Uzma Khan - Thinner Than Skin

“That is a horrific story,” I whispered.

She nodded. We rode the train in silence, arms entwined.

Back in San Francisco, the fog had cleared and the day was surprisingly warm. I was learning that October was spring in the Bay. “Seems we’re the only ones not jogging, or walking a dog,” I said idly.

She turned to me. “Nadir, I don’t dismiss what you do. You only think I do. I just wish, well, that you were equally happy with me as when you’re alone, at night, running, without your camera.”

“I am.”

“What’s the north of Pakistan like?”

My stomach clenched. Here it comes. “It’s — isolated. Isolating. Cleansing. I don’t know how to explain. People who live there have names for what we don’t. But — you find your own.”

She did something like a hop before swiveling to face me, walking backward on the pavement as I moved forward, keeping step with me, barely avoiding a streetlamp, her pace growing in speed as she pronounced, “Oh Nadir, I can arrange for us to go!”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve applied for funding. We’ll get it.”

“We?”

“Wesley. You’ll meet him. A comparative study of glaciers in northern Pakistan and northern California. Call it a fact-finding mission, to see if I can work in my country!”

“You will get it, or — already have?”

She soared into my arms, flinging us side to side, before presenting the route she believed we ought to take. We’d fly from Karachi to Rawalpindi, then, depending on the weather, take either a bus or plane to Gilgit. From Gilgit we’d take a bus to Hunza, from where the two glaciers that would best fit the requirements of her preliminary study were easily accessible. These were Batura Glacier and Ultar Glacier. Did I know of them? Of course. Did I know how dangerous they could be? Of course. Did I need to practice climbing around here, first? I shot her a look. She brought that man called Wesley into the conversation too. They’d apparently worked together on Whitney Glacier on Mount Shasta, where they collected and “dated” ice samples. Did I care how? No, I did not.

Naturally, throughout this monologue, there was no mention of Kaghan Valley.

Later that night, back in my apartment, she let me photograph her naked for once, torquing her spine to artificially recreate the image I first fell in love with.

“Why?” I asked. “Why today?”

She peeled off her sweater, shirt, bra, still delirious with the joy of having skillfully engineered her return. And all this time I’d believed she was waiting for me to say yes. There was never any consent involved. We were going.

“Why today?” I insisted.

She giggled. It was as if she were drunk and wanting to have sex with me after refusing when sober. It was her choice, yet I was having to make it.

“Come on, Nadir. Pick up your camera. I know you’re dying to.”

“Actually, I’m not.”

“Sure about that?”

I hesitated. To say yes would mean choosing no. I picked up my camera.

I didn’t enjoy it. In those moments, I didn’t want Farhana, neither behind my lens nor in the flesh. Even when she wound her braid around her, I couldn’t see the calla lily. It was all too conscious, too rehearsed. Hadn’t she planned it all — the visit to her father, the walk home, the seemingly innocent question about northern Pakistan, the news, the news, and now this? And yet, and yet. As I put her through my lens and captured that twisting torso, her ribs so protruding tonight, a thought flickered in my mind. Was it her pleasure that was dulling mine? I shook the thought away. No, this jeannie was just fine out of the bottle (even if she bent so far out of the bottle surely her spine would crack). I snapped another dozen shots. No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t even pleasure. More like victory. I could see it in her gaze. It had killed the wonder this moment was always meant to hold. As she adjusted her hips and I kept on snapping, I tried to conjure it up, this wonder, this thing which cannot always be there, which is entirely fleeting and numinous, which, like luck, or talent, or wealth, cannot be equally distributed between those who love, between those who mate. Snap! She was raising her chin so high. She was rising from the bed. She was turning off all the lights.

When it was over and she fell asleep, I hurried out into the night, a disturbed man.

Even the act of seeing becomes a theft, even a murder.

I hated the conversation I’d had with her father earlier that day. It wasn’t even a conversation. I hated today.

So I was to go back as her escort. When I had just begun earning. She had a great salary. She’d keep building up her resumé, while I became the porter. Photographing her was my payment for her pleasure.

No, no, I had to stop thinking of her this way.

I asked God to help me feel the way I normally felt on my solitary walks. Empty my mind, make me a happy man. I increased my pace.

The weather had turned again. It was now colder than on our way to the BART this afternoon. Gusty too, even for the Richmond. So much for spring in October. Why couldn’t San Francisco be still? Oh, if only for tonight! In my haste, I’d left my sweater behind and worn only a windbreaker over my shirt. I’d also left my umbrella. Not that it would have helped. When the rain came, the wind scattered it in every direction, opals spinning cartwheels under streetlights. I passed a man and a woman hunched beneath the same coat, and a solitary man talking soothingly into his phone — such composure, at this hour, and in this weather! — but they were the only ones I noticed as I walked down Balboa Street toward the Great Highway, a stretch of coastal road that always reminded me of Clifton Boulevard in Karachi and gave me a kind of peace. From there it wasn’t a short hike to the Sutro Baths but I knew that’s where I was headed.

It always happened this way when I set out at night. My body knew where it wanted to go, as if it had programmed the route from some earlier time. So I let my legs guide me, aware that to second-guess the purpose in my stride was as fruitless as second-guessing the need to flip onto my right side when I’d crawl into bed later to sleep.

My legs were sure, but my mind remained troubled. I tried to immerse myself in the glittering loops of rain, each drop dazzling, each cluster of multiple drops elastic and yielding. Instead, for no apparent reason, something I once heard Farhana say to my roommate Matthew danced around me instead. It was a silly thing and I’d had no right to eavesdrop. Nonetheless, it stuck.

“… put up with his farts and smelly underwear and the toilet with the urine stains all the way to the floor, and then to accompany him to a public soiree where he is so charming, so delightful. Do women really not know that underneath all that charm a man is farts and stains? Why do we fall for it, again and again?”

I’d heard Matthew laugh; his toilet was pristine.

First of all, we weren’t living together, so I couldn’t understand why she was having to put up with my smelly underwear et al. as if we were. Second, was she really talking about me? In a way, I hoped so. I didn’t know I possessed charm. I would like to, even for a few facetious moments at a public soiree. Third, public soiree? What the hell was that? Ergo, was she talking about me? Fourth, I didn’t fart as much as Matthew; I washed my underwear more often than she washed hers; I confess to the crusty commode. Ergo, it would have made sense if instead she’d said, “… put up with his finicky taste buds (no food is as good as my mother’s), his restless sleep (whenever I returned to bed after a walk, she claimed I woke her up), the toilet with the stains (yes yes), and then to have him accompany me to monologues by my father, who is so charming, so delightful …”

I felt a blade at my stomach. I was very far from the baths, drenched, and there was this man who must have been born of the opal rain, moving swiftly to wedge a knife under my windbreaker and through my shirt, just left of my navel. I wondered if I was being punished for having petty thoughts. Or punished for taking the photographs. Or just fucking punished.

“What do you want?” I heard a rasp exit my throat.

He was shorter than me and of paler complexion. High cheekbones, very obtrusive chin. Though this section of the road — definitely not the Great Highway, so where the hell was I? — was too dark to be sure, there could have been gray in the chin.

He could have been anyone.

He stared at me for a long time, and his breath was acrid, a mix of stale white wine and an illness, a stomach illness, perhaps, or a mental one. He gave me a lopsided grin and I could hear the sea. It had stopped raining. I was far from my apartment.

“What do you want?” I repeated. His knife poked harder into my flesh; still he did not reply. There was drool on his lips and he seemed to be shaking, with cold, or with laughter. I told myself the dampness at my belly was my soaked shirt. I wasn’t walking, or running, I was standing still, still as a dried urine stain. Yet I was drifting, as though bewitched, and the air was a checkerboard of moving points, flashes of color darting by.

His fist suddenly jerked to indicate my windbreaker.

“Jacket?” I asked. The knife was no longer at my belly. There was a sharp pain instead. He threw me a ghoulish grin.

In the wind my jacket inflated like a pneumatic device, as if I were blowing it with a rubber tube in a desperate attempt to escape on a solo flight across the Pacific. It would save me. It would save me, but only if I took it off. I began to undress slowly.

He was wheezing. I could hear words behind the wheeze. “Jack-eet. Jack-eet. Gee-ve-me-your-jack-eet.” They were not words but sounds merging into one roll, one hymn. While he repeated this hymn, I freed one arm and then the next, realizing, too late, that my wallet and my keys were in the jacket pocket. He began to hop; I saw Farhana hopping earlier that day. When my jacket was off he began to skip — away. And then he bolted across the street.

This was worse. He hadn’t taken a thing. He’d double back, follow me home.

I pressed my stomach and my fingers came away sticky. I was bleeding. I did not put the jacket back on but I did remove my wallet and keys. I held the jacket out to him as I crept away.

I must have walked south from Balboa, not north, because I could see the silhouette of the Dutch windmill when I looked over my shoulder for him; there it loomed, at the corner of Golden Gate Park. It was the first time my legs had misled me. He’d disappeared under the bridge, toward the park. I heard hushed footsteps but saw no chin, no gray sweats, and no soiled, thick-soled joggers without laces on the left foot. I only knew I’d been staring at the shoes when I searched for them on my way home.

I don’t remember entering my apartment. I remember smearing my stomach with an antibiotic cream from Matthew’s medicine cabinet (above his pristine toilet), bandaging it, taking two Tylenol, and climbing under the blankets with an icepack, naked and shivering. Farhana didn’t stir, didn’t curl into me.

It was still dark when I woke up again, bleeding. Beside me sat a friend of Farhana’s. His name was Wesley.

My parents first saw themselves as a married couple in a mirror. It was considered bad luck to gaze directly into each other’s eyes. This was an invitation to a jinn. But it was good luck to gaze at each other’s reflection. And so, at the wedding, my mother’s sister held a mirror across my mother’s lap and the newlyweds looked down, and, according to my aunt, smiled. “Your mother made a coy attempt at covering her lips so your father could not see how broadly she smiled, though of course, she was sitting next to him. He could hear the smile. And she could hear his.”

The same was true for the slopes of Malika Parbat, Queen of the Mountains. Her lovers were not meant to gaze at her directly. We were meant to gaze at her in the lake.

By the time we crossed the glacier and arrived on the banks of Lake Saiful Maluk, Malika Parbat’s reflection was being admired and broken by a stream of exhausted pilgrims and a dozen boats. Irfan warned Wes and Farhana to avoid the boats, declaring, simply, “They sink.”

It was Malika Parbat’s snowmelt that created the lake that reflected her. Her melt, tossed in with that of the surrounding mountains. If you let your imagination soar, far in the distance to the northwest of the Queen appeared a tiny fragment of what might have been the most photographed and feared peak in the Himalayan chain: Nanga Parbat. Naked Mountain. Or perhaps it was just some mystery mountain that only looked like him, for he was too far away to actually be seen from here. Whoever he was, by all accounts, he rarely showed himself as clearly as on that day. Even those who negotiated the lake’s treacherously deep and icy waters in creaky boats to better gaze upon the reflection of the Queen now lifted their chins to gawk across the cerulean sky at that phantom peak, who was her rival, or darling, depending on whom you asked.