Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  “No?” She jumped up from the couch and glared at me. “You’ve met my mother and Fanny, but I’ve never met your parents. You didn’t take me to your grandfather’s funeral. And since your return you don’t seem interested in what we have, or once had. Are you trying to avoid talking about us? Are we still in love, Sal, or are we just getting by? Are we really together?”

  “Of course we’re together. Don’t be ridiculous,” I mumbled, but there was a constriction in my stomach. It wouldn’t let me meet her eyes.

  “Don’t patronize me. You’re obsessed with your own little world. Look, I have no problem with you giving time to your folks. Or your gramps’s work. But we’ve been together for three years and you still find excuses to steer me away from your family. This cultural thing that you claim to resent, you seem almost proud of it. Do you see what I mean?”

  “No.” I was beginning to get a bit angry. “And I’m not sure you do either.”

  “You’re lying. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Do I? Okay, lemme try to explain what my problem is. Look at me, Sara. What do you see?”

  She stared at me, shook her head. “I see a man who doesn’t know he’s lost.”

  “Wrong. You see a twenty-eight-year-old brown man living in a shitty apartment, doing a shitty job that doesn’t pay much and has no hope of tenure. You see a man who can’t fend for himself, let alone a wife and kids—”

  “No one’s asking you to—”

  “—if he doesn’t do something better with his life. But you go on believing all will be well if we trade families? Open your damn eyes.” I leaned against the TV cabinet, suddenly tired. “All my life I was prudent. I planned and planned and gave up one thing for another. Moved here. Never looked back. Did whatever I could to be what I thought I needed to be. The archetypal fucking immigrant in the land of opportunities. But after Gramps died…” I closed my eyes, breathed, opened them. “I realize some things are worth more than that. Some things are worth going after.”

  “Some things, huh?” Sara half smiled, a trembling flicker that took me aback more than her words did. “Didn’t your grandfather give up everything—his life, his family, his country—for love? And you’re giving up … love for … what exactly? Shame? Guilt? Identity? A fucking manventure in a foreign land?”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m not—”

  But she wasn’t listening. Her chest hitched. Sara turned, walked into the bedroom, and gently closed the door, leaving me standing alone.

  * * *

  I stomped down Highland Avenue. It was mid-October and the oaks and silver maples were burning with fall. They blazed yellow and crimson. They made me feel sadder and angrier and more confused.

  Had our life together always been this fragile? I wondered if I had missed clues that Sara felt this way. She always was more aware of bumps in our relationship. I recalled watching her seated at the desk marking student papers once, her beautiful, freckled face scrunched in a frown, and thinking she would never really be welcome in my parents’ house. Mama would smile nervously if I brought her home and retreat into the kitchen. Baba wouldn’t say a word and somehow that would be worse than an outraged rejection. And what would Gramps have done? I didn’t know. My head was messed up. It had been since his death.

  It was dusk when I returned home, the lights in our neighborhood floating dreamily like gold sequins in black velvet.

  Sara wasn’t there.

  The bed was made, the empty hangers in the closet pushed neatly together. On the coffee table in the living room under a Valentine mug was yet another note. She had become adept at writing me love letters.

  I made myself a sandwich, sat in the dark, and picked at the bread. When I had mustered enough courage, I retrieved the note and began to read:

  Salman,

  I wrote tried to write this several times and each time my hand shook and made me write things I didn’t want to. It sucks that we’re such damn weaklings, the both of us. I’m stuck in love with you and you are with me. At least I hope so. At least that’s the way I feel read you. But then I think about my mother and my heart begins racing.

  You’ve met my family. Mom likes you. Fanny too. They think you’re good for me. But you’ve never met my dad. You don’t know why we never don’t talk about him anymore.

  He left Mom when Fanny and I were young. I don’t remember him, although sometimes I think I can. When I close my eyes, I see this big, bulky shadow overwhelm the doorway of my room. There’s this bittersweet smell, gin and sweat and tobacco. I remember not feeling afraid of him, for which I’m grateful.

  But Dad left us Mom and he broke her. In especially bitter moments she would say it was another woman, but I don’t think so. At least I never saw any proof of that in my mother’s eyes when she talked about him. (In the beginning she talked a LOT about him.) I think he left her because he wanted more from life and Mom didn’t understand pick that up. I think she didn’t read his unhappiness in time. That’s the vibe I get.

  Does that excuse what he did? I don’t think so. My mother’s spent all her life trying to put us back together and she’s done okay, but there are pieces of herself she wasn’t able to find. In either me, or Fanny, or in anyone else.

  I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to end up like my mother. That’s pretty much it. If you didn’t love me, I’d understand. I’d be hurt, but I could live with it. But living with this uncertainty, never knowing when you might get that wanderlust I’ve seen in your eyes lately, is impossible for me. There’s so much I want to say to you. Things you need to know if we’re to have a future together. But the last thing I want to do is force you.

  So I’m leaving. I’m going to stay at Fanny’s. Think things through. It will be good for both of us. It will help me get my head straight and will let you do whatever you want to get your fucking demons out. So fly free. Go to Pakistan. Follow your goddamn heart or whatever. Just remember I won’t wait all my life.

  You know where to find me.

  Love,

  Sara

  I put down the letter and stared out the window. Night rain drummed on the glass. I tapped my finger to its tune, fascinated by how difficult it was to keep time with it. A weight had settled on my chest and I couldn’t push it off.

  If an asshole weeps in the forest and no one is around to witness, is he still an asshole?

  Nobody was there to answer.

  * * *

  For most of the fifteen-hour flight from New York to Lahore I was out. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I slumped into the economy seat and woke up half-dazed when the flight attendant gently shook my shoulder.

  “Lahore, sir.” She smiled when I continued to stare at her. The lipstick smudge on her teeth glistened. “Allama Iqbal International Airport.”

  “Yes,” I said, struggling up and out. The plane was empty, the seats gaping. “How’s the weather?”

  “Cold. Bit misty. Fog bank’s coming, they said. Early this year.”

  That didn’t sound promising. I thanked her and hurried out, my carry-on clattering against the aisle armrests.

  I exited the airport into the arms of a mid-November day and the air was fresh but full of teeth. The pale sea-glass sky seemed to wrap around the airport. I hailed a cab and asked for Bhati Gate. As we sped out of the terminal, whiteness seethed on the runway and blanketed the horizon. The flight attendant was right. Fog was on the way.

  At a busy traffic signal the cabbie took a right. Past army barracks, the redbrick Aitchison College, and colonial-era Jinnah Gardens we went, until the roads narrowed and we hiccuped through a sea of motorbikes, rickshaws, cars, and pedestrians. TERRORISTS ARE ENEMIES OF PEACE, said a large black placard on a wall that jutted out left of a fifty-foot high stone gate. The looming structure had a massive central arch with eight small arches above it. It had a painting of the Kaaba on the right and Prophet Muhammad’s shrine on the left with vermilion roses embossed in the middle. Another sig
n hung near it: WELCOME TO OLD LAHORE BY THE GRACE OF ALLAH.

  We were at Bhati Gate.

  The cab rolled to a stop in front of Kashi Manzil. A tall, narrow historical-home-turned-hotel with a facade made of ochre and azure faience tiles. A wide terrace ran around the second floor and a small black copper pot hung from a nail on the edge of the doorway awning.

  I recognized the superstition. Black to ward off black. Protection against the evil eye.

  Welcome to Gramps’s world, I thought.

  I looked down the street. Roadside bakeries, paan-and-cigarette shops, pirated DVD stalls, a girls’ school with peeling walls, and dust, dust everywhere; but my gaze of course went to Bhati and its double row of arches.

  This was the place my grandfather had once gazed at, lived by, walked through. Somewhere around here used to be a tea stall run by a Mughal princess. Someplace close had been a eucalyptus from which a kid had fallen and gashed his head. A secret that had traveled the globe had come here with Gramps and awaited me in some dingy old alcove.

  That stupid wanderlust in your eyes.

  Sara’s voice in my brain was a gentle rebuke.

  Later, I thought fiercely. Later.

  * * *

  The next day I began my search.

  I had planned to start with the tea stalls. Places like this have long memories. Old Lahore was more or less the city’s ancient downtown and people here wouldn’t forget much. Least of all a Mughal princess who ran a tea shop. Gramps’s journal didn’t much touch on his life in the walled city. I certainly couldn’t discern any clues about the location of the eucalyptus treasure.

  Where did you hide it, old man? Your shack? A friend’s place? Under that fucking tree stump?

  If Gramps was correct and the tree had fallen half a century ago, that landmark was probably irretrievable. Gramps’s house seemed the next logical place. Trouble was I didn’t know where Gramps had lived. Before I left, I’d called Baba and asked him. He wasn’t helpful.

  “It’s been a long time, son. Fifty years. Don’t tax an old man’s memory. You’ll make me senile.”

  When I pressed, he reluctantly gave me the street where they used to live and his childhood friend Habib’s last name.

  “I don’t remember our address, but I remember the street. Ask anyone in Hakiman Bazaar for Khajoor Gali. They’ll know it.”

  Encircled by a wall raised by Akbar the Great, Old Lahore was bustling and dense. Two hundred thousand people lived in an area less than one square mile. Breezes drunk with the odor of cardamom, grease, and tobacco. The place boggled my mind as I strolled around taking in the niche pharmacies, foundries, rug shops, kite shops, and baked mud eateries.

  I talked to everyone I encountered. The tea stall owner who poured Peshawari kahva in my clay cup. The fruit seller who handed me sliced oranges and guavas and frowned when I mentioned the pauper princess. Rug merchants, cigarette vendors, knife sellers. No one had heard of Zeenat Begum. Nobody knew of a young man named Sharif or his father who ran a calligraphy-and-design stall.

  “Not around my shop, sahib.” They shook their heads and turned away.

  I located Khajoor Gali—a winding narrow alley once dotted by palm trees (or so the locals claimed) now home to dusty ramshackle buildings hunched behind open manholes—and went door to door, asking. No luck. An aged man with henna-dyed hair and a shishamwood cane stared at me when I mentioned Baba’s friend Habib Ataywala, and said, “Habib. Ah, he and his family moved to Karachi several years ago. No one knows where.”

  “How about a eucalyptus tree?” I asked. “An ancient eucalyptus that used to stand next to Bhati Gate?”

  Nope.

  Listlessly I wandered, gazing at the mist lifting off the edges of the streets and billowing toward me. On the third day it was like slicing through a hundred rippling white shrouds. As night fell and fairy lights blinked on the minarets of Lahore’s patron saint Data Sahib’s shrine across the road from Bhati, I felt displaced. Depersonalized. I was a mote drifting in a slat of light surrounded by endless dark. Gramps was correct. Old Lahore had betrayed him. It was as if the city had deliberately rescinded all memory or trace of his family and the princess’s. Sara was right. Coming here was a mistake. My life since Gramps’s death was a mistake. Seeing this world as it was rather than through the fabular lens of Gramps’s stories was fucking enlightening.

  In this fog, the city’s fresh anemia, I thought of things I hadn’t thought about in years. The time Gramps taught me to perform the salat. The first time he brought my palms together to form the supplicant’s cup. Be the beggar at Allah’s door, he told me gently. He loves humility. It’s in the mendicant’s bowl that the secrets of Self are revealed. In the tashahuud position Gramps’s index finger would shoot from a clenched fist and flutter up and down.

  “This is how we beat the devil on the head,” he said.

  But what devil was I trying to beat? I’d been following a ghost and hoping for recognition from the living.

  By the fifth day I’d made up my mind. I sat shivering on a wooden bench and watched my breath flute its way across Khajoor Gali as my finger tapped my cell phone and thousands of miles away Sara’s phone rang.

  She picked up almost immediately. Her voice was wary. “Sal?”

  “Hey.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause. “You didn’t call before you left.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me to.”

  “I was worried sick. One call after you landed would’ve been nice.”

  I was surprised but pleased. After so much disappointment, her concern was welcome. “Sorry.”

  “Jesus. I was…” She trailed off, her breath harsh and rapid in my ear. “Find the magic treasure yet?”

  “No.”

  “Pity.” She seemed distracted now. In the background water was running. “How long will you stay there?”

  “I honest to God don’t know, but I’ll tell you this. I’m fucking exhausted.”

  “I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry. I smiled a little.

  “Must be around five in the morning there. Why’re you up?” I said.

  “I was … worried, I guess. Couldn’t sleep. Bad dreams.” She sighed. I imagined her rubbing her neck, her long fingers curling around the muscles, kneading them, and I wanted to touch her.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  Pause. “Yeah. Me too. It’s a mystery how much I’m used to you being around. And now that…” She stopped and exhaled. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She grunted. “This damn weather. I think I’m coming down with something. Been headachy all day.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. It’ll go away. Listen, I’m gonna go take a shower. You have fun.”

  Was that reproach? “Yeah, you too. Be safe.”

  “Sure.” She sounded as if she were pondering. “Hey, I discovered something. Been meaning to tell you, but … you know.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Remember what your gramps said in the story. Lightning trees?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, lemme text it to you. I mentioned the term to a friend at school and turned out he recognized it too. From a lecture we both attended at MIT years ago about fractal similarities and diffusion-limited aggregation.”

  “Fractal what?” My phone beeped. I removed it from my ear and looked at the screen. A high-definition picture of a man with what looked like a tree-shaped henna tattoo on his left shoulder branching all the way down his arm. Pretty.

  I put her on speakerphone. “Why’re you sending me pictures of henna tattoos?”

  She was quiet, then started laughing. “That didn’t even occur to me, but, yeah, it does look like henna art.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Nope. What you’re seeing is a Lichtenberg figure created when branching electrical charges run through insulating material. Glass, resin, human skin—you name
it. This man was hit by lightning and survived with this stamped on his flesh.”

  “What?”

  “Yup. It can be created in any modern lab using nonconducting plates. Called electric treeing. Or lightning trees.”

  The lightning trees are dying.

  “Holy shit,” I said softly.

  “Yup.”

  I tapped the touch screen to zoom in for a closer look. “How could Gramps know about this? If he made up the stories, how the fuck would he know something like this?”

  “No idea. Maybe he knew someone who had this happen to them.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “The heck should I know. Anyways, I gotta go. Figured it might help you with whatever you’re looking for.”

  “Thanks.”

  She hung up. I stared at the pattern on the man’s arm. It was reddish, fernlike, and quite detailed. The illusion was so perfect I could even see buds and leaves. A breathtaking electric foliage. A map of lightning.

  A memory of heaven.

  * * *

  I went to sleep early that night.

  At five in the morning the Fajar call to prayer woke me up. I lay in bed watching fog drift through the skylight window, listening to the mullah’s sonorous azaan, and suddenly I jolted upright.

  The mosque of Ghulam Rasool, the Master of Cats.

  Wasn’t that what Gramps had told me a million years ago? That there was a mosque near Bhati Gate that faced his house?

  I hadn’t seen any mosques around.

  I slipped on clothes and ran outside.

  The morning smelled like burnished metal. The light was soft, the shape of early risers gentle in the mist-draped streets. A rooster crowed in the next alley. It had drizzled the night before and the ground was muddy. I half slipped, half leapt my way toward the mullah’s voice rising and falling like an ocean heard in one’s dream.

  Wisps of white drifted around me like twilit angels. The azaan had stopped. I stared at the narrow doorway next to a rug merchant’s shop ten feet away. Its entrance nearly hidden by an apple tree growing in the middle of the sidewalk, the place was tucked well away from traffic. Green light spilled from it. Tiny replicas of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina and Rumi’s shrine in Turkey were painted above the door.