by Tahmima Anam
‘What should we do next?’ you said.
‘We should go and look at the Glass Flowers.’ I’d had the idea in the kitchen at your mother’s, and I was hoping it would be a new discovery for you, even though your tenure in this town had been far longer than mine.
You paused for a moment, then exclaimed: ‘Oh, the Glass Flowers! My grandmother used to take me. Did I tell you that? How did you know?’
I was thrilled. ‘I took a chance.’
We went back down Mass Ave, stopping for a pizza at Hi-Rise Bakery. All my clothes were sticking to my skin. I complained and you bought me an ice lolly from a convenience store. When we reached Kirkland I relaxed – this was where I was most comfortable, among the red-brick buildings, the courtyards and the small, triangular gardens.
The receptionist at the Museum of Natural History gave us two small metal pins to attach to our lapels. I led the way up the stairs to the top floor. ‘I want to show you something,’ I said ‘before we see the glass flowers.’ We went through the displays, past the ancient Rhino and the Glyptodont. We paused in front of the domed shell of Stupendemys geographicus, the giant tortoise, and I told you the story of how it had been transported in pieces. In the Vertebrate room I led you to the giant glass cabinet that held Kronosaurus. I’d seen it many times before, and I knew its murky history – that what we were looking at was probably an incorrect reconstruction, but it always took my breath away – something about the whole swimming reptile, all the way from its enormous maw to its pelvis to the articulated bones of its fins. I held out my hand with a flourish. You read the caption. ‘So this is what you’re up to,’ you whispered. ‘One-upping this guy.’
‘Something like that.’
The glass flowers sprang up from inside the display cabinets as if they had just been cut out of a field. Tiny filaments of wire held the petals and stems together. Without context, they sat like silent pearls in the felted hush of the museum.
‘I haven’t been since I was a kid,’ you said. You read the plaque, illuminated by a small lamp attached to the wall. ‘Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.’
‘Father and son. It took them almost fifty years.’ I had forgotten how much they were about sex. Stamens and ovaries and modes of reproduction. And they were bigger than I remembered.
I considered telling you that you were taking something away from me right now, standing there with your fingers wrapped around the handle of my suitcase, staring at the glass cactus as though the pink flower blossoming from its side were some sort of miracle. I considered telling you my parents liked to tell stories that would make them feel better about the adoption, for example, that I resembled my maternal grandfather, whom I had never met, that I had his height and his small eyes, which made me look a little Mongolian, and his curly hair. There was an old joke in the family that my grandfather was descended from Genghis Khan. I had never heard anyone tell this joke apart from my parents, who forced a couple of laughs out whenever they said it, and then looked at each other and willed the whole thing to be true. Then I turned nine, and they confessed everything, and by then I was old enough to know we would never speak of it again. But I didn’t say anything like that. Because, for the first time I could remember, I didn’t care where or who I came from. I didn’t care if I was an amphibian or a member of an in-between species because I belonged here, in this moment, with these fragments of moulded glass, and little else mattered.
On the way down, you stopped on the second floor and leaned against the banister.
‘So now you’ve seen the Glass Flowers,’ I said. ‘Again.’
‘I don’t want to say goodbye.’
I thought about the night I had lost my virginity, Rashid sneaking into my bedroom while my parents were at work, the ceiling fan muffling our sounds, the way my knees felt wobbly for days afterwards, the guilty, exhilarated glances we had given each other in school the next day.
‘I would like to see you every day,’ you said.
‘I’m leaving on Friday.’
‘That’s ages away.’ You were holding your hands wide apart to indicate the vast amount of time between now and then. I worried if I spent another minute there, on those steps, with you, I would be rooted for ever, that I might live and re-live this moment for the rest of my life. ‘We’ve got tomorrow, and the day after,’ you said. ‘And on Friday I’ll take you to the airport.’
In all my years in America, no one had ever taken me to the airport. Or picked me up. Bettina had offered, but I had always said no, not minding as I passed through the arrivals gate without scanning the crowd for a familiar face. I’d had a twenty-hour plane ride to morph into an anonymous student, landing at Logan Airport along with the Argentinians and the Koreans, getting our bags checked in case we’d attempted to smuggle in Mama’s dulce de leche or kimchee. And when I departed, I took the T and then the Silverline. I banked on the fact that no one would miss me, that there were people on the other side to whom I mattered more. So when you offered to take me to the airport, because I had spent years in this country without allowing that sort of intimacy to blossom, and because I was leaving now, probably only to return once, I threw up my arms and said, ‘okay,’ for the first time in seven years not wishing I was somewhere else.
The next morning we met at the Science Center and walked again to the diner. We ate the same sandwiches. You confessed to an addiction to coffee, I an addiction to chips. By chips, I said, I mean French fries. The space yawned and narrowed between us like an accordion. We shared a love of Russian literature, and, recently, Shostakovich. I confessed I was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you replied that your childhood was bereft of television, sugar, and most forms of processed food. You said the house in Vermont had no running water or electricity. I told you my ancestors had worked very hard to get running water, thank you very much. I drew a parallel with the whale, saying, you white Americans, going backwards into the sea when everyone else is happy to be on dry land. Ah, but your fascination with the whale suggests you see the benefits of bucking history, you countered. I smiled at that. You said again that you would very much like to see where I had grown up. And I wondered what I would ever do with you if I did take you home. There was a reason I had chosen Rashid, and that reason sat inside me like a stone. I was thinking now that you would say something about your grandmother, but you didn’t, and I had no idea if this was the way people displayed grief in your family, by making new friends and laughing and showing them sandwiches. Falling in love and calling it friendship.
In the evening we went to the apartment. Bettina was stirring something on the stove, and when we entered, she said hi, turned down the gas, and went into her room. Small signs of the party still remained – the faint whiff of whisky on the tabletops, the kitchen bin overflowing with blue-and-white plastic cups. I avoided looking at you or talking to you, finding myself wishing I hadn’t stripped the bed that morning. It was only 8 p.m. and there was the whole evening to fill. Wordlessly now I pulled a few ice cubes out of the freezer and poured us each a glass of water. You were scanning my almost-empty bookshelf, your hands in your pockets. I passed you a glass and we drank water in silence, your eyes still trained on the few remaining books. There were three copies of Anna Karenina I was waiting till the last minute to pack away. I wondered if I should offer you something to drink other than water, a glass of wine or something. Then Bettina came out of her room and asked if we wanted some vegetarian chilli. ‘Have we met before?’ she asked you.
‘I don’t know,’ you said.
‘Do you run the ArtSpace?’
‘Actually, yes.’
‘What’s the ArtSpace?’
‘It’s a Bacchanalian gathering of very talented people.’ Bettina explained. ‘Supposedly they are making art, but I’ve heard rumours.’
This conversation made me feel terrible. I opened the fridge and found the sangria. I pulled it out and drank it straight out of the jug, the lip of glass fat against my mouth. The two of you looked at
me and I saw that you were the same, growing up with giant cartons of orange juice and Christmas carols in December. I told myself to calm down. Then I announced, while you and Bettina were discussing whether we should all walk over to Church Street for an ice-cream cone: ‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’
‘We’re ganging up against you.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
Outside, the air was muggy and you began to hum the song you had sung at Clementine’s funeral. At the Brattle there was a late showing of The Big Sleep, and you declared we must go. I tried to get Bettina to join us, but she said she had some reading to do and wanted to turn in early and headed home with a scoop of mint chocolate-chip. I don’t understand mint chocolate-chip, I said. It tastes like cold toothpaste. You asked me if all the things I had wondered about these last seven years in America were just coming out now. No, I said. Mint chocolate-chip is the only remaining mystery. The theatre was only half-full, and we found seats towards the back. As soon as I hit the velvet cushion, I regretted myself. I could see what was coming as the lights dimmed, a flashback to the moment at Sanders when we held hands in the dark – was it only the day before yesterday? – and now, two hours in a cool theatre with Lauren Bacall, who, Bettina had just informed me, was the sexiest woman ever to grace the screen, and here she was, her voice pitch dark, a rasp against wood. I was finished. ‘I need popcorn,’ I said, jumping out of my seat and bending forward as I excused myself past the knees of the other people in our row. In the lobby of the theatre I bought a drink, and as I was paying I realised I was still holding my ice-cream cone, and that the ice cream had dripped onto my wrist. I threw away the cone and licked my wrist, recalling Bogart’s long and narrow face, the hat pulled over his forehead. I re-entered the theatre, and when I sat down you didn’t look at me or say anything. I concentrated on the film and understood very little. At some point you whispered to me, with a small laugh, ‘You forgot the popcorn’, but I didn’t see the humour in it, I only wrapped my fingers around the armrest, as if to say, please don’t hold my hand. And you didn’t.
The Dig
I dare myself to wait for you at the intersection, but you are never there. The triangular building juts into the street and the sidewalk beneath it is empty of you. Sometimes I walk to Porter Square and on the way I look down the street in the direction of your mother’s house. I think about ascending the four wooden steps and ringing her doorbell, but the distance between the thought and my finger on the buzzer is vast and unbreachable.
In the meantime, there is this. I spend my days deep in the belly of the new building, three storeys down where the corridors smell of nothing and the lights are brilliantly white. All the specimens have been transferred to vast metal drawers, and it is not unlike a hospital morgue. I’ve heard people complain, but I don’t mind: I like the idea of Diana coming back to the world in this neutral, unghosted space.
The fragments arrive at irregular intervals. Suzanne Williams has completed the first specimen, and I’m looking at Diana’s ankle – the double-pulley that connects her to our herbivore, land-dwelling mammals. It is perfectly intact. Suzanne is one of the best preparators in the country; for years I had only ever passed her in the hallways of the old building, a tiny woman with a grey ponytail and a fierce silence around her. Now she sits hunched beside me in the prep lab, her fingers delicately separating bone from matrix, the tap-tap-tap of her tools like a metronome.
I scan the bone and send the images to Bart and Jiminez. Often I stop and consider what I’ve been given, that Diana in my hand is a miracle, a testament to everything we are as humans – the scientists who uncover the past, the artists who imagine it, frail, delicate beings who seek immortality even as we realise we are mere pinpoints in the long chapter of our own history. At night, I turn my thoughts to our story. Piece by piece, I put it together. All the other voices clamour to be heard – my mother, and Anwar, and Mo, and the other life I might have had if things had taken a different turn. You don’t know Anwar, do you? Not yet. You are wondering who he is. I say his name but say nothing more. Perhaps I should tell you now (no, he is not my father). He is a man who revealed to me the entire history of my being, and, having done so, released me from all the things I believed I couldn’t do, wasn’t entitled to, because my past was a mystery. That is all I will say for now. Anwar will tell you the rest himself.
I went to Dera Bugti, even though until the last minute I was convinced something would happen to prevent the trip from materialising. Was I secretly hoping it would fall apart so I could stay in Cambridge with you and repeat our little rituals all summer long? Or was it, perhaps, a slight premonition that this was the start of a downward cascade, only a brief interlude on my way home, and home, too, was not going to be my ultimate destination, that other, final place more barren than anywhere I could have imagined?
I am rushing. Let us take it one miserable location at a time. Here I am now, on the bus to Dera Bugti. The open window whips my hair into gravity-defying tangles I will later spend hours righting. Eventually I will give up, and in a few weeks I will let it all turn into a giant, dust-cemented knot. On the seat beside me is Jiminez, who collected me at the airport. Jimmy and Professor Bartholomew Smith, the leader of our expedition, arrived early to set up camp. Jimmy looks more like a heavyweight boxing champion than a palaeontologist. He tells me straight away that he’s an ex-army man and that he’s done three tours in Afghanistan, as if he’s used to having to explain his shoulders, the pyramids of muscle climbing up his neck. The bus is only half-full and I am the only woman on board. I’m dressed in a long-sleeved tunic and a black veil that covers my head and most of my face. I also have to hold in my pee because there’s nowhere to go, and I’m too embarrassed to tell Jimmy that’s why I’m not drinking water. ‘Take a sip or the desert’ll suck you dry,’ he says. His voice is kinder than his bulk would have you imagine.
It’s a long ride. I sleep, wake, listen to the playlist you made for me before we parted, write little notes to you in my mind that I will never send. Like this: what if you came with me? I think of the grand piano in Sanders, brass feet blending into the gold tones of the savannah. The veil, so close to my mouth, amplifies my breathing. We pass fields of millet. It isn’t all bare: spiky green bushes are dotted all over the rolling hills, with occasional bursts of colour, like the Translucent Honeysuckle, Lonicera quinquelocularis, which Jimmy points out when we change buses at Kashmore. I consider asking for the toilet, a dull pain spreading through my lower stomach, but I don’t want to leave Jimmy’s side. I realise, too late, that I’m not the adventurous type.
*
‘How shall we keep in touch?’ you asked at the airport, the smell of detergent and tired bodies our little anthem of departure.
‘The world presents you with an infinite number of possibilities,’ I said. ‘Text, email, phone, Skype. And sub-possibilities. iMessage, WeChat, WhatsApp, Snapchat.’
‘Your knowledge of the genre is impressive,’ you said.
‘I am never less than a thousand miles from someone I love.’
‘Letters?’
‘The post is abysmal. It’ll be ten years and I will have missed something crucial. Imagine the regret.’
‘Smoke signals?’
I had no reply to that.
‘Something encrypted,’ you explained.
‘I’m afraid I won’t get it. We have to make up the rules before we start.’
‘Okay, how about lines from Anna Karenina?’
‘Too depressing.’
‘Moby-Dick?’
‘I’ve never read Moby-Dick.’
‘What kind of a cetophile are you? No books, then.’
‘How about songs?’
We looked at each other. There was only one answer. ‘Nina Simone,’ we both said at the same time.
‘I may stray a little,’ you said. ‘I can already think of a few standards she didn’t cover.’
‘You have something of an advanta
ge.’
‘True. But you’ll catch up. Consider it an education.’
‘In restraint, or music?’ Because there would be so much more to say.
‘Both.’
Before my plane took off I looked up a list of jazz standards. ‘Love Me or Leave Me’. ‘Darn that Dream’. ‘Jonah and the Whale’. ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’. ‘I Wish I Could Know What It Means to be Free’.
Professor Smith was leaning on a bolster, talking to a man in a beard and cap. ‘It’s a damn shame about Baluchitherium,’ the professor was saying. ‘It could have changed everything.’ Changed everything is the holy grail for people like us. We look for the bones that will rewrite everything we have known about our history. We look for the ear of Pakicetus, the ankle of Ambulocetus, the spine of Rhodocetus. I knew what he meant – Baluchitherium may have yielded such bones, but it was never fully examined.
Everyone in the small world of cetacean palaeontology knew that Professor Bartholomew Smith had spent his entire career in this part of the world. That he spoke the regional dialect and dressed in the manner of the local tribesmen, in long cotton tunics and embroidered vests. Now I was seeing this something of a legend man in the flesh and finding him weathered and small, his body as if recently unpacked from within a very small space. He had a betel habit that had turned his mouth a lurid colour of red.