The eye of the storm opens up to swallow the whole world and still asks for more,
The male body is nothing more than an ejaculator. The female body vacuums up the whole universe!
An hour later, a muscle was still twitching involuntarily in my thigh — do I come off as an amateur to you? I could go on explaining forever — and I could still feel that branch of lightning cracking all around me.
Yours,
Aisha
P.S. Do you remember that morning when we bumped into each other in the library? You were so surprised to see me. You stopped for a while to have a look at the research I was doing on the computer. It was about an extinguished star, which had a black hole at the center and a green halo around it, and had been discovered accidentally by some amateur. Your eyes kept flicking nervously to the door, however. You must have had a date with some girl. I felt sorry for you so I tried to distract you by saying, “There are black holes in space threatening the young stars that are trying to come fully to life, like this one.”
“And was this one also discovered by an amateur like me?” you said, teasing me in turn and laughing.
P. P. S. I just remembered that song my mom and Auntie Halima used to sing about how babies are made: “Water mixed with water …” They’d giggle and say, “Can you believe we used to sing that out loud when we were young?”
An Eye and an Eye
MU’AZ WAITED EAGERLY FOR HIS FREE MOMENTS SO HE COULD GO AND VISIT Yusuf. He knew he might attract people’s attention, but he couldn’t stay away from the treasure whose keys he’d given up willingly. He felt deprived; it pained him for that world to be taken from him.
The moment he stepped into the hall, he sensed the profound change that had come over the house all of a sudden. It was as if the house was conspiring with Yusuf. It was giving him access to places Mu’az had never been to, showing him photos Mu’az had never seen.
His first thought was to kick Yusuf out, then he calmed himself down and considered locking Yusuf into the central hallway and taking back the keys to the upper floors, but the kind soul within him, the one who’d memorized the Quran, intervened on Yusuf’s behalf. Nevertheless he was still possessed by a burning jealousy. What was it about Yusuf that exerted such power over the house in a way he never could?
Yusuf avoided Mu’az’s accusing gaze, hiding a deep sense of guilt. Over the days he’d spent alone in the house, he’d fallen into an arid solitude, which had driven him to sneak into the parlor where all those faces were, impelled by a sudden urge to be among those Meccan features. There must be faces he knew or faces that knew him and could make him feel at home. Just one face might be enough to give him a sense of place and bring a sense of center to all the broken vignettes around him and the wholesale destruction of ancient landmarks. He stared at every photo; he didn’t pass a single patch of wall without interrogating every picture, looking for threads to tie him to Mecca or to the Lane of Many Heads, examining events that he hadn’t noticed at the time, which had brought him to this destitution. He’d known full well that Mu’az wouldn’t be happy, but the house was reeling him in like it wanted to prod and revive his memory.
~ ~ ~
Mu’az bored into Yusuf’s face. The eyes, which evaded his own, worried him. Was Yusuf seeing the Mecca hidden in that place through the eyes of history? Whereas he, Mu’az, had only ever seen through the eyes of art and technique, like al-Lababidi? Art’s eye was restorative and healing, but history’s eye liked to pick at scabs. Why had he let that coarse eye in here to pick through Marie and al-Lababidi’s treasure? Without realizing what he was doing, Mu’az hurried to beat Yusuf to the biggest scab in the place.
“It was off this very roof that I threw away my book of sins,” he said, pausing to see whether the words had any effect on Yusuf. Unlike Mu’az’s father, though, Yusuf wasn’t frantically obsessed with catalogues of sins, so Mu’az carried on. “Because I was so proud that Marie appointed me to be guardian of the house — even though she warned me never to go through any of the floors without her express permission.” He gazed down at the feather duster he was holding. Yusuf kept silent, having taken note of Mu’az’s tone of accusation, which was no doubt due to the temerity he’d shown by going into the parlor.
“I used to dust Mecca’s every epoch with this peacock feather duster, making sure the pictures on the wall were straight, and I’d clean the developing baths and change the red lightbulb.” He pushed the switch a few times but the lamp didn’t come on. Yusuf felt sorry for him. “They must have cut the electricity off ages ago …”
Mu’az stared at the floor in front of him in silence, unable to describe the part of himself he’d discovered in that house. “Do you know Verse 260 from the Surah of The Cow? When Abraham asks God to show him how he resurrects the dead. Do you remember how God responds? ‘Take four birds and tame them. Then put a part of them on each hill and call them and they will come flying to you.’ How he called them through his faith, and the parts came flying back to him whole? I’m those birds. I was scattered across Mecca’s mountains and scattered among you boys in the Lane of Many Heads, then along came this house and this camera, and it brought me together so I could fly whole …” He strove to impress all this upon Yusuf and to undermine his apparent affinity with the house.
“It’s like a treasure hunt. We are — I mean, each one of us is — scattered about in caves and on mountaintops and in deserts, in places and in people all over the world. And we find — or at least the lucky ones find — a little piece of that treasure as we go along. I found a huge piece of my treasure in this house. Marie allowed me to discover it through a camera lens. I found another part by memorizing the Quran … No, the Quran is the power or the faith with which I called those parts together. They came ‘flying to me’ and made me whole.”
After a pause, he went on, “You never saw me, Yusuf. I was just a shadow of you golden boys in the Lane of Many Heads. I was your negative. I was just a blank sheet for you to scrawl your heroism on. But here … I discovered the image of a black and white Mu’az, who wasn’t just programmed to record you. I develop this world. I am its continuity. All that time it had been waiting for my lens and my flash and my patience as an artist. Marie saw all that in me with her trained eye. She gave me this professional camera and told me, ‘It’s yours.’ It was like recovering a lost piece of myself — like some amputated part suddenly returned to my body to make it whole. When I wandered up and down all the floors, al-Lababidi took over my body. Took me out of the world. And Marie made time to teach me how to use the camera. The sound of the shutter made my entire body tremble! You know? When I was growing up my body could always sense the lost camera. It could sense its twin somewhere in that void — until the twin was embodied in this little light-sensitive contraption. Marie taught me what to see and how to see. The Quran taught me how to find light in the darkness, and Marie showed me how to capture and manifest it. I flew with my camera above the citadel, my heart racing, and I said to myself, ‘I’ll begin where al-Lababidi began. I’ll capture a beauty equal to, even rivaling, my own worth. But I could feel the difference in the camera from the very first shot; the truth hit me and it hurt. Al-Lababidi’s lens had captured growth and construction, mine captured destruction and decay. It could recognize the magnitude of the changes that were happening to the city, not only to its body but also to its spirit. A spirit that had once called out to the Hidden Imam was now preparing for the monster that would smack the ground with its tail and bury the city alive. My eye would flicker thousands of times a minute, following the rapid movements of the shutter leaves, before a wall of collapsing skylights, or a mirror retrieved from the splinters of a house, or the still-standing vaulted ceiling of a caved-in sitting room, or a beautiful doorway closing for the last time with panels bearing the fingerprints of old world craftsmen — wood and plaster panels that vied to out-exquisite the other. They shyly cast their verses of Quran and poetry onto forgotten courtyards, to wait under a layer of dust for resurrection, but they were threatened from both sides: on one side the grasping fist, and on the other the decay eating away at their sweat and blood.