THE SIKH PATIENT---Chapter 7---KNIGHTS

KNIGHTS

            Well, if you want to know the truth, this is the beginning.  I wasn’t sure if you were ready for it…I wasn’t sure if I was ready to let go of it.  So here goes…

Maybe you came here for a story.  Maybe you want to know what “really happened.”  I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.  Because I don’t know. I don’t know what “happened.”  Somewhere in the middle of my life, it became someone else’s life and I had to hand over the details.  But I was blindfolded and I don’t know who I gave them to or where they went, the details.  So now I don’t know what is real and what I’m making up.  Maybe I’m making you up and you’re not even there.  Maybe this is all just empty space.

            But it’s not.  These are pages.  These are the pages of my life.

            Maybe you are a magician too; you make yourself out of thin air.  You were once nothing too, no one could see you.  You moved around like a ghost and only spoke in whispers.  But the thing is; if you’re like me, you still saw things.  You could stand in between people and hear their voices when they didn’t think anyone could hear them talk.  The things they said.  Those are the only things I remember. 

            “I never wanted children,” my dad said once when he was eating Corn Flakes.  He was talking to the bowl; he didn’t know that I understood English.  He thought I was just thinking kid thoughts as I brushed my Barbie’s blonde hair and made her climb on a plastic goat some weird relative from India gave me for my birthday.

            Did he know I never wanted a father?  I told him that once because I thought he didn’t know.  I told him after he woke up after passing out.  After binge drinking with his “friend.”  But the thing is, even though I was talking directly to him.  He didn’t hear me.  I was talking to the walls, really.  He was sweating and I felt sorry for him. 

            But those are just words.  What did he look like?  Don’t ask me that because I haven’t forgotten, but I will.  And that day, the day I totally forget, you can call me dead.  Because what kind of person throws away all her pictures of her dead father just so she can see if she can remember?  Only deranged psychopaths do that, and me.

            So if you’re still reading it’s because you too make things up as you go along.  You don’t mind mistakes and lies because you know when you’re washing your car you wish someone would lie to you.  So you could stop washing your car.  You know that is the first sign of love…a lie.  You know it is the first sign of life.  You know you are empty without the fiction you have invented about your life.  So you are patient and you will tolerate mine.  Because just remember that this is not what it seems.  It is not true. 

            How did I end up in this room?  A room with no carpeting.  A room with waxed wooden floors the color of caramel.  Sometimes I even think I could eat these floors.  These are the things I never say out loud. 

            It’s a miracle really, that they ever left me alone.  Finally, they trust that I can be alone.  Even if I am insane, it is my own business.  It shocks them, the possibility that I am not insane.  Because if I am not insane then I am something that does not have a category in their books, something unmentionable.  I am scary. 

            I had to leave all of them.  I had to leave town for a little while because it is only here in New York City that I can find somewhere between the yellow cabs and the dandelions the same color, where I only notice the coincidences and write them down.  Where no one looks at me funny when I say things to the clouds.  And when I say I know the clouds, know them by name.  Everyone sees that this is poetry and can walk away from me without crying.

            Nick cried when I left for New York.  He’s still there, in Michigan, I think he stands a lot near the empty U of M football field, shouting to hear his own echo.  At least I imagine that is what I would do if I had to stay there.  It would seem like there was nothing more important to do.  I wonder if he shouts my name at night.  If I ever heard him, I might go back in his arms.  But I bet he hasn’t even asked god yet about me.  What kind of love is that?  I don’t think it’s anything worth mentioning.

            Shall I tell you the beginning or the end first?  I don’t know if this is a sad story.  Because it starts out sad, but I don’t think it gets sadder, so does that make it happy, simply because everything is relative?  You tell me.  This is your story really.  I’m giving it to you.  Because I don’t want it.  That’s why I tell it, to get rid of it.

            I envision the telling like vomiting, all the excess I leave in your lap. 

            I was living with Mona in a two-bedroom apartment in Ann Arbor.  We had a nice navy blue couch with tiny mint green flowers printed on it that got bigger and bigger from the middle of the couch on out.  If you looked too hard at the very couch you were sitting on, you might think you were tripping on acid.  Seventies décor left over from the previous tenant, a man we suspect was growing Marijuana on our window ledge.  Of course, he didn’t leave any, just a faint smell that we try to eradicate with misty lilac incense.  We met him at the Hash Bash at the University of Michigan, the protest to legalize Marijuana where literally people drove from like Tibet and Kansas to get high for a cause.  Just by walking the streets the weekend of the bash you could become intoxicated, or you could eat a mystical brownie and buy a tie-died T-shirt as the police directed traffic.       

            Sometimes me and Mona don’t speak.  This is when I know her best.  When she slowly slices cantaloupe on our wooden table.  She breathes deeply.  I know she is obsessed with the scent of the moist fruit, but she never tells me this, and I never ask.  She didn’t change.  Even when Khalid came into her life.  He left a mark in her eyes, and if you look closely at her in the light of dusk, you can see that she longs for something.  She longs for the taste of his sweat, but she never says this.  And I never ask.

            I don’t remember how they met, I don’t remember that part.  He was just there one day and sometimes the three of us would go to the market and buy chips and fruit.  Khalid and I concentrated on the chips, his favorite was sour cream and onion; mine was salt and vinegar.  We would stand in the corner of Village Corner and flip a coin.  I always flipped the coin because I knew Khalid was a liar and he agreed that he was.  We might as well have played hide and seek because we were looking for a game, that was what we wanted, but we had nothing to play.

              “OK, let’s say there’s a man dying in a cave and he’s a virgin.  His last dying wish is to lose his virginity, would you do it?” Khalid asked me as I put a Dr. Pepper in our shopping cart.  We meandered through the junk food aisle as Mona inspected the produce.  I sort of felt like an obese animal when we did this, but never let that stop me.

            “No,” I said and gave him what I considered to be a condescending look by frowning my eyebrows.  How dare he.

            “Oh my god, he’s dying.  You wouldn’t show a little compassion.  Would you at least give the guy a hand job?”

            “No, I would not.”  I wanted to use my nun's voice, but I don’t know any nuns.

            “Hell, I would.  Of course, if he started to get better I’d have to strangle him.  You’re frigid.”

            “You’re sick.”

            “At least I can admit it.”

            “Am I gonna have to separate you two again,” Mona said as she bumped into Khalid and handed him her carton full of strawberries and asparagus.  I kind of suspected that she was a witch and was going to one day put me in one of her weird stews.

            “I’m telling on you,” I said to Khalid.  I looked at him with mock anger.

            “She started it,” he said and put his hands through Mona’s long straight hair.  Her hair looked shinier than usual because she began to use some weird mud shampoo that looked exactly like mud.  I didn’t understand why she was paying for it. 

            Khalid.  He never really talked about it.  He didn’t tell me the story about how his family had to flee from Iran when the war broke out when he was eight.  How he used to love it there, it was paradise to him now.  When he came here he got into fights in school every day.  He never told me his brother would have been sent to war if they had stayed in Iran, he was twelve.  But maybe I always knew that even before I found out.  Before I overheard Mona talking on the phone with him.  Before I felt like a bitch for being so interested, for eavesdropping, for taking notes in my head full of useless information.  This was useful though, somehow, as I sat on the floor of the living room on the shaggy carpet, I knew I needed to know this.  I never read Mona’s diary though, so you can’t blame me for being able to read her mind.

            I never told Khalid how my dad had to flee from Pakistan when he was five because of the partition of India and Pakistan.  I didn’t tell him because then he would find out that I am obsessed with coincidences.  He would find out how strange I am, how I obsess over these things at night, instead of sleeping.  I pretended not to notice the same note in both their voices when they got angry, how they swept everything under an intricate rug of humor.  Like the Persian rugs, like the rugs little dark-skinned boys in India slaved over. So pretty and so evil.  Their eyes were embroidered with this same texture.  They would give you looks so beautiful you couldn’t throw them away even though they slowly etched away at you. 

            Who knew that I am a coincidence; that I am just like both of them?  That when I stand alone, I don’t know where to walk to.  That I remember some death, the one I was standing in the middle of, the one I allowed to happen.  The one that happened to my father as the poisons we whispered in his ears killed him.  Maybe it was me when I yelled back at him.  I started that war, when I told him he didn’t know me; that he never could, that I would never let him.  The rest of him I laughed at, and I laughed loud.  Don’t you think he could hear me?

            But I met Khalid when my father was still alive and I was busy killing him.  I think Khalid taught me some of the right words about war, the ones that you cannot forget because they hurt in a way that is eternal.  The words that will later hurt my children.  It was a style of speaking really.  Because the only thing that really hurts is the truth, so I don’t know why they tell you to tell it.  The bastards, they want to kill us.

                                                                        *

            If I were to write our story, maybe I would write it like this:

               Every now and then Khalid had fantasies about women who hid themselves.  Mostly women who covered their faces with black scarves.  In Iran, all the women covered their bodies now.  Eleven years ago, when he was there, he could see the hair of some women.  He could see their soft olive faces.  The new laws of Iran and the laws of Islam hid everything but their still eyes.  He stayed up nights thinking about a woman he saw buying strawberries whose eyes had stopped moving.  The only place Khalid could see a woman’s soul was in her eyes.   He didn’t see anything in the American woman’s eyes.   He found that the American woman doesn’t hide her body; she hides her soul.   Khalid had dreamed once of a woman his uncle had told him he saw on a yellow bus in Iran twenty years ago.   She wore black cotton from head to toe and her face was covered but he could see her light brown eyes.   His uncle fell in love with her and never saw her again.  Khalid never questioned the sincerity of that love.   

            He stared at Mona’s long straight hair as they sat on the orange vinyl seats at Domino’s pizza.  It was true it was just the chase for Khalid.  He would rather not have to look at Mona so closely.  He could see the perspiration between her pores.   He knew he had to understand that he was falling in love with her, falling into a space that might never let him out.   To him, Mona seemed as though she had an aura of morality, someone who could transform the tests that tortured him.  The IQ tests he gave himself regularly, the LSAT he could not pass because he literally passed out when he touched those number two pencils.  He didn’t have words like she did, he didn’t know how to name her life the way she could.  She could explain himself to him.   Mona wasn’t a Muslim and she wasn’t Iranian.   He didn’t want her to be, because he didn’t have to go back to Iran and he didn’t believe in Islam.  He once said to Mona, “If there is a God, I am God.   If I’m not God, that’s because there is no God.”

                                                                        *

              Yasmine didn’t know how to stare at her own naked body.  She decided to see it by accident.  She pretended there was a painting on the wall where the mirror hung.  She pretended she was only made of color and she was being painted by God.  She gave him advice, this curve is too big and this one is too flat.   She didn’t know what to think of it or if to think of it.  It was not very often she stopped.  Now and then she knew she had a silhouette.  But today was the first day she saw what she had known.  Her eyes went from her breasts to her hips, and then to her thighs.   She stopped at her very round belly.  It was the stop, the stare; the motion of her skin as she breathed that intrigued her.  The fact that mirrors exist and once in a while you can look in them while closing your eyes.  She did this to see if maybe she could see inside herself.  She opened her eyes because you can’t stare at other people, only yourself.  But you can spend hours looking into your own eyes.    She wasn’t sure if this was her, she could have sworn she was prettier.   Wasn’t she thinner in another life?  If she could only remember what she looked like before she was born.   She could have sworn this was someone else’s body.   There has been a mistake, Yasmine thought.  

               Yasmine always had nightmares about beautiful actors.   They stood in a room and played cards with an incomplete deck, it was missing the fives.   They always played cards standing up as if sitting down would ruin the game.   The point was to stay awake so that Yasmine would never wake up.   These attractive movie stars that never made it, the ones who were talented but never discovered, knew they were in a dream.   The well-built man who should have been the star of The Titanic, screamed, “I like this dream better than the movies, I like acting for Yasmine!”  They all applauded because Yasmine was a very good audience, and they knew she was very boring when she was awake.   The actors liked being a product of her mind because they hated her mediocre body.   Those who can walk away from bad bodies are the people who can think about beauty in their sleep.   Sleeping is not death, just practice.   The goal is to practice being beautiful.   Death is when the dream doesn’t end.   These fake movie stars plotted to kill Yasmine.

                                                                    *

            “Khalid’s coming here but I have to go to class, can you watch him for a while?” Mona asked as she applied black kohl eyeliner to her right eye.

             “Watch him?” Yasmine asked.

              “O.K. you don’t have to look at him,” Mona chuckled.  Mona finished combing her hair in their tiny bathroom and looked around for her orange backpack.  Her striped sweater accentuated her chest.  Yasmine wondered how Khalid would ever think that wasn’t sexy, that it was her mind that was sexy.  She wondered if he would love Mona if she cut off her breasts.

               After Mona left, Khalid came in.  He wore a black coat and his hair was slightly messy.  She looked at his face and thought his nose was rounder than Mona’s and his lips were larger.  He was kind of pretty himself.  If he shaved his head and grown a long beard, Mona would have flipped.  Khalid was quite built, although since he had been dating Mona he stopped working out.  Soon he would become softer, like Yasmine.

              “What are you looking at?” Khalid asked and then laughed to himself.

                “Nothing,” Yasmine replied.  Nothing has a lot of colors, she wanted to say.

                “Are you checking me out?” he asked.  He walked over to the mirror.  “I don’t blame you, a beautiful guy like me.  You know I may not have a job or any money, but you have to admit I’m one of the best-looking people you’ve ever met.  But you, you’re one of those ‘personality people.’  You like to think you judge people by their personality.  You know, ten years from now, you’ll be glad you knew me.”

                Yasmine shook her head and sat down on the blue chair next to the window.  “If you outlive me, you’ll appreciate me after I’m dead.”  She was wearing lipstick and it annoyed her that she had put it on when she wasn’t going anywhere.  Khalid sat down on the couch next to her.  He put his feet on the glass table because Mona wasn’t there.  He liked to do things like that in front of Yasmine.  Yasmine tried to ignore him and she put on the news because he was irritating her.  There were two more murders in Detroit.  Khalid looked over at Yasmine who tried to pay attention to the local news.

               “You know, I could kill someone.  I’ve really thought about it.  I think I could do it,” Khalid stated and stared at Yasmine’s straight teeth.

               “Why don’t you kill me?”

                “Naw, it wouldn’t be worth the effort.  I don’t hate you enough to want to spend time in jail for your death.”

                 “Who would you kill?”

                  Khalid thought about how that wasn’t a fair question.  It wasn’t about who he would kill.  If he had to kill, he would do it.  Eleven years ago he had seen the old man who lived down the street get killed, shot in the street by a soldier.  He walked outside past curfew.  The army didn’t know that he was senile; he probably had Alzheimer’s.  They didn’t care.  The man who shot at him didn’t ask him what he was doing in the street.  The old man who got shot used to give chocolates to Khalid on his birthday.  Khalid didn’t eat chocolate anymore and he didn’t question why people killed and who they would kill.  If they could kill one person, they could kill anyone.  Khalid wanted to be able to kill but he wasn’t sure if he was strong enough.

           “I don’t know, maybe your children,” he finally answered.

            “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked.

            “Do you mean that in the general sense?” he joked.

            “You’d like to think you’re some badass because you can shock people by being offensive.  You wouldn’t even get into a fight, Mona’s told me that.  So why do you want me to think that you would kill someone?”  Yasmine looked over at Khalid as he played with the remote.

              “It scares you doesn’t it?  It scares you that you can’t be sure if I am lying if the person sitting next to you could pull out a pistol and shoot you in the head.  You don’t even know if you could do it.  You only see the human capacity for good.  You wonder who would join the Peace Corps and who wouldn’t.  I wonder who would have killed my brother if he had gone to war.”  Khalid stared at Yasmine as he spoke.  Yasmine lifted her head and the anger lifted from her eyes.

                 “You know what?  I understand there’s things that I don’t understand.  What I don’t understand is why you would want to traumatize people because you’ve been traumatized,” Yasmine said as she stared at the hair falling in his face.

               “You think it’s trauma to hear about how I could potentially kill someone?  No.  Trauma is seeing people you know dead.  Not just dead, but half dead, bleeding to death.  Everything else is just talk.”  Khalid did not look at Yasmine when he spoke.  He stared at the white wall next to the window.  “I could kill anyone because I would just convince a jury that I’m insane,” Khalid said as he tried to finish, his voice was distant.

                    “Then spend your life in an insane asylum,” Yasmine let him finish his game.

                    “No, I’d just convince the doctors that I completely recovered.  You know for all your virtuousness, I bet for a million dollars you’d put a hole in someone.” Khalid looked right at Yasmine when he said this.  He drew out “hole” to emphasize his point.

                       “How much would you bet?” Yasmine’s voice was lower, her eyes were softer.

                      “Come on, for a million dollars you would at least shoot someone in the leg.  For a million dollars you’d shoot your father in the leg.”

                      “I wouldn’t,” Yasmine almost whispered.  She was tired of this.

                      “Come on, so he spends some time in the hospital.  You buy him a Mercedes and explain what you had to do.  He wouldn’t be upset.”

                       “I’d be upset and please shut up.”

                     Khalid smiled and looked at the TV, a Mentos commercial bellowed.  This was how he drained the unnecessary blood in his life.  Yasmine could not believe Khalid spoke so casually about wounding her already broken father.   Her father was a nice man, but he was an alcoholic.   Yasmine thought that it must seem OK to shoot alcoholics.   Alcoholics deserve to die because alcoholism is their own fault.   There is only one person to kill if you want to get rid of an alcoholic.

                    Yasmine sat in front of her bedroom mirror that night and looked at her hair.   Her straight hair fell down to her lower back.   She couldn’t believe it was so long, that life is so long.  She hadn’t cut it since she was six.  Her grandfather died at ninety-eight and for the last seventy years of his life had taken two shots of vodka a day.   That was his secret.  Her father told her it was against her religion to drink and to cut her hair. But he was a liar.  Yasmine held a pair of scissors and opened them.   She kept them hanging open for a minute and then began cutting an inch of her hair in a crooked manner.   She watched as the black bits of hair fell to the floor and landed on her feet.

                That night the actors in her dream had a brawl on stage.   First, in the middle of a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a short extra exclaimed, “I want to play Khalid.” 

              Then another said, “No, me, I want to be Khalid.”  The two men ran at each other and began violently punching one another.  

               Yasmine appeared from backstage and yelled, “But why do you all want to be him?”

               “Isn’t it obvious?” an innocent bystander commented, “He’s intense, intense characters lead to Oscar nominations. Obviously, you haven’t seen Silence of the Lambs.”  A gun produced itself in Yasmine’s hand and she shot the man who said that.   

               “Take a chill pill, woman,” one of the men who was fighting said in mid-punch….to be continued…..

By

Nina Kaur