by Adi Alsaid
That afternoon, before the older man picked me up from in front of my dorm, my mother called me.
“I just wanted you to know that your father has decided to leave E—.”
“What do you mean, leave? As in, he no longer believes in our religion?”
“He’s had a series of revelations. And he’s decided that while it has many good elements, it isn’t the true path.”
“So, he just, what, raised us to believe in this not-true path for the last nineteen years, and now he’s like, whoops, my mistake? Was he planning to tell me this?”
“I’m sure your father wants to talk to you about his next steps. He is using his spiritual tools to create a new path.”
“He’s starting his own religion?”
“It isn’t a religion. It’s a spiritual path to higher consciousness.”
I must have said something. I must have said goodbye. The words of my childhood had softened and then rotted in my mouth. I had been struggling with my faith for the last year; I had left the holy book on my shelf where it seemed to glow with the toxic shame of my inadequacy, of my obstinate need to judge its contents and find them not just unbelievable, but offensive. Dad had told me that I was just too spiritually underdeveloped, that the brilliance of the text would make itself clear to me as I surrendered myself to God and our spiritual leader.
The god and spiritual leader that he had apparently decided were a big lie about two weeks ago. Only now had my mother bothered to tell me. Dad had been the highest-ranking Spiritual Aide in the region when we were growing up. He would wake us up at five in the morning every weekday for prayer services before school. He would criticize our spiritual development, our inability to fully practice the doctrine.
I told the older man on our date. I made it a joke. “Can you believe that my mom called just to casually inform me that my dad left his cult—the one he raised us in—to found his own? So, I guess I’ve lost my religion?”
He told me that he was agnostic. I liked the sound of that. I didn’t want to hear another word about my spiritual goddamn development for the rest of my life, I decided it that very night. We went to some East Village concert, in some bar where they ought to have ID’d me but the older man convinced the bouncer I had left mine behind. He was charming, practiced, persuasive in his conviction to get whatever he wanted. It was a familiar dynamic, but more pleasant: what he wanted was to show me his world. As long as it was nothing like my own, I would take it, hold it until my hands bled and I forgot why I clung so tightly in the first place. I knew only that I had to hold on, or I would have to face myself, a kind of death.
* * *
I went to Mexico for the first time a few months before I finally broke things off with the older man. After eight years, the pressure of his presence, once so comforting in its familiarity, weighted down my very organs. I felt as though I were facedown on a glue trap. If I stayed I knew where I would end: the self-hypnotizing handmaiden to a demagogue. Agnostic white savior or latter-day black messiah did not make as much of a difference to the fundamental dynamic as I had imagined at nineteen. I went to Mexico with my sister, and I began to breathe again. We spent our days climbing ruins. We climbed the baths of Nezahualcoyotl, the poet-king of Texcoco, who would take to the waters in the rocky hills above his mist-shrouded city and contemplate the death of all of his glory: Annochipa tlalpac. Zan achica ye nican / Tel ca chalchihuitl no xamani no teocuitlatl in tlapani no quetzalli potztequi / Annochipa tlalpac. Zan achica ye nican. (Not forever on this earth, only here for a little while/ Even jade shatters, even gold cracks, even quetzal plumes fall to pieces/ Not forever on this earth, only here for a little while)
A little stone frog squatted on the edge of one bathing pool, a worn-down stump where his face used to be. We climbed over the terraced hillside, the earth fragile and crumbly with the ash of a recent slash-and-burn. I imagined these baths the way they would have looked to Nezahualcoyotl, volcanic stone whitewashed and decorated green and blue, running with clear waters that would have reflected the thousand colors of the day and night. I imagined the farmland surrounding them, the terraced maize fields much like the ones we hiked through in our tourist’s sandals. The maize would push up from the lunar black and gray, green stalks covered with a fine down, diamond-studded in the morning fog and green as jade when the sun blinks its eye. The rains would end, and ears golden, sapphire and onyx would be struck from stalks, hung in garlands in storerooms and local temples. And those selfsame stalks, old and brown now, would fall to the earth in a great burning, to be reborn, like Quetzalcoatl, with the morning star. I did not know any of that then. I was busy dying, as it turned out, in preparation.
We would drag our dusty feet back into the city that night, eat the cheapest food we could find in La Condesa (not very cheap) and collapse in our hostel bed. Every night I was assailed by terrors. I could barely feel my body. I could barely think. I dreamed of rat mazes, endless turns and dead ends and no possible escape until I awoke, heart pounding. And yet I was cradled in the unknown speech of this place, the languages that I did not know and whose very mystery cleared my throat of words I no longer believed. Among the old bones of civilizations lost to the earth, that old skin of an ancient crocodile, the hard knot in the wet rag of what had been my heart eased just a little. I thought to myself—a voice from the other end of the wormhole, my own self screaming back in time, a signal flare—I could live here.
* * *
I was seventeen the first time I left home for a place unfamiliar to me. It rolled me over and raised my head. I did not know then what was air and what was earth, only that I longed to breathe.
My father and I traveled to Nigeria to dedicate a new temple in a coastal city. My father had been instrumental in bringing the teachings of our religion to West Africa, and when we arrived, I realized that while he had been an important person in the small cult world of Washington, DC, in Nigeria he was someone much bigger. They had photos of him everywhere. They wanted his blessing, his words. As his daughter, the holy aura extended to me, an uncomfortable, sticky glow. Dad wanted me to reflect well upon him. I was required to sing religious songs (mostly American classics tackily redone with spiritual lyrics) twice a day during the services. I met some other teens. One, Tope, was particularly fun to be around. I escaped my minder—an earnestly religious woman in her forties whom I perceived as trying far too hard to be jolly and good-natured, and who was, I am now sure, merely trying to do her job corralling a confused and rebellious American girl. I told her that I needed to use the bathroom and escaped through the window while she waited patiently outside the door. Tope and I bought ice pops from a local vendor and walked around the giant compound. The main temple was mostly finished, but the parishioners had planned a monumental complex to honor the spiritual teachings that my father had helped bring to this country. We walked among the concrete block foundations of various outbuildings, much as I would walk among the ruins of ancient temples years later in Mexico: imagining what they would be, imagining what they had been. Bones exist not of themselves but as representations of potential, past or future. They are a being reduced to its bleached essence. But it is flesh, so briefly animated, that makes those bones dance, resplendent in gold and jade. It is hope, and then death.
Tope told me that he had always dreamed of a girl like me; the girls here, he said, weren’t spiritual enough for him. I must chant my prayers every day; I must speak directly with our spiritual master.
I didn’t have the words to tell him the truth. I was running from my father in those ruins. I was looking at those cinderblock bones and imagining the flesh of a different kind of life. Two years later, when I met the older man, he played me some songs by Richie Havens. I became obsessed; I listened to his best-of album hundreds of times. And I wrote, from inside that older man’s world, which would never be my own, Richie Havens, late at night/ Is searching for his dolphins/ while I’m searching for my
father.
* * *
There are only five hours between my old life and the new; five hours, or eighteen years. It’s time to jump.
I have come back to visit the older man one last time. My birthday is tomorrow; I am now older than he was when he first met me, a month after 9/11. I cannot imagine dating a nineteen-year-old; my whole being balks at the idea. He has been keeping the last of my things in the US in his basement. But he has a new girlfriend now, and she doesn’t like seeing these relics of me in his house. I could tell her: the house is nothing but relics, old sediment that accretes and hides the cockroaches. The books in the bathroom—entirely tiled in black—are the same ones that were there a decade ago, when I first left.
This is the last time I will leave. I have brought two friends with me. Old friends, who understand more than I have said about these sticky men in my life, my lifelong flight. Home, an automatic mantra of these days when I am overwhelmed and at sea. Home—both curse and current of deepest longing. We throw out a lifetime of dust in an hour and a half: boxes of books, written by others and written by me, old copyedited manuscripts, my first unpublished novel that I spent an entire summer editing on the older man’s couch. I learned how to write that summer. I was all alone in a sticky trap, but I was becoming, even then. The woman who got out, who found a place where she could breathe and so learned to speak—she was living inside of that girl, waiting.
I see that girl as we paw through her things, careless in our haste. The older man places himself between me and my friends, as though it is his animal nature, even now, to isolate me from any other support. “Don’t you want to keep this?” he asks, “Are you sure you want to throw this away? You can leave this here, Snoozly.”
I hate when he calls me that. I have always hated it. I took it like medicine.
I look at the stuff of this girl, most I will throw away, and some I will keep. I love her, in that moment, in a way that she could never love herself. I love her for trying. I can even understand her staying. You don’t live here anymore, I tell her, when it’s over, when I am in my friend’s car with the last of the boxes, shaking and crying, I’m taking us home.
* * *
Thursday morning, the sun has just poked its shoulders over the mountains. The burning eye is lidded, sleepy. My thesis defense is today. I’m awake. The air is dry, the cars are quiet. Beside me, my partner shifts and rests his hands in the valley between my rib cage and my hip. The garbage truck comes early; the bell peals below our window, close now and then more distant, as the man walks up and down the street. The garbage bell is the first note of the symphony of the day. Soon will come the flute of the knife sharpener, a lonely trill, a descending scale that ends on a minor note, the ghost call of Tenochtitlan’s migratory birds. Then the junk collector truck, with its iconic cry: se compra, colchones, tambores, refrigeradoras, estufas... The gas men with their deep bellows and the drum of tanks rolled over the sidewalk. The brassy tinkle of the sweet wafers and the clown-car toot of bread and pastries.
Five hundred years ago, the lake of the Basin of Mexico was a vibrant expanse, crisscrossed by aqueducts and highways and plots of land built-up over the lake bed. Canoes navigated the canals, through houses and temples and intensive farm-plots and open markets, where you could still buy tamales and atole in the morning, or pulque, or candied squash dripping with honey; bells would ring through the streets and conch shells would sing the hour and the sun, that burning eye, would stare lidless down at the world of their creation. Even then, there would have been people like me. People who escaped to Tenochtitlan, the most beautiful city in the world, to live again.
I head to the university with my friends. A few minutes before we all go into the exam room, I walk to the balcony and look out over the south of the city. The smog has lifted this morning, and the mountains are clear. I feel, as I do every time I see them, a gut punch of relief, a longing and a peace, the knowledge that I am now very far from where I was. My best friend from high school is here with me, and my partner. She who knows me where I came from and he who knows me where I am. I cannot give up that other place, but I have been learning to release my grip. I bring the girl with me when I stand in front of my committee and present the work that has been my passion for the past three years. She knows how to stand, knows how to speak in public. Her father gave her that. There is so much love in the world. We had to go far away, learn to breathe in a different language, just to articulate it. The exam concludes. My friends and I all go into the hallway again to await the results. I sit on the floor with my head between my knees, swaying with the weight I have carried for so long and now released. I have my flesh, my bones, the dizzying view from all the years I have climbed like mountains.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alaya Dawn Johnson has published seven novels for adults and young adults, including The Summer Prince, longlisted for the National Book Award, and Love Is the Drug, winner of the Nebula award. Her latest is the historical adult novel, Trouble the Saints. She was born in Washington, DC, and spent thirteen years in New York before migrating to Mexico City, where she now makes her home. She received her master’s degree in Mesoamerican Studies from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in April of 2019, with honors.
THE TRIP
Sona Charaipotra
Today’s the day. I can feel it in my bones. Well, okay, not my bones. But my dil. The way my heart has been racing all morning, speeding up even more every time I’m within five feet of Rajan—and I will be, for the next ten days. I know something big is about to happen. And I can’t wait.
“Everyone got their passports ready?” Professor Hollander asks as she starts handing out boarding passes. Ten days, twelve teens, and two (decidedly lax) chaperones. I feel like I need to pinch myself, like they do in the movies. Or like there are bees in my stomach instead of butterflies. This incessant buzzing of heat and energy. Like I’m on the edge of something, and totally ready to fall off.
I still can’t believe it’s finally here. I’ve been looking forward to this trip for two years, since I first moved to Westwood High as a freshman and joined the model UN team. Geneva. For a whole week. I’ve never been anywhere. Except for India, of course.
But this is different. For once, I get to be just the average girl. No parental supervision. No chores or drama from Nanima, who likes to stalk my every move, like she’s my mother, not Mom’s. I still don’t quite know how Mom convinced her to let me go, although I overheard several murmured discussions over late-night cups of chai. And then Mom said it was okay. I barely survived the month before the trip, I was so bursting with excitement.
Now it’s here: a week exploring and having fun, completely parent (and Nani!) free. And well, the whole presentation thing, too. With my best friends. And Rajan. Though I’m probably more excited about that part than he is. We’ve been practicing our talk for a month, and I think he’s finally starting to realize I’m a girl. Maybe.
He’ll definitely know after this trip. I packed and repacked my bag all weekend, plotting out each outfit, so he’ll have no choice but to think of me as more than just his debate project partner. And this morning, a little kajal, a shiny lip gloss, and, for good measure, those pale blue glass bangles he kept commenting on last week.
“Hey Sarika,” Rajan says, coming up behind me on the security line, touching one of the bangles. He’s staring down at me from behind those unruly curls that keep landing in his line of vision, that too-wide grin making me blush before I can even say a word. “What seat are you?”
I look down at the ticket Hollander handed me. “23C.” I smile, trying my best not to actually beam.
“Oh, I’m 23E. Maybe I’ll make Mike switch.” He grins. “Then we can go over our segment. I mean, it is an eight-hour flight.”
“I’m gonna sleep,” Mike says with a groan. “So you guys better keep it down.”
Rajan raises a brow and smirks. “I m
ake no promises,” he says, and Mike punches him lightly in the shoulder.
“Come on,” Hollander shouts in our direction, and we all scoot to catch up with the group. The security line winds for miles behind us, even though it’s barely 6:00 a.m. The thought of getting lost in this crowd sends a shiver through me. I’ve never traveled solo before. I mean, I’m on a school trip, so it’s not really solo. But no parents. It’s surreal, the freedom of it. Even if Hollander is kind of hovering.
“Andy will take half the group, and you five stick with me,” Hollander says, waving to me and a few others. I watch Rajan and his friends shuffle off behind Andy. But Neha and Beck stay put, so I guess I should, too. I pull my laptop out of my bag, along with my stash of snacks, and dump them into the security bins.
I throw my backpack onto the conveyor belt and walk toward the little security gate.
Andy and his group—including Rajan—are through in about ten minutes, but we’re in a different and apparently much slower line. Hollander hands our passports over to the guy at the desk, who scans each one, frowning the whole time. He hands her back a bunch but keeps one. Hollander pushes us forward.
The woman behind the counter scans every bag from top to bottom, rummaging through each one even when the scanner brings up nothing, and rerouting about half of them for further checking. Sigh. One by one, we go through the full body scanner, lifting our arms and shedding our dignity.
My underwire triggers the thing, as usual, and the uniformed, blonde woman behind the gate waves me over for a pat-down. Funny how no one else’s bra ever causes such drama.
“Remove your necklace, please,” Faux-Ever Blonde says, and I slip off my little Ganesh chain and place it in the round bin the lady holds out. He’s the god of new beginnings and so very necessary for this trip. Plus, Nani gave him to me, so I feel a little pinch as the lady shoves the bin onto the conveyor and I watch Ganeshji disappear.