Love Enough (7 page)

He cannot fathom why he brought her here, why he wants to hurt her, why he wants to hurt himself, to crush something in himself. It is not love that brought him here, it is possession. It is not love that brought her here either, it is possession. It is so private, so sacred, so overwhelming, this possession, and it is malignant. Possession covers their heads, it is a tight band, a cupola of airless air. A covering so complete there is no world outside. Except she sees the billowing lake and she wants to dip her head into it, she sees a sign in the black bird with red underwings and she tries to show him. While the man is thinking that if he can free his forearm or if he can absorb the pain he can surface. Otherwise he will pull her down with him, and he doesn’t intend to go alone—he knows he is selfish but he doesn’t care. Why should he go alone? Why should he have to take all this hatred with him and leave her in the beautiful world? Then she will live without him and forget him and who is she to have the world while he loves her, and while he is gone.

Months ago he had spotted her in a bar, no, it was outside a bar in the Distillery District. Despite its condo reincarnation, the old Gooderham and Worts factory lay
its 19th-century shadow on their meeting. He was smoking, she was smoking, though it was freezing outside. He wasn’t lonely that he can remember. He was sad, but he is always sad. The kind who has a primeval sadness, before he was born he was sad. No, he doesn’t know why he is sad. When she gave him a light he wanted to speak Dutch to her but he didn’t actually know Dutch. His mother knew Dutch, his father knew Dutch, but he didn’t, he only knew English, so he started off wrong with her. He said, “Hey,” and that was the beginning of misunderstanding. He couldn’t get the right language out of himself, he only had feeling to go on and feeling is all primitive. That night he told her he’d been a peacekeeper, first in Bosnia and then in Haiti and he showed her how to subdue someone. He grabbed her arm and twisted it and then he let her go and laughed. She stayed talking to him after because she was afraid to walk away. And because he said she looked like Hilary Swank, and then he said, “Hit me in the face. See if you can do it.” And she did.

People can’t handle the senses the way animals do. Animals eat, drink, sleep, fuck at a certain time. They don’t kill if they don’t have to kill for food. People have no borders, everything is mixed up, they’re lawless. Both of them were lawless. And it had brought them to the
lake. He said she was beautiful and she took his statement as a command and did anything he asked. She had no centre except that word. She had been hanging from that word ever since she was a child. It meant giving other people pleasure, saying “yes” and never “no.”

The woman loves being loved, more than she loves. That the man loves her is more compelling than whether she loves him. But sometimes, as now, she is overwhelmed by this love and breaks off to the lake or to the red underwings of a black bird. The blades cutting into him are spinning deep. He pulls his arm away and is about to hit her. Then the chamber he is enclosed in opens a fraction and he hears “butterflies.”

“What?” he screams at the woman.

“Nothing,” she breathes. She ducks her head and crouches down. He feels someone run up to him. She sees two women run by briskly in an argument. His arm arrests mid-stroke, he brings it down on his head and walks off. He’s sure he heard her say “butterflies.” What butterflies? The woman is still in a crouch on the boardwalk. She’s going to stay there until he’s gone. Then she will find the taxi man if he’s still there and she’ll go home.

That is what Da’uud, the taxi driver, saw, the possibility of violence in the man. He’s seen this possibility in people all over the world. Beginning in Mogadishu during Siad Barre’s time and after he fell. It was there. The lethal tensions in the city. It was no longer important that he was an economist: the economy had tanked and now faith was the engine. He saw the signs: he saw the disrespect from ordinary people, and that it was more important to pray than to think. He had lived his life until then on the falsity of the idea that prayer was all that was necessary, yet he knew how powerful that idea was: it made people irrational and murderous. But then the facts of his profession glared at him: it too was irrational, though disguised as rationality; it too was murderous. How many eventual deaths had he relegated to one side of a ledger, calling this act “austerity”? The kind of murder that was gradual. Not the sweeping murder of the famine or the war. But at least, at least, he thought, his kind of murder was accidental. All murder was bloody but when people murdered for faith it was elemental; it was crude and bloody. He wasn’t capable of that, others were capable. The brother of his wife had wrapped himself in robes, joined the faith courts and become capable of anything. Da’uud had thought that bailing out of Mogadishu with his wife and daughter would be enough.
But it wasn’t. Everywhere the violence had assailed him. When they arrived in Addis Ababa and later in Rome, it was there too—this same violence of faith—in people. He toured a church in Rome. It was full of ferocity and punishment. All he saw there was more blood. It surfaced again in the airport in Sweden in the simple look of a border guard, the interrogation room, and as much as he tried to ignore it, the violence pursued him over months in Oslo as he searched for work and a place to live. It made a dull sound like a weapon, a cleaver, on a human back.

This is why he is talkative in his taxi. He watches the road and he talks as much as he can. He doesn’t want to see that violence in people. He talks even faster when he glances in his rear-view and sees someone like the red-haired woman in the back seat. He wishes he had told the woman he dropped off at Sunnyside to be careful, but nobody listens to him. Not his wife, not his daughter, not his son, nobody. Well, perhaps his wife, Amal. She listens. She left Mogadishu with him even though her brother was against it. If not for her the brother would have killed him. And look now, that same brother has sent his son to Rome for his education. So much faith, so little faith. After they had made such a mess of Mogadishu, a mess. He could have told that woman, he could have told
her, but who listens to a cab driver; who listens to a man from another world.

The lake is green this early evening, Da’uud notices. He began noticing the lake after three years in the city. Before that, life was like a hand over his face. When he discovered the lake he tried to get all the fares along the lakeshore. He likes this end of town, the south. It has definition, it has nature. If he is to drive a taxi, to spend his life driving a taxi, he’d rather drive it here along the expanse of the lake’s shore, from Cherry Street in the east to the Humber River in the west. You don’t see nature much in this city, not from a cab. Unless nature includes people. But he tries not to get involved in the passengers’ lives, he tries not to feel their anxieties.
Insha’Allah
. He’s got anxieties of his own, and that kind of nature he can do without. The day driver loves people, or so Khalid says. Khalid is always talking about how good people are, how funny, how crazy kind they are. Maybe, Da’uud thinks, maybe day people are that way but not evening and night people. Maybe the day driver gets more sleep so he has a better perspective on people, a different perspective. Da’uud doesn’t get enough sleep, but that makes him keener, he thinks, more alert to people. He only sees evening and night people and while people can be pleasant enough in the daytime, at night they run amok.

Da’uud would rather be in an office with numbers and papers. He does not want to embarrass himself, he does not want to embarrass his family but … and this “but” always sits on his chest. He has a good life here, there is nothing wrong with working. Poverty is slavery, and one cannot count on riches. There was that “but” again. You live, you live. You get married, you have children, you make a family. Nobody says how, just that you have to do it. Which is what he told Bedri. You live, these things you do. He even sent Bedri to Somaliland, where it was calmer. To see how life may truly be lived. Because despite everything, there you meet your obligations and you live a good life. It was over for him but not for Bedri.

Five airports from here to Somaliland. Dau’ud told Bedri, you will pass through five airports. Each one a passageway to how life is supposed to be lived. In the first airport, Pearson, you get rid of all the things you are living. You remember but you can forget it because you must leave. You are sad, you think you don’t want to go, because of the people you leave behind. You are anxious. You want to hold on. The left side of your chest is raw with this, maybe. Yet you are not so sad because you are a little excited for the future. You escape into that fact. You must do this, you must. You are being made to leave. In the
airplane you already feel a little far away from yourself. You are only yourself because you know that you are yourself. In the second airport, you are a small book with a coat of arms at the wicket before a guard. You are a photograph and a hand under a glass window. He looks at you. He does not recognise you—not the you you know, nor the you that you are leaving behind. He, the guard, is looking at the new you he makes with his stamp. You see your self in his eyes now. After you pass him you are even less the self you know you are. In this second airport—it could be Frankfurt or London; it might be Paris—you get rid of the other half of what you were living. After all, you are only a passenger, you have the portable body of a passenger: it only holds what it can carry. In the third airport, Abu Dhabi or Dubai, you remember nothing. Falling asleep, waking up on a bench, listening for your flight, you are suddenly blissful. You feel free. All the things you were worried about in the first airport, the friends you left, the events, the work undone, all this is irrelevant. They have gone away. You are in the middle of time. You can do nothing about old friends, they don’t matter. The thought occurs to you in this airport that all the important happenings you had planned, all the anxieties you experienced living in your life before the first
airport, it’s good that all this does not exist. You need no longer exist in that life. It is going on, without you. You get some water now, you eat something, you hear your flight called. In the fourth airport at Addis, your eyes are open, your ears are open; you smell the world. You can change your clothes, free your legs, you can melt into a new life. You take out a phone from your pocket, you do not recognise it. It is your old phone with numbers from your life before. Is there someone you would call there? No. So you throw the phone away and you join the new ways of the people entering this life: how easy it is to forget, you say to yourself. You laugh. Hargeisa is the fifth airport. It is raining when you arrive there. There’s an earthy smell in the air, the smell of cool rain on the hot ground. The rain is not heavy. You breathe in the open world before you. Your bag of clothing and all that you thought you needed seem weighty. You’re tempted to leave the bag but you are vaguely curious to see what the other person who was you some hours, perhaps a day and a half ago, has in that bag. You’re sure you have no use for anything in there except perhaps a toothbrush and that you can buy. Here is your new life. You know no one and no one knows you. You will make no mistakes here and all past mistakes are erased. You begin.

When you return, if you return, you never return the same. And where you return to is not the same.

He is my boy, Da’uud thinks, but he has no imagination. Bedri returned from the African continent and slid right back into his bad habits. He was new for a while, full of all he had seen and learned from the five airports, but after only a few months, the city seeped into him once more. He became friends with that boy again.

Lake Shore Boulevard stretches in front of the taxi. The dispatcher has been calling him. He hasn’t had a fare since the woman. He’s just driven this line of lake and rail and condominiums and old factories and beaches for the last hour, thinking.

E
very other Wednesday, Sibyl, the woman who washes her face in Clorox, came to visit June at the archive. She washes her hands in Clorox too, and any other part of her body that she decides needs it. Clorox, Sibyl said, was a great invention and if only Lady Macbeth had had it, none of us would have known that story. June pointed out to her that
Macbeth
was a fiction, only a play. But the woman said it had to be true first, for it to have become a fiction.

She came to see June about dreams. Was it possible, Sibyl asked, was it possible at all, that she was in a dream?

This question gave June real pause. In reality she should tell the woman no, no it is not possible. But why? The woman is delusional, but what good would it do to tell her that? It would be much better for her if it were possible that she was in a dream. The reality, in which she washes herself in Clorox, is much more understandable as a dream after all.

So June told Sibyl, “Quite likely.” Sibyl looked relieved, briefly, then looked at her bleached hands. They were dry like papyrus and some parts were burned white. “And how do I stop dreaming?”