Lailan in the hall. Olivia sees her through the threshold, lying on her back on the floor as if forbidden from getting closer, a pillow beneath her head and her doll in hand. She lifts the doll above her, twisting it as if it’s flying. Olivia watches the doll’s hair trail in a lazy arc, blonde and long like corn silk.
105.1. Soran is back and says this number as if it should mean something to her. “We cannot take you to the hospital,” he says. “You would only get worse.” The thermometer is then in a strange man’s hand, someone who’s appeared with a suit and a checked shirt that also has a pen wedged in its pocket, and she sees the meaning of those numbers like a shadow, here one second and gone the next.
“It’s almost over,” the man says.
“What?” she asks him. Or she thinks she asks him. “What’s almost over?”
But then the man is gone, and Soran is in the chair. Through the open window, she hears the calls of the chukar birds outside, laughing in the face of her inquiry.
Nomads and goats whose milk becomes cheese and is sold all over the region. A citadel that is more than six thousand years old. Chewing the gum from trees. The special dish they make called Saro Pè, which Soran tells her means head and legs. Working construction on dams for foreign companies. “In one day, I made fifteen to twenty dinar. A teacher only made forty a month.” She catches him looking down the hall, toward Delan’s room, and realizes even through her fog of sick that Soran needs to be in here with her as much as she needs him. “Keep going, please,” she says, because now she needs his voice to remind her she is here and not alone, and so he continues, telling her about women who circle around piles of yellow grapes, turning them to raisins.
Then it’s Delan who is there, right next to her, the chair dragged against the bed, a window open to the sound of rain, heavy drops hitting leaves.
“There was a man,” he says. “He had one arm. Born with one arm. Horrible already, his story, to be born with one arm. And they hung him by that arm. Till he told them what they wanted to hear, till he gave them information. But he must have not known what they wanted, because that arm came out.”
A man who lost his tongue, the tongue shown to others. Ears cut from heads. She listens to him talk and is not sure what she’s hearing. A confession or a delusion. Her eyes are closed. He must think she’s asleep. Images dart in her mind, visions of taffeta and birds on wires and beautiful blonde hair and blood that runs pink in the rain. Maybe she is asleep. At times his voice does not sound like his, just quiet, hypnotic murmurings. Maybe none of it is real.
And you, Liv. I thought of you. All that you should have and none of it is this. Selfish. I was selfish to think it could be me. Liv, I don’t have my toenails. They took my toenails. And the screams began to sound like silence.
The fever breaks with a pummel. Punishing and then gone. When she returns to herself, he is there, in a chair by the window. The curls of his hair knotted in the light. He tells her she was very sick for four days.
“Only four days?”
“You wanted more?”
“It seemed a lifetime. But I should be taking care of you,” she adds, though now she is unsure of what was real. She doesn’t know how to ask him and only looks to his feet. He’s wearing socks, when usually he does not.
“No. No. You’re the one who almost died,” he says, standing. “A sheep. Lailan says you petted a sheep. The doctor said that might have been it—they’re not clean. You and your love of animals. I should’ve warned you. And Lailan, speaking of her, she’s glued flat pebbles to her shoes to try and tap dance. She’s going to hurt herself, and she’s loud. But me, I’m fine.”
And though she lets him say it, she sees the way his hand holds the back of the chair, as if letting go is a risk he cannot take.
The wind in the trees sounds like the ocean, and blossoms tear from branches, petals on the path like confetti. Later that morning, they walk in the garden, and she finds herself saying “mmm” in reaction to anything, as if even small ideas have taste. There is a distance between them. Something has changed. Of course what he went through would change a person, there is no doubt, and she wants to lash the stupid girl within her for expecting anything different, for being impatient, for being hopeful that him returned was all that mattered and wanting nothing more than to wrap her arms around him and stand in the sun.
Normal, she tells herself. It’s normal for him to be different—as much as anything can be normal with what just happened. But in her mind, there is also a stirring of his quiet murmuring at her bedside and a pull of something that had to do with her. Just the thought brings back the feeling of being sick. A weighted, sludgy feeling. And so she fills her mind with other things. The wedding the next day. Her dress that Soran picked up for
