[her]

On this planet, you lived through the lives of others. It was that simple. She knew that from the moment she signed up, signed in. In another century, in another kind of story, she might have signed in blood. Not in this one. This was a bloodless transaction, though no less binding. What it took from you was invisible, and she knew that too. She was willing. For him, she was willing to forsake, forswear. This was the effect he had on her, the man she had met just thrice.

He was small and good-looking. His head, shaved close, was shaped like the stone she wore around her neck, which she rubbed when she was anxious. He had a way of speaking softly, without opening his lips much. He spoke in a refined accent, with intelligence. The moment he walked into the basement where the party was, gladness fell upon her like a greedy child.

She had been exhausted, a long day filled with travelling and talking, she had showered and changed and wanted nothing more than to sleep, but this party was for her. She was visiting the city, her friend always threw a party for her. She couldn’t miss her own party. And so she had stepped down into the basement, watched the fairy lights come on, and agreed, fuzzily, to a glass of wine, when he walked in, holding himself carefully, as if afraid of intruding, or breaking, as if he were precious in a way the others might fail to see.

She had sat as far away from him as she could. That was her way of protecting herself. But there was no protection from her interest in what he had to say, in his small precise voice. She, who was no giant, felt clumsy and overbearing when she answered him, questioned him, when she rose to pour herself another one, slowly the wine gathering momentum in her blood, speeding her impulses towards a point in the distance that seemed increasingly closer. Her tiredness had fallen away, a crumpled robe near her feet. She walked over it disdainfully in the high heels that she had, in a moment of frivolity, worn. She never wore high heels at home. The steely tapering points felt like spikes driven upward into her heart. They sounded too loud to her unaccustomed ears, she was afraid the edges of her black silk wraparound trousers would snag and rip, she was afraid the wraps and ties would not hold, she was afraid. The clearer, firmer and stronger her words got the more slippery her hold on her body and her clothes seemed to get. The raw silk whispered against her bare legs, threatening disclosure. When she crossed her legs, feeling like a novice who has just learnt to sit, she was careful not to allow the slightest hint of skin. Her friend had whistled at her sleek calves when she was dressing. Her legs, even to herself, had seemed luminous against the silk as it swished and flared, not wanting to be tied up, tied down. With her girlfriend, it was fine, that candid admiration of flesh. Not with him. And the more she shut herself up in the armour of her flimsy clothes, the more open she grew in her regard for the man with the small mouth, the way he had of seeming to smile even in the middle of an argument. She had noticed the little dents at his temples, the almost unnoticeable deposit of sweat that collected in them, nudging his beauty towards a kind of bedraggledness, suddenly accentuating the unshaven grey of his cheeks which she hadn’t seen when he walked in, the sudden sense she had that he too was being held hostage by his clothes, the silk waistcoat too hot for this weather, those sharp shoes.

Dinner was boisterous. She argued with everyone, made her opinions clear, and ate like a man. That was something she prided herself on, her ability to eat without feminine fussiness or falseness, without kowtowing to those unseen and tyrannical goddesses of diet and weight-watching. She burned it all up, the food, the energy. What was excess seared her hair white in the nights. She was turning white. Silver her friend said, say silver. But she never did. She liked to flaunt this whiteness in the faces of those who guessed she was young, but not exactly how young. She carried her wine to the table, and her voice was rich with a feeling she was now certain of.

Later, to escape the knowledge that there were now less of them in the room, she went out for a ride in the car with her friend. It was raining and the streets were wet, and empty.

***

When she saw him the second time, she could not smile at him. At the very same instant that her heart leapt up, a child knocking a ball out of someone’s hands, her face muscles froze. She was glad of her failure to smile, she wore her seriousness like a shield, and trembled behind its paper-thin protection. Heightened to a level that made her feel skinless, exposed, was her awareness of him in the room, his eyes which she found looking down when she talked in his general direction and which she knew he had fixed on her when she turned away. How long can we do this, she thought, how long can this balletic deception continue? She was surrounded by too many people, and yet when she sensed he was near the door, about to leave, she threw caution to the winds and called him by his name.

***

It was on the third meeting that he gave her his hand to shake. It felt like a kitten, his hand, thin, a clutch of absurdly small, bendable bones in the palm of her hand. She felt the singe of fur, but his hand, she recollected later, was not hairy. A small clean soft hand. Then why had she felt like she was holding, for a very brief moment, the tumbling newborn body of a feline?

***

When she went back home, her real home, she felt gutted. A building burned to its shell, a skeleton scaffolding on which nothing could be built. A rabbit cleaned for the table by a very sharp and spotless knife. She was tempted to think about the knife, its cold grip warming under the flesh of her wielding hand, the danger of carrying it around corners.

She owns a series of knives, like others own cars. She cherishes their metal sleekness, their powerlessness without the human hand. Lately, when she has been carrying the bare knife into the kitchen from the bureau where she stores them, she has been wondering what it might feel like, the cut on a piece of bared flesh, not animal. She is afraid she might suddenly cut open a piece of someone’s flesh, anyone who happens to be in that room, lounging around with his shirt off, something about bare backs attracts the passing, tiptoeing edge of her sharpened knife.

It seems impossible that only a week ago she had no knowledge of the existence of this man whose surname she has forgotten to ask. How will she find him again? The thought that she may never find him—because she will never ask her friend about him, this is a secret too dark—terrifies her so much, she knows she is about to betray her iron-clad rule, the rule of remaining real.

And so she signs up, signs in, she begins her life on the other planet, where all her friends have already moved, living lives so blatant it makes her laugh, one short sharp laugh, like the stab of the knife in her stomach.

***

She finds him. Her memory for faces helps her find the right one. There are so many men by that name. But none with that face. She wants to weep with relief, with gratitude that he did not use evasion, did not put, instead of his face, the cover of a book, the shadow of a tree, a cartoon. Why be on Facebook and resort to such camouflage? She detests such subterfuge, she has always considered such subterfuge, were she ever to succumb, but now it is unthinkable. She must be identifiable for him to accept her as his friend. This acceptance may take minutes, hours, months. He may refuse her, ignore her. The thought of it makes her cringe, makes her want to disappear, erase all evidence of herself from this world where she feels, already, like an interloper. Lope. Wolfhound. She will lope through the lives of those she has befriended, who have already befriended her, with whom she feels no connection, in whom she has no interest, because she already knows them, from another life, she has eaten and drunk with them in real rooms, she has known some of them for twenty years, and now she is seeing them as if for the first time, in poses that leave her amused, indifferent.

It does not take too long. It takes forever. He responds, he accepts, he confirms. The universe is spinning so rapidly around her ears, she feels she may lose her balance, fall down a very steep precipice. For days she restrains herself from acknowledging his presence in her life, this other, changeling life. And then, because every passing ticking second is a pit into which she has voluntarily jumped, she succumbs, she writes the first innocuous message. She writes, and so it begins.

***

She follows him everywhere. At least everywhere that he is visible to her. When he shuts off, signs out, she loses access to him. It maddens her, that loss. She sees him everywhere. In the word “buoyant”, in the word “tenseness”, in the small leading hand of the cursor clinging to a name on the screen. She sees him with others of his kind, terribly distant from her. He seems so at home in this world, it is his world and it is alien to hers. The man she met in a basement full of fairy lights, the man she now sees on a screen bristling with faces—the two seem to have nothing in common. Here, he is a poseur. He shuts his eyes when he is photographed in a roomful of pretty young women. He wears a golden wig, or a mask like the kind worn at children’s parties. The golden wig frightens her into a silence that lasts for days. She revisits the photos, rereads the updates, ferrets out the meaning of all the comments by all his friends. He seems endlessly mutable.

Are you seeing him, the question they asked in the old days, the question they still ask. Yes, she says, no, she says. I don’t know what I am seeing. She is hesitant to say “who”, for she does not know who he is. If it weren’t for the terrifying certainty of the number of friends he has, 759 in all, she would doubt his existence. He has real friends, she tells a real friend, sitting in a coffee shop, how can I doubt that he exists? She lopes through his photo albums, constructing intricate ladders on which she hopes to climb towards him. She examines, brutally, every face that surrounds him. She wants to understand with clinical precision their hold on him, his hold on them. His hold on them is unmistakable. He has made them his slaves, that much she can see.

She refuses to be one of them. And besides, she sees things no one else does, no one else can. She sees in one photo—a space between two bricks. His face is turned to the light, but she knows what he really wants her to see is that dark space between two bricks on the wall behind him. In another photo she sees his twin, the cat in the cage, the big cat, the leopard on a branch, ready to spring. In another she sees the same indentations on his forehead, the glistening sweat, the haggardness that comes from a secret invisible strain, destroying his looks in a way that no one else comments on because no one else but her can see it.

Are you seeing him?

Yes.

***

And then, he disappears. She searches and he is gone. It has happened before, these periodic disappearances. Absences like stagnant pools in which nothing stirs, no matter how much or how hard or how long she stares at their surface. He always comes back, with a cheery line flung like a stone into their midst—a hello that includes everyone, all 759 of them—whose ripples she reads like no one else can. Pleased with the appropriateness of the phrase on this planet, seduced by its suggestion of harmless intimacy tilting towards a ferocious ownership, she had written “I can read your face like a book” in one of her letters to him. They call them messages on this planet, why not call them what they really are, SOS messages from the damned and the drowning. Why a message? Why not a letter? Because here everything is contingent on signals, on signs, on codes.

But this disappearance is different. Nothing remains, no posts, no profile, no pictures, none of his 759 friends, herself included. His name remains, and that seems to her more petrifying than if it, too, had disappeared. She fears the worst. He is dead. He has gone climbing and fallen off a cliff. She thinks of Rilke exposed on the cliffs of the heart and her stomach plummets. He has gone back, where has he gone, wherever he came from, why had she not thought of asking? Where do such people go, the ones who afflict you, so suddenly? Why has he left, without warning? What does she know of his life, his real life? There is a churning inside her, and that dizziness never leaves her. She never signs out, she checks every two seconds, again and again, he is not there. The golden wig now seems ominous, the victory sign mocking, the shades another way of escaping into a darkness that does not include her. But what frightens her most, fills her with a pain akin to what the starving must feel, is that where his face was, next to where his name still hangs like a noose, where his face should have been—there is now only a question mark in a pale, grey box. This is the telltale mark, the secret sign of her doubt.

She must have imagined him into being.

She has no one to ask if they have seen him, once, ever, many times. She has no friends in common with those 759 bar one. She cannot draw attention to herself by asking, have you seen this man. Here, on this planet, she knows the most public utterance will be forgotten in seconds, things move too fast here, and yet she will not ask. The secrecy of her pain makes it impossible for her to heal, for she has no one to tell, no one who will want to listen even if she is willing to shame herself by telling. Only a human voice can make her pain less spectral. She forces the pain out of her, as if it were a mangled child, she forces it with a wail into the world where it will have to suck on the air to stay alive, where it will have to be slapped on the back, hard, unmercifully, to cough its way into breathing. She wants to make a spectacle of her absurd secret. A chorus of jeers might help her leave it behind, on the ground, thrown away hastily in a wrapped leaf. Wait for what will surely come, she tells herself. Some sign of his breathing, living flesh, somewhere beyond the pale. Wait.

The very next minute she looks for another way to wound herself. She opens herself up again to the possibility of pain, a phone call, made by her. Inside her head the number she has stored is a hole, a gash in her side, where the spears of her impatience have left their tips. Close every gateway, she hears the distant voice that was hers in another life saying. Close every pathway that may lead you to abandon that last shred of dignity and run down it, screaming out his name. Which part of me should I shut down, lock up? Her pleas are heard only by her. In a stonelike trance, she feels the stirring of a too-ancient dread.

She is the swarm of dust that flies into the cleaning woman’s face. She is the spider that scurries away when the bathroom light comes on. She is a fingerprint on a smudged glass. She is a tangle of wires under a stack of paper. From chair to chair, screen to screen, she flits, gnawing at her nails. Nothing will ever be still inside her again. She plays her music loud enough to deafen and finds her heart thumping to a borrowed beat. For a few blinding moments she forgets about him. When the silence returns, cannibalized by the whir of one electric fan, she feels as if the sound is from inside her, where the blades are turning, will keep turning. She no longer knows who she was, the way she was. Everything now is a perpetual after. After she met him. After he wrote to her. After he vanished. Longingly she examines the word “aftermath”. She recalls his expressionless eyes, his mutating face, the shape of his head, the pitiable softness of his fingers, the singe of invisible fur. What did you think of me? Did you think of me? Think of me. She feels feeble, as if climbing a mountain with a rock on her back. She recalls Sindbad and the roc and all hatched and fantastic things and it is no consolation. No story can take the place of a real hand, held tight. She is the breath that blows the last candle out. She is the sigh that follows like a heedless thing. She is the dark, weeping soundlessly for itself. She changes every second. Tears, humiliation, pride. She trembles as she resists her desire to speak. The word “speak”. The word “desire”. Inside her, every word is converted into that same action, the same fluid gesture—his face turning towards her. And now instead of that face, instead of any face, the question mark in the little grey box, and everything unanswered.

[him]

1.

On this planet, everything is visible to everyone. Boredom, anger, someone’s nose in a snifter, another’s in a box of naphthalene balls. Not one minute stands unaccounted for on this planet. Its inhabitants smile out of the little boxed rooms that frame their faces as if they were pictures, faces shaded by sunflowers, sunglasses, faces angled to the sharpest view, the cleanest profile, Best Face Forward is the motto of these unprivate people. A terrible restlessness, akin to fever, resembling dizziness, afflicts the people of this planet, and a stranger (just visiting) can see it rippling through the seconds that mark the changes.

2.

Every two seconds, each person’s face has something new to say. Every two minutes a sheet of disturbance ripples across the surface of this planet as information changes, rapidly, too rapidly. No one escapes this, not even the most stoic, the latest entrants into this world. Days don’t start without this anxiety, this unease beneath the fingernails that is soothed, momentarily, as the people start racing their fingers over the keys, start scrolling down, typing in… And the sharing begins, an unstoppable treadmill, the incessant sharing of moods, locations, places they have reached in the book they are now, this very second, reading, people who have passed away two minutes ago, whom they are already mourning with RIPs so loud, you can hear the air tear, a sound as harsh and mocking as asbestos being ripped in half. Pains in the neck, knee, ass. Opinions on a goddess’ mode of travel (elephant or palanquin), rants against fork-tongued men in crisp lungis and tri-coloured scarves around their necks. The longing for things to eat, the relish of having eaten them. The hieroglyphs of forward and back slashes, the pinprick of the colon, the wink of the semi-colon, the intestinal churning of commas. Speak to me! each face shouts from the frozen room in which it sits and smiles. There are no sad faces on this planet.

3.

A new gesture is born—the comment. A spy on this beat (and what is he but one) can glean so much from that gesture. Who is dating whom, who is coy, who desperate, who doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t just observe. Oh no, he is too subtle for that. He participates. He learns the gestures. The V with the first two fingers of his right hand (Vicarious, Voyeuristic, Vigilant), the golden wig they place on his head with a benediction of giggles, the dark glasses they give him to learn to live in so much light. He rejects nothing. He embraces the customs, the mannerisms, the soft bodies that are pressed against him against the flattening camera glare that will make him look bloodless next morning, when he sees himself displayed, just one in a parade of clowns. He learns the lingo.

4.

He wants to write, but dare not, to her, who lopes after him with a feral tread, she has suspected something in the twist of his fingers, he must be careful. He wants to write in a letter, not a message: “Where once days might have passed wondering what someone thought of a poem you read, a remark you made, a hug you might exchange after an evening of drinking, an unfinished conversation you might carry away, a talisman to keep under your pillow as you drift into a dream you might one day remember, where once absence and silence glowed with the promise of their opposites, there now exists—nothing. Instead of the ungiven hug, the revisited and replayed kiss, the memory of fingers, soft or surprisingly hard, in a handshake—instead of all the ambiguity of the unsaid, the endlessly delayed, instead of the joyous pain of not-knowing, instead of all that—this, this instantaneous self, this updating, this sharing with the whole wide world what once might have unfolded, secretly, deliciously, between two people alone.”

5.

And oh, the wit of it, the alien thinks, the endless, tiring, noisy wit of it, the snappy message, the droll update, the clever comment. The working at it, the posturing that shines through, like spit on the teeth of a too-wide smile, the crafting of this me-you, you-me that falls away into a pit of jabbering mouths. Glib, hip, smooth, slick. No one on this planet is ever tongue-tied, ever at a loss for words, no one finds it difficult to speak. A monstrous eloquence possesses the people of this planet, the ones who are most at home, who have dug their roots in, spread their tentacles wide, far, the ones whose lives are now being lived on electronic farms where tomatoes grow in two hours and even that seems too long to wait. This planet seems to be one of teeming leisure, where men and women, with fixed smiles on faces they change too often, play games of predictable variety. The word game, the guessing game, the personality test, the compatibility test. Scores are flaunted on this planet as if they were scars won in battles that have tested the limits of valour and endurance. What do they know of either?

6.

Unknowingly, that dread disease, the beginning of restlessness, creeps into the alien’s heart, and damages it, slightly. Suddenly, it wants speed to be its skin and all of its inside to be a racing demon that keeps pace, keeps up, keeps face. Honour is not alien among aliens. Biting its nail or hook, its paw or claw, biting the bundle of bones that she had held for a very brief moment, the alien shudders its way back into a kind of calm, and continues, for stories must be told when he returns home.

7.

And yes, it is when the alien is posturing—he is a natural poser, a naturalized alien, he knows it—it is then that he will realize this planet is not an open one, no, openness is merely its best-kept illusion. Where once one got into a ship and travelled for days towards the promise of a face, what meaning can that face have now, in this world of boxed-in rooms? How can they (how can she) breathe on this planet, where the edges of the visible seem to be curling inward, threatening to crush you, how can they bear the claustrophobia of so much contact? When two friends meet after twenty years, what will they have left to tell each other that will still mean something, after all this? A feeling of great hostility will engulf the alien, then. This is a hostile planet, where friendship is a circus, where the shout has replaced the whisper. Ssh, the alien will say to himself, ssh.

8.

The hostility is not imaginary. Through the days, weeks, months that the alien has been studying the inhabitants, he has spotted certain patterns. Allegiances, tributes, flatteries. Something smooth and poisonous coils out and in between the hieroglyphs that they use to speak to each other, to tell the world, see, we are speaking to each other, no, see, we are intimate. It seems depraved to the alien, who believes deeply in intimacy, but who finds in these declarations and flagellations unspeakable kinds of fear. It is the fear of the real room, where two bodies may sit and send each other messages through their skin, their sweat, their averted, colliding eyes. Something has frozen here seconds after something has erupted, and failed. There is a terrible stasis in this perpetual movement, this climate that changes every two minutes, this miasma that feels like a new, lethal depression.

9.

Once, on another planet, the alien had sunk himself in hot springs that burned like rock, the water had felt hard and strong. Here, the water that oozes out of him is thick, sticky, he would hesitate to call the water “tears” if it hadn’t oozed from his eyes. Time to leave, the alien thinks, time to move on. He deletes them one by one as he exits, the friends he had added on this planet, a mathematical ruse of safety, safety in numbers, 759 friends, and feels again the blissful air of solitude rush across his unboxed, unsmiling face. I can read your face like a book, she had told him once, while trying to tell him something else. More than any message, he remembers the way she held his hand as if she were holding a kitten by the scruff of its tender breakable neck. He wants to write, though he will not, may not, cannot—“But that was long ago, on another planet, no, that was on this one, at another time, not so long ago, when its people still met face to face, still knew that privacy was the most cherished gift a friend could give another, still felt the hurtling wonder of a word coming slowly to one’s lips, offering one the choice of utterance or silence, the knowledge that either choice came with its own reward or bitterness, and that the universe was vast enough to keep one’s secrets secret.”