Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Do you need help with that safety belt?” he asked, without a shred of irony.

  At the Lamplighter Inn, he said he’d duck into the restroom to change. But I said, “I think you look just fine. As is.”

  “Really? I stink!” he said, then instantly clicked his eyes away, not sure he should’ve said that.

  “No. Please,” I said. “You’re fine.”

  He had a little smile on his face. “Well, you’re the boss, Lena.”

  My gaze rested on the straight lines of the uniform, the clear, black form. I’d always had a primordial memory—an atom of memory—of a kind man in a dark uniform. Charlie handed me a menu, then told me to ignore it. “Pot roast’s the only way to go here,” he said. Then he leaned forward and said, “So tell me about Lena.”

  “Tell you what?”

  He shrugged. “About your childhood. All that junk.”

  At that moment, I figured I had two choices—I could either flee the restaurant or stay with him.

  I was twenty years old. I stared at the level shoulders, black tie, pocket flat against his solid chest, the curling black hairs along the backs of his hands. And then, even though Pia had warned me against telling anyone about the apes, barely with an awareness of what I was doing, I began talking. The story came in fits and starts; I gulped air. It was as if I were afraid of hearing it out loud. Charlie interrupted me, saying, “Wait, Lena, slow down, slow down. Take it easy, here—you’re not making sense.” But once I got going it got easier. I started by saying: “Okay, well, this is what I think I know . . .” I told him about a plane crash, a rain forest, an ape who may have cared for me, even raised me. I reported what Pia had said: that when they found me, I walked bent over, using the tops of my knuckles against the ground. That I shrieked and yelped and jumped on furniture and combed my fingers over Pia’s hair and skin.

  While I spoke—running the tips of my fingers along the table edge, not quite capable of meeting his eye—Charlie sat stock-still over a plate of congealing beef, a huge, openmouthed smile growing on his face, all ready to crack up. And indeed, the whole time I spoke, I felt a glimmering dismay—who would ever believe such a story? Did I even believe it myself?

  When I stopped, he spluttered with laughter, slapped the table.

  Finally, he settled down. “Hoo-wee, that was a good one,” he said, wiping his eyes with his cloth napkin. “Aw, Lena, you really had me going for a minute there.”

  When I didn’t laugh, his smile faded. He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. “Now, come on, now,” he said. “Come on, Lena, you’re shitting me! What do you mean, the monkeys raised you? What’s that supposed to mean? This is just a big fat joke on me, isn’t it?” He craned around, looking over both shoulders. “Hey, did Jerry Mallory put you up to this? He did, didn’t he?” He sat up and hooted into the back of the diner, “Mallory, you mick son of a bitch, I’m gonna get you for this!”

  “No, Charlie.” I touched his wrist—and surprised myself—I’d barely touched a man before. “It’s not—it isn’t a joke.”

  And I found out something about Charlie that day. I learned that he has that ability that law enforcement people sometimes develop, the drop-dead sense of discerning when someone is telling the truth. He got very quiet, almost somber. He gazed past the table for a moment, into the middle distance of the restaurant, and nodded as if in agreement with something. I told him that I’d always been forbidden to tell anyone anything about my secret history. He watched the way I twisted my napkin as I spoke.

  “So you grew up—never telling anyone about this . . . this time?” he asked. “Totally no one knew?”

  “Just me and my foster parents.” I didn’t tell him that Pia was afraid if I thought too much about it I might go crazy. That she’d instructed me it was important that I be with people who could help me “stay normal.”

  His eyes took on a satiny quality. “And you trusted me enough to tell me.”

  I tilted my beer, the coldness of the glass breathing toward me. My thoughts felt filmy and distant. “I wanted to,” I said, mystified by myself.

  He took the glass of beer our of my hand, put it to one side; his hands closed around mine. “Lena.”

  He told me I needed him. He said that he would teach me everything. And he said, of course, that he would never leave me.

  SOMETIMES HE’D COME sit beside my desk at work, his eyes lowered and cool, watching everyone’s movements.

  Or he’d collapse stony-eyed in front of the TV—a cop show that he’d make fun of, teasing apart the logistical details that they’d gotten wrong. But a story or a character might hook him—he liked the tough, ugly, runty cops—the ones always getting into tight spots. And he’d say, “Lena, do you see this? Are you watching? Because that’s the plain truth, right there. I need you to know this—you cannot trust anyone. Here are the people you can trust, listen—me, Frank Viso . . .”

  I used to lie beside him at night and follow his breath like a line of bread crumbs into sleep. One of the good things about Charlie, one of the things I miss, was our bed: the way Charlie held me, one arm locked around my ribs, protecting me from the dreams. His mouth would be close to my ear and he’d whisper, “Lena, forget the monkeys—you’re as human as anyone.”

  I listened, eyes shut in concentration. Without Charlie’s restraining arm, my own edges seemed fluted and formless—the fact of my own material being in question, as if—if Charlie had lifted his arm—I would’ve evaporated on the spot, like those spots of water that hover over summer highways.

  We were engaged and then married in a year. He was thirty-five; his son lived with his ex-wife. In the time we were married, the world was all Charlie, his loud laugh and spanking-black uniform. Sometimes the force of his personality seemed dizzying. We lived in a two-story wood frame house on Westcott Street in an urban neighborhood filled with SU students and faculty; Charlie trimmed the lawn with a crotchety hand-push mower, I learned a few paint-by-numbers dishes from The Joy of Cooking. It was good enough. The apes receded from me. I rarely thought about them, and when I did, I wondered if it was possible that I had imagined it all.

  There were many nice days with Charlie. There were leaf-shot summer afternoons, the sidewalks steaming with humidity, evening rising over the buildings. And I would feel richly tired after work—as if from a long run—the sensation of having worked well all day—making latent print identifications, reading fragments—small successes. The sunsets would be cut into bands of amber, green, and violet, the air mellow. And Charlie would be waiting at the end of the corridor, his shift over. He’d gather me close and murmur, “Lena, you’re mine.”

  For days at a time, even weeks, this would be plenty for me—the bicep and forearm across my chest, the hand holding my shoulder. Sometimes he’d hold my arm as he fell asleep, between the wrist and the elbow: like apprehending a suspect.

  But inevitably, there would be something—the laughter of birds, mare’s tails of clouds under a high, dense cover—and a nightmare from another place would slide through my sleep.

  ONE MONTH AFTER we were married, I discovered the piece of paper with the phone number (the old surprise—it fluttered out while I was checking his uniform pockets for the laundry). The wind went out of me. Elizabeth. I didn’t have to call the number, I was an evidence specialist—I knew exactly what this curling script meant. I’d seen Charlie leaning in, whispering to the young girl who worked at the station reception desk, noticed the way her hair swooped over one shoulder as she giggled, the name tag vibrating over her right breast: Elizabeth. I didn’t confront Charlie either. Pia had made it clear that with my “background,” I was lucky to find any man at all. At our wedding, she commented that “it really is a miracle.”

  I taped the paper to the refrigerator door as a way of letting Charlie know that I knew. He didn’t say a word, just pocketed it and pull
ed a beer out of the fridge. I watched him wander into the living room and snap on the TV: the breath caught in my throat like a fish bone. I’d been warned, hadn’t I? By Charlie and Pia both. I had no right to feel so much pain. I wondered, if I’d listened to Pia and had never spoken of my past to Charlie, if perhaps none of this would’ve happened.

  After ten years of marriage, Charlie ended up leaving me for his fourth girlfriend, Candace, from the pizza shop three blocks up the hill on Crouse Avenue. She was the one who insisted he choose between her and me. And when he left, it was nothing less than a simple, terrible confirmation of the thing I’d grown up expecting to happen. It confirmed the sense of my own unacceptability—the mark of deformity. I stopped speaking for months. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t make a sound. I’d open my mouth and start shaking. I had to take a leave from work. For a month, Alyce came over and brought me thermoses of tomato soup, plastic containers of macaroni and cheese. Even after I returned to work, I still clammed up. I spent the days staring at prints, my hand lens burning light into my eyes until the ridges and furrows swam together. I was disoriented; even my precious print images couldn’t hold me in place. After an hour or two of work, I would put on my coat and walk past Alyce, Sylvie, Margo, walk past Peggy—who would glare like Dracula and mutter about docking my pay—walk past my boss, Frank Viso, go out the front entrance—and keep walking.

  I walked miles across Syracuse, around the university campus, through downtown, into the suburbs. I walked until I could breathe again. One day I was walking west on James Street toward Clinton Square, when I noticed the building across the street, its rectangular windows topped with sandstone arches. A beautiful building, now an urban ruin, but its lovely old lines were still there. There was a bright orange furnished for rent sign in the window.

  Charlie and I sold the house on Westcott Street for $48,500—a loss, thanks to the upstate housing market. Charlie moved in with Candace, and I moved three suitcases total into my new fourth-floor, semifurnished, one bed/one bath at the St. James Apartments. The rent was so cheap I could save most of my paycheck, and it was walking distance to work. I didn’t mind its shabbiness—I like living in a noble wreck. A few months later Charlie’s girlfriend left him. And I stayed on inside the St. James, its water-stained striped wallpaper and grimy windows. The building saved me. It was dreary and quiet and reclusive as a cave. I began to resurface, to eat and shower, and, finally, to speak again.

  I GET UP and pull on yesterday’s clothes, still in a pile by the bed. I comb my fingers through my hair, avoiding the mirror over my dresser. I don’t like looking at myself—my appearance is a kind of evidence that leads nowhere. Who is the person who looks like me?

  My racial identity blurs at the edges: I have Caucasoid smooth wavy hair the color of black coffee. I cut it myself, between clavicle and jaw—Charlie likes it long. My skin seems too deeply pigmented to match my eye color: I look suntanned—almost amber, but sallow in elevators and lobbies. My eyes are that compromise of the indefinite—green—brown-flecked, gold-ringed. My face is long, the bones in my jaw and cheeks pronounced, my nose low and narrow, my mouth wide—the skin of my lips naturally a bitten or burnt vermilion, my lashes thick but straight, my eyebrows dark enough to suggest concentration. Sometimes, when people meet me, they get the idea that I’m an actor. Or they think that they’ve met me somewhere before. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of myself, I’m startled by the expression on my face, my asymmetrical smile.

  I try to follow Charlie’s instructions to go forth and make conversation. It was something that the psychologist had also recommended. At the end of the session, Celeste would say, “Try and get out there, Lena. You are not alone in the world. Try.” So I wrap myself up in my weekend coat, the olive army parka that my foster dad gave me, with its fringe of synthetic fur around the collar. I put on insulated, knobby-soled boots, swath my face in a scarf, pull on mittens, take the elevator to where the lobby doors are shaking with wind. I tug on the door and the cold rolls in: instantly my sinuses smart. I lick my lips and step out to the sidewalk.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE COLUMBUS BREAD BAKERY ON PEARL STREET IS SEVEN BLOCKS away—a walk that takes me down jagged old streets sooty with frost, down steep alleys, under dripping overpasses. The cars ring past and leave a slice of cold in their wake.

  The Columbus Bakery’s windows glisten as I open the door, their bells wagging over my head, the air incandescent with flour. Inside, there are men in full-length aprons carrying trays of dough. The bread lady works alone behind the counter up front, punching keys on an old-fashioned cash register. Her hair, mostly tucked into a soft baker’s cap, escapes like a frond across her milky forehead; it has the blue-black iridescence of a wing. Seeing her surrounded by her men, I think of Snow White. The wall behind her is lined with shelves of loaves in fresh paper jackets.

  “Round-flat?” she asks.

  Bread is my favorite food. I keep a triangle of the dense, round-flat loaf in my pocket. When it gets too hard to chew, I buy a new loaf: fifty-five cents.

  “It’s cold, isn’t it?” she asks, rubbing her hands together. “I can feel it when people open the door.” She starts to slide a loaf into a paper sleeve when she leans across the counter and says, “You know what, if you can wait a second, they’re bringing out a fresh batch—it’ll be nice and hot.”

  She nods, and just as I agree to wait, another customer enters. A cold gust follows her in. She walks ducked forward under the bell of her hooded coat, which she holds clenched shut with both hands.

  “Hiya, Opal,” the girl says. “Cold enough for you?”

  “Hey, Emmy.” The woman pushes back the hood; she’s in her late sixties—the hair around her face is mostly white, the rest sprinkled with black, and it flows down her back. She turns toward the window a moment. “You know, there’s a very disturbed individual out there.” She has a young voice.

  We all look. “Oh . . . yeah, he’s a regular,” the girl says. “I wish he didn’t do that, though. He’s interesting to talk to, but he scares people.”

  I can see the man’s form flickering back and forth in the windows like a fish in a bowl. He’s pacing and talking to himself.

  “I suppose there is something . . . compelling about the man,” Opal murmurs.

  “That’s actually one of my neighbors,” I say.

  She runs one hand along her hair as if to reassure herself. “I’ve just moved back downtown for work. I guess I have to get used to seeing people like that again, walking around loose.”

  “What do you do?” I ask.

  “I’m a critical care nurse. I work up on the hill, at Upstate.” She smiles. “Not that there’s all that many choices—it’s pretty much the only show in town anymore. How about you? You work nearby?”

  I nod heavily. “Work, live. There’s no escape.”

  Her gaze lingers; she asks, “Long week?”

  I feel instantly abashed. “I guess,” I say. Then I hear myself adding, “We’ve had some tough cases at work—SIDS cases.” I’m horrified at myself—though she doesn’t know what I do, we’re never supposed to talk about work with “outsiders.”

  She simply nods and says, “Oh, that’s hard. My mother lost her first child to SIDS.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, wishing I could leave now.

  “It was awful.” She picks up a loaf of fresh bread that the girl has set out on the counter. “Of course, that was before I was born, but I always felt . . . the aftereffects.”

  I hesitate, then, caught by curiosity, I ask, “Where was this?”

  “We lived in the country—just west of Lucius.” She hugs the loaf to her chest. “No one ever figured out why it happened. They had three other children, perfectly healthy. SIDS is like that—no clear pathology.”

  I stare hard at the bread crumbs on the floor, torn between professional curiosity and a se
nse of discretion—I’m thinking about asking her more about SIDS when the door rattles. I turn to see the little bells jump with the force of the door, and a tall figure, head lowered, surges into the store.

  He’s wrapped in a tattered raincoat—that’s what I recognize first. Sometimes he wears a big cross that I suspect one of the nuns at St. Rose’s must’ve given him. His eyes are blank and blurry: the sort of face children imagine floating out of their bedroom closet at night. It’s Mr. Memdouah. He and his unemployed daughter Hillary live on the second floor of my building. Hillary was there first, then one day her father was also there. He was once a sociology professor, Hillary said, at Binghamton University, but he’d had some “troubles” at work. When he turned fifty, he began experiencing adult onset symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Now he logs hours in the TV lounge on the third floor of the St. James Apartments, chomping peanut brittle from Walgreens, the TV light strobing over his face. He can hold forth about any television show, but his thoughts corkscrew into obscure, unrelated topics. He often complains that other sociology scholars are stealing his unpublished work. When I’ve asked him how they’re doing this, he says, “By reading my mind.”

  Hillary, on the other hand, routinely threatens to “leave town” ever since her father moved in with her, and it’s not uncommon to see her waiting at the bus stop, announcing that this time she’s “had it” and she’s moving in for good with her boyfriend in Nedrow. She’s usually back before the end of the week.

  “Hello, Mr. Memdouah,” I say. He is ungainly and holds himself in a forward tilt as if pushing into a strong wind. His big face is always out of kilter, one eye brighter than the other. It’s startling just to be near him. Both of the other women gape at him a bit, cowed into silence. “Aha, it’s you again,” he says, somewhat intensely, to the gray-haired woman, who blinks.

  “Have we met before?” she asks, one hand pressed flat against the front placket of her coat.

  “Oh yes,” he says. “Of course we have. We both despise the so-called ‘modern,’ alienated society. The society of oblivion in which we are each simply dreams within dreams, in which we dream and destroy the other at will. The society of the great American man,” he says with venom.