Free Thinner Than Skin by Uzma Aslam Khan Page A

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 tosecond-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