Читать книгу Thinner than Skin - Uzma Aslam Khan - Страница 8
ОглавлениеSay an Owl
It was a barn owl outside my window that night in Kaghan. She— all beautiful things are feminine to me, I make no apologies— perched on the bough of an almond tree at the edge of the river and the moon was high. As I opened the door of my cabin, she swung her neck and looked full into my face. There is no creature more direct than an owl. A rose has thorns, a cat has claws, but an owl the ferocity of her gaze. Unable to pull free from the ruffle of white feathers billowing around her ice-black stare, I delayed ducking back inside for my camera.
It was in my jacket in the closet on the far side of the room. Moving quickly, I remembered the night in San Francisco when Farhana and I had been returning home from a late dinner. The car’s headlights had shone on something large and white on the road. We’d stopped. Farhana fell to her knees, and began caressing the ring of down delineating the eerie, heart-shaped face. Its eyes were open—ah, dead beauty loses her sex!—and a cloud of feathers fluttered around a gaze with a softness that made me shiver. I stroked a limp wing with the pattern of cream and toffee swirls, wishing I had my camera, even if this upset Farhana. As my fingers moved to the still breast, she said an owl was a symbol of many wonders, evil and wise, and “ours” was wise. I wondered if this would be a good time to propose. And while I’m at it, I thought, I might also suggest a honeymoon (somewhere in a forest, she loved lushness, the propinquity of green), though not immediately after the wedding; I still wasn’t earning enough. In which case, should I wait? When Farhana started to cry, saying she wanted me to look as peaceful as the owl when I died, I decided to wait. I remembered hoping that I wouldn’t die in an accident late at night, tossed on the roadside till some inquisitive passersby stopped to admire my breathless form, only to leave me and drive away.
The living owl was an obliging model. I shot two dozen photographs while she glared, swiveled, and glared again. There was the heart-shaped face and the wings with the delicate markings. There, the heart beneath my fingertip. I could feel it beat this time, caught in a small silver button yielding to my touch. I could squeeze the drumming of an enraged predator’s pulse.
When I returned inside the cabin to review my handiwork, all the images were white. Nothing else. Only a sallow blur. Stupefied, I rechecked the settings, the battery, the light. All as should be. By the time I resolved to try a second time, my visitor had vanished.
Leaving my cabin again, I finally did what I’d stepped out to do. I set out on my nightly walk. I didn’t interpret the owl as evil or wise. To me she only meant that I should have listened to my father and not become a man who “spends his life hiding behind a lens.”
On the other hand, he’d wanted me to be an engineer. If I couldn’t take a few simple shots of a creature who wanted herself seen, imagine what else I might have failed at. Who’d feel safe walking across (or even under) a bridge of my design? Such were my thoughts as I headed for the river, inhaling a mid-summer chill deep into my lungs.
Breathing was like sucking a hookah filled with flakes of glass. Strangely, the sensation was pleasant. No doubt it had to do with the elevation—five mountain peaks over 8,000 meters, fifty over 7,000 was a common boast—but that would only impress a man impressed by facts. Surely, it had more to do with the purity of the place, which was why it was here, more than anywhere else, that I came closest to feeling I’d rather be here than anywhere else. Rare for me, a man who likes to move. Fitting, then, that I was running beside a river in a valley shadowed and graced by nomads. Even if this hadn’t been the plan.
It was our first night here, on the ancient Silk Route, a route which had never been the route at all, not for us, nor for a single man, horse, or fly. There were as many routes through these mountains as veins in a rock, and, true to the spirits of the routes, our own track had changed since our arrival in the country. We were never meant to stop in Kaghan Valley. Which was why, earlier in the day, Farhana and I had argued. We’d barely spoken since and she was sleeping in the cabin while I photographed the owl. Or tried to. It occurred to me as I jogged along the river breathing phantom glass and feeling energized in a way that only happened to me late at night, that had I succeeded in capturing the owl on my screen, I could have shown the images to Farhana in the morning after waking her with a kiss and we might have made up.
Then again, perhaps not. She frequently complained that I was a photographer by day, a happy man by night. Like my father, she saw my passion as a disguise rather than an art, as if the two are dissimilar. She dismissed my camera as a veil that I only removed when the sun set. She was right about the timing. I always leave my camera behind on my nightly walks. She was also right that leaving it behind made me look at the world differently. Sometimes I liked the world more, sometimes less. Since meeting her, I’d begun to think of my two states as “with” and “without.” Without, Farhana weighed more prominently on my mind. But while photographing the owl, I hadn’t thought of Farhana even once.
I met her soon after moving to the Bay Area from Tucson, two years ago. I’d left my job with a design and construction company and couldn’t return home a failure. It would have been hard to explain that, having turned out better at shooting engineering projects than erecting them, I’d become a photographer.
It was landscapes I excelled at, or wanted to. I left Tucson and spent the next few weeks making my way up the West Coast, occasionally veering back into the desert after hitching a ride. I still have them in my portfolio, those who stopped for me, and the shadows of the many who didn’t: pick-up trucks, scuffed boots, silver belts glistening in the sun. There was old man prickly-pear cactus all around and of course the Joshua trees, as the wind blew in from the northwest and purple clouds draped us. For all the tales of murder and kidnapping in these parts, I never chose poorly. I was more often mistaken for Latino than A-rab, even by Latinos, including the one so amused by his mistake he followed me deeper into the desert. Anywhere else, I’d mistake him for Punjabi.
“So, you Moozlim or what?” he asked.
“Or what?” I took his photograph as his shoulders shook and I eventually saw that he was laughing. There is something about large men with quiet laughs. Laughs that boil up slowly from within. A single raindrop splashed his nose. Only his belt, his teeth, and a patch of the distant San Bernardino mountains reflected the sun. After the second raindrop he was still laughing. I thanked him for the ride, walked into the desert, and did what I feared I could spend the rest of my life doing. I really looked at cactus. I really looked at triumph. Blossoming in shocking gimcrack hues of scarlet and gold in a world that watched with arms crossed, if it watched at all. It reminded me of the festive dresses worn by gypsies in Pakistan’s desert borderlands and mountain valleys. The drier the land, the thirstier the spirit.
When I finally arrived in San Francisco, for no reason other than that it was San Francisco, I had a stack of photographs of the Sonora Desert, the Petrified Forest, and Canyon de Chelly. I mailed off the best and waited for someone to bite, while renting an apartment with two other men. I had two interviews. The first went something like this:
“Why are you, Nadir Sheikh”—he said Nader Shake—“wasting time taking photographs of American landscapes when you have material at your own doorstep?”
“Excuse me?”
“This is a stock-photo agency. We sell photographs to magazines and sometimes directly to customers and sometimes for a lot of money. We might be interested in you, but not in your landscapes.”
“In what then?”
“Americans already know their trees.”
“Do they know their cactus?”
“Next time you go home, take some photographs.” When it was obvious I still didn’t get it, he dumbed it down. “Show us the dirt. The misery. Don’t waste your time trying to be a nature photographer. Use your advantage.”
Back at the apartment, my housemate Matthew felt sorry for me. He said a former boyfriend knew a nice little Pakistani girl. I ate his nachos while he talked on the phone.
I walked along the River Kunhar, thinking of Farhana. My way was lit by the moon and the rush of the current and the silhouettes of the trees and the hut down the way where we’d eaten trout earlier and it thrilled me to know that the others were asleep so I unlaced my boots and peeled off my clothes and stood buck-naked.
I heard a story once. A long time ago, on the banks of the river before it bends to meet the Jhelum, the Mughal queen Noor Jehan paused on her way to Kashmir. She was suffering from an eye infection and decided to dip her hands in the river to wash her face. The water was so cool and pure her eyes were cured. Ever since, the river has been called nain sukh, that which soothes the eye. I knew I was further upriver than the bend where the queen had once stopped, and I knew glacial water was not the cleansing stuff of myth. Yet something compelled me to kneel at the Kunhar’s edge and rinse my eyes, and even to drink her noxious fumes.
Which is what I was doing when I saw her again. The owl, soaring across the opal moon breaking in the water. Flapping twice before circling back toward me, she came to rest on a giant walnut tree. There, looking directly down at me, she spoke. “Shreet!” It was the voice, more than her flight from my camera, or her return now, when I was without, that made me feel signaled. No, singled. Singled out.
I was being sighted.
I arranged to meet her the afternoon of my second interview. This time I included in my portfolio a series of photographs taken on a previous return to Pakistan. It was a series of my mother’s marble tabletop, which she’d inherited from her mother, and which dated back to the 1800s. The swirling cream-and-rust pattern changed as I played with the light, sometimes slick as a sheet of silk, sometimes pillowing like a bowl of ice cream. A few frames were, if I say so myself, as sensuous as Linde Waidhofer’s stones.
The second interview did not go very differently from the first.
“Your photographs lack authenticity.”
“Authenticity?”
“Where are the beggars and bazaars or anything that resembles your culture?”
“The marble is a real part of my family history. It’s old, from 1800—”
He waved his hand. “It seems to me that when a war’s going on, a table is trivial.” I wished for the courage—or desire—to ask what images of what war he was looking for.
He stood up. “I’m a busy man. Could’ve ignored you. Didn’t, know why? There’s something there.” He leaned forward expectantly, so I thanked him for thinking there was something there.
I left the office and walked down the corridor to the stairs, passing the photographs that hung on the walls, photographs I loved with an ardor that stung. I’d recognized them all on my way in, of course. There were prints by Linde Waidhofer to taunt me, including one from her Stone & Silence series. A Waidhofer can be a nature photographer of the Wild West but a Sheikh must be a war photographer of the Wild East! He must wow the world not with the assurance of grace. He must wow the world with the assurance of horror.
I wound my way slowly through prints from Ansel Adams’ Yosemite series—it was the wrong moment to view Bridalveil Fall, the sheer force of the torrent almost making me weep, and I found myself wishing, childishly, if only the drop weren’t so steep—before halting, finally, at Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach.
The coincidence hadn’t hit me on my way into the interview but it hit me now, as my eye swooped down from the whiteness of the clouds to admit the whiteness of the surf breaking on the shore. I was meeting Farhana on Baker Beach in one hour. It had been her idea, and she’d been specific about where on the beach I’d find her. I stared at the photograph, surprised at the fluttering in my breast. It astonished me that I was hoping to find her on the exact same length of shore depicted in the frame. Worse, I believed that once there, perhaps without her knowing it, I’d look up and see the bridge from exactly the same perspective as I was seeing it now.
Did I want the picture to be a sign? Possibly. It happens this way when you have just been tossed down a roaring cataract. You grope for a raft, anywhere. You even tell yourself that you have found it.
Before the owl swooped across the moon’s reflection in the River Kunhar, I’d been thinking about that word, Kunhar, how kun sounded like kus which sounded like a cross between cunt and kiss. Do we desire and despise in the same sounds in all tongues? I’d held the bitter taste of glacier melt in my mouth as the silver disc eased deep into the river’s skin. I’d dipped my head to taste her again, and, gathering filigree into the fold of my tongue, gazed down the Kunhar’s length. She cut through the valley for one hundred and sixty kilometers. I’d been thinking of a long labia.
“Shreet!”
The thought scattered like moonseed.
“Shreet!”
The second time, the sour glacier water inside me froze and my fingers grew so stiff that when I reached for my clothes, I simply poked at them, as though with sticks. I crouched to my knees for warmth, bewitched by those gleaming black eyes in the pretty heart-shaped face. Instead of the owl, I saw the face of a girl. She had morphed into human at an hour no human should see. She had spoken at an hour no human should speak. How many minutes or hours passed before she shot up into the sky and flew in the direction of the lake we would head for tomorrow?
I eventually returned to my cabin, still naked, and slid into bed beside Farhana. She shifted. I was never more grateful for the heat she radiated under our sheets. I curled into her back and she turned, presenting me with the same gift as on our first night of love: she slipped her finger in my navel. Mocking my “proper Convent-boy English,” she whispered, “I’m going to have a listen.” She put her ear to the hollow, exhaling her sweet hot breath over my cold skin till it thawed.
“What do you hear?” Her hair was spread in a fan across the pit of my stomach.
“Shh!”
As her lips enclosed me, I thought, Bliss! I will not have to make up with her in the morning, she is making up with me! And I heard it again. The rush of wings, the moon diving in the Kunhar. Shreet! An ascending—higher, higher, through a smooth, silvery sky—a falling—deeper, deeper, down a silky, slippery skein.
I walked briskly to Baker Beach in joyous agitation. Descending from the parking lot, I pulled off my shoes, expecting to see a girl of Farhana’s description—“look for a long braid, the longest on the beach, black, of course”—waiting at the edge of the sea, as per her instructions, her back to me (showing off the braid), with Golden Gate Bridge looming to her right. Instead, I wound up in a volleyball game, with all the players entirely in the nude.
Was she among them? Damn, how was I to know?
There was a player with a dark braid, though she had two, neither as long as I’d been led to believe. Leaping for the ball, she made a full-frontal turn, and my God, how astonishingly she was built! I gawked at the hair between her legs, wondering if this were a cruel joke. (Granted, not entirely cruel.) Matthew must have arranged it, getting “Farhana” to lure me here. He was probably watching, laughing till he hurt. Nice little Pakistani girl. Funny, Matthew, funny. I stared at the volleyball player one last time—no, that couldn’t be Farhana, please let it not be Farhana! Please let it be Farhana!—and turned to my right to scan the bathers on the shore.
Almost all naked, mostly men. Obscenely overdressed, I jogged in mild panic toward a cluster of rocks on the far side of a thick cypress grove. Along the way, I tried to hunt discreetly for a long braid slithering down a shapely back, but many figures lay on their backs, some on their hair. I could see the rocks now. She wasn’t there. Two naked men were, one walking out to the water, hand on hip. Long cock, wide grin. I waded into the sea, my back safely to him, but the water was too cold for my taste. After a few minutes, I trundled closer to the boulders, trying to look-not-look.
She was sitting there, smiling. Her braid was pulled to the side, draping her left shoulder, and she waved it at me like a flag.
“We must have just missed each other!”
“I thought you told me to wait on the beach?”
“I’m sorry. It got late.”
I was on the verge of asking how she got all the way here without my noticing when I saw how her eyes sparkled. It wasn’t Matthew who’d been watching me but Farhana. I clambered up without another word, crossing a series of tide pools and a snug sandy enclosure between the boulders that sprawled in a V. I crouched down beside her and looked to her right: there loomed Golden Gate Bridge.
“Did you think you’d recognize me better with clothes on?” she giggled.
“Your clothes are on.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“I’m relieved.”
“How disappointing.”
So I learned this immediately about my Farhana. She was one of those people who liked to receive a reaction, and she didn’t like to wait very long for it. That day she must have been pleased enough with what I gave, because we met almost every day afterward. And what did I give? Embarrassment. Curiosity. I know she caught me wondering how much she was going to reveal, and she knew that I knew that beneath her T-shirt, she wore no bra. For weeks, that was all I’d see. Nice little Pakistani girl.
“Why do you keep looking up at the bridge?” she asked, about an hour into our rendezvous on the rocks.
I said nothing about the photograph. I never did. But as the sun set, I took several shots of the bridge. In the foreground, there was no surf and no sand, only a line of jagged rocks—without Farhana. She wouldn’t let me photograph her that day.
When we finally stood up to leave, I realized how tall she was. And how boyish.
She knew. “I would have gone topless if I had breasts.” Again, she required a reaction.
I am not an eloquent man and am usually tongue-tied around directness, but directness attracts me. I looked at Farhana and took all of her in, all that she’d spent the afternoon telling me: her work with glaciers, her father in Berkeley, her mother’s death, leaving Pakistan as a young child, her life in this city where she grew up. I took that in while absorbing her height, her leanness, the paleness of her skin, and the way her braid now wrapped around her in a diagonal curve that extended from left shoulder to right hip. I realized I was maybe three-quarters besotted, perhaps halfway in love. I said she looked more like a calla lily than any woman I’d ever met.
“Not just any calla lily,” I added. “Jeffrey Conley’s calla lily. Have you seen it?”
She bowed her head, suddenly self-conscious. Turning her back to me, she took off her T-shirt. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“When?”
“Same time.”
How hard it was to pull away!
Scrambling off the rocks, I glanced up a final time before turning toward my apartment. She’d twisted to one side so her long, deep spine was now perfectly aligned with the braid and both encircled her like an embrace.
The next day, I began courting Farhana. At first empty-handed, and wherever she chose, but by the second month, at her home, and with a gift. I courted her with calla lilies. Nothing delighted me more than descending the hill into the Mission District where she lived, a potted plant in my arms. I knew the flower shops with the widest varieties, from white to mauve to yellow, some with funnels as long and slender as her wrists, slanting in the same way her braid embraced her spine that first time we met, and still embraced her each night as she torqued her body to undress. I longed to photograph that spine but she wouldn’t let me. So instead, with my naked eye, I watched her fingers undo the knots of her braid. I’d learned not to interfere with this lengthy ritual, during which her strokes grew increasingly harsh and her face wore a million different permutations of annoyance. The comb always came away with a wad of black wool that she tossed in the dustbin before climbing into bed, beaming. I loved seeing that smile approach me every night. This morning in Kaghan, it was I who beamed, as I watched her sleep. I tasted her breath with the roof of my mouth. Pine and glacier steam. I traced the fleshiness of her lips with the tip of my nose. Her mouth was a pale beige tinted with the softest pink, the delicate rim so subtle in its arch. She seldom wore lipstick, for which I was thankful, because her naked mouth blended beautifully with the rest of her. When worried, her tongue would dig the subtle indent at that luscious lower lip, and sometimes the thumb would cooperate, picking at plumpness, drawing blood. I learned this gesture in the days after we first met. I learned it especially on the bus to Kaghan Valley. But this morning, she slept peacefully; the tongue was still and so was the thumb. I tasted her again. More steam than pine. Farhana’s morning breath was never her worst feature, though she’d cringe at that, demanding, What’s worse?
Our cabin was old. Perhaps its walls were the source of the pinewood scent enveloping our bed. The doorframe was a medley of pale and dark wood. I imagined the hand that must have reached for blond walnut when the dark cedar was gone, reached for red polish when the brown was upturned. Perhaps the man attached to the hand had been unable to walk to wherever the red was kept. Perhaps he’d been older than the cabin was now. Perhaps he didn’t belong to this land but had come from a windier, sandier world.
I lay on my back, rolling the word Kaghan around my tongue the way last night I’d played with Kunhar. Did the word come from Kagan, a woman who’d arrived in this valley long ago? On a previous trip, I’d heard stories, fragments that never extended far enough into history books but lingered in the air. Some said Kagan was descended from the pagan Kafir-Kalash tribe of Chitral Valley, to the west. Others said in secret that she was barely human, and belonged to a world of fairies and spirits. She was accessible only to those who worshipped her, and when she appeared, she wasn’t dressed like a Kalash woman at all. She wore mist and rode a horse.
Or had the word Kaghan come from Khagan, a grander version of Khan? The Turkic rulers who’d spread from Turkey to China on the ancient Silk Road had divided into two, one branch becoming the lion khans, the other, camel khans. Now this valley had neither lions nor camels. But it did have owls. And horses. Were its earliest inhabitants owl khans? Horse khans?
Most of the horses in the valley belonged to the semi-nomadic tribes that spent their summers in the mountain pastures and winters down in the plains. We’d be seeing them later today at the lake. No one knew where the nomads had come from but they were believed to have ridden down from the Caspian steppe thousands of years ago, and perhaps had once been Turkic-speaking. A third rumor held that Kagan had been one of them. And she had been a pari khan—ruler of fairies.
Beside me, Farhana inched a little higher on her pillow, blowing glacier steam in my eyes. Apart from her, nothing stirred. Kaghan mornings in our cabin were windless.
I walked to her side of the bed. On the bedside table lay a map, with Kaghan Valley circled in red at the easternmost corner of the North-West Frontier Province, on the edge of Kashmir. I’d drawn the circle on the bus to the valley, telling Farhana that to see the Frontier, you had to imagine it as the profile of a buffalo’s bust, facing west, with the capital Peshawar the nose, Chitral Valley the backward tilting horn, Swat Valley the eye, and Kaghan Valley the ear. The Frontier listened to Kashmir at its back while facing Afghanistan ahead, and it listened with Kaghan.
On the bus, Farhana had refused to listen to me, or to Kaghan. She’d picked at her lip, reminding me that we were never meant to be here at all. Until last night, I didn’t think she’d ever forgive me.
I opened the cabin door. I listened to Kaghan. Around me rose rounded hills, scoops of velvet green on a brick-red floor. Like the mossy moistness of rain-kissed tailorbirds. It was for this I’d come, not to upset my beloved. Around us the valley undulated like the River Kunhar that gave it shape, cupping nine lakes in its curves, sprouting thick forests of deodar and pine, towering over 4,000 meters before halting abruptly at the temples of the Himalayas and the Karakoram. The only way through the mountainous block was by snaking along hair-thin passes, as if by witchery. Here the overwhelming sensation was not a closing or crowding. Not exactly. It was more a cautioning—a slope to the side, a wait and see. The buffalo’s ear is always cocked.
I knew that in colonial times, the British considered it a pretty sort of wedge, this ear, nicely if incidentally squeezed between the more considerable Kashmir and the more incomprehensible, and feared, hill tribes of the west. And so they mostly left the valley alone. Today, most of the hotels, restaurants, and shops were run, though not owned, by Kashmiris and Sawatis. Even those who couldn’t read or own a television were keenly aware of what was going on, and where. They liked to say that the buffalo is as attuned to what lies behind as what lies ahead. Why else did shivers keep running up and down its spine? Why else did it keep sweeping its hide with the smack of its tail?
I’d noticed military convoys yesterday, soon after our arrival. It was unusual in this valley. I’d been too preoccupied to give this much thought. The trucks were as twitchy as buffalo tails, creeping up and down the valley’s spine, seeing nothing, fearing the worst. The whole country was teeming with convoys of one kind or another. So what? We were here to enjoy the place, even if we couldn’t enjoy the time.
A shadow flickered on the doorframe. There were other areas— the ceiling beams, the paneling by the bed—also randomly spotted with light and dark timber. With the curtain drawn, despite the checkerboard paneling, it was night in the cabin.
That flickering shadow was a lizard, sidling for a mate.
I kissed her, slowly, drinking her, hoping to keep her beside me a little longer, just us.
“I once heard a story,” I whispered, stroking her hair. The scent of her shampoo pooled with the musk lingering on my fingers from last night. It wasn’t the walls that exuded the scent, it was Farhana. And it wasn’t pine, or even musk. It was, curiously, tobacco. She’d never smoked in her life and abhorred the habit. How to tell her that her own most intimate odor was that of a cigar? I slid between her knees.
She smiled into her pillow. “They’ll be here any minute.”
“Maybe they’re already eating.”
“You were going to tell me a story.”
“It can wait.”
“I think I hear them.”
“You hear us.”
She laughed. “I can hear them. I bet they’re coming here for breakfast. Who wants to walk to the restaurant?” She pressed her knees, whispering, “Tell me the story.”
I ignored this.
“Is it the one about the lake? And the jinn. And the princess. Please?” She arched her back. I threw off the sheets.
“You already know it.”
“I work with facts. I forget the fairy tales.”
So I told her again.
As soon as we finished, we heard the knock. Farhana’s colleague, Wes, and an old friend of mine from Karachi, Irfan. They were staying in the adjoining cabin. We were meant to meet at the restaurant for breakfast before leaving for the lake, but here they were now, as Farhana predicted, because no one felt like trudging a quarter mile for eggs. So we dressed in a hurry, welcomed them inside, and ordered in.
The omelettes were cold by the time the waiter arrived, but still crisp around the edges, the interior plump with finely minced tomatoes and green chilies. Irfan and the waiter talked at length in Kashmiri. Or was it Hindko? I could identify only a few sounds—akh, gari gari—focusing more on Irfan’s expression. The news wasn’t good.
Wes and Farhana discussed glaciers. They might as well have spoken Gujri. I chewed my omelette in silence. Red, yellow, and green. The colors made a familiar flag, though I couldn’t remember which. Afghanistan’s had the red and green, though its eggs weren’t yellow but black. And I wasn’t even sure what flag it flew these days; after the American invasion, Taliban white had been dyed to something like the flag that had flown under the monarchy. Senegal; Sri Lanka. Yes, they flew these three colors. On the plate before me, I replaced the lion of Sri Lanka with the owl of last night. I decided to tell everyone.
Irfan said the sighting was an ill omen (though I still couldn’t help thinking I was the one being sighted). Irfan was the reason our route had changed, which was the reason Farhana and I had argued yesterday, at a shop that sold shawls. My hurt at the way she rejected the one I’d draped around her shoulders, and her anger—“We didn’t need to come to Kaghan at all”—was all of it still raw? I looked at her now, afraid of losing the peace of waking up together this morning. Was it already beginning to fade? But she remained cheerful— no lip-picking today!—saying that in some places, owls were believed to be holy spirits of shamans, and when I said, “As holy as ours?” she tossed me a winsome look and Irfan shifted disapprovingly. Perhaps he’d heard us last night. Or this morning.
Wes glowed as if he were the one we’d all stayed up listening to. “Take any pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see.” He chewed with his mouth open.
“They didn’t come out.”
“What do you mean they didn’t come out?” His smile was an oval of eggy goo.
“Just that.”
“With a digital? You’re literally in the wrong business.”
Farhana laughed. “Don’t tease him. That’s a touchy topic.”
What if I revealed all her touchy topics?
“We should leave.” I stood up. “The lake is crowded by noon.”
Irfan returned to his cabin for his jacket. Farhana picked hot peppers out of a second omelette for Wes. She called him “Wesley” and he called her “Farrah.” She called him “wimpy” and he called her “hella sweet.”
As I packed my bag with my camera and lens, I resisted the urge to glance again at Farhana. I suppressed a longing to sweep everyone away—like a buffalo clearing its back with a tail!—so we could start again, just us. But what I could not resist—though I knew it would ignite that prickle resting so close to the skin, I knew I would regret it before I could even begin—was replaying the past week in my head.
