Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  Bill is the only person she can say this to. Her queer friends are all too ecstatic and will be too defensive: they’ll disparage her, insinuating that she’s capable of saying this only because she’s now dating a man, a fact she can no longer deny, even if her mind still abounds with ambivalences.

  She doesn’t question the night in Iowa—it had to happen, if only so she can have tried it. If only the experience had been more conclusive. But what had indeed been wonderful was the warm succor of Bill’s body after the cold failure of the night. She hadn’t been held that intimately by anyone since Ann, and never with that protective embrace. Had she actually been relieved that the sexual act itself hadn’t progressed far, so she needn’t make a decision that very night? Had a part of her been envisioning their future together in Vermont?

  Now with the campaign dead, and with the marriages in San Francisco’s “Winter of Love” thrust in her face, she can’t help but question: What are she and Bill doing?

  The answer is they’re “dating.” They’re taking things slowly, sex can wait; they’ve advanced to holding hands, to quick kisses on cheeks, to back rubs and shoulder massages, to holding each other in bed. The answer merely raises more questions: of betrayal, of hypocrisy, of fraud. If there is a bright spot, it’s that Bill, wary about the effect of the ongoing marriages on her, rarely brings the topic up himself, and at least with him she can ignore the entire hoopla roiling San Francisco.

  13

  But this, too, happens: A couple of weeks after returning from Iowa, Seema sits up in Bill’s bed with a gasp—of terror, a nightmarish vision of her body in the coils of carnivorous tendrils; of pain, as if her insides were being wrenched out. She kicks the comforter out of her way. The hour is just past four in the morning.

  It’s a damp February, and the air in the room is heavy and clammy around her nightgowned self, like childhood memories of monsoon. Other memories impinge, of the indignities her body is capable of inflicting on her: she still suffers occasionally from her pubescent ailment of traumatic irregular periods, though their frequency and intensity have much reduced over the years. But what’s happening now cannot be that, surely not without the usual warning symptoms—she presumes she knows her body well enough by now, although she has been puzzled by a strange tiredness the previous week, which she attributed to depression and despair from Dean’s loss.

  She scrambles out of bed, evading Bill’s pacifying arms, and heads toward the bathroom.

  “Seema, are you okay?” he asks.

  Even in her urgency she recognizes that his voice is alert, slumber-free, as if he’s been lying awake the entire time. She feels both bolstered and badgered.

  He turns on the night lamp.

  Simultaneously, she feels the floor give way, as if the light has brought the roof and room of her caving inward. She squeezes her thighs and knees tight together, against the knife-edged pain, but the flow is not to be contained: the warm gush streams down her legs to a spreading pool around her feet, to the Berber beige of the bedroom carpeting. Any move to the bathroom now would only leave a trail, and she lowers herself to a clenching squat, hoping to minimize the damage, pressing her nightdress into use as a pad. The fabric soaks and turns crimson.

  Bill is beside her, his arms around her, seeking to help her up.

  “Don’t! Leave me alone—” She pushes him away, too embarrassed to have him looking at her.

  Another piercing pang—its ferocity is unfamiliar to her: what exactly is this?—another tingling spurt, almost scouring on its way out, viscous, clotted. She is too faint to fight Bill off now, one hand on her back and another reaching under her, and then a flick upward, and she’s in his arms, the length of her curled up by his chest, one palm supporting her there, where he’s been allowed only recently, a gentle alleviating pressure.

  “Where?” Bill asks, his voice still steady, though his arms strain, and he pivots as if to carry her back to the bed, which is closer.

  “No, silly—the bathroom.” A weak laugh, despite herself; her gown has surely soaked through and soiled his hands.

  Bill sets her down on the toilet seat, letting her slip from him a little hastily, clumsily, when she grimaces with the knowledge of another impending attack.

  He backs away, turning to wash his hands at the sink as she scrunches down into herself over the bowl. He’s careful to avert his gaze.

  “I’m okay, I’ll be okay, go—” she says.

  Although she wouldn’t mind Bill staying, for a coiling dread tightens with each additional spasm: what’s happening to her, inside her, cannot be the usual disruption. But Bill takes her at her word and leaves, while she continues to strain over the toilet bowl, trying to empty out as quickly as possible whatever is writhing within her, even as she prays it’s merely her period, one more vicious than usual.

  Bill has left the bathroom door ajar, and she focuses on his movements to still her anxiety. First, his measured footsteps as he goes to the kitchen and returns with a roll of paper towels, then as he blots the blood-soaked areas of the carpet, then as he crisscrosses the bedroom covering up with white squares the trail she has left behind. Now he sits on the edge of the bed, the side closest to the bathroom, elbow on knee, his chin resting on a fisted hand—not Rodin’s Thinker but Worrier—and now he paces up and down the width of the bedroom, between the bed and the wall, the reassuring sliver of him visible each time past the bathroom door. As time stretches, she hears him pause longer and longer by the door, until he’s a fixed presence on the other side, a guardian spirit breathing.

  A timid knock on the door. “Seema, should we go to the ER?” Bill sounds apologetic about his ignorance, his lack of experience.

  She’s been in here for the better part of an hour, and the bleeding has nearly stopped, only slight spotting left. “I’ll be out soon. Can you get me my handbag, please?”

  She wants her menstrual cup, though she’s certain now it’s not her period. She discards her stained nightgown, washes herself slowly in the shower, the water so abrasively scalding that her body barely registers the softness of the towel afterward. She inserts the cup and wraps the towel around herself but is reluctant to leave the security of the bathroom.

  Bill is waiting. “I was worried.” He holds out the flannel shirt he’s lent her before and his softest corded pajama pants, the ones she has much admired. “Here—you can roll the legs up.”

  But one further glance at her face, pallid and drooping, and he latches on to her apprehension. “What is it?” he whispers.

  She shakes her head—I don’t know—as she debates whether to accept the clothes he’s offering or to get dressed and leave.

  “I can take you to the ER.” He’s observed her glance in the direction of her dress hanging by the door, and is doubly alarmed now, alarmed on her account and alarmed she might withdraw.

  She does not withdraw. She can’t be alone. And the prospect of the ER is both daunting and demoralizing, to be subject to the mercy of doctors who don’t know her body. Besides, she feels exhausted suddenly, enfeebled, and only wants to crawl back into bed. “The bleeding has stopped. I prefer to be checked by my own doctor.”

  It’s Sunday morning, and that means at least a day, if she manages to get an appointment for Monday. She takes the shirt from him, but her fumbling fingers are stumped by the buttons, and he does them for her, helps her pull on the pajama pants, and crouches by her feet rolling up the bottoms, while she supports herself pressing down on his head. He leads her back to bed.

  As she dozes back to sleep, her body curled toward his, her head halfway on his shoulder, she knows he can’t be entirely comfortable, but he doesn’t complain, and she accepts his offering, too drained even to be grateful, knowing that he’s probably going to lie awake next to her the entire time.

  When she wakes up later there’s been little to no further bleeding. The day passes in a haze of drowsiness and lethargy. She’s grown leaden with her anxiety about the outcome of the upcoming appo
intment, her body somehow grown too weak to bear its own weight, ready to give up its responsibility to something or someone else—the bed, Bill. She lets him help her sit up in bed, fluffing the pillows behind her, lets him spoon her the moong dal and rice ganji he’s made from her descriptions of her mother’s sickbed recipes, lets him distract her with poems from the collected works of Audre Lorde he’s picked up based on a suggestion she once made long ago, his reading voice quite expressive for someone unused to reciting poetry, and wholly earnest, like Tahera’s. She naps, soothed by the signals of his presence around her, his sounds from the living room, his shadow in the bedroom. She could almost be home in Chennai.

  Bill accompanies her to her appointment the next day. There she learns, to her immense relief, that unlike in the past, her latest episode of bleeding was due to chemical pregnancy and a miscarriage, resulting from their first and only occasion of unprotected sex, frustrated and abbreviated as it was, the night of the caucus. Astonishing to think that Bill’s sperm could be so virile and so numerous as to prevail even in his precum, with little penetration. Her doctor’s suggestion of birth control with a hormonal IUD has an added benefit: it has been shown to reduce the intensity of menstrual bleeding. Another demon from her Chennai days could simultaneously be laid to rest.

  14

  Two other things happen in the first six months of my to-be parents getting together—one that stokes their anger and one that offers them hope.

  In April, stories of torture and rape of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers are reported by the national media. The photos emerging from the Abu Ghraib prison horrify: of naked Brown men in barred prison cells and dimly lit corridors, some hooded, some shackled, some dragged around on dog leashes, some posed in sexual positions, some heaped like carcasses, while American soldiers—White, and in uniform!—stand around them, over them, straddling them, flashing triumphant smiles and thumbs-ups. Seema is outraged, though not surprised; Bill is especially haunted by one photo: a detainee hooded and robed in black, the lines reminiscent of the white regalia of the Ku Klux Klan, a savage irony, for he’s precariously poised on a cardboard box, arms to the sides, wires running from his fingers to electrical connections behind him. It’s his father’s face Bill imagines under the hood, a father who’d died in prison purportedly of a ruptured appendix.

  Seema has never seen Bill this shaken, his anger shining through his attempts to repress it—she welcomes it, even as she comforts him. He is as riled as she that the Democratic nominee to challenge Bush is to be Senator John Kerry, who’d voted to authorize the Iraq War, only lately coming out against it, professing to have been misled about Iraq’s WMDs. Kerry’s vice-presidential pick is slick-haired senator John Edwards, who had also voted in support of the war.

  At the Democratic convention in July, Kerry accepts the nomination with a salute, touting his military credentials and Purple Heart—which Bill and Seema watch with disgust. But at the same convention, a young state senator from Illinois, running for the U.S. senate, gives a keynote speech that electrifies them. He is fresh-faced but confident, he is Black, and his words soar.

  He speaks of hope. Not blind optimism, not willful ignorance, but the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores, the hope of slaves sitting around fires singing freedom songs. What is this audacious hope—a belief in things not seen, a belief that there lie better days ahead—based on?

  It’s only in America, Barack Obama says, that such things are possible, with its faith in simple dreams and insistence on small miracles, in hard work and perseverance, summed up in a declaration made more than two hundred years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Isn’t his presence on this stage improbable enough that it constitutes proof?

  It’s the messenger, of course, as much as the message. My to-be father is immediately smitten. A prophet in his own image, living and preaching a message of belonging and flourishing in America. There seems to be no anger in Obama, his face soft, open, solemn, creasing to sweetness whenever he smiles, so different from the man in the photo Mame had kept hidden, with the gun and the hard set to his jawline.

  My to-be mother is at first a little skeptical, with the wariness of the recently burned, made uneasy precisely by Obama’s lack of anger. But Bill channels Obama with the single-mindedness of an evangelist, and he succeeds in persuading Seema to join him in his faith, her last reservations suspended when he reads to her Obama’s speech denouncing the Iraq War from two years earlier, even before Howard Dean.

  No sooner does the Kerry-Edwards ticket lose in November than a buzz begins to build around Obama, even though he has just won his first term to the U.S. Senate and has denied any presidential ambitions. Bill and Seema become early acolytes. And two years later, when Obama publicly announces his candidacy, they will be joined by a growing multitude ready to follow him.

  And along the way, Bill and Seema become lovers, get married, and move in together into a house on the top of a hill, with spectacular views of a peninsular city and sparkling bay, visible when the fog permits.

  15

  Are our endings foretold in our beginnings?

  Consider my parents’ wedding. Bill and Seema had agreed they’d get married on the day Barack Obama officially kicked off his presidential campaign. In February 2007, three years after they first got together, Obama finally does so: addressing a freezing rally in Springfield, Illinois, in front of the state capitol, where a century and a half ago Abraham Lincoln called on a house divided to stand together, he issues his own call, for people to come together for the purpose of perfecting the union and building a better America.

  But that happens on a Saturday, and the San Francisco City Hall doesn’t perform civil ceremonies over the weekend. When Bill and Seema show up, with Fiaz and Pierre in tow, the following Monday, they are confronted by another rally: it’s also the three-year anniversary of the day same-sex marriages had first been performed in San Francisco, marriages that had been voided within a few months by the California Supreme Court, citing Proposition 22. A crowd of gay and lesbian couples and supporters throng city hall to hear Mayor Newsom reiterate his commitment to win them the right to marry and reinstate their voided marriages. City hall echoes with applause and cheers, praise and gratitude.

  “I didn’t know this was happening today,” Bill whispers to Seema.

  He is disappointed that the main hall is occupied by the rally—their wedding would now be held in a small chamber instead of under the rotunda’s spectacular dome—but the disappointment is overshadowed by the fear that the rally might change Seema’s mind.

  The rally does give Seema pause. There are many couples in the hall dressed in wedding attire, like the lesbians in the white tuxedo and the white dress. She finds herself scanning the crowd for a particular pair—of all the images of a euphoric San Francisco celebrating in the wake of Newsom’s order three years ago, this is the one imprinted indelibly in her mind: The first couple to be married, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of America’s first lesbian rights group fifty years earlier. In the photo, the then eighty-three- and seventy-nine-year-olds, dressed in lavender and turquoise suits, hold each other in their frail arms, their wrinkled foreheads touching, bashful as teenagers.

  But there’s no sign in the hall today of Del’s unruly mop of silvery hair beside Phyllis’s sedate gray-brown. Were they still alive? If so, they’d been together for close to fifty-five years, married for less than six months.

  They have to skirt the crowd. Bill takes Seema by the hand, searching her face for signs of doubt. Seema has, in the three years they’ve been together, never shown any regret about the community she’d left behind. Fiaz is the only remaining connection she maintains to her queer past.

  Their sex life, too, after that disastrous start in Iowa, has more than righted itself, with some patient
instruction from Seema. There’s no reason to fear himself inadequate or her unfulfilled, if that morning’s frenzied lovemaking is anything to go by. She’d awakened charged and aroused, with a rapaciousness that had inflamed him too. They’d fucked feverishly, Bill crying out in long tremulous sobs as he came, the shock of his orgasm coursing through him. And then he’d pleasured her to a protracted climax, tongue and fingers flicking and stroking slowly, deliberately, the way she liked.

  “Bill, slow down.” Seema stumbles in her high heels. “I know we decided to dress like the day we met, but repeating the ER part is going too far.” She has on the scarlet dress she’d worn for the anti–Iraq War march, and Bill his blue shirt and pigeon-gray slacks.

  Bill stops in contrition, and she kisses him on the cheek, whispering, “Relax, I’m not going to pull a runaway bride.”

  But she’s glad she’d insisted on everyday clothes for their party. She’d warned Fiaz and Pierre against wearing anything fancy or bringing any wedding accessories: bouquets, balloons. She’d have felt too awkward, too guilty. Now they could be at city hall on some trivial business.

  Her mother called earlier that morning, when they were dressing for the ceremony. Ammi had asked, “Will you wear a saree today?”

  “No, I don’t even own one anymore.”

  “Do you remember—how you and Tahera fought over my wedding saree?”

  How she’d coveted Ammi’s wedding saree, with its elaborate vines and flowers of gold zarr covering every inch of the silk, a luscious dual-toned crimson-peach, unlike the more modest dark reds that brides in their family usually wore on their weddings. She’d badgered Ammi until she’d been promised that saree for her own wedding. Tahera had to be placated, of course, so she’d offered Tahera her first three choices among the other sarees Ammi was setting aside for them, in the bottom shelf of her almirah. All those sarees that Ammi kept adding to regularly each year of their girlhood—and all the jewelry, too, the gold necklaces, earrings, and bangles, that Abba periodically brought home to enchant his two daughters with—they must have all been used for Tahera’s wedding.