by Mohsin Hamid
“Cheat,” she says.
“A compliment, coming from you.”
Her own eyes take in your posture, the inflection with
which you lower the ashtray to the sofa. You are a gifted bluffer, inscrutable, as steady with a bad hand as with a bountiful one. It is your strength. Hers is her unpredictability, her instinct to win big or lose big, to eschew the odds. It is also her weakness. And while both of you suffer from mediocre memory, what you lack in recall you jointly make up for with slow, smoldering intensity.
“I’ll raise you, little boy,” she says.
“Well, well. That tells me all I need to know.” “I’m sure.” She arches a slender brow.
“Wait and see, pretty girl.”
You call. The hand is yours. Chance, really.
You scoop the pile of what were originally backgammon chips, smooth and cool to the touch, mostly whites but a pair of blacks too, sliding them your way. She rises to fetch herself a glass of lemonade.
“It must hurt,” you say. Inwardly she seethes. But outwardly she grins. “It’s not over yet.”
Returned to the sofa, her drink on her armrest, she examines you as you shuffle. Your gaze is focused, like a mechanic disassembling an engine, with none of that cloudiness that can descend upon you so suddenly. She leans forward and waits. You notice. You kiss.
When the pretty girl’s death comes it is mercifully swift, at diagnosis her cancer having spread from her pancreas throughout her body. Her doctor is surprised that she is in so good a superficial state. He gives her three months, but she lasts only half that, refusing to relinquish smoking until the very end, when breathing itself becomes difficult. There is no point admitting her to a hospital, and so she spends her final weeks at home, cared for by a nurse, her factotum, and of course you, who tries to hunt down her favorite movies for her to watch an ultimate time. Never fond of prolonged cuddling, she leans against you now, and allows you to stroke her sparse white hair, though whether she does this to comfort you or to be comforted, you are not entirely sure.
“I don’t want you to be alone,” she tells you one afternoon, as you sip your tea.
“I won’t be,” you say. You attempt to add that her factotum is here, and her tenant, and on the telephone your son. But you are unable to form the words.
Medications do not relieve her pain, but they make it less central, and in her center builds instead a desire to detach. It costs her to be touched, as she approaches her finish, companionship softly irritating her, like the remaining strand of flesh binding a loose milk tooth to its jaw. An almost biological urge to depart is upon her, a birthing urge, and at the end it is only with great consideration for what has been, with love, in other words, that she manages to look up from her labors to give you a smile or squeeze your hand.
She dies on a windy morning with her eyes open. You arrange to bury her at a graveyard belonging to her community. She might not have had much to do with them, but it is unclear to you where else she ought to be buried. Besides a preacher, a pair of grave diggers, and a prospecting band of professional mourners, who tear up and moan with robust commitment, there are just three of you in attendance.
The actress who was the pretty girl’s tenant sticks around for a while, because the pretty girl has asked her to, but uncomfortable in a house otherwise occupied only by men, and despite the low rent, eventually she departs. The factotum stays, in part out of loyalty to the pretty girl and in part because it is easy to skim money from you. You do not begrudge him this. You would do the same. You have done the same. It is a poor person’s right. Instead you are grateful for his help, for his refusal to sever you from your few remaining possessions by violence. The townhouse’s water pressure has dipped so low that filling your tub takes an eternity, and therefore you must be sponged, sitting naked on a plastic stool in your bathroom and unleashing the occasional prodigious fart, and this the factotum does for you twice a week, without complaint.
Until one day you wake up in a hospital bed, attached to interfaces electrical, gaseous, and liquid. Your ex-wife and son are there, and they look a little too young, and you have a moment of panic, as though you have never left the hospital, as though the last half decade of your life were merely a fantasy, but then the pretty girl enters. She too is a little too young, and maybe she has just heard of your heart attack and rushed here from her home in the city by the sea. But it does not matter now. She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, and there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife, and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and I writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.
