Savage Tongues

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  I met Ellie at the Damascus Gate after that. I told her what happened, and we’d begun to laugh. You are not a Muslim, we kept repeating to each other, laughing our hearts out at the preposterous request that I justify my humanity. It was an absurd utterance, a statement that ushered hatred into the world—a statement designed to remind me that I was under surveillance, that I, a potential purveyor of future violence, needed to be monitored, controlled. How, Ellie and I had wondered, laughing out our pained hearts, were we expected to carve out lives for ourselves amid all of that suspicion and hatred? How were we meant to believe in God? And what would that belief absolve us of? We had treated our friendship as sacred, as a kind of religion. Was that not, then, a manifestation of devotion? Was love and laughter not devotional? “Laugh,” my mother had often said to me as a young child. “Laugh as a way of being close to the grace of God.” That was long before this story had unfolded. As I emerged from the street and looked up at our building, I remembered how Ellie and I had stood in the shade of those ancient walls and given ourselves over to laughter. We’d barely been able to contain ourselves. Tears had streamed down our faces; we’d been on the verge of having to urinate, folded over, giggling in heaves between breaths, everything rushing out of us in one mad delirious stream. Had we been crying then? Crying together through our laughter, articulating side by side our profound sense of loss and loneliness? Had we been asking the universe not to turn its back on us? Had we been asking God to kneel down as our witness?

  7

  BY THE TIME I GOT to the building entrance, the fog had lifted. I’d wiped my face, calmed myself down. I looked up at the sky. A few clouds hung above the sun’s round bright face; their bellies glowed with a refracted copper light. It was going to be a sweltering day. The air was humid, heavy. It clung to my skin. I felt clammy, weighed down from the brackish waters that had dried into a white flake on my skin and from walking through air that felt like a bowl of tepid water, from sobbing like an inconsolable child. I couldn’t wait to change my clothes, to dry off. I needed to restart the day.

  When I walked in, Ellie was sitting on a towel on the floor. She was leaning against the couch, her legs stretched out under the coffee table. She was eating dates, and there was a pile of pits growing next to her coffee mug. There were pillow marks on her cheek, and her hair was wispy, the curls loose. I could tell she’d slept in. She was wearing a wrinkled black romper and one sock that had the face of a cat on it. She was licking her fingers free of the sticky meat of the dates, staring blissfully at the blue sky beyond the window, at the palms leaning against the sun-washed walls hemming in the old city. In that light, the walls were the color of wheat.

  I stared at Ellie as she absentmindedly cleaned her hands. I remembered that she used to have a lip piercing, that she’d had a habit of rotating it with her tongue, tugging at it with her fingers. Her bottom lip was often moist with spittle. I’d once told her that it wasn’t the most flattering of habits, that she should be careful not to do it while she was conducting a reading or teaching a class. It was a nervous tic, if slightly erotic at the same time.

  She’d just looked at me with a wide smile and, in the most earnest voice, asked: “It really bothers you?”

  “It really does,” I’d said, and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, as if I was the one with the quirk. I never brought it up again.

  That was years ago, I thought. Back then, in Amherst, Ellie lived with Sam and their respective partners, partners who tended to come and go, who, despite being queer, couldn’t always grasp Sam and Ellie’s arrangement, a kind of unromantic marriage that required financial, psychological, and emotional commitment from each of them but none of the joys of physical intimacy; it was an arrangement into which Sahar and I also had entered, and for a while, it had felt as if the four of us were all married to one another. The arrangement required that we either live together or next door to one another, a setup that fell so far outside of normal social structures that it required a complete suspension of the rules we’d been raised with, rules informed by the religions of our families of origin, that dictated a nuclear life of heteronormativity and children rather than a life of devoted companionship with friends, exes, and pets. Among us, I realized, we formed a holy triune: Ellie had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem and New York City; I in a progressive but culturally Muslim family in Iran, Spain, America; Sahar in a conservative one in Bil’in and Chicago; and Sam, who would later transition, in a Catholic family from the deep South, a family from which he had emancipated himself by moving north to New York City, where he’d met Ellie. We were able, because of the lines that ran through our lives—the homes we’d abandoned, the oppressive surveillance we’d fled—to build a home together, to become reoriented alongside one another. We’d all risked departure from what we had known; we were all curious to learn what would become available to us if we pursued our alleged deviances, perversions, side steps. And it had felt incredible to find one another. We filled one another’s lives with a sense of elation and surrender.

  I’d been standing there for a good three minutes and Ellie still hadn’t turned to greet me. She was so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed me walk in.

  “Where’s your other sock?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said smiling softly. “I didn’t hear you.” She gathered her thoughts quietly for a moment then, removing the one sock she had on and pinching it between her fingers for me to see, said, “I couldn’t find the other one. Have you seen it?”

  It was a custom-ordered sock, and the cat’s face, I now realized, was her cat Olive’s face. It was a gift, she told me, from her girlfriend, a woman who lived in London, whom I had yet to meet.

  I told her I hadn’t seen it, but given her habit of pouring the contents of her suitcase out and spreading her scent all over the apartment, it seemed likely that it had rolled under the bed or was tied up in the sleeve of one of her shirts or in the hem of her pants. I loved nothing more than to tease her. It was an exercise that restored me.

  She turned to face the window again and set to work on another date. She was, it seemed, operating in slow motion. I remembered how I’d thought she was as high as a kite when I first met her. But I knew her too well by now, knew that when she transitioned into this kind of stop-motion gear it was evidence of unacknowledged stress. I wondered if she’d also had ugly dreams. If the walls of the apartment had assaulted her with their vengeful nature while she was asleep, her defenses down, unable to protect herself. I considered the geography of her mood: it was terraced, a stratified frame of mind that made her remote, inaccessible. At first glance it seemed like she’d entered a state of deep pleasure, detached and impermeable, when in fact she was feeling overwhelmed; there was a front of artificial calm that only revealed its false appearance to those who cared to stay the course. I recognized the signs. She would turn her head slowly, look fixedly at objects, or whomever was standing before her, as if she were searching their eyes for some secret knowledge; and she would take her time responding in conversation, with a delay that only she could manage to make seem fashionable. Despite not always making a great first impression, Ellie had at her disposal such a deep well of charm that she could quickly clear the air of any tension. People fell for her in ways they hadn’t expected, hadn’t initially deemed possible, and that early error of judgment functioned to her advantage. The fact that her interlocutors were unable to see the extent to which she would casually seduce them into loving her only served to increase her hold over them.

  What exactly she was feeling overwhelmed by now, I did not know, but I knew enough to know that this was not the moment to ask and that more than likely her stress had to do with the fact that she’d left Oxford while the semester was still ongoing, when the reasonable thing to do would have been to stay behind marking papers twelve hours a day. But she was stern in her conviction that it was her responsibility as my dearest friend to come to Marbella with me and
so had convinced herself that the beach was a perfectly reasonable place for grading forty-five twenty-page student papers.

  I told her not to worry, that I was sure her sock would reappear.

  She stared at me for a while, then said, “This apartment is far more unassuming than I’d anticipated. I thought it would be slightly more luxurious. It’s so small, so basic, but somehow still so imposing.”

  I told her that I’d felt the same way about her parents’ apartment in Jerusalem.

  “But the light!” she said.

  There was a terrific Mediterranean light, a thickly honeyed auburn light that flooded the rooms of their Jerusalem apartment, a light so bold and decided that it was capable of submerging all darkness. That light, I remembered, announced itself at the windows by noon and fell in geometric patterns on the floors, patterns that shrank ever so imperceptibly over the course of the afternoon; by evening, they’d left me with the impression that the apartment was a spaceship on the cusp of levitation.

  Ellie lifted the mug to her mouth and gulped down what was left of her coffee. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a cup. She’d washed a few mugs and spoons, and set out the milk and sugar. When I returned to the living room, I was in the mood to tease her, to have a laugh, to distance myself from that terrible fit of crying. What had she thought? I wondered, giggling to myself. That my wayward father had bought his wife a hilltop castle with floor-to-ceiling windows and marble floors? Decorated the front entrance with Orientalist fountains and figures? I told her not to worry. I told her that there was a very fancy yacht with palatial furniture and silver cutlery moored in Puerto Banús, courtesy of my father—a double-decker named La Perla with panoramic views of Gibraltar that we could move into as soon as she washed her face.

  “Porto what?” she asked, giggling.

  “Puerto Banús,” I repeated.

  I explained to her that it was where the rich and famous go to eye one another, to buy Louis Vuitton and Prada in shops with floor-to-ceiling windows, that their million-dollar yachts are visible through the glass; that way, not only could shoppers touch the clothes, examine their delicately worked fabrics, they could also imagine what they’d look like wearing them in the lap of luxury, draped across the white leather cushions of a yacht, staring out at the trail of brackish foam produced by the engine as it cut across the blue half-moon of the sea. I told her it was a sinister place, a place of extremes, a strip of earth crawling with society’s wealthiest and its most dejected. The Vegas of the Mediterranean, which is to say that it was a little more exclusive and a little less visibly vulgar. It was where I’d first gone dancing with Omar. I told her that the first time he’d come to the apartment with the money my father had sent he’d invited me to go to a virgin beach with him. We both laughed. It was only now, with the force of hindsight, that I could see the irony in the fact that Omar had taken me to a virgin beach, a pure stretch of unharmed sand and straw and dunes and grassy knolls that led to turquoise waters hardly anyone knows about.

  I’d agreed to go, I told her, reluctantly at first, but the longer I’d looked at his figure leaning against the fridge in the mercurial light of the kitchen, the more something inside of me shifted. I’d felt an inevitable gravitational pull between us, a pull that had led me to say yes. And as soon as I’d said that word—yes—the air pressure in the room had changed. I felt an ache between my legs I’d never felt before, and for a moment, as I stood there staring at him, taking in his muscular, powerful figure; his sweet smile; his gray-green eyes and long lashes that gave him the most distinctive feminine softness, a gentleness and beauty that balanced his rugged masculinity to perfection; I felt my loins grow moist and hot. I suddenly worried that my period had arrived, that blood was running down my thighs.

  No one, I told Ellie, had had that effect on me before. I told her that I’d been terrified, not just because I thought I was bleeding and was too embarrassed to bend down and look between my legs for proof, but also because, just by being near him, I’d felt as if I’d stepped out on a ledge, that his influence over me was so grand and so unfamiliar, I’d lost my words.

  “So what happened?” she asked.

  “He took the lead,” I said. “He told me to be ready at two the next day, that he’d be waiting for me on the street with his motorcycle.”

  She wanted to know where he’d taken me, but I couldn’t remember the name of the beach or the roads he’d taken to get there. All I could remember was getting off his bike in the heat and standing on a stark, empty, sandy sliver of land that was punctuated by rocky cliffs at either end. I could see through the rows of the gold-dusted dunes a strip of the greenest, most reflective water, an emerald runway lit up by a brilliant Mediterranean sun.

  I told her that I’d struggled to pull my helmet off and that he’d leaned forward to unclasp it. He’d pulled the helmet off for me with such a coquettish smile you’d think he was pulling off my bra. He’d smelled like musk, I told her; his scent returned to take its place among my memories. I told her that we’d walked barefoot through the dunes toward the sea. We were virtually running because the sand was so hot, it was burning our feet. As soon as we’d put our stuff down, using the helmets as weights to keep the towel pinned to the beach, he’d grabbed my hand, pulled me along to the cliffs, and begun climbing them. He encouraged me to follow him because, he kept saying, I wouldn’t believe the view that awaited me at the top or the feeling of freedom that I was about to experience. “We’re going to leap off of these rocks into the sea,” he’d said.

  I could still remember how, in his company, I had fearlessly laid claim to the land, its streets and dunes and cliffs and blue sea. I felt as though I belonged to the world, that I was made of it, that my flesh and blood and bones were composed of earthly matter. Omar behaved as though nature belonged to him, and he took such vain pleasure in it that the sentiment became contagious. I didn’t feel remote from the earth then. I wasn’t saddled with the sense that the world was synthetic, that it was a stage on which my role had been cast long before I’d arrived at my body. Everything was possibility, plausible. He’d made me hungry for life again. And yet, I told Ellie, beneath that wildness, that rush of untethered, expansive emotions, I’d felt considerable apprehension, an inkling that this freedom was temporary, an eerie calm before a turbulent storm; it was only now that I could identify that premonition as an internal alarm telling me to stay away.

  “So,” I said, picking up the original thread of the story. “I followed him up the cliff. I climbed the sharp rocks to the top and stared down at the water, and he counted to three and we jumped in, feet first, holding hands.”

  It turned out, I told her, that he was right: as my body ripped through the air and broke the surface of the water, as I sunk like a rock to the bottom, I felt lighter than I ever had in the seventeen years I’d been alive on this earth. In that fleeting moment, before all my weight returned to me, it had seemed to me that as long as I could remember the feeling of standing on a rock at the end of the earth overlooking the water, utterly unrestrained, I could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone I wanted. It was as if, for that one singular moment, I was a child of the universe. It occurred to me that that’s how my father must have felt at sea, that he had both wanted a family and resented our needs, which, in his view, restricted his rights to roam the world on a ship, wild and free. My mother, my father, my brother, all of their tyranny and pain and overprotection and neglect dissolved the moment I took the leap; it no longer belonged to me, nor was my fate answerable to theirs. That very evening, as we rode his Ducati back in the orange glow of the descending sun, our skin crusted with salt, darker than when we’d arrived, both of us bronzed and glowing, he took me to Puerto Banús.

  “And then what happened?” Ellie asked, getting up to go to the bathroom but leaving the door open so I could continue to talk to her.

  “I had a couple of cranberry vodkas, and we danced late into the night to the songs of summer. Remember that song
‘Blue’?”

  She said she did, then, as an aside, she opined through the open door that the bathroom was disgusting, that despite having cleaned it and taken a shower herself there were still hairs stuck to the edges of the porcelain tub, grime on the rusted fixtures, stains all over the floor. I heard her open the doors of the cabinet beneath the sink. She let out a loud shriek.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I think there’s a dead animal in there,” she offered, her voice trembling.

  I rushed to the bathroom to inspect the situation. For a moment, I thought I saw the shadow of that wild boar sliding against the wall, looking up at me with her pitiful eyes, emitting her simpering groans, her warning siren, tensing the sharp blades of her shoulders on that thick striped torso. But she was nowhere to be found. I felt an intense sadness, a grief tinged with insurmountable guilt. Why had I not freed her?

  I looked at Ellie. She was sitting sideways on the toilet, her underwear at her ankles, her knees squeezed together to make room for me to look under the sink. The cabinet was full of old shampoo bottles (all empty), a bottle of bleach (also empty), a stiff black sponge, and a large pile of rags that looked like they’d been dipped in black oil and tossed aside. Or were they covered in blood? I couldn’t be sure. I went into my room and grabbed a wire hanger, bent it in half, and returned to the bathroom. Ellie was standing there, hands on her hips.

  “Aren’t you going to flush the toilet?” I asked.