The Others (25 page)

I think this place holds everything my father gave me. It
is
everything he gave me.

I was taken unawares by the strength of my reaction, which nearly made me swear at her except that my tongue stumbled over the words.

Uh, you are—

It’s just exactly what you see.

Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?

Here—I’m sharing my secret with you now! I waited so that you could see it with your own eyes.

A secret—why a secret?

You know what the others expect. Windows, stories, trees, little songbirds. I am as far away as can be from anything like that! I am a crazy woman whose head spins at the color white. That means I do not treat white according to some presumed idealism or goodness. One time I read that art rests on destruction—of ideas, structures, and ready-made notions of beauty. By instinct, I am a really good destroyer.

Knowledge has corrupted you, Dareen.

Dazzled, I studied her secret dwelling place. With an admiration I could not hide, I said, God must definitely love colors, to so fill the world with them.

She raised her finger to me, shaking it as if to say, Give me a minute, and I will remember it exactly.

Don’t reproduce a translation that is wrong. The original sentence is
God must be a painter
. From the film
A Beautiful Mind
. She was standing in front of a painting and—

I interrupted her. I can second you on the film, I said, but if you are going to start talking about details on the canvas, you know better.

I pointed to the three works hanging on the wall. Why these especially, and not others?

When I lose my belief in what I am doing, when I don’t have enough reasons or motives to go on, whenever I doubt my ability, I look at them and I see what I was and then what I have become and I regain my confidence. My stages—the first was anger, as I call it, all red hues, large mouths screaming, fast steps, and swarming streets.

I don’t see any of that.

There is no reason to assume that you will see what would amount to a literal translation.

I don’t mean that, I mean … so, that was your embryonic stage, if it is okay to use such an expression. Writing exactly on the lines.

My embryonic stage, as you put it, consisted of some sketches in notebooks. I didn’t yet know the difference between watercolors and oil, nor between abstract art and surrealism.

Yes, I get that. So what was the next stage?

Nothingness. Nihilism. I would fill the spaces of the canvas with more emptiness. At that time, in most of my paintings I used colors tending toward black. I was consumed by the idea of contradiction between black and white. I was thinking that if I had been born in the middle of the twentieth century, like in the sixties, and had grown up watching films that weren’t in color, I would not have been very happy.

Do you like naming your pieces?

Her smile almost disappeared. This really is a tragedy, she said. At that time, I was sketching my dreams. Every swipe of the brush was a dream. With a certain amount of conceit, maybe, I really believed that at any given time I had enough images and thoughts crowding inside of me that I could draw and draw without stopping. I didn’t really notice that I was just going on and on suspended in the same place. I was not taking a single step forward.

And now?

Have you seen
Shine
? If I am not mistaken, it got an Oscar for Best Actor. It is all about a piano player named David. When I saw it, I heard a sentence I can’t ever forget.
Play as if there is no tomorrow
. When I heard him playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, I could never forget it, even after I learned that this David could not actually play the passage. His fingers betrayed him. I am going to risk saying that every painting is a stage, or part of one. But now, I do paint every one as if it might be the last one, if my fingers should betray me.

Why are all the others turned to the wall?

How do you feel about your poems a while after you’ve composed them?

I hate them.

Yes, it’s like that.

Show me the one you hate most.

Shame on you!

She searched among them and lifted out one. You have to really prepare yourself for this one, though I should not prepare you in advance.

I put my hands out to her, saying, Come. She did, and stood facing me. I ordered her to close her eyes, and she did. I took her hand, and passed her forefinger from my middle finger to my palm. Every time she seemed impatient to go faster, I slowed her down. We were so close that I could smell the fragrance of the shampoo in her hair and I felt the heat of her breaths against my skin, and when I again moved her finger across the bump on my palm, I said, This is me!

She had a curious look on her face. You are this wound?

No! I am what you feel when I am inside of you. When my being there doesn’t violate any other thing.

She smiled, seeing me fall into the
thing
trap, out of which I had so recently tried to pull her.

The sound of the late afternoon call to prayer rose and it was almost time for me to leave. Wait, she said. I also have something small for you.

It was her turn to order me to close my eyes. We were always carrying out these weird sequences of repeated behaviors. I interrupt her, she interrupts me; I kiss her hand, she does the same; if she starts swearing, I come back at her with something worse. I heard the sound of her making a little commotion as she hurried over, and then she permitted me to look. Facing me was a white canvas, as white as if it were a slab of ice, the very image of what I believe heaven to look like. Not colors but what is beyond colors.

It’s for you.

What?

You heard me.

But it is your painting.

I made it for your sake.

I can’t take it.

Why not?

Because it is your work.

You can certainly give me, dedicate to me, the finest poem that you will ever write, and then we’ll be even.

You don’t understand. The poem will remain with me even if I give it to you. But the painting, no.

Take it! Hang it over your bed.

Why specifically over my bed?

Because you are the only crazy woman who sleeps the wrong way around in her bed.

Meaning, it will be the first thing I see when I wake up.

And you will remember me.

You mean, I will think about you.

And you will remember me, she repeated firmly.

I really wanted to say to her, but didn’t, Hide me, Dareen, here, in this secret place of yours, hide me between your fingers. Draw on my body, draw directly onto my skin without any distances or obstacles, draw, with all of your colors, all of your fingers. Draw on my body as if I am the very last of your canvases. Your drawing will erase all of the futile, stupid actions of others. I will not be the best of your canvases, Dareen, yet this canvas, me, will be one of the best in its power to move the emotions, to express meaning. Aren’t you comfortable with the way my body speaks? So, then, hug me, hug me a little, no, hug me a little less than that, and then do not start searching inside my chest, do not ask me, Why is your soul not there? I have no soul, Dareen. The others have consumed it, the others who come and go, across me, these others who pass by, and those who thought I loved them and they loved me … you consumed it, you, Dareen, or perhaps it was Nadia.

We were silent for a little, so sad that we could not rise above our sorrow. Then she punctured our silence with words.

Do you know what the song of our relationship is?

Of course, it is what you made the painting of.

And it is just ours!

Dareen, too, possessed her own particular ability to predict, and this is what she told me as she sang it.

O Time

Since these plants threw their shadow on the wall

And from before the days when these trees grew tall

O Time, light the lamps, and look at my friends

They’ve passed on by and I remain all alone

O friends who are leaving, and the snow that was here

You’ll no longer return to my door in this drear

Howl at them, wolf, howl with the winter

Howl to my friends, and maybe they will hear …

It was as if she were saying, I will wait for you even if you do not come, and I forgive you for being absent even if I do think it is wrong.

After we were finished I was careful not to leave anything behind me. The law says: Nothing left hanging behind you when you leave. No words lest they be said, no stories lest they be told, no needs lest they be longed for; because, most of the time, such things come back later to spoil the ambience. I was accustomed to ending my relationships in the most seemly way, what I can call
a clean kill
. I make our final day the very best day we have ever had, and I make sure that no doubt remains, not even the lightest tiniest tremor of concern, about whether the relationship deserved all that we poured into it. That way, nothing is left over that we are compelled to revisit at a later moment. And so, on that day precisely, I was fulfilling everything required of me, saying everything that needed to be heard from me, so that I could be absolutely certain of not leaving this place before seizing everything due me or paying everything I owed.

But—Dareen!

I simply was not capable of taking advantage of her heedlessness, fooling her this way, nor was she capable of playing along—of playing this game with me. I sensed that we would come together; we would find a way through this that would defuse the tension. We would make a relationship that did not leave such a heavy footfall. We would not release ourselves, such that we could be unfaithful, despite the few times, really, that we had been together, so few as to be considered nothing much at all. Times that had always come to a close with the certitude that our intimacy would not repeat itself. We had not been so caught up in our bodies; our desires had not run away with us. But this is what the impossibility of attainment, after its possibility, does. The jealousy germinating in the joints of a body which is no longer able to commit the act, to touch, to kiss; and the belated flame of desire which is fueled only by the power of that other’s existence, and the fire of distance. Perhaps we would meet in paradise, where we could become light, ridding ourselves of the burden of our bodies, released finally from memory.

Rayyan was a story in one chapter. I do not know which one of us finished with the other one. We just ended it. Supposedly, short stories do not leave vast spaces of sadness behind. Supposedly, transients pass lightly. Supposedly, we remain friends and he leaves the lamp in his window lit for me, so that I may turn to it in my darkest nights, when I make my way along corridors that lead nowhere. But things do not match up with our
supposedlys
or our prior expectations.

The worst thing about death is dying slowly, wilting and fading away, dissolving and decomposing. The worst is to find that your every breath holds a little less air. The worst case scenario is when death does not come quickly and decisively; and that was the scenario that overtook Rayyan and me. We ended slowly, so slowly that I have no idea in what moment we actually did end it. I cannot pinpoint or even guess the time span that framed our relationship. We ended so slowly that it wasn’t really an ending.

We met through pure Internet mischief in an online club. I do confess, Rayyan is one of my favorite writers. I was determined to hassle him, so I highlighted a marginal bit of information in one of his comments, and declared it wrong in a thread I added. Later on, he told me of his suspicion that I was stalking him, likely with some bad intentions. He was outraged and he decided on the spot to break my head, as he put it. Breaking a head takes time and effort, though, and we found ourselves dangling in a certain trap without having realized that we were falling into it.

When I said to Dareen, What I long for in you is a man, but it’s a man who will never show up, she whispered into my ear, I wish I could be that man.

But I do not expect anyone, I answered with truly lofty hauteur.

Without knowing it, she drew my attention to the entity missing in my life. There had never been a man, never at all. In my remotest hopes, in my very feeblest and most secret thoughts about the future, there never ever had been a man. I dealt with the problem of the absent man as a foregone conclusion, a grim reality. Even when the world of the Internet opened before me in all of its tempting, enticing possibilities, that particular absence was a premise whose bases I did not contest. Umar himself was an exception—an exception far beyond the usual or the anticipated. The virtual space where our relationship played out with its natural limitations contained my awareness of him as a presence that had no physicality, no gender, no sex. I expect that if it had not been for the nature of these circumstances, which allowed him to slip easily into the tiniest crevices of me, we would not have come close to completing our second year together as buddies on the Internet.

Whenever I got close to negotiating with the idea of a certain man’s existence in my life, I had to think about the possibility of there existing a man who would be right. But the sheer question of sexual nature would shove me off course every time I allowed an opportunity to perch in my mind. I am not someone to give my body to strangers. I do not invite to my bed those who will put on their clothes in the morning and go away and not come back. I cannot detach my body from my soul; I cannot fill one of them up while the other remains hungry. There is an enormous distance between releasing my body into the whirl of its desires, and being cheaply and easily available.

They say that you know love when it shows up in front of you. I do not know if this thing with Rayyan was love or if it was something else. They also say that love comes when we are really ready for it, but it comes from a direction we don’t expect. I was living our relationship as if it were a tightrope on which I had to balance without any safety net below—that
below
which was deep and very dark. Our relationship took on a strange pattern of absence and presence. Boredom quickly grabbed us if we were in each other’s presence too long. Desire stung us when we stayed away. So we swung between presence and absence, two dubious choices with no third way out. Without any prior accord, we seemed intent on filling an obligation to time our absences and our presences alike. That way, one of us did not have to wait and the other did not have to feel ignored. Knowing from the start that Rayyan would be absent, I did not feel any great fissure opening up behind my ribs if I did not find him there, no gap that solace could not close, no hollow that could fill up only with the muck of regret or the standing water of unbearable grief.