Read The Hidden Light of Objects Online
Authors: Mai Al-Nakib
The Hidden Light of Objects
To my parents,
Nazha Boodai and Basil Al-Nakib
The mind has to do violence to itself, has to reverse the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks, has perpetually to revise, or rather to recast, all its categories. But in this way it will attain to fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of adopting the very movement of the inward life of things.
Henri Bergson,
An Introduction to Metaphysics
The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.
Marcel Proust,
In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way
Contents
Blink and it’s gone. But when it’s there, it’s expansive and may appear to cover a lifetime. It’s a sand fountain or a bubble in a box. It’s kept impeccable under glass. Sandwiched between one ordinary day and another, it’s a night of school performances – a play or concert, band or choir. Walking, no, sauntering into school grounds at night, when it feels like we aren’t supposed to be there, is an early experience of confident ownership not soon forgotten. Parents come later, after us, but, unlike us, they inch in timidly, on legs wooden with awkward reluctance. They don’t really want to be there, though they are proud of us in advance for whatever it is we are going to do. What we do – a clarinet or sax, a song or dramatic turn – doesn’t matter much. What matters, really, is the irresistible edge our school develops at night – the sexy shadow of the bubble against a pitch black concrete wall; hushed corners, invisible during the day, now deep, inviting pockets. As we march through the gates, heading toward whichever room we are supposed to be in, we think we hear something, a voice with an unexpectedly hoarse timbre that tickles the pelvis, maybe someone moaning. We look behind, to the left, to the right, nothing. But we can hear giggles about ready to explode into something grander. We feel the air pounding around us, like being encased in someone’s racing heart. It feels like mischief.
It’s dark and the December air is cool and crisp as a Chinese apple. Nothing big happens on this night, though electricity tingles all around us, and there are shapes in the shadows glued on like construction paper cutouts. The band plays, and then there’s an extravagant performance of
The Frog Prince
or
Oklahoma!
It’s background noise to the temptation strung all around like paper lanterns or popcorn, hanging there for the taking. We don’t take enough, the arrogance of youth, and now look at us in our corner of the world, shattered in shards.
Once there was still mischief to be had and we were safe as crystal dreams.
Japan is marvelous when you’re ten. Japan is a street fair with white paper lights strung overhead. Japan is clip-clopping in wooden shoes through the twinkling night, your parents sauntering behind, pinkies linked, your sister, small as a dot on a map, safe in a stroller. Japan is a teal-colored kimono with a glorious peach sash. Japan is streets full of people you don’t understand, laughing, pausing for breath, celebrating something unknown.
In Japan I was still the cherry blossom princess with a view of the world extended. That trip, a month and a half of our lives, now over two decades behind me. My father training to use complicated medical instruments, acquiring valuable expertise. My mother, my sister, and me along for the ride, suspended in a new place for a while, away from our desert home. That trip to Japan – an old man with Chinese apples, my sister the dot not falling, but almost. That trip to Japan – a razor on a window sill, four rice people in a box under glass. That trip – before the war that saves some of us, before my mother says, “My babies, my babies, take care of my babies.” We were perfectly happy then, perfectly aligned. The four corners of a perfect square.
Every weekday morning in Japan, my mother would carefully place my four-year-old sister in a stroller and push her along the lovely tree-lined street near our apartment. The dot would squint her eyes at the sunlight squeezing through the trees, examining curiously the green and gold specks streaming across her arms. The dot wasn’t very talkative then. She was thoughtful and maybe a little sad, like she knew something she wished she didn’t. I didn’t take her silence too seriously. I was content to be left alone, collecting the story objects I would share with her at night. The first week of our stay, my mother was preoccupied with the quotidian, figuring out where to get bread, butter, honey, vegetables, where to go in case either of us split our heads open, how to heat the water, how to pay for things. I didn’t mind. I could never have enough time to myself. Like the dot, I too liked to be more quiet than loud. Surrounded by people speaking a language I didn’t understand, the trip to Japan was ideal for expanding my collection. Without the usual tonnage of verbal distractions, I was free to devise my own.
I have collected story objects for as long as I can remember. Story objects are both objects and stories. Either the object or the story may come first. Most of the time, I select an object. It can be anything: a pouch of cat’s-eye marbles, a sweaty scrap of blanket, Mr. Potato Head’s smile, a small wooden bear, a pendant of a pyramid at Giza, a white cotton robe with blue flowers, a tiny packet of playing cards wrapped in fuchsia tissue paper. The object might appear in a room, under the seat of a car, on a desert trip, behind a green trashcan, on a forgotten shelf. I don’t necessarily have to save, own, or touch the object. Spotting it, even fleetingly, is usually enough. But once in a while I stroke the object methodically, my fingers creating an invisible grid around it, then cradle it possessively in my arms to feel the story enter me directly.
That’s exactly what happened when I was eight and I decided I wanted to dig to China. I was slightly concerned because I imagined hell to be somewhere between China and me. But since it was daytime and the park full of adults, I was pretty certain nothing too serious could happen. Those were the days before smart bombs pinpointed children’s heads, before oil was exchanged for lung cancer. Back then, a quick glance around the crowded playground was enough to quell any of my niggling fears about hell’s creatures, its fire, its dank, fusty terrain. I started to dig at once. Past the loose top layer down to where it was damp, then wet, then thick as clay. The second I began to worry about worms, I felt something hard against the edge of my nails. I scraped away the wet sand around whatever it was and pulled. A fat, cobalt blue, partially melted, lopsided candle. It smelled awful, like stale, wet yeast. I brushed off the sand and ran home with the candle wrapped like a prize in my dirty red sweater. I washed it in the kitchen sink, but it still stank.
That night, I told the dot – a captive audience even at two – the story of the candle. It had been buried years earlier by Xiao Yong, a small boy in China. Like me, he had the idea of digging through the planet to get to the other side, to reach the place that wasn’t China, to see if things were different there and how. He had dug far deeper than I and had needed a candle to light the way in his dark tunnel. Fortunately, his family happened to be candle-makers, so there was no shortage of candles. From among the various colors he could have chosen – fire red, pus yellow, moss green, party pink, plum purple, mottled – he had selected blue for immortality and also because it had been the favorite color of his freshly dead brother. He knew he could face hell with his brother in his heart and his family candle in his hand. The blue candle had done well by Xiao Yong. It had glittered long past the center of the planet and almost all the way to the surface on the other side. But just when he thought he might actually make it, the slimy creatures of hell had caught a whiff of the candle’s plucky little wick. Yong had been sucked into hell’s fury and was never seen or heard from again. The blue candle had remained buried where he had last been. I flipped the candle over and, sure enough, found a stamp on the bottom that could only have been the Xiao family trademark. I kept the candle beside my bed and, on the one-year anniversary of finding it, lit it in honor of Xiao Yong and his brother.
Less often, I invent the story first. This happens mainly at night, in those rubber moments reserved for brains to bounce before falling asleep. It may also occur on a balmy day at the beach when the sun and breeze make me feel like I will stay young forever. Or while flying in an airplane through the clouds or looking down at them, thick and rolling, from above. In any case, seldom does the story come first, but when it does, the next day or two or three or the entire following week is organized around locating the object belonging to it.
Elias’s story came to me this way, many years after Japan, after the Chinese apples and razor, but before the loss of the rice people, before the war. Late one night, I shared his story with my sister. A middle-aged man had decided to leave a green bottle by the side of the road. He had drunk from that same green bottle always. It was what he happened to be holding when they had come that morning to shoot his father and to pull his own life out from under him. For the next thirty-five years, Elias had funneled arak into that bottle religiously every night, then taken slow sips from it over the following day. By the time he was ready for bed, his bottle would be ready for a refill. One morning, Elias had awakened to find his bottle empty. A confused bird or gust of wayward wind through the window might have knocked it over in the night. His routine had been disrupted, but he had continued to take sips from the empty bottle that day because he hadn’t known how not to. Every sip of air had surprised him, lacerated him with a loss he had for so long squeezed out of his memory with the help of distilled aniseed. By nightfall, Elias had felt less a man than an animal. He had collapsed onto the blue and white tiled floor of his apartment, his knees and hips melting away. He had moaned like death for twelve lingering hours. Every moan had stood for one thing he would never have because his people’s land, his father’s land, his land had been filched: a wife with magnolia skin, a child with delicate fingertips, an orange grove, a shattering blue sky, pine nuts in a bowl, bougainvillea climbing the garden wall, evening cicada songs, green bottles for clear water, a patient, persistent peace. The next morning, the first thing Elias had done when he got up was to take the empty green bottle to the side of the road and leave it there. The time to bottle loss had come to an end for this man. It was time to remember, not to forget.