Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (17 page)

I take the tube all the way to the Nekropolis, carefully protecting my wreaths from the other commuters. All day I walk through the Nekropolis, talking to stall keepers, stopping sometimes for tea, and when I have sold the wreaths, sitting for awhile to watch the people, letting my tired mind empty.

I am at peace, now I can go back to my mistress.

The Second Koran tells us that the darkness in ourselves is a sinister thing. It waits until we relax, it waits until we reach the most vulnerable moments, and then it snares us. I want to be dutiful. I want to do what I should. But when I go back to the tube, I think of where I am going; to that small house and my empty room. What will I do tonight? Make more paper flowers, more wreaths? I am sick of them. Sick of the Nekropolis.

I can take the tube to my mistress’ house, or I can go by the street where Mardin’s house is. I’m tired. I’m ready to go to my little room and relax. Oh, Holy One, I dread the empty evening. Maybe I should go by the street just to fill up time. I have all this empty time in front of me. Tonight and tomorrow and the week after and the next month and all down through the years as I never marry and become a dried-up woman. Evenings spent folding paper. Days cleaning someone else’s house. Free afternoons spent shopping a bit, stopping in tea shops because my feet hurt. That is what lives
are
, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there
is
no meaning? I sit at a tiny table the size of a serving platter and watch the boys hum by on their scooters, girls sitting behind them, clutching their waists with one hand, holding their veils with the other, while the ends stream and snap behind them, glittering with the shimmer of gold (this year’s fashion).

So I get off the tube and walk to the street where Mardin lives. And I walk up the street past the house. I stop and look at it. The walls are pale yellow stone. I am wearing rose and sky blue, but I have gone out without ribbons on my wrists.

“Diyet,” Akhmim says, leaning on the windowsill, “you’re still sad.”

He looks so familiar and it is so easy, as if we do this every evening. “I live a sad life,” I say, my voice even. But my heart is pounding. To see him! To talk to him!

“I found your token,” he says.

“My token,” I say, not understanding.

“The flower. I thought today would be your free day so I tried to watch all day. I thought you had come and I missed you.” Then he disappears for a moment, and then he is sitting on the windowsill, legs and feet outside, and he jumps lightly to the ground.

I take him to a tea shop. People look at us, wondering what a young woman is doing unescorted with a young man. Let them look. “Order what you want,” I say, “I have some money.”

“Are you happier?” he asks. “You don’t look happier, you look tired.”

And he looks perfect, as he always does. Have I fallen in love with him precisely because he
isn’t
human? I don’t care, I feel love, no matter what the reason. Does a reason for a feeling matter? The feeling I have for my mistress may be there only because I am impressed, but the
feeling
is real enough.

“My mistress is kind,” I say, looking at the table. His perfect hand, beautiful nails and long fingers, lies there.

“Are you happy?” he asks again.

“Are you?” I ask.

He shrugs. “A harni does not have the right to be happy or unhappy.”

“Neither do I,” I say.

“That’s
your
fault. Why did you do it?” he asks. “Why did you choose to be jessed? You were free.” His voice is bitter.

“It’s hard to find work in the Nekropolis, and I didn’t think I would ever get married.”

He shakes his head. ‘Someone would marry you. And if they didn’t, is it so awful not to get married?”

“Is it so awful to be jessed?” I ask.

“Yes.”

That is all he says. I suppose to him it looks as if I threw everything away, but how can he understand how our choices are taken from us? He doesn’t even understand freedom and what an illusion it really is.

“Run away,” he says.

Leave the mistress? I am horrified. “She needs me, she cannot run that house by herself and I have cost her a great deal of money. She has made sacrifices to buy me.”

“You could live in the Nekropolis and make funeral wreaths,” he urges. “You could talk to whomever you wished and no one would order you around.”

“I don’t want to live in the Nekropolis,” I say.

“Why not?”

“There is nothing there for me!”

“You have friends there.”

“I wouldn’t if I ran away.”

“Make new ones,” he says.

“Would you go?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I’m not a person, I can’t live.”

“What if you could make a living, would you run away?”

“Yes,” he says, “yes.” He squares his shoulders defiantly and looks at me. “If I could be human, I would be.” He is shaming me.

Our tea comes. My face is aflame with color. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think. He feels morally superior. He thinks he knows the true worth of something I threw away. He doesn’t understand, not at all.

“Oh, Diyet,” he says softly. “I am sorry. I shouldn’t say these things to you.”

“I didn’t think you could have these feelings,” I whisper.

He shrugs again. “I can have any feelings,” he says. “Harni aren’t jessed.”

“You told me to think of you as a dog,” I remind him. “Loyal.”

“I am loyal,” he says. “You didn’t ask who I was loyal to.”

“You’re supposed to be loyal to the mistress.”

He drums the table with his fingers,
taptaptaptap, taptaptaptap
. “Harni aren’t like geese,” he says, not looking at me. His earring is golden, he is rich and fine-looking. I had not realized at my new place how starved I had become for fine things. “We don’t impress on the first person we see.” Then he shakes his head. “I shouldn’t talk about all this nonsense. You must go, I must go back before they miss me.”

“We have to talk more,” I say.

“We have to go,” he insists. Then he smiles at me and all the unhappiness disappears from his face. He doesn’t seem human anymore, he seems pleasant;
harni
. I get a chill. He is so alien. I understand him less than I understand people like my old mistress. We get up and he looks away as I pay.

Outside Mardin’s house I tell him, “I’ll come back next Tuesday.”

***

It’s good I did so much before, because I sleepwalk through the days. I leave the cleaning machine in the doorway where the mistress almost trips over it. I forget to set the clothes in order. I don’t know what to think.

I hear the mistress say to the neighbor, “She is a godsend, but so moody. One day she’s doing everything, the next day she can’t be counted on to remember to set the table.”

What right does she have to talk about me that way? Her house was a pigsty when I came.

What am I thinking? What is wrong with me that I blame my mistress? Where is my head? I feel ill, my eyes water and head fills. I can’t breathe, I feel heavy. I must be dutiful. I used to have this feeling once in a while when I was first jessed, it’s part of the adjustment. It must be the change. I have to adjust all over again.

I find the mistress, tell her I’m not feeling well, and go lie down.

The next afternoon, just before dinner, it happens again. The day after that is fine, but then it happens at midmorning of the third day. It is Sunday and I have the afternoon off. I force myself to work through the morning. My voice is hoarse, my head aches. I want to get everything ready since I won’t be there to see to dinner in the afternoon. White cheese and olives and tomatoes on a platter. My stomach rebels and I have to run to the bathroom.

What is wrong with me?

I go to the Moussin in the afternoon, lugging my bag, which is heavy with paper, and sit in the cool dusty darkness, nursing my poor head. I feel as if I should pray. I should ask for help, for guidance. The Moussin is so old that the stone is irregularly worn, and through my slippers I can feel the little ridges and valleys in the marble. Up around the main worship hall there are galleries hidden by arabesques of scrollwork. Kari and I used to sit up there when we were children. Above that, sunlight flashes through clerestory windows. Where the light hits the marble floor it shines hard, hurting my eyes and my head. I rest my forehead on my arm, turned sideways on the bench so I can lean on the back. With my eyes closed I smell incense and my own scent of perfume and perspiration.

There are people there for service, but no one bothers me. Isn’t that amazing?

Or maybe it is only because anyone can see that I am impure.

I get tired of my own melodrama. I keep thinking that people are looking at me, that someone is going to say something to me. I don’t know where to go.

I don’t even pretend to think of going back to my room. I get on the tube and go to Mardin’s house. I climb the stairs from the tube—these are newer, but, like the floor of the moussin, they are unevenly worn, sagging in the centers from the weight of this crowded city. What would it be like to cross the sea and go north? To the peninsula, Ida, or north from there, into the continent? I used to want to travel, to go to a place where people had yellow hair, to see whole forests of trees. Cross the oceans, learn other languages. I told Kari that I would even like to taste dog, or swine, but she thought I was showing off. But it’s true, once I would have liked to try things.

I am excited, full of energy and purpose. I can do anything. I can understand Fhassin, standing in the street with his razor, laughing. It is worth it, anything is worth it for this feeling of being alive. I have been jessed, I have been asleep for so long.

There are people on Mardin’s street. It’s Sunday and people are visiting. I stand in front of the house across the street. What am I going to say if someone opens the door? I am waiting to meet a friend. What if they don’t leave, what if Akhmim sees them and doesn’t come out. The sun bakes my hair, my head. Akhmim, where are you? Look out the window. He is probably waiting on the mistress. Maybe there is a
bismek
party and those women are poisoning Akhmim. They could do anything, they
own
him. I want to crouch in the street and cover my head in my hands, rock and cry like a widow woman from the Nekropolis. Like my mother must have done when my father died. I grew up without a father, maybe that’s why I’m so wild. Maybe that’s why Fhassin is in prison and I’m headed there. I pull my veil up so my face is shadowed. So no one can see my tears.

Oh my head. Am I drunk? Am I insane? Has the Holy One, seeing my thoughts, driven me mad?

I look at my brown hands. I cover my face.

“Diyet?” He takes my shoulders.

I look up at him, his beautiful familiar face, and I am stricken with terror. What is he? What am I trusting my life, my future to?

“What’s wrong,” he says, “are you ill?”

“I’m going insane,” I say. “I can’t stand it, Akhmim, I can’t go back to my room—”

“Hush,” he says, looking up the street and down. “You have to. I’m only a harni. I can’t do anything, I can’t help you.”

“We have to go. We have to go away somewhere, you and I.”

He shakes his head. “Diyet, please. You must hush.”

“You said you wanted to be free,” I say. My head hurts so bad. The tears keep coming even though I am not really crying.

“I can’t be free,” he says. “That was just talk.”

“I have to go now,” I say. “I’m jessed, Akhmim, it is hard, if I don’t go now I’ll never go.”

“Your mistress—”

“DON’T TALK ABOUT HER!” I shout. If he talks about her I may not be able to leave.

He looks around again. We are a spectacle, a man and a woman on the street.

“Come with me, we’ll go somewhere, talk,” I say, all honey. He cannot deny me, I see it in him. He has to get off the street. He would go anywhere. Any place is safer than this.

He lets me take him into the tube, down the stairs to the platform. I clutch my indigo veil around my face. We wait in silence, he has his hands in his pockets. He looks like a boy from the Nekropolis, standing there in just his shirt, no outer robe. He looks away, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, ill at ease. So human. Events are making him more human. Taking away all the uncertainties.

“What kinds of genes are in you?” I ask.

“What?” he asks.

“What kinds of genes?”

“Are you asking for my chart?” he says.

I shake my head. “Human?”

He shrugs. “Mostly. Some artificial sequences.”

“No animal genes,” I say. I sound irrational because I can’t get clear what I mean. The headache makes my thoughts skip, my tongue thick.

He smiles a little. “No dogs, no monkeys.”

I smile back, he is teasing me. I am learning to understand when he teases. “I have some difficult news for you, Akhmim. I think you are a mere human being.”