by Pasha Malla
The fog tattered and broke. Out of it he plummeted. A town opened up before him. And a figure stood at the base of the hill, maybe seventy-five yards away. A big man in goggles, waving his ski poles. From this figure boomed a voice of authority: ‘Whoa there, Dhar. Ease up, slow it down now.’
Why? Faster was better. The faster he went, the more alive he felt.
The big man, fifty yards away, was still yelling. Matt, Ash thought: his alleged best friend, about whom he knew nothing. Beyond Matt was a fence, and beyond that the building from which a procession of those little booths climbed swaying up the mountain.
‘Are you trying to kill yourself?’ cried Matt. ‘Bring your tips in!’
Kill himself? Surely not. The alternative appeared to be stopping. But how? He lowered his hands to his sides but that achieved little. He crouched, which only increased his speed. He willed himself mentally slower. No result.
The skis cut fast through the snow with a gristly, raking sound. Matt was a hundred feet away, eighty, sixty. Close enough to see the terror in his eyes, and now bracing himself for impact—arms out, feet set. ‘I got you, bro!’ he cried.
But it felt wrong and possibly detrimental to crash into this person. So what to do?
Fall.
So he fell. Leant left and crumpled, skis detaching and pinwheeling away. His body crunched hard into the snow and knotted and pitched, over and over and over, like a bit of litter balled and flung from the window of a moving train.
And then it all stopped. Pain shot from his hip to shoulder. But pain was good: it anchored him. Lying on the frozen ground, Ash gazed up at the colourless sky. Snowflakes floated down, lighted wetly on his cheeks. Winter, he thought. Simple and clear: Winter, winter. The word tumbled through his brain, a sock in a clothes dryer—
A memory interrupted. Something here: wet socks, a burning smell. And this place. But before these elements could connect and concretize Matt was upon him, hollering and gesturing hugely—‘Gosh, good, you’re alive, are you okay, what were you doing, did you break anything, that was crazy, what were you thinking?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ash simply. And wondered when he might answer a question with anything but those words.
4
‘WHAT YOU NEED,’ said Matt, ‘is a massage.’
It had the implication of a threat. Ash, sitting in bed with an icepack pressed to his lower back, crossed his arms. ‘I don’t know, I’m still pretty sore.’
‘So let me fix you up. I told you, I’m pretty much licensed, don’t worry. Down you get.’
‘On the floor?’
‘Need the leverage. Bed’s too soft.’ Matt was coming at him now. ‘Shirt off, pants off.’
‘Pants off?’
‘Everything off.’
Obediently Ash stripped down to his boxers. Pulling off his shirt, he cringed: pain shot through him, seeming to originate everywhere at once.
‘What are you, bashful? I’ve seen your junk a hundred times. Look, I’ll gear down too if it makes you more comfortable.’ Matt’s shirt came over his head. His chest, as broad and pale as a whitewashed wall, was speckled with stubble and razor burn.
‘Is that necessary?’
‘What are you, afraid of a little man-on-man action?’ Matt laughed. ‘Fine, I’ll leave my trackpants on if you’re going to be so homophobic about it.’
And then he was lowering Ash to the carpet and straddling him.
‘Not too hard.’
‘Don’t fret. I’m a pro. Just gotta be careful with my pinkie, it’s nearly totally healed.’
As Matt began working his shoulders Ash crossed his arms and laid his cheek on his wrists. His view was straight under the bed to his open duffel bag on the other side. That strange grey container poked out from amid the clothes.
Matt’s hands worked rigorous circles over Ash’s deltoids, down across his shoulder blades, along his spine. Pinching, kneading, furrowing. ‘How’s that feel?’
‘Okay. A bit…intense, maybe.’
‘That means it’s working. Relax.’
Ash tried to obey, but every time Matt moved to a new region of his back he felt his entire body contracting, resisting.
‘Where’s it hurt the most?’
‘Right where you’re sitting, actually.’
‘Gotcha.’ Matt moved lower to bludgeon Ash’s calves. ‘Swedish,’ he explained.
Matt’s hands ventured northward, up past his knees, knuckling into the meat of Ash’s thighs. Ash thought he felt a stray finger snake up the inside of his boxers, but it retreated. Up it crept again, a little more adventurously, and he tried to wriggle away. But Matt pinned him in place.
‘There we go,’ Matt murmured. ‘Some really tight knots right here.’
He worked Ash’s upper legs briskly, almost aggressively, thumbs probing inward. Ash tried to bring his knees together to close the gap. But Matt pried them open again.
‘Just gotta get at your glutes.’
And his hands were now cupping his buttocks, working them like balls of dough. Ash could feel the outline of each splayed digit, the thumbs delving down into the space between his legs and then pulling up and outward, stretching him—
‘Okay,’ said Ash. ‘That’s probably good.’
But Matt kept going. He pressed his prickly chest to Ash’s back. His breath came in gusts. And then he went still. For a moment Matt just lay there: a quarter-ton of man spooning Ash from above. And was that? No, Ash thought; impossible. But, wait, yes: Matt seemed, almost imperceptibly, to be grinding his hips. Ash held his breath. It stopped. Nothing for a moment. And then the humping—was there another word for it?—resumed, a little more propulsively than before.
With all his strength Ash rolled onto his side, tipping Matt onto his knees.
Matt looked baffled. ‘Everything okay, bro?’
Immediately Ash felt ashamed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just felt a little claustrophobic.’
‘Pretty standard osteopathic technique,’ said Matt. ‘Using my full weight on you. Working out those kinks from your fall. But if it wasn’t working, that’s cool.’ With a shrug Matt picked up Ash’s shirt and pants and handed them over.
Ash felt stupid; he’d made it weird. He dressed while Matt stayed kneeling, eyes focused on some point a few inches from his face. ‘Did it help?’ he asked, looking up.
Bending and twisting at the waist, Ash told him yes, it had. ‘Thanks,’ he added.
‘No prob.’
Down the hall a door slammed. A scuffing noise of footsteps raced past their room.
‘Might go try to check my email,’ said Ash.
‘Smart,’ said Matt. ‘Good way to get some info. About yourself, I mean.’
‘Exactly.’
For a moment, neither of them moved or said anything.
Ash broke the stiffening silence: ‘Should probably clean up a bit first.’ He moved his duffel onto the bed and began stuffing it with errant clothes. But zipping it closed was a struggle; the two sides bulged around that grey box. Ash pulled it free and set it on the dresser: a gift awaiting its recipient.
‘You’re going to need your password,’ Matt said, standing at last. He came over, pushed aside the grey box and scrawled a line of digits onto the hotel notepad. ‘Same one you’ve used since you were fifteen,’ he said, tearing off the page but not handing it over. ‘PIN to your bank account, alarm to your condo. Everything.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No problem.’ Matt folded the paper in half, concealing the number, and slipped it into Ash’s hand. ‘I keep telling you, bro: whatever you need, just ask.’
—
THE SCREECH AND STATIC of the dial-up modem played like an old, familiar song. Ash smiled at this—a blast from the past, albeit a past he could recall only peripherally.
The concierge supervised over Ash’s shoulder, hands clasped behind his back in a posture of official surveillance. ‘Online?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ash.
‘Proce
ed.’
Matt’s password worked. And here were Ash’s emails in a great cascade.
‘Begin here,’ instructed the concierge, leaning in and tapping the most recent unread message, from someone named Sherene. The subject was ‘Book Club.’ Ash clicked and read, the concierge following intently over his shoulder.
Ash—
So I’m 100 pages into DQ and yeah sure it’s hilarious and sort of cool too I guess, and surprisingly modern, and thanks again for the gift, you’re sweet—but JESUS, Ash. Talk about bro-lit. Been imagining it as you and your meathead buddy gallivanting across India instead of Spain. I mean I hope you aren’t getting in fights all over the place and defending maidens’ honour and whatever else, tilting at rickshaws, but seriously it’s got me thinking how many men are still like this, how many men end up chasing some ridiculous ideal that has nothing to do with who they—and you too, sweetie, don’t think I’m letting you off!—actually are.
The email continued but Ash stopped reading for a moment. The message stabbed at the core of something. He felt needled. She’d called him ‘sweetie’—was Sherene a lover? The absence of a girlfriend or wife in Matt’s rundown had not seemed notable until now. No picture accompanied Sherene’s email address. And when he tried to find an image online a warning popped up on the screen.
‘No web searches,’ warned the concierge. ‘Blocked.’
Ash returned to the message:
But the thing for me mainly about this book, the big disappointment, is Sancho Panza. I had this idea that this was like THE BOOK about friendship. But he’s more of a lackey. I mean DQ is delusional right? Possibly insane? And Sancho just trucks along with him because of this vague promise of some island fiefdom or whatever. Not to honour his friend. And this willing obliviousness is what gets me, Ash. Like he’s willing to just play the idle witness while his pal suffers one humiliation after the next, and even encourages him sometimes too when really he should be acting with real kindness and just be like, no, this isn’t real, let’s go home. Anyway, speaking of, it’ll be nice to get back to Canada again. London’s fun for a few days but I’ve got another FORTNIGHT here, as my cousins keep telling me and inshallah, Ash, I already can’t wait to get back to work, isn’t that weird?
The rest of the email eased into some book recommendations and well-wishing for his trip and a gentle sign-off: XO. And here the possibilities of romance deflated; those weren’t passionate kisses. Sherene’s message pulsed with the exasperated affection that blooms in the gaps between love and sex. She and Ash were close, to a point, but there it stopped. Even so, she seemed like a friend he might actually trust.
Encouraged, Ash returned to his inbox and, to the concierge’s dismay, skipped the next three unread emails to click another from Sherene. It had no subject and consisted of a single sentence:
Oh, sorry to bring up work though I did talk to management and it looks like we’ll be able to get you back in the chair for the spring season, so good news there and no one seems to despise you anymore than they did already! XO
A colleague too, then. But why might Ash be despised at work? Matt had claimed that he was ‘a famous radio host’ and loved by ‘literally dozens;’ no part of that biography touched on anything particularly contemptible. Though if Matt were as good a friend as he claimed, might his casually brutish way implicate Ash? Ash pictured himself in the studio mewling at a twenty-something intern as she leaned down to adjust his microphone, smacking her rear-end as she fled the room. Maybe he and Matt were more similar than he thought, or hoped. How close were they, really?
A flash of that massage invaded his thoughts. Ash shuddered, shook it away.
Better to align himself with Sherene. Ash preferred the version of himself she mirrored. And he sensed tenderness beneath her vitriol. He liked, too, how she repeated his name; there was something warmly imploring about it that spoke of shared history: they’d been having conversations like this ‘for years’—and here they were, still.
‘Ten minutes left,’ announced the concierge.
Ash clicked back to his inbox, scanned the list. Chose an email titled ‘I am so pregnant!’ from someone named Mona—his sister, he remembered, according to Matt. The message contained no text, only a photo. The dial-up struggled; the hard-drive chirped and whirred. Line by line excruciating the picture unfurled on the screen: dark hair, peaked eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes. From the framing and blurred focus Ash guessed that it was self-taken. Halfway down the nose it paused. The concierge leaned in. The cursor became an hourglass tipping back and forth. Mona’s expression was unreadable—coy or sombre? He could hardly admire her pregnancy from her forehead!
Ash cancelled the download and hit refresh.
An error message appeared.
He clicked back.
Nothing; the connection was down. The photo had vanished, his inbox had vanished—all that data, lost to the ether.
‘Offline,’ said the concierge.
‘How long before it comes back up?’
‘Minutes, hours.’ A shrug. ‘Days.’
‘Days?’
‘Possibly.’ The concierge’s hands appeared from behind his back in, possibly, the opening gambit of a chokehold. ‘So, finish?’
Ash stared at the screen: Unable to connect. He laughed a lone, sharp syllable somewhere between ‘ha’ and ‘huh.’ And then the concierge stooped and pulled the plug.
Dreading a return to his room, Ash headed outside and stood on the steps of the hotel shivering in the winter dusklight. From the carrel across the road a pony-wallah approached with an emaciated animal. He wore only a woollen gown, hands and head naked to the chilly air.
‘Take ride. Very good price.’
‘Where would we go?’
‘Apharwat Peak,’ he said. The solicitation had the fatigue of habit, as if in obligation to some lapsed belief. His eyes were sad. ‘You know what? Sure,’ said Ash. ‘Let’s do it.’
He was helped up onto the saddle and wrapped, with surprising tenderness, in blankets. Beneath his weight the horse’s spine sagged. Yet she staggered forward, snow squeaking under her hooves, with the pony-wallah clutching her bridle and clucking softly. ‘You are from?’ he asked.
‘Canada,’ said Ash meekly, as if offering an apology.
‘No. Not Canada. You are…Indian?’
Ash enjoyed a little surge of possibility. ‘My dad’s from here. From Kashmir.’
‘I knew it!’ His smile revealed a jumble of yellow teeth. ‘You have the nose. Name?’
‘Dhar.’
‘Hindu?’
‘My dad is,’ said Ash, following Matt’s script.
‘I am Mumtaz,’ the man said, bowing. ‘Welcome home, Pandit Dhar.’
They walked for a while in silence. Ash considered his nose as a marker of identity. And Mona’s, chopped off at the bridge: did they share this nose? And what kind of brother was he? A protector, a confidant? Or merely a blood relation to send compulsory updates—a single picture, snapped haphazardly, but no words.
Mumtaz clucked. The horse stopped. ‘You will come to my village for tea?’
‘Your village?’
‘Not too far.’ He indicated a path up through the woods. ‘No charge.’
Ash eyed the mountain.
‘Apharwat, later. It is early only. Come. Please. A Hindu. At last!’
‘Oh, I don’t know how Hindu I am.’
‘How Hindu?’ Mumtaz laughed. ‘You are enough Hindu. Come. We will go.’
—
MUMTAZ LIVED JUST OUTSIDE TOWN in a cluster of stone and timber cottages amid the trees. His house was small and modest, the interior painted in an array of pastel shades. Ash was led to a drafty, cement-floored room blanketed with worn carpets. An electric heater glared in the corner. Mumtaz heaped some cushions together and encouraged Ash to sit.
‘Now I will fetch the tea,’ he said, and withdrew.
The room had no decorations, no furniture, not even an end table. Ash wondered how a
ccustomed to any of this he might be. Maybe he had relatives who lived in similar homes? Maybe he’d spent countless afternoons in parlours just like this; maybe the situation echoed some previous experience to which, now, he was oblivious.
A boy came in with a plate of—were they?—bagels.
‘Hello,’ said Ash.
‘Sir,’ said the boy. He knelt and deposited the tray at Ash’s feet.
‘What’s your name?’
The boy looked nervous. He took a step back, eyeing the doorway behind him. ‘Pastries, sir,’ he said. And vanished.
Ash tried a bagel. Dry as a crouton. Stale? Or meant to be this way?
A man appeared in the doorway, broader in the chest than Mumtaz, though with the same sad eyes and wonky teeth. He touched his forehead and sat. ‘Welcome.’
‘Thank you,’ said Ash, through a mouthful of dough.
‘You speak Kashmiri?’
Ash scanned his thoughts: not a word. ‘No. Sorry.’
The man nodded; his melancholy seemed to deepen. ‘You are coming from? Canada?’
‘Canada, yeah.’ Ash felt himself being watched intently, almost imploringly. In an effort to please his interlocutor, he finished the dusty bagel.
The man was joined by another, elderly, long and lean, in thick glasses and a stark white goatee. On his head perched a peaked woolly hat.
‘Hello,’ said Ash, offering him a pastry: declined.
The old man knelt, joints crackling, and wretched violently into a handkerchief, which he pocketed.
More and more men piled into the room, alone or in pairs, lining the walls. Some acknowledged Ash directly, others simply squatted and stared. Soon a dozen strangers watched him with the reticent curiosity of UFO researchers sizing up their live specimen. What was expected of him? Just to eat?
Finally a woman entered in a loose silk pantsuit and matching headscarf. (Salwar kameez, thought Ash, with taxonomical satisfaction.) The position she assumed, facing him directly, seemed to have been reserved for her. She was acknowledged by the older guy with a nod. Then all eyes turned back to Ash, as though viewing him anew, via the gaze of the room’s sole female presence. He again felt himself on display. Or trial?