Читать книгу Thinner than Skin - Uzma Aslam Khan - Страница 11

Jinn, Jeannie

Glaciers in the eastern Himalayas are receding. Some say the Alps will be ice-free by 2100. Greenland’s glaciers are melting so fast they could sink southern California and Bangladesh. But in parts of Pakistan, glaciers could be expanding. It was a possibility Wes and Farhana had come to explore.

We finally left our cabin, though not as early as I’d have liked. Wes and Farhana decided to scrape up every last bite of my cold omelette too; perhaps the air was making them hungry. An hour later, as I watched Farhana trek up the glacier to Lake Saiful Maluk with Wes, I feared her love for me was like a Pakistani glacier. It was difficult to say if it was growing or retreating.

What did she love about them? Glaciers, I mean. They weren’t shady or concealed, nothing marshy there, except perhaps the slushy, slippery surface. Unlike her, glaciers were slow-moving, sluggish, with bouts of extreme rage. Between stasis and thrust, they rattled and creaked, moaned and bickered, adjusting and readjusting their old, old bones. Like a ghost in the family, and unlike Farhana, they were insistent lingerers. (Granted, she did linger over those damn eggs.) Snails must be born of them. (I once made a photo-collage of a glacier speckled in snails; the snails looked like little glacier turds.) Was that the attraction—the promise of a deep, stubborn rootedness? Rejection of the New World? Here in the land to which she “returned,” she found glaciers that weathered global gas emissions and spurned newness. Except this wasn’t true, of course. Glacial growth and decline were equal indicators of global warming, as she herself liked to remind me, and if glaciers were growing in the Old World, they were also growing in the New. They were growing in Mount Shasta in northern California, for instance, and Farhana was here to compare the rate of growth in the western Himalayas to that of the southern Cascades.

Apart from returning, of course.

There were others trekking up the glacier with us, as well as a line of jeeps, all heading up to the lake, all leaving brown scud marks across the glittery white expanse. (Snails!) The jeeps slid across the ice, white-knuckled drivers steering wheels that kicked like steeds. To our right was a drop thousands of feet down into the river. I peered over the edge. A school bus lay on its side. I overheard the driver of one jeep tell his passengers that the accident was only two days old. There were no survivors. A whiff of hashish circled us as the jeep continued up.

Leaning over the edge, Irfan said the schoolchildren had probably been listening to their teacher tell the story of how the lake got its name, just as the bus had skidded.

“What a happy thought,” I replied.

“She had probably just gotten to the part about the prince falling in love with a fairy princess,” he added cheerfully. “Or the part about the jinn.”

I looked at him. With his clipped pointy beard and sharp cheekbones, Irfan had an elfin look about him, except that his eyes, hard with sorrow, belonged to this world. He had a way of hunching his shoulders and pursing his lips when reminded of all that caused him pain, which was most things. His wife Zulekha had died soon after their marriage; she’d died in a car hijacking in Karachi, on her way home from a wedding with her brother. The hijackers had shot them both before driving off with her Honda Civic. Irfan was near Kaghan when it happened, working on a water management project for a Norwegian company. It was before the days of the cell phone. He returned to Karachi to find his wife already buried.

In America, a shrink would say Irfan needed closure. In Pakistan, he needed God. But he lost Him when he lost his wife, and his brooding posture enfolded a man nothing like the Irfan I’d gone to school with, the one with whom I’d trekked across these valleys before, to see the mating of glaciers. I thought it was to remember being here with Zulekha that Irfan had changed the plan and decided on this detour to Kaghan. I assumed it wasn’t entirely because Farhana loved forests.

Now I mumbled, “A lot has changed since we were here last.”

He grinned, somewhat devilishly, as if to say, all for a Honda Civic.

As I raised my arm to offer something—perhaps a thump of camaraderie to his back—I nearly slipped. I pulled his jacket for balance and we found our footing barely two inches from the edge.

“Not even a fairy princess is worth falling for,” he laughed as we turned away from the bus to follow Farhana and Wes back up the glacier.

They were far ahead of us now, two tall figures, both identifiable by the color of their coats—Farhana a red blur, Wes a mustard— the ends of her braid occasionally scattering sunlight across my field of vision like a lens flare. They were probably taking readings as they went; people seemed to be watching them. I walked in the dirt track her shoes left behind as the glacier creaked. There were unimaginable pressures stored in the ice beneath our feet.

This morning, as we lay in bed in our cabin, before Wes and Irfan disturbed us, I’d told Farhana the story about the jinn and the lovers. She lay on her back, knees slowly tracing arcs in the air, casting spells across her damp bush. Before she pulled the covers over her, for those few moments, we were naked together, enjoying the warmth we still held between us. I was glad there were no dishes to wash in our cabin and no access to email, or I could never have kept her there long enough to whisper the tale in her ear.

“There was a jinn who fell in love with a fairy princess. The jinn was the guard of Malika Parbat, the mountain that borders the lake.”

“And Malika Parbat means?”

“Queen of the Mountains.”

“Go on.”

“The fairy princess was called Badar Jamal, and she was a water creature, all silvery and slight, dipping in and out of the lake, stretching pleasingly on Malika Parbat’s slopes. The jinn would watch her. Trouble was, a prince began watching too. He was called Saiful Maluk, and he came from across the steppes.”

“So the lake is named after him, not her.”

“Well, yes.”

“Go on.”

“To Badar Jamal, the prince was everything a man should be. On a horse, in a turban, and most importantly, from a distant land. The jinn, well, he was a household thing. You can imagine the rest.”

She ran her feet up my calves. “The exotic prince whisks her away to a life of adventure.”

“Not quite. To put it bluntly, the jinn was a jealous fiend. His scalding fury caused Malika Parbat’s snow to melt with such force it breached the banks of the lake and nearly drowned the poor lovers.”

“Nearly?”

“Fortunately, they had a cave to run to.”

“So, the jinn’s wrath melted the snow? The jinn is global warming.”

“No, the jinn is an evil spirit that cannot experience love or happiness, but is tormented when others do. The cave is copulation. It’s our only hope.”

She laughed. “You don’t think there are parallels between mother wit and science?”

“I think there are parallels between you and heaven.” I blew gently on her skin.

“Did you ever find the cave?” I asked Irfan on the glacier, pulling myself away from the sweet memory of this morning. “I want to show it to Farhana.”

“What cave?”

“You know, the one in which Saiful Maluk and the fairy princess take refuge when the jealous jinn gets jealous.”

“That cave!” Irfan smiled, casting me a look I couldn’t understand. “Yes. I know where it is. But it’s far from here. We’ll need Farhana’s consent.” This time I understood the look. The old Irfan would have accepted the love between Farhana and me, vacillating though it may be, without judgment.

I ignored his comment and the look, focusing instead on Malika Parbat looming to the east. The mountain rose just over 5,000 meters, a modest height compared with all the giants to the north. But it was to see her reflection in the lake that lay 3,000 meters above sea level and was named after an alien prince that everyone trooped all the way up.

Irfan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, frowning. “We’ve lost contact.”

“Good.” I’d left my phone behind in Karachi and not missed it once.

“Maybe not so good,” Irfan muttered.

I left him to his phone as I increased my speed up the glacier. By now it was packed with tourists and trekkers and I could barely spot Farhana ahead. Take care of her, her father had commanded me, before we left. She is all I have. The sun soared directly above us; her red coat flickered irregularly over an icy horizon now blindingly white. So blinding that I was almost grateful for the filth left behind by those transgressing against the glacier’s beauty, some while slipping to their knees, others while gliding forward, as if on fairy wings.

In the weeks following our fight at the fort, I returned to the coast often, always alone. A small part of me knew it was to cleanse my palette, as if to revive something that had been lost on that wild stretch of land when it included Farhana.

My eye was hungry. I photographed the Monterey pines and the valley Quercus. The agave that bloomed before death. The pups that replaced them. California buckeye, star tulips, and bell-shaped pussy ears with stems as thin as saliva. Diogenes’ Lantern, the sweetest of flowers, yellow as the yawning sun.

How did they survive the onslaught of the Pacific wind? Why didn’t the stems snap, the buds fall? They flourished at the edge of chaos, in a nursery of knotted cypresses, while I was an intruder, a gray wolf with coarse mane unnuzzled, neck arched plaintively to a remote moon.

I crawled back to her house. Mirror, mirror, I bayed at her glass. Forgive the ugliest of them all! She wouldn’t let me in. Once, through the glass, I saw a small dark man approach the door, and I knew he was going to open it. Before he could, I heard Farhana shout Baba! and he turned away. Another time, a tall white man paused at the door, and Farhana was nowhere. We stared at each other through the glass, his image wavering as though he were gazing at me from under water, before swimming away.

I worked longer hours at the brew pub. I gave up trying to push my landscapes, including my mother’s marble-top table. What’s the point? You’ll never sell any. Perhaps she was right. The pub allowed me to advertise my skills as a wedding photographer, for which I was developing a reasonable reputation. The irony of it. A Pakistani goes all the way to the land of opportunity only to end up taking photographs of brides. As if there weren’t enough brides at home. With the exception of Farhana, women seemed to like me photographing them.

Then one evening, she came into the pub, smiling. It happened as quietly as that. We spent all evening smiling at each other. We smiled through the night, and through the subsequent days. We said very little, and when we did, it was politely coquettish. “How’s work?” “Fine. Yours?” When after several more days additional words were spoken, they were about her father. She was finally ready to introduce me to him.

The meeting was arranged for an afternoon in October, eight months before we were to leave for Pakistan, though I didn’t know the we part yet. We hadn’t dared revisit the birthday promise she’d tried to extract from me in May, though it filled the air around us more oppressively than the fog. As we walked to the BART station, I decided I wasn’t looking forward to this visit. I’d been kept in suspense about her unpredictable father for so long it was as if now I’d somehow passed a test. (I’d considered wearing a tie.) Perhaps this was part of our patching up, but I couldn’t help thinking that she was allowing the meeting. Worse, the concession was a way to get a concession from me. Our quarrel grew two legs; it walked beside us all the way to the station, demanding, Take me back. It was as if she’d proposed to me. Take me back was to be our marriage. Take me back was to take us forward. (For the millionth time I thought, Dammit, for her, it isn’t even back!) If I said no, she’d move forward by leaving me.

I stuffed my hands in the torn lining of my windbreaker’s pockets, irritation turning to anger. Is this what marriage would be, the appearance of favor for favor, when, in fact, it’s two to none? Stacking your chips, keeping score? Living in a damn game of mahjong?

I glanced at her. There was a smile lurking around the corners of her mouth. Not a smile of cunning. A smile of sweetness. I found no justification for my dreary mood. I drew her to me. “I love you.” A kiss without chips.

She started to laugh. “You can’t kiss me like that in front of him.”

“So we should kiss like that now.”

“All right then.” After a time she broke away. “I should warn you. He can be unpredictable.”

“You’ve warned me many times. I couldn’t be more terrified.”

“Terrified? But he’s wonderful.”

“Wonderful?”

“Well… You just can’t know.”

I nodded. “Unpredictable. Wonderful. No kissing.”

“Sometimes he talks a lot, sometimes he smiles happily at the dust.”

“You make him sound senile.”

“Oh, don’t be fooled. It only means he’s sizing you up. He never remarried, you know—”

“You’ve told me.”

“I’m his only child. He hasn’t been great with former boyfriends.”

Though I’d heard it before, it was hardly reassuring to hear again.

I tried to distract myself with stories of a mother she’d described for me many times, a mother whose photograph hung above her bed, inside a carved sandalwood frame that still smelled musky, and always reminded me of my grandmother. Her name was Jutta. She came from Bavaria, and she was of Celtic descent. Every summer, Jutta’s stern Catholic father would lavish his one indulgence on the family, a trip to Kaltenberg castle, to taste the dark lager that had been brewed there since the days of King Ludwig. Farhana had her grandfather’s palette, enjoying beer more than anyone I knew, and she loved to sample the flavors of the brewery where I worked. The more bitter-chocolate, the sweeter she would grow.

Jutta had come to Karachi when her first husband became the director of the Goethe Institute. Farhana’s father, a gifted musician, according to her, was the tabla player for a concert at the institute one night. It was the player, not the raag, that mesmerized the German woman. Their affair turned them into castaways even before Farhana was born (too few months after her mother left her first husband). Farhana’s maternal grandparents still never answered her letters while her paternal grandfather, recently deceased, never did forgive his son.

We got off the train in Berkeley. Three blocks later, Farhana spotted her father at a window seat of a dark tavern not unlike the one where I worked. I thought I could recognize him from the time I saw him through the glass, approaching the front door. Was it to let me in or to yell at me? Both?

She was saying, “Dada’s death has made Baba even more unpredictable. You know the history between them, because of my mother. Still,” she swung her arm in mine (not a kiss, but it was something), “though he hasn’t been kind to other boyfriends, I just know he’s going to like you.”

And she was right. And it was mutual. At least at first. Our conversation bore no trace of the So what does my daughter see in you? assessment I’d been dreading. In fact, to Farhana’s dismay, we didn’t talk about her at all. At least at first.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said, sitting back down after shaking my hand, stretching spindly legs in baggy jeans, “don’t call me Mr. Rahim. Call me Niaz.” I could imagine him saying the same while easing into a chair with the same languorous grace (that had skipped Farhana) in mid-seventies Karachi, outside one of the tea shops in the Saddar area that teemed with poets and revolutionaries. Thirty years later, he still had the air of a Saddar hippie. In fact, he still had the same jeans. They drooped around his waist, the belt tied ludicrously loose, forcing him to yank them up each time he moved. It made him look both comical and vulnerable. Maybe this was why women left their husbands for him.

Somehow it was perfect that the beer he was drinking was called Moose Drool. And that he had a cup of cappuccino next to it. We ordered coffee.

He looked at me. “So, where have you been hiding all this time?”

I looked at Farhana.

“You know how hard he works,” she replied.

“I’m unpredictable,” I added. Under the table, Farhana pinched my knee.

He finished his beer, smiling her smile. She asked after his health. Apparently, he had diabetes. He ordered a second beer. They quibbled about his diet. (He also ordered fries.) He didn’t look diabetic at all. He had the body of a young and lean rapper, a Lil Wayne lookalike, while his face was that of an exceptionally gaunt Kris Kristofferson. I was startled when I put his two halves together and came up with Jesus Christ. So startled that when he asked me a question, I nodded without hearing it.

When the second beer arrived Farhana pushed it toward me. I glanced at her as if to say, Why aren’t you having it? She ignored me.

He chewed the end of a pipe while his cappuccino got cold. “So, what are they?”

“Sorry, what?” I asked, embarrassed.

He frowned. “I asked if there are religious reasons for your father’s dislike of your work.”

I shot a glance at Farhana. She had an irritating habit of telling the world that my work was a touchy topic. Of course the world wants to touch that.

I cleared my throat. “I never thought of it that way.”

“He must have assumed you would. A good son should think about why the Prophet forbade images of himself, and forbade figurative art in general, no?”

I opened my mouth for no apparent reason.

He flashed me a toothy grin. “I was not a good son either.” He took a sip of his cappuccino. “Don’t they make hot drinks hot anymore?” He pushed the cup aside and reached for my—his—pint. “About which I couldn’t be happier. I photographed Farhana’s mother many times before she died. Before I knew she was dying.” He sucked on the unlit pipe in silence.

I shot another glance at Farhana. It hadn’t occurred to me that the photograph above her bed was taken by her father, nor had the irony struck me till now. She cherished the image, yet she wouldn’t let me cherish enough of hers.

Farhana moved the beer back toward me. “Let’s sit outside so Baba can smoke.” I chuckled inwardly. He could die of cancer but not diabetes. Carrying my coffee—which was, as usual, too strong—I left the second pint inside.

We settled around a small table on the sidewalk. There was no milk and I thought it might be rude to go back inside to get it myself. Why did Americans make coffee like mud and tea like rain? When I turned back to Mr. Rahim he was watching me over his pipe, now lit, and over a helix of fries.

He said, “My father never let me take any photos of him, you know. He said that you can reproduce an image, but you cannot reproduce a soul.”

“It’s so much warmer out here,” said Farhana, “than in the city.”

“You cannot reproduce a soul,” Mr. Rahim repeated. “Every picture tears the body from the soul. He saw paintings and photographs as theft, a way of owning and even destroying someone else.”

“Baba,” said Farhana, “don’t scare Nadir. He’s given enough flak for what he does.”

This astonished me. It was one thing to steer conversation away from her dead grandfather to protect her father, but another to use me as the pretext! I went back inside for the milk. When I stepped out again, it was her father who tried to defuse the pressure building in my chest. “I think he’s less annoyed with me and more with you for thinking him so easily scared.”

She smiled at him. “Do you want another cappuccino?”

He tapped his cup. “Your smile is warming this one.”

Satisfied, she leaned across the table and kissed him.

He turned to me again. “Where was I? Yes. Maybe it was the time he spent in Malaya during the Second World War. Whatever the reason, my father had a fierce aversion to what he called the fascist eye. He was terrified of its power to replicate an imagination that could not resist it. He bemoaned it, right until his death, the way the Third World is seen by the First World that makes up these terms. What he called ghoorna. Their gaze. On us.”

I was startled by the intensity of Mr. Rahim’s gaze, on me.

“Should we go for a walk?” said Farhana.

“He said the public gaze acted no differently from a camera,” continued Mr. Rahim. “For him, even the act of seeing became a theft. Even a murder.”

“Baba,” whispered Farhana. “Don’t go into all that now.”

He stood up, went inside, came out with a pint half-consumed and resumed talking as if there’d been no interruption. “He had seen the gaze in the way the British looked at women in his village, with both desire and disdain, as if it was beneath them to desire blacks, as if this justified deepening the gaze. He saw it again when deployed in Malaya, in the way the Japanese regarded local women. When he returned from the war, he returned to an India on the verge of independence and partition, but because his friends had scorned him for fighting for the British, he felt himself under their gaze. He returned both decorated and humiliated. He died a complete hermit.”

Farhana asked for the bill.

“But isn’t it ironic?” Her father sat on the edge of his seat, shirt collar pulled to one side, clavicle jutting like a bluff. “He grew so paranoid about the public gaze that he enforced strict purdah, both on himself and his wife, obsessed not with seeing but how we are seen, saving his morality—and that of his family’s—to the point where there was hardly any spirit left to save.”

“But you are so spirited!” She curled her fingers around his.

He threw back the pint. “You tell me, was he resisting tyranny or yielding to it?”

I shifted, an intruder in a private conversation between a father and a daughter; no, between a son and a spirit.

Farhana tapped his hand. “Please stop, Baba. You’re meeting Nadir for the first time.”

He regarded her the way he must have regarded her when she was born, and his eyes grew misty. “But I already know him! Why have you told him nothing about me?”

“But he knows everything!” She played along. “Don’t you?” They both looked at me. I looked at the sidewalk.

“Then he knows that you are nothing like me, and everything like your mother. I thank God for that every day!” Now his eyes danced with mischief as he looked from Farhana to me. “At least Farhana is not married.”

I choked on my coffee.

She examined the bill.

His eyes stopped dancing. There it was at last: his assessment of me.

He paid the bill and stood up to leave. “You must show me your photographs some time.” He pulled up his jeans.

I also stood up. “It was wonderful to meet you.” The farewell sounded as stale as his interest in my work.

“Well, I’m glad Farhana is not hiding you from me anymore. The next time we meet, it should be at my house.” This, with more gusto. He had deep vertical worry lines between his brows; they seemed to grow deeper as his face brightened.

“I’d like that.” I shook his hand more vigorously.

He walked away as abruptly as his moods had changed.

Once assured that he would not turn around again, Farhana flung her arm into mine. “Okay, so he was more unpredictable than ever.”

“I like him.” It was all I could think to say.

“Who wouldn’t?” She smiled.

I could imagine a lot of people not liking him, but decided not to say so. We started walking back to the station. “So, you’ve told me everything about him, huh?”

“Well, all the juicy parts. My parents were very in love.”

At least Farhana is not married.

“What are you thinking?” She looked at me.

“What happened in Malaya?”

She frowned. “I don’t know much.”

“What do you know?”

“Only what Baba told me once, in a fit of despair, after my mother died. Whenever he’s upset, he thinks of his father. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, do you really want to know?”

“Of course.” A curl had caught in her mouth. I pulled it free with my fingers.

“It was soon after my grandfather was sent to the peninsula. A group of Indians and Malayans pointed him to a bombsite littered with reams of photographs of local Chinese women, as Japanese soldiers—many still in boots and belts—raped them. Before the war, Dada had already considered life imagery to be prohibited. These photographs haunted him till his death. The entire village had seen them. In fact, there were those who pointed out the photographs to Indian soldiers the way they’d pointed out the girls to Japanese soldiers. They called them, ‘Cheeni! Cheeni!’ They deliberately left them there, in the open, for all eyes to devour what little was left of the Cheenis.”

“They could have been left for other reasons.”

“Such as?”

“To inform.” I shrugged. “Elicit outrage.”

She shook her head. “No one had any idea what happened to the girls and no one cared. Baba said it was this episode that led to Dada’s becoming a recluse later in life—this, and his unpopularity with his friends for fighting for the British. It was as if Dada felt that he too was trapped in those photos. He believed himself to be in the power of everyone who’d picked one up, whether accidentally or deliberately, indifferently or greedily. Sooner or later, every single person who’d ever entered the village became complicit in the crime. Maybe identifying with the victims was a way of feeling less complicit.”

“That is a horrific story,” I whispered.

She nodded. We rode the train in silence, arms entwined.

Back in San Francisco, the fog had cleared and the day was surprisingly warm. I was learning that October was spring in the Bay. “Seems we’re the only ones not jogging, or walking a dog,” I said idly.

She turned to me. “Nadir, I don’t dismiss what you do. You only think I do. I just wish, well, that you were equally happy with me as when you’re alone, at night, running, without your camera.”

“I am.”

“What’s the north of Pakistan like?”

My stomach clenched. Here it comes. “It’s—isolated. Isolating. Cleansing. I don’t know how to explain. People who live there have names for what we don’t. But—you find your own.”

She did something like a hop before swiveling to face me, walking backward on the pavement as I moved forward, keeping step with me, barely avoiding a streetlamp, her pace growing in speed as she pronounced, “Oh Nadir, I can arrange for us to go!”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve applied for funding. We’ll get it.”

“We?”

“Wesley. You’ll meet him. A comparative study of glaciers in northern Pakistan and northern California. Call it a fact-finding mission, to see if I can work in my country!”

“You will get it, or—already have?”

She soared into my arms, flinging us side to side, before presenting the route she believed we ought to take. We’d fly from Karachi to Rawalpindi, then, depending on the weather, take either a bus or plane to Gilgit. From Gilgit we’d take a bus to Hunza, from where the two glaciers that would best fit the requirements of her preliminary study were easily accessible. These were Batura Glacier and Ultar Glacier. Did I know of them? Of course. Did I know how dangerous they could be? Of course. Did I need to practice climbing around here, first? I shot her a look. She brought that man called Wesley into the conversation too. They’d apparently worked together on Whitney Glacier on Mount Shasta, where they collected and “dated” ice samples. Did I care how? No, I did not.

Naturally, throughout this monologue, there was no mention of Kaghan Valley.

Later that night, back in my apartment, she let me photograph her naked for once, torquing her spine to artificially recreate the image I first fell in love with.

“Why?” I asked. “Why today?”

She peeled off her sweater, shirt, bra, still delirious with the joy of having skillfully engineered her return. And all this time I’d believed she was waiting for me to say yes. There was never any consent involved. We were going.

“Why today?” I insisted.

She giggled. It was as if she were drunk and wanting to have sex with me after refusing when sober. It was her choice, yet I was having to make it.

“Come on, Nadir. Pick up your camera. I know you’re dying to.”

“Actually, I’m not.”

“Sure about that?”

I hesitated. To say yes would mean choosing no. I picked up my camera.

I didn’t enjoy it. In those moments, I didn’t want Farhana, neither behind my lens nor in the flesh. Even when she wound her braid around her, I couldn’t see the calla lily. It was all too conscious, too rehearsed. Hadn’t she planned it all—the visit to her father, the walk home, the seemingly innocent question about northern Pakistan, the news, the news, and now this? And yet, and yet. As I put her through my lens and captured that twisting torso, her ribs so protruding tonight, a thought flickered in my mind. Was it her pleasure that was dulling mine? I shook the thought away. No, this jeannie was just fine out of the bottle (even if she bent so far out of the bottle surely her spine would crack). I snapped another dozen shots. No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t even pleasure. More like victory. I could see it in her gaze. It had killed the wonder this moment was always meant to hold. As she adjusted her hips and I kept on snapping, I tried to conjure it up, this wonder, this thing which cannot always be there, which is entirely fleeting and numinous, which, like luck, or talent, or wealth, cannot be equally distributed between those who love, between those who mate. Snap! She was raising her chin so high. She was rising from the bed. She was turning off all the lights.

When it was over and she fell asleep, I hurried out into the night, a disturbed man.

Even the act of seeing becomes a theft, even a murder.

I hated the conversation I’d had with her father earlier that day. It wasn’t even a conversation. I hated today.

So I was to go back as her escort. When I had just begun earning. She had a great salary. She’d keep building up her resumé, while I became the porter. Photographing her was my payment for her pleasure.

No, no, I had to stop thinking of her this way.

I asked God to help me feel the way I normally felt on my solitary walks. Empty my mind, make me a happy man. I increased my pace.

The weather had turned again. It was now colder than on our way to the BART this afternoon. Gusty too, even for the Richmond. So much for spring in October. Why couldn’t San Francisco be still? Oh, if only for tonight! In my haste, I’d left my sweater behind and worn only a windbreaker over my shirt. I’d also left my umbrella. Not that it would have helped. When the rain came, the wind scattered it in every direction, opals spinning cartwheels under streetlights. I passed a man and a woman hunched beneath the same coat, and a solitary man talking soothingly into his phone—such composure, at this hour, and in this weather!—but they were the only ones I noticed as I walked down Balboa Street toward the Great Highway, a stretch of coastal road that always reminded me of Clifton Boulevard in Karachi and gave me a kind of peace. From there it wasn’t a short hike to the Sutro Baths but I knew that’s where I was headed.

It always happened this way when I set out at night. My body knew where it wanted to go, as if it had programmed the route from some earlier time. So I let my legs guide me, aware that to second-guess the purpose in my stride was as fruitless as second-guessing the need to flip onto my right side when I’d crawl into bed later to sleep.

My legs were sure, but my mind remained troubled. I tried to immerse myself in the glittering loops of rain, each drop dazzling, each cluster of multiple drops elastic and yielding. Instead, for no apparent reason, something I once heard Farhana say to my roommate Matthew danced around me instead. It was a silly thing and I’d had no right to eavesdrop. Nonetheless, it stuck.

“… put up with his farts and smelly underwear and the toilet with the urine stains all the way to the floor, and then to accompany him to a public soiree where he is so charming, so delightful. Do women really not know that underneath all that charm a man is farts and stains? Why do we fall for it, again and again?”

I’d heard Matthew laugh; his toilet was pristine.

First of all, we weren’t living together, so I couldn’t understand why she was having to put up with my smelly underwear et al. as if we were. Second, was she really talking about me? In a way, I hoped so. I didn’t know I possessed charm. I would like to, even for a few facetious moments at a public soiree. Third, public soiree? What the hell was that? Ergo, was she talking about me? Fourth, I didn’t fart as much as Matthew; I washed my underwear more often than she washed hers; I confess to the crusty commode. Ergo, it would have made sense if instead she’d said, “… put up with his finicky taste buds (no food is as good as my mother’s), his restless sleep (whenever I returned to bed after a walk, she claimed I woke her up), the toilet with the stains (yes yes), and then to have him accompany me to monologues by my father, who is so charming, so delightful…”

I felt a blade at my stomach. I was very far from the baths, drenched, and there was this man who must have been born of the opal rain, moving swiftly to wedge a knife under my windbreaker and through my shirt, just left of my navel. I wondered if I was being punished for having petty thoughts. Or punished for taking the photographs. Or just fucking punished.

“What do you want?” I heard a rasp exit my throat.

He was shorter than me and of paler complexion. High cheekbones, very obtrusive chin. Though this section of the road— definitely not the Great Highway, so where the hell was I?—was too dark to be sure, there could have been gray in the chin.

He could have been anyone.

He stared at me for a long time, and his breath was acrid, a mix of stale white wine and an illness, a stomach illness, perhaps, or a mental one. He gave me a lopsided grin and I could hear the sea. It had stopped raining. I was far from my apartment.

“What do you want?” I repeated. His knife poked harder into my flesh; still he did not reply. There was drool on his lips and he seemed to be shaking, with cold, or with laughter. I told myself the dampness at my belly was my soaked shirt. I wasn’t walking, or running, I was standing still, still as a dried urine stain. Yet I was drifting, as though bewitched, and the air was a checkerboard of moving points, flashes of color darting by.

His fist suddenly jerked to indicate my windbreaker.

“Jacket?” I asked. The knife was no longer at my belly. There was a sharp pain instead. He threw me a ghoulish grin.

In the wind my jacket inflated like a pneumatic device, as if I were blowing it with a rubber tube in a desperate attempt to escape on a solo flight across the Pacific. It would save me. It would save me, but only if I took it off. I began to undress slowly.

He was wheezing. I could hear words behind the wheeze. “Jack-eet. Jack-eet. Gee-ve-me-your-jack-eet.” They were not words but sounds merging into one roll, one hymn. While he repeated this hymn, I freed one arm and then the next, realizing, too late, that my wallet and my keys were in the jacket pocket. He began to hop; I saw Farhana hopping earlier that day. When my jacket was off he began to skip—away. And then he bolted across the street.

This was worse. He hadn’t taken a thing. He’d double back, follow me home.

I pressed my stomach and my fingers came away sticky. I was bleeding. I did not put the jacket back on but I did remove my wallet and keys. I held the jacket out to him as I crept away.

I must have walked south from Balboa, not north, because I could see the silhouette of the Dutch windmill when I looked over my shoulder for him; there it loomed, at the corner of Golden Gate Park. It was the first time my legs had misled me. He’d disappeared under the bridge, toward the park. I heard hushed footsteps but saw no chin, no gray sweats, and no soiled, thick-soled joggers without laces on the left foot. I only knew I’d been staring at the shoes when I searched for them on my way home.

I don’t remember entering my apartment. I remember smearing my stomach with an antibiotic cream from Matthew’s medicine cabinet (above his pristine toilet), bandaging it, taking two Tylenol, and climbing under the blankets with an icepack, naked and shivering. Farhana didn’t stir, didn’t curl into me.

It was still dark when I woke up again, bleeding. Beside me sat a friend of Farhana’s. His name was Wesley.