Perhaps I really do give my illness an opening to stop my life cold. But that is because I figure this is the only way that I can get the better of it. I will not allow it to continue through my children or because of them. I do not want to be a transit lounge for this disease, nor to live my mother’s life all over again. After every spell that electrifies my body, she is powerless to make anything happen that would absolve her of her sin, just as she was powerless faced with the death of Hassan. I am grateful to God for this lovely chance, but I am not kicking His grace in the face if I say no. In other circumstances, perhaps I would have considered Hamza one of the best opportunities to come my way; he would be a good companion for a life, a whole life. But I live here, suspended in this body of mine, with its limited possibilities, and I cannot gamble with future lives for the sake of my life here and now.
As soon as I heard my mother’s steps on the staircase I turned toward the wall. I did not have it in me to bear up under her sorrow. She came and pressed herself against my back and began to stroke my hair, weeping over her powerlessness and her weakness. With every seizure—these seizures that seemed to reoccur at fixed and regular intervals—I would feel the convulsions of my body stripping me naked. It was a nakedness that left me powerless to cover myself, a nakedness that meant there was no point in pulling the cover up and over me or clutching my clothes tightly. It was the nakedness of exposure, need, and weakness. I heard her sobbing but it was hard to make myself feel it, for my seizure enveloped me in a stifling sheath and took me to a place of total isolation. It took me far away.
I was empty, and among the things that had left me was my desire to stop the seizure. I was reaching the moment where everything was absolutely like everything else, since my head was vacant and my spirit was quenched completely. I was so weary that I let the thread of saliva stream across the pillow. My mother’s sobbing, growing louder, and the rattlings in my throat, sang their parts in turn, like a chorus, and I was seeing myself from the inside, and hearing myself from the inside, and my temples were throbbing inside the walls of my chest and echoing back, and the echoes were spreading to the deepest recesses of me. Every seizure settled deeper inside of me, leaving more residue.
Muhammad, who could transform any event into gripping entertainment, inventing jokes from it and making me laugh, was hiding his worry under an artificial calm. He asked me rapid-fire questions the whole way there. When had I eaten? When did I wake up? What time did I go to sleep? What did I do today? All in an effort to keep me with him, but my drowsy state kept me from responding beyond a few unconnected words. The letters I did try to enunciate would drown in the saliva of my seizure, and that was enough to distort my few words beyond intelligibility. My head was very heavy and my sleepy state pushed me to hallucinations. Sometimes I was trying to answer questions that had already been superseded by other questions, and sometimes I was answering the same question twice in a row. When I could not speak because the words only gurgled in my mouth, or when I stayed still, quiet without a sound or a rustle because I was so fatigued, he would put his hand out to me and say, Squeeze my hand. Out of weakness or pride, I did not much give him my hand.
For so long I had been sure that I—rather, I and my illness—were standing on the rim of a dangerous precipice, and if we fell we would fall together. I believed that the impact our crash made would resound in my ears for a very long time. I would know then, and for certain, that we had indeed fallen. What happened, though, was that when we fell, my senses and the cracking sound of my bones lied to me. What happened is that I exchanged that gigantic blackness swallowing me at the opening of the precipice for mere everyday darkness, which I handled by saying nothing and claiming that nothing had happened, while in fact this descent was burying me alive little by little. We had really fallen, and my new belief was that every fall concealed behind it another drop that was even worse, that would take me down a steeper incline and further into the abyss. I knew I was threatened with more.
When I was in the sixth grade, aged eleven, the first signs of my illness came in the form of light, uncomplicated spasms attacking me as I slept, giving me a bout of fright or a nightmare, some tremblings and a choking sensation, and then I would wake up bewildered. My mother carries the disease in her genes, so she had always been immediately suspicious of anything at all that afflicted us, no matter how short-lived. We would not let her watch any medical program, because that would mean a new name, a new disease, to add to her already rich vocabulary, as well as another round of anxious suspicion about every passing cold that would inhabit our bodies. When my mother saw those nighttime seizures, she willed herself to believe that I did not suffer from any diseases. It was not possible for her cute, sweet little girl to really be sick. But after three years of it, seeing the way I would shake uncontrollably in the middle of a seizure, she could no longer deny it. The results of the EEG were enough to prove it.
I remember her face, when she was sitting in front of me as I was undergoing X-rays. I could see her face in a little mirror opposite me, as I was encased in that huge disk, an enormous white coffin. She was moving her lips with verses from the Qur’an and was all but crying. I remember how she questioned the doctor fiercely as he wrote out a prescription and said that if I stuck to the medication it was very possible that we could control the seizures and stop the disease from progressing any further. She was arguing with him about entrapping my blood with tranquilizers and turning me into a girl from whom all life had drained. Meanwhile I was laughing. Epilepsy. The doctors are really something, coming up with names for sicknesses that sound so hilarious when you repeat them.
My mother believed that the sum of all the changes she was making would lessen the possibility that any of this would hurt me. She bought me a new bed with really low sides and corners, and no bedposts, and she populated it with a whole tribe of pillows. She covered the floor of my room with a fine blanket, since during my seizures I often fell out of bed. Whenever I fell, she would question me about my head. Whenever I was about to go in for another examination, she would be terrified at the thought that they might find a tumor in my brain, even though those falls of mine did not even bruise any bones. I had to stick to a few rules: I was not allowed to have a bath in the bathtub, or cross the main street by myself, or lock the door to my room. Some of her rules were illogical, and some of them I didn’t bother to carry out.
We did not have any fights over my disease until I graduated from high school and decided to apply to King Saud University. If my mother did not feel confident about what my disease might do and what it might mean for us when I was with her, how could she feel comfortable if I were so far away! I found myself explaining and talking and coming up with lots to say with the aim of confronting her fear and apprehension. I asked her not to put obstacles in my way, to let me run my life as I wanted to. But she deserted me. And so, for four years I studied a stupid trivial subject in a stupid college, with no opportunities to achieve anything with my diploma. I studied because that was what I had to do. And I succeeded and passed because that was what everyone did.
I knew that the moment my feet stepped through the hospital doors, my seizures would stop—seizures that had gone on relentlessly for some ten hours or more with no more than five minutes separating each one from the next. I knew exactly what would be said to me. It is one seizure, they would say, one continuing seizure! Sure, I know! And I don’t want anyone to remind me. I only want them to take my body and try it out for just one day. For three or four seizures. Then I will leave them the freedom to choose their terms and descriptions and names and cold drivel.
The seizures really did stop. The on-duty doctor came. Before she began talking, I was all set to address her aggressively, hostilely—the one tool I possessed by which I might defend my own body, in light of the feeling of violation and the sense that any space of my privacy had disappeared. She asked me what was wrong, and I said, I took one pill more than the max dose. As soon as I said it, Muha
mmad was on the point of jumping in with maybe two pills but he sidestepped when I gave him a couple of really angry looks. Answering her, I prepared a logically connected equivalence: my usual dose of Tegretol, the orange pill, as my mother calls it, is 200 mg. I used to take two pills every day, but my doctor combined the dosage into one pill, and I forgot. My seizure didn’t stop, so I thought that taking extra pills would improve things a little. The maximum dose was eight of the old 200 mg pills, or 1,600 mg, and since I took five pills each of 400 mg, that meant I had taken 2,000 mg.
I used up every last bit of my energy presenting her with this detailed explanation. Her response stunned me with cold suspicion: But since getting here, you haven’t had any seizures at all! The questions that followed confirmed my misgivings. She asked, Had I had a fight with anyone? Did I have any family problems or pressures at home? Was this the first time I had taken more than the usual dose? Had I played around with any other medications? Was I seeing a psychiatrist? From time to time she would check my answers with Muhammad, talking to him in English as if I were a stupid girl who would not understand, and as if her expressions did not reveal clearly, even to a blind person, what she meant. I locked down my mouth, biting on my lips to keep my anger inside, until I found myself exploding at her doggedness. Write in your report that it is a failed suicide attempt! I don’t care!
She resumed examining me in silence, an atmosphere of tension closing in on us. I hated specifically the hammer that they used on my legs, the soles of my feet, and my elbows to check my nerve responses. And I hated it when the doctor asked me in the first examination whether my seizure made me urinate uncontrollably. As much as I hated it, I had to let my leg react, and I had to answer no. A firm no, but a very faint one. The nurse ordered a blood sample. She called Muhammad over and told him it was necessary to wait for the results of the blood test to be sure. The whole thing was more than a matter of one night’s observation in the hospital, she hinted, even if the overdose was small and the passage of a few hours since taking it had allowed my body to get rid of it, most likely without any permanent damage.
The whiteness here is unbearable! I clung to Muhammad’s hands, saying, Don’t leave me! Please. I will die if you leave me alone, don’t leave me! The first thing he would do tomorrow would be to come to me, he said, and he promised me things as if I were a little child—a box of Mackintosh chocolates, Baskin-Robbins ice cream. All that was lacking was a doll with blonde hair who would sing The fox is gone away …he circled round seven times today. Muhammad thinks that being born first gave him precedence—which should have meant he would be the one to receive the defective cells that sit in my brain, and the unfaithful blood of Hassan that would not clot. Like my mother, he carries guilty feelings about not getting sick instead of us, which would have allowed him to settle all the family debts at once, by means of one person.
The whiteness here is unbearable! But I give in to Muhammad’s will, and I put on a white shirt that is barely there, and I lie down in the bed with white sheets, in a room whose walls are white, whose curtains are white, whose doors are white. Everything here is white with a sharpness that makes you dizzy, and brings fear and dark nightmares. How can a whiteness like this be anything other than death, that whiteness in which we shroud our dear departed? In one of these white rooms, Hassan grew two wings and flew away, no longer weighed down by his blood, no longer under the control of his body. He was released, a luminous spirit. On that day, a shooting star fell and wounded my eyes—the shooting star of a short life. I missed distancing it from my vision with the shade of my hand, just as I missed the chance to charge it with a wish, as if it were Hassan, as if he would return, a star to hold suspended in the skies, from a long thread whose end would be in God’s hand.
My mother says, The good folks—they are the ones the world does not want! My mother is always smart about inventing philosophies that convince her of God’s perennial justice in anything involving her. She does not run down His judgment, does not speak disparagingly of the trials He visits upon us, never blasphemed him, not even once in her whole life. It is He (as I convince myself) who will bring Paradise to her, as the Qur’an says. For those who earn Paradise on that day, says God’s Holy Word, will find a better abode, and a fine place of repose.
I am not a good enough person for the world not to want me, but I am weary enough to want my death. I would embrace death, if Death were anything like Joe Black. Maybe Death is really like the guy in Meet Joe Black, handsome and tall, and fond of the creamy inside of peanuts. I will not bargain with Death to obtain a few days more, and if he wishes to divide with me whatever part of my life is left, I will give him all of it. I am ready to believe any legend that will lead me into an easy death. Like the ancient Babylonians, I will have coins placed on my closed eyes, coins to consume my sins and return me to the whiteness of my purity. I will believe in the boatman of the underworld, who guarantees me a safe passage to the Bank of Death. I long for death, but I fear the look of the world over there. I am afraid to knock on the door and find no one there to open it. I am afraid to go on, after the door locks behind me, and find that there is nothing but darkness and loneliness and many people entering whose faces I do not know, and a time without end. I want Death to be a little bit nice to me, to take me without hurting me, to take me gently and lightly, to take me without stuffing me into a space smaller than my body, to take me with my filth and black spots and the mire in my soul, to take me and raise me on his wings, to lift me outside and above my body, above the world, above, where God is. I want to say goodbye to my body, but without death I will never be able to leave it.
I add the twenty-seventh star to the calendar of my nights in white rooms, but I am still not used to this. The odor of cleanliness here is loathsome. All alike in their dull stupid looks, the faces inspire sarcasm. It is exactly the way things always are, and always have been, on most of these white nights of mine, ever since I was old enough to know where I was. I have spent most of them singing, as swans do before they go away, the singing that I saw in Hassan’s eyes during his final illness, and then I knew he would be fine. He would get well as he had promised me, and he would no longer be exhausted by his body, and the failures of his blood. His promise was made good. He was cured in the only way he could manage. Death. I have spent this night humming and murmuring an old song by Fairuz. I can only remember a whole line from it with difficulty. If only its sound, if only her voice, which lives in my memory, would not sting me so, as it goes round goes round goes round … something about a big girl in a big world and absence no longer frightens her but she will be afflicted there’s no doubt about it with sad longing.
The whiteness here is unbearable! My own room tonight must feel the loneliness like I do. My phone cries and no one hugs it; my little things scream, trying to get someone to pay attention, but nobody gives them even a passing glance. I am alone except for the songs, in the isolation of my light weeping. The lights from the window pound in my eyes, and the silly movements of the nurse around me or in me, every hour, keep me from going to sleep, and anyway I cannot go to sleep in a strange room.
At five o’clock the next evening I left the sinister whiteness. Every added hour I spent there meant someone else getting the news in all of its details, and extracting whatever seemed useful, putting the proper expression on his face, and putting on some old stinking clothes and coming to the white room bearing a prayer. But they were prayers that these people did not really intend to send upward, and so they sat heavily and painfully on my soul. Walking away, my visitors sliced off parts of my soul carelessly. If the white room had a door, I slammed it shut, time after time, declaring, I did not want to see anyone! And a virtual window whose luster was extinguished by the red writing bore the word overdose.
21
Taking Stock: My Year1
… a single reason2 gives me justification for plunging into a balance sheet of this year, which is almost over; only one reason but, it appears to me,
a very important one: I have the feeling, without any proof to confirm my intuition, that each of my coming years will be an exact copy of the one before, with a few small made-up details on the margins that will not require or attract much attention. Thus, the reason for taking stock of this year is so that I will know for sure that I lived it. It is true that I will not forget the grand turns it took, but I am not positive that there are rooms in my memory to house this year with proper hospitality. I want to convince myself that I lived it in the best possible way without feeling any regret that I let pass by some different possibilities according to which I might have lived it.
A few hours separate me from the end of the last day in my twenty-second year. I have no intention of transforming this stock-taking into a long-winded elegy. I know how much we tend to recall things in an idealized way, simply because the fact of their endings makes us more gracious toward them, to classify them under the forceful admonition, “Remember the merits of your dead.” Or the opposite, since we do examine the scratched-out side of the tablet. I will try not to fall into that trap.
The first impression I can cull from this year is that things were not great. Things were not warm to me, in response to my having ignored them. I will not start by complaining, for I do respect the complexity of those things’ position. Many things happened to me, and many things struck me—poems, songs, beginnings of musical phrases, beginnings germinating inside of me, and my two fish, Yaza and Nala, with their gold and orange hues. But they all faded quickly, and no traces remained. Everything leaves me before I can close my fingers around its shadow. Swiftly, the songs would depart, exhausted by being sung and heard so constantly, and the poems became banal, the poems themselves no longer felt any joyful surprise at life, and one certain day both of my two little fishes were floating on the water’s surface, even though I had not skimped on changing their water and feeding them once a day.
The Others Page 23