Things Are Good Now

by Djamila Ibrahim

  “No wonder no one is using them. Look how boring these stations are,” she said to him, raising her voice to be heard above the ambient noise.

  He shrugged. He was reading the instructions on one of the other stations. “I want to try this one. Do you mind?” he said, already adjusting the seat in front of the monitor.

  He’d started the game without waiting for her answer. She bit her lip. A few teenage girls watched their boyfriends play with the learned patience of older women. Others, less resigned, pulled on the boys’ arms trying to distract them from the games. Even though she was at least five years older than these girls, she recognized herself in them. And despite his age, her boyfriend also resembled all the other young men in the room, their unblinking eyes glued on their screens, their minds in a surreal world far away from the dingy room that their bodies — and those of the women waiting for them — occupied. She felt her chest tighten. This is just a video game, she told herself, a momentary escape from reality, but there was something about being the one left behind, the one waiting, that bothered her deeply.

  Before they headed out to Ebisu district where they’d booked a room for the night, he’d suggested they stop at a famous mom-and-pop ramen joint that had been run by the same couple for over thirty years. Plastic samples of various bowls of ramen were displayed behind the glass wall under the cash register. The noodles, meats, naruto, and other condiments were all perfectly sculpted and painted to imitate the real things. Something of an art form in Japan, she would later learn.

  “I guess having pictures of the damn things in a menu was not good enough,” she said.

  “Why are you salty today? This is awesome,” he said.

  They ordered their food and sat in a quiet corner, wearing oversized paper bibs. He flipped through TripAdvisor’s suggestions of must-see places in Tokyo, reading aloud for her benefit. She followed the husband and wife duo in the open kitchen behind the cash register as they bent and twisted their bodies around each other in the narrow space, mesmerized by their perfect timing as they assembled steaming bowls of ramen and placed them on the counter for the server to pick up. She wondered how long it had taken them to fine tune this daily dance, the sacrifices required to achieve such harmony, whose habits and choices had prevailed and who’d had to compromise. And what would happen if one of them suddenly picked up and left? She looked at her boyfriend again and the ridiculous bib around his neck. She foresaw herself fading away into his world. She felt that familiar tightening, but in her throat this time. She focused on all the little things that bothered her about him. The way he insisted she look him in the eye when they had sex, his heavy grunts, the way his sweat smelled sour afterward. She started to rid herself of these memories. She started to let go of him.

  She spent the night alone in a tiny room in a cheap hotel that brought to mind a sepulcher but she thought of it as a space travel pod instead. She dreamed of stars, of the infinitely empty space between them. Of the limitless possibilities they promised.

  Then there were relationships that ended before they even began, such as the one she had with an old high school crush. He’d invited her to visit him in Dubai after they’d seen each other at an old classmate’s wedding. As she waited for him to pick her up at the airport, she’d watched women dressed all in black scurrying behind men all in white. The men’s gait was purposeful, their gaze assured and outward focused; the women’s bodies folded onto themselves, their eyes lowered. She wondered what these women thought or spoke about when they were alone or with other women. Would they trade places with her?

  When he picked her up, she told him about this to break the ice.

  “Things aren’t the same in these parts of the world,” he said. He had the tone of someone warning an inexperienced, Western tourist.

  She swallowed her irritation. She’d never travelled this far for the sole purpose of being with a man before so she’d hoped things would be different. She couldn’t quite fathom what different meant for her, but she was turning thirty and felt it was time to figure that out.

  They drove past hundreds of skyscrapers, wide highways, and familiar brands on billboards. The sky was heavy with manufactured rain.

  “I guess this is what oil buys,” she said, making a sweeping gesture at the landscape unfolding around her.

  “Dubai doesn’t produce oil anymore, but Abu Dhabi still does,” he said, confidently.

  She was too tired and jetlagged to explain herself. She bit her lip.

  They drove by the marina, the water sparkling with the lights wrapped around the palm trees lining the bay.

  “Unlike in North America, here they stay lit all year long,” he told her, his face beaming as if he had something to do with the wealth that made this possible.

  As she chewed on fettuccine alfredo that tasted of rancid butter and old cheese, she watched him. They were in a restaurant lounge overlooking the water, a room packed with people sipping on alcohol and smoking shisha. House music blasted out of huge speakers at each corner of the room — she felt it pulsating in her head as though it were spilling out from within her throbbing blood vessels. His body twitched with boisterous excitement as he bobbed his head to the beat. He greeted nearby people as if he owned the place. It made him look too young and eager. Her spine stiffened against the thinly veiled proprietary rights he displayed as he introduced her to the other expats and against the unsubtle assent of men appraising merchandise. It made her want to wipe the glee off their faces, made her want to take something from him.

  By the time he unlocked the door to his apartment, she felt her fingertips throb with the need to grab and claw. Her teeth ached to bite and tear through flesh and bone. She instructed him not to turn the lights on. They ripped each other’s clothes off in the dark. She straddled him. He was a blank canvas. He was any man and no one at all. She was all flesh and pleasure. She took all he had on offer and by the time they were done, only her body was still in the room. She left while he was in the kitchen making her tea.

  To make most of the situation, she signed up for a desert safari. As the driver of the four-wheel drive sped along immaculate highways out of the city, Helen took in the treacherous desert surrounding them, the mangled tires melting in the sun. She breathed in the ungodly heat. She revelled in the vastness and beauty of the desolate land, the dunes rising and falling into the horizon. She thought of the peace and silence ahead.

  She dated other, more sophisticated men. Men who’d eventually made her feel like a shipwrecked sailor: small and disoriented. And some of them left her. But she didn’t allow herself to think about these men often. Whenever she felt herself falling for a man, she went to visit her mother’s grave in Addis Ababa. She could always count on her mother to remind her what it cost to love.

  A few months after one of those visits, she met another man. She’d stayed in Addis Ababa because a cousin, who’d heard about her work in international development, had offered her a contract as an economic advisor at an NGO based in the city. When she wasn’t wading through the murky waters of foreign aid and its often nefarious effects on the people it was supposed to help, she surrendered herself to the ebbs and flows of her grandmother’s daily life, which included old friends, cousins, neighbours, and strangers. No matter how many times she came back, it always felt odd to be surrounded by so many people who looked like her. She stared at them as if they were all distant relatives she was supposed to remember.

  He was the same age and almost the same height as her. He spoke her mother tongue and shared her love for travel. “Qui se ressemble, s’assemble,” he told her in his heavily accented French.

  He took to picking her up from her grandmother’s house. As they drove around the crowded city in his old Mercedes-Benz, he’d point at important landmarks and tell her about their historical significance: Menelik II and the Lion of Judah statues, Tewodros Square, Africa Hall, the Yekatit 12 monument. Sometimes,
he’d give her a broad and unreserved smile that made her feel as if they’d always known each other. And other times, she’d watch him stare into the distance, lost in his thoughts, and she’d think of final departures, of loss. But eventually, as he passionately related their common history to her, she started to feel his pride (and sometimes his anger) as her own. Where she grew up, Black heroes were hard to come by, let alone female ones, so she especially enjoyed hearing him tell Empress Taytu’s story. Empress Taytu had not only seen through the Italians’ ruse to have her husband, Emperor Menelik II, sign a treaty that would have made Ethiopia an Italian protectorate in the late nineteenth century, but she’d also led her own army to the Battle of Adwa to deal the Italians one of the most humiliating defeats suffered by European colonizers anywhere in the world. Then one day, Helen found herself daydreaming about a daughter she’d name after Empress Taytu.

  The day she really felt herself falling for him, they were at the National Museum. She’d found it hard to resist the idea that they fit together, that they were part of each other as much as they were part of the historical figures they were learning about. Helen had decided to visit her mother’s grave after he dropped her off, but her grandmother was waiting outside for them and had invited him in for lunch.

  After lunch, he and Helen sat on a rock pile by the compound wall facing her grandmother, their arms touching a little. Helen was fanning the charcoal stove on top of which her grandmother had placed a deep pot. The old woman cut big chunks from the block of milk-white butter she’d had the maid buy at the market and brought the pieces to her nose to test their freshness before she dropped them in the pot she’d lined with a bed of garlic, ginger, and koseret and other spices she’d just roasted and ground. The butter slowly turned greenish yellow as it melted into the fenugreek, beso bela, and korarima. With a big wooden spoon, her grandmother gently pushed chunks of still-solid butter floating in the liquid against the wall of the pot to speed their melting. As she did these things, the old woman hummed a song. Its slow, heart-wrenching melancholy filled Helen’s chest with joy and sorrow for things she couldn’t name. There was stillness in the air and in her grandmother’s gentle voice that made Helen’s breathing easier.

  “What are you singing?” Helen asked. “It sounds so familiar.”

  “It’s ‘Tizita.’ It’s the longing and memory connecting you to me, you to him, and to all the ones that came before us. And those that will come after us too,” she said. There was a hint of Helen’s mother’s eyes in the way the old woman looked at her.

  The scent of clarified butter took hold of Helen’s senses. She thought about her mother’s funeral. Her rigid, cold body inside the ornate casket. She imagined her mother’s heart coming alive with each shovel-full of earth thrown at it. She pictured the body warming up, loosening, and growing tendrils to latch onto the casket’s walls, then breaking through the box. She imagined the tendrils transformed into umbilical cords, her mom reaching out to the soil of her birth like a fetus to its mother. She pictured her mother’s features creasing into a smile as her body fed itself back to life, then folded into the warm embrace of her ancestors.

  “Stop fanning the fire, love,” her grandmother instructed. “You don’t want the butter to burn.”

  For a moment, Helen couldn’t remember a time before that second in her grandmother’s backyard, but she knew in her bones, something had led her to that instant. She no longer felt shipwrecked, adrift, or seasick. She stood on firm ground.

  She pushed her thigh against his. She longed to be alone with him and her desires again: to touch him, kiss him, to feel him move inside her, to see in his eyes what she felt, to break through the constraining weight on her chest, to let her heart find its own beat.

  Later on, as he made love to her, she was, for a moment, distracted by the mixture of orange peel and roasted coffee scent on his fingers. It had the tang of something burnt. It reminded her of the smell of cigarette smoke on an old lover’s hands. Then she remembered her mother’s words: Men come and go but children always stay.

  “We don’t need this,” she said to him, and reached down for the condom.

  She took in his surprise, watched it turn into delight. She felt nostalgic almost. She wrapped her legs tighter around his waist and synced her rhythm to his. She closed her eyes and focused her thoughts on a daughter she would name Taytu.

  learning to meditate

  I met him on a Friday evening. I was in front of the building where I worked, pretending to be waiting for someone. In reality, I was avoiding going home.

  “Are you alright? You look troubled,” he said. With his thick, white beard and watery, brown eyes, he was a perfect picture of wisdom and solicitude.

  I must have stared at him blankly. He looked me straight in the eye as if he’d always known me, as if he knew I’d lost my way, and asked: “Would you care to go somewhere and talk?”

  I didn’t have the clarity of mind to accept or decline his invitation, so I stood there thinking about the empty apartment that still harboured my boyfriend’s shadows a month after he’d left me. I pictured myself entering its dark mouth, mindlessly turning on one light after another, feeding the microwave a frozen dinner from a pile in the freezer, and downing one mug-full of expensive wine after another as I flipped through glossy magazines, searching for myself in them.

  “Follow me,” he said, and I followed him past tall glass and chrome buildings glimmering in the rain, past men and women in business suits and no-nonsense faces, scurrying to catch their buses home, past war and freedom statues overseeing an elaborate traffic system.

  He pointed at a pub called Yesterday’s. I took that as a sign.

  Funny how sudden the time between lost and found.

  My father was a silent stranger I carried inside. He never had time for PTA meetings, his children’s birthdays, or his wife’s concerns. Whenever he deigned to speak to us, it was to remind us of the people who were dying in his home country’s civil war, of his younger brother who’d suffocated in a metal barrel while hiding from government soldiers, or of his obligations to the Resistance. What I wished to forget was how the air always felt thinner, harder to breathe when he was around; how I’d resigned myself to the inevitability of hearing my mother’s stifled cries as she rushed down the corridor past my bedroom to the bathroom late at night; or how hot, fragrant tea trembled in its cup as she set the table for breakfast the next day.

  He ordered pints of Alexander Keith’s for us.

  “It breaks my heart to see such a beautiful, young sistah looking so beaten down,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him I wasn’t as young as he probably thought (I looked eight to ten years younger than my real age, which was thirty), but I didn’t want to interrupt him.

  “I know things,” he continued, smoothing his beard with thick fingers. “Whatever you’re going through, I’ve been through it. Probably many times over.”

  I watched the frothy head of foam on my beer slowly deflate before I took a good gulp and wiped my mouth with my thumb.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said again.

  There was something unsettling and yet familiar in the way he looked at me, but I felt too tired and my mind was too foggy to try to decipher its meaning.

  He loosened his gaze and cleared his throat. “I was married for twenty-five years. My wife died last year,” he said, his eyes now on his half-empty glass.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He shook his head. “That’s alright. That’s life.”

  I noticed the fraying collar of his windbreaker, the clean but thin button-down shirt underneath. I infused my imagining of his life with financial hardship, heartache, and loneliness. I saw a man of dignified bearing who, despite it all, had come to grips with life’s shortcomings. It made me feel sorry for him. And it made me feel closer to him.

  “See, we are all guests in this world.
This is not our home. We’re here to learn and grow, and we’re only given one chance,” he said. “So we shouldn’t squander it.”

  “I read an article not long ago that postulated we might all be simulations run by a highly advanced civilization,” I said.

  His brow furrowed. He narrowed his eyes as if he were trying to make out my features from a distance.

  “You know, like characters in video games,” I continued.

  What I really wanted to tell him was that my one chance at a good life might have been destroyed the day I first witnessed my father’s violence break my mother into a bundle of howling sounds and tears as though she’d regressed into infancy. That remembering this made me wish I could cry into his shoulder the way I used to with my grandfather, when I was little and he was still alive.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that … And young lady, you shouldn’t buy into that white folk nonsense either,” he said, shaking his hand in front of me.

  His tone betrayed the nature of a man who didn’t take well to contradiction.

  I nodded. I didn’t care that his assertion was ridiculous. In fact, I welcomed it — not only because my boyfriend was the one who’d read the article and this man’s dismissal therefore was a negation of everything that he stood for, but also because it had been so long since I’d had a conversation with someone who looked like me that his rebuttal was in itself, an acknowledgement. A reminder of who I’d been before I moved to the city, before my boyfriend made me believe I could change if I really wanted to, and before I became a hollow vessel instead.