It takes a moment to sink in.
“Wait. Are you kidding?”
“I had no idea they were ready to try,” Mani says.
They’re both gathering their things, tapping over a tab-close, standing. “Warsaw managed to run a water supply off a condensation system for a week,” Amir says. “But this is Beirut.”
“So what if it is?” Mani says. “Beirut is superb! Beirut has water!”
They’re skipping along the stairs to the boardwalk. A louder murmur than the sea is rising from the seabed café: the municipality message spreading.
They reach Mani’s house in record time. It’s a hot day and Amir is itching from sweat and screen residue with an urgency he’s never felt before.
“Mom? There’s water!” Mani shouts into the dark house.
“No one,” says Amir.
“Ah, she’s got an hour of cross-skilling this afternoon.”
“Should we wash our hands?” Amir pants, chasing Mani up the stairs.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Have to go all the way.” She opens a door in the hall. “In here.”
Amir follows her. She’s planted in front of a bone-dry shower stall. The showerhead is impossibly shiny. There’s still a bit of plastic wrapping on it. It’s an antique, but brand new.
“It’s nearly two o’clock.”
“Are they going to be able to do this?”
“Trust, Amir. Trust.”
“Do you think it might even be heated?”
Mani, scooting out of her swim knickers, raises her eyebrows at him till he shoves his down too. “I bet it is.” She reaches into the shower stall and twists a handle. It screeches with disuse.
They wait.
At exactly two, their ears fill with the furious sound of a rainstorm. Then their own whooping. Mani bounds in without testing the temperature, makes a shrill sound. “It’s warming up!” She reaches out and grabs Amir’s arm. Her grip raises goosebumps. “Come on, get in!”
He does. It’s the most sublime thing he’s ever felt. He puts his hands flat on the wet tiles and closes his eyes under a hammering of water.
“How long can we stay in here?” He manages not to choke. Such a quantity of water is coursing down his face and onto his tongue.
“We’re being good by sharing. Let’s not get out for a while,” Mani says. “Are you crying?”
“Yes!” He opens his eyes to look at her but her face is blurry-wet. “Are you?”
“That’s private,” Mani says. But she wraps her arms around his waist, her belly against his flank, and rests her forehead on his cheek. Their bodies are slippery and warm. Amir hears himself make a purring noise. “Oh. Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Not like the mist,” he says.
“No. Totally different.”
Sharing a patch is encouraged in the misting rooms. They’ve done this many times. They wash each other’s backs and argue about what true pan-humanism might look like. It’s pleasurable. But this—private, warm, untimed, all this water sheeting down—is a whole different register of existence.
“I think I should tell you,” Mani says, “that I’m thinking about sex.”
Amir opens one eye to look at her, can only see the top of her head against his cheek. “Me, too,” he says, almost but not totally redundantly. Mani’s got a good view.
They’ve almost so many times, but never. This moment feels ripe, so very theirs. But it’s also the wrong moment.
“Water, though, Mani! Mindfulness. Presence. This.”
“Of course,” she says.
“We might never be able to have this again.”
“We might never have any given thing again,” Mani says, the pedantic one for a change.
“But all this water,” he says.
“No, you’re right,” says Mani, hushed in the hypnotic roar of the shower. “All this water.”
The Beirut Water pilot is considered only a partial success; it isn’t repeated again for almost two years. By then Mani has left. Amir will remember different selections of things from the day of the pilot depending on how hot or cold his thoughts are, but he’ll cap the memory with this, every single time: the fond way Mani slides her hand against his drenched ribs under the flow of hot water before she entirely lets him go.
• • • •
Amir sleeps poorly the night before university assignments are due to go out. He knows but does not know-know that he will get into Beirut and Environs, his first choice. His grades are excellent. He’s done twenty percent more personal growth hours than required—he likes doing them—and his civic engagement score is the highest ever for Beirut-3’s Academy. But he’s still nervous. When his watch buzzes at four AM, he startles awake: BEIRUT AND ENVIRONS FUTURIST COLLEGE, UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHY STREAM.
He taps over the notification to Mani with a string of exclamation points, his foggy enthusiasm-slash-relief dampened only slightly when she doesn’t respond right away. Mani’s grades are stellar but her civic engagement score’s not great. She’d wanted Pan-Humanist Polytechnic but Amir has a sinking feeling she’s been assigned to College of the Near East.
He composes a fortifying speech in his head as he gets ready, complete with references to the most famous pan-humanist thinkers who’d attended Near East and their contributions to society. Near East is a great school, and it’s half an hour closer to Beirut and Environs by bullet than Pan-Humanist Polytechnic. Mani will do amazing things wherever she goes.
Amir is fifteen minutes early for the morning’s personal growth session. They’ve only just opened the doors to the Reflection Center, a handful of early risers filtering in under the kaleidoscopic arches, quiet murmurs of conversation as they set up mats and blankets on the centuries-old stone floor. But Mani is already there waiting for him, sitting cross-legged on her mat, gripping her hands together so tight that her fingers are white to the knuckle. Amir is brought up short.
“Mani?” he asks, uncertain.
Wordlessly, she raises her wrist for him to see, the notification still up on the watch screen: INTL UNIVERSITY FOR HUMANISM, MOGADISHU, GLOBAL PROGRESS.
Amir feels his heart go ka-thunk. Global Progress at IUH is . . . he’d thought about applying, more as a lark than anything, but they only accept three students per year, from the entire world, and he never thought . . .
“Wow,” he says, dropping down next to her, voice low so it won’t echo. “Wow, Mani, that’s—I didn’t even know you were going to apply, that’s—amazing. That’s so amazing. I’m so, so proud of you,” he says, and even means it.
Mani’s face is complicated with emotions, flickering by too quickly for Amir to properly catalog them, happy-sad-excited-nervous. “It’s far away,” she says.
“It’s exciting,” he corrects. “Mogadishu, can you even imagine! Maybe I could visit you, one time.” This is unlikely, and they both know it. Mogadishu’s not on a clean air travel vector with Beirut yet. He’d have to do two months of civic engagement and a month of personal growth to balance taking a dirty flight for leisure. Mani musters a smile anyway.
“I’d love that,” she says. In the center of the room, today’s meditation guide is setting up at the podium. The overhead heaters have been switched on, spreading the scent of the cedar beams throughout the space. Mani bumps Amir’s shoulder with her own. Her smile builds into something a little more true. “Come on, though. We both know you’ll be too busy changing the world to think of me at all.”
2: THE MECHANISM, A WORTHWHILE TRADE
It’s not that Mani’s right, because of course Amir thinks of her. He thinks of her every single day, at least at first. But then the water starts coming back to Beirut, and Amir gets swept up in the civic spirit, in the new swell of hope. He switches out of Utopian Philosophy the day after he helps a volunteer group install a kinetic walkway on the university’s main green—they expect to be able to clean-power the quad’s lamps for two hours each night—and enrolls in Urban Design. The idea of regeneration-plannin
g the city is wedged deep under his skin.
After graduation he walks into a competitive apprenticeship with Beirut Grid, where he meets Rafa, who’s working on the Bekaa Valley’s poetry microcity and in the capital on up-skill, and Ester, a third generation Beiruti whose grandmother led the rights movement for domestic workers at the turn of the century. They all fall for each other almost simultaneously.
He’s twenty-two. He’s got an apartment on al-Manara. Through his kitchen window, the lighthouse illuminates the brushstroke froth of the Mediterranean and every time Amir Tarabi sees it he says a silent word of hope for the sea, for it to have body and swell with muscle forever. He remembers his conversation with Mani about the fish, imagines a day in the future when they’ll wade into the surf and see entire schools, silver and bronze and fleeting, with their own eyes.
• • • •
Amir’s at work late when his watch buzzes. Rafa and Ester. Let us in, we’re at the door to Research-4.
He limps down the hall on pins-and-needles. The recollection that they’d planned a dinner date for tonight—for an hour ago—wallops him right before he releases the door.
Rafa and Ester don’t usually band together against Amir, but here they are, standing side by side wearing exactly the same expression, and it’s not we’re so glad to see you.
Ester raises a package and Amir smells food.
“I don’t remember ever blowing through a date with Amir when I worked at the Grid,” Ester says pointedly to Rafa.
“Hmm, Ester,” Rafa replies theatrically. “Is that because you were respectful of his time and attention? Because you understood that interpersonal relationships require careful cultivation?”
“I’m so sorry,” Amir squeaks, letting them in, putting a hand out for their coats. “Can I explain what happened? Not an excuse, just context.”
Ester looks at Rafa. Rafa looks at Ester. Both of them look skeptically at Amir.
“You guys, I’m sorry. Do you remember my Crowdgrow thing?”
“Where you wanted to foster-home ecoboosted flowers around the neighborhood?” asks Rafa. “You told us about it last month.”
“Right,” says Amir. “We found out today the bio team managed to get a couple of shoots synthesizing air pollutants in the lab. Mesilla asked me to put together a grant application for the project. If it gets funded, she wants me to lead the research team.”
Amir’s fortunate that both his partners know what this means to him. Their faces soften.
“Nice. I knew Mesilla would come around,” Ester says. “You still don’t get to flake on dates.”
In a deserted Beirut Grid kitchenette, Amir fetches plates and Rafa piles herbed eggplant casserole onto them. While they eat Amir projects stained photos of cross-sectioned saplings onto a wall, and Rafa and Ester mmm through his commentary for a few minutes, until Rafa says,
“Amir, love, it’s nine PM and you’re still using words like ‘floral load.’”
“Good point, Rafa,” Ester says. “Amir, tap over projector control.”
The projection cuts to the backdrop of his favorite immersion strategy game.
“I’ve got dessert,” Rafa says. He produces a huge bag of caramel chews and a bottle of whiskey. They clear some space.
“Ooh,” Ester says, confirming a glance-down-pause setting. “We need to be able to snack.”
“Oh no,” Amir says. “This never goes well. It’s an immersion game.”
“Shush,” Rafa says. “It’s destined to be a drunk immersion game.”
Their love is like this, comfortable and forgiving of Amir’s faults. Then, at the beginning of summer, Ester breaks up with Rafa and Amir—no hard feelings, just different needs, different takes on life. It’s not that it doesn’t hurt. Amir and Rafa spend several days moping in each other’s laps, swapping sympathy cuddles. But Amir’s always believed what pan-humanist theory says: that love is respect and collaboration held together with radical acceptance, freely gained and lost.
Amir tells himself to take comfort in this, and does his best to keep an open heart.
• • • •
The Future Good conference in Hanoi is the biggest of its kind, twelve academic streams and full air travel exemption. Amir and Rafa apply for spots every year and never get them, until they do. They’re giddy on the flight over: neither of them gets to leave Beirut often, and they’ve certainly never had a reason to travel by air together.
They attend the welcome address then spend the allotted cultural hours in the Old Quarter, sitting on low stools with their knees knocking together, feeding each other quail egg bánh bao. Rafa’s old advisor is leading a Q&A session on arts micro-cities, but Rafa and Amir lose track of time strolling the banks of the Red River hand in hand. Once they’ve missed that, there’s no reason to go back to the hotel, so they stay out till three AM sampling sticky rice wine, which everyone tries to warn them is stronger than it tastes.
The next morning’s reclamation technologies forum is something of an accident.
They’re trying—oh, Amir is almost too embarrassed to admit it. They’re trying to find breakfast, and Rafa spies a cute ambiguously-gendered human with multicolored hair and a dapper three-piece suit sneaking out of one of the conference rooms, their arms full of coffee cups and muffins. Amir and Rafa are hungry, so they creep into the back, sights set on the buffet table lining the rear wall, and there is Mani Rizk, making her way to the front podium.
Amir’s entire body floods with adrenaline. He grabs Rafa by the cuff of his sleeve and steers him to one of the chairs. He’s trying to be stealthy but Rafa is mumbling confused protests around a coffee-stirrer and Mani sees them, of course she does, and her face goes taken aback then pleased. And then she does a pretty good job of pretending like she didn’t see Amir, because she’s got a lecture to deliver, after all.
Rafa stares at Amir in confusion for about a minute before his eyebrows go up in a particularly knowing manner. He spends the rest of the lecture elbowing Amir any time Mani says something brilliant, which is about every thirty seconds.
“So?” Rafa asks, delighted, when the lecture is over and they’re waiting at the back of a densely knotted crowd. “Who is she, eh? Political rival? Academic crush? Long lost lover?”
“No,” protests Amir, a little too loudly for the enclosed space. “She’s just—a friend. We were friends, when we were young. That was all.”
If nothing else, Mani seems at least as eager to see him as he is to see her: her attention keeps sliding away from whoever she’s talking with, darting to Amir over and over. He smiles, catching her eye, spreading his hands in an awkward gesture that he hopes will convey both hi and I’ll wait. As soon as the crowd thins enough for her to break away she does so, inching her way to Amir and Rafa with a string of apologies and excuses.
“Amir,” she says, and half-tackles him in a hug.
She’s round and solid and small—it’s weird, Amir hadn’t hit his growth spurt until he was eighteen, and in his memory they’re still like that, him looking up. Now Mani barely comes up to his collarbone. He wraps arms that feel oddly long and lanky around her shoulders, holds her tight.
When she finally lets go her eyes look suspiciously bright, but that might just be the ceiling ambients. “I didn’t know you were coming to my talk,” she says.
“It was kind of an accident,” Amir admits.
Beside him, Rafa groans. “Don’t tell her that!” He turns to Mani. “What he means to say is, he wanted to surprise you. And your lecture was phenomenal.”
“I’m not going to lie to her,” says Amir, affronted. “About the surprise, I mean. Your lecture was phenomenal. I didn’t know you’d been studying hydrophobic materials.”
“I’m part of a water reclamation forum at IUH,” says Mani, and then, to Rafa, “and I’ve known Amir too long to expect flattery. I’m Mani.”
“Rafa Zarkesian. I consult on architecture projects for art spaces in Beirut.”
“Rafa�
��s my boyfriend,” says Amir. It seems important to mention.
“Oh, I thought I recognized you! I’ve seen your picture on Amir’s stream. How long—”
“Mx Rizk?” cuts in a voice over Mani’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry to intrude, but—”
“No, no, of course,” says Mani. “Sorry, I really should—”
“Yes, of course,” says Amir. “It was good to see you, Mani, I—”
“Tonight,” she interrupts, “after closing remarks. There’s that gallery installation, the interactive city grid? I haven’t been able to see it yet. If you have time, maybe the three of us . . .”
They’ve got a pre-dawn flight back to Beirut; they’d planned to get to bed early and had contemplated skipping the closing remarks entirely.
“That would be wonderful,” says Rafa. “We wouldn’t miss it.”
• • • •
That night, it rains in Hanoi, just a light, champagne-fizz mist, but it’s enough to lend a celebratory attitude to the entire city. They find Mani waiting for them outside the installation’s entrance, a crown of water droplets clinging to her hair, reflecting a riot of blinking, changeable light. Amir grips Rafa’s hand a little harder.
“We got lucky,” Mani says, squinting as she tilts her face upward, holding out a cupped palm as if to collect water there. “Good closing note for the conference.”
“Lucky,” echoes Amir, feeling a little dazed.
Rafa bumps his shoulder against Amir’s. “Come on, you two,” he says, already fond. “Let’s go in.”
The installation is a concept city rendered one-fiftieth scale in shimmering interactive holograms and delicate print-resin latticework. The space isn’t enclosed, and the scrim of the rain occasionally does glitchy things to the projections that make Amir groan in solidarity with the event planners. Rafa and Mani are both charmed, however, and Amir can’t help but be delighted by their delight. He gets video of the support cables of a projected suspension bridge twining around Mani’s ankles, insistent and loving as a cat. They take turns decorating Rafa with sprigs of star-like flowers in the constructed wetlands section.
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 30
