A religious figure moves through a large crowd, surrounded by bodyguards and followers. He sits in his car and then the scene is interrupted; an explosion rocks everything, knocking people to the ground. A “surge of dust and fire envelopes [the narrator]” (3), burning him as he hears and feels nothing. The sheikh’s car is on fire in the center of a chaotic scene. The narrator scrambles weakly through the rubble, hearing ambulances and crying children. A burned man tries to pull the sheikh from the burning wreck. As people lie dying, the sheikh’s body is finally dragged from the car. The narrator looks down at his wounded leg and lies helplessly on the ground as a doctor examines him, declaring him “a goner” (5). He thinks about his mother, his father, and his grandfather. The narrator is thrown into an ambulance with the other corpses and wishes that he could wake up from his nightmare.

The narrator, Amin, is an Arab-Israeli surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He meets with Ezra, the hospital director, who helped Amin find a job when he was a young doctor and recently-naturalized Israeli citizen, looked down upon by his young Jewish classmates.