by Mai Al-Nakib
Julie remembers walking up to Yannis in her straw hat, its thin red ribbon fluttering in a lulling breeze. She wants him, his fingers on her thighs, her scooped, half-moon belly, her arms lifted above her head, elbows back like a taught bow, like a bird. She wants him to watch her as she struggles to come up for air, for his hands to hold down her hips, to anchor her, to keep her from drifting. She wants him to speak to her in lilting, foreign French, sometimes unexpectedly harsh, with a word that could as easily be Arabic as Greek. She wants his northern light, misleadingly northern. She assumes he is from Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo. But even after she finds out where he is from, she wants the incongruity – her father’s girl – of his northern fairness and his languid, southern solidity. She wants. She desires. And when Jules is born, she wants him too. His ten fingers and toes, tinged blue at first, then rose, his teal blue eyes, his round head crowned with blond wisps, his dimples twinkling. With Zoé it is different. On a bed for months, blood dripping slow, then infuriatingly fast, then slow, thinking only of her mother, how they have no language to connect them, the cord cut by her father, by French, too early, far too early. But for months on that bed, checking the rate of drips every fifteen minutes – as obsessively as her son rubs his forehead with that demonic clown’s head – she connects with her mother again, maybe for the first time, in a language without words, a language of fear. Her Zoé, ceramic doll, nearly lost in the drips when they come too fast, almost too fast to stop. Her mother is far away, as always, nowhere near her. They will never be close, not like they were in the first flashes of Julie’s life, a red ribbon fluttering inside her mother. Her mother is never close, and later, her mother will be mash on the ground, a final fall down, at that moment finally free.
If the three of them are taken away from her – die, vanish, go – she might be free too. Or, if she takes herself away – dies, vanishes, goes – she might set them free. On the back of a flying cat. It makes perfect sense. The three of them on a catamaran flying through indigo waters. She will put it in the section called “Things I Shouldn’t Be Capable of Thinking but Am” or, possibly, “Wonders of the World.”
VIII
Encounters are contingent. The unique beauty of a perfect encounter is in its chance occurrence. A young girl sits in a corner under a tree and a teacher she has had a crush on for years slides up beside her and whispers, “Stay out of my dreams, kiddo,” then moves on, and she knows that fortune has played a distinct role. It’s the kind of line that ends careers. The kind of line parents today will tread razors to try to prevent from being thought, let alone uttered. But it happens, despite their best efforts. It happens, one near catastrophe at a time.
The very best encounters are quick as silver, over in a flash, leaving behind a residue of sparks glinting in the late afternoon sun. We wonder, after such encounters, whether they happened at all, trying frantically to trace the logic of their unfolding. He risked everything to tell me I was appearing in his dreams. I was meant to shoulder the blame, apparently, turning up as I was without his permission. I wasn’t supposed to be there, and he was choosing this moment beneath a shady tree, under a dusty white sky, to order me to stay away. But in his instruction, how could I not detect the small unruly excess? “Kiddo” signified endearment. “Kiddo” marked his desire for me to return, over and over again. “Kiddo” meant it was an encounter he wanted, despite his strict disavowal. He wanted me in his dreams and, more importantly, he wanted me to know I was already traipsing through them. Unquestionably, he understood that – apart from this exceptional encounter under a tree – there could be nothing more than dreams. Still, even now, I can’t deny the pull of that encounter, its imperative beckoning, its excess – that kiddo – frothing over.
Snow Dossiers
I sought to share
the life of snow
and fire.
Adonis, “The Passage”
Charles isn’t happy with the shape his ending is taking. He is no longer a young man. He realized this on his fiftieth birthday, his wife, his age, by his side, his few friends, no younger, in view. Looking at them, puffier than he remembered, he knew he had finally crossed the line. He never thought it would happen to him. Rushing like the wind through his thirties and forties, he never thought time would one day arrest. He had assumed it would extend the way it always had for him. No one is that special.
The year Charles turned fifty was the year his father died in his sleep. His father had deserved to die a quiet death after all he had been through, but Charles isn’t convinced anyone dies quietly. Failing organs must induce consciousness. Dying bodies surely seek a last glimpse around, one final farewell. Charles can see no possibility of peace in it. The thought of his father awake alone for the last time continues to torment him. Losing his father and turning fifty the same year had not been easy.
It is astonishing to Charles the way trees can withstand the weight of wet snow, the push and pull of the wind. Squirrels and possums scramble to the tips of branches delicate as lace and they will hold. It is coming down to such details, tessellated mosaics in his head. He often sits out on the porch mesmerized, looking at the trees, the half-hidden horizon, the rain, if it is falling, or the snow, blue crystals floating down. He drifts through a passage, a leaf on the wind, till Meredith comes out, splintered with worry and exhaustion, to coax him back inside.
Mere is good, one of the good ones, like his old man. Mere is kind, generous, selfless. Mere is beautiful, still simply lovely with gray hair brushing honey shoulders. Mere notices details, the small things he is only now paying attention to. She pointed these out to him incessantly over the years of their life together, even when they were teenagers and just friends.
Watch for the pink patch under that bird’s wing, Charles.
Look at the amethyst light reflecting against that shop window.
Charles, isn’t it funny the way kites catch the wind, almost trapping it, and the way the wind slips out from underneath, victorious no matter how long it takes?
Mere charms Charles, though slightly less as the years have accrued. Charm is less important than goodness, however, and it is for her goodness that Charles belongs to Meredith, his wife of thirty-seven years. Meredith and Charles were both twenty when they married, a few months before graduate school. They were going to be teachers. They had known each other in high school, lived in the same neighborhood, were good friends. They hadn’t started dating, hadn’t fallen in love till college. Charles often wonders why it took so long. Why weren’t there flashes of light or extravagant minor chords in the air from the start? At the time, he had convinced himself it was because theirs was an adult relationship, a partnership to raise healthy, confident children. Meredith was good, so incredibly good, and Charles had fallen, without fireworks, for that goodness. But goodness does not transfer. Being with someone good does not make you good. This it would take years for Charles to comprehend.
Charles was nine when his mother died. When he turned twenty-seven he was shocked to think it was the age his mother was when she died. When he turned twenty-nine he was shaken to the roots of his teeth realizing this was the same age his father was when he lost his wife. It scared Charles and it scarred him, though only now is he beginning to recognize how deeply. Charles loves Mere, some years more than others, but he does not love her the way his father loved his mother. He knows this because his father never, not once – despite how ridiculously young he was when his wife died – contemplated remarrying. They were married only ten years. His father said it was enough for a lifetime. His was the kind of love that did not fear loneliness. It was a brave love, a love that could face death standing up. “In her way, she died alone,” he would say whenever Charles dared suggest he try to meet someone else. “For her, I will too.” And he had, alone in his bed, sleeping soundly, his only son thousands of miles away. The doctor had tried to reassure Charles many times that it was peaceful, that his father had not woken up. Charles remains skeptical.
&nbs
p; Charles’s life was punctuated by a series of crises, its trajectory propelled by moments of profound misfortune – about one a decade. He wonders whether this is how it is for everyone. The first crisis was the death of his mother when he was nine. Growing up, his father never explained anything. Not till he was twenty-seven could Charles bring himself to ask his father how exactly his mother had died. He suspected cancer because of her hair. Breast cancer, his father confirmed.
Cancer wasn’t an illness mentioned much in the late 1950s, certainly not in the suburbs of St. Paul. It was confusing for Charles since his mother seemed fine most of the time. She laughed and made jokes; she cooked for them; she teased his father till his cheeks burned and his lips curled up. But Charles had a dark, hard sense in the space between his ribs and his lungs that things were not quite right. Whispers at night, furtive trips in the late afternoon when he was left with their neighbor, sixty-year-old Mary, who smelled of urine and something else, acrid and cutting, troubled him. Charles hated being left alone with Mary, but he knew to stay quiet, grateful his mother came back that evening or the next day. When his mother’s hair began to fall in clumps, he thought nothing of it. Falling hair is not experienced as traumatic if your mother makes it seem normal, which his did. He said nothing, and nothing was said to him, though his mother, toward the end, would hold him tight in her arms at night when she thought he was asleep and breathe in his hair. He would never forget the feel of her cool hand on the back of his neck.
His father worked hard to construct a happy home. He mentioned his wife often so his son would not forget her. He never brought up her illness or her death, but he talked about everything else constantly. He tried as hard as he could to leave the sadness off to one side so Charles would not be burdened by it. Charles was brought up by his father and by the cheerful ghost of his mother. He felt lucky to be cared for by such a good and giving man. Through his childhood and adolescence, he endured silently the hole left in him by his mother’s absence, never once mentioning to his old man that a happy phantom couldn’t fill it and that memories hurt.
Charles’s second crisis came, unsurprisingly, at twenty-seven. What mattered about his second crisis was its outcome. He and Mere were teaching in St. Paul. She taught second grade. He taught seventh and eighth grade science, ninth grade in a pinch. They had been married for seven years. They had been trying to have a baby for seven years. They both wanted children. It was his fault they couldn’t. His sperm wasn’t quite right. Mere was devastated by the news, as was he. He felt inadequate and small, less of a man. Mere ached for a child, that’s how she put it in the early years, before they knew for certain. Once they knew whose fault it was – and he registered the fault as damning – she never mentioned words like “ache” or “desperate” or “yearn” again. She filed such words, along with “family” and “babies,” away from herself and from him forever. Her students became her kids. It took him many years to learn to tolerate being around young children. Charles and Mere never considered adoption.
The weight of his mother’s lost youth and the regret over his own lost children drove Charles to finalize a decision they had been thinking about for a few years. There were, in the 1970s, many openings to teach at international schools all over the world. One of the reasons Charles and Mere, neither of whom had ever been outside Minnesota, decided to go into teaching in the first place was because they thought it might allow them to travel. Charles’s second crisis pushed them to make the break. Apart from occasional visits to Mere’s parents and Charles’s father, they would not return to the US for twenty-three years. Initially, they planned on Europe – Paris or Frankfurt or Rome – but that didn’t seem foreign enough. The Middle East – its sun and dunes together with murky fantasies they both had about tents and camels – beckoned more insistently.
They spent their first four years in Cairo, teaching at the Cairo American College. The following eight years, the longest they every stayed in one place, they taught at the American School of Kuwait. Next, they moved to Pakistan for four years and worked at the International School of Islamabad. They had not expected to stay that long in Pakistan. They figured two years out of the Middle East, for a change, and then back. But their closest friends moved there from Kuwait the year after they did and planned on staying, so Mere and Charles decided to stay too. It was hard to make close friends moving around as much as they did. Veronica and Tom were worth staying for, despite what happened later in Lebanon, the mess he made of their friendship. Their next destination was Abu Dhabi, teaching at the American Community School there. For the last three years of their expatriate life they taught at the American Community School in Beirut. Their final contract was cut short with the news of Charles’s father’s death. And after Charles’s own diagnosis, there was no going back.
The Middle East was infuriating but, to this day, Charles would rather be there than anywhere else in the world. He loved its heat, the weight of its air. He loved the way the light could switch from Mediterranean blue to dull beige or mud brown. Once in Kuwait there was a dust storm that turned the sky maroon, the color of blood let from the slit throat of a goat. The air was still, silent, not gusting the way it usually did during dust storms. The red dust, so many floating atoms, hung in the air. It was exciting to see the sun suspended in the sky, to look at it directly without having to squint, to see it matte, pomegranate-toned, and flat with burnt edges. That happened only once while they were in Kuwait, but there were other storms in other places. He remembered coming upon the pyramids at Giza for the first time through a dust storm so fierce it obliterated the Nile, erased it completely from view. The pyramids and the Sphinx were still there, plopped casually in the desert, the dust behaving the way mist might in Ireland.
Charles coveted every storm the Middle East threw at him.
He also loved the corniches, roads that ran along the shore. There was one in Cairo, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and in Beirut. He imagined every Arab country had some version of a corniche. To drive down a corniche in the Middle East with the window down, even in the hell of summer, made him feel invincible. It did something to the lining of his heart, softened it, allowing his chest to expand. It felt like the fulfillment of a silent promise. He had no clue why driving down any road would have this kind of effect on him but it did.
Unlike his fellow expats, Charles was endlessly entertained by all the bukra inshallahs. The slapdash, give-me-cash mentality did not repulse him. His sensibilities were simply not that delicate, and he was not so deluded as to believe these traits were exclusively Arab. His colleagues were brought to the edge of madness by the disorganization of the bureaucracy and, worse still, by everyone’s shrug-of-the-shoulders attitude. Driver’s licenses, health cards, IDs, visas, telephone lines, everything, but everything, would take months and months to obtain, and if you complained you got a glazed stare and the ever ready bukra inshallah, tomorrow God-willing. He watched young teachers cry because they had been promised on somebody’s father’s grave their phone line would be functional the following day. They had been looked in the eye and sworn to that it would work. It never did. Not the following day, not the day after, and not the day after that. Not until some gears were greased would that phone line crackle to life. None of this fazed Charles. It grounded him. It made him feel safe.
* * *
Now, at fifty-seven, he is far from grounded. He is unraveling or already unraveled. There are the little details he picks out daily. Those help. He counts them one by one, the way old men at outdoor cafés in Cairo or Beirut worry their beads or the way he used to count his marbles when he was a little boy. Most of the time, though, he feels like he is being lowered into an icy lake. He feels his toes go in, then his ankles and calves up to his knees. He hangs there for a bit, the blood in his feet and lower legs thickening. After about a minute or so, he is lowered again, half his torso in the frozen water, his extremities mercifully numb and brittle. He is plunged in quickly after that, the frigid water closing over his h
eavy head with a swoosh. He never struggles, his body a bag of stones. He welcomes the pricking fire of the water. None of this means Charles wants to die. He is certain he doesn’t want that yet, not for a while. There are still the details to collect and the layers of memory to archive.
What does one teacher matter? In particular, what is the weight in worth of a childless teacher, a man not always good? Not much, he is beginning to figure. When the young pharmacist with the blue-black hair hands him his orange plastic cylinder of pills, presents them to him with an unsolicited smile, it brings him to tears. It is one of the details he counts. Though her smile to him is probably genuine, what does it disclose about his value to the world? Not a thing.
He has done wrong in his life, and it weighs heavy on him, makes it excruciating to be alone. He is not a bad man. He did not, for instance, practice the inveterate evil of a serial killer. He just isn’t good, not the way Mere is, not the way his father had been. At the time, he hadn’t lost any sleep over it. What had he done? He had slept with a number of women other than his wife. Ten other women. If Mere had left him when he was in his forties, he would have recovered. He would have felt lonely for a while, but he would have still been young enough to believe something else was possible, that a different breed of passion was attainable with a different woman for a different version of a lifetime. He knows now, especially in his state, it is too late. Who would want him, old man before his time? Mere is a saint for staying, for loving him despite his behavior, which she knew all about, which he never (except for that one shameful encounter under a tree he would take with him to his grave) tried to hide from her. What kind of woman would put up with what he had done? Even now he isn’t sure why she is still here, not that he is ungrateful. He is grateful every day, so grateful it makes his heart as limp as his dick.
