At his home in Chennai, a husband, father, grandfather is busy with his daily correspondence. There are decisions to be made: Which proposals to support? Which speaking engagements to accept? Which invitations—to meetings, dinners, and receptions—to decline?
He has a routine he adheres to religiously since his wife’s departure. After waking up, he goes for his morning walk in the park around the corner, stopping first at the neighboring restaurant for his morning cup of tea. On his way back he picks up his breakfast from the restaurant, his usual order kept ready for him: two idlis and two vadas, the sambar and chutney packed in small plastic bags. He shaves and showers, dresses, then eats his breakfast reading the newspaper. When the maid arrives, she’ll clear the table, wash and put away the plates and dishes he’s used, then sweep and clean the house, while he works in his study.
Now he consults his calendar and makes plans: he has a full day, ending with the keynote speech he’s to give at the Indian Medical Association’s annual convention. When the maid is done housekeeping, he leaves the house and won’t return until bedtime. He looks over the speech, about the responsibilities of doctors in the twenty-first century, and makes a few final edits.
He ponders for a moment whether he should call his wife. But why should he? They should be the ones calling him.
In Irvine, a father watches his daughter fall asleep. She lies in his bed, the side where her mother usually sleeps, whom she’s cried for all evening. She is silent now, but her face, even in repose, is tense. He strokes her hair, waiting for her body to slacken, and studies in the half gloom the worried creases of her forehead, the tight thin lines of her lips.
Eventually, when she has slipped into a sufficiently deep slumber, he lifts her into his arms to carry her to her own bed. But he pauses by the door of the children’s room, suddenly reluctant to enter. He turns and carries her back to his room, her body a comforting weight against his chest.
Later, he’s ashamed: Is he afraid of his own son? He lies awake in bed pondering, then persuades himself to return to check on the boy. His son is sleeping peacefully, his chest rising and falling with the grace of a bird riding a gentle breeze, his face serene, lit by Allah’s own words and the ceiling’s glowing universe.
At the San Francisco International Airport, a daughter, sister, mother waits by the departure gate for her flight to Dallas: she has bought a ticket on the last flight leaving that night.
When her phone rings—displaying a San Francisco number—she’s quick to answer, on the hope of hearing her mother’s voice again. But it’s a voice she hasn’t heard before, a man claiming to be her sister’s ex-husband. He tells her that her mother asked that she be informed about her sister: bleeding, emergency, ambulance. He gives her the name of a hospital and is in a hurry to hang up.
But she needs to be at home, by her children’s beds, looking down at their sleeping forms. Hasn’t she been punished enough for her decision to abandon her son and daughter? She has her boarding pass in hand, her luggage has been checked. Surely her sister will be all right—
She remains rooted to her spot.
In the halls of a hospital in San Francisco, a wants-to-be father paces the marbled floor, one end to the other, spinning visions of the future: the joys of accidental fatherhood, perhaps even an unexpected restoration of his ruptured family. Any doubts he’s harbored have been replaced by the simple longing to hold the baby, and the mother, in his arms, even if he has to—as he will, as he wants to—accept the inclusion of a fourth into the family.
He’d never really believed life capable of granting him this. But now he feels a strange stirring of hope, of pride almost, of attaining some kind of happiness. Like the day two years ago when a man in his image was elected president of his country.
Surely it is a sign that he’s been called to be present here today. He has declared himself the father of the baby to be born; he neglects to correct the nurses when they refer to the mother as his wife.
He’s not unaware of the dire peril to mother and baby. A nurse has tried to reassure him: they’re doing everything they can. He has willed himself to believe the doctors capable of miracles.
In one unlit corner of the waiting room, a mother, wife, again-to-be grandmother stands with her back against the wall. She feels safer in the relative shadows, away from the light, as if by doing so she can escape the malevolent attentions of the universe. Every time someone—a doctor, a nurse, an orderly—enters, she shrinks a little as if to render herself invisible, preferring ignorance to bad news about her daughter and the baby.
But as the minutes pass uninterrupted, a slow anger builds: Will no one—no doctor, no soothsayer, no god?—reveal to her the outcome of this waiting and free her from this particular hell? She’s been patient long enough. The time allotted to her is even now running out.
Until then she’d accepted her impending death with resigned equanimity, much as she’d accepted everything that happened as simply how the world worked. But now she wants more than just the knowledge of the well-being of her daughter and her baby:
She wants to hold and coddle her grandchild, to be there when he takes his first steps, when he utters his first words. She wants to teach him Urdu, to sing him Urdu lullabies and ghazals. She wants to see her daughter settle down with her partner; she wants to cook for them the most delicious meals they’ve ever eaten.
She wants the world—for herself, for her two daughters, for all her grandchildren—more fiercely now that she’s confronted with a world slipping away from her.
A figure approaches, haloed under the light, unearthly, otherworldly. He’s a doctor, a healer—like her husband, her daughters’ father, but not him—and as he draws nearer:
Oh, what comfort does he bring?
Inside an operating room, a not-to-be mother is laid out on a table under the cool annular brilliance of surgical lighting, her domed belly exposed.
She’s unaware, of course, of where she is. Her heart continues to pump what feeble blood it can. Her lungs continue to inhale and exhale a straitened air. She’s hooked up to machines that monitor her body for signs of life, to tubes that dribble into her the blood and fluids her body has lost and the anesthesia that will deaden her to any pain her mind can still acknowledge.
Around her assemble doctors and nurses, their hair covered, faces masked, bodies gowned, hands gloved. Scalpels and scissors, forceps and suction tips—these are the tools at hand for these robed figures: inadequate, but the best they have. A scalpel slits through the skin and fat covering her belly and slips into her womb.
Blood seeps out of her like a spring. Gloved hands probe the interior of her split womb, seeking to lift out her blood-smeared baby. The umbilical cord connecting her to the child is snipped. Her body struggles to hold on to the wispy flame of life still flickering through it. Others bear the child away.
Here I am, breached into this world, all twenty inches of me, all seven pounds, with all my features and appendages in their place. The downy mammalian hair that once covered my entire body is gone. I’m fully and independently human now, even if I haven’t yet taken my first breath.
To think that only nine months ago, I was a mere leech, the size of a grain of rice, clinging to my mother’s walls. And then a lump of flesh, pea-sized, formless and shapeless, just a week later. I was an inch, head and heart in place, limbs budding, when my mother decided to keep me. My urogenital folds had fused and extended out to form the spongy shaft of my penis, clarifying my boyhood, by the time my father rejected me. I was beginning to make my presence known, pushing out against my mother’s abdomen, when she first met her current lover.
Two days earlier, when my mother’s sister accepted guardianship of me, I was ready—my intestines already functioning, fashioning and storing what will be my first stool, black and tar-like, while my lungs, the most developed of my organs, lay compressed but ready to assume from my mother’s lungs the task of providing oxygen. I was as prepared as I’d ever be to leave behind the three shells that had protected me from the world’s harsh brilliance: the placenta that nourished me, the uterus that harbored me, the body that housed me.
When I emerged from my mother’s womb and the umbilical cord was severed, a reflex triggered by a hunger for air should have made me gasp, and I should have taken my first breath. My lungs, until now a crimped-up mass of solid tissue, would have then expanded with their first taste of air, and my blood would have begun to flow through them, to be renewed there. The respiratory muscles that line my rib cage and diaphragm would have become engaged, forcing me to take my second breath, and then my third.
But I don’t respond this way, and someone slips a suction tube into my mouth to clear my windpipe and induce me to start breathing. Someone else wipes me clean of the blood and mucus smearing my face and body. They thump me on the back—part encouragement, part prod—to shock my body into responding. My collapsed lungs resist, and someone places a mask over my nostrils to force air into me. My stubborn lungs strain with the pressure, but even as I convulse and splutter, they expand only slightly.
As if, by some grace, I’ve been given the power to choose whether I wish to enter this world or, by holding my breath, forsake it.
On a ship sailing from England to Italy, a poet despairs—a storm rages outside, and a storm rages within. He’s confined to his cabin in this wooden coffin taking him away from everything he loves. It’s not fame he lusts after anymore, nor the moon’s otherworldly beauty.
His friends and supporters have chipped in generously to finance this convalescence in Rome, in the hope that the merciful Roman winter would grant him a reprieve, allowing him to return to his world—to his fiancée and friends, to his poetry. But he knows there’s to be no return from this journey. The symptoms are recognizable—blood, phlegm, a wasting away, a hollowing of chest and body. Hasn’t he nursed and lost his mother and brother to the disease’s ravaging clutches?
He has asked the friend accompanying him to buy him some laudanum for seasickness—a drink of that could put an end to his suffering. Who would have thought the human heart capable of containing so much misery?
The sea outside, the very air, heaves and strains.
In the basement of a church in Oakland, a to-be father who will never know his son serves a much delayed breakfast to hungry children. There are three tables, each with twenty kids, and they’ve been waiting for food the last thirty minutes. They’ve been led in their daily pledge already—I pledge to develop my mind and body to the greatest extent possible; I will learn all that I can in order to give my best to my people in their struggle for liberation; I will discipline myself to direct my energies thoughtfully and constructively rather than wasting them in idle hatred—and one of his Panther comrades has given them an impromptu lecture on resistance and history, but they have less than half an hour to get to school, and they are restless and ravenous.
He arrived at the church early that morning only to find the storeroom ransacked—the flour strewn around, the fridge emptied, the eggs smashed, the milk spilled—and one window busted open. There had been little time for anger or investigation, but he’s sure he knows the perpetrators: the pigs in uniform.
He’d immediately set about trying to forage supplies for some kind of breakfast to feed sixty hungry kids, leaving his comrades behind to clean up the mess—he refused to even consider turning the kids away. He stopped at the pad to scrounge for whatever cash he could find and managed to procure grits and sausages and a few cans of orange juice concentrate.
He’s in the kitchen dishing up the next batch of plates, listening with pleasure to the laughter and joking in the next room that returned once breakfast was announced, when there’s an abrupt silence. And then the bellow: Who’s in charge here?
Sounds of a scuffle, chairs and trays being shoved aside, shouts and screams, the whimpering of kids, the protests of his comrades. He rushes to take a look, finding trays on the floor, an orange-yellow mess of grits and juice. The children cower in their seats, their faces frozen in fear. His two comrades are lined up against the wall. Covering them, with guns out, are three White cops, weaving and blustering, while a fourth stands guard at the entrance to the basement.
Instinctively, he darts back into the kitchen and picks up the pistol he keeps hidden behind the fridge, in anticipation of such occasions.
At the airport, some passengers notice a woman hurrying away from the departure gate. This wouldn’t have bothered them except that she’s wearing a hijab and is covered from head to toe in a dark-brown gown. She looks frantic, almost disturbed. They debate whether this is cause for concern and decide they’d rather be safe than sorry.
They inform an airline employee, who passes on their concerns to a security agent, who after some consultation institutes the following precautions: the terminal must be thoroughly searched for any unattended baggage; all carry-ons must be examined manually on every flight leaving the terminal; all flights with possible Muslim passengers must be flagged and delayed till the agents are able to identify the fleeing woman.
Many passengers—some frustrated, some scared, some angry—call friends, family, lovers to advise them of the delay, and to hear their voices for what could perhaps be the last time.
In the Castro, a lover returns to his apartment earlier than expected and finds it empty. Not wishing to spend the rest of his evening alone, he sets out in the hope of locating his boyfriend at one of their usual haunts. But repeated text messages go unanswered, and after checking bars for some time, he gives up and returns home, changes into pajamas, and climbs into bed. He gives a friend a call to check on her, to offer and seek sympathy, but gets no answer from her as well. He’ll eventually fall into a fitful asleep. Later, he’ll be vaguely aware of another body joining him under the sheets. He’ll turn automatically to his side, so that the length of his partner’s body is pressed against his, comforting, the way he likes it.
In Oakland, in her small tomb-like studio a lover lies awake in her bed, dry-eyed, alone. When the phone rings, she springs to answer, but it’s not her girlfriend, and right now she doesn’t want to speak with anyone else. Her mind replays the evening, reenacting the moments so it doesn’t end the way it did: banished from the only world she wants to inhabit, the enveloping warmth of partner and child. She’ll drift through the night, waiting for the phone to ring.
In Washington, D.C., a president who’d once proclaimed the virtues of hope has woken up in the middle of his sleep, despondent. His party is poised to be trounced in the upcoming midterm elections, and with the House passing into opposing hands, he may not be able to achieve anything more before his current term ends. He may even be denied a second term.
I am firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings—justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings—are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.
He’s feeling a little sorry for himself: his opponents are proving more adversarial than expected, united in the goal of denying him any success, viciously rooting for his failure. He’d tried working across the aisle, as he’d promised he would, wooing them with concessions and compromises, which they’d rejected, rousing their base against him.
He’s a little bitter too: his own supporters seem to be turning against him as well. They already seem to have forgotten that he inherited an economy on the brink of collapse, a military mired in two wars, a nation under terrorist threat. Instead of having his back, they take pride in whining about how disappointed they are, condemning any compromises, and protesting pragmatic steps as too little, as if perfect failure were somehow more admirable than imperfect success.
All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort to find common ground.
Yes, he’d campaigned in poetry and is governing in prose, but surely adapting to the way the world actually works is the only rational thing to do: he has no power, after all, to compel the world to comply with his wishes.
We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning.
He must continue to hope.
At the airport, the woman weaves wildly through the passengers heading in the opposite direction, indifferent to the startled eyes trailing her. There are no taxis waiting outside the terminal—she’s on the departures level. The few cabs dropping passengers off don’t stop for her, despite her frantic waving. She must seem hysterical, she imagines, a tiny woman running toward them with her hijab fluttering, her jilbab billowing in the cold Bay Area breeze.
In desperation, she darts in front of a cab speeding away. It swerves to avoid her but does come to a stop. She clambers in, breathlessly announcing her destination, hoping the driver knows where the hospital is. The driver begins to protest in his gruff Russian accent, but something in her demeanor must be convincing of some emergency, for he nods and turns the meter on.
She’s riding the same route she’d taken scarcely a week ago, except this time she’s alone. But not entirely, for the ghosts of her mother and sister accompany her—a mother abandoned, a sister spurned. Sitting on the edge of the seat, she keeps her eyes fixed on the road ahead to avoid the sight of the empty seats beside her.
When the cab climbs up the final hill into San Francisco, she can see very little, the hilltop blanketed by a fierce swirling fog. When the taxi crests and swoops down the hill, she is dizzy, as though she is falling off a cliff whose base is hidden somewhere deep in the clouds of fog rising to meet her.
The city has been obliterated, erased with some vicious white marker, and in its place is a smoking void. Only occasionally the billowing fog parts enough, to reveal at times feeble pinpricks of house lights, at times glowing rivers of headlights like molten lava overrunning a hillside.
Somewhere in that are her sister and mother. It strikes her now that she’s riding into its fiery ruins for some definite trial and sentencing. For doesn’t the Quran warn of grievous penalty when the sky issues forth a smoky mist to envelop the people?
Perhaps her punishment is to be that her sister and mother are forever lost to her, erased from her life. She recalls that evening decades earlier when she’d walked into her sister’s room, only to find it bare, stripped of every sign—her sister disappeared with meticulous care. And—Allah forbid!—if something were to happen to her sister or the baby now, her mother would never forgive her. As she would never be able to forgive herself.
She’d allowed herself to behave hatefully. What had gotten into her, she who has always prided herself in her righteous ways? Her son’s face rises before her eyes—she imagines it at the moment the rock flew out of his hands, the set of his jaws, the line of his brows—but no, she cannot blame her son for her actions this evening. She sees it clearly now—whatever hurt, whatever anger, whatever hate drove him to such an act, it surely also belongs to her.
For a brief urgent moment she contemplates asking the driver to turn back to the airport: she needs to be in Irvine right away, something hanging there in the balance. Otherwise she may be too late, returning to her son only to find every loving trace of him erased. Hadn’t her husband spoken of whisking her son away? But then there’s the threatened erasure, too, of her sister and mother. Why is Allah forcing these dilemmas on her?
The cab is hemmed in by the traffic brought to a crawl by the fog, too far from the airport to make it back in time for her flight. Surely Allah knows best: He is, after all, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. She can only hope she’s being led to some sort of redeeming test, her son’s and her sister’s fates somehow linked and connected.
Allah, she prays, Allah, spare my son and my sister, let nothing happen to them.
The driver turns a startled face toward her: she has spoken the prayer out loud. Please hurry, she tells the driver, please hurry—
The car revs and lurches forward into the fog, the pale nebulous light opening and closing around them. And the car swings and zips down blurred streets lit by milky lamps, past drowsy traffic lights, past phantom buildings, through the ghostly remains of a shrouded city.
All the while she repeats the prayer under her breath, sitting on the edge of the seat and rocking herself back and forth, the way her daughter sometimes does. It’s a child’s prayer, repetitive and insistent—she’s slid back into a practice of praying from her childhood days, unmediated by a surah from the Quran or a dua, unmoored from regular offerings five times a day, from a time when prayers were part entreaties, part demands, part inveiglements, part threats, part negotiations, scripted by the needs of the hour and whispered over and over again to the universe.
She includes in her prayer everything she is in danger of losing: Allah, give me back my sister. Allah, give me back my son. Allah, spare my mother pain. Allah, protect my daughter from harm. Allah, secure my husband’s love for me. Allah, save my sister’s son. This is all I ask from you. You have to hear me this one time. I’ll never ask for anything else ever again.
The cab glides to a stop in front of a shimmering building that extends into the hazy heavens like a portal.
In Irvine, in a still-possible future, a brother says to his sister: Come, I’ll show you something.
He looks excited, and his sister drops what she’s doing and follows him. He leads her down to the garden, away from the house, and picks up the hose lying there.
She’s wary but goes to his side: Bhaiya, don’t get me wet, I just got ready for asr namaz.
It’s an afternoon in late fall, a limpid sky stretching across their heads. The sun shines above their rooftop, above the treetops, behind them.
This is the best time for this, he says. I’ll show you something beautiful.
He points the hose in the direction of their shadows extending on the lawn in front of them. He turns the hose on: a fine sheet of water sprays out in a wide V shape from the nozzle and falls to the lawn in a graceful curve.
Look, he says, and sweeps the nozzle up and down, as though he were washing the air in front of them. In the delicate scrim he creates from the water glinting in the sunlight, there appears—broken at first, and then more fully—a rainbow, large enough that it hovers like an arch made for the two of them, and near enough that they could easily leap through it.
Bhaiya, it’s lovely, she exclaims, clapping. It’s like magic.
Not magic, he explains: When the sun is behind us and low enough, some of the rays striking the water are reflected back from the inside surface of each droplet. But since different wavelengths of light are refracted a little differently, the light is separated, as through a prism. Depending on where we’re standing, only some of these rays reach our eyes, from droplets that lie in a narrow arc, the reds from the outside of the arc, and the violets from the inside.
We’re each seeing a slightly different rainbow, he says. A rainbow, like beauty, is in the beholder’s eye.
At some point, when the hydrogen in its core is exhausted, the sun’s nuclear reactions will cease. The sun will have expanded to more than a hundred times its current size by then, engulfing the earth and its moon. Perhaps that is the description of the dawn of Qiyamah, the day of resurrection.
But this is billions of years in the future, and the inventories of my own futures interest me more.
In the normal course of events, this is what should happen after my lungs expand for their first taste of air: My vocal cords will quicken for their first cry. My lips will seek a nipple for my first suckle of mother’s milk. In a few hours, my bowels will move. In a few days, my stomach will increase from the size of a marble to the size of my fist.
I’ll learn to recognize voices, faces, smells, in a couple of months. My eyesight will become capable of distinguishing primary colors, then the full rainbow spectrum, over a period of five months. I’ll sit up, then crawl, then take my first step, then walk, then run, over a period of two years. I’ll gurgle, then babble, then speak, first in words, then in sentences that will grow more confident, more complex, over a period of six years.
My first set of teeth will erupt, then fall away one by one, to be replaced by a permanent set, by the time I’m twelve. Sometime around then my testes will increase in size, my scrotum will descend, the shaft of my penis will grow longer, thicker, and pubic hair will begin to sprout. My testicles will produce the first of the millions of sperm they’ll churn out over my lifetime. I’ll experience my first ejaculations. My vocal cords will shorten, and my voice will drop an octave lower, to my adult voice. I’ll be sixteen when these changes are complete. I’ll have grown from my current height of twenty inches to my adult height by the time I’m twenty-one.
Meanwhile, the hundred billion neurons in my brain—formed during my first six months inside my mother’s womb—will form hundreds of trillions of connections with each other, rapidly at first, as my newborn brain responds to every attention and stimulation, then slower and slower, as newer experiences serve mainly to reinforce some connections, weeding out others.
I’m a blank slate at birth, with an infinity of futures available to me. With each neural connection that is made, that my brain fails to make, that is pruned, the futures are whittled down, until if I were alive long enough, there’s only one life I could possibly live.
Call it fate, call it destiny. Call it qismat, call it the will of Allah. Call it following the laws of nature, call it acting in accordance with our natures. Say it’s been decided by evolution; say it’s in our genes, in the secretions from our glands, in the pathways in our brains. Say we’re the products of our environments, our upbringings, our histories.
Aren’t our lives circumscribed, in any case, by powers over which we have little control?
Seema, I held our son in my arms. They had swaddled him in a blanket, to keep him warm, so only his face was visible—your face: heart shaped, an obstinate set to his lips, his eyes tightly shut. But his hair was all mine. I wanted to hold him without the blanket but didn’t know how to remove it. I was afraid I would drop him if I tried to unwrap him with one hand.
I asked a nurse to help. She looked at me oddly at first, as if she didn’t understand, but then she took him to the table and undid carefully the bundle of him. When she handed him back to me, holding him in one hand, with his body resting against her forearm and his neck supported by her palm—oh how tiny he was, how beautiful, blue-black all over, with just a hint of pink on his lips—I couldn’t figure out how to take him from her, how to hold him, with his arms and legs dangling and in the way.
How easy she made it look. Like this, she said, hold your arms like this. She made me raise and hold one arm bent, with my other hand below it, palm facing upward. To support the body, she said.
Grandmother, waiting outside you’re unaware of what’s transpiring in this operating room, even though the force of your mind is bent here.
Here’s how your elder daughter, Seema, dies: After plucking me out of my mother’s womb and handing me over to a nurse without even a glance, the doctor turns his attention back to my mother’s body on the table, attempting to stanch the flow of blood that is quickly draining her of life. But how to force the blood to remain in a body that seems intent on expelling it? He’s only human: he continues to try even after your daughter’s heart ceases pumping.
As for me: What real chance did I have? My body has always known what awaits it: acids have been building up in my bloodstream, and my brain has for some time been slowly strangled of oxygen. Detached from my body, my mind has all along been hovering—fluttering, skittering, skipping—suspended like a trill clinging to the air, straining to keep afloat, to keep away the final dying cadence.
But what a glorious song, Grandmother! Death sings in ways Birth cannot. It takes a lifetime to perfect that purity of tone, the vibrato of lament.
It has taken me all of three minutes.
Don’t pity me, Grandmother: I may not have experienced anything real but the inside of my mother’s womb, but I still have the song Death sings through me.
In that respect, I’m perhaps no less fortunate than others with more life: for aren’t so many of their songs merely wishful or fanciful, lined with desire and regret and envy, about what might have been but never was—or merely bitter and dissatisfied, lined with anger and remorse and guilt, of what was but never should have been?
I share this song with you, Grandmother, so it might bring you some comfort. I have mere moments to live. You will soon learn of our fates—my mother’s and mine—without needing to hear the words spoken by the doctor, for the expression on my not-to-be father’s face will convey everything you need to know.
Grandmother, somewhere in this building your other daughter, Tahera, my other not-to-be mother, is searching for us. She is lost: the maze of corridors that separate us—identical and blandly monotonous—have confused her. She asks for directions but is too impatient, too agitated, to heed them. Now, in the desperate hope that she’ll somehow be led to us, she’s hurrying through corridors picked at random, clutching to herself her jilbab, which trails her raggedly—the sleeve and skirt were caught in the car door as she made haste to exit the cab, the fabric ripping when she yanked to extricate them.
Grandmother, you will be resting your head against a wall, your gray hair against the white tile, your gray face in the shadows, when she stumbles on you. Bill will be seated by you, holding the shell of me in his arms, the two of you inches and miles apart. Tahera will catch one sight of you and freeze, transfixed.
Will the three of you grieve together, Grandmother, help each other grieve? So much depends on the answer.
There’s what’s left of your life, and Urdu ghazals and Faiz’s poetry and Noor Jehan’s voice. There’s Bill’s and Tahera’s lives, the lives of their loves, both current and future. There’s the lives of my now not-to-be siblings, both born and as yet unborn.
When you sense Bill shudder, will you let your hand stroke his hair like you’ve stroked your daughters’ hair so many times before? When Tahera unfixes herself, will you let yourself rise to take her cloaked and ragged form in your arms, as you’ve done so many times in her childhood? Don’t you see, Grandmother? It’s that past Tahera, too, who runs toward you with her arms open.
Will you forgive, Grandmother, and let yourself be forgiven? Console and be consoled?
Yes, there could be a hereafter. Perhaps we’ll all be resurrected, all our loves and our loved ones, our bones put together, then covered in flesh and skin. Maybe breath will then move our bodies, and maybe breath will then move us. And perhaps we’ll have forever for what may be granted us: kind words, a touch, maybe even a kiss, a caress. Perhaps we’ll be held, or be able to hold.
But in this cold clinical room there’s only the three of you.
The light dazzles my eyes, yet I catch a glint of the blade approaching.
Father, was I born for this end?
Come with me, quickly. There isn’t much time left, and I want to show you something beautiful: here by the entrance to the hospital, where the fog swirls fiercely, hiding the city and its comforting lights from us, hiding the universe from us.
Wait here, on this ridge overlooking the concealed city, till a car comes by, as one surely will very soon, its headlights aimed directly at us as it swings into the parking lot. No, we won’t be blinded by the lights, we’ll face the other direction, toward the open hillside.
Here comes a car now—don’t be scared, don’t turn around—and here is the fog rising off the hillside in front of us, and here are the headlights illuminating the fog for us.
Look! Strangers approaching us through the glowing fog, from the direction of the hidden city, treading through the air, floating over the hillside! And can you see? Shimmering around them: a perfect halo! And what’s that circumscribed within the halo? They’re trailing folded wings behind them!
How the figures loom larger and larger as they approach us, and then how suddenly—when it appears as though they are reaching out to greet us—they take wing and disappear!
No, they’re not angels descended from some heaven, nor visions from some dream world. These radiant fugitives are created by us: they’re merely our shadows cast on the fog, their wings bestowed by these rails that are protecting us from falling off this ledge.
And the glorious halo is a fogbow—like a rainbow, only with the colors tightly braided—produced by the light from the headlights reflecting off the inner surfaces of the millions of tiny droplets of water suspended in the air in front of us, obscuring the hillside, the city, the sky. So tiny that the droplets of water interact with the very particles of light.
But we are minuscule ourselves compared to the universe, and we are innumerous as well, and there is indeed light cast upon us, so perhaps we too can—