But there were also so many people between us, with no purpose but to watch us and impose their strange world on us, with its ways, words, habits, and pretenses; they pulled us into their coffeehouses and gatherings, and we lived in constant resistance. Between you and me, Ali, were your eyes, which I have run out of metaphors to describe. There was everything between us, but it all existed in a very tight space. There were no gaps or emptiness. Nowhere to move. We were held closely together by a strong glue that we had discovered and decided together to use, even while we knew that removing it would be painful as hell. Pain is a generic word, meaningless unless you’ve lived it. Pain was nothing compared to what we put each other through.
I could not compare this with what I had with Zayn: he was a safe haven. When I rested my head on Zayn’s thigh, the world slowed down around me. That was a time before this smell of decay started to appear in my kitchen. These days I find strange things. There’s a tiny spider that has made its home in my kitchen, so tiny that if I blink it disappears, only to reappear a few days later from behind the fridge. Now, the smell in my kitchen comes and goes. I look for its source, to no avail. Sometimes I find a moldy tomato or something left in a corner, but other times I find nothing at all, just the smell. Ali can’t smell it. I’ve used all types of cleaners and disinfectants. Two or three times I saw a big cockroach crawling slowly and confidently across the kitchen’s threshold. The last of those times, Ali was there and it made him jump, but then he killed it and threw it in the toilet. I looked at the dead cockroach and couldn’t think where it could have come from. I live on a high floor in a tall building and there are no openings through which a cockroach could have crawled into my apartment.
In Zayn’s days, there was just peace and poetry and our walks hand in hand in the streets of Downtown. I clung to Zayn. Now Ali was clinging to my clothes and waiting to get bored.
24
I Skyped with Radwa and told her what was happening. She told me that Ali was a child and that he would break my heart. I told her I knew. I could predict all of Ali’s actions and was waiting for the day of the final heartbreak. I told her that I didn’t know if I was happy or miserable. I just knew that I saw Ali’s eyes everywhere—in the bathroom mirror while brushing my teeth, at the door. At every turn, his magic eyes were watching me go through my day. I remembered Zayn and cried a little. Radwa got upset and told me that I had become soft, not as strong as I used to be. “Where’s the Nadia I know who used to simply shoo away half-men? He’s not a full man, Nadia. Forget about him and take a breath. You got yourself into a difficult tangle. You know what? Just say bye. You know how to say bye?”
I laughed, feeling somewhat choked. “No, I can’t say bye. I’ll wait until he says it.”
“Suit yourself,” she said angrily. “Just keep torturing yourself until a vein pops out.”
Radwa didn’t know, when she used that expression, that I would wake up a couple of months after that chat with a strange bulge in my neck. When I looked in the mirror, there was a big, bulging, blood-red vein in my neck. I touched it and murmured to myself, “Careful what you wish for, dear Radwa.”
Some days I woke up and found myself completely alone. Radwa was on the other side of the globe. Ali was never there in the first place. My mother was dead, but she too was never really there. Like Ali, her presence always crushed my own, but she only ever existed in a parallel universe.
My father. I would go to my father. On dark mornings like this, I went to my father. I called him.
“Good morning.”
“What’s wrong with your voice, Nadia?”
“Nothing. Just feeling glum. Do you want to get lunch?”
“OK. Come on by, and let’s have lunch here in Heliopolis.”
“Cool. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. I’ll get ready now, then be on my way.”
I hung up, feeling that I still had someone to talk to or even sit quietly with.
I got dressed and took a taxi, and watched the road all the way as was my habit. We crossed the traffic-laden flyover. Warda sang on the radio.
As much
My love
As the many dark beautiful eyes in our land
I love you
Endless billboards—ghee, underwear, fashions for veiled women, ice cream. Warda sang on.
Neither time
Nor place
Could put our love in the past
Every night that passed without you near me
My soul, my eyes
We were finally close. So much had changed in Heliopolis. New Kamal, where we used to eat fruit salad when we were kids, had turned into a big shop for mobile-phone accessories. The stationery shop where I used to get the things I needed for school was now a fish seller’s.
As much as all that’s been ever said
Of love or patience
I love you
Years I spent awake
Singing your love
I got out of the taxi in front of the house and stood for a few minutes outside the big front garden. I didn’t want
