Other rebel fighters said that Gadhafi’s body, along with dozens of loyalist prisoners, was being taken to Misrata.

Motassim Gadhafi, the fifth son of Gadhafi and a Libyan Army officer who is believed to have been directing the final stand in Sirte, was also confirmed dead. His body was seen at a local field hospital.

Libya’s interim government confirmed Thursday that Gadhafi was killed as well.

“A new Libya is born today,” Mahmoud Shammam, the chief spokesman of the Transitional National Council, said Thursday as reported by The New York Times. “This is the day of real liberation. We were serious about giving him a fair trial. It seems God has some other wish.”

A rebel military official in Tripoli later confirmed to Al Jazeera that the rebels had captured and killed Gadhafi but did not release further details about his death. The U.S. State Department has yet to confirm Gadhafi’s death.

Libyan rebels first took arms in February after a popular protest movement gripped the eastern part of the country. The conflict was largely a stalemate until NATO forces began flying sorties over the country in late March. Although the capital of Tripoli fell last month, loyalist soldiers holed up in Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, had been making a last stand for several weeks until Thursday morning, when rebel forces finally gained control of the entire city.

Then along came the Arab Spring and the colonel’s security forces started cracking heads and killing protesters. Nothing fundamental about Gadhafi had changed — anyone familiar with his four-decade reign in power knew he would employ violence if his rule were ever challenged — but with his people in open revolt it became too embarrassing to embrace him any longer. And so, in the manner of past American SOBs — think Somoza, think Noriega — U.S. policymakers found it expedient to cut him loose. The problem was that since Gadhafi had been rehabilitated in the Western media as a repentant bad boy, Washington’s policymaking agenda needed new narrative: to reestablish Gadhafi’s credentials as villain.

Just the job for a reliably credulous American press corps, whose bosses have grown bored with the details of bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington policymakers know full well that launching war, even an undeclared one like the NATO and U.S.-led overthrow of Gadhafi, cannot be sustained without a good story line.

The formula is not complicated. The two essential components are an evil enemy on one side and heroic, brave and true allies on the other. As the story unfolds, the government serves as the studio, producing and directing the movie while editors and reporters enlist as scriptwriters. These faithful scribes periodically demand their artistic freedom (i.e., by reporting on friendly fire deaths or criticizing an official action) but generally succumb, in the end, to the studio’s demands for a neat Hollywood ending.

Many outside the media class see this collaboration as cynical, if not conspiratorial — and, on the part of the policymaking class, it usually is. Conversations on “deep background” keep the names of policymakers out of the public eye. NATO psychological warfare units, while proud to disclose their leaflet drops, are doctrinally dedicated to pumping out information damaging to the enemy, whether true or false.

On the part of journalists, however, the collaboration is often pathetically idealistic. U.S. policymakers have never had a hard time finding reporters to sign up as wartime scriptwriters. Back in the Reagan years our “freedom fighters” went mano a mano with the Soviet empire, lauded by the likes of Charles Krauthammer. Never mind that these rebels (no, brigands) were cutthroat Islamic fanatics, of whom not a few subsequently joined an emerging organization that came to be known as al-Qaida. That was not a detail to be worried about by smart people in Washington. 

No matter that in the mid-1980s the White House-funded contra rebels in Nicaragua, cheered on by the Washington Post and the Washington Times, preferred slaughtering non-combatants to real war and trafficked in cocaine on the side. When Jonas Savimbi, a murderous champagne-swilling Angolan guerrilla leader backed by South Africa’s apartheid government, came to Washington, he could count on a warm reception in the pages of the liberal New Republic.

A competent press corps would know this history and be wary. But then Sept. 11 “changed everything” — and changed nothing. The U.S. government teamed up with another coalition of Afghan rebels to topple the Taliban. Largely forgotten was that our newfound allies had ruled Afghanistan from 1992 until 1996 and that their thievery, incompetence, squabbling and criminality paved the way for the rise of the Taliban in the first place.

Next to fall out of favor was Saddam Hussein. When he was willing to massacre waves of Iranian child soldiers in the 1980s, the Iraqi dictator was glad-handed by special U.S. envoy Donald Rumsfeld, who quietly orchestrated U.S. financial support for Saddam’s government. When Saddam ungratefully invaded Kuwait in 1991, he was transformed from unpleasant U.S ally to official monster.

Media enablers would help. When the Bush administration officials settled on the Iraqi government as a scapegoat for the 9/11 intelligence failure, they were fortunate to find the New York Times correspondent Judith Miller as a witness. She stenographically reported the White House’s suspicions of (nonexistent) WMD and (never corroborated) ties to al-Qaida, while touting the virtues of the Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi. Back then U.S. officials privately acknowledged that Chalabi always had more influence along the Potomac than along the Euphrates. Today, they admit, he effectively serves as Iran’s lobbyist in Iraq.

But no matter, the persistent Judy Miller still advises statesmen on how to Do Good in the world. 

Which is not to say that some U.S. enemies were not genuinely evil people. But leave the political and policy questions out of it. Whether or not war in Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea, the media mythmaking around war proved hazardous to the country’s health. A more honest and accurate pre-war assessment of our allies would have made clear that what really matters is not military victory but what comes afterward.

The same holds true for Libya, which is now getting its own Hollywood treatment. Whether Gadhafi is moving from hideout to hideout or hiding out, à la Osama, in plain sight, his ending will be written in a screenplay that has undergone many rewrites over the years.

For most of his career Gadhafi was depicted much as Saddam Hussein would be: a pariah. That began to change in 1999, when he decided to turn over suspects in the Pan Am bombing to Western authorities. A bigger breakthrough in his charm offensive came in 2004 when, in seeking to end his international isolation, he renounced his WMD programs (which were never very far along to begin with).

President Bush soon lifted most U.S. trade sanctions. In 2005 American oil companies funded and founded the U.S.-Libya Business Association to push for improved trade and diplomatic relations with Col. Qaddafi’s regime. David Goldwyn — who had served at the Energy Department under Bill Clinton and would become the Obama administration’s special envoy on international energy in 2009 — headed the group.

Gadhafi, the story went, was not a bad buy. Within a few years, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other U.S. companies were producing 30 percent of Libya’s daily output.

Gadhafi signed up as a close ally in counterterrorism. He turned over Islamic radicals to neighboring pro-Western governments and in exchange the U.S. handed over to Gadhafi some Libyans captured in the “war on terrorism” and allowed his agents to interrogate Libyans held at Guantánamo Bay. Dick Cheney and Moammar Gadhafi may have disagreed on many points of policy but they were bipartisan on waterboarding: It was not a problem.

By 2008, the U.S. relationship with Libya was blossoming. That year, Congress, in response to lobbying by the oil companies, exempted Libya from a law signed by President Bush that allowed American victims to seize assets of countries found liable for terrorist attacks — a law that had specifically targeted Gadhafi.

Who really cared that Gadhafi continued to maintain his bizarre personality cult and violate human rights? The U.S. government and media quickly lost interest. “The Americans no longer want to see Gadhafi’s regime destabilized,” Ashur Shamis, a London-based Libyan dissident, told me back in 2005. “Opponents have written off the possibility of receiving tangible political support from the United States.”

It was only when the Libyan people spontaneously rebelled in 2011, and Gadhafi pledged to lay waste to Benghazi, that the U.S. government began to reconsider the wisdom of its newfound friendship. Hollywood screenwriters rarely feel controlled by historical truth and neither, alas, does Washington. The policy agenda needed a storyline that again cast Gadhafi as Evildoer, and the press corps dutifully provided.

The most explosive charge in the Libyan civil war, which originated with the rebels, was that Gadhafi was feeding Viagra to his troops and sending them out to rape women. In June Secretary of State Hillary Clinton solemnly said she was “deeply concerned” about these reports and the media did its part. At CNN the tag team of Wolf Blitzer and Nic Robertson ran a lengthy report on the Viagra charges under the banner of “A tool of massive rape.”

Not quite. Several human rights groups launched major investigations into the claim of government-ordered rapes and found no evidence for it. Last week, the New York Times derided the story as one of the rebels “far-fetched claims.” Back in June the paper of record published a story saying rebel officials “had discovered condoms and packets of Viagra in tanks and other vehicles captured from Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers.”

Another widely published claim was that, again in the words of Secretary Clinton, Gadhafi was flying in “mercenaries and thugs” to kill his own people. Ali al-Essawi, who resigned as Libyan ambassador to India after Gadhafi cracked down on protesters, told Reuters that the mercenaries were “from Africa, and speak French and other languages.”

This story, accepted as true by much of the media, also turned out to be largely, if not entirely, fictitious. Many of the “mercenaries” paraded by the rebels at international press conferences later turned out to be undocumented laborers from other African countries. The story was handy, though, because it purported to explain why Gadhafi, who allegedly had little public support, managed to remain in power for six months despite massive bombardment from NATO aircraft.

The point, systematically deleted from the memory banks of U.S.-based news organizations, is that our overseas allies supported for purposes of (the clinical term) “regime change” always generate propaganda to influence U.S. public opinion. Like the Nicaraguan contras in the ’80s and the Iraqi National Congress in the 00s, the Libyan rebels have ample reason to lie to U.S news outlets — and yet many reporters and editors take their claims at face value.

Fortunately, not by all. As ABC News recently reported, Abdelhakim Belhaj, who led the rebels into Gadhafi’s compound, was a founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an anti-Gadhafi group whose members fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden and whom the Bush administration designated as a terrorist organization in 2004.

Only recently has more attention focused on the fact that the rebels, like Gadhafi, have committed vicious brutalities during the war, and that their own leadership is prone to fierce, internal squabbling. In late July, the Transitional National Council in Benghazi killed (and burned the corpse) of their military leader, Gen. Abdel Fatah Younes, who was suspected of treason. In what journalist Patrick Cockburn called “a masterpiece of mistiming,” the assassination was committed on this very day that Britain recognized the rebel government.

And there’s one more aspect to the story that has been cut from the current script. Whether he was “our” SOB or “their” SOB, there is no doubt that Gadhafi used his oil revenues to provide far more to his people than many U.S. allies in the region. In the United Nations 2010 report on “Human Development” Libya ranked first in Africa and a respectable 53rd out of 170 countries overall.

Gadhafi’s government had a terrible human rights record but it provided its citizens with free education and healthcare. The World Health Organization says Libya “boasts the highest literacy and education enrollment rates in North Africa.” Childhood immunization is close to universal and infant mortality rates are very low. Libya also ranked high on gender equality, and women were prominent in politics. The poor had a degree of protection with subsidized food and fuel. In Libya, “social exclusion due to poverty and lack of access to education is nearly nonexistent,” according to this report.

There was nothing in Gadhafi’s Libya comparable to the mass poverty of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, which has one of the highest adult illiteracy rates in the world. During the revolution in Egypt, breathless reporters on U.S. cable news networks would say that the popular upheaval had “exposed” the appalling circumstances of the Egyptian poor, as if the reality hadn’t been obvious to any sentient observer all along.

Gadhafi was corrupt, but the scale of his thievery does not appear to come close to that of the Mubarak regime in Egypt or the energy-fueled kleptocracies that U.S. policymakers quietly indulge in places like Equatorial Guinea and Turkmenistan. The reports about Gadhafi’s decadent lifestyle withered under scrutiny. The New York Times recently ran a story under the headline of “Gilded Traces of the Lives Qaddafis Led,” which reported that “as the former subjects of Col. Moammar el-Qaddafi comb through his family’s estates, farms and seaside villas, the properties are revealing the details of lives lived far removed from the people” and “the distance between power and powerlessness.” It was so unlike classless America, where the political elite and the working class live together in the same neighborhoods and vacation harmoniously on Martha’s Vineyard.

The facts of the story betrayed the headline. “The residences of the House of Qaddafi were not quite as grand as people might have supposed,” the Times acknowledged. The villas of Gadhafi’s sons “on a sand bluff overlooking the Mediterranean … failed to match the ostentation they displayed in other facets of their lives. They were not lavish; the brown paint on the patio decks was peeling, and they had a distinctly 1970s feel.”

Such are problems of scriptwriting. In Hollywood, the producers and the screenwriters always disagree. In Washington, the official story always clashes with the irritating reality of facts on the ground. As a state-sponsored media spectacle, the Libya story will conclude when Gadhafi escapes or is captured or killed. For the country where 6.5 million people live, the story line is less certain.

The odds are that a new government, even assuming it is stable, will be dependent on outside support. It will have a very hard time matching Gadhafi’s egalitarian record on economic rights. Democracy is unlikely to flourish any time soon. The rights of women’s are endangered. Human rights generally will continue to be violated.

Finally — and this is the safest bet of all — U.S. oil companies will get back into Libya as soon as possible. At which time U.S. government and the stenographers of the press corps will not devote a lot of air time or column inches dwelling on human suffering in the post-Gadhafi era. Why bother about such details when there are other important scripts to be polished elsewhere? 

Ken Silverstein is an Open Society Institute fellow and contributing editor to Harper’s magazine.

What they did imagine is that there might be a time when the Revolutionary Leader would have to ride alone for some hours in a windowless bulletproof chamber, and that’s where he is now. It is air-conditioned, and soundproof. There is a bed, where he sits, legs crossed, and a water cooler, and a glass-fronted bookcase, and an entertainment console complete with stereo and television. The bookcase, to his dismay, contains little to read: only the Koran and his own — he admits it, boring — writings. The Green Book? Please. He was barely 30 when he wrote the thing. The rest of the bookcase is filled with videocassettes.

There is no computer. There is no Internet. He has his phone, but can’t get service. The rebels have fouled up everything.

The Revolutionary Leader is depressed. Really, he ought to have thought to have them keep this transport up to date. The television is a bulbous CRT that hums when you turn it on, and all the tapes are from the ’80s. There is also a drawer under the stereo that contains compact discs of traditional music, and a couple of board games. Checkers and Monopoly. And there are video games: Atari, and a little pile of cartridges.

There is also a Rubik’s Cube.

The RL draws a breath and lets it out slowly. He climbs off the bed and looks through the videocassettes. “Back to the Future.” “The Breakfast Club.” “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” Is that the one with Tina Turner in it? He tried to get her to perform in Bab al-Azizia, back then, but no dice. A shame, he thinks she would like him. They would have a lot to talk about, he thinks — astronomy, socialism.

He considers masturbating, but is too depressed. He misses Halyna and his wardrobe. He misses feeling good about himself. The ’80s! he thinks, still gazing at the row of videotapes — those were the days. When Reagan hated him, when he meant something in the world. Safia still loved him, he had a sense of humor. Life was fun. Now he feels like a loser. Why did he sponsor those terrorists? Why did he get so pissed off at the Berbers? All his decisions now seem arbitrary and capricious. He wants to go home and eat a giant meal and fuck his nurse. He wants to flip through his Condi album and remember the glory days.

Instead he slides a videotape off the shelf — Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” — pops it into the player, and snatches the Rubik’s Cube from the drawer.

He used to have a book that told you how to solve this thing. Memorized it in a couple of hours. Indeed, he got pretty good, around the time of the conflict with Chad — he used to sit in the war room, waiting for the troops to move, for the brass to arrive and explain themselves, and he would solve the thing over and over again. It calmed his nerves. And then he would sit there at the conference table with the solved cube in front of him and endure the pathetic explanations of those sweating generals.

That war. A humiliation. Beaten by a bunch of ratty bastards in pickup trucks. And now it’s happening all over again at home. But no — don’t go there. Too depressing. Watch TV. Solve the Cube.

Sagan. “One voice in the cosmic fugue.” The music is soothing — pianos and synthesizers, and on the screen, stars and galaxies wheeling past. They cast a red glow on the tiny room. There is a rumble outside, the caravan is turning right, the RL ignores it. He is bent over the Cube.

First, a cross, you make a cross on top. That always bothered him — why couldn’t it be a star, or a crescent? He remembers now, he always started with green or red — national colors, of course. His fingers, encumbered by rings, twist the slabs of plastic into place; the Cube clacks and clatters as Sagan talks about the Samurai.

A war between clans. “Each asserted a superior ancestral claim to the imperial throne.” That’s always the problem, isn’t it — everybody thinks they’re right, nobody backs down. Well, the RL did, after the Americans got Saddam — he could see the writing on the wall, figured he’d get himself on the winning side. And look where it’s brought him. A metal box in the middle of nowhere. The transport lurches — just a bump in the road. Back to the Cube.

Corners next. Red, red, red, red. Blood in the corners: That’s where they push you, then they kill you. Well, not him, he’s getting out. Gave these people water, pulled them out of holes in the ground and gave them houses with electricity, he brought wealth and peace to this country. And this is the thanks he gets. “The Heiki warriors threw themselves into the sea and drowned,” Sagan says. The ultimate sacrifice! He would have made it for his people! Instead, this!

And now the edge pieces. Left, up, right, down. Right, up, left, down. Sagan is saying, “… marked the end of the clan’s thirty-year rule … the Heiki all but vanished from history …”

And now the transport is slowing, and it rocks back and forth, and the lights flicker, casting the Revolutionary Leader briefly into darkness. The air conditioning dies, then wheezes back to life. He could solve it now in the dark, he thinks, though he doesn’t have to: He’s got the middle row finished, and now the orange edge pieces on the bottom, and all he has to do is the corners. Up, right, down, clockwise. Left, counterclockwise, up, left, down, left, left, and –

Ah, shit. Didn’t work. And he messed up the bottom corners. Tries to remember what he did, to do it in reverse. Right, right, up. Left? No, right … It’s like his life — you think you’re planning things out, you think you’ve created order. But chaos creeps in, doesn’t it. There’s no keeping it at bay.

Through the soundproofing, gunfire. Shouts. There is an explosion: The transport heaves and creaks. The lights flicker again. Sagan says, “… patterns which resemble a human face … with the aggressive scowl of a samurai warrior …” He is talking about crabs, Heiki crabs, the final incarnation of the defeated warriors. And now the Revolutionary Leader knows he’s beat, because he has lost the bottom edge pieces, too, and the lights go off, and then on again for the last time. The videotape lurches to a stop, starts up again; and it is to the strains of a shakuhachi flute that he glimpses, in the last seconds of light before he is trapped for good, the pattern of a face, his own face, in the Cube, a broken cross, blood in the corners, the end.

They’d had to come in so quickly, there was no time to gather food. And the place was not pre-stocked correctly. There was only water, gallon jugs that lined the walls. Thin roof from which to emerge through a hole when ready, secure enough to ward off enemies, secure enough for concealment, but like a tomb, he thought. With a missile from above he’d be obliterated. But no one would think he’d be here in the middle of everyone, among over a million people, and they wouldn’t kill their own; that was the difference between he and them. They’d be tracking him east and west with their agents, their dogs, that and manning the waters like fools in their little boats. He’d wait them out right here.

The boy was silent, his small arm locked under Moammar’s, child hands gripping the man’s bicep. Moammar spoke aloud now. “Do you know what to call me, little one?”

“No, Momo,” the boy said.

“Call me the King of Kings,” he said. A joke now, here. But nothing was funny anymore. He pushed back his hair and stared at the boy. The only one left to him now, his first son’s youngest, first son from the colonel’s second wife Safia Farkesh, his first son dead on the floor in the corner of the room. The boy was the newest grandson. Called Saif after his father, although the boy’s name was something else. Everyone was dead.

The boy turned and placed his head on his grandfather’s lap. The colonel dreaded the next step. Nothing for it, though, he told himself, he would commence with it tomorrow and it would be done. The boy must survive and get to exile, and return as a man. He had thought he would do it today, but instead, now that the light waned, he took the boy and lifted him in his arms and kissed the boy’s face, his cheeks, and lips, and carried him to the bed and lay down with him until the boy slept and the colonel rose and returned to the floor and held his knees in his arms and stared straight ahead.

The following day, near night, he heated the cooking pan. He set the boy’s hand on the floor, drew the knife and cut off the last joint of the boy’s pinkie finger on the left hand. The boy yelped with pain and fear and clutched the hand as blood purled over the surface of the skin. The colonel took the boy’s hand and pressed the stub end of the pinking finger into the burning pan on the stove. He held the boy’s squirming, shrieking body and gripped the boy’s hand and pressed firmly as the flesh burned. The boy screamed and did not stop screaming even when the colonel removed the boy’s hand from the pan and held the boy to his chest, and sat with him on the edge of the bed, holding the boy as his small body heaved and sound came like a siren from his chest.

“Remember this,” he whispered in the boy’s ear. “This cutting, this burning … they did this to your grandfather, the King of Kings.” The boy’s screams became sobs as he huddled against his grandfather’s chest. He carried the boy to the body in the corner of the room, and pulled back the blanket with the knife and showed the boy his father’s face. “Remember this,” the colonel said. “This they did to your father.” He leaned and touched the lips of his dead son. “Avenge your father,” he said to the boy. “Avenge me.”

He covered the face again, and carried the boy away from the body toward the bed. The boy clung to him like a fierce creature. He pulled the boy from his chest and held him up and looked into his eyes. “You have my strength,” he said. “Survive. Thrive.” “Fear Allah that you may prosper,” he said. “God is with those who persevere.”

He draped the boy on his back. “Hold my neck tightly,” he said. He carried the boy up the wall ladder to the hole in the ceiling where he worked the lock and opened the trap door and emerged to his chest. There he set the boy out on the surface.

“Go,” he said, and the boy fled, frantic like a wounded man, holding his hand to his chest as he ran across the rooftops further into the city. The colonel watched until the body was a small light that merged with the darkness and was gone.

Then the colonel closed the trap door, set the lock, and descended the ladder. He took the knife from his belt again and walked and lifted the foot of the blanket in the corner of the room. He carved two long strips from the calf muscle on the right leg of the body. He returned to the stove and set the strips in the pan. So little time now before the body would sour and the meat would be inedible. Carved thin, the cooking would not take long. The smell was something akin to incense and wild animal. The smoke fed itself into the air vents and disappeared. The colonel turned the stove off, took the pan and sat cross-legged on the floor. The meat, he carved into small pieces. “Flesh of my flesh,” he said, and fed himself.

When he was filled he leaned his back to the wall and closed his eyes.

When the room was black he went to the bed and slept and did not dream.

We’re not far from Heliopolis, in Misrata. We’re only several hundred kilometers. The acrid scent of gasoline hangs over the highway that stretches between us. So if you’re lucky enough to be alive on that night, twice a millennium, when the phoenix appears, having just buried its father — stand outside, look toward the horizon. Do not be afraid. It will be a massive bird. A beautiful, wide-winged creature. It will reflect the sun as it sweeps in a great circle, sweeps out across Al Butnan and then the Gulf of Sidra and then, disappears.

We thought, at first, that the phoenix was born in 1911. We thought, next, that it was born in 1951. We thought, again, that it was born in 1969. Were we wrong? I worry that we were wrong, worry as I’m sitting here in this little, claustrophobic room, with my damn microwave and my 10-gallon container of water, and my woolen blankets, and my chessboard, and the ants, and these filthy clothes and my pistol.

- – - – - – - – - -

I stand at the windowsill. It’s a dirty windowsill. Dust settles on everything, here. Even the mortars won’t shake it off.

Everyone is bleeding. They come to me — as their brother, their colonel, their father, their comrade — they come to me in bandages. I touch their wounds to comfort them. They are different every day, these people; the old ones disappear; new ones take their place. Except Al-Mu’tasim; he’s here, each day, as always. This morning he appeared with his left arm wrapped in gauze. He was carrying a small brown bag. I looked at him and sighed.

“How were you injured, my brother?” I said. And I reached out and took his arm and held it, just here, in the center of my chest, beside my heart. I began to unwrap his wounded arm. I would touch the skin, I would press it to my own skin, and — I knew — it would begin to heal.

“Shrapnel,” Al-Mu’tasim said. “But it’s healing.”

I nodded and released his arm.

“What have you brought me?” I asked.

Wordlessly, he held out the bag. I opened it. I looked inside. Nestled in a bed of torn newspapers, slick and waxy and the color of cauliflower, was a human ear. I nodded.

“And the boy?” I said.

“Outside.”

I nodded again.

“Bring him in.”

And so that’s what he did. The boy was young — maybe 13. His arms were thin, so thin, the arms of a child, covered with soft, feathery hair. He’d been beaten, but not badly; he had one black eye and a cut across his mouth. If he knew that he was standing two feet from a paper bag that contained his father’s ear — he did not betray that knowledge.

“Do you play chess?” I asked.

He hesitated, then he nodded.

“My uncle taught me,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Sit down and we’ll set up the game.”

We played for half an hour. He was just a boy but I could tell he was proud of his skill. And he was good for his age — that is to say he was pedestrian and clumsy — but then again I’ve played against grand masters, against world champions, I’ve played on boards of elephant bone and onyx, of sapphire and saltwater abalone.

“What would you do if those pieces on the board were real men and women?” I finally asked him. “What if it was your family — if the queen was your mother and the king was your father?”

The boy shook his head.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“But would you play the game in the same way?” I asked.

The boy looked at me with his wide brown eyes. We waited there, for a moment, staring at each other. We waited and I could imagine the sound of the line of ants, shaking the dirt as they ate this forsaken house, one particle at a time. The boy said nothing — he continued staring at me. He would have stared for hours, I think, his eyes fierce and unblinking. There’s a Berber saying that I have always loved: Angels bend down their wings for the brave and the innocent.

Finally, I motioned to Al-Mu’tasim — who’d remained in the doorway that whole time. Al-Mu’tasim bent down. I brushed my lips against his ear. I rested them gently against the skin of it.

“Kill them in the night,” I whispered. “Do it so they do not suffer.”

And with that I had him take the boy away.

But it’s quiet here, now. Some part of me wishes I hadn’t done what was right. But in these sad, last days — what can I do? I can do nothing but tell the truth. I am the brother of the people. I am the golden bird. I am beloved by everyone.