She stared at me in shock. I flushed the toilet. It made a loud noise, as if the pipes were straining to flex their joints within the confines of the walls. I dragged the towels out of the cupboard with the end of the wire hanger. They were indeed covered in what appeared to be blood. I remembered having seen blood gathering against the seams of the walls, along the window frames. I wondered if it was the apartment itself that was bleeding. I felt my body go cold. There were red crusty patches all over the towels, which had an odd sculptural quality to them; they’d dried into strange geometric shapes.
“It’s not a dead animal,” I said, drawing in a breath of relief that it wasn’t the wild boar. We both stared at each other in confusion while the bloody rags hung stiffly off the end of the wire hanger between us.
Ellie looked pale under the yellow light coming from the dusty bulb overhead; I assumed my complexion also looked like bile. I had no idea whose blood was on the towels or who had stashed them away under the sink. Was it my blood? Had I run out of Tampax, wiped my sex and my loins with a kitchen rag, then dumped the towels in the cabinet? I couldn’t remember. Was it Omar’s blood? Why would his blood be there? Did the blood belong to that wild boar whose life had barely begun when Omar had laid his hands on her? Had he killed her in the tub in the middle of the night while I was asleep? No, I thought. She would have shrieked. I would have woken up. I didn’t remember either Omar or I being cut or injured, and we certainly hadn’t ever drawn blood from each other. He’d always been a very civil predator; there had been a few instances when the tone of his voice had shifted to deliver an order, a command that did not allow for a reply, but mostly he’d conducted his business politely, even tenderly, lovingly.
Ellie and I walked out of the bathroom in a tense silence. She sat back down on the floor and raised her mug to her lips, drank her coffee quietly, picked up another date, chewed it, spat the pit in the palm of her hand.
“We’ll clean the place,” I said to console her as I walked into the kitchen and dumped the bloodied rags into the garbage. I felt an intense sadness. My chest hurt, it stung. My lungs were heavy with grief. I returned to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I didn’t recognize my face. A vertiginous sensation took hold of me. There she was, that other future version of me—her features wounded and disfigured, her skin stretched, sagging, the light in her eyes spent, her mouth cracked open—staring back at me from the reflective surface of the mirror. I grew increasingly claustrophobic in that yellowed narrow windowless bathroom. I felt the walls leaning in. I heard the deep echoing rumble of the sea, its quiet susurrus that threatened to swallow me whole. I put my hand over my face in the mirror. I didn’t want to recall that disfigured face—my own—staring back at me from the tree of my dream.
“Okay,” Ellie said. “Tonight?” she asked, coming back around.
“Yes, I’ll clean tonight,” I said.
I didn’t want to think about the bloodied rags again. I told her that there was a euro store down the street and that while we were there buying cleaning products we could buy some sunscreen and a few fresh towels and slippers to wear around the house until we’d bleached the floors a few times. I told her that buffing the floors would require a few passes, that you can’t clean an apartment that’s been boarded up for years in one evening.
“But we’re only here for a few days,” she protested.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “You can just help me tonight, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
She seemed relieved at the thought of mopping the floors. A moment later, as if nothing strange had transpired in the previous five minutes, she said, “The song you were talking about just came back to me. ‘I’m a blue man in a blue world.’ ”
“That’s the one,” I said, sealing the garbage bag, lifting it out of the bin, and putting it by the door. I wanted those towels as far away from us as possible.
“Eiffel 65!” Ellie said cheerfully.
That song had been on the radio incessantly the summer I’d spent with Omar. It was 1999. “That song was playing when Omar first kissed me,” I told Ellie. “He put his hand around the back of my neck and pulled me toward him, then leaned in and planted his lips on mine. I could taste the salt from his sweat and heard him groan with pleasure, then”—I paused for a moment because even the retelling filled me with disbelief—“he put his hand, the same hand he’d just hooked around my neck, against my chest like he was stopping me. ‘What are you doing trying to kiss me?’ he said. I was so confused, I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at him in shock. I was so hurt, but I should have been enraged. He was a strategist and had begun, of this I am certain, to lay out his plan of attack before he’d even reached the apartment door to meet me.”
Ellie put her mug on the floor and started pinching her lips with her fingers, as if her piercing were still there, a ring she could spin to speed along all her uncomfortable thoughts. A horrified expression had taken hold of her face, an expression that simultaneously revealed the deep terror that stirs in most, if not all, women’s hearts when we’re reminded that we’re regarded as prey in this world. She dropped her hand from her lips. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, “that as women we all learn that there are predators loitering at the margins of our lives, that other people are the ones who will decide what shape our lives will take?”
The problem, I told her, is that predators are so pervasive, people hardly acknowledge their presence. I, for one, had never been taught that I had agency over my own pleasure, that I was my body’s keeper, its rightful owner. I had learned that sex was the man’s domain, that the only surefire way to avoid conflict or violence was to oblige men’s desires politely. But had anyone taught me that explicitly? No. No one had come to me and said that my body is not mine, that it has only been loaned to me, that one day a man will appear as its master and I will repay my debt without protest. Put that way, all of our heads would spin. Instead, I was made to understand these brutal facts by means of other laws governing social interactions between genders: don’t speak up too often, it’s not feminine; sit with your arms and legs crossed in order to appear small and frail, in need of a protector (this, we are told, is the best way to attract a strong mate); be successful but not too ambitious and certainly not more successful than your husband. The list was long. These rules, I told Ellie, were articulated silently, yet their effect was violent, oppressive. It was a twisted paradox, the thought of which left me feeling ill.
“How could that be?” I said to Ellie.
“It’s like the song,” she said. “A totally upbeat song about wanting to die.”
I told her that if I’d known then that she would become my greatest, most brilliant friend, a friend I would refer to as my wife, I would never have wasted my time on someone like Omar. “I would have happily waited the years out alone,” I said. It was true. My friendship with her and with Sam, and, however briefly, with Sahar, had restored my sense of dignity.
Ellie’s face now mirrored what I could only recognize as my agony, an old, stale ache that I was trying to dislodge from my past by returning to Marbella to retrace the sour events that had caused it in the first place. I could feel a profound love radiating from Ellie’s eyes, a love I often felt between myself and Xavi, a love so pure that it could break through the barrier of time and reach our former selves, the people we’d been before our lives intertwined.
I continued my story. I told Ellie that over the years, I’d become aware of how Omar had manipulated the narrative of our kiss, quite literally reversing the flow of action so I would believe that I’d been the one who set into motion what would soon become our terrible affair.
I glanced over at the garbage bag by the door and thought about the bloody rags. I thought to myself, What if the blood on the rags belonged to her? That other future version of me? What if she’d lived on, trapped in this savage apartment, alone, afraid, hungry for years? I felt myself split in so many directions, dissected, each part neatly severed from the other. I heard my mothe
r’s voice in the cavern of my mind. Where are you? she asked, at first patiently, then desperately. I felt the hot, aching pangs of guilt as her trembling voice rose to the surface of my mind, her voice, which I’d let sink into the deep, cold waters of the wide ocean that stretched between us, heaving and icy. The remorseless force of the madness I’d courted came on suddenly. I felt hollow, vacuous, unreal, inhuman. I had the strange sensation that I was standing on the edge of a sinkhole, that if we didn’t leave soon we never would; the apartment wouldn’t let us go. It took a leonine strength to push the image out, out, out until the thoughts that came with it left me and I could breathe easily again.
I was, I told Ellie, returning to the thread of our conversation about my first day with Omar, unaware of being a pawn in Omar’s story, a captive animal in a focused hunt executed by him with military precision. My lack of awareness, I told her, was hard to come to terms with. It had made me question my own judgment for years. I’d been deeply suspicious of myself for so long—sometimes I still was—as though I were composed of more than one person. Parts of me, I thought, were ruthless, dead set on deceiving the parts of me that had hope, that clung to innocence, that wanted to give a great big yes to life. I’d been remorseless toward myself, toward that wild boar. I thought to myself, and also said out loud to Ellie, that Omar had kept the wild boar in the bathroom, in my bathroom first then in his own, and that when the shrieking had gotten to him he’d put the wild boar on his terrace, where he also kept birds in cages, birds he caught in the mountains and sold at the market, or to his friends, or to anyone who wanted one.
Then I remembered that, according to Omar, the wild boar had committed suicide. The details of that story, which he’d delivered perfunctorily, suddenly aligned in my mind. She’d crawled onto a fruit cart he’d left in the corner of the terrace and leapt off of the balcony. I wasn’t there when it happened. Omar had told me the story one afternoon while we were lying in bed, the sheets moist from our sweat, the sun filtering through the curtains in his room. It was all coming back to me. We were adrift between wakefulness and sleep, but I remembered distinctly feeling that Omar was lying to me. Perhaps he’d killed the wild boar in my tub after all and sold off her flesh and bones; perhaps he’d wiped the wild boar’s spilled blood with those towels and stuck them in his backpack and brought them here to deposit. It was a crime to steal wild boars, to hunt them for game. Was he trying to hide the evidence of his crime?
I walked to the door, opened it, put the garbage back outside, and shut the door again. I couldn’t stand being in the same room with those rags anymore.
Ellie grunted. She mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear but that sounded to me like a gesture of agreement, a kind of Yes, we’ve finally put some distance between ourselves and those bloody rags.
“It’s only now,” I said to her, returning to my earlier point, “after so many years of being a writer in the world, that I can see clearly that I was a character in a prefabricated plot, a powerless agent caught in a tightly manicured story designed by Omar.”
Perhaps, I reflected out loud, it was because of this experience that in all of my years of writing I hadn’t once been able to produce an outline or a novel that was distinctly plot driven. The word itself—plot—seemed problematic to me, artificial. On the one hand, it rang of secrecy, conspiracy, a desire to dupe the reader with its tropes of realism, putting forth a manageable version of reality, a legible reality composed of epiphanies, conclusions, conflicts with clear boundaries, events that administer exacting lessons to the characters, forcing them either to grow or become more calloused versions of who they already were.
On the other hand, that word—plot—also signified a piece of land, a territory with distinct boundaries, with a frontier designed to contain the story rather than mark the site of a potential transgression. The literature I craved was untethered, mysterious, atmospheric. It was boundary crossing. I couldn’t, having lived an itinerant life, produce anything else and still be honest, honest before the page in the privacy of my own home and honest with readers, whoever they turned out to be.
I told Ellie that what I wanted was to feel the words being plucked out of the deep reservoirs of human life and brought into a feeble light while I looked on with trembling adoration. That I wanted to capture the feeling of uncertainty, to transcribe the vertiginous quality of being alive onto the page, to honor through my writing the pleasures and the dangers of not knowing how one’s life will unfold, what it will amount to. “Enduring uncertainty, embracing doubt,” I said to her, “is a sacred practice tantamount to religious devotion. But instead of praying, I write. Like friendship, sentences can have a devotional quality to them; they can be full of reach and yearning and interrupted longings.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I know exactly what you mean. Sentences that are prophetic and that remind us of our long wrestle with the divine.”
“Exactly,” I said.
As we spoke, I kept thinking about Omar’s strategic nature. I imagined him sitting in a dark cockpit gliding a plane over a vast sea veiled by clouds and mist. He was driving the plane toward a ribbon of orange light that sliced the sky in half; I could see from his relaxed posture that he was confident of what lay on the other side. He would navigate that plane over the horizon and bring it gently down to taxi on a distant runway. He made it seem effortless, easy.
“So what happened after he told you to stop kissing him?” Ellie asked.
“I barely spoke to him the rest of the night. I just kept drinking and smoking until he was ready to take me home.”
I told her that when I got home I hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on. I just walked through the unlit hall to my bedroom, somewhat drunkenly, a little nauseated from having smoked so excessively, and planted myself in bed. It had been raining. The rain had been slow at first, a warm summer shower, but by the middle of the night, it had turned torrential. I could hear the rain pounding the pavement. The drops were incessant. They were falling like beads on the hoods of the cars and making hollow drumming sounds against the lush foliage of the trees. The rain was playing the world like an organ. It was a symphonic storm. Cars, café sidewalk tables, the asphalt, roofs, garbage cans—they were all being battered and worked.
I sat on the edge of my bed and listened, as if Vivaldi or Bach were directly outside my window delivering a private concert meant exclusively for me. I could see the distant headlights of passing cars below, an illuminated window or two glazed with rain. All of my senses were muted except for my sense of hearing, which seemed to be at its peak. My body was numb, my mind empty. Whatever thoughts were there had been pushed out by the disco music, the strobe lights, the deep thump of the base that traveled in electric waves through the floors and walls. It wasn’t long before the rain began to subside.
Once it did, I told Ellie, my feelings flooded back. I felt as though someone were reaching through my chest and pinching my heart. A malevolent air settled in the room. My lips were burning. I kept feeling the weight of Omar’s mouth against mine. Every time I closed my eyes to try to get some sleep, I heard his voice repeating those same words—What are you doing trying to kiss me?—worried that I wouldn’t see him again, that he wouldn’t be next to me long enough for me to kiss him a second time.
It was all very strange, I explained, the feeling that one could be desired and rejected within a span of seconds or that a lie could be formed so quickly, a false narrative spun out of thin air seconds after the events that it referred to had passed. Not even seconds. The lie had been concomitant with the event, overlapping, simultaneous. What had Omar thought, that I had the memory of a goldfish? That I was so dumb, so utterly undeserving of a covert strategy? Perhaps I was. Or perhaps Omar was just normalizing his own bad behavior, sanitizing it; perhaps he had recognized in me a deep distaste for covertness and so had done everything openly, overtly, as if to signal to me that there was nothing to hide, nothing shameful in his advances, in my desire, no matter what he
’d claimed. And I had desired him; of course I had. But I hadn’t been the one to act on that desire. I wouldn’t have known how. At first, I hadn’t even known to recognize my desire as desire. I’d thought that the warmth I felt between my legs was my period.
I recalled that I had, in fact, felt furious that night, that I’d been smoking out of rage. The sense of indignation had come in waves. I’d wanted to charge into him like a wounded bull. But, simultaneous with the anger, I’d felt an even more powerful emotion: longing. I’d longed for Omar, longed for an adult who understood the world far more easily than I did—someone I could rely on. Who could translate the world for me. That was the longing that Omar recognized in me, and he’d distorted it to meet his own needs. I’d turned my back on my mother; my father was entirely absent. I was parentless, alone, scared even if I didn’t recognize my fear as such.
I remembered that my mother had tried to call me the next day. She’d called me frantically, every hour, and I’d ignored her calls. When I finally did pick up, late in the evening, sleepy from having napped on and off through the day’s heat, I told her that I was fine, that there was nothing to worry about, that my father had left only for a day or two on business, that he’d be back by morning. All lies. But I didn’t share much with anyone back then. I bottled up a lot of things, mostly because there was no one around to consult or complain to but also because I was always afraid that my mother would overreact; she’d become so terribly overprotective. Who could blame her? She was a mother. She’d licked our eyes clean, fed us with her own body. I wasn’t a great comfort to her, no. But I tried as much as I could not to worry her.
“I suppose it’s my character,” I said to Ellie, who sat there listening attentively. “I don’t like to go around vomiting my feelings; I like to analyze them privately, thoughtfully, without the interference of well-meaning outsiders. An old habit,” I said, reaching for my cigarettes, “like smoking.”
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