She consults the address again by the blue light thrown from someone’s living room TV onto the sidewalk. For a while she’s convinced that she is lost. Then she turns a corner and realizes she’s on the right street. The address leads to a shack tucked in between a couple of sedate two-and three-story apartment buildings. Its clapboard sides are rotting away, moldy, and part of the structure is made from unmatched plywood boards. The lawn is crabbed up with thickets of weeds and even the two banana trees look stooped over and stunted, their broad fronds split and curling brown. An electric power line droops sizzling over the sunken roof. There isn’t a house number and Sirine can’t see any lights inside—it looks uninhabited.
She dismounts her bike and cautiously walks it up to the porch. There’s an acrid, foreign smell in the air. She stares at the door slightly askew in its frame, and decides to abandon the whole ridiculous plan, turn around, and ride home. She’s just folded the address into her pocket and walked back to the street when she hears a door creak open behind her, turns, and sees Nathan standing there. “Oh my God. Sirine,” he says. “I thought I heard something out here.” He drops his arms to his sides and grins. “You came.”
“Hi. I…” She stumbles, unsure if she was even invited. “I saw some photos today—they were in the paper—I don’t know. I started to think about you—and—”
“Please, please.” He holds his arm out, welcoming her, and she goes to the crooked door. “Forgive me. I spend so much time in the darkroom that I miss day and night. They just aren’t there for me anymore. I’ve gotten used to living without turning any lights on.” He flips a switch in the room—more of a night-light than an actual lamp—that barely casts enough light for Sirine to make out shapes: empty cups, boxes, cans, all sorts of odds and ends floating around oversized furniture.
“Come, this way.” He leads her through the room—she follows, bumping into unidentifiable objects. “Please forgive the—” He kicks something out of the way. “I hardly ever get actual company.” He opens a door in the back. And here the smell is the strongest—metallic, sour, and acidic, nearly dizzying. The room is bathed in a powdery bronze-red light and more half-seeable objects loom in the corners and hang from the ceiling.
“Welcome to my bat cave.” There are various pieces of equipment, a metal folding chair, a long table set out with trays full of solutions, and a stack of negatives that he’s been cutting apart.
“This is where you work?” She feels shy. Both of them speak in lowered careful voices, as if there were people sleeping nearby.
He holds up some negatives, then moves to the trays. “I was just doing some prints. See—this one is developer and this is stop bath and…” His expression is obscured in the red light. He holds up a pair of silver tongs. “Do you want to see?” He slides a paper into the tray and gives it a little slosh, then chuckles. “I really can’t believe you’re here. Really—no one ever visits me.” He pauses, then asks, “Did you tell Han you were coming over?”
She smiles archly. “No. But I think it’s okay.” She picks up a canister, puts it down. The room is cramped and Nathan seems to hunch instinctively, moving between the trays. Nathan says, “Watch.” He slips the paper into a tray and after a few moments Sirine can see ghostly shapes rising on the pages in the plastic tub. She tries to get a closer look: a woman’s hair, face, and feather-white arms lifted at right angles, swimming across the surface of the page; her legs look oddly bent, her feet bound together—a fishtail? He flicks it into the next tray.
Nathan bends back over the trays: more exotic images emerge from the chemical bath—people laughing—wedges of bright teeth in darkened faces. They look like beings from another planet.
“What are these pictures of?”
“Oh, I never really know.” He holds up another negative. “I used to label everything, put dates on my film and keep it all in order. Then I found out that it was better to just forget what it was that I photographed and let it come back in this new form. So I could really let myself see the images.” He bends over the trays with such concentration that Sirine senses that she has just flicked out of his consciousness. His breathing is heavy, unselfconscious, with a thin wheeze like a bird’s cry. She scrutinizes his profile; his hair looks as if he’d chopped it away with a kitchen scissors or a knife; his narrow jaw clenches and unclenches.
“What’s this?” She points to a machine with a dial like the setting on a stove. She touches it and the red overhead light goes out, throwing the room into dimensionless darkness. She grasps the edge of a table. “Oh!”
“The timer.” The red light comes back on. Nathan’s hand is on her forearm. Gray ghost eyes, all pupils. “You okay?”
“Fine.” She laughs weakly.
“You sure?” He looks at her, squints. “You don’t look completely fine.”
She sits on the metal folding chair beside the table and wonders if the fumes are making her dizzy. She closes her eyes and opens them and his face looms close to hers. For a moment it seems as if he might kiss her. Then he straightens up and turns away.
“Would you like some water?”
She stares at his back. She would love to figure Nathan out. It’s like a tickling sensation just beneath the surface of her skin. It seems that he wants something from her, but not really the sorts of things that men usually want. This feels more like a type of impossible and endless wanting—the kind that cannot quite be satisfied. She notices the tender swath of exposed neck, the pink ridges of his ears, and the back of his cropped head, and she senses that he is waiting for something like validation, absolution. “Nathan,” she says slowly, “how long did you live in Iraq?”
He turns back; she can see he didn’t expect this question.
“It’s just—you seem to know so much about it,” she says. “I know it really makes Han happy to talk with you about it.”
“Does it?” He picks up a pair of tongs and turns them around. “You know, I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“You weren’t?”
“There’s a ban on travel to Iraq. But I went with a friend who was doing relief work, smuggling in food and school supplies for children. Totally unsanctioned by our government. When I was in Baghdad, I was approached by an American man in a business suit who told me I had two choices: leave the country or hand over my photographs.”
“Oh.” She feels her eyes widen. She’s heard a few of these sorts of stories before from the students—about being called upon for questioning—the C.I.A., F.B.I.—the invisible men who seemed to have the power to do just about anything to whomever they choose. “What did you do?”
He squints at her painfully. “I was in love at the time, I couldn’t leave.”
“Oh.” She blinks, her breath caught in her throat like a hiccup. “What were your photographs of?”
He shakes his head, mouth set and grim. Then he says, “Just people. Nothing important. I didn’t think there was anything important there. The man asked me to write up a report of my experiences and I refused to do that. I wouldn’t give him any names or that sort of information. I took off, left my apartment in the city, and went to stay with the family of the woman I loved. I slept in the fields outside their house. I knew there wasn’t any way the man could find me there.”
“Were there any photographs of her that you gave the man? Of the woman?”
He stares hard at the silver tongs. “Several.” He turns away and dips his tongs into one of the plastic tubs. Sirine watches the images coming up from the bath: blackbirds, bare trees like pencil drawings, people talking, but there’s something not quite right about each—a man seems to have too many fingers on his hand, a single horn protrudes from the center of a deer’s head.
“Did—did anything happen?”
He shakes his head, rattles the tongs in the tub. “It’s too much to explain. To be honest…it’s hard for me to think about, that old stuff. It all happened years ago. I’ve already said too much as it is.”
She waits, ho
ping he’ll go on. When he doesn’t, she finally asks gently, “Do you have any pictures of her?”
A child whose hair looks dunked in tar, slicked against his head. A woman with eyes like tar, deep holes filled with liquid.
“I can’t find any,” he says. Then he looks up at Sirine, his expression pleading. “Please, don’t tell Han about this. About the man or the photos or any of it. I didn’t have a choice,” he says intensely. “I couldn’t leave her and I couldn’t bring her with me. I didn’t know what to do, I was desperate. Please don’t tell Han, please, I don’t think he’d understand.”
“I’m sure Han wo—”
“Please, just promise me.”
She nods. “It’s okay, it’s all right, really. I won’t tell anybody anything.”
Nathan shakes his head. “I feel lousy that I told you any of this. I’m always saying too much and I don’t mean to and I don’t even know it until a day or two goes by and I’ve had a chance to realize how crazy I sound. I’m sure people think I’m nuts.”
“Really—it’s—”
He cuts her off, “Why do people have to talk about everything all the time anyway? Talk, talk, talk. Why can’t we just let things go? As far as I’m concerned, this is all I need.” He gestures toward the prints. “It’s what I can see, which is plenty for me. Why do people have to go digging back behind the edges and scratching up words and things, trying to get at stuff? There’s nothing else there. Or nothing that anyone needs to know about. I know enough of what’s inside of me, and that’s all I need.”
“Isn’t that a little…lonely?” she murmurs. She glances around the room. Somehow, from beneath the chemical layers, she believes she can smell his breath or his skin—a musty sort of mix of sesame and burnt sugar. And his voice, so low-modulated and trembling in her ear like the voice from inside a shell, from deep beneath the sea. Suddenly it all feels too close; she doesn’t want to be there any longer. But Nathan is holding up another photograph, saying, “It’s like you can see just where their soul is. Tucked inside some part of them.”
She glances at the image: a dark-skinned man sitting in a chair in front of an office door. His legs are crossed and his head is slightly turned, his posture and the slope of his shoulders gracefully canted in a fine, calligraphic arch. His expression is yearning and grief-stricken, as if he’d been crying and only just stopped before the photo was shot. “How sad,” she says softly. Her heart seems to rise in her chest; it’s such an odd, stirring image. “Who is this man?”
Nathan chuckles, then stops and looks at her. After a moment he says, “Well. That’s Han, of course.”
She stands waiting in Nathan’s doorway. In the half-moon light she looks out across the neglected lawn; she can see pears hanging red as roses in the leaves, soft-winged moths, sulfurous and turquoise, flapping past. She smells the lemon leaves and myrtle and berries roasting in the hot night. The late darkness softens the house and the yard, makes it look quaint and romantic.
“Here it is!” Nathan comes back into the front room, holding a photo with a white mat board frame around it. “I meant to wrap it first, but…” He slips it into her hands as if it were a shared secret. “Thank you for coming over here. And letting me go on about—you know—all that. It meant a lot to me.”
She takes the photograph without looking at it and pauses for a moment. She rubs her fingers along the edge of the mat board, then looks up. “Nathan, what would happen to Han if he were to go back to Iraq?”
He turns his head slightly. “Why? Has he said something—”
“No, oh no, I’m just wondering, you know, what would happen if he did.”
“I think we’d never see him again.”
She holds his gaze a moment longer, then steps back and glances at the photograph: a blur of cars, a little boy in one corner with smudged lips that Sirine can tell, even in black and white, are cherry-colored, a hand pulling him out of the frame, a shop sign in sloping Arabic letters. It’s a street scene, the shops between Nadia’s Café and the butcher shop, and at the center, there’s Sirine with her face like a question, her hair white as a torch blowing away from her face, on her way to somewhere.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
So where were we? Waiting with Aunt Camille on the banks of Lake Tanganyika, hoping that the Mother of All Fish will meet with her. The Tanganyika is a wild, curling, crazy water, a lakewater giving into the Nile River, filled with every manner of aquatic beast. There were Big Eyes and Yellow Fins, Whirling Lanterns and Fat Mouths. Fishes with wrinkled foreheads and stubby fingers like angry accountants and fishes with smirks and scheming minds like college students, and fishes with long streamers like hair and long hanging fins like legs and goofy freckled faces like the kids from across the street.
And in charge of all the fish babies in the deep, sapphire-blue waters was the old, old, old, old, old, old mother. And she loved all her fish, even the one who looked like the goofy neighbor kid, because that’s how mothers are. No objectivity on the subject. Even when they say they’re objective, don’t you believe it.
And the Mother of All Fish, you might be surprised to learn, was a tired, tiny, salty little sardine of a fish with a flat little nose and a drab little dress and a tiny little babushka knotted under her chin, like all the old Russian and Greek and Italian and Arab ladies got their ideas of how to dress from her. Her bodyguard, the cocoa-skinned jinn, had abandoned her for exactly one stuffed eggplant, so there was nothing left for her to do but take pity on the foreign traveler, wandering lost along the bank, and rise to the occasion. She poked out her dainty fish nose and said, “What now? I am the Mother of All Fish. Now what did they do?”
Aunt Camille arranged herself on the very edge of the lake and wrung her hands and said, in her softest, loveliest voice, “Oh, Dear Mother! I too am a mother, perhaps you’ve heard of my son. His name happens to be Abdelrahman Salahadin—”
Suddenly, the mothers of the slugs and the frogs and the otters and all the lake beings, along with the Mother of All Fish, rolled their eyes and shook their heads and sighed theatrically. “Abdelrahman Salahadin…. Funny,” the Mother of All Fish said, “somehow you don’t think of a boy like that as even having a mother.”
“I know,” Aunt Camille said. “He’s a naughty boy and I tried to bring him up right and teach him what he needed to know, but he’s still naughty. And for some reason I love the worst one the best of all.”
Here again, the mothers of the lake beings all sighed in unison, feeling empathy on this point.
“Still and be that as it may,” Aunt Camille continued, “the fact is I must’ve spoiled the boy. If I told him once, I told him a thousand times, no more fake drownings! But did he listen? No! He’d turn right around and do exactly the opposite. Fine. Never mind. The problem is this: exactly what I said would happen has happened—he faked his drowning so many times that he forgot how to swim. He’s been missing for months…maybe it’s years, I lost track. Dear fish-mother,” she pleaded, “you’re my only hope. I appeal to you, mother to mother, can you tell me what has become of my youngest and favorite son Abdelrahman Salahadin?”
The Mother of All Fish meditated for a while, pensively blowing bubbles, then she bobbed back up and said, “Well, this is a breach of protocol, but out of respect to the Solidarity of Mothers, I will answer you. I know what it feels like to lose a son. I have lost uncountable children in nets and on lines, in droughts and during famines, and a mother feels each loss as keenly as if it were her only child in the world! I do indeed know what happened to Abdelrahman Salahadin. He was abducted by one of our many maritime enchantresses, called afreet or mermaids or selkies or sirens. Alieph, this particular no-good mermaid, amuses herself by pretending to be a grieving widow in search of her lost husband and luring innocent Bedouins out to the ocean and other such places where they have no business being.”
“An afreet!” Aunt Camille exclaimed, and she shook in all her bones. The situation was graver than she had thought.
Sirine and her uncle try to invite over anyone who needs a place to sit and have a bite and a conversation. At work, Sirine announces that this year will be an Arabic Thanksgiving with rice and pine nuts and ground lamb in the turkey instead of cornbread, and yogurt sauce instead of cranberries. Mireille sulks and says she doesn’t like yogurt and Sirine says, annoyed, why can’t we ever do things differently? And Um-Nadia says, girls, never mind already, we can have the for-crying-out-loud rice stuffing and I’ll bring the can of the red berries sauce.
“I’m going to start doing five hundred or so sit-ups every day,” Mireille says, checking the waistband of her black jeans. “I plan on losing weight in honor of Thanksgiving.”
In the past Sirine would be absorbed for weeks with thinking about what she would cook for Thanksgiving. It was her mother’s favorite holiday and the traditional American foods always made Sirine think of her, the warmth of their table in the fall; it was among the earliest and best of her memories. But things are different now. Her mind has been taken up by Han. She hears his voice in the fabric of things, in running faucets and motors and in the courtyard garden of the birds.
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