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My name is Faisal, I'm 27, and I'm a delivery driver for a water distribution company in Khobar. My entire world is the rattling, air-conditioned cab of my small truck and the endless rows of villas and apartment blocks I service. The sun on the Eastern Province is a physical force, bleaching the color from everything and baking the asphalt until the air shimmers. I live with my parents and my two younger sisters, Maha and Sara, in a small apartment in a building that always smells of curry and bleach. My father is a security guard who works nights, so we barely see him. My days are a loop of loading heavy water bottles, wrestling them onto dollies, and navigating the city's traffic, my shoulders a constant, dull throb of pain. The voices started as a crackle on the car radio, like a station I couldn't quite tune into. Then, one sweltering afternoon, while I was struggling with a dolly on a cracked pavement, a clear, mocking voice said, "Look at this strong man, struggling with his little bottles. What a fucking hero." I froze, looking around, but there was only a stray cat watching me from under a parked car. Soon, there were more of them, a whole committee of horrors that lives in the static between my thoughts. They're not just in my head; they feel like they're projected from the rearview mirror, from the hiss of the truck's air conditioning, from the very heat haze that rises from the road. They run a constant commentary of my failures. When I'm delivering to a fancy villa: "Smell that money, Faisal? That's the smell of a life you'll never have. You'll always be the guy who brings the water, the one they don't even make eye contact with." When I'm eating the lunch my mother packs for me: "Your mother pities you. She sees the deadness in your eyes and knows she birthed a failure." They know everything. They know I secretly hate my father for his weakness, that I sometimes steal sips from the expensive bottles I deliver, that I look at the women in the vil

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