by Hoang, Jamie
“Yup,” Jeff said. “Any tips for the newcomers?”
“Scrub yourself with the salt of the Dead Sea,” she replied, tossing her long brown hair back with a smile. “Your skin will thank you for you it.”
The elevator doors opened and she got off, but not before looking directly at Jeff and saying, “Come join my friends and me at the bar later if you’re not doing anything. Both of you.” She looked at me and smiled.
“What’s your name?” Jeff called.
“Bridgette,” she replied as the doors closed.
Our room wasn’t huge, but it came with a king-size bed. Exactly what two romantic newlyweds would want. I turned around and gave Jeff the eyebrow raise.
“What?! We’re newlyweds, remember?!” he exclaimed.
“Not to be a prude or anything, but I’d rather not have to sleep with you getting it on next to me with your elevator floozie, so…”
“She seemed nice,” he said.
“What kind of bourge-y name is Bridgette, anyway?”
“Aubs, are you jealous?”
“Just put a sock on the door if you need me to stay away,” I replied, making him laugh.
Plopping down on the incredibly fluffy pillow top mattress, I sunk in way further than I expected and burst out laughing. Watching me bounce up and down with amusement at first and then curiosity, Jeff hopped onto the bed as well. Flipping on a TV for the first time since leaving home, I was shocked to find a rerun of Saved by the Bell dubbed into Arabic. In the episode, Zack and Jessie have to kiss for a high school play and end up questioning their feelings for each other.
“Do you wanna watch a movie?” Jeff asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Jeff flipped through the channels and found the XXX section, “Oooh, there we go,” he laughed.
Beneath the mounted television was a mirror that ran the length of the wall. I smiled at the image of us watching TV just as we had as kids in Jeff’s bedroom. His childhood room had the same set-up, with his bed on one side and a TV atop a large dresser in the corner. Jeff liked to sit straight up on the right side of the bed, and I liked to lie flat with two pillows propping up my head. Time, it seemed, hadn’t changed everything.
“Well look at that…it’s us circa 1993,” Jeff said.
“All you need is a Jurassic Park comforter, Snoop Dogg’s Doggy Style in the CD player, and porn under the mattress!”
“I did not hide porn under the mattress!” he said. Then, smiling mischievously, he declared, “It was in my ski boot, behind a bunch of junk.” He was so proud, grinning from ear to ear, that I didn’t want to tell him I already knew. Especially given the fact that his mom was the one who told me.
Jeff’s mom, Cherri, and I routinely watched romantic comedies when the boys bailed on our regular Thursday night dinners at the Andersons’. One night as we were watching Shallow Hal, she turned to me and said, “I really hope Jeff doesn’t turn out like Hal, with all the porn he’s got stuck in his ski boot.”
I look at her, amused. “Ski boot, eh? That’s creative.” We both burst out laughing.
With only boys in the house, I think sometimes she secretly hoped they wouldn’t make it for dinner just so she and I could watch the latest Hugh Grant or Matthew McConaughey movie. The tradition began in the eighth grade, when I was too young to realize that the movies were completely unrealistic and delusional, and it remained a tradition until I left for college. She was always so excited about our ‘girls’ nights’ that I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I had outgrown them.
“Next time you write home, tell your mom I said ‘Hi’, okay?” I said.
“Mm,” he replied. Jeff’s eyes were closed and he was already drifting off. Jet lag had really begun to take its toll on him. From New Delhi to Jordan, we gained three-and-a-half hours, so the sun was just about to set.
Slipping off the bed, I gently slid the door of our balcony open and stood at the edge of the railing looking down at a bright, aquamarine pool filled with couples chatting, laughing, and cuddling in the comfort of one another. Beyond the lip of the pool, the Dead Sea shimmered with the last rays of sunlight and within minutes disappeared into the dark.
The weather was almost uncomfortably warm for nighttime and the black abyss of still water in the distance was like something out of an existential movie about the nothingness that awaits us after death. My eyes were open, but they may as well have been closed, and for a moment going blind wasn’t all that scary. In fact, it was peaceful—like being in a constant state of meditation. I hadn’t stopped wishing for the diagnosis to be wrong, but in this moment, I not only acknowledged that RP was real, I believed it. The disease was no longer something that was going to happen, it was here.
A high-pitched yelp followed by a flirtatious laugh cut through my thoughts. I shifted my gaze from the darkness to the well-lit area beneath me. Two drunken lovers on a lounge chair had forgotten they were in public and the man had stripped the woman of her already barely-there top, causing the shriek I’d just heard. I knew my glance had turned into a stare, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away. The serenity of darkness I’d felt just moments before was replaced by fear and jealousy. I wondered if this was what I had to look forward to: me staring into the dark as the world moved on without me.
“I had the most bizarre dream last night,” I said, speaking for the first time the next morning. Jeff was sitting at his computer, a position he had been in since I woke up, took a shower, got dressed, made coffee, and started planning out the day.
“About what?”
“I was on a bench next to this guy, Tim, who I don’t even really know that well. He was a friend of this guy I dated for a few months back in college, so we naturally lost touch after Tony and I broke up.”
“Uh-huh,” Jeff said, his attention elsewhere.
“Well we were sitting there talking and I remember pretending to be happier than I was. In the dream I was blind and kind of in a desperate place. But I was acting as if it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”
“You were blind? That sounds scary,” he said, still not looking at me.
“I wasn’t scared about it, but for some reason every time I tried to pick up my paintbrush it felt like I was trying to dead-lift 500 pounds.”
“Sorry, Aubs,” Jeff interrupted. “I’ve got another half-hour or so of programming. Can we talk about this more while we float in the Dead Sea?” he asked.
“Forget it,” I said. “It was just a stupid dream.”
I grabbed my blue and white candy-striped bikini and went into the bathroom to change. After brushing my teeth, I started packing a bag full of beach essentials as Jeff got ready. Grabbing my sunblock from the desk I noticed that Jeff had been looking at Facebook. There were a couple of programmer screens covering the page itself, but there was no mistaking the tab that had been left open to Veronica’s page. He almost never posted anything, despite being the developer of the automatic status update generator, so I wondered what he was looking at or if he’d sent her a message. Coming out from the bathroom, Jeff caught my eye and closed the computer. I considered pressing him on the issue, but I didn’t feel like discussing the woman who’d kept him from my parents’ funeral. It bothered me that he still pined after her—a person who, to me, had no soul. I wanted her to be the enemy, the common denominator of hate that brought us closer together, or for her to simply cease existing.
She mattered to him though. I knew because he had a pained look on his face any time he was forced to mention her name, and because in all the idle time we spent traveling together he hadn’t brought her up. It was almost as if he went out of his way not to mention anything that had to do with her.
On our way down to the beach, Jeff stopped to buy two Frisbees from a local market. The store was only four aisles wide and a mixture between a hardware store and grocery store. A typical dollar store in the United States would be the closest comparison.
“Did you play Ultimate in college?”
I asked.
“What?”
“Frisbee. Ultimate Frisbee. It’s one of those intramural sports they have for the athletic non-athletes.”
“Is that what those guys were doing on the field?” he wondered aloud. He didn’t bother answering my underlying question, which was why was he buying Frisbees at all, but my excitement trumped my need to know as the beach came into view. I took in a deep breath of fresh air as we reached the water and quickly undressed.
Years of studying art had turned me into a connoisseur of misplaced details and errors in paintings as well as in my natural surroundings, but at the Dead Sea my skills were null. There were none. In fact, what I noticed was a lack of visual noise. The shoreline was the color of salt, the water crisp and clear with no aquatic life lurking below. Above us, a few clouds lingered in the powder blue sky; directly in front of us on the horizon was the Israeli coastline, which, from our vantage point, was nothing more than a crust of sandy-colored earth; and below the horizon was the vast expanse of Dead Sea water. The topography was simple, natural, and seemingly pure. Of course, industry and commerce pulled from the wealth of natural minerals—packaging expensive, highly-sought-after beauty and health remedies for sale—but the landscape, as far as I could tell, remained untouched.
“Are you ready to experience magic?” Jeff asked.
“I am so ready, though, I still fully expect to sink,” I said.
He laughed. “The water is 33.7% sodium chloride. Scientifically speaking we’re guaranteed to float.”
The second my toes hit the water I noticed they were buoyant. Scooping up a handful of water, I peered at its cloud-like color and made a mental note of its density. Releasing the salt water back into the sea, I cautiously sat down, trusting Mother Nature to cradle me, and actually found myself not only floating, but feeling like I was being pushed up and out of the water. With the two Frisbees in his hand, Jeff started doggy paddling into the water and probably ended up drinking enough sodium chloride to cause a severe spike in his blood pressure. I watched as he got out, ran to our bags to gulp down about half the jug of water we brought, then dry heave as his body tried to remedy the situation. His taste buds would never be the same.
“Are you okay?” I asked. He nodded yes and gave me a thumbs up. When the two Frisbees he’d abandoned reached me I shouted, “What are these things for?” He tried to reply, but his throat was so dry that nothing came out and he ended up dismissing me with a wave of his arm. The water wasn’t moving much, so I left them to drift nearby as I took in the sights.
From where I lay bobbing in the water, shapes and color in the distance lacked any real definition, so I tried to focus on an object. The blue sky turned gray at the horizon, which then melted into the brown of the earth. Muted tones were ubiquitous, with only a small patch of green way off in the distance. A spaghetti-thin black line dangled in the center of my vision breaking the singular scene into two continuous images, but if I squinted I could almost make it go away.
I hadn’t seen any sprawling lawns since arriving in Jordan, so I wasn’t sure what the thin, narrow patch of green was, but it looked like a single blade of grass. I began to think about the uncommon singular identity of grass and found that even the singular word—grass—described the multiplicity of it. I pictured its life cycle in my head: it grew, was stomped on, survived, and then died. And wasn’t that simply the cycle of all life? I grew, struggled to become a painter, found a niche, and was about to lose my ability to see. Luckily—or perhaps unluckily—Retinitis Pigmentosa was not fatal, which left me to ponder how it might be survived.
Drifting on the surface of the water, I noticed the dark spots lining my peripheral again. The contrast of dark black against the bright blue sky accentuated its effects.
“I’m going blind,” I said, in a low mumble to myself.
“What?” Jeff asked. He had just managed to float toward me with two books in hand—mine and his—which he placed on the floating Frisbees. They were meant to be floating tables.
“Ahh,” I said, purposefully ignoring his question. “Very cool.”
Giving my Frisbee a light push towards me, he closed his eyes and asked, “What were you talking about this morning? You had a weird dream?”
“I can’t remember anymore,” I lied. “It wasn’t important.”
Jeff was silent for a while and then he said, “I quit my job.”
“What?”
“Yeah…” he said.
“When? And more importantly, why?”
“I’d been planning on it since before we left, but today I officially did it,” he said.
“Why? What changed?” I asked, wondering if it had anything to do with Veronica.
“Around this time they usually send out classroom assignments and when I was checking my e-mail this morning I realized I didn’t want to be getting one.” He opened his eyes, letting them adjust to the bright sunlight.
“Do you feel good about it?” I asked.
“I think so. I’m on this new app that I think is going to be huge.”
“A different one?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool, what’s it called?”
“I Travel Better Than You,” Jeff said.
I was silent for a few seconds as I tried to figure out how to delicately ask him whether it was another hate app. “What does it do? Is it like a comparison of people’s travel experiences? Like Yelp?”
“It’s so much better than that,” he said, excitedly. “I’ll show you when I get a little further on it. It’s still in the initial stages so I think it would be hard for you to conceptualize how it might work,” he said.
“Deal,” I said, backing off. “I can’t wait to see it.”
“Thanks,” he said, sincerely. I could tell he meant it.
“How are you feeling about it? Nervous?”
“Not really. I think it’s just kind of sinking in at the moment,” he said.
“Michael, who you would have met at my gallery opening had you not snuck out early,” I said, unable to resist the jab, “he would always tell me to sit with my fears. He’d say that fear is a powerful friend. Being afraid of something means that there is something to lose, and the greater the endeavor the more fear you have to overcome.”
“I agree,” he said.
“Did you tell your brother?”
“I sent him an e-mail, but I’m not worried about him. He’d just say, ‘It’ll come to you when it comes to you, bro’. He never thought teaching was a good career for me anyway.”
I nodded. “Maybe it’d do me some good to become a stoner.”
“It helps,” Jeff smiled.
After an early dinner of yellow and white rice, falafel, and hummus, Jeff wanted to go back and work on his app, so I went down to the pool, ordered a glass of pinot noir, and watched the sunset—or “magic hour”, as my friend Carol-anne called it. “Everything is prettier at dusk, even though the colors aren’t as vibrant. And there’s less contrast because the light has to travel through more atmosphere,” I remembered her saying as she snapped pictures of a sunset to go with a magazine article someone had written about Venice Beach.
Refraction of light created rainbows; without light there would be no red, orange, yellow, green, or blue at all. What if tomorrow the sun came up blue and the sky was yellow? What difference would it make to me? Just the other day in Delhi, I was swimming in a sea of magenta, Indian yellow, cyan, tangerine, hot pink, olive green, and endless other variations of the spectrum. Four or five weeks from now, color would be relegated to a simplified word, cyan would be nothing more than light blue. Creating different shades and hues of colors had always brought me joy, and RP was stripping me of all of it.
On my way back up to the room, I passed by the lobby bar, stopping for a second when I saw Jeff sitting on a stool next to Bridgette. She was sitting so close to him she might as well have been sitting on his lap, and he, well… he looked to be having a pretty good time. He laughed at something
she said and even from a distance I could see the smile-wrinkles at the corner of his eyes. Quickly turning away, I headed upstairs to get ready for bed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Story
“YOU took a gun to one of the Seven Wonders of the World and shot it?” I asked Atef, who drove as Jeff and I sat in the back of his boxy green Jeep. On either side of the road, large rock mountains made up the vast majority of Jordan’s topography.
“Yes,” he replied with a proud smile. He was telling us about the bullet-ridden urn at the top of the Treasury when I interrupted him. As far as tour guides went, Atef was a beautiful, godlike specimen of a man—a Jordanian Jesus. In his mid-thirties, he was dressed in brown cargo pants, a gray pullover sweater under a black leather jacket, and covering his head was a red and white checkered turban. Lean, with naturally muscular arms derived from manual labor rather than steroid-driven gym sessions (my college boyfriend was built the same way), Atef had a ruggedness that merged with the landscape harmoniously.
The vast expanse of golden-red desert was covered in a haze of dust, just as I imagined it looked in biblical times. We had been driving for over two hours on bumpy dirt roads peppered with checkpoints and tanks, making the Middle Eastern conflicts hard to ignore, but I never felt the need to lock the door or thought the country any less beautiful.
For most of the morning, we listened to Atef tell us the history of Petra, the Lost City. Hidden deep in the deserts of Jordan, Petra was accessible by only one entrance, known as the Siq. Thought to have been part of Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty, it was a city of great proportions. Spanning more than sixty square kilometers through canyons, up mountains, and along riverbeds, the city was thought to have had a sizable population. From the rock, they carved huge monuments like the Treasury and Monastery, but all along the main avenues of the city were rock cut-outs where people lived, worshiped, and were buried.
