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Marwa opens her eyes.
It has been dark for so long, an endless dreaming darkness, that she feels blinded by the dazzling lights blazing in this room. The furniture is strange and the walls are strange and she’s certain she’s never been in this room before.
She’s at the back of a crowd, all of whom she knows: her fellow wives, bickering amongst themselves as usual. She has always tried to keep to herself.
Apparently, that would not be an option.
Marwa hangs back as the crowd of them surges forward, shouting in Farsi at a man she cannot quite make out. The room empties and she is alone again momentarily. Then she feels a set of eyes upon her.
A dark-skinned man with glasses and a too-big coat stands silently in the doorway.
“Do you know where you are?” He asks softly in her native language.
“No,” she replies. Her throat is rusty from disuse.
“What is your name?” He asks gently.
“Marwa,” she says. Her own name feels foreign in her mouth.
***
She shares a room in the attic of the house. There is a boy with kind brown eyes that brings them food and clothing and seems frazzled but never shouts at them. There are other voices in the house, but Marwa has not ventured out of the attic yet.
Every day, fewer of the wives return to this dusty room. The ones that do chatter for hours, doze a little, wake when the houseboy comes in with food. They are summoned, one by one, by the husband that Marwa only vaguely remembers.
Every day, more comes back to her memory: sand dunes and palm trees, the soaring palaces and her own bedroom stuffed with books and her astronomy equipment, scrolls of knowledge and the most sumptuous silks and velvets. The sparkle of millions of stars in the ink-blue desert sky at midnight, as she tracked the progress of the planets over her head.
One day, there are no other wives left. Marwa rests on a narrow bunk bed by herself in the dusty attic room. She is alone. The feeling is familiar, comfortable.
“Marwa,” says a familiar voice. “My beloved wife.”
She sits up. She’s still wearing her wedding dress, the clothing she arrived here in. It smells musty, like a tomb might. The mirrors and beading of her gown reflect the blazing candlelight.
She turns to look through the doorway. Her husband is standing there, dark hair and dark eyes and so tall and broad just as he was the last time she saw him. But he was lost in battle, wasn’t he? Hasn’t he been gone for years?
“Husband,” she replies faintly.
Nandor says something to her which she does not understand. She looks at him blankly. He glanced over to the dark-skinned man and makes a request.
The dark-skinned man clicks his pen once.
“This is the one,” he says to the dark-skinned man, smiling with pleasure. The words are still unfamiliar but she knows the meaning. “I remember. This is her.”
“Where are we?” She says, and the words that she speaks are not the tongue of her beloved Al Qolnidar but they make sense to her all the same.
“We are in my house,” he answers. “Our house. I have brought you here to be with me again, Marwa. Are you happy?”
“Yes, husband,” she says. Yes has always been the safest answer with Nandor.
The dark-skinned man meets her eyes before looking away.
Nandor gestures to the people holding the large black device up to her face. “Talk to the cameraman,” he instructs. Marwa looks at them blankly. She can see her own face reflected back at her in the glass of the device.
“Tell me about yourself,” the man encourages her.
Hesitantly, she begins to speak; she quickly warms up, her voice strengthening as she tells him all of the things she loves: math, and science, and the stars. The path of the planets. The rings of Saturn.
Behind her, Nandor whispers something to the quiet man with the oversized coat. He moves his hands in a sinuous curve. The djinn, she remembers Guillermo saying. That is the djinn. The one who brought me back.
The djinn clicks his pen.
Marwa feels nothing. Maybe there’s nothing to feel.
***
The wedding is fast approaching and Nandor does not want her input. He seems tense and on edge, moreso than she remembers him being. She asks for pink and white flowers. Much later, Guillermo regretfully tells her no.
Guillermo is usually the one delivering bad news, she’s noticed.
She steels herself to ask Nandor for her parents to attend. He insists that they are dead. However, since she herself was dead only a few days ago, this seems like little impediment. She watches him sigh and roll his eyes at the dark-skinned man who seems to follow Nandor like a shadow. He tells her he will see what he can do.
She smiles sweetly at him, before turning away, her face dropping. Surely she’s not making a mistake. She’s been married to him before, after all.
She walks through the house and stops suddenly at the sight of her parents, confused and dusty, standing in the foyer. She greets them with delight, embracing them, and her Baba asks where her idiot husband is. She feels guilt curl in the pit of her stomach.
“Are you sure you want to marry him again, my daughter?” Her mother asks, concerned. “I remember you were so lonely.”
“I -” Marwa hesitates. “It will be different now.”
“How will it be different?” Her father demands. “He is the same idiot, yes? So it will be all the same again.”
“This time, I am the only one,” she says quietly. Her parents process this, and then her father sighs.
“You know we would do anything to see you happy, Marwa,” he says gently. “And you were not happy before. You blossomed after he disappeared. Why would you want to marry him again, now that he is restored?”
“I feel as though -” she hesitates. “I feel as though I do not have a choice,” she says quietly. “I have had some doubts, but now - now I know that it is what I want the most in the world.”
“Only if you’re certain, my darling,” Marwa’s mother urges.
“I am certain,” Marwa says firmly. “I feel completely certain.”
***
On her wedding day, Nandor presents Marwa with a gold gown and a bouquet of black and red roses.
She feels a slight pang of disappointment.
“Aren’t they lovely?” Nandor says enthusiastically.
“Yes,” she says, and they are. “They are lovely.”
Marwa walks down the aisle on the arm of her baba. She doesn’t recognize anyone in the room besides Nandor, Guillermo, and the two other vampires who live in the house. But that’s all right. Nandor is beaming enough to make up for it. Marwa beams back.
But there’s always a hitch in the plans, it feels like. Because Marwa’s mother objects; “it’s not natural,” she insists.
“Mother,” Marwa says resolutely. “This is what I want!”
“Well, I can’t just not say anything!” her mother says, defeated, lifting up her hands and sinking back into her chair.
But her mother has opened a floodgate of dissent: everyone, it appears, has a reason for her not to marry Nandor. And she hears them, she does. It’s just - every single objection seems to ripple and then slide off of her, discarded, to the floor.
The djinn holds her gaze steadily throughout the litany of criticism. He is a solid, safe face in a sea of strangers.
Nandor finally loses his patience; he swears at the guests, eyes blazing with anger. Marwa finds herself standing too, reaching out, taking the microphone from him (the cameraman - he has microphones too. Marwa is a quick learner).
“I have had my doubts about this marriage as well,” she says into the microphone, her voice echoing around the high-ceilinged room. “I almost called it off, more than once. But then yesterday, a feeling came over me, and I realized that, if this is what Nandor wants...then it is what I want, also. ‘Cause, when it comes to Nandor: I like what he likes!”
And it feels good to say it. But her eyes catch the djinn’s again, and he looks troubled. His dark eyes do not leave hers, not for the rest of the ceremony.
Later, at the reception, Nandor leans close to her. “Marwa, I must ask - when did this realization come over you, that whatever I like, you like also?”
“Yesterday evening,” she says with a smile, laying her hand on his richly-embroidered sleeve.
“Was it early evening, or late?” Nandor asks, brows furrowed.
“Late evening,” she answers confidently. His eyes are troubled, and he looks away.
“Thank you,” he says quietly.
***
The reception drags on, and Marwa feels an undeniable pull towards the table where Guillermo sits, alone. It takes her some time to excuse herself from the dancing and the small talk but eventually she slides into the chair next to him, touching his cheek. She says his name lightly, teasingly. He looks at her and smiles but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Marwa,” his voice all soft. “You look beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she says, pleased deeply that this gentle man would compliment her looks. “You have done such a wonderful job tonight, Guillermo,” she continues, patting his cheek. He blushes and declaims, but she needs him to know she appreciates it, she appreciates him.
A warm spark in her stomach burns for this soft, eager little man. It wasn’t there before. It threatens to consume her as those coffee-dark eyes gaze fondly at her.
“I don’t know what I would do without you,” she says, and it’s her voice but those words don’t belong to her. She surges forward to embrace him, to kiss him, but he turns his lips away from hers so she catches his cheek instead. She feels the irrepressible urge to kiss him again, and again, to feel those soft cheeks, to smell the crisp, floral scent of him. She rubs her nose against his face, like a cat might.
“Wow,” he says quietly, and she knows he’s stiff in her arms, but she can’t let go. Her arms are not her own.
***
Nadja and Laszlo close out the reception by singing a raunchy song. She expects her parents to be appalled but they’re drunk enough on the very good champagne (thank you, Guillermo) that they’re enjoying themselves. In fact, everyone is enjoying themselves - except Nandor. His face is creased in a frown and he leaves the reception before anyone else.
***
A few days after the wedding, Nandor announces that he’ll be leaving for the weekend on a trip with Laszlo and their human friend. Marwa is disappointed; Nandor has been avoiding her since the wedding. He has not even asked her to move into his room with her.
It is not the same Nandor she was married to before.
Nadja appears in the attic with her little doll and the blonde-haired Guide, and she makes a face to find Marwa present. But she seems to make up her mind suddenly and she embraces Marwa, shouting “Girls’ night!”
And Marwa has not had girlfriends in ages, so. What’s the worst that can happen?
Nadja sings and they dance and laugh and it’s so warm, so freeing, that Marwa almost wants to cry. Then Nadja puts a tape into the television set (the television set is magical) and there is even more singing and dancing. It’s the story of a girl called Sophie and her mother and three men who might be her father, or might not be. Sophie is getting married, and she wants her baba to attend.
A girl after her own heart.
Nadja leaves for another glass of blood, but she doesn’t ask them to pause the film.
The women in the movie sing and clutch each other. They are safe. They are respected.
Sophie gets to say no.
And Marwa - she wanted to, she remembers wanting to and then, suddenly, not. Suddenly the wedding was as important as anything that had ever happened to her.
But Sophie changes her mind. Could Marwa change her mind?
Because since the wedding, Nandor has begun to chafe. There is resentment, and there is disinterest, and worst of all: Marwa is beginning to suspect that, actually, her world could be bigger than this gloomy old house on Staten Island.
And she thinks, maybe, Nandor is feeling the same icy grip: that they are not right for each other. That nothing, actually, about this situation is right.
***
Marwa is not the only discontented creature in this house.
She can feel it in all of them: in Lazslo’s almost manic need to redecorate; in Guillermo’s secretive, furtive smiles at his phone; in Nadja’s all-consuming obsession about the club. Only Nandor seems restless, unable to settle into anything. He sits in a chair only to stand up again, instantly.
Marwa finds herself nodding along to everything Nandor says: that sometimes, things get stale. Sometimes, we need a space for ourselves.
Maybe I can carve out a space of my own, Marwa thinks.
When you’re one of thirty-seven spouses, it’s easy to be overlooked. Nandor isn’t out of the habit yet, either; perhaps centuries alone have left him a little inconsiderate, a little absent.
So when the idea of the man cave is pitched, she’s humming with excitement. This, this is it. A place for only one person. She can make it hers.
Because really, she can’t stand the sight of Nandor’s face all hours of the night anymore.
She works for hours, stopping only briefly to eat a plate of food Guillermo brings to her - Nandor does not think about Marwa’s human needs. She snatches a few hours’ sleep on the floor of the future man cave, the attic where she was so briefly reunited with her sisters and brothers in law.
When the room is finished, she looks around, swelling with pride. This room, this is hers. Something real, that she made with her own two hands.
Nandor comes in with the host of the renovation show, that man who doesn’t smell quite human. He’s gloating over how much he loves the room, and Marwa feels a wave of possessiveness wash over her. When he tries to sit on her beanbag, she intercepts him. And when Nandor, the idiot - just like her father warned her - agrees to inspect the lock on the door, she easily turns the bolt, keeping this room all to herself.
***
Everything starts falling apart all at once.
Guillermo is giddy with delight over a secret he’s keeping. She suspects it has something to do with the voice from his mobile phone, but he just blushes and grins and then changes the subject if anyone asks him.
She can feel it on the edges of herself: a little tug, a jealous pull towards Guillermo that she’s felt before but never named. She finds herself drawn to him, watches from the shadows as he puts his arms around a tall, white man; watches Nandor watching Guillermo, too.
And then there’s another sort of wanting, the man himself: he’s tall and gangly and doesn’t make a lot of noise. She studies him, feels Nandor studying him, yearns to know all the angles of his face.
She cannot sleep that night. She paces her attic room, lays and stares at the ceiling. When the sun rises and she walks unsteadily downstairs for a cup of coffee, she hears Nandor pacing in his bedroom, too.
They sit beside each other the next evening, barely speaking. She feels Nandor’s discontent rolling off of him in waves; feels them sweeping into her own heart. The chair is uncomfortable, but she asks Nandor how he feels. She doesn’t care.
Fuck, he’s boring.
Nandor’s mind is elsewhere, and so is Marwa’s. Freddie, Freddie, Freddie. There’s a ghost of a hand on her arm.
“Excuse me for a moment,” Nandor says politely.
Marwa’s head begins to pound to the rhythm of Freddie, Freddie, Freddie.
The room is growing dark but the candles are still burning. The light hurts her eyes.
Her brown eyes turn blue and her head swims and then everything goes blurry and then everything goes dark.
***
Marwa sits quietly in a corner of her brain.
There’s another person here in her body with her, he’s taking up too much room and blotting out almost everything that was hers; but some tenacious little spark holds on tightly, digs in its claws. Marwa holds on for dear life.
She can see Nandor and the way he smiles at Marwa inside of Freddie. She is nothing but an echo.
“Hello, nice to meet you,” the mouth that once was hers is saying. The hand that used to be hers shakes Nandor’s, familiar but muffled, like she’s underwater.
Nandor takes Freddie out into the city, where he never took Marwa. Freddie’s fingers grip a pen, write a list of all the things he wants to do. Nandor takes him to do all of them. He’s kind and open in a way that Marwa has never seen. Not in this life, nor in her lifetime before. Nandor’s arms around Freddie are warm and solid and real in a way Marwa has never felt, exuberance and gratitude and lust roiling in her own brain as it roils in Nandor’s, the scent of Freddie’s human skin heady in her nostrils, heavy on his tongue.
Nandor takes Freddie home and wraps him up, pressing down with so much fondness and desire that Marwa thinks she will be pushed right out of her own head. Nandor’s touch is firm and certain and burns on the skin that belongs to Freddie now. The softness of Nandor’s beard is not hers to feel first; it’s filtered through Freddie, his hazy passion, his throbbing heart. None of it is hers. None of it was ever hers.
Then she hears another voice that makes her shared heart pound faster: soft and gentle and then stunned and angry and devastated all at once. Guillermo. She looks out of borrowed eyes at his round face falling in disbelief as he looks at Nandor loving Freddie. He doesn’t see Marwa. Marwa is a shadow on the wall of her own body.
“This is my own Freddie,” Nandor says with deep satisfaction, the friction of their bare skin distracting Marwa even as she longs to reach out and hold Guillermo, wipe the look of blank horror from his dear face. He did it to me too. He did it to me too.
But Guillermo doesn’t see her, can’t see anything but Nandor’s betrayal, and the pain and the triumph and the fucking glee on her husband’s smug face is so much it threatens to bring vomit up in Marwa’s throat but Freddie’s stomach is made of stronger stuff.
And then she hears it, at the same time that Guillermo hears it: I had the djinn turn Marwa into a carbon copy of your Freddie. Don’t be upset about it, you should be flattered!
Guillermo’s face is still twisted in a mix of emotions that Marwa can feel too. And then the Other Freddie comes into the room, the whole twisted tableau is completed, and Marwa is watching from the sidelines, a fifth wheel in her own life. Her accidental second life that she never should have gotten, never wanted, doesn’t deserve.
Her Freddie screams. The Other Freddie screams, too. Marwa could scream, but what's the point? No one will hear her. No one will care.
***
Nandor speaks to Her Freddie in a soft, soothing voice. He says the same words again to the Other Freddie.
The hypnosis doesn’t work on Marwa because even Nandor can’t see that she’s still here.
And Guillermo tries, he tries so hard, but he cannot bear it and neither can Marwa and neither, she suspects, can either Freddie. Even under the hypnosis she feels the ripple of horror from the other mind.
Guillermo finally snaps, she sees it in his eyes the moment that it happens, even if neither Freddie or Nandor notice. He exchanges low, hissing words with Nandor and then he and the Other Freddie are gone into the night. Nandor looks crestfallen and confused but she can feel the tickle of guilt in his mind, in her mind.
Her awareness of the Other Freddie grows and grows even as the pain washing over Guillermo and the guilt growing in Nandor war for her attention. The appeal of him is foreign to her, but familiar, comforting and easy - so much easier than loving Nandor, or Guillermo, or her parents or even loving herself. Freddie is simple. Freddie is sincere. Other Freddie, Her Freddie, they’re drawn to each other and Marwa is just along for the ride.
Nandor, as usual, makes things worse: he pushes Marwa and Freddie into Guillermo’s room, a misguided gesture of apology that really just emphasizes Nandor’s ownership of this entire clusterfuck. As if people could ever own other people. But for Nandor, it’s the only thing that makes sense. She can feel it. Guillermo wants Freddie; I have A Freddie; I’ll give him My Freddie and everything will be fine.
Apparently, neither Freddie nor Marwa ever meant that much to him. And if Guillermo ever did, well, Nandor doesn’t seem to realize that he’s losing all three of them.
But Marwa feels it, as she’s offered up alongside Her Freddie to the grieving little familiar who has always been so kind - as if Freddie, and her, are no more than a jacket Guillermo might want to borrow, try on for size.
It’s not so easy to make things right. Guillermo does not accept the apology.
Neither does Marwa.
***
She stands on a platform alongside a train. Her body is strange, pale and gangly still, but she can feel herself just under this foreign skin.
“I must set you free,” Nandor says, tucking a ticket into her breast pocket. “But I’ll leave you as Freddie. You seem so much happier in this form.”
No, no, no: Marwa and Freddie both scream but their mouth does not know which brain to listen to and instead keeps quiet.
Nandor deposits Her Freddie on a train like so much luggage, careless of its final destination. As soon as he walks out of the station, he’ll forget all about this. He’ll consider it over, done, finished. Guillermo can be happy now.
Marwa and Freddie? Well, they’re a distant memory.
Her Freddie loves to travel, and Marwa is curious. Staten Island is too small for both of them, after all. And if she has to stay with this man who came into her life so suddenly, and violently, well - he never asked for her, either.
All they can do is their best.
Even as she thinks it, she feels Her Freddie sigh. Defeat, sadness, resignation.
Marwa feels only a great courage blooming inside of her shadowy chest.
***
Her Freddie, it turns out, never wanted to see the world. He only wanted to find his other half.
He tangles around the Other Freddie, wraps tight with the original version of himself, tries to press themselves together with mouth and tongue and body.
Marwa watches passively, knowing she is stronger. Older. Wiser. Patient, the way a woman must be patient to survive a world designed to diminish her. A woman who charted planets, but is made small by her sex. Even now, a man has made her choice for her. Well, not anymore.
That world is gone. Marwa will make another.
Her body is changing. The man she shares with is growing fainter. The insistent pull towards the Other Freddie diminishes each time they kiss. One day, when their lips part, Marwa sees his eyes looking back with confusion.
She looks down at her hands: small, brown, familiar hands.
Her body is her own again.
The Other Freddie looks shaken and swollen, twice as big, inflamed. The copy of Freddie who shared her body is under the Other’s skin, now.
The Other takes a step back, and another, and then turns on his heel and runs.
***
Marwa walks through the open-air market. It reminds her of Al Qolnidar in some ways. The chatter of the Parisians around her and the roaring engines of cars passing by remind her that her homeland is eons out of reach. But she’s seeing the world, like she always wanted to.
She stops in front of her flat. It’s small but neat, just like her. It’s filled with things she has bought herself, things that she loves: books and a telescope and pretty tea cups, food she cooks for herself instead of eating, cold and congealed, from a takeaway carton. Choices she makes as Marwa, just Marwa, with no one wishing for her to be anything other than what she is.
She does not feel any of them anymore. She is alone in her own head. It’s just big enough for her and her own dreams.
There is a dark-skinned man in a too-big coat sitting on her stoop. He looks up at her, a shock of black curls falling in front of his eyes. He removes his glasses. He looks diminished, but somehow more real than he did before. He is lighter.
“You are here,” she says quietly. “I did not think you could leave the house.”
The djinn nods. “You are correct. I was a prisoner, too.”
“So now we are both free?”
“Yes, Marwa. Now we are both free.”
“What was Nandor’s final wish?”
“Do you wish to know?” He smiles, half-sad and half-teasing, and she shakes her head, smiling too. A real smile, not forced on her by someone else’s will. A smile that is her own.
“No,” she says firmly. “No, I don’t want to wish anything.”
He regards her with dark eyes, and she shifts her weight, moving her produce bag from one shoulder to the other. He offers to hold it for her, carry it upstairs. She declines.
She does things for herself, these days.
Something in his eyes, though, calls to her. There is more to him. There is more to her.
Doesn’t everyone deserve a chance to live outside the walls others build for them?
Shyly, she gestures at the flat behind her. “Would you…would you like to come in?”
“Yes,” he answers. “I think I would.”
Without hesitation, he stands up, and walks inside.
Marwa closes the door.