Hannah Lillith Assadi

Another Shore

Every time we speak, I explain to my daughter Alia that I do not live here alone. They usually arrive at high tide, the visitors, and help themselves to my home as if it were their home. My conversations with Alia always end when I tell her that they don’t quite seem to be of our time. “Some are from the future, and some are from the past,” I say clearly and slowly in my best English like a grade school teacher explaining what one plus one equals, but before I can finish Alia always says, “Dad I’m running late”—to what I never know—and hangs up.

Today, I came from the bathroom, and noticed a young couple lying on my bed, dressed in what seemed to be modern fashion but I had never seen it worn before. The girl’s eyes were a syrupy hazel, lined in thick kohl just like my Alia. Her beauty was ruined by her tattooed metallic skin, a technology not yet possible in my time. Surrounding her and her bum boyfriend were needles strewn around them on the floor.

Sometimes when I am having a cigarette on the porch, which floods when it rains, a woman in a floral gypsy skirt is staring at the water. Her rapt gaze has her leaning so far out over the railing I fear she might fall into the canal, but she never does. Though I have never quite seen her face, I know she must be very beautiful.

There is a mother and son I see often. They dress like the people from my country. Even in the cold, they are dressed for the desert. The mother is always coming in through the door to collect the son who awaits her anxiously in the hallway. And then the mother opens her mouth to say something to him but all I can hear is the purr of ocean in the distance.

There is reason to believe that I live in the present, in the year 2017, in this little bungalow built a century ago on Jamaica Bay just miles from JFK Airport, squeezed between the mighty North Atlantic and the siren jettisoned city of New York. I have lived in 27 different homes in the course of my life, and like a cat have lived nine lives.  This life and this home are my last.

When my daughter first drove me into this fog-worn land, the car shook from the planes flying mere feet above us, gnashing the sky. An American flag hung from every house, but there were no people in sight. The yards were full of car parts and nativity scenes.  On one shore was a miniature size Statue of Liberty, emerald and all, except the torch in her hand was missing.

“I had a perfectly big house in New Mexico with nothing for miles but desert,” I said to Alia.

“That foreclosed.” She had to remind me.

“The ocean is going to wipe all these places away. I’ve already had to swim for my life, miles of—”

“How many times do we have to hear that story?” She parked the car and tucked her arm in mine as if I were taking her down the aisle again to marry John James William The Third, or was it William James Henry The Fifth?

“How’s James?” I asked her.

“Who?” she replied.

“William?” I tried, but Alia was hardly listening, looking at her phone instead and pressing buttons. It was not my dementia that caught Alia’s attention but the black cat Al-Shitaa, who would come to be my best friend, and was blocking our entrance to the house. She was perched in front of the door, bearing her teeth, her eyes yellow and watery, crying at us to go away, go away. It wasn’t English, but I understood her language all the same.

“You like cats don’t you baba? There kitty, kitty. We’re your friends.” Alia suddenly hated cats since marrying Henry Joseph Michael The Eighteenth.

“Alia, do you ever consider the end of the world? That thousands of years of religious faith might have a point and tomorrow another sun will slip from behind our own and we will die in an instant?”

“No, baba. I don’t think about that. I think about paying my mortgage and now your mortgage, and then having a nice glass of wine at the end of a long day.”

“Are you still trying to have a child?”

Alia ignored this question, cursing the keys which were stuck in the lock.

“You know your problem, Alia, is that you think this world is all there is…” I said, opening the door with little effort. I had learned to be an expert with keys at some point in my life. It was important to a man who was always going from home to home. I kept all the keys I ever had on a large chain that jangled with me in my pocket. They were the soundtrack of my life. For some reason the key ring was from Sarajevo. Whether I had purchased that or it was given to me, I can never remember.

The hallway beyond the front door was long and narrow. And there just beyond the curtains that marked the horizon of the little house, was the vast steel grey sea. At first glance, it was strangely familiar. Without looking, I knew where the bathroom would be, where the closets would be, how high the ceilings. It was all wood inside like the cabin of a boat I had once been on.

But then walking further, I saw that the furniture was all white and linen, ordered just yesterday from a catalogue pretending nothing in it was made in China. Just to sit on it was to stain it. I gasped at the kitchen, shiny and made of aluminum, with a single orchid set primly on the counter. “When did you become a WASP?” I murmured.

“What?” Alia was busy slamming the door in the cat’s face.

“Let Al-Shitaa in!” I yelled.

“Who?” Alia asked.

“I said I didn’t want a television, Alia.”

Alia was kicking the cat which only made it whine louder.

“Let my friend in, Alia,” I bellowed. “I could use some company. My little Al-Shitaa, my little rainy winter.”

“I’m going to keep you company,” Alia said. She almost believed this lie. And I almost saw the child in her at that moment, the girl who used to run into the night pointing out constellations, the girl who wanted to be an astronaut instead of a hedge fund manager. I never understood what it is that she did for a living. Once I asked her to explain her job to me.

“I oversee investments,” she had said flatly and changed the subject to my weight.

“Money doesn’t buy happiness,” I said.

“It’s bought me plenty of happiness,” she said, but her skin looked grey.

That first day, Alia boiled water for tea, forgetting there was no sugar in the house. I never took my tea unsweetened. The cat pawed at the porch window, meowing loudly for my attention. Through the curtains, I saw a blue skirt billow up with the wind, trailing a woman I could not see.

“I’m glad I get to spend the few years I have left with my little girl.” It was a thing I hadn’t said aloud before, present the fact of my end to Alia, to myself.

“It was a good investment,” Alia opened the curtains then the screen door that led out to the porch. The skirt was gone. “What a cheery place!” Rain was falling in sheets. No face appeared in the windows opposite my home. There is a proverb in my language that goes something like: a paradise without people in it is no paradise at all.

“This house reminds me of somewhere,” I said, stepping out onto the porch. “Somewhere more beautiful…”

“Can’t you just pretend to like it?” Alia asked.

“Alia is there a store around here? Somewhere I can walk to buy my cigarettes?”

“I know the perfect place for us to go have dinner. A real old-fashioned sort of place. You’ll love it. And…” Alia paused for dramatic effect. “The waiters are still Italian.”

“Alia, I always believed it would be in the desert that I spent my last days. White sand against blue sky forever…” We were both staring out on the polluted canal.

“I thought you quit.” She took the cigarette I had lit and threw it into the water.

There is only one restaurant in my little neighborhood and it is called Mario’s by the Sea. I have only dined there once and it was that first night. Alia sat forward in her booth as if it were contagious. The food was the same as it is at any diner in America. Alia ordered a Caesar salad and a glass of Chardonnay and I ordered a burger and a Coke. When her wine came, she took a sip and her face soured. She was spooning bits of her salad from one side of the plate to the other.

“Why can’t you just order normal things?” I asked her. “I hate it when you waste.”

“Who’s paying for it?” she asked rhetorically. Then she excused herself to the bathroom. The burger was stale and the Coke flat, but I would eat what was on my plate. I always had. Just as Alia returned, a waiter banged some glasses together and the restaurant quieted to a hush.

“I told you that big group was celebrating a birthday,” she said. “Isn’t that so nice? A place in New York where the waiters make a big thing of someone’s birthday.”

I turned in the booth to behold the scene behind us. One of the younger men stood up to speak. He wore a cheap suit with an American flag pendant fastened to it.

“I want to thank you all for being here,” he began. “This little neck of Queens is our home. All of us, the sons and daughters of firemen and policemen. We are the real New York.”

Alia coughed up more of her food into her napkin. The American man with his American flag continued.

“Mary, as most of you knew her, was Irish by birth, but a patriot of this great land, my mother...” As soon as the man had said the word mother, he began to cry and his speech disintegrated into a cacophony of toasted glasses.

“Alia, it’s a funeral,” I said.

Most days pass like the rest. My daughter has not been here since she deposited me that first day. I call her every morning to say hello, to tell her stories about my visitors. Sometimes she picks up, sometimes she does not. There is still no grandchild and my little girl is near forty. Perhaps she will be the last of our great line. This reasoning leads me to a vision of me and my ancestors before me walking toward the horizon, and falling off the edge of the earth.

I take a shower. I sit on the deck through the afternoon. I smoke cigarettes. Inside, the wood creaks and moans and sighs. The mother and her son are reunited for the hundredth time in the hall. They disappear. Every day, I see one living person at the bodega a ten minute walk from my home. Tony is from somewhere in South America. We speak for a few minutes. And I leave with my cigarettes and turkey sandwiches and he says, “See you tomorrow.” And I return home, my bones bleeding, my lungs heavy.

It is dark by five in the evening. I sit out on the deck again. Al-Shitaa comes and violently rubs herself against my legs. I give her a piece of turkey. To thank me, she likes in particular to stick her chin in the crevasse of my bullet wound. I have long believed animals have superior minds to humans, especially humans like William John Billy Bob the Hundredth. The stupid cat understands my life’s pain without me ever having to say a word. I quit telling my real story when I was informed by someone somewhere that Americans prefer humor to tragedy. So now when an American asks about my limp, I simply reply: “Oh it is just my Achilles heel.” I don’t go into the details of how I was shot running from snipers at eight years old after leaving my mother to die surrounded—she had only just come in the door and though she was far away, down the long, long hallway I could hear her—her last muffled words I am always with you, I am always with you, and then I ran, leapt off the deck, and out into the grey desert, nearly fast enough, running and never looking back, jumping onto the boat which was bound for freedom, but as if this tragedy was not enough for one small boy, the boat bound for freedom capsized in the sea some days later, and so with my Achilles heel, I swam miles on the blackest, moonless night, the pull of the bottomless void beneath me, the terror of which I still feel in my dreams. And when my feet at last touched sand, I believed I was already dead and had washed up on God’s country. “Mother!” I shouted to the empty beach though it was not she but the policemen of paradise who found me.

My daughter lives the American dream. Her face fills a page of a google search on the internet and she has a cleaning lady and an assistant who checks on me when my daughter cannot. The assistant is the one that sends flowers on the anniversary of my wife’s death. It is not clear to me how I produced such a wonder. And though I admire my daughter very much, I often find her boring. She isn’t timeless. She is thoroughly of her time.

But what’s more boring is the millionth generation Plymouth Rock motherfucker of a husband she chose for herself. Suppose you are me, and you must suffer a long dinner with such an individual as her husband—Henry George the Fourth—and this King of England will always have something witty to say about my language or heritage. “Hey, daddy-o, did you know that the word for house is basically the same as the word for life by way of the root system?”

And I try to engage, I try, to politely correct him about my own language. “You know Bill/Bob/Henry, it actually isn’t quite like that.”

And my daughter will clatter the glasses to signal for the Mexican girl to fetch our dinner which is never finished, and change the subject to politicians or the weather or sometimes more nauseating, the stock market. I guess John or George cannot bear to be wrong.

When that’s all through, and I am leaving, she will whisper to me. “Why did you have to ruin everything? I spent a week preparing this meal. The flowers, the wine, the meat. Even the candle vases. All for you.”

“Me ruin everything?” I protest. Then Harry/ Tom/ Jerry runs to her side and begins massaging her shoulders like a pervert, smiling smugly at me as if I were a homeless man at his door begging for change. And then I limp my way two avenues and five blocks to the train, always missing the last regular one of the night, waiting there in the rat infested underground for twenty odd minutes, for my ride, going local, drunken shouts, stalled between stops, a drum, a dancer, three bums, until an hour and a half later, I finally emerge here, to this loneliest of seas.

I love my darling Alia. And I wonder, how did we make her? Her mother Lily was the opposite. She stayed up until dawn and slept through the day. She associated with psychics and thieves and no matter the weather she could be found running out into the snow or the rain in the floral, gypsy skirts she sewed, her hair swirling, burnt red as the sun, until the very end when she left this planet claiming she had been called by God who was female, mind you.

Lily and I had moved a great many times. She and I both shared the same need, every few years, to change homes. We were Sufis. We were wanderers. We believed in other worlds, other realms, chakras and jinn and the downfall of the bourgeoisie. When I lost my Lily, I lost my reason for living. The policemen of paradise came for me again. This time to take my house.

The entire bay stinks of jet fuel. Of the same oil that caused the war in my country that caused my Achilles Heel, the same oil that falls through the rain onto my little watery porch, and all across the world. Planes fly like locusts overhead so I can barely hear the ringer when I receive an extraordinary phone call from my daughter. Alia tells me she has landed in Paris. “Baba, turn on the news,” she commands.

“Alia, did you know that right now there is a mother and her son in my hallway. She has just walked through the door and—”

“I don’t care about that right now!” she shouts.

“I hate the news!”

I can hear sirens from the street where she stands, that eternal sound of Europe I had not heard in a great many years. I always loved Paris. I imagine walking across the ocean and finding Lily there, in the city of eternal light. “There’s a storm coming, baba.”

“Bad service where you are, can’t hear you,” I say and hang up.

I have made it a point not to turn on the devil’s box once since I have been here. It used to play all my waking hours and then when Lily passed, I quit. The way after hypnosis, former smokers can’t bear the smell of cigarettes, I can’t bear the news. All those thousands of days I spent watching the world become degenerate, I could have been memorizing Lily’s face. Equally tragic to her death is the fact that her face is disappearing from my memory.

I wince and press the “power” button. A woman with clown’s makeup on smiles like an imbecile. I mute her offensive voice. Her teeth look like they might separate from her skull how broadly she is bearing them.  Then I see the trailing announcement. A storm is coming. Hurricane Zara. They use Muslim names to pretend they don’t hate Muslims. Zara, it takes me a minute to draw the connection. Zahra was my mother’s name. Every few seconds the screen rids of the newscaster, in exchange for a map, a spiral of white cloud has blinked out the Atlantic, which reminds of a dream I had last night. The beautiful woman from my porch had painted a clock which she was showing to me, but all the hours between six and twelve were blank. Then we were looking at the ocean, and a great wave rose, and we could see beneath its curl a spiral of black space and stars. She pointed to it excitedly and though I could not understand her language, I believe she was trying to say: that’s home.

It’s strange that I can recognize my brother there on my porch given I haven’t seen him alive since we were children. He has been dead three years though somehow has located my home, with its little strip of sidewalk, without even a driveway, hidden from the satellites, teetering on the brink of the sea. Perhaps this is why the dead can find me. I am outside the GPS. And again, I wonder why Lily has not tried. I miss my brother but my wife much more than him.

When my brother was alive, we used to talk for hours on the phone as I drove through my Southwestern desert, and he through his Pacific Northwest. We had reconnected after forty years, not knowing that the other had survived the wars, and the sea, and then the West, and made it to the New World, the both of us. After forty years, we only had five to get to know each other again and it was all by phone. The land where we were born had disappeared from the global map. It had been redrawn into a new country and there were newer, more politically relevant wars, though our people were still dying and would keep on dying until there were none of us left.

I would often say, “I like living beside the Native American people and driving through their land. It is quieter than other parts of the desert.” I don’t know why this was true but it was.

“Are we a part of their problem?” my brother would ask.

“You mean, you and I?” I would say and take a few minutes to think it over. “I suppose so.”

We repeated ourselves in conversation when he was alive as the old do. And then we would return to the topic of our country and the countries surrounding it which were all at war. My brother did not live to see the way this country has come to resemble our old country. The fact, that when I used to turn on the devil’s box, I saw blood staining the streets, body bags, loose gunman, constant helicopters, dogs in airports, dogs at elementary schools, hunting for bombs and the dead. Where am I really? I want to know.

I join my brother on the porch but do not greet him as my visitors never speak. It’s high tide and the water is up to his ankles. The smell of frozen seaweed and gasoline arrives with him. It is especially quiet. I cannot hear even the planes. In fact, not a single plane has flown overhead in hours.

Here is my brother and here is the little Al-Shitaa, opening her violent teeth and whining at us incessantly. If only she could take a cue from my quiet, dead relative. Still, there is something unsettled about him. His hair is whipped up in the wind and with his eyes he is trying to guide me somewhere, lead me to something, I cannot see. It is coming from the direction of the ocean. I look at my brother helplessly.

“I’m not going anywhere. This is my home. People visit me here,” I say. 

“How else would you have found me?”

After some time passes, he shrugs and walks into the fog.

It’s time for dinner. At the bodega, Tony asks me if I am ready for the storm.

“Americans always make a big deal of these storms,” I reply.

“They say they’re closing the bridge this time,” he says.

“You leaving?” I ask.

“Where would I go?” Tony shrugs.

I nod my head knowingly.

“You think we’ll flood?” I ask before heading out the door.

“Everything’s always underwater, here,” Tony says.

Lily used to say that there was a strangeness to places that have been underneath the water, places that have flooded. That water never quite leaves a place. It leaves its mark. Once you’ve seen the sun from below the depths, you have seen the underworld, you have seen the deep reaches of space.  You are a shipwreck.

*

As night falls, the wind becomes tyrannical. The television is close, just there, and the remote is upon my fingertips but my fingertips burn. I am dreading what I might see: guns and bombs and guns and war and guns and guns and rape and lawsuits and guns. Once, we watched a man land on the moon.

Here is an anchor waving his hands frenetically like he is engaged in some asshole’s idea of dance. The little island of New York and its environs appear on the screen. What a peculiar place to live, surrounded by so much water, so much largesse of ocean, and so little land to defend against it. The anchor is showing various strips of coastline beneath the sea. Their visual technology has gotten so great that there is no need to even hear their stupid voices. One only has to watch the entire east coast of America drop under the Atlantic over and over again.

As if she can finally read my mind, my daughter calls again. “I’ve been ringing and ringing you. Why don’t you answer that cell phone I got for you?”

Now it is my fault I don’t understand the cell phone she bought for me. There is a perfectly good phone here just beside the couch where I can have a view of the canal and the beautiful woman who is currently leaning out over the railing of my porch, not one bit afraid of the wind, rain, or storm. Her hair is auburn and falls in curls to her waist. “The cell phone was far away,” I say.

“Did you evacuate? Of course you didn’t. What a stupid question. You are answering the landline.”

“Alia, right now there is this gorgeous woman on the deck but I cannot see her face—“

“They are about to close the bridges, baba.”

“When are you going to finally understand that this world is just one among—”

“It’s a category five!”

“Did I ever tell you that Zahra was my—”

Alia doesn’t let me speak. “You are in a fucking flood zone!”

I doze for a time after drinking my tea, and dream again. Never have I dreamt so many dreams in the span of twenty four hours. This time it is of a fortune teller in a foreign town who leads me into her small cavern of candlelight where we sit atop dunes of sand. We speak over her shifting cards of the places I had lived in and loved, and the people I had also lived with and loved and with much sadness I ask her what year we are in for I know suddenly all those places and those people are gone. We are in between time. Above it, below it, outside it.

“When I get back, where will I be going?” I inquire of her.

Her skin is purple and sequined, shining, made of stars. Her face is very beautiful and very familiar, tucked between sweeps of ravenous red curls.

“I’m going home?” I stutter. She nods. “But I am already home. I’m home.”

I

It is better to watch the trash television than wander the land of saddest dream, but the screen remains black. I press the remote and shake the remote and stand up even to press the button on the machine. Nothing happens. All the lights are off. All I can hear is the ocean.

“I am always with you, Alia,” I say aloud to the empty room.

I step onto the porch. I lick my finger and hold it up to the wind to see from which direction Zara comes. Very far away, it seems. The next world. The night has turned blacker, as if all the stars and all the lights on the entire planet have gone out. On the porch, the sea is up to my knees. There is smoke in the distance and the smell of fire. I find the cellular phone in my pajama pocket which I use for light. All I need is sand. Where had I seen sand? When there is no water, pray with sand. Where in New York does the ocean end and the desert begin?

The rain hits horizontally, cutting my face and my arms, and the phone my daughter bought for me has fallen along with the set of keys I have carried with me my entire life. I search for them in the churning water. The deck is about to collapse. It always happens so fast—the end.

I hear my mother’s voice. The water rises hungrily around me. Everything is lost. I see my mother’s face. She has just come in through the front door. She is so far away, all the way down the long thin hall. She is already bleeding from the abdomen. They are behind her, then surrounding her, black waves rising toward me. I am always with you, she says. Just a whisper, she is too weak. Says again. I run out and leap over the porch, into the desert. I run. I run from her. The desert is grey, grey as the sea. It will rain. The desert and the sea are one. There is the boat. I look back once: the desert falls into eternity. I have found it. I will never see it again.

The rain might break this roof. The roof is all tin. This house is older than time. And although not today, on some future tomorrow, it will be with the sea. It is, after all, only another kind of boat. One thing I have learned from this life is that men who have everything will never cease taking from men who have nothing. Why this petty thought comes to me now, I do not know.

Al-Shitaa leaps over me. We are saved. I never heard her real voice until now, half bird, half ghost. She doesn’t like the idea of drowning, she tells me. After all, she remembers the centuries her kind had been drowned with the witches. She thanks me for my sand, my desert. We are not alone. My mother has just walked through the door. She does not open her mouth to say anything. It has all been said. There are no snipers. Only the rain. On the couch are the junkies: my granddaughter, her eyes dusky as my Alia’s, with the loser she loves. Their metallic skin shimmers future dreams. My brother walks out and into the storm. On the porch, leaning out, gazing at the receding water in her bluest gypsy skirt is Lily. My Lily.

Like Satan has joined us himself, the television turns on of its own accord. Everyone else disappears. It’s just me and the cat again and this devil worshipping anchor whose teeth are falling out of his skull just by smiling. The headlines blare: Tropical Storm Zara makes landfall. Former Category Five Zara can’t beat the Big Apple! America triumphs against Zara. The phone won’t stop ringing. Sand covers the living room, so fine it might only be dust. Al-Shitaa is pawing at my life’s worth of keys, making a great commotion, as if it is not loud enough in here.

I pick up the receiver. “Alia, earlier this morning, I met your baby girl.”

Alia suddenly wants to know the answers to everything at once. I try to explain what I have discovered as clearly as I can.

“You brought me home Alia,” I tell her. “You see a very long time ago, very far away, on another shore that faced the desert, I lived here in this very same house with my mother.”