This Must Be What Happened

Faris came home at exactly four, because that’s what he does every afternoon. If he doesn’t come home at four, it means he’s been run over in the street or is lying in a hospital bed. He comes home at 4 p.m. every day. The door creaks in his hands and he calls out to me, every day. When I don’t answer he assumes—naturally—that I am in the bathroom, buried in bubbles.

He definitely opened the door and found the bathroom empty, the Jacuzzi dry. He probably thought I was in the study, because recently, very recently, I’d started to write. The bad habit he’d hoped I’d break. He’d look for me there and not find me. Then he’d go look for me in the kitchen. He’d say, Maybe she’s making salad. I wasn’t there either.

He would return to our bedroom and sit on the bed, surprised. He’d fail several times to get control of his thoughts, which were racing around the room, but then, in that spot where he sat on our double bed with the earth-colored bedspread decorated with goatskin pillows—pillows he loves and I hate—he’d notice that paper, a yellow Post-it stuck to the mirror. At that moment he’d encounter the letter informing him that I’d left.

He’d read it and not understand a thing, because it was incomprehensible. He’d take his cell phone out of his right pocket and call me, and when the phone company told him the number was out of service, he’d start to believe. His lips would part, despite the dryness and late afternoon thirst, and he’d whisper to himself, “She’s crazy!”

Then his photographic memory would begin to discover the things that had disappeared: my comb, the Chanel eyeliner, and the bottle of oud essence. In the bathroom he’d notice the disappearance of my toothbrush and the Close-Up toothpaste. He’d notice that I left the Signal 2 toothpaste for him and he’d believe it a bit more, because he knows that I prefer the taste of Close-Up.

Most likely, different thoughts would hit him all at once. He’d have one idea and an idea that refuted it at the same time. He’d think in opposites and wouldn’t notice his ideas contradicted each other. And because he wouldn’t have the slightest idea what he should do, he’d most likely call Saqr. He’d dial his number then hang up before it rang. He’d say, The last thing Fatima would want is her childhood jailer. And he would be right.

He’d think that he should go to the police and submit a missing-person report—after waiting twenty-four hours. In this case he’d have to hide my silly goodbye letter stuck to the mirror and act as though I’d been kidnapped by a gang, and it would look as silly as in the movies. The policemen would start asking irrational questions: Does your wife have a secret lover? It would be embarrassing. But he had to do something, because his wife—a woman addicted to pills and to crying for long spells at night—had run away.

At first he would decide to go to the police to submit the report, then he’d notice a small, trifling detail that would enter his heart like a bullet. On the dinner table he’d find a spread of his favorite dishes: mashbous laham with truffles; arugula salad with haloumi cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, and toasted pine nuts; fresh orange juice; and lemon custard. The meal Faris dreams of having every day of his life until the world ends.

The gesture will shake him. Despite the anger, confusion, and heaps of incomprehension, it will touch his heart. He’ll go out. He’ll start the car and rest his head on the wheel. Here, most likely, he’ll decide that he’s going to wait. What is he going to wait for? He doesn’t know. He will just wait. For his life to move from this moment to the one after it.

Because he can’t stay at home he’ll spend his night looking in every possible place. He’ll start at the hospitals, to reassure himself that I’m not lying in an intensive-care unit, and then he will go to the cafés and restaurants we used to frequent together, and then to the sea. He’ll search all of Kuwait and won’t find me.

He’ll go to every hotel he knows, the ones everyone knows. He won’t notice this cheap three-star hotel, old and run-down. An unseen building—he’ll walk right by it and won’t see it.