The Others (29 page)

I finished the school term with a little farewell party, the crying of Yasmine, which left a spot on my jean skirt, and little gifts: a Pooh-shaped eraser, an old issue of the children’s magazine
Maajid
, a hair tie, sugarless gum.

I called Muhammad from my room.

I’m really tired.

Do you want to go to the hospital?

I took an extra pill. Or two.

Don’t close your phone. Get up right now and open the door.

I got up, but it was difficult. I was able to estimate distances. More than once, I sensed that I was about to bump into the wall. I felt as though the floor was opening under my feet and swallowing my steps. I constantly had to repeat to myself what I was about to do so that I would not lose myself halfway and forget. I had to fiddle with the key several times to be able to open the door. I came back into the room with my vision blurry and the fogginess of the encroaching illness stealing my senses. I picked up the receiver and before I said anything, Muhammad said, Just wait a little and mother will be there.

He told me to keep talking to him. I think I raved plenty, my words broken, unlinked sentences without meaning.

Finally, a prime opportunity for my mother to care for me had come. My seizures could keep coming in quick succession for however long my damaged brain wished as long as my mother would be there to help in the end. She would keep feeding those ropes of conversation to me, the cords that had broken between us. As long as she would stop looking at me as if I were not even there, and busying herself with any old trivial thing whenever we happened to be together, and talking, waking, and feeding me by means of the maid, Edna!

Then, I could tell that the level of whispers and furtive talk with which I always lived had become unusually high. The repeated visits from Fatima stirred my suspicions. Every time I went in to where mother and Fatima were, they stopped their whispering abruptly and immediately made up some new topic of conversation that they stuck to until I went out of the room. I knew that there was something going on. My mother said, Your aunt is going to visit us on Thursday. Her sister. I said to myself, My aunt visits us every day, so what is new?

And the girls, your cousins, my mother added. Uff! I completed the thought for my own benefit. Another family gathering to kill off boredom.

And don’t come up with excuses to be away, as you usually do, she said. For shame!

Of course. For shame! Shame! Shame!

That night I did not sleep. Hamza getting engaged to me! They must be joking. Why would he ask to engage himself to me? All I am is a sick and defective girl. I am a girl who cannot get along with the world nor even come to terms with the expectations she is supposed to have as a reasonable and well trained daughter, but who is every bit as incapable of throwing herself under the wheels of a train, because she is so afraid that it might miss her. All I am is the girl whom writing and hours on the net and the company of young men there have corrupted and ruined. That is the way my aunt sees it, and she has managed to get my mother to see it that way, as well. My aunt would always set strict limits on how much her daughters could mix with me, so that the rotten apple wouldn’t spoil the crop.

Moreover, in combination with
him
, I am nothing more than a collection of bad genes, I thought to myself. What was in his mind? Was he thinking that we would hatch damaged children who would spend their lives moving between hospital rooms? Or maybe he was thinking that God would spare them the curse of our blood? And then what if we did marry, and in an intimate moment he saw me clinging to his nakedness, my longings overpowering me, and suddenly, I would be nothing more than
a woman
, a body erupting with passion, a being of deficient understanding!

What if we got married and I had a child, or more than one? How would I bathe it without being afraid, how would I hold it and carry it down the stairs and not be afraid, how would I give it my breast when my seizures will not stop coming? How would I put it to my chest and comfort it so that it would sleep? How, when this body was not ruled by my will in any condition? If this is a joke, I do not understand what is funny about it, and if they are serious, then I am almost certain that I am the only sane and rational one among them all.

My aunt, who would present her son to me with obvious benevolence, as if she were sacrificing him, and my mother, who believed that she would achieve her goal in life by guaranteeing me eternal happiness with Hamza, agreed on one matter. They agreed that I would agree to this. Indeed, I had no reason to refuse. The two of them had spent days planning out our life, where we would live, the hall in which we would get married, and the timing of everything, all the way to the names of our children, how many there would be and the spacing of each. That is why it would be truly hard on my mother to believe that I would say—and in such a loud voice—No!

Perhaps I really do give my illness an opening to stop my life cold. But that is because I figure this is the only way that I can get the better of it. I will not allow it to continue through my children or because of them. I do not want to be a transit lounge for this disease, nor to live my mother’s life all over again. After every spell that electrifies my body, she is powerless to make anything happen that would absolve her of her sin, just as she was powerless faced with the death of Hassan. I am grateful to God for this lovely chance, but I am not kicking His grace in the face if I say no. In other circumstances, perhaps I would have considered Hamza one of the best opportunities to come my way; he would be a good companion for a life, a whole life. But I live here, suspended in this body of mine, with its limited possibilities, and I cannot gamble with future lives for the sake of my life here and now.

As soon as I heard my mother’s steps on the staircase I turned toward the wall. I did not have it in me to bear up under her sorrow. She came and pressed herself against my back and began to stroke my hair, weeping over her powerlessness and her weakness. With every seizure—these seizures that seemed to reoccur at fixed and regular intervals—I would feel the convulsions of my body stripping me naked. It was a nakedness that left me powerless to cover myself, a nakedness that meant there was no point in pulling the cover up and over me or clutching my clothes tightly. It was the nakedness of exposure, need, and weakness. I heard her sobbing but it was hard to make myself feel it, for my seizure enveloped me in a stifling sheath and took me to a place of total isolation. It took me far away.

I was empty, and among the things that had left me was my desire to stop the seizure. I was reaching the moment where everything was absolutely like everything else, since my head was vacant and my spirit was quenched completely. I was so weary that I let the thread of saliva stream across the pillow. My mother’s sobbing, growing louder, and the rattlings in my throat, sang their parts in turn, like a chorus, and I was seeing myself from the inside, and hearing myself from the inside, and my temples were throbbing inside the walls of my chest and echoing back, and the echoes were spreading to the deepest recesses of me. Every seizure settled deeper inside of me, leaving more residue.

Muhammad, who could transform any event into gripping entertainment, inventing jokes from it and making me laugh, was hiding his worry under an artificial calm. He asked me rapid-fire questions the whole way there. When had I eaten? When did I wake up? What time did I go to sleep? What did I do today? All in an effort to keep me with him, but my drowsy state kept me from responding beyond a few unconnected words. The letters I did try to enunciate would drown in the saliva of my seizure, and that was enough to distort my few words beyond intelligibility. My head was very heavy and my sleepy state pushed me to hallucinations. Sometimes I was trying to answer questions that had already been superseded by other questions, and sometimes I was answering the same question twice in a row. When I could not speak because the words only gurgled in my mouth, or when I stayed still, quiet without a sound or a rustle because I was so fatigued, he would put his hand out to me and say, Squeeze my hand. Out of weakness or pride, I did not much give him my hand.

For so long I had been sure that I—rather, I and my illness—were standing on the rim of a dangerous precipice, and if we fell we would fall together. I believed that the impact our crash made would resound in my ears for a very long time. I would know then, and for certain, that we had indeed fallen. What happened, though, was that when we fell, my senses and the cracking sound of my bones lied to me. What happened is that I exchanged that gigantic blackness swallowing me at the opening of the precipice for mere everyday darkness, which I handled by saying nothing and claiming that nothing had happened, while in fact this descent was burying me alive little by little. We had really fallen, and my new belief was that every fall concealed behind it another drop that was even worse, that would take me down a steeper incline and further into the abyss. I knew I was threatened with more.

When I was in the sixth grade, aged eleven, the first signs of my illness came in the form of light, uncomplicated spasms attacking me as I slept, giving me a bout of fright or a nightmare, some tremblings and a choking sensation, and then I would wake up bewildered. My mother carries the disease in her genes, so she had always been immediately suspicious of anything at all that afflicted us, no matter how short-lived. We would not let her watch any medical program, because that would mean a new name, a new disease, to add to her already rich vocabulary, as well as another round of anxious suspicion about every passing cold that would inhabit our bodies. When my mother saw those nighttime seizures, she willed herself to believe that I did not suffer from any diseases. It was not possible for her cute, sweet little girl to really be sick. But after three years of it, seeing the way I would shake uncontrollably in the middle of a seizure, she could no longer deny it. The results of the EEG were enough to prove it.

I remember her face, when she was sitting in front of me as I was undergoing X-rays. I could see her face in a little mirror opposite me, as I was encased in that huge disk, an enormous white coffin. She was moving her lips with verses from the Qur’an and was all but crying. I remember how she questioned the doctor fiercely as he wrote out a prescription and said that if I stuck to the medication it was very possible that we could control the seizures and stop the disease from progressing any further. She was arguing with him about entrapping my blood with tranquilizers and turning me into a girl from whom all life had drained. Meanwhile I was laughing. Epilepsy. The doctors are really something, coming up with names for sicknesses that sound so hilarious when you repeat them.

My mother believed that the sum of all the changes she was making would lessen the possibility that any of this would hurt me. She bought me a new bed with really low sides and corners, and no bedposts, and she populated it with a whole tribe of pillows. She covered the floor of my room with a fine blanket, since during my seizures I often fell out of bed. Whenever I fell, she would question me about my head. Whenever I was about to go in for another examination, she would be terrified at the thought that they might find a tumor in my brain, even though those falls of mine did not even bruise any bones. I had to stick to a few rules: I was not allowed to have a bath in the bathtub, or cross the main street by myself, or lock the door to my room. Some of her rules were illogical, and some of them I didn’t bother to carry out.

We did not have any fights over my disease until I graduated from high school and decided to apply to King Saud University. If my mother did not feel confident about what my disease might do and what it might mean for us when I was with her, how could she feel comfortable if I were so far away! I found myself explaining and talking and coming up with lots to say with the aim of confronting her fear and apprehension. I asked her not to put obstacles in my way, to let me run my life as I wanted to. But she deserted me. And so, for four years I studied a stupid trivial subject in a stupid college, with no opportunities to achieve anything with my diploma. I studied because that was what I had to do. And I succeeded and passed because that was what everyone did.

I knew that the moment my feet stepped through the hospital doors, my seizures would stop—seizures that had gone on relentlessly for some ten hours or more with no more than five minutes separating each one from the next. I knew exactly what would be said to me. It is one seizure, they would say, one continuing seizure! Sure, I know! And I don’t want anyone to remind me. I only want them to take my body and try it out for just one day. For three or four seizures. Then I will leave them the freedom to choose their terms and descriptions and names and cold drivel.

The seizures really did stop. The on-duty doctor came. Before she began talking, I was all set to address her aggressively, hostilely—the one tool I possessed by which I might defend my own body, in light of the feeling of violation and the sense that any space of my privacy had disappeared. She asked me what was wrong, and I said, I took one pill more than the max dose. As soon as I said it, Muhammad was on the point of jumping in with
maybe two pills
but he sidestepped when I gave him a couple of really angry looks. Answering her, I prepared a logically connected equivalence: my usual dose of Tegretol, the orange pill, as my mother calls it, is 200 mg. I used to take two pills every day, but my doctor combined the dosage into one pill, and I forgot. My seizure didn’t stop, so I thought that taking extra pills would improve things a little. The maximum dose was eight of the old 200 mg pills, or 1,600 mg, and since I took five pills each of 400 mg, that meant I had taken 2,000 mg.

I used up every last bit of my energy presenting her with this detailed explanation. Her response stunned me with cold suspicion: But since getting here, you haven’t had any seizures at all! The questions that followed confirmed my misgivings. She asked, Had I had a fight with anyone? Did I have any family problems or pressures at home? Was this the first time I had taken more than the usual dose? Had I played around with any other medications? Was I seeing a psychiatrist? From time to time she would check my answers with Muhammad, talking to him in English as if I were a stupid girl who would not understand, and as if her expressions did not reveal clearly, even to a blind person, what she meant. I locked down my mouth, biting on my lips to keep my anger inside, until I found myself exploding at her doggedness. Write in your report that it is a failed suicide attempt! I don’t care!