“And you? I didn’t catch your name.”
“Thomas,” Tom said, a thing I’d never heard him call himself.
“Thomas,” echoed Mishti.
“I don’t belong here either,” Tom said, “but I’m trying to name the thistles in the seventh Captivity hanging and I thought maybe Joan could help me. Nell speaks very highly of Joan.”
I’d never heard Tom say things like “speaks very highly” either and I wondered what kind of hat he was putting on.
“Me too,” said Mishti, abstractly. “I wanted a break from Orgo and treated myself to some flowers.”
And then you entered. It turned October yesterday and the campus maples are more than half red. Your hair is more than half gray. The midday sun did nothing to lighten the black of your sweater, your pants, your clogs. You saw us. You didn’t really want to come near and you came just a little nearer. We are in the freshest part of autumn now. This was a pumpkin patch quality day. Your two stone earrings hung wearily from your ears and the left one got to nuzzle into your braid. I wished I could carve you a pumpkin.
Barry saw you and said, “My Joan.”
Carlo smiled. Mishti smiled. Tom had his back to you and turned around, frantic. I wanted to remove the word my from Barry’s vocabulary forever.
“Do I crash the Breakfast Club?”
Barry reached into his pocket and gave you an apricot. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen him do.
Carlo wasted no time in saying, “Carlo.” You shook his hand as if shaking hands with a bus stop. Carlo turned to Tom and said, “And I don’t think we’ve met properly either, but, hey man.” Tom smiled because he liked being called “man.” Carlo put his arm around Mishti and turned her slightly, to announce that they would be leaving. Tom had nothing to say and seemed to want to have something to say. He kept smiling with his lips slightly parted. You must have sensed this and you told him, “Good eye with the bistort.” Tom filled his hands with his own hair and threw it all over one shoulder, like he’d just won a sack of prize tomatoes.
I’m not going to fight Tom for you, I’m just going to rely on your better judgment.
Nobody asked you what a bistort is. Mishti just stood there and suffered. She’d done the problem set Tom hadn’t done, and she’d worn her alpaca shawl. You didn’t look at her once. You pushed a folder of problem sets into your large purse. Carlo and Mishti walked off. Tom was gone suddenly, the way Tom could sometimes suddenly go. Barry put his arm through your arm, as if he were your daughter.
“Behave yourself,” you told me, peeling me a grape.
PYRAMIDS
“They could just run off together,” Mishti let me in, fuming, “I don’t care. Carlo’s shoes are shiny and pointy maybe I got this whole thing wrong.” We started up the stairs. “Maybe he just wants to run away with your ex-boyfriend. That would be cute, right? That would be cute.”
“It’s hard to say what you’re talking about.”
We paused on the landing between the second and third floors.
“Tom just stood there smiling at him!”
“We’re talking about Tom?”
“About Tom’s big crush on my boyfriend.”
“Huh.”
I had never considered how obviously almost gay Tom was, partly because it was so obvious; I figured Tom would have discovered it himself by now, if there was anything to discover. But it was certainly a likely and plausible option. Carlo seemed farther from it. We started climbing again.
“I think Tom was smiling because Carlo is a cool guy and Tom wants to be a cool guy too,” I said from a few steps behind her.
“Well he’s not going to become one by smiling at them—” Mishti’s fury was convincing and unwarranted. “He should have punched Carlo in the shoulder.”
“I guess I disagree.”
We stopped at the fifth floor and panted quietly. She opened our old door.
“You want our menfolk to wage battle,” I said. “Against each other.”
“Yes. I want each to improve himself at the expense of the other. Then we will arrive at two evolved men.”
I took my colander.
“I want Carlo to inspire Tom with loathing so great he leaps into action.” She wasn’t done. “Leaps! It doesn’t matter where he lands.” Now she was done.
I sat on the sofa and put eight of my fingers into the colander’s holes. It was a nice one, coated in white ceramic, and the ceramic was cold, especially inside the holes. Mishti turned on the television. The screen filled with a paused DVD; I recognized Hrithik Roshan’s face because he was her favorite. Mishti only watched Bollywood after three a.m. or in moments of high agitation. I loved to watch anytime. Hrithik was paused here in the middle of “You Are My Soniya,” a musical number that required him to wear a black pleather bodysuit. We’d watched this dance the most times and it was some of the more successful male gyrating I’d encountered.
Mishti abruptly stripped and got in the shower. I liked the way she didn’t need to watch the movie to feel its effects. I leaned back into the sofa. My fingers were cold now and I removed them from the holes and sat on them. The sweater I’d retrieved from the snow globe coughed up the smell of my past, every time I moved. I pulled the last Pirate’s Booty from the bottom of my backpack.
The sad thing about this particular movie, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, is that the proud parents reject the poor bride and disown their son and exile the young couple into wretched misery. About six months ago I was very attached to this movie because it played out what would happen if Tom had married me. Veronica would have put on a ravishing sari and banished us to the Indian suburbs of London, far from our Delhi home, to start a new life without any family support.
I found it moving that the son missed the parents so much once in exile. My parents call me about twice a year; I may as well live in Southall. So far it hasn’t hurt me, but this movie makes me wonder if I’m repressing myself.
The Booty was stale to the point of soggy but still almost erotically salty. I skipped the scene after “Soniya” and went straight to the next song, “Suraj Hua Maddham,” a number that begins in an Indian street market and then moves to the sand between the Egyptian pyramids. In it, Veronica’s son (he’s too robust to be Tom, but he is an Indian Ottaway) wears an entirely translucent white blouse. He climbs to the top of the sand dunes and makes his body into the shape of a howling wolf against the setting sun. The subtitles say he is singing, “Why did the sky begin to melt?” His poor bride is wearing thick lines of kohl and looks perfect in her skirt, veil, and chestband—all red.
When they got to the part about “Oh, is this my very first love? My darling, is this my very first love?” Mishti started singing along from the shower. Her voice when she sings in Hindi is so gentle and high-pitched it has nothing at all to do with the very abrasive English speaker she also is. I liked Mishti’s voice better than the poor bride’s. After only a minute she came out with big drops running from her new short hair down her new naked neck and stood in her towel in the center of the living room, dripping.
“How did you really put up with him?” she asked. I paused the movie.
“Tom?”
“Didn’t he just mope all over you all the time?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you wish he would wake up and do something?”
“Why is everyone always telling everyone to do something?”
You hate Mishti but you’d really like her.
“He could do something if he wanted something,” she said.
“I think he does want something, he’s just never needed anything, so it doesn’t come naturally to him.”
“What does he want? A unicorn of his own?”
The image of Tom’s long black mane beside his unicorn’s long white mane made me feel instantly and entirely relaxed.
“I think he wants to
get a job.”
“He doesn’t know what jobs are.”
“That’s right.”
Mishti reached the height of her frustration with Tom’s elemental inefficiency and went back into the bathroom to get dressed. I pressed play.
“How beautiful this moment is!” They were singing. Mishti started singing again too. “Everything is changing! The dreams blend into reality.” I read along and wished that I could sing. Mishti emerged in giraffe-print pajamas and sat next to me on the sofa. The disowned son sang, “Is this bond between us centuries old? Is that the reason why I’m meeting you like this?”
Is this bond between us centuries old? Is that the reason why I’m meeting you like this?
Suddenly they were in water. I couldn’t tell if the water was near the pyramids or a new realm. His translucent blouse was now soaking wet translucent. The poor bride had changed into a turquoise sari that complemented the brown of the water mud. When she flung the veil back over her shoulder it smacked him in the face with a wall of spray and he looked as if he’d been waiting for that smack all his life. She kissed his Adam’s apple. I’d never seen lip kissing in Bollywood so the neck kiss felt supremely sensual. Now they were dry again. Now he was in turquoise. Now she was translucent. A fourth realm welcomed them with its large globular rock formations. I wanted to move between climates this simply. I wanted to wear turquoise and collect every desert weed, herb, and bud. Finally, the street market again. Mishti turned it off.
“I can’t tell you how much that movie means to me,” I said sincerely, but I understand why she thinks I was joking.
“Leave me alone. Do you want to stay over?”
I’d fallen back into the feeling of things as they were when I lived there and Red Hook felt as far as Kansas. I said yes. Mishti pulled a full-size bed pillow out from under the couch and threw it at me. It knocked the colander off my lap. We laughed.
“You’re probably right,” I said, “Tom should do something. I should do something. You’re the only one who ever does anything.” Mishti knew and liked this about herself. She said nothing. Then she said, “Carlo does too.”
I suppose one version of love is to match your nature with a similar nature. I can imagine that’s pleasing because if you like yourself, you like your partner just as much. Personally I find Carlo stiff, but if Mishti admires him, that’s more sustaining to her than coziness. Joan I could make you feel so cozy. My breath is always terrible but I will celebrate the innermost tenderness of you with a love you cannot picture and have never known before.
“What are you doing?” Mishti said. “Anything?”
“Don’t turn this on me.”
“I’m really asking.”
“I don’t know, Rachel would have set a new record for thallium binding if she’d, you know. I think—” Mishti’s face settled into real listening. For the first time since I got expelled somebody was looking at me as if I were about to say something plausible. “I think I want to see how fast I can detoxify ricin, or maybe even aconite, whichever works first, make Columbia admit they gave up on us too fast, make Joan admit that I’m, or I don’t know, make her, you know, proud, but first I have to grow them both from seed and without the lab’s lamps and bases that’s probably impossible.” I didn’t want her to stop looking at me. I said, “I don’t know if that counts as doing anything.”
She said, “Carlo’s taking me to Bermuda for Christmas.”
I pushed the pillow into the corner of the sofa arm and lay my head deep into it. Mishti stood up, turned off the lights, and went to bed, as if she were going right then to Bermuda. Avenue C hummed outside, it wasn’t late, I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t cold.
LIZARDS
In the morning I went uptown instead of downtown partly because of habit and partly because of you. I sat on the steps of the library for a while waiting for somebody to drop an ID card, the way bums wait for swipes at the subway turnstiles, or Tom plucks Met admission badges off the rotunda floor (“I don’t owe them anything, I’ve given them my mother”). Nobody dropped one because these are highly competent minor scholars carrying zippered wallets in a variety of peach tones. They marched right into the library as if going to the library were so easy. I went to your office.
You sat inside talking on the phone, and Barry and Carlo sat outside in the hall. In a video game I would have had 2.5 seconds to draw my ether pistol from the master belt I’d recently earned in the Nether Woods and zap them for twenty points each, but I’d woken up in real life at Mishti’s, and carried only half a banana. I never want more than half a banana, but I always want half a banana. Bananas really back you up into a corner this way because all and nothing are both unacceptable options. I saw the three yellow peel parts flopping down over my jeans pocket and lifted the poor thing to finish it. It was brown and mushy by now, and too much banana. Barry and Carlo only noticed me by the sound the peel made hitting the bottom of the trash can between us.
“Nell, right?” Carlo asked. He could remember the name of his girlfriend’s professor’s husband’s visiting colleague, but not of her best friend.
“Who are you?” I asked, showing him the masticated fruit in my mouth. Carlo neither answered nor laughed, confirming my total uselessness.
“Mr. Parada here is going to be helping out around the dean’s office,” Barry said. “Mendelson took an instant liking to him.”
“Which shocked me, you know,” Carlo looked less than shocked, “because I’ve heard Mendelson is a lizard.”
It was five after nine in the morning and overnight new alliances had formed. I had only slept, Mishti had only sung, Barry had only burped I was sure since we’d met the afternoon before. Carlo had been in action.
“Well these guys never really want the administrative roles,” Barry said. “It’s an honor, and a bonus, so they take them for a term or two, but they need someone with a head like yours to execute.”
Carlo dropped his shoulders and lengthened his neck, as if to emphasize that he had a head. I’d met guys like Carlo before, guys who had more means of executing their will than will, guys who lived therefore in a showroom of execution, their walls covered in thickly framed stock photography. I looked at Carlo and felt his brain operated inwardly—it wasn’t love from others that fed him, it was a kind of problem solving that left him feeling clean and actual. Maybe he wouldn’t suffocate Mishti after all. Maybe his distant father and fawning mother had left him suspicious and bored of love altogether. It was a shame he had such a great body. He might have been a circus star, had the determining forces of his childhood allowed for that as an outcome. He might have loved the way it felt to fall from a trapeze.
“Nell,” you surprised all of us by being right there and speaking loudly, “for Christ’s sake,” you looked at your phone, “it’s October third.” I didn’t know what to say, you were right. “Go home. Do you have a home?” You untied and retied the elastic at the bottom of your braid while I failed to answer this pretty difficult question. In mercy you kept going. “Finish your little reproductive interference piece by the fifteenth and we’ll submit it to Oxford Systematic. You can do that in two weeks, you could do it in two days if you were functioning.”
I wish so badly that I were functioning.
“Why would you want to interfere with reproduction?” Carlo asked.
I couldn’t tell you that I would do it, because who knows if I’ll really do it, and I didn’t want to depress you with the likelihood that I wouldn’t do it, and Barry was idly running his finger down a groove in your corduroys, and Carlo wasn’t a trapeze artist, so I very strangely and slowly backed away.
“Nell?” you called. I could smell the banana peel in the trash. “The fifteenth?”
I just kept going, walking backwards like an idiot crab estranged from its own nature, and then down the stairs and then back to the library, where nobody had dropped anything of value.
SASSY BARK
The name of this bark is sassy bark. It’s categorized as “an ordeal.” Joan! You are everywhere. You are the human of every plant. In West Africa all three kinds of Erythrophleum, the suaveolens and the guineense and the chlorostachys, produce the poisonous alkaloid erythrophleine, a toxic agent. In Liberia the relevant tradition is a trial by ordeal, in which a suspect drinks a whole lot of bark poison.
The person who is designated as guilty of the crime of witchcraft is arrested by the soldier king, and condemned to the ordeal of sassy-wood. The bark of the sassy-wood is powerfully narcotic, and a strong decoction of this the person condemned is forced to drink; and after he has drank it, he walks to and fro, exclaiming “Am I a witch,” “am I a witch?” while one of his executioners walks behind him replying “You are a witch, you are a witch;” and this continues until he either throws off from his stomach the poison, when he is pronounced innocent, or it operates as a cathartic, when he is declared guilty, and compelled to take more of the decoction, and is subjected to other cruelties, which cause his speedy death.
James M. Connelly, “Report of the Kroo People,” Appendix G, in Report of the Secretary of State, Communicating the Report of the Rev. R[alph] R[andolph] Gurley, Who Was Recently Sent Out by the Government to Obtain Information in Respect to Liberia, United States Senate, 31st Congress, 1st Session, Ex. Doc. No. 75, Washington, D.C., September 14, 1850, page 59
Now you just skipped over the citation but I wrote it out deliberately and I have to ask you to go back and look at it. I want you to understand that the reporter was Recently Sent Out by the Government to Obtain Information in Respect to Liberia. I want you to discover, the way I did, that R. R. stood for Ralph Randolph, and that Ralph couldn’t hide that from posterity. We found out his secrets and put them in brackets. A civilized place to put them. Cane Sterling Professor Joan Kallas, Ecology Building Fourth Floor, [wedded a sleaze and can’t find her way back to safety].
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