Eating the Apple

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who’s the ugliest one of all?”

 

“You are, O apple eater.

You are, O naughty bookworm.

You are.”

 

I didn’t wake up, I plummeted to awareness.

The mirror in front of me, terror filling my pores.

Who am I?

The dream had thrown me out. It wasn’t a nice dream, though I’d have preferred to continue it rather than return to this place. For a moment I wondered, what’s this? Where am I? Then I realized—or remembered. This is where I’m hiding. I’m in the hotel. I ran away. It wasn’t yet 3:30 a.m. What was I going to do with myself, awake? I bent my knees and pulled them to my stomach, hugging myself. I’m a ball in the form of a woman, more ball than woman. Like a letter C with its wrists tied together.

I pulled the blanket over my head and closed my eyes. Sleep, Fatima. Tomorrow we’ll sort out your thoughts. Tomorrow you’ll iron your shirt and comb your hair and sort out your thoughts. That’s the plan. All you have to do now is sleep. The night isn’t on your side. You know that, Fatima, and still you wake like this.

I curled up into myself, a snail that knew what to do. Sleep, little one, sleep. I sang to myself as if I were my mother, as if I were my child, as if I were the only person I had left, because I was the only person I had left. My limbs were trembling, my body was in revolt. The dreadful reality washed over me like the horror that always accompanies that simple question. Who am I? I ran away. You really ran away, Fatima.

The face in the mirror mocked me. Shout it out, Archimedes, shout out your brilliant discovery. Wake the whole world up! Please sleep, Fatima. Go to sleep, quick, before the outlines of the story come back, the immorality and indecency of it all, its power over you. Before the thought absorbs you entirely and sucks the life out of you, leaving you withered and powerless.

I can’t stop thinking. I have to turn off this crazy machine they call the mind. I jump out of bed, my fingers shaking as I open my suitcases, my fingers as frantic as I am, bony and sweaty and injured like me. I open the suitcases one after the other, tear through them, throwing things out, rummaging and raging through them, ransacking the contents. I dig my fingers deep, deep into the pockets and openings and corners of the suitcases. I dive, searching for relief, for that damn bottle of pills that pulls me gently out of my reality. Alprazolam, the magical soporific, cure for epilepsy, anxiety, and depression—my best friend and worst enemy, working steadily, with my blessing, toward my undoing.

Where are they, those little devils? Come, dears. Come, little ones. Come, before I run out of the room and turn myself in to the first policeman or tissue vendor I find in the street. I fumble over the bottle under the cotton pajamas. Opening it with trembling fingers, I swallow a pill. I assure the frantic being inside me that things are under control. Calm down, Fatima. You took the medicine.

I am sinking into the bed. The bed is a pit and I fall. The pit is endless, like bloodshed, like the hungry, like the dead, like Sayyab’s poetry: “Your gifts, my Lord, I accept them all. Bring them . . . Bring them . . . O giver of shells and death.” Am I delirious? I’m shaking, and not from passion or ecstasy or prophetic revelation. The alprazolam is tearing through me, leaving me lit. A terrible dryness in my mouth. There’s no water in the well.

I close my eyes and see Faris. He’s searching for me through the many streets, wandering the sidewalks and looking all over, looking for me behind trees and under rocks. I smile at him tenderly and mumble with a tongue thick as a bag of sand, Sleep, dear. Sleep. The numbness crawls toward me from my fingertips, my limbs are shrinking. I’m slowly being eaten away, getting smaller and smaller. I grow numb and can now think of Faris. I feel sorry for him. With my weak throat and thin voice, I sing to him, sing him to sleep.