The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

Yasmin thinks: She won. Natch.

  Cyril says, “You must still believe.”

  “How so?”

  “You wouldn’ be here otherwise, would you?”

  28

  THAT THE RESTAURANT had not changed through the years was, as Jim remarked, a singular achievement in a city where permanence was finite.

  It was here, in this large room rendered intimate by a phrasing of shadow and light, that she had agreed to marry Jim; here, in this room where elegant waiters moved with spectral judiciousness, that they had celebrated her pregnancy; here, where discretion marshalled sound, that they had marked her accession to the anchor desk.

  The champagne that Jim had ordered was uncorked and approved with nonchalant formality. As they clinked their glasses, Yasmin thought of the middle-aged couple who, on the evening that Jim asked her to marry him, had sat at the corner table conversing amiably. Her mind distanced itself, turning back to observe them. She saw that they had become that couple, but without amiability, and what at the time would have been a comforting thought now proved an unconsoling one. It awoke the dread — for that was not too strong a word — that she had been feeling for some months.

  There was no identifiable reason for it. Her forty years they were here to celebrate had taken no unusual physical toll: a few wrinkles, the silver strands that had come to her following Ariana’s death dissimulated among the dark mass of her hair. Her one unusual Pap test had turned out, upon further examination, to be innocuous. Her breasts had remained lump-free.

  And yet a certain uneasiness had come to her somewhere between her thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth birthdays. Before then, age had not mattered except as a way of marking the milestones of her life. But thirty-seven, following on years informed by a knot of ineradicable heartache, came quickly, and it tugged in its wake the looking certainty of forty.

  Forty: A large number — an age she could associate with herself only in gentle disbelief. Her mind was sharp, her limbs strong, her enjoyment of life — as she thought of it — undiminished, within reason: How could she be forty? Middle-aged. Life half lived, if she was lucky. It cast a shadow.

  Jim had wanted to have a party for her: invite everybody. But his idea had struck her as inappropriate. She wanted something smaller, more intimate. Secret. A restaurant, then — and not one of those places where tone-deaf waiters belted out “Happy Birthday” around a cupcake. New restaurants, each offering new concepts in food and decor, opened every day in the city, but Jim opted for the known and dependable. She was not surprised.

  The waiter came for their order. She chose the rack of lamb. She usually had salmon. Jim raised an eyebrow in surprise, then ordered his usual filet mignon, “as red as a sailor’s sunset.” He conferred in a knowledgeable murmur with the waiter over the choice of wine.

  When the waiter had gone, Yasmin said, “Do you still think about the light?”

  Jim cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. “The what?”

  “Never mind. Nothing.”

  He reached into his pocket, placed a small box in black velvet on her plate.

  As she opened the box and lifted with a show of delight the strand of imperfect pearls, she couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the arrogance and originality of his years gone by.

  She has thought about it, of course.

  The possibility of dismantling the life that has outlived its beauty.

  This is how she has imagined it: the wrapping of the silverware and the vases and the lamps; the boxing of the books; the bundling of linen; the removal of furniture; and the suitcases maniacally stuffed: a methodical undoing of the life, the house, stripped of personality, returned to a shell of brick and echo.

  This division of the spoils appears to her to be a mere formality. She covets nothing beyond the photographs of her daughter. Take it all, her mind says to Jim. What is important is to begin again — and the avoidance of rubble.

  And yet this is what stops her: this thorough dismantling which would be like ripping out sections of gut; the inevitability of rubble; and the vagueness of what would come next.

  For, despite everything, she cannot imagine herself happy.

  There is fear, there is suspension of breath, but there is no rapture.

  Later, as they got ready for bed, Jim said, “It really isn’t so bad, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Age. You get used to it.”

  But it was not a matter of adjustment. It was not a matter of age itself. The problem, she suspected, was the possibility never broached, and now beyond reach: the possibility of another child.

  Yet, after a moment, she said, “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”

  But he didn’t hear her over the rush of water from the tap, and when he climbed into bed, the moment had passed.

  Lying beside her, forearm thrown over his eyes, Jim said, “There’s a coldness at your centre, Yas. A ball of ice that survives beneath all those layers of warmth.” He turned, pressed himself to her side, his head on her shoulder, his thigh crossing hers.

  He had aroused her despite herself, and in the enlivened darkness she had rediscovered a youthful energy, an energy without age. Now, with just a few words, he had returned to her the anxiety he had caused her to forget.

  His palm, lying moist on her belly, crept up her side, touch lightening as he found her breast, skimming slowly across the nipple — she winced: it was sensitive still — and settling on it, grasping lightly at her flesh and at the pearls she had not removed. It was an artless gesture and, following on his words, grotesque.

  She reached for his hand, removed it.

  He hesitated. Then he turned onto his back and mumbled goodnight.

  She rolled onto her side, away from him, and stared wakeful into the darkness. For beyond everything — beyond the pleasure she had received and given; beyond the anxiety in her belly and the mindlessness of his touch — was the certainty that, in identifying that deeper coldness within her, Jim was right.

  29

  CYRIL SAYS, “THEY stopped here that day. He needed to pee.”

  Yasmin leans on the car and looks around. Sand. Palm trees widely dispersed. A beach that is broad and flat in low tide, the waves unfurling themselves with whispering grace.

  “They say that if he —”

  “Who says?”

  “Actually — there were two people with him that day. A driver and a political advisor. Whatever we know we got from the driver before he died. And — I warning you now — is not much.”

  “Did you talk to him yourself?”

  “No, no chance o’ that. The fella manage to talk to the ambulance attendant on the way to the hospital, and he’s the one who told the police.

  “Who told you.”

  “Right. So you see, all this is fourth-hand information.”

  “Was there an investigation?”

  “The police looked into it, yes. But you know, nobody was ever —”

  “I know. An immaculate killing. But Cyril, this is a small place. Surely there were rumours.”

  “Sure. And there was a rumour for everybody. Maybe it have an answer somewhere on a piece o’ paper, but I don’ believe it. The only thing we know for sure is that Ram and his two people were killed, shot, a little bit up the road, after they stopped here so he could relieve his bladder.”

  Yasmin walks from the car, out from beneath the trees to the beach. The sunlight is bright, reflective, an oblique afternoon light, and the breeze coming off the sea is steady and cool, tangy with brine and fresh fish. She says, “What is this place?”

  “Just a beach. A pretty popular one. Crowded on weekends, nuh.” He gestures at a line of garbage — discarded cans and paper cups, empty containers of every kind — pushed neatly far up the beach by the high tide.

  “Was it crowded when he —”

  “No, no, it was during the week. Afternoon. It was probably pretty much like this.”

  They stand together in the silence, listening to the wave
s and the breeze, to their echoes among the lengthening shadows.

  And finally Yasmin says, with a frustration that surprises even her, “What was he about, Cyril? I don’t —”

  Cyril takes her elbow and says quietly, “If you ask me, Ram was a man who spend his life looking for vengeance — and I mean big vengeance, vengeance on history, nuh — and in the end is what kill him. We don’ know who pull the trigger, and at this point it hardly matter. You see, I come to believe that what really kill him was the beast within.”

  Her gaze reaches out over the water and she wonders whether her father, too, in what he did not know to be the final moments of his life, had looked out and shivered at its endlessness.

  30

  THE ROAD SWINGS gently inland, rising once more. The friendly vegetation of the seashore gives way to a denser growth that occasionally suggests impenetrability.

  After a sudden steep rise the road levels off and Cyril slows down. He says, “It was around here … Yes, just about there.” He pulls to the side and turns off the car. “They were waiting just up the road. Waiting for his car. They pulled in front of them, forcing them to stop. Apparently Ram got out. Then he saw the guns and started running, there, into that field.”

  She sees no field, just a stretch of tall grass distinguishable from the surrounding growth only by its lack of trees.

  “It was a vegetable garden back then, some local farmer, nuh. Ram probably thought he could disappear into the forest but they followed him. The two other fellas were shot in the car. As for Ram, they count twenty bullets in the autopsy, he din’t have a chance.”

  He turns off the car engine, and in the silence Yasmin’s mind begins to struggle with the story. The cars. The roadblock. The flurry of panic and movement. The explosion of gunshots and the sounds of crashing glass.

  Had there been moments of clarity — when fate came clear and inevitability invaded the soul? Had there been a time for final thoughts — or just a blind and wrenching panic?

  But no answers come to her, and even the scene shapes itself in her head as something out of a gangster movie: fancy hats and double-breasted suits, submachine guns spitting fire.

  Cyril opens his door and puts out a foot.

  Yasmin thinks: No, God, no …

  But she follows, muscles taut with unwillingness, as he pushes his way through the grassy field.

  Cyril’s eyeball swerves off-centre. He says, “This is where they found him.”

  Hidden among the grass, camouflaged by moss as thick as knitted wool, is a small plinth. He pushes the grass away, stamping on the blades so that they will not spring back.

  “We put this up a year later, a kind of commemoration. Some people had an idea for some kind o’ park but, as you can see, it din’t get very far.” He scratches some of the moss away, revealing a patch of wet and darkened stone. “Is only concrete. We were going to add a brass plaque later, with his name and dates, nuh, but somehow we never get around to it. Life goes on, people get busy.”

  And a life, Yasmin thinks, is reduced to a lost relic. She touches the plinth. The concrete, cold and damp, turning friable, leaves a sandy residue on her fingertips. She thinks of the boulders beside the sea, of the water steadily reducing them to rubble, of the blind man and his pebbles that left no ripples — and her throat constricts with a sudden surge of emotion that rises from her stomach and erupts, bitter, in her mouth.

  Cyril stands back from the plinth. He slides his hands into his pant’s pockets and after a moment says, “Oh, well.” He asks if she wants some time alone, and when she shakes her head he gestures towards the car. “Shall we, then?”

  She leads the way back, in a hurry to leave this place.

  In a hurry now to care for her mother.

  31

  ON THE WAY back Yasmin stops seeing. She has a sense of time stopped on an urgency, her mind occupied by the plinth, and by the box that sits in her room at the house.

  A bit farther on, Cyril turns sharply right, following another road into the mountains, and she knows that they are taking another route back, completing the journey by completing a circle.

  The vegetation thickens and arches; darkness falls. The headlights of the car hug the grey asphalt ahead. In the mirror outside her window Yasmin sees a black tunnel, its centre a circle of pale light retreating steadily.

  Cyril says, “You think you might come back one day? For a visit, I mean. Maybe with your husband?”

  “I can’t think that far ahead.”

  “But you must. This trip — is not really a visit, if you know what I mean. You must come back. After all, you’re one of us.”

  His words send a chill through Yasmin. This world — the world of her mother and father — is undeniably part of her. But his words force her to acknowledge a greater truth.

  “I don’t even know,” she says, “what it means to be one of you.”

  “Is —” He sighs, and in the darkness she sees that he is exhausted. “Is to share flesh and blood. And to understand things without all the words. Is to know that you’re home.”

  “Cyril …” She is grateful he does not see the shake of her head, for she would rather not tell him that by most of his definition, she is not one of them.

  They emerge high up into a soft evening light, the world opening up: the sea and sky a rich, dark blue, the sun an orange glow behind the far arm of the mountains. Just above the horizon, as if waiting in the wings, a crust of icy moon hangs in fragile suspension.

  Yasmin feels a sweet unravelling within herself, as if her ribs are unlocking themselves one by one.

  The road, here wide and well paved, begins a steady descent down the mountainside. As it curves and bends, they drive through a flickering transience of darkness and light. On the plain below, the town emits a dull glow that will harden and brighten as the greater darkness takes hold.

  Yasmin feels a stirring of gratitude towards Cyril. This drive, offered as improvisation but clearly calculated, has not had the effect she suspects he intended. He has opened her eyes to the limits of the worlds within her.

  The road curves into darkness, headlights flickering on the, cut mountain wall on one side and, on the other, drawing the low metal barrier that marks the edge of the cliff.

  Suddenly the car wobbles violently, tires rumbling on the narrow verge between pavement and mountain wall — the wall no longer parallel, dead ahead now, filling the vision in a rush.

  Cyril says, “Shit!” and wrenches at the wheel.

  Tires squeal.

  Orange. Blue. The cold, cold moon.

  The metal barrier, hard and narrow, a band of silver approaching rapidly.

  Yasmin’s mind races with thoughts of flight, of falling through soundless air.

  Cyril wrenches at the wheel again and the car tilts crazily, the headlights marking its path away from the barrier, back onto the roadway. With a jolt and a hiccup, they come to a stop.

  Thoughts of Jim flood Yasmin’s mind as her lungs — inert, collapsed — balloon with air. Her hands cover her face, palms hot with her gasping breath.

  Cyril says, “Well.” He touches her forearm. “You all right?”

  She nods.

  “Sorry ’bout that. I don’t know what —” And suddenly his voice breaks. He sniffles, and with an emotion that startles her he says, “You know, I mean well, Yasmin. I’m not a bad man.”

  His words puzzle and move her. “Of course you’re not,” she says.

  He sighs, sniffles again. Then, putting the car into gear, he says, “Hellofanepitaph, eh?”

  The last of the light blends earth and sky with the colour of mercury.

  The road takes them through a silvered world.

  Past the town, buildings smothered in pewter.

  Past the port, anchored tugs and fishing boats like monuments in stainless steel.

  Past trees and parks plated in chrome.

  It is, Yasmin thinks, like a world perfectly, beautifully preserved. And in the seconds that
the light persists, she imagines it a world metalled into time.

  32

  JIM SAID, “THERE’S no such thing as coincidence, Yas. Accidents don’t just happen. They have a logic to them — a logic too cosmic for us to grasp.”

  Yasmin heard in his voice the sound of a man trying to convince himself. It was not a game she could play: her struggle was to accept senselessness.

  “The problem, Jim,” she said, “is that I find no comfort in that. None at all.”

  The effort of speech, more difficult with each word, lent a formality to her sentences. She sounded, she thought, like an actress on stage; sounded like her mother. The words were not filling her void; they were instead falling into it.

  Jim rolled his chair backwards, stood up slowly. He paused, a silhouette against the window, as if listening for sounds in the night.

  “Neither do I,” he whispered.

  He made his way around the desk, features emerging from shadow. He placed himself behind her, laid his hands on her shoulders.

  She knew that he had heard the echo of the falling words. Knew that the trick for them would be to catch the words as they fell.

  33

  SHE EATS LITTLE at dinner and the conversation, such as it is, is desultory.

  Cyril speaks of the day, but Penny is not receptive.

  Ash is absent, and no explanation is offered. But Yasmin notices that Penny glances occasionally at his empty chair with a look that is an indecipherable blend of helplessness, anger and wistfulness.

  Amie, serving, moves with the litheness of a phantom, her feet gliding across the floor as if cushioned by a membrane of air.

  It is as if she has woven the filaments of her life into a cloak around herself, Yasmin thinks.

  As if a life of servitude has brought to her layers of silence that resemble insubstantiality.

  As if hers has become a life distanced to speculation: as always followed by if …