by Daniel Lowe
“Today, no Azhar,” he said. The phrasing seemed ominous.
“What do you mean, no Azhar?”
But Saabir had learned enough English to turn the sentence around.
“You know Azhar?” Saabir asked him, his eyes still on his face. “Do you know Azhar? Marc?”
That was the first time Saabir had used his name, and Marc could no longer hold his gaze.
“You know Karachi?” He took the gun from his shoulder and tapped it three times on the ground. “You know here. Here. Room.”
“What happened to Azhar?” Marc asked again.
Saabir shook his head and smiled, pulled the gun back over his shoulder, and tapped his temple with his fingers, as if he were signaling for Marc to think.
“You have a son, Saabir? A boy?”
Saabir’s eyes narrowed, but he looked more troubled than angry.
“Josephine told me.”
“Josephine,” Saabir repeated.
“And a wife who died.”
He half expected Saabir to reach back and strike him, and he did lift his hand, but instead he brought it to the side of Marc’s face and rested his fingers for a few seconds on his cheek, and then patted it slightly.
“Girl,” Saabir said. “Marc’s girl. Died.”
Marc felt the familiar cut in his diaphragm.
“I want to see Josephine,” he said.
Saabir took his hand away and stepped back and smiled, and Marc belatedly recognized the irony of his statement.
“Eat,” Saabir said. “Josephine after.”
But it was long after. When he’d finished the cereal, Saabir walked him around the small perimeter of the two buildings; rarely did he see anyone in these slow, ten-minute walks, and he realized now this was likely by design; he might get a glimpse of a long-limbed boy through a narrow space between buildings when they came around to the door again, but he was always at least fifty feet away, and never turned his head to look at him. And there was the man he saw in the next building the one time, and the empty cups of tea. But when he was inside the room, he often heard people passing by. Many must have known about him now, but he was unable to hold that knowledge as comfort. He was thinking less and less of Lynne, and more of Josephine, and Claire as a woman, and himself as a lonely man who Joline had said was a hostage, as if this were a destiny no matter if Claire lived.
Through the extended afternoon he sat up on his mat and thought of them. The day was particularly warm, and even sitting still, sweat dripped from his face and into his lap. Saabir alternately sat staring at his feet, or sweeping up only the dirt that his broom raised, or stepping outside, Marc assumed, to escape for a minute or two the rising suffocation of the room. Saabir spoke only when he brought in his noon meal.
Marc understood that Claire seemed the least real of the people that Josephine described. In his telling of his own memories of her, she had grown increasingly vivid, and the ache in his stomach as he spoke had slowly developed a knife’s edge that only eased when Josephine began her storytelling. He still couldn’t grasp its purpose. Could not get the point. Why should Claire seem less formed? Because he’d known her? Because he loved her? Because she’d died? Josephine had described her as someone who wished she could choose a day that her life would begin, and Claire’s more distant memories, at least of her childhood, seemed to pass through her like a sieve, and only Genevieve’s story of Marc at the lake house seemed to take root in her. And why should that concern him? It was all an invention. It was preposterous. There was something horrific about the entire construct. But Josephine’s voice, deepening slightly as she narrated her tale, was the only thing that soothed him anymore, and any apparition of Claire if she had lived was better than—what exactly? Don’t let her die, he thought. And yet, she was dead.
For the last two days, toward evening, a shaft of sunlight angled through the small upper window, and the beam now slanted half a foot above Saabir’s head, and the rectangle of light on the floor seemed almost brilliant in the darkening room. He remembered a year after his parents separated, where he and his mother and sisters lived with his grandmother. On the wall adjacent to the dining room table, where each night he sat to do his homework, there was a small stained-glass window that would brighten near sunset on the few winter nights that were left undimmed by clouds. He had tracked the progress of the light across the glass for weeks, how a blue rectangle would brighten at a certain hour, and then a few days later, the yellow one next to it as the sun arced higher across the sky through the lengthening days. Even in June, when school was out, he’d find a way to escape his friends—their pickup ball games in the field near the well house, their cooling swims in the nearby murky lake—to sit in the chair at sunset, and his mother began to worry over him, asking why he would come in to sit alone after dinner when there was another hour of daylight to play outside.
He was waiting for something—though he was unsure of what, perhaps the return of his father, whose face he was struggling to recall—when, the last day of June, the sun found a particular sliver of the sky, and shone through the glass so that a patch of colored light was cast on his chest where he sat in the chair. In his mind, it was as if he’d stopped time, and he thought to call in his mother, but wanted to keep the moment for himself, and for five nights afterward on a brilliant stretch of sunny days the square of light traveled up his chest and was finally cast on his face, warming it slightly through the heavy panes of blue and yellow glass, until, two nights later, it disappeared altogether.
Now, he watched the rectangle of light travel up the far wall, narrowing with each minute, as if it, too, might in time bring a revelation. When it had become the width of a flashlight beam, he heard her knock on the door.
Saabir pulled the chairs so they were facing one another in the now familiar ritual, and Marc rose to his feet without being prompted and sat in one of them, and then Saabir bound his wrists and wrapped the blindfold around his eyes.
When she came through the door, the sounds outside were briefly amplified: someone’s footsteps on the street, and what sounded like a cart with a broken wheel being dragged through a distant alley. He realized part of him had been waiting for the call of the muezzin and the sunset prayer, but it had yet to come. She said a few words to Saabir, and closed the door. He wasn’t certain, but he thought Saabir was still in the room, and Marc listened to her settle her garments as she sat down in the chair.
“How are you tonight, Marc?” she said. He again felt her voice as soothing, and he knew that he would have trouble resisting it.
“Not much different from how I was last night,” he said.
“Really? After everything we told each other?”
“I’m not always sure of the purpose of what you’re telling me.”
“I’m not, either, if you can believe that.”
“Well, you rarely hesitate. You rarely stumble on a word.”
He heard her shift on her chair, uncross and recross her legs.
“Has Azhar been killed?” he asked, and was struck by his tone of resignation.
She didn’t respond immediately, and then said a few words in Urdu. Saabir was still in the room, after all.
“If I told you no, would you believe me?”
“To take away a father from his children, I don’t care the cause—”
“Don’t. Listen to me. I’m telling you no.”
“What did you say to Saabir?”
“I told him that soon I would be asking him to leave.”
“Can I see Azhar?”
“No. You won’t see him again.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but remained silent. She said a single word to Saabir, who responded with a word of his own that sounded half-spit, but he opened the door to walk into the evening. When he closed it, the call went out for the sunset prayer.
Marc asked, “When he leaves like that, and he hears the muezzin, where does he go to pray?”
“You’re assuming Saabir is necess
arily devout,” she said.
“I asked him about his wife and child.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “The time is coming where we may have to move you. It may be far away, and I may not be the one speaking to you anymore.”
“Why?” He heard the note of desperation in his voice.
“Because, as I’ve told you, I don’t coordinate things here.”
He felt hollow inside.
“Have you remembered another story you can tell me about Claire?”
Before an image could invade his mind, he said, “Josephine. Joline’s story is your story, isn’t it?”
“Shhhhh,” she said. “Tell me a story you remember about Claire.”
Something rose in him without the effort of recollection.
“The last—” He had to clear his throat against a tide. “It’s strange, you know.” Because he had to think past the story of the time of Claire’s healing, and her leaving the note, and her running away, but this he didn’t say. “The last time I saw her. It was like something out of a movie, if you can believe that. It was maybe a month before the phone call I told you about.”
“When she said, ‘You shouldn’t have kissed me’?”
“Yes.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking about that.
“Tell me about it.”
“I told you already that the time of that phone call was just after I’d moved into an apartment. A month and a half. And when I saw Claire, I’d been in it maybe a week. It was early December, out in the street in the city, and it was late afternoon, but seemed closer to nightfall because of the shorter days. There were a lot of people out on the sidewalks, but it was colder than hell, and they were walking fast to get to their bus stops or into the stores. The light posts were already wound with those tiny white lights, and the display windows framed with ribbon. I don’t know how it is for you to feel heartbroken, but for me, it—” He stopped for a half minute, and Josephine didn’t speak. “For me, it made the world more alive. Closer. Raw. I remember feeling this cynicism. At the orgy of buying going on in those streets. And the next second, I remember almost weeping at one of the shop displays where a gold ribbon was strung above a child mannequin’s head like it was a halo. I thought it was so beautiful. Before I saw Claire, I was standing near a bell ringer. Someone working for the Salvation Army, an old woman. She did not seem right all the way, you know? There was something fixed in the smile on her face, and her eyes seemed vacant. She was probably half-frozen. But a few people were dropping in coins. And I remember standing there, imagining how cold those coins must feel in people’s hands, and how much colder they were sitting in that kettle, and I was fingering a dime and a quarter in my own pocket, and not feeling particularly charitable, and then suddenly wanting to empty my wallet for the strange woman. The coins in my hand were cold, too, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I think I’ll give my coldness away,’ and I remember thinking—like it was an epiphany, and it wasn’t—that the source of all charity was not a human warmth but instead a need to distance yourself from the cold, and then my eyes glazed with it, and despite myself, I saw a beautiful woman coming around the corner across the street.”
He could feel himself sweating, and he could hear himself breathing in the odor of it. Each time Josephine came to see him, he was increasingly aware of the smell of his body, which had grown worse even though he washed up in the mornings with the basin half-full of stale water.
“I wonder if you’d wipe my face,” he said to her.
He heard her stand up. He thought he heard her lift a corner of her garment, and she started with his forehead, and, with a light touch, worked around the circumference of his face, then under his eyes, and down his neck before she sat back down.
“Thank you.”
When she turned back to her chair, her clothing moved the air over his skin.
“So, like I said, my vision was blurred. But, like everything else that afternoon, her beauty seemed vivid. Striking. I wanted it closer, and ran my coat sleeve over my eyes, and saw that it was Claire. And I thought I was losing it, then. For a few seconds, I thought I was falling apart, hallucinating, and I was terrified. But it was her. And she was beautiful, but not in the way I’d first seen. She was walking with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold, no gloves, in a navy-blue coat. She had a wool cap over her head, but I could see her red hair falling to her shoulders. Her eyes were focused on a spot on the sidewalk always a few feet ahead of where she was stepping. I guess I was transfixed. Her expression from that distance—I thought it was troubled, but why wouldn’t I? She looked pale, but she was always pale. And then a man walked into that space in front of her, and she glanced up at him, and she smiled with—well, people call it a radiance, but it was actually that way—and then I saw her mouth the words Excuse me, and she reached up and tapped the man’s shoulder as she passed. And it was only then, after she touched him, that I thought to say her name. My jaw was tight with the cold, and I probably said it barely audibly at first. By the time I said it with a shout, she was already heading around another corner.
“But she heard, and she slowed and looked back. I couldn’t tell you if she saw me. From that distance, you can’t tell when someone’s eyes meet yours. But she kept on going. There was a lot of traffic on the street. By the time I’d crossed over, she was gone.”
He heard Josephine stand up again, and again she wiped his forehead, and ran the garment in precisely the same motions she’d used earlier, as if it were a ritual she’d been observing for months.
“Thank you,” he said again. But he was feeling the knife edge in his gut. She was sitting in silence in front of him. He was under the blindfold. Claire was turning the corner. She was turning the corner. He called her name again. She looked back. She was turning the corner.
“I want to see your face,” he said quietly.
She sighed, but it sounded more like she was blowing a candle flame to make it flicker.
“Marc, you know that will never—”
“I want to see your face,” he interrupted.
“I’m going to tell you about Claire and Genevieve now.”
“No,” he heard himself say. “I want to see your face.”
“Marc—”
But he was standing up. “I want to see your face,” he said more loudly.
“You have to stop this.”
He took a step toward her voice, and almost stumbled, and when he found his balance, she brushed against him but stepped away.
“I want to see your face!” He was shouting now.
“Marc—”
“I want to see your face!”
Then Saabir came through the door and put two hands hard to his chest and pushed him, and he sprawled across the floor, and he knew she had gone, but he was shouting, “I want to see her face!”
“No face,” Saabir said. Marc rose to his feet and charged at the voice, but Saabir had moved, and he slammed into the wall.
“I want to see her face!”
“Who face?” Saabir said, mocking him. “No face.”
He again ran at the sound of it, and Saabir caught him, wrapped him in his arms, and pushed him to the floor with his mouth to his ear.
“You die? You die now? Who face?”
But now he was shaking, shaking, and the sobs were working their way up through his throat, and he thought he would vomit. “Her face,” he said. “I have to see it. Please, please let me see—” And he could not stop it then, saying over and over, “Her face, her face,” and everything he’d ever known about her, about anything, was coming up: “Dad, I don’t want your help.” “But if you just shift the paper this way—I don’t want your help!” On Lake Michigan, she was lifted by a heavy wave and went under. “She’s drowning!” Lynne shouted. “No, she’s not; she’s learning how to swim.” He was a boy, and his mother was an hour late from the store, and he was alone in the house, and a panic rose in him. Later, she ran her hand through his damp hair. “What were
you afraid of?” “That something happened.” “That what happened?” But he could not tell. Claire was sprinkling brown sugar over the entire surface of her bowl of oatmeal. “You trying to make candy out of that, kid?” “Yep. I like candy.” Lynne, so small when he first knew her, lay with her head on his bare chest and her nude body stretched out the entire length of him. “Do you think this will last?” “What will last?” “This. This. The incredible comfort of this. Me lying on top of you like this.” At seventeen, Claire took a black-and-white photo of herself, and her expression, under black freckles that seemed overexposed, was a kind of amused confusion, as if she weren’t certain the camera would work properly, and when she hung the photo on the wall, she said, “That’s my all-time favorite picture of me.” Just before she asked him to leave, Lynne had said something uncharacteristic, and she was holding a glass of orange juice when she said it, the sun pouring through the kitchen window. “Mornings shouldn’t feel like this. Not morning after morning.” “Like what?” “Like a shroud. This November sunshine feels like a shroud.” Claire wanted to play the whisper game. “The whisper game? We haven’t played that in like two years. Since you were maybe nine.” “I know, Dad.” It was a game where you spoke in the other’s ear in the faintest voice possible to see if the other could still discern the words. The angles of her face were becoming more like a woman’s. She put her mouth to his ear. “I like boys.” He had heard her, but he told her he hadn’t, so she repeated it again, with a half-suppressed delighted laugh at the end. “I like boys.”
And then he felt Saabir whispering in his ear, still lying on top of him, pressing him to the floor. But he had not used his gun. “Stop now, Marc? Stop now?” He felt himself trembling under him, and was cold, though he knew the room was still certainly too warm. “I get up,” Saabir said, then something in Urdu. He used Marc’s shoulder for ballast and pushed himself to his feet. Perhaps Saabir had dropped the gun, because Marc heard him checking it, releasing the safety, and then reengaging it. He heard him kneel down again. Saabir said, quietly, “Last time, Marc. Yes?” Then he untied Marc’s hands and removed the blindfold.