“Have you never looked in the mirror?”
“Not—not down there.”
“Never?” Miranda struggled to absorb this. Natural curiosity was apparently no match for religious dictates.
“We are forbidden from looking at ourselves naked in a mirror.”
“Even alone?”
“Aiwa.”
“Okay.” Miranda studied Tazkia’s face, the deep sadness rising behind her eyes. “Are you forbidden to look at yourself in a painting?”
Tazkia frowned. Then, a slow smile creeping into the corners of her mouth, “It’s not exactly addressed. I guess it’s what you call one of your ‘beige areas.’ ”
“Gray areas,” Miranda corrected automatically. “Let me show you something,” she said. Uncrossing her legs, she rose stiffly and crossed the diwan to pick up another book. Sitting once again next to Tazkia, she turned its pages until she arrived at “L’Origine du Monde, Courbet.”
“Let me show you,” Miranda said. “Let me show you how beautiful you are.”
—
AND THEN ONE night in the stifling dark of Miranda’s prison, her thoughts tumbling around in her skull, she wonders if instead there could be any connection with whatever it was that happened in Afghanistan. That mysterious something Finn would never discuss. Was that even possible? But that was more than seven years ago, she reminds herself. And there are different terrorist organizations here. It is pointless for her to dwell on it when she has no idea what Finn is keeping from her. She should have made him tell her before they married.
Even more than the men’s words, more than this death sentence to be carried out at an undetermined time, the silence terrifies her. To keep it at bay, to protect her heart from the sharp edges of memory, she talks and sings to herself. Not too loudly, in case anyone can hear, but loud enough for it to fill her ears and stop them against the emptiness. She speaks mostly in French and Arabic, fearful of being overheard. She wishes she knew the words to more songs. Her repertoire is woeful. But she remembers Christmas carols. These are what have stayed with her over the years. Not the pop songs she sang along to in her bedroom, dancing herself dry after a shower. Not the alternative rock songs she listened to on long car journeys. But the carols, she remembers. She tries to translate them into French or Arabic as she goes along, never managing to get all the words (manger, Hark! and yuletide proving particularly tricky) or to make them scan quite right. But it gives her something to do. Something to keep her mind from turning on itself.
It is amazing how close to the surface insanity rises when you are left alone with yourself, thinks Miranda. How quickly that membrane between sanity and madness threatens to melt away. She feels lunacy’s dark pressure in her skull, urging unfamiliar sounds from her mouth, strange prostrations from her body. Every day she has to develop new tactics to keep it at bay, to keep it from closing down around her. Music is one such tactic. It’s slightly harder to go insane while singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” though obviously not impossible. She thinks of Ophelia afloat on that flower-choked river, singing the names of plants. Wait, was she singing? Or was she just reciting? Miranda thinks of Ophelia as a singer, perhaps simply because of the position of her parted lips in the painting. She has seen Hamlet only once, but the image of Sir John Everett Millais’s Ophelia was burned into her brain through countless art history slides and trips to the Tate Britain. But Ophelia was not a real person, she reminds herself. She needs frequent reminding that the subjects of paintings are not always living. To her they so often are. Well, she thinks, if singing doesn’t keep a person from slipping from reality’s grasp, then at least it adds grace to the fall.
Why is it that keeping our own company drives us mad? Why is solitary confinement such a harsh punishment? How feeble our brains must be, to turn on themselves so easily. She can feel her mind salivating to cannibalize itself. To stop this, to distract this monstrous masochism of the brain, she creates schedules for herself. In the morning, she makes herself sing seven songs (or poems) before breakfast. They must be different songs and poems each day. Her selections include nursery rhymes, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Shakespeare, “Deck the Halls,” Tom Lehrer, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” She then does a few dozen abdominal exercises, push-ups, and yoga positions to slow the disintegration of her muscles.
Relief comes when Luloah arrives, often wailing with hunger. Miranda lives for the moments the baby first sees her, her small face radiant with undiluted joy. She draws out the nursing as long as possible, keeping Luloah at each breast, those dark eyebrows knitted together in concentration, until she falls off with exhaustion or satiety. When Luloah is there, Miranda narrows her focus to the child. She strokes the thick black hair, the velvety cheeks, the pinkish yellow soles of her feet. She sings. She tells her stories. And until the child is taken away again, she plays with her: patty-cake, peekaboo, raspberries on her tummy. Luloah is only just starting to laugh, bursting into delirious chortles when Miranda hides her face under her shirt and then emerges again. “Lucky girl,” Miranda tells her. “To forget how little we have to laugh about.”
When Luloah is gone, Miranda returns to her exercises, mental and physical. She tries to remember something, at least one thing, from every single year of her life, starting with her earliest memory. But chronology is surprisingly hard. The images of her childhood jumble together like photographs in a cardboard shoe box, shuffled all out of order. There is the house itself, of course, an airy blue-gray Craftsman bungalow, with a steeply sloping roof and wide front porch. Was her first memory of standing at the edge of their handkerchief-size back lawn behind their manual lawn mower, straining her plump little arms to push its two rusting wheels forward and failing, until her father placed his hands on either side of her and helped her to push it along the tiny patch of green? Or was it the awe-inspiring population of her ceiling? Surely the ceiling came first, given how much of her childhood was devoted to lying on her back, imagining alternative realities.
Her mother, Leonora, who normally produced artwork as abstract and opaque as possible, had covered Miranda’s pitched ceilings with all twelve of the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus. It was a concession to her daughter’s interest in identifiable images, this spasm of realism—if painting goddesses can count as realism. Miranda was so absorbed in the lives of the archaic gods that she shelved her Greek myth collections in her nonfiction bookcases. Those quarreling, humanlike deities were more familiar to her than any of her friends from school.
Nearly every night, her father had read to her from Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s illustrated Book of Greek Myths as Miranda sat in the bathtub until the water turned cold. She developed a morbid obsession with the illustration of Argus, with his eye-spotted body. How did he bathe when half of his hundred winking eyes were open at any given time, keeping watch over Io? When her father came to that part of the story, she would close her eyes, trying to shut out the distressingly eye-studded body, but curiosity always won out. She’d open one eye and squint at the drawing as she soaked in the fragrance of Leonora’s organic gardenia bath beads. How could he lie down, with eyeballs on every part of him? Were there eyes on the soles of his feet? On his bottom? Didn’t they get dirt in them? What would it feel like to get soap in fifty eyes all at the same time? She shuddered to imagine such vulnerability, and was very glad that Argus had been left off her ceiling.
Because Miranda had already read Aesop by the time she was started on Greek myths, she was conditioned to seek morals in literature. The Greek stories confused her. What, after all, was the moral of Argus, bored to death by Hermes’ soporific storytelling? Never to listen to a dull story? Never to close your eyes? Decent principles, she thought, though difficult to heed. Miranda’s father was unhelpful on the topic. “It’s just a story,” he’d say. “There doesn’t have to be a lesson.” But Miranda thought that there did. If you didn’t learn anything at all from a story, then what was the point? She wanted something she
could take with her when she walked away: a compass. She still feels this way about painting, that every square of canvas needs to help somehow in the living of life.
As a teenager she painted over the gods and goddesses on her ceiling, smearing on pure black, as though to erase her mother’s influence. She needed to start again, start from nothing. At first she simply retold fairy tales, painting Snow White marrying a dwarf; Hansel and Gretel building a cottage from carrots; and Rapunzel climbing down a rope she had made from her own hair, no prince in sight. I realized I was bisexual, she later told friends, when I wanted to be both Rapunzel and her rescuer.
Is painting helping her now, in the living of this half-life? No and yes. No, in that Magritte’s Attempting the Impossible is not about to spring the lock on her door and guide her to safety. But without the catalog of artwork in her brain, her arsenal against madness would be greatly diminished. At night, lying on the thin mat, she summons her favorite images, the phantasmagoria of Remedios Varo. She imagines a Catedral Vegetal over her head, a ghostly companion in her carriage, sails like dragon’s wings propelling her forward. She can remember the day she first discovered Varo in her local library, the way her heart staggered with an almost erotic enchantment. On those pages she watched boundaries fall away, rules of physics alter, and women summon mystical powers. Her mother had found her obsession with the solemn, hollow-cheeked women macabre, but Miranda had defiantly covered the walls of her room with prints of Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (depicting a robed woman dropping a man’s decapitated head into a well), Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River (a woman sailing alone in a ship fashioned from a waistcoat), and Encounter (a seated woman opening a chest only to find her own face peering out at her).
When her mind wanders from childhood memories, she returns to her first art history class, mentally flipping through the slides. Should she begin with the Paleolithic cave paintings of South Africa? The Sumerians? The Egyptians? It doesn’t matter. Today, she starts with the Venus of Hohle Fels. What is older? It hadn’t been part of her art history syllabus, of course, given that it hadn’t yet been discovered when she was in school. But it’s definitely the oldest. She closes her eyes and sees the swollen belly and stumpy legs, adds the strangely gravity-defying orbs of the breasts, imagines the person who first saw this image in that woolly mammoth tusk. For some reason, she thinks the sculptor must have been a woman, despite the belief-straining breasts. Miranda imagines the fat, headless woman as a kind of demigoddess. Perhaps wearing the zaftig female as an amulet increased fertility? But why no head? Was this purposeful or had there been one long ago, a head that had left no trace of its existence? These questions were the parallel bars around which her mind flipped and twisted, kept itself limber and strong.
Amulets and ritual appealed to Miranda’s love of the occult, of magic, of the unexplained, though she had no specific faith. The closest thing to religion Miranda was exposed to as a child was her parents’ unswerving belief in the moral obligation to recycle, buy organic vegetables, and vote in every election, no matter how minor. While Miranda has more or less adopted these tenets, the only thing in which she has true, passionate belief is painting. Only when sitting at an easel, funneling her mind’s images through the tip of her brush, does she feel the possibility of the divine. And now that has been taken.
—
AT NIGHT, WHEN Luloah is returned to her, she remembers the lullabies she would sing to Cressida. Cressie’s favorite was “Hush, Little Baby.” Miranda had never known all the real words, so she made up rhymes as she went along. “Hush, little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby. And if that lullaby won’t calm, Mama’s gonna buy you some Tiger Balm, and if that Tiger Balm’s not divine, Mama’s gonna buy you a green grape vine. And if that green grape vine won’t juice, Mama’s gonna buy you a friendly old moose, and if that friendly old moose runs away, Mama’s gonna buy you a brand-new day…” And so on. No matter what other verses she sang, she couldn’t help eventually arriving at a brand-new day. And then she would have to stop, rather than go on to say, “And if that brand-new day won’t dawn…” She could not bear to think of a day refusing to dawn for her daughter. Sometimes she got through forty-seven verses before coming to the brand-new day, sometimes it popped up after only nine. At least she does not have this problem when singing in Arabic or French.
Only when she sings these songs, to herself or to Luloah, does she allow herself to dwell on the memory of her daughter. She closes her eyes and wills the words back to the city, or to wherever Cressida and Finn are now, as if she still has the power to comfort her daughter. I will come home to you, she insists in the dark. I will come home. I will come home.
JULY 4, 2010
Miranda
Miranda was dressed for the firing range an hour before Tucker was scheduled to pick her up. He was always early. He had taken her with his team several times now, teaching her to fire a series of increasingly powerful arms. She began with a pistol and an AK-47, and worked her way up to an M16 and the Heckler & Koch G3 7.62 mm, with a recoil so powerful she had to fire it lying on her belly. In spite of her pacifist nature, Miranda went to the range because Tucker had asked her and she was grateful. In the first year, few people from the embassy had asked her to do so much as have a cup of tea.
Tucker was different. True, it was his job to protect her and Finn. But it wasn’t his job to befriend and entertain her. This was something he did of his own free will, and Miranda loved him for it. She would have loved him anyway, for the simple fact that he kept Finn safe from harm. Both he and his wife, Paige, had spent their entire careers in the armed forces, managing to spend only about half of their time in the same country. At the moment, Paige was in Iraq, and Tucker worked tirelessly so as not to feel her absence so acutely. In his rare off-hours, he worked just as tirelessly boosting everyone else’s morale. He hosted barbecues and costume parties and taught them all how to shoot. Always the first on the dance floor at a party, in a wig and miniskirt, he was also the last to go home. Men in the armed forces, it hadn’t taken long for Miranda to discover, were the most likely to cross-dress.
Today’s visit to the range was not optional. The CP team was going to try a “live extraction,” a series of maneuvers they would perform in the event of an attack on Finn or Miranda, in order to remove them from danger and get them to safety.
“You might want kneepads,” Tucker said when she opened the door. “I’m afraid we’re going to rough you up a bit.”
When she climbed down from the car an hour later, she gazed around her feeling—as always—like a visitor to another planet. Planet Men. Planet Guns. Bruise-colored mountains curved around them like a theatrical backdrop. The skies were the postcard-blue of the dry season, the sun having vaporized the last of the clouds. In front of her stretched an empty expanse of sand and dirt, heat rising from it in waves. No life in sight; no plants, no trees, no animals, no humans. This was the range. “You could close your eyes here, and open them in Kabul, and it would look exactly the same,” said Tucker. It sometimes seemed to Miranda that she was the only person in the country who hadn’t been to Afghanistan or Iraq. Even Finn had been posted to both places. The way the men talked about the dangers, the wild parties, and their cramped pods all in the same breath made Miranda feel she had missed out on something life-altering. She envied the bond among those who had survived.
While they waited for Finn to arrive from the embassy, the team scurried around setting up a long row of targets, black-and-white prints of a generic enemy with dramatic five o’clock shadows and a more than passing resemblance to Richard Nixon, crouched over his gun and glaring from under his helmet. The pictures were stapled onto sheets of plywood propped up in front of a vast sandbank, which absorbed the bullets after they passed through the targets.
Tucker put his men through a pistol drill with their SIG Sauers, blowing a whistle and shouting out, “Shimal!” or “Yameen!” (Left! or Right!) or “Khalf!” (
Behind!) In response the men cried out, “Ado Shimal!” (Enemy left!) or “Ado Yameen!” (Enemy right!) and fired.
After each drill, the men sprinted to the targets to watch Tucker count and chalk the number of bullet holes that would have killed the enemy—those that hit either the center of his body or his head. Most of the team could kill the enemy twenty-three out of twenty-six times. Mukhtar and Yusef were the best, but even tubby little Bashir was a pretty good shot. It gave Miranda confidence that they might actually be able to nail a terrorist targeting Finn—if they saw him first.
When it was her turn, Mukhtar helped fit her with a pair of noise-canceling headphones, reminded her how to load the magazine, and handed her a SIG. It felt light in her hands; a machine capable of a baker’s dozen murders in the space of a few seconds should have more heft. She fired six rounds, her heartbeat swooshing in her ears, hitting the target with about every third shot. Her aim was worse with the AK-47. Her first shot not only missed the target entirely and the board it was stapled to but also missed the entire sandbank, sailing up into the sky behind it.
“What’s behind there?” worried Miranda.
“I don’t know, but whatever it was is dead.” Mukhtar grinned at her.
“Want to try it on automatic?” asked Tucker.
No, thought Miranda. I really don’t. But she nodded and allowed Tucker to shift the appropriate lever. It took nearly all of her strength to hold the gun steady as it sprayed bullets; it was like trying to hold a jumping rabbit. A hot, homicidal, steel rabbit. The movies make it look way too easy, she thought. The targets remained unscathed.
“Ana mish tammam!” I’m not good!, she cried. The men rushed to reassure her. “Laa! Antee jayyida,” said Mukhtar. “You could kill someone!”
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