by Chaitali Sen
A number of student groups were out that day, handing out flyers, pamphlets, and one amateur newspaper after another. John looked over at Mariam, who had collected a pile of flyers and was trying to find a place for them.
“You don’t have to take them all,” he said.
“I might read them later.”
He took one from the top and started reading it to her. The meek shall inherit the earth.
“Hasn’t that one already been written?” he asked.
She snatched it back and read it silently.
“Something happened to me, recently,” she said.
“You lost your virginity?”
“No. Why would you say something like that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, embarrassed. “What happened?’
“I’ve known for a while, but finally I am able to admit there is no god.”
She ended the sentence with a dramatic exhalation, as if her lungs had been harboring the final stubborn vestiges of her faith. He waited for more. “That’s it?” he asked.
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“How did it happen? How did you decide?”
She thought about it. “I suppose it happened a long time ago. When I was little I had a Catholic nanny. She was very devout. She should have been a nun really except that she fell in love with my father.”
John laughed and they got stuck there for a moment. He wondered if he’d heard right about the nanny and her father, and if that was the end of the story or if it went on, and if he should ask her more about it now. After all that thinking he didn’t know where to start.
“I wasn’t brought up to follow a religion. Religion is complicated in Sulat. My father thought the war was caused by religion but my mother, maybe she would have raised me differently if she had the choice. She was always talking about God. She was always whispering to herself, praying. I wanted to believe there was someone listening to her. I wanted her prayers to be answered. But I knew there wasn’t. I know it even more now.”
“What did she pray for?” John asked.
“I don’t know. When she was young her family fled the war. She must have prayed for peace. For my father to still love her. I know she prayed for me a lot. She was always saying how she prayed for me.”
“Well, you turned out all right, so how do you know her prayers didn’t work?”
She stared at him with a confused little smile. She had never been this close to him. The hairs on their arms were touching. For the first time he discovered the flecks of gold in her irises. From certain angles they caught the light and made her eyes look impossibly bright.
He spoke very softly. “Anyway,” he said, “how does it feel to be godless?”
“I feel free,” she said.
Just then she trapped her bottom lip with her front teeth. She released it slowly. Now it was moist and rosy and it filled him with a desire to have his groin strangled between her thighs. All this time she must have been flirting in her own demure way, and now, she had said it herself, she felt free.
“We should celebrate,” he said. “We should get hammered. You want to?”
“Hammered. What does that mean?”
He whispered it in her ear. “It means we drink until we can’t remember our own names.”
She smiled. “Will I remember your name?”
“I hope so, Mariam. I really hope so.”
He showed up at her door a few hours later with pastries and an expensive bottle of vodka his uncle had given him for his eighteenth birthday. Mariam greeted him, radiant in a yellow dress that did not suit the season or the occasion. “My roommate’s not here,” she said.
He’d forgotten about the phantom roommate. He had heard about her, but in a month she had never materialized. He should have invited Mariam over to his room but he was afraid it would have put her on guard. “Will she be here later?”
Mariam frowned. “I don’t know, why?”
“Just wondering,” he said. He couldn’t wait to get drunk. They sat on the floor against her bed. Mariam’s side of the room was immaculate and austere. She had not put up anything to mark her place here. Her roommate had decorated her side of the room with posters of the pop star Freddie Mercury wearing different leotards. Last year in his high school, the girls had gone crazy for him. John could think of a half-dozen guys in Alexandria who looked just like him, with equally bad teeth, but none of the girls gave them a second look.
He handed Mariam a pastry and took one for himself. He tossed his back in the bag after a few bites. It wasn’t very good and his mind wasn’t on eating. She took forever to finish hers, talking in between tiny nibbles, asking him about places he’d been to and things he’d eaten in those places. She was particularly interested in French wine and Russian caviar. Before she was finished eating he decided it was time. He put a little vodka in two paper cups and gave her one. “It’ll burn,” he said.
“Do I take sips or do I chug it?”
He imagined it both ways. “Just toss your head back and swallow.”
She looked skeptical. “Have you ever done this before?”
“Sure,” he said. “Not with this vodka. This vodka is supposed to be—,” he tried to think of a word other than expensive, settling on “delicate.”
“I wish we had some caviar.”
“On the count of three,” he said, getting impatient.
At three they both poured the vodka down their throats. She swallowed and squealed, throwing her hand up to her neck. “That’s vile,” she cried. She slumped against the bed, her eyes already brighter, her cheeks flushed. One more drink and she might be ready.
“Want to go again?” he asked. After a second and third round all the sharp edges in the room started to blur. She talked but he had no idea what she said. Her mouth reminded him of a little boat bobbing on the ocean. A little, pretty, pink boat.
She covered the boat. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
And just like that she was gone.
He kept on drinking without her, mournfully.
He must have passed out. When he woke up Mariam was in her bed, snoring, and across the room a girl sat on her bed, smiling at him. She was wearing a V-neck sweater and tight white pants. He was sure Mariam had mentioned her name but he couldn’t remember it. Maybe because he was drunk, she appeared to be incredibly beautiful.
She lifted an eyebrow. “John?” she asked. He sat up. His name, even as a question, meant Mariam had talked about him.
“Nora?”
“Nina.” She pointed her chin toward the bottle on his lap. “Anything left in there?”
He picked up the bottle and shook it. It was about a quarter full. He poured himself another shot and handed the bottle to her. “You can finish it.”
“Mariam didn’t tell me how cute you are.”
“I can’t imagine why she would have left that out.”
Nina looked over his head, at the bundle that was Mariam.
“She’s not of this world,” Nina said softly.
“She has yet to decode the sexual behavior of humans,” he said, continuing her joke, but Nina looked shocked. “You’re awful,” she said.
John turned around to make sure Mariam was really asleep. Thick strands of her hair, curled at the ends like the tentacles of a black octopus, fell across her face. He wanted to tuck them back behind her ears. He wanted to wake her up, give her some water, get her out of that ridiculous dress.
“Don’t worry, she sleeps like a log. I can do all kinds of things in here and it doesn’t rouse her.”
He looked back at Nina, feeling strangely timid. She watched his reaction even as she tilted her head back to drink from the bottle.
They talked for a while longer, more comfortably as they finished their vodka. “Are you going to sleep here?” she asked. �
�Sneak out in the morning?”
“No, I’ll go now.”
“Good,” Nina said. “Mariam might wake up. It would be awkward if she woke up and found us fucking.”
He glanced at the door. It was far away.
“I’m just kidding, John. God, the look on your face. As if you don’t want to.”
“Okay,” he said. He was going to say that’s enough like a middle-aged husband trying to temper his drunken, bitter wife. It was time for him to go. He rose unsteadily on papery legs. The vodka had aged him. He wasn’t sure if he could make it home, but he wasn’t going to stay here. This girl scared him. It was a terrible night, a terrible waste of a night.
The next day around noon he called Mariam to see if she was all right.
“What did you give me?” she mumbled.
“I’ll bring you some coffee. Do you want something to eat?”
There was a long silence. He didn’t realize Mariam had put the phone down until she came back on the line. She said, “Nina wants a butter roll.”
In less than an hour he saw them both, side by side, and it was as if an experiment had been set up to show him the difference between a girl who lights up a room and a girl who does not, a girl who in fact absorbs ambient light to feed some mysterious light-eating organ in the pit of her body. They were all together in that room, but Nina talked, Nina flirted, Nina sat on his lap and thanked him for the roll. “Are you still drunk?” he asked.
Mariam finally found her voice. “That’s how she always is, John.”
“Maybe I’m just happy,” Nina pouted. “Do you want him Mariam? Because if you don’t I’ll take him.”
“I don’t even know what you mean by that,” Mariam said.
Nina rolled her eyes. “Can you believe her?” she asked, and John would have said no, he couldn’t believe how little Mariam cared to fight for his attention. He patted Nina on the thigh, nudged her off of him, and made an excuse about having labs to do. The room was starting to feel small. When Nina looked at him and whimpered like a puppy, all he could do was stare and smile. Mariam was back in bed, curled into a fetal position and clutching the corner of her pillow with her girlish fingers.
During midterms he tried to keep to himself, but he ran into Nina late one night and brought her back to his room. He didn’t know what to call the thing that happened between them, but once she’d gotten started, who was he to put a stop to it? She had a lean, athletic body, and she was beautiful, unbelievably beautiful.
Afterwards, reasonably satisfied with his performance, he was ready for a long, deep sleep, but she wanted to tell him about every sexual experience she’d had since she lost her virginity to her family doctor at sixteen. She said it sounded worse than it was. He was a gentleman, really, and she had been extraordinarily mature for her age.
In the morning, long after she’d left, he found himself craving a cigarette. He got dressed and packed his bag to go to class. On his way out he passed the lounge, where his chemistry lab partner Vic Arora was sitting by himself, smoking. John stopped, fixated on the pack of cigarettes.
“Hi, Vic,” he said.
“Hello.”
“Can I get a cigarette?”
Vic threw him the box. “Was that your girlfriend?” he asked. “Who snuck out of your room this morning?”
“How long have you been sitting here?” Nina had been gone at least two hours.
“She’s tasty,” Vic said.
Vic never knew the right thing to say. John lifted an eyebrow, which he did often to question Vic’s word choice. He was smarter than he let on, certainly smarter than John and a more meticulous lab partner, but no one liked him. He had a big lumbering body with thick beefy arms. People tolerated him because he looked like he could crush any one of them in a second.
He started talking about the chemistry midterm, tapping his heel so fast and hard against the floor his leg vibrated like a jackhammer.
“Are you trying to get somewhere?” John asked.
“What?”
“Your foot. It looks like you’re trying to drill a hole in the floor.”
Vic put a hand on his knee to steady his leg. “Sorry,” he said. “I haven’t slept in three days. Do you know there’s a sickness that feels better than being well?”
“No, I didn’t. Thanks for the cigarette,” John said.
“Sure,” Vic said. He didn’t try to keep talking, which was unusual for him. He normally didn’t know when to wind down the conversation.
After his night with Nina, John avoided the places where he used to run into Mariam, and he wondered if she wasn’t also hiding from him. Many days went by and he began to worry about her. He found her in the library during midterms. The half-moon depressions under her eyes, which he had begun to find strangely attractive, had turned a grayish blue. He wanted to settle something there—the tip of his thumb, a light kiss. She offered him the empty seat across from her.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“In my room mostly.”
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“You could have called.”
He had been afraid to call. He should have called.
She leaned her head against the wall. “Are you having fun with Nina?”
He didn’t know what Mariam knew, what she thought had happened, or what she wanted to hear. “I’m not having any kind of fun right now.”
“It’ll be over soon. Maybe you can ask her out after midterms.”
He couldn’t read her at all. Her face was completely impassive, but she looked exhausted and unhappy. “What did she tell you?” he asked.
“She said she likes you. It makes perfect sense,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. She likes you a lot.”
“Think of what?”
“Of you two. You and Nina. She likes you a lot.”
“You already said that.”
“Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
“She’s a little overwhelming.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, sighing. “Poor John.”
He took his physics book out and tried to work, but he could feel Mariam weighing on him, and he knew he would feel her even after she was gone because she always left something lingering. He wanted to ask her what happened, what he had done wrong. He could love her, but he couldn’t for the life of him understand why he would pick a girl so undeveloped, so shrinking.
“Do you understand all those figures?” she asked.
She was looking at the page in his book.
“You mean these equations?”
“Yes, all those lines of numbers and letters.”
“They’re equations,” he said.
“It’s so alien to me. All these things exist that I don’t feel capable of understanding.”
He didn’t really know if they were still talking about equations, but he tried to elaborate. “I don’t always understand why they’re true, or how someone arrived at this conclusion, but eventually I understand most of it.”
“How do you know that you understand it?”
“I can picture it. That’s what forms first, images, and then I try to describe it.”
He almost couldn’t go on, suddenly unfamiliar with the shape of her face, as if he were seeing her for the first time.
“Can you describe what the color blue is?” she asked.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I read in a linguistics book that none of the ancient texts, including Homer, the Bible, the Koran, the Vedic texts, none of them described the color blue for the sky or any body of water. In most languages it was not its own category but a different shade of green or black. When you said you get an image before you can explain that equation, it made me wonder how I would explain the color blue. I don’t think I could g
et past the images and labels. The sky, the ocean. I couldn’t explain what blue is beyond that.”
“I guess it would depend on who I was explaining it to,” John said. “Someone who never saw colors? Someone who couldn’t perceive the difference between blue and green? But honestly I’d have an easier time explaining physics than the color blue. Physics is all about interactions in the material world. It lends itself to description. The color blue is static. What is there to say except it’s pretty?”
He wished they could have this conversation snuggled under a blanket outside, under the stars, her body all soft and doughy and naked next to his, but he couldn’t imagine it. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t her.
“Blue, the color of twilight and sadness,” she said.
After midterms he slept with Nina again. The more time he spent with her the more he appreciated how pleasant life was when she was around. The most refreshing thing about her was that she had no self-consciousness. She was always willing to risk looking foolish in order to move their relationship forward. He came to understand that he got lucky with Nina, and after a while it didn’t feel strange that he was seeing her more than he saw Mariam, to get through a day without thinking very much about Mariam at all.
He hadn’t spoken to Mariam in over a week when he walked by the lounge in his dormitory early in the evening and saw that it was crowded. It was an unexpected hour for the lounge to be so populated. The television was showing something of interest, maybe a football match, John thought, but he saw Vic in there, looking agitated. He elbowed his way in until he could see what they were watching. It was a news program showing strange footage, a bright sky full of slowly descending parachutes and a journalist in the foreground speaking over the drone of airplanes and the popping of machine gun fire in the distance. He explained that this was the beginning of an air and ground invasion of Northern Sulat, where rebels had taken over an army base. The camera cut to a scene of men shooting from a rooftop, and then a bomb falling on a block of concrete buildings. When the bomb exploded and the concrete shattered in all directions, one side of the room erupted in cheers and shouts. John recognized Vic’s voice booming over the others. He said people who cheered at bombings should get bombed themselves, and of course an argument ensued. In a second Vic was shoved and surrounded by three or four others while the rest of the kids moved aside. John went over to stop him from doing something stupid, but he didn’t know if he could. Vic was undeterred by the fact that no one had come to his defense or that he was outnumbered. He kept shouting about the bombs falling on innocent people. His opponents didn’t back down either. They claimed none of those people were innocent and they would do the same to us if they had the chance. Then one of them said, “Go back to Sulat, pigfucker.” John put his arm between them, barring Vic from charging forward. “Come on,” he said, pulling on Vic’s shirt. “It’s not worth it.” He could feel everyone’s eyes on him and John got nervous. He wasn’t much of a fighter.