I see much from the roof of my house. I like to sit under the white awning that shades me, with a bottle of water, and look at the wonders of my city. I can see (everyone can see, from anywhere in the city) the colorful twisted minarets of numerous mosques. I see the rooftop gardens on the other houses of my neighborhood and some of my friends sitting on top of their homes, shouting at people below or throwing rocks at dogs.
         To the west, of course, is the giant silver arc of the Ankh Multinational Corporation Reconstruction Arch which is (I have heard them say) the monument to the war.
         I see sand. Always, I see sand. When the wind is high, I can't see much else, grit erasing the lines of buildings, dampening the Arch's customary gleam. On those days, it's not worth much to be up on the roof, but much of the time I see things that I don't understand.
         The Ankh Arch never stays in one place for very long - it passes over entire neighborhoods in a matter of days, able to span several blocks at once and top even the tallest buildings of the city. It glides forward sometimes as I watch it, each foot carried on the back of a flatbed truck like an awkward rollerskater in the new discotheques. The base of the Ankh Arch is almost always hidden by its own, personal cloud of dust, kicked up by the line of bulldozers that advance before it, knocking down mortared and burned buildings, homes with more than half their faces eaten away by bullets, clearing a path so that the flatbeds can drive forward.
         But today there is no dust. The Arch has not moved in the past three days, the bulldozers sit idle, even the constant ant-line of refuse trucks that constantly ferry from the Arch to the dump outside town are now penned up behind a chain-link fence, empty, watched by armed men who smoke or sleep in the shade. I know one of the truck drivers; he lives on my street, and I see him walking past my house.
         I shout down to him. "Sadim! Why doesn't the Arch move? Have you lost your job?"
         Sadim waves to me, desultory. He is held in very high esteem along this street because he works with many Americans and has absorbed many fashionable things from them like his western-style hat, the ill-suited clothes into which he is always sweating, his cigarettes, phrases of Yankee slang. "No work this week," he tells me, "because of sabotage. Somebody put a landmine into the Arch's hopper. It didn't explode, but it still jammed up the nozzles so we cannot build anything until the engineers clear them." Sadim is proud of his knowledge, as proud as he is of his favorite t-shirt which says, in big English letters, "Too Drunk To Fuck."
         Fasil, who sells DVDs in the market, told me what it says, but he also told me it should really say, "Too Muslim to be too drunk to fuck," in order to be accurate.
         A helicopter passes directly over us and we tense and look up. Before, the sky had always been thick with them, common, but ever since the Americans withdrew, leaving us only the Arch as a constant reminder of them, helicopters are a rare, foreign appearance. This one comes closer, lower, and settles in the middle of the street two blocks away.
         I use binoculars - something I never could have done during the occupation, afraid always of being mistaken for a soldier - to see three men get out of the helicopter. One of them is dressed in a business suit and carries a briefcase. He is followed by two men, not soldiers and not police, but wearing armor and baseball caps, and they carry weapons. They are the most heavily-armed men in the city. I have seen them guarding the Arch and their hats have the logo of the Ankh Corporation across them.
         The three men walk up to the mosque, where they are greeted personally by our imam. He shakes their hands, ushers them inside. The helicopter is gone into the sky, leaving them behind, but it will be back to get them when they are done.

         The next day, the Arch begins moving again, and Sadim goes back to his job.
         I go into the market and hear the buzz of excited rumors. The imam has been talking to the stall owners, to water sellers and goatherds, but not to little thirteen-year-old boys and so I know nothing about all the fuss until I corner Fasil at his stall.
         "The Americans are building a mall," he tells me grudgingly, annoyed at having to take his attention off of his work.
         "What is that?" I ask him.
         "Like a market, a great big building filled with stores."
         I look around us. "But we have a market already." We have several. This is one of the more modest ones.
         Fasil shrugs his hands. "They say it will be big enough to hold all of the markets from the city under one roof. It will stretch more than three blocks, a whole neighborhood will be passed under the Arch to make it."
         I have seen the neighborhood that the Arch rests over and I think quickly. Then I say, "Where will all those people go?"
         Fasil says, "The Americans say that the mall will give them jobs."
         "Jobs doing what?"
         "Working at the stores. Selling things. Wonderful things from all over the world. So the imam says to us."
         I am confused. "Who are they selling them to? Almost all of the Americans are gone."
         "I suppose they will have to sell them to every one else working there since they'll be the only ones with money," Fasil agrees. "These new buildings, the Arch, all the shiny toys they give us now because they feel bad about the war, it always does us no good. These buildings, you watch, it will turn out just like when they gave us water."
         I look at the bottle in my hand and remember. During the first years of bombing and attacks, the city was without water. Without electricity, sanitation, roads. Then, after the soldiers gained control of the refineries, they put their efforts to the people of the city, handing out water bottles by the palletful. We drank from plastic for over a year, got used to the habit of it, until they finally brought back running water to our neighborhood.
         Mama ran the tap over her hands, bringing up a cupped palm for a drink. She spat it out, saying it tasted like poison.
         All of the other women in line argued with her, and amongst themselves. Maybe the pipes had rust, some said. Maybe it would clear up in a matter of time. So they said.
         So the soldiers said, and the aid workers stopped handing out free bottles and, for a time, all the city had was water dirtier than ever before. For a while.
         Then water sellers showed up in the streets, young boys recruited to carry huge trays slung around their necks, laden with the same bottles of the same water that we'd had for free not so long ago. The boys cried their wares loudly, charging a week's worth of money for one bottle! Nobody in our neighborhoods could afford even a single bottle, so the boys made their business mainly with foreigners. Mama went to listen to some of the men complain to the imam about the water, and I hid behind her legs.
         The imam reasoned with the men of our neighborhood. "The Americans have given you jobs! You have been blessed by this situation. Look at the money that our young men are bringing back home to you. And some of you have been employed, also, to pick up the bottles from the street and drive them to the edge of town. This is honorable work, doing what you can to repair the city."
         What he said was true. Papa had one of those jobs as a truck driver, but every night he came home and told us how the truck owners, Americans, took half of his pay, and told us of the tin-shack stores that lined the street just outside the truck lot, filled with tempting sweets, alcohol, cigarettes for tired drivers to spend their money on and how every day he had to resist spending all his money before even getting home.
         Mama would throw up her hands at the state of the world and every night when she wasn't looking, Papa would put in my palm a piece of candy that he had picked up at one of those stores.
         And then one night, there was an explosion in the city, which didn't even wake me by then.
         That was the night Papa didn't come back, and Mama started speaking less and less until she could go for weeks without uttering a word to anyone except for God.
         And then the Americans, for the most part, left. They left their water in stacks of pallets in the old warehouses, until looters broke in and carried them off. There was a brief time - less than a month - when the looters tried to keep selling the bottles to us, but nobody had the money.
         Mama used empty bottles to carry water from a well, and when they were empty again she dried flowers inside them, on the windowsill.
         Sometimes I bring her flowers for our rooms. Today I look around the feet of the stalls for anything that might be growing but all I find are rocks and maybe some weeds. When I stand up again, something bright and colorful flashes in the sun, at my eye level. I stop and watch the confectioner.
         He is putting little frosting flowers onto eggs made of sugar. The flowers are pink and green, the eggs yellow.
         Fasil stands behind me as the decorator squeezes the bag of colored frost and the flowers come out in perfect shapes, dropping from the star-shaped plastic nozzle on the end of the tube. "Watch," says Fasil. "See how the paste becomes a flower? Just like this, the Arch forms anything it wants out of paste. Only each one of its thousands of nozzles is smaller than this candy tube, able to draw smaller lines. and that means the Arch can make more detailed objects, finer than the tiniest blossom."
         "The mall will be made out of candy?" I can hardly imagine it. I think of the treats that Papa would bring home.
         Fasil laughs. "Not that kind of paste. The Arch is designed to make things out of dirt and sand. It can make lines only a millimeter thick, lay down wiring, even circuitry. Or it can press out plates of glass. So that when the mall is complete, it will have working appliances, picture windows, very modern."
         I say, "How do they make all that out of sand?"
         "The Arch can separate the different materials in the sand - silicon to make glass, metal to make wires. It is very clever, the imam tells me."
         The confectioner says, "The imam says a lot of things."
         Fasil says, "Ankh is a very ambitious corporation - they want to use the Arch to print houses and habitats on the Moon, using moondust. The only place that has more dust than our city, eh? The Moon? So why do you think they have given us their giant space printer? Because they are such nice men at heart?"
         The confectioner places each finished egg under a glass jar so that the sand and flies will not stick to the sugar.
         "The Americans are using the Arch here because we have a lot of sand?" I say.
         "That's right. They are testing the printer here, making new buildings and houses and streets, making sure it works before they launch it all the way to the Moon. They come here to use our sand because - can you believe it - in America they sell sand to each other."
         I can't believe it. Sand is everywhere.
         The confectioner makes a grunt of disapproval and Fasil nods. "Might as well try to bottle the ocean and sell it to us."
         "I have never seen an ocean."
         "The ocean is filled with oil and plastic," Fasil says. "The Americans who come here take our oil and dump it in the water. Then they cannot drink the water so they have to buy bottles. Then they collect our empty bottles and throw them in the ocean."
         "Enough plastic and soon the ocean will be covered over, and it will never rain," says the confectioner.
         "It never rains here."
         "We could use it, wash away the dust," the confectioner says. "Look at this boy's clothes. What were you doing underneath my table, anyway?"
         I say to him, "Picking flowers for my Mama."
         "Flowers, huh?" He thinks for a second. "Hold out your hand." He prints a small green flower onto my palm and says, "There. Take that home to your mother."

         After I take the flower home, I go for a walk in a different part of the city, a part that the Arch has already passed over. Everything is covered in a white crust of dirt that the construction left behind, everything is the same color.
         Men are scrubbing the walls and streets with brooms, breaking the crust away. It looks like they are painting the buildings and street, but this is not paint, it will not chip or flake away under the sun and wind, it is the actual color of the paste that the Ankh corporation has chosen for us.
         Other parts of this street are changed. Buildings are different, houses are smaller and there are more of them. In the center of a roundabout is a statue, but that is different also, no longer a statue of the old dictator. The bulldozers came and knocked it down and the Arch printed a new person in its place. The new statue stands in the same pose but it doesn't have a strong Persian nose anymore, nor bold eyebrows that shadow deep-set eyes. There are words on the pedestal but I can't read them because they are in English.
         Now the men scrub the statue with their brooms and the white plaster falls away to reveal black hair, western skin, the military uniform of another country, blue eyes bright enough to be filled with tears. The statue looks alive.
         I watch him for a while, to see if he will move.

         "Listen," Mama says to me.
         I am looking at the metal frame of her favorite photograph of Papa. She has stuck the green flower to one corner of the frame.
         "Listen," she says to me. "This mall that the Arch has made. Do not eat the food there."
         "Why not?"
         "They do not follow God's laws when it comes to food. What they eat is haram. They have unclean, unhealthy animals, and soda, which is filled with caffeine."
         "What's soda?"
         "It is like candy, but you drink it. It is poison, like the water when the soldiers were here."
         "But the imam said it was all right, we can eat there. I heard him talking."
         Mama says, "The imam says many things," which is funny because that's what the confectioner said. She has other pictures, paintings, a few more photographs, on the walls of our rooms, but only the one in the frame is of Papa.

         And in the morning, the Arch is over our house, the sun reflecting off of it into my eyes and wakes me.
         There are people in my house but Mama is gone, to the market already or to get money from her brother. There are three men in the doorway. Two of them are white and wear the caps with the Ankh symbol on them. The other man lives downstairs. He owns the house.
         The white men say something and start to set up cameras in the corners of the rooms. They open cupboards and shine lights into hiding places.
         "You need to leave the house today," the other man says. "The Arch is going to make a new house, but you can come back tonight."
         The white men are taking pictures of everything, even pictures of our pictures, which is also funny.
         "Where is my Mama?"
         "I'll tell her. Don't worry. Go, leave, come back tonight."
         I go to Sadim's house even though he is not there. He is driving his truck but I know how to get on his roof by climbing a trellis and from there I can watch the bulldozers crash into the rows of houses, send up huge clouds of dust. Then the tractors load the debris into dumptrucks and young men like Sadim pile it up outside of town.
         When the block is cleared down to the foundations, the Arch starts to move, the nozzles slide up and down on their tracks, coming low enough to touch the ground. Paste pumps out, the nozzles move forward, laying out a maze of walls. Then the whole structure rises up and paints another layer atop the walls, making them taller. The Arch does this incredibly fast, faster than I can watch, faster than any bricklayer in the city, able to build five building in just a few hours.
         The Arch passes away like a shadow.
         Sadim finds me shortly after. "I saw your mother," he says, "outside the city, by the dump. I drove her back."
         "She's home right now?"
         He nods. "She is waiting for you. In your new home."