I
N MARIN, the higher up the hills one went, the fewer services there were, but the better the scenery. Nadia and Saeed were relative latecomers to this new
city, and the lower slopes were all taken, and so they found a spot high up, with a view across and through the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco and the bay, when it was clear, and a view of scattered islands floating on a sea of clouds, when the fog rolled in.
They assembled a shanty with a corrugated metal roof and discarded packing crate sides. This, as their neighbors had explained, was earthquake friendly: it might fall in a tremor, but it was unlikely to do its occupants too much harm because of its relatively light weight. Wireless data signals were strong, and they secured a solar panel and battery set with a universal outlet, which accepted plugs from all around the world, and a rainwater collector fashioned from synthetic fabric and a bucket, and dew collectors that fit inside plastic bottles like the filaments of upside-down lightbulbs, and so life, while basic, was not quite as rough, nor as cut off, as otherwise it might have been.
From their shanty the fog was a living thing: moving, thickening, slipping, thinning out. It revealed the invisible, what was happening in the water and in the air, for suddenly heat and cold and damp could not merely be felt on one’s skin but be seen through their atmospheric effects. It seemed to Nadia and Saeed that somehow they lived at once on the ocean and among the peaks.
For work Nadia hiked down, first through other unpiped and unwired districts like their own, then through those where grid electricity had been installed, and then through those where roads and running water had reached, and from there she caught a ride on a bus or pickup truck to her place of employment, a food cooperative in a hastily built commercial zone outside Sausalito.
Marin was overwhelmingly poor, all the more so in comparison to the sparkling affluence of San Francisco. But there was nonetheless a spirit of at least intermittent optimism that refused entirely to die in Marin, perhaps because Marin was less violent than most of the places its residents had fled, or because of the view, its position on the edge of a continent, overlooking the world’s widest ocean, or because of the mix of its people, or its proximity to that realm of giddy technology that stretched down the bay like a bent thumb, ever poised to meet the curved finger of Marin in a slightly squashed gesture that all would be okay.
• • •
ONE NIGHT Nadia brought back some weed a coworker had given her. She did not know how Saeed would react, and this fact struck her as she hiked home. In the city of their birth they had smoked joints together with pleasure, but a year had passed since then, and he had changed since then, and perhaps she had changed too, and the distance that had opened between them was such that things once taken for granted could be taken for granted no longer.
Saeed was more melancholic than he had been before, understandably, and also more quiet and devout. She sometimes felt that his praying was not neutral towards her, in fact she suspected it carried a hint of reproach, though why she felt this she could not say, for he had never told her to pray nor berated her for not praying. But in his devotions was ever more devotion, and towards her it seemed there was ever less.
She had considered rolling a joint outdoors and smoking the weed by herself, without Saeed, concealed from Saeed, and it had surprised her to be considering this, and made her wonder about the ways in which she was herself putting barriers between her and him. She did not know if these gaps that had been widening were mostly her doing or his, but she knew she still harbored tenderness for him, and so she had brought the weed home, and it was only when she sat beside him on the car seat they had bartered for and used now as a sofa, that she realized, from her nervousness, that how in this moment he responded to the weed was a matter of portentous significance to her.
Her leg and arm touched Saeed’s leg and arm, and he was warm through his clothing, and he sat in a way that suggested exhaustion. But he also managed a tired smile, which was encouraging, and when she opened her fist to reveal what was inside, as she had once before done on her rooftop a brief lifetime ago, and he saw the weed, he started to laugh, almost soundlessly, a gentle rumble, and he said, his voice uncoiling like a slow, languid exhalation of marijuana-scented smoke, “Fantastic.”
Saeed rolled the joint for them both, Nadia barely containing her jubilation, and wanting to hug him but restraining herself. He lit it and they consumed it, lungs burning, and the first thing that struck her was that this weed was much stronger than the hash back home, and she was quite floored by its effects, and also well on her way to becoming a little paranoid, and finding it difficult to speak.
For a while they sat in silence, the temperature dropping outside. Saeed fetched a blanket and they bundled it around themselves. And then, not looking at each other, they started to laugh, and Nadia laughed until she cried.
• • •
IN MARIN THERE WERE almost no natives, these people having died out or been exterminated long ago, and one would see them only occasionally, at impromptu trading posts—or perhaps more often, but wrapped in clothes and guises and behaviors indistinguishable from anyone else. At the trading posts they would sell beautiful silver jewelry and soft leather garments and colorful textiles, and the elders among them seemed not infrequently to be possessed of a limitless patience that was matched by a limitless sorrow. Tales were told at these places that people from all over now gathered to hear, for the tales of these natives felt appropriate to this time of migration, and gave listeners much-needed sustenance.
And yet it was not quite true to say there were almost no natives, nativeness being a relative matter, and many others considered themselves native to this country, by which they meant that they or their parents or their grandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents had been born on the strip of land that stretched from the mid-northern-Pacific to the mid-northern- Atlantic, that their existence here did not owe anything to a physical migration that had occurred in their lifetimes. It seemed to Saeed that the people who advocated this position most strongly, who claimed the rights of nativeness most forcefully, tended to be drawn from the ranks of those with light skin who looked most like the natives of Britain—and as had been the case with many of the natives of Britain, many of these people too seemed stunned by what was happening to their homeland, what had already happened in so brief a period, and some seemed angry as well.
A third layer of nativeness was composed of those who others thought directly descended, even in the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa to this continent centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion to the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it, and unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all future transplanted soils, and to which Saeed in particular was attracted, since at a place of worship where he had gone one Friday the communal prayer was led by a man who came from this tradition and spoke of this tradition, and Saeed had found, in the weeks he and Nadia had been in Marin, this man’s words to be full of soul- soothing wisdom.
The preacher was a widower, and his wife had come from the same country as Saeed, and so the preacher knew some of Saeed’s language, and his approach to religion was partly familiar to Saeed, while at the same time partly novel, too. The preacher did not solely preach. Mainly he worked to feed and shelter his congregants, and teach them English. He ran a small but efficient organization staffed with volunteers, young men and women, all Saeed’s color or darker, which Saeed too had soon joined, and among these
young men and women that Saeed now labored alongside was one woman in particular, the preacher’s daughter, with curly hair she wore tied up high on her head with a cloth, this one woman the one woman in particular that Saeed avoided speaking to, because whenever he looked at her he felt his breath tighten within him, and he thought guiltily of Nadia, and he thought further that here, for him, lay something best not explored at all.
• • •
NADIA PERCEIVED the presence of this woman not in the form of a distancing by Saeed, as might have been expected, but rather as a warming up and reaching out. Saeed seemed happier, and keen to smoke joints with Nadia at the end of the day, or at least share a couple of puffs, for they had adjusted their consumption in recognition of the local weed’s potency, and they began to speak of nothings once again, of travel and the stars and the clouds and the music they heard all around them from the other shanties. She felt bits of the old Saeed returning.
She wished, therefore, that she could be the old Nadia. But much as she enjoyed their chats and the improved mood between them, they rarely touched, and her desire to be touched by him, long subsided, did not flicker back into flame. It seemed to Nadia that something had gone quiet inside her. She spoke to him, but her words were muffled to her own ears. She lay beside Saeed, falling asleep, but not craving his hands or his mouth on her body— stifled, as if Saeed were becoming her brother, though never having had a brother she was unsure what that term meant.
It was not that her sensuality, her sense of the erotic, had died. She found herself aroused readily, by a beautiful man she passed as she walked down to work, by memories of the musician who had been her first lover, by thoughts of the girl from Mykonos. And sometimes when Saeed was out or asleep she pleasured herself, and when she pleasured herself she thought increasingly of that girl, the girl from Mykonos, and the strength of her response no longer surprised her.
• • •
WHEN SAEED WAS a child he had first prayed out of curiosity. He had seen his mother and father praying, and the act held a certain mystery for him. His mother used to pray in her bedroom, perhaps once a day, unless it was a particularly holy time, or there had been a death in the family, or an illness, in which case she prayed more often. His father prayed mainly on Fridays, under normal circumstances, and only sporadically during the week. Saeed would see them preparing to pray, and see them praying, and see their faces after
they had prayed, usually smiling, as though relieved, or released, or comforted, and he would wonder what happened when one prayed, and he was curious to experience it for himself, and so he asked to learn before his parents had yet thought of teaching him, and his mother provided the requisite instruction one particularly hot summer, and that is how, for him, it began.
Until the end of his days, prayer sometimes reminded Saeed of his mother, and his parents’ bedroom with its slight smell of perfume, and the ceiling fan churning in the heat.
As he was entering his teens, Saeed’s father asked Saeed if he would like to accompany him to the weekly communal prayer. Saeed said yes, and thereafter every Friday, without fail, Saeed’s father would drive home and collect his son and Saeed would pray with his father and the men, and prayer for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father. Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honor the goodness of the men who raised them, and Saeed was very much a young man of this mold.
By the time he entered university, Saeed’s parents prayed more often than they had when he was younger, maybe because they had lost a great many loved ones by that age, or maybe because the transient natures of their own lives were gradually becoming less hidden from them, or maybe because they worried for their son in a country that seemed to worship money above all, no matter how much other forms of worship were given lip service, or maybe simply because their personal relationships with prayer had deepened and become more meaningful over the years. Saeed too prayed more often in this period, at the very least once a day, and he valued the discipline of it, the fact that it was a code, a promise he had made, and that he stood by.
Now, though, in Marin, Saeed prayed even more, several times a day, and he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope, but he felt that he could not express this to Nadia, that he did not know how to express this to Nadia, this mystery that prayer linked him to, and
it was so important to express it, and somehow he was able to express it to the preacher’s daughter, the first time they had a proper conversation, at a small ceremony he happened upon after work, which turned out to be a remembrance for her mother, who had been from Saeed’s country, and was prayed for communally on each anniversary of her death, and her daughter, who was also the preacher’s daughter, said to Saeed, who was standing near her, so tell me about my mother’s country, and when Saeed spoke he did not mean to but he spoke of his own mother, and he spoke for a long time, and the preacher’s daughter spoke for a long time, and when they finished speaking it was already late at night.
• • •
SAEED AND NADIA WERE LOYAL, and whatever name they gave their bond they each in their own way believed it required them to protect the other, and so neither talked much of drifting apart, not wanting to inflict a fear of abandonment, while also themselves quietly feeling that fear, the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they had built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else would share, and a shared intimate language that was unique to them, and a sense that what they might break was special and likely irreplaceable. But while fear was part of what kept them together for those first few months in Marin, more powerful than fear was the desire that each see the other find firmer footing before they let go, and thus in the end their relationship did in some senses come to resemble that of siblings, in that friendship was its strongest element, and unlike many passions, theirs managed to cool slowly, without curdling into its reverse, anger, except intermittently. Of this, in later years, both were glad, and both would also wonder if this meant that they had made a mistake, that if they had but waited and watched their relationship would have flowered again, and so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.
Jealousy did rear itself in their shanty from time to time, and the couple that was uncoupling did argue, but mostly they granted each other more space, a process that had been ongoing for quite a while, and if there was sorrow and alarm in this, there was relief too, and the relief was stronger.
There was also closeness, for the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things, which it did for Saeed and Nadia, and so even though they spoke less and did less together, they saw each other more, although not more often.
One night one of the tiny drones that kept a watch on their district, part of a swarm, and not larger than a hummingbird, crashed into the transparent plastic flap that served as both door and window of their shanty, and Saeed
gathered its motionless iridescent body and showed it to Nadia, and she smiled and said they ought to give it a burial, and they dug a small hole right there, in the hilly soil where it had fallen, using a spade, and then covered this grave again, pressed it flat, and Nadia asked if Saeed was planning on offering a prayer for the departed automaton, and he laughed and said maybe he would.
• • •
SOMETIMES THEY LIKED to sit outside their shanty in the open air, where they could hear all the sounds of the new settlement, sounds like a festival, music and voices and a motorcycle and the wind, and they wondered what Marin had been like before. People said it had been beautiful, but in a different way, and empty.
The winter that year was a season that had splashes of autumn and spring mixed up in it, even an occasional day of summer. Once as they sat it was so warm that they did not need sweaters, and they watched as the sunlight poured down in angled bursts through gaps in the bright, roiling clouds, and lit up bits of San Francisco and Oakland and the otherwise dark waters of the bay.
“What’s that?” Nadia asked Saeed, pointing to a flat and geometric shape. “They call it Treasure Island,” Saeed said.
She smiled. “What an interesting name.” “Yes.”
“The one behind it should be called Treasure Island. It’s more mysterious.” Saeed nodded. “And that bridge, Treasure Bridge.”
Someone was cooking over an open fire nearby, beyond the next ridge of shanties. They could see a thin trail of smoke and smell something. Not meat. Sweet potatoes maybe. Or maybe plantains.
Saeed hesitated, then took Nadia’s hand, his palm covering her knuckles.
She curved her fingers, furling the tips of his around hers. She thought she felt his pulse. They sat like that for a long while.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “So am I.”
She almost kissed him on his prickly cheek. “Well, somewhere down there is everything in the world anyone could want to eat.”
• • •
NOT FAR TO THE SOUTH, in the town of Palo Alto, lived an old woman who had lived in the same house her entire life. Her parents had brought her to this house when she was born, and her mother had passed on there when she was
a teenager, and her father when she was in her twenties, and her husband had joined her there, and her two children had grown up in this house, and she had lived alone with them when she divorced, and later with her second husband, their stepfather, and her children had moved off to college and not returned, and her second husband had died two years ago, and throughout this time she had never moved, traveled, yes, but never moved, and yet it seemed the world had moved, and she barely recognized the town that existed outside her property.
The old woman had become a rich woman on paper, the house now worth a fortune, and her children were always pestering her to sell it, saying she didn’t need all that space. But she told them to be patient, it would be theirs when she died, which wouldn’t be long now, and she said this kindly, to sharpen the bite of it, and to remind them how much they were motivated by money, money they spent without having, which she had never done, always saving for a rainy day, even if only a little.
One of her granddaughters went to the great university nearby, a university that had gone from being a local secret to among the world’s most famous in the space of the old woman’s lifetime. This granddaughter came to see her, often as much as once a week. She was the only one of the old woman’s descendants who did this, and the old woman adored her, and also sometimes felt baffled by her: looking at her granddaughter she thought she saw what she would have looked like had she been born in China, for the granddaughter had features of the old woman, and yet looked to the old woman, overall, more or less, but mostly more, Chinese.
There was a rise that led up to the old woman’s street, and when she was a little girl the old woman used to push her bike up and then get on and zoom back down without pedaling, bikes being heavy in those days and hard to take uphill, especially when you were small, as she was then, and your bike too big, as hers had been. She had liked to see how far she could glide without stopping, flashing through the intersections, ready to brake, but not overly ready, because there had been a lot less traffic, at least as far as she could remember.
She had always had carp in a mossy pond in the back of her house, carp that her granddaughter called goldfish, and she had known the names of almost everyone on her street, and most had been there a long time, they were old California, from families that were California families, but over the years they had changed more and more rapidly, and now she knew none of them, and saw no reason to make the effort, for people bought and sold houses the way they bought and sold stocks, and every year someone was moving out and someone was moving in, and now all these doors from who knows where were opening, and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English,
