Free Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab by Shani Mootoo Page B

fill me up so that I know I exist. When I wasn’t remembering the dream, I pretended that Zain sat next to me. There was an intense knowing between us. It was the same knowing I had felt the first day of high school when I met Zain and she pinched my arm.
    The airplane landed in Trinidad at five thirty in the morning. I had been here only weeks ago, yet I felt as ifyears had passed. Day broke as I stood waiting in front of the arrivals building at the airport. A heavy greyness, portending rain any minute, hung in the sky. But then the low clouds on the distant horizon took shape with the light and slowly transformed into the outline of the Northern Range. Ahead, the parking lot emerged. A wide umbrella of almond trees shaded the doubles vendors who had already stationed themselves beneath, and from the branches of the trees the sound of quarrelling parakeets crescendoed with the dawning day. I watched the light creep over the mountain ranges, incising deep vertical ridges and bringing out of the darkness the rich variety of trees. I shook my head hard, trying to make sense of the fact that all this before me was just as I had left it mere days before, but Zain was gone for good. Trinidad was still Trinidad. But Zain was not Zain. This was not as simple and obvious a thought as it may sound. No, it was a baffling, shameless, outrageous thought. How could Trinidad exist without my dearest Zain? As a result of this revelation, everything I experienced and thought on that particular journey to Trinidad, to Zain’s funeral, felt stark and transparent. I saw the country, and the tenuousness of my place in it, as I never had before. I stood apart and watched.
    A line of cars idled in place. Their drivers stood outside, leaning on car doors, ready to jump back in and make the circle if some authority were to move them along.
    As I waited for my ride, my eyes wandered away from watching the sunrise over the mountains for no more than five minutes, and when I looked again, recognizable formshad emerged. My tongue danced inside my mouth:
banana
,
silk cotton
,
poui
,
immortelle
,
cannonball
,
breadfruit
,
mango
,
caimete
,
bois canot
,
nutmeg
—the words themselves becoming an umbilical cord. I picked out the roofs of houses, the silver of an unpainted galvanized roof, the fleck of a red one, one turquoise, and here and there light green patches of cultivated plots.
    My father had insisted upon coming to meet me. I would have been happier if he had sent the driver to pick me up. Despite the reason for my trip this time, I couldn’t shake the usual discomfort that I would not be rewarding his effort with a son-in-law and grandchildren in my tow.
    I had considered dressing more formally than usual for this journey home, out of respect for Zain. But Zain had once, quite a while before, met me at the airport when I was wearing a pair of baggy blue jeans, a golf shirt printed with horizontal stripes in red, yellow, white and green, navy socks and blue leather Campers. She commented in her usual teasing way that if I had clutched a large book or briefcase across my chest, I would have passed for an impossibly cute young boy in desperate need of sartorial guidance. I was, of course, pleased, and Zain thereafter became interested in trying to help me dress in that very manner. So, I had decided to wear this outfit, even though I had long outgrown the style. Against my chest I clutched a green all-weather knapsack from Mountain Equipment Co-op in which I had placed all the letters Zain had ever written me.
    One might imagine that as I waited for my father I waspreoccupied with thoughts of my dear dead friend, but self-consciousness, born of the habit of self-preservation, got the better of grief. I observed my fellow passengers, but so as not to have it confirmed that they were indeed judging me I did not let my eyes catch theirs. I was not, however, beyond judging them myself. This was again a matter of survival. I decided that the majority