Free The Hidden Light of Objects by Mai Al-Nakib Page A

triggers after the petal of bougainvillea, though she got into the habit of reading the world as a basket of signs addressed especially to her. Without being aware of it – it had become an unconscious tic – she would go through the day trying to single out which sign would this time jolt her back to the years she could not rewrite. Which mark among many would fill her mouth with a cement taste she could not rinse out? Would it be that snag in her navy pleated skirt? That light sneaking through the keyhole? That chewed-up red pencil with the small plastic compass attached? That faded white box in the gutter melting a touch more every day? That folded paper boat with the finger smudges? That fish in the heavy silver tray? In her head she prepared compressed captions for the proliferating signs around her, which she registered as Polaroid shots:
     
    Snag in navy blue
    Sneaky light
    Teeth-pocked pencil
    Melting boxes
    Folded boat
    Fish
     
    While the others remained in her head, this last one she wrote down thoughtfully in a slim notebook of cheap recycled paper she had recently bought at the supermarket. Fish .
    And then curiously and without warning, after two years of caption lists and bricked-up breathing, after seventeen years of diary death, something more.
     
    Wednesday, July 21, 2004. When my mother died, the fish in the sea committed collective suicide. Millions upon millions of broken fish washed up on shore and the entire country smelled of rotting corpses. It should have been a national emergency, but it wasn’t. Private citizens responded in odd and quiet ways. Some walked along the silvered shoreline shaking their heads in dismay, mouths and noses sheathed with head scarves and hands. Others stayed home to avoid breathing the noxious air, as they had in the days of the burning wells. Public announcements declared that only the heads were poisonous but that all other fish flesh was healthy to consume. Fish head soup out; fried fish tails in. Newspaper experts objected to government claims but offered no explanations of their own. It didn’t matter since there were neither heads nor tails of fish left in the sea to eat. People murmured jagged concern in private corners. But mostly the population just got on with a life without fish. I, however, like a forgotten phantom at the end of a dark corridor, cannot get on with a life without fish. I mourn for them, for my mother, for the loss of my life in the present tense.

IV
    Ice in the desert. Not in Switzerland or Germany or Wisconsin. Not in a place where lakes turn milky as waters slow in late autumn, then stop for a while. To walk into an ice rink in the full heat of the desert and to feel your cheeks rise pink is miraculous and makes you believe that anything, just about anything, is possible.
    Every Wednesday, the last day of the school week, we would all meet at the rink in the early evening. Standing around outside before the doors opened, we would eye the competition from other schools and try to find out what was happening that weekend, where the party was going to be. At the rink: the best greasy fries in the world and Michael Jackson blaring, a star, a hero, and, we were convinced, Billie Jean’s lover. At the rink: learning to lace up skates, learning that kissing involves wetness, tongues, time. At the rink: holding tingling hands with girls, with boys, with both if you wanted, knowing it was all right, Michael muffling the wail of mosques outside.
    Alex would come to the ice rink to skate seriously. He played hockey on Sundays and Tuesdays. On Wednesdays, he would whizz through the rest of us, blades so sharp they sprayed a fan of snow when he stopped, hard and sudden. There’s an Alex at every school – beautiful, athletic, smart. But the Alex at our school was also distant, like he was hiding something, which made him even more wondrous in our eyes. We all worshipped Alex – German-Palestinian god – whose second cousin on his father’s side