Tender : Stories

by Sofia Samatar

  Sometimes at night I wake up and feel so light, so light, my shadow buoyant under me. No, I will not be the one to discover life beyond earth. But perhaps I will be the spinner, or the thread that guides them home.

  Please consider my request for an extension.

  The Closest Thing to Animals

  I have a habit of meeting people right before they get famous and don’t need me anymore. I met Rock Morris two weeks before his book came out. I met Cindy Vea when she worked at the bakery. Her hair straggled out of her ponytail and neither of us would have guessed you could even be a full-time blogger. Six months later, I emailed Cindy to remind her about the panel we were putting together for the Conference on Negative Realism. She never wrote back. I met Nadia Barsoum the year before she started growing peppers. She kept saying her knee hurt. We thought it was the fog.

  The day I met Hodan Mahmoud, I was home with a cold. I’d been cultivating it for a few days, staying up late, leaving my house with wet hair every morning, and coughing a lot at work to make my throat sore and let people know I was coming down with something, and finally it had paid off. I was lying under blankets, pleasantly woozy, preparing to sleep, really sleep, when I heard something crashing and banging around outside the window. It lasted so long, I got up to see if dogs were in the trash, and there was Hodan digging around in it with a stick.

  I pushed up the screen and leaned out. “Hey!”

  She looked up. “Hey.”

  Hodan always has a vague look, sort of drowsy. She was wearing a green bandana over her hair, and a stained trench coat with the belt tied instead of buckled. I immediately felt embarrassed. I thought she was homeless. I’d never stop a homeless person from going through my trash.

  “Hey,” she said, “I know you.”

  “Um,” I said, but then I realized she was right: we’d gone to the same college. Now I was even more embarrassed, and also sort of panicked, because you should probably invite an old classmate up for tea, even if she’s turned out homeless.

  “I’m sick,” I blurted. “I’m home with the flu.”

  “That sucks,” she said. She sounded genuinely sorry. “Am I making too much noise?”

  “No, it’s no problem. I mean. Are you—is there something special you’re looking for?”

  She didn’t seem flustered. “Not really,” she said. “Just checking.”

  Hodan is a great artist. I knew it the minute I stepped in her room. She had a sculpture of the Lolly Whales made out of plastic milk jugs. The Lolly Whale sculpture glowed faintly blue, exactly the way the real Lollies had done on the beach when I went to see them as a kid. There was even a Lolly Whale smell in the room: a gentle, wistful stink. It came from the milk jugs, Hodan told me later. She’d never washed them out properly. That was her genius: she understood that whales are made of milk. She’d put fairy lights inside the jugs to make them glow.

  “Wow,” I said.

  She opened the fridge. “Want a lassi?”

  “Sure. Wow.”

  We drank canned lassis sitting on the floor in the glow of the Lolly Whales. There was nowhere else to sit. There was a bed, but it was covered with junk: old stuffed toys with their hair worn down, lassi cans, paper bags.

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked.

  Hodan looked at me sort of blankly. “On the bed.”

  Outside her little window the night lights went drip, drip. The red ones are Hodan’s favorites. She told me that later. She says they slide down the sky like luminous cough drops sliding down a throat.

  “I love this,” I said.

  She didn’t try to pretend she thought I was talking about the lassi. She didn’t even ask me why I was whispering.

  “Me too,” she said.

  She doesn’t have a big smile, but it’s very warm. You probably know what I mean. You’ve probably seen her picture.

  Hodan was born in Minnesota. She moved here when she was twelve. She fell asleep on the plane, and when she woke up she was flying over a crater. No trees at all outside the window, just drifts of something that could have been snow or sand. “At one point,” she told me, “it was the moon.” I think she still feels like she’s living on the moon. I do, too. Things get away from you, like you’re trying to hold onto dust. When Hodan was in eighth grade she said she hated California and her teacher sneered, “It’s better than Somalia.”

  We used to get packed snow from Minnesota. Remember that? It was a big deal to get a carton while it was still a little bit frozen. Kids used to stand in line. That was before the lanugo. God, it makes me feel old.

  This is a really good world for artists.

  I’m not an artist. I mean, I am a little bit of an artist. You are, too. Don’t you secretly think you could write a book someday? Are you into embroidery, or making jewelry from bottle-tops and shells? The kind of artist that just calls themselves “artistic.” At my job we used to have a plan for you called Unlocking the Artist Within. Cindy Vea developed it almost right after I got her a job at the company. It seemed like she’d only worked there for two weeks before she was quitting, and blogging, and suing, and famous, and not my friend anymore.

  I loved having Cindy as my friend. She wore white shoes that cut her around the ankles. She always had Band-Aids there. Her look was totally hungry. “That one’s starving,” said Marco, my boss, on Cindy’s first day at work. Approvingly, of course. He didn’t know the half of it.

  Cindy and I used to stay up late. We’d sit on my bed and eat day-old bread from the bakery where she worked, her wolf-face harsh in the light of my reading lamp. We said “we” a lot. We criticized everybody at both our jobs. Cindy had phrases. That’s her gift, I think, the thing that made her famous. Lots of those phrases are on her blog, unlockingtheartist.com. “Get what you wish for.” “You can have safety or passion—your choice.” The phrases I remember from our late-night talks are dumber, but also more intimate somehow, like “Never use lip balm, it’s addictive.”

  After I met Hodan, I went on unlockingtheartist.com for the first time. It gave me a little pang to see Cindy’s face on the screen. A professional photo, perfectly lit, her head tilted to one side. Her jaw looked smaller. I wondered if she was still wearing the shoes.

  I clicked on the link called “Putting It Out There.” The new page unrolled like a carpet. It had the same fine print at the top, decorated with something like tiny feathers: “This blog is the sole property of Cindy Vea.” I guess she didn’t want anyone to forget she’d sued the company and won.

  “Whatever, Cindy,” I told the screen.

  I scrolled down the Helpful Tips. My idea, of course, was to Put Hodan’s artwork Out There. “Find your community,” Cindy advised. “Can’t afford to rent a space? Team up with a friend. Be their opening act.”

  That’s me, I thought. The opening act.

  Except I never take off on my own, the way you’re supposed to, according to Cindy’s blog. “An opening act is like a baby bird. At a certain stage, it’ll leave the nest.” I imagined Cindy typing this in her room on the eighteenth floor. The elevator was broken; that’s why we always hung out at my place. I imagined Cindy there, even though I’m sure she’s got a better place now. I could hear her long, firm fingers tap and see her long, firm jaw in the light from the screen. I saw her get an alert from me: “hey! about that conference . . .” She tucked her hair behind her ear in her quick impatient way and clicked Ignore. She was wearing the gray sweater with the yellow patch on one shoulder. I was with her the day she bought it. “Ugh!” I said out loud. “Stop thinking like this!” I closed the tab and opened a new email.

  Hey Nadia! Omg it’s been ages. How are you? Good, I hope! I’m ok, just dealing with Marco’s bad breath and worse manners, haha. Anyway look I’m writing because I saw you’re doing a fundraiser thing (which is awesome!) and I was wondering if you’d like to involve an artist? I have this friend Hodan (Somali like me!) who does AMAZING stuff, really timely and innovative—for example, sculptures of extinct ani
mals from upcycled trash! I think you’d love it, and it could help raise awareness about environmental issues at your gig. Anyway, let me know!

  Love,

  S.

  At work, I was developing a project called Finding Your Center. Marco’s idea, not mine. Still, I’d had to sign all the new paperwork: the pages of terms and conditions to make sure I didn’t go off and start my own blog with the same name, as Cindy—or, as Marco called her, The Razor—had done. Marco had taken to hanging around my desk, fuming. He cracked his knuckles like the bad guy in an old movie. “That bitch,” he’d say. When he wasn’t growling and swearing he’d lean over me and, in an oniony whisper, ask me for Cindy’s number.

  After work I went on walks with Hodan. She pushed a baby carriage. By the time night fell, it would be full of trash. “Nice one,” she’d say, if I found something rare, like a child’s rubber bracelet. She was never in a hurry: she could frown at an empty chip bag for fifteen minutes. She was never the one to say we should go home, either, but when I suggested we stop for dinner she was always ready to go. It seemed to me like she’d found her center. “Have you always been like this?” I asked. “So calm like this?”

  She laughed. “I’m not calm.”

  Once we’d sat down and ordered, I said: “You’re calmer than I am.”

  “Okay.”

  “See? Okay. You agree to everything! I wish I could be like that.”

  “I don’t agree to everything,” she said. “I hate lots of things. Most things, in fact. Except trash. And light. And food.”

  “And me,” I said. I wished she’d said it instead.

  She smiled. I know you’ve seen it, but when it’s for you—it’s like being injected with honey.

  The tea came. We added milk, sugar, and a dash of pepper to make a drink Hodan called California Shaah.

  California Shaah tastes terrible. It’s nothing like real tea. I still drink it, though. It might be a magic potion. It might turn me into something.

  “If somebody said to you, I need to find my center, what advice would you give them?” I asked.

  “Wow. That’s a terrible idea.”

  I went home and called my parents and listened to my mom cry. I always call them when I feel bad, and it always makes me feel worse. They were on vacation in Florida when the quarantine came down. Every year it becomes less likely we’ll ever see each other again.

  When the quarantine first went into effect, the tent was black at night, smudging the stars. In the day it was the same as it is now: grayish, like a fuzzy window. The sun lamps helped in the daytime, but at night, they eventually figured out, the extra blackness was making people depressed. I don’t know if it made me depressed. I was in college, and taking a lot of Q, which was popular then. It made you feel a ghostly presence. My ghostly presence used to part my hair and blow on my neck. I found it comforting, so I probably was depressed. The night the lights came on, I went outside with everyone else and looked at the sky. Lights sliding down in different colors, like glittery rain. Everyone clapping and taking pictures. They hadn’t tried to mimic the stars: studies had suggested that would only make people feel worse.

  I lay on the floor and watched the lights, trying to avoid the red ones. I was annoyed with Hodan. Pissed off, really. Maybe Finding Your Center was a stupid project, but it might help someone someday, maybe not a great artist like her, but a regular person, someone who was ready to try anything, knitting, diet and exercise programs, meditation, because they lived in a giant bubble and couldn’t visit their parents or anything, and any minute they might catch the lanugo and die. That kind of person might actually be interested in finding their center, not arguing about whether you should think about it or whether it even existed. I fell asleep on the floor and woke up sore, as if I’d been kicked. There was a paper bag with a note on it under my door.

  Please forgive me for last night. I’m sorry I upset you. I hope I can offer you the fact that I am not used to being with people, and have it arrive not as an excuse but as a truth. I know that I am often withdrawn. I’m fighting it all the time.

  For me it is difficult even to imagine a center. A center seems like something inside, but I picture everything going out. My whole effort over the last few years has been to open, to give, to be in the motion of opening. Maybe I don’t want a center.

  Despite the desire to open constantly I have been closed! For example when you asked if I had a partner or dated people. I said “no,” but that was a half-truth. I’m married. My husband is on the other side of the tent. He was on a business trip.

  When I found that I was a tent-widow, I was glad in a way that made me feel angry. I walked a lot. I lost two of my jobs. But now I’m glad in a way that just makes me feel blank. I see this as progress. You know how there’s gray in the morning? Soon they’ll turn on the lamps.

  Does it ever seem strange that we call it a tent? A tent is supposed to move. Why don’t we just pack up and go?

  I wish we’d gotten to know each other in college. I was always too shy to talk to you, even though my parents had told me to make friends with other Somali girls, and of course you and I were the only ones. You were so beautiful (still are!) and you seemed to be everywhere. So different from me. At ease. You didn’t have the immigrant thing. The shit that used to matter! But some things still do. The way you can say with confidence, “Safety or passion—your choice!” I admire that.

  My husband and I speak often. We’re considering a divorce. It’s hard to see what counts as safety sometimes, and what counts as passion.

  As for “your choice”—that’s one of the ways I want to open out. To give that to others. I love you, abaayo macaan. Talk to me later? Your choice.

  I love you, dear sister.

  The trains hadn’t started yet. I ran all the way to her apartment. I leaned on the doorbell, then after a minute I heard her undoing the locks. I started talking before she opened the door. “I wish I could hold onto even one single thing from the past. I’m a tent-orphan, but I wish I could be a tent-widow too. I wish there was more stuff holding me down. Sometimes I think there’s other new diseases out there, besides the lanugo, and maybe I have one.”

  We hugged. I held her so tight. She was wearing a T-shirt and her shoulders felt solid and soft. “It’s like I’m made out of string,” I said. I realized that people, with their warm weight, their softness, and their smell, are the closest thing we have to animals now.

  I determined to make Hodan Mahmoud famous. It was the great purpose of my life.

  And yes, I did think I might become a real artist as well. Sometimes I thought I was changing slightly. I kept a notebook beside my bed and wrote words in it, her hand, the fog, my hand. I felt that Hodan and I would enter the world as artists together, although I was not sure exactly how this would happen. Perhaps I’d write poems about her work. The important thing, I felt, was that we stick together, side by side, finding our way.

  Nadia Barsoum came through. She didn’t write to me, but her manager did. I read the email out loud in Hodan’s apartment. “Ms. Barsoum would be happy to allow your client to exhibit her works in the convention center at the Fight the Lanugo event.”

  “Your client!” Hodan chuckled through the scarf that covered her mouth. We both wore scarves, because of the fumes. Hodan was varnishing.

  She read my eyes. “You don’t look happy.”

  “I am happy! It’s just—she could have written to me herself. We used to be really close, you know, before she got sick. We did all this stuff . . . We’d sneak onto trains. We learned how to knit together. We went dancing at the same place every week. For a year.”

  “You knit?”

  “Not really.” I shook my head hard and blinked. “Never mind. This is good news!” As I said it I realized it was true. Hodan frowned, not in a rude way, just in the way that meant she was going back into her work. I loved that look. She was varnishing buttons and little chunks of eraser. It was for a piece called Summer of the Swollen
Bees. If you’ve seen that one then you know how it gives you all the precise feelings you had the summer it happened: when the big slow bees came drifting over the sea and filled the air like confetti or tiny party balloons before they gave up and died all over. When you walk inside Summer of the Swollen Bees, it’s like entering a fresh and sparkling afternoon where childhood is everywhere magically dying. I watched Hodan work and listened to the whirring of the air cleaner and felt so happy. I honestly didn’t mind that Nadia hadn’t written.

  A friend is like armor, I thought. Or like a tent.

  The height of happiness was moving things into the convention center. The space was huge and dark. We brought our own lights, because the city wouldn’t turn the lights on in the center unless there was an event in progress. A couple of guys and one girl from the center helped us move all the pieces in on trolleys. They joked and flirted with us. They set up little round tables. The idea was that the visitors would stand at the tables and drink their drinks or whatever, and around them would be the art.