The Portals

Ousama came home drunk again.

It wasn’t his breath that bothered Hakim as much as his wobbling into the house in the middle of the night, waking up the twins again.

“You can’t keep doing this,” Hakim told his husband. “Tomorrow, you can’t come home drunk again.”

“Ok, dear. I promise.”

The next day, Ousama came home drunk again. This time, he wasn’t as wobbly. That didn’t seem to stop Hakim and the twins from waking up again so naturally, he had to promise not to do it again the next day.

A day later, Hakim set up some expectations. He told their baby girls that daddy had a lot of important government work to do, that the United Council of World Nations had declared their dad as an important leader. He was doing everything he could, Hakim had promised the girls, to come home as early and sober as possible, but the aftermath of the portals that opened a few months ago was something everyone was dealing with differently.

Hakim even went as far as turning on fan noises in the twins’ bedroom, setting the volume up as high as possible. He turned on three alarms for himself—one for 12:05 AM, the earliest Ousama had returned home that week, one for 12:30 AM, the average time Ousama had come back in a while, and a pessimistic 2 AM one, the just-in-case alarm.

With expectations and alarms all set, Hakim went to bed. He didn’t pray much but on that night, he prayed that his husband wasn’t drunk when he returned home. He closed the blinds of his bedroom so the bright light emitting from the floating portals didn’t bother his few hours of sleep.

When the first alarm went off, Hakim awoke calmly. He walked over to the front door, looked out the window and waited for a few minutes as the bus arrived. When Ousama didn’t emerge, wobbling or otherwise, Hakim sighed and went back to bed. That was just the optimistic alarm anyway—there was nothing to worry about just yet.

When the second alarm went off, Hakim felt a bit sweaty. He wasn’t sure if he’d even gotten much sleep in the 20-something minutes since the last alarm. Nevertheless, he got up and approached the front door. The bus dropped off Samira, their next door neighbor who was working late nights at the art gallery she opened up a couple of weeks back depicting all of her art on the portals. The bus also dropped off Karim, their recently-single friend that liked to party on weekdays since the world had moved on from typical 9-to-5s. Then the bus took off to its next stop. No sign of Ousama, but there was no need to panic. There was one more alarm, the pessimistic alarm, and plenty of time for Ousama to return home.

When the third alarm went off and Ousama hadn’t returned home, Hakim panicked.

He put on a robe and set out on a mission to find his husband. With the front door of the house locked and his daughters sound asleep, Hakim walked out of their house and started moving. He didn’t know where to go look or what he’d expect to find, but he knew that waiting by the window wasn't an option.

Hakim didn’t want to go out looking at every bar in town like a lunatic. He needed an actual plan, something strategic that would give him the best chances of finding Ousama and returning home together. He thought about calling some bartenders he knew, but he didn’t want to alarm their friends at this hour. He considered taking a bus and just looking out the window on the off-chance he found a wobbly man wandering the streets. That didn’t seem sustainable either, what with the number of buses and routes to pick from. Plus, that wasn’t too far from the first “looking out the window” idea.

No, Hakim needed something concrete. Something that would be most likely to give him results. And, as if just on cue, he heard a flickering sound from a few feet up in the air. The portals. Of course, the portals!

Ousama had to be near one of the portals—it’s where his job at the government agency had taken him months ago when these things first started appearing in random parts of the world, it’s where Ousama would spend most of his waking hours, it’s what started his alcohol obsession to begin with!

Feeling good about this plan, Hakim started walking towards the nearest portal he could see. Hovering just a few feet up, the purple blue gooey material flickered and lit up the sky and the trees in the park it was surrounding. This portal would be blocked off by the police like any other portal, but at the very least it might also give Hakim a clue as to Ousama’s whereabouts.

And a clue it gave. In fact, the biggest and best clue Hakim could have possibly wanted. There was no police by the portal, just yellow tape and Ousama.

“Ous?”

He didn’t turn. Ousama was staring up at the portal, like a tourist gawking at a painting in an art museum. This was no painting, however; the portal was very real. He stood still—very still—unbothered, unshaken. Hakim called out for him again, but no answer.

“Honey.” Hakim approached him from the front and noticed nothing particularly wrong with his husband. He was blinking, breathing and behaving like any normal human as far as Hakim could tell. “Are you ok?”

“H-H-Hakim?” His voice trembled, but it was surprisingly coherent. “Where are the girls?”

”They’re fine,” Hakim replied, swallowing his throat. “They’re sleeping. I turned on fan noises so they wouldn’t wake up until dawn at least. What…are you doing here? Do you wanna go home with me?”

“Fan noises.” Ousama chuckled, his eyes not once moving off the portal. “That’s good, that’s smart. They’re sleeping. That’s good.”

“Did you have way more to drink tonight than usual, sweetie? I told you, you need to cut back.”

Ousama stuttered for a second then finally looked at Hakim. He smiled as soon as their eyes collided. “I—no, no, I didn’t have any drinks today.”

”You…didn’t?” Hakim’s brows raised.

“No, you told me not to. I was being…getting home late and the girls and you and I didn’t want to turn into my father.” He paused. “Don’t want to turn into my father. So no drinks. Not a single sip today. But they didn’t like that.”

Concerned, Hakim grabbed his husband’s hands and squeezed. He was cold, but still soft like he always was. “Who’s ‘they’, honey?”

Ousama took a deep breath and said, “The agency.”

“The United Council of World Nations? They’re making you drink every night?”

“I-I’m sorry I kept this from you,” Ousama cried. “We made a discovery, a few nights back, with the portals. It was groundbreaking and it didn’t make total sense, but nothing’s made much sense since these things appeared, I suppose.”

“What…what did you discover?”

“That if I have high levels of alcohol in my body, I can enter the portals and come out unscathed.”

Hakim thought his heart stopped beating for a second. Speechless, he glanced at the portal floating behind him then looked back at Ousama and sighed heavily. “You’ve been going in? They’re making you enter the portals?”

“Only if I am drunk enough.” Ousama corrected, though it still didn’t make all that much sense to Hakim. “Something about my toxic levels and my DNA, I don’t know the full details, but they needed me to get drunk so I could go through the portals and report back on alternate dimensions. It’s all top-secret and I could probably go to jail for telling you.”

“Well, I’m sure you guys can wipe my memory later or something,” snickered Hakim. Then, after a pause, “I’m kidding. Wait unless–”

“I don’t think we can do that,” Ousama smiled back after a long sigh. It was like a giant suitcase had lifted off his shoulders and split into two, smaller suitcases–one for Ousama and one for Hakim to carry.

“Shall we start walking back home,” Hakim asked, “while you tell me more government secrets?”

“Or…”

Hakim looked at him and their eyes wandered towards the portal. “We could…go in. With the girls.”

He didn’t know if Ousama was joking or not, though nothing about his body language or tone indicated so. Hakim just smiled back and said, “You do realize that you are literally saving the world by getting drunk.”

Ousama laughed so hard, Hakim couldn’t help but admire the dimples forming on his face. Neither of them acknowledged their curiosity about going through the portal together. While Ousama’s curiosity was more about experiencing other dimensions with his partner, Hakim’s mind went wild over the possibilities of what could be out there.

“I’m not saving the world. I’m merely telling our government some interdimensional secrets every now and then.”

“And you’re doing it by going through portals that no one else in the world can, as far as we know. And you’re getting paid to drink on the job.”

Neither of them said anything for the rest of the night, or the next morning during breakfast when Ousama made za’atar manakish for the family. They didn’t talk about how Ousama was going to quit his job, about how badly that conversation was going to go, or what was going to happen to the portals if there was no one else to investigate them anymore. They didn’t even discuss whether the fact that “no one can enter the portals” is a top government secret or if it’s true that people who have gone in have never returned–except for a drunk Ousama.

Instead, they just sat together as a family. When they finished eating, Hakim turned on the news out of habit. The usual headlines scrolled by—economic updates, weather forecasts, political corruption, and mass hysteria over the portals. But then a breaking news alert caught their attention: "Mysterious Disappearance Near Local Portal."

A reporter on the scene spoke urgently, describing how a family of four had gone missing the previous night. Authorities were baffled, and there were no leads. The only thing that was confirmed was that the family, two adult men and two young girls, was last seen near a portal that had not been guarded. Police were investigating why the portal was left carelessly unsupervised.

Ousama and Hakim squeezed hands tightly. They turned the TV off and went back to their breakfast with the girls.