by Raja Alem
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 48
Dear ^,
You read all my charts: the CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds, my medication schedule.
So tell me: is there any part of me that’s still alive? Worthy of surprise, of another step toward life?
I think maybe I’ll gather that all up into an amulet and put it around Azza’s neck if she comes to bid me farewell.
I’ll let you in on a secret:
Azza is on the verge … of taking a leap.
Am I her reflection?
Should I let you in on one last, final secret?
Me Aisha, I’m the one who’s always been ready to walk away from this world and everything in its packaging. Everything the world gives us comes in packages, which we then open so we can absorb life from them. If it weren’t for you, I’d have taken those unopened packages to the grave with me. I discovered that I barely touch my perfume bottles, never turn on a new device, never dare cut up an entire cake; that I squeeze every last drop out of my toothpaste, carefully skim the surface of my lotions and lipsticks, never scrape out my eye shadow or sharpen my eyeliner, my new clothes yellow where they lay folded in a suitcase at the top of my wardrobe. I pass over things as if not passing over them at all. Only lightly touching the surface of things, never reaching their core or even denting them (just like my hymen). I haven’t had a haircut since I was born. It just creeps down my back. I was planning to hand it all back over to the angels on Judgment Day, to be bare once again like I was on the day I received it, the day I was born. If it hadn’t been for you, my can opener. You were the one who bothered to cut my hair one Sunday as we sat beneath a breathtaking willow tree. The tree made a palace just for us, shielding us with its branches. You surprised me by undoing my braid and wetting my hair with a splash of Evian. You layered my hair like cascades on either side, which shimmered with every nod or laugh. I was so graceful with that hairstyle.
Azza, on the other hand, has to open everything and rummage through it. She has to burrow down to the bottom of every box she sees, and the angels have made a note of that habit.
Being able to jump is a miracle.
I know you’ll laugh at me, but:
I used to be too worried to sleep on my front in case I damaged my perfectly shaped breasts. I never let anyone touch them, not even myself. God knows what Azza did with that perfection. She used to tease me: “What’s the point of having those perfect, perky breasts? What have you ever done with them?” They’re like the breasts of a mannequin, but it’s not as if I had them molded and formed and brought to life.
I failed to discover either body: human or bionic.
If Azza ever had to deal with a computer, she’d wear it out by running programs, and hooking up peripherals, and adding more memory. Me, on the other hand, I’d run away from the buttons at the first warning beep. That’s why I’m going to die before ever discovering the basic boot-up functions of my own body-device.
Can we diagnose my condition as a life’s blessings inferiority complex? Azza might have called it a mental inferiority complex, but I would call it a self-awareness inferiority complex.
My emotions and fears and desires, my frivolity—is there anything frivolous about me?—in boxes, with their documentation, sealed up to keep you out.
Azza and I would’ve stood like that before the angels of death: me and my boxes all sealed tight, she and hers licked clean. Am I just passing through? Is she the permanent one, the permeating? I wonder.
Impossible P. S. I wish I could sit with you one last time with all my boxes laid out before us. We’d open each one together and drink it down to the dregs.
P. S. Boxes of chalk, left over from my days as a schoolteacher, collecting dust. What was I supposed to do with a box of chalk? But then as soon as I gave them to Azza, look: she moved them and the world followed.
If only you could see Azza’s room. Spaces packed full of black and white figures, which have surpassed the limited range of their colors and who move constantly, going in and out of the Lane of Many Heads as they please.
P. P. S. Even my breathing is short. It’s rapid, it doesn’t last a whole second, so that none of my cells split open. That was until you taught me how to breathe. Deeply. Count to ten as I breathe in. Hold it for ten seconds as every cell explodes and its stores burn up. Then for ten seconds as I breathe out, right up to the very last molecule of CO2. And for another ten seconds, I leave my body empty. Forty seconds of life in a single breath. God, pleasure is so slow. Pleasure hides between the oxygen of life and the two in carbon dioxide.
I can live for forty seconds in a single breath.
The pleasure hidden within a single breath is so intoxicating. Forty tick-tocks of joy spent between oxygen and carbon.
In the ten seconds of emptiness, I make sense of the thirty seconds of burning.
P. P. P. S. This is the music of de Falla. Once again, I wonder: me and Azza, which one of us is Sancho Panza and which one is Don Quixote?
From how many to how,
Azza is the one who deserves to be transferred into life.
Because she is able (without having the means to be able) to exist beyond the circumstances of existence. She wasn’t given the opportunity to be educated, like I was, let alone the access to books that I had.
Her skeleton is made of gold (pliant and hard). It jumps into the fire and comes out in never-ending life-shapes.
Final P. S. Love is all there is to life.
That is to say, to live is to yearn. Or, to love. Or to love by yearning for what you can never have back.
My name is Aisha, not Hayah. It means living, not life. That sums me up, don’t you think?
Aisha
Nora wailed and wailed until her tears ran dry, as de Falla’s music reverberated in her bedroom. Her breathing slowed as if she were under a strong anesthetic. The words jostled her and tore at her clothes. Everywhere she looked there was blood. Her heart fell out onto the paper before her, buzzing, followed by her lungs, and the words penetrated through her cranium, sinking all the way to the bottom of her spine. That crossed-out name stopped her short. Who? And who crossed it out? A deep sadness was troubled.
As Nora went through the small stack of emails, her fever rose higher. Through her veins flowed mutual betrayal, between her and the author of these emails: was this Aisha? The one who presumed a personality that wasn’t her own? Wearing her face? Her features? Her reactions to life? The Aisha who stole the girl who resembled her, who stole her name and hid her in the ruins, while she lived off the death of the girl who resembled her? Angry knocking at her door ripped her from that other world. She discovered that she’d spent the entire night reading and crying; she hid the documents and opened the door.
“Why’d you lock the door?” Her hazy look raised his suspicions. He scanned the room as though looking for evidence of a crime and repeated the question. “What’s the matter?”
He embraced her roughly, pushing her head down against his chest, staring deep within her. “Your eyes look blindfolded like a falcon’s. What are you hiding from me inside that head of yours?”
She shut her eyes. She collected the saliva in her mouth and swallowed, worried that her breath would give away the smell of emails. “It’s because of the sleeping pills. I haven’t slept ten hours straight in months,” she said, trying to sound blithe.
“I can’t detect any Valium on your tongue though. Give me a taste of the truth.” He clamped his lips onto hers, jealously, possessively. She covered him quickly, in fear. Might he taste the bitterness that overpowers the bitterness of waking up from a strong anesthetic? The bitterness that discovering the emails poured into her throat: the awakening of her clouded mind, which was proceeding toward her end, with trepidation, as though it were trying to delay it.
Abraham’s Palm
FOR DAYS AFTER MU’AZ’S PHONE CALL, YUSUF MOVED ABOUT FEVERISHLY AND agitatedly, torn between the tree that was revealing itself to them on th
e wall and the woman he’d dreamed of, for all those months, being dead and risen, in her death, to a place where she could no longer be sullied. News of the phone call had disturbed Mushabbab. They shared the task of going out to gather information that might lead them to the one they called Long Belt. Where was he? And what possible link could there be between him and Azza?
IT WAS DIFFICULT TO SAY HOW LONG IT TOOK THEM TO UNCOVER THE TREE CREATED by the guide Ayif al-Ghatafani, who had traced, over the course of his own lifetime, nearly three quarters of a century of Sarah’s branching lineage in the Sabkha Tribe, and her son’s marriages outside the tribe. Finally they arrived, with surprise, at the abrupt end of the tree’s branches, presumably marking the point when the guide himself died. No matter where else they scraped at the wall, they found no other word or branch.
Then Nasser came across a device in the form of Ursa Major at the bottom of the tree. The three stood looking at it for ages, some intuition alerting them that it contained a sign, until their flashlight died and the darkness became dense around them. Suddenly, a silver beam penetrated the pitch black, and they became aware of the full moon outside shining in through a hole in the roof and falling upon the furthest corner of the hall, the spot where they had been bedding down at night. The silver beam revealed the disturbed surface of the soil, and when they scraped it away they found a stone marked with seven depressions representing the stars of Ursa Major. It felt as if the remains of the fort were conspiring to shed their every last mask before them in one go, or as if, because of all the time they’d spent there, they’d been accepted into the fort’s mind. They applied themselves immediately to digging up the stone, and it lifted as soon as Yusuf slid the shovel beneath it. Underneath was a copper-lined wooden box, and inside it lay a piece of parchment spread carefully between two sheets of blotting paper. Mushabbab held it up to the faint light, displaying a tree illuminated with colored inks: they were certain that it could only be the missing final page of the parchment inside the amulet, containing the rest of the tree that began on the wall, and whose later branches Ayif al-Ghatafani’s descendants must have diligently added over the centuries.
In the dim light, the three heads fused into one and the three hearts throbbed with a single beat, as their sleep-deprived eyes took in the complete tree, spread between wall and parchment. They traced the tree’s two oldest branches—the first beginning with Moses and Aaron and leading to Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf in the year 629 A.D., and the other descending from Wa’il, Rabi’a, and Nizar—to where they met in Marid, Sarah’s son born in the bed of Sa’d, sheikh of the Sabkha tribe.
On the paper was the more recent half of the tree, which showed the descendants of Marid Sabkha born of Arab women exclusively from the heart of the peninsula. The ink was faded, blotched, and smeared in places, varying with the skill of Ayif al-Ghatafani’s many descendants at handling the fine old parchment, and revealing the difficulty they faced in documenting the lineage over fourteen centuries to the present day. Impatiently, the three pairs of eyes scanned the branches passing through Iyad, Qays, Saleem, Ma’ad, Bakr, Mu’awiya, and Awf to the present, where Nasser’s eyes settled on the final entry in the document, which Muflih al-Ghatafani had added to that long branch of Marid’s descendants. The name was clear and unmistakable: Khalid al-Sibaykhan.
Nasser laughed hysterically, while a shudder ran through Mushabbab. “This is Long Belt! Al-Sibaykhan a descendant of Sarah and her son Marid, and right in Mecca!” He sputtered.
A single sentence uttered about that parchment pierced their dream, destroying it and expelling them. A glaring light flooded the hall and figures in khaki uniforms appeared.
“Give yourselves up!” they barked, quickly closing around the tree on the wall. Nasser stepped forward calmly with his hands in the air, but Mushabbab hurled himself blindly and without warning at the source of the light. Hands attacked him and everything became a confused tumult; Nasser hit out in the darkness and was hit back at, and it was impossible to tell who were the attackers and who the prey. In the chaos a shadow slipped out and limped away, vanishing into the darkness.
Cyber Attack
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 90
It scares me sometimes the way you read my thoughts. The last article you sent me was about the legendary game designer Miyamoto, who’s banned by Nintendo, the company he works for, from talking about his hobbies and dreams because they’re worth a fortune. This is the man who has transformed the most banal aspects of his daily life into obsessions that have gripped the entire world. He invented Nintendogs after his family got a dog and he invented Pikmin because he loves gardening.
I’ve been watching break-dancers who walk on their hands and move their bodies as though they’re made of rubber. And I’ve been watching Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who broke the world record for the hundred-meter race at the 2008 Olympics, reaching the finish line so far ahead of six of the world’s best sprinters no one could believe it. All these physical accomplishments make me feel like there’s a new species of humans being created that we’re not part of. My species, physically and emotionally stagnant, ought to just die out.
No dreams worth mentioning, or movement.
Nora set the message down so she could take a look around the military plane that was taking her to Medina. The art exhibition had come and gone and now she was back to the series of sporadic moves that determined her life on the sheikh’s chessboard. She resumed her silence thousands of meters in the air. A few luxurious chairs and a circular meeting table were all there was to the troop-carrier they were flying in. That and the roaring engines, which shook her heart and relieved her from having to speak or listen. She shut her eyes and pictured her paintings hanging on the gallery walls. Beings not male or female, limbs severed, in the paintings and the gallery, visitors were all on a single plane. They held animated conversations. Saying things they’d never dared to say before, or hadn’t been able to fit in, as the sea air salted their exchanges. They missed their missing limbs, or criticized them, or justified their absence. The female university students who’d come to the exhibition on an organized visit were a challenge. They provoked the darkest lines, they dug up the empty canvas and poured their rebellion or apathy onto it. They stood in front of her paintings, laughing and winking to one another, giving the figures a taste of life’s sting, if only for a few seconds. Nora was standing there, facing life’s onslaught, when they dragged her into conversation.
“Are you scared?” one of them asked.
Nora nodded, indifferently. “Maybe. It’s fear that makes us fight,” she said sarcastically.
“Your paintings make me feel beaten down,” another one of them said. “Why are you so cruel to bodies? You should leave them alone.”
Another girl laughed, not bothering to hide her malice or lower her voice as she sniggered. “This is the work of a butcher’s daughter.”
Nora’s skin was tanned for the first time in her life, by the sea air, and it came to life. For a few days, her figures were more than a monologue delivered by her fingers to the canvas. They’d become human in those gazes, but the exhibition was over and at that altitude, she allowed her figures to be wrapped up, like a cinema reel, back to their hiding place, back to the faint El Greco sky on the grave. The airplane banked sharply and when Nora looked out she could see the lava fields spread around Medina, as if a volcano had dipped its giant fingers into the earth’s core and sprinkled its coal around. Another look was enough to transform all that coal into diamonds, like the source of all her paintings. At that moment, she wished she could come back as a line of coal over that land, which had given shelter to the Prophet in his flight, and could be safe. She drove the black lava fields from her mind as, in the midst of a cloud of palm trees, the minaret of the Prophet’s Mosque came into view. Nora had missed those minarets, “which will never cease calling people to prayer until they hear Israfil blow his horn for the resurrection, and they shall be the first, and the
ir dead shall be the first to come up out of the earth to answer the call.”
The thought made her shiver. She was like someone facing resurrection, weighed down with choices.
Nora was alone in her suite at the Intercontinental Hotel, though she was used to her sheikh being away at private meetings by now. Then, just like any other time she was left on her own, she found company in the handful of emails, which she secreted away like illicit drugs. If only she’d stolen the entire file. What might’ve been revealed to her—matters of life and death. Something like this short message:
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 66
Something inside me has broken. My satellite receiver maybe.
But. Here. There’s a signal.
You present it to me with a single orchid. You say, “Orchids remind me of you.”
My body believes you. My body mimics and learns how to be haughty.
My head spins from dancing on the inside.
A
Nora took pleasure in examining the orchid just like she took pleasure in the millions of tiny spiral loops that Aisha laid down in her messages to express herself, carrying herself from the peaks of life down to death. Her reflection had disappeared from the mirror: every time Nora looked she saw Aisha. She flipped through the guestbook from her exhibition for the hundredth time, asking herself who these comments were written for: Nora or Aisha? As de Falla played in the background, she scanned the book word by word to see which of them was the dead Sancho Panza and which of them was the living Don Quixote. How long would it take for one of them to come back to life and for the other to recede into death? She kept reading until the entire universe had shrunk to the size of a man’s head, and then to the size of a thought in a man’s head, and finally to the size of a ray of light in a man’s eye. Was it an Arab’s eye or a Westerner’s? Perhaps the eye belonged to the person who was stoking all these events and turning them into a time bomb. She was the one who’d dropped her name and identity: anything that would cause her to be born out of pre-existing memory, the memory of the woman who’d written these emails, which inhaled and exhaled her in their naked lines.
