The Others (19 page)

And then, like a person who suddenly wakes up and discovers that he is still sleepwalking, she went abruptly still for a couple of minutes before pulling herself back, still above me. She took a deep breath, almost a moan, and then got completely off me in one sudden motion as if something had stung her. She sat down beside me. I felt the air around her collapse, in the same way that she was collapsing. She was so disoriented and bewildered that she forgot to breathe. Slowly, she undid the ties around my hands and pulled off the band of cloth over my eyes.

I flicked my eyes from one side to the other in search of something to cover me. I tugged at the top bed sheet and wrapped myself in it. I got up to go into the bathroom. I shut myself in as long as it took to regain some balance and steadiness. Meanwhile, my mind was a horrid black hole, my face washed clean of features. I returned to the room. She had shredded my clothes, even the bits that required no more than her two hands to yank them cleanly off me. I opened her wardrobe and pulled out the first thing I saw. It was the last thing I wanted right now, to wear something that had touched her body, when her touch was why, in the first place, I had to take her clothes.

It was impossible for me to believe that what was trickling from my lips and from various places on my body—this red substance, welling out in drops—was actually blood, that something which had exactly the lightness of water could be such a source of pain for a body whose skin struggled with bruises. The parts of my body seemed unconnected to each other, disfigured as they were with rainbows horrible to see in their harshly clashing colors, splotches ending only to cede the space beyond to another patch of awful color. My body was painful, useless. Even if it might have seemed to me, had I given it any thought, that my left hand was not crucial to my day-to-day life, I might well discover that I did need it, to put on my clothes, for example, to attend to trivial little details to which I had not paid any attention before. I might need it for little things like doing up my trouser zipper, closing the back of my bra, or putting my arms into my shirt sleeves.

I went back into the room. I gathered up her clothes and piled them next to her. Mechanically, I began to straighten up the room, returning things to their proper places, straightening the bed sheets and coverlet. She was following me, first with her eyes, then with her breathing, and finally with her whole body. She edged to the side of the bed and grabbed me by the hand. I escaped lightly, and a second time, too. I fetched her clothes and set them down next to her. I was on the verge of feeling that I could overcome the pain in my wrist enough to help her into her clothes. But just then, she stretched her hands around me and shoved her head into my stomach and began to cry, her tears springing from her eyes without even touching her cheeks, as if they could exceed and escape the power of gravity, falling forward to melt into the weave of my shirt and moistening my body below. I remained a silent tablet, a memory with no space left, a mute wall, anything at all, as long as it had nothing to give it a touch of emotional connection or consolation or understanding or sadness or even a formal kind of sympathy. Nothing.

As soon as she finished putting on her clothes, I left on my own, taking the back stairs, which I had normally used only after visits that ended in quarrels. There had been a lot of them. I went out. And I did not come back.

I stayed away from the college for three days. The semester was in its last month before attendance lists would be submitted, and given what the averaging of my absence record would be, since I had had that seizure, another absence no longer had any importance. In the college, always, and no matter where I was or where I went, I felt her shadow darkening every spot, falling over my shadow and erasing it. I would feel the sizzle of her gaze on my back, the dreadful penetration beneath my skin; and twisting around, I would confirm to myself that I had not simply been fancying things. I could see her half hidden in odd and slightly remote corners, staring in my direction, never blinking, her eyes giving off a terrible sadness that was unbearable to see.

It was April Fools Day, and the strands of my lies were intertwining and forming complicated knots, getting shorter and shorter, revealing themselves as lies. Just as she had come out of I don’t know what kind of void, I opened a door in the wall and ushered her back into nothingness. I rid myself of her. I returned to my own room instead of to Muhammad’s room, because I no longer felt any fear of my room being soiled. I dropped her number from my cell phone and her name from my on-line lists. Her email, too—I erased her from my address list, and I tore up the letters which she had slipped from time to time into my locker at the college. Her gifts settled into the depths of the trashcan, except for her last gift, a small pillow cushion in the shape of a heart, red; at the center was written I LOVE YOU in English. I was in need of something shouting into my face like this, in big letters—no, in huge letters. I was in need of a single thread of memory that would not become frail, that would not break. I was in need of something that would remind me every day never to ignore what the beginnings of things say, nor to disregard the prophecy of my heart.

The strange thing is that I do not miss our bodily acts. I recall what she said about hunger, yet I do not sense my body yearning for what had been. What I have missed are those little things, the details that do not draw your attention at the time, amidst the complexity and chaos of the way things turn out. My fingers on the dimples in her cheeks, and her smile as the dimples grow deeper; her sadness, and the troubled expression on her face when she gets sad. I miss us when we are going to sleep, me on my back and her on her stomach, each of us looking at the other and the world entirely empty but for us. I miss her voice. I miss more the hoarseness of her voice the moment she wakes up. I miss hearing the phrase
Ya quwwat Allah
in the astonished way she says it, I miss her toying with my sleeve when she is talking away, I miss her finger in my mouth, I miss her pushing her nose into the inside of my elbow and sniffing me—but I don’t miss the heat of our bodies together. Worse than this, I miss all that we did not do together, all that we could have done but we forgot or put off. We let things slip away from us, negotiating a time, and now, time was emptying its hands of us.

A week, ten days, two weeks. Time had no meaning now. The minute that my wrist recovered from the bruise and the dark patches vanished from my skin, I buried her in a perfect forgetting. The forgotten, like the dead, never come back.

My prediction this time was different. I knew that I would be opening a door onto hell and that I would not close it until after extinguishing every bit of the coldness that crouched inside of me. My little stupidities, I knew, would have intoxicating effects. My slip-ups would mean I was nodding off when I should be paying attention. Even fear would not stave off my tendency to overlook danger signs. I was unbearably fearful, and what that means is that I reverted frequently to my dependence on the same person who had pulled me to the very farthest limits of pliancy and avoidance. That is, in utter contradiction to my need to keep myself within a reassuring space, I treated myself with the very illness I needed to cure. I submerged myself in whichever behavior appeared more frightening to me. Instead of running off to shield myself behind the rigid armor of refusal when others approached, and sweeping away everything that would give them reason to be in my life, I did the opposite. I would leave my door slightly open, waiting for whoever and whatever would enter, heedless of whether it was the fire of poison or the fresh pure water of paradise.

Dareen called me. It was our fourth or fifth telephone conversation since I had met her at the
mazraa
, and altogether we had spent about ten hours on the phone. Into our conversation I had snuck the observation that, notwithstanding my great esteem for her and even though I really valued her, I would not throw myself into this vortex of relationships where partners were shared, or relationships were open or involved multiple parties, or whatever the particular label or category was, into this world whose practices I had not yet even learned to pronounce with ease. With a big heart, she had accepted my hints with one of her own—she would not argue about this, but would leave everything to time and its dictates.

She was calling to ask if we could meet, her voice tinctured with a slightly dark shade of worry, as if to let me know that she was aware of what had happened recently. I had no objection, I told her, as long as she didn’t expect much. I was completely out of energy, tired and troubled, my body and head burdened by a loud clamor inside that would not quit and bad dreams in which, every night, I fell and fell into a bottomless chasm. No doubt my voice betrayed my state of mind. She said she was not expecting anything at all, and I had no trouble believing her.

So I visited her. It was not my body’s tensions and nightly longings that propelled me, nor a need for sympathy or a desire to forget. I had been shouldering all of these on my own. I went to her for reasons I am the last to know, if indeed there really were any reasons. Dareen did not hold anything back deliberately—that was her nature, as I knew—but she seemed to be restraining herself. Every time she began leaning warmly toward me, she would recall herself and straighten up again in her seat. She lowered her voice the moment anything other than social generalities entered the conversation. Apparently, the walls of the sitting room where guests were always received held concealed ears and smuggled-in eyes that observed and examined, accused and judged. This at least was the first impression I surmised from her behavior.

For two entire hours, we talked. We chatted about everything and anything. What we were talking about was not particularly important compared to how much enjoyment we got from the act of conversing, and the time slipped away without either of us sensing it. She had seated me in the first row of the cinema, and her words opened a wide-screen vision. Compelling and dazzling—that was what her stories were. Her ability to describe things astonished me, the way she talked about neglected details, how she dissected everything under a strong light. She could remember and describe exactly how the stairway appeared in a certain film. She could repeat two sentences from another film; she would offer up a refrain that some movie star always used or a scene that consisted of nothing more than a few steps on a wet pavement and a black overcoat.

I remember that she started talking about the film
Chocolat
, going into its use of symbols, the significance of chocolate and ash, the kind of role the gypsy played in the plot, the ascendancy of politics over religion, the ascendancy of politics and religion together over society, and the forms that society’s acquiescence and its complex adjustments took. I am a person who swallows movie scenes whole, in a single gulp; it never occurs to me that there are meanings taking form behind the translucent curtains of the film, which need nothing more (says Dareen) than a simple hand pushing aside those curtains in order to be seen.

Dareen’s only problem—if I could possibly consider it a problem—was that what she projected on her screen was so astonishing that the attempt to convey it was an impossible task, as was reducing it to our linguistic systems of words and meanings. It was so impossible as to be absurd, or stupid; so impossible that the attempt could not but disfigure the image. With that way she had in conversation, she would display images that were sparklingly comprehensive, balanced, and mature—but any attempt to talk about reality as comprehensive, balanced, and mature seemed an utter waste of time to all of us.

When I gave her my hand as I was saying goodbye, she left a letter in my palm and a kiss on my cheek. I’ll see you soon, she said. Promise me that? She tugged at my hand as she spoke, and so I answered, Definitely! I had no idea whether my firm response was just a momentary reaction without any lasting value, or whether it expressed something that had touched my heart with need.

On my way home, I opened her letter and read it.

My heart began to simmer and it bubbled over

I don’t know what happened

And I am not anxious for the details

Except of course if you have a desire to tell,

and then all of me is listening

What I want to say is, I love you

And I am not asking you to meet me with the same

Likely, you are asking how this could be, so quickly?

I do not have an explanation

Be with me, and I will not desert you

I will not fatigue or trouble you, and you will always be content

And I will not shackle you to me—you can go whenever you want

A chance only, that’s all I ask

I want to hear from you soon

I want us to be together

And I give you my love

That is all

I cannot decide for you

And whatever your decision, I respect it in advance

and I will honor it

But if things were in my hands

I would have written on the divine slate that inscribes your fate,

tonight, to get in touch

And to say Yes,

Or to say nothing at all

I will understand you without any words

I love you

Two days later, she was in my room. It had been my turn to call her. I did not know what words to use in response to her letter so I settled on asking her simply if we could meet. I left it to her to pick the time, and she answered me, Yes, the first possible opportunity, right now, for instance!

We had finished; she kissed me randomly and then rested her head on my chest, breathed in my skin, and said, Thank you.

For what?

Because you touched me with love.

Don’t thank me, I am simply a reflection of you.

She closed my eyes with her fingertips and leaned over my body to turn on the lamp. She picked up her bag from the side of my bed and began searching for something. She lay down again, next to me, pulled up the cover over her chest, tugged it around and under her arms, and said, You can open your eyes. Her wallet was open to the picture of a girl at whom Dareen gazed with what seemed an old sadness.