The
weekend had been going so well until Hassan disappeared whilst swimming. The night before, he and Alicia had driven
down from
After their family dinner Alicia’s
stepfather had retired to his study to complete some work on an important legal
case, while her mother chatted with them in the living room. She had gone to
bed at around
Their house was a classic New
England Victorian, magnificently sited on a low bluff overlooking the wide
mouth of an estuary. Its Queen Anne turret rose above the foliage of a near-by
pine tree whilst the rest of its stately bulk was neatly hidden from the beach
by a mix of deciduous trees. The blue of the water in front of the house looked
icy in the pale June sun, which, although gaining strength in the early
morning, was not quite warm enough to coax canny locals into the estuary to
bathe. But Hassan was undaunted. His tolerance for cold water was higher than
that of most ordinary human beings.
“Its
my British education that I have to thank for that,” he told Alicia as he slung
his towel over his shoulder and headed down the stone path towards the beach.
“It knocks the wimp right out of you.”
“So manly!” Alicia watched him, as
she hugged her knees in the oversize porch chair, sipping on a mug of
coffee.
Hassan had told his friend Eddie
about Alicia only a few days before this trip down to her mother’s place on the
cape.
“She’s incredible, Eddie,” he had
told him. “There’s just an uncanny connection that we have, you know? She’s
charming, funny, smart, you name it, and she’s beautiful, too.” Eddie looked dubious. “If it was anybody but
you saying those things I would be happy for them, in an uncomplicated sort of
way.” Hassan sighed. “Oh here we go again,” he said. Eddie continued: “But sooner or later she’s
going to want you naked in her sack.”
“Oh its not like that.”
“Everything is like that,”
Eddie said. “That’s life in the real world, my friend, its put out or get out.
I mean where do you think she thinks this is going? Huh? A good-looking
(sort of), educated, single man….a colleague, who she likes and admires
and—fancies? I tell you she’s not looking for a platonic relationship, man.
Sooner or later your little ship of denial is going to run up against the rock
of reality.”
Eddie had seen it all before with
Hassan: The well-heeled college girls, easily impressed by this super-sensitive
Iranian man with the sleek good looks and an international education. Hassan’s
almost-unconscious habit of making himself their confidante, getting inside
their thoughts and soliciting their deepest secrets, unsettling them with his
attentions, and then, finally, when the bait is set and the prey is ready to
enter—nothing but an awkwardness and confusion resulting in estrangement.
Hassan dismissed Eddie’s cynicism;
just more of his friend’s two-dimensional narrow mindedness. Eddie’s whole
mindset, in fact, was the problem with society these days. Maybe it was a
peculiarly American problem; the New World was so unwaveringly black and white,
as if all things were only ever thus and not so, could only be
one thing and never another, as if the universe of human experience was
pristine, devoid of cagey shadows, free of doubt. What it needed was some of
the ancient world’s give-and-take, some polymorphic propensity. You bet your
life that Alexander the Great, having chopped a few dozen enemies into dog
food, stopped for lunch and a quick romp with several of his concubines, found
time in his schedule to get cozy with an attractive young boy from time to
time. And what would that have said about his otherwise beyond dispute
masculinity? American mainstream society, it seemed to Hassan, was too hung up
on these rigid definitions of Man and Woman, of Masculine and Feminine, of Gay
and Straight, and although he had lived here for years, and felt largely
acclimatized to his surroundings, he never quite shook the perception that
there were some intrinsic differences about him—that he was in the end a
foreigner—and those differences might as well have included an extra set of
legs for all intents and purposes. And this issue of sexuality was, perhaps, a
part of it.
“Its about people,” he
explained to Eddie. “Its people I love, not men or women; the shape of their
bodies is irrelevant, the specifics of their appendages do not concern me.”
“Except if they’re breast-shaped,”
was Eddie’s response.
“Its not their bodies I’m interested
in, whatever sex,” Hassan said.
“You just refuse to recognize that
you’re afraid of women,” said Eddie.
But from the country that was
supposed to have liberated women, the country that gave birth to counter-culture,
to Dykes on Bikes, to the notion of legislating civil rights, this
brittle obsession with gender roles—the need to be all man or all-woman
was ante-deluvian and hypocritical. The
point was that he liked Alicia, he felt good around her and she certainly
seemed to enjoy his companionship. What was sex, anyway? True, he had found
himself in compromising situations before when he had allowed himself to get
too close to a woman, but the truth was that he loved women—he just did not
particularly enjoy sex with them; it was somehow messy, not only physically,
but it did something alarming to the finely-calibrated boundaries between
people, changed the partner into something almost unrecognizable, something
foreign, something in the end a little less human. For Hassan the
connection between two people was greater than the exchange of bodily fluids,
more than the base gratification of physical urges. True companionship was
ethereal, was spiritual, was of the heavens not of the earth, as the Persian
poets well knew—this talk of physical indulgence, of intoxication and union,
just a metaphor for what was, ultimately, a deeply spiritual experience—the
knowledge of God.
Hassan entered the water gingerly at
first, pausing as it rose over his upper thighs, tickled the underside of his
testicles, causing him to suck in his stomach and wince. Then, remembering that
Alicia was probably still watching him from her perch on the porch, he held his
breath and forged ahead into deeper water until his feet lifted off the sand on
the sea bed and his body achieved buoyancy in the achingly cold liquid. The
mouth of the estuary where Alicia’s house stood was probably a quarter of a
mile across, he guessed. He had left his glasses next to his bed, not wanting
to lose them in the water, and all he could make out of the other side of the
estuary was some wavy grass and a thin strip of gold which he took to be a
beach or a sand bar. He was used to long swims; he had been getting up early
recently and driving out to Walden Pond where he swam in the company of the
triathlon trainees. They went much faster than he did, timing themselves with
water-proof chronometers, swaddled in rubber suits to preserve body heat. He,
on the other hand, crossed the pond in a leisurely freestyle, clad only in a
pair of loose boxer shorts, occasionally reverting to an energy-saving kind of
backstroke in which he just kicked his legs. But he enjoyed being around these
athletes, joking with them as they suited-up, or stripped to get dressed for
their work days, and he admired their sinewy bodies, free of excess flesh. They
were a can-do group of people whose optimistic attitude was attractive to
Hassan who felt like a complex, cynical creature in comparison. And the
literary setting added something to the experience, something that everybody
seemed to feel—a sense that one was in greater harmony with nature than would
ordinarily be possible in any old pond. For Hassan, Walden had an extra special
appeal as Thoreau’s transcendentalism was so intimately connected to the to the
old world and the centuries of accumulated wisdom to be found there, beginning
in the heart of the fertile crescent and sweeping out towards India and China,
including, of course the sages of Persia, and sometimes as he swam he recalled
Thoreau’s use of Sheikh Sadi’s words from the Gulistan: Fix not thy heart on
that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow
through Baghdad after the race of Caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty,
be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an
azad, or free man, like the Cypress.
Hassan had been so enamored of
Walden that, after quitting his Ph.D program, he had sent a proposal to a small
local educational non-profit, suggesting they build some curriculum projects
around the history of the pond, and they called him in for an interview, with a
view to offering him a fundraising job. The interview had gone well—that is,
until the two female principals had called in their male colleague, whose first
question had been: “Do you like working with assholes?” The man’s
confrontational stance had brought out Hassan’s more idiosyncratic, combative
side, perhaps that had been his intention, and the interview had gone downhill
from there. As it came to an end Hassan found himself saying that he could only
work there if he could bring his dog to work. What kind of dog, they had asked,
looking at him quizzically. Hassan did not actually have a dog, although it was
his firm intention to get one in the future.
Before he struck out for the other
shore, Hassan cast a glance behind him. The house was mostly hidden from the
beach—from where he was standing he could just make out the porch, although his
vision at that distance was too blurred for him to be able to tell whether or
not Alicia was still sitting on her chair. On the beach there was a small
wooden boathouse with a blue door, and he made a mental note to use that as a
landmark should he lose his bearings in the long swim; the blue door should
stand out nicely against the beach. With the image of the blue door seared into
his mind he struck out with an energetic crawl, burying his face in the frigid
bosom of the ocean and churning the water with his feet. He soon fell into a
steady rhythm, coming up for air every second stroke, on his right-hand-side,
and using his hands to best effect as they scooped the water in front of him,
drawing it down past his torso, and releasing it as his hands emerged again,
scattering droplets, by his back-side. He focused intently on trying to develop
a rhythmic kicking motion with his feet—something he had always found difficult
with this stroke, he was either going too fast or too slow, his feet reverting
to an anemic twitch every so often. Still, with the pull he was exerting with his
hands he found he was making tolerable progress when he looked up after a
couple of minutes, and saw that he had put perhaps a hundred and fifty yards
between himself and the beach. The wind was causing a slight ripple on the
surface of the water making the going somewhat more tiring than it otherwise
would be, and the cold of the sea water was taking longer to get used to than
he had anticipated.
As he swam his mind wandered, like a
visitor to an art gallery maundering from room to room with no direction and no
agenda, map-less and adrift. He found himself back in his family’s village in
southern
“That.” His father had said,
gesturing. “That was our land.”
“I don’t care about what was,
Bawbaw,” Hassan told him. “What is ours now?” But there was nothing now. The
dozens of villages which had comprised the estate, and the thousands of acres
of farmland, were now in public hands, seized by the government, or re-sold.
And the same was true of the twenty-acre plot in the middle of Tehran which had
belonged to his great-grandfather—government property, worth millions, locked
up in a legal battle that would likely last for decades. Not a pomegranate tree
to show for it. His father shrugged and loped off down the hill, his shoulders
sagging visibly under the weight of what should have been such as promising
life that had turned bad, and the exile they had hoped would be temporary,
twenty-five years before—a lifetime ago.
In the darkness inside his head, as he
swam with his eyes shut tight against the sea water, Hassan saw his father
sitting eating pistachio nuts and drinking tea in the bazaar in Tehran; a
chubby, small-framed man now, not like the physically imposing individual he
had been in Hassan’s youth. He saw his mother in her house in
He reached the bank on the other side
of the estuary, finally, having slowed to a more sustainable breast-stroke, and
he crawled up on the wet sand and sat, facing Alicia’s house. He could still
pick out the blurred fuzz of blue which must have been the boat house door.
Miraculously he had swum a relatively straight line—something he found
particularly difficult while doing the crawl. He allowed himself several
minutes to regain his composure and recover some of the considerable energy he
had expended in the crossing; the water had been colder than he had bargained
for, and whereas he thought he would quickly get used to it, he found he was
almost shivering upon arrival at the sand bar. To his right, towards the
estuary mouth, was a sand bank next to which a noisy flock of gulls were
arguing and diving into the water catching fish. There seemed to be no houses
on this side of the estuary—not that he could see very far—but the shapes and
colors meeting his retina were not suggestive of human habitations, instead
there was a large expanse of low trees and brush, and then more sand dunes. He
realized, looking at the acres of blue which also stretched in several
directions, that he must be on a peninsular, possibly a tidal peninsular
submerged at high tide, judging by the moist condition of the sand and the
abundance of bones and shells and weed.
He let himself sit for ten more
minutes, absorbing the rays of the warming sun, before a vague sense of
anxiety, coupled with the thought of Alicia alone on her oversize chair,
prompted him to launch himself into the cold water for the return journey. He was more fatigued than he had counted on
being at the outset of this swim, the cold water enervating him, but he struck
up a steady crawl nonetheless since it was so much quicker than his breast
stroke, even though the cold made his head ache. He began to recycle the
previous night’s events in his mind: Alicia’s step-father’s initial, withering
gaze, which Hassan had returned undaunted. His father had always told him: “You
are every man’s equal, so always look people in the eye—whoever they are.” In a
sense it was about all he had, that sense of status—a status that had been
catastrophically withdrawn by the hand of the revolution. But it was about the only thing his father
had ever told him that he took to heart. During dinner he had also felt
Alicia’s gaze upon him while he was talking—performing, really—to her parents;
explaining the mission of the institute, how he had come to work there;
describing his family. On this subject, however, he held back more than he
would have liked. He had not mentioned his father’s extended absences in
No, he had not mentioned any of this
at dinner, speaking instead in the wide sweeps of generality which usually
accompany initial encounters, and allowing a picture of a traditional family
from the traditional world to form in the minds of his hosts. Alicia had thrown
in nuggets of information from time to time, as if supporting Hassan’s
narrative with examples, mentioning that he had attended a British boarding
school, as if this bolstered his resume and enhanced him in her parents’ eyes.
Walking on the beach afterwards he had reached out and touched her auburn hair
which was glowing lightly and lifting in the breeze. She had turned and smiled
at him, beatifically, and he had stopped. Inside, later still, they were
cross-legged on the couch as they talked, her tank top loose, with no bra under
it, her shorts exposing the insides of her golden thighs, and the tendons that
ran up to her groin. She had suggested he sleep in her room—without being
explicit about sharing the bed, but he assumed that is what she had meant—and
he had claimed that he was tired and that he should probably respect her
parents and not give them any ideas. She had remonstrated, clasping his hand,
and claiming that they were “very modern,” and that she was an adult, besides.
All the same, modern or not, Hassan had said good night, and with Eddie’s voice
in his ears, he had retreated to the sanctuary of his own room.
As he slid through the water he felt
a sudden a pang in his stomach, like a shot of adrenalin, as he envisioned
Alicia naked, lying across her bed, her bare breasts small and pert, the
nipples pink and pointy and raw like blood-filled ticks, like outrageous fruit;
the image of her—her back arched, her rib cage pushing up and her labia exposed
to full view, seemed to destroy everything beautiful about her in the daylight,
clothed in the accoutrements of grace and style and elegance, it seemed to
destroy the sense of purity and serenity she exuded, to give way to something
foul and primitive and chaotic. He imagined the both of them in Eddie’s words,
“naked, in the sack,” a rough, burlap sack, tied at the top, both of their
sweaty, writhing bodies locked together in darkness, her mouth a gaping red
orifice, her cunt a slimy hole, a cock-vacuum, aided and abetted by her long
athletic legs which wrapped themselves around his buttocks and drew him in.
He shook the image from his mind and
reared his head from the water, gasping for air and wiping the salt from his
eyes. Then, after a few seconds he rolled onto his back and lay face up,
staring at a few pale clouds above him, breathing heavily. When he lifted his
head he attempted to focus on the shore and he realized that he had been so
engrossed in his thoughts that he had forgotten to take frequent bearings on
his direction. He could see the shoreline, although he was making very poor
progress towards it, and try as he might he could see no blue boathouse door.
He could barely make out any houses whatsoever, in fact, and as he bobbed in
the slight swell which was coming from the mouth of the estuary he experienced
a growing sense of panic. He looked back at the shore he had recently left. It
was not far behind him, but it seemed to him that he had gone up-river— perhaps
quite far up-river—and then he realized that he was in the middle of a
fast-moving tide which was washing him away from Alicia’s house at an alarming
rate. He put his head down again. This time he aimed himself down-river hoping
to compensate for the tide’s strength, but he realized with a sinking feeling
that he would have to swim much faster to make way against it. He focused again
on his leg movements, knowing that if he was to maximize his swimming
efficiency he needed to reduce drag from his feet by kicking in small fast
movements and keeping them regular. But his legs seemed to resist this
neurological command. They sagged in the water like two saturated logs. His
arms arched out above and in front of him and his body rolled slowly to the
side with each swing as the pulling arm described its arc from surface to
surface, his hands molded into a shell-like cup. He kept his lungs full, exhaling
slowly while his head was down and sucking in air again quickly when he rolled
to the right.
He tried to keep his thoughts
focused on his swimming motions, partly to assist his swimming and partly to
prevent grotesque thoughts about Alicia from seeping back in. But no sooner
than he thought about the need to focus his mind, Alicia’s face re-appeared,
with an open, gaping mouth allowing him to see her insides, the bloody workings
of the human body and all that it implied for its frail mortality. And then, as
that image faded, he managed to replace it with another, more wholesome one of
the rolling hills of his family’s estates, greens and golds and browns under
the sun. But he could not hold this thought in mind for long before he
envisioned it as a land flooded with a tide of martyr’s blood, blood that could
have been his and his family’s if they had stayed, a swamp, alive with a fresh
harvest of corpses, cut down as they grew from the slime by an army of
black-cloaked Mullahs wielding scythes, the progeny of the revolution which had
been unleashed upon the land to devour it whole. And he saw Alicia now, spread
eagled on a bed, beneath one of the Mullahs, his black cloak hiked up around
his hips and his hairy, brown buttocks pumping into her as she moaned and
screamed.
It was a good twenty-five minutes
before Hassan reached the shore. By now he was barely moving through the water,
his arms throbbing from the exertion and the rest of him numb with cold. His
legs found purchase on a rocky part of the sea-bed and he clambered up onto
some boulders which lay scattered around the shore at the foot of a small
cliff. As he negotiated these, with the little strength left to him, he sensed
a sharp pain from his foot, and looking down he saw a shard of glass sticking
out of it, and a thin, dark stream of blood running onto the rocks. He sat down
heavily and took hold of the piece of glass, pulling it carefully out of his
foot and throwing it away. Where it had been, there was a gash several
centimeters long filling with blood. He
lay down on the smooth round boulder for a while gasping for breath and letting
the sun re-kindle what fire had been extinguished inside him. After a few long
minutes he sat up and looked myopically around him, noticing that his foot had
begun to throb uncomfortably and was still bleeding. He did not recognize
anything. The landscape itself was completely different to everything he had
seen at Alicia’s house, and on top of that anything more than twenty feet away
was a colorful blur. There seemed to be a building above him, looking over the
bay, and he decided his only option was to go and find someone from whom to ask
directions. It was impossible to walk up the beach, which consisted now of
rough-hewn slabs of rock. He was not even sure whether the beach would lead him
to Alicia’s house, or whether he had somehow entered another body of water
entirely.
He climbed over the boulders on the
shore, half limping, and soon found himself crossing a patch of grass which, he
realized awkwardly, was someone’s front lawn, perfectly manicured and
surrounded by mature plantings. The house which owned the lawn was an imposing
structure, clad in the gray, weathered shingles of the local architectural
style. But this fine detail was lost on Hassan who perceived a fuzzy slate-gray
mass in front of him. He approached it,
aware that he did not look like the kind of visitor one would ordinarily
expect, even on a summer’s weekend, and he fumbled with the front of his boxer
shorts only to discover that his penis was sticking out of the hole in the
front. He hastily closed the hole with the button. As he came within range of
the house he saw on its right hand side that there was a garden gate with a
pergola above it over which was trained a rose bush. He guessed that there
would be a side door round the back, since he did not want to go to the front
door—it somehow seemed too impertinent. The gate opened without a problem and
he found himself on a brick path. There was indeed what appeared to be a
kitchen door on the side of the house, but as he was about to knock on it, he
heard voices from around the other side of the house and he stepped off the
stoop and wandered around to find them. Around the backside of the house he
entered a patio area with a café table, some flower pots and a grill set.
Around the table were five people with blurred features apparently in the
process of breakfast.
Into this secluded family oasis
Hassan stumbled, naked but for his baggy, soaking boxer shorts which sported
large purple love hearts—a gift from a former female friend—unshaven for the
past forty-eight hours, and bleeding heavily from the foot. He stood with his
blood-covered feet on the warm gray flag stones of the patio, squinting at the
occupants of the patio like someone just released from long bondage in a dark
cargo hold, as one by one the members of the breakfasting family (a father, a
mother, a thirteen year old boy and a sixteen year old girl and an older woman,
perhaps an aunt or a grandmother) slowly ceased their conversation and turned
their heads in his direction. For a second, or perhaps several seconds, Hassan
found himself mute; something about the tableau in front of him—its symmetry,
its painful conformity and its undeniable strength—and his own inability to fix
on any one individual to address, robbed him of speech. The vision presented by
this family seemed to negate him entirely, to render him not exactly invisible,
but irredeemably foreign to the extent of being a different species of human
being, and he felt that there were no words in his possession that could
possibly bridge the gap. As he stared, the mother stood up, her metal chair
breaking the silence on the flagstones, and then the father stood up, his face
a study in determination as he said, “Its alright Jenny, I’ll handle this.”
Hassan took a step forward, but as
he opened his mouth to say something and explain his otherwise inexplicable
presence in their garden, the flagstones came racing towards him and collided
with his nose before he even had time to raise his hands and protect himself.
Darkness followed for what seemed like an eternity, and Hassan wasn’t sure
whether he was still swimming, or had finally succumbed to the dark, cold water
and was resting on the bottom of the North Atlantic, a tropical fish far from
its migratory path, or whether he was somehow back in his tiny studio apartment
in Somerville in the dead of night. Then, before he could resolve the question
of his whereabouts, he saw a man’s face perilously close to his, and then a woman’s,
and a confusion of voices around him raised in alarm.
“Are you alright? Do you speak
English?” The man was saying. “?Habla Ingles?”
“Yes.” Hassan finally muttered,
hearing his voice as from a great distance, “Yes, I do, I…I am. I’m sorry… I
must have fainted.” His voice sounded foreign and weak to his ears, the voice
of a wounded animal, and he cleared his throat in an attempt to regain his
normal timbre, and re-establish himself as a civilized member of society.
“Who
are you?” said the man, “Where do you come from?” Hassan recognized something
not entirely welcoming in the man’s voice, not quite the concern one would have
expected from one stranger bending over another incapacitated stranger, and he
still spoke unnecessarily loudly as if to help him understand English. He
clearly misunderstood the situation; he must have sensed a threat where there
was none. Hassan struggled to sit up and begin to clear up the situation by
announcing his relationship to Alicia’s family who were no doubt familiar to
them as neighbors.
‘I was swimming, I got caught in the
tide, I was headed for the house up there, I think,” he pointed along the
coast.
“This is the last house on this
side,” the man said. “Perhaps you’re turned around.”
“There’s a blue boat house door, a
big house set up above it on a hill, Forest, my friend’s name is Forest.” He
paused, expecting to see recognition soften the man’s features, as his words
sunk in and found their mark, but the man maintained his quizzical, vaguely
threatening expression, and Hassan found himself struggling to come up with
further landmarks, names and details that could serve to place him. But as he
mentioned Alicia’s name again he realized that she did not share her
stepfather’s name, and he did not know what that was. Undoubtedly the house was
in his name, and her mother probably shared his name.
“I’m staying with the Forests, well,
she’s a Forest, her stepfather’s something else, up the road, there. The people
with a big Victorian house on the point…”
“What’s
the name?” the man was saying, now, looking ever more resolute in his
intention, “Their name?”
“I’m sorry,” Hassan said, sitting up
and accepting the glass of water the older woman was giving him. “My friend’s
mother is remarried, her stepfather, I don’t know his name.”
“Well, then, their street address?
What address are you staying at, pal?”
He looked around at the family. They had moved
towards him now and their features were more clear; the girl—pretty in a
somewhat vanilla kind of a way, yet on the skinny side—with strawberry blond
hair and an early-season suntan, was staring at him with her mouth slightly
open. Hassan briefly wondered whether Alicia had been like that ten years ago.
The boy was watching almost impassively, still eating a large bowl of cereal
and looking on from suspicious, heavy-lidded eyes.
Hassan pushed himself up to a
standing position. “I’m very sorry to trouble you,” he said. “I think I can
find my way back from here. If you can show me to the road.” He made his way to
the edge of the patio and turned the corner of the house; the man followed him
a couple of steps behind, unsure, apparently whether to prevent him from
leaving or encourage him. He kept walking, past the front of the house, until
he saw the sun reflecting off cars, and beyond that what he assumed were the
front gates. The husband and wife were both several steps behind him now, their
attempt to keep up with him stalled, and they remained by the front door,
watching him and talking in earnest, hushed tones to each other, debating their
course of action.
The road on which he found himself
existed in a world beyond his immediate power to visualize. There were
blob-like structures back from the road some fifty to seventy feet—houses, he
presumed, but it was equally possible that they were office buildings, possibly
even large boulders. He walked towards
one and slowly a residential fence came into focus, and next to it a mature
hedge, neatly clipped. The black-top went between these and snaked its way
towards the blob which he now concluded was a house—although he did not think
it was Alicia’s. Hassan did not have the stomach for another encounter similar
to the last one; these homes were too pristine, too self-assured to admit
someone like himself in his condition, and he realized that without Alicia by
his side, without at least a pair of shoes or a shirt, he could communicate
nothing to these people. He continued down the road, and through the trees from
time to time he caught glimpses of what must have been the sea, although he
could make out very few details; whether there were any blue boat house doors
or not he was too far away to say, he could only be sure of the proximity of
the sea. But now that he had left it there was no way back to it unless he was
to walk through someone’s yard again, and the road itself did not look familiar
to him from his drive the previous night. So he continued walking as the sun
rose and strengthened and after ten minutes or so he felt the presence of a car
approaching behind him.
He turned around just as the police
cruiser pulled up alongside him in a stealthy, predatory way. A fuzzy ball of
white and blond peered through the cruiser’s window. There were dark glasses. There was a dark
lining of threat below the surface of the voice.
“Hi there. Do you need any help,
sir?” More of a challenge than an offer.
Hassan
stopped and looked up and down the road. His foot was still bleeding and
beginning to hurt badly and his head ached still from the water and the
sun.
“Thanks officer. I got a little lost
swimming. I think I’m staying down here,” he gestured to the end of the road.
“Do you have any identification,
sir?”
Hassan looked at him. “I don’t
usually take my wallet swimming with me.”
“Well, how about you ride with me,
sir, and we’ll go around the block and see if we can find your friends’ house,
then we’ll take it from there?” Hassan groped for the car door and sat himself
down on the seat next to an alarming computer set up which was bolted onto the
dashboard. Lights blinked and flashed and the radio buzzed and crackled every
few seconds. They rolled along the road
past the houses and Hassan peered at them all, his weak eyes hardly able to
distinguish anything familiar. As the
rode he described the house to the police officer, and told him about Alicia’s
parents, and how he could not remember their names. They turned down several
streets which were on the water, and still nothing registered with Hassan.
“Sir, it may be better to go on back
to the station and get some more details from you. Maybe we can get a fix on
things from there,” said the officer. Hassan understood his meaning clearly
enough. He would, no doubt, be asked to give some kind of personal information
that identified him as a legal entity in the country, but he had no idea how he
could do this without any documents of any kind.
As the cruiser turned around and
headed back towards the station a voice came on the police radio. Much of it
was incomprehensible to Hassan, including coded numbers for specific police issues.
The officer picked up his hand set and had a rapid fire discussion with the
dispatcher.
“Well, we may have solved your
problem,” he said, grinning at Hassan. “looks like your friends called the
police and reported you missing. At least somebody cares about you.” The drive
to Alicia’s house took another ten minutes, and was much further than Hassan
would have guessed. As the cruiser nosed its way into the driveway between two
stately pine trees Hassan made out three figures standing in front of the
house. He identified Alicia by her red sweatshirt, the same one she had been
wearing when he left her on the oversized chair on the porch. As the cruiser
negotiated the circular driveway, Hassan half wished he were back in the
estuary, swimming, ensconced in the forgiving liquidity that is water, where
even the keenest human eye is reduced to blindness. As he stepped out of the
car, Alicia ran up to him and wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug. He was
back, and forever hostage to the stubborn reality of the brittle world he was
destined to inhabit, perhaps as an azad, or free man, after all, and not
a date tree.