When the room was full, nearly two women for each man, the captain spit the last of the orange seeds into his cupped palm and announced.
The beauties of Cagliari. Cousins of Sophia Loren. Sisters to Gina Lollobrigida. Take your pick. I will pay. A gesture of goodwill for our journey.
At first no one even looked. The room was stifling with the heat of bodies and the day’s leftover temperature. Saladin tried to avert his eyes, but everywhere he moved there was a painted face, a hip or breast or pouf of hair, everywhere flesh: troubled over, overexposed, neglected or too long attended to. Some of them were angels as he had imagined angels—willing, loose limbed, gentle about the face and hands—and some reminded him of sheitans, a constant evil at work behind their eyes and mouths, some hot fire alight deep in the center of their heads. The men shifted and nudged each other, and the women stood perfectly still. Finally the men who coupled with one another in the container every night began to walk the room and pull women to the center, where they grabbed their asses and shoulders and did a coarse dance to the smooth Italian pop that played from another room. Some of the women laughed and others did nothing, and after the dance ended, couples or trios began to disappear down a dark hallway, and soon only a handful of men and a few women were left. Saladin saw his brother on a couch in the far corner, a tall, black-eyed girl on his lap.
In the time after their mother died, the brothers felt what they felt together. Ali would find Saladin and insist, Let’s go for a swim, and the two brothers walked along the banks of the river to an eddy where Ali would hide behind a boulder and pull Saladin down with him to watch the Kurdish women who lived just outside the town wash their blankets, sheets and each other. For the first few visits there was no desire at the sight of them—sweaty, wet women who laughed and let their hair loose down their backs—and Saladin took in the scene with the same boredom and confusion and sadness that clung to him all the moments after his mother’s death. He let himself grow distracted, by the river and the birds and occasionally a girl his age who splashed more than she washed, but mostly he looked at Ali as he pulled at himself rhythmically with what seemed like expert hands, and Saladin waited and ached for his mother in a way that was, at best, painful.
One afternoon, focused on the sight of bare shins and dripping arms and shirts that opened and closed on bare chests, Saladin did as his brother did, and with the sudden release came an understanding, just as abrupt, that those sights produced a hunger that could be fed by the behavior of his hands and body, and, like this, he could carry desire around with him wherever he went. Saladin ran to the cinema and sat for the years of his boyhood and adolescence waiting for bathing suits, silk gowns, tight jeans, underwear, the right kind of T-shirts, to feed this new appetite. He tried to get Ali to come with him, and he did, once, and the brothers sat side by side, and Ali laughed the whole way through a movie with Natalie Wood. But she is a whore, Saladin jaan. Don’t you know? Jeddeh! After that, Saladin went by himself. He lived his life in game and jest and lust with the girls of the mountain town but saved all of his thickest fantasies for the women that floated off the screen: women with faces as big as buildings, bodies as tall and thin as trees, alabaster skin like poured milk. He imagined taking off their shoes, rolling off the sheer nylons, unbuttoning the skirts or slacks. In some of his imaginings the women were giants and he would climb over their breasts and hips and stand before the center of them, miniature, and take his time walking in. In all of these chimeras he excited himself most with the unwrapping, the slow reveal of this package and all of its heretofore-remote gifts.
The woman who sat on Ali’s lap had been unwrapped long ago, some part of her eaten, some already swallowed and a few bits spit out. Saladin tried to see a Sophia or Gina, but in the mud-red dark he saw the face a young girl who knew not what she wanted and the hung skin of a harridan that didn’t want anything, anymore.
Ali, what are you doing?
Ali looked at the girl’s knees and ran his hands gently between them.
Saladin jaan, why not? It was you who always said an American would be your first. I never said such a thing.
But here? We are almost in America, closer now …
Are we? Where are we, brother dear? Tell me so I can find this nowhere on a map. How many days or hours or months should I wait?
The girl ran her mouth against his neck. Her eyes stayed open and stared up at Saladin, feral and black.
Maybe, my brother, tomorrow we will die. Maybe we will die tonight. Shouldn’t we take this one pleasure with us?
As if she understood, the woman smiled at the word pleasure and kissed Ali’s forehead and then his temple. Ali closed his eyes to the touch, and when he opened them, the shade of their green, their stare, was cool and empty.
But what about Heidieh?
Ali lifted and dropped his shoulders. Saladin had never seen his brother so loose, so indifferent and lazy. He had been quiet and far on the boat, and now he was careless and coy. The woman raised herself from his brother’s lap, and her head reached much closer to the ceiling than Saladin thought possible. Ali stood shortly beside her, and she took his hand and led him down the hallway, where blackness took the outline of their forms, then the shapes of them and finally the sound of their steps.
Saladin sat alone with the Captain, the old woman, and two whores, one fat with blue eyes and a young woman with tiny teeth in a mouth that didn’t close. The room, even in its new emptiness, was warmer than before, and Saladin could smell himself and parts of everyone who had passed through.
Well, Khourdi? You are the shy brother? I wouldn’t have guessed it …
Saladin did his best to catch the eye of the woman with the small teeth. Though her lips did not press together, she had the face of one without enough air, suffocating. The polish on her nails was chipped, and her hair hung long and limp and thin down her back. And now that it was time for Saladin to do the thing that takes no thought, thoughts came vicious and obstinate: his mother’s flesh between her skirt and the short wool sweaters she wore in the winters; Haleh and Heidieh’s flesh that wore underpants and undershirts and swam in the river and threw rocks and kept close to him on the hot sand for warmth, their bodies bony and wet; the flesh of his brother when they fought; the flesh of the hands of the dead men, hands he wanted to reach down and hold as they crossed from warm to cold.
The captain winked.
Come, boy. We don’t have all night.
Whatever desire Saladin had held in the years since the first desire was now gone. The air in the room grew dense and he sweated at the thought of another’s body near his. He craved the cool cinema, the cold women just beyond his reach.
Which will it be?
The captain urged.
Saladin shook his head, little had gone as planned.
No. Merci. No.
Very well.
The captain signaled to the matron in the shawl.
I will take them both.
The two women followed behind the captain as if it made no difference whether they stood or lay down, for whom or how many. He watched the party leave, the backs of the women and their six slow feet, and Saladin knew then it had not gone as planned for the two whores either, and that they were like him, hollow of desire and locked in the not.
For the few hours it took, Saladin stayed in the hot room with the old woman who worked at the silk shawl and did not once meet his gaze. Heat pulsed through all parts of him, and he tried to walk out the same door they all came in, but the door was locked, the old woman useless to his demands to Open! In the end he lay in the middle of the floor and waited; never in his life had he been so hot, never had he felt heat for what it was, the body in slow, loud panic, and he would not know it again until his second day in Los Angeles, when he walks under a sun that pushes down and fills him with a slow, steamed dread. He is too nervous to go into the cinemas again and too hungry to stop moving, and he walks about and thinks to find work, thinks of his dirty hands and back
and feet, of the days and days of travel that, even after arrival, do not end. His feet move no faster than a shuffle, no faster than those of any animal trapped in a punishing atmosphere.
He walks into an area without houses, grass or bright storefronts. There are no women or children here, only block after block of concrete and cement lots wrapped in chain-link fences, gigantic structures with doors as wide as streets for the groaning trucks and their loads. There are buildings to house the colossal machines that do the work of a thousand hands, buildings that hold no flesh life, only the exchange of labor and steam, electricity and combustion. The warehouses are endless, one after the next, and Saladin stares into the open ones to catch a glimpse of the oiled appendages, the bellies of fire, the miniature men hatted and hard eyed, who rove about to prod and tame and feed the beast. He goes on, past other warehouses closed and dark.
From across the street Saladin sees a line form outside a rolled-up metal door. No sign announces the building or the business, no information explains the amassed, and the line is just a line, twenty or twenty-five men, various in skin and hair, all strong and low to the ground. Saladin walks and stands at the end of it, rests his feet and, for this moment, lets himself belong to something that accepts him.
The line moves in one-person increments, and Saladin does not speak to the man in front of him or the man behind him. The sun beats down over their dark heads, and one by one they disappear into a room under the rolled-up metal door. Some reappear with papers in hand, some without, but all wear a wet sheen across their faces as if whatever trial they went through in the office of the enormous building was even hotter than the trial of the sidewalk or the street. Saladin shifts his weight from one foot to another, moves the few inches forward and expects nothing.
When he is near the front of the line, he sees a small office with a glass window in the door. The man in the office gestures for the next in line, and the stocky man in front of Saladin goes in and closes the door behind him. They sit in an almost silence, punctuated by occasional movements of the lips and nods. All around them, inside the office and out, a horrible noise churns in the air—pneumatic hisses, collisions of metals. The sensation is that something tremendous is either dying or being born.
You ever work steel before?
Saladin understands the word work, thinks of the money he does not have on his second day in America and how soon, on the third and fourth and fifth and thousandth day, he will need money to eat, to be left alone, to live. He thinks of the hunger he felt this morning and just a few minutes ago. He nods to the man’s question.
Yes. Work.
You know your way around a crucible?
He knows if he answers in the affirmative the back door of the office will be opened and he can go to the place where the work is, where he is given the papers in the hand and can wear the nervous, resolved look that will make him one of them, a worker. He nods once more and, to make sure, mutters, Yes. Yes, because more than the work Saladin wants to see the machine, this machine that breathes and spits just behind the office door.
We pay cash. Two weeks on Friday.
Yes.
The foreman stares at him for a second after his answer and then another long second after that. Saladin cannot tell if he is skeptical or if the narrow look is simply his regular face. His eyes are small and set far back into his head. On his forearm a faint anchor is tattooed, beneath the anchor another tattoo, even more faint.
Let’s go have a look. I’ll know when you see her if you’ve ever seen her before.
The man is slow and patient in his movements and turns the doorknob with impossibly swollen fingers on an impossibly swollen hand. They walk out the back door of the office into a warehouse with windows high, almost too high to let in any light, and hot. Ash and dust cover everything and Saladin lets his eyes adjust to the dimness until only one thing is in front of him: a stove the size of a house, black encrusted on the outside and with the red glow of a giant’s hearth within; the source of all heat and noise; the behemoth. The men that work it are small and sweating and all of them in the same service. Now and again one of them opens a large metal door, and Saladin can see the tense, white heat at the center of the oven and the molten iron around it.
She holds thirty-two tons of oxidized steel.
The foreman walks toward the heat and Saladin knows to follow, knows this is the test, the trial that determines him as capable or not in this man’s world, as a worker here or wanderer on the streets. In the oven the crucible does not glow. It takes the fury of the heat that surrounds it, burns beneath, melts through, and stores it, conforms and contorts so that one element may change into another. Saladin stands as close to the insurmountable heat as he can bear. He breathes through his mouth because it burns to inhale through his nose; his clothes absorb the water that pours from him. In a moment he too will melt, leaving only the essential elements of his human form: the calcified teeth, the belt buckle, the bones and the fundamental ash: resistant; age-old; our common element. The foreman takes a step closer to the oven, his skin and T-shirt parchment dry, hands in his pocket and a proud push in his chest. He talks to the noise of the oven, to the hotbox and fire.
It is the heat that breaks it, takes the pieces apart, all the earth spent so long pushing together. You get the temperature up high enough and you can undo all that and then there is just steel. Strong steel.
He takes a step closer and Saladin tries to follow, to keep up, but the heat singes at his shirt, and the polyester of his pants from the tailor in Tabriz sizzles and his skin is on fire beneath it. Nothing about him can withstand the furnace before him, but he nods yes. Yes. Yes. Even though he understands nothing. Not the chemistry. Not the piercing heat in his lungs. Not the foreman’s words or the work of the machine. In the presence of the fire he only recognizes fire. The heat that keeps him at bay, that asks no permission to take him apart, melt him into an anonymous version of himself. When the foreman turns to look back at him, Saladin’s face and hair and shirt and shoes are wet.
The foreman laughs and the edges of his lips lift.
Thought so.
The foreman walks to the back door of the office, holds it open for Saladin and without a handshake opens it to the street and lets Saladin out in a gesture that lets the next man in.
The air on the street is only slightly cooler; Saladin can breathe it, see through it, just barely think in it, and he walks away from the warehouse and the slow-moving line of men who come to wait and then work and then dissolve into component parts in service to the steel.
By afternoon he has made his way downtown among the vendors and the tall buildings, and still the heat is inside him, a steady, strong burn that emanates from the gut, fills the nodes of the spine and glows throughout. Around him the city holds her own heat: the sharp blades of light reflect off the glass of skyscrapers, the cars and sewer grates and chrome, and over them the sun caresses it all. Though he walks and walks, Saladin finds no relief from mountain grass or cool rivers; there are only boulevards lined with desiccated plane trees, their bark drier than the inside of his mouth. He cannot think of a time when this slow walking will ever end.
He stops at a truck that sells food from a window in its side and watches the men order and then does the same as them. He holds up two digits, and when the food comes, the tortilla and the meat and the sprinkling of onions and cilantro, he runs away and the man in the truck shouts and then shakes his head but stays trapped in the truck. Moving, Saladin takes a bite and is burned by the hot oil of the meat, and the vendor—a melted man who sits in an aluminum truck in front of a hot stove under the hot sun and bakes himself each day—sees the thief suffer and laughs. The vendor’s laugh, the spit and sound of it, travel out from the little window of his truck and attach themselves to Saladin, who is molten and sticky and takes to him everything he encounters, for the heat has eroded the defense of clothes, of fear, ideas or determinations. He sees the tears drop from his eyes, warm and salty, and wa
tches as they become a part of the Los Angeles sidewalk. He runs and bites and chews, finishes the food, tastes nothing of it and moves on.
Like this the afternoon passes. The city gathers enough heat to melt all people into their constituent parts: the lips of smiles, the tremble of laughs, the blink of eyes, drops of sweat, the scent of fear or exhaustion or lust, chords of a call, the touch of hands and shoulder and hips in passing. Everything comes apart, attaches to everything else, seeks shade, cools and becomes anew, a little bit less of itself, a little more of the whole.
Saladin sits on a bus stop bench next to a Chinese woman in white pants and thick-soled shoes and a nurse’s cap. For a brief moment their thighs touch, and she leaves something of herself on his pliant body and he moves on. On a street where people sleep on stacked cardboard boxes, a man with a halo of white hair and dry, black skin comes from behind and slaps his damp shoulder. Hey, man! Hey! Hey, man! Saladin keeps moving but the man’s handprint is still there, on his shoulder, like a stamp. Across the street a girl runs from her brother and into the traffic. Her small body narrowly misses the bumpers of cars that honk furiously and brake with even greater fury. Behind her, a mother shouts and drivers shout and her brother laughs and the girl runs to grab Saladin by the leg. Her body, as tall as his knee, shakes, but she smiles up at him in a delirious terror. The mother pries her off, and the shape of her plump arms and small hands leaves a ring around Saladin’s thigh. Yes. Yes. Yes. He takes it all, lets the mold change shape, and moves his supple figure around the boulevards and alleys downtown and yields to it all—the games of children; the scowls of the old men gathered around dominoes; the confusion in the eyes of the men and women like him, just arrived; the mother’s frustrated yell; the empty hands of beggars that open and close and send all their want up into thin air. Yes. Yes. Yes. He has no choice, cannot, by strength of will, resist. The city is a furnace and the human elements therein crumble in the fire, morph into one another and so create a new element that belongs more to Los Angeles than to whatever oven held them before.
The Walking Page 10
