A Life in Men: A Novel (52 page)

“Atlanta,” she says. “You’re really going?”

He nods. Kisses her forehead. She gasps a little and holds the mask on her face, huffing the air, and right away her eyelids get heavy. He pulls the mask back a little. “Wait,” he says. “Please.” He has no idea when he last used that word:
please.
“I promise. If I weren’t going home to see my boy, I’d have kept this for myself and you’d have been on your own. Don’t fade on me, baby, please. You’ve gotta tell me what you want me to do.”

Tears are rolling down her face. “You just want to be the last person to see me.”

“True,” he says. “True.”

A nurse could walk in at any moment. His heart is pounding hard and he feels hers, too, through her thin gown, fast against his chest, fluttery and unconvincing next to his, easy to distinguish even though they’re beating right into each other. He has to sit up, has to get this show on the road. Probably right now the staff is gearing up for the onslaught of the Americans, the pulmonary specialist husband—they’re all busy, quaking in their boots and waiting for some damn international incident. Like she’s not even here.

She is nodding, biting her lip. “It won’t hurt?”

This is the first thing he’s been sure of. “No. It’ll be good. And then it won’t be anything.”

She starts shaking her head. “But—okay, say you get out. Wait . . . you fly home, okay. But they’ll find out.” Her voice is urgent, a child about to get in trouble. “They’ll see it in my system. They’ll come after you.”

He’s thought of this. Of course. Even if Boutell is happy to chalk it up to her disease, the husband will want an autopsy: he’ll be trying to prove what the hospital itself did wrong. They’ll find the heroin easily, not exactly a needle in a haystack. He believes with everything in him that Sandor and Leo will be on
his
side. He knows this may be crazy but believes it nonetheless, can’t fathom that they’d voluntarily give him up. But maybe they’ll have to: the doctor and nurses have seen him with them, they can’t just pretend he was a phantom. Sure, fine then: the law will come after him. He feels himself fighting annoyance. What the hell difference does that make?

“I don’t care about that,” he says. “This is stupid. This whole thing—it’s . . .” And then it’s on him, a dry sob he can’t control, though he promised himself that he wouldn’t break down, no matter what her answer was. “I’ve gotten out of shit before,” he says, struggling to keep his voice even. “Don’t you understand they’re just going to let—I can’t stand it. You, trapped like a rat, coughing blood and fading away, choking on the world. For Christ’s sake, why shouldn’t your last moment be a rush, be like the best fucking climax you ever had? Not like
this
.”

She presses herself to him the way she did that night in Essaouira, urgent, but without desire now. He thinks of what she said to him in Tangier:
beyond sex.
She made it sound good, almost noble. There’s nothing noble about it. Sex is life. She was wrong about that.

Somehow, though, she is smiling. Intermittently holding the oxygen up to her burning face because the need for air is beyond her control just like these sobs are beyond his. She’s squirming in his arms, too hot for his touch, fever rising again. She regards him, and in that moment he is able to compose himself, to take this last of what she can offer and hold it, click it in his mind like a photograph. She says defiantly, “I’m
not
sorry. Nobody should go to Morocco without somebody who’d help them bury a body. Even if the body’s their own.”

“Good girl.” He makes himself sit, feels the air invading the space where her skin has been. “We’re running out of time, though. We gotta roll.”

She is still smiling. “I can’t,” she says. “Kenneth. Thank you . . . so much. You know I can’t.”

In his eyes, Mary watches emotions flash. Relief is not one. Nor surprise.

“It’s not about me anymore,” she whispers, touching his face, her hand against the roughness of hair. And it would be so easy, so perfect, to stretch their secret liaison all the way to this, to turn even death itself into a collusive game they are in together. She could hand her arm over to him without fear, trust him to give her—as he has done before—exactly what she needs. “It’s not about you, baby. They’re coming. I’ve never seen anything through. I owe them this.”

“You don’t owe anybody anything,” he says, but she lets her hand drop, closes her eyes at last. Behind the lids she can still see him. Him and the others in the room, those who have died here maybe, those who lurk in corners and behind curtains, just waiting for Kenneth to make his exit so they can have free rein. They do not fear her: she is too close to being one of them. They are not real; of course they are not real. But she does not fear them either. They can accompany her farther than the real ones can go.

So many things she meant to do but didn’t. Learn to meditate; become truly fluent in Spanish; read those kinds of books her brother reads. Allow her mother to feel needed. Love her husband as exclusively as he has loved her.

She has been lucky, almost unspeakably lucky. There are women who spend their entire lives in one town. Women who never finish high school, much less graduate school, who never have a friend like Nix to lose, much less other, healing bonds like those she’s found. Leo and Sandor: their tenderness, laughter, open arms. Kenneth: an unflinching eye beyond words or conditions. And Geoff—Geoff, who held her in memory and jumped worlds to find her, and who will now hold her in memory again. There are women whose lives are spent waiting by the phone, but although she was neither the most beautiful nor the most worthy, every man she has slept with loved her at least a little, even Eli, dear Eli, practicing for old age by now. There are women who have never had an orgasm, who have never seen a lover get down on his knees in the rain, who have never been photographed or painted, who have never tasted paella or watched the sun burst into color over Mount Kenya. Women who have been invisible and quiet for eighty or ninety years and called that a life. There are women, too, who have had all she has had plus babies, grandchildren, vibrant health, dazzling careers; who go gray gracefully and die fast in their sleep. There are, aren’t there? They are out there somewhere; thank God she does not know them. She has
lived,
and in the world she’s traversed, she has seen and been loved more than most. More than her mother, more than poor dead Agnes. Even more than Nix.

She does not think these thoughts. She has conjured them all before, dozens of times over years of dress rehearsal for thinking them when the time comes. But now she finds them slippery as mercury, utterly elusive.

“I wanted a baby,” she manages to say, eyes still shut. “You could have forty years left, longer than I’ve had. It’s not too late, Kenneth. Go and find him. Promise me.”

“I already promised,” he says. “I’m going. I’m going.”

But he stays, waiting for Sandor’s phone call. Beyond that even, watching her sleep, willing her to wake and speak to him just one more time, until it is truly too late and he hears voices approaching, cuts out and sees them only briefly: Leo and Sandor’s mouths gaping with an almost comic surprise. For a moment he catches the husband’s eye—
her
husband, Mary’s husband—not enemy or competitor but just another man to whom an invisible torch has been passed. He is the keeper of all things now. Geoff sees the long-haired white dude staring, radically out of place in these surroundings, and a sense of déjà vu ripples up his back, then is quickly obliterated by the business at hand.

By then Kenneth is gone, has rounded a corner and left her to them, making his way swiftly down the opposite hall.

Epilogue

(GANDER: HASNAIN)

There was a crime. But there were also the lovers.

—
IAN MCEWAN
,
Atonement

Hasnain is not claustrophobic. When he was a small boy, he used to hide in a trunk in his parents’ bedroom on occasion to spy on them and report back to Ali their goings-on. Usually banalities about the restaurant, or sometimes a mild row about the children: about Ali’s poor marks and how Baba had ruined Hasnain’s future by insisting that he take up piano. Nothing he and Ali didn’t already know. Still, Hasnain studied their tones and inflections to do impressions of them later for his twin. They did not own a television, so on days they weren’t forced to help out at the restaurant, there was little else to do. Their father did not approve of television, whether because it would rot their minds or because it would dilute them, turn them into slouching, smoking, cursing, drugging English punks, Hasnain and Ali could not be sure. His disapproval turned his children into spies, ferreting out any small kernel of interest. Ali could not hide in the trunk—it was small and felt airless, so he panicked—but Hasnain remembers liking it in there.

A woman in the aisle seat behind him is crying. She says, “I have to get out of here, I can’t breathe. Can’t they let us off already? Why can’t we just find a hotel or rent a car? Why are they holding us prisoner?
We
didn’t do anything.” Her husband tries to calm her, though she is already whispering. Nobody wants to set off any alarms in case there are terrorists on board the plane. Upon the husband’s shushing her, though, the wife increases her volume. “Do I look like I’ve got a bomb strapped to my leg, for Christ’s sake; I’m a fucking housewife from Decatur!” Hasnain does not know where Decatur is. The husband shushes her again, admonishing, “Yeah, you sound like June fucking Cleaver with that mouth. Keep your voice down. Don’t you know it’s illegal to even say the word ‘bomb’ on an airplane? You can be arrested for that!”

This much Hasnain already knew.

T
HERE ARE FIFTY-THREE
grounded planes. They clutter the tarmac as though for an aircraft show, as though at any moment the locals of the town,
Gander, in Newfoundland, Canada, will materialize and mill between the planes to admire and touch them with curious hands. In truth, no one save security is permitted to approach the planes, any more than the passengers are permitted to disembark. They sit packed into cramped seats, breathing recycled breath and air-conditioning. In an effort to ward off staleness, the air is excessively cold, and many of the passengers have blankets wrapped around their shoulders or slung over their legs. Hasnain finds his eyes darting toward concealed legs, trying to ascertain what is hidden under the blankets, searching for an invisible bomb.

T
WO MEN ON
the plane wear openly Islamic dress, sport long beards. The other passengers mainly avoid them, though Hasnain notices a few overcompensating, being overly solicitous of the men, who do not return their friendliness. Or perhaps it is not overcompensation so much as
keeping your enemies closer
. Perhaps these passengers have appointed themselves ambassadors of sorts, and they are merely keeping an eye out.

He does not know why he brought the letters with him on this trip. It would make sense if he flew only rarely—if every time he anticipated being airborne he thought of her and took her letters along in homage. This is not the case. He flies frequently, both for work and to visit family in London. Yet he has not read the letters in years—five years, six? He has never taken them with him on a flight since the one he hopped to New York in 1989, on which he took everything he could carry, everything he owned.

The things I have been writing to you have been borrowed scraps of other lives, the usual semester-abroad adventures I hear my flatmates gossiping about in our kitchen every morning over PG Tips and cigarettes. I’ve regurgitated their stories for you, hoping to accomplish something by it, a tamer form of the same “something” I was trying to accomplish that day in Mykonos. It’s just like my mother says, I never learn. In reality, I lie in my twin bed every day after the others have gone to class. They’ve stopped even asking me to take the Tube in with them because everyone knows by now that I’m the weird girl, the basket case, the one who has come all the way to London to fail out of school and hide under my covers all day. I lie here and tell myself not to picture it all, but I still do and it’s always so real, like it’s happening over and over again, whether I’m in my bed or in a classroom, it doesn’t matter. The only time it stops is when the piano player next door practices every morning from 9:30 to 10:30. Mozart, Chopin, Ravel. I don’t know the names of the concertos, but I remember them from my father’s collection, from everything he took with him when he left. The walls must be thin because I can feel the pounding of the keys under my body in my flimsy bed, and the music takes me out of Titus’s villa, out of their hands, and not back to being a little girl with my father exactly, but somewhere safe, somewhere else . . .

H
ERE IS WHAT
they have been told. First, that they were making an unexpected landing in the Canadian town of Gander, to check out a possibly malfunctioning part that might need to be replaced. Quickly the crew went about the business of shutting down the plane. Hasnain was not concerned, but upon landing it was immediately clear that something was wrong. The pilot came over the PA system and joked, “I bet you’re wondering if all these other aircraft have the same malfunctioning part we do,” and there was a nervous titter of laughter, but most faces had gone serious. The human body carries inside it an archetype of knowledge that things can change in only an instant: that what has been an ordinary day can quickly become war. The pilot announced that there had been some terrorist activity in New York and that US airspace had been shut down—all transatlantic flights, including theirs, would be grounded until they received further word. Hasnain felt his skin grow clammy, slippery, his vision tunneling and turning dark.

It sounded abstract:
terrorist activity in New York
. It could mean anything. Had Manhattan become a war zone? Were there riots, people fighting in the streets and slinging grenades? Though they were not sitting together as a group, and other than traveling companions, none of them seemed to know one another, it immediately became clear who onboard hailed from New York: a camaraderie already beginning to form. Still Hasnain sat quietly in his seat, staring at his carry-on stuffed beneath the chair in front of him. He had brought the letters for no reason, or so it had seemed.

Now he knew why.

H
E IS NOT
claustrophobic. He is not, but the walls of the plane seem to be contracting, moving closer like the walls in that room at Disney World when he and Leslie took the kids. He imagines Leslie now, calling his mobile, but none of the phones on the plane are working. Canada has a different cell system and any call that gets through at all goes to a Canadian operator who keeps saying all lines to the US are blocked or jammed. They cannot reach the outside world. Back in New York, nobody knows they are here.

They have been on the tarmac for twelve hours and are down to only Pepsi, small bars of chocolate, and crisps.

L
ESLIE AND THE
boys. They seem at this moment an abstract concept, too. For the overthrowing of New York, Hasnain conjures Leslie—the phantom Leslie of his imagination—donning guerrilla fatigues and bursting from the house to join the revolution like the good progressive she is: going to join the uprising. Except there is no rising
up.
The Twin Towers have been brought down by Islamic terrorists; a plane has flown into the Pentagon. Onboard, passengers circulate rumors about the Sears Tower, so that for a while it is common knowledge among them that Chicago is under attack also. Only later, when they have access to television, will they learn that this never happened, and they will be unsure why it seemed to them a fact.

He imagines his sons hiding in the coat closet, as they are fond of doing: always spying just like he and Ali did. In his mind, Leslie has left them in the house to fend for themselves while she runs the streets in her fatigues, though in reality she would never do this, not for any cause.
What is the cause?
He isn’t thinking straight. In reality, she is a stay-at-home mom, a pacifist, a lapsed Lutheran, and only an armchair radical.

O
F COURSE THE
ones to fear are Islamic extremists. In England, in his youth, often they were Irish, but now, in the landscape of today, the terrorists will be Arabs—Muslims, like him. And Leslie will be stunned, her hand going to her mouth in alarm as she realizes in one fell swoop that she cannot be on their side—that their side is not what she imagined. That their side is monstrous.

A
LREADY HIS FELLOW
passengers are losing their fight, their grumbles dying down. They will spend the night on the plane—there is no getting around it—and so mothers tuck children into laps, and men stretch their legs out into the aisles. How quickly human beings become like cattle; how quickly the drive to resist settles down and what is enforced becomes what is inevitable. One woman on the plane weeps while a cluster of seatmates around her—friends now—console her. The woman’s husband, Hasnain has overheard, works in the Twin Towers. Even the pilot has attempted to use his own phone to call the woman’s home, but he has not been able to get through. Time passes, and within a few hours even this woman’s tears die down as she settles into resignation, into fitful sleep. She will have told herself, he knows, that her husband could not have been in the building at the time, that today is the day he goes to the health club in the morning and doesn’t get to the office on time, that he seemed slightly ill when she left on her trip and right now he is probably feverish in bed. Hasnain remembers the stories he told himself in the hours after Lockerbie was announced—the way he got in the car and raced to Heathrow, convinced that he would find her there, lost and wandering among travelers, unable to leave him, unable to get her feet off British soil. As though death were simply an impossibility; as though the human brain is devoid of all deep history, of all memory. As though it can never learn.

E
VERYTHING I HAVE
written you until now is a lie
, her first letter urgently begins.
This is the letter I meant to write but couldn’t.
It is dated just days before he and Nicole met—the first of five letters she left behind with him, along with her black sweater from Neal Street Store, along with her tapes of Miracle Legion and Sam Brown and Chopin, along with a tattered copy of John Updike’s
Trust Me
and Thich Nhat Hanh’s
The Miracle of Mindfulness
. She kept a yoga journal, but she took it with her on the plane along with her address book. All of that became fire and ash and blood somewhere above Lockerbie, so that only these five letters—folded and shoved into the back of a biography of members of the Bloomsbury Group and directed to a friend from home sometimes addressed as Typhoid Mary—remain.

A
RMED GUARDS LINE
the path from the planes to the yellow buses as passengers, ordered to leave all luggage behind, are hustled off. Their pilot, whose voice has become like that which Musa heard booming from the fire—an unquestioned truth—stands by at the plane’s exit, reminding them to remain calm and obey Canadian authorities, stressing, “Everything will be all right.” An elderly man holding the arm of his wife freezes in his tracks, so that for a moment Hasnain suspects he may be having a heart attack. When he looks at the man’s face, though, he is crying. He turns to the pilot and says, “I know you didn’t mean it this way, young man, but that’s exactly what they told us when we got off the trains at Auschwitz.”

H
ASNAIN IS NOT
the only Muslim here. He sees quite a few corralled into the buses, some clearly not speaking English and blinking in confusion, unsure what is happening to them. To the side of the tarmac, three women in full burkas, nothing but their hennaed hands visible in the morning glare, have been taken under the wing of some kind and folksy Canadian and are not being led to the buses. Hasnain knows they are probably headed for a private home, just as many of the elderly are being separated for their own safety, along with a couple of pregnant women. Yet he reminds himself mentally to check for these women when the planes are boarded again—
if
the planes are boarded again—just in case.

The Canadian authorities check his passport with interest at first, and then, when they see his name and British citizenship, the alarm lights that had flashed are quickly extinguished. In Kashmir, now the site of one of the world’s most dangerous nuclear stalemates and once the home of his father’s family, Muslim and Hindu surnames are mixed up, free floating, unlike in most parts of the world. For the first twenty-four years of his life, the fact of his Muslimness was a given, common knowledge, part of where he fit in among London’s complicated brew; the name Hasnain announced it, yes, but did not need to.
All
the Indians he knew then were Muslims—that was the world his parents kept to, though they had every kind of patron at the restaurant.

As soon as he landed in New York in 1989, he began the process of changing his name from Hasnain to John. He meant it ironically, John being a name he saw then as quintessentially, almost comically American—a name itself devoid of any deep history and memory, just like his new country.
John Wayne
. It was common anyway in Indian culture to have anglicized nicknames, though Hasnain had never had one. And so his passport bore a name unlikely to belong to any terrorist, the fact of his Muslim heritage disguised by a mere omission, slipping into the cracks between language.

If he never mentioned it, it did not exist.