The Others (30 page)

She resumed examining me in silence, an atmosphere of tension closing in on us. I hated specifically the hammer that they used on my legs, the soles of my feet, and my elbows to check my nerve responses. And I hated it when the doctor asked me in the first examination whether my seizure made me urinate uncontrollably. As much as I hated it, I had to let my leg react, and I had to answer no. A firm no, but a very faint one. The nurse ordered a blood sample. She called Muhammad over and told him it was necessary to wait for the results of the blood test to be sure. The whole thing was more than a matter of one night’s observation in the hospital, she hinted, even if the overdose was small and the passage of a few hours since taking it had allowed my body to get rid of it, most likely without any permanent damage.

The whiteness here is unbearable! I clung to Muhammad’s hands, saying, Don’t leave me! Please. I will die if you leave me alone, don’t leave me! The first thing he would do tomorrow would be to come to me, he said, and he promised me things as if I were a little child—a box of Mackintosh chocolates, Baskin-Robbins ice cream. All that was lacking was a doll with blonde hair who would sing
The fox is gone away
…
he circled round seven times today
. Muhammad thinks that being born first gave him precedence—which should have meant he would be the one to receive the defective cells that sit in my brain, and the unfaithful blood of Hassan that would not clot. Like my mother, he carries guilty feelings about not getting sick instead of us, which would have allowed him to settle all the family debts at once, by means of one person.

The whiteness here is unbearable! But I give in to Muhammad’s will, and I put on a white shirt that is barely there, and I lie down in the bed with white sheets, in a room whose walls are white, whose curtains are white, whose doors are white. Everything here is white with a sharpness that makes you dizzy, and brings fear and dark nightmares. How can a whiteness like this be anything other than death, that whiteness in which we shroud our dear departed? In one of these white rooms, Hassan grew two wings and flew away, no longer weighed down by his blood, no longer under the control of his body. He was released, a luminous spirit. On that day, a shooting star fell and wounded my eyes—the shooting star of a short life. I missed distancing it from my vision with the shade of my hand, just as I missed the chance to charge it with a wish, as if it were Hassan, as if he would return, a star to hold suspended in the skies, from a long thread whose end would be in God’s hand.

My mother says, The good folks—they are the ones the world does not want! My mother is always smart about inventing philosophies that convince her of God’s perennial justice in anything involving her. She does not run down His judgment, does not speak disparagingly of the trials He visits upon us, never blasphemed him, not even once in her whole life. It is He (as I convince myself) who will bring Paradise to her, as the Qur’an says. For those who earn Paradise on that day, says God’s Holy Word, will find a better abode, and a fine place of repose.

I am not a good enough person for the world not to want me, but I am weary enough to want my death. I would embrace death, if Death were anything like Joe Black. Maybe Death is really like the guy in
Meet Joe Black
, handsome and tall, and fond of the creamy inside of peanuts. I will not bargain with Death to obtain a few days more, and if he wishes to divide with me whatever part of my life is left, I will give him all of it. I am ready to believe any legend that will lead me into an easy death. Like the ancient Babylonians, I will have coins placed on my closed eyes, coins to consume my sins and return me to the whiteness of my purity. I will believe in the boatman of the underworld, who guarantees me a safe passage to the Bank of Death. I long for death, but I fear the look of the world over there. I am afraid to knock on the door and find no one there to open it. I am afraid to go on, after the door locks behind me, and find that there is nothing but darkness and loneliness and many people entering whose faces I do not know, and a time without end. I want Death to be a little bit nice to me, to take me without hurting me, to take me gently and lightly, to take me without stuffing me into a space smaller than my body, to take me with my filth and black spots and the mire in my soul, to take me and raise me on his wings, to lift me outside and above my body, above the world, above, where God is. I want to say goodbye to my body, but without death I will never be able to leave it.

I add the twenty-seventh star to the calendar of my nights in white rooms, but I am still not used to this. The odor of cleanliness here is loathsome. All alike in their dull stupid looks, the faces inspire sarcasm. It is exactly the way things always are, and always have been, on most of these white nights of mine, ever since I was old enough to know where I was. I have spent most of them singing, as swans do before they go away, the singing that I saw in Hassan’s eyes during his final illness, and then I knew he would be fine. He would get well as he had promised me, and he would no longer be exhausted by his body, and the failures of his blood. His promise was made good. He was cured in the only way he could manage. Death. I have spent this night humming and murmuring an old song by Fairuz. I can only remember a whole line from it with difficulty. If only its sound, if only her voice, which lives in my memory, would not sting me so, as it goes round goes round goes round … something about a big girl in a big world and absence no longer frightens her but she will be afflicted there’s no doubt about it with sad longing.

The whiteness here is unbearable! My own room tonight must feel the loneliness like I do. My phone cries and no one hugs it; my little things scream, trying to get someone to pay attention, but nobody gives them even a passing glance. I am alone except for the songs, in the isolation of my light weeping. The lights from the window pound in my eyes, and the silly movements of the nurse around me or in me, every hour, keep me from going to sleep, and anyway I cannot go to sleep in a strange room.

At five o’clock the next evening I left the sinister whiteness. Every added hour I spent there meant someone else getting the news in all of its details, and extracting whatever seemed useful, putting the proper expression on his face, and putting on some old stinking clothes and coming to the white room bearing a prayer. But they were prayers that these people did not really intend to send upward, and so they sat heavily and painfully on my soul. Walking away, my visitors sliced off parts of my soul carelessly. If the white room had a door, I slammed it shut, time after time, declaring, I did not want to see anyone! And a virtual window whose luster was extinguished by the red writing bore the word
overdose
.

Taking Stock: My Year
¹

… a single reason
²
gives me justification for plunging into a balance sheet of this year, which is almost over; only one reason but, it appears to me, a very important one: I have the feeling, without any proof to confirm my intuition, that each of my coming years will be an exact copy of the one before, with a few small made-up details on the margins that will not require or attract much attention. Thus, the reason for taking stock of this year is so that I will know for sure that I lived it. It is true that I will not forget the grand turns it took, but I am not positive that there are rooms in my memory to house this year with proper hospitality. I want to convince myself that I lived it in the best possible way without feeling any regret that I let pass by some different possibilities according to which I might have lived it.

A few hours separate me from the end of the last day in my twenty-second year. I have no intention of transforming this stock-taking into a long-winded elegy. I know how much we tend to recall things in an idealized way, simply because the fact of their endings makes us more gracious toward them, to classify them under the forceful admonition, “Remember the merits of your dead.” Or the opposite, since we do examine the scratched-out side of the tablet. I will try not to fall into that trap.

The first impression I can cull from this year is that things were not great. Things were not warm to me, in response to my having ignored them. I will not start by complaining, for I do respect the complexity of those things’ position. Many things happened to me, and many things struck me—poems, songs, beginnings of musical phrases, beginnings germinating inside of me, and my two fish, Yaza and Nala, with their gold and orange hues. But they all faded quickly, and no traces remained. Everything leaves me before I can close my fingers around its shadow. Swiftly, the songs would depart, exhausted by being sung and heard so constantly, and the poems became banal, the poems themselves no longer felt any joyful surprise at life, and one certain day both of my two little fishes were floating on the water’s surface, even though I had not skimped on changing their water and feeding them once a day.

The prevailing characteristic of this year is that I was busy. Very little time and many postponed projects. I got my tasks done at the last possible moment: my final paper for graduating, studying for my final exams, picking up my diploma, applying for the job, and then leaving it. My pace this year was accelerated and I moved to a loud beat, so that when I finally stopped I no longer knew how people spend their days when they do stop!

I added only two kilograms to my balance sheet this year—and the credit for them goes to bags of m&ms and long hours on the Internet—and I lost them in the second half of the year with my disturbed sleep patterns and sharp mood, in addition to not having partners to share the dining table with me at two o’clock in the morning, eating two fried eggs with cheese and a round of bread. Most of my losses yielded to the same reasons: a bad mood and a messed up sleep schedule, plus missed conversations left on the screen of my cell phone and angry friends.

But overall, my relationship with sleep this year was pretty good. Waking, also, was fine, accompanied by a less sharp mood and the heightened possibility of hearing three particular words and seeing half a smile before brushing my teeth. I finally did away with the ticking of the alarm clock, since I did not have any important appointments that required my waking up at specific times. The new thing was that my dreams seemed attached to my eyelids with steel forceps whenever I slept, and they remained fixed there until after I had awoken. For a person who has never remembered dreams, it is not comfortable to acquire this new habit of remembering them.

I still have my old doggedness about every no I have said and my hesitation before every yes. I all but leave those
yeses
silent. Sometimes. This year I believed that I was living according to a plan I did not understand, and so I would end up with more spontaneity, and absurdity, more isolation, and fear, more likelihood of dedicating myself to desires that my personal shortcomings would not allow me to transform into reality. I was more compliant this year, sometimes going beyond what I was expected to do, and I turned into a wall for others’ graffiti. There were many unintelligible writings, and others that were good, and some sculptures. And likewise there was some foul graffiti and offensive words.

I do not want to make excuses for what I was, nor for what I was not. I grew up a lot this year. I grew up more than three hundred sixty-five days’ worth. I accommodated my fragilities and achieved some balance with my failures. I came to terms completely with my receptivity to defeat and my propensity for setbacks. I came out of it in a way different than I went into it. I am no longer concerned with counting up my nose dives or lying in wait for my losses or beheading the scarecrows in the fields of my fear. I no longer have any desire for immediate gains or enjoying the limelight or making new friends. There is no almanac whose days I would study, no miracles to fortify my certainty, no anticipated victories to include among my winnings. I grew up, like other people grow up. And—even if this comes in the category of belated confessions—this was the year of my weakness, the year of a devastated harvest, the year of ruin and a wrecked soul, and the tetanus that eats at the edges of the heart.

It was the year of the one and only one error, and the open curtains, and the few quarrels with Mama. The year of navy blue, of irrefutable books, of the printer’s screech. The year of Herbal Essences shampoo, ads for CloseUp toothpaste, Galaxy chocolate. The year of the Internet, deservedly—MSN chat windows and all of the imaginary users with their imaginary names. The year of French fried potatoes, cans of green beans, sandwich crumbs wedged down between the keys on the keyboard. The year of evil desires and lack of resolve, of a total inability to make my mind up about anything, and wrong hypotheses. Right now, the hypothesis that I am putting to the test is the following: If I was able to reserve myself a preferential seat in a doubtful year like 1400, it will not be impossible for me to reserve an even better seat, with a comfortable cushion and footrest, in every year to follow.

This year I loved Grenouille a lot, so much that I did not find his crimes scandalous at all. The only crime that left me raging was his death, arranged with the lowest imaginable level of savagery. I mean the kind of savagery that the death of a
lord
deserves, and not a simple savagery of dogfights and cleavers, even though I understood why Patrick Süskind wanted to grant Grenouille less glory and a death that would not make him into a legend. I loved Kundera. I would not forgive him at all if he had chosen to not limit the forlornness of this world with his lightness that is unbearable. I loved especially his surpassing ability to introduce the world to me, and to push me to put my questions—every one of them—on the table. I loved Nietzsche because of the one and only line of his that I’ve ever come across, that to bear double pain is easier than bearing a lone pain.

I loved the crying of a little boy, a long and silent crying because he was so overwhelmed by the wide gap between his imagining of the world and the truth of it in
Almost Famous
, and I loved when they all sang “Tiny Dancer.” I loved Michael Nyman’s brilliance and his earthy soul in the music to
Gattaca
. I loved Tom Cruise in
Vanilla Sky
, even though everyone I talked to about it badmouthed the film and insulted him. I loved him in
Magnolia
, and I loved the intersecting lines of the film, and his genius in convincing me that he was not coming out of a screen but rather out of houses and streets and bars, coming from the backdrops of real places and their vestibules, and from the eyes of those who lived in the film and their tired hearts. I loved the man who said,
I have a lot of love, and I don’t have anyone to give this love to
. I loved him and I hated the rain of frogs at the end of the film. I loved Westlife for their song “Soledad,” about the singer’s absence and the streets that were empty without her, and the feeling that those whom we miss are a loss hard to replace. I loved them too when they sang “My Love,” which goes, “where the skies are blue … where the fields are green, to see you again.”