Thinner Than Skin

by Uzma Aslam Khan

  He drank. His lips were moist, his skin as tawny as his belt. “Shh,” he whispered, lifting a finger to those wet lips, though he was the one talking. “Listen.” From his throat poured a sound like a gurgle. “RrrrrRrrrr!” It sounded like an engine, though, apparently, it was meant to represent water. “Low sound is water gushing, finding a new opening. RrrrrRrrrr!” I heard no low sounds, no gushing water. Only him. “There are always openings in the mountains. Always. You can find them. If you learn to track with sound.” He grinned. “It is a skill that will suit you, when you go.”

  Suit you, he said, in English. Suit me how? And go where? He spoke in an Urdu with no trace of a northern accent. He threw in many English words. And his talk was beginning to make less and less sense.

  “It is hard to endure, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you know?” His voice was growing brittle as the bottle in his hand.

  I hesitated.

  “Can you play the flute?”

  I shook my head.

  “Drums?”

  I shook it again.

  “What good are you?”

  I nodded.

  “Here, try this.” From another pocket, he pulled out a double flute, embellished with multicolored tassels, many intricately braided.

  I held it in my hands.

  “Play,” he commanded.

  When I held it to my lips, I tasted paint. No sound came from me.

  He laughed. He began to play.

  I heard again the melody played the day Kiran’s body was taken down to the plains. I remembered the way her brother’s cheek had filled with air kisses, the way his farewell filled the shores of the lake, the way Queen of the Mountains and Naked Mountain sang back the notes. I did not recognize this man from that day. As his dirge grew more elaborate, it rolled into the valley like twin armies of dark clouds, each shadowing the other with thunder in its breast. The mountains answered back, with deeper thunder.

  When he stopped, I did not weep. But I began to feel afraid.

  He dried the lip of each pipe tenderly with a corner of his shirt. “I played at her birth,” he said. “You know?” His eyes were not mild at all. He spat on the wood and began to shine it. He was humming. “Six years for six stars in girgiti. I promised. I keep my promises. Hmmhmmhmm.”

  I could feel myself slowly slink away from him, though I didn’t have much room. It was either the chasm, or him.

  Without looking up from the flute, he said, “I was coming down from the steppe when it happened. From Kazakhstan. You know Kazakhstan?”

  I hesitated.

  “She sits on two hundred billion barrels of oil. You know?”

  I nodded.

  “America says no, no, no pipeline, not through Iran!” He was laughing vigorously now, unbuttoning his jacket after resting the flute on his lap, the black stones at his throat glistening with sweat. “But others, they say yes, yes, yes!”

  I had nowhere to go.

  “China ships it, the crude. All the way to Iran, from Pakistan. Then back up to China. China, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Iran. The new Silk Road. You know?”

  I nodded.

  “But still they are poor. So they want my help, my friends.” He fingered the bottle. It had a red label and he drank it slow. “Are they my friends?”

  I kept very still, hoping he wouldn’t notice me searching for an opening. How did he put it? There are always openings through the mountains. Another Chinese proverb?

  “The way it used to be,” he kept on. “Except, now we run on land and water.” He stared past my head, at the chasm beyond. “We have always run,” he added, still gazing with some longing at the drop.

  I could not speak.

  He picked up my camera. “I have seen many others. Better than this.” He shook it, roughly. He flipped it back and forth, searching for the on button.

  “Uh.” I cleared my throat, trying to indicate the button with my eyes and my chin.

  He pushed it. I looked away. The photographs would begin with the most recent. The one of them, at the glacier. Reason for the broader grin, no doubt. He’d probably seen them first. He was always ahead of me on the trail. He could have killed me any time, on the way up. But he’d waited, wanting me to see. And he was pleased. He began to skip through the pictures backward. I began to see them all in my mind again. I ought to have been offended at his obvious interest in Farhana as a nude and I was, even as I told myself it didn’t matter anymore, but, in fact, I was more offended than I had been on the beach—that must be the one he was gaping at, his wide eyes about to burst—when I’d hardly been upset at all, when the voyeur had been a voyeur not of film but of flesh.

  He took his time. I didn’t interrupt.

  Eventually, he put the camera down in the gravel, outside its case, and without switching it off. I fought the urge to tuck it away securely.

  Moments passed. The sun was high, higher than the man beside me.

  After a while, I dared to ask, gently, “Should we leave?”

  He scratched his chin, where thin wisps of golden brown fluttered in a wind that scraped my throat so dry, I was tempted to drink his drink.

  “Maryam’s mother. She was an escort.”

  It chilled me to hear her name spoken. “Yes?”

  “Of the sick. When a soul would wander away, she would bring it back.”

  I kept looking at him with as much interest as possible.

  “You are sick,” he announced. “But I am not here to help.”

  It was curious how the will to live now burned bright in me, where earlier this morning, I’d lost it entirely.

  “I thought I was going to kill you.” He grinned.

  I hadn’t lost the will, not at all. It was a discarded friend I welcomed back. And as it raised its head to fill the space I cleared for it, I wondered about Irfan. Still conscious? An ever-expanding part of me hoped he was, even as I wanted to silence this part. They couldn’t have reached help yet, Wes and Farhana, though they might be close. No, I couldn’t count on that. It would be some time before they made it all the way back up.

  By then, what would have happened to me?

  He said I thought I was going to kill you.

  He was peering into my face with eyes now small and red.

  “You know?” he asked, seeming genuinely lost.

  I took a chance. “Have you ever killed?”

  Seeming to remember something, he frowned, as if to chase the thought away. “You are a sick man. A dying man. I have never killed a dying man.”

  Well, this was hopeful.

  “A life of exile is worse than death. You will forever be alone.”

  Another proverb?

  He smiled, suddenly pleased. It was different from his grin. He looked almost pretty. “I was going to give you a choice, but the dying have no choice. I do not think there is need for this.” He pointed to his gun. He picked it up. He fired into the chasm.

  I pressed my hands to my ears. If before the mountains had answered his flute with a series of thundering echoes, now it was the valleys and the bluffs of my skull through which the gunshot ricocheted first. There were hundreds of surfaces inside me to strike, no matter how hard I squeezed shut my ears.

  A very long time passed before I found the courage to remove my hands. And when I did, I vomited. I had only biscuits and water to bring up and they did not surrender with ease. A string of froth fell on my chin, on my shirt, and at his heel.

  He offered the bottle again.

  I nearly vomited again.

  “I would not have to do anything except make sure you were never found.” Still with that smile around his lips. The bottle lay with his gun, the cap back on.

  I returned the smile. I could taste the acid still rising in me.

  “You know the choice?”

  I shook my head.

  “Go outside the mountains and never return. Or, die.” He pointed again to his gun.

  “No!” I squeezed my ears.
r />   He shrugged, feigning surprise, as though I’d just declined a sweet.

  I shut my eyes and thought quickly. It would be just fine with me if I left. Distance is a great protector! A quick stop at my mother’s in Karachi, then back to San Francisco, or perhaps the desert. I’d forget all of it. I’d live unencumbered by shame or yearning, history or memory. The farther into the future I’d go, the less my past would shadow me.

  “Should we leave?” I hazarded again.

  “I said no. No choice.” He fired the gun again.

  This time I bowed my head like a coward. My eyes, however, stayed open. I was listening and watching, even if that meant the crack through the canyon made my ears hum and every sound fade as though I were plunging to the bottom of a lake. My ears were filling with water but I would have to keep listening.

  I waited. He seemed almost to be in a trance. He’d look at me, then gaze dreamily at the abyss beyond. Look at the bottle, then look at his flute. Look at my camera, then look again at the chasm. Speaking in circles, as though delivering a chant.

  “Not south and not across the seas, from wherever it is you came. No no no. I mean north.”

  “North?” My voice already sounded very far away. “This is north.”

  “China north.” He was laughing again.

  And then he began to outline, in the most labyrinthine detail, and still in that trance-like voice, the destiny he had mapped out for me.

  Disguised as a trader, I would arrive at the frontier town of Tashkurgan, where I would pass into Kashgar. After that would come a checkpoint, the keeping of which was the bitterest of jobs, when the thermometer dropped to below zero. It made the men cranky, the ones who would tell me to take off all my clothes, there in the cold. And I would be given a new name. And different clothes, clothes worn by the last man to make the passage, and the one before him, crossing in the other direction, perhaps, with no fingers or toes. And the clothes would not have been washed and they would be live with creatures that had survived the cold, and I ought to learn from them. Only after that would I be ready for the Silk Route proper, which I would take from Kashgar to Yarkand, tracing the footsteps of those who had done the same for thousands of years. And this route was more often called the Ghost Route, for it was haunted, so I would need to prepare. I would track ghosts by listening, learning which to avoid and which to sit beside, at a fire, sipping tea mixed with millet seed, telling tales of flying horses whose names changed like the colors of the nimbus through which they soared. Pegasus, Tulpar, Jonon Khar. I would hear them go. And the fire would blow out. And the spirits would vanish. And if my skin were thick enough, I would eventually find my way to Karakol Lake, the blackest of lakes, surrounded by the Pamir Mountains. And the Pamirs would be reflected on the surface of the lake, her peaks and valleys swooping into Karakol’s depths, blue wings in a dark deep, and I would again be visited by fairies and jinns, owls and full moons, and I would kneel by the banks of that lake and wash my tired feet and drink the glacial melt and see the two of us, myself and my love, though he did not say this, he said the two of us, the Queen and the Nude, reflected as on another lake, one in which an unspeakable crime had been committed, for which someone had to pay.

  He was blinking like a lizard in the sun.

  My lips were cracking. I could taste the warm comfort of salt and blood.

  “No.” He shook his head. “That is not how it will be.”

  I did not know if I preferred it when he looked at me or past me.

  “You are already paying. You know?” The smile returned to his face. “But tell me, you would not choose this life, if I let you choose?”

  A life of banishment in place of death? Without love, with only the company of barren rocks? At one time I believed myself desirous of anonymity and solitude, but I was trembling now. He was right. I was sick.

  “The dying have no choice,” I answered.

  He laughed. “You hear me well.”

  “You speak well.”

  He grinned.

  Again a long pause.

  Then, “Can you hear it?”

  Behind me, I thought I could still hear the glacier crawl. I said as much.

  “No no no. Not the glacier. Your friend. He is moving.”

  I decided to stand up, very, very slowly.

  “One last thing.” His eyes flew open.

  I slid back down.

  “If I let you go, you must give me something in return.”

  In return for what—my new lease on a lonesome life?

  “I want this.”

  He took my camera.

  “One more last thing.”

  I waited. He was looking beside me, at the box wrapped in red cloth.

  “Where is your bag?”

  “I gave it to him,” I pointed to the general area where Irfan lay trapped.

  He seemed alarmed by this. “Did you take anything out?”

  “Just that.” I pointed to the camera in his hands. “And that.” I pointed to the box.

  He looked away, still troubled. I thought it atypical for him.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I was never going to kill you with a gun.” He began to laugh.

  As I climbed down the mountain, he played the flute. Goodbye! The melody was at my back, and then on my back. It swung around, knotting a pair of tassles around my waist. It pranced before me in the dust as I walked. Goodbye, goodbye! It was leaping and kicking, skipping and taunting, this jealous jinn, this giddy guide. Not even a fairy princess is worth falling for! It was what Irfan had said, at the edge of a different glacier, on our way to the lake. We’d nearly slipped, both of us. I’d pulled his jacket for support. He’d let me.

  Did he only have a broken leg? Was he even alive? A yearning began to rub me raw.

  The descent did nothing to relieve me of it, not even when the melody finally faded and my thoughts grew heavy and dull through sheer bodily fatigue. Now my most steady companion was time, time in which to re-live my tale as I scraped my shins against Ultar’s jagged fangs, forging a distance between me and all that I loved, a distance that was no protector at all. I made my way by listening to rocks fall, and to memories surround me: I ought to turn back. I ought to help Irfan. He was in danger. I’d swum away from Kiran and Farhana. Now I was running from Irfan. Farhana and Wes would also leave him. Where was the help? He was abandoned. He was in danger. I, on the other hand, was now out of danger.

  I did not turn back.

  Before I could reach the first village, I saw a convoy of trucks heading for the foot of the mountain. They stopped when they saw me.

  “That’s him!”

  “No. That is not him.”

  “Then what is that?”

  Two men got out of a truck and told me to put down the box. While one kept watching it, the other searched me roughly. He sneered at my ID card and pocketed the forty dollars I still had in my wallet. They asked what was inside the box and I said food and they asked where I’d been. I tried to explain that I was with a group of friends, but my tongue was stuck somewhere at the back of my throat. Irfan would have been better at this. Besides, they weren’t my friends.

  “We are wasting time,” said another man from inside a second truck.

  “This man is lying.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Hurry up!” They called from inside.

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “What did you say?”

  “He isn’t the one we want.”

  While they argued, a black Honda and white Hyundai drove up. “Check it,” called a man from inside the Honda, before it had even screeched to a stop.

  “Be careful, he might be carrying explosives,” said a man from inside the Hyundai.

  Did I hear them correctly? I began to laugh.

  Immediately I was surrounded. There were six men around me now, each pointing a gun to my head, and one of them began to shout. “What’s this?” He pushed my head so I was leaning forward, gaping at
the box wrapped in red cloth. They would not touch it.

  “That’s mithai,” I said, my voice shaking.

  “It’s him,” a skinny man with a face like a screw said to the large man whose hand was still pushing my head. The large man kicked the backs of my knees so I fell to the ground. “Get up!” said the skinny man, and when I tried to get up, he slapped the back of my head and told me to kneel. And now the most extraordinary thing began to happen.

  While the trucks and cars started driving away, the six men took long steps backward, still with their guns pointed at my head. They walked steadily and heavily away from me, as though in me they had stumbled upon an unexploded mine. I was entranced by their mistake. They were afraid of me. The weak one, the one to always bring up the rear, the one who ran away. The man moving the slowest was the skinny one, who had two diagonal lines extending from his cheekbone to his nose, and two more diagonal lines on the other side of his face extending from his nose to his jaw. I was looking at those lines as he began to bark his orders.

  “When we are there, at that tree with the cloth tied to its branches,” he pointed behind him and I raised my head to see the end of the road and what might have been a tree, “you will open the box. Understand?” I nodded. In truth, behind him I saw only shimmering brown earth. The day was scorching, and the dust on the horizon was growing thick. Where was everybody? I’d never been entirely alone even once on this trip, even when I’d wanted to be. Eyes had followed me everywhere. Where were they—my accusers? Didn’t they want to see me now?

  “Do you understand?” he kept repeating as he withdrew into the searing sky. I kept nodding, even when I knew he couldn’t see me. “Understand?” Yes. Yes, I understand. My neck agreed. My spine too; all of me was bowing in consent. All of me was jerking up, and flopping down. Yes! I understand! It took me a while to see that I was not merely nodding, but sobbing.

  “Open it now.” Perhaps they had a megaphone, for the voice appeared to reach me from very far away, yet it was clear.

  I stared at the sky. I stared at the red cloth.

  “Open it NOW!”

  There was a bomb and they were making me open it. It was not mithai or fruit. Irfan had not put it there. How did it get there? I remembered dropping my pack, when I got lost on the mountain the first time. The escort had found me, and the pack, and returned it. And before we’d parted, he’d asked me where the second box was. It was with Irfan.