Fugue States

by Pasha Malla

  Everything was so gentle, almost tender.

  Ash stroked Cyprus’s back up to her shoulders.

  She eased onto his lap.

  He held her to him.

  She ground her hips. ‘Like that?’ she said.

  Ash said, ‘Okay.’

  She took his face in her hands. ‘Do you want to tell me about your father?’

  He opened his eyes.

  Cyprus was staring into them.

  ‘My father.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’ She stopped moving; her face flashed with panic. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘But if you want?’

  What did he want? Ash stared.

  ‘My father, he is also dead,’ she said—plainly, simply, in a way Ash almost envied.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Long ago, when I was just a child. In Lebanon. In Beirut.’

  ‘In the civil war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My dad was from Kashmir,’ Ash told the half-naked woman on his lap. And felt immediately preposterous. Yet blundered on: ‘He left there a long time ago, but if he’d stayed…’ He let the pause suggest the same fate as Cyprus’s father: solidarity!

  ‘The world, it’s hard,’ she said.

  ‘It is,’ Ash agreed, sealing their compact of suffering.

  ‘Was your father in pain?’

  ‘At the end? No, it was all very quick.’ But before that, thought Ash: yes. Brij had been in pain—the discreet pain of longing, of loss—most of his life.

  Cyprus nodded. ‘C’est tout qu’on peut demander.’

  ‘Oui,’ said Ash stupidly. ‘Exactement.’

  She reached out and touched his face, drawing her fingers down his cheek where a tear ought to fall.

  Ash moved his hands to the small of her back.

  Cyprus wiggled a little closer. Her breasts pressed against his chest. Their faces were inches apart. Her breath fell warmly upon his lips.

  The moment opened up, expanded. Cyprus’s eyes were wide and kind—and quizzical. They seemed to search his own for a way in.

  —

  ‘YOU WHAT?’

  ‘Shut up, let’s just get out of here.’

  ‘Oh man. You didn’t.’

  Ash dropped two twenties on the table. ‘Leave your beer. Let’s go.’

  On the way to the truck Matt had to race to keep up. ‘Who tries to kiss a stripper?’

  Ash ducked between two businessmen in suits, around an elderly woman pushing a cart of groceries through the slush.

  Matt followed, his laughter booming up St. Catherine. ‘The one thing you’re not allowed to do and you just go for it.’

  Turning down a side street, Ash clawed in his pocket for the car keys. ‘How am I in the wrong here? You act like an asshole and yell shit at these women and it’s fine?’

  ‘It’s just out of the rules, bro.’

  ‘Insane. The whole thing makes no sense.’

  ‘Yeah, right. It’s the rules that are insane, not you.’

  In the truck Ash sat for a moment behind the wheel, watching traffic putter by. ‘I swear to god she wanted me to do it. There was something between us.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What do you mean, “nope”? You weren’t there!’

  ‘Dhar, listen to me. I’ve spent enough time at the peelers to know that no stripper, ever, wants you to kiss them.’

  ‘Specifically me?’

  ‘You’re lucky she didn’t sic a bouncer on your ass. It’s a bad idea to mess around in Montreal clubs. Hell’s Angels run half these places.’

  ‘So now a biker gang is going to hunt me down for trying to kiss this woman.’

  ‘Cyprus.’

  ‘There’s no way that’s her real name!’

  ‘As if you know her.’ Matt shook his head; the code had again been breached. ‘There’s your number one problem in the first place.’

  —

  AS HE QUITE LITERALLY opened a new room of Brij’s life, Ash had to resist the Hollywood anthropology of it: chamber by chamber, the mystery unlocked…

  ‘I feel like a super-lame Indiana Jones,’ he said, entering his father’s office, tucked away in a corner of campus with Mount Royal looming up behind.

  ‘India Jones though,’ said Matt. ‘India Jumanji.’

  ‘That’s Africa.’

  ‘Same diff. They both have elephants and hungry people.’

  On Brij’s desk was a framed photograph of Ash and his sister, dressed up for Ash’s grade eight graduation. His head was shaved (‘You’ve got plenty of time to go bald,’ his dad used to carp. ‘Why not enjoy your hair while you have it?’) and he wore a billowing silk shirt and tie, its clumsy double-Windsor as big as a fist. Mona was fifteen, standing with her arms crossed and the distant look of someone with better places to be.

  ‘Nice duds, Arsenio,’ said Matt, plopping into the swivel chair behind the desk and picking up the photo. ‘God, your sister is beautiful, you know that?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘No, honestly.’ Matt put the picture down. ‘I’m not trying to be a creep. You guys are lucky to have each other. Me, I’ve got nobody. No brothers or sisters, no mom or dad.’

  Ash looked away.

  ‘And hey? I know sometimes I act dumb and say the wrong thing and embarrass you and whatever, and your sister probably hates me—’

  ‘Hate might be a strong word.’ Matt lifted a hand as if pledging an oath. ‘What I’m saying is I’m here for you guys. You’re like my second family. I’m here for you, bro. Your oldest, best bud.

  Which is actually better than a husband or wife or whatever because we can’t break up. And way better than that nose-picking commie Mona’s married to. Right?’

  Ash nodded.

  ‘But if I’m in the way, just tell me.’ Matt cringed as if preparing himself for a slap.

  ‘It’s probably good we came to the city,’ said Ash. ‘Just to give Mona some space.’

  ‘And to get wasters with Chip tonight,’ said Matt, recovering. ‘And for you to kiss a stripper.’

  ‘Okay, get out of the way. Let’s see if I can find this stupid thing.’

  While Ash fired up the old PC, Matt sprawled on the floor with his phone. After a minute he sat up and announced, ‘In 2000 thirty people were murdered on that pilgrimage.’

  ‘Amarnath?’

  ‘Yeah. Would that be terrorists?’

  ‘Or freedom fighters, depending what side you’re on. You’re looking this up?’

  Matt shrugged, sunk back into the cushions, returned to reading his phone.

  The login screen appeared and Ash keyed in what he hoped was still his dad’s password: Srinagar. It worked. As the old Dell began to chirp and gurgle Ash felt invasive, on the cusp of trespass. Computers were such strange repositories of the subconscious; among Matt’s bookmarks he’d once unearthed a folder marked Sweet Pussy Vids of—astonishingly—kittens doing adorable things. What might Ash discover about his dad? Secrets, revelations, a hidden life. Maybe even some other family back in India, one he’d left behind and sent monthly payoffs and never ceased to love.

  Though as the home-screen loaded a breakthrough seemed impossible. His dad’s desktop resembled his bookshelves. Atop a background image of Dal Lake, dozens of icons and files floated like leaflets strewn by the wind.

  ‘So why would anyone go see this thing?’ Matt’s voice was the honk of a trombone through the small room.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Ice cock. Like, what’s the goal?’

  ‘It’s a shrine. It’s one—’

  ‘—of the most important sites in Hinduism. I know. It says that right here. But, like, why walk up into the mountains just to look at it? Does it work like Viagra or something?’

  ‘God, no. I don’t think?’

  But Matt had gone quiet again, frowning, tapping away at his phone.

  Ash returned to the wild mosaic of files. Stupidly he’d left his dad’s ma
nuscript in the truck, and lacking a title he struggled to think of an exact phrase to narrow the terms of a search. He typed ‘lingam.’ No results. ‘Amarnath’ also revealed nothing. ‘Kashmir,’ conversely, returned more than a thousand hits; Ash clicked on one—a conference paper, ‘J-K Sleep Deprivation and Psychosis,’ co-authored with some researchers in the Lolab Valley.

  Perhaps Brij had written that story years ago on some other, older machine. Ash leaned back in his chair, knocking his fist against his chin, another gesture he’d inherited from his father. Now it felt mimetic. His hands fled to the keyboard. But what to type?

  ‘It doesn’t look like a dick at all,’ said Matt. ‘No nuts, no glans. False advertising!’

  Ash looked briefly away from the screen. ‘I really don’t know much about this. My dad kind of gave up on the Hindu thing when he moved to Canada.’

  ‘Is seventeen-fifty expensive for a direct flight to India?’

  Ash tried ‘pilgrimage’—no results. ‘You’re not really thinking about going, are you?’

  ‘I told you, bro. Me and you. Road trip. Or air trip, I guess. Like old times.’

  ‘I’ve got a job. I can’t just leave. Besides: brown boy’s dad dies, brown boy flees to the fatherland to discover who he really is? No thanks. I’ve seen that movie and it sucks.’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. Isn’t India where people go to find themselves?’ Ash laughed.

  But Matt didn’t seem to be joking. ‘This one’s cheaper but it goes through Frankfurt. That’s in West Germany, right?’

  ‘Right. On the happy side of the old Iron Curtain.’

  ‘Jesus H. Vishnu, eighteen hours in an airplane! Do you think my one-hitter would set off the fire alarm in the can?’

  ‘I think if you went to India you would be dead in an hour,’ said Ash, punching ‘novel’ into the search bar. All this revealed were papers that used the word adjectivally and a few old emails goading Brij’s friends and colleagues into purchasing Ash’s book; the link was broken. He returned to the ‘Kashmir’ search and began prowling through the files.

  Everything was work-related. Ash had been wary of discovering a diary, but all these research papers were its opposite, each one clinically titled, the language academic and bland. His father’s career had been spent writing, enough to fill a dozen books. All of it about sleep. Yet nowhere did he mention dreams. ‘Any luck?’

  Ash shook his head, kept scrolling. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, ob-la-di, ob-la-da. Looks like we’re going to India so you can finish it.’

  ‘I told you, no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Going to Kashmir? After my dad dies? What a cliché. Picture it: me scattering the cremains from some mountain, and then honouring his memory by completing his opus. And then what? People read it and are so moved that peace descends on the Valley? Or, worse, I win a prize?’

  ‘So what are you guys doing with the ashes?’

  But Ash had come across a JPEG, and for a moment Matt ceased to exist.

  Titled, ‘Poonch, July 1965,’ the file was a black and white image of four men seated on a sofa—or crammed into it, as was often the case with real estate in India. The picture took Ash aback because the guy second from right looked so familiar. An old friend? Some cousin he’d not seen since childhood? Only upon recognizing his uncle among the other men did Ash realize that this person was, in fact, his father.

  Brij as a twenty-year-old. Brij with buddies. Brij with hair, the part like a fissure in petrified magma. Photos from this era, in the Indian way, were usually posed: people shoulder-to-shoulder as if for a police line-up, faces stoic. But this one was candid. Brij’s smile was cheeky. His right arm was slung around some lean and beaming pal. His shirt bore an absurd, hysterical print, unbuttoned to release a froth of chest hair; his trousers were white and flared. He was so young!

  And smiling so blithely, his own death an unseen shadow flitting beyond the frame. A version of Brij who didn’t know the son he’d father, nor that one day that same son would be chasing his future self through the ether (computers! the internet!) only to find him, here, lodged among friends upon small furniture.

  Ash missed this person he’d never known, this smirking hippie, this alternate Brij in bellbottoms and a sensationally patterned shirt, faraway in Kashmir. The Brij who never left India, who existed forever in bliss within the borders of this photograph, ignorant to the Troubles, to exile, to anything beyond lounging each day away in perpetuity. Who coasted through life without loss.

  ‘Dhar?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s shaking over there?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Honestly? Then why so quiet and weird?’

  ‘Want to see something funny?’ Ash said.

  Matt came over. ‘Whoa, is that a brown boy-band?’

  ‘That’s my dad.’

  ‘Sweet Shiva’s frozen schlong! Holy crud, it is. And the fella with the moustache, the one your dad’s feeling up, that’s his fiancé?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Ash had been looking so intently at his dad’s face that he’d not noticed Brij caressing, with a single index finger, the forearm of the man beside him.

  ‘No, smart guy, that’s just the way Indian men are with one another. Affectionate.’

  ‘I’ll say. Look at the grin on Mister Moustache.’

  ‘It’s not like that. They’ll hold hands, cuddle on park benches. It’s not sexual.’

  ‘Sure doesn’t sound it.’

  ‘Weirdly they’re super homophobic too.’ Ash laughed at a sudden memory. ‘Listen to this. So when my dad was not much older than he was in that photograph, twenty-two or so, he came to New York for a conference. And he met up with a friend of his—maybe even that guy—who was living in the States. They went for a walk, and as they’d do back home they linked arms. But walking through Central Park or whatever people start yelling at them: “Get a room, faggots,” “Go to hell, you queers,” stuff like that.’

  ‘If that was me and you, Dhar? I’d frigging murder them.’

  ‘Keep in mind this is the seventies. But the thing is? My dad and his buddy have no idea why anyone is saying anything, because being gay—actually having a romantic relationship with a man—is so far beyond their realm of comprehension. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just two pals out for a stroll.’

  ‘So how come you never hold my hand when we’re at the bar?’

  ‘Wait, listen. This is the best part. Eventually they realize what’s going on, so they let go and keep walking without touching. And then they make it to the Village.’

  ‘Gaytown?’

  ‘You got it. Men everywhere are holding hands, cuddling, doing whatever they want. So they link up again, and walk around the rest of the day just like they would at home.’

  ‘Man, the more I hear about India, the more it sounds like the place for me.’

  ‘So you can cuddle guys?’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t you think it’d be nice?’ Matt pushed a little closer. Ash was assaulted with familiar odours, the body spray not masking the weed-stink so much as candying it. ‘Honestly though,’ said Matt, ‘they do make a cute couple.’

  ‘Oh, for god’s sake!’

  ‘Dhar? Would you frigging relax and look at them?’

  Ash did: at the two young Pandits smushed together at the end of the couch, at Brij’s finger snaking into the crook of his friend’s elbow, at their faces alight with happiness. Had he ever seen his dad so comfortable, so at ease, so at home in himself or the world? Though now Ash also realized why it had so disoriented him at first: Brij’s gleeful expression was one he’d rarely seen on his father’s face. That smile—that ironic, slightly smug, self-satisfied smile—Ash knew better as his own.

  4

  ‘THIS IS THE BEST,’ Matt declared from the head of the table, and raised his beer and chugged it down. It was a command to do the same, so Ash and Chip obeyed.

  Idly Ash turned his at
tention to a nearby big-screen—two shirtless men caged and wrestling, limbs entwined and cheek-to-cheek—and finished a text to Sherene, who was touring brew pubs with friends on the Plateau. You should come downtown, he begged. Her reply was instantaneous: Not in a million years.

  The bar—Matt’s choice—was a dingy basement with faux wood-panelled walls and framed hockey jerseys and a steady grind of corporate rock. It was a hive for a certain type of man, a man like Matt. Ash felt edgy. In these places difference was cause for suspicion. Matt, who relished any chance to play alpha, understood this, and he kept glancing around for an excuse to defend their honour. At a similar spot in London, some poor sap had once splashed beer on Ash and found himself pinned to the wall by his earlobe. ‘You got a problem,’ Matt had snarled, ‘with my little brown friend?’

  Maybe we’ll head that way, Ash messaged Sherene. Which was doubtful. Matt was in his element. Montreal’s language politics and warren of one-way streets made him anxious, but a generic sports bar offered refuge. These were the places he’d spent half his life, either as client or staff. He ordered another round with a twirl of his finger, then blew their kilted server a kiss.

  On TV, one of the fighters hitched his legs over the other guy’s shoulders, crossed his feet at the nape of his neck, and hauled him in.

  No you won’t, wrote Sherene.

  Their pitcher arrived.

  ‘Mare-see, Claudine,’ said Matt, reading her name tag, and filled their glasses. ‘The three of us together again, boys? Honestly? This means the world to me.’

  ‘So good to see you guys,’ said Chip. ‘Cheers.’

  As always the drinking was purposeful, and the other two fell instantly into their old dynamic: Matt holding court, Chip egging him on. Ash was meant to play the straight man, calling out Matt’s lunacy with cutting asides, to which Matt would respond with physical terror—noogies and nurples and swift, backhanded blows to the groin. And Chip would laugh. Yet Ash didn’t feel up to it, and the beer had a coppery, bloody taste.

  While the other two bantered, Ash brooded behind his phone. The air felt static with what was left unspoken, the real reason they were together. Since Ash’s childhood Brij had existed to his friends as a shadowy figure often ‘away at a conference’ or ‘on call’ or just absent and unaccounted for. Even though Matt had seen Brij for his apnea their relationship had never progressed beyond the clinical, as far as Ash knew. So with no point of entry, what could anyone say? Besides, they’d long ago established that trauma was best tiptoed around like a coiled snake, its bite numbed with booze.