She

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

chapter thirteen

  A GOOD DAY

  SHE SWINGS THE door open into her silent house blazing with light. She hears a thump and then padded feet thudding down the stairs. Smokey runs into view, making a beeline for her, or maybe it’s the front door. She shuts it quickly against the February night cold and sets down her suitcase. One of the dining room chairs is inexplicably against the wall in the living room. Smokey jumps onto it and sets the chair sliding across the wood floor up to where she’s standing in the entrance to the living room. A new trick. Smokey is pretty pleased with herself, stretching up, her light green eyes hypnotizing her into stroking her soft back. She can’t help but grin at her cat. She picks her up, tucks her into her arms, and strokes her head to tail. She feels good. A purr rumbles forth in agreement.

  The week-long Aunt Liv vacation was restful. No cooking, no cleaning, napping for as long as she needed, whenever she needed. Walks in the snow or sitting in the sunny kitchen gossiping with Aunt Liv bracketed the naps. It was good to catch up; they hadn’t seen each other in seven years. Even the drive home with her grandmother wasn’t so bad. She hasn’t felt so vital since, well, since that last day before Akaesman hit.

  She lets Smokey leap down and trot to the kitchen. After shedding her furry coat and her boots, she follows. There’s food and water in both bowls, and Smokey is hunched over one crunching her kibble. Mail is piled up on the table. Good old Nance. The place looks even better than when she left it. She pours herself a glass of water, turns off the light, and pads upstairs. It’s late, and she’s whacked from being in the car all that time. She’s looking forward to tomorrow, even the chore of emptying her suitcase and cleaning the dirty clothes within. Her homemaker won’t be here till Friday, and she’s liking the idea of two whole days of sleeping in.

  In no time she’s in her pyjamas and turning off the light. In the spill of streetlight through the shutter laths, she pulls back the duvet, slides underneath, pulls it up to her chin, and shivers. She tucks herself into as tight a ball as possible to try and warm up the sheets and pillows and inhales cat hair. Damn. Smokey has been between her sheets. Oh well. She’ll wash those too in the morning. Right now, she sits up, flips the pillow over, and lies back down. But she can’t close her eyes, instead the conversation she had with Aunt Liv runs through her head.

  Much to her surprise, Aunt Liv had heard of Akaesman. Apparently, Akaesman is as old as time. They’re not sure where he comes from; there are stories that he’s an immortal visitant, a supernatural being, or one of God’s creatures living in the void space, created to roam the earth, to keep an eye on human beings and probe their temptations. Somewhere along the line, he learnt how to slip into an unwary human — doesn’t say much about her, she had thought — and become a part of him or her, changing them into his image before moving on. They say that people change as soon as he slips in. At first they lose all vitality, but then they gain talents or skills they hadn’t had before or change personalities or sometimes they become vegetables. No one knows how it happens, Aunt Liv had asserted. She had contradicted her and said the therapists know. Aunt Liv had looked skeptical, but had allowed that it could be possible. She also averred that she hadn’t changed. Well, she was tired a lot, she had admitted to Aunt Liv, and things were harder to do, but it was all temporary. She was sure. Aunt Liv had looked at her with knowing eyes.

  In the silence between them, she had begun thinking. Well, there is that voice that reminds her of how unutterably exhausted she is; there is that irrational fear that comes from nowhere and overwhelms her; there is a sense of constantly fighting herself to be herself. But she also fights the people around her and their assumptions about her. Wrong assumptions. Selfish assumptions.

  Upon seeing her darkening visage, Aunt Liv had broken the silence and warned her to hold onto herself, her core self that is.

  She wonders now: what is her core self? She turns over and pulls her duvet up over her back and slithers down. She, who used to be in control of everything, her emotions, her thoughts, her actions, can no longer control even her mouth. She, who used to have a wicked sense of humour, in the words of her friends, and picked up on ideas as quickly as snapping her fingers, processes jokes in confusion and can’t follow rapid conversations. She, who used to never be sick a day in her life, feels like she has a long-term case of the flu, if this is what the flu feels like. She, who used to not need help to do anything, who could accomplish whatever she put her mind to, needs help to make the simplest decision like how many apples to buy for the week.

  So who is she, who is that core self that Aunt Liv had talked about? She doesn’t know.

  Aunt Liv had been skeptical when she’d said she didn’t know. Aunt Liv had said that she did, that she just had to have the courage to face it. She turns back and snuggles into the pillow. Her eyes have adjusted to the dark, and she gazes over the softly luminescent shelf edges, the brunet bulk of the dresser, before settling on the evanescent white of the ceiling above.

  A thought is trying to intrude. She shoves it away.

  Your core self is music.

  She flings herself onto her back and screams silently, “I’ve lost that!”

  Every time she tries to sit at the keyboard, the notes make less and less sense. The keys look unfamiliar; middle C remains elusive. She’s become afraid of her instrument. She tries to write, for words are easier. As the communications therapist had said, it came out of her. But when she sits down to write a song, the words that come make no sense. She scribbles furiously, yet when she reads it, it’s peppered with words that are wrong, wrong, wrong. They’re nonsense words or real words that make no sense for the context. Her songs make no sense upon reading. And they’re so short. “A stanza is not a song,” she says to her bedroom.

  Her music career had only begun to take off although she had been writing songs for as long as she could remember. When this had all first happened, she’d called her manager and publisher, said she’d been in an accident, that she was working hard on recovering and would soon be back on track. Her publisher had called about a year ago, but she’d put him off, saying she’d be better soon. But she isn’t. Better. She hears the word echo in her mind.

  He’s probably forgotten about her by now. All that work wasted. All the struggles to build up her skills and study piano mean nothing now. She flings her arms out wide, pushing the cover down. Heat is building inside her torso. Her feet remain frozen. She can’t live without her music, but how can she get it back? Everything she’s done up till now has been focused on retrieving her talent, that core of her that needs to be expressed, more than ever before. What if nothing will bring it back? What if Akaesman has destroyed it forever? But how could that happen? How could he have destroyed it? Aunt Liv had said to her that he bestows new talents, but she’s seen nothing yet. Besides, she wants her old talent back, dammit.

  She’s not sure she believes in God. Grandmother ruled the roost when it came to church. She has vague memories of going with her parents, but Grandmother had stopped it. She’d learnt the basics of Zoroastrianism from Grandmother, some of it only because she lives it. And she’d snuck her mother’s books and father’s Bible from their packed boxes in the basement to read when Grandmother was not around. Still, all that good and evil stuff seemed a bit preposterous to her. She agreed with Grandmother: it was all about being a good person, knowing what was right. People with good intentions did not do bad things. She tries to remember the Zoroastrian creed, something about good thoughts … good words … good deeds. That’s self-evident. Of course, one strives to say good things and do good things. What was it that Jesus had said about anger? Or was it murder? Something about the thoughts in one’s heart leading to murder. How could that be? How can a thought kill? Sure, there is violence and lack of control, but everyone gets angry. Even murderers get forgiven on Oprah. So what’s happened to her makes no sense.

  Why do bad things happen to good people?

  She stills her thoughts, waiting for an an
swer. A car accelerates up the road. The wind picks up and bangs the window. Smokey thuds to the floor downstairs. But there is no answer.

  Nothing. Nada.

  All her life that question was for others. She knew karma ruled: good things happened to good people, not bad. And she’s a good person, or at least she had thought so. Does this mean she wasn’t a good person? How could she have deceived herself so much though? Had she really been a bad person? She’s certainly gotten no peace wherever she’s turned — except when she ate that Srukar two weeks ago. She exhales sharply through her compressed lips. This is all too difficult to think about; it’s making her forehead hurt, that headache that always comes on when she thinks. How can she write songs when thinking hurts so much? She raises her arms and slaps them against the bed, feeling the diminishing bounces against her body. She slams them harder against her cover. Harder again in punctuation to her scream. She lifts her fists to her forehead and presses, rotates hard. With a huff, she flips herself onto her right side, adjusts her pillow to support her neck better, and determinedly closes her eyes. She’s going to go to sleep. She rubs her forehead as the fog of mindlessness descends.

  Sun penetrating the shutters wakes her up. She asks herself what day it is. Wednesday. Pause. March 1. She snuggles up to her pillow and closes her eyes again. It takes her another half hour to get up out of bed, and Smokey is waiting there for her, patiently sitting outside her closed bedroom door. Breakfast for both of them is a long affair as she gets back into the routine of making her own oatmeal, or rather nuking her own oatmeal. She’d gotten used to eating Aunt Liv’s old-fashioned porridge, so warming and filling. She clears her bowl and glass into the sink and runs water in them. And then she picks up the cordless phone to call Nance. She should be at her desk. She rarely leaves it, except for lunch. It goes to voice mail. She puts perkiness into her voice, not hard today as she’s still riding high from her vacation, and thanks Nance for looking after her cat and mail and to call her. She calls Charlie and Belinda and gets their voice mail too. She’s become accustomed to leaving messages and has perfected a standard message so that she doesn’t sputter inanities as she tries to say what’s in her head and fails or hangs up abruptly, not knowing what to say. She hangs up. It’s too quiet. She flips through her pile of CDs spilled on the coffee table, sees one of Bif Naked’s, and in seconds We’re Not Gonna Take It is rocking into the house.

  She thinks: cookies! Chocolate chip cookies. She dances back into the kitchen.

  She finds her favourite recipe, the one her mother made with her, lays it on the counter, and looks over the ingredients. The words blur together. But Aunt Liv had said to take out all the ingredients first. And so she does. First she lines the dry stuff up on the counter. She takes the wax paper out of its drawer. Unrolls a length, rips it off, and lays it beside the flour container. She then finds her sifter and puts that on top of the paper. She measures the flour and baking powder into the sifter. She’s a bit tired, and remembering Zenobia’s instructions, she sits down for a few minutes. Once a little refreshed, she rereads the recipe. The words jumble together. Taking a breath, she focuses on the wet ingredients. Butter and sugar she knows get creamed together first. With her finger, she marks where they appear in the recipe before going to the fridge to take out the butter. She can’t remember how much. She reads the recipe again and measures the butter. She plops it into her mother’s old KitchenAid mixer. Memories of baking with her mother flood her and make her feel safe and contented. Resting one hand on the mixer, she sinks into them, giggling as she remembers how she would spill the sugar every time, much to her mother’s — . Sugar! She was getting sugar. What kind? She can’t remember. Back to the recipe. Oh yeah, this one uses granulated. She takes it out of the cupboard, finds a dry measuring cup, and then wonders how much she needs. Back to the recipe book. She needs a break, but first measure out the sugar and get the mixer going. How much again? Oh yeah, one cup. She scoops the cup measure into the sugar container, levels it off, and pours it over the butter. She pulls the mixer head down, locks it closed, and sets it turning. She sits back down.

  Suddenly she remembers she’s mixing cookies. She stands up quickly and goes to look at her butter and sugar. Pretty fluffy. Well, maybe a bit liquidy too. Oh well, the cookies will still be okay. She stops the mixer, scrapes the batter down, starts the mixer up again until the batter edges have been mixed in. Then is about to pour in the flour when she remembers to check the recipe. Good thing too as she needs to mix in one egg. She does so then pours in the flour, after which she measures out one cup of chocolate chips, splashes in some vanilla extract after it, and mixes it all. She finds her small ice cream scoop, lays it on the counter, and then realizes she hadn’t turned on the oven. Sighing, she sets the temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, checking the recipe first to make sure she’d remembered right. She’ll have to wait fifteen minutes. She’s missing something anyway. After staring at the counter for a bit, she decides to check the recipe. The baking sheet. She fishes that out of its cupboard along with the roll of parchment paper. She rips off a length of paper and lays it down on top of the sheet. The paper overlaps the sides of the sheet a bit.

  She waits.

  At last the oven beeps. She scoops dough onto the sheet and pops the cookie-dough laden sheet in the oven. She sets the time for ten minutes and waits, not only for the cookies to bake, but also to cool so that she can slide them off the paper into a plate and scoop twelve more heaps of dough onto the paper-lined sheet. She pops that in the oven and licks the bowl before clanging it in the sink and running water into it. The oven dings, and she takes the cookies out and puts the baking sheet lengthwise on top of the stove. She takes one of the cooled cookies and bites into it. Warm chocolate oozes into her mouth and dribbles onto her lower lip. She licks it up with a contented sigh.

  Satiated with one cookie, she thinks about something nutritious to feed her hunger. An egg. Aunt Liv had told her to have an egg a day, the perfect food she’d called it. She bangs a frying pan onto the stove next to the baking sheet and turns on the gas. It pops into a flame, and she goes to the fridge for an egg. Nance had stocked the fridge with basics like milk and eggs and bread. Gratitude fills her. She takes an egg out of its carton, turns around to go back to the stove, and sees little flames dancing on the edge of the parchment. She blinks. Her cookies. She has to save her cookies. The flames are multiplying. She leaps forward, dropping the egg on the floor, and turns off the stove flame. But the paper remains afire. She lifts the baking sheet and hesitates. If she pours water on it, the cookies will be soaked and no good. She stands there as the flames lick along the edge of the paper toward the back of the sheet and the wall, indecision filling her.

  Pour water on it!

  She carries the sheet to the sink and tries to angle it so that the water won’t get on the cookies. The flames lengthen and travel toward the cookies and her hair.

  Run the water now!

  She turns the tap on and hesitates.

  Now! Now! Pour the water on now!

  She shoves the angled sheet under the running water and soaks the flames and some of the cookies. The rest somehow stay in place and stay dry. She turns the water off and sets the sheet across the sink and counter.

  Suddenly it hits her, how close she’d been to setting her kitchen on fire because she couldn’t think. Only that voice had saved her, had got her to do the sensible thing that any normal person would’ve done without a second thought. She backs away, out of the kitchen, hits one of the dining room chairs, and stumbles into it. How could she have been so stupid? Whose was that voice that saved her? She breathes raggedly. She can’t tell anyone about this; they already think her a loser, a failure for taking so long to get over it, it being that windy day in June, that minor incident that couldn’t possibly have led to all her problems.

  Deep breathe.

  She steadies her breathing in response to the whisper and starts counting. One, two, three, four as she inhales;
one, two, three, four as she exhales. After a couple of minutes, she feels calm, clear headed enough to deal with the cookies. She gets up, slides on the smashed egg, looks at it for a moment, shrugs, and decides she’ll clean that up later. She shakes her slippers off her feet. Padding in her stocking feet, she puts the saved cookies with the others on a plate, tosses the soaked cookies in the garbage, crumples up the charred parchment paper, and tosses it into the garbage too. And then she goes for a nap on the couch.

  ~~~*~~~