Thinner Than Skin (18 page)

Why wasn’t I aroused by her lately?

Our departure was just weeks away. Ours. We had our tickets. Our maps. Our separate allies, Wes and Irfan. If she wanted me to cancel, there was no chance of it. I was increasingly excited about what I’d do in northern Pakistan, with or without her, and this had renewed interest in my work. Nor would she agree to watch me leave without her. There was not going to be a
without
, no matter how many bombs were dropped or bombers martyred, not after working all year to claim a
with
. We were going. We both knew it. We saw it clearly in the shadow in our bed.

I bought a brand new Nikon digital, a 300mm lens, and a 20mm extension tube. I photographed small fry. The rainbow in a dragonfly wing. A single California poppy. Farhana’s nipple.

I suppose the image of the magnified nipple and the blurred contours of the breast preoccupied me more than she did, but then, she was already preoccupied. Always on the phone, always talking about him, her work, her return, her anxiety about her return. Her breasts.

She liked me photographing them. Breasts that had begun to stir me only in the frame. At least I didn’t get off on images of other women.

That day on the beach? It excited her, seeing herself magnified. And color-filtered. Image pre-processing, not to be confused with post-processing, to enhance maximum photorealism. To make the infeasible feasible. She lay on her stomach; I drizzled sand on the mound of her buttocks. It cascaded down her curves, featherlike, matching her skin tone. When we viewed the images together, the texture of the sandspill on her flesh made her wet. We were nestled between the same cluster of rocks where I’d found her the first time, on the far side of the cypress grove. There were others around, though none in our nest, or so we thought. She rolled back onto her stomach, raised her hips high into my groin. The sand scrubbed my erection. I heard the figure behind me, his breathing. I could feel it on my neck. I assumed she mistook it for mine or would have stopped. There was no way she could have seen his shadow on her spine.

Later, we both lay on our stomachs a long time. When we eventually got dressed, we didn’t speak.
He came when I did
. She couldn’t have noticed.

Now I looked in the viewfinder of my camera. I’d kept the photos of the weeks before we’d left, including that morning on Baker Beach. There were several shots of her—muted backgrounds, magnified nipples. I hadn’t needed them since coming to this country, where secrecy seems to play the same role.

At lunchtime, I heard Wes and Farhana leave the adjoining cabin, presumably for the restaurant. I stayed inside. I hadn’t slept in a long time. We’d been arguing for two days, almost without cease. I shut my eyes.

Nadir, you were swimming away from us
.

I hadn’t stopped seeing her, since that time at the bus stop. Sometimes she shrank into a distant, stamp-size image, as though I were looking through the gap in the front row of her teeth. A tiny girl in
magenta and green, stick in hand, climbing a hill, chasing a black goat. But always, when she descended, the playback was at the wrong speed. Her movements grew rapid and jerky, trapped in a silent movie. Whoever shot that film had grossly undercranked it. The goat bounced like an epileptic, and Kiran shuddered backward and forward on the hill in the frame made by the gap between her teeth.

In this way, Kiran was my past.

Other times, I was looking at her from above, through a camera in an unmanned plane, and Kiran appeared in a burst of grainy images. Getting in the boat, hunkering in her seat, folding her hands nervously in her lap while heavy bracelets rolled down her wrists. Her movements slower now, her shape elongated.

In this way, Kiran was my present.

Or I was looking at her through a series of gaps, all cut into a cylinder, and she had not shrunk, rather, I was a mouse peering into a giant zoetrope. Her mother twirled nearby, black sleeves rimmed in pink thread, bangles sliding as her arm rose in objection. Ob-jection, OB-JECTION! When the cylinder spun, Kiran’s bangles as she fidgeted in the boat and Maryam’s bangles as she gesticulated in fury were in absolute synchronicity.

In this way, Kiran was my future.

I hadn’t forgotten how her mother’s shadow crossed mine in the sand, next to Kiran’s corpse. Sometimes, as I slept, Maryam appeared in my room, throwing her image against mine. Sometimes it would become Kiran, her discolored face breathing on my pillow, wet hair tickling my cheek. And she’d touch my cold neck the way her baby sister had done, brown on blue.

I saw them, constantly, yet what I still could never see was my dive. I couldn’t see myself make the jump. One minute I was in the boat, the next, in the lake. And the next, the boat was very far away. How to find the gap? I tried to recreate the scene at different speeds:

Kiran skidding with her left foot and falling backward. Kiran hitting the side of the tipping boat. Farhana screaming “Sit down!”

Farhana not reaching for the girl. Farhana trying to balance the boat instead. While I had done—what? Where was I?

Kiran skidding rolling backward hitting boat Farhana screaming Farhana leaning into boat and me—
and me?

I was a slit in my memory through which I could see absolutely nothing.

KiranhittinghipcrackFarhanapullingboatbackKiransplash-Nadirnil.

And what about that rattle? Where was I when I heard it? Whose was it—Farhana’s? Did she, in fact, dive first, as I waited safely on board? Had she been too kind to tell me this? Was the rattle the sound of her swallowing silt, risking being buried alive as the girl pulled her down?

Next I am shooting like a projectile down to the bottom of the lake. Terrible pain in my legs, the water so cold, and that sensation, the one of an eel locking itself around my spine. Kicking my way back up. Keep kicking. But by then, the boat is barely visible. Dive again, into a rain of sand. No Farhana. No Kiran. Just a fish. Large, too large. What is that fish? Floating away from me, a broad shadow, murky, oddly shaped, a misshape in the midst of an underwater avalanche.

And then I am touching the bottom of the boat. Circling it as the fish circle me. These
are
fish. Not misshapes. Their yellow eyes examine me. Eyes with weight. A swarm of eyes, surrounding me the way eyes now surround me on land. The feeling that if I linger too long, the watching will grow mean. The fear of not knowing when. And which. The large white one with the gray brow or the smaller one, with the gray teeth?

I am still circling the boat, listening to a keening above, watching those eyes enclose me, when a wave of fresh ice water hits me. I press the boat’s hull with my palm. And listen. That misshape, floating near me in the water for barely a second. That was not a fish. What was it? Kiran? In arm’s reach
—my arm’s reach?

A second wave of water hit me.

It was Irfan, in my cabin, throwing cold water in my face.

He was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it. I wasn’t ready to get back into the boat. I squeezed my eyes. I kept rubbing the skin of the hull into my flesh.

He threw a third cup of water in my face.

The boat began to recede. Instead of swimming toward it, I was swimming away, toward Irfan in the bathroom. He was filling the cup and running back to hit me again.

I shot out of reach just in time. “I
need
to go back there. I
need
to know. What if the too-large fish was Kiran?”

He blinked, meanly. Then he slapped my cheek.

If I hadn’t swum away, if I’d helped Farhana as she held her,
if
she held her …

“Are we continuing north or heading back?” Irfan was shouting. “I’m sick of waiting. If you won’t decide, I will.”

He pulled me out the door and pushed us both into the adjoining cabin without knocking on their door and repeated whatever it was he was trying to say.

More importantly: Farhana and Wes were seated neatly at a table, playing Scrabble. She didn’t look up. She joined
amply
to
messy
. I was keenly aware of having to resist upending the board.

Wes made
search
and scored triple.

Irfan began to talk. He wanted to cancel the trip. “It isn’t classy to go on.”

“Why not?” asked Farhana, still not looking up. She had shitty tiles.

“It would be diminishing the weight of what has happened.” He addressed her back, daring it to say what else could go wrong, for which he’d have to apologize.

Farhana joined
limb
to
amply. B
on double letter. “Sounds like you’ve decided.”

Irfan looked at Wes. Wes said, “We’ve come this far. We go on.” I couldn’t help recalling that in Karachi he’d wanted to return to San Francisco.

Irfan looked at me. “I agree with Wes,” I said, suddenly sure of what I was about to say. “I want to continue.” I moved away from the table. I’d go on by myself if I had to.

Shaking his head, Irfan pushed me out the cabin with even more force than he’d pulled me in, slamming the door behind him.

“Careful, the cabins are old.”

He didn’t slap me again. “Did you not hear me the other day? It isn’t safe.”

“I heard you.”

We stared at each other, daring the other to speak. In the past, I would have given in first. Now I didn’t care.

He finally announced, “I need to return to Karachi and not go on to Gilgit and Hunza because it’s the right thing to do, the safe thing to do, and—” he couldn’t meet my eye now “—for other, personal reasons.”

Perhaps I should have looked more closely then. Instead, I shrugged. “Okay.”

He seemed surprised. “Okay? So, you will back me when I tell them the plan?”

“Yes.” I kicked the dirt.

He opened the door.

“You could try knocking,” Farhana said, still not turning around to look at us.

“Nadir has something to tell you,” said Irfan.

“We’re going,” I said.

Irfan swung his neck like a dagger.
This isn’t what we’d agreed
.

I didn’t swing my neck in return. I was breaking my promise to him. I didn’t care.

Irfan cleared his throat. I could feel him reaching for the right words, the right tone. “I may not be able to keep taking responsibility for you,” he said to the room in general.

“Who’s asking you to take responsibility?” asked Farhana, rearranging her tiles.

Irfan stood angrily at her back.

I explained to Wes and Farhana all that Irfan had taken responsibility for: Kiran’s death; forging a truce with her family (I still didn’t know how); our safety.

Farhana kept playing with her tiles.

“Nevertheless, I feel it would be a mistake to retreat,” I continued. “But we should all agree to no longer expect Irfan to step up for any of us.”

Farhana’s fingers fluttered over her tiles as she cried “Oh!” All seven letters.
Traffic
. “I knew I took the blank for a reason!”

“Farrah,” said Wes. “Maybe we should think more about this.”

“It’s your turn,” she replied, not even looking up for him.

“There’s worse trouble in the valley.” Irfan saw an opening. “It’s made people here—jumpy. And the death of the girl hasn’t helped our popularity. Even if she is only a Gujjar girl. Was. We shouldn’t stay or go on. We should head back.”

Wes pushed his tiles away as he repeated, “What kind of worse trouble?”

Irfan told him about the training camps near Balakot. Was it me, or did I sense a little victory there, as though Irfan was pleased to deliver this final piece of rotten news? When he was finished, Wes asked glumly, “Who was Syed Ahmad Barelvi?”

“A martyr. He once called for jihad against the British. Now his supporters use his memory to cry for another jihad.”

The air thickened. Was this fear I sensed in Wes? Well!

“There’s an 8:00 a.m. bus to Abbottabad,” Irfan continued rapidly. “From there we can take the connection to Islamabad. There’s a flight to Karachi the next night. The same way we came.”

“Once again,” said Farhana, “you decide.”

“Didn’t you already say that?” Irfan snapped.

“Of course we leave!” Wes pushed his tiles away. “It’s a no-brainer.”

Farhana answered me, at last. “We go on.”

“You’re all nuts!” Wes overturned the Scrabble board for me. “How about you and I go back,” he looked at Irfan, “and let these two go on?”

“We had an agreement.” Farhana looked at Wes.

What agreement?

So did we
. Irfan looked at me.

“Then it’s decided,” I said, bolting toward the door before Farhana changed her mind, and more agreements could be made.

In our cabin, Farhana’s and mine, Irfan was sullen while unbuttoning his shirt. He said, “You and Farhana could fight your battle back in America.”

“You don’t have to come with us.” It sounded like I was trying to get rid of him, when in fact I knew we needed him.

He knew too. He didn’t bother answering me. Though no one said so, some of us at least seemed to hold to the belief that we all went forward or all went back. We had long ago ceased being mere friends. We were accomplices.

I watched him arrange his shirt on a hanger, then drape his jeans over a chair. Next, a fresh pair of socks, fresh underpants, and a pair of leather shoes. Joggers were only for trekking. He was always the most dapper man I’d known, second only to my father, who polished his shoes every night in slow, deliberate movements that were almost relaxed. The last time I was here, with Irfan’s wife, there was no electricity in any hotel in Naran. To impress Zulekha, he’d taken all our clothes to the one laundry place in town, where the Khan had a coal iron. While the Khan put burning coals in the iron and waited for it to heat before painstakingly smoothening every wrinkle from our shirts and Zulekha’s shalwars, kameezes, and especially her dupattas, Irfan and I stood by patiently, till one of us offered to get the other a boiled egg sprinkled with salt and pepper.

He had his own travel iron now. He was the only one of the three men in the group who shaved daily, keeping his beard clipped just so. There must have been shoe polish somewhere in his bag. Yet, apparently, even his fastidiousness had its limits. Irfan climbed into bed in his underpants without brushing his teeth.