The Hidden Light of Objects

by Mai Al-Nakib

  It wasn’t until two years later, at the end of a summer filled with clandestine car rides and music played late into the night in other people’s rooms, that the first horror occurred. Mina came home one scorching afternoon to find her diaries in tidy piles all over her room. It was a New York City of notebooks, paper skyscrapers forming a grid across the floor. Her mother sat silently on the bed, Mina’s most recent diary butterflied open on her lap. It would be too easy and not exactly accurate to describe the look on her mother’s face as shock. It was more the look that follows shock. Her face was as still as a Himalayan mountain top, as if the nerves under her skin were no longer capable of accepting or responding to stimuli, her blood cells unable to advance single-file through her capill­aries. Her mother did not move as Mina walked into the room, but her exhausted eyes looked into her daughter’s, searching for something familiar.

  “Are these words true? Are these terrible stories about my family true? Have you really done such reprehensible things?”

  Mina found it impossible to slice her own silence with any plausible explanation. How, with the evidence set before them in its grid-like glory, could she explain that the truth could be stretched in more than one direction at once, that it wasn’t for her to say whether or not the words that emerged out of her pen, the words she had never thought to restrain, contained such a thing as truth? If anything, the diaries had always been a place for the dissolution of truth, where the truth could be picked apart and left to reassemble differently than it did on the outside. But it wasn’t Mina’s place to explain such things. She accepted the guilt implied by her silence. She accepted the tears that her words had caused to stream down her mother’s face as a judgment worse than any that could be meted out by an unforgiving and merciless God she didn’t believe in anyway. Mina would never be able to put together her mother’s broken face, at least not in her own mind’s eye, an eye, as it turned out, as focused as the confident Bedouin had once claimed.

  As far as Mina could see, the only solution was to burn everything. To burn every notebook, every piece of crumpled paper, every word on every scrap was the only way to rub out the betrayal and scrape the shame. Mina brought in large, black trash bags that smelled of petroleum, opened them wide, and started to layer the doomed lot one atop the other. There were exactly one hundred notebooks, all black, all with red corners and binding. She did not allow herself to think for too long about the contents of her one hundred notebooks. Her mind was like a huge desert moth with furry wings. With every downward flap, the unraveled coil in Mina curled tightly up inside her once again. This was the cost of betrayal, the price of atonement. If Mina had known that death would come anyway, sooner than either she or her mother ever would have believed, that survival could be stolen in a flash, would she still have burned the notebooks? Probably.

  The ensuing bonfire was celebratory. The stinking smoke of plastic bags and raped language did little to diminish this festival of imagined rebirth. Mina invited her sad mother and bewildered father to join in the late night merriment. Her mother acknowledged the gesture with a gentle hug. Her father, oblivious of his wife’s recent discoveries, wondered why this was happening. Nobody, not even Mina, could explain, and he quickly decided not to probe. The next morning, Mina could not get out of bed. Outwardly, her body registered a fever. Inwardly, it felt like her lungs and stomach had been scooped out. The violence of what she had done the night before hit her full force, and she didn’t think she could survive the realization. She felt herself deflating, becoming smaller and smaller, as small as a tadpole in a rotten swimming pool. She whimpered all afternoon.

  A tidy life was what Mina led after the big explosion of 1987. She continued to keep a diary but no longer crafted encounters or wrote stories. Her new notebooks contained mostly stolid accounts of the day-to-day, with hidden sparks. She invented a code so veiled only she could crack it, though not without fail. It was always possible that after a few years or hours she would lose the key. Wednesday, April 19, 1989. Interesting class on Romantic poetry could simply mean that she had enjoyed the class or that she had slept with the boy in the fourth row with the blazing gaze. Tuesday, May 29, 1990. Vanquishing desire could mean that she was clamping down on the unpredictable little eruptions of yearning that would suddenly scramble the surface of her complacency or that she had had an especially enjoyable breakfast.

  A few coded lines a year for over a decade, and then, the second horror, an event for which there could be no code.

  Sunday, September 9, 2001. Mother dead meant that disease had wracked her mother’s fading body for ten months, that tubes and machines had been intimately involved, and that she had slipped away forever one quiet afternoon in a medically induced sleep. Unequivocally.

  * * *

  Fifteen years after Mina’s decision to burn her childhood, her adolescence, to burn, essentially, herself, regret began its steady throb. The diary flow had slowed to an irregular trickle. There was no need for words when once wide-open dreams were slamming shut like shop-fronts in the gold souk at midday prayer. Mina’s coil of potential was now so tightly wound it was a knot inside her. The whirl of stories, half true, half something besides, stopped. She felt as futile as a mirage, all shimmer and no quench. She became what all children of promise and their teachers dread most: ordinary. Her life without words was as dull as stale cornflakes. But this she could have lived with because extraordinary events continued to happen even if nobody happened to write them down. What had become unbearable to her was not so much the absence of words present as the lament for words past.

  The realization crept up innocently enough early one morning in her mother’s bird garden. Unlike her grandmother’s room, her mother’s garden was not full of glamorous varieties. It attracted plain little sparrows that stopped to drink cool water from the terracotta dish hanging from the wide lacy branches of an old sidr tree. Her mother would thoughtfully fill the dish for them every morning at dawn. After her death, Mina continued to do the same, though, unlike her mother, she didn’t especially enjoy waking up early. Sometimes she slept late, and on those days small panting birds were left thirsty for hours, blinking at each other in confusion from across a dry dish. However, on this particular morning, Mina had managed to wake early enough to avoid guilt over parched chirps. She provided cool water then stretched her bones out on the grass.

  The sun was not yet overhead and it was breezy enough to forget that only two months earlier it would have been impossible to spend five minutes outside air-conditioned space. Mina was doing what people do when they have half an hour or so to kill before work or errands or taking care of responsibilities that once belonged to someone else. She was musing in random patches. Fidgety thoughts rested for a second or two before moving along. Her finger played casually with her bellybutton – that funny little cave which at one time linked her flesh so intimately to her mother’s. A stray petal of bougainvillea landed on her exposed belly.

  In Kuwait, bougainvillea is called mejnooneh, crazy, notably in the feminine. Crazy because the fuchsia tissues multiply with an exuberance bordering on madness despite the heat and dryness. That this unique form of insanity was marked feminine always appealed to Mina the diarist who, as a girl, imagined writing down her observations, her owlish insights, on hundreds, thousands, millions of crazy petals in gold ink and then releasing them into a sky as tragically blue as the Mediterranean. She pictured the massive cloud of pink tissue petals, gilded feathers without bird bodies to keep them together. She thought of the people who might glance up expecting to see nothing more exotic than a pigeon only to find a ball of fuchsia rustling overhead, low enough to reach up and grab. Each person would end up with a single petal. If they were lucky, it would be meaningful to them. If not, and they happened to be standing beside someone who had also grabbed at the impossible floating pinkness, an exchange could be arranged. For example, It is sometimes unreasonable to expect the world to mirror your responses could be traded for Cacti that lo
ok like artichokes are wrapped blessings. Or, To be left alone in a lonely place means only that joy is invisible, not absent might be swapped in favor of Stairs may lead to nowhere and doors may open onto a steep drop. The young Mina had filled pages and pages with her fragments, believing, with a degree of arrogance masquerading as largesse, that one day they would firework the desert skies as never before.

  Mina tried to peel the mejnooneh petal off her belly with her thumb and forefinger, attempting, unsuccessfully, to keep it intact. It was crushed, leaving in its place the electric pink dust that memories are made of. Inhaling this memory dust was pleasant enough at first. Fuchsia tissue petals and gold ink, parrot feathers and mysterious pouches, recommended books and The Wizard of Oz. But it wasn’t long before towering paper sky scrapers began to shadow the horizon and, worse still, to come tumbling down. Red triangle corners started to bleed into the white muslin of memories fluttering in her head. She felt the loss of each moment twice, first to flames, then to time. Mild discomfort turned into a gigantic concrete brick of anxiety lodged tightly in her throat. She couldn’t swallow, but she ached to regurgitate the pages burned to ashes. What had she done? What had she done? She descended into a notebook-shaped hell of her own making. She was now in her thirties with a lost-and-gone-for-ever past and a future she couldn’t put into words. She had shed her writing skin with such effervescent ease. Now she was paying a price that had not been disclosed up front. She didn’t know how to sweep the ashes back to the place where words resided.

  After the morning in the garden, the brick-in-the-throat panic would knock Mina out anywhere, any time of day or night. There were no special triggers after the petal of bougainvillea, though she got into the habit of reading the world as a basket of signs addressed especially to her. Without being aware of it – it had become an unconscious tic – she would go through the day trying to single out which sign would this time jolt her back to the years she could not rewrite. Which mark among many would fill her mouth with a cement taste she could not rinse out? Would it be that snag in her navy pleated skirt? That light sneaking through the keyhole? That chewed-up red pencil with the small plastic compass attached? That faded white box in the gutter melting a touch more every day? That folded paper boat with the finger smudges? That fish in the heavy silver tray? In her head she prepared compressed captions for the proliferating signs around her, which she registered as Polaroid shots:

  Snag in navy blue

  Sneaky light

  Teeth-pocked pencil

  Melting boxes

  Folded boat

  Fish

  While the others remained in her head, this last one she wrote down thoughtfully in a slim notebook of cheap recycled paper she had recently bought at the supermarket. Fish.

  And then curiously and without warning, after two years of caption lists and bricked-up breathing, after seventeen years of diary death, something more.

  Wednesday, July 21, 2004. When my mother died, the fish in the sea committed collective suicide. Millions upon millions of broken fish washed up on shore and the entire country smelled of rotting corpses. It should have been a national emergency, but it wasn’t. Private citizens responded in odd and quiet ways. Some walked along the silvered shoreline shaking their heads in dismay, mouths and noses sheathed with head scarves and hands. Others stayed home to avoid breathing the noxious air, as they had in the days of the burning wells. Public announcements declared that only the heads were poisonous but that all other fish flesh was healthy to consume. Fish head soup out; fried fish tails in. Newspaper experts objected to government claims but offered no explanations of their own. It didn’t matter since there were neither heads nor tails of fish left in the sea to eat. People murmured jagged concern in private corners. But mostly the population just got on with a life without fish. I, however, like a forgotten phantom at the end of a dark corridor, cannot get on with a life without fish. I mourn for them, for my mother, for the loss of my life in the present tense.

  IV

  Ice in the desert. Not in Switzerland or Germany or Wisconsin. Not in a place where lakes turn milky as waters slow in late autumn, then stop for a while. To walk into an ice rink in the full heat of the desert and to feel your cheeks rise pink is miraculous and makes you believe that anything, just about anything, is possible.

  Every Wednesday, the last day of the school week, we would all meet at the rink in the early evening. Standing around outside before the doors opened, we would eye the competition from other schools and try to find out what was happening that weekend, where the party was going to be. At the rink: the best greasy fries in the world and Michael Jackson blaring, a star, a hero, and, we were convinced, Billie Jean’s lover. At the rink: learning to lace up skates, learning that kissing involves wetness, tongues, time. At the rink: holding tingling hands with girls, with boys, with both if you wanted, knowing it was all right, Michael muffling the wail of mosques outside.

  Alex would come to the ice rink to skate seriously. He played hockey on Sundays and Tuesdays. On Wednesdays, he would whizz through the rest of us, blades so sharp they sprayed a fan of snow when he stopped, hard and sudden. There’s an Alex at every school – beautiful, athletic, smart. But the Alex at our school was also distant, like he was hiding something, which made him even more wondrous in our eyes. We all worshipped Alex – German-Palestinian god – whose second cousin on his father’s side would, in a few years, accidentally blow himself up in a garden. Alex was the girls’ common denominator, our irresistible sorcerer. Kissing Alex at the rink – just that once – was kissing moonlit perfection. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and I lifted my chin up to meet Alex’s lips. A throwaway kiss at the rink, like kissing glory. We hardly exchanged a word. We exchanged, instead, our youth in small, private packets. In that worn army jacket, he was, for an instant, mine. He smiled so rarely, tall, flawless Adonis, but that night – just that once – he smiled for me.

  Years later, I heard from someone, I can’t remember who, that Alex was damaged, somehow broken. It’s very possible. Alex was, after all, too good for the universe to allow to be true for too long. That night at Elsa’s, all I could do was jump up and down on her bed screaming, “I kissed Alex! I kissed Alex!” It could never, not ever, get better than Alex at the rink.

  Playing with Bombs

  Death is not what they promised. No one-way ticket to paradise. No special dispensation for martyrs. No houris. Those houris were supposed to be awesome. I looked all over for them after the blast. Nothing. Time seems to pass over here, though I’m not exactly sure how it moves. In the ways that count, I think I’m still fifteen.

  I had friends who could identify every specimen of bomb. I would stand around rolling my eyes and gnawing into my cheek as they rattled off names, model numbers, and destructive capabilities. Some of them sat around all day making lists like the ones kids in normal places make of their favorite athletes or rock stars. I was surprised they didn’t hide posters of artillery under their pillows in place of Playboy centerfolds. My best friend Rami had photocopies of Playboy pictures hidden under his bed, and, God forgive us, they were fantastic.

  I, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less about explosives. I hated what they did and never got angry enough to want to use them, not even against our sworn enemies. That made me different – a loner, an outsider, on the fringe. Oh, and I loved that. I was fifteen and reading Camus and Dostoevsky, what do you want from me? A couple of years earlier, there was the intifada. That was a dynamite moment, and I was as fired up as all my friends were. Everyone who knew me made fun of the fact that at last something had yanked me out of my corner and into the streets. “From books to stones, eh, Nimr? This is what it takes to get your head out of the clouds?” I would have been a stone myself if I hadn’t been stirred by what kids like me were trying to do. While stones are weapons, they aren’t bombs. I felt I could get behind stones with a clean conscience. The other side didn’t use stones to fight back, I promise you. To even the fie
ld, our side started to pick up less innocent objects too. That’s when I drifted back up into my clouds. Not everyone is made for fighting.

  I was the youngest of four boys. My mother always said, “Three for me and one for the cause.” I figured, being the youngest, I was okay. Little did I know. Don’t get me wrong, I cared about the cause. I wanted liberation for Palestine as much as anyone. I was sick of being caged in, tired of having to shuffle paper to move from A to B, fed up, most of all, of watching my dad struggle to piece together in his mind his decimated village, his father’s rock-smashed knees. Most of the time, though, I worried about other stuff. I wanted to figure out this whole girl thing. I was desperate for a girlfriend and thought I was making headway with Sireen. Sireen’s hair looked like Medusa’s, whose picture I had seen in a book about art my father kept in the glass cabinet with all his special books: the OED, The Times Atlas of the World, and the one on human anatomy with glossy foldouts. She scared me a little, Sireen. She was wild, I could tell. I was sure we were destined to be together. She lived next door and we saw a lot of each other coming and going. I let my eyes linger. Her eyes would dart away quickly, then come back slowly. I knew she probably liked me too.