“I’m making eggs for us.” He sits on the side of the bed, smiling. Did I leave it in the coat check at the party? I’m fucked. The metallic ball in my head hits the back of my neck and bounces to my ears. “Hey, you.” I lift myself up and prop the pillow behind me. “Oh, you’re awake.” The door cracks open, and Bunny Ears Guy walks in with a steaming mug in his hand. Was I smoking weed or cigarettes? There was this guy in a red rubber harness with fluffy pink bunny ears. BACKDOOR lasted until the early morning hours.

I try to lift myself up, but my headache feels like a small metallic ball stuck inside my skull, and it keeps hitting on all of the corners, ringing loudly like church bells. Maybe Coal Harbour? Maybe it’s West of Denman? I can’t tell directions yet. I’m somewhere downtown I can see the Trump Tower through the window. My leather harness and jockstrap are tidied up on a little sofa in the corner by the window with opened curtains. It’s not like I had much of a choice if I didn’t sleep at his home, where would I sleep? You can sleep with whomever you want, he’d said, as long as you come back home to me. I’d told Ray I would never sleep over at anyone’s home. Maybe this guy is living with his parents. There is a desk in the corner, a small TV hanging on the wall, and a mirror on the closet’s sliding doors. It’s clearly someone’s room in a shared apartment. I finally manage to erase the blurriness in my vision and realize that I am not home. Who opened the curtains? Is Ray making breakfast? What generosity was bestowed upon him overnight? The softness of the bedsheets feels foreign to my home. Is my brain misfunctioning? I shield my face with the back of my palm. My right eye opens for a second before my left.

My eyelids are made of steel they refuse to part. I also had the audacity to tell one-night stands to stay when the morning came.” The moral, which still features in a different capacity in the final text, was inspired by a photo I took walking around Vancouver for the first time. The T-shirt he picks rests in my closet I am too embarrassed to put it on. “Still,” he writes, “this little gem is dear to me: The room described here is based on my room in my first year of arrival to Canada as a new refugee. Ultimately, Ramadan decided that the scene he shares here, from Hussam’s point of view, wasn’t needed for the novel. Set in Damascus and Vancouver, it is the second novel from Danny Ramadan, himself a Syrian Canadian and an LGBTQIA+ refugee, and it is one that draws from his life without burdening the novel to conform to that, or to any notion of a “typical” refugee story. The Foghorn Echoes is, fundamentally, an epic: the story of two men, two cities, and between them, love and a war.

The Foghorn Echoes by Danny Ramadan