“Hey,” said one of the convention guys. “We should all go to Disneyland.”
Disneyland was what they called this big space at the back of the center. A ramp went steeply down into dark. You got on a trolley, held onto each other, and flew down the ramp with your eyes shut against the crash.
There was actually no crash in Disneyland. You just rode on and on through darkness until you stopped. Your stomach kept going down and down.
So there I was, at the big event. Smart dress, boots, red lipstick. Tilting my head to one side. I was the artist’s friend. People talked to me like I was her manager. I made sure I kept Hodan in view at all times. I didn’t want our relationship to grow thin.
The room filled up. Though I tried not to, I saw Cindy Vea at one of the tables. Of course she was here. She was talking with great animation and gesturing at a piece called Mild. Mild is the one that just hangs there until you want to go to sleep under it. Take that, Cindy, I thought. You’ll never make anything half as good.
The truth is, I was nervous enough to scream.
Some important person went up on the stage and introduced Nadia Barsoum. “If there is a way out of quarantine, ladies and gentlemen, this may be it.” A moment later, Nadia rolled up to the podium. I hadn’t expected the bubble. There was a box on it for her voice, and she had to maneuver so that the box faced the microphone. Her voice sounded full of bees. “Hello, everyone.” I kept thinking of trains, the way we’d hide in the bathroom and ride to the end of the track.
“Hey,” someone whispered close to my ear.
I turned, and it was Rock Morris.
“Hey,” he murmured with his seductive smile, “I heard you work with the artist?”
“Yes,” I answered frostily.
“That’s great. Could you give her my card? I’m Rock Morris, the writer? Apocalypse Manifesto?”
He was handing me a card. It had a drawing of a man smoking a pipe on it, because Rock Morris is a pretentious ass. He also has animal magnetism, which is basically an allergen. Some people aren’t allergic to it. I am.
“Could you ask her to get in touch? I’d like to write about her for the Times. Maybe even an interview? I don’t know if she does those anymore.”
Then we just stared at each other. On the stage, Nadia talked in her buzzing voice about the future and about death. “I think of myself as a field,” she said. I was staring at Rock Morris, trying to process the meaning of the word “anymore.” He was staring at me the way you stare at a person when you remember you once asked them to suck on a piece of hard candy and pass it into your mouth.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Somebody shushed us.
“Holy shit,” he repeated more quietly. “It’s you! I mean—this is amazing! How are you? And how do you know Hodan Mahmoud?” He was laughing, incredulous. “This is nuts!”
“I go on waiting for winter,” Nadia said.
I went inside Summer of the Swollen Bees. A couple of other people were in there, exclaiming at the beauty of the silvery flecks. One of them was crying. I tried doing some of the breathing exercises I’d written about for Finding Your Center, but soon I gave up and searched Hodan’s name on my phone.
I should probably explain that I never read about the arts. Not even Cindy could make me do that, with her phrase “Know your context!” I hate the way it makes me feel. I’m like the woman in a story I read who swelled up until she burst all over her couch. Inside the woman was a tiny baby girl, curled around her sternum. The baby was waiting to take the woman’s place. My envy is like a hungry baby curled up in my chest, pissed off, impatient for me to swell up and die already.
I looked at all the galleries where Hodan’s work had been displayed and the articles about her and the pictures. In the photographs she looked thinner. I tried to see that she also looked unhappy, as if something were missing from her life, but she just looked like always: half asleep.
I strode through the swollen bees, knocking them aside. Hodan was in a crowd, of course. I pushed through them. “How could you?” I shouted. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her smile faded. “What?”
“That you’re somebody,” I yelled. I waved at the people, the lights. “That you’ve done all of this before. That you don’t need me.”
Riding the train home I just cried and hated. This is such a good world for artists, but it’s a terrible world for everybody else. It’s terrible to live underneath a quarantine tent with no birds or wind if you can’t find a way to make yourself immortal. What’s the point of this experience if you can’t turn it into something else, some sign? Are you just going to stand there and leak like a broken hourglass? Blurred lights passed in the window and I could see Hodan and Cindy and Nadia Barsoum and even Rock Morris sipping bright drinks with little parasols in them. They were drinking and laughing together and everybody was taking their picture. And I just cried. How carefully I’d read Apocalypse Manifesto! I can still quote whole passages. “Everything must be about something now. There is no room for the inessential.” And he hadn’t even remembered me. The night we met at the Book Club and he told me, so excited, that his own book was coming out soon. His room with the real wood floor, and the kids’ toys and picture books lying around because his sister and nieces got stuck at his place in the quarantine. We tiptoed in so as not to wake them up. “They throw their shit everywhere,” he said. And in the morning there was something wrong with my tights. I yanked them on and crept out while he was asleep because I knew he was disappointed in me and wouldn’t call me back. Hobbling to the train station in my tights like a pair of shackles. By the time I got home my legs were almost dead. Upstairs I realized that I’d taken a pair of his niece’s tights by mistake and I felt the whole meaning of my life in that error. I really did. The whole thing. So strong I could cry about it months later on the train. I was almost at my stop when my phone buzzed in my coat. A text from Nadia Barsoum. “No surprise that u didn’t say hi since u never visited me in the hospital. U really are the worst person.”
I hadn’t done Q in years, but I still had a stash in the medicine cabinet. When I got home that night I lined up the pills on the counter. Every time I started feeling alone, I took another Q. A ghostly presence held my hand for forty-eight hours.
When the last of the presence faded, I went to see Nadia Barsoum in the hospital.
I got there too early for visiting hours and had to sit in the freezing lobby. Everything smelled like a dentist’s chair. A nurse who smelled like a dentist’s chair came and took me into a room to change my clothes. I had to wipe my entire body first with a special kind of wipe. The clothes were pink: “It seemed like you,” the nurse explained. A pink cap buttoned over my brow. The nurse took me up to Nadia’s room, where I looked at Nadia through a plastic wall.
Inside, Nadia had a normal room. She had a blue fuzzy carpet, a desk, and an old-fashioned lamp with a yellow bulb. There were books and balls of yarn all over the place. It was the kind of room where you would expect to find a cat. The only cat, however, was Nadia herself. She was in the most advanced stage of the lanugo ever experienced, because, unlike other victims, she had survived. Her long hair grew everywhere. It was shorter on her hands and face; she must have trimmed it.
“Hi, Nadia.”
“Hel-lo,” she said. “Will wonders never.”
She looked tiny, shrunken in all that hair. She was wearing a purple sweater vest and denim shorts. I tried not to look at her legs.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come before.”
“Oh my God. What are you? Are you a person? Like, ‘Help, my friend is sick, let me run away. Oh wait, no, I need a favor for my other friend! Let’s see, let me call my abandoned friend and ask her! I won’t talk to her though! Because ew!’”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Are you going to start crying? Because that would be awesome. That would be so perfect. Oh my God. I need a camera.”
I swallowed. My eyes were st
inging. “Nadia, I am so sorry. It’s just—you were busy. You were so busy all the time. Your appointments and interviews—”
“I was busy being sick! I was busy almost dying! What is wrong with you? Are you actually made of cardboard?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. I’m made out of cardboard.”
She shook her head. Her knees were red, raw clusters of peppers—anyway, they looked like peppers. I remembered when her legs started aching, and she joked that she had arthritis like an old lady, because it got worse in foggy weather. And then her lanugo started, and she disappeared into the hospital, and my own test for the disease came back negative, and I didn’t even tell her because it seemed like a betrayal, like I should have gone with her into illness and death. And now her knees, the only part of her body not covered with hair, were these bulbous bunches of bright red growth with yellow veins going down. I wanted to ask her if it hurt, and it occurred to me that at this point I had nothing to lose, so I did.
“Nope,” Nadia said. “They give me the most amazing drugs. Like I’m flying right now. You can thank these drugs that I haven’t thrown you out. Seriously, I feel great. Do you still knit? I made this vest. I always do some knitting after my weekly hand-shave.”
My eyes stung again. “I sort of gave it up.”
“Why does that not surprise me? Cardboard.”
Her eyes shone dark and bright underneath the wings of her brows. Her power to make a room seem warmer was absolutely unchanged.
“Nadia, I’m so sorry!”
“BO-RINGGG! Sorry but life is like, really short.”
She took a pile of papers from her desk and shook them in my direction. “Guess what this is? A book. It’s called ‘Lanugo Memoir.’” She put the papers down to make quotation marks in the air with her furry fingers. “In quotes. Everything in my whole memoir is in quotes. Like I say we made ‘sweaters’ out of ‘yarn.’ We had ‘milkshakes’ in the ‘park.’ That’s to show how fake everything is inside the tent. You know? The human ability to make all this amazing fake shit. Fake meat. Fake cheese. They way they make fake food that actually goes bad if you leave it out.”
“Like milk,” I said, thinking of Hodan’s Lolly Whales.
“Exactly! It’s to trick us so we don’t run around screaming from horror. But actually we should all be screaming from horror all the time. Except me. I’m real, you know, a real animal, and now also a real plant. And the doctors are pretty sure that Plant-Me is saving Animal-Me. I’m going to put a giant picture of me on the cover. It’ll be like, ‘All of lost Nature concentrated in one young woman!’ Totally grandiose. You better buy a copy.”
“Of course I will.”
She shook her head, smiling. “Well. You actually came up here. That’s something. Do you still hang out with that girl from the bakery?”
“Cindy Vea. No.”
“Good! She came to my thing, you know. Came up to me afterward like ‘Can I interview you for my blog?’”
She still had her talent for mimicry. She could even do Cindy’s jaw. I laughed.
“Seriously! And I was like, what could possibly be in this for me?”
“Her blog’s kind of famous.”
“Look deep into my eyes and ask me if I give a fuck. She’s the worst.”
“I thought I was the worst.”
“You’re a close second.”
Before I left, Nadia told me her mother visited every day. “You’re lucky you missed her! Oh my God! She stands there and prays for hours!” She told me it was weak and insulting to pretend to believe in prayer if you really didn’t. Because she loved her mother, she screamed and threw things during the prayers. “Drone drone drone,” she said. I told her how much I missed Cindy Vea, how I’d been looking forward to the Conference on Negative Realism, how sad I was that now I couldn’t go. “Why don’t you go by yourself?” she said, and I told her I didn’t think people would listen to just me.
“Do you think people want to listen to that awful Cindy person? Are you broken? Why do you love everybody so much?”
I told her I’d written a poem for her.
“Let me hear it.”
“It’s really short.”
“Just let me hear it!”
“Okay.
her hand
the fog
my hand”
Once I read that an aluminum ring dropped through a magnetic field will fall more slowly. Maybe if the magnets were strong enough, they could keep it from hitting the ground. Once I read of an old Somali poet who demanded to know why he should stay in the country now that the girls, slender as trees, were gone. I’ve read a lot of other things I could tell you about, but I don’t really think it would help. On my way to Hodan’s place, I picked up a scrap of plastic. I picked up a piece of gum. It was old and hard and I scratched it off the sidewalk and placed it tenderly inside my pocket.
She undid the locks on her door and left the door open, then turned away and got into bed. I went inside and closed the door and fastened the locks. When I turned around she was sitting with a great quilt over her lap, bent over and stitching. It was so beautiful I gasped.
She looked up, her eyes sparkling not with happiness but with tears. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the galleries. I didn’t think it mattered. I never know what matters, to you or to anyone. I’m not good at it. I’m too dumb.”
I took a deep breath. My stomach went down and down. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter,” I said.
It was like peeling off skin and throwing it away. And everyone would see that under the skin you were nothing but cardboard and plastic and string and fake milk, utterly inessential.
I crossed the room, took off my shoes and got under the quilt opposite Hodan. Cans and toys jostled under me. Our feet touched. I squirmed until the random objects around me made a nest. The quilt was huge; I could draw it all the way up to my chin.
“I feel like there’s a magnetic field in here,” I said. “I’m still falling, but more slowly.”
On the quilt there were elephants and bees and whales. There were people fleeing their country and a dead woman by the side of a road and a little boy vomiting in the back of a truck. There were terrible crowded apartments and policemen banging the doors with their guns and a cat in a noose hanging from a mango tree. There were trees and trees and girls as slender as trees lined up to draw water in dusty camps. There were lonely taxi drivers chewing qaat in the snow. There were bats and bleeding lizards and whales expiring on the sand, the brief lovely grotesque menagerie of our childhood. I snuggled down into it. Soon I was lying curled around Hodan’s feet. I drew the quilt over my head and went to sleep.
Fallow
1. Miss Snowfall
Here is the peaceable kingdom.
I once heard a beautiful story. Two people, a brother and sister, worked at the Castle until they were very old. Then the sister fell ill and couldn’t work anymore. In her illness her eyes became brighter and brighter, and her face thinner, until she looked like a little old child. Eventually she was so small the brother could carry her on his back. He carried her up to the Castle for medical treatment. There’s a long part of the story in which the brother staggers through the Castle, getting confused, going into the wrong rooms, waiting for hours to get clearance. All the time he has his sister on his back, and also something else: her pain, which has been growing until it nearly fills her whole body. “Pain is the heaviest thing,” said Miss Snowfall, who was telling the story. A faint clicking came from the back of the room, where some boys were fiddling with chalk. At the end of the story, the two old people were so worn out and bewildered they returned to the village without even seeing a doctor. The old woman died in her bed, underneath her own quilt, holding her brother’s hand. Her last words were: “Do you remember the way to the Castle?” Miss Snowfall delivered these words in a soft voice, almost a murmur, a voice that always filled me with a special anguish, because it made it seem as if she were speaking not to us but to hersel
f, that she was far from us, removed. After the story she took out her handkerchief and, in a characteristic gesture, doubled it up and pressed it to her lips. Temar hated the story of the brother and sister, but to me it’s like a window through which I can see another world.
In those days, if you had asked any of us what we wanted to do when we grew up, we would have answered: “Work at the Castle.” Children probably say the same thing today, but I imagine it carries a different meaning for them than it did for Miss Snowfall’s pupils. For us, who had the immense good fortune to study under a teacher so inventive and eccentric we often didn’t know we were studying, a teacher whose one goal seemed to be to whip our imaginations into a frenzy, the Castle was a temple, a magic portal, a citadel, a cave. Ezera said it was an inverted world in which people floated face downward. Lia insisted people there spoke without words, in bolts of electricity. To all of these fancies Miss Snowfall responded with an approving smile, a smile that was slightly sad and therefore irresistible. We competed with one another for the honor of provoking that smile. Even those whose parents worked at the Castle, such as Elias, whose father was a security guard, or Markos, whose mother conducted inspections of the water system, made up outrageous stories without being scolded. “That’s probably true,” Miss Snowfall would say with her melancholy smile. The classroom was a zone free from accusation. All things were permitted there, above all Miss Snowfall’s weird assignments, which included knitting and lying on the floor to contemplate the inner light.
Tender : Stories Page 20