The Others (33 page)

And so we met here in Medina. I gave my mother the excuse that I had to buy a toothbrush. Don’t be late, she said. In the trade center, which is always full of crowds and commotion, we met. All I saw of him was his back, and all I could hear in the sea of chaos and crowds was the sound of my confused steps on the tiles, which were out of sync with the rhythm of my pulse. I thought my heart would stop completely at the rate it was pounding. A shop window crammed with colors and goods and perfume bottles, all glass. Lots of glass. I do not know how I walked those twenty steps to Donut House without the slightest turn toward the dark green hue of The Body Shop façade. I found myself behind him exactly, pressing my fingers into his palm, his warm palm, like two old friends, or a pair of lovers, and as if I had done the same thing a million times before. He was startled for a moment, I think he was startled, and then he said, I don’t know which one you prefer, choose yourself, and I pointed randomly. I felt the whole world staring at us. They all must know that we had an assignation. He took his wallet from the pocket of his olive-green trousers and paid, and pushed the glass door leading to the street so I could go through, and the breeze went straight to my heart, and without any reason for it I loved him more, and I don’t know why I remembered something he had said to me many times.
I will always be concerned with you, and I will work to make sure no harm comes to you
. We went outside and sat at the fountain and I laughed, because I don’t eat doughnuts, nor does Umar, and we had not cleaned off the spot where we sat down, and there must have been a terrible gray stain now on his pants and my
abaya
. A few meters from us stood a policeman next to a No Smoking sign. Next to us was an Iranian family taking pictures of the fountain and the tiles and the walls of the sacred enclosure where the Prophet is buried. For a moment I thought I was in one of Ally McBeal’s craziest, most hysterical made-up scenes.

Umar was exactly like himself, exactly as I had seen in his pictures and via the webcam in the few times he happened to be at an Internet café. Here were the same facial expressions and gestures, the same sharp aspect with the fine protruding nose ending in a tip that needed only an index finger poking playfully at it, the same dark complexion and deep brown eyes, the hair whose blackness the breeze made fly, his long fingers always ready to sketch shapes in the air, his reserved smile that waited until his face was turning in the other direction to complete itself, his laugh like the breaking water in the fountain nearby, and his broad forehead, which offers an abundant destiny for someone wanting a full life to immerse them. There was his smell mixed with Calvin Klein cologne, his smell that God did not duplicate in anyone, and the warmth of his body, too, which no technique could dispel.

My entire world had withdrawn into the confines of virtuality, where my features are embodied icons, my voice a “respond” box, and my room a chat window where time falls away and place goes missing. My friends, my little homelands, the man whom I thought I loved, my mailboxes, the cafés where we would meet—it was all virtual, even our names. My cousin’s names were no longer what they had been twenty years before, but had changed to Hiba and Sundus and Aqil, even before the Internet when we had pseudonyms for the magazine. Dareen first introduced herself to me using her Internet name, and then apologized, smiling, and replaced it with the name on her birth certificate. She loved the Qatif region so much, she said, that she had chosen the name of a coastal part of Qatif’s body. She said to me, I wanted a name that would unite the memory of my homeland, Qatif, with Nadia. “Nadia” and “Dareen” share letters. Rayyan chose the name that no one called him by except his mother—and it appears that my luck at its best was with people whose names contain the letter R. Dai said, By pure coincidence my eye fell on the word Dai at the very moment I was registering, and there wasn’t any other name in my head at the time. Only Umar was a fact that virtual reality did not demolish, nor did distances, nor my fear.

On the horizon of my expectations, the possibility of our meeting as quickly as this had not occurred, nor had the possibility of it happening again this fast. I returned with my head spinning, searching for a way out. Umar would not stay for more than five days, and I would have to make up some convincing reasons to cover two or three meetings during that time without stirring up my mother’s suspicions. My mother—who doubts even her own doubts, and who does not impose enough logic on her rules—did not even allow Salaam to drive me to the college that was outside Qatif, for everything outside of Qatif in her view amounted to nothing more than unknown, foreign towns. Even here, in the city that I had visited some dozen summers in a row, and whose map might as well be drawn on my palm, I knew it so well, and which became every summer another Qatif, so that wherever I turned I would see someone I knew—even this remained for my mother an unknown, foreign city—and no one can trust foreign cities.

My only way out was Salma. I figured that God loves me and so He sent Salma to me. I called her and I told her a double lie. I asked her to help me claim in front of my mother that she was inviting me to lunch, because, I told her, I was going to meet up with Nuuf, a net girlfriend, and my mother would give us a hard time, and so would Nuuf’s mother, and we wouldn’t be able to find any middle ground to meet on. I was only half lying, because I really was going to meet Nuuf, and we were searching out a secret way to meet without having to get into an argument with my mother and hers which would end with the mothers opposing the idea or expressing their displeasure at our relationship altogether. A little while later, Salma called me back, so that the idea of the invitation would not appear to have been arranged in advance. We talked for a few minutes and then I gave my cell phone to my mother. I know Salma’s way when she is going after something she wants. So I knew that my mother would be embarrassed enough that she would agree without any back-and-forth or bargaining. I got what I had been strategizing for, even though my mother gave me no more than three hours. That was not a problem; I had learned how to bargain with her for more.

I couldn’t sleep. I stayed sitting up in my bed, staring out the window to the glass façade where Umar was asleep behind one of its windows. Tomorrow seemed very far away and it was taking its time about arriving. It is only 2 a.m., I thought, so hopefully he is not asleep yet, and if I were to wake him up he would go back to sleep. No doubt he is tired enough to fall asleep again. So I called him, and thank God he was not asleep. I told him my naïve need to know which window he was sleeping behind, so he turned the light on and off several times until I was able to find his window. I reminded him not to put on any cologne tomorrow so that my mother would not smell its scent on my clothes. I wished him a sound sleep and clean sheets and a pillow that didn’t hurt his neck, and I hung up.

In my dreams, Hassan came to me. He had never before visited me in my sleep. His face was covered with a small piece of white cloth that I pulled away, but it returned to cover his face again, growing larger, reaching for his limbs and his whole body. I pulled it off but it came back and grew still larger, and so it mutated from a handkerchief into a
ghutra
like men wear over their heads, and then into a sheet and then a shroud. I was asking him, Have you forgotten me, Hassan? Why don’t you come? Come with me, okay? Get up from death, and come. All he did was smile, a long and sweet smile, not the kind of smile that indicates the helplessness of the dead when their shrouds bind and incapacitate them. And before the dream was blotted out, he said to me, This is not the right of the dead over the living. What do you mean by that, Hassan? What do you mean? What? and I found myself tumbling into a foggy wakefulness and the room.

At midday, as soon as I stepped into the elevator alone, I called Umar to open the door for me. As I walked through the door to Room 1407 he put out his right hand to me. Men shake hands, and we girls kiss each other, and sometimes we hug. I gave him my left hand, since my right one was not free. He took the two plastic bags I was carrying. I went to the window, pointed out my window, the open window on the ninth floor, and said, I am five floors beneath you, and he laughed. He always laughs when a possibly suggestive expression slips out of me. Just as yesterday we sat next to each other at the fountain, where his trousers and my
abaya
got soiled, today we sat beside each other on a sofa the color of soil under yellow lamplight. He hoisted one of the bags.

A bottle of beer and strawberry gum … what made you late?

Two minutes aren’t
late
unless you are going by Greenwich Mean Time, I said. Often I say any old random thing when he has me cornered and I can’t find words to finish my sentence. In the second bag was a sealed bottle of ∏ cologne.

Why ∏? he asked me.

I can always love a man who wears ∏. Another random sentence, I guess.

In bed, he asked me, Do you love me?

Since when do you use love as a way to something else?

Don’t be pedantic—answer me.

I sang something about waiting for opportunities that always come late, and things that keep you from being well, and your need for a compass that isn’t broken down, for an angel to come and take you from your cold dark room, to empty your veins of memory and make you light, snatching you from your lowliness and making you forget the fear of endings, an angel who flies you somewhere high, to where you are in a safe place.

Am I your angel?

More than that, Umar. There is a sentence in the film
City of Angels
, if you remember it, the angel said something like,
he’d rather one breath, one touch, one kiss, than eternity
…

And you are the one to whom I voluntarily cede my eternal angel-ness, if I were an angel, for the sake of human-ness.

He smiled. We had not put out the light, and I saw how he smiled.

I love you, Umar. I love you a lot. By the Lord of the Heavens, I love you.

And although I had said it before,
I love you Umar
, in tens of circumstances I had said it, these circumstances had never come my way before. I had never said it as a young woman ready to love, a young woman at ease with a guy she trusted and amazed by all the little signs of his guy-ness: his beard, the whiskers on each side of his face, the hair on his chest, the different proportions of his body, his heavy smell—as a young woman who had always been searching for solutions and discovers now that all her possible solutions were there beneath her hand, but she never noticed.

He asked me if I was afraid. No, I responded. He laughed, for the glint in my eyes gave me away rather scandalously. So I pulled back a little and said, Fine, yes, I am a little anxious. The question was flowing along the edge of my tongue as Umar took it between his lips. Will you be disgusted if I get a seizure when I’m in your arms? I could ask it, knowing that he would close my mouth with a firm hand, and say in a firmer tone, Don’t say that, don’t think about it, okay? Or that he would lightly bite the tip of my forefinger like he does with Jawd, his littlest sister, every time she memorizes a bad word and repeats it without understanding what it means.

With the kiss, he spread his hands across me and lifted my clothes off. Slowly he lifted them after I had undone the buttons on his shirt, my reaction growing along with every new part of my body he revealed, and as I saw my reflection in his eyes desire burned over me. I had never seen myself reflected in another person’s eyes. His fingers moved down over me and then up—Umar, whom I thought would rip across my body like a sandstorm but who in reality moved more like the ebb and flow of a tide.

He tried to take off the necklace around my neck and I refused. I had not taken it off for five years—as of last Muharram it was five years—and I could not take it off. It would be as if I were taking Hassan’s hands off me, Hassan who told me as he clasped it around my neck that the angels would protect me as long as I wore it, Hassan, who never for a day believed in the protection of amulets or in summoning angels. I refused, and he murmured, unconvinced, Never mind.

When he slipped his hand beneath the flesh of my legs, I said, Don’t do that, don’t touch my leg like that. He took a long breath and drew nearer.

Do you trust me?

You know the answer without asking.

I need you to trust me now more, a lot more than ever before.

I was chewing on my nail and he took it out of my mouth.

I need a cigarette.

No, no you don’t need a cigarette.

I need the bathroom, then.

I got up quickly, slipping out from under his hands. I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I opened the tap. I stood in front of the mirror. I feel as if I am spoiling these moments, and I don’t understand why I am doing it, and why now I feel that I am weighed down by my memory, possessed by all that has gone by and everyone who has gone by. The old murmurings are hurting me, and the whispers of the darkness, and the vapor of breaths on my face, and my underwear twisted at my feet or thrown carelessly against the bedpost, and panties damp in their stickiness and odors that choke me, and the hand circling the flesh of my leg as I suppress my fear and my crying that must not be heard, I repeat, I do not see, and so there is nothing happening. I do not see anything, and so nothing is happening. Nothing.

I heard Umar’s footsteps, he must have been spying from the bathroom door.

Umar, go away.

What are you doing in there?

I have to pee
, I said in English.

Why the embarrassment?

It’s all about dirty words
.

Haven’t we said words this dirty and shrugged them off?

We’ll say them
in English
. Now, go away.

I am tired of my old features. I want to wipe them away, I want a clean memory, and a body without traces of anyone’s passing across it, a body free of sobbing and oblivious. I washed my face. I washed it several times. And I came out of the bathroom.