When Marc woke, he first remembered Josephine’s story of Claire and Genevieve driving down the highway, and asked himself, Did that happen? The phrase returned to him when he lifted his head and watched Saabir rise from his mat over the threshold of the door. Did that happen? Much as the phrase Claire, how could you? returned to the version of Marc in the story that Genevieve told. That Josephine told, though he knew her name wasn’t Josephine. He found himself wondering again if she was a woman at all.
He laid his head back down, and Saabir glanced over at him and said, “Up. Time to eat.” Saabir finished rolling his mat, set it neatly in a corner of the room, and opened the door and walked out to get the food.
Did that happen? Marc with an imagined live-in lover who had discovered he had an estranged daughter. It was the blindfold he had to wear as Josephine spoke, he thought, as much as anything. As a boy, he had played the game with other children that began with the question, “If you had to choose, would you rather be blind or deaf?” and he’d chosen blind because he couldn’t imagine not hearing his mother’s voice when he asked her a simple question, such as “What are we having for dinner tonight?” But now he wondered how reality was shaped for those who couldn’t see, who had to trust those who could for the naming of things, for the laying out of the world. An image returned to him of Joline holding the baby that late winter night, an image that was not real, and how the baby, too, would have to trust others for the naming of things, no less helpless, ultimately, than any child. Than he was himself when blindfolded. Than Claire had been. Had been, because she was dead. She was killed. Yet those words, even as he almost whispered them to himself, still seemed unreal, more inverted because of the stories Josephine had told, and suddenly he saw Claire at age six, playing with magnetized letters on a metal board, creating random arrangements of imagined words—czelim, erintel—until she turned the board toward him and the letters read She is dead. She is killed, and he woke again with such a start that he immediately sat up on the mat.
And yet, still, in the imagined house on the frozen lake, he held to the mystery of her disappearance, to Kathleen, who may share in that mystery, and the possibility Claire was out there; he thought he would have given his life, here, in Pakistan, so that she and Genevieve could go on driving east.
He felt cold, felt he wanted to hold Joline’s baby to warm himself. He tried to stand up, and had to catch himself against the wall because he was suddenly light-headed. The walks around the perimeter of the building had done little to maintain what he considered the already waning strength of his limbs. His head cleared as he heard the muezzin call for the morning prayer; he remembered the story Josephine had told about the girl in high school.
When Saabir came back through the door, his gun strapped to his shoulder, he brought a bowl of mashed fruit and cereal, and then motioned to the chair. Marc walked over and sat down; Saabir cupped his hand under the bottom of the bowl without holding the rim as he held it out to Marc, as if it were a kind of offering, and along the edge of his forefinger Marc saw a faint spattering of dark fluid.
“Azhar,” Marc said, looking up at Saabir, who was still standing in front of him. He remembered Azhar’s despair the night before as he rested the barrel of his gun against the back of Marc’s neck, but, likely because of the storytelling, last night seemed a week past. Saabir was smiling, his mouth slightly open, his eyes in the rising morning light dark and beautiful.
“Today, no Azhar,” he said. The phrasing seemed ominous.
“What do you mean, no Azhar?”
But Saabir had learned enough English to turn the sentence around.
“You know Azhar?” Saabir asked him, his eyes still on his face. “Do you know Azhar? Marc?”
That was the first time Saabir had used his name, and Marc could no longer hold his gaze.
“You know Karachi?” He took the gun from his shoulder and tapped it three times on the ground. “You know here. Here. Room.”
“What happened to Azhar?” Marc asked again.
Saabir shook his head and smiled, pulled the gun back over his shoulder, and tapped his temple with his fingers, as if he were signaling for Marc to think.
“You have a son, Saabir? A boy?”
Saabir’s eyes narrowed, but he looked more troubled than angry.
“Josephine told me.”
“Josephine,” Saabir repeated.
“And a wife who died.”
He half expected Saabir to reach back and strike him, and he did lift his hand, but instead he brought it to the side of Marc’s face and rested his fingers for a few seconds on his cheek, and then patted it slightly.
“Girl,” Saabir said. “Marc’s girl. Died.”
Marc felt the familiar cut in his diaphragm.
“I want to see Josephine,” he said.
Saabir took his hand away and stepped back and smiled, and Marc belatedly recognized the irony of his statement.