Work Text:
Zero
A person crawls ant-like across the desert.
In the Al-Ahsa Oasis, millions of date palms surge and leap, spreading out endlessly. A rope is lowered into the mouth of a vertical well. Rest now, life: the desert dried out for two thousand years, the date palms dried out, the living dried out.
Father began to cough, with a shuddering violence, suppressing the last force of some primeval fracture passing through the stones before an earthquake. Dust rolled in the heaving sunlight, sinking in stages, falling back beneath the world to which it had once belonged.
“Come on! Come on!”
Beyond the courtyard wall, the sky was high and remote. Her little sister’s flying braids appeared and vanished as she jumped. Behind them, from the dressing room, there drifted the fine thread of Mother’s favourite perfume: a single strand, or something like a golden hair, stringing together one small fantasy — a girl’s fantasy, a daughter’s fantasy.
There had been enough time for quarrels, for loving one another, for harmony and anger. Yet only when one looked back did one realise that almost no evidence remained with which to mourn. Father began to cough again, violently, and with a start she realised that the afternoon bell for the delivery of books and newspapers meant two-thirds of the day had already passed. After sunset, in the cold night of Saudi Arabia, sweat broke out all over her.
“Mama, Mama! Come here! Come here!”
The fur collar nestled against her neck, holding up a tender, flushed little face.
I. Scattering
Not happiness, but sorrow. Not tranquillity, but pain. To break free from the “Kingdom of Black Gold” — on a winter night in 1996, fireworks rose joyfully into the air. Above them, the universe was lucid and pure; below them, the crowd laughed. It was a night devoted to the pursuit of happiness and peace.
There was no need to go far. It was right there, inside happiness itself. The sweet smell of toasted bread and sausages wrapped around the city, a city flushed with celebration because one person had succeeded. Celebration was the theme of the night. The protagonist made her gradual entrance: behind her stood an immense team, a vast collective force; what stepped onto the stage was only a small, condensed portion of it.
She was a blonde goddess born out of The Iliad,² singing of Achilles³ as he burned himself to destruction in the flames of wrath; a goddess who, with acrid elegance, mocked the heroic disregard for human life. She never made a point of showing herself off, and yet desire filled her at every moment. Like any human being, her bowl-shaped irises reflected the clean blue of the sky.
The sky is blue because sunlight meets millions upon millions of molecules, scattering again and again, parting and reuniting. Suddenly Huma’s heart swelled like a balloon being blown full. I am one of those millions. Those blue eyes really had passed through the crowd and fixed upon her face. And that dry, firm hand had, in that instant, taken hers.
So I had already reached out my hand.
So it was like an explosion.
This was our first meeting — or perhaps, in a world composed of layered probabilities, one reunion already verified ten million times over.
Many years later, when the blonde goddess looked down upon the mortal world, a strange fantasy suddenly enveloped her thoughts. The girl — the girl. Was she, somewhere in some corner of the vast Asian continent, riding a horse with her hair in disarray, whistling wantonly as she wandered to the ends of the earth? Did she sometimes tighten her cloak around herself, the hood there only to shield her from the too-burning sun?
Not in a courtyard. Not wrapped in carved villas and synthetic lace. Huma would be living proudly and freely, as though she were both master of all things and child of all things, roaming through a world of desert, springs, and little meerkats.
In that case, perhaps they would never have met.
But only in the heart of America — and in a certain sense, the heart of the world — ten years later, twenty years later, thirty years later, the goddess would bring her daughters to the Taj Mahal. On the ivory-white steps, a girl with curling ornamentation would be leaning there. Wars would have receded into the distance. In a world without dispute, they would meet as a warm southern breeze meets a jasmine flower.
Mother.
Mother.
Water split the air into two halves. One rose and became sky; the other descended, lingered, and could not escape — either to die, or to enter the cycle of rebirth.
II. Water
She was certain she was inside a dream, dragged down by an irresistible drowsiness into the abyss of the void. In restaurants and ballrooms where the lighting was ambiguous, the dream pushed her, as if in enchantment, round and round over blue-grey sandstone.
Muslim: المسلم, “one who submits”.
Khattab⁴ was not “one who submits”. Yet he was a Muslim.
Huma had nowhere to ask that question. By the time the Chechen war broke out, the father who had first brought faith into her heart and her life had already gone to Heaven, serving long and loyally at Allah’s side. To make a living in this world — chaotic as a smoke grenade, full of danger and yet full of hope — and to seek one clean place for the soul became a lesson a daughter had to face alone.
In this world of mutual attacks, a world that had collapsed in its sense of close intimacy, when the veil was laid over the face, the heart was covered with it. As if an iron bucket had been clamped down over her, leaving only permission to survive, there opened before her a strange, blurred territory of the unknown, where the right to explore had been excessively stripped away. Compared with the Saudi Arabia of her childhood, when she sat in a dim room and peered out at the wildness beyond the window, the moment Anthony bent to kiss her, his shadow falling over her body, she felt, astonishingly, a belated satisfaction.
Then they married.
Whose will had they obeyed? God’s, or Allah’s?
This man who kissed her, who tried to explain sex through “possession”, trailed a long tail behind him. Like something hunting prey, he waited for one weak little creature to fall behind. Wet and sticky, his hand closed round hers; a ring slid onto her finger — a trap.
In smiling dizziness, Huma paused, briefly.
The wedding dress, and the white flowers; the hymns rose just like that. What change would tomorrow’s life bring? She heard someone call her “daughter”, and the word was a symbolic title, its face indistinct.
This was the White House, the heart of political life. Its grey zones were teasing forbidden areas; such forbidden areas were not open to her. So, forced to open her eyes, she saw her boss lower her head and wipe the corner of her eye. Short golden hair fell forward and covered her eyes. Was she crying? In a daze Huma saw her mother’s black-robed back.
A silent, sorrowing, dark family life could help her dream her way back to 1980. The tears locked inside her eye sockets fell once more across time and space. A demon sang a low requiem beside her ear: come back, come back, return to childhood, return to the source. And Abedin followed step by step.
The plane took off. Abedin remained where she was.
Anthony laughed, and the whole room burst at once into delighted noise. She began, full of warmth, to look back on the good old days. Her glass was filled with wine. Thirty years of astonishment endured in silence had given her wisdom — but a narrow, socialised wisdom, the wisdom of someone who wanted something yet did not know where to go. Her dignity was contained in it.
Hillary’s hair was golden; it was yellow; it was honey made translucent in sunlight; it was the colour of the desert; it was the colour of heaven and earth when smoke rose from the living volcano of Yellowstone. Huma could not help bending to kiss the reflection of a flowing sunset. Hillary turned, opening a pair of misty eyes, and suddenly Huma bent down again.
When people hurriedly called out to her, she merely lay down, pitching forward, then falling back.
“I was going to stand in the rain.”
Her head rested beside Hillary’s waist. One tear, round as a heavenly lake, drowned itself in the smooth silk sheets and disappeared at once.
“What?” Hillary reached out. Like a forked branch holding up an apple almost ripe, Huma’s face leaned into her hand. The hair at her temple wound like a brook over her shoulder and rolled into the deep valley of her breast. She lay on her side, and her honey-coloured skin glimmered faintly under the lamp.
“You came to hold an umbrella for me. I would have walked too slowly,” Hillary said, turning to switch off the lamp. Beyond the gauze curtain, night embraced the bedroom; silver moonlight arrived late.
“You would get wet too…” Huma propped herself up on her arms and climbed towards her, speaking softly. A grey road ran skyward with the imprint of a wheel-rut, sunset and flying car raising a burst of dust. This was New York State. Ten centimetres above Hillary’s eyes, Huma seemed to see the cool lakes of Kalamazoo and abundant pasture, cows grazing at leisure, a girl herding cattle blowing a tune on a leaf.
Hillary stroked the long hair falling over Huma’s forehead. With a drunken softness, light as pinfeathers, she said:
“Then dance for me. Dance.”
Like a small animal, Huma hesitated. Thinking, perhaps. Her eyes flickered slightly. Hillary’s gaze fell on her very lightly — on her body, her head, her face. Her profile was moonlight: silver-white, a crescent shaped like a bull’s horn, sweetly illuminating the beloved whom she carried so lightly in her heart.
As though a requiem had started beside her ear, something pushed Huma forward, and she could not help laughing.
“Sure, why not,” she said, straightening herself. “Why not?” With a free movement she tossed her long hair back. A draught came in and made her tremble faintly. Yet at this moment she was kneeling over her leader, fearless and victorious as a warrior.
She came and she went.
This sexual pollutant, this redemptive fall, disillusions human ideals and reminds us, without cease, never to forget what material we are made of.⁵
Huma wandered through the market holding her mother’s hand. On both sides of the road, the charred fragrance of flatbread, beef, and mutton made saliva flood her mouth. So much so that she forgot who was Mother, and who was I. In a wave of black, Huma was lost.
III. The Zhongshan Wolf
Hillary burst into ringing laughter, like the prow of a ship cleaving the surface of water. She was a person of iron will, miraculously detached. Her every gesture carried a clean, bracing strength. She was a crack in something old and rotten.
Huma was suffering from grave insomnia.
Fanatical, drawn-out arguments, indifferent to weather or season: the energy spent demanding the duties of wife and mother from a woman already struggling bitterly, her mind and strength exhausted.
In the next room a child cried piteously. When Huma burst in, dragging her nightdress and the sticky remains of her make-up, the nanny was already holding the infant and humming a lullaby. Huma’s sudden entrance frightened her. Huma tried to soften her steps. In this world of ultimate individualism, figures leapt before her eyes: givers of life, pillars, those who endured, the men and women who had supported Huma in her struggle to live. Step by step she approached her son. His short curly hair, his soft cheek bearing the mark of the pillow’s edge: a child as clear as window glass, far from the raging fire of quarrels, sleeping in perfect calm.
Huma had not slept properly for three or four days — she could not remember whether it was three days or four, perhaps, counting this deep night, already the fifth. The heron-like patience with which she had once prided herself on restraining all desire to disappear could hardly keep its footing in a soft, dizzy world deprived of rest.
A rush of anger surged upward. Jesus Christ, he never cared about the child, never cared! She rushed at him and seized his throat. A suffocation instead seized her. Anthony’s half-naked, slightly hairy upper body drove a fist into Huma’s face. She had watched boxing before — that was a hard punch. If it struck the eyeball, the eyeball would burst; if it struck the bridge of the nose, the bone would break.
I love you my wife is old how could I grow old with her marriage ah grave ah love ah passion ah God ah you are truly Eve in Eden how could I not be moved by you God ah God ah God ah Jesus Christ ah never mind I want to see can you take one for me of course I’ll take one for you isn’t it sexy yes the Yankee chest God ah just one look holy slut!!!!!
Love letters? Harassing messages? Pornographic transactions?
Marriage bound you. I bound you. I am the wife.
“At first, when the gentleman saved me, he bound my feet, shut me in a bag, and weighed me down with his books of poetry. I bent my body and dared not breathe. How could I not bite him?”⁷
Save me Huma I love you beyond saving — back then you trapped my feet with vows, bound my body with marriage, made me lose passion, buried ambition! How could I not...
Huma felt a fatigue like post-war syndrome. God, Allah, Mama, Father, Heaven and Earth! Just agree with me for one minute!
Caffeine announced itself extravagantly, forcing its way through the crowd, one hand gripping her cranial nerves, the other her duodenum. Twist! Huma, a wet towel, twist! She vomited with a rush, unable to reach the toilet or the sink. Vomit charged out of her throat, half-dissolved sleeping pills inside it, their corpses still present, the rotten fluid exceptionally bitter.
“Madam! Ma’am — Miss Huma...”
My daughter, I hope you will be happy. Her mother had said it with joy at the wedding. Hillary had said it too.
“I believe him.” Yellow race? Or a sallow face? Reporters closed around her. The speech spun once upon her tongue. Suddenly, in Huma’s mind, fragments of the banquet flickered like slides: a host with a huge mouth telling jokes savagely, drinking; and she herself like a playing card, spinning towards a gambling table upon which hope was imposed, yet which had nothing to do with her.
Play card.
Huma, Huma.
You have won: one diamond ring, one husband. We wish you good luck and prosperity!
Do you take him, in sickness and in health, in old age and in death, to the ends of the earth?
“My — my family needs him. I believe him.” Huma was almost sick. She had fallen countless times.
Flash grenades and flashbulbs have the same mother. Huma began to fight. No one was her enemy. Anthony lowered his head obediently, upper lip covering lower lip, his eyes sinking downward.
I have never had a marriage. As for men, neither.
I believe him.
But at least you shouldn’t...
I believe him.
But obsession is an excessive focus on what one does not possess, and blindness to what one already has.
This time Huma had time to rush into the washroom. Perhaps I am exactly a river of India — the Ganges, drifting with corpses, torn clothes, heavy-metal pollutants. My mission is to settle, to purify, to carry them away. When everything flows through my life, then I may say that I exist. Huma thought of the Saudi Arabia of her childhood. It had not changed much from now. Women could not show their faces in full. At least I do not have to swallow vomit, to let it clog my nasal cavity. This land has sent away ten thousand Muhammads. In the dream Huma turned back violently, and Anthony Weiner’s face overlapped gently with her father’s. He kissed her and said: you’re so beautiful, baby girl, the young New York City councillor — when I became a councillor you were only sixteen!
Sixteen. Huma Abedin was still far away in Saudi Arabia, dreaming overlapping dreams of Barbie princesses and knights drawing swords.
— If this is the curse of “happiness”.
Perhaps this is my destiny? Like river-sand rising, leaving its place and being carried by the current into the White House. Its final fate is nothing more than to die on the beach or sink back into mud. Even if the dregs rise again, the result is only submission to the gravity at the centre of the earth. A test rocket without fuel must still fall. The dead happen every day; death is the norm. Perhaps life is the coincidence in probability, invisible and trackless, that cannot be spied upon.
A dwelling hole, damp.
Exploitation had already devised its rules with precise cruelty. To endure pain required only acceptance and endurance. No need to know, no need to understand, no need to do anything at all: only endure. Anthony Weiner served as the executioner. Huma — everyone must die, all people will die, die die die!
In that case, I believe him.
To wrongfully kill Huma Abedin alone would not count as an injustice.
Perhaps this was how the collective dissolved her pain. She thought of Saudi women slapped to the ground by their husbands. Their graves were an entire desert, and what howled past was the epitaph called woman’s fate. Huma Abedin fell backwards with unstoppable force, bearing grief and pain, falling back as her mother had, her grandmother, her grandmother’s mother, the grandmother of her grandmother. My mother was happy, my grandmother lucky. She remembered their peaceful black eyes, gentle as deer. The six realms of reincarnation, life and death exhausting themselves; perhaps there was some enlightenment in the Qur’an, though she could not fully remember it. The Bible said: forgive.
The reporters stirred. Anthony Weiner stood obediently, head lowered, like a sick wolf waiting for the hare to hit the tree. Huma said I believe him. The corners of his mouth, beyond his control, pulled back towards his ears. Quickly he feigned grief and emotion, clenching a fist to cover it. He enlarged his pupils, trying to make himself look like a little dog; but compared with his wolf image, this half-dog, half-wolf appearance revealed instead a kind of horror.
“When beasts betray kindness like this and you still cannot bear to kill them, you are indeed humane — but also very foolish. To strip off your clothes to save a friend may be good from his point of view, but how is it different from putting yourself in the place of death? Are you not just such a man? Benevolence fallen into stupidity is not what a gentleman approves.”⁸
Anthony Weiner stood obediently, hands folded, like a child who had done wrong.
Jordan slept and slept. His mother hoped he would not wake again.
IV. Rain
She endured the whole pregnancy, the birth, then spring and summer. For several years in succession she hid — in her own house — enduring soaking rain, mud, cruel heat, killer bees. She was starving, parched, short of ammunition.
Aside from concern for her son, Huma seldom went home. Even if, in that place, she did not necessarily have to run into the person she did not wish to see every moment — perhaps that place could no longer be called “home”. With despairing calm she discovered that her dressing gown had been worn; that at the waist, even, the place was unmistakably covered with semen stains; and that in the corner of the photograph — a photograph shameful enough to make every person involved die of shame — there was even the sweet sleeping face of her son. That room, that house, was Anthony’s pleasure den. Even if he had resigned in disgrace, he did not need to rush about for a living, because he had her, his wife. It was the home after Jordan’s birth. It had clean water, heating, cereal, bottles, formula, nappies, a birth certificate: all the external things that could not be cut away.
Powerlessness eroded her. Instead, the oppressive, silent, dark life became methodical, full of the security brought by order, warm and damp as it took her hand, pinching the bones of her cervical spine from behind. Anthony looked over in silence, and a whole day of anxiety could be released. The reward of endurance! So long as she followed the rules, safe happiness would always belong to her. Huma — wife Huma.
How could Huma Abedin bear, and even accept, such a life in silence? Anthony Weiner did not cast so much as a glance at her. Wedding vows — spell — the black wings of Death during the Black Plague — squeezed her like splints. He knew how precious life was, and therefore he must, by any means necessary, expect her to burst like a balloon filled with water. Only when vitality withered so miserably — even when, through depression, mania, fantasy, despair, she died — could his heart be soothed. How could Huma Abedin be sealed inside a glass jar and complacently admired, toyed with? Huma Abedin’s vitality had not dried up in the desert, had not been ground away in the black empire; was it, then, to die meanly and twistedly in teeming, traffic-clotted New York State, under the name of “love”, under the name of marriage?
How could Huma Abedin, because of any role at all, be made unable to move inside a fence long rotten?
Huma Abedin exhaled deeply. If there were a curtain of rain before her eyes, it could blur her face, persuade her that she was no different from every Saudi woman, no different from all suffering beings. Stroking her pregnant belly, she tried with all her strength to persuade herself — Mother. Mother. I am a mother.
Hillary looked up from the papers. Her blue eyes were like the cold wind of a late-autumn morning. Huma flinched, but still asked aloud, “What’s wrong?”
“You can take half a day off.” Hillary lowered her head and wrote something — perhaps a signature. The pen-point moved over the paper with a dry whisper. “You’re very tired, and you’re pregnant. Besides, you’ve already finished the work.”
“No…” A rush of unease suddenly sprang up. Her boss’s tone was too light, as if Huma had become a faceless role, dispensable, replaceable at any moment.
“Don’t be nervous.” Hillary stood. Her golden hair was combed back very neatly. She came over. Abedin stared hard at the tips of her shoes. “Huma Abedin, there is only one of you in this office, isn’t there? Before you give yourself up, no one can replace you.”
She urgently needed a drenching rain, one that would come upon her head unexpectedly, shattering stone and startling heaven. She ought to hurry to find shelter. But a young soul — a will-o’-the-wisp flickering over a grave at midnight, a soul rampaging about and unwilling to be lonely, a soul whose new shoots must burst through soil and see daylight again — naturally longed for a thorough rain. It was desperate to cry out: I want. I want it.
When Huma Abedin turned back, she saw HRC: dressed in clothes bright and vivid, yellow roses, pink roses, red roses, touring the whole world. Sometimes she told her own story; sometimes she told other people’s. She did not betray because the world was bad, nor convert because the environment was good. She too raised her head to look up to God, to the long history and future of human life behind clean morality and faithful love.
A black Asian silhouette passed through a glittering world of gold. As in childhood, when she crossed the desert countless times, she arrived again and again at the border of order. Hillary danced with abandon. In her hand, wine red as blood turned and trembled in rings of happy whirlpools. In this Hillary land, where lights and cameras had briefly been switched off, Huma Abedin flashed back in silence, accompanying every wild eruption of improvised saxophone with a reserved, tooth-hidden smile.
In this Hillary land.
Come here, my love. Hillary beckoned absent-mindedly, her eyes misted. The wine bottle floated in an ice bucket. Friends held one another in pairs. Hillary stared towards the chandelier far away; the pearls on her ears shone moistly with a dim light. She was full of energy, descending upon the human world like a bolt of lightning with thunder, wilfully stirring the air and raising a hurricane that howled across the whole North American Midwest.
Did Hillary often see hurricanes in Arkansas? Removed from the forces human beings could summon, transplanted from an industrial city of tangled roots and thickly set gangs to this place, she absorbed it all — natural force, human dealings — and became focused beyond resistance.
In the darkness they embraced. Huma’s arms passed under Hillary’s armpits. Down thirty thousand miles, forward two thousand years: there were no inexplicable, unverifiable decisions. Yet fate and history were so inconstant. Huma thought of 17 August 1998, the first day she truly stepped into the White House as an intern, while another Clinton admitted before a grand jury to an improper relationship with another intern. The corners of Huma’s mouth lifted strangely. Very quickly she answered:
“Yes, yes, I’m here.”
If we fail, you and I are the guilty ones.
In 2016, tornadoes struck farms and cities. Everything descended.
V. Run!
Too many things make me cry the whole world is connected to me through the fog of emotion I see pain is the person who hurts me now you or myself? Can I settle accounts with myself? A new self grows out of the old shell is this the reason I forgive you? Who is kissing my cheek and who is stealing my life?
Run!!!!
Let us talk about why you chose to support him back then even though you already knew he had sent sexual messages to an underage woman.
Huma look at me you say you are a feminist are you do you know what your ex-husband did how can you have the face to call yourself a feminist your husband betrayed you and you deserved it didn’t you you are exactly this kind of two-faced woman!
Huma Abedin, yes, I know her. Isn’t she the one who made HRC lose? I heard she and the Secretary of State had a scarlet sort of relationship… Huma Abedin, yes, I know her. That woman and HRC did every evil thing together, do you know how many children died in… Hands trembling, muscles spasming, face taut, wanting to scream, uncontrollable crying, explosion, flesh and blood flying everywhere…
“She’s a good girl.”
Cheeks soft and downy as a red pumpkin glowing in the stove.
After revenge, one discovers that the only person avenged upon is oneself — was I wrong? Mama, I cannot see the way out of life, the exit from living. After fleeing oppression, I also betrayed the security of order, and once again I was shattered and thrown into a world of stern rules, running for my life. Mama, where are you? Where should Huma Abedin go?
“With a snow-bright blade concealed against my breast, I take one step — aiya — and cry, cry aloud; hurrying along the goat-track, the road stretches far. I rejoice to see bright stars shining down; in an instant clouds bewilder me, fog encloses me. Suddenly the wind sweeps leaves down, and through the mountains tigers roar in bursts. Again I hear apes wailing sadly. Ah! I have run until my soul has flown and my courage scattered, like a dragon colt in flight. Ah! In all this haste I still cannot escape the ancient road before the mountain.”⁹
Most members of the team did not give Huma Abedin the feeling that her world had overturned. They did not confirm anything by phone with the boss. Though anxious, Huma still carried her bag to work on a weekday. When she handed documents awaiting signature to HRC, HRC still signed her name with the same fluid ease.
HRC gave her no extra glance, no extra emotion. Thank God. Private life, stripped of the media, proceeded step by step just as Huma had prayed it would. A small copper plate worn close to her body carried an imprint of HRC’s name. She carefully scraped away the husband’s surname. In the workplace she called her Ms Clinton; close against the body, she hoped there would be only her name, the first name. One tree growing into a forest is a taboo in politics, but not in hers. Even if people can survive only inside social relations, Huma remained stubbornly hopeful that, in the Republic of her ideals, Hillary could appear free of relations, stripped of all attachments, proudly only the H.
“See you tomorrow.”
“What?” Huma, sunk in chaotic imaginings, heard the voice as if in a dream.
“I said, see you tomorrow.” The elevator doors closed slowly. As if speaking through a crowd, darting left, darting right, very deftly, passing through many heads, HRC’s gaze landed on her and squeezed the left eye a little.
The gate of Huma’s heart — raised on both sides, hollowed in the middle — seemed to be knocked by a single ray of sunlight between Apollo’s fingers, and moved slightly. She stood with her head lowered outside the office elevator. Beneath her feet there appeared, strangely, the long accelerator pedal of a convertible Camaro. With a roar all the way, Huma Abedin walked out of the building like the wind.
Outdoors there was almost no snow left on the ground. Traffic and horses roared. Huma broke into a run in the opposite direction. There stood a sparse row of trees. Passing through a much denser, much taller wood, Huma arrived at — no, there was almost the feeling of having committed a crime, of having trespassed into a primitive, uncultivated, tranquil, unpolluted region like any oasis enclosed by the Rub’ al Khali.¹⁰ What was the world like before human beings entered it? This place, which had a calming power, existed vast and quiet at the level of secular sublimity, a place where a person could drink beauty deeply and yet feel neither oppressed nor afraid within.
Perhaps tomorrow, the day after, she would still have to return to the crowd, surrounded by meanness, brutality, deception. Life would produce certain situations and force her to interrogate everything. Suddenly not even a path of retreat remained by which she could avoid falling into nightmare — no choice but this. During the marriage she might not necessarily have cut open the whole course of events, kneaded it to pieces, swallowed it and ruminated on it. But today the courage of the whole world gathered upon her body. Before her eyes appeared a pair of eyes shining like frozen lakes in North American forests: oval, sharp at both ends, surrounded by snowy, speckled mountains, beyond layer upon layer of curved ridges a wild plain stretched out. Hillary squeezed her left eye slightly and said:
“See you tomorrow.”
Run!!!
Go.
At the centre of the ice, in the place closest to God, a person was fishing.
VI. Bye-bye
If we speak of love, let us run full tilt into the open fields, to the place where church bells cannot be heard, to lonely wasteland where rivers run across everything and no human habitation can be found. Let the sound of wind, grass, and birds take the place of vows. When we return to human society, we will remain as before, redeeming our tacit understanding in the cracks. The next time your summons calls us back to the mountains, into the wheat, I will make a wish for my homeland — the place where the myth of One Thousand and One Nights began — that one day it will be so quiet no gunshots or horns can be heard, that oil will flow underground and we will pay it no heed. At that time we will be at the centre of the world, kissing in the heart of the desert. Camels will pass behind us. You will be wrapped in a zebra-striped cloak, abandoning life and abandoning death, saying: love me.
I will. Chicago is also the place of my dreams. This song — I want you to sing it.
HRC was looking out the window as we approached the sprawling urban landscape that was my hometown. The dark of night was scattered by the thousands of yellow lights dotting the city’s buildings and streets. Our line officer had thoughtfully arranged for my mother to meet the plane when it landed at King Abdulaziz International Airport. Mom had just hosted British prime minister David Cameron at the college, but she was far more nervous and excited about this visit. After rushed hellos, protocol dictating formality, I departed with her for one night in my childhood home.¹¹