The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Koray continued. “Father is brilliant at sniffing out opportunities in the dark cracks of existence where most souls are too frightened to look. Goods, licit or not, must cross worlds, and when they need to, we are there.” Koray sniffed his wine. “This rotten portion of the city is probably mostly ours, too.”

  Music dribbled from the speakers. The singer carved a soundpath in lacerating notes. Ayaana listened to both the singer and Koray.

  Koray spoke. “Father knew souls in peril needed…extraordinary services and were willing to pay large sums for the privilege of access to…safety. We offer, for prime rates, a middleman’s infrastructure.” He paused. “Yes, there are those who, in turn, need access to souls in peril.” He shrugged. “For the right price, we deliver.

  “The food is good,” added Koray, his jaw crunching the bread. He continued, “We supply life jackets, lifeboats…” He reached over and took one of her kebab sticks.

  Silence.

  Koray scrutinized Ayaana’s face, its confusion and hint of fear. He said, “Remember, canim, nobody quibbles over the color of money, or its source. The point of war is money—industry, jobs at home—power. People are and have always been”—he smiled—“tradeable.” He reached for his soup.

  She ought to have cried out. She ought to have protested. Yet now she understood the surrender of the mole in her kitten’s mouth. Ayaana picked at her salad, shredding its leaves; her thoughts were crackling, and she was no longer hungry. Koray’s words were more grays in the malignant shades of a world that was a riddle. She asked him, “So why do you bother praying?”

  Koray shifted in his seat. “Strange question.”

  “Answer it?”

  At a Siming mosque, months ago, glancing down the hall at men prostrating themselves, she had been drawn to one body that had conveyed a sense of prayer as a dance of abandonment. She had watched the man for a while. When the man stood up, she realized it was Koray. Struck as if by light, she had been embarrassed by her sudden need to get close to him, to see and taste what he knew.

  Koray asked, “Do I pray?”

  “You do.”

  Koray leaned over to wipe a sauce stain off her chin. “Maybe I have this need to hear from Someone Other than Me.” He laughed. “And…the mosque is a great place for strategic contacts. It is important to be read a certain way…and”—eyes hooded—“fine, I admit it…I am curious. Always felt that death was such a bore. Especially now…with Father…” He stopped abruptly.

  Track change: an inscrutable smile. “My father says I am wasting you.” Ayaana tilted her head, waiting. “Emirhan,” Koray continued, relishing his words, “considers himself a connoisseur of women—a hobby. There are others who share his…predilection. Men who would pay prime rates for the pleasure of your company, and even higher premiums for the ownership of your body.”

  Ayaana’s skin turned cold.

  Koray reached across the table. She shook off his hand. Her voice was ice. “I’ve met such demons.” Her eyes were dark.

  “Where?” Koray growled.

  “At home.”

  Koray said, “Aha! The mystical island is not so benign after all.”

  “Strangers.”

  “They hurt you?”

  “They tried,” she said.

  “You hurt them?”

  “Mother did.”

  Koray’s look was predatory. “Good.”

  Ayaana’s eyes were huge with the emotions wrestling within her. Her awe and revulsion, her fear and enchantment, her sense of all she did know and would never understand, her avid curiosity. Koray guffawed. “Ah, canim, your face!” She looked away quickly. “Hey,” he now said, “hey…a theology must withstand the test of reality.” He cupped her chin. “I am in the market for one…if you have a suggestion.”

  Ayaana opened her mouth, and then shut it firmly.

  Koray grinned. “Don’t worry so much. Ask me to protect you. I can. Even from the world and its…strangers.”

  Ayaana folded her arms over her body. Koray told her a Turkish joke. Ayaana then asked, “Koray, what happened to the Syrian employee?”

  A swift frown that faded. “Who?” he asked. “Oh! You mean your enthralled migrant?”

  She started to object. Koray lifted a hand. “I know that nothing untoward occurred between you.” Koray waited, calculating risks, his pupils dilated. “Our work attracts all sorts. Qualified refugees—they are affordable—we hire them. He was good. Meek, obedient until he fixated on you. We had to let him go.” Koray paused. “He did throw his shoe at us. Did you see it?”

  “The bloodstained shoe?” she asked.

  Koray’s eyes were again predatory, yellow with hunger and potent with knowledge of superior strength. He said, “We are successful because we do not take hostages, Ayaana.” His look was hard. “And this, my darling, is where your tour of my hidden cave ends.”

  * * *

  —

  The evening juddered on, interspersed with the clash of jostling contradictions. When Koray spoke, Ayaana’s fears subsided. He mocked their campus lecturers, making up a conversation between them in their different accents and voices. Koray performed and proclaimed and then got up to dance to Turkish pop. Ayaana was now weeping with laughter. When the plaintive music ended, on a warbled screech, Koray said, “Tell me more about your mythical island.”

  So Ayaana talked about Munira. And Muhidin. Koray listened. Ayaana told him that, one day, Ziriyab disappeared from Pate. Koray listened. Then Koray said, “Life is crafted from absence to absence.”

  She asked Koray, “Your brothers?”

  He hesitated before admitting, “Yes.” Now he spoke of the music he loved, and confessed to Ayaana his secret expeditions to a Mawlana Rumi center. “When I was a child, I wanted to be a dervish. I would wrap myself in sheets and whirl.” He reached across the table to touch her face, her hair. “Dance obsessed me. If it wasn’t for so many things—this—maybe I would dance.”

  Ayaana’s fingers twirled her hair and remembered her vision of Koray at prayer. She lifted her head to say something when she glimpsed the glow in his gaze. She propped up her chin as he recited, his hands gesturing: “ ‘Gel, gel, ne olursan ol yine gel / Ister kafir, ister mecusi, ister puta tapan ol yine gel…’ You’ve heard it? ‘Come, come, whoever you are / Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving—it doesn’t matter…’ I took Farsi lessons. Oh, I had intended to inhabit the Mawlana.”

  And silence dropped upon them. Koray frowned, and his mind roamed.

  Chameleon man. What is he? Ayaana had followed Koray here. Might she…escape? That word. As if she were imprisoned. Could she pick up her handbag and race into the night and release herself from the magnet that was this man? She saw the lies woven into partial truths. The Damascene. She had heard a human scream that night. She had heard the popping sound of a gun being fired. Bloodstained shoe. She had seen a car being driven out that night. She had…Koray—the seduction of this night, his frontierlessness. He was not a “good” man. He did not pretend to be. He was Koray, a man who brandished his flaws, her guide into the sunless geographies that were the world. He offered few apologies. He did not stop for chasms, either; he created them, he expanded them, he was paid to build bridges over them. He turned uncertainty into profit. He treated lie and truth as one thing—anything for power. He was interested in light, only if it served his purposes. All this flashed through Ayaana’s senses in the second it took for Koray to switch from wine to a pale green juice in that slowing-down night. His words were dragging Ayaana downward, into a whirlpool. The spell had sunk tendrils into her soul, and in this replaced her instinct to flee Koray with desire.

  Ayaana waited for “next.”

  Koray’s voice was low and warm and sure, and when he laughed it was a rumbling. Ayaana rested her head on the table. Becalmed heart.

  His voice sa
id, “You know I could love you.”

  She waited.

  Koray reached over and wrapped her hands with his. He said, “I want you to have this.” He placed a small black box between them. He opened it for her. Inside was a sapphire ring. “Madagascar sapphire,” he added.

  Ayaana’s voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear her. “What does this mean?”

  “A gamble,” he said.

  Ayaana shook her head: “What is this for?”

  “Take it.”

  * * *

  —

  The music of Erdoğan’s Turkey. Melodies that wanted to soar but consistently crashed into the Bosporus. It sounded like an ode to loss. Ayaana was descending, with no idea of how to be or where to go. Koray got up and murmured, “Come, güzelim, now let us dance.”

  “But…”

  “I’ll dance us,” he whispered. “Stand on my feet.”

  Within the brew of homelessness, exhilaration, ferment, and weariness, Ayaana crumbled. Tomorrow. She would take up wondering again. Tomorrow. Now she needed to be led, guided, moved, raised to someone’s feet, held, and pressed into a man’s body—the opposite of hers and its curved fragilities. She clung to Koray as if she were tumbleweed. But then there emerged a sudden, secret counterpoint, a tune once heard in the company of the phantoms of the doomed: “Lacrimosa dies illa / Qua resurget ex favilla…” Ayaana ignored the warning; she closed her eyes. She stopped listening. Tomorrow, she thought. Now she allowed a man with broad shoulders to dance her, and Koray asked, “Why would I let you go?”

  Ayaana heard him. She would give him an answer tomorrow. Koray lowered his head. She could taste blood and wine and sweetness and sour in her mouth, and still she did not speak. It is raining. Pattering sounds from the street; the flustered shrills of those surprised by the downpour. And she was here, dancing in silence, her body molded to fit into another’s. Turbulent twisting. Downdraft. She was spinning freely into a maelstrom.

  * * *

  For a timeless moment, she was inside a ship cabin, enclosed in the arms of another, so that when she opened her eyes, if Koray had been paying attention, he would have noted her shock that it was his face before her. Still swaying, they left the restaurant. It was long after midnight on a moonless neon-lit night. The wind flung debris at them. Ayaana gripped Koray’s hand, grasping for certainty, imagining his could transfer itself to her. She was immersed in the darkness, but as long as Koray was whispering to her, she was not afraid. A night mist offered by the waters settled and numbed footsteps. Koray pressed Ayaana to his side. She imagined passageways through his heartbeat and reveled in the fact that he was at ease in this dark. He laughed. He referred to foghorns that she could not hear. A sliver of fear…tomorrow, she told it.

  * * *

  —

  The whisper of passing ghosts: A father unknown, Fazul the Egyptian, Wa Mashriq, Suleiman. The empty, hungry thing that consumed the beloved things: a kitten, Muhidin. A mother’s vaulted silence. Koray spoke, and his voice was a thin flute. She forgot to remember the Damascene. Koray’s arm was tight around her. A buzzing around her, dizzy, as if she were intoxicated. And she was. As on that night on the ship, again, a streak of lightning. Ayaana was clutching a chameleon man who was offering words to night deities, and leading her up to a doorway, through a doorway where an impassive doorman stood guard.

  * * *

  —

  Koray said, “Tell them, should anyone ask, that this is our Nikāḥ al-Mutʿah.”

  A traveler’s marriage.

  He laughed.

  She laughed.

  [ 75 ]

  He told her she would be his bride. She did not care. But for this one night—one night when she ached to know, to feel, to fall—for one night, she suspended waiting.

  That was all.

  * * *

  —

  Later.

  Metamorphosis.

  Him. Intimate touch. Ensconced, surrounded by him, his wounding, the dark, the freedom it proposed, and she had drunk of pleasure and pain and gnawed on these, but then she had also plummeted into the roaring abyss, its sinister emptiness.

  * * *

  —

  Later.

  * * *

  —

  He murmured to her:

  “You, mine.”

  Longing, containment, and disappointment. This—the secret, whispered, sanctioned, intimate thing—was not infinity, either. She looked at him. She had scarred his face. Bloodlines. Eyes narrowing, he asked her, “Do you see as I see? Do you, gülüm?”

  * * *

  —

  Cartography of possession. What had she expected? Now she was the hostage. They stank of each other. Sticky, clingy bodies. Her mouth was swollen. His face was scarred. Her body scourged; his appeased. From within the web Koray had spun, his red-rimmed eyes.

  “Mine.” He wrote his name across her bare breasts.

  A bloodstained covenant.

  Her blood.

  Not his.

  Both her wrists locked by his hands. He squeezed them and told her matter-of-factly, “I would kill for you.”

  Bloodstained brown shoes.

  She hid her gaze.

  He whispered: “And now, I want your soul.”

  Never.

  Inside her body, within the spaces of dreaming, she peered over the rim of this seductive chaos, its moans just like the sea but without the sea’s truthfulness. She ought to have leaned closer to Delaksha’s heart to learn how to fall.

  * * *

  She watched Koray in the filtered morning light. A piece of sun had fallen across his large body. It made a circle rainbow. Hooded eyes, angular face, lips she used her lips to brush against. He was watching her, his face taut with thought. More streaks of red: she had deliberately tried to draw blood. “We are hunters,” he had said, meaning himself. But hers were the gleaming eyes. Reaching for her: “I want your thoughts.” Half-closed eyes. He added, “I could love you, birtanem.” He stroked her face. “The day I heard about you, I knew you would suit me.”

  Ayaana walked her fingers on his body. A wisp of thought, a reaction, like an itch. It blinked. It escaped. And Koray was breathing hard, sweating, and grunting. His hands and fingers and mouth everywhere, and he cajoled, “Your soul,” and she screamed out her ecstatic “never,” her absolute “no.”

  Real, concrete, solid.

  She could stay hidden inside Koray, in spite of the acerbic aftertaste of blood-iron on her tongue, its sweet bitterness when he touched her. His body had swallowed her, and for a minute she was secured, and she craved this weight, this pounding, tearing, breaking, shattering sense of having and losing again and again.

  Stillness.

  She read a future on Koray’s face. There she was reflected in his gaze. Here, in this crucible of yearning, she saw herself in pieces.

  He said, “I have something for you.” She waited. He reached into the pocket of discarded jeans to reveal a small black velvet box. He opened it. It contained a sapphire ring that was a precise copy of the one he had given her at the restaurant.

  “Here,” he said.

  A riddle. “The other?”

  “This is real, gülüm.” He held it up to the light. The blue of the stone was bluer than the other one. “See? Inclusions? Let me put the truth on your finger.”

  Ayaana’s large eyes studied Koray. “Inclusion?” She did not care. “It’s too large.”

  Koray tapped her nose. “The foreign thing enclosed within a forming crystal. Like water trapped inside a rock.” He whispered, “High value.” Then laughed at a private joke. “It will fit.”

  Ayaana’s lips were numb.

  Ebbing. Hearing her heartbeat anew. Understanding in another way the language of bodies straining toward a concealed nothingness that spilled into fragments, l
ike shards of blue light. What was true?

  Koray stroked the gem. “This one is alive; its color changes. It breathes.”

  She looked. Saw violet.

  Koray had lifted the gemstone to the light as if it were a sacrifice.

  And a sliver of blue light sprinkled Ayaana’s body. A lightning strike that evaporated the threat of tears.

  Hatred of an incandescent six-rayed star glimmering inside the stone and Koray’s gravitational pull, its consumptive impulses; the power of his seductive hunger had been undermined by a gem and its fake. And Koray, thrilled with something, was talking about the Descendant, asked if she realized that she was of strategic import for the future of the Terzioğlus in China, the dazzling future.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana half listened. Adrift again, clutching to her soul.

  Unmoored. Remembering. It had niggled, the talk of Chinese heirlooms and artifacts. Perhaps in all intimate relationships each person had to bring something tangible to the table. Koray his networks, she her perceived influence.

  Koray was now advising her about risk management, its necessity in, particularly, the important aspects of life, like the choice of one’s woman.

  He added, “I shall keep you.”

  Never.

  But she moved, unresisting, into his desolate otherness. The paradox. Now she was almost reoriented.

  Later.

  Ayaana said, “We should return home.”

  His look was unreadable, shadows tinting his gaze.

  She watched. He was studying her, too, with penetrating eyes. His left hand was on her neck, a finger beneath her ear, feeling its pulse. “We shall design our own.” A finger stroking her cheek.