The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  “Pilar!” he shouted again.

  He turned with surprise when I appeared. His eyes were red. The fingers of his right hand were entirely silver now; it looked permanent. I wondered if he’d ever be able to wash off the spray paint. But how could he, if the job was never done?

  “I left my keys,” he said. “I gotta get them.”

  “I’ll stay,” I said.

  He sprinted down the stairs. I stood by the door, didn’t bother knocking. If that kicking didn’t wake her, what could I do?

  “Is he gone?”

  I almost collapsed.

  “Pilar! Were you messing with him?”

  “No,” she said through the door. “But I wasn’t waiting on him. I was waiting around for you.”

  I sat so my head was at about the same level as her voice. I heard her labored breathing through the door. “It’s been a while,” she finally said.

  I rested the side of my head against the cool door. “I’m sorry.”

  She sniffed. “Even women like us are scared of women like us.”

  I lowered my mask, as if it were getting in the way of what I truly needed to say. But I still couldn’t find the words.

  “Do you believe in past lives?” she said.

  “That’s the first thing you ever asked me.”

  “When I saw you by the elevator, I knew we’d met before. Recognition. Like seeing a member of my family.”

  The elevator arrived. Andrés stepped out. I raised my mask and got to my feet. He unlocked the door.

  “Be careful,” I said. “She’s right there.”

  But when he pushed the door open, the hall sat empty.

  Andrés found her in bed. Dead. He came out carrying a bag, my name written on it. Her black-and-white oxfords were inside. A note in the left shoe. Give them back when you see me again.

  I have to slip on an extra pair of socks to make them fit, but I wear them everywhere I go.

  nd now it’s your birthday on top of everything else. You’ve been dreading it. That’s what you’ve been texting friends for days now: I’m dreading it. Adding a pained emoji face. Xs for eyes, open mouth like an O. Making fun of yourself and your silly dread. But the dread is real. That’s why you’re here in spite of everything. A place you found on the dark web. Open despite the lockdown. A penthouse suite downtown. The dark womb of a treatment room heavy with steam and eucalyptus. The light is so dim and kind. You’re lying naked on a heated table. A woman is kneading your face with some sort of goat placenta. You can feel her knuckles digging deeply into your cheek, draining you of lymphatic fluid. Lots of draining to be done, she says softly. “I’m sure,” you whisper. “Drain away.”

  The woman looked ageless in her black suit, her hair pulled back in a tight bun.

  Three deep breaths, there you go, she said. I’ll take them with you. Shall I take them with you?

  She rubbed her hands with essential oil and held them suspended over your nose and mouth. Don’t worry, she said, perhaps sensing your fear, your hesitation. We take every precaution. Well, all right. You breathed deeply together. You felt your chests rise and fall.

  There, she said. That’s better, isn’t it?

  You heard a water fountain in the distance. Soft music composed of no instruments you recognized. Like the endless gong of some terrible bell. But beautiful.

  Now she says: “I’m just going to turn on the light so I can assess your skin. It’s a bright light, so I’ll be covering your eyes.” She presses a damp cotton pad over each of your closed eyelids. You think of pennies on the eyes of the dead. The light’s so bright you can feel it through the cotton. Flaming red. Hot on your face. And the fact of her eyes. Looking at you.

  “Well,” you say at last, because you can’t take any more of her silence. “What’s the verdict?”

  “You’ve had a difficult year, haven’t you?”

  You picture yourself alone and afraid in your apartment. Shivering on your island of couch. Body on fire. Breathing as if you were drowning as the tears gushed from your eyes.

  “Haven’t we all?” you say quietly.

  She’s silent. The eucalyptus scent is becoming oppressive.

  “It’s all here, I’m afraid,” she says at last. Her finger pads trace your forehead furrows, the deep creases between your brows. The veins around your nose, the folds around your mouth. Nasolabial folds, you found out they were called. Laugh lines that weren’t even born from laughing. She touches it all so tenderly that a tear leaks from your eyes. She lifts the cotton pads from your lids and holds a mirror over your face.

  “Memory and skin go hand in hand,” she says. “Good memories, good skin. Unhappy memories—” And here she trails off. Because the mirror speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

  “How about we do something about it?” she says in a voice like a caress.

  And you say, “What?”

  And she says, “First, I have to ask you: How attached are you to your memories?”

  You look into the mirror. Your life’s miseries imprinted there on your skin. Your pores gaping open at you like silently screaming mouths. The toll of the past year alone casts a grayness that might never be lifted.

  And you say to your own reflection: “Not attached. Not attached at all.”

  * * *

  Now here you are in the bright light of the late summer afternoon. The sun’s still high in the sky, so lovely and golden. There’s a bounce to your step as you skip out of the building. You’re skipping; why not? It’s your birthday after all, isn’t it? Haven’t forgotten that. You wonder what you have forgotten. You think of the woman rubbing those sleek black discs all over your face—those discs attached to electric cables, hooked up to a machine with dials. The woman turned the dials up like volume knobs, and you tasted metal deep in your teeth. It’s funny now to think about how you screamed when you felt electricity crackle along your cranium.

  The shop in the building’s lobby is closed. More than closed; the front window is shattered as if someone had hurled a brick at the glass. Inside, a bald white mannequin stands naked. A glittering swan purse dangles from her wrist as if she’s about to go to a party wearing nothing at all. She stares at you with shining eyes. Red lips in a slight smile. A darkness fills your gut. Dread spreads through your limbs. But then you see yourself reflected in the shattered glass. Glowing. Lifted. Eradicated. That’s the word that comes most strongly to mind: “eradicated.” Which is odd. Doesn’t “eradicate” mean destroy? Your face looks the opposite of destroyed. So what if you’re wearing a sad black sack? Your face has all the lightness and life and color you need. To add more color would be almost too much. A slap in someone else’s face.

  * * *

  In the taxi home, you smile at yourself in the window, in the rearview mirror, at the cabby, though he doesn’t smile back.

  “Busy day today?” you ask.

  “No,” he says, as if you’re insane. Is he glaring at you? He’s wearing a scarf tied over his mouth and nose so it’s hard to tell. Maybe he’s sick? With what, you wonder. You wish him well, the poor man. You try to communicate this goodwill with your face. He just stares at you coldly in the mirror until you look away, out the window. The city looks surprisingly empty and dirty. In your lap, your phone buzzes. A text from someone called the Lord of Darkness.

  Fine, he says, I’ll meet you.

  It’s your b-day, after all.

  Park at six. Bench by the swans.

  You scroll up to see earlier texts. I need to see you, you apparently texted the Lord of Darkness only two hours ago. Please. Three times you pleaded. Interesting.

  Well, can he really be so terrible if you wanted to see him? Needed to, no less? And he knows you well enough to know that it’s your birthday, so…

  Why don’t we meet at a wine bar? you text back.

  Wine bar?! he says. Yeah, right. See you at the park.

  A date with the Lord of Darkness. It’s frightening but also thrilling, isn’t it? You look at your face
in the partition. You instantly feel calm at the sight of yourself. You picture a sun shining out from behind a mass of gray clouds. You’re standing in that wonderful light of the mind, and it’s beautiful and it’s blinding.

  At the park, you try to hand the cabbie cash, but he shakes his head violently. He doesn’t want your fucking cash. Pay by card only, please. As you stand there watching him screech down the empty street, you notice the sidewalks are empty. In the park, the grass seems to have grown shaggier, wilder, since the last time you were here. There’s one couple walking quickly along the path by the pond, their heads bent low.

  You see a man in a black hoodie sitting alone on a park bench by the swans. The Lord of Darkness, has to be. Sure, you’re afraid. Mostly excited. An adventure! You’re so up for that right now. As you skip along the gravel path, you pass the couple. You feel relief at the sight of them up close—people! But as you approach, smiling, about to say, Hello! Quiet today, isn’t it? Well, at least we have the park all to ourselves, hahahaha! they drift off the path onto the shaggy grass; they walk all the way around a weeping willow to avoid you. And while they do this, they glare at you. You’re about to say, What the fuck? when you hear your name.

  You look over. It’s Ben, your ex-husband. Sitting there on the very edge of the bench, staring at you with sad eyes. He’s got a flask in his hand. He looks terrible. Puffy and gaunt at the same time.

  “Ben?” you say. “Is that really you?” Of course it’s him. You just can’t believe the Lord of Darkness is Ben. Probably a little joke you were playing to amuse yourself one night. You got drunk and came up with silly names for your contacts. Too funny. When was the last time you saw him? You try to search your mind, but there’s nothing. A stone wall.

  “Julia,” he says. “It’s good to see you.”

  But he doesn’t look like it’s good. He’s looking at you and frowning. Which is weird, considering how amazing you look. You couldn’t have picked a better day to meet your ex, frankly.

  “It’s good to see you too,” you tell Ben. He doesn’t smile.

  “I picked this bench because it was the longest,” he says. “So we could sit on either end.” He gestures along the length of the bench. You see that he has placed a bottle of screw-top wine and a small white box on the opposite end. “For your birthday,” he says. “Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks,” you say, and immediately remember how weird Ben was. Still is, apparently.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I wiped the bottle down. The bench too.” He smiles, warily. You notice a face mask dangling from his neck. It’s made of a floral-patterned fabric. It looks as if he made it himself with a sewing machine and fabric ripped from a tablecloth. Possibly your old tablecloth.

  Looking at the mask sparks something—a coldness—but then it’s gone. So his germophobia is getting worse. People get weirder as they get older. Sad, really. It makes you feel tenderness toward him.

  You join Ben on the bench. Sip the wine and open the white box. There’s a Hostess cupcake inside, which he assures you no one has touched. Great, you say. You smile and wait for him to be devastated by you. But he just keeps looking around as if he’s afraid.

  “Look, I really can’t stay long,” he says.

  “That’s fine.” It is fine, you realize. Completely. It’s a little empowering to realize this. You take a bite of the cupcake. Ben visibly relaxes. So much so that you feel as if you just agreed to something awful.

  You smile at Ben. “What’s this about?”

  He looks at you, dead serious. “You invited me, remember?”

  I need to see you. Please.

  “Oh, yes. Well. I thought it might be nice to catch up.” Sure. That sounds like you.

  Ben looks at you as if you’re nuts. He sighs heavily. “Look, Julia, you know I care for you.”

  “I care for you too, Ben.” It’s nice to say it back. It feels true.

  “But there have to be boundaries,” he adds quickly. He looks at you meaningfully from the other side of the bench.

  “Absolutely,” you agree. “Boundaries are great.” What the fuck is he talking about?

  “I’m in a relationship, you know that.”

  He needs a haircut, you notice now. His hair is shaggy and long like the grass.

  “Sure.” You nod. “Congratulations.”

  He looks appalled. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  His eyes suddenly strike you as strange. Didn’t they used to be blue? Now they’re just this watery gray, the whites full of red veins.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Look, Julia, that was fucked up the other night, OK? I fucked up, too, I’ll admit it. But when you call me up crying like that, what am I supposed to do? I mean, what choice did I have?”

  You search your memory for the other night. No night to be found anywhere. You try to picture yourself calling Ben. Tears pouring out of your eyes as you dialed. Just blue sky all around, the most pleasant shade.

  “I just came to bring you groceries,” he says. “I told you I was just coming to bring groceries. I would do that for any friend who was sick.”

  He says the word like a slap. “Sick”? That word seems so wrong for you, for how you feel right now. In spite of Ben. Look at him trying to get under your skin like this. He’s the one who’s sick. He looks about a thousand years old.

  “I was just going to leave them outside the door and walk away,” Ben says sadly. “But then that sound.” Now he closes his eyes. He looks so pained it’s ridiculous.

  “What sound?” You think of that terrible, beautiful bell in the treatment room. Its endless gong filling your head even now.

  “You,” Ben says. “Crying. Sobbing. Gasping through the door. All alone. Begging and begging me to come in.”

  You watch him shake his head. “It still haunts me, if I’m honest,” Ben says, looking at you. Waiting, it seems, for you to be devastated. By the shame of your apparent desperation on this night. This night where your grief made a sound he will never forget and apparently couldn’t resist. And that’s when you know you and Ben must have fucked. Definitely you fucked the Lord of Darkness. Perhaps this is why he’s the Lord of Darkness.

  “We were reckless,” Ben cries. “I was reckless.”

  And his voice is like a brick. Trying to shatter you as if you’re so breakable. Maybe you were once. You observe this as though you are observing a sad fact from very, very far away. But you can’t be shattered now. Even with that cold creeping in, you have the red lips of the mannequin—you feel them curved right now in her slight smile. You look at Ben with shining eyes. Ben turns away to stare at the swans.

  “Probably just hay fever, thank God,” he says. “You always get it at this time of year, and you always forget and think it’s something more sinister. You always think you’re dying, Julia. Even before. Even before all this.” And here he waves a hand around at the world. The swans, the sky, the weeping trees and the shaggy park, a group of people walking by, all masked, you notice now, homemade masks like Ben or scarves like the cabbie. They stop in their tracks and turn toward you. Glaring at your bare, glowing face. Because whatever all this is, you’ve forgotten it. It’s been eradicated. Lifted away by the woman in the black suit.

  Suddenly you want to take Ben’s hand and press it to your face. His hand was callused in places, soft in others, and it was always warm and dry as it held yours. You remember that now. You reach your hand across the long expanse of bench. Ben’s face darkens. He looks at your hand as if it’s a snake before mumbling that he has to go. You wave goodbye to him as he gets up and then you wave hello at the staring people because you might as well, you’re already waving. They gape at you in horror. Which is just so tragic. What is there to be afraid of on a day like this? Under a blue sky like this? Such a beautiful day. Your birthday.

  zra swung open the gate and stepped onto the road. Are you sure? her mother said from the garden, where she was walking in circles, one circle eve
ry 45 seconds.

  Everyone’s doing it, even women on their own, Azra said, but she left the gate open as she stood outside, clutching her handbag, which was empty except for the mobile phone that made her feel simultaneously safer and more of a target. Five minutes! Zohra called out, walking toward Azra at her usual brisk pace. Her voice could doubtless be heard halfway down the street. It took me five minutes to walk to you. Less.

  That seemed unlikely, given that it took nearly that long to drive between their two houses, but Zohra insisted it was true: the traffic, the one-way streets. Azra closed the gate and heard her mother break away from her loops in the garden to step into the driveway and bolt the gate from inside. Wash your hands, Azra said through the narrow opening between the gate and the wall, and her mother said yes, yes, all right, Ms. Paranoid.

  They set off, Zohra a pace ahead and a few feet to the side. There were no sidewalks, so they were walking on the road, but even in ordinary times there was little traffic on this residential street. A few houses down, a woman standing on a balcony raised a hand to the pair. The woman had lived there since the house was built, nearly 25 years ago, just after Azra returned home from university. Azra raised a hand back. First interaction.

  Early April and already winter was a memory in Karachi. Azra tugged at her kameez, which was sticking to her skin with the humidity. Zohra had dressed as she would for their regular walks in the park—yoga pants and T-shirt. It had been over three weeks since they last walked in the park, though Zohra still drove there daily to feed the park cats; the security guard, who shared her affection for the animals, unlocked the gates for her.

  There was only one topic of conversation, but many different subsets of it. They meandered between the quotidian and the apocalyptic, walking along the straight, eerily silent expanse of a main avenue, until the scent of the sea rendered them silent. It shimmered ahead of them for a while and then they were upon it, the sand stretching out, camel brown, pristine, and the water dove gray beyond it. The food vendors, the dune buggies, the kite-sellers, the couples sitting together on the sea wall, the carloads of families seeking the one place where Karachi’s urban snarl turned into a smile: all missing. Two policemen, masked, on horseback, rode up to them.