The Thunder Beneath Us

by Nicole Blades

  “You know my choice,” Fatima says, slow and low.

  Parveen taps my wrist and somehow I respond; I step back from the couch with her. “I will be in the other room, just beside this wall,” Parveen says. She’s looking at Fatima but there was no darling attached, so I know the message—a gentle warning—is meant for me.

  There’s a solo chair directly across from Fatima. It looks odd, borrowed from another room, possibly from another time, and it is backing the door. Figure it’s mine.

  Fatima’s clocking me, each move my hands make as I unpack my things: notebook, pen, digi-recorder. It’s not a curious thing. It’s more suspicious.

  “This is just a tiny recorder I like to use.” I hold it up and offer it across the table. She’s not disarmed. She doesn’t budge, just more staring. “Anyway, it’s easy. I touch this button on the side and it’s on. I still take notes. It’s a weird habit, more a distrust of technology, really. I get that from my father.”

  Fuck.

  Fatima takes a deep breath. I can see the top of her tiny body rise.

  Christ on high.

  “It’s okay,” she says, her head down.

  “Um, it’s okay to start?”

  “It’s okay to say father.”

  “I’m sorry. Sometimes, when I’m nervous, I don’t think it through and I say things, all the wrong things—I’m sorry.”

  “No apology. It’s just a word.”

  “Right. Still, sorry.”

  Fatima raises her head to look at me. She’s smiling, I think, but it’s so vague and ailing I’m not sure. “Do you want to talk about him, your father?”

  “What do you want me to say about him?”

  “You don’t have to talk about the trial or anything. That’s in the papers, in the past. Maybe you could talk about what it was like living with him, before what happened. I mean, what was he like? Was he loving, gruff, funny?”

  “He was just my father. And now he’s not even that,” Fatima says, leaning back on the chair’s thick pillow. She’s warmed up, eased up a little. Even the agitation in her eyes is clearing. I need to follow her lead.

  “From what I understand, he was strict. Part religious dedication, part Middle Eastern ideology and socialization. But was all of that pressed into the walls at home or were there sweeter, more generous moments, pockets of warmth and graciousness from your father?”

  Fatima’s face is blank. No signs of a struggle to reach for memories from the very back of her mind and hold them up for me.

  “Was yours?”

  “My father?”

  “Yes,” Fatima says. “Was he warm, shy, generous?” She’s not angry. Her voice is committed and she’s not looking anywhere else but right at me.

  “Uh, yeah, my father is those things: warm, always, and shy; used to be. He’s a reporter, retired now. And he’s a loving, nice man. He likes to cook and read about the news of the world and—I’m sorry, Fatima, this is not how it usually works, these interviews; I’m not supposed to be answering questions about my life. I’m not important to the story. This is about you, your life, your experience. I don’t count. I shouldn’t be anywhere in the story.”

  “Just curious.”

  “I know. It’s okay. I’m curious too. Listen, do you want to just skip this part about your father for now, come back to it later?”

  “No. I can say it now. I won’t talk about him later.”

  “Well, let’s go back a bit. What was it like for you growing up with a very religious father, with all the rules about what clothes you wear and the friends you can talk to and where you could go?”

  Her eyes dart around the room before settling on the top edge of my notebook. “Can I change my answer?” she says.

  “Sure, but you haven’t really answered anything yet.”

  “Talk about him later”—quick whisper—“Cousin here.”

  Parveen backs into the room carrying a large tray. “The tea’s here,” she says. In each interaction with this woman, she grows more pleasant. However, Fatima’s face hasn’t really changed much at all since the first stale smile. Of course, Parveen notices her grim look the minute she spins around. I click my pen closed, slide it in the center of my notebook and close that too. It’s only a matter of minutes before Parveen shows me the door, back to the cold driveway with a scowl and flinty please. It won’t help, but I do it anyway; I hold my breath and wait for Parveen’s reaction to unfold in full.

  “Is everything all right in here?” Parveen says calmly and sets the tray down on the narrow coffee table. There are two cups, not three, and she’s almost done filling the first one. I keep holding my breath, watching to see if she moves the teapot over to the second cup.

  She does fill it, without a pause.

  I watch the steam rise and let my breath go with it. “Oh, yes, ma’am. Everything is fine. We just started.”

  “Very well.” Parveen looks to her cousin for confirmation, maybe a nod, wink or some other secret signal that I’m telling the truth. “Do you need anything else, darling cousin? More covers?”

  Fatima shakes her head. It’s slow and uneven, and she’s gazing at some fascinating spot on the wall behind me. I can’t tell if this drunk-toddler thing is a side effect from her injuries or something that had been there long before her father and brother tried to kill her.

  “Thanks again.” I smile at Parveen. “This is great.” Now . . . please, I want to say, with one of her servile hand gestures. I won’t get anything good from Fatima this way. I won’t get her to let down her quirky fences if this cousin stays perched at my shoulder.

  “All right, I’ll leave you to it,” Parveen says after a weird, long lull, and shuffles backward to the door. “I’ll just be in the kitchen, next to this wall.”

  The click of my pen is loud, almost like a snap of my finger, and Fatima’s attention is back with me. “How about we start with you instead, your recovery. How are you feeling?”

  “Different. Strange, most days, and tired.”

  “Why strange?”

  “My sisters are dead and that’s strange. It’s strange and different that they are no longer here with us, with me.”

  “I’m sorry, Fatima. It’s unimaginable, that level of sadness and loss.”

  “Aliyah would be nine right now. Her birthday, it was last month.”

  “Tell me more about her, Aliyah, and about your other sisters.” I grimace a bit here, thinking about the big no-no I just committed. My father would have kissed his teeth hearing me go with Tell me about. “Tell me about is not a question,” he always says. “It’s a statement. It’s limp and not specific. And the answers you hear back will be limp and not specific too.” To my slight surprise, Fatima takes a breath to answer anyway. Rules will have to be set aside for this one—that’s clear.

  “My sisters, I miss them, each one and all of them together. I miss them.”

  “Are you physically in pain still?”

  “I go to doctors. They check different things. But I don’t really feel anything.”

  “Do you mean you feel numb?”

  “Maybe. It’s more a way for me to avoid getting overwhelmed.”

  “Overwhelmed by . . . guilt? About being the one who survived?”

  Fatima sits up, arching closer to me. It doesn’t feel angry, but who knows? She might be getting ready to throw that scalding tea in my face. She says nothing for a long, uncomfortable stretch. I start to reach for my recorder. A pause might be good here.

  “The guilty ones have been given their sentences to serve.”

  “You mean your father, your brother?”

  She nods.

  “So what overwhelms you, then? What makes the numbness come?”

  “The questions,” she says, in her flat way. “There are a lot of questions coming from different directions. I don’t really have any new answers. I’ve stopped looking for new answers. I wonder when everyone else will stop asking the same questions.”

  “Does it bother
you that I’m asking you questions right now?”

  “No. You’re not really asking me anything,” she says. Fatima sits back into the couch. “Your story, it’s supposed to be about me as a survivor, my strength and courage or will to live or something, right?”

  “Yes, exactly that. Being as young as you are, having to shoulder that kind of nightmare . . . I want to know about that experience. I want the readers to see into that, see your heart and what the burden of survival means.”

  Fatima slides the creased baseball hat off and rubs the top of her head. “That’s what I’m saying.” Her voice is loud now and as choppy as her jet-black hair. “Parts of my body are demolished: eardrum, bones, muscles, nerves. I’ve had tubes shoved everywhere. Dull pain, searing pain, it’s all there still, two years later. It hurts and it’s hard to do small, simple things most days. I’m surviving that. I’m living with it. But I’m not a survivor. My sisters died. I didn’t. I’m not a survivor, I’m just lucky.”

  “Do you really believe that? You honestly think it’s about luck?”

  I can’t even veil the outrage. This girl made it through poisoning and drowning alongside her three sisters and she’s boiling it down to luck? Luck is for suckers. Fools who think that things remain floating in the air until some arbitrary combination of ingredients settles to the bottom of the jar and you wind up on this right side of chance. Fuck that. It’s ludicrous and simply untrue.

  Fatima is looking at me, probably because my face is screwed and streaked with irritation. Hers remains composed and cold. I’m trying to pull out the journalist, the third-person and scrape together some kind of integrity.

  I’m failing.

  “I’m sorry, Fatima, I find it shocking that you don’t see yourself as a survivor. You don’t see your strength driving through all of this. I mean, you were the last one drugged. Maybe that’s where luck played its one small part, but everything else? That’s all you. You were able to hold your breath long enough and, in the midst of that horror, have the genius idea to play dead. That is incredible and extraordinary and the definition of survival mode. You did that. You did. That’s not luck. That’s you.”

  “And my sisters, they welcomed death? They didn’t fight it enough?”

  “No. That’s not what I meant. This isn’t a judgment about your sisters. I’m saying that your story is inspiring and astounding, and it has nothing to do with being lucky.”

  Fatima reaches for her teacup. She moves slowly, deliberately, and her hands are trembling a little, rattling the cup against the saucer. I grab mine too, as if I’m thirsty at the exact same time she is, and try to blend in some clanking sounds of my own.

  She sips and sips again. Her eyes go to the tray. Maybe she’s thinking about what to say to me next. Maybe she’s thinking about how to get the cup back on the saucer more steadily this time.

  “There’s a book I was reading before . . . It’s called Civilization and Its Discontents. It’s Freud, his theory that humans will fight for life, even involuntarily sometimes. Our bodies will just take over and fight the death, no matter what.”

  “That’s heavy reading for a high-schooler.”

  She shrugs.

  “But, Freud, didn’t he also have a theory about a death drive too?” I say. “A death wish?”

  “Yes, he goes into that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” she says. “I read that too. The theory is that the goal in life is death. All self-destructive behavior we humans display is really our unconscious desire to die coming to the surface. The behavior is an expression of the death drive. Violence and aggression are really the death drive, or more the energy behind it, turned outward.”

  “So, if both of these theories are true, we’re—what—fight-ing to die while fighting to live? How does that even make sense?”

  “Jekyll and Hyde, I guess,” Fatima says. She rubs the top of her head once more, but this time there’s irritation there, impatience, and I don’t know how much longer she’ll entertain me.

  “You seem tired. Do you want to take a break?”

  I sound like Dr. Monfries, and Fatima is playing the role of Me like a true understudy. This whole scene—quoting scholarly books, the removed comportment, stray smirks—it could have been ripped straight from any session I had with him in those first years. Only instead of sitting in a dim den, we would be at Dr. Monfries’s office in the mental health institute. On warmer days we left his office in the pavilion and walked the grounds, down by the sculpture garden. I liked when we did that, but I would never dare tell him so.

  She’s looking off to the side. I push for more. “Maybe we can bundle up and go over to that snowy playground out front. What do you think about that?”

  “I haven’t been outside in weeks,” she says.

  “And it’s like shrivel-your-balls cold out there, so why venture—I get it.”

  Fatima chuckles. I’m talking a half a snort, thin smile, and actual noises rising up from her throat. I send a smile back, and for the first time since getting off that train I don’t feel like this is a losing game. I’ve cracked through some kind of shell with her, and I’m going back in.

  “I have an idea,” I say and close my notebook with added drama. “Let’s just talk. The recording is on, so let’s just talk, about everything or nothing really or whatever you want to talk about.”

  Jesus. All we need now is a shabby tweed sports coat, pleated chinos, and a pair of thin, gold frames, and my transformation into Dr. Monfries will be complete.

  “I don’t really know what I want to talk about,” she says. All grins are gone, the meager gains lost.

  “Really? Just nothing—we sit here and wait for the walls to whisper?”

  Fatima squints and cocks her head. “Waiting for walls to whisper. That’s a weird thing to say.”

  “But so was bringing up shriveled balls, right?”

  Her tamed grin returns. “True,” she says.

  “The balls thing is all me. I don’t have balls, obviously, so it’s funny to me when I use them as a point of reference. The wall-whisper bit, that’s something my mother used to say whenever we complained about being bored. ‘Well, go sit on the bed and wait for the walls to whisper to you.’ And we actually did it those first few times. Waiting there on the edge of our beds with our ears pointed like hounds. Can’t blame her fully, though. We could be kind of annoying when we were ready.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, me and my brothers,” I say, caught-up and breathless.

  “Do they still live at home, your brothers, with your parents?”

  “No.”

  In the stillness I hear myself, everything I just said, echoing. I shake my head.

  “We’re not supposed to talk about you,” Fatima says.

  “No. We’re not.” I grab my notebook from the table between us, but with her eyes set on me so heavy, I feel like I’ve stiffed her on a promise and close the notebook again, tossing it to the floor on top of my slouching bag. “Not for this story. Maybe if we went out for a drink sometime. I could get into all my stories, exchange views on the fucking human condition.” I smile, but she flinches. “Oh, pardon my language. It’s just something this guy—a friend—says, and it stuck with me.”

  She pauses, wrinkling her brow as if truly considering my loose, undercooked offer for a drink “sometime.” We both reach for our cooled tea.

  “Do you drink alcohol, Fatima?” I say between gulps. “Is that something that got you in trouble at home?”

  “I tried some—twice, in the summer. I didn’t like it. Made me sweaty and dizzy.”

  “Did your father find out?”

  She nods and looks down into her teacup.

  “Were you punished, when he found out?”

  “He tricked my sister,” she says, speaking directly into the cup. “He told her no one would meet trouble. He said he needed to make sure I wasn’t going to get a disease in my stomach. She was frightened of him, always. She didn’t see it was a trap.”
<
br />   “What do you mean by trap?”

  “He beat us both with her jump rope and tied us up—rough box string on her and an extension cord for me. We stayed like that past dinner through to the night. My sister, she was so scared—she vomited on herself, but he still kept us there by the furnace, chained up like beasts.”

  “Where were the others, your brother and sisters, when this was going on?”

  “Upstairs with him, praying.”

  “Praying?”

  “Praying for our forgiveness. We betrayed the creed, he said. We betrayed Islam. Betrayed our family, bringing shame on all of us.”

  “Jeez. Did that kind of thing happen a lot?”

  “Yes—the punishment and the praying. He believed that we were doomed, us children. The more time we spent with non-Muslims only sealed our fates.”

  “So why not homeschool you all? Why bother introducing you to this country, its culture? I read that the move to Toronto was your mother’s idea in the first place. Why stay after . . . well, after she passed?”

  “My mother, bless her rest, was the one person who could speak to him plainly. Never with disrespect, but in this way that he’d listen. She wanted her children—especially her daughters—she wanted us to have education and opportunity. The things she wished for herself and, with his careful permission, was planning on getting.”

  “How was she planning on getting these things?”

  “She took a drawing class. My mother was very talented like that—born with it. She longed to do more things, but the cancer came and took her first. He stayed, I think, because he didn’t want to leave the memories of her here to get cold. And he also believed there was still work for him to do here.”

  “Like what? Run the town off its sure path to hell?”

  “Not the town. His children.”

  “Did your father tell you that? That you were doomed, going straight to hell?”

  “Nothing was more important to him than honor and family. He believed that here, we were turning out backs on both.”