The Others (26 page)

I always believed that I would not love. Not because love was not capable of including me, but because I was not courageous enough for it. Now, though, I seek to distort or misconstrue some of our truths, or to deflect my thoughts about them, for the sake of convincing myself that I did go through this once. The world can have its truths; I want only some peace of mind within the space of my illusions. Many times—I did not count how many—I said
I love you
, and he said
I love you
, and our voices choked on the fierceness of our desire. But these are instances I do not put much stock in. The words we say as a couple of glazed-over sots playing with their bodies across a telephone connection have no value. Many times, when we were on the edge of real grief, he would say, I want someone! Anyone! And I would understand it as: I don’t have anyone! No one is with me.

How often I have intuitively understood the notion that what begins at boiling temperature ends tepid. Whatever the qualities that create such intensity, they are consumed in that breakneck acceleration of desire, for which there can be no preparation. We are not born as adolescents ready for anything. By nature, we are creatures who develop gradually, and just as this is our nature—and the Creator’s will—so it is also the nature of what we do and think and have. My relationship with Rayyan, which flared and flamed suddenly beneath our fingers on our cell phone pads in a conversation lasting no more than ten minutes, clearly was going to sink and die out just as quickly. We are not giving a relationship enough of a chance if its first moment is its best, for then there will be nothing afterward worth waiting for. And having something worth waiting for is what keeps us going. Probably our repeated truancies from each other on the Internet were half-successful attempts to prolong our hypothetical time together—the time we
should
have had!—or to grant us a little respite across which we could begin again. But it would not be easy for us to begin again, or to reset the biological clock of our relationship to zero.

I have sincerely and fervently believed at times that the grief that condemns a certain relationship is also capable of retrieving it. For that sorrow does not leave us. It alights on our pillows just before we wake up, and it seals our eyes shut before we sleep, and it brings those who have left us, or those whom we left, and who all carry that sorrow heavily. Sorrow brings them to us, coming along with them in all of its severe and inscrutable presence. We feel it is the heavy severity of things that hover because they are never forgotten and they allow us no opportunity to overlook them. From Rayyan on, every day of my life, the thought will come to me that those who do not
ever
arrive—we open a path for them by parting the waters, and still they do not come—are sources of sorrow whose impact we cannot take lightly, although I feign distance from them and claim that I can live with them perfectly well.

During one of those intervals when our relationship was flagging, Rayyan was in an accident although he was not hurt. I said to him, I do not want you to die! I do not like people who die. I remember that he laughed. That was the moment when I began to observe and count up his absences and mine. As I thought about them, I realized that I no longer found anything enjoyable and appetizing there. It was as though he filled me with stones every time he went away, and I would drown—drown! and when he went away for good, he sent me to the deep and murky bottom without leaving even a breath of air in my chest.

Our public and passing disagreement lasted a few messages and then extended to long hours of chatter on the Internet, since after all, I was such an expert at immunizing myself against strangers. I found myself opening all my horizons to him. When I heard the little bell signaling that he was entering the site and I read his screen name,
Wa-tamuut ma had diri fiik
!, “You-die-and-nobody-knows!”, something told me in a whispered voice that I was being taken in by this assured longing for sympathy, and that I would definitely pay the price. I remember my first sentence: On the first of September, many things happen. And I remember his answer: But one of them is not that I will become your Black September!

It occurred to me that if I had met Rayyan only one month earlier, in August, even in mid-August, then everything between us would have been a mere summer misdemeanor. I am very good at arguing at great length about how negligible are all of the sins or errors I have committed out of pure boredom. I can argue about them and come out of it without any losses worth mentioning. The summer is good for crafting sudden provisional things that are quick to disappear. All things melt in the summer, not only ice and
gelati
. I can stand it that the ice cream I have with Rayyan melts. But I am not capable of being his tree, and he my autumn, so that I become naked and alone.

When I heard his voice on the telephone, sounding wounded for no obvious reason, I could well believe that distance creates a temptation that you never feel with anything or anyone nearby and easily available. I told myself that Rayyan was a chance at love that would not come again. He seemed such a sure thing, exactly because he was so far away. He could not really hurt me when he was 400 kilometers distant. Besides, Riyadh—which teaches its children how to be tough and severe—taught him well how to distance himself from people, among them me.

The borders around our relationship were imposed in advance, without any need on our part to interfere and make adjustments. We did not give the matter any thought. After all, we would not actually meet, and so we could not become embroiled in questions such as, Where will this relationship lead us? How far should it go? There was nothing there to merit such questions. There was no
what about later on
? to plague us. It was a beginning that had no tomorrow. This was an ideal situation as far as I was concerned, since I am someone who refuses to allow anyone to pin me down so that I cannot move. That day he had to change his name to
A safe place for love
. But he was a human being, he said to me, not a place. We are all places, I replied.

That wounded voice of his tinkered with my heart and mind and changed the whole order of things in there. It was the disordering impact of a man on a woman whose only triumphs were over ordinary matters, her only successes within tightly contained boundaries, and her only achievements governed by stern laws. This is what men are so good at, and they have no rivals. They make a woman into a woman and nothing more.

Rayyan had an attractiveness about him that I could neither resist nor outdo. He knew how to be beautiful in his sadness, desirable in his anger, compellingly extravagant in his thoughts and ideas. The Internet—that ground across which we sowed our first steps—was, as he saw it, the only space that offered women balconies for love trysts, in a country which mounted perfectly arranged conspiracies to turn its sons into deserts—dry and harsh. When I told him that his personality made him extremely good writing material, he answered me sarcastically, So will you kill me off, the way that Algerian writer Ahlam Mostaghanemi does with her heroes? Then he added, Writing does not give me glory. Only praise and women!

Rayyan is like this: he says things he does not mean, and inflates his words grandly and shoots them out, while at the same time concealing what he truly means ever deeper below the surface. His double-sidedness slays me: sometimes he is frivolous and trivial, but far more often he is incredibly stupendous.

Once the froth that floated on Rayyan’s surface was swept away, what drew me to him was the fact of our difference. We were opposites who could only accommodate difference, like God’s dark night and His day, woman and man, a Shi‘i girl and a Sunni guy, the ancient Bedouin purity of his blood and my sedentary inheritance—for my blood runs with green heads of grain—dry and rainy, sharp and fine. Even my same-sex experiences fell opposite to his background, which was fundamentally a straight and proper line between two points, reflecting his thoroughly upright character. For him, I was something else for sure, something other, as he was for me. It was obvious from the many issues that came up and astonished us. We would talk about these things, on and on, question marks popping up to which we provided answers, each in turn; and massive differences of opinion that we argued over before giving them a figurative slap on the nape of the neck and telling them to go away. When he saw a picture of me, he said, The origins of people from the Qatif region must go back to Iran. If not, where do you get all this pale skin
? Inti haliib, ya bint
! You are milk, girl!

We advanced play by play in our game of e-absences, with its persistent rhythm of recurrences, but whenever we overdid it we returned to our policy of frugality. I recall him saying, Only with you I sense how light my absence is, how little impact it has. And I would ask myself at what point on the path of our relationship had we wrongly taken a side road that became a shortcut leading us toward the end—the end of us. Our absences had become something we celebrated and treated with utmost respect. Our absence became more important than our presence. This is the hardest part of it all. I don’t know what was wrong. Why did we come to an end? What was the final obstacle on the road that we stumbled over? The hardest thing about it is that I search for the reasons and don’t find them, and so I cannot finally or definitively escape him, nor can he truly rid himself of me. We would continually return, having conversations of an hour or two. I would go on feeling angry about our predicament. I would think, This is not where we were meant to end up. When he returned, I would still feel that I needed him, and I would shelter him for an evening or two. He did the same for me, leaving his door slightly open. I remained certain that it was not a question of one of us playing with the other, raising all of this dust in front of our steps and sending all of this inflammation into our eyes. We were still attached. We still came back. We still did not come back.

In his wallet, he kept a scrap of paper filled with notes and observations, and when he returned he would read it to me, like a sacred book, even if it only inscribed little things. “I am having a falafel sandwich for supper, I am not inviting you. Anyway, your bad blood prevents you from accepting my invitation.” “I am watching
The Others
, are you still crazy about it?” “I am feeling kind of blue and I miss you.” “The exams are at a bad time for me to read
Love in the Time of Cholera
, and anyway, I am longing to hear you say, On condition that you don’t make me eat eggplant. And instead of my saying, I am returning the keys to your life to you, I found myself thinking, If you cross the street you will find me dead when you come back.” “I know you despise our Abbadi, as famous as he is, as great a lute player and singer as he is! But hey, listen to this … or, never mind!” “There is someone who is a lot like you and she is egging me on, she wants me to seduce her. Are you using a new nickname?” “Still love me?” “It isn’t the hunting season, but I am going out into the wilds for the weekend … just so you know, my phone will be off, but don’t worry.”

Just little things, the things that he was going to send to my cell phone but was forced to actually write down on paper instead, to keep himself from sending them right at that moment. To cool the need in his blood, he would say. We savored our state of chastity, but at the same time each one of us was thoroughly tangled up in the other, and we also savored that to the point of addiction. One time when real stupidity got the better of me, I sent him a strong and probably hurtful message, which I started by saying, Honestly, doesn’t your heart pain you over me? I did stop saving up my transient daily details to tell him, because doing so filled me with more need for him. It made me turn and turn again in the same maze, coming out one door only to find it sending me back inside the very same maze through another door. I would fill up with need that I would try to blot out, and then, when we were together again in virtual space, and close, I would start feeling sorry for myself and so I would revert back to absences.

He told me that he had been unfaithful to me for a short time at the start of our relationship. I laughed at his use of the word
unfaithful
. His girlfriend had returned to him and his longing for her had intoxicated him, and so they had had sex, he said. He tried to lighten the presumed impact of the news on me by saying it only happened two or three times, on the basis that a little unfaithfulness and a lot of unfaithfulness are not the same thing; meanwhile, I was thinking, Once is enough for it to count as unfaithfulness. But in fact I didn’t consider it that. Our very ambiguous relationship did not permit me to interpret what he had done as unfaithfulness. I listened to his tale all the way to the end. Afterward, I made no attempt to cut any of the long and entangled threads of it, for that would require me to make some sort of decision, and I did not want to do that. Although he saw my reaction as a lack of interest, I considered it an attempt to remain impervious to scratches.

He was always repeating that it was up to God to put him in paradise, if not as compensation for denying him any assurance in life, then at the very least because he had repented of all his sins out of pure anxiety. We did not see eye to eye at all whenever we got onto the subject of God, nor when I would ask him, Have you visited your mother? He would respond, What you mean is, have I visited my mother’s grave! Rayyan encumbered himself with other people without any of them having any right of possession over him. No one permanently inhabited him; he was a many-roomed mansion, housing others when he lived on nothing more than the screech of the wind that came in through the cracks. God moves in mysterious ways, he said to me.

Both of us hark back to the same northern region, even to the same tribe, a fact which caused Rayyan two minutes of pure astonishment and a passing cackle before he could take it in, and a coincidence which gave me a moment’s doubt about the passed-down tale reciting the origins of our family. A distant male ancestor of mine, when I was only a latent prospect in God’s will, left his northern home and settled somewhere near the Gulf, after switching from his Sunni-ness to the path of the Shi‘is. I mull over the possibility that he was a great man. I do not care how he changed or from what or why. What is important is that he did it. It seems a great thing to me that he looked to God with his own eyes and not with theirs, a wondrous thing that he left all of his former hazy doubts and began with a new vision. It is not important that others might have seen him as a freak.