Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  No one recognized him; he was not one of theirs. They buried him on a hillside nearby, with others, one body to one grave, graves marked with small green flags on poles of various heights. And across the city, strips of green fabric dot the hillsides, fluttering, prayers written across them, marking the graves of the numerous, nameless dead. He was not one of theirs; they’d only just returned. He enters and exits nightly. Leaves through the glass, stops to look back at the house, its living, dreaming inhabitants, then continues on into the arbor, where the ripening grapes hang, swollen. He has no voice, he speaks through her, the young woman who has returned to her childhood bedroom. And nightly her people wake her to tell her it’s okay, no one hurts you, no one holds you down or under, the guests will wonder at your vile cursing, your kicking, you are a young woman, what will your future husband say?

  outside, the moon

  Outside, the moon, like an egg’s yolk, full and golden, threatens to break its diaphanous membrane and run down over the hills, flow into the hushed valley.

  Q

  Questions. And there were many in the sisters’ minds. They flitted about, burrowed and rummaged, rang and knocked, and were mainly left unanswered. But the questioning itself was not unfruitful, for it bred new worlds. And what strange, what terrible, what marvelous worlds!

  Questions. Yours? How many you have! How little help I am.

  sleep—the dreamer

  The dreamer’s work was never done. She dreamed a hundred dreams each night. She woke up full, unable to ingest anything superfluous—food or drink or words spoken—for she had already feasted and held lengthy conversations, attended conclaves and funerals, chased monsters and saved children. Yet she woke up alert and ready for the long day’s work. While the others filled the kitchen with their busy bodies, vying for the toaster or a favorite teacup, preparing this or that for breakfast, discussing the coming of things, the dreamer prepared herself for yet another solitary adventure. She tied her shoes with expert and fastidious precision using two knots instead of one per shoe; she rolled up the hems of her pant legs, twice each; tucked in her shirt and rolled up its sleeves to her elbows; turned the watch face so that it might be guided by the sun; and depending on the day of the week, she either plaited her long hair into two braids, one over each shoulder, or tied it into a single ponytail on the right side of her head. Because she was always in two places—in the dream realm and in the day-world—she was simultaneously here and not-here and, therefore, was unable to commit to a full smile. She half-smiled in school pictures, at her sisters across the playground, at the schoolboy over the library book.

  At school or on the walk, then the bus ride, to school or back, she took mental notes of all she witnessed or heard: a bee caught in a flower’s sticky trap; a silver car moving too fast in a direction perpendicular to her own; her sister’s mismatched socks hiding and peeking out alternately, blue, green, blue, green, as the younger girl walked ahead of her; a toothy-grinned boy panting and nodding while he crossed the monkey bars; her teacher staring with eyes crossed out of the classroom window; a dead silvery balloon caught in a small tree’s branches, a fly envious of her sandwich. She looked for clues everywhere, collected them and, one after another, registered them in the catalogs, and placed them upon the shelves, of that place in her mind that was her memory library. She could not help but tinker with the articles she collected before recording and placing them, turning the popped balloon into a mechanical bird, lost and trapped in a world that was not its own, or seeing, through toy binoculars, a fire-breathing dragon miles up in the sky where there was a glimmering dragonfly in the air a few feet over her head. She gathered clues as one gathers seashells: methodically (turning them over in her hand or in her eye alone), deliberately (she was aware of her duty), and yet unmindfully (she daydreamed even as she collected). She searched for and gathered by day the clues that might make sense of the world around her even as she copied the blackboard or rinsed the dishes or banged on the bathroom door. She collected her articles—those pure and those tinkered-with, those precious and those dull, those clear and those ambiguous in her child’s far-reaching mind—and found a place for them, one and all, in her limitless and private memory chamber, knowing that each had worth and would one day contribute to solving the riddle: why are the flower beds colored here, devastated there?

  The sister who would dream knew of secret doors and hidden passageways in the backs of closets or at the base of old trees. She was aware of underground tunnels and of the creatures who resided in or traveled through them. She knew that if she climbed high enough into the canopy of the grandfather tree she could converse openly with the tree, the insects who made their home among it leaves, or the small clouds that descended to halfway meet her there. She worked alone and worked in secret because she had taken an oath to do so long ago in a dream. She knew that dreams were neither tidy nor considerate; she knew that often they spilled out of sleep and over into the day-world just as that world crept or pushed its way into the space of dreams. It was her job to reconcile the land of dreams and the land of the sun. Where the two collided, she found additional clues or doorways that furthered her endless hunt. And because the two continually collided, in darkness and in broad daylight, her work was endless, and she tireless, or seemingly so, as she stepped from dream into daydream.

  She discovered that beneath the vast memory chamber in her mind lay a vast briny sea (a trapdoor and a narrow spiral staircase took her from one to the other efficiently) and on the reflecting surfaces of this sea she saw not only her own face but those of others, many she knew and recognized, and multitudes she did not. And because this ocean was immense and had many tributaries feeding its brackish edges, she guessed that the tears that made up its waters were not her allotment alone. And yet she saw no one else cry as she did, shamefully and needlessly, at all hours of the day, evening, and night. Had she made an oath to all the others who kept their grief in this ocean, to cry on their behalf as well? While the pain she felt was familiar (when had she not carried it?), she felt it could not be hers alone. Who else contributed and why did they not come to take back their share? She could not contain the waters that pushed with unrelenting pressure against the cavity of her chest, gurgled up the pipes in her throat, and filled the narrow passages in her skull. She leaked. Huge amounts of saltwater poured from her eyes and filled her mouth (how well she knew the taste of brine) with little warning (she was forever ill-prepared) in the cafeteria lunch line, or in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek with friends or sisters, or over the pages of a book, or deep inside of a dream. Was she a prisoner of this subterranean sea? Did it not seem that her feet were forever soaking at its edges, forever wrinkled and sodden? She needed ten thousand eyes to release the waters of this sea. She hid her tears as best she could: she hid behind doors and sofa cushions, beneath blankets, and in the limbs of trees. On the bus to school, she opened the window, let down her hair, and let it fly freely in the wind, across her face, to hide and to soak up the tears streaming down her cheeks. In the schoolyard, she found a bench beneath a tree or against a wall and settled behind her embroidery hoop or her knitting needles. How familiar she became with the corners of things: of walls, of books, of her hands brought together over her face. And not knowing that the cool spaces of her mind were buoyed, in fact, fed, by the warm waters of her heart, she cursed these waters and the constant leaking that clouded her vision, hindered her work.

  The sister who would cry understood only too well the value of, and the danger involved in, dreaming. Though she looked forward to the end of the day, to the coming of night and the world of dreams where she no longer had to work clandestinely or don the guise of a little girl, she could not enter sleep unarmed: she knew what perils lay there. Over time, she had learned that the language of dreams was not the language of the day-world. So the dreamer collected the many and myriad names of her sisters by day to form a new alphabet. By night, she set to tirelessly arranging and rearranging the letter
s of this alphabet in order to speak in the language of sleep, in order to write her sisters’ stories anew in this coded language, in order to fight the demons and marauders of her dreams with these stories. When she drew her eyes closed, the girl who cried at all hours saw that her sisters had yet more names, dressed in yet stranger garb in the other worlds. One night, she saw clearly that the sisters were five and whole and complete as such, like the five fingers of a hand. On a separate night, she witnessed the sisters double, then multiply so that they were now ten, then a hundred, then five thousand, and she knew that still they remained whole and complete, as an oak tree bearing two hundred thousand leaves is whole and complete.

  Because movement was in her blood, she found that even in sleep she could not keep still. Though her body lay immobile in bed, she traveled far and wide and met with those familiar and those she did not recognize from dreams or from her day-life. She visited the before-life and saw it as it was and saw it as it was not. She spoke and laughed and ate and sated herself in sleep with loved ones and strangers alike. She ran and was chased by bearded demons with skin red or skin blue, with horns curved or horns hidden, with eyes hungry and eyes clouded. She hid atop buildings, beneath cars, inside dryers, or behind sacks of rice. From her hiding places, she saw others who were not so fortunate as she, and she became used to witnessing the letting of blood, the splattering of blood, the running slow and the running fast of blood, the shallow and the deep pooling of blood. And the dreamer collected what she saw as evidence. And the dreamer used what she collected to save herself time and again. She learned to fly through air as a bird or a kite, or to swim in the skin of a snake through water, or to cast light, brilliant and particulate, as one casts seeds over the earth: by the handfuls; and to raise more light.

  Through time and across a thousand and one dreams, the sister who would sleep sensed, and then eventually witnessed, an undercurrent that told a story subtler than her own, and which made her own story small. She saw the living world, as it was at its birth: green, unspoiled, unknown, and unknowing. She witnessed the various manifestations of its inspired youth, let run before her eyes the long, shifting, branching courses that produced its many lineages. She heard its laughter and laughed along. In the acquired dream tongue, she conversed with the many faces of the earth’s diverse outcroppings and loved each with a child’s easy devotion. Over time, she saw a new face, one open and forward-gazing, and looked on it as into a mirror. She studied the creature’s form: upright and bilateral, full of vigor and ability. And in this new offspring’s eyes, she recognized joy, awe, and resolve. And in its long, dark shadow she made out the fallen buildings, the deserted streets, the rivers not running, the endless and empty horizon. And here at this place, always here, she woke up with a start, facing the dark corner of her bedroom wall, ashamed again for having soaked her pillow with a brine that could not be hers alone. She cursed the depth of that ocean that kept her tethered night and day. But the dreamscape called her back, promising that down in the depths of the well or within the heart of the shadowy forest or past the sleeping giant lay the key, the answer for all that was irreconcilable by day.

  taxicab driver

  The taxicab driver brings home a chicken, washed and plucked—this is the city, not the village; he has purchased the chicken from the butcher at the central market. He asks his wife to make a soup, start it early; he will be home before the evening prayer. They were children together; their families farmed adjacent plots. They married in the village, came to the city where his uncle lives. He is independent now, lives with his pregnant wife and baby daughter in an apartment above a garage. He has worked the many odd jobs and driven his cab the many hours, early and late, and paid his uncle back the full value of the taxicab. He keeps it clean, daily wipes the dust and moisture from its seats, its hood and mirrors, and pays to park it in the repair shop below his apartment. His wife makes the soup but the taxicab driver does not return for the evening prayer or the warm meal.

  On the morning of the third day after his disappearance, they find his cab in front of a government office building. The minister tells the cab driver’s wife and his aunt: he was found out, we know he was a spy, a criminal, a traitor, do not worry about him, he is done. The taxi driver’s wife listens, unable to say a thing. The man behind the desk is a minister, a senior government official, he has found other traitors—musicians, shop owners, professors, bank clerks—announced their names and crimes on state television; he has saved the nation many times. The family nod, they rise and they leave, they are not persuaded.

  They search about the city, follow the rumors whispered and the trails warm, and wait outside the jails with others, hopeful. They drive out to newly constructed buildings-like-fortresses at the far edges of the city and morning to night await the release of prisoners, with hundreds of others like themselves, hopeful. The few prisoners who are released, who tell or do not tell tales of the goings-on within the walls of the utilitarian buildings, do less to elucidate the taxi driver’s fate to his family than the passing of days marked on their calendar. And questioning, searching, the family gather some information, enough. And there is one who is released who tells them: yes, I have seen him, your husband, heard him, his voice, his feet, shuffling, he was earnest, not silent, pleading, he was marched along, shuffling, there are places, great pits, bound, his feet, they do not bother with bullets or hammers or blades, shoveling, at that stage they do not trouble themselves, I have seen, they fall, I have heard them, falling, the living, they breathe, still, they have fingernails, still, many of them, and voices, still, without tongues some, still, they call, through the earth, they move, they have feet, I know the urge, the urge is great, from the beginning, it is great, the urge to walk, we are human, and underneath, and against the others, too close, the others, neighbors, the urge must travel from the feet, bound, upward, through the torso, to the wrists, bound, to the tips of the fingers, to the nails themselves, claws, the urge to walk releases there, at the end, it is basic, the earth in the gullet, it is basic, it is backward, the earth within, it is too soon, I know, I was with them though I stood without, still, I was there, and I heard him, your son, he was mine too, and I have others, too many and I am young, still, I have a mother, I am her child in two now, below and above, I have feet and fingernails and swallow, cannot stop, do not stop me, I swallow, I was there, below and above, they have not saved me, will my mother know they have not, they employ me, I have feet, fingers, claws, tongue dry, bound to the earth, I cannot return to the sky, I have seen within, the earth is thick, a heavy blanket, the earth, dust, it covers the stars, I heard them, they said they are not dead if the sky is covered so, they said, death comes to those above, who breathe air, see light, in the end, it is the order of things, the earth cannot fashion it, death, as it fashions life in the beginning, it gives, but cannot take, in the end, in the wet gullet, it is not its place, the taking is backward, and some fell so, and others forward and I with them, and still, though I walk, innocent, I am, falling forward, I am, not living and I will not meet my end, it was taken with theirs, with his, he was there, I heard him, your husband, your son, he was there I was with him, he said, in earnest, he said, I am, he said I. The cab driver’s wife returns home to her village to have her second child, a boy. There are no television sets in the village; she does not hear the names of traitors nightly broadcast. She learns, a month later, in a letter from her husband’s people in the city, that the name of the same government minister they visited was listed, was read and broadcast, and he taken in. He too was a spy, a conspirator against the new and the beloved state.

  speechless

  And while the tongue grows thick, lies immobile in the mouth, while the heart pounds impotently against the chest cavity, though the lids drop to switch on the dreamless sleep, the pen labors, it scratches and claws to tell the story that is not the writer’s story.

  R

  Does  the  river  not  return  to  its  source
? If you follow it long enough, with a steady gaze, you will see it returns there again. Runs, then returns again. Then runs again. And I find I return to the beginning. Again. Then again. Perhaps the river has misplaced something, as I have, and scours its route over and again in search of what it is missing. It scours and wears a winding and an ever deepening groove into the earth, though it stays nowhere long.

  Faithful reader, perchance this is how you now read this book: you return again and again to the beginning for answers, scouring the text, turning the pages, staying no one place long, but ever deepening the furrow in your brow. If you think me unsympathetic, you are mistaken.

  released

  Father receives the rare bright missive. His close friend and former colleague has been released from prison after suffering years of torture, hunger, and isolation in the buildings-like-fortresses constructed by the occupiers in the first land. His name was read along with Father’s by their colleague-under-duress on public television in the beginning days. But Father had just fled the country and was just out of their reach, long and capable as their reach was. At the time, his young friend had been married a month and, despite the war and despite the threats all about, he looked forward to a joyful and new future in his homeland. He was not difficult to find; he was at home, with his new wife and his mother when they came for him. They came for him in the middle of the day and kept him for eight years. In the beginning, they came for him daily. Daily, they collected him from his cell, took him to the windowless interiors of the building to pry him with instruments and with questions. He had nothing to tell. Few prisoners had anything truthful to divulge. As the years went on, and as the most avid of the torturers and prison guards grew tired of their vocations, and themselves chose to leave the country for the brighter lands, there was a reduction in the physical torment he suffered. But his spirit diminished continuously and was kept alive only by a single thought: his wife was waiting for him. And now he is released and has hastily written Father two lines to share the good news. Father suppresses a cry as he smoothes out the letter that has traveled the distances to reach him in the land of the sun.