Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  Ferang waits seven seconds. He counts in his mind in a superstitious knocking-on-wood kind of a way, then he leans over the corner.

  Nil looks menacing in the way he stands. His shoulders stretched out. His head cocked to one side. He is using his own stature to intimidate, but Gabriel doesn’t seem to be bothered. The crimson sari draped over his lean body, he observes him, his back to the wall. Relaxed. In complete control.

  “Tell me his name,” Nil bites. He contracts the words when he is drunk.

  Gabriel cranes his neck, baring his white teeth in a conciliatory smile. “You have beautiful eyes. You shouldn’t hide them behind those glasses.”

  “And you shouldn’t be here,” goes Nil, but he retreats a little.

  “Why not? It’s a nice place, full of beautiful people.”

  “You came here for me.”

  “You little punk,” Gabriel scoffs, “you remind me of a mutual friend of ours.”

  Ferang smiles to himself.

  “Tell me his name,” Nil repeats.

  “I’ve come for you,” Gabriel says. He moves away from the wall. “But not for a name.” They are close enough to feel the breath of each other’s words on their skin, and the thought titillates Ferang’s mind.

  Nil raises his arms. “You are in the open here,” he says. “Don’t you know who—”

  Gabriel laughs. “A threat?” he goes. “Cute. I know who your father is.”

  Nil takes a deep, soundless breath. He sways a little. He looks like he wants to sober up with all his might. “Please,” he says, “the name.”

  “You two have already met.”

  “The name.”

  “You know his name. Yet it does not matter.”

  “Don’t play riddles, not with me.”

  “The only riddle is the one through which you yourself occlude the truth.”

  “Is he a politician?

  Gabriel smiles that sort of smile you give talkative children.

  “Is he a banker?”

  Gabriel winks. Nil stutters.

  “Does he—does he exist?” He looks like he might be sick there and then.

  Gabriel laughs. “This is not a dream, like it or not. And when the time comes, you, you alone will have to decide whom you love the most.”

  “Tell me what you’re talking about.” Nil is losing his patience. How scary. “Now.”

  “Or what?” Gabriel puts his arms up in the air, mimicking Nil’s gesture of exasperation. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Want to see?”

  “You can’t do anything to me. You can’t even touch me.”

  Gabriel takes step further. The difference in stature between the two is negligible. Nil stiffens. They are closer than they appear.

  “Listen,” he says after a moment’s hesitation, “we just want to help is all.”

  “Do it, then. If not for me, do it for the people of the Pit. Do it for her.”

  “Tell me his real name and I will.”

  “Ameen.” Nil shakes his head, but Gabriel is joking no longer. “Ameen. That’s his name.”

  “Not possible. We’ve gone through every register of the city.”

  “And you found him.”

  “He’s clean.”

  “Exactly. He hides in plain view, and like all the good mobsters, he’s well protected.”

  “Who covers him?”

  Gabriel claps his hands. He seems about to smile but simply blinks. He looks serious, then he looks away. Black and red walls. “Ask Mel,” Gabriel says.

  “What?”

  “What?” Gabriel grins.

  Nil looks wasted again. He mutters incomprehensibly, then he repeats, “What?”

  “Anyway,” goes Gabriel after a beat, “I’m here to invite you to my little party.”

  Nil moves his lips without saying a thing. He rubs his nose. “Wait,” he cries, lucid again, “if we’ve always known who the fuck he is, there must be something we can do.”

  “You have no evidence.” Gabriel touches his own perfectly shaped eyebrow. “And even if you had any, it would make no difference. The craftsmanship behind every power play is to ensure that the deception isn’t vulnerable to the truth. Instead it survives it and is even corroborated by it. Secrets are a form of art.”

  “There are no doors,” murmurs Nil. “There are no windows.”

  “And objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

  Nil winces and gasps. A shocked glimmer in the deep of his eyes. “How do you know?”

  “The use you make of your questions is rather poor. Always has been.”

  “Gabriel...” Nil says in a pleading voice.

  “Tomorrow. You’ll see Ameen tomorrow.”

  “You must be kidding.” Nil’s reactions to things are always hilarious.

  “Why?” goes Gabriel in a flirtatious manner. “It’s my party. I decide who’s coming.” He smiles. “It’s going to be the party of the century.”

  “Wait—”

  “Look through, Nil.” Gabriel is walking off.

  Ferang steps back, retracting behind the corner.

  “No, wait,” goes Nil, chasing him, “you won’t get away with this just like that.”

  “Back off,” spells Gabriel, a hint of amusement in his voice. “Or I’ll throw a curse on you and all your family.”

  Ferang waits to see him appear around the corner. Gabriel winks as he walks past him.

  “Please,” calls Nil. Pitiful. Just pitiful. Then he sees Ferang leaning against the wall and regains strength and, puffing out his chest, he screams, “Hijra!” but Gabriel is already far into the black and red corridor. “You fucking faggot,” growls Nil. His lips tremble, anger climbing his face like the summit of a mountain. He’s shaking all over. Throws his glass against the wall. Black and red. It shatters against the black and red wall.

  Ferang watches him. He knows that, if he were sober, he could have disguised the profound ecstasy he feels by looking at the scene, this cheap display of human melodrama, but at the end of the day he doesn’t really care, he is enjoying it big time. Unable to banish the smile from his lips, he puts his arms around Nil’s shoulders.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  They start down the corridor. A schmaltzy remix of “Wonderwall” by Oasis echoes from wall to wall. Red. Black. Nil looks aghast. His eyes downcast. He doesn’t really look frightened, only freaked out.

  Next to the door of the ladies’ room, a girl has fainted. A friend, curled up beside her, is laughing frantically. She sees them approaching. She stops laughing. She turns toward the unconscious girl, noticing that one of her nipples is protruding from her black dress. The friend lingers, as if to allow the show to be enjoyed a little longer. Then she covers her up. She is back looking at them, dead serious. Not laughing anymore. The music intensifies. The flashlights of the dance floor bathe the final stretch of the corridor.

  “Mel,” says Nil.

  “Yes, we are going to get her.”

  “We have to ask her.”

  “What?”

  “T-tomorrow,” Nil says. “Gabriel’s transition is tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” goes Ferang, getting off on the physical and emotional state of his friend. “We all know that.”

  “Ameen will be there tomorrow.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “That’s politics.”

  “Smartass.”

  “We...” Nil has the attention span of a goldfish when he’s drunk. “The Hijra said that we need to ask her about Ameen.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  Nil tries to turn around, but Ferang keeps pushing him against the crowd, opening the way.

  “We have to tell her,” says Nil, “she’ll knows what to do—”

  “Dude, no.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you want to make an impression on her? She gathered all the information, the freaking life and times of Gabriel in that interview, and you want to dump more responsibility o
n her back? We just have a name and, tomorrow, a face, a name and a face that most of the people in this city know anyway. Concretely speaking, we still have nothing. No evidence. For now.” Ferang cringes in his fucking stomach, adding, “But with your talent, I’m sure we’ll make it. Just keep on swimming, huh?”

  “We should cheer her up.”

  “And you think that this will do the trick? Let me tell you what will—a gram of dope, and a good f—”

  “A good?”

  “Yeah, Nil. All the rumors about her? They’re true. She carries herself in this Mother of Dragons-kind of a way, but deep down she’s all Kim Jong Un.”

  Stop now.

  “She’s going through a difficult phase, that’s all,” says Ferang, gripping Nil’s back in a benevolent grip. “Let’s wait to have something in our hands before we trouble her with more of these questions. If you really want to lift her spirits, just wait to have the truth, bhai.”

  Ferang can’t see Nil’s face, only the back of his head.

  “It’s been months now,” Nil blubbers, “and we have nothing and we are spinning in circles and when it seems like we’re getting closer, here we are in another dead end.” Nil shivers. Despite the AC, it’s hot as balls. “We have nothing.”

  “Again, you’re wrong.”

  “How so?”

  Ferang lets out a dramatic sigh, then draws him to himself. He whispers. “Ameen is a duck decoy.” A pause. “There’s someone higher up.”

  “Who?” The music’s too loud, and Ferang knows that.

  “Come on,” says Ferang, taking him by the arm and dragging him through the dance floor.

  “Wait,” goes Nil, “how do you know?”

  People are higher, sweatier than before. Ferang uses Nil as a breakthrough to ram his way through the mob. Looking for Mel. Finding her is no big deal. Strangers are dancing all around her. For them she is a blond and sparkling toy, nothing more, nothing less.

  “Mel,” he calls out.

  Her head tilted back, her eyes half closed. Although in the middle of a group, Mel is dancing alone. She is probably too drunk to still care about fitting in with people who, so very sorry, will never see her as one of their own.

  “Mel,” Ferang repeats.

  Mel doesn’t say anything. Stretches her neck. Opens her eyes.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  Mel looks at her friends. She looks at them with some kind of self-realization, maybe noticing that she has no clue who they are. She shrugs it off.

  “All right,” she goes. “There’s shitty music anyway.”

  The three of them leave the dance floor, slipping into the elevator. In the parking lot, a boy brings them the Enfield, wobbles his head, hands the keys to Mel, careful not to touch her kind-of-fair skin. Mel smiles back. She wants to do him.

  “Where?” she asks, once on the saddle.

  “We should go to the overpass,” says Nil, is voice drawling. “It always helps to pick up the pieces.”

  “Too far.” Mel is totally stoned.

  “Trump?” goes Ferang.

  “Trump it is,” says Mel. She guns the engine.

  The two of them climb up behind her. Ferang in between. Parked near the gate of the hotel, a police car. The cops wave at Mel. She ignores them, accelerating. The night is beautiful. Ferang is too intoxicated to realize that Mel’s driving tonight could be the end of their lives. The tires slide through on the pockmarked tar as if skating on the finest ice. Ferang is trashed but still full of the pleasantness and confusion that come before the nausea. He has to pee.

  The Trump Towers are not that impressive, but the illuminated black glass that covers their surface from top to bottom makes a nice show of ostentation. At the entrance of the yard, the three intersecting compasses—the Worlds United symbol.

  Mel knows the guard. Nil knows him too but pretends not to. The guard, Sandeep or something like that, is a gay man in his thirties hired through a new campaign launched by Worlds United and promoted by Nil’s mother to combat discrimination and integrate out-of-the-closet homosexuals into the company. The result of this policy, said the Express, is social ostracism of those individuals within their communities. In a few cases, reported the Times, some residents of the poorest areas were beaten and killed by local Hindu radical groups. But hey, a gay guy works at the construction site of the Trump Towers, so it’s all good.

  “Good evening, Madam,” says the guard, opening the gate.

  “Look what I brought you,” says Mel, nodding toward Ferang and Nil sitting behind her.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” says he. His cheeks burn with embarrassment.

  Mel parks the Enfield opposite the entrance. Gets down. She’s fucking drunk. Ferang and Nil, still sitting on the bike, watch her walk perfectly straight toward the glass doors. She punches in the correct passcode at the first attempt. The doors slide open, sucked in by the black walls. Mel enters. She doesn’t turn around. Starts towards the fire escape. Ferang, with a mixture of attraction and aversion, follows her in. By the way Nil stares at her movements, Ferang is certain, he’d bang her, but he can’t touch her, can he? They’re following her. They parade in front of the temporary huts littering the yard, where the workers and their families live for the moment. Inside, the lights are off. They’re all asleep.

  “Let’s go see the stars,” Mel howls in the stairwell. Her voice is well calibrated, the way she speaks shows no sign of slurring.

  Ferang and Nil climb up the stairs, chasing her. The echo of her voice seems to climb up with them. Floor after floor, the walls get barer, the steps more rough. The aroma of everything new gives way to the smell of what is incomplete, an odor aggressive and inviting, bitter and sweet at the same time. The handrail is laid bare of paint and covered with rust in spots. Where the electrical connection has not yet reached, even the emergency lights are off. The last floors of the West Tower are dark and silent, animated only by the shrill voice of Mel talking to herself in a dramatic fashion.

  Towards the top, the walls give way to the night. Long metal pipes protrude from the concrete, pointing at the sky like broken phalanges. Pigeon shit covers the rooftop. Puffs of dust rise heavy, gust after gust.

  “Aren’t we pretty seen from above?” says Mel, once Ferang and Nil have reached the roof as well. Beyond the edge, East Ayodhya stretches out as bright as a carpet of jewels. “Down there everything is chaos, my personal interest crushing yours for fear of being crushed by someone else’s. There is nothing else, only the clash of factory-made destinies. But here—from here the roads and the cars strolling on them and the yellow street lamps under which they parade and the homeless and the apartments they stare at with murder disguised as worship—from here all of it moves in order, like a clock and its gears. Down there all is blindness. Up here we can see the big plan hidden behind the blindfold. Or at least pretend there is one.”

  She’s fucking drunk.

  Ferang chuckles. “I’ll keep this romantic side of yours in mind the next time you tell me about the intrinsic egoism of procreation.”

  They sit down. Mel in the middle, her feet dangling over the edge. Nil grabs his legs to his chest. Mel lights a bidi. The smell of the smoke pollutes the air. Ferang tries to breathe the clean wind blowing on top of the Trump Towers. Clean as a radioactive dump. Nil rests his chin on his knees. Ferang glances at Mel’s knees. They are clean. Immaculate.

  “So tomorrow is the big day,” says Ferang.

  No one answers. They ignore him. They heard him, and he knows that. Though his is not really a question, Ferang expects an answer. Of course he does. But no one says a word. Push them.

  Ayodhya shines like a basket full of jewels.

  “What is it, Nil?” Mel says after a while. She keeps staring straight ahead. Takes a drag.

  “Nothing,” says Ferang. “He just drank too much.”

  Nil blinks as if the sight of Ayodhya has become unbearable. He hungs his head, then lifts it up again. “Mel,” he says. “Can I
have some of your coke?”

  Ferang stares at the landscape ahead, at the airport headlights, while Mel fishes for the envelope inside her bra. At the lights of the Old City in the distance, when he hears the rattling of the plastic packet passing from hand to hand. Listening to the scraping sound that follows Nil’s snorting, he stares at the ubiquitous United Worlds sign dotting construction sites everywhere. Nil hisses, his molars grinding. Ferang stares at the enormous, almost absolute darkness of the Pit, a spasm running through Nil’s body. In the distance, the slender silhouette of the Scheria Tower. He listens to the silence weighing on their heads, stares at the emptiness besieging Ayodhya beyond its most extreme limits, the darkness of an India unseen, unknown. Irrelevant. He stares ahead until Nil takes a deep breath, and Ferang knows he is a step closer to his goal.

  “Will you sing for us?” asks Ferang.

  Mel exhales. Her breath smells like alcohol and smoke but there is an undeniable sweetness to it. She parts her lips. Her voice pours out with a second’s delay.

  “You know how does time fly,” intones Mel, never singing a song from the beginning, always halfway through. “Only yesterday was the time of our lives.”

  It’s wonderful. Both her voice and she, at this very moment, they are both wonderful. She always is, when she sings. A sublime talent, hers, hidden inside a spiny carapace, as unexpected as to seem unreal. This time, like all times, Ferang is struck by it. Ayodhya disappears, and he must devote to her his full attention.

  “Oh, friend, why are you so shy?”

  And the lights disappear. And the towers disappear. And the night disappears, and with it time. The universe is reduced to Mel’s lips, to Ferang’s conscience and to Nil’s presence, and nothing else. Yes, there is nothing but the three of them. There is no other. Only them and that song. They are somewhere only they know.