The Pact We Made

by Layla AlAmmar

  At home, I stood dripping wet – wrapped in a towel, my skin hot from a long shower – and stared at the wall of Goyas. I had them in a grid, seven rows and more columns than I cared to count. They were printed out in different sizes and with differing clarity, but it didn’t matter. There was a story there, I was sure; a story of entrapment, dissolution, and veneers. From the illusions of courtship to the squatting asses, the flying beasts and yawning maws, there was a story there if only I could puzzle it out. Every time I thought I was close to getting it, like just then in the shower, I’d face the gallery and grow befuddled once more. The meaning faded, the string of a loose balloon floating away. And then, this flash of something ugly, a resentment would rise up in me so fast I was dizzy with it. If I’d gone away to school before, if I’d really pushed for an art degree straight off the bat, would I have been able to really see his Caprices? Would it have made sense to me? Would I have seen more than his brief explanations allow?

  Was it too late to be who I might have been?

  I began taking them down one by one in a haphazard way, paying no mind to the order of the grid. Down came Love and Death, all the hunters and the shameful ones. I peeled them off the wall with careful fingers, mindful of tape and paint and not to rip the paper, though I could have always just printed out others. I laid them face down on the bed, a neat little pile of what Goya called the ‘foibles and follies of civilized society’.

  There was a knock, and then Mama opened the door. I was momentarily stunned, my hands freezing against the wall. Aside from the occasional sound of acknowledgment, we’d said nothing to one another since that day at the chalet. That old shame had washed up on her shore again, or perhaps she really was done with me. In any case, she was behaving as she had when I was fifteen and cotton-brained and unable to understand why she wouldn’t look at me. She moved around the house like a ghost – a shadow against the wall, a rustling on the stairs, a dark outline before her bedroom door closed. If there had ever been a chance for us to be close, for me to seek out her comfort, it had long since passed.

  ‘You’re finally taking those down,’ she said, nodding to the half-empty wall. ‘Hamdilla.’

  I felt a childish urge to pretend I was just rearranging the grid, but I quashed it and resumed peeling off the pieces of paper. She watched me from the doorway, quiet as I removed print after print, laying them down on the growing pile.

  ‘There’s a wedding next month,’ she said. My hands froze again, although the paper they held trembled slightly. ‘We’ll go.’

  ‘It’s not proper.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘He just died.’ I rearranged the pile on the bed, refusing to look at her.

  ‘It will have been long enough by then.’

  I didn’t say anything. She held herself tense, one thin hand gripping the door jamb, but I didn’t argue. Let her make her plans; they were all just words.

  ‘And remind me to ask Nadia where we can get that abomination removed,’ she added, pointing at my bare shoulder before turning and shutting the door behind her.

  When she was gone, I turned the Goyas over and spread them across the duvet, my hand moving in widening circles until it looked like a grayscale hurricane on an ocean of blue. A few fell off the edge and fluttered to the floor. There was a cyclone in my mind, thoughts whirling and spinning, loop-the-loops of sour words and bitter contention. It felt like all the arguments, all the hurts, all the doubts were speeding across my mind like a movie. I didn’t hate my parents; there was resentment, and perhaps there always would be, but I didn’t hate them.

  Maybe the Goyas aren’t a story, but a series of nightmares and worst-case scenarios.

  And this final print, number 80, I picked it up from where it had drifted to the floor. The four men, each with an expression more grotesque than the last. Outstretched arms, biting thumbs, screaming mouths. It is time, the print declared, and the men appeared eager for it. It is time.

  One thought crashed through all the others in my head, demanding to be heard.

  My life here is over.

  I said the words out loud because thinking is passive whereas speaking would make it so. I had to believe as much.

  Have you ever seen an orchid flower die? It happens in less time than you’d think. The flower is there, in bloom and fine, and then suddenly one day, it falls, just plops straight off the stem to the pot below. You pick it up with gentle fingers, though you know it’s dead. It doesn’t look dead, that’s the problem. The petals are white, veiny and dry, but still white, no indication that entropy has won.

  And the plant is fine. It may be no more than a bare stalk, but it’s erect and proud, confident that another flower will bloom.

  The sameness of my routine was vomit-inducing. The nausea assaulted me at the coffee shop I stopped at on my way to work; it settled in when the barista called out my order without asking me what I wanted. I had a ‘usual’. The traffic was backed up on the 40, like always, cars inching along and weaving through lanes, looking for the one moving the fastest. I had visions of speeding up on overpasses, of crashing through barriers, launching myself onto the roads below. Bile flirted with my esophagus when the same awful songs came on the radio.

  The air outside my window was warm and damp, like a sauna or one of those hot yoga classes people say are so good for you. Our long trek through another summer had begun. Soon there would be blistering winds and gritty sandstorms, suffocating days and humid nights. The dust would invade our homes, our bodies, our everything, scratching away at us as though trying to erode our very existence. It would continue for months on end until you were certain the sky would never be clear again.

  ‘Hey.’

  I turned from the window and smiled at Yousef, who had an elbow propped up on my cubicle wall. ‘Hey.’

  ‘All good?’

  ‘Can’t complain,’ I replied, doodling on the desk calendar before me.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Yeah, loads.’

  ‘What about …?’

  I looked up to find him nodding towards his shoulder. I waved away his concern with a smile. ‘I forget it’s there.’

  ‘Have your parents seen it?’

  I gave him an abbreviated version of the goings-on at my house: the fight with my parents, the words we’d flung at one another, the threats and pleas. He nodded along, unsurprised by any of it.

  ‘You can’t really be upset,’ he said when I was done. ‘You knew that’s how they would take it.’

  ‘I know,’ I agreed. My doodle had morphed into a bird, some alarming creature that looked like a cross between a crow and an owl.

  Despite the inhospitality of the weather, I wished I were outside. I yearned for every kind of freedom possible. I wished that I were a bird, a bulbul or zarzour, soaring from branch to branch, alighting maybe here, maybe there. To be a child again, blissfully ignorant of everything to come, or a man, able to get in a car and drive to Istanbul – thirty-odd hours and you’re there.

  I wondered where I could be in thirty-odd hours if I really put my mind to it.

  I took a long coffee break, going to a café a few blocks from my office. The weather had shifted, the wind kicking up, hostile and sharp with dust. It didn’t deter me, and as I walked I pretended it was a glorious spring day. I imagined the sky was blue and not flat beige, that those shapes on the horizon weren’t dust clouds, but the fluffier sort. I skipped across busy intersections, skirting honking cars and past construction workers milling about work sites with nothing to do.

  There was a ticking time bomb in my breast. I could feel it, thumping against the yathoom, just begging me to do something. To just, for the love of God, do something. I felt restless, reckless, as though, given the opportunity, I could walk forever, to the edge of my life and straight off the side perhaps.

  Walking back to work, I noticed a black car keeping pace with me. At first I thought it was just someone who was lost or maybe looking for a p
lace to park, but it stayed on my heel as I approached my building and I eventually turned to look. An Indian driver was in the front, and in the back seat, behind a dark window and even darker sunglasses, I made out the precise features of Bu Faisal’s wife.

  The car stopped, the engine rumbling with a heavy purr, and she lowered the window to greet me. There was an awkward moment, and I hesitated before discarding the idea of leaning into the car to kiss her cheeks. Her face was made up to the fullest: caked foundation and bronzer too dark for her tone; rosy cheeks; and a bright peach gloss on her lips.

  ‘How’s your mother doing?’ she asked when we’d exchanged greetings.

  ‘Hamdilla.’ It was the standard reply, and she accepted it with a frown of sympathy.

  ‘I didn’t see you at the funeral.’ She lowered her massive sunglasses, revealing heavily drawn brows two shades darker than her walnut hair and eyes loaded with green shadow and spider-black lashes.

  ‘I was sick,’ I replied, my lie smooth and rehearsed.

  She pursed her lips. ‘Salamat. Not too sick, I hope.’

  Sick enough, I thought, but I said, ‘Just a stomach bug.’

  She nodded, and her dark eyes looked me up and down. ‘You look like you’ve put on some weight, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing.’ Such comments were commonplace. A woman’s body or face were fair game for anyone to comment on, and it was best not to respond to such things. She smiled wide to soften the insult. ‘Bu Faisal’s secretary says you stopped by the other day.’

  ‘I did,’ I replied, my eyes wandering to the office building up ahead like I had somewhere to be. ‘It was about some work thing.’

  ‘Work thing?’ she repeated with a nod and a secret sort of smile. ‘Nancy said it didn’t look like you had come from work.’

  What had I been thinking, showing up at his office looking like that? How could I have thought it would go unnoticed? I struggled to keep my voice even. ‘I hadn’t, but I had papers to drop off.’

  She nodded again and tapped her sunglasses against her lips. ‘A company like yours must have messengers for that sort of thing. Surely you don’t need to go so out of your way?’

  ‘Of course,’ I replied.

  She tilted her head, looked at me like she knew something I didn’t, like her eyes not only saw through me, but into the future, like she could see into my head and knew what I was considering.

  There was a part of me that, when faced with his flesh-and-blood wife, recoiled from the idea. The scandal would be horrendous, and with me not there, it would fall squarely on my mother’s shoulders. And my father’s. They didn’t deserve it, but we were, all of us, accustomed to getting what we didn’t deserve. I didn’t deserve what had happened to me, Mama didn’t deserve such a cousin, and Baba didn’t deserve all these lives that made no sense and that he couldn’t keep in line.

  But life was intolerable, and I could not, would not, stomach it any longer. The panic flapped above my head like the wings of a thousand insects.

  Later, after I’d swallowed several cups of coffee and shuffled the pending documents on my desk into a multitude of configurations, after I’d given the hybrid bird wings and sent him soaring across the calendar, I found myself on the internet pulling up plane tickets. I searched for flights leaving that night, leaving in the early hours of the morning, leaving in the next hour. I listed, in big bold letters, all the possible destinations. Capitals and travel hubs marched down and across my notepad like little soldiers telling me not to be afraid: Paris (did the Marais fit after all?), London (my parents would immediately suspect it), New York (infrequent flights; I would have to transit somewhere). There were destinations less desirable – Moscow in April hardly seemed like a sensible idea. There were patently ridiculous destinations, but that didn’t stop me from click-click-clicking away at images of the Maldives or Mykonos or Tenerife.

  I put my head in my hands and cloned myself a dozen times over, sending each little feeler-me out on a hypothetical journey. These simulacrums scampered off, reporting back on how easy it was to get on in Paris, even if you didn’t speak the language – the French are much friendlier than people think. London was quite expensive, they concurred, but then again, the dinar was awfully strong. New York was no better, but my savings would stretch even further there. I picked up my pen again, filling my desk calendar with crude doodles of monuments: leaning Big Bens and Eiffel Towers, indistinct Statues of Liberty and cartoonish Kremlins.

  A beep sounded from the computer, and I looked over to see a new email notification. I ignored it and as my eyes returned to the pen, they swept across the Japanese fan Bu Faisal had given me all those weeks before. It had been folded up and tucked into the mug I used as a pen holder. Yousef must have done it, not wanting to risk it being stolen or lost while I was out of the office. I plucked it up and unfolded it, fanning it all the way open, and ran my fingers lightly over the delicate silk and etched bamboo. I traced the scene, my fingertip following the lines of trees and sky and the ladies trapped in that forever-winter.

  22

  I Have Chosen

  The little plane is hovering over Newfoundland, about to cross into the US. We’ve been on this plane for ten hours, and still when we land our journey won’t be complete. Bu Faisal – he’s asked me to call him Nasser, but I don’t think of him that way yet – won’t say where the next plane will take us; he insists on treating this like a vacation rather than what it is – a brutal tearing of the fabric of my life.

  It was a perverse and manic spontaneity that gripped me as I held that Japanese fan, the one that is tucked into my bag under the seat in front of me. There is a part of me that’s quite sure I’ve lost my mind. No rational person would behave as I have in the last few hours. What sane person waltzes into their boss’s office and quits? Without preamble or explanation? Who then renounces the balance of their salary and paid vacation time in lieu of providing notice? Just so they can leave, free and clear, that day?

  You’d have to be at least a little crazy to then go home and try to pack up your life as quickly as possible while arousing as little suspicion as you can. My parents weren’t home, but the maids were, and all it would take was one phone call from them to bring the whole thing crashing down.

  It’s amazing how little the junk you accumulate matters. When you’re forced to squeeze your life into two suitcases and a carry-on, you learn what items you can and can’t live without. Aside from clothing and shoes, in went books on art, and posters unframed and carefully rolled back into their tubes, pictures of my family and Mona and Zaina, my sketchbooks and illustrations.

  One illustration – a Waterhouse girl, her veil whipping in the wind – I’d had mounted and framed a couple of weeks back. I sent it off with the driver, wrapped up with a note in an envelope with Rashid’s name on it, to Mona’s house.

  I considered leaving a letter for Mama; all while packing, I drafted and redrafted it in my head, but no words seemed sufficient for the enormity of what I was doing to her. I thought of calling Baba, pulled up his contact in my phone log a few times, but I never hit ‘dial’. For a moment I considered calling my sister, but Nadia was sure to panic and drive over to intercept me. I would contact them later, I decided, which is when I did something that, if not a crazy person then certainly a stupid person would do.

  I sent three texts – to Yousef, Mona, and Zaina. All variations on the same message, variations of the same reason for what I was doing.

  It was one of the girls who called Baba.

  He found me sucking down a coffee while I waited for Bu Faisal to return from the currency exchange. I was thinking about the calls I’d have to make when we got to wherever we ended up – calls to the girls, to Nadia, to Yousef, Mama and Baba. I was thinking about repercussions, about tearing things asunder, about actions you can’t ever take back.

  When our eyes met, I had a childish impulse to turn and run to the bathroom. My stomach leapt into my throat and the coffee burned like acid in my gu
t.

  He looked sad, almost as sad as when I was fifteen. He looked older, too, as though our lives and all our choices had finally caught up with him. Or maybe I was seeing him through new eyes. I don’t know.

  Lies were told.

  ‘I’m travelling on my own,’ I said, while my eyes darted around the departure hall to see if I could spot Bu Faisal.

  ‘Everything will be fine, if you just come home,’ Baba said, his voice strange and pleading.

  A blatant lie, one I didn’t even bother disputing. Much of what was said were regurgitated lines, but we recited them as faithfully as actors in a play.

  He was angry, his eyes flashing as he said, ‘Come home now.’

  I shook my head. ‘What are you going to do,’ I whispered, ‘drag me kicking and screaming through the airport?’ His eyes darted this way and that, taking in the travelers hustling around us. ‘Because there will be kicking, Baba.’ His eyes returned to mine. ‘Screaming, too.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked, his voice as low as mine.

  I looked to the ceiling; anything to keep the tears from falling. I wouldn’t cry there. ‘I can’t breathe here. I can’t breathe.’

  He glanced down at the blue passport clutched in my hand, with the boarding pass sticking out of it, and I had a wild notion of him ripping it away from me and taking off down the escalator. His eyes moved to the bag at my feet, stuffed and bulging with last minute things I’d decided I couldn’t part with: photos of my family and the girls, from back when things were simpler; a dull blue and white nazar pendant from a night long ago in California; a little ceramic shaggy cow Yousef had brought me from a trip to Scotland; that pink soup bowl of a candle.

  ‘I already failed you once.’

  I looked up, but he wouldn’t meet my eye; his gaze hovered somewhere over my shoulder, on the neon of a store sign or the muted brown and green of the coffee shop.

  ‘If you go …’ He shook his head, looked down at our feet. ‘I couldn’t protect you there. I’d be failing you all over again.’