KEY QUESTION

I reached into my pocket for the keys to our apartment door, but my small daughter stopped me. She asked to be lifted so she could open the door, so I brought her up to the level of my chest.

She had a set of plastic keys from her doll’s house. The toy house held antique furniture, candelabras, dishware—all visible in rooms with cutaway ceilings. She didn’t know that metal keys were needed for our door, and not just any metal keys, but ones that had been cut, serrated, and notched to fit.

I held her as she stretched out and tried to insert her keys into the locks. “They’re not going to work,” I said.

She understood what I was saying but didn’t believe me. She kept working her keys against the slots, first in the top lock and then in the lower lock.

“Just hold me,” she said.

I held her with my fingers laced beneath her legs. She tried for what seemed a long time, pressing the plastic keys—each a different color—at various angles against the metal plates. She seemed to think the problem was with her technique, but I knew the problem was with the hardware. The toy keys were made for toy locks. Our apartment door had real locks, installed to keep burglars out. “They come in through the front door,” the locksmith had said to me when we moved in.

We were not trying to break and enter. We just wanted to release the bolts that kept the door shut. We didn’t need picks or power tools, but we did need real keys.

When we finally got into our apartment—with my keys—we saw none of the Victorian decorations that were in the doll’s house. Our furnishings were not high priced, and few items matched in color or design. But our ceiling, at least, had not been cut away. It was intact.

COUNTRY HOUSE

Two men who didn’t know each other well were staying in a country house—the older one owned the house; the younger one was his guest. They’d met at a mutual friend’s dinner party in the city. Soon after they’d arrived, the homeowner noticed the water pressure was low, but when he tried to fix it, he cut off all the electricity. The lack of power didn’t matter, at least not during the day. Sunlight came through the branches of the pine trees that surrounded the house. However, water would only trickle from the faucets.

The homeowner set a pot under an open tap. After a few minutes, the pot had collected some water, so he next tried to light the gas stove. He turned a knob and held a match next to a burner, and the gas puffed into a blue flame. He boiled the water and made two cups of tea.

Both men sat a low table and sipped the tea. “Why don’t we leave?” the guest asked.

“We should stay, at least for a while.”

As they sat with their tea, the daylight slowly faded.

“I’m going to pack my things and call a car,” the guest said.

“You can’t call a car here,” the homeowner said. “Anyway, we already have a ticket back.”

“What will we do here?”

“Well, I can fix things. I can put on my tool belt and take out my wrench.”

“I’m not into cosplay.”

The guest zipped his luggage and started to get his coat.

“Let me try the circuit breakers,” the homeowner said.

He went down to the basement with a flashlight. In a closet, he found a metal plate on a wall, unsnapped it, and examined two rows of double-pole switches. He couldn’t tell which ones were on and which were off. So he started flipping them randomly. As he worked through the rows, lights started to come on. He called upstairs, “Is anything working?”

“Yes, the refrigerator is on, and a clock is lit.”

When he threw the last switch, the rest of the lights in the house came on. That was good news, but he still didn’t know what to do about the low water pressure.

“I’m going to do some reading now,” the guest said. He went into his room then and shut the door.

GIGGLE SHIT

I was visiting a friend in Italy. My friend worked during the day, and when he came home in the evening, he brought out his hashish works. He had no pipe, so he used a pin stuck through a piece of cardboard. He placed a small chunk of hash on the point of the pin, set the cardboard on a table, and held a match to the pellet.

“What keeps the stuff together?” I asked.

“Camel dung,” my friend said.

We set a drinking glass upside down over the smoking dung and let the fumes collect in the glass. We sat on the floor, slid the glass to the table’s edge, put our lips to the space between the glass and the table, and sucked in the smoke. After I’d inhaled, I waited a minute before breathing out. Then I couldn’t get off the floor. I reached but couldn’t latch onto anything. I fell back, raised myself to a sitting position, fell back again.

“Are you buzzed?” my friend asked.

I rolled on the floor, laughing. “You know,” I said, “my father used to call me a giggle shit.”

“I think you’ve had enough,” my friend said. He took the blackened glass, along with the pin and cardboard, and “hid” the works on top of his refrigerator.

I chuckled to myself for a few minutes.

The next day, I was in the apartment alone when the housekeeper, named Picci, arrived. She spoke only Italian. I tried to avoid her, but she found me. She was carrying the hash glass. “Brutto,” she said.

She shoved the glass toward me. “Molto brutto,” she said.

I tried to ignore her, but in the evening I said to my friend, “Picci found our smoking glass and called it brutto. What does that mean?”

“It means ‘ugly,’ ” he said.

“She said it was molto brutto.”

“ ‘Very ugly.’ ”

Picci had disposed of our hash works, so we had to use a different glass. Fortunately, Picci hadn’t found the stash. There was a black chunk the size of a fist in a plastic bag in a drawer. The block was hard—the camel dung was like glue. We cut off small pieces for heating on the point of a new pin, under a clean glass. We got on the floor and sucked in the smoke.

I started to laugh silently, but I couldn’t keep the sound down. I put a hand on my stomach and hacked. Quickly, I sank to the floor lay there, fetus-like, laughing.

“You are a giggle shit,” my friend said.

The next morning, my friend talked to Picci before he left for work. During the day, I had nothing to do; I was on vacation. I planned to go out later to a cultural site, but before I left I saw Picci. I had thought she spoke no English, but when she caught my attention she said clearly, “Giggle shit.”

DEAR MR. CHALAMET,

I don’t know if I can call you Timothée, since we haven’t met, but Timothée seems easier, more comfortable, than Mr. Chalamet. After all, I’m much older than you. Still, I wouldn’t expect you to call me Mr. Rutkowski. Anyway, here, in this letter, I’ll most often call you “you” and myself “I.”

Although we haven’t met, I saw you once on the street. I didn’t notice you, because I didn’t know who you were. I wouldn’t have recognized you, even if you were standing next to me. But I was with my daughter, and we were walking up a street from a park. We’d been sitting on a bench, trying to have some time together but not saying much of anything. We were coming up the street, and we both saw a skinny young guy crossing in front of us. “That’s Timothée Chalamet,” my daughter said, but I didn’t know who she was talking about.

“We made eye contact,” she added.

By that point, you had crossed and were on the sidewalk heading west, and walking rather fast, at least compared to how I walk. I saw only the back of your head, but the hair was distinctive, as I later learned. My daughter followed you, and I followed her. She took a couple of photos of your back with her phone, presumably to post on social media. You didn’t turn around, and it was soon clear that we had no reason to keep following, so we stopped and went home. We lived only a couple of blocks away.

The idea here is our daughter and I had a shared purpose, even though it was short, less than a minute. While we had little to discuss when we were trying to talk in the park, now we had something. Almost instantly, I forgot your last name, but I remembered your first name, Timothée. That was enough to identify you. “We saw an actor on the street,” I said to my wife. “His name was Timothée something.”

“Oh,” she said, “you mean Timothée Chalamet?”

“Yes,” I said, and I started learning about you. You aren’t much older than our daughter. You went to an arts high school, where some of our daughter’s middle-school classmates went. They must have known you, or known who you were. Their brush with fame might have been like my experience in college, where I kept hearing about Christopher Reeve. I never saw him—he was a couple of years older than I was—but I knew where he’d lived on campus. It wasn’t far from where I lived. This made my college experience a little more exciting, knowing that Reeve had been there. Everyone knew who Reeve was; no one knew who I was. But maybe someday they would know me, because I’d lived close to where Reeve lived. Of course, that in itself was no reason to know who I was.

—T

THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI is the author of seven books, most recently Tricks of Light, a poetry collection. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

I started peeling off my skin and laying it carefully on the table in front of the mirror. Just like how you peel a fruit, I started doing the same to my face. Picking it up from right below my eyes to the ear on the other end of my face, I tore apart the skin and it came off so easily as if it was patiently waiting for this day from a long time. Then, I started from my left cheek and took a quick turn over my nose to reach the deformed forehead.

Red juices started coming out from my face. I looked like a battered pomegranate. My face appeared as if someone had chewed on the fruit aggressively and threw the remains on the ground after it became unbearable to gulp it down. I felt its juices all over my face.

My face, the fruit, looked like a human brain, which has been beaten again and again to take a shape, which is not natural but depicts a violent submission. It was mocking me, reflecting me, and daring me to wipe the juices off my face. I raised my hands to my face and started crushing it further with my hands, feeling its seeds fighting against the skin of my palm and fingers. I wanted it to be shapeless, formless, and unidentifiable. I wanted people to look at it and feel nothing because its shape would be unknown to them. It was my rebellion against nature’s cruelty to give us a living form that’s incompatible with our desires.

I laid the peeled-off skin on the table and stared at my new fresh face for a solid minute. I had seen this face somewhere. I had seen someone peeling off their skin in the broad daylight. I had witnessed it right before my eyes and all I could feel was jealousy, pure unadulterated jealousy.

Her name was Leylah. I remember her name because it was a big deal to her. It was Persian. She used to give references to songs, movies, and legends to me so that I can understand the depth of her name better. All I ever wanted to tell her was that her name was the least of my concerns and it was painful to hear her ramblings all day. One day, she came up to me and gave me a half-hour lecture on the meaning of my name. I couldn’t care less but it was her face that made me keep my mouth closed. She was a beautiful woman, too beautiful. Sometimes, I just wanted to touch her skin to see if it was real. She used to do it all day to my face but I couldn’t bring myself to do it to hers. I would ruin it; I knew it. I don’t know why but I knew it. It came to me naturally, an instinct to not act on my foolish desires.

She also never kept her hair long. Again, I couldn’t care less but it was weird. She always wished for long hair but the day her hair used to get longer by a mere inch, she used to cut it, with her own hands. Then, she would bawl her eyes out in front of me and wish for long hair again. I used to laugh and every day, whenever I remember her, I laugh.

She was one weird little woman but aren’t all of us – women, I mean— weird and sad.

Leylah was not too religious but she wasn’t godless like me either. She had a ridiculous obsession with tying holy threads around my wrist and neck, the same places one would chain a person. I loved the way she tied them around my wrists and neck, knowing that the second she goes away, I would tear them as if my skin was on fire. It didn’t burn my skin but I felt like puking my guts out every time I looked at those hideous colorful threads around my fragile pale wrists. It was anomalous. It didn’t belong there.

Today, I remembered her after a long time. I don’t forget things easily but I tend to refrain from making use of my brain’s capacity to remember every person I have met. It’s a torture and a waste of energy so; I wonder why I can still recall each minute detail about Leylah.

While I was reminiscing my time together with her, I was still standing in front of the mirror. I had no regard for time but the weird sensation in my knees, and the shooting pain in my spine forced me to cry out and fall on the wooden floor. I fell awkwardly and all I could do was painfully grasp my abdomen so that it overpowers the ache in my spine.

I could feel the rage in my spine wanting to come out. It was impatient and thrashing against everything it came in contact with. Some days, it felt as if it came out and lay in front of me on the floor but it was just inside me, brutally caged by the flesh. I couldn’t do anything except reach for the drawer and consume ‘two painkillers of the day’. That’s the golden rule. Never take more than two painkillers in a day – one would not be enough to ease the pain and more than two of them would not kill you, but will result in other damned reactions in the future.

Once you raise the pill to your mouth, its revolting smell will reach your nose and you will know that it’s going to taste bad. Then, a lump will automatically form in your throat making it impossible for the pill to go down. It will come up in your mouth and release its atrocious insides there, right where you can taste them, making no mistakes.

Now, you are met with two choices. First, you can let your mouth suffer and gulp down some water, one time, two times! – helping you to drag the medicine down your throat. You might choke but that will not be enough to kill you. Second, you can vomit the medicine out. That would be simple, right? Not for me. Since I have fallen ill like this, I have never vomited the pill out. Even if I did, I used to pick it up and complete the ritual. I hated looking at my family’s faces, full of annoyance and worry at my childish tantrums. It took me a while but I concluded that no one should be at the receiving end of those faces.

Leylah never did look at me like that. She used to look at the discarded pill instead, with so much anger and hatred as if that pill should have been easier to swallow down. It wasn’t my fault; I never thought it was my fault. I house several incapabilities but not self-blaming. She knew that and never consoled me about it.

Sometimes, Leylah used to cover her head, and sometimes, she didn’t. Whenever she wore the hijab, it had random prints on it. She was inclined to eccentric clothing. Not that it concerned me, it was her body and nobody should ever dare to speak in the matters of someone else’s body but I had my favorite though, the pomegranate print one, it was lovely. On some days, she would come rocking a bob. It was a treat to watch her giving no attention to her fellows calling her a pseudo-Muslim, whatever that means.

I am proud that I never gave any attention to those people, screaming about Hollywood’s obsession with removing the hijab of Muslim women but not accepting a woman, who does so by choice. I was angry too but after some time, it became entertaining because it all boiled down to what Leylah wanted to do and she was remarkable at it.

Leylah was not a bubbly-happy woman, she was an angry one. She was not a band-aid to society’s sadness but the one that wouldn’t think twice before punching you in your face. Even, her favorite album was Radikal. She made me listen to that album every day. I loved it too, it was refreshing. One day, she was lying down on the grass while humming to one of her favorite songs and her hair started swaying with wind or the music, I couldn’t decide. She had cut her hair unevenly and I could see that she hadn’t washed it that day. It looked so pleasing to the eye – her hair flowing with the wind that barely graced us in summers, her sun burnt skin giving a suitable backdrop to her hair, her eyelashes were not curled but straight and you could only see their beauty up close, and her adorable crooked nose, which I loved from the depths of my heart.

Leylah also had freckles like me, the only thing we both shared.

I still remember the day I told her that I was going back to the place I came from. I had to go back to see if the reason for which I left still existed. She was neither emotional nor ecstatic about it. As usual, she was angry. She wanted to travel with me and see for herself the place, where I was born. I hated it when people wanted me to accompany them like an ever-smiling tour guide so that they could get an authentic stamp on their visit to Kashmir. I had told Leylah that I would never take her to visit my place but her stubborn little heart thought that I would change my mind soon and that didn’t happen.

It’s not that I am possessive or patriotic about my homeland, I never was. I just detest the foreigner’s gaze. The gaze, devoid of any compassion, understanding, and love towards others, who are trying to live, resist and fight against all odds. It fills my heart with so much bitterness. This is exactly how violence robs you of friendship, love, and trust and, wherever I go, this theft follows me.

I have been an object to the foreigner’s gaze several times in my life. I know the feeling very well. The humiliation when you are treated like a centerpiece on a table. The foreigner’s gaze is also present in my family, friend circle, and so-called community. It didn’t take the people of my community two seconds to escape and run into the warmth of their houses when I was being treated like filth. They will accept you as long as you worship their God, stay loyal to their ridiculous idea of religion, hate the ones who dare assert their identity and lick the boots of men who have pledged to protect the veiled virgin women of the valley.

I didn’t want Leylah to look at me like that. I am much more than these baseless questions and colonizer’s assessment. Violence might rob us of friendship, love, and trust but it can never overpower our individuality, our non-conformist desires, and our everlasting curse on the occupier’s trickery. As I lay on the cold wooden floor, waiting for the painkiller to work, I admitted that my illness might go away but the resentment would not. It has grown roots inside of me.

I stood up and neared my bed. I heard my mother’s voice from downstairs. ‘Have your dinner’, a simple call from her but it frightened me.

I knew that now, I would have to forcefully stuff my mouth and stomach with food.

I pushed my feet against the floor and ran downstairs. I could have walked but I ran to show my mother that I am hungry, to show her that I am like the other normal children she has, and to make her believe that I am recovering but the taste of painkiller in my mouth stated otherwise.

I prepared myself and thought, I would divide the food into small pieces and then, evaluate my chances of whether I could completely eat it or not.

She filled one plate with rice and placed it on the dastarkhaan. After some time, she gave me her lovely warm smile and pushed the rice filled plate towards me.

While I was looking at my mother’s face, I realized that she was once again eating the cold leftover rice. I didn’t ask her about it because I knew what the answer would be. She would have either said that she didn’t want to waste food or she would have thrown the soaring market prices of rice towards me. I once told her that we can all divide it and eat it together but she said that it will make us ill. Exactly, my concern.

My father on the other hand usually stayed quiet but that day, he decided to open his mouth and, one thing I knew for sure is that whenever he opens his mouth, nothing good comes out.

‘Why do you cook so much if nobody eats it?’ he asked my mother in his arrogant voice. That’s the thing about my mother; she doesn’t pay attention to him, she never has. She ignored him like she usually did and urged me with her eyebrows to eat. My father zeroed his gaze on me and I knew in that exact moment that I would not be able to eat anything from that plate.

Whenever my father looks at me like that, I know he will leave nothing to amend or aid, it’s going to be a complete massacre, and why not. I mock the religion he treasures so much, I am indifferent to the God he worships so much, I hate the community he loves so much and I live according to my own set of values that he detests so much. I am a living contradiction of him.

I looked at him and his eyes scared me. I wanted to vomit but I couldn’t. I needed an outlet – tears, words, screams, vomit – anything. His eyes reminded me of the foreigner’s gaze, one that is in constant search of fresh bodies so that they can be carved up and sold in the market at the highest price.

I ignored his gaze and focused on the food in front of me. In that second, my throat clogged up and cold sweat started breaking out on my skin. My mother’s voice became distant as the moments passed and my father started eating his food normally.

I looked to my side and saw my sisters crying silently and looking at each other for help. Why does he have to open his mouth? Why can’t he eat and go to sleep? Why does he always look at me as if I am the ugliest thing in this house? Why do we have to eat together?

Then, everything started coming back. Like an avalanche, it completely overtook my being under a dark opaque blanket of overwhelming sickness.

I looked down and saw a bunch of moths crawling out of the rice on my plate. After some time, they started flying toward me and rested right inside my throat. I started choking but nobody looked at me. Nobody dared to.

I stood up and ran upstairs to the warmth of my solitude. I heard my mother and sisters calling me but I couldn’t reply. The insects had started multiplying in my mouth while their wings were absorbed in the pomegranate juice. I could taste their bodies on my tongue as they kept on taking birth there. I started chewing their bodies and they oozed with the fruit’s liquids.

After chewing each of them, I spat them out. I looked at the dead insects on the floor. Only I could make out that they were moths just a few minutes ago and not something unknown. I glanced at their bodies and the lump starts to make its unwelcomed appearance.

I ran into the bathroom and vomited freely. I clutched my head in my hands because it felt like my head was going to roll back and fall on the floor anytime then. I could feel my thick hair wrapping itself around my fingers, squeezing them until they turned white, and gave up their resistance to keep my head intact. This is how it feels every time. I patiently waited for my heartbeat to rise and then calm my body down gradually with it.

‘You need to know what works for you and have some faith in your body; it will try its best to survive’. That’s what Leylah used to say to me. It was something that I learnt from her amongst all the other things. I follow it and recite it like a prayer every day. It works.

As I came back from another episode of my breakdown, I sat down on my bed and started recalling more details about my time with her.

I don’t regret my decision to come back here but on some days, I am uncertain about the choices that I made or we make in our youthful craze.

With this thought, I close my eyes with thoughts of Leylah still humming in my mind and I dance away to her sweet tune.

SABAHAT ALI WANI is a writer, researcher and artist from Kashmir. Her writings about Kashmiri women have been published by International Literature and Arts Festival (USA), South Asian Today, and Empower Magazine. She is also a mixed-media storytelling artist who aims to create a space for bold and critical statements through her art experiments. Her artwork has appeared in Club Plum Literary Journal, About Place Journal (Black Earth Institute), Long Con magazine, Maaje Zevwe, Blue Marble Review and Variant Literature.