Thinner Than Skin (11 page)

He kept on about his struggles. I nodded, wondering unkindly when he’d leave. I wasn’t due at the pub for a few hours so had no reason to excuse myself. Nor could I count on my roommates for diversion. Matthew’s new boyfriend lived in Maui so he’d all but
moved out, while the other one, Cesar, an up-and-coming aerosol artist, kept strange hours, lifting weights in front of the TV all day, then disappearing for weeks. (According to Matthew, Cesar had been on the verge of converting to Islam till he met me.)

“Yes, I had to work hard. But your relief has come. You did not have to wait.”

My relief? Did he mean Farhana? Was he suggesting I didn’t have to try hard enough to get her? Or hard enough at anything? He waved the caramels under my chin, smiling beatifically. “Finish them. Even with salt they go stale.” It wasn’t even 9:30 in the morning. I took a second.

“
My
relief I had to work for. But it came in the shape of …”

I missed the part about how he came to purchase milk for his tea.

I was imagining the woman in the photograph over Farhana’s bed. Jutta, her mother. She reminded me of Robert Frank’s wife. The expression on her face was not entirely the same—Jutta’s gaze being more pensive than challenging—but neither could break free of the frame.

He was saying, “Who would have guessed where the trouble began? Where the cancer in her mother first took root? It was already in the brain when we found out.” He looked at me in a way that made me feel accused, just as he had the first time we met, though for what I couldn’t say. “It always begins before you think it does.”

I ate a third caramel.

“Look after her this summer. She’s all I have.” After a string of truisms justifying why he’d left Pakistan (“society frowned on us, her mother and I”) and justifying why he hadn’t been back (“hard work eventually pays off”), he began justifying why he knew what was happening there better than most (“it is the mentality”).

When he left I checked my email.

There was a message from Irfan, with news from home. It didn’t help. More trouble in Waziristan, where the Pakistan Army’s
hunt for Baitullah Mehsud and his “guests” from Uzbekistan and China was turning increasingly bloody. No one believed the drone attacks were launched by Pakistan, at least not only by Pakistan. Irfan called the drones stupid eyes—”If they’re so accurate, how come the war gets bloodier?”—and forwarded links to various articles on their “accuracy.” As if I wanted to read them.

I spent the morning in pajamas. In the afternoon, my life receded in the cool, dark walls of a tavern where I existed only in the moment of pouring drinks and collecting bills and wiping counters and listening to others who also felt their lives recede. At night, I fell asleep on the couch in the living room while leafing through photographs by Robert Frank and Elizabeth Carmel and eating salted caramels.

I awoke to Farhana pushing me deeper into the couch with a kiss. And then she told me. Wes was coming with us. He’d been to India and wouldn’t mind seeing it from the other side.

“The other side?” I tried to sit up. My mouth was gummy and dry.

“Besides, he did save your life.”

“What?” My feet found the floor. “It was a minor stab wound, you know that.”

“And what if you hadn’t made it to the hospital?”

“And what if we had ambulances?”

“Let’s not fight. He’s very experienced. We were on Mount Shasta together, drilling the ice, you know, reading it. He’s taught me a lot. He could teach you a lot too.”

“About what? India?”

She pinched my knee, almost fondly. “I’ve had a long day, while you’ve been eating caramels.” She waved the half-empty box under my chin, reminding me of her father.

On the table beside us lay the copy of
Brilliant Waters
, open at the photograph of a lake, the surface so rich and still.

Beside me, Irfan lay peaceful and motionless, though his eyes were now open. We said nothing, the evening too dramatic for speech. High above the lake, the mystery mountain was now entirely free of clouds and glistened a silvery amethyst so pure it belonged to another world, a world of princes and princesses, jinns and fairies.

Down below, near where the mortals lay, the lake continued breaking on the shore like a troubled sea, and it was hard to know which to believe: the triumph in the sky or the restiveness in the snowmelt. Goat bells rang like heralds between the two worlds.

To my left, Farhana and the girl had descended the hill. They moved toward us, the goat happily at the girl’s feet. I noticed a dog now too, black as the goat. The two animals casually circled each other, like lovers who know their love was there all along.

“She isn’t still upset about the detour to this valley,” said Irfan. It was a declaration, not a question.

I answered anyway. “I don’t think so.”

He nodded. “This time tomorrow, we’ll be in Gilgit. Two days after that, Ultar Glacier. Then she and Wes can take all the readings they want.”

“She nearly didn’t come at all, you know.”

He twisted his neck to look at me. “I thought it was her idea.”

“It was. But a few months before we left, she started getting cold feet.”

“Why?”

“It might have been her father. He didn’t want her to come.”

“Neither did you.”

“My reasons were different.”

“What were his?”

“What do you think?
It’s not safe
. He wouldn’t hear otherwise. Telling an immigrant the country he left is not as he imagines is like telling a father the daughter who grew up is not as he imagines.”

He laughed. “We’ll be passing our glacier.”

I smiled. “I know.”

She’d text me messages.
Did you hear about the bomb blast
? I’d text back:
Don’t panic. Everything will be all right
. She began fixating on Pakistan’s “border badlands” and our conversations were increasingly about al-Qaeda hideouts, suicide bombers, bearded fanatics. She decided that Pakistan was a place where women couldn’t survive. I asked what she thought 85 million Pakistani women were—unsurviving? Still the nervous texting didn’t stop.
Another. That makes more than last year, right?

One day I sat at my desk, wondering how it happened. After establishing the need for me to accept her “return,” she was suddenly establishing the need for me to prevent it.
How did that happen?

I logged on to the internet. A Yahoo! headline announced the terror threat was red. There was a message from Irfan with an image of a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle armed with Hellfire missiles, described as MALE. Medium-altitude, long-endurance.

I looked closely at the image. The drone was white, lean. It looked a little like a capsule I inserted into my rectum once, as a child, when I had worms. (Come to think of it, I’d seen something similar in Matthew’s pristine toilet: hemorrhoid suppositories.) The drone had wings, a tail. The tail was spinning, and I could feel the nerves of my rectum tingle, anticipating the speed with which I was about to get reamed.

It was taking off from a runway in Nevada, from a place called Cactus Springs. I liked the name. I liked how it could be read in many ways. It could be a declaration of the ability of cactus to leap, which some do, if you brush up against them. Or it could have nothing to do with movement. The cactus could be standing still, but in the middle of a well, or a fountain, or several fountains, all gushing copiously. Or it could be long seasons of cactus—entire years made up only of March, April, May.

This was how it worked.

There was a pilot who stayed on the ground. Once the robot plane was in the air, the pilot could set its path as it flew over
Afghanistan and Pakistan, hunting for al-Qaeda fighters. Inside the drone was a camera capturing entire villages, where dark figures slid quickly into labyrinths, their shadows shifting, crisscrossing, into walls, into rooms, into each other. A target became a non-target, a non-target became a target. Before the camera could tell them apart, the world could be saved.

Beneath the photograph was a caption.
If the target is taking cover or lying down the effect is reduced, but if it can be caught standing up or running then the full effective casualty radius of 200 feet will apply
. It ended with a wistful afterthought.
While a drone can drop two 500-pound bombs with each strike, its camera shows us images of daily life in an area most of us never think about
.

To be the one looking up at that.

And to be the one at a Playstation in Cactus Springs, looking down on a land that wasn’t even down there, as you were about to destroy it.

A small part of me felt exhilarated at the power of the drone’s camera. (A large part of me felt exhilarated at the power of
all
cameras.) That bird’s eye view. My life as a pelican. Or an owl.

Irfan’s messages were increasingly concerned with where the unmanned planes were taking off from. Cactus Springs in Nevada, or Shamsi Airfield in Pakistan, near the Afghan border? Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, Shamsi was being used as a base for US Special Forces—that much was known. Prior to that, Irfan reminded me needlessly, it was used by wealthy Arabs to launch a different predator. Falcons. They were flown in on jets to hunt the endangered Houbara Bustard, a pheasant with aphrodisiac meat, though the real aphrodisiac was watching a falcon spray a Houbara’s feathers. (Falconry was forbidden to Pakistanis, yet Pakistan produced more falconry gear than any other country, all for its Arab patrons. Call it hospitality.) Ironically, since the start of the war and use of the airfield by US forces, the bustards could no longer be
hunted on the same scale. But people could. Had Shamsi Airfield been gifted to the CIA to launch predator MALE? Irfan threw these questions at me.

As well as this detail: in the sand dunes near Shamsi lay another airbase that could, after a sandstorm, disappear for days. It was in these sands that, soon after the war began, a Pakistani shepherd found unexploded US cluster bombs. He kicked one by accident while herding his sheep. It tore apart his hands and legs and made the news and elicited anger. Since then, if any shepherd lost his limbs, even the story was lost.

I heard the ring in my pocket. A text from Farhana.
Fourteen killed in a mosque. Why a mosque, Nadir
? I texted back,
Um, ask God?
I shut off my phone. I shut off my computer. I went for a walk.

I passed a newsstand.
Kidnappings Traverse Border
. I assumed it meant the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. But as I moved away, the word Mexico jumped out at me, and I thought, Oh
—that
border. Then I thought, Oh—
this
border.

I kept reading. Phoenix, Arizona, was becoming the kidnapping capital of America, and, outside Mexico City, of the world. The torture tactics of Mexico’s drug cartels—including ripping off hands and legs—had spread across the border. It concluded,
Are we too obsessed with al-Qaeda to care about our own backyard? For California or Arizona, terrorists linked to the drug trade are a more immediate threat
.

The article excited me. See! We’re not the world’s biggest danger! Mexicans are worse! Even if I look like both! I carried the paper all the way to Farhana’s house, as though for reward.

She said I was being racist. “Stereotyping Mexicans as drug dealers and violent gangsters is not a productive way of thinking. It engenders fear. Makes you think of fellow human beings as ‘them’.”

“And fear of Pakistanis?”

“Are you calling me racist?”

“Why would I?”

“Why aren’t you answering me? You know I’m sorry this is hard
for you.”

“I am. You know I’m sorry you’re afraid, but we’re not going anywhere near the Afghanistan–Pakistan border.” (I thought fleetingly, we
are
the border.)

“I’m not. What should we have for dinner?”

“Okay then. Sushi?”

Later, she was in the mood. I wasn’t. We tried again in the morning. I was as floppy as ahi.

When she got out of bed, I asked the shadow between us if her “return” was a way to somehow purge her fear of the place she called home. A fear that had only recently been made known to me. A fear that would haunt us right till our departure in July (and, I was to find out, even after we arrived). She wanted a role in it, this home, but didn’t know what. It was still only March; the shadow stretched its limbs and bared its teeth and said nothing. On subsequent failed attempts—still no altitude or endurance—the shadow would only keep growing in length, as would its silence.

Did I finally hear the answer in July?

Was saving Kiran by dragging her into the boat the role?

A woman, a child, a voyeur. How quiet the confrontation. How murderous the gaze.

“Come with us in the boat,” said Farhana, bounding toward me from the shores of Lake Saiful Maluk.

I’d been watching her descend the hill and move toward us for a while. Irfan now sat up, blinking in bewilderment. He’d fallen asleep again.

“You guys!” Farhana rolled her eyes. “Come on, Nadir. Wes says it’s safe.”

“Safe as a leaking boat can be,” said Wes. He’d found the potatoes and the pear.

Irfan rubbed his eyes and looked at Farhana. “You haven’t eaten lunch yet.”

“No,” I added. “We saved you sandwiches.”

“I’m not hungry.” She was looking away, at the lake, now a bowl of amber light flecked with clouds—or were those whitecaps? “Nadir’s done it before, haven’t you?” She sounded dubious.

I said I had in the past, and the boats did leak. I watched the brow furrow, the tongue slide into the indent of her lower lip. But she’d made the proposal and I knew she wouldn’t retract it. If she didn’t want to follow through, she’d want me to prevent it from
happening. I’d seen the same conflict play out in the weeks running up to our departure from San Francisco. She was protecting her own fear while desiring to be free of it.

Irfan was still wiping the sleep from his eyes. From behind his fingers, I heard him mutter, “Well, if Wes says it’s safe …”

“We could take a long walk instead,” I offered. “Look for the cave.”

“What cave?” Wes sliced the pear with his penknife, presenting half to Farrah.

She took the half. It was like breakfast all over again. “What cave?” she echoed, a trickle of pear juice on her chin.

“The one where the fairy princess took shelter with her lover, Saiful Maluk. You remember, after the jinn got jealous and tried to drown them.”

“Awesome,” said Wes.

“It’s far,” said Irfan.

Farhana turned to me. “No. I want to get in a boat. With you. And the girl.”

“The girl?”

She nodded. “She’s never been in one.”

Irfan laughed. “Of course not! The boats are for tourists.”

“That would explain why you’ve done it,” she shot back.

“She may not want to.” He glared at her.

“Oh, she
wants
to. No one’s ever
asked
what
she
wants.”

“Have you?” He stared harder.

“Oh shit!” Wes laughed.

Irfan turned to me, said loudly this time, “If Wes says it’s safe.”

I was about ready to take the boat—by myself.

While Irfan and Farhana glowered at each other, the child hung back, behind Farhana. To be honest, I’d only been vaguely aware of her standing there till just this moment. Now I saw that she was eyeing the tents along the lake’s shore. And then, as suddenly as I spotted her, she skipped away, her bracelets jingling.

“Where are you going?” Farhana called after her.

“She’s going home,” said Irfan.

Farhana was walking away, toward the tents.

“Where are you going?” I called after her.

“To tell her family I’m taking her with us.”

Irfan turned to me. “Teach her something. She’ll be putting them in a very awkward position. They won’t want their child going off with a group of strangers and they won’t want to say no to Farhana, who’s a guest. She should accept their hospitality,” he pointed to the empty plates, “instead of pressing for more.”

“She thinks she’s doing the girl a favor.” My defense ended up sounding like criticism.

“That’s exactly the problem,” Irfan agreed.

“It’s a ride in a boat.” Wes shrugged. “You guys talk as if poor Farrah were trying to abduct her.”

Poor Farrah?

“Give her a break,” he added, maddeningly.

I followed Farhana.

Farhana followed the girl.

Irfan followed me.

Wes literally inhaled poor Farrah’s sandwiches.

It was as Irfan said it would be. The girl, whose name was Kiran, appeared fairly neutral to the outing. Her family was against it. Farhana pleaded with them and eventually, Kiran’s father agreed. At least that is how I understood his quiet responses to her fragmented Urdu, and later, while walking us to the lake, how Irfan translated their more rapid conversation. “It’s even harder to say no to a female guest,” Irfan added, Farhana ignoring him. “It’s considered bad manners.”

Kiran’s father and brother—the same boy who’d brought the food—were standing outside the tent, watching us walk away. I could hear a woman’s voice from inside the tent. Later, as I held the boat so Farhana could climb inside, I turned back to see two
women watching us as well. One held a young child in her arms, and she was arguing furiously with Kiran’s father. I saw her black shirt billow in the breeze; the cuffs of her sleeves were rimmed in fluorescent pink thread and I could hear bangles chime as the arms gesticulated in protest. It might have been the same woman I’d seen by the fire. Kiran’s bangles as she arranged herself in the boat—folding her hands in her lap before unfolding them again—were like an echo of the woman’s bangles. There was such perfect synchronicity between them that it had to have been a private conversation. I knew, as we pulled away, that the woman was her mother.

I rowed backward at first, looking behind me as the bow pierced the lake’s skin, cutting a wide triangle the shape of a fin. Somewhere over my left shoulder must have loomed the actual summit of Naked Mountain, radiant in the evening light, I was sure. I could imagine the clouds circling him like a promise; he was above their promise now. Below us, in the glacial water, Queen of the Mountains’ valleys and crests plunged all the way down to a depth that was surely our own nadir.

The boat was shaped like a tub and it was heavy. It wobbled. Apart from the ungainly shape, the rocking made no sense; there was almost no breeze. I rowed out about twenty feet before swiveling the boat around to face in the general direction of Naked Mountain. The tide did not recede. It was the same tide that had confounded us when we first got here; it was the tide of his ardor for the Queen, hers for him, and we were intruders, duly rebuked by being splashed from all sides. The further out I rowed, the larger grew the swells. Kiran and Farhana shared the plank in the stern of the boat, and every time the whitecaps hit her, Kiran shifted in her seat, rocking the boat more. She was light but her disquiet was heavy. She’d been talkative with Farhana when they walked into the hills together, but not now. I asked Farhana if it was me.

“Maybe.” She frowned. Switching to Urdu, she asked, “Are you enjoying yourself?”

The girl shook her head.

“At least she’s honest,” I said.

Farhana wrapped an arm around her. “Is it because you’re cold?”

She hesitated, then nodded. Her bangles still chimed; there was still the compulsive folding and unfolding of hands in her lap. But there was no longer a reply.

A pool of water was collecting inside the tub. It was impossible to say how much was coming in from the sides and how much was the leak. The heaviness grew. It was much harder to row that day than it had been the last time I was on the lake. Farhana offered to take over but though her legs were strong, she had no strength in her arms. When I told her this she reminded me that I had none either.

“Still,” she conceded, “you do have shoulders.” In English, so the girl wouldn’t understand, she said that if we were alone we could both take a break.

I played along. “I could show you that vein in my shoulders that makes you wonder if I go running at night, or weightlifting.”

She smiled. “This air suits you. You look—” She glanced at the girl. “She doesn’t seem happy. Maybe I made a mistake.”

“I look what?”

She rubbed Kiran’s back. “Should we have brought your goat with us?”

Kiran grinned, showing two gaps in the front row of her teeth.

“I look what?” I repeated.

She met my reflection in the lake. “Like something I’d like to …”

There were no other boats nearby. If we’d been alone.

Beside Farhana rolled the Queen’s deepest hollows. She was there, beneath my oar, tempting me to dive, face first. “In Karachi you said a quick fuck is a dead end.”

“We’ve done it quickly since. Never on the water.”

I was unutterably aroused. And grateful that I’d worn loose jeans. And mortified. Kiran wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Couples who have children must have to deal with this
all the time. Forced to navigate a third wheel, how do they keep their balance? But she wasn’t even our child. And I wanted this moment with Farhana. We’d made love twice already in under twenty-four hours. Hat trick? This was just the thrill, just the
newness
, our long weeks before leaving San Francisco had lacked.

I spoke quickly. “Let’s turn back, drop her, then come out again.”

“We can’t do that. We brought her with us.”

We
.

Kiran was looking down at the lake now, and her gaze was one of resignation. She was the child of gypsies, her bare feet caked with the soil of mountains. She sat hunkered in the boat as if in a cage. Water was a solid barrier, a mountain pass she could not traverse. There were no pine trees to lead the way, no goat bells to chase. The only markers were down below, in the lake bed, and these would slip through her fingers before she could tap them. Between the big toe and second toe of her right foot protruded a single pine needle, the thickness of her hair, darker than her hair. It had caught in a toe ring. She lifted this foot out of the pool of water rising past her ankles and rested it on Farhana’s leg. She wiggled her toes. Bells on her toes.

“Tell Nadir your goat’s name,” said Farhana.

Kiran looked at me, and I realized she’d been avoiding looking at me till then. She knew I did not want her there. Her large green eyes were the color of sun-quenched grapes. “Kola,” she said, daring me to take an interest.

“Like Kala Kola hair tonic or Coca-Cola drink?” I made a poor attempt at raising my voice in a friendly, child-accessible way.

She turned to Farhana as if to register her dismay at the degree to which I was capable of stupid questions.

“And the others, the ones you didn’t have to chase?” pressed Farhana.

“Bhuri! Makheri!” She stared ahead, at the shore.

“And what is your favorite color?”

“Billoo.” She stared at the sky.

Farhana laughed. I tried to smile. There was an awkward pause.

Well, my moment with Farhana on the water was over.

Or so I thought.

“Last night—” she began, switching to English again.

I waited. When she continued to hesitate, I urged, “Your timing was perfect.”

“I know I’m not patient enough for you sometimes.”

“You’re just right for me.”

“Last night, have I ever told you how good you …”

“What?”

“Well, better than salted caramel.”

“Jesus, Farhana! You never talk to me like this when we’re alone!”

Farhana hugged Kiran, tightly. “I’m sorry! It’s not fair we brought her, even though she wanted to come! We should take her back!”

“And then return.”

She nodded.

I spun the boat around, too quickly, straight into a wave. It crashed over Kiran’s face, dousing her in ice water. She screamed. Then she stood up and the boat pitched and she screamed again. I did not see whether her right foot ever came down or if it was still pressed into Farhana’s leg. But I did see her left foot skid in the puddle as she lost her balance, falling backward into the side of the teetering boat. “Sit down!” I heard Farhana shout, clinging to the opposite end of the boat with both hands. It occurred to me only later that Farhana had been thinking more clearly than I. She’d tried to balance the boat. If she’d reached for the girl instead, the boat would surely have capsized. I have no recollection of what I did. None. Not until I heard Kiran hit something—perhaps her hips. And then she was in the lake.

How long before I jumped in after her?

It must be that not even a second passed. Because I had no time to blink or even breathe after I heard the splash and the kick and the
shriek that started as a piercing whistle but ended as a dull rattle; I heard it, again and again—how did I hear it, if I wasn’t in the water too? Was it coming from me?

Then I heard myself shout—and this time, I knew it was me—”
It’s freezing
!” And then time could not move fast enough. A fist curled around my spine and squeezed, a cold wet eel crushing my lungs, my limbs. My shoulders contorted, my muscles screamed, all of me convulsed. I could feel the feeling bleed from me as I became dead weight, plunging vertically to the bottom of the lake. When the pain in my legs returned, it was killing me.
It will kill me
. That damn eel was shooting electric currents deep into my veins.

“Kick!” I yelled, and this time I swallowed the lake.

“Kick!”

Surfacing at last, I spat into the air.

I moved rapidly now. I moved without thinking where I was going, all I knew was that I had to keep moving. When I looked around me, the boat was very far away. I could not see inside it. I did not know if Farhana had jumped or stayed. I could see no one in the water. I began to kick toward the boat.

No one. I shut my eyes and dived.

I opened my eyes and saw a downpour of silt. How did the water appear clear from above? How could it reflect us so sweetly when filthy inside? I surfaced. Blinked. Dived again. Again an avalanche of debris, falling softly all around, and then a fish—large, too large. I surfaced. “Farhana!” I dived again. I could now touch the bottom of the boat. I circled the boat. More fish. White, with yellow eyes. Orbiting me as I orbited them. We’d eaten trout every night since arriving in Kaghan but none had looked like this. Curious without a care. Their cold engagement ignited in me a panic of a familiar kind, unrelated to the likelihood of drowning. That was knowing what might be. The panic now creeping under my skin was the panic of not knowing. It was the panic of walking home in the dark with my jacket held out as a flag of peace to anyone, from anywhere.

I must have circled the boat four times before I heard a keening from above. I pressed my palm to the wood and for a moment, it was as if the boat were weeping. I could comfort her simply by placing my hands here, there. I could wrap myself around her, or, if her girth were too wide, I could receive her embrace of me. And so I did, as yet another form of panic seized me. This was the panic of knowing what might be. Now it was land that frightened me.