The locality around Marin seemed to be rousing itself from a profound and collective low in those days. It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself, and, not just in Marin, but in the whole region, in the Bay Area, and in many other places too, places both near and far, the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief.
Indeed there was a great creative flowering in the region, especially in music. Some were calling this a new jazz age, and one could walk around Marin and see all kinds of ensembles, humans with humans, humans with electronics, dark skin with light skin with gleaming metal with matte plastic, computerized music and unamplified music and even people who wore masks or hid themselves from view. Different types of music gathered different tribes of people, tribes that had not existed before, as is always the case, and at one such gathering, Nadia saw the head cook from the cooperative, a handsome woman with strong arms, and this woman saw Nadia seeing her and nodded in recognition. Later they wound up standing beside one another and talking, not much, and just in between the songs, but when the set ended they did not leave, they continued to listen and talk during the set that followed.
The cook had eyes that seemed an almost inhuman blue, or rather a blue that Nadia had not previously thought of as human, so pale as to suggest, if you looked at them when the cook was looking away, that these eyes might be blind. But when they looked at you there was no doubt that they saw, for this woman gazed so powerfully, she was such a watcher, that her watching hit you like a physical force, and Nadia felt a thrill being seen by her, and seeing her in turn.
The cook was, of course, an expert in food, and over the coming weeks and months she introduced Nadia to all sorts of old cuisines, and to new cuisines that were being born, for many of the world’s foods were coming together and being reformed in Marin, and the place was a taster’s paradise, and the rationing that was under way meant you were always a little hungry, and therefore primed to savor what you got, and Nadia had never before delighted in tasting as she did in the company of the cook, who reminded her a bit of a cowboy, and who made love, when they made love, with a steady hand and a sure eye and a mouth that did little but did it so very well.
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SAEED AND THE PREACHER’S DAUGHTER likewise drew close, and while there was some resistance by others to this, Saeed’s ancestors not having undergone the experience of slavery and its aftermath on this continent, the effects of the preacher’s particular brand of religion diminished this resistance, and with time camaraderie did too, the work Saeed did alongside his fellow volunteers, and then there was the fact that the preacher had married a woman from Saeed’s country, and also that the preacher’s daughter was born of a woman from Saeed’s country, and so the pair’s closeness, even if it prompted unease in some quarters, was tolerated, and for the pair themselves their closeness carried both a spark of the exotic and the comfort of familiarity, as many couplings do, when they first begin.
Saeed would seek her out in the mornings, when he arrived for work, and they would talk and smile sidelong, and she might touch his elbow, and they would sit together at the communal lunch, and in the evenings when their work was done for the day they would walk through Marin, hike up and down the paths and the streets that were forming, and once they walked past Saeed’s shanty, and he told her it was his, and the next time they walked by she asked to see the inside of it, and they went in, and they shut the plastic flap behind them.
The preacher’s daughter found in Saeed an attitude to faith that intrigued her, and she found the expansiveness of his gaze upon the universe, the way he spoke of the stars and of the people of the world, very sexy, and his touch as well, and she liked the cut of his face, how it reminded her of her mother and hence her childhood. And Saeed found her remarkably easy to talk to, not just because she listened well or spoke well, which she did, but because she prompted him to want to listen and speak, and he had from the outset found her so attractive that she was almost difficult to look at, and also, though he did not say this to her, or even care to think it, there were aspects of her that were much like Nadia.
The preacher’s daughter was among the local campaign leaders of the plebiscite movement, which sought a ballot on the question of the creation of a regional assembly for the Bay Area, with members elected on the principle of one person one vote, regardless of where one came from. How this assembly would coexist with other preexisting bodies of government was as yet undecided. It might at first have only a moral authority, but that authority could be substantial, for unlike those other entities for which some humans were not human enough to exercise suffrage, this new assembly would speak from the will of all the people, and in the face of that will, it was hoped, greater justice might be less easily denied.
One day she showed Saeed a little device that looked to him like a thimble. She was so happy, and he asked her why, and she said that this could be the key to the plebiscite, that it made it possible to tell one person from another and ensure they could vote only once, and it was being manufactured in vast numbers, at a cost so small as to be almost nothing, and he held it on his palm and discovered to his surprise that it was no heavier than a feather.
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WHEN NADIA WALKED AWAY from their shanty, she and Saeed did not communicate for the rest of the day, nor on the day that followed. It was the longest cessation of contact between them since they had left the city of their birth. On the evening of their second day apart Saeed called her to ask how she was doing, to inquire if she was safe, and also to hear her voice, and the voice he heard was familiar and strange, and as they spoke he wanted to see her, but he withstood this, and they hung up without arranging a meeting. She called him the following evening, again a brief call, and after that they messaged or spoke to one another on most days, and while their first weekend apart passed separately, on the second weekend they agreed to meet for a walk by the ocean, and they walked to the sound of the wind and the crashing waves and in the hiss of the spray.
They met again for a walk the weekend after that, and again the weekend after that, and there was a sadness to these meetings, for they missed each other, and they were lonely and somewhat adrift in this new place. Sometimes after they met Nadia would feel part of herself torn inside, and sometime Saeed would feel this, and both teetered on the cusp of making some physical gesture that would bind them each to the other again, but both in the end managed to resist.
The ritual of their weekly walk was interrupted, as such connections are, by the strengthening of other pulls on their time, the pull of the cook on Nadia, of the preacher’s daughter on Saeed, and of new acquaintances. While the first shared weekend walk that they skipped was noticed sharply by them both, the second was not so much, and the third almost not at all, and soon they were meeting only once a month or so, and several days would pass in between a message or a call.
They lingered in this state of tangential connection as winter gave way to spring—though seasons in Marin seemed sometimes to last only for a small portion of a day, to change in the time that one took off one’s jacket or put on one’s sweater—and they lingered still in this state as a warm spring gave way to a cool summer. Neither much enjoyed catching unexpected glimpses of their former lover’s new existence online, and so they distanced themselves from each other on social networks, and while they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.