The Others (13 page)

Umar said that I was accustomed to my seizures occurring in front of the emperor who has no clothes. When he first said this, I answered him with a giant
Aaaah
but then I retreated to ask him, Uh, what do you mean? It was odd that I did not fully absorb or understand the expression despite its obvious meaning and the familiar context in which he was using it. I had been telling him that I was used to the spell coming on in front of my mother. But who can ever get used to falling into a dark chasm day in and day out? Now, I missed her hard grip on my right hand, squeezing the palm, and her voice as she called to me, as if she was trying to bring me back from the far and isolated place where the seizure took me. Perhaps it was her hand’s presence that made me able to regain control over the right half of my body and sense its movements during the convulsions to a far greater extent than I could with my left side.

My entire face was like a burst of gunfire floating on a dark and empty expanse. The faces of those women were like reverberations from a game of roulette that began as a joke and ended in a wall of blood. I saw many faces lowering their gazes toward me, most frightened, others haunted by worry. Even when it is not contagious, illness strikes fear in people’s hearts, for it offers observers a live show of what could easily happen to them under similar circumstances. Illness exhibits to all watchers just how fragile our humanity is. Even so, I do not doubt even one part in one hundred that the effect of illness on witnesses to it is nothing compared to the reality of how illness disfigures a human body, gashing open the soul and mind of the invalid.

As it happened, I had not had occasion to be embarrassed by one of my seizures. My illness was a serious defect when it came to questions of physical perfection, but it was a recognized human deficiency that could happen to anyone. What embarrassed me was the saliva flowing out the sides of my lips and rushing downward toward the collar of my blouse. I wiped my mouth in disgust while my other hand covered my forehead to shade my lowered face, so that the few tears welling from my eyes would not be visible, nor my shortened breaths obvious. I do not understand how the details of my spells became a personal shame, just as no woman understands why she feels so ashamed when her underclothes or bed sheets are soiled by her menstrual blood. Perhaps I could attempt to explain the matter to Umar by asking him what he feels when he wakes up damp from a dream. He would be likely to respond,
A little bliss
! Or,
Not a whole lot to concern myself about
.

With difficulty, I was able to leave when the supervisor let me know with a nod that I could go. In the bathroom, a vile desire to cry engulfed me; I felt I would release a veritable flood, the kind that sweeps everything along with it and shatters the landscape completely. I was incapable of releasing it, though, of letting myself cry. Here, and at this moment, it would mean increasing my stock of gratuitous scandals. My feelings were so confused and heavy and chaotic that they left my legs too weak and tired to hold me up. My heart was beating erratically and I felt all mixed up inside, and there was a colossal, tyrannical ringing in my head, and the sort of heavy headache that normally hits at the earliest after a third seizure. As happened every time, my mouth smelled disgusting, an odor something like a chemical of unknown composition or a medicine bottle filled with rotting capsules too unbearably noxious to swallow.

I recalled the little character Cole in the film
The Sixth Sense
, when he wakes up with an intense longing to go into the bathroom. He stands in front of the lavatory and is surprised by one of the dead who pursues him. He runs out of the bathroom and heads for the little tent in his room, and mutters in a voice trembling with shadows, This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening … this really isn’t happening. Then he feels the heavy jolt on his shoulder when the ghost’s hand lights on it. When he turns, he sees the dead man directly behind him, and so he flees outside, terrified, screaming. He later recites a talisman in singsong Latin, something like “Grant me salvation O God.”

Clinging to the face of my mother and the reassurance it gave me, I repeated what she always said when my spasms arrived,
kaf ha ya ayn saad
, those letters of the alphabet that so mysteriously appear in the Qur’an, at the beginning of the Chapter of Maryam, like the letters that appear at the start of other suras in the Holy Book. Some people believe they have healing power when you say them.
Kaf ha ya ayn saad
. I repeated them until I was completely quiet, still and motionless. I washed my face and left the bathroom. If I stayed any longer, I feared, someone would come looking for me.

The supervisor smiled at me and walked over. Do you want to go to the clinic? she whispered.

No.

Some classmates clustered around me in a sincere attempt to give any help I might ask for: the clinic, tissues, water, even permission to leave the college before noon, when the authorities would open the gates. I responded with a stern
no
and a friendly, even ingratiating, smile to everyone’s overtures. The supervisor rapped on the door and ordered the students to attend to the lecture. After two or three reminders, their offers began to flag, until they stopped completely. I felt enormously thankful to the supervisor for thrusting away from me the difficult burden of sympathy.

The first time the warning siren reverberated during the second Gulf War, it was a drill, an attempt to teach people how to vacate the streets and rooftops where they had congregated in the fastest possible time, to hide like rats in tightly shut rooms with all openings blocked and with huge Xs on their windows. Isn’t this the sign the two heroes of the
X-Files
series make to each other that going
into
a building is forbidden?

On that occasion—and it was the first—people fled in terror at the reverberations, their children tucked under their arms. The sound of the siren convinced them of the danger. They wept and prayed and prepared for a long period of misery and exhaustion, as if the war had wrenched away doors and windows to enter as a ghostly evil spirit whose breaths we could feel on our bodies and whose footfalls we sensed, even if we could not see him. It was very real, because it was the first; utterly frightening, because it was the first; and savage, because it was the first. That is exactly how this spell of mine appeared to me. It was terror that stayed on for years, not mere months, standing just behind the door, and now, with a single kick, the wall had lost its façade and the shadow came to rest inside, unwanted and unwelcome.

I was uncompromising about giving myself strict training for just such a moment as this. I set up mental classrooms for myself, and in my mind’s eye I erected horrendous scenes I could imagine facing. I lined up a succession of possible scenarios, though over the years I did change their order. I persisted in my peculiar drill, which was to make myself summon up model reactions to these mental scenarios. When a seizure actually arrived, though, it would be overpowering, pulverizing, and I would be unable to remember a single element of my scheme. My cautious, conservative nature did well enough to protect me from the well-intentioned but quite possibly dangerous interventions of others, those well-intended people who had the effect of trampling my honor to shreds without being aware of what they were doing or understanding my condition. Without necessarily meaning to, I would meet these interventions head-on, protecting myself behind a shield of outright rejection and self-assurance, attempting to plaster onto my features an enhanced confidence—or a forged one, what’s the difference—behind which I was concealing a body cracking into pieces, a devastated soul and a sense of security that was suddenly gone from beneath me.

An hour passed, and another half an hour, and a new professor took the old one’s place on the screen, and there was still another half hour to go before the day’s classes would end for me. The crying inside of me was picking a quarrel with the rims of my eyelids, and accumulating beneath. I pushed the tears back, but I could not keep them from their steady push toward the edges. What to do? What does a person do who finds herself pierced through and rigged to sail, being carried on a cold wind, alone in the most savage of her solitary moments? What was I to do when I could not hide my face from the curiosity of others, nor my eyes from unintentional humiliation, nor the writhings of my body from scrutiny? How was I to say what I needed to say to the sixty girls who sat with me in the lecture hall? I am fine, take your eyes off me! I am not an object to be stared at or a procession of gypsies, or a circus hopping with clowns! Do you not understand that there is a slick surface to your gazes on which I will slip and fall, breaking the neck of my pride? The interest you are taking in me, your overdone concern, has a stink to it, a smell I won’t accept. The way you are gathering so tightly around me like this makes me think of a cocoon, one that suffocates whatever is inside. I am living these spells, they shatter and wreck my soul, they ravage my body, wreaking it with exhaustion and illness. But I cannot cross over your sympathy as if it is a bridge, nor can I go on living beneath the mercy of its very low span.

I had thought that the fast circulation of talk, its spread outward in such rapid waves, was only to be found in rural areas, or perhaps in cafés, but only on the outskirts of town or in small and intimate evening gatherings. I also assumed that our college was a microcosm of an urban society, civilized and above suspicion of being ruled by empty chatter, the leakage of story after story. But now, my attempt to philosophize all of this does not look so logical or realistic. I left the lecture hall and went straight to my locker. I remembered the business of the article and Sundus, so first I passed by the hall where her lecture was, but did not find her. Next, I went over to the girls gathered nearby to ask whether anyone had seen her. I sensed something suspicious, but my extremely sensitive emotional radar could not give me a precise reading. The stares that followed me and the odd questions about whether I was well seemed more numerous than usual, and more intense, as did the whispered offers to save me a seat on the bus.

I was very skilled at closing up my face behind a neutral and perhaps ambiguous mask which allowed no one, however hard she tried, a glimpse of what was really there unless I wanted her to see it. In a scene from
The Man in the Iron Mask
, after the iron mask has been stripped off Leo’s face, he fishes out his mask and puts it on once everyone has gone to sleep. He has gotten used to seeing the world through it. The mask is his safest place and refuge. That was the way I was, putting on a jellylike mask and sailing through others, practicing a murky withdrawal that gave others only a noncommittal expression. My face was not a little transmitter broadcasting my news out to them, so I figured that others had taken it upon themselves to spread this news item around. I felt an overwhelming desire to laugh. For it is laughable that, for an entire nine years, I kept my secret so well, even from my closest friends, from girls who were so often in my company, and then one single spell scattered all of my long efforts like particles of dust or soot.

My illness had always been a secret. For long periods of time, even speaking about it was a disgraceful act that could trigger a scolding in our household. It was as if the illness was a sin without possibility of forgiveness, a flaw it was necessary to hide, a little scandal blemishing the family that must not get out beyond the most intimate circles. I understand the logic that equates illness with a bad reputation. No one is going to come forward promptly to pick this up and carry it for you; no one wants to take it to his bosom; no one will be in a hurry to procure such a thing for his sterling family tree. Until now, I had been utterly grateful for the secretiveness that gave me a life no compassion disturbed and no sympathy interrupted. But my questions, now, were slaying me: What will change? What has already actually changed, since this happened? What more will happen? I am afraid my questions are many, and there are no easy answers.

Before she was near enough to my ear to whisper
Give you a hug
? I knew who she was, by the sound of the heel of her shoe on the tiling. There is a distinctive character to the way she marks out her steps, one after another, a series of sharp
taps
. Her perfume penetrated my nose as she leaned over me, confirming who it was. I took the hand that had come to rest on my shoulder and turned her toward me, and as soon as she faced me I saw a quality of anxiety in her face, stimulated by my paleness and the rising flood of tears that my eyes concealed. But I had singled out Dai to read my pain plainly and in all of its horrid details.

She crouched down at my knees and began to rub my cold palms. She put her hand on my forehead.

What’s wrong? What have you got?

Nothing.

Are you sure?

Yes, I’m sure.

To change the course of the conversation and dispel her worry, I said, Tell me, how did your exam go?

Fine …
I guess
.

By the looks of you, I swear, you made a mess of it!

And you?

Very well.

I said it with a broad smile to reassure her. I picked up my bag, took Dai by the hand, and led her out of there. First, though, passing by the vending machine, I put in two riyals. The machine spit out two cans of Pepsi. I plastered one against my cheek to lighten the redness and fever, and I set the other one in Dai’s bag. We went out and sat down on one of the white stone benches in front of the glass wall that lets us see half of the inside courtyard. I gave her my article and then I handed her some paper and a pen so that she could rewrite it. I chatted with her about the morning’s opportunity that I had lost in searching for Sundus. I don’t know, I said, where this girl hides when I’m searching for her!

I hate Sundus! she said, but she said it the way a child would. She looked at my handwriting and began to laugh. She had every right to laugh, since the article looked like a toddler’s brash scribbles: after all, I had written it on the bus yesterday, with the pen jolting and sliding across the paper every time the bus shook or bumped. She sighed in near-wonder
. Ya quwwat Allah
!
1
One, two … whoa, only seven words crossed out! I began to dictate to her as she wrote, and I shaded her eyes with my hand so that she could see what she was writing down. Now and then, she would stop me to give her opinion. I knew what she was likely to say. If you would write it like this instead of like that … if you expand a little on this thought … if you open the door to that idea … I know Dai, and I know her desire to make everything in this world perfect, superlative in the appearance it makes, even if it is just a one-thousand-word essay.