Do you have a place in mind? I asked her.
Yes, she said. It’s a little place that I know, a faraway place with a cabin. I was there once before. I spent a week there with an ex-lover. We came in the summer and we decided to live like two wild women in the woods, without anything. It was fun. She grew up in nature and loved nature. We fished and ate wild berries, we jumped naked in the river. We hiked and climbed. You should try dangling above a cliff with only a rope to hold you.
Oh, I might fall, I said. I have an attachment to ropes and dangling, but the cockroaches always cut it for me. I was silent for a moment. Then I said, I often think of you. Do you think of me?
Shohreh smiled, reach her hand over, caressed my hair, and didn’t answer. Then she smiled and said, You and your cockroach!
WE WALKED TOWARDS the cabin. Shohreh entered it and called me in. Look, she said. It is still the way we left it. We used to sleep on the floor and we made a fire over there.
Later I pulled out the gun, cranked it, and aimed it at a tree. I fired, and the echo of the shot rose from the other side of the mountain. The tree trunk released a little air from the spot the bullet hit.
Okay, Shohreh said, blowing warmth into the joints of her fingers. My turn.
I pulled the magazine out. I show her how to insert the bullets, how to push the magazine inside the gun’s butt. I showed her slowly how to crank it, cock it, lift it. I told her never to point it in someone’s face, always to point it to the floor or up to the sky. I showed her how to make an imaginary line that starts at the end of the gun and goes to the end of the barrel and extends to the target.
She grabbed the gun and stretched her arms.
Where are you aiming at? I asked her.
The stone, she said. The big stone at the edge of the water.
She fired and her hands swung a little. The bullet was far from the target.
I told her to hold her hand steady, and before she shot to hold her breath, focus, and then not to hesitate.
Once you decide to shoot, just do it. Do not think, and never hesitate.
The second shot was closer. Shohreh kept on shooting until she emptied the magazine. She hit the stone once and then she turned, bouncing, and asked me if I had seen the shot.
It was getting cold. Shohreh suggested we make a fire and stay inside the cabin for a while. But nature horrifies me and open spaces make me feel vulnerable. I wanted to leave and go back to the city before night came and the deer howled, and the wolves twittered, and the bears danced, and the moose and the beaver wrestled down by the river, and the trees bent down to watch me sleep. And what if early in the morning birds came and laid their giant claws on me, held me to the ground and dug their beaks into my chest and tore my flesh, threw me on my back and devoured me alive, with my feet dancing in the air under their big, monstrous eyes.
I need to go back, I told Shohreh.
Too soon, she said. Let’s stay a little longer. See how quiet it is? Smell the forest. Look, look there are birds in the sky.
I looked up and saw two black dots suspended in the air, floating under a blue sea. I rushed into the car and made sure all the windows and doors were locked. Shohreh stood there, her hand to her forehead, looking at the sky and squinting. Then she walked in circles and smiled, and I watched her through the glass, turning and dancing in worship of it all.
BACK IN THE CITY, Friday afternoon, I waited across the street from the Artista Café. I smoked and paced, and when the professor stepped out I followed him. I caught up with him and held his elbow. When he saw me, he liberated his arm and stepped back, but before he could run or yell for help, I said to him: I just want to talk to you. No harm, everything is cool. I just want to talk.
I am busy, he said, and started to walk away.
I followed him, pulled out one of the stolen love letters, and started to read it.
He turned with his eyes open wide, and shouted, Where did you get that?
Let’s talk, I said. I need to talk to you.
Give me back that letter, he said, defiant. He looked ready for a fight.
His reaction surprised me. You are not going to fight with me, professor, I said. You are a little too old for that.
Un fou, t’es malade, mon ami, un homme malade, he replied, and he started to raise his voice again.
I just want to talk to you.
I will call the police if you follow me, he said, and he held his leather briefcase in his fist, ready to swing it at me.
I do not understand, I said, why you let her do this to you. She does not care about you. She only talks about herself in these letters. And why do you lie to us? You do not teach or work as a consultant. You are on welfare. Why do you deny it? Tell me, please, what is wrong with being poor and in need?
The professor snatched the letter from my hand and started to walk away fast, and like a madman he shouted, Police, police, un fou, un fou.
And that was the last glimpse I had of the lost exile in his long, pitiful coat, his stolen case swinging and rubbing against one of its large pockets. He looked like a goner, a little lost imposter, a lonely spy walking out into the cold of the world.
I walked home, taking a left turn on Prince-Arthur Street. Some restaurants had ventured to put tables and chairs outside. It was a sunny day, and if you wore a light jacket you could safely sit and have a drink and a smoke outside and look at all the young women eager to reveal their summer legs, uncover their shoulders for the sun, and walk without fear on the last few batches of slippery ice, through the noisy slush and the shivery cold. I decided to sit and have a coffee and smoke.
I chose the patio of a café that was marked off by ropes dangling from one pole to the next. I lifted the collar of my jacket, lit a cigarette, and waited for the waitress to come. I blew smoke in the air and listened to the sounds of female shoes clacking along the street. The sun hit me in the face, and I wondered what had happened to those days when all I had wanted was to escape the sun. Now the sun did not seem that bad. I recalled a choice passage from one of the professor’s letters: the morning his lady woke up early and walked with a towel to the sandy beach and noticed the birds. I wondered if people like that, always in a daze about beauty and sensuality, ever masturbate. What would their fantasies be like? Would they imagine a soft, handsome gentleman who walked around surrounded by flowers and floating smiles and deep and gentle voices? Were the colours more vivid in their dreams, the air just the right temperature, the towel and the sand the epitome of softness and delight? And yes, the songs they heard would all be good songs about mild suffering of the heart, nothing really tragic. I thought about how fantasies like that should rightly belong to poor girls with violent fathers and crazy mothers, but instead they were in the possession of the rich, the complacent, those who aspired to the old days of aristocracy and to chambermaids, swooning, and ballroom dancing.
Filth! I thought. I could shoot them all. I have a good aim. I never miss a shot. I could enter the professor’s lover’s dream and kill all those pretty boys, those older, sophisticated men with silk scarves around their necks. I could change the background music, halt the soft lapping of the ocean, shoot all the seabirds, and pull the towel from under sleeping swimsuits. I could also bring the professor with me and change him — make him look better and talk with arrogance, and give him better shoes, and lose his glasses and loosen his tie, and give him un regard so that he would always seem pensive, romantic, and suave, and of course rich. Then maybe that lover of his would be more attentive and loving to the old man.