The Hidden Light of Objects

by Mai Al-Nakib

  Amerika’s obstinacy meant she had to deal every day with the acid gaze of teachers and the cruelty of classmates. Suffering years of their relentless pestering was draining, sometimes almost more than Amerika could bear. She put up with it because she knew in four years it would all come to an end. In four years she would finish secondary school and go to university. She would be the first in her family to do so. She would study English literature and it would set her free. That dream, along with satellite TV and her beloved books, kept Amerika going. She would have wanted her teenage years to mirror Betty and Veronica’s. Going to the movies on a date, pool parties and bonfires on the beach, spin the bottle and first base, chili fries and root beer floats with her best friends forever on Saturday afternoons. She would have wanted the Macy’s Day Parade and touch football on a nippy fall day. Footloose and fancy free, fun in the sun, and the devil take the hindmost. That would never be hers. Still, she knew she had more than most, so she put up with her solitude and with the bitterness of others. She put up with it because she had her box to put it into.

  Amerika’s box was for the extras, for the not quite rights but the wanting it anyways. Every desire to and yearning for was there. Some objects remained in compartments for months, even years. In other compartments there was a tornado of changes. From a red Lifesaver, to a snippet of jeans, to a cherry-flavored condom virtually overnight. She played her box like a virtuoso musician, fingers flying across compartments, folding, unfolding, arranging, rearranging, sliding in, pulling out, ceaselessly. She spent hours hunched over it, examining it from every angle, carefully considering what belonged beside what and for how long. The hours of the day she was away from it, she was thinking about it, drawing maps, making lists. Her maps looked like constellation charts, her lists like clever haikus. Amerika’s box was her escape, her window opening when the doors, one by one, were clicking shut.

  * * *

  When the buildings came down, everything changed. Suddenly it was no longer Amerika and America together. Now it was the Axis of Evil and terror under every rock; it was us and them and never the two shall meet. Amerika was, lickety-split, completely alone. Her name, no longer exuberance to others, often triggered fury and furrowed brows. Her box had been her portal to elsewhere, her string of idioms a fishing line to an alternative pond, bigger and better. Instead of marriage and children, instead of a dead-end job at a ministry or bank, instead of segregated tea parties, her box and her album were travel and ambition, optimism and go-getting, mountain climbing and paragliding. But after the buildings came down, Amerika slowly turned into a half-knit sweater unraveling. She started to come undone like the laces of bright white Converse hi-tops. To stop the weighted stones, the magnet pull, Amerika began to collect buttons for the compartment where three Tootsie Rolls used to be. Ghost white buttons. Misty rose and dim gray buttons. Firebrick red and burnt sienna buttons. Buttons of pale flesh. Buttons for empty spaces, for something missing, for reaching outward and spreading she wasn’t quite sure what or where to anymore. Her search for the right color buttons held things in check for a while, through secondary school, until she turned seventeen and heard about the ring of fire around Baghdad.

  Iraq was the other side of Amerika. It was as much for Iraq as for America that Amerika was named, though in a different direction, away from rather than toward, despite rather than because of. Growing up, she hadn’t given much thought to Iraq, to Iraqis. Saddam Hussein was the bogeyman lurking under the bed with spindly green fingers waiting to grab unsuspecting ankles. But Saddam was not death to Amerika. He was no longer a threat, no longer armies marching in, tanks rolling down the Fifth Ring Road, hellfires burning. He was no longer bullets in brains and homes gutted, at least not for Amerika. She didn’t know Saddam had made her father cry for the first time in his adult life, had made her mother get down on creaky knees to take her husband’s head in her hands, to smooth away foreign tears, to knead hard the strangeness of being taken over, gulped up in a day. Ahmed and Fatma wanted to spare her, their little sprout, the memory of loss, the skeleton of fear. But it was in her name, hollered impatiently, whispered with concern. Iraq was in Amerika. Saddam was there. Fear was there. Her name was the maze of memory, an ant threading a shell, around and around. It was loss – deep, sharp cuts into the bodies of fish, waxy feathers melting in the sun.

  Amerika had always felt her life unfolding like her box. Amerika was a virgin but she didn’t want to be. She wanted to feel herself glistening and unfolding in someone’s arms. When she thought about sex, she saw herself in an airplane or at an airport. She saw LAX or JFK or O’Hare, sometimes even Fiumicino or Charles de Gaulle. She saw her box in her arms and a JanSport slung across her back. When Amerika thought about her box, she felt her body free, uncovered. She dreamed of belonging to herself, of being alone and not being afraid to be alone. She imagined what it would feel like to glow. At seventeen, Amerika was ready for something to happen to her, to her body, to her box. When she felt herself being pushed into the Axis of Evil, into the center of its wicked triangle, despised, spat upon, after all this time, she made the decision to wait. This was not her moment. She forced her body to recoil back into its shell, no ant circling and threading with ingenuity, with care. She stopped anticipating the smell of the Atlantic. She had begun to see in America her direction home, from sea to shining sea. But it was spitting her out now. She had to pause it all, to stop before everything came undone, before it all unraveled to nothing. Amerika waited with bated breath.

  Then the war came. Not her war exactly. Not her country’s war. Not exactly, but inexactly it was hers, her country’s too. Here it was, the stones weighing down, and her body, pure as the moment before flight, never to be her own. Kuwaitis were told to stay inside, to seal the windows with duct tape and plastic; it was too late for gas masks. There would be a symphony of sirens, a swell of sound, and then a mad scramble into the safe room, sweating, gasping, thirsty. Dodging Scuds for America, Scuds from Iraq. Once, twice, three times Amerika and her family scrambled, crammed together like dates in a crate, and then her father, Ahmed, decided to ignore the wailing, to stay put because he was fed up. Enough was enough. He wanted to eat, to pray, to sleep in peace.

  During the sirens, they stared together at the TV screen, at a flashing “Danger Ongoing” and then, improbably, at Bugs Bunny screeching, “Of course you realize, dis means war!” They heard CNN announce: “Decapitation Strike.” They heard: “Shock and Awe.” They heard: “Lit Oil Wells in the South” and “A Circle of Fire.”

  Amerika spent most of those first few days of the war in her bedroom, stretched out as wide and open as possible on her bed, listening to the sirens sounding endlessly, majestically, one after the other, then the all clear. Time felt suspended, attenuated, an inchworm and a cougar. She kept her box and album beside her, not wanting to forget, not wanting to allow the wailing to blot out everything else. She thought of Acapulco gold and being lit up like a Christmas tree. She wanted to remember laughing her head off and the world as her oyster.

  * * *

  On the ninth night of the war, Amerika decides to go for a walk. There is an imposed curfew, she knows there is. She waits until each member of her family falls asleep one by one (like candles blown out after the kind of party her parents had never hosted, would never host, but that she dreams of hosting one day, welcoming her guests in a silver dress), then goes out anyway. She walks into the night where everything, in its velvetiness, seems possible still. The roads are automatic walkways, the empty country, never before so empty, an airport, a promise of something else, outside the Axis, outside war and vitriol and falling down, down, down with melted, exhausted wings. She walks out in a blue pleated skirt and gray V-neck sweater, her box in her outstretched arms. The album stays behind, the scraps of idioms breadcrumbs home. The country is still, fossilized in the amber light of streetlamps. It is cold, the end of March, desert temperature extremes. She wanders down the lonely walkways, pulled by a magnet. She h
eads toward the edge of the city, toward the devil and the deep blue sea. Police cars float by and, once, a chemical weapons detector truck with equipment on the flatbed – jerky rotations, colored lights beeping – tasting the air.

  Nobody sees Amerika. Nobody is looking for a girl in the dark with a box and a red scarf around her neck. She pushes on, not really thinking but moving, feeling her body ebbing seaward. She stops at a slice of beach, rocks piled up, a concrete pier. She arrives at a sliver of what it used to be before McDonald’s rose upon the broken coast. She dances along the shore, tries to imagine it long once again. She pictures Icarus, Alexander’s island, whole, afloat on phosphorescent blue, haloed with snow white waves, a place before sons fell.

  Amerika pulls her box to her chest and dances harder, the wind knitting lace with her hair. She twirls and dips and kicks up her heels, always the letter k at heart. Out of breath, she stops. She rests on the shore, feeling the sand, shattered crystal, embossing the backs of her thighs. The icy waves approach her toes but never dare to touch. Her right hand on the box at her side, she takes in as much air as her lungs will hold. She rests her eyes for a minute, it could only have been a minute. She thinks about icicles and trees bursting red in autumn, parades and clambakes. She thinks about Archie and making out on the beach. Then she thinks about falling, pale flesh, misty rose. She thinks about firebrick red, burnt sienna, and then plumes of dim gray.

  When she opens her eyes she sees a shooting star zooming toward her. She smiles. Stars in my eyes. She blinks. It continues toward her. She blinks again. She thinks, Out of the blue. There are no sirens. A floating star heading toward the shore. In the twinkling of an eye. CNN will say: “Surface-to-Surface.” It will say: “Non-Existent Arc.” It will say: “Chinese Seersucker” and “Under the Radar.” It is missile number thirteen, the only one that makes contact. She thinks, Into thin air. Amerika picks up her box, kisses it, turns away from the moving star, and flings it as far away from herself as she can. She hears it explode on the pavement. She hears herself explode. Painting the town red.

  When they come, they find the contents of Amerika’s box, charred, scattered, inexplicable. They find footprints of ballet flats, an invisible dance along the shoreline. They find the residue of loss, the triumph of fury. They find traces of a square peg in a round hole and the end of the future. Amerika’s box, Amerika, Radio City Rockette extraordinaire, never a mouse, never evil, into thin air she flies, like a kite.

  X

  Think of it as a living, breathing organism. A dome like the gently curved back of a whale, covering just over 22,000 square feet. Its skin, a flexible white membrane, deflecting the rays of an endless sun, held bravely against incessant blasts of sand, hardly nudged by gust after gust of hot wind. Brought to life by waves of air, its arc suspended by a miracle of strong, steady pulses, it formed what would quickly become our familiar cocoon. In the early 1980s, when it first went up, we had no idea what it could pos­sibly be. We were told, “A new gymnasium,” but we had no viable sense of what an indoor gymnasium was. We were used to PE outdoors, young enough to shrug off the kind of heat that today would buckle our knees. We thought nothing of flinging our sparrow bodies into puffs of air nearly congealed with dust and sweat. The idea of an indoor place to exercise would never have occurred to us. But one morning, we noticed a rectangular hole that rapidly transformed into a gleaming, near Olympic-size pool. Another day, we saw that the ground around the pool and to the right of the pool, the size of two basketball courts at least, had been surfaced bull-blood red, with sharp yellow lines designating something no doubt crucial. Soon after, revolving doors of glass and steel went up at the corners – four sentinels on alert – and between the doors, massive air vents or pumps. None of that, however, could have prepared us for the thick white hide crumpled across the red rectangle, remnants of a skinned giant or two. Nothing could have prepared us for the inflation of that white skin – up, up it went – into a half-bubble of mammoth proportions. Our new gym.

  We were brats at the time, most of us protected by the warm, snug shadow of our living, breathing bubble. It bounced away fear. It suspended guilt. It eliminated necessity. It instilled confidence, a slanting kind of innocence. What mattered most was that it seemed to breed choices – a zillion lives to lead, all at once if we wanted, a feast of simultaneity, a gorging on opportunity. That castle in the sky would last about a decade, and, even then, it seems impossible we didn’t know, in pinched little recesses somewhere, that it all had to be a mirage, a marshmallow mist. Our white bubble would pop soon enough, worse than any weasel, slamming us down onto the dun sandlot home always was.

  The Hidden Light of Objects

  What strikes us is how serene our mother looks stepping off the plane, the prime minister of our small country waiting to greet her. Nothing fazes her. Not the prime minister. Not the string of parliamentarians angling for photo-ops. Not the frenzied media’s nest. Not even us. Everything seems to bleed together for Zaina.

  For us everything feels sharp, outlined in black. We remark on the rarity of the clouds in the steel sky. We read them as a sign. We have spent ten years reading signs. It is no surprise that on the day of her release we lose ourselves in a flurry of them. Sparrows precariously balanced on instruments played by the army band brought in for a special welcome. A sliver of obstinate moon at an hour when it long should have moved into someone else’s night. Most striking of all, through the sulphuric fumes anyone living in an oil town like Kuwait is familiar with, whiffs of vanilla.

  They do not comment on my short white hair or papery skin. They fail to note my quick intakes of breath as I navigate the steps of the plane. They see a mask of calm, my practiced serenity. They cannot hear my irregular heartbeat or feel my brittle bones. I perceive little through the flash of bulbs, the microphones under my nose, the hands thrust into mine. Carefully, I embrace my daughters, three stunning women, almost strangers to me. And my husband Karim, his eyes, like mine, creased with age. I refuse to release my burlap sack, my sole acquisition in a decade. The smell of white cake surrounds me, and I wonder how they have managed it.

  There are other signs on that arrival day, but we decide that clouds, sparrows, the moon, and vanilla are signs to be taken for wonders, a string of impossibles signaling that the impossible could happen, has indeed happened. We discuss those four signs at length soon after we arrive home, while she is in the shower, her first shower in a decade. There she is, in our father’s bathroom, their bathroom, washing off ten years of captivity. We can hear her.

  I am not sure what we expected. The night before her arrival, we were a mix of euphoria and palpitations. My father and my youngest sister, Yasmine, were rapturous and starving, endless platters of food not enough to fill them. But Ghusoon, my other sister, and I were agitated, unable to keep down water. Privately, the two of us fretted over our mother’s damage. Ten years a prisoner of war. Had she been starved? Tortured? Had what normally happens to women’s bodies in war happened to hers? Would she be the mother who kissed our Band-Aids? We were all too old for that now. When Zaina was taken, Yasmine, only ten, was young enough to need kissed Band-Aids. While she was gone, it was those kisses we remembered most. What we would have given to feel her lips on our scraped skin, our faces, our hair. It was, for ten years, a desire that carved through our bellies like an ulcer. To feel her kisses. To hear her morning songs. That night before her return, Ghusoon, now twenty-five, and I, already thirty, wondered whether she could still be the mother who sang us awake. And we felt guilty for wondering.

  We didn’t expect the calm mask of her face. We wanted tears and dimpled smiles. When we take her into our arms, we want more to be taken into hers. We feel ourselves clinging to her. It reminds us of the way she had always hung on to us before our trips away to school, to camp, to visit cousins in far-flung places. She always wanted us to go off into the world, already at twelve, at fifteen, to recognize ourselves as independent and as strong as she always was. But at the ai
rport, at the final goodbye, she would cling to us as if our separation were going to be forever, as if our plane were going to plummet. We would be antsy, cruel in our childish insouciance. A plane ride! A ski trip! Off to college! We couldn’t get away fast enough. Our mother’s hugs were quickly forgotten, her pooling eyes a source of gentle teasing. Now it is all reversed. We cling to her. We cry. We worry she will melt into air. She kisses us back but she doesn’t cry. She doesn’t cling and we want her to.

  In the brief interludes provided by her showers – she takes four in the first four hours off the plane and then one every few hours during the first week – we huddle together, parsing our observations of her. Does she seem happy to be back with us? Does she seem sad? Afraid? Angry? Nothing seems to fit. No word can be stretched enough to cover what we think we perceive.

  We watch her especially when we think she isn’t looking. Every flicker of eyelid, every unassuming gesture, every ripple of expression. Hope? Anxiety? Despair? On the third day, Yasmine declares: “Defiance.” Yes, that comes closest, we think. Defiant but not bitter, seemingly without regret. Our regret is sufficient. Enough regret to fill the belly of a whale, a hollowed-out planet. All that time gone, everything she hadn’t seen, would never feel or hear. But, we decide, the missing bits we want her to know about have everything to do with our lives, our time gone by, not hers. We recognize our selfishness, feel guilty about our long ropes of regret.

  That first week, we don’t talk about her ordeal and neither does she. We don’t want to push it. We have decided to give her space and time to figure things out. There is no one around to advise us and I’m not sure we would listen anyway. We want to build a wall around her. No therapists, no counselors, no experts. The politicians are there, of course, for the pictures, the papers, the votes, hoping their florid displays of sincerity will cover up the unresolved POW fiasco. Then there are the inevitable family members and friends, thunderously forthcoming with their congratulations. We can feel her wince and it makes us want to slap them all and send them as far away from her as possible. Well-meaning brothers and solicitous sisters. She embraces them though they were never close. They stay for a while that first day, come back the next, but by the third they are more or less gone, promising to visit again soon, to call. We haven’t seen them in ten years. They wouldn’t call, we thought, and that was fine with us. But nobody, not the politicians, not the family, not the friends, has any advice for us on how to deal with her return, on how to treat her.