by Nafiza Azad
“The Between is failing?” Eulalie sounds scared.
“Indeed. Were we not talking about the decreasing levels of magic in the natural world last night?” Mama Magdaline sighs again. “I fear that this is the beginning of the end.”
“Can’t you speak to other powerful middle worlders? Have them make laws that protect Taraana? If the Between fails, won’t the middle world end?” Paheli frowns. “Can you not warn the other keepers, the Dar who wants to capture Taraana, of the consequences of his actions?”
“I have tried. But I can only speak to other beings in positions of power if they are willing to listen, child. The recently freed Dar from Uttar Pradesh is only one of your enemies. This won’t sound pleasant, but Baarish is the only active pursuer because he has claimed you.” Mama Magdaline exhales.
“Who are these others, do you know?” Paheli asks.
“Everyone who sits on the Magic Council with Baarish is a potential enemy,” Mama Magdaline replies. “I have seen them, gorged on magic, and full of the arrogance too much power brings, talking and planning.”
“Is there nothing I can do to keep myself safe?” Taraana asks.
Mama Magdaline thinks for a while. “You need to bond to the Between, child. That is when you will truly become the Keeper of the Between and gain the powers of the office. I’m not sure of the specifics, but I know for certain that the Between-bonded keepers don’t lack power.”
“How do I bond to the Between?” Taraana’s question is a little desperate.
“That I do not know. I’m sorry to disappoint you, child.” Mama Magdaline takes a deep draft of sweet tea. She puts her cup down on the table between the two settees. “To bond to the trees and green, I had to find the first place the magic flowed in the area I call my own—I had to find the oldest tree in existence and mix my blood with its sap. Perhaps you need to find the door to the oldest city in the world and bleed on it? I’m not sure. But for all our sakes, I hope you find the way soon.” Having said this, Mama Magdaline proceeds to ignore our existence and devotes her attention to the sumptuous tea Eulalie prepared. We hold out for a minute before we join her. It is, of course, rude to let a guest eat alone.
Blood and the Between
Mama Magdaline left after eating her fill of Eulalie’s food. Though she is gone, the smell of roses remains, and the sunflower growing outside pokes its leaves in through the window Ghufran just opened as if searching for her. We are draped over the furniture in various poses of repose, recovering from Mama Magdaline’s overpowering magic. Well, all of us are exhausted except for Taraana.
He sits beside Paheli (which is not a surprise at this point), with his chin cupped in the palm of his hand, his elbow of which is resting on his knee. He is deep in thought.
“What do you plan to do now?” Eulalie nudges Daraja over and sits next to her on the settee Mama Magdaline was sitting on. Valentina and Paheli, who were whispering to each other, look up at her words.
“It depends on what Taraana wants to do,” Paheli replies. “I’m still thinking about the best way to defeat villains.”
“With a giant vat of boiling oil,” Kamboja suggests.
Paheli pauses, tilts her head, and narrows her eyes. She seems to be considering the suggestion.
Widad sighs loudly. “Be serious.”
“I don’t know how you can get more serious than a giant vat of boiling oil,” Kamboja huffs.
“I will not dignify that with a response,” Widad replies.
“But you just did?” Ligaya points out.
“Have a jelly bean.” Daraja takes out her stash and places it on the table.
Before the chaos can fully descend, Taraana clears his throat. We fall silent and look at him.
“I would like to see if I can bond to the Between,” he says. His voice is too soft, as if he’s not sure of his right to make noise. We will have to give him screaming lessons.
“It’s not easy to figure out which city is the oldest one in the world. I mean, there are speculations but nothing certain,” Talei says.
“We can try as many as it takes…” Taraana’s voice is hesitant.
“You mean you want to find the doors to all the oldest cities and bleed on them just in case one of them is it?” Paheli says, her voice containing no censure.
“Do you have to word it that way?” Taraana asks with an annoyed expression.
“Yes,” Paheli replies.
Taraana sighs. “Yes, well. That’s what I want to do. Bleed. On doors.”
“Okay. We can help you do that. It will be safer if not all of us accompany you, so we will use New Orleans as a base. Does that sound good to you all?”
We nod at her question.
* * *
The next day, before Paheli, Talei, and Areum accompany Taraana into the Between to search for the door to Varanasi, Eulalie stops us and hands a phone to Taraana. He takes it with a questioning look before he puts the phone to his ear and hears the voice on the other end. His expression crumples and he sobs out a name. “Assi.” He doesn’t ask her where she is or if he can go see her. We know why. We have all learned to let go.
Taraana’s forays into the Between are unsuccessful, but he doesn’t give up. He bleeds on the doors leading to Cádiz, Thebes, and Larnaca. In between those days, we give him secret looks at the New Orleans we know. The day before the trip to bleed on the doors of Thebes and Larnaca is a sunny one, so Paheli, Daraja, and Talei take him for a picnic in the City Park where Paheli hugs trees and Taraana tries not to be jealous.
When some of us (Kamboja, Valentina, and Paheli) accompany him to bleed on the door to Athens, we run into Baarish’s minions in the Between. This time, the scaled middle worlders make no attempt to capture Taraana or hurt him; they do nothing that can be construed as explicitly malicious. In fact, there is always a careful distance between us and them. All these scaled middle worlders do is look, but somehow it is a violation. Paheli chases them off, but the damage is done. Taraana’s sense of security is eroded again.
When we return to New Orleans, he is shaking with fear. That night the cobblestones are slick with rain and the air full of music. We accompany Taraana through the hours of the night, singing, dancing, covering all possible surfaces where loneliness and pain may fester with our presence. We ply him with chocolate and ice cream. We move from one room of the house to another, up and down the stairs. We coax Valentina into playing the saxophone and Paheli into singing, something she rarely does. Her voice has all the broken notes of a tragedy and echoes long after the song is done. We climb into bed only when the darkness turns to blue and Taraana has regained the faint edges of the smile we’ve worked so hard for. He perseveres and ventures out into the Between again, but like a bad stench, Baarish’s servants are there every time he does.
Two weeks pass like this. Taraana’s hands are now filled with pinpricks from which he squeezed out blood, but he refuses to give up. He tries the doors leading to Balkh, Kirkuk, and Tyre, all of them old cities.
When none of these are successful, Paheli rebels and refuses to let him bleed again. They argue and she locks herself into the study with Eulalie, leaving Taraana to us. Daraja feeds him yellow jelly beans and Areum brings him some beignets from Café du Monde. Between warm, buttery pastry and confectioners’ sugar, we coax Taraana out of his shell, which is a lot more fragile than we thought.
You see, while our tormentors were human and our escape more solid, he lives his life poised to fall, anytime, on a sharp blade. He may not see his enemies around him, but he knows they’re always there, waiting. He only trusts us because we wear his tears on our palms and he can read our hearts to a certain degree.
We wonder what he reads in Paheli’s heart, but he refuses to say, claiming some things are his alone.
He likes eggplants, cotton candy, and mangoes. He likes to read, and were he allowed to live a normal life, he would write books in which all the monsters die.
“I would write impossible things like happi
ly-ever-afters, requited love, and freedom,” he says with a smile lighter than his words deserve.
The first day Paheli locks herself away, we watch American television: a commercial that states good cologne is all a man needs to attract women; a music video of a song with lyrics that dissect the character of a woman while the singer surrounds himself with girls who are little more than accessories; the news that talks about how the promising futures of several young men are suddenly in jeopardy because a high school freshman made them rape her. We turn off the TV and bury the remote control.
Paheli emerges at noon on the second day and tells us we are leaving New Orleans. We make preparations, but she suddenly insists on visiting Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo first. She won’t say why she needs to visit the store, but she won’t be denied. Eventually, we give in and accompany her. The place is not far from where we are, so we walk over. Taraana, as always, walks in the middle. The store is beautiful and crammed full of things we itch to touch but know better than to lay a finger on.
You see, human conjury is the antithesis to the magic we are familiar with and are immersed in. Eulalie says this is because human conjury is transient, unlike middle-world magic. Magic is a state of being, while conjury is a placement of intention into an object. Human intention, like human lives, is short. If magic were to haunt a house, it would haunt it forever, while conjury would haunt the same house with the same conditions for a week at the most. Real human conjury is very rare, and when it meets middle-world magic, explosions occur.
Paheli has a particular obsession with conjuries. We’ve accompanied her as she’s searched for it in many different stores in many different cities. This time is no different. She is about to waltz into the store when Taraana catches her hand.
“You can’t go in there,” he says.
“I totally can,” she replies with a sunny smile. “I just need to take one step, and I will be there!”
“Assi said human enchantment unravels middle worlders,” Taraana says. “She told me to stay away from it.”
“But, Taraana, you aren’t a middle worlder. Neither am I.” Paheli pulls her hand away from him. “You don’t have to come in with us if you don’t want to.”
So, he doesn’t. Talei, Valentina, and Ghufran stand on the sidewalk with him, waiting for us to come back.
We walk gingerly inside the store, trying to move without touching anything. Most of these things are fake; in our experience, conjured objects, conjuries, have a purple aura, a sheen that is a poor cousin to the glow of the magic that we are used to. Human conjuries depend largely on faith; sometimes we wonder if the reason we see so little of it is because we do not believe in it.
Paheli looks around the shop with a frown on her face before finally picking up a flask filled with water. She swirls it around and looks at the gleaming liquid inside.
“This is lake water sourced from India. It is supposed to open your senses to magic,” a shop assistant says, appearing beside her. “Would you like to try it?” Paheli stretches out a hand in response, and the shop assistant uncorks the flask and sprinkles some of the water onto her outstretched palm. The water falls on the embedded star and immediately turns into steam. Paheli looks at the shop assistant blankly. “It’s not supposed to do that.…” The shop assistant gives her a suspicious look and, making an excuse about stocking, leaves.
We wait for some tragedy to befall us, but nothing happens. “It wasn’t a true conjury,” Paheli mutters, turning around to look at some bird skulls. Ten minutes pass as she examines everything on the shelves.
Suddenly, we hear Talei’s piercing whistle. We exit the store to find that clouds have taken over what was a clear sky just a few minutes ago. Taraana is frozen, his eyes on the sky.
“What is it?” Paheli asks, and grabs his hand.
“He travels by thunderstorm,” Taraana whispers.
“Show-off,” Paheli grumbles just as thunder shakes the old bones of the House of Voodoo and the store’s wooden sign lurches in the sudden wind. “Let’s go.”
We take a few steps out of the cover of the store awning and rain hurls down, punishing in its fury. Humans run for shelter while we look around for a wall uninterrupted by windows. We find a wall separating a garden from the sidewalk, and Paheli runs her fingers down the cement.
“Call a door,” she tells Taraana. She could do it, but she chooses to make him take the first step.
He cannot stop shaking.
“Taraana,” Paheli says, reaching up and cupping his cheek. “Listen to me.”
He blinks as if emerging from a trance. He lays a trembling hand on the wall. A door with its edges gleaming in gold appears. Thunder booms again and the skies crack open. We watch Baarish descend from a staircase made of what look like clouds. Before he can reach the ground, we are gone.
Some days we don’t get out of bed. We can’t. We fold in on ourselves and retreat from the world—and each other. We do not smile, joke, or pretend that everything’s okay. Some days we let the dark we carry inside slip out and cover all the colors we surround ourselves with. We cry softly and loudly—a broken anthem for our girl nation. On these days, the minutes stretch into hours and the hours become small eternities. We sink to the very bottom, and because we are among comrades, we emerge unscathed but for the wounds on the inside. The wounds that will never heal. The wounds that we have learned to live with.
The Library of the Lost and the Stories of the Silenced
I.
We slam the door to the city behind us and stand still in the Between for one charged moment. All of us are drenched from the rain, but the reason we are shaking has very little to do with the cold. Taraana’s fear is catching, and all of us are nearly drunk from the force of it.
“Follow me,” Paheli says, and walks ahead, pulling Taraana behind her.
“We were betrayed,” Valentina says. She doesn’t move a step from her spot. Paheli stops and half-turns to her. “Eulalie—”
“Eulalie wouldn’t,” Paheli cuts her off.
“How can you be so sure?” Valentina demands. We look between them uneasily.
“Think on it, Tina. If it were Eulalie, she would have granted Baarish access to the house when we were sleeping and at our most vulnerable.” Paheli shakes her head. “It wasn’t Eulalie.… It was probably me.” She looks chagrined. “The voodoo store clerk sprinkled some lake water on my palm. The palm containing the star, I mean. She said the water was from a lake in India, but I didn’t think—”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? You never think.” Valentina’s voice is cold, and the air in the Between is colder.
Paheli nods and a smile blooms brilliant on her face. “That is correct. I never think. Thinking is vastly overrated.”
The lights of the Between flicker suddenly, and we look at Taraana. He has stopped shaking, but he refuses to relinquish his hold on Paheli’s hand. The magic in the Between covers him so he looks like he is made of coruscating balls of light.
He looks at Paheli for a long moment but doesn’t say a word. Instead, he slips a hand around her waist, touching her more easily than any of us have ever dared. Paheli meets his eyes and looks away, the smile on her lips fading slightly.
“Let’s go.” She starts walking again and we follow her, keeping our counsel. The only person willing to fight with Paheli is Valentina. We don’t know where Valentina gets the courage from, but Paheli never responds to her provocations.
We pass many doors and turn several corners before arriving at a solid black door we have never seen before. We turn to Paheli, but our questions simply compound when she brings up her free hand and knocks on the door in a complicated pattern.
We have never before needed to knock on doors, as we operate on the assumption that none will ever fail to open for us. Half a minute later, this door is pulled open by a brown-haired, hazel-eyed boy of about nineteen. We look at him suspiciously, but he merely nods at us and smiles warmly at Paheli.
“I didn�
�t expect you back so soon,” he says to her, and we lean forward, puzzled. He stands aside and gestures for us to enter.
The door does not lead to a city but to what, at first glance, seems like an immense library that contains not just books but various objects as well.
“This is Qasim,” Paheli says, nodding at the boy. “He is one of the librarians here at the…” She pauses and looks at the boy. “Perhaps you ought to introduce this place.”
Qasim smiles at us. His gaze encompasses all of us without judgment or rancor. There are other patrons in the library, but none of them look toward us or display any curiosity at our entrance.
We are standing beside the door to the Between, which, unlike any other door we have encountered, seems fixed in place, on a small platform from which a staircase descends to lower levels. The middle of the library is an atrium, and around it are many levels that are enclosed by railings. We are standing on the highest level.
The boy moves toward the railing and gestures to the space beyond him. “Welcome to the Library of the Lost and the Silenced. We do not curate works of literature, carefully crafted and revised, but the lives of people clumsily lived and easily ended. The stories of the silenced occupy positions of honor here at the library. Follow me.”
He leads us down one level to a section labeled OUT OF TIME and gestures to a large collection of objects housed in glass cubes. “I am not just a librarian but also a collector of stories contained in the object a person most values. That object holds that person’s life story after they move on.” Perhaps he notices the skepticism on our faces because his lips quirk. “What, do you not think an object can be read?” He takes out a scuffed leather shoe from a glass cube and brings it carefully to a viewing table nearby. He sets the shoe down and gestures us closer.