All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

  After we eat, my mother says, “I’ll get some sheets. You can sleep on the sofa.”

  “I have a hotel room.”

  “No,” she says. “You have to sleep here. What kind of mother lets her daughter sleep alone at a hotel?”

  The cushions of the sofa are too soft, the night too full of city sounds. I lie awake, still dressed, listening to my parents’ breathing in the next room for perhaps an hour before a wedge of yellow light spills into the hall from George’s bedroom. He steps softly into the living room and stands looking down at me.

  “You awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Want to get out of here? Have some fun?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right, come on.” He holds out his hand to help me up from the couch and I’m surprised all over again by the strength and size of him. When I’m standing, he looks me up and down and says, “Do you have something else to wear? Something less…you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he says. “I don’t want people to think I brought my aunt to a party.”

  “Shut up,” I tell him, but I’m smiling in the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  From outside I text Abike: Need a break? Going to a party, meet me there. I ask George for the address and send it to her, then we hail a cab and head out across the city.

  The party is in a basement apartment in the far western suburbs. A few lamps with pink shades cast a dim light over the main room, where people are packed tight together and dancing. George disappears into the kitchen to get us drinks. I look around for Abike but don’t see her. The people here are anywhere from eighteen to thirty, college students and office workers and new arrivals who’ve come to give the big city a try. They all look impossibly young to me. George presses a bottle of beer into my hand and says something I can’t hear. Soon he is dancing with a girl in a low-cut dress, leaving me to my own devices. I retreat to the kitchen, where a man smiles at me and asks me where I’m from.

  “Near Matazu,” I reply, though the village where George and I grew up feels like it’s several lifetimes away. I tell myself, It’s not that hard. It’s just talking. Just talk to him. But it’s been a long time since I talked to a man for fun. I take a deep gulp of my beer and let the alcohol relax me, and soon we are chatting, like normal people. Others join us and an hour goes by before I go to look for George, and finally spot him on the far side of the living room, standing in a corner with Abike.

  George is smiling but he looks dazed. He is staring down at Abike and opening his wallet. She stands with her hand out, smiling in a self-satisfied way, as George counts a pile of pink and blue bills into her palm. He stops and she taps the money with her finger, more, and he starts again. For a moment I stand where I am, unable to move, just watching them. Then I am across the room in three strides, shouldering my way through a throng of dancers and grabbing the money from her hand. “No,” I say.

  Abike laughs. “Peche, relax, don’t we always share?”

  I shove the money back into George’s wallet and close his fingers around it. Abike looks at me like I have lost my mind, like she would be angry if she weren’t so surprised. “No, no, it’s George,” I tell her. “It’s my brother.” What I want to say is, He’s different. He’s not here to beat us or rape us or even lie to us. He’s a good boy. But he’s not a boy anymore, and I can feel tears hot in my eyes and my fingers curling into fists, as though there were someone to strike.

  Abike looks at the floor. “Sorry,” she says, and turns and walks away before either of us can say anything else.

  George stands there blinking, clutching his wallet. “I think I’ve had too much to drink,” he says. “Who knew it was possible?” He smiles his little-boy smile at me. “Is your friend here yet? We can come back later. Let’s go get something to eat.” He wraps his arm around my shoulders, and I let him lead me away.

  * * *

  —

  By the time we return to my parents’ apartment, the sky is turning from black to blue. George stumbles to his room and immediately falls into a heavy, snoring sleep, and I rush to the bathroom to change into my pajamas before my mother wakes up. But even when I’ve stuffed the black dress to the bottom of my duffel, I still feel anxious and dirty. I scrub my face and hands, but the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke sticks to my skin; the taste of stale beer lingers in my mouth. I can’t sleep. When my mother comes out to make breakfast and finds me sitting on the sofa clutching my knees, she nods sadly and says, “You’re ready to leave again.”

  “I’ll come back,” I tell her.

  “I hope so.”

  I dress and get ready to go. My mother insists on doing my head wrap for me. I sit in front of the mirror and she smoothes my hair back from my forehead and pulls the fabric of the gele around the back of my head so that she is holding the two long ends in front of me. In that cradle of cloth, my head suddenly feels lighter, my neck loose and limp. She wraps the fabric across my forehead and pins it in place while she gathers the rest into her hands.

  “I wish I could come home for good,” I say.

  “We all wish that. You come whenever you’re ready.” She lays her hand against the back of my neck. Her skin is cool and soft against mine. She finishes pleating the gele and fans the folds carefully above my head. Then she takes a handkerchief from her pocket to wipe my face. “Don’t cry,” she says. “I’m proud of you. How many girls could survive what you have?”

  As she says it, I wonder if it’s true, if I have survived. Until today, I have never missed my old self, the self that could be abducted, bullied, raped, made to marry a man for whom I had no feelings but dread and hatred. I have rejoiced many times in the death of that girl, but now my mother looks at me in the mirror and I know that’s who she is looking for. I can feel it in the way her eyes sweep across my face.

  * * *

  —

  Abike and I ride home in the back of a millet truck. For most of the ride she is silent, but I can tell she is watching me when my eyes are closed. When we are almost home, she reaches out tentatively and takes my hand.

  I press my thumb against hers. “I’m not angry at you. You didn’t know,” I say. We have reached our town, and I call for the driver to stop. Abike kisses my cheek. “I’m going to ride on to the market,” she says. “I’ll be home soon.” I nod and don’t look back as the truck pulls away.

  The village is dusty and quiet. Stray dogs nap in the sun outside our house. When I go inside, Karim is at the stove, boiling water. He looks frightened when he sees me but tries to hide it. He pours two cups of tea and motions for me to sit down at the table.

  “Go ahead,” I say, and he sits across from me, resting his hands on the tabletop. The backs of his hands are dotted with the scars of old cigarette burns. For a while, this was something Abike and I liked to do. We could make him sit with his palms flat on the table while we pushed the lit end of the cigarette against his flesh. All his fear and pain would go across his face, but he wouldn’t move his hands until we let him.

  Now I look at Karim in a way I haven’t looked at him in years, with no command in mind. For so long, he has been nothing to me but a curse I broke, a monster I hollowed out and made weak, but now it occurs to me how little I know about him: what his family is like, what he himself was like as a boy, how he came to be part of a band of ruthless men with guns. Whether he really believed in the Prophet or whether he just wanted three meals a day and something to do. His skin is bagged under the eyes, his hair patchy where he has worn it away with nervous scratching. He is only thirty-five years old. “Go and get Bashir,” I tell him.

  A few minutes later they return and sit side by side across the table from me.

  “Bashir,” I say, “my husband is going to divorce me. You are our witness. Karim, tell me that you are divorcing me.”

>   He does it, without hesitation. To him this is no different from any other command, not freighted with meaning or emotion. He might as well be ordering food in a restaurant.

  “Again,” I tell him. “Again.” And then it’s over. He’s not my husband anymore, he’s just a man on the other side of a table. He sits quietly, watching me, waiting to hear what I’ll say next. “I want you to leave. Go away from here,” I tell him. “Never touch another woman as long as you live. If you do, you’ll fall to your knees and never get up. Remember that.” Even as I say it, I don’t know if this is enough, if a man like this can ever be punished enough. But I am tired of being the one to punish him.

  “Where do I go?” Karim says.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  He shrugs his shoulders weakly, but he doesn’t look away. His gaze is the soft, searching gaze of a dog being scolded for a crime it doesn’t understand. He waits for me to tell him what I want, what to do. What comes next.

  And who knows the answer to that?

  In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there lived a fisherman named Robert Greenman. He was the latest in a long line of fishermen, thirty-three years old, quiet and ruggedly built just as his father had been. He had a pretty wife, Carol, a nurse he’d met at Portsmouth Regional Hospital when a cut on his arm had threatened to turn gangrenous. Sometimes when they lay in bed at night she liked to run her fingers along the scar that cut had made. They had been married a year and, so far, had no children, though certainly not for lack of trying, she liked to say, with a little laugh like wind chimes. Robert was, above all else, a sensible and sober man, and he adored Carol as only such a man could, with a love built on a list of reasons and proofs of her goodness. She was a charming woman, cheerful and intelligent, with strawberry-blond hair that she kept cut short, just below her ears. For work she wore sneakers and scrubs, but at home she favored dresses that showed her shoulders, and shoes with low heels that made a particular clicking noise that had become, in Robert’s mind, the signature sound of women.

  Now Carol was standing at the end of the Portsmouth dock in her bright blue wool coat, waving at Robert as his ship headed out to sea. He didn’t wave back, he never did, but he knew that she didn’t mind and wanted to wave anyway.

  He was on board the Ushuaia, a cod-fishing ship headed up toward Newfoundland. The captain, known in Portsmouth simply as Tomás because his last name was considered unpronounceable, was an Argentine who had moved to New Hampshire when he was a young man. Robert had worked for Tomás before and liked him. The trip would last five weeks, if it took that long to fill the hold, and it probably would. Over the past several years, fishing along the New England coast had dwindled—the result of overfishing in previous decades—so that every season the captains had to push their crews out farther to make a profit. Robert had spent most of the year since his marriage at home with Carol, working odd jobs in town to supplement the money she made from nursing, but lately he had been going to sea again. He knew most of the crew on this trip. They had been fishing as long as he had, if not longer. The only person he did not know was Mark Leslie, who was new to town and, from the look of him, to fishing as well. Mark was pale, with limp blond hair and brown eyes that seemed too large for his face, like a child’s. He was thirty years old but acted much younger. As the ship moved out into the bay, leaving Portsmouth, Mark leaned against the rail and stared down into the water, then turned and grinned at the other men on deck as though the mere sight of the ocean were something astounding.

  The first night at sea was clear and warm. The fishermen sat on deck, talking and smoking. Mark pointed out the constellations, not just Orion and the Big Dipper and the ones they all knew, but others as well, the strange Greek names sliding easily off his tongue. When he finally stopped talking there was an awkward silence until the captain told a joke, and Jim Barner—the cook, and a friend of Robert’s from high school—started laughing his high, shrill laugh that made him sound like a teenage girl. The other men began laughing and telling jokes as well. Robert chuckled and nodded along but he was watching Mark, who sat across from him on the other side of the circle of men. There was a thin line on a fishing ship between men who were useless and those whose incompetence endangered their shipmates; it was still unclear where Mark would fall.

  Their target fishing ground was five days northward, a swath of ocean around the 55th parallel, just outside the bounds of Canadian fishing laws. As they traveled they worked, rechecking the nets, making sure that the ice machine in the hold was in working order to preserve the fish they would catch. On the fifth day, an hour before sunset, the captain looked up from the sonar and said there were fish around. He sent Robert and Mark to pay out the nets, and the motors of the net drums growled as they slowly unwound twenty miles’ worth of woven monofilament line that would float through the water like a spider’s web, reaching hungrily for the passing fish. They would let it drift with the tides and haul it in the following morning, to see what their fortune would be for this trip.

  By the time they finished with the nets, the rest of the men were asleep. Robert felt his way through the dim bunkroom, and heard Mark stumble in behind him. They both got into their bunks, but as soon as Robert lay down he could tell this was one of those nights when he’d struggle with the insomnia that sometimes came over him at sea. He stayed in bed for an hour anyway, listening to the other men’s breathing as they sank into heavy sleep. Then he donned his boots and jacket and went up on deck.

  The moon had come out, and the waves were black, edged with foam and shivering streaks of light. Robert leaned against the rail, eyes drifting aimlessly over the waves, getting lost in their pattern. Then he saw the mermaid.

  At first he thought she was a large fish breaching the surface. He saw only her tail as it slid beneath the waves, silver and glittering in the faint light from the moon. But even the sight of the tail tugged at his nerves. She surfaced again, and the nervousness hardened into a knot. Her skin was pearly white, and gave off the kind of glow he’d seen in certain jellyfish. She was perhaps forty feet from the ship, and she floated at the surface of the water with her tail submerged, facing away from him. A line of silver scales marked her spine and disappeared into her hair. She slipped in and out of the water, her tail propelling her quickly, gracefully, its movement delicate. She seemed to be looking for something, turning her head side to side, and every time she turned, he hoped to catch a glimpse of her face, but never saw more than a thin crescent of her profile. As he watched her, an ache filled his bones. The light from her skin made everything around her dull. The moon-capped waves, the stars, even the black water lost their gloss. Eventually, she dove underneath the waves and didn’t reappear. Robert watched for her until the sun came up, and when the other men shuffled onto deck, yawning, he joined them.

  They pulled in the nets and Robert scanned the deck, afraid that he would spot a pair of white arms among the lines, but he saw only fish. It was a fair catch, nothing to brag about, but enough to put a little money in each of their pockets. Robert loaded fish into the hold. He was not superstitious, as many fishermen were. His eyes and ears did not play tricks on him and he was not given to daydreaming under any circumstances; certainly not while on board a ship, where so many things could go wrong. He trusted himself completely. So the mermaid must be real. He wondered only where she had gone when she disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  The mermaid had been born at the bottom of the ocean, a place beyond the reach of sunlight, warmed only by the muttering of geothermal vents. She had wandered up out of those depths and spent her early years on the slopes of an underwater mountain near the tiny islands of Tristan da Cunha, thirteen hundred miles from the next piece of dry land. Every memory from the moment sunlight had touched her eyes was clear, frozen, perfectly preserved even decades later, but of her birthplace she retained only a vague impression of magnificent creatures with sk
in like a carpet of teeth, of tentacles that snapped and plucked blindfish from the water, and currents that burst from the lips of the vents like magma, warmth from the very core of the earth. Among these hazy memories there was no picture of another mermaid.

  Eventually she had followed a swordfish north, along the coast of South America, and then up to Newfoundland. The water, as she traveled, turned from sapphire blue to a murky gray-green, and the fish grew larger but lost their bright colors. She did not find the northern seas as appealing as those she was used to, but she was a creature of endless curiosity. Still, she might have turned around and gone back to warmer waters were it not for the shark.

  He was hard to see, even when he was moving. He blended so completely with the deep sea that he could have been a shadow, a swell of agitated water, a cloud of black sand sent up by a manta ray. The mermaid observed him from a distance, watching for the white flash of his belly whenever he twisted to change direction.

  She had decided it was best to approach him when he had just eaten. Not that he ever made any move to attack her—he preferred to surprise his prey, and the mermaid was watchful. But he was calmer after eating. When he was hungry, the shark dove deep into the water until he was invisible from above. As she waited for him to resurface, the mermaid felt a strange electric trill at the back of her neck. She became suddenly aware of the water against her skin, something she seldom otherwise noticed. The shark circled slowly until he had spotted his prey, and then he shot upward, mouth open, sometimes bursting above the surface of the ocean with his attack. After gorging himself, he swam in lazy circles while blood still clouded the water.