What Lies Between Us

by Nayomi Munaweera

  Then another relative will arrive from somewhere farther away and he or she will be shocked by everything all over again. There will again be tears and denial. There will be anger. Then in a few days he or she will also be exhausted, accepting. The cycle will resume. These are the rhythms of our days.

  * * *

  I have seen miracles too. Once a girl came in, gaunt and wasted. Twenty-six years old and dying of a disease that made her prone to stomach cancer. They had cut out two-thirds of her intestines, so she was a tiny wasted thing in the bed. Her mother gave her things to throw and she exorcised her anger by screaming across the room and throwing teddy bears, paper plates, cutlery.

  I didn’t try to stop her because her screams were weak, more like long, exhausted sighs. The objects she threw fell a few feet away, rolled under the bed. I didn’t try to stop her as I might have with a louder screamer, a more adept thrower, because I didn’t think she’d make it through the weekend. We made her as comfortable as we could; we checked her vitals hourly, gave her a heady concoction of sedatives. The chaplain came and she wept through instructions for her own funeral. Various family members trooped through the room saying their farewells. And then they left and we waited.

  And then miraculously she didn’t die. Her vitals went up and she survived the weekend. Then she survived the week and did not stop surviving. There was no explanation for either her having this rare disease so young or for her remaining among the living.

  She comes to visit us sometimes. She brings flowers, cookies, balloons. She fills the ward with her laughter. She hugs me tight and says, “I couldn’t have made it without you.” She looks deep into my eyes as if she sees me. She makes my heart pound. She is beautiful, thin as a supermodel from the lack of so many coils of intestine, and the men love her for it. They do not realize she is a miracle.

  She brings flowers for the nurses, large, waxy white orchids. They are supposed to be for everyone, but I know they’re mine. I was her principal care nurse; I watched over her in those crucial days. Once when no one was watching, I folded a sprig of her orchids into my jacket as I left the hospital. I took it home and put it in an old painted vase I had found at a thrift shop and sat it in the middle of my kitchen table.

  Then I poured a cup of tea and stared at those incandescent flowers. They lit up my kitchen. Three blossoms climbed the curved stalk, which ended in two perfectly rounded buds. I looked at the flowers with their large creamy wings lifted in flight, the mysterious interiors with all their carvings and curvings, the yellow passages into their hearts. I brought my face to the sprig. There was no scent, only the purity and smoothness of skin against my lips. I couldn’t resist. I dipped the tip of my tongue into the innermost crevice of a blossom and the inner lips pulled at me as if to hold on forever.

  Here is the secret of that girl, the one who was cured and who brought us flowers. When we were alone, when even her mother had left, I held her clawed hand and I prayed to whatever power was poised above us, enormous and invisible, weighing her life on its scale, fingering the cobweb of her breath, scissors opened around it and ready to snip. I begged this unseen creature for her life, and somehow it was pacified. The scissors were withdrawn; her life was spared. He looked at me once before he left, the mighty winged angel of death. He promised me he would return, but then I didn’t care. We aren’t supposed to do such things, of course. We aren’t supposed to pray or have favorites, but I did. For her, I prayed. These flowers are my just reward.

  Thirteen

  In these years I stay away from men; I stay away from women. I avoid love; I shun desire. I am creating the purest monogamy. My body belongs only to myself. My heart is as contained as a creature hidden deep in its shell. I know that the hungers of the body, its needs and impulses, are dangerous. They can maim unnamed but important parts of you. It’s easier and safer to break the body into its working parts, to learn the names of bones and the functions of organs, the uses of chemicals to stunt or stall the advent of disease. These are the only acceptable ways I can delve into the physical.

  There are men who like my slim tallness. They like the tumble of hair that releases when I refashion my ponytail. There are men at the hospital who look at me—doctors, sometimes recovering patients, a fellow nurse. They ask if they can come over and cook me dinner, maybe a spicy curry. I would like that, wouldn’t I? They make it easy to reject them. I am a hunger artist in the realm of love.

  Amma, who has guarded my virtue like a dragon at the door, is now obsessed with its end. She calls to say, “Yes, it’s good for a girl to have a job, to be able to take care of herself. Good-good.” I can hear Catney Houston purring next to her; the cat is ancient now, half blind and mangy, but still alive, still passionately in love with Amma. My mother goes on. “You’ve done really well … But…” I wait for her to pick up the thread she has left dangling from our last conversation and of course she does, “You need to start thinking about settling down before you get … you know…”

  “Get what, Amma?”

  “You know, dried up.”

  “Amma! I’m not a sponge.”

  “Yes, darling. But good to have someone, no? Look at me. All alone. You mustn’t end up like me. You can’t be happy all alone. With no one to take care of you.”

  “I’m fine, Amma. I am happy. I have my work, my place. I like my life.” I say this emphatically. Later after I hang up, I think about what it must mean to her that I live alone. In the place she came from, the only reason for this solitary state would be widowhood.

  If we had stayed in Sri Lanka, there would be a hundred voices a day reminding me to find someone, to get married and settle down. Everyone from the aunties to the fishmonger would be asking where my husband was. If I revealed that he didn’t exist, they would pantomime shock and proceed to tell me about their father’s uncle’s grandson who had just returned from abroad and was looking for a wife. Here, thank god, only my mother calls to harangue me and warn me against getting “dried up.” I know that she doesn’t mean I’m getting wrinkles. She is referring to a more intimate sort of desiccation. I look out of the window at the city street and laugh.

  * * *

  If love is absent, belonging is not. This apartment poised above the Mexican grocery is where I have felt the most at home in years. It is my small kingdom, my patch of earth. A tumble of green vines spills over the bookcase; an anatomy map in lurid detail rests on the dining table; a globe sits on the side table so that I may spin it and come to rest a finger on that single spot of green island in the wide blue sea that was my home a long time ago.

  On a dresser by my bed is the aquarium, a two-by-three universe lush with plant life, a stream of silver bubbles constantly rising. It was once populated by a kaleidoscopic array of flitting fish, tiny red shrimp, snails who slid across the glass and participated in huge snail orgies, their shells turning this way and that as they fucked in whatever way snails can be said to do that. But over the years a few careless overfeedings on my part, a few ammonia blooms, have made the fish arc themselves out of the water. I would find them later, tiny and dried as wood chips on the floor. I mourned over each minuscule life and couldn’t bear to replace them.

  But one has survived. One shrimp has outgrown his kin by inches and outlived all his kind. In his red carapace like a king’s mantle, his antennae bristling, he moves about the aquarium, climbs rocks to survey his kingdom, brings pincers to his face to feed himself. I call him Godzilla for his ability to survive devastation. He reminds me of those days when the river was my life. The days before water became dangerous, but here water is small and contained. Here I can watch Godzilla in his busy life and wonder if he too watches me as I come and go. He is my closest companion in these solitary days.

  * * *

  Days off I spend among flowers. When I first saw the dahlia grove at Golden Gate Park there was a moment of breathless recognition. How I had missed the flowers I grew up amongst! Those luscious crab claws and jacaranda of childhood. But h
ere too are monster blossoms with wild faces. Not the same, because this soil, this air, yields different beauties, but likewise seductive. I gaped at them, worshiped their tumbled madness or precisely placed geometry. From the lightest champagne pink to the bloodiest midnight dark they turned their bold faces to the sun, and I wanted to kiss each one. So I cajoled and worked my way through the ranks of volunteers until I am here once a week. My fingers in the dirt, stripping away dead leaves, loving these flowers.

  * * *

  This is my life. A private undertaking. A place of refuge and solitary pleasures. And then, as always, everything changes.

  Most evenings I am home curled up with a textbook. The human body doles out its secrets bit by bit, so there is always more to learn. But this night I am restless. A warm spell has fallen over the city. It is a rare enough thing to make people spill out into the open, everyone giddy at the thought of walking the streets without jackets, sweaters, scarves. There is the feel of a holiday. I feel a pounding restlessness in my blood, and soon the textbook is abandoned and I am pacing the apartment, not sure what to do with myself. My phone pings. It is Nadine, a nurse on my floor who has been after me to come out for ages. She has said, “You need to get out more. You’re alone too much.” Now she texts, My new dude is spinning. At the Elbow Room. Come?

  I thumb back, Yes ☺

  What? Really?!? ☺ ☺ ☺ ☺

  I am already pulling on my shoes.

  I walk down the long stretch of Twenty-fourth Street to the bar, where shimmering curls of silver ribbon hang from the ceiling and throw swirls of light around the dim interior. It’s packed and loud; it feels like we are all swimming underwater, moving through some green, lightning-streaked liquid. Nadine grabs my hand as I walk by, pulls me into a booth, pushes an icy bottle of beer into my hand. A man she knows crowds in next to me and suddenly I am at sea.

  He doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at him. We don’t talk to each other. But I can feel his long thigh resting against mine, the heat of it almost too much to bear. He talks to the others squashed into the booth with us. I can’t tell who they are. Everything is loud and overwhelming. I sit mute. Nadine is already drunk. She points at me with her beer bottle and says, “This is…” But my name is swallowed up by the music and the voices.

  I feel my face flare up. He turns to look at me, says, “What is your name?” And I lean into him and whisper it like a secret, and he looks at me and nods; some recognition sparks in both of us.

  He says, “Let’s dance.” And I am shaking my head. “No, no, no. I don’t dance.” But he is laughing and saying, “I bet you do,” and he reaches out and our fingers interlock and we stand up and then he is pushing through the crowd, pulling me along.

  On the floor, a crush of bodies, sweat spilling from skin to skin. I am shy, but then the music enters my bloodstream. It takes over my pulse and my feet. My fingers are undulating and I am unwinding and uncurling and expanding and laughing riotously with this man who has appeared like something mythical, something magnificent. We dance for hours, his body connected to mine by the music. We stomp and twirl and make faces. We are camp to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, melancholy to “True Colors,” singing at the tops of our voices along with the crowd, sweeping our arms in poetic gesture, then frenzied when the DJ reverts to drum and bass and the whole place is only bodies moving to rhythm.

  Then the lights turn on and we are all blinking in the glare like beached fish and he turns to me. His eyes are startlingly blue in the sudden light, blue as deep water. He says, “Do you want to come and see my view from the roof?”

  I’ve never done anything like this before. Later I will feel surprise and even shock that I agreed so quickly. I, who am so used to dodging love. But at this moment I know, with a sureness I’ve never felt about anything else in my life, that this man is magic.

  * * *

  We walk up the hill to Noe Valley, suddenly awkward. He lives in a house perched on a side street off Twenty-fourth. He has three roommates, he says, but they are all probably out on this beautiful night. We enter the house. His room in the back is large, cavelike, and high-ceilinged, and on every wall are paintings that looked like they have been ripped out of art books, bought at thrift stores, some framed, some taped from the back. Along these walls turned away from sight are stacks and stacks of canvases.

  He goes to get us wine, and in the dim light I study the painting on the wall closest to me. A Japanese print showing a few figures hurrying across a bridge, bare pale legs, the shards of a storm coming down, a riot of waves rising underneath. I move to another and see a woman writhing on the ocean’s edge. She is caught in the coils of a giant octopus, tentacles snaking all over her body. I look more closely, feel my face flare up. She’s rearing back in pleasure, her fingers at her crotch, her snorkel mask forgotten at her throat, and the water gathered at her back. The octopus, enormous and frightening but also erotic, holds her captive. Its tentacles stretch around her ankles, drape around her arms; one encircles an aroused nipple as she pleasures herself. I imagine these tentacles moving around me. How heavy they would be, how easy it would be to succumb to that embrace. Daniel next to me, hands me a glass of red, says, “Teraoka. Do you know him?” I shake my head, embarrassed that he has seen me looking.

  He must sense this because he says, “Come on.” He grabs a throw from its place on an old chair and disappears through a window. I push through behind him and am borne into the night. He spreads the throw on the roof and we sit. It is astoundingly warm. There is a downward slant on the slate under us, making our toes curl in vertigo. Below us, late-night stragglers, arms around each other’s waists, stumble home to bed. We perch above them, unseen, but seeing everything in the dim light of the sharp sickle moon. We talk shyly and carefully through the wine. I don’t remember what was said, just that it was said breathlessly. When he reaches over to kiss me I surprise myself by not pulling away as I have done so often. Then there is a dizzy roll, a loss of gravity, a sort of slipping and sliding. His mouth and his scent and a thousand giddy kisses, a hungry taking of tongue and breath and taste, and somehow we have rolled to the very edge of the roof; just below us is a drop into the now-silent street. We look down and laugh because we are invincible, and nothing, not even that empty space just below our heads, is frightening.

  And then he says, “Bed?” and stands up and I follow him as he scrambles up the roof and stumbles through the window and toward the bed. He pulls my hand, kisses me more softly, seeing that the atmosphere has changed, but I shake my head and pull away. I cannot do this. There are terrible memories in my skin. I walk out of his door as he calls out, “Can I call you?” I shake my head hard, say, “No, absolutely not. I’m not available.” It is a warning and a threat. I close the door quietly behind me and pray never to see him again.

  * * *

  His name is Daniel. He is an artist, a painter in oils and gauche. In the daytime he handles art for museums and collections; at night he paints. He’s twenty-nine, a year older than me. Nadine tells me all this. She tells me he’s been asking about me, asking for my number. She asks if she can give it to him and I say, “No!” and then I go home and look up meanings of the name Daniel. It means “judgment of God.” I shudder. That’s the last thing I need. I read this about men of this name: “Daniels tend to be passionate, compassionate, intuitive, romantic, and to have magnetic personalities. They are usually humanitarian, broad-minded and generous, and tend to follow professions where they can serve humanity. Because they are so affectionate and giving, they may be imposed on. They are romantic and easily fall in love, but may be easily hurt and are sometimes quick-tempered.”

  I look up that artist—Teraoka, he had said. I find a cross-eyed geisha, her long tongue intent on her ice-cream cone, characters caught in a shipwreck, and many, many women writhing in the giant octopus’s embrace.

  I slam my laptop shut and shower as I always do under burning hot water. I eat my solitary dinner, my eyes on the textbook in f
ront of me. And later I look down to see that I have drawn his name in looping octopus curlicues in the margins of my perfect and ordered notes.

  * * *

  I wait for Nadine to ask again. I have to wait days, but then she asks and I say yes, give him my number, and I ignore the Cheshire cat grin that stretches across her face.

  He calls. We talk. I tell him I prefer texts because I am busy. So then he texts and asks me out. I say yes. He will pick me up on a Saturday morning. I am beside myself that morning. What will I wear? I throw clothes on the bed, huge discarded piles of everything I own. I strew shoes across my perfect apartment. Godzilla watches me from his tank; he has never seen me so nervous. I settle on the most innocuous clothes—a sweatshirt, jeans. I cannot bear the thought that this man might see he has unsettled me.

  He picks me up. The sun is shining. We drive toward the water. I had thought we would have lunch, see a movie. Instead he says he wants to walk the Golden Gate Bridge with me. I’ve never done this. It’s always seemed the dominion of tourists. We park and walk along the bridge. Water crashes blue-green under our feet. We hang our heads over the edge and watch the ocean dashing itself against the rocks, breaking itself into a million silver bits. We turn to look up into the sparkling sky, the arches of the bridge stretching high into the air above our heads. I point to the other side and say, “That way is Asia!” Excited as a school kid, he laughs and grabs my hand. We walk along in the most perfect silence, our heartbeats in synch, our bodies reaching out to each other, our nostrils flared to catch each other’s scent.

  * * *

  Later he kisses me slowly and carefully. I feel the tightly wound cocoon of myself loosen and begin to unravel, but it is months before I am convinced into his bed. When he enters me, I hold on to his shoulders and weep. Here are memories under the skin that are being released. But for him I can bear them. He asks with his eyes if he should stop and I shake my head and hold on harder and his tongue shoots out and licks away my tears and I sob until he comes. Just before we fall asleep, I whisper, “If you leave, I will die.” He’s mostly asleep, but he kisses my eyelids, whispers, “Never.” Sated, still and calm, I fall asleep with him still softening inside me.