The Hidden Light of Objects (11 page)

Bear

This will be a love story. It is set in Kuwait, but Sweden hovers in the background. Unlikely collision between desert girl and snow boy. In a small leather pouch carried every day for a year: a secret disclosed too late. This is a story of endings.

Does she write this for him? One year, five years, two decades plus pass. Time’s relentless march. Short brown hair and a red sweatshirt around her shoulders, sleeves flipped back like a scarf. In the places that count, Mina remains the same. He once wrote, fifteen years later:
You’re still fourteen years old, pretty as a flower, with great expectations about life, love, and the future. As I’m writing this, I suddenly remember the kiss on the deck.
Time marches and stops. Some events freeze solid and remain hidden in pockets to be taken out and fingered after five, fifteen. Even twenty.

Mina and Jonas sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Last comes love. Too late.

The kiss on the deck of a stationary ship. The kiss in an elevator. The kiss on a bus before goodbye.

A dream, lately, about another kiss photographed. A lost snapshot glimpsed between the pages of a book in a dream and the rest of the dream an attempt to locate this phantom photo between the pages of a phantom book. A desperate attempt to recover that photograph, to stop time, to capture a patch of impossible infinity.

She imagined him in Swedish snow then, and imagines him that way now. Jonas with the white kerchief tied around his neck and his striped shirt blue and white. She had wanted to untie that white around his neck. He would walk in late. Five minutes before the bell. Three minutes. One. She would be there earlier, watching the gate. Always with the lanky haloed boy. Sunshine Peder racing in and Jonas, always slower, hanging back with an indulgent smile. It was Peder who would sweep her off her eager feet, kiss her on the cheeks, her red sleeves flapping. Every morning bright kisses. But not from Jonas of the white kerchief. Did Peder know then, in October, December, January? Were Peder’s kisses Jonas’s? Peder could not resist lifting her up by the armpits. A lift, then a kiss. One too many kisses. Sunshine Peder faded to black. Jonas from the land of snow stepped forward.

What he had said to her was this: “In ten years, you will still be here. You will be married. You will have children. You will always be in this place.” Offhand, with smug certainty. She would prove him wrong. She would escape the trap.
Je refuse!
She had refused to stay put. To marry. To have children. But she had, more than ten years later, closer to fifteen, come back. Kicking and screaming. She had returned to take over someone else’s responsibilities. Bird feeding, heart mending, memory gathering. How could he understand? It would require too much to untangle. To understand takes time and time has passed. Five, fifteen, twenty. He would smile again, slow and indulgent. In ten years, you will still be here. You will always be here. But there are no children and always is a long time. Never too late. Too late for Jonas and Mina sitting in a tree.

She couldn’t understand his skin, his floppy brown hair, his gray-blue eyes, light brown eyes, hazel green. His skin more vibrant and darker than a snow Swede’s should have been; his hair not blond enough; his downward-curving eyes, color now forgotten, more sad. But maybe her own sadness was there, not his. He was happy and floppy. A singing Swede. Drinking and taking in the dizzying Arabian sun. It didn’t belong to him. It wasn’t his trap. A one-year reprieve from snow. But there was brooding in those downward eyes, she was sure. A young man’s passion and arrogance and irony and, in droplets, his insecurity, piercing the way only a young man’s could. It disappears soon enough, replaced with a sticky, eye-rolling confidence. It goes away, the young man’s feminine beauty.

She thinks they officially met after she already loved him, waiting for him to walk through the gates. Maybe it was the contrast to Peder’s ebullience. Maybe they were in a class together. Maybe it was because he carried little things in his pockets, mysteries he would take out once in a while, look over, then put away. He kept a little black notebook. Once they were friends he let her peek in. It took many months for him to show her. Inside it he wrote in tiny script, baby ants across a shrunken page. The marginal illuminations were tiny too. Persian miniatures in watercolor. Smaller than a postage stamp, the size of painted rice. An artist, it seemed, so more broody, less floppy. She loved him before the notebook, probably. But that notebook clinched it.

She had forgotten about the bank, about the island escape. He loved her, in other words, in other worlds. He reminded her later, after five, ten, fifteen. They had agreed to rob a bank together, to escape to an island. Sea and sand and time to love. To seek solace in a cliché as only young lovers can. They were never lovers. It was far too early for that; he knew better than she. Both too early and already too late. Clichés become a lifeline. The island with its sand, sun, and breeze, its hammock and unfolding future. “Maybe we could rob a bank together. Maybe you will leave this place after all. Maybe I will take you to an island in the sun.” Secrets in a small leather pouch and on islands that still, to this day, intrigue. The mystery of the leather pouch she knew all along.

It was in his pocket with the notebook, the other objects. Out it would come. The leather pouch fingered gently. “What’s in the pouch, Jonas?” The downward curve, the vibrant skin. “What’s in the pouch?” The Cheshire Cat smile looking up or down. It happened maybe once a week. Sometimes he would be sitting, other times standing. But the fingering, gentle, tender, that was the same. And the same question, “What’s in the pouch, Jonas?” The Cheshire Cat smile till she had had just about enough and would throw water at him from the fountain or run away for him to run after her, into the playground like the kids they no longer were but still, sometimes, wanted to be, into the darkened locker room that one time.

The bite on the arm was an act of love. The bruise left behind an insignia of faith. Of that she was oblivious then. Then, it was a chase during lunch. Rushing into the boys’ locker room where they were not supposed to go. The space dark like a hotel room. They were still panting, still laughing and tumbling, but they knew they had arrived at a moment. The stillness of a vortex point. Still panting but not laughing, looking up into downward eyes and looking down into
what exactly?
Did she have her arms around his neck without the white kerchief that day? Did he put his arms around her waist? Did he lift her and kiss her? She must have been wearing short sleeves. How exactly did his head bend down, then down some more, lower than she would have thought, past lips and chin and neck and shoulder? Did he kiss her first? A kiss on a bare arm in a white uniform shirt? Dark and silent, with kids laughing outside, running around the playground, throwing water from the fountain, giving chase to boys. Boys catch girls. Three, two, one. You’re it. Did he lift her chin up with his artist’s fingers? Their first silence. No panting, just breathing or holding breath. Four, five. The bell about to ring. Then the coil sprang. His head, lower than she would have thought, his mouth closing in, his teeth biting down hard on the flesh of her arm. She screamed and splintered the hush. This time he ran. She stayed and looked down at the strange sign of his love. She rubbed his saliva into her skin and, for the next week, wore the badge of his teeth marks with pride. Phantom kiss.

February, March, and she kissed others in sand and ice, in hidden stairwells. She knew he had a girlfriend, maybe two or three. She still would wait, heart pounding, for him to walk through the gates, but she would leave before he could approach. Maybe there were other moments. Maybe they sat together during algebra. Maybe they walked to class together. She remembers him tripping on steps once on the way to class and herself laughing at this unexpected interruption. That fall was a gift to her – his vulnerability, his shyness afterwards, his body splayed like a pinned insect. A long dancer’s body with artist’s fingers. She laughed but he didn’t, which made her remember he was a kid after all. Eighteen is still a kid. Maybe it was then, February, March, that they stopped running, that they became friends.

It seemed invisible for months, March, April. It might have had something to do with the warming weather. The sun and sand and smell of freedom and fun and not being bogged down with the weight of love bites or loaded clichés. Lifting does not belong to blue spring days. She in her world. New Wave and boys and a love affair with the beach. Sun-baked pleasure with the girls, laughing together in the sand and sea. Waves of the blue-green Gulf. Unfurling together at the Sea Club. An island escape. She would not conform. A bikini is a weapon.
Je refuse!
In the Arab world, a bikini is a slap in the face, a stare down, a face-off, a go to hell in a hand basket. She learned then to wear her body without shame.
Look at me. You are invisible.
Laughing with the girls in waves and kissing the boys they decided were pretty enough to kiss in the breeze. Count them: one, two, three.

She in her world.

He in his.

A French girlfriend with bouncing blond hair.
Oui.
A coquette in the French style. At the Sea Club sometimes, a flip, a wink.
Voila!
How to compete with that? Smitten with the pretty French girl with the glass giggle. Jonas fell for the icicle blonde, delicate as tulle,
la
French
belle
. At least for a while and not too hard. Drinking, as young Swedes do, in the sun. He in his world peeking at her in hers.

The pouch disappeared. She (almost) forgot about it.

It was the year of the furtive whispers by men who were old enough to know better. The year she smelled of freshly cut grass in a country where landscaping is a luxury. She stretched out, all promise and exuberance. No illnesses, no deaths, no prohibitions, yet. No attempt to save time. No reason to follow the phantoms of desire, of photographs lost. Everything poised to begin just then, the vortex point. A stillness beneath pulsing flesh. Mina was, in this final year of late childhood, already the adult she would become minus the damage of the onward march. There was expectancy and quivering. Music drifting out of windows left open on purpose. White curtains flapping like red sleeves in the dry breeze. The word girl’s flesh and blood. It was the year of airports imagined for later. Taking flight. In ten years, you will still be here. You will be married. You will have children. You will always be in this place.
Je refuse!
In the breeze carried in by the long white tails of open windows, she refused. In the words she writes, even now, she refuses to let the phantom go.

Maybe this is the story she has been rehearsing her whole life. Why this moment? Why this pouch? This stationary deck? This elevator? Why this goodbye before flight? Why this snow boy’s kerchief-tied neck? This bite like a badge? This dizzying sky, Arabian blue, before the fires, before the end for us, before death and damage and no going back. Frozen in him, Mina becoming, not what she would become (for now, but not forever, please, never forever; she still refuses!). Frozen in the snow, still unfurling, arms outstretched, expectant, land still open and hot. In snow there is no war. No prisoners made to stand like crosses, unspeakably smeared. No inexplicable cancer. No oil under the desert more beautiful without it. No plastic byproducts dimming the blue-green. No holy moly abracadabras one, two, three, you’re dead if you don’t bow down four, five times a day. Jonas from the land of snow with a pouch that contains everything from before. There are days when the pouch opens. A tear in the constellation letting old light in, blue-greens and downward-curving brown-grays. A talisman in the pouch hinting at, promising, reaching toward something, anything that hasn’t come before, that doesn’t feel somehow, yet again, familiar. In his slow walk from gate to building, in her anticipation of what might or might never follow a bite is everything we ever hope for. A constellation of sparks, a tapestry woven over the years, strand by glittering strand, a life. And then, suddenly, a tear in the constellation letting old light in. This could break her heart. Or maybe it is just what she needs, just what she has been waiting for. Maybe it is what we need to stop dimming seas, naked crosses, multiplying cancers, holy moly abracadabras, the oil in the desert breaking the world apart. Just what we have all been waiting for.

*  *  *

He gave her the leather pouch, before the kiss on the bus, before the envelope unopened, before the final flight on the last day. The pouch, after the kiss on the deck, after the kiss in the elevator, the first real goodbye. Silence between them on the deck, words unsaid. The French
belle
gone. Mina and Jonas sitting in a tree. Finally. April, May, June. Jonas of the snow, floppy still, insecure but piercing. A young man with young skin and a dancer’s body, artist’s hands. The boy lost for words but piercing still. Electric fingers locked and thumbs caressing. Looking out at the blue-green, seeing only black, at a dance on the deck of a stationary ship. Waves licked the sides of a ship aching to move, to escape the trap of land, anchors aweigh to sail on the merry sea, now black with night, to the land of snow and ice, elsewhere. Murmurs and whispers. They stammered to each other. Straining to hear them. Half-sentences, half-words strung together like popcorn, paper chains, a feather necklace. Pretty. Stars. Far away. Island escape. Fragile. Tonight. Trembling. Snow. If only. Language failed. Silence like before the phantom kiss. This time Jonas kissed Mina, opened her throat for shushed sound to emerge, eyes closed but flickering to see them kissing for the first time, slowly, slowly, all the time in the world to kiss her lips. Never again such excruciating beauty, electric fingers, open throat. Never again like that, black sea ahead and stationary ship. Before goodbye, that kiss. To save between the phantom pages of a phantom book in a dream. Forever is a long time.