apologize. Did she need to apologize?
“This is perfect,” the director said. He threw his hands in the air. “That’s a wrap!”
He thanked them and directed them to the catering table serving cold-cut ham sandwiches. Although Hasan couldn’t eat the sandwich, he took it anyway. He then went outside to the decrepit picnic table. Natalie joined him.
Hasan watched Natalie scarf the sandwich down, leaving a string of lettuce on her lip and mayo on her finger, which she licked clean. Between each bite, she told him about her annoying children, overprotective father, and ambitious husband. They were saving money to move to Los Angeles. Hasan nodded along, still feeling her finger against his chest.
With the money he earned from shooting the video, Hasan rented a bed and breakfast in Roswell. In historic downtown Roswell, he didn’t have to worry about seeing anyone he knew. On the inn’s front lawn was a white picket fence and a brown signpost with some historical facts detailing a Civil War battle that had been fought here. He told his girlfriend, Eliza, he had booked a commercial in Boston for the weekend. He needed the escape from Buckhead.
It was as if everything there told him he didn’t belong: the endless Porsches and Teslas on the road, the residents in Patagonia’s newest collection, purebred dogs, billboards for plastic surgery, farm-to-table restaurants, the boutiques with little placards reading “appointment only.” Everything told them they didn’t belong. They only moved to their building because they qualified for housing assistance.
The only thing that told them they belonged was the black-and-white interracial couples. Everywhere he went, he saw richer versions of himself and Eliza. His counterparts dressed in North Face or Canadian Goose with a Rolex, while Eliza wore a boutique dress with a pearl necklace. Wherever they caught the mirrors of themselves—on an elevator, waiting in a line, or passing each other on the street—their counterparts would small talk them and smile with white teeth.
Their neighbor, a fifty-year-old widow, was an artist. When they first met, she told them their name, but now they’d long forgotten it, and too much time had passed to ask for it again. Hasan and Eliza referred to her as the Italian Woman. They could hear her shuffling around at odd hours of the day. They built a rapport by running into each other while waiting for the elevator, culminating in her inviting them for a glass of wine once.
Hasan walked three buildings from the inn every morning to the French bakery. By Sunday, his final day, he’d been initiated into the coveted spot of “regulars.” The barista, a young college student with piercings and a sleeve of tattoos running up her arm, chatted with him while she went through the motions of the espresso machine. This was the kind of service he wouldn’t get in Buckhead.
“Hey, are you that guy from the Instagram video?” the barista asked. She worked through her tickets for lattes.
For the past five years, he hadn’t had social media. “What video are you talking about?”
“That racist white lady yelling on the plane,” the barista said. “What she said was fucked up.”
“Yeah, that happened a couple of months ago,” Hasan lied. He didn’t expect the video to be posted so fast. He expected them to give him at least a heads-up. The director had given them the story of what to say when they were inevitably confronted. They were supposed to turn down all media interviews. Under no circumstances were they supposed to tell anyone it was a fake video.
Between making lattes, the barista gave him her apologies. She cursed about racist white people, how this wasn’t right, and how things should change. At each point, Hasan nodded along. After forty minutes of this back and forth, Hasan told her he had to leave.
Hasan went back to his hotel room. He had over ten missed calls from Eliza and texts from his friends and family. He had to get his story straight. He called Eliza. She was either studying or heading to her nursing job.
“Why didn’t you tell me what happened with that lady?” Eliza asked. She had already asked if he was alright, and he mumbled through, saying he was fine.
Hasan hesitated. He’d rehearsed the lines in his head for days. Yet, now, he couldn’t find them. “I was embarrassed,” he said. It wasn’t a lie. Not entirely. Natalie had said those words to him. Those words had been confirmed; they had existed in this reality. Natalie’s finger against his chest was real, too. What did it matter if he had changed the context? In his mind, he wasn’t lying. “I’ll be back early in the morning.”
“What was your flight number?” Eliza asked. “I can file a report for you and a complaint with the airport. They can’t let her get away with this.” She pleaded with him to give her the flight number. Hasan stood firm.
“I can’t believe people are still that racist,” Eliza said under her breath.
Hasan wanted to tell her it wasn’t bad, but he didn’t know how to explain. He wasn’t ashamed of Eliza’s ignorance. He woke up every morning in their apartment with the morning light pouring in through the lace canopy, happy that this was his life. Yet, there were parts of his life he wasn’t ready to share.
Instead, he told her a story—about how his father, who had never watched a baseball game in his life, forced him to play in middle school. His father believed that’s what American boys do, right? So, when the sports coaches came to a PTA meeting in January, his father gave him a choice: baseball or tennis.
For an entire week in early spring, Hasan’s father drove him thirty minutes to a baseball field in Trenton, Connecticut. Hasan stood in the outfield, drowning in a uniform too big for him, his oversized baseball cap spinning on his head with every sharp movement. During the season’s first game, he spotted his father in the stands and wanted to impress him. He swung as hard as possible each time he stepped up to bat. Each time, he felt the air cut past him. At the bottom of the ninth, Hasan swung so hard he felt his shoulder wrench. Later that night, after returning from the ER, they told his mother he’d hit a home run, winning the game.
Eliza laughed.
After hanging up with Eliza, he called his parents. They insisted on daily phone calls even five years after his move to Atlanta. They hadn’t trusted him down here by himself. His mother lived in constant fear, imagining the worst—that one day, she’d turn on the news and see his face on the screen: dead.
“Habibi, are you alright?” she said once the phone connected.
Hasan assured her he was fine. Then, he told her the same story he had told Eliza.
“You need to come back home, Insha’Allah,” Hasan’s mother said. “I never should’ve let you go down there. The crime rate in that city is through the roof. Last week, Layla told me her niece went down there for the summer. Do you remember Layla’s niece? You two used to play together—such a good girl. Two months later, they found her dead in an alley.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I’m not walking around alleys at night,” Hasan said.
“Do not talk to your mother that way,” Hasan’s father said.
Although they never stated it, Hasan always assumed their calls were on speaker. His father, sister, or mother would jump on the call anytime, and they would attempt to bring him back to their living room again.
“I can’t come home,” Hasan said. The thought of returning to New Jersey made his stomach turn. Nothing awaited him there except his mother’s cooking and his father’s demands to find a real career. Returning would mean throwing away all his career progress—and leaving Eliza behind. “I’ve got a role in a movie next month,” he lied. “My agent thinks this might be the one.”
“Hasan, you’re not safe down there,” his father said. “We watch the news every day.”
“What happened to me could’ve happened to anyone.”
“But it didn’t happen to anyone,” his mother said. “It happened to you.”
“Do you remember Khalid next door? I told him where you wandered off to, and you know what he said. He told me that’s where the devil went—Georgia.”
“Baba, what? Are you talking about the song?”
“It is not safe down there, Hasan. At the least, read the Quran and say your prayers.”
He promised he would. He said he’d been reading and praying every day. In reality, the Quran sat untouched beneath a stack of Eliza’s biology textbooks, gathering dust.
Hasan arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport early in the morning and waited in the lobby. When Eliza texted to say she was there, he stepped outside, acting as if he’d spent the entire night traveling. She wrapped her arms around him in the car loading lane as if he’d been gone for years.
“I haven’t been able to sleep since seeing the video,” Eliza said. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if things with that Karen had gone differently.”
Hasan kissed her on the forehead, unsure how to ease her worry. A loud honk from the car behind them ruined the moment. A police officer barked commands at Eliza to move her car.
“Let’s get takeout,” Hasan said.
On their way home, they stopped at their favorite Chinese takeout spot, Wok & Roll. Normally, they saved takeout for special occasions. They ordered their usuals: glass noodles for Eliza and orange chicken with fried rice for Hasan. They punched their order into the self-checkout machine by memory.
When their order was ready, the cashier’s eyes locked on them. “Wait. Are you that guy from the racist Karen airplane video?” he asked. Before Hasan could respond, the cashier’s face lit up in recognition. “Yes! I knew you looked familiar!”
“Yeah, that was me,” Hasan said, holding out his debit card to pay for the meal. This would be the last bit of money in his bank account. He still had the wad of cash the director gave him burning in his pocket.
“Naw, man, it’s on me,” the cashier said, sliding the bag across the counter. “What that lady said to you was messed up. The shit we have to deal with in this country…”
Hasan put his debit card back into his wallet. He didn’t want the free food; he didn’t deserve it. The alternative, though, would be to spend money he desperately needed to save.
“He doesn’t like to talk about it,” Eliza said, grabbing the bag from the counter.
“Shit, man, I’m sorry,” the cashier said. He placed the box of fortune cookies on the counter. “Take as many as you want. I can’t understand what you must be feeling.”
“Thank you,” Hasan said. He reached into the fortune cookie box, the plastic crackling under his fingers. He didn’t deserve any extra, nor the cashier’s sympathy or Eliza’s. He grabbed two fortune cookies, then they left the restaurant.
“I know it’ll take some time before you talk about it with anyone—me included,” Eliza said on the drive home.
“No, I want to talk to you about it…with you,” Hasan said, balancing the hot food bag on his lap. “It’s just—I don’t know what to say. The whole thing feels embarrassing.”
“Well, I’m here to listen when you’re ready to talk. Last night, I found some therapists who specialize in traumatic experiences.”
“Therapy? Eliza, are you serious?”
Eliza slammed the car too hard at a red light, sending the food bag flying forward. Hasan caught the bag before it fell to the floorboard.
“I’ve double-checked,” Eliza said. “All the therapists I found are Black, and some specialize in Eastern religious worldviews.”
Hasan rolled his eyes. He didn’t want to yell at her—Eliza just wanted to make him feel better, to comfort him, and he knew that. But instead of feeling grateful, he felt guilty for being the target of her compassion. He could’ve told her the time he saw a therapist in elementary school when his teacher mistook his bed bug bites for signs of neglect. But instead, he chose to tell her another story.
He told her the story about his father fumigating their house. To save money, his father went to a home supplies store and exterminated the house himself. That night, they slept with the windows open, and Hasan could feel his eyes burning from the chemicals. The neighbor’s dog howled the entire night.
“You always do that,” Eliza said when he finished.
“Do what?”
“Tell stories.”
When Hasan told stories, he was in control. He decided what the focus of the subject and the topic were. For however long he could weave together his stories, nobody would force him to share what he wasn’t ready to share. So, he did what he always did and told her another story.
#
Their lives followed the same pattern for two months: Hasan drove rideshare between auditions, and Eliza treated him with tenderness. She had something waiting for him every night on the kitchen table—a takeout box or a meal she cooked herself. In every bite, he felt the weight of the truth he couldn’t tell her.
Some of his rideshare passengers recognized him— especially the younger ones. “You’re the guy from that airplane video, right?” they’d asked, waiting for Hasan to nod. Then they’d lean forward and ask, “What happened?”
Over those two months, Hasan had learned how to tell this story. He knew where to pause and when to lower his voice to draw them closer, knew which parts made older Black men clench their fists and mutter, I can’t stand them people. Every time he dropped a passenger off, they learned he hadn’t only taken them to their location; he’d delivered them to a new emotion entirely, one they didn’t know how to process. So, they opened their wallets and handed him whatever they had: cash, coupons, even candy.
Then, one afternoon in early summer, he picked up an actor from a studio backlot. He was tall, hardly fitting into Hasan’s backseat, so Hasan slid the passenger seat forward to give him more legroom. For the first ten minutes of the ride, the only sound in the car was the GPS guiding them through the windy suburban Atlanta streets.
“Have I had you before?” the actor said as Hasan pulled to a red light.
Hasan used this opportunity to look at the actor through the rearview mirror. Hasan had never seen him in any movies. He was probably just a C-lister. “No,” Hasan said.
Hasan drove the actor to his small mansion on the top of a hill in Vinings. Through the passenger window, the west side of Atlanta sparkled against the trees, glowing like a Christmas tree. When he pulled into the driveway, he unlocked the car doors and switched on the cabin lights.
“Wait!” the actor said, one foot dangling out the backseat door. “You’re the guy from that Karen video! The one on that airplane where she pushed you to the ground.” The actor shoved his phone toward Hasan.
“Yeah, it happened so long ago now,” Hasan said. “I almost forgot it happened.”
“Man,” the actor said, “my mom showed me that video. It’s crazy to think people are still out here like that. You hear stories, but seeing it in public…damn…. What happened? I saw the video, but what’s the full story?”
Hasan hesitated, but his tongue went on autopilot. He told the story again. The same polished story he’d perfected a dozen times. When he finished, he opened his eyes to find the actor staring at the backseat with crossed arms.
“Bullshit,” the actor said.
Hasan froze. If anyone were to understand why he’d faked the entire event, it would be the actor. The man had spent his entire life telling stories, living within stories. But Hasan couldn’t tell him. He didn’t want to feel like a fraud. He wasn’t a fraud. He was paid to act, just like any other actor. What happened with Natalie had happened. She had said those words and pushed him onto the ground. The look of powerlessness captured in the video wasn’t fraudulent. He was a fraud. “It haunts me every day.”
They stood there looking at each other. The actor didn’t leave the car, nor did Hasan ask him to leave. The actor reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. He handed Hasan three twenty-dollar bills. “Thanks for sharing.”
Hasan looked at the bills dangling in the air. Then, reluctantly took the money.
When he arrived home that night, his back ached from sitting in the driver’s seat for so long. He stumbled down the hallway as he regained his balance. The smell of Wok & Roll greeted him when he opened the apartment door. He saw his favorite dishes arranged on the kitchen table. Eliza looked up from her half-finished bowl of glass noodles with a smile across her face.
“I thought you would be home sooner,” Eliza said, a piece of noodle dangling from her mouth.
“My last ride sent me to the other side of town,” Hasan said. He slipped out of his shoes and cracked his back. Then he sat down in the dining room chair across from Eliza. The spices of the orange chicken prickled the back of his nose. How could he continue lying to her?
“Eliza,” he said, slow, serious. She glanced at him, her chopsticks in the air. “The whole airplane video was fake. It was for some guy’s art project.”
Eliza slurped the rest of a glass noodle into her mouth. She patted the oil stain on her lips clean. “What do you mean?”
“The video, the airplane, the woman— it was all fake. We were in some studio in North Atlanta.”
Eliza slammed her chopsticks down on the table. “What do you mean it was fake? Why would you fake something like that? Half of the internet wants to burn that woman alive.”
“We needed the money,” Hasan said.
“We make enough to get by. If anything urgent happens, you know my parents will help us.”
Hasan didn’t know how to explain to her that he didn’t want to live based on the generosity of a white couple he’d only met once. He didn’t know how to explain to Eliza that he wanted to provide for her, needed to provide for her, because this is what his father had told him he needed to do. Without the money, without the control over their lives, how would they get married? With Eliza in school and his acting career struggling to get off the ground, they were stuck, missing out on an important stage in their relationship.
“I feel like I’m taking from them something I don’t deserve.”
“So, you fake a hate crime?”
Hasan opened his mouth, but no words came. The problem was not that what he did was fake, but that people felt it was real. When people scrolled on their phones, none thought to question the video. Because they knew someone somewhere who had had this experience or something similar, and that person didn’t have someone with a camera recording. What he was doing was helping voice those fears and concerns for people.
Hasan pleaded with her. He wanted to tell her about how his father met his mother at a gas station in Newark. No, he wanted to tell her about their first date at Piedmont Park after they met on a dating app. How nervous he had been to hold her hand in public. He didn’t know where to start. The stories jumbled in his head. His mind could only find the director.
“It was a Craigslist ad. A director needed someone for a viral video. They said they’d monetize it, use the algorithm or something, and make money. They paid a lot— more than we’d make in months. I didn’t… I didn’t think it would blow up like this. You know how the internet works: here today, gone tomorrow.”
Hasan told her the real story, which he could hardly tell himself. He told her about the Craigslist ad, the sketchy studio lot, Natalie and her annoying children, an overbearing father, and an ambitious husband. Unlike the story he told his passengers, he didn’t know the flow of this story. He didn’t know whether to pause or slow down. Once he reached the end, he expected Eliza to yell at him and threaten to leave. Instead, she grabbed the rest of her glass noodles and went to their bedroom, locking the door behind her.
Hasan sat alone at the kitchen table, wondering if she was crying, sleeping, or scrolling on her phone. He thought about knocking on the door, begging for her forgiveness, but he knew she wouldn’t open it—or that she shouldn’t.
Silence filled the apartment for the next week. Eliza refused to leave the bedroom except for food and water. She continued her life, going to the library to study and walking around the park across the street during the afternoon as if Hasan didn’t exist. Every time she passed by him, Hasan chased after her with a bouquet of apologies.
Hasan didn’t know if he should stay or pack his belongings. Where would he go? He couldn’t go home to his parents, who were waiting for their son to be a movie star. Every night, he made a pallet on the sofa, stared at the ceiling, and entertained himself with stories. Next door, he could hear the Italian woman listening to opera. Her voice sometimes hummed along.
One morning, when Eliza was out making coffee, he called his parents to confess. He made a big show of it, pranced around the living room with the phone on speaker, and hoped to get her attention.
“Ya qalbi,” his mother answered.
“Ummi, I’m sorry,” Hasan said.
“What’s wrong?” his mother asked. “What are you talking about, Habibi.”
Hasan told her the truth. He hadn’t known how to tell them that he had lied, that the South they had created in their minds was based on a story he and others had made.
“Why would you do such a thing?” his father asked when he finished.
“I thought—” Hasan began, but the words never came.
“Why would you throw your name—our name—in the mud? This is how the world will know you now. They will think Hasan, the liar.”
Hasan felt like a child again, caught by his father sneaking cookies out of the kitchen pantry. “Astaghfirullah,” he said repeatedly in between his father’s yelling.
After begging for forgiveness, his parents offered him little. Like Eliza, they wanted him punished. In their eyes, he’d become what Americans feared he would be. From this, there was no return.
A year after the video’s release, Hasan had only told three people the truth: Eliza, his mother, and his father. He hadn’t dared to tell anyone else. Slowly, his rideshare passengers forgot about the incident. The wad of cash in his pocket slowly stopped growing. The world had run out of pity to give him.
One day, the same director called and offered him an audition for his next project—a legitimate movie. With the money they made from the airplane video, they had saved enough to fund a small independent movie. The director offered him a supporting role: a struggling immigrant cab driver who befriends an aspiring playwright from the Northeast. They promised to submit the film to every major film festival.
Hasan wanted to tell the director no—the role felt reductive and a caricature of everything he’d been trying to escape. But he knew he needed this as much as they wanted to reduce him. He couldn’t afford to turn down the offer. He jotted down the audition address on the back of an overdue bill.
When he told Eliza about the audition, she put her foot down. “If you don’t want the role, don’t act for them,” she said. “I don’t like the idea of you working with him again. He’s already ruined your life once.”
Slowly, their relationship had mended itself. She let him back into their bedroom, and most nights, he held her, scared that she would be gone in the morning, though this felt like a truce waiting to fracture. They took small, careful steps towards rebuilding their trust, but it was never the same. The lie, the video, and the stories he told lingered between them.
Hasan wanted to act. He wanted the role to be wrapped in someone else’s story so he wouldn’t have to be so lost in his. From the hundreds of auditions he had done in the past year, no role materialized outside of small parts in student films. His rideshare shifts became longer.
“I need this role,” Hasan told Eliza the morning before the audition as they lay facing each other in bed. Sunlight kissed them through the bed canopy. “I haven’t acted in a real project in so long. It’s like an itch in my brain I can’t reach. Every day, it’s there. It won’t go away. I know the role is dumb, but this isn’t about them. I need to do this for me.”
With that, Eliza didn’t argue.
On the morning of the audition, Hasan dressed in his best clothes. Eliza giggled when he stepped out of their bedroom. He ignored her, adjusting his collar and sleeves to perfection. He was in a rush to beat traffic. He kissed Eliza goodbye and left. As he neared the elevators, he heard a woman calling behind him.
“Ciao, aspetta un attimo! Un attimo!” the woman said behind him.
He turned around to be face-to-face with their Italian next-door neighbor. She wore her painting overalls, covered in dried splashes of every color imaginable.
“I have something for you, amico!” the Italian woman said, grabbing Hasan’s arm before he could protest. She pulled him through her living room, where they had wine and expensive cheese, past the bathroom, where he tried to hide that night until they stood in her art studio.
So much had changed since his last visit. The canvases that had been stacked against the wall were now gone. Instead, a singular large canvas stood in the center of the room. He looked at the painting: a Black man dressed in a luxurious medieval blouse with shiny metal armor. He held out a sword as if cleaning it. Behind him, a balcony overlooked rolling vineyard hills and a thinning blue sky. The man’s face was obscured with her touch of cubism—his face fragmented, his ear attached to his forehead, his forehead to his neck, his nose to his hair.
“For you!” the Italian woman said. “Le chiedo scusa, I heard what happened to you. It inspired me. I’ve been working on this for you. Per piacere, take it! Take it!”
“No, I can’t take it from you,” Hasan said. His face turned red at the thought that the Italian woman had worked on this for months. “Let me give you money.”
Hasan reached into his pocket. He pulled out the wad of cash tips—an accumulation of months of tips and the rest of the money from the airplane video. He hadn’t counted the money. He didn’t know how much he had collected. He felt guilty keeping the money, so he never spent it. He held all the crumpled, wrinkled dollars out to the Italian woman.
“Sei matto?” the Italian woman said. She held her arms behind her back. “It’s a gift for you! No money. You’ve been through enough.”
Hasan pleaded with her to take the money, but she refused, growing more frustrated with him each time. He placed a chunk of the cash on the painting easel, but she grabbed it and put it against his chest. He returned the money to his wallet.
“One last touch,” the Italian woman said. She grabbed a thin paintbrush and dipped it into the pool of white on her wooden palette. Then, she signed her name across the bottom.
Hasan held the painting as if his touch risked fracturing it. He felt guilty for taking the painting. He should’ve told her the truth. She worked for free for months to give him a painting he hadn’t deserved. Standing outside his apartment door alone, he read her signature: Giulia Vitale.
“You’re going to be late to your audition,” Eliza said from the kitchen. She sat at the table surrounded by books.
“That Italian woman next door gave me this…” Hasan said. He turned the canvas around. She gasped.
“We can’t keep this,” Eliza said. “This looks so… so nice…” She brushed the tips of her fingers over the surface of the canvas as if not believing it was real. “What is it supposed to be?”
“I don’t know. She said the video inspired her, so she painted me.”
“This is you?”
“That’s what she said.”
Hasan leaned the painting against the wall. They stared at it as if they were in a museum, but there was no placard to explain what they looked at.
“Did you tell her the video was fake?”
“No.”
Eliza turned away from the painting and sent daggers up at Hasan. “Why didn’t you just tell her the video was fake?”
“The video wasn’t fake,” Hasan said. His voice was louder than he intended. “It wasn’t fake.”
“Wait.” Eliza squinted. “Is that supposed to be Othello?”
Hasan picked the painting up. He inspected the canvas’s pores. Were these the shores of Venice behind him? He remembered the portraits he’d seen of Renaissance paintings and Othello in high school, but those memories were fuzzy now.
When Hasan told this part of the story to groups of drunk friends, and eventually even his children, he told it with confidence: how he charged back into the Italian woman’s apartment, how he yelled until his vocal cords went cold, how Eliza had to pull him out of the room by his arm. How he refused to let himself be caricatured by her. How he wouldn’t let her reduce him like he had reduced himself. He had told many stories, but America only saw his first version.
But the truth was, he skipped the audition. Instead, he sat alone in the living room, staring at the painting until his eyes ached. He knew he had already created this painting of himself on his own long before the Italian woman ever picked up a brush. This version of the story wasn’t for anyone else. It was his, and his alone.
