HAMID
He had known her a long time, almost a year, almost long enough to appreciate her strange sense of melancholy, almost long enough to appreciate her love of language. He knew her fears: tunnels, bridges, dogs and guns. He knew about the German Shepard and the broken fence gate. He knew about the fourteen-year-old brother of her best friend, the handsome one who put a shotgun to his face and pulled the trigger. He knew about the country boy she dated in college, the one who looked like Superman; the one she thought could have ended up a star in a big-budget Hollywood film about the end of the world.
She had told him about her scars: the little ones on her knuckles; the long, thin straight ones on her stomach; the one on her knee that looked like a drop of white paint. He knew she sometimes called her heart, the web of the spider. He knew about the freckle on the palm of her left hand, and how her mother had once told her it was a sign of good luck.
When they talked, he spoke of his love of the Jordanian desert, romantic and lonely. He told her about the basaltic castles, the night air, and the gaze of the moon. Sometimes he would call her at work, tell her the fable about the shadow of the gray wolf, how he moved the sand with the beating of his heart. "The desert is vast," he said. "We could lose ourselves out there." She imagined him extending a brown arm for emphasis; she imagined the taste of his shoulder in the palm of her hand, the warmth of her hand beneath his shirt.
When she was fourteen her parents took her to Mexico. "We will live as a simple family," her father had said. "We will learn the language of the people." But in Mexico she found only caution, learned to keep the secret of her blue eyes. She stared at the ground, kept her movements slight and pious. She covered her white skin and waited, tried to blend into the walls. At the top of a cliff by the sea she found a statue of Christ. At night, in her dreams, he came to her as the ghost of a child, innocent and protective. "Usted finalmente me ha encontrado," she said. In the silence of her daydreams, she called him el lobo. In the silence of the day, she spoke of nothing to no one.
Eventually Hamid became to her like a cloud, sometimes here and then gone. Sometimes she would notice his absence, sometimes not. His voice began to sound like someone she had known from childhood, someone she had once loved and later come to distrust. When he talked of the wolf she began to cry. "I do not want to hear anymore fables," she said. "I only want what is real." He told her how he had once stepped on a rusty nail, how he had become so worried it would get infected. He had heard stories, and ever after he had walked gingerly, imagining he could feel abnormal heat and infection swimming in
his blood.
She thought about telling him of Mexico: of the sandy beaches and the summers of her forgotten language and the freckles on her shoulders that would never fade with time. But she did not. She told him instead about her days in college, how she had once fallen in love with a married theatre professor, how he had ignored her stories and her poems filled with words like want and need. Then she laughed at herself. "I have become that girl," she said, "the one who offers her true-love a gift wrapped in paper tissues. And you are the man, holding my gift in your palm, the one touched by the very thought but resolved to harden yourself against such gestures in the future."
He denied it was so and she giggled and said she was sorry and then their words became as the cloud: first a paragraph, then a sentence, now just a word or two in passing: yes, no, maybe. She felt guilty and sent him the gold ring her mother had given her as a baby. She put it on a long silver chain she bought at the mall and wrapped it in red tissue paper and mailed it to an address he once gave when she sent him a copy of her favorite book of poetry. Hamid later held the ring in his hand and cried alone at home because he was very touched by the gift and because it also seemed a helpless and misguided way to get his attention; something somehow all too gritty about something that it seemed he should be above.