“I talked to Jane Peach,” said Hamid. “She was very clear, those scholarships are not for my boys, they are for… for not-Americans, for kids from countries where they have suicide bombers.”

I winced. I remembered Jane Peach saying something exactly like that to me, earlier in the day.

“Where did you come up with a suicide belt?” Making conversation. Talking about his work was always an easy win with Hamid; this counted as that, right? Something he’d made…

He sneered at me. “You and the boys,” he said, “you think I’m an idiot, that I don’t know about their phones, but I do. I may just be a butcher, but I can follow instructions on a website.” He stood up and paced, back and forth. Like he was trying to figure something out.

“Nobody thinks you’re an idiot, Hamid” I said. “I am just impressed, that’s all.”

“Hand skills,” he said. He sounded bitter. “I can do anything, really. My father was a butcher, so I am a butcher. That’s all people see, of me: Hamid the butcher. Hamid the backward, Hamid the violent, Hamid the killer, Hamid with the blood-stained clothes and the blood-stained hands. Do you know what it’s like, out there, being a Muslim butcher? Everyone looks at you like you’re going to kill them, all the time.”

He was making a lot of leaps, all at once, but I sort of saw where he was coming from. “Yeah,” I said, “But I don’t think anybody in here thinks of you that way. Everybody in Masada knows you as Hamid the Scoutmaster, right? You’re the one taking the boys out all the time, you’re… you’re the reason we don’t have street gangs, Hamid. You’re the reason that these boys are going to…”

His face crumpled up when I mentioned the boys.

“The boys,” he said. “They’re not going to be allowed to do anything either, are they? They’re going to be butchers and, and mechanics, and…”

“Simi Baloch wants nothing more than to be a mechanic,” I said. “Nothing would make him happier. And…”

“He doesn’t know, yet,” said Hamid. “He doesn’t know.”

He stopped pacing and stomped around behind the Commandant’s desk. Manuel sat facing away from a huge window that overlooked the camp; it would have been perfect light for reading or writing on old-fashioned paper, and in the last decade computer screens had finally caught up. Hamid sat down heavily in Manuel’s chair and opened the top drawer of the desk.

It wasn’t a surprise, I guess, that there was a pistol in there. It seems irresponsible in retrospect, but at the time — I don’t know, Manuel just seems like the kind of guy who might have a pistol in his desk drawer.

Hamid seemed like he knew it was there. Probably one of the boys had seen it, snooping or just hanging around Manuel, and had told everybody else. Hamid opened the magazine, checked that it was loaded, then slammed it back in and worked the slide, cocking the weapon. He pointed it at me.

“Hamid…”

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” he said. “This is supposed to be, you know, symbolic. A gesture of frustration, at how we’ve been treated, at how…” He waved the pistol around, seeming to mean to include absolutely everything. “At how my boy’s future is being treated.” He sneered. “Suicide bombers,” he said. “It’s what you think of us anyway, right?”

I opened my mouth; I was pretty sure he didn’t mean me, personally.

“It won’t work with you here,” he said. “It’s not a protest, then, it’s murder. Killing the chaplain.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m not leaving.” I was almost certain I wouldn’t run out of the room.

He nodded, sadly, and met my eyes. “I wish it could have been more dramatic,” he said. He spun the chair around, so that he was facing the window, looking out over the camp.

I didn’t realize what he was doing until right before the gun went off, so I was just standing up to say something like, “Hamid, no!” when the top of his skull burst outward and his brains sprayed over me and the rest of the room.

The door burst open; Manuel was standing there. I realized that there must have been a gunshot, but I hadn’t heard it. Hamid’s body was just sitting there, lolling in the chair.

“Fuck,” I said.

“The fuck was that about?” Manuel was looking around his office. The disaster, for him, was many layered: His office was a biohazard for at least the rest of the week, while important things were going on; an important and influential member of the community he was responsible for had just killed himself; and a Muslim suicide-bomber had just died in his office. It was going to take a minute to parse.

I started to take the shirt off, and then I looked down at it, covered in blood, and I wondered if this was how Hamid felt, his whole work day.

The sound of cheering came through the window. I looked out, past Hamid, at where people were gathering in the only real open space in the tightly-packed camp, the square in front of the administrative plex; it looked like the start of a party. There were some fireworks already being set off, and as I watched, someone popped the cork on a champagne bottle.

It was surreal and cruel, for a second, the world reacting this way, and then I remembered: The war was over.